Transcript
Target Advertiser (0:00)
With Target, you can get back to school. Supplies delivered when you want it, like today. Pens and markers. Check.
Customer (0:05)
Folders?
Target Advertiser (0:06)
Got it. Snacks, sneaks and backpacks. Yup, right to your door or your classroom. For all of the above, it's back.
Narrator (0:12)
To school at Target.
Detective (0:15)
Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised. So you're gonna let. You're gonna let this little punk over here dictates your life? There's blood on your shoe. You're in the house the night that this murder happens. You can't play stupid.
Narrator (0:52)
If you want to know what the most detrimental thing in a young man's life is, it's not having a father. You can be a father and still be absent, still leave a void in a young man's life. And since the majority of crime is committed by males, this should be a problem that we all focus on. When young men grow up without fathers, they're left searching for guidance, often pledging loyalty to the wrong people. In the absence of a steady, strict hand. They idolize whoever steps in, no matter how toxic they are. We've seen that, haven't we? With a certain set of brothers over in Romania is it? And their onlyfans empire, where they flash their fancy cars and homes and chains and things to all the eager young men out there that are desperate for a little taste of that life and too rudderless to know how to get there, that end up screwing up their own lives because of bad advice. That misplaced loyalty can lead to devastating choices in life, the kind of choices that we talk about here on Sword and Scale. Sometimes those choices lead to murder. This is episode 306 of Sword and Scale, a show that reveals that sometimes the worst monsters are fatherless and very real. It was a muggy Florida night. Yes, we're talking about Florida again. In Palm Beach Gardens in early March of 2017. I mean, are you surprised, really, at this point, we're gonna talk about either Florida or Ohio every week. So I don't know. Fix your own states, people. On this particular night, the sky was black. The highway was eerily quiet. And the quiet was only broken up by the occasional whoosh of a car off to the side of the road. Flames flickered in a patch of overgrown weeds. Smoke curled up into the air as if trying to keep a secret. Fire trucks arrived, blazing, their lights slicing through the dark. It didn't take long to extinguish the flames, but what they uncovered left the responders frozen. Two bodies wrapped in sheets and Plastic hidden within the dying fire. By morning, the discovery had been leaked to the local media. Helicopters swarmed overhead and news crews parked as close as they could to the team of investigators from the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office working the scene.