The Widow & The Deer Hunter - Belfast, Maine

This week, in Belfast, Maine, a twisted story emerges from a cold-blooded murder in a family driveway, leading to the unraveling of strange relationships and a look into the underworld of a small town. Welcome to Small Town Murder. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay! Yay, indeed, Jimmy. Yay, indeed. My name is James Petrigallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today on another absolutely wild, crazy edition of Small Town Murder. As usual, we have crazy stuff for you, so buckle up for that. Before we get to all of that, definitely head over to ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com. Oh, that's nice. Number one, first of all, merchandise you could want, but tickets for the live shows. We have two more live shows left this year, November the 13th in Tarrytown. I don't even know if there's any tickets left for that. There was only a few kind of scattered ones. You can check on it. I'm not sure there's that. And then the next night, though, in Medford, Massachusetts, outside of Boston at the Chevalier Theater, we are going to be there on November 14th. Tickets left for that, so get those right now. 2027 schedule comes out pretty soon here in the next couple weeks, and then they'll go on. Sale in December, so get ready for that. ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com. Also, check out our other shows, Crime and Sports, and, of course, Your Stupid Opinions, if you like to laugh. So that's a good time. Check those out. Get yourself Patreon. That's the major thing we're trying to do here. Patreon.com slash Crime in Sports, just like the name of that other show that we'd like you to listen to. That is where you get all the bonus material. Oh, yeah? There's a ton of it. Anybody $5 a month or above, you get everything we put out. Soon as you subscribe, you're going to get almost 400 back bonus episodes you've never heard before immediately upon subscription. Then you get new ones every other week, one Crime in Sports, one Small Town Murder, and you get it all, my friend. So it's a good deal. This week, what you're going to get for Crime in Sports, we're going to do just not a lot of crime here, but just very interesting, the history of the Harlem Globetrotters. Oh. Very cool. It's amazing. The amount of people that you don't know that played for the Globetrotters that are athletes from other sports, like Wilt Chamberlain played for the Globetrotters. You know what I mean? Like football players played for the Globetrotters. And the tie-in of why it exists is just fascinating in itself. It's absolutely incredible. So we'll talk about that. And then for Small Town Murder, very fun subject, we did a couple years ago a Patreon about Nazis on drugs from a book called Blitzed. This person wrote another book about how those Nazis that we took over here, the scientists, helped make LSD and all this shit. So we're going to connect the Nazis. Basically, we're connecting Nazis to hippies. Not that they're the same, but how the— Is this one called Krieged? I can't even remember the name. I think it's called Tripped, actually. Oh. Blitzed and Tripped. Yeah. So anyway, we're going to do that. It's a crazy story. It's a lot of fun. So we'll talk all about that. Patreon.com slash crimeinsports is where you get all of that. And on top of that, you get everything we put out, all of our shows, Crime and Sports, Your Stupid Opinions, all the Small Town Murders, all ad-free. Ad-free. Ad-free. And you get a shout-out at the end of the show, too. So can't beat the deal. That said, I think it's time for the disclaimer. This is a comedy show, everybody. It is. We're comedians. People are going to die. It's called Small Town Murder, so that should be no surprise to you when that happens. And you might go, well, how do you mix those? How do you make that funny? Pretty easily, actually. You'd be surprised. First of all, we're all from some kind of town that deserves to be made fun of. From somewhere, yeah. Who cares? Yeah, we make fun of that. We make fun of, you know, some bubble. We make fun of some kind of stumbling police force that can't catch a murderer, so they go kill more people, which kind of sort of happened in this case. And then, on top of that, we make fun of murderers, because fuck them. What do we care? What are we going to do? We have no other recourse against a murderer. We can't go in there and take their honey buns away. All we can do is mock them from a distance. So, that said, you're going to hear a wild story, and if you think true crime and comedy should never, ever go together, this might not be for you. Bye. Bye. But we think it might be, actually. Give it a shot. Either way, no comment. No complaining later. That's the point here. No bitching about it. So, that said, I think it's time to sit back, everybody. What do you say here? Clear the lungs. Arms to the sky. Let's all shout. Shut up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody. Let's go on a trip, shall we? Yeah. Let's go here. We're going to Maine this week, a place. What a lovely place. Both Jimmy and I adore. Yeah. We just like Maine. The ocean and without the heat. That's what it is. There's some questionable spots, but for the most part, down there near the coast is pretty legit. I just like, I like a rocky beach that's not hot. I like a hoody beach. Those black pebbles are pretty incredible. Good stuff here. Belfast, Maine. It's coastal Maine, kind of down in the southeast part of the Maine area there. It's about an hour and 45 minutes to Portland, Maine, about three hours to Boston, and about an hour and 25 to Fayette, Maine. There's our last Maine episode, episode 696, A Strangely Murderous Grudge. I remember that one. This is in Waldo County. We found it. Here it is. Find Waldo on the map. We found Waldo. Here, boom. One county over here. Dressed very appropriately. Yeah. He looks like he's going to the beach on a fall day in Maine, doesn't he? He looks like he's going lobster hunting. Yeah. The scarf and everything. Area code 207. A little bit of history here. In about 1720, General. General Samuel Waldo of Boston here bought the Muscongus Patent, which had evolved into ownership of this land, which was then known as the Waldo Patent. Now, Waldo died in 1759, and all of his heirs sold the plantation that he had to 35 Scottish and Irish people from Londonbury, New Hampshire. There was a big group. There was a big group that got together and bought them, like they bought the Dodgers. They got a group together here. Londonderry? Londonderry, yeah. Then it was renamed after Belfast, which a lot of the Irish immigrants who bought the land were from Belfast, so that's how it worked there. Apparently, this is another coin toss town. The name was decided on a coin toss between Belfast and Londonderry. They were going to call it Londonderry still. Why would they do that? They said, do we call it the place? Do we call it the place we just came from or the place we came from originally? They were like, flip a coin, and Belfast went. Londonderry is literally less than an hour from here. There's tons of those places with the same name, so it's very weird here. Now, the village was pretty much abandoned during the Revolutionary War because British forces occupied right by here. The British military burned Belfast in 1779, then held it for five days during the War of 1812. Wow. British really had it in for this fucking joint. They hate the Irish, that we know, Northern Irish. Shoe manufacturing became a huge business, which in New Hampshire was big, too. After World War II, though, then it became poultry, and they had a lot of processing plants here. Waldo County Farms supplied factories with up to 200,000 birds a day. That's a shitload of birds, and they have a- How do you do that? That's a million a week. I don't know how you do that with a lot of birds. Poultry, that's why they're raised shittily, because you cram them in there. The poultry business collapsed, though, in the mid-'70s during the recession, and kind of really devastated these towns, and they've been trying to build back since then. Here's some reviews of this place. Okay. Here we go. Five stars. Belfast is a beautiful, welcoming, cozy town on the ocean. It's extremely safe, for my family never locks our car. Okay. For our home. For my family. How hard is, yeah, for my family. How hard is this? Yeah. How hard is it? I'm daking if you're listening audio. It's a little, with the door. You just do that. It doesn't, you don't have to really muscle it or anything. You just take two fingers. A baby can do it. You don't even have to do that anymore. It's one button locks all of them. I'm talking in your house, just a deadbolt. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Just one of those. Nah. We're safe. If someone breaks in and slaughters us all. At least I didn't have to do that with my hand. I didn't have to turn it, you know, 40 degrees. And that would have been a huge pain in the ass if I had to do that. So, okay. Almost every person you walk by will recognize you in some way. And even if they don't, they will smile and give you a warm nod or hello. Oh. Okay. The architecture is beautifully traditional. There's a lot of old buildings here. Yeah. Additionally, there's a great variety of local stores ranging from the oldest shoe store in America to a local shoe store in the United States. From a local organic grocery store to an eclectic bookshop, you know, small town shit. Northeast small town shit. Oldest shoe store in the country, huh? I guess so. I mean, I wonder how many shoe stores claim that. Who knows? Right. Here's three stars. Belfast offers a medium quality of life. Medium? That's three stars, I guess. It's accurate. This place is room temperature. It's all right. Yeah. Medium quality. Cultural diversity is scarce. No public transportation. And employment opportunity. are restricted to local economy, gorgeous nature, That is true. That's true. All right. And finally, one star. People in this town are some of the rudest people I've ever met. Really? How dare you nod at me? God damn. It's all the fucking smiles. Wow. Yes, they put on a fake show for the tourists. But now it's fucking Funny Farm. Cue the deer. All get together. But when someone who actually moves and chooses to work in this area come in, they treat these people like crap. Don't move to this area unless you want to deal with people who act like there isn't a whole country or even world out there and want to be treated terrible daily. Holy. Wow. Yes, there are a few good apples in between, but most of them live in a shallow bubble, especially the senior citizens. Oh. Thank God they'll be dead soon. Yeah. That's what it sounds like. You can't do anything right in this town, let alone this entire state, if you weren't born here. Okay. Rudest people I've ever met. I'm shocked. I'd love to know the experience. Wow. Yeah. What are you doing exactly? Who are you? I'd like to know who you are. What's the rude part? I just don't understand. I don't get it. How do you expect people? I don't care how people are generally. I just don't care. Did they force feed you lobster rolls? What happened? Get over here. Come on. Let's go. Open up your yap. Let's go. Put this in your gob. It's lightly mayoed. You're going to love it. Come on. Let's go. Chill. Chill. Chill. Come on. Swallow. Swallow, you bastard. Swallow. You have the worst accent in the country. It's tough. I don't know about that. It's pretty aggressive. And northern Wisconsin is. That is. Yeah. I watched The Departed the other day. Buffalo? Yikes. Watching actresses and actors that you know don't talk like that. Do it? It's fucking off-putting. It is. It's like an English accent after a while. Yeah. Or even a New York accent. It's the same thing. When I see someone who doesn't have a good one, I'm like, come on, Johnny Depp and Donnie Brasco. I get you're a good actor, but no one said, hey, Johnny, do a better New York fucking accent, please. Could you please do that for us? We get that you're famous and you're going to sell the movie based on your name, but. Do a better. Not just New York, but the New York Italian he's doing. It's like real. That's. Real fucking off-putting. That's the problem. They can do a New York, but the New York Italian's a different accent. But he does British real fucking well for a dude from Kentucky. How the fuck does he pull that off? A movie I made, we had a guy and we had to teach him that accent. Yeah. And this guy who was directing it, quote unquote, he's like, I'll talk to him. And I was like, you're from Indiana and you're Irish. You're not doing this. It was me and my cousin, Jesse, and we're like, we are teaching this guy how to do this accent. This is all of our uncles. What are you talking? What are you talking about? I don't even know what Johnny Depp is, but I know he's from the hills of Kentucky. He's from Kentucky. Yeah. Why is he doing this? It's so weird. People in this town, 6,890. So not a huge town, not a tiny, tiny town, just a middle of the road town. This is a wild thing. There's a lot of old people here. The median age is 60.1. Yeah. So that's median age. Yeah. There's 56% women, 44% men. Wow. Wow. So this is. Southern Maine's a lot of retirees. Yeah. And when they get old, obviously, the men die first and you're left with 56% women here. Family here, it is 54% married. So it's above the national average. It's very married type of thing here. Race in this town, 96.9% white. Pretty white. 0.7% black, 0.0% Asian, 1.7% Hispanic. It's white. That's it. Religion, 13.9%. 9% are religious in this town. That's awesome. That's one of the lowest numbers we've ever seen. What? That's. Right now, I'm looking up. I'm going to open a window for Zillow right now. Zillow, Belfast, Maine. And the number one thing is, with a bullet, Catholic, 2.3% is the number one. Wow. I'm surprised it's not 11. That's it. Because as we know, Catholics are the Baptists of the North. That's it. 0.0% Jewish. Unemployment here is about average. Median household income here is actually low. Yeah, it's fixed income, people, right? Yeah, it's almost $70,000 in the rest of the country. Here, it's $55,900, so that's pretty low. It's got to be fixed income, folk. Cost of living, also a little bit lower. $100,000 is regular. Here, it's $89,000. Wow. And the housing. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this part. Shut up. Stop telling people. They're all going to move that. I have to even show them houses. We have to do it. It's our duty, Jimmy. $321,700 is the median home cost, which is lower than that. That's not bad. That's the national average. And if you've decided, damn it, you're going to the coast, you don't care if people nod at you or not, we have for you the Belfast, Maine real estate report. All right, your average two-bedroom rental goes for $1,440, which is about the national average now for that. Is it not $1,700? It might be up to like $1,600-something, so it's around there. Now, this first house. This first house looks like a murder shack. It looks like where a person would live in the woods and kidnap women and take them here to torture them for about a month and a half before finally murdering them and placing them in a cemetery that he made outside. That's what it looks like. This is where a lot of people have little getaway cabins for the weekend, so that's probably what this is. Oh, this is. No? If they're getting away here, I don't know what they're getting away from, but it's got to be terrifying, because this fucking thing is boarded up, their ceilings are falling in inside. It's not good. It's probably used to be. It used to be, I'm sure. Two-bedroom, one-bath, 935 square feet on 0.3 acres, $99,900. Oh, boy. So that is a complete knock-it-down. You're just buying the land. Need some work. Here's a three-bedroom, one-bath, 1,512-square-foot house on 29.78 acres. Oh, boy. A bunch of acreages. It's been built recently. The inside is beautiful and brand new. Outside, it looks like. What are those houses that look like a barn, almost? Like, they're like. The roof comes all the way down to the sides. It's a barn. It looks like a barn. It's a barn dominium, is what it's called. But it's 1,500 square feet, and very nice, and in the woods. $325,000 for that. Almost 30 acres. That's amazing. And it's very nice. This is why I didn't want to do this. It just had a $24,000 price cut, too. And getting cheaper. Getting cheaper by the day. And then finally, damn it, your shoe factory just made you so much money. It's doing great. We have a six-bedroom, six-bath T-bowl for each and every b-hole. The Florsheim Castle. 4,605 square feet on 2.17 acres right on the water. Yes! Right on the bay. Beautiful. $2,950,000. But it's silly. It looks like one of these places that, like, a romantic comedy goes for a destination wedding. Like, my mom lives on the ocean. We'll just get married by her house. It's beautiful. Mama Mia or some shit. We can probably rent it out on weekends as a wedding venue. That's part of it, too, as it says. It's got a history of rental, and it's that kind of joint. Things to do here. Yeah, because it's one of those. That area is so picture. Picture-esque. Yeah. Pretty. It's all like Porky Pig. Pretty. Hibbity, hibbity, hibbity. It's great. It's nice. They're really appealing. It's really nice, though. It's right on. I mean, like, the rocky ocean. There's stairs down to the water. Like, it's fucking. God damn it. It's gorgeous, and it's. Yeah, if you were going to show up somewhere to take pictures, this is where you go. It's really fucking nice. You're pulling fresh lobster, James, every day. Oh, lobster, crabs out of their. Clams out of the. Right there. Awesome. It's beautiful. Things to do here. The All Roads Music Festival. Yeah? What the hell's that? It's here. Yeah. The Weekender, a multi-day. Multi-day music festival, artists and artists showcased annually in downtown Belfast. Building on the spirits of All Roads Music Fest, the Weekender celebrates the depth and diversity of Maine's independent music community while showcasing the city's vibrant arts culture and longstanding commitment to local creative talent. A lot of songs about lobsters and pulling them from the ocean and. Sailing as an old salty dog. Sailing. Yeah. I gotta say, like, I liked Widow's Bay a lot, but I'm really tired of shows where there's, like, 12 shows on right now that take place in small northeast fishing villages that basically all have some weird mystery thing that's forced, and it's a lot of people just, like, staring into the ocean while. Staring into the distance while wearing a hat. That's just all that is on TV right now. It's fucking crazy. It's too much. I like Widow's Bay, but the other ones I don't. Can't watch. It's what we're all doing anyway. So I may as well do it into the ocean. It's just staring off into the distance, everybody. They're just all just staring, going, what? What happened? All these towns are, like, you know, 30 years behind in technology and all these shows. I don't get what's happening. Still got phones on the wall. Yeah, everybody's got rotary phones and shit, and you're like, this isn't correct. So this festival here, let's see, Friday, the big acts are Leaf, just Leaf, Catherine Perkins, and Isaac Raven. Okay, those are local. Sounds like it. Then we got a whole schedule here. All right. The bumbling. woo-hahs will be there well that sounds hot wow let's see what they got there's five different stages um the cold creeps the uh kate fiano will be there main songwriter circle yikes sorry safari it's tanking james yikes mediocre men is it all alliteration bands sorry safari mediocre men cold creeps yeah uh xo um yeah 13 scotland road it's just somebody's address here in town joel fetford uh-oh okay this is really getting bad vices inc certainly isn't getting good boy scout um small pond i guess they're in a small plus stephanie ryan with two n's oh boy the wolf sisters with two f's oh nothing spelled correctly nothing is spelled right here uh general farewell yeah it was a j general farewell farewell with three l's um intricate mouse work okay uh talons of spring city planners people expect to show and they get up there and just a guy gets out blueprints and it's just the city planning department they all learned an instrument okay the fucking t square he gets him he gets it out and he's like this is what we're gonna do here uh crying caleb allen crying caleb will be there everybody the sunburned sharks which would be a terrible thing for happen to a shark because they can't get out of the sun depends on the kind of shark midwestern medicine and then finally on the at the opera house this is like the big one alice limoges and then from 4 45 to 5 30 plague dad will be there plague dad plague dad what the fuck is plague dad you can't have a band and they'd be called that's just one dude right plague dad hi i learned how to play guitar during covid how you doing i'm plague dad my kids hate this i should be at their little league game right now but instead i'm here anyway here's a little tune about being stuck in the house didn't end fuck man um crime right in this town what we that's it there was no headliner james that is the headliner i think it's plague now the headliners are the ones we said at first katherine perkins isaac raven and leaf i believe there's is that leaf with like erickson oh boy and then saturday's headliners are the wolf sisters and stephanie ryan they're in the biggest letters it's so bad i don't know what's going on there uh crime right here property crime right about average for the rest of the country which you wouldn't expect but it's a tourist town so that's when you get you know people pissing and throwing garbage away and labor day is a mess around here it's a mess and then violent crime murder rape robbery and of course assault the mount rushmore of crime less than half or under half the average so it's very safe not even half that's why those people don't lock their doors they get shit stolen constantly but nobody kills killed them yet look yeah may to september this place sucks but uh outside of that it's pretty great so that said let's talk about some murder shall we let's do this okay friday december 16th 1983 yeah that's right we're all fucking uh girls just want to have funning right now and uh whatever the hell cindy lauper was doing and shit around then a week before christmas week before christmas well yeah and nine days before christmas this is between 7 30 and 8 30 p.m and uh in maine in that time of year it's been dark very cold three and a half hours already it gets dark at 4 30 at that point um it's after dinner um and in this house uh this is the groton house g-o-r-t-t-o-n that's the family there's 16 year old michael groton who's the son of the family he's playing guitar with a friend in his room dicking around trying to work shit out yeah noodle in a bit here now his mother norma is also in the house she is on the phone with um her oldest daughter and um michael's older sister rosalyn they're on the phone talking um now this is a friday night on on friday night every night every friday night the same thing happens and that's dad comes home as we'll find out dad is in the navy and works four hours away and spends the whole week somewhere else as we'll find out and comes home every friday night to spend the weekend with the family and then go back to work in the navy he's in the navy yeah yeah he's in the navy and so um no he's in rhode island i think oh we'll get to it later though all right um so they're getting ready here it's a four and a half hour drive yeah newport rhode island um every week he'd come in back the truck in get out walk up to the front door it's just regular thing that he does here so um now on the phone rosalyn can hear loud bangs in the background at one point one two and then a third one okay okay so rosalyn hears something and thought it sounded like a vehicle backfiring and said what was that is dad home now is something wrong with his truck is it backfiring what's happening over there i can hear something and norma her mother just said i gotta go she said i gotta go that's all she said hung up the phone and then michael and his friend ran to the living room window um and uh looks outside and seized the a figure laying there bleeding in the driveway oh shit so that's where we are right now to see if we can get him back in the car to start out 911 is called obviously first responders come and we'll get to that um now this family let's talk about who's in this house and who is this family now dad is mervin laforest groton jr g-o-r g-r-o-t-t-o-n um he goes by sunny everyone calls him sunny oh i guess because he's junior right so it's easier to call him sunny yeah yeah he's born november 15th 1937 um he's from califast maine born and raised his whole life his parents are mervin senior obviously and uh margaret um now he dropped out of high school early oh he's a high school dropout but he ended up joining the navy and making a career out of it yeah which you can do and um he's a real into tech shit is what in the 50s in the 50s real into gadgets anything that's technical anything like that he's super into uh he works his way he's a machinist mate chief petty officer an mmc they call it here uh in the navy um after 25 years um he likes his daughters describe him as having the biggest heart in the world here um he was in the navy through vietnam oh i mean he joined in the late 50s so yeah you know he's in for vietnam um he works his way up to being an instructor at the naval education and training center in newport rhode island which is where he goes all week um so um basically what his job was before that as a machinist mate is to keep the engines and mechanical systems going pumps boilers all the shit yeah all the shit in the bowels of the ship that looks very complicated it's his job to make sure all that shit works right here um basically he was described as the guy who when something's broken and nobody understands why he's the guy that they go get fixed and he comes in and he comes in with the owner's manual and shows you what's what figures it out yeah because he might have set up that particular system so he might know exactly what's going on here now he gets married in 1957 to norma small and she'll become norma groton um she's born in 1939 two years younger than than mervin here than sunny um now they have three kids and you're going to notice that you don't hear michael and you don't hear rosalyn because that's another story that's late oh okay okay now when they get married norma already has a child from a previous marriage okay which in the 50s was a massively big deal yeah like two so she's looking with him yeah well yeah well why are you with nobody that's the thing so she is looking for back then if you were you know a woman and you got divorced you had to find another husband asap if you had a kid so you could make a family for that kid basically and back then too it wasn't like now where you know we've we were divorced and we have our kids on you know alternate this or we had you know we share them and yeah back then it was like the mother took the kids and the father went and started another family and like the last one never happened that's literally what people did back then yeah and sometimes he would cheat on that wife knock a woman up and be like well i'm married go figure it out yeah that's another thing yeah especially my fucking family has done that like my favorite uncle was that he saw his mom saw the man walking down the street and he didn't even look at them yeah it's it's crazy now my grandfather never was around anymore like they got divorced she married somebody else and that was that like it was made another family he made and went made another family and i i met him when i was 12 and then he died two months later that was that it was lovely so yeah um is there's a lot a lot more to that story but we'll get into that oh yeah so um so there's russell he was born in may of 1954 may 8th 1954 so that's the child she brings into the marriage but he has uh he takes sonny's last name so he's russell groton after that because like i said dad's gone that's it now we're moving on new family um they have two more kids uh betty ann who's born september 29th 1957 yeah and then they have mervin the third the third the third um wow who's born october 12th 1958 so they fuck at a certain time because those those are only a couple weeks apart so those are that's somebody's birthday what's his birthday she's got a fertile time i feel like here um his birthday is in november so that doesn't quite work out but no it's uh birthday it's somebody something here hers is i don't know her exact birthday but it's 1939 so this is the family here they have three very little kids yeah on may 26th 1959 a fire breaks out in the house oh so this is uh the one kid's five russell's five betty ann is two um not even two actually and mervin is about eight months old brand new brand new babies so their house is on fire house is on fire now i'll read this from the newspaper articles i found at the time um 1959 fire chief henry chapels of belfast said the fire started under stairs leading to the second floor of the two-story wooden frame dwelling where the three children were trapped by smoke and flames oh fuck they were russell four betty one and mervin uh the third seven months their mother discovered the fire while she was downstairs and when she attempted to go up and reach the children she was driven back by a wall of flame and smoke oh no the father was at work sunny at belfast clothing factory when the fire broke out shortly before 8 a.m fuck mrs groton raced next door to the home of mr mrs edgar moore at 100 lower congress street who notified the fire department and rushed back with the frantic mother to the burning home where they were joined by dale palmer another neighbor the trio pushed a ladder up against the rear side of the building and the fire broke out and the fire broke out the second floor bedroom and palmer climbed in smashed a window but was driven back by the heavy smoke oh no okay meanwhile mrs groton spotted her oldest son standing at another upstairs window screaming for help this is horrifying imagine those two kids seeing that unable to enter either the right rear or front door because of the flames mrs groton grabbed a long-handled iron rake and tried to smash in the upstairs storm window so the child could jump to safety her efforts were fruitless when the heavy glass of the windows failed to break oh my god when fireman arrived on the scene the entire house was ablaze inside and it was nearly 20 minutes before firemen were able to reach the bodies of the youngsters oh no so she watched this kid crew scream for help out a window and then he burned to death in there all three of her kids all three wow that's fucked and she does not have a fucking scratch on her um listen guys i get it fire scary if my kids are on the other side of the wall of flames i'm gonna be burned if i survive it it's because i went in there got super burned and came out and it was because i was on fire i'm not i'm not just gonna go oh that's hot and run away like did she hit with like a a wire rake that has no rigidity to it it's 1959 who the fuck knows what did you what it was like metal flexible rakes you hit with the back end mama long handled iron rake it seems like no yeah that that should have broke that's a damn fine window good window i guess in maine you'd want some good storm windows insulation isn't what it is now so and they didn't have like the dual panes and all that shit now chief staples said the heavy aluminum type storm windows hampered rescue efforts and prevented any possibility of the younger boy breaking a window and jumping he said that type of window is fine for heating and insulation but they're terrible handicap in fighting fires yeah mrs groton collapsed on the scene and was taken to the home of a neighbor where she was treated by a doctor the bodies of the children were removed to a local funeral parlor oh dear christ damage to the home was estimated at over four thousand dollars the whole house mrs groton who was on the first floor they said she tried but a wall of fire stopped her um three small windows were removed from the house and she was taken to the home of a neighbor where she was taken to the home of a neighbor where she was taken to the home of a neighbor where she was children who suffocated when the fire swept through their home tuesday morning will be buried together at groves grove cemetery friday that is a jesus imagine you're at work and this happens too like holy shit um as the bereaved young parents mr and mrs mervin l groton jr completed plans for the funeral of their only children fire officials searched the smoldering ruins of their home on lower congress street hoping to find some clue to the cause of the fire that ended in tragedy never found out i looked through every newspaper never came out what the source was what the what the fuck happened oh my god all we know is three children burned to death and she got out perfectly unscathed and dad was at work and that's all we know shit um there's a picture in the newspaper and i'll post it as one of the social media pictures of the two like investigators standing over the completely burned out crib that the baby was in oh boy and underneath it this is why we do those old timey articles on patreon because they're so blunt and crazy back then it just says where baby was found fire chief henry chapels of belfast views the charred crib in which seven month old mervin groton the third was found dead from the fumes and heat of a downstairs fire at the home of his father tuesday the fateful fire trapped and claimed the lives of his older brother and sister as well ah wow um shocking it doesn't say uh fire investigators look on where a baby was forever wearing the ones that melted to his body no shit well they didn't melt back then they would burst into flames yeah that's yeah that's before fire retardant things covered in fire you get a thing and it would say extra flammable on it and you'd be like oh this one must be really good quality it's fuzzy it's extra flammable don't light a match near this bitch those fleece ones had a zipper from the foot to the chest yeah this is the time period i actually saw a thing on this this is a time period in america where from like the late mid to mid 50s early 50s to the 1980s early early like 81 82 were the peak fires that we've ever had in this country and fire remember when we were little people were terrified of houses catching on fire we had all the stickers on everything and now you don't see this amount of house fires that you used to see a lot of it yeah go ahead sorry oh no no if you know a lot of it consisted of the electrical wiring that's what it was electrical wiring was aluminum well and that aluminum wiring it you run an electric current through it it it expands then you turn it off it now doesn't have the current so it shrinks and over time it creates a space between the conductor now you have an arc yeah that shit just catches on fire and then all the insulation was just that flammable shit yeah that pink shit well that that's it that's part of it and why there was fires even before that but in the 50s is when all sorts of new gadgets came out post-war is when we had all before that you only had like a light that's the only really electric maybe an icebox now all of a sudden there's all of these things all these appliances and the plug the plug was only two prongs yeah it didn't have that ground prong that's a problem too what they would do is they did not have all their shit updated for all this stuff so people would start put a penny in the fucking thing so it wouldn't break and people just rigged it up themselves because they didn't have the money to have an electrician come in and completely rewire the house so they could have a dishwasher now and a washing machine and all this crazy they're just sucking all this current and the house can't handle it boom so it would just burst into and they would do it themselves i mean they would put it so the circuit breaker would override and then it would catch on fire so it was like how many times did you back when you were a kid see friends houses that had like wild shit happening electrically oh yeah there's all sorts of crazy shit that's how it went in the 80s you ever flip a switch and get shocked yeah at friends houses that you saw where i grew up in the village and you think those people are updating their electrical panels jesus christ the switches in my friend's houses in their bedroom i'd flip and go what the fuck man like oh yeah that that one will bite you yeah bite you gotta wear a glove you gotta wear a glove when you turn that one on oh okay i didn't realize sorry it's crazy don't do it when you get out of the shower no so they make three new kids to replace the three old kids what like we need three new kids this is crazy so they have three more kids after that they start completely over a lot of people would have like either been never having them again sitting there staring at the wall for the next 40 years and they would have got a divorce over that because it's like we can't handle the tragedy or whatever find an adirondack and stare at the ocean and a hat for the rest of your life that's what we're doing and wait for the squid or the force or whatever the fuck is here for some reason to take us all yeah or the sea lady for something yeah the sea hag um so they have three new kids and they're like oh my god i'm gonna have three new kids they have rosalyn who will talk a lot i'll hear a lot from her uh nina who's the middle daughter and then michael who was born in 1967 and he's the one who's a teenager and still living at home when we started this story so they didn't do another mervin huh no more well what are you gonna have mervin the fourth now it'd go the third again wouldn't it i don't think so we've already had a third i don't think you can just erase him from history and go well that one didn't work out never mind starting over but a second can't do it - You can't have a fourth, can it? was already a third yeah why not the third has to have the fourth well those thirds and fourths though don't even have to be from the father sequential your uncle could be this third and then you named after you're named after him so now you're the fourth so that could be yeah that's how people do those thirds and fourths and seconds and shit sometimes they can't that that should be illegal there's a difference between junior and second we when we were talking about this on crime and sports somebody sent us a whole thing about it but it's gotta be it doesn't matter in secession otherwise you can't do that i mean it doesn't though you can name people whatever you want i mean yeah you could name your kid jimmy wisp in the ninth it doesn't fucking matter it's legal you name him whatever you feel like naming him i don't think anyone's gonna go back and count i thought what did you name him hold on we're gonna look into your ancestry.com right now and make sure that this is actually the fourth you're not allowed to do that we said no there should be there should be an approval committee like you get a license plate on your car people have to approve that a lot of countries have more shit you're not allowed to name your kid great we have like a few things you're not allowed to name your kid and it's state by state right most of it's adolf hitler you can't name your kid like adolf hitler wisman you can't that's a really yeah which is probably for the best i mean morally you probably shouldn't do that anyway you should even if you are a nazi you're right now your kid has to be adolf hitler wisman this is ridiculous you should certainly be arrested for that yeah so their routine was this is the hard thing about for sunny is that um it's a four and a half hour drive from newport to belfast so this is not a drive you could do every day you can't commute four and a half hours that's impossible so he would live and work in rhode island during the week because it's all he could do and then drive back on the weekends um and uh that's what he would do he'd return to the home the same time every friday every sunday leave at the same time very scheduled very regimented um pulling in the driveway like we said get out back in get out walk up to the front door between 7 30 and 8 depending on traffic when he left it's the same every every time um so by the early 80s is when he's doing the naval education training center in newport and uh later on it's described as uh he had been working in newport rhode island at the training center helped helping to train new officers on shipboard equipment and other surface war uh warfare type skills yeah transfer of knowledge yeah so yeah classes so um now what kind of people are we dealing with who is this family um his son michael described him as very geeky yeah i mean he's very geeky that's what he said he loves gadgets he's very intelligent and he said that if you wanted to be good at something you had to work hard at it like he was always a part of that um his son called him morally focused it was a good way to put it he said his daughter said he had the biggest heart and was so giving and so honest and so hard working and so loving so everything so so so so so dad so dad um and he is always helping people too like he's the guy where if something's broken he'll come over to your house and fix it like neighbors and shit like wow yeah he's got like oh well saturday i gotta go help somebody fix his boiler and then i'm going over to help this guy do that it's got a lot going on like that uh rosalind said my dad was such a nice person that he would be helping everyone else in my in every spare moment he had and it would piss my mother off to no end oh which is funny because my dad was such a nice person that he would be helping me because the first thing i thought of is oh boy his wife's gonna be fucking pissed he's not he's gonna hate this shit you're home and now you're going over here what makes you a good person to the rest of the world doesn't always endear you to a spouse that goes for any gender it doesn't matter it's just yeah it's just that's the way it is you know you could wow all that stuff you're doing that's amazing meanwhile there's a spouse going when's the last time we went out to dinner together we were on a vacation considering your the flapper and the toilet doesn't work yeah you're over here fixing theirs that's great that's great that's great that's great that's great that those kids with palsy or you know i have a couple extra bucks and everything but jesus christ fixed the toilet's been running for three weeks that's yeah that's kind of how it goes um unfortunately uh rosalind says because she was a selfish person and he was a giving person um yeah i mean they they usually attract though so she said they were brought up two totally different ways yeah a lot of times you get people who one's a giver and one's a taker and that's how they end up together great that she likes to cook i like to eat that kind of thing yeah that usually doesn't work out though because after a while the one person feels put upon and then the other and he gets exhausted it doesn't work yeah at first it seems great but that's all unhealthy relationships whatever that thing in your head that's unhealthy that that's triggering that's why they seem great that's why someone who grew up with an alcoholic dad loves a guy even though he drinks a little too much you know what i mean they know intellectually this is bad but they're attracted to it if all if all dysfunction was and and red flags weren't active at a at a second for for a moment the relationship wouldn't have happened anyway yeah yeah all of your all of your psychosis for lack of a better term whatever's going on in your head is going into your attractions yeah and most of it's very unhealthy that's the thing most of the time you'd be better off of like sitting down on paper and working it out rather than being like i feel this way do the math problem before you date yeah um rosalind says she was kind of like well it's an awful thing to say but it's true kind of like a jekyll and hyde type of person she could be fine one minute then the next minute you want to duck because something's going to go flying and you're going to get hit oh really so mom's unpredictable which is that's tough now also that could be you know traumatic she could have some okay if i was me i would need born in the 30s i can't imagine the amount of therapy you'd need from watching your son scream for help and then burn to death like because you couldn't get in there now yeah whatever so and worse off there was a baby in there that couldn't get up there's a baby it's it's horrifying um so they said though that um one of her accounts she said that her mother was always running a con oh and michael said she was always unfaithful to her father their father as well oh what the fuck um he said that rosalind said my father never yelled that just wasn't what he was it wasn't who he was she said i couldn't understand why because dad was always such a nice person he never raised his voice he never raised a hand it's not like he was abusive or being mean anything she wanted anything she got it so she's like i don't understand why she would cheat on him because he's a good husband basically well because she's fucked up who knows where yes right family of origin yeah right there's no challenges i have to create a challenge well chaos is the thing some people need chaos you you you in the past have been attracted to chaos like you're the person where you tell me some crazy shit a woman's that you're dating is doing and i go yeah jimmy because you love chaos that's why and you go fuck you're right yeah every time you're like why didn't i see that you look for chaos it's it's bad well i like to help i'm a helper so what's that called what's that called jimmy you've been to therapy yeah i understand yes exactly you shouldn't help your person in your relationship you guys should have a mutual something it shouldn't be a helping relationship it's nice yeah it's chaos i can't help it fucked up chicks fuck great yeah that's crazy it's funny because we had very similar upbringings yeah but you are attracted to the chaos and i see that chaos and my i get like i went the opposite i'm like i'm i'm the woman who dad was a drunk so if you have had one drink in your life i'm never dating you like i'm that guy like i go for the most stable people like i need that yeah trauma bonding there carries a relationship too sometimes no it's not no no it's not healthy until it doesn't until it yeah that'll attract you but then after a while yeah i'm not saying my what happened to me or the way i did it was healthy neither of them are healthy they're both reactions to something that happened rather than something else so i'm not saying it's not healthy i'm not saying it's not healthy i'm not saying it's not there's certainly a way to accept and and uh and reject a healthy portion of it but it's setting it's those boundaries man and the boundaries are so fucking difficult to find and uh there's only so much that you should be taking but yeah i take all of it so uh norma left sunny multiple times really she always ended up coming back and he would always take her back um rosalind remembered the time that she was cast as the lead in the sixth grade production of cinderella big deal in a young girl's life she's like 11 she gets to be cinderella yeah she said in the sixth grade i had the lead in cinderella i was so excited i mean who wouldn't be excited about being cinderella right right yeah she said then a station wagon pulled up she said well my mother pulls up in this uh pulls in with a station wagon and she says come on get in let's go we're leaving we're going to california and she said well my mother pulls up in this uh pulls in with a i can't go and she had left dad again bluebirds are gonna put a dress on me i can't leave i'm gonna ride in a pumpkin in like two minutes this is fucking crazy no there's three mice one of them is a fat cute one i gotta stay for gus i always wanted to see if a glass slipper was actually comfortable please damn it i want to see if it gives blisters yeah so she got she didn't have a choice she was 11 so she got in and she said they didn't stay long they didn't stay away long they never did they ended up back home but she of course missed cinderella so that understudy was shitting in her little pantaloons that day boy what thrill um so that's what happened everybody used to run away to california back then that was a big thing you could just run my grandmother did that in the 60s she went to california she ran away to cal she had to because it's different if if you're italian and from that neighborhood and all that literally you remember godfather 2 when frankie pantangeli was testifying in front of congress so they brought his brother in just to sit there and stare at him from italy that's a thing that that's real they tried to bring when my grandmother was leaving my grandfather they tried to bring her brothers from italy to come and tell her to go home so she ran away to california so nobody could find them basically so it's crazy that's what people used to do go start over on the other side of the country yeah and it was cheap back then and it's sunny and why not you know what i mean so um and there's a lot of men that's the problem um and they said that they were the kids would always have to be interested in the world and they said that they were the kids would always have to be introduced to these guys because you know norma had left so this is a new life she's starting so this is your new stepfather or whatever the fuck here um rosalind said there was always a man involved there were several i mean we were supposed to call them uncle whoever and they didn't or they didn't have a name i couldn't recall i couldn't recall exactly how many oh jesus god that's a lot uncle so confusing yeah why is uncle fucking mom that's weird yeah why did uncle terry kiss you ma that's so weird that's weird and every time she'd end up coming back when she realized this isn't working because sunny is immensely stable and and all that kind of thing when she realized that this excitement isn't quite working out she'd go back and sunny would always forgive her and take her back sunny that's how it went um now summer of 1982 comes around and there's a young man named boyd smith okay now boyd smith i guess is the name of the was rosalind's boyfriend okay okay um now it's very interesting so he ends up moving into the house okay with that into into junior's house into this sunny's house the groton house here sunny enormous house um it's it's real interesting he's a big guy a tall guy um not a bad kid or anything he's you know 16 years old at the time he's just some some goofy kid that's dating his 1983 haircut he might have had a flock of seagulls we have no idea jimmy it could be anything this could be nuts a hard mullet a flock of seagulls i mean there's really a feather job shiny leather jacket you never know man so by the fall of 1983 here um sunny is tired of this shit he's tired of tired of norma he's tired of the constant bullshit over the decades of her leaving and coming back trust his wife and all that kind of thing so in november 19 1983 this is a quote from rosalind quote he's like i can't do this anymore and he'd had enough and that was in november and i'm like oh my god after you know thinking about that later it's just it was messed up and we'll talk about why so he said he was done with the marriage and that was that he was going to figure out a way to get out of this marriage so michael's 16 the kids are getting older this is what's like he was hanging in until the kids got to a certain age and then he was like i'm not gonna you know well we have three small kids i'm not gonna do it but later so december 9th through 11th 1983 it's a home weekend okay sunny comes home like always um he leaves on sunday to drive back to newport kisses norma goodbye as one does when you're leaving for a week you kiss your wife goodbye now a friend of norma's a woman named vicky was at the house when this went down and he kissed her he walked out the door and apparently um norma turned to vicky and said that'll be the last time he does that to me kiss me how dare you kiss me goodbye yeah yeah she hates him um which is very odd um at that point so and then other things there's another person that she talked to that she basically said the same thing to like he's i don't know if that's because maybe he told her that he was wanting out of the marriage and we're not sure about that um so friday december 16th 83 between 7 30 and 8 p.m is where we started okay um here we are that like i said after dinner michael's playing guitar we hear the backfiring truck or whatever the fuck it was she's she says i gotta go michael and his friend run to the door and tell him that norma's calling 911 and now norma's dialing 911 as well sure now first responders arrive and they find sunny in the driveway bleeding yeah he's alive oh but he can they're asking him questions he can only make gurgling sounds he can't talk can't say who did this or can't say what happened he can't say anything so okay that's tough um so now the calls went out to an emergency dispatch like i said a neighbor reported the sound of gunshots coming from next door and he's like oh my god i'm gonna go to the emergency dispatch and he's like oh my god i'm gonna go to the emergency dispatch and he's like oh my god i'm gonna go to the emergency dispatch and he's like oh my god i'm gonna go to the emergency dispatch and he's like oh my god the other was from norma obviously um and a third call went out that night as well um i guess they said that it was her grandmother called rosalyn yeah and rosalyn said it wasn't very long after that after she hung up with norma that my grandmother called me hysterical on the phone and said rosie you've got to come over your dad's been shot and i'm like oh my god oh boy so he's rushed to the waldo county general hospital where he's pronounced the dead at 8 36 p.m oh no dead 46 years old dead in the didn't talk didn't couldn't get a word out oh shit the whole time um did not last long either they got an hour though of struggling for your life with not being able to communicate as fucked 45 minutes to move yeah something like a half yeah it's a lot so 8 45 p.m uh trooper mark nickerson of the state police comes to the house while waiting for the detectives to arrive it was a definite setup in my opinion oh he said i don't yeah this had to be on purpose he didn't get in an argument with somebody at night in the driveway and then they shot him this has to be on purpose no he's not robbed also yeah this is a weird robbery too let's wait for a guy to get out of his car you don't know what if he has anything on him you don't know what you're robbing so it's very very interesting here now the bullets as we'll talk about um here are it's it's they're rough here um the three shots here the first hit him in the left hip oh we took him down the second tore through his left upper arm and passed through his torso and came out of his back what kind of yeah and then the third shot they said came from an exceptionally close range uh-huh so shot in the hip on purpose oh god shot in the chest he falls and then someone came up and just plug final shot right in the head fucking uh an obvious kill shot like somebody this is on purpose clear what kind of weapon was used a rifle as we'll talk about i think it was a 30 30 jesus a hunting rifle he was the point here so it's a lot um so yeah 8 45 this trooper's there and uh they described it as gunshot wounds to the face and trunk region yeah the last shot right to the face point blank boom which is fucked up um so they're looking through it and trying to figure out how this happened basically based on where he is the angles and everything so they're like it's been dark out for hours he came up the street in his truck the yard is cold there's wood piles stacked on the side of the house because everybody's got a fireplace and they're burning wood fires up there um he said every yard has wood piles this time of year this is when you've probably just gotten a big batch of wood for the year i know that because i just had my wood shed filled up with fucking how many cords do you have one or two we usually end up doing three for the season we end up burning the time you go through do you get it all at once or do you do you usually get two two is what usually fits in our wood shed and then we'll have them bring another cord of wood it's a lot of it's a bunch but you burn it quick man you got wood stoves that like because we don't we use that as a lot of our heat just because we like we like the heat from it it's a nice heat so um anyway this guy reconstructs it and figures out sunny backed in the truck he gets out yeah this guy said he didn't even make it to his home and was shot in the walkway he's like the rifle was fired they figure out from blood spatter and everything else from the direction of the backyard wood piles oh somebody may have been hiding behind it using it for cover um this one cop here later on an ncis agent which is hilarious because already we've talked about the ncis show number one how terrible it is it's just an awful show for old people but that's a whole separate thing who's that redhead mark harman on that one or no david caruso that's csi oh that's is he on ncis i don't fucking know he might be on csi you might be right i have no idea i didn't want either of those shows i haven't seen it since grissom was on there and that and that handsome ass black guy with the blue eyes or green eyes i don't know he was so handsome yeah i've uh is that why you watched it jimmy's just like i'm gonna watch the show with the handsome guy i watched it for mark helgenberger i had a big crush on her oh boy So, yeah, she must have a lot of chaos going on. you might be right because in bad boys she was such a bitch i was like god i want to i think that's what it is you're like oh she'd be terrible for me awesome oh she would ruin my fucking life she could destroy five she'll ruin my 40s perfect fuck i want to give her a house i want to buy her things and take her places oh god so uh yeah we make fun of ncis because my whole thing was it's a naval police yeah but like on the show the two seconds clips i've seen here and there they're like whipping out the ncis and people are like oh no one's like what the fuck is that like if you're not in the navy and someone said ncis freeze you'd go i don't know what that is are you like an are you like a housing inspector like what does that mean i don't know can you explain nsa what what are you what is this and the nhs what health services from england what are we talking about why are there four letters there's only supposed to be three let me look at bring that badge closer if you could like that would be how many interactions would you have to have before you went this job sucks man no one respects us because even if i have my gun out they go huh who are you but this freeze pl xl jj3 why are there so many freeze t1000 what so these these people it's this is i guess when someone in the actual navy is killed then they have jurisdiction and they actually are part of the whole shit which is amazing jurisdiction i guess so they're working with state police and everything so i think they're all kind of working together here and he put it together and he said you know he fell from the second shot they think the first shot in the hip didn't put him down actually he said it was the second shot that went through his arm and torso that put him down um now rosalind said it sounded like a car or a truck backfiring in the background and i asked her what was that and she just said i gotta go so she hung up really quick and that was that um now michael and his friend were playing like guitar with an amp and shit and they heard it over the guitar yeah it's a lot of noise so it's loud and michael looked out and sees his father in the walkway bleeding heavily um so they said at that point they thought the wood piles was the place so they began searching around in the dark around the wood piles and they said investigators discovered two spent 30 30 rifle casings between two wood piles located in the backyard third one's still in the rifle probably um the casings were found approximately 30 to 40 feet from the spot where sonny fell after being shot yeah because the two were from there and then the third one was from right up close the investigators' did not find any other physical evidence that that evening though that's the problem they have two casings they don't have a rifle they don't have footprints they don't have fingerprints the no eyewitnesses that saw someone running away from the scene anything nothing all they have is two fucking shell casings no snow yet it's december december 16th no no it's not snowy apparently um so three bullets hit him and uh you know that's that they never found the third one so they said also a 30 30 lever action deer rifle is probably the most common weapon in the state of maine yeah but it's also a it's not usually used as a murder weapon because they know it's a deer rifle yeah the the the lever action itself is it's cumbersome and not used to like defend yourself ask oswald you know what i mean i know that wasn't a 30 30 but it's a lever action that was a bolt action which is easier than the lever honestly right yeah that lever action you gotta pick the whole rifle up yeah it's weird so it's a so but they said it's every house in maine has a 30 30 deer rifle it's just okay every house in the in maine new hampshire like it's just that's the most common deer rifle at the time so they're like basically that narrow doesn't narrow it down at all nothing it's not like well this type of weapon only a you know a certain number of these it's everywhere yeah they sell this at the hardware store i mean it's just it's a very cheap rifle too it's a common your basic hunting rifle so they said that they the the one thing they did notice from the scene is whoever did this knew what was happening this isn't random they knew sonny's routine they were waiting for him they knew the time it's cold out in the dark out no one's just sitting behind a wood pile for five hours going hope he comes home soon they know when he's coming they know what he's going to do they know he's going to back up into the driveway they know where he's going to be they said this is an inside job basically someone had a job 20 degrees and it's cold um and they knew where to stand so the wood piles you know hid were hid from the street and the house also everything so it makes sense um it has to be someone who was either told what he did or had watched him and stalked him well you never know but then why'd they kill him what's sonny up to um and we'll talk about that maybe he's into some shit so trooper nickerson here the guy who got there first uh he said that when he arrived and was doing the crime scene norma was inside and he said he watched her and he said that you know he knew it was a setup at that point so he was obviously immediately suspicious of the wife is yeah a cop here a cop in a murder scene suspicious of everybody but sure yeah when any kind of spouse dies their spouse is number one suspect until they're cleared period that's just the way it is so um he said just the way the whole thing unfolded it shocked the area mr. cotton was executed it looked like an execution somebody lying and wait as he backs in gets out of his vehicle and walks to his house and somebody shoots him that's execution style right um and he thought by the time they're done doing this crime scene norma's leaving this fucking house in custody it's gonna be her um he said i was confident when our detectives showed up within a half hour they were going to be lugging her out in handcuffs and when it didn't happen i was shocked what the hell they let go and he's like she's good they're like and we're leaving he's like okay okay it seems pretty i mean more info what are we doing i guess so so they look into does anyone hate him does he have enemies he's not even around enough to have enemies he's hardly here he's got to be somewhere a lot of time right yeah what's maybe he has a whole second life in rhode island where he's got banging some guy's wife and this guy's pissed and he's gonna come stalk him and kill him and she knows what time he goes home something like that but they looked into it they found nothing they found nothing they found nothing they found nothing they found nothing they found no secret life no affairs no drugs no booze no debts no enemies he's boring as fuck this guy literally goes to work goes home goes back to work he does nothing exciting at all interesting he does not like chaos he's interesting how uninteresting he is yeah yeah he's a very dull guy i mean steady guy um so investigators here they're looking at everything and they're looking and one of the ncis agents who comes on much later says when sunny was away in newport working for the navy his wife norma had sort of taken on a different lifestyle taking it that taking advantage of the freedom she had oh we started to pick up information that she may have been involved in extramarital affairs and that she was involved in drug use and some drug sales this is how far away she has gotten from sunny she's 1983 she has become a drug kingpin in no no belfast maine she's hooking up with guys who do drug stuff and she does some drug use and she's around for deals and she's basically just becoming like trash of the town yeah which is weird they said and living a life that was much different than the one that sunny may have known about her because she had all week to do whatever she wanted right so they figured out too in this area um the sheriff of the of the county john ford called this era of the early 80s a crazy era for them in terms of drugs he said there were so many fucking drugs here it was crazy yeah he said cocaine had arrived it was there took a little bit of time to get there from new york and boston but it got there and um people at the bars the guys who worked in the mills liked it yeah keeps you going and everything else um now we'll talk a little bit later but a large state police uh state police sting would end up getting like 40 people in the area all these people and uh it's interesting now one of the people they were most interested in is a guy named joel fuller okay now he's in his late 20s he is described as a poacher a painter and an outlaw he's a butcher a baker and a chemist got it all he does all three a poacher a painter and an outlaw he calls himself the deer hunter that's his nickname that he gave himself that everyone else calls him too um a main sheriff i think it's john ford actually calls him a highly talented smart individual with no scruples dangerous is what that is it's the only way to describe that dangerous brilliant and doesn't give a fuck that's scary just don't give a fuck um now back to norma they said she definitely used she definitely sold some drugs not a big dealer but she would hook people up she used drugs she had boyfriends they found a big trail of cocaine and semen in her in her life path basically a lot of white in their background a lot of white Um, is that dried semen or cocaine? I can't tell. Can't tell. So she had, you know, her husband would show up every Friday and want to be a husband. So she'd have like the weekends. It's kind of like some guy who goes out drinking all week and then gets his kids on the weekend and like goes to the fucking park and stuff and acts all like whatever, drops them off. Sunday goes home and gets shit hammered because it's been, that's kind of what she does. Um, the, another detective said she had also told people that she dreaded when Sonny came home and was kind of happy when he left for the week. Oh, okay. Now back to Joel Fuller, the deer hunter here. Um, he's described by, uh, by down East magazine as a small guy with a rough beard and a piercing stare, someone who'd do anything for a buck. And the Bangor daily news said he was quote legendary Waldo County bad man. That does not describe shit. Describes nothing. I can't see the guy at all. I mean, I picture. Lots of black and red checkered shirts. Oh, well for sure. Flaps over the ears. Absolutely. I can't. What the fuck does that mean? What does it mean? He's human Elmer Fudd, but has no scruples. What are we talking about here? Is the unkempt? Is he just completely wild? Does he look like he has ticks? Yeah. What's the deal? Well, they said, I really, this is the John Ford guy. He met him when he was Maine's game warden, the sheriff guy. He said, I really got to know Joel Fuller back when I was game warden. Because he was one of the lawbreakers, right? He killed shitloads of deer from what he told Ford, the sheriff that he killed more than 50 deer a year. Okay. But he wouldn't do it during deer season and have tags and shit. He did it out of season and at night with a light, which is not cool. Just ambushing these things. Yeah, this is, it's illegal. It's called jack lighting and it's illegal. And it's kind of like one of the main things the game wardens are doing. They're trying to crack down on as people doing this because it's not fair. It's cheating, right? You already have a goddamn rifle. Is that not an advantage enough for you? It's got a rifle and attracts them. Yeah, I don't get it. I could see if you were, you know, surrounded by lions and you had to hunt them to get away from them or something. But you're just going into these deer. You're getting something that's very docile just fast. I like deer. They're awesome. They're in my yard. I love them. So I'm like, why are you doing that? He's a really good painter. Really? Yeah. It's the wild part. And he would send the game warden slash sheriff his painting sometimes and he would get in trouble. The sheriff said the talent that he's got from his paintings is just unbelievable. He tells about how he shot over 50 deer a year. And John boy, I hope you like this painting. Yeah, that's me with the light. And it looks like him. It's because he sent this guy a painting of him committing the crime. And it even looked like him. And then a note saying, hey, that's me. And this is what I do. Isn't it cool? Here's a picture of me raping and murdering. Love Ted Bundy. Isn't that nice? Yeah. With like a head sitting over here. As I revisit a skeleton. He mailed it to the war. He mailed it to him as a gift. Wow. That's kind of fun and classy as a criminal, though, at that point. It's like that's a fun thing. I mean, he's not convicted of it. So. So it's just him like rubbing his nose in it. You got to catch me. Oh, he's gotten caught for it before. Oh, it's not like a big enough. It's only he's going to go to prison for it. It's a fine offense. And it's one of those things. So he doesn't care. They developed what they called an unusual friendship over this. Like he had respect for this guy's criminality. And this guy had sort of respect for him because he treated him like a human being. So it kind of went back and forth. He said, quote, he called himself the deer hunter and he called me the other side, the other side of the law. Yeah. Fuller would sign his letters to Ford. He would write him all the time. He would write the sheriff and call and say, quote, a friend from the other side. That's how he would sign his letters. The sheriff said, people look at it and they say, well, you know, you're in law enforcement. Why have you got this relationship? I guess my philosophy is that that I've learned a lot about him. I've learned a lot about what his lifestyle was like. He said, Joel Fuller was a highly talented, smart individual. Joel with no scruples. That's what I learned. But if you don't talk to him, you don't know. Yeah. That's why McNulty went and sat with Bodie and had a fucking and ate some lake trout. What you're hunting. Yeah. You have to. What are we talking about? And it's also like it's we don't hate each other. Right. We don't, you know, have different goals. We're the coyote and the and the fucking, you know, the roadrunner. At the end of the day, we punch out and then we go see tomorrow and we go home and fucking. Bird feed and coyotes looking to eat a roadrunner. Evidently, it's the end of the day. They're like, well, that's that. And they go home. That's how it is. So December 1983, still the same month. Detectives interview Norma because they're very interested in clearing her or what's going on, Norma. So they ask her, tell you what. And this is standard operating procedure with this type of thing. Take a polygraph and let's clear you. And then we can move on. Basically, we can't let you until we can clear you. Lie or don't into this machine. It's completely unusable in court, but it'll give us reason to keep investigating. Yeah, fuck it up. Well, that's what they do is that's how they clear people to, you know, wipe them off as a suspect and move on to the next guy. So she says, no, I won't take it. I won't take it. And Rosalyn is like, what the fuck, mom? You won't take it. She said, I'll go with you and just take the stupid lie detector test because you didn't do anything wrong. So what are you afraid of? Yeah. And the detective said she wouldn't take the polygraph. So that's kind of a red flag. Yeah, it is. If they're if you expect to be asked, if your spouse is murdered, they are going to ask you to take a polygraph and you better fucking take it and pass or else do a lot of things. They're going to be the suspect. Otherwise, they're going to see how long or short your penis is. They're going to find out a lot of no. Well, I could see like if you're, you know, if it was some like drug crime or something, you kill the guy and. All that. And I'm not taking the polygraph. That's fine because it's like, hey, you're going to try to pin this on me and blah, blah, blah. You might not be the main suspect, but if you're the spouse, you are the suspect until you're cleared. So that's what's fucking crazy. They said before Sonny's death, for example, some of Norma's friends overheard her state that she would quote that she would be, quote, better off if Sonny was dead than alive and that Sonny is worth more dead than alive because they branch out. They're talking. All her friends and all her friends are like, let me tell you what she said. She's talking about life insurance and shit. Yeah. So they said that she would receive insurance money and. Military pension. Well, a death benefit from the Navy, full ownership of the real estate she held with Sonny. Oh, yeah. She'd just have everything. And also a monthly check from the VA that would keep coming for years. Yep. They ran the numbers. They said it was a death benefit from the Navy. She received the real estate she owned with Sonny and she received a monthly payment from the VA. That over 15 or 17 years amounted to $100,000. Just that VA. Just the VA benefit and the real estate and everything else. So is it Norma, though? I mean, it makes sense. There's always anybody that dies. You can look at their spouse and go, well, obviously they had a reason to kill them because they're going to benefit. Everybody does. Yeah. But is it actually her? Well, the polygraph didn't help. She didn't contradict herself in any major way. And they kept interviewing her and she kept her story straight. She didn't. She didn't say, well, maybe you should talk to this person or have like some other idea. I wasn't trying to story over and over and over again. Put him on her whole thing is, I don't know. Yeah. Wasn't trying to. Well, you should look at this person because they're really, you know, trying to didn't try to like put them on another direction. Yeah. Investigators, though, can't place a weapon in her hands or a gunman that could have possibly done this. They said they got to a certain point in the case, but just sufficient evidence didn't exist to charge anybody responsible in this case. They didn't. They just didn't have anything. They had Norma Stonewalling and they literally had zero leads outside of that. So they could charge her and have no evidence and not be able to go to court. So they just basically say that you wait for more evidence now. So it keeps going. By December 1984, they still have nothing. So that's when a guy named Norman Grainer has an interesting evening in Swanville nearby. He's a cocaine dealer. Norman Grainer, who shot to death with buckshot from a 12 gauge shotgun while he's watching TV. Ah, now, remember Joel Fuller, the brilliant scrupulous man? He's charged. He's charged with the murder. A 12 gauge, huh? 12 gauge. He evades police for an extended period of time before finally surrendering. And then they release him on bail. Why? He he was a fugitive from a murder charge. They finally. They finally get him and they're like, well, we can let him out again. I'm sure he'll come back. I mean, you can trust he'll be back in court. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Then January 10th, 1985 is when the state police uncovered the cocaine ring here. And there's a lead investigator who uses an informant and they have a big raid on a Congress Street apartment in Belfast. More than 40 people end up being arrested with drug trafficking. And one of them's a guy named Scott Lacombe. Remember that name for later. Okay. that may have been 1985, a guy named Lloyd Bryant is fishing with his brothers in a river near the Route 173 intersection. Okay. What'd they catch? Well, he caught a damaged lever-action rifle. Nice! Fucking what lure catches that? It's a good one. You got the Winchester one. It's a spinnerbait. Chartreuse spinnerbait, I believe, is how you catch that. It's something stinky, I'm sure that stinkbait catches the Winchester. Only rubber worms. It's all you can do. You gotta go to the bottom. So this guy, rather than just go, ah, goddammit, that's not a fish, and throw it in the woods, he turns it over to the state police. That's what you're supposed to. Good boy. Well done. Are you? I would never do that. You'd never turn over a gun that you caught in the water? No. Fuck no. It's none of my business. I don't even want to unhook it from my line. I want to call somebody to come take it. Clip. I clip the line and go, that never happened. None of my fucking business. Tie a new one. None. Couldn't be less of my fucking business than that. Lace up another hook. If I find a body, I'll call someone. Outside of that, none of my fucking business, and I am not getting involved. No interest. Any gun from a body of water also has bodies on it. Yeah. Which is why I'm not getting involved. Yeah. I'm not doing it. Didn't the only count. I'm not touching it. Because I just said Lloyd Bryant is I don't want James Petragalos fishing with his brother, and he found a fucking, I don't want that in the, I don't want to know about that. How damaged is it? Just water damage? Firearms examiner test fires it and compares it with the casings from this case, and he can't, it's inconclusive. Okay. Inconclusive. So, now Scott Lacombe, the guy who got arrested in that bust, he's a young kid, 22 years old. Yeah. He's arrested, and he agrees to cooperate with the state. He's a young kid who got busted on coke charges. That's what they do. Yeah. So, July 2nd, 1985, that was. He was due to plead guilty on July 3rd, but on July 2nd, he's due to plead guilty, then cooperate and testify against a shitload of people. Catches a 30-30 with his eye? Well, July 2nd, he's shot with a 12-gauge shotgun outside his home in North Park. Oh, boy. And his fiancee said she found him face down on the ground. Dead? Dead. Oh, fuck. He's murdered, too. So, this is like, this is, this town, has some shit going on. It sounds like this is, yeah, Brownsville. This is bad. That's why the guy said it was a crazy era, I think, during this time. We had drug killings and shit. So, 1993 comes around. We are 10 years out. Joel Fuller, if we remember him, the brilliant artist guy, with no scruples. Yeah. He's convicted of killing Scott Lacombe in 1993. Right, in the car, in 1993. With the shotgun murder. Outside of his house. The last guy. The informant. Okay. Prosecutors say he was hired by Linwood Jackson, who was, worked at a mill, but was the cocaine boss of the town. That's how he distributed cocaine. Through the mill. Really? Yeah. They said, but Lacombe was cooperating with authorities. That's why this happened. They said the price for this hit that Joel Fuller did was $20,000 and two sports cars. Wow. That's a hit, man. Yeah, that's especially back then. Between, this is crazy, between the Grainer and Lacombe killings, two shotgun killings, that they're pretty sure he did the Grainer killing, too, Fuller drove a car with a bumper sticker that said, kill a rat, on it. Oh, my. Why did, no scruples. Scruples, son of a bitch. Why would, and no brains, either. What are you doing? Don't announce what you're doing. No. Kill a rat. So, Fuller is convicted in the Grainer murder, so not the Lacombe murder, the Grainer murder, and sentenced to 50 years. Shit. Then he's convicted in the Lacombe murder, as well, and sentenced to life in prison. You, sir, may fuck off life in prison. So, in between killing two informants, he was, he put a bumper sticker on his car that said, kill a rat, and was like, that's perfect. And that came up in court, if you don't think it did. Hell, yeah. So, he's serving these, he's never getting out of jail, basically, and for the Lacombe murder, the judge said, all evidence points to Mr. Fuller's guilt. Killing someone for hire is abhorrent to all the values of a civilized society. So, 1984 to 2000, nothing happens. Nothing. Essentially. Nothing. It's cold. Cold for 16 years. Everybody just thinks it's over. Then there's a guy named Larry Phillips here. Larry Phillips remembers a day in the winter of 1984. This is sometime between 84 and 2000. For some reason, the exact date isn't known. We don't know if it's early 90s or what, but I'm going to say it's probably between 93 and 2000, because that is when Fuller was in prison. He was put away, so now it's safe to talk about him, basically. Larry Phillips here is best friends with Joel Fuller in the winter of 84. They're drinking and driving through Waldo County, just driving around drinking, having a good time. What a time to be alive. What a crazy time. Headed toward Rockland. As they approach the intersection of Back Belfast Road and Route 173, remember that intersection we just talked about? Fuller tells Phillips, there's a 30-30 rifle in the brook on the right-hand side. So Phillips, who's a gun collector, said, shit, I'm going to go look for it. Pull over! Yeah, where'd you see that? And Fuller says, don't bother. I smashed it against a telephone pole. So it's all fucked up. Don't worry about it. But he pointed that out, said there was a rifle. Later that day, Fuller told him why it was smashed, because he said, why'd you smash a rifle? I would have taken the fucking rifle. He said, he'd been paid to shoot some guy on White Street, which is where the Grottons live, a serviceman. Guy in the military. Military man, yeah. He said, he said, I waited behind a wood pile and shot him in the back as he reached for his door. Oh. That's what he tells this guy. Okay? Phillips. So, also he says that, basically that his, he went on further and said the guy was pleading for his life when he came up and shot him in the face. Yeah, man. And basically, he had a hand over his face when he shot him. He was trying to block it. So, that's crazy. So, yeah, this guy said he shot the man in the back, then he shot the victim in the head as he attempted to cover his face with his hand. At some point, Phillips went to the police. Now, in the report, we don't know exactly when it happened, but we do know that he took a polygraph over this and passed. Yeah? This Phillips guy. Passed the polygraph. Huh. So, yeah, the cop said Joel proceeded to tell Larry that he used the rifle to kill Sonny. He did take a polygraph test and he did pass, so we felt pretty comfortable that Larry was telling the truth at this point. That's good. And they got, you know, this guy who's got a story and passed a lie detector test, and then they got a wife who refused a lie detector test. So, they're like, huh, what are we doing here? It's interesting. Now, you know, by the way, that's hearsay and we'll talk all about that later. They said shots coming from the wood pile and shot from behind as he reached for the door, they said that was information that nobody should know except the shooter. That was not publicly released. So, they just basically put this story away in a file with the rifle and nothing happens. That's just part of the case file, but they didn't immediately go and do anything because they go to Fuller and he goes, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. That's the end of that lead. It's over. He's not going to cooperate. This guy said this. Okay, cool. Great. Well, fuck him. He's a liar. I'm in here for life. Anything else? That would have been it. Yeah, I got life without. I don't care about any of this. Goodbye. Yeah, eat dicks. So, anyway, in the early 2000, by then, Norma's been interviewed 11 times. They've talked to her a lot. 11 times, and basically that there's they never get anything new out of her. It's always the same story. She admits nothing. She, by the way, reverted to her maiden name, Norma Small, pretty quickly after the death, which is an interesting thing. I mean, I get that people do that, but it just seemed like, well, good. Got rid of that name. I mean, my sister's been divorced from her last husband for 10 years. She still has his last name. Yeah, my ex-wife still has my last name. It was easier than changing a bunch of shit. Yeah. So, it's just, whatever. Who cares? You know, I'm like, I don't care. Who cares? Enjoy it. Enjoy having everyone mispronounce it and never spell it right. Some of them just like it because it's much easier at the school. Yeah. Well, also, you gotta do a bunch of paperwork and shit. It's a pain in the ass. I get it. I wouldn't want to do that either. Who cares what your name is? It's a difference. I'm too lazy. I don't want to do that. So, the Maine State Police Detective Dean Jackson in early 2000 said, "We just needed to look at this case again." They said, we were kind of wondering, trying to work things into a case here, but it was just so old. There was just no, just all the same info. Nothing new. Nothing was ever connected. But the thing they were looking at, trying to connect to, is the fire. They're looking at her and they're going, Norma killed her fucking kids. They think she did it on purpose. When they look back at the police reports and the fire reports from back in 59. There's three kids dead. She clearly wanted to start over. By 2000, though, there was like most of the people involved, the fire people, they were all dead by then. So they couldn't go back and talk to them. All they had was the reports from the time. So they were like, we wanted to connect it, but it was so fucking old. We couldn't. But we felt like, they said, we felt like what parents walking out without a burn on them when their three kids are burning to death. I'm going to be cut up in the 1950s from that goddamn glass. The glass I'm going through. I'm going to put a wet fucking thing on. I'm going in there. I'm getting at least some of these kids out. I'm going to get those bodies out before the fire department does. I'm trying for sure. So they said, we just never trusted that here. She collected all of her Navy death benefits, the monthly VHX. Eventually, she moved to Kansas in the late 90s. Oh, no. In the tiny town of Gas, Kansas. Like GAS. GAS. Gas, Kansas. I mean, the first couple of syllables are gas can. That's crazy. Gas, Kansas. Yeah. Near Iola. By 2001, basically, I think her benefits had run out by then. Right. And she was cleaning motel rooms in small town Kansas. In Gas, Kansas. So life has not been good to Norma. And they said that if I, she said, if I didn't, I would have nothing to live on. And I tried working. That took too much out of me. She was talking about that earlier of why she, whatever. So they figured out that she applied for and received $88,270 from the VA. Pretty good money. Now, Sonny was getting near retirement. He had 20 plus years in and he was a chief petty officer with a pension. So they talked about that, too. They said when the homicide occurred, it was clear that it was that it was because Sonny was getting ready to retire. Right. From the Navy and was going to be moving back home to Maine and would be there all the time. And that lifestyle that she had developed, whether it was running around or the involvement in drugs or the social life, she seemed to life away, wasn't going to happen anymore. So we thought she had him killed. That makes sense. It's just inconvenient for her. She dreads that he comes home on the weekends. Well, every day is about to be the weekend. Yep. And if they get a divorce, if he had told her that I'm leaving you, then he's. She's not going to have any more benefit, you know, any more tie in. She's going to get half of whatever. And that's it. That's over. So, I mean, there's always divorce. One of the NCIS agents said what you and I would normally deal with through divorce, a breakup she dealt with through murder, they said. OK, that's at least the story that they're creating. That's what they think anyway at this point. So NCIS in 2000, they have a newly formed NCIS cold case squad. Oh. That takes up the murder alongside a main state police detective, Dean Jackson, that we talked about. They put this as their top priority, this case at this point. They have. So one of the cops said, for us, cold cases present an investigator challenge. They haven't been solved before. We may have a little bit of competitiveness and a desire to see the case resolved. No murder should go unresolved. And he also said that, you know, we had 11 prior. So they decided right away, because they're deciding how do we go about this? What's the strategy? They said a 12th interview with Norma would be fucking pointless. It's fruitless. They use the word fruitless, actually. He said, I really came to the conclusion that interviewing Norma again without any new information would probably be fruitless. We had to develop some direct evidence against those that we believe could be involved. Great points. Which makes perfect sense. Yeah. So they came up with a plan. They're like, talking to her is pointless. So fruitless. Let's come up with something different. So they sat around and brainstormed of how they can approach this, which this seems like fun because it's it's there. You have so much time and you can really kind of, you know, any like when someone dies, like you kind of just go with the investigation where it leads you first. And there's not a real lot of time to sit back and go, let's get a strategy. Yeah. They call it leads for a reason. It leads places. Now there's no leads. Well, they said, OK. They said one of the guys said we came up with what we came up with is what if what if Joel Fuller had a buddy in prison that he served time with? But this guy was now out and was able to make contact with Norma and ask her some questions. What if we did that? OK. So like that, I'm going to talk about a thing. Yeah. Yeah. Try to get her talking here. So they said, OK, who do we have? So they have this guy. There's a guy, an undercover guy who looks like. An ex-con. And he looks like a piece of shit. He's an undercover guy. I mean, that's what they do. They look like whatever scumbags are fitting in with. You know, we were talking about the J. Dobbins, the ATF guy with he got himself sleeved out. He had to make himself look like a fucking bike. Shaved his fucking head and grew a handlebar goatee. Just a crazy long corkscrew thing. So one of the cops said, I figured out who to send. He said, I learned about Dave Truesdale's undercover work and realized he was pretty good at it. He worked with ex-cons. He knows what they think. He knows what they act. Knows what they act. He said he knows what they act, which is weird. He should have corrected that. I read it and I'm like, that's that can't be right. It is. I thought it was me. He can talk like them. Now, Dave Truesdale, the undercover, grew up in a military family. He's all tatted out. He's got a black belt in some form of martial arts. He's one of those guys. And he said, anytime I see a military member hurt by somebody, it does prove me wrong. He pushed me to resolve that incident because he grew up in a military family. He said that undercover operations can be very dangerous. Best case scenario, you blow your line. Worst case scenario, you get killed. Yeah. And he said, I kind of developed a particular personality when I was undercover. I'm sort of a tough guy, but I like to play a tough guy. When you're undercover, the tattoos are very helpful because most people don't associate heavily tattooed people with law enforcement. This is 25 years ago. Now, the guy with the most neck tattoos, I assume, is a fucking cop. Just assume he's a cop now. And he just got out of the academy. Yeah, especially if I see certain ones. If you know which ones I'm talking about, I definitely assume it's a cop. So, it was different. He said his usual targets were dangerous dudes. This is literally a grandmother in her 60s who cleans motel rooms. So, he's like, I wasn't real. Yeah, because I didn't go in with the same, like, hey, don't fuck up, man. False move and you could be dead. Like, probably not. Was she going to do spray pledge in your eyes? Like, there's not a lot she can do to you here. He said, this was a very unique role I had to play. I took from my past all the other roles that I played as kind of a tough guy and went up against someone who, at the time, could have been my mother. So, he's like, it was real weird, didn't it? He's used to dudes his age that are dangerous. So, he had to pick a name. He picked Tony. Tony sounds like a criminal. You know, that's fine. He said, I was probably, at the time, 14. I was probably one of the most experienced undercover operatives or special agents in NCIS. Let's go. So, let's do it. So, he approaches Norma outside the motel room where she works. He walks up to her. Gas can-zis. Yeah. And there's a picture of this, too, which is funny because she's, like, going to her car and he's standing on the other side of the car. It's from their surveillance. And it's an undercover video with audio and everything. And he comes up to her. And think about it. 60-something-year-old lady. Yeah. Cleaning motel rooms 1,500 miles from this. This was almost 20 years ago. She's not thinking anyone's walking up to her. Yeah. So separated. He comes up and says, hey, my name's Tony. Yeah. I'm a friend of Joel Fuller. He sent me here to talk with you. Listen, the police have come back from talking to Joel and he's scared. Yeah. He said, and he wanted me to come out here. I owe Joel some favors in the penitentiary and he's heard that somebody's cooperating. In this case, that's what he says to her. So I'm here from Maine. So didn't say where just said I came here to talk to you because I owe him some favors, which again makes Joel look powerful, right? Like he can send some thug guy out here to talk to you and shit. So that they're trying to scare her that way. And I owe him a favor doesn't imply go have a conversation. Yes, I owe him a favor. I got to find out who's cooperating in this case. So she says, and this shows the big picture. I bet he's never, when first talking to a suspect been given this answer quote, sure. Ain't me, honey. No, sir. I don't think any guy in the past has ever said that to him. Probably sure. Ain't me, honey. No, sir. And she says, and he says, now Joel didn't really think it was you, I guess who was cooperating. And she said, no, no way, but I don't know who it could be rather than, I don't know what you're talking about. Now she is. He has just opened the door for this now. know who it could be oh who could be what what are we talking about rather than i don't know what you're talking about i don't know him that's not what she said also uh she obviously knows him i don't know who it could be there was only me and him involved in it is what that sounds like it's it's interesting so he said obviously i'm not here to hurt you because i'm here talking to you right so obviously i didn't come here to fuck you up or anything she says i wouldn't have heard nothing she said yeah exactly you would have just been in your room i would have got you one of the motel rooms would have been easy uh he said and i don't want to hurt her she said this is norma i don't want to hurt joel or anyone else but i ain't talking to nobody i ain't pulling the plug on nobody and i expect the same this is not good talking gangster talk well she's a to be a drug dealer yeah she knows what she's doing she said they tried to tell me that he was implicating me what they're doing is they're lying to get some info but didn't work uh-huh and so tony says quote you didn't do nothing and she says no sir so rather than saying who's joel fuller i don't know who you're talking about i don't know anything you're talking about she knows exactly what they're talking about very quickly and is up to speed in this conversation so impressive that's interesting um so basically she told this guy to tell fuller to fucking sit tight and relax nothing's happening yeah so this agent truesdale tony said right then we knew that we were on to something we suspected that she was involved from the very beginning but we knew now now you know yeah um okay so over the course of this because he stays in contact with her he's like well i'll be getting back to you yeah and he stays in contact and keeps kind of mining her to build a library of conversations basically who could it be that's snitching if it's not you who could it be and then finally she says there is somebody that it could be yeah she says a big tall fella what's his name um boyd boyd smith she says no he was a friend of the family he was the only other one that knew what did he know the girlfriend's daughter's boyfriend boy that was staying in their house yep so tony says find a pen i need that boy's name what's his name uh-huh and they want in her handwriting obviously yeah so she says boyd smith he was a friend of the family and tony says what did you tell him now this is this is what they're waiting for she says i was gonna hire him that's what i thought the plan was okay and so tony says what's the deal with boyd and she says he was the one that was supposed to do the thing what this is crazy she's like a fucking mob boss she's a 65 year old lady daughter's boyfriend that's what's this is real weird so tony says did he get cold feet is he a chicken shit what happened yeah and norma says yeah kind i guess i don't know what his problem was i don't know what he couldn't just murder this nice man who fucking puts him up in his house i don't know what his problem was pussy why is happening holy shit so the agents who are listening to this conversation said almost simultaneously we look at each other when she said boyd smith's name and we kind of with a puzzled look on our face said who is that yeah they never heard of this fucking guy before it's been 17 years they have never fucking heard boyd name boyd smith's name mentioned once this kid is 35 years old now completely different right so no one ever mentioned him and norma's gave it up um so and this is a funny thing she told on him to a guy she thought was a criminal so she wouldn't be considered a rat by joel fuller so she ratted this guy um and truesdale tony said he didn't hear of him either he said i had no idea who boyd smith was so then suddenly i had to start rolling on boyd smith and trying to dig up what the relationship was so spring 2001 they tracked down boyd smith he is where's he at just outside belfast maine still not hard to find left he lives in a house in the woods oh yeah he's just been a recluse i guess sort of thing here um and at this point he's 42 years old and they find him in the woods near belfast they said quote boyd smith lived in a house in the woods near belfast maine we went to his house he completely disavowed any knowledge of the homicide huh we went back and forth back and forth ultimately he admitted that norma came to him and asked him several times to kill her husband she was trying to get the 16 year old that lived in the house and banged her daughter or whatever to fucking do this probably so he just says i don't know anything about the murder all i know is that that woman tried to get me to hire or hired me to kill him and i was interested in banging her daughter while come feel the noise played in the background right in 1983 that's what i was interested in so that's it oh yeah that'll help yeah good shit man so they that's what happens so then they set a second meeting with boy because that's the first meeting with boy they badger him into that then the second meeting with boyd here um now this is tony doing this by the way this isn't the cops this is the undercover pretending to be a fucking whatever um to pretending to be a thug and a prisoner um so a second meeting is set and they said you pick wherever you want where you're comfortable right because he said i don't know i'm worried about cops being around i'm worried about this they said well you pick the place and he said a cemetery in camden on my lunch break on my lunch break from work because you can see jesus christ it's hard to mic a cemetery and you can see things coming from mob guys would meet at cemeteries because it's wide open you can see anything coming no one can hide no you know none of that shit taking pictures you can see him yeah yeah so that's why um tony said when they get to the cemetery this is the recording from the cemetery tony said this is a good place because we were looking around trying to make sure there was no cops here yeah you know um because that was my big concern that you were going to run to the cops last night and then come and we were going to get whacked today oh so he said yeah i was concerned that you were going to puss out on me here yeah so he then says what was the actual agreement with you and norma how did all that come about and he said i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know what happened so boyd says norma wanted her husband gone and that was the bottom line she was always bitching rah rah rahing rah rah rahing that's that's gassing something up not bitching about it cheering it on yeah if someone was saying they love something constantly be like always rah rah rah with this shit you'd say probably you wouldn't say it about this but that's what he said he lives in the woods what do you want the chaos yeah um he said about this and that and she asked me if i would do it actually she asked me several times and then she said can you put me in contact with can you arrange something yeah and the tony said and then you put her in contact with joel fuller right and he says and that's all they need for him is that means he he did it yeah he facilitated a murder conspiracy at that point knowing what was going to happen in every yeah so they grab boyd and pick his ass up and bring him into the police station and sit him down in an interrogation room and it's detective dean jackson and agent morrow from the ncis and he tells a totally different story than he told tony oh okay he says he didn't connect norma and joel fuller that wasn't me oh he said no no no um so detective jackson says norma's version of this is she of course she's trying to wash her hands of it she says i got boyd to do it and he got joel yeah okay so boyd says well she's lying because i didn't tell her that i got joel i may have suggested well okay you know try to get a hold of joel fuller i know a guy with no scruples i didn't like pick her up and bring her and drop her off at the guy and you know say hey you two are should be friends with each other yeah um he said that i didn't know joel back then i did not put norma and joel in touch with each other that is the truth which probably is true because he was 16 how would he know a 29 year old underworld guy at 16 yeah so he i can't imagine he'd be friends with him no he's more than 10 years older than him he might have known of this badass guy in the town named joel fuller who's a criminal yeah that i could see so that's kind of believable a lot of deer heads on his wall tons of deer heads on his wall um so they they said him she said you made me the arrangements you told her you made the arrangements and he said she's lying okay and they said well what's your story then yeah let's get that on record and he said i told you my story and they said that doesn't work that's not gonna work and then hours go by they're sitting in there at one point jackson puts a hand on boyd's shoulder you know because he's you know he's here with you i feel you father yeah he said boyd come here listen to me you listen to me right now this is important he said this is your time to tell the truth you're going down the drain right now buddy you're swirling you're swirling and the other guy said that's it you're done man we have on there that's all we heard and jackson said this is almost looking like you know if your story's true this is almost looking like you're the guy that pulled the trigger right so now they're saying we're going to put it on you if you don't put it on somebody else essentially so which is a pressure move that they do you basically just told them each other congratulations you both met a cool person that's it so they said at this point you're looking like the trigger man so that's worse um and the guy said it's all right come on just tell us get this off your chest come on come on boyd they're they're ra-ra-ra-ing him they're getting him up for it so he takes a long poise and he said i met joel at raleigh's which is a bar it's a bar i met joel at raleigh's told him i knew somebody that was looking for somebody dead so he didn't he was 16 16 i gave him norma's address and norma's name and said talk to her yeah now his thing was that gets me out of this now i've connected those two couldn't be more of a conspiracy right absolutely but in his mind at that point he was just this is this will make norma leave him alone uh-huh she won't ask anymore and i'm out of this now okay so that's fine so later though they really did want her and we find out the details because now he gives the details of exactly what led up to this yeah and uh basically um they said shortly after smith moved into the house norma began telling boyd smith that she wanted somebody to kill her husband so it was like immediately um boyd said he didn't take it seriously at first he just thought she was talking shit to the moon alice i mean he wasn't actually going to punch her out of the orbit of the earth right so you know whatever astronauts a long time to get there it took a while to get there so she said i'd like to see him dead i thought she was just yanking my chain he says um so the detective said well when did you realize that she wasn't just yanking your chain and he said when she offered me money that's when i knew it was getting it was serious now this is an actual offer um and they said there was a lot of conversations about this um talks became an actual money offer norma offers him ten thousand dollars to kill sunny which for a kid is a lot of money a lot of money um so yeah um later on um which is fucking hilarious they go to talk to norma by the way and uh this is very funny i'll put this in this part and then it'll it will go back but uh basically uh they talk they talk to her and uh they said and what were you offering boyd to do that because they she starts admitting about joel and she says do i have to tell you that too and they say ah it's part of the truth and she said you know already yeah and they said yeah and she goes all right yeah 10 and they said 10 000 and she nodded and they said okay so he was telling the truth this lines up um ten thousand dollars and that's an 83 too so that's good money it's real good fucking money there then so it's a lot and i guess he was he wasn't 16 by the way he was 21 boy i don't know why i said he was 16 because the daughter was around that age um but norm boyd said norma wanted him gone and that was the bottom line so kept asking um boyd said he thought about it at first and they did a dry run actually what yeah he said now i thought about it and thought about it and thought about it and i told her i says i got cold feet said no way can't do it says i says i got cold feet i says i says so he hid somewhere with a gun and was like i can't do this i can't do yeah i'm not gonna be able to do this this is crazy um but before he said no that's when he he rehearsed it and they said that later on the court said smith considered the proposition and decided to conduct a dry run of the execution to determine if the murder was possible one night in february 83 so this is 10 months beforehand almost a year before yeah he said one night in february 83 he hid behind the house and watched sonny return from work he said he just couldn't do it he said he got out he watched him pull it and he watched him go up and they said boyd said he waited at the corner of the house and he tried to imagine shooting sonny or killing him and got physically sick and started vomiting and realized that he couldn't do this realized he's not a killer he's not a killer he was vomiting without even having a gun in his hand just the thought of doing it so imagine if he actually had a gun the guy would be they'd have found two shell casings and four puddles of gunpowder and he would have been killed he would have been killed he would have been killed of puke with corn and chicken and nuggets and shit all over the place yeah i'm like my god someone exploded over are we sure this person's alive too because everything came out here all day is that semen too is that cocaine we can't there's dried something we can't tell the difference yeah um so yeah and he said that the he walked inside you know sonny walked in and he never knew what was going on out there and he was like wow um so um yeah he says i i thought i had cold feet i couldn't do it and uh so that was that and uh he said so he went to her and said i can't do this and she got mad really and said repeatedly demanded well if you can't do it you find somebody else to do it i'd be like i'm moving out of your house how's that we'll get an apartment so i don't have to shoot people this is crazy so the jeff morrow ncis guy said he chickened out he couldn't kill him she was angry and she insisted that he find somebody else um so there we go boyd he said a few weeks after the dry run he finally gave in and he said that he said i'll find i'll find help find you a killer here um and he had a one name in mind because everybody in the county knows this guy as the arch criminal of this county and that is joel the deer hunter fuller that's the guy um and the guy who knew him that likes him the ford guy the sheriff said he's a killer and he said he's a killer and he said he's a killer and he said no question about it there's probably no other person who's as cold-blooded as he is from shooting deer to shooting people you know it's not a big stretch to think joel may have done this basically joel joel did two killings for contract he's a bad guy he's a terrible guy um so truesdale there tony said i've been around some really bad people in my career joel is the personification of evil when you look at him you get the chills and i think a lot of others felt like that too he's the worst there is he's as bad as it gets and he's this is an undercover guy he's dealt with everybody now rosalind the daughter is shocked about all this she said she had no fucking idea that this was going on no idea that this was going on with her boyfriend no fucking idea no not until now she found out now she said i couldn't believe that this person i had a relationship with the year before was capable of even thinking about doing something like that it's crazy um but fucking fuller is the guy fuller was deep in the drug scene they said he ran with a cocaine dealer named linwood jackson who was the big kind of cocaine yeah kingpin of the area like we talked about yeah linwood jackson wasn't the the guy that uh manson familiar fought with wasn't he didn't he have like a soft name like that too that he fought with he shot him the guy oh the the papa papa papa papa something yeah it's papa papa licious or pop a lot pops a lot sir pop a lot yes he had he had baby got boobs it was a different song back then yeah it was papa lots or papa the guy that yeah lots of papa lots of papa thank you ah that's the one there we go they always have a goofy ass name yeah lots of papa sounds like a snack it does hey give me some of those lots of papas all right fine you got a kangaroo on the box yeah don't eat them all man jesus christ they're my lots of papas my favorite lots of my favorite one so lots of papa so john ford here uh that sheriff guy later said that fuller was hired to take out any of them at any time meaning people that linwood jackson had problems with sure um anyone who threatened the operation uh boyd smith he still says i didn't know the guy i just knew his reputation as a guy that would do just about anything um he said this is what he said he said he was cold and he was available he was in the drug scene and he was a nut case that would do anything for money um he said everybody in waldo county has heard about joel and um that was that so he said i went to him because i heard he was a nut case and a wild man he'd do anything for money so i who the fuck else am i gonna ask about this um rosalyn the daughter said my mother had asked me to do anything for money and i said i'm gonna do anything for money and i said i'm gonna do it and i asked him if he knew anybody else that could do it and he was like oh yeah joel fuller he'll do anything for money including killing someone so they meet at raleigh's like he said they sat down and um i guess boyd went down to raleigh's found joel fuller put him in touch with norma and he said that i met joel at raleigh's and um gave him norma's name and address like we said and he said that fuller expressed interest in the proposal and took the contact information so he had some strange kid walk up to him and say hey i know a lady who wants to get somebody killed here's her name and address and he was like hey sounds good thanks thanks kid rather than get the fuck away from me you fucking idiot and I don't know you and you could be a cop. Yeah. Thanks for giving me the work, buddy. I appreciate it. Like a landscaper. I know he's got a tree that needs to be trimmed down. Thanks for the reference. That's great. Yeah. Is this Raleigh's like Raleigh like the city or Raleigh like fingers? Raleigh fingers. Yeah. Like a guy named Raleigh. I wonder if it's still open. We should do it on Your Stupid Opinions if it's still open. That would be fun. I don't know. It was open in 1983. It might still be open today. I mean, in Maine, maybe. Those bars up there are never closed. That's what I mean. There's full of drunks up there. Yeah. Definitely go. I'll bet it's still open. Summertime keeps them going. We'll check it out. I'll check for the next Your Stupid Opinions. So he, I guess, boy, then went back to Norma and said, this dude's going to contact you directly. And he said at that point he was done. His hands were washed. He was out. He said, I connected you to him. That's my job. I'm out. He thinks they're washed. They are so dirty. There's filth blood all over them. They are covered in grease, man. Grease, blood, gunpowder. Gunpowder, residue, semen, and cocaine. So much. All of it. So much. He said, so much. He said that he had no further discussions with Norma or Joel Fuller about this. And he said, I told him I didn't want any more to do with it. Imagine giving the cops that story and then being like, so I'll be going home now. So that's it for me, right? I guess I'll see. I'll be seeing you. You fucking asshole. Now, Fuller always denies this, though. He denies this ever happened. So now we enter Karen Reed. Not that Karen Reed. Her name is Karen Reed. We enter Karen Reed into the tale. Same spelling? Probably the same terrible accent. This is R-E-E-D, not R-E-A-D. So she's got a big voluptuous ass, probably. We don't know that. Is she the opposite of Karen Reed? Yeah. Jimmy had a real problem with Karen Reed's ass. So, here, Karen Reed said she was Fuller's cousin, and had been an acquaintance of Norma's in the late 70s and early 80s. So she's someone who actually knew both of these people, which is rare. A rare connection here. According to Karen Reed, she said she saw Fuller at Norma's house two or three times in the six months before Sonny's death. And it's her cousin, so she'd know. She'd know who he was. And she said he was over there a bunch of times figuring it out, I suppose, or maybe having an affair with Norma, for Christ's sake, for all we know. Who knows? So he was there two or three times. And, by the way, they asked the one cop, Jackson, did you ever think Boyd was the trigger man? And he said, Norma said that Boyd Smith was the only other one who knew. But I think Boyd's personality, I don't think he has the guts to shoot someone in that manner. I mean, that's an up-close and personal thing. It makes more sense that Joel would be capable of something like that. Joel was an avid hunter. He was an avid hunter. He's used to shooting. He's used to killing things. He has done other murders in the same kind of manner. Boyd, I just don't, didn't see that killer instinct in him. You just don't have it, bud. It's also very interesting the weapon choice because it seems as though after that, he learned that a through-and-through rifle shot doesn't, one good shotgun blast and it's over. Well, that's very interesting. Very interesting that you mentioned that because there's going to be something very telling that comes from that. That's perfect that you said that. So, now, they tell Boyd Smith, Norma's been arrested. She's on her way in right now and he says, uh-huh. And they said, they're going to sit down and talk to her just like we're talking to you to see if he, like, started changing his story because now she's going to have a different story. That was May 9th, 2001 in Iola, Kansas. She's arrested while driving. People and all the people that know her are, they're shocked. All they know is this nice grandmotherly lady who fucking cleans motel rooms. people in Kansas are like, what? There are. Yeah. Yeah. One neighbor, the news media came and talked to the neighbors about it. One neighbor said, you mean the little old lady who lives here by herself? Yeah. Her? That's who it is. What? Fuck. Yeah. Listen, people don't realize that time catches up with you. Well, you don't think, too. I bet this is from 20 years ago. Right. Yeah. You think, well, she must have just killed somebody. She doesn't look like that. She looks pretty nice, but it's like, that shit was from another life, man. Right. She was doing coke back then. 20 years ago, she didn't think for a second, I'm going to be an old lady one day. No, definitely not. So, nobody does. No. So, they sit her down, Detective John Dyer and the NCIS agent here, and they say, hi, Norma. I'm John Dyer. I'm with the Maine State Police. The NCIS agent, this is my favorite thing ever, says, hi, I'm with NCIS. And she says, whatever that is. See? See what happens? You're in the interrogation room, already arrested. And she's like, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Anyway, back to the guy with a badge who's a cop. What's an acronym, man? Shut the fuck up. I don't know what that is. Because this is before the show, I think, too, back then. So, no one knew. I had never heard of NCIS until that show. Until the show, yeah. That's the first time I ever heard of that. And I was like, well, they make up a fucking agency for this bullshit. But she hadn't heard of it either. And she's like, literally, whatever that is. Button it, acronym man. That is amazing. We're talking to the cops. I'm trying to talk to the police. Can you stop interrupting with your fucking acronyms? He said, Naval Criminal Investigative Service. And he, so she was like, big deal, whatever. She said, he then said, what led up to this? How did it get this bad? Was it just an overreaction to an emotional situation that you later regretted? Uh-huh. Like, they're trying, well, they're trying to get, also, make an excuse for it, at least then you're admitting to it. So they're trying to get her to at least, we already know about that. Let's start at the place where we know you killed him and then we'll find out why, rather than, which is what detectives always try to do. Yeah. Start out, listen. We're going to presume the confession is coming, so just give us why. Yeah, that's, you hear that if you watch confessions all the time, they'll go, look, we know what happened, so let's not even, don't even give, we know what happened. All I want to know is why. That's all I want to know, why. Let's get past the, you know, you confessed to murder part and all that. Let's pretend you already did that. We're pretty sure you know what you did. Yeah, that's what every, that's the, that's what they all do. That's just the, that's interrogation 101. Start with that, depending on the person. So, he said, you know, was it a situation you later regretted? And she sat there for a second, and this is the moment of truth, whether she goes, I don't know what you're talking about. She said, quote, I just got tired of the bullshit. Oh my God, Norma. They're like, God damn, this lady's badass. What the fuck just happened? That is the coldest sentence I've ever heard. Yeah, I would say. So, the dire guy, the agent, not the NCIS guy, the other guy said, yeah, what kind of bullshit though, I guess, is what we're looking at. Yeah. What kind of bullshit, I guess, is what, we figured there was fuckery about since there was a dead person. There was some bullshit. There was a heaping hell thing, a bullshit. Ma'am, can you classify the bullshit, please? Can you categorize this bullshit and put it in the box for us? So much bullshit, it won't fit in a box of lots of pop-up, but. Lots of pop-up, lots of poop-up. So much lots of poop-up. Start explaining. Start splaining. Yeah. And she said, oh, just picky, aggravating things. So, she's just giving it up now. She said, fuck it. Oh my God. Just a mountain of sand is what it is. It's little grains. Yeah. She's got tired of them. The things that most people, just get a divorce over. That's why you get a divorce. If you ask divorce people, what was it? I don't know, just a lot of bullshit. Well, what things? A lot of little things. It's exactly what, picky, aggravating things. That's exactly what most people who haven't had cheating or beating or, you know, gambling or some shit. That's what they'd say. Yeah. So, she just decided it's better this way to do it this way. So, the NCIS guy said, let's go through what led up to that. She's like, who are you again? Who are you with again? No, she didn't say that. Did you say you're from MSNBC? Who are you with? Who is that? NCIS, is that the local radio station here? I don't want to be interviewed on the radio. Listen, WGN, you button it. Yeah. So, they said, well, what led up to that? Who did you approach? What took place? What did you say? And she said, Boyd. That's her answer. Boyd. So, they said, Boyd. And, what did you say to Boyd? You know, expand on that if you could. Stress that's happy, babe. She said, I asked him if he would. And they said, but he would do what? Say the thing that we need you to say. And she said, quote, if he would take care of my husband for me. Okay. So, now they have to ask, what's the next question? What does take care of me? Yeah. Jerk him off, make him dinner, rub his feet at the end of the show. Take care of. Put him in a home? Yeah. Exactly. Is he ill? Wipes his ass? What's happening? What? That could work. Yeah. Take care of could be anything. And they say, and by take care of, what do you mean? Yeah. And she said, well, take him out, to put it simply. Listen, bitch, I'm going to strangle you. Norma, I'm going to jail for murder if you don't say, kill my fucking husband. And they said, quote, are you saying, kill your husband? Is that what you're saying? We're all on the same page here with these guys 25 years later. No, what I mean is I wanted to have him whacked. When you say whacked, put him to bed. What does that mean? Norma, I'm going to fuck you up. Norma, you're driving me crazy, goddammit, Norma. I got to get home to my kids, and if you keep giving me one more fucking slang term for murder my fucking husband. Norma, Norma, Norma, Norma, Norma, Norma, Norma. We're going to put him in a deep sleep. What does that mean? You're going to give him NyQuil? What happened? So are you saying you're going to kill your husband? Is that it? And she said, yeah. Okay, finally. So then in all this shit, and she never said she was abused. She never said she was afraid of him. She never said any of that. She was just aggravated with him. Tired of being a wife. So she didn't even, his wife at least, so she didn't even try to give an excuse of, well, I couldn't help it. I had to. She was just like, fuck that guy, which is a crazy defense. So then she says, it's fine, because they start going into the, you know, ramifications of this. And she says, it's fine, because, you know, God is okay with it with me. So I'm cool with God with this, so I'm all right. You do whatever you got to do. Oh, boy. And the NCIS guy goes, your creator has given you forgiveness for the death of Mervyn. Yeah. And she said, uh-huh. Sure has. Sure has. So, I mean, so I'll be going home now. What time is it? Yeah, it's almost dinner. I got to get out of here. So he just says, you have been forgiven. All right. Give you another chance to say this. And she said, quote, he put me, he's been, I'm right at ease. I mean, I have no, no qualms about it. No. She's totally, that doesn't even feel bad. Zero remorse. No regret. It's done. I have no qualms about it. It's settled. Dead and buried. No pun intended. And God has even forgiven it. So if the dirt is settled on him and God has said it's fine, what are we really talking about right now? I mean, if we dug him up, there would be very little left. Very little left. And by the way, where are you from again? The NC ALU? What's happening? Who are you? The NCIC? Is that it? The NICU? What are we doing? Yeah. NICU. Is that where you're from? Are you from the Florida hospital? Do they keep the sick babies? Did you say GSLA, Girl Scouts of America? Calm down. I'm talking to the cops. God damn it. Jesus. Let me talk to this guy. I don't need you. So you've been forgiven and yeah, no qualms. And so the NCIS guy goes, no guilt? None. And she says, nope, nope, nothing. Put it in your paper. That's right. Imagine later when you're getting sentenced and they go, there's no guilt. Nope, nope, nothing. Feeling good about it, actually. That's not going to look good. So then they give her another chance. Wow. It must be because she's kind of grandmotherly and they feel bad or something because the NCIS guy goes, no ill feelings. Like, come on, give me some emotion. And she says, this is the greatest. She says, quote, no, no, it makes me feel good. Oh my God. Not only do I not feel bad. I feel, this is really, this is the only downside of it. I've been feeling great for 17 years till now. All the things you're saying are the, go to the opposite spectrum of feelings. That's where I'm at. That's what I'm over here. So the NCIS agent gives her another out and says, do you think the kids, you know, your kids, his kids will have the same peace of mind or how do you explain this to them now? Her answer, this is wild. Quote, they'll understand. It's been too long. They'll understand. We'll be fine with it. They don't care. They don't care. They can't grieve. They can't grieve again. Dude, that's wild. This is unbelievable. She also told them that she had changed her mind after the offer to Boyd, but couldn't find him to call it off. And she said she never had any contact with Joel Fuller. She says, if anybody shot Sonny, it's Boyd. Who did you pay fucking money to? How's that? Let's start there. And why was he at your house three times? She says he wasn't. She says I never met him. So she's going to create a story. She feels no guilt in it, but she's going to create this story where she distances herself from him. Why? It's fucking insane. You've already given all the reason in the world to lock you up forever. Forever. And you're going to now try to kick back? Well, she was just saying that it wasn't Joel. It was because she's afraid of Joel, but she's not afraid of Boyd. Oh, bingo. There you go. I think. Because, yeah. So she said that. And she said, it's got to be Boyd. And they said, so you think it was Boyd? And she said, yeah, he must be because I had no contact with Joel whatsoever. I did make a mistake and I couldn't correct it. So, oh, well, they'll understand. The mistake of hiring a man to kill your husband? Yeah. I made a mistake. It's fine. So Rosalyn hears about the arrest of her mother from her sister, Nina. And she says, my sister called me because she was living at the time. Oh, I guess her sister must be dead. Okay. Because she was living at the time and said, mom's been arrested. And I'm like, what? Yeah. And it's like, oh, my God, for the murder of dad. And I'm like, holy crap. Right. This is crazy. So they arraign her. She pleads not guilty. Really? And Rosalyn, the daughter again, said, talking about Boyd and everything, she said, and it's like, that's just too wild. You just don't. Do you really know your parents? Do you really know your spouse? Do you really know your children? It kind of makes you almost paranoid. Do you know anybody? You know, it's scary. That's this show is what she just described. Yeah. This whole show. Everybody's capable of everything. That's what we found out. Every single type of person, whether they're two dudes drinking fucking purple drink and eating groundhog for breakfast in the hollers or some fucking doctor in Massachusetts who teaches at Harvard. Same shit. It's all the same. Or a housewife in Maine whose husband works for the. The Navy doesn't matter. They're all capable of everything. She hangs out with drug dealers. So it's a lot now. OK. As the trials approach, because they're going to charge Boyd, they charge Joel Fuller, they charge Norma, they charge everybody. Yeah. So as it's approaching, Joel Fuller's writing letters to the former sheriff, John Ford, who he had always talked to. Yeah. Friend from the other side here. And in one of these letters, he said, John, listen to my words. If I am lying to you when I tell you that I did not kill Sonny Groton, may the Lord strike my mom and sister Zona dead right now as and they both live in hell every single day for eternity. Strong words. Strong words for a guy who is already in for life, no matter what. Yeah. This does not matter if he just it's for him. It's irrelevant. He told told Ford, I never I don't know that family and the police are only tying me to this because I had other. Murder for higher convictions. So they think it must have been me. And he said at the end, quote, I did not commit that murder. I'd have murdered Sonny Groton with a shotgun, not a rifle. Great point. I know how to get shit done. Remember? So that's that would have been my. Why did his friend say there's a 30 30 in that pond? That's the. And then they found a 30 30 in that pond. Maybe the friend didn't know the friend years after it was found, had no idea it was found there. Right. So he had that had to be true. It has to be true. Has to be. There's no other way of it. Just because he discovered a much easier way to kill doesn't mean that he didn't do this. Exactly. The other murders were after. Right. So he might have said that was inefficient. I'll use a shotgun next time. Three fucking shots. Yeah. He probably figured since he's an expert deer hunter, he probably figured I'll use my deer hunting gear because that's what I'm the most. I put deer with this. Right. Yeah. I'm the most skilled with that out of my guns. And then he went. Well, I took fucking three shots and the last one was pretty gross. So I better. I was there too long. Too much noise. Three shots. Three shots. Whose fucking car backfires three times when it pulls in the driveway. And especially one, two. Very quick. And then three. Yep. Takes a while. Three. So that's that's another thing. That space. Fire two. Now people are looking and I got to get rid of this guy. You can't leave him just talking. So February 2002 is Boyd's. Smith's trial. He's the first one. Now under Maine law, obviously murder has no statute of limitations, but lesser crimes do like what? And it's been 18 years conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation that had those of statute of limitations had run out. I think it's 15 years and it's been 18 years. Now, Norma didn't matter because she could be charged with murder as an accomplice and it didn't matter for Fuller because he's the trigger puller, but it mattered. A lot for Boyd because everything in Boyd admitted doing from the dry run to the meeting to all this is conspiracy and solicitation. That's not. So the the agent, Jeff Morrow, one of the guys there from NCIS said we felt that he committed a conspiracy to commit murder because this case was as old as it was. The statute of limitations on conspiracy to commit murder had run out and the only choice that the AG had was to charge him with murder. You can't do that, right? That's the problem. They had to convince the jury of this. So it's murder under the accomplice liability with no lesser charges available. You're not even giving the jury something that they can – It's this or nothing. This or nothing. So the prosecution's case is the recordings, the mm-hmm when he asked if Norma put – if he put Norma in contact with Joel, Boyd in the interrogation room finally admitting that he met Fuller at Raleigh's and gave him Norma's name and address. And so there's all of that. So the agent Truesdale here, Tony, said Boyd's trial was interesting. He confessed during the undercover. He confessed during the post-arrest interrogation. And he actually testified on the stand as to what he did. He confessed on the stand. He said the same shit. He told him about the dry run, throwing up, can't do this. But I didn't do it. They said, so you have three confessions that are all – one of them is right in front of you. One of these people. The defense though here didn't argue that Boyd was – they didn't say he's a great guy. You're ruining a good life. He argued that Boyd was a scared kid who walked away. That's all. He said he'd been pressured by his girlfriend's mother. He refused to do the killing. He did a dry run that ended in vomiting and made one introduction under pressure and then had nothing else to do with it. Now he's 40 and hasn't committed a crime since. Yeah. Now he's 42 and he lives in the woods. Yeah. They said he wasn't at the scene. He didn't fire a gun. His lawyer described him as petrified. Yeah. And argued that holding him responsible for another person's act would be a drastic measure was the way he put it. Yeah. Yeah. So the agent, Amaro, said his defense was that he removed himself from the conspiracy before the crime was actually committed. And his lawyer. Okay. His lawyer, Morse, told the jury during closings that the accomplice liability statute allowed a person to terminate involvement before a crime is committed. He said the state was required to prove Smith's direct participation in the planning and carrying out of the murder. He said, quote, it's a drastic act to hold someone accountable for the conduct of someone else when you're not at the scene and you didn't pull the trigger. Morse also suggested that the true accomplice was Norma, not him. Correct. He said it was she who spoke for years of killing her husband. He said, we know what was inside the mind of Norma Groton. She's the one with the motive. She's the one with something to gain. She's the only connection to Joel pulling the trigger because they're looking at it like, look, she's getting the benefit she wants. Joel, assumingly, assumingly got paid. What he got that boy got nothing out of this. So his lawyer said also that boy did a terrible thing. But his actions don't fall. They don't fall within the narrow scope of the law. Like, look, what he did was shitty and it was illegal. But that's not what we're here for now. What he's done that's illegal is time lapsed and it's over. That's it. They missed. Basically, yeah, you're going to say because those statutes are up, we're going to convict him for a crime that he actually didn't commit just to get back. So, you know, because we're mad that the statute. Right. You can't arrest this kid for stealing back his Heisman. No, exactly. Or you can. And put him in jail for that forever. So he also noted that Smith was not required to notify authorities of his knowledge in the case. That's not a legal thing that you have to do. They said, yes, he made the introduction. He made these mistakes and then he backed out. He was petrified. And what he did was a terrible wrong. And he knew in his heart that it was terribly wrong. Norma Small got what she wanted from Boyd Smith. She was the accomplice. Joel Fuller and Norma Small await trial right now. This will be done. They will have to face the music. All right. But Boyd shouldn't. Don't make him face anything. No. So it goes to deliberation and the jury sends a note to the judge. And Dean Jackson, the cop, remembered. He said the jury had sent out a question to the effect of can we convict Boyd of anything else except for murder? Oh, like solicitation or some other. We'd love to put him in prison for something. Yeah. Feels like he's certainly responsible. So the judge said, no, the only charge is murder. And also the judge told the jurors, the other charges are not your concern. Just deliberate the thing that you were sitting there to deliberate. Oh, boy. So seven hours of deliberation goes by. And they find him not guilty of murder. What else are you going to do? Go back to the woods of Maine. Enjoy. Wow. The detective said, I think the jury just. Felt a little sorry for him. That's what it seemed to me. Okay. They felt bad for him. His life hasn't turned out great. It seems like he got nothing out of this. He didn't shoot anybody. He wasn't involved in this. He didn't want to be involved in this. So they felt like that. This guy's suffered. A young woman's family. And his life wasn't. That sucks enough. Yeah. No. August 2002 is Norma's trial. She won a change of venue out of Waldo County, which is nice. She is charged with murder. Intentionally. Intentionally or knowingly causing the death of Mervin and count to theft by unauthorized taking for obtaining Navy and VA survivor benefits that flowed from the murder. And I was wondering if that would be a federal charge on that. But I guess not. It's it's being done in the same time as a state murder case. So they wrapped it all up into one. Now, the state's theory, obviously, here, Norma asked Boyd to kill. He said no. Told Fuller about Norma's proposition. Arranged it. There we go. So the assistant attorney general here said that and said that the killer stood over Sonny and blew off the lower part of his face. Oh, that's the way you put it. They call Boyd Smith as a witness. Really? Oh, yeah. He testified that Norma began telling him she wanted her husband dead shortly after he moved in, offered him ten thousand dollars so she could collect military benefits, which that's what she said. And that he did. Dry run. Couldn't go through with it. She angrily insisted he find someone else. And then he met Fuller at a bar, passed along the name and number. Same shit that he'd said before. He said, I gave him Norma's name and address and told him I didn't want anything to do with it. They call Karen Reed. She says, well, I saw Fuller there multiple times. He's my cousin. I know Norma. Looks like I know when he's over there, basically. So there's that. Then they had friends of Norma's to testify about statements made before the murder, like Sonny. It was worth more dead than alive. She'd be better off if Sonny was dead. I want to. I want that guy dead. Things of that nature. You know how that goes. How much she dreaded him coming home on Fridays. How she said that'll be the last time he does that to me. I kissed her. All that shit. Now, Larry Phillips comes in. He's the guy Joel Fuller's friend told about the gun in the water. Oh, right. Yeah. The guy. Right. Oh, Lawrence Phillips here. Yeah. We know him well. Interesting. So this is a big deal. Now, I'll read this here. Basically, this is all with the jury outside. Obviously, the state called Larry Phillips and asked what Fuller had told him. Defense objected and said hearsay. Yeah. What the fuck? Fuller wasn't there to be cross-examined. Phillips was just repeating something a drunk man said in a car allegedly 18 years ago. The state's answer was main rule of evidence 804B. B3 to be exact. There are statements against interest. And you'll see this come in a lot in the trial. This comes up if you watch court TV type shit or whatever the fuck now trial stuff on YouTube. They said the idea behind it is that people usually don't make up stories that send themselves to prison. If you tell your friend I was paid to shoot a guy, you're exposing yourself to a murder charge. Yeah. They said that makes the statement in the law's eyes more likely to be true because you said it to your friend here. So they said that the judge dismissed the jury and held a huge hearing on this. Both sides agreed that a 2000 main case state versus Cochran set the deal here. The declarant had to be unavailable. The statement had to be so against the declarant's interests that a reasonable person would say it wouldn't say it unless it were true. So Fuller basically has to not be willing to testify or be dead or whatever. And it has to be something that he reads. He really wouldn't want coming out like whatever. So and there had to be more corroborating circumstances that clearly indicated its trustworthiness. You know, like the fact that someone found that rifle exactly where the guy fucking said he put it. So all these things line up perfectly. Well, it's damaged in the same way that he said it would be damaged. And exactly the right caliber and everything. It's the exact same thing. Now, Fuller took the fifth. He didn't testify at this trial. I tried to call him. He took the fifth. Really? Yeah. Um, so a guy who's got family members that he's wishing death and in hell if he's if he's lying. Wouldn't you think you'd testify? I really think so. But you don't want to. Some people just won't help prosecution do shit. Fuck them. He's especially a criminal guy. He's like, I'm not helping the criminal state do a thing. Condemned for life. Fuck him. Not to mention in prison. It's much better to be a guy who said I ain't saying shit in court than a guy who went up there and testified. It's just better for your whole existence in prison. So and they said, obviously. - Yeah, absolutely. That was a statement against his interest. He's unavailable. He took the fifth, and the state has corroboration because they found the rifle where he said it would be. So that's all three prongs of that thing, hearsay allowed, basically. So he testifies, this Larry Phillips, over objection, and he said all about the rifle in the brook, was paid to shoot some guy on White Street, the serviceman, the woodpile, all the shit that only the murderer would know. The woodpile especially, shot in the back, then shot in the face as he covered his face with his hand. It's all there. They also call the firearms examiner, who said he had an inconclusive test on the rifle, so he was a useless witness. They play all the tapes. The jury heard the undercover recordings with Tony, including Norma's assurances that, quote, she ain't pulling the plug on nobody and expected the same. They talk about, I have no qualms, I made a mistake, I couldn't correct, they had all that shit in there. So, both sides. Stipulate to the fact that she did get $88,270 in survivor benefits here, all that shit, and I guess insurance collected after the murder were reported at more than $180,000, too. She got a lot. So she testifies on her own behalf. She's going to try to get out of this. She's going to say, you send a 65-year-old lady up there, you say let your hair gray up, and you fucking wear a sweater, and you go out there trying to pull a Donna Adelson. Which didn't work for her, either. No, it didn't work at all. At all. But that's what she was trying to do. Well, they've got tapes of her standing on the street going, you can call my son about this, or whatever. Yeah, I don't know anything about this. God, that's amazing. I can't wait to talk about that story one of these days. Taking a number from a stranger and then just being like, I'll get it to the appropriate channels. We haven't done that on Patreon yet. We can't do it for the regular show because it was in Sarasota. I think we did a Sarasota show. Wasn't that the Jerry Springer episode? I think so. One of that one. But also, if we do it for Patreon, it's going to be like five fucking parts. It has to be. Just reading their phone conversations is absolute comedic gold. And there's hours and hours of it. An incredible, fun nickname. The trial. How do you even get to that nickname? The whole thing is fucking bonkers. So she gets up, testifies. And the detective said she got up on the stand and testified. And I think the jury could see that she wasn't really being truthful. She told the jury she'd only told the police what they wanted to hear so they would leave her alone. Because that's what happens. Once you admit to a crime, then they just send you home and it's over. They leave you right alone. Yeah, they leave you alone in a jail cell. Especially if you say, I'm okay with it. God forgave me. No qualms. I guess the court doesn't have to worry about it. No guilt. So, Truesdale, the Tony guy, he was in the courtroom. And he said there's probably not a day that goes by that she doesn't think about Tony, whoever the heck he was, that undercover guy. Norma would have seen me in the gallery after that. The verdict comes through. Four and a half hours of deliberation. And they find her guilty of theft and guilty of murder. Oh, boy. So, she got the straight murder charge on the accomplice. And Truesdale said, I was in court when she was found guilty. It was a sense of relief. He didn't even wear, like, those glasses with the nose on them. He should have. That's what he should have worn into court. A big mustache. Yeah. The old Groucho Marx just put it all on. This guy just showed up as the undercub, just looking her straight in the face. But wearing a polo shirt instead of, like, a Harley shirt, I'm sure. You know, that's all the only difference. Wearing a tie, maybe. Or a Soda Springs Harley shirt. Yeah. He's got, like, a fuchsia polo instead. A little different. So, sentencing comes around. Yeah. And the prosecution would like 25, I'm sorry, the defense would like 25 years. And the prosecution would like life and never get out. Life plus 10 years for the theft is what they'd like. And they'd like a consecutive, please. We'd like to see her make cookies for a long time behind bars. We'd definitely like to see her. We'd like to see her dead in prison, if that's possible. So, victim impact statements. It's her own goddamn daughter up there, Rosalind. She's coming back, huh? Fuck yeah. She said it was bad enough to have our father murdered brutally. But to find out your mother was the murderer, that was the clincher. It has ruined all of our lives. Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. He said, we all feel that our mother should spend her life in prison. She's alive. She's eating. She's sleeping. My dad is six feet under the ground. She should do all of that. Nine bars. Take my mom and throw her in prison, please. Which, I don't blame her. Don't get me wrong. We agree with the prosecutor. Yeah. Norma did her statement. And they said she sniffled and dabbed her eyes with a tissue throughout the hearing. And a few friends spoke on her behalf and asked for compassion. They said the only time she spoke was to turn to them sobbing and say, you'll never know how much I appreciate it. What? She did like a Corey Richards. Like, she wasn't sad at all about the murder stuff. Once somebody said, I like her. Oh, God. Thank you. Crying. I like you, too. So the judge has a way different take on it than most people. The judge says, quote, this is a contract killing, a murder for hire. Mervyn Groton was worth more dead to her than alive. And apparently that proved to be true. I'm not sure you can reconcile compassion and love for your children after you had someone murder their father. He then called her. Instead of divorcing your unwanted husband, you coolly spent months plotting his murder. It's too late for Mr. Groton. And I regret to say it's too late for you, Ms. Small. You, ma'am, may fuck off 60 years for murder. Oh, my. Plus 10 for theft. Consecutive. Consecutive. Consecutive. She'll be eligible for murder parole when she's 101. And that's what she's going to do. And that's when the 10-year consecutive starts. So when she's 111, she has a chance of getting out. Go clean the gray Motel 6. Enjoy. Yeah, we got some toilets for you to clean in there. Holy fuck. So the prosecutor said he didn't get his life, but he was satisfied anyway. He called it almost perfect. He said it's well within the range of appropriate sentencing. And for a 63-year-old woman, 70 years is life anyway. She got life. She's not going to be 100 and fucking. She's not going to be 30 years old, I doubt. So 120. Then February 2003, Joel Fuller's trial. Uh-oh. We're getting all sorts of fun here. And this man denies. He denies anything about this. Yeah. They have Larry Phillips is the whole case. Yeah. His friend. The woodpile, the shots, all that, the rifle. The defense is to attack Larry Phillips because he has pending weapons charges and other charges of his own. Well, I'm sure he has a lot of weapons charges. He likes guns. And he's not going to do that the right way. No, not this guy. He's a criminal. Hangs out with these people. The defense called him a professional snitch, a professional rat. Said there was no physical evidence linking Fuller to the scene. There's no physical evidence linking anyone to the scene. There's no physical evidence linking that gun to the scene. Exactly. The rifle couldn't be matched. Nobody saw him there. He denies it. What are we even doing in court, basically? The star witness here, Larry Phillips. Phillips, not good. Didn't do well on the stand. Agent Morrow said some of our key witnesses were a bit frazzled. Testimony was probably not as strong as I hoped it would be. There were some decisions made regarding admissibility of some evidence. Detective Jackson said Larry Phillips did a terrible job testifying. God damn it, Larry. He said, I think he was intimidated by Joel and he had smoked some pot before he came in to testify to try to relax himself. And he was just a mess by the time he got on the stand. What the fuck? I don't recommend smoking weed before testifying in a murder trial. And I smoke weed a lot. I do not recommend that. Who the fuck would think that would be a good idea? And by the time they call you, then you're getting sleepy and you're like, huh? What happened now? Is it lunch break yet? We go on stage to have a good time and joke. Yeah. And I don't even want to do it then, having fun. The amount of stress in a courtroom in a murder trial. That's crazy. And I smoke before we go out in front of 1,500 people and throw down on a fucking show. I wouldn't do it here, though. I would never do it there. Well, I'm trying to make a dick joke stone. That's easy. And I can read what I've already put and do my slides and all that. But I can't do a murder trial stone. What a Larry thing to do. Asshole. Fucking Larry, you idiot. So basically came down to that. Fuller's own account. And this is what he relayed. To John Ford. In a letter, the sheriff, he said, my attorney made Larry look so bad that I think that jury knew he wasn't telling the truth. Fuller does not testify. He's going to stare clear. They got no evidence that he was there. There's no reason to testify on this. All you can do is they'll just bring up all of your murder for hire because they'll bring in your prior bad acts because they're relevant. They're murder for hires. The same fucking thing. So the jurors during their deliberations. to have. Larry Phillips' testimony read back to them and then re-reviewed Boyd Smith's confession tape as well. So they're taking this very seriously. It's four hours of deliberation. That's so fast. Truesdale said the evidence was there. All the testimony was there. Wow. Not guilty of anything. Wow. How'd the rifle get there then? How'd the rifle get there? How about Norma? Right. How would she tell the guy if he didn't have something to do with it? We got Boyd saying, I hooked up Norma and Joel Fuller. We got fucking Norma saying, Joel Fuller. We got everybody, Larry Phillips saying all this, and they go, I don't think so. We got Joel's cousin saying, I saw him at her house. That too. People have no reason to lie. Truesdale said when the jury came back and found Joel not guilty, shock. I mean just totally. Total disbelief. Wow. She had her husband murdered and hired somebody. But this jury can't find that guy. I'm shocked. I'm shocked. According to the state of Maine, Norma did this all on her own. Yeah. No, the logic of it's wild. See, if you had all three of them together, you couldn't have that logic and be like, well, we'll convict her, but acquit those two. But when they're separate trials, you can do that. You can lose. Yeah. You get a non-logical. Which is she's the only one who did this, even though no one has even broached the subject that she pulled the trigger or anything. And we know she didn't. She was on the phone when it happened. I suppose you just got to tie a payment to him from her. And if you can figure that out, then you win. Then it's something. Yeah. But even then, unless he's like went and immediately deposited it in his checking account and we have those records, we wouldn't know anyway. We might have her pulling money out, but who the fuck knows who she handed it to. She could have given it to John Gotti for credit. For Christ's sake, we don't know. Yeah. So Truesdale said she was the one, the only one of it of all three that was found guilty. Detective Jackson said, you know what? Who gives a shit, basically? He's in jail forever anyway. He said, I think justice was served. You have the person that started this whole thing. If it hadn't been for this one person, Sonny wouldn't have been murdered. Right. That's what a loser would say. That's what you say, loser. Loser says what? I think it was served. I really do. I think I did my job perfectly because otherwise I'm a fucking asshole. I think really without me, none of this would happen. So I think I did great. August 14th, 2003, her appeal comes through here. Norma raises two issues, both about Larry Phillips. She argued that the judge applied the hearsay rule wrong, which we just explained it. That's what it is. She read the Cochran test, which is the how you figure that out. As requiring the state to satisfy all all four sub factors of trust were of the trustworthiness prong. The court disagreed. So that's prongs within a prong. Basically, it noted that the rules explicit corroboration requirement is written for statements offered by a defendant to clear himself, not statements offered by the state. Mills had considered the judge had considered corroboration anyway. So there's no abuse of discretion. Second, she argued that admitting Fuller. Statements violated her Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses against her. Oh, that's a bigger argument. In 2003, the governing framework was Ohio versus Roberts. Hearsay from an unavailable witness could come in if it had sufficient indicia of reliability. And in 1999, U.S. Supreme Court case warned that accomplice confessions offered by prosecutors are often unreliable because accomplices talking to the police like to shift blame. Right. Obviously, the law court said that that's the one case there said that Fuller's statements were different for three reasons. He made them voluntarily to a friend during one of their drinking and driving outings, not to police. He didn't minimize his own role. He said he did the shooting and he never met and he never mentioned Norm at all. As the court put it, Fuller's statements make no direct reference to her and only became incriminating when viewed with other evidence. And introduced a trial. So if it was if he specifically mentioned her, it would have been less legally tenable. The court also rejected an attempt to stretch another rule, the Bruton rule, which protects or Bruton rule, which protects defendants in joint trials from a co-defendants confession to Norm a separate trial. They're like, well, that's you weren't tried together. So that doesn't matter. So judgment affirmed. Good. OK. Two days after the appeal was decided, the Banger Daily News ran a story under the headline Detectives Who Cracked Belfast Murder Honored. What? They honored these guys. Truesdale reflected and said, Homicide's the ultimate crime. There's nothing else above homicide. When you resolve something like that, it's a tremendous feeling of success. I suppose we can give some credit to Truesdale. But yeah, he did some fun. Maybe they should have done this shit 30 years ago. Yeah. Well, these guys. These guys who got the case in 2000 did as well as you can do with a cold case. Right. And Truesdale did fantastic because he had to pretend. He had to pretend. He had to get all these people to. Yeah, it was a great deal. So now 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case called Crawford versus Washington and threw out the Roberts reliability framework for testimonial statements under Crawford, which got thrown out. If a statement is testimonial, retire a reliability doesn't matter. The defendant has to have. Has to have had a chance to cross-examine the person who made it. It's one of the biggest shifts in procedure in a long time, but it doesn't help Norma because the Crawford court itself distinguished testimonial statements from a casual remark to an acquaintance. A drunk man telling his buddy he shot a guy while driving around with no police around is non-testimonial. As they're saying, that is just him talking to his friend. So under the new rules or the old ones, Larry's still coming in because normally if that's retroactive. She can then appeal based on that rule going backwards on it, and they'll tell you whether it's fair. But this one, either way, the ruling is there. There is one thin area where no matter what the ruling is, it comes in. And that's exactly what Larry Phillips did. So either way. Now, June 2016, there's a CBS story. Oh, it's 48 hours. NCIS. I assume they're trying to plug their shows is what this is. Pushing that show. That's probably dying. Probably. Yeah. Thinning every week. Dying off, I would say, every week. It's old people. Plus, I think there's like three different versions of it now, too. Anywhere there's a port city, they have a fucking NCIS. There's an LA one. I think there was a New Orleans one or some shit, as a matter of fact. So the CBS crew comes. Michael Groton did not want to talk. The son. Oh, I can't imagine. He said, it's more important to me to remember who my father was before that. So, yeah. Now, the CBS. The CBS producer said that the reporting, he said, all the facts that people have believed for the past 15 years may not hold up because the twist was Fuller's denial delivered through his old pen pal sending letters to Ford. Ford told the reporters about the letters, about the curse on his mother and sister, about I'd have murdered him with a shotgun, not a rifle. And this Ford said, I have a tendency to believe that he really didn't do it. He claims that Boyd Smith is the murderer. Hmm. So, but then why would Norma tell the undercover? It makes no sense. So, um, um, so anyway, the Ford then also remained unconvinced. Dean Jackson, though, the detective said, Joel denies he did it. All you can do is just look at the evidence and make your own determination. At this point, case is closed. Yeah. Um, Michael Groton, the one who was 16, said he was asked to come to Belfast for an interview, which he said no and called it a cosmic joke. Um, and he said also that I don't believe this twist at all. He said Fuller is a quote, very narcissistic, arrogant guy. There's nothing to him for him to gain by saying he did something. He's not going to say he did it. Essentially. Um, they aired this episode called the sting because they did a big sting operation here. Uh, Rosalind talked. Rosalind was by her father's grave and said, my dad, Sonny Groton was the greatest dad in the world. I could just use just about every good adjective that there is. Um, and he said, I don't believe this twist at all. It's known in the dictionary to describe him. Anytime you needed anything, he was right there. He was just, he was just super wonderful. He really was. We should get her more adjectives. She says she wants to use them all, but she's going back to very, we'll get her at the source because she seems like a nice young lady or middle-aged woman now. Yeah. Here's the bummer. 60 year old lady probably. It feels like Norma tried to get out of this and, and opinion, whatever. Uh, I, I think she tried to get out of this relationship years before by burning the house down. I think so too. Then she came, he came, he forgave her and she realized, fuck, I need to have a house. And then she, and then she got herself back into the exact same situation with three children and then just realized, I guess the kids are fine. I don't want him. All the cops think she killed those kids in the fire. They all think that was on purpose and she killed those fucking kids. There's no way. They all do. There's, how, how else? is, man, especially the way her kids describe her. So Rosalyn said, my dad has been six feet under since 83 and she's still living, still breathing. She's watching TV. She's eating food and my tax dollars are paying for her medicine. And it really pisses me off because it shouldn't be like that. I believe in an eye for an eye. I'm sorry, but when you do something like that, the same should be done to you. Just let it be over. It's not really over until she's gone. I think that's the biggest part. It's not going to be over until she's gone. The whole chapter, the whole book. She wants to kick her mother's ass. She's going to be paying a prisoner to fucking shank her. March 26th, 2023, 12, 17 AM at the main department of corrections, women's center in Wyndham. Um, she dies, she dies under the care of prison medical staff. She was taking up a bunch of, uh, yep. Uh, she was 83. Um, they, everybody was notified. She served a little over 20 years of her 70 year sentence. Her earliest release date on the murder count would have been February, 2041. And that's when the 10 year sentence would have started. Only needed 20 more years to start a second one. That's it. Um, so the, the book is now closed on her. Um, Sonny's buried at the Grove cemetery in Belfast, Maine, and that's that. So there you go, everybody. Belfast, Maine, a quiet little scenic, coastal town with some dark shit going on in there, man. Normal was a force in that town. She was, this is why we love small town murder because crazy shit like this happens. And it's just bonkers, man. So there's a lot. So there you go. If you enjoyed that show, please tell the goddamn world about it. Get on whatever app you're on. Give us five stars. If you're listening, if you're watching on Netflix, double thumbs up, show them what's up, Jimmy. That's right. Two of those right there. We'll make it happen. Thank you so much for doing that. You want to follow on social media. We are at small town murder on face on Instagram at small town pod on Facebook. So you can check that out. You can head to shut up and give me murder.com. We recommend you do get your tickets for live shows. Last two of the year, everybody, uh, Terry town just about sold out on November 13th. Might want to check and see if there's it's coming up real fast. Then November 14th, Medford, just outside Boston. Get your asses in there. The Chevalier, the theater, real nice place and beautiful place. Great place. You can avoid the Boston traffic and it's the last live show of the year. So let's make it a fucking banger. Everybody. We can't wait. Um, new live show dates coming out this month in November. And then, uh, in December, the tickets will go on sale. So you can make those holiday presents or whatever you want to do with those. So thank you for doing that. Holy shit. Patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get all of that. And, uh, that's everything, man. You give us any $5 a month or above. You get everything. As soon as you subscribe, you get almost 400 back bonus episodes to binge on. Boom. That's a whole feed right there. Then you get new ones every other week, one crime in sports and one small town murder. And you get every last drop of it this week for crime in sports. We're going to talk about the Harlem Globetrotters and the history. Cause I just think it's insanely interesting. And just the list of alumni that you'd go, that guy was on the Globetrotters is incredible. Mainstream people. And it's just an interesting story. When we grew up, this shit was on TV all the time. Them beating the shit out of the Washington generals. They were on Scooby-Doo for Christ's sake. They were on Gilligan's Island. They were on fucking every show in the seventies. They were the biggest thing. And, um, I thought they were awesome when I was a little kid, even though that was kind of past its prime. The seventies really was like its biggest. Um, and then for small town murder, we're going to talk about how Nazis, this is, we talked about the book blitzed, which was drug addled Nazis. We love Nazis. This is how, no, we hate Nazis and we love making fun of them. That's the boy. Please isolate Jimmy's. We love Nazis. That would be great. But not murder. We love Nazis. We hate them and nothing makes me happier than making fun of them because they were the most ridiculous asinine people I've read. So they're so fucking stupid. So, uh, these people, um, basically we're going to show you how Nazis connect, to hippies and LSD. Unbelievable. Not that one is turns into another, but one fueled something else. And it all kind of came through that yet. It's a weird thing, but there's the scientists came in and we've talked about that. We'll get into all that and more patreon.com slash crime in sports. Get that right now. And you also get all the shows we put out driving sports, your stupid opinion, small town murder, all ad free, ad free, ad free. My friends, not only that, you also get a shout out, which is right. Goddamn. Now, Jimmy, do me a favor. Hit me with the names of the best goddamn people going right now. So we can hear them. People who would never, ever hire a drug dealer from the bar to kill us. Hit me with them right. Fucking now. There's an executive producer. Gary Howard is in Kentwood, Louisiana this week. Happy hours in Westfield, Indiana. Where the fuck is that? Indiana Westfield and Kentwood. They both sound terrible. You guys. Ooh, that sounded like rough ones, but that's okay. Thomas Woodward, Penny Boyce, Lilia Bjorge, and Danae Pruner. She was going to try and get us some Italian food from the restaurant in San Jose, but we were so late. We were late and covered. That was nice. Thank you, though. Yeah, thank you. Other producers this week, Liz Vasquez, Peyton Meadows, Devin Randall, Janice Hill, Emmanuel Maltazakis. Thomas Smith is in England. He's moving to Ozzie's hometown, Birmingham. Isn't that where he's from? Oh, look at you. Isn't he from Birmingham? I think so. That's the accent. 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Well, at least, you know what, that's the first step in healing is really to get it out in the open. That is, you got to admit there's a problem before you can solve it. You got to admit otherwise. Feller with no last name, Brandy Dunn. Nicole Martin, Whitney with no last name, Kat with no last name, Mitchie A., Paula McPherson, Brittany Furpass, Connor Ellis, Sue Claycomb, Samantha Brockington, Jackie Wood, Brian Palumbo, Allie Fudger, Carrie Harris, Kristen Hagstrom, M.L., Amanda Campbell, Anthony Juare, Cody Jackson, Emily Kinsella, Seth Shager, Will Ray, Maria Galvez. Alvan, Lisa, Lysa, Marie, Lisa with an E, Lisa with an EI, James Burkett, Hyde, Shannon Kaplan, Rob Marshall, Chloe McGrath, another 1984 Megan, and all of our patrons. You're the best. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for all that you do for us. Honestly, it blows us away. We cannot thank you enough for everything you do for us. So we just appreciate the shit out of you. 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