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April 24, 2025 - Weird Little Guys
56:39
Listener Q&A

Molly answers questions submitted by listeners.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back.
It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarky, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past.
The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s.
Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death.
Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season.
Find more crime and cocktails on Criminalia.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You Feeling This Too is a horror anthology podcast.
It brings different creators to tell ten vile, grotesque, horrific stories on what scares them the most.
You Feeling This Too.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media Hello listeners, Molly Conger here.
I've got something a little different for you this week.
Something a little lighter.
I will finally wrap up the South Africa story arc next week.
And that story will end the way it began, with the President of the United States peddling conspiracy theories about white genocide.
But I'm going to level with you.
I just wasn't in the mood this week to cut clips from audio of Jordan Peterson interviewing a guy trying to sell real estate in a planned ethnostate.
That shit sucks, and I still haven't made the seating chart for my wedding next week.
I mentioned probably a month ago at this point now, That I was thinking about doing a listener Q&A episode sometime soon.
And then I promptly got lost down an infinite series of bottomless side quests.
I'm still lost down there.
But my attention has been pretty divided lately, and I felt like this was the right week to try and answer some of your questions.
I combed through the questions you all submitted on the Weird Little Guys subreddit, and they seem to fall into a few main categories.
There are...
Questions about me, questions about my research and writing methodology, about how the show gets made, and questions about the lives of the weird little guys.
And I can answer some of those, for sure.
But by far the most common questions, both from you all on the subreddit and from the groups of university students I've had the opportunity to speak with in the last few months, are ones I don't really have good answers for.
They aren't.
Questions of fact.
The answers aren't in a newspaper archive.
They aren't something I can dig up in the court records.
They're questions of the soul.
I've been invited to speak to students at the University of Richmond and the University of Virginia a few times this semester.
And every time, regardless of what the subject of the class or of the event is, no matter what I have prepared or how the professor prompts the group, People always ask me one question in particular.
Can people change?
Can you bring someone back once they've become the kind of guy who might end up on an episode of Weird Little Guys?
The short answer is yes.
Yes, of course they can.
There's always, always hope.
I believe that because I have to.
I don't think I could do this.
Maybe I shouldn't have started this with the hardest question, especially if I'm not even going to answer it.
But I wanted to address it because I know it's one a lot of you have asked yourselves as you listen to the show.
And like I said, I don't have the answer.
Not really.
I'm not a philosopher or an ethicist or a theologian.
Not a psychologist or a sociologist.
And I don't have any direct experience in de-radicalization, the work of engaging with people who want to leave the movement and supporting them in that process.
But I think the lack of a definitive answer to this question is ultimately a good thing.
If the question remains open, you have to constantly revisit it, reassess it.
I spend so much of my time wading through the evidence that evil exists.
I should constantly re-evaluate what I think that means.
And I've seen a lot of monstrous things.
I've watched live-streamed mass murders and read manifestos.
I've sat in little courtrooms just feet away from men with massive stockpiles of weapons who were planning mass casualty events and assassinations.
I've watched men who proudly call themselves Nazis.
Men who worship Hitler.
I've had a casual chat in a public park with a member of Rape Waffen.
So maybe you don't expect me to say this, but I absolutely still believe that every single one of them is still human.
They're still reachable.
There is still the possibility, however remote, that they could wake up one day and realize they were wrong.
That they took a wrong turn.
And wound up down a dead end, following an ideology that hurts everyone, including themselves.
The catch is, they have to want to.
And they rarely do.
Redemption isn't something that just happens to a guy.
It's something that's hard fought for and not always won.
And if they're doing it right, you'll probably never know about it.
There are real-life stories of people in the movement who made one black friend or one Jewish friend, one gay friend, whatever, and then realized that those kinds of people are human.
And that led them to question and then renounce their beliefs.
It happens.
But that's a lot to ask of marginalized people.
I'm not telling you to go out there and love a Nazi until he loves you back.
It doesn't usually work, and it doesn't sound like a fulfilling way to spend your time.
And there are some splashy news stories every now and again about a former neo-Nazi on a redemption arc.
But the real work of making amends is quiet and boring, and perhaps quite rare.
I think in most cases the best we can hope for is a half-assed version.
Guys who quit the movement and...
Just stop hurting other people.
They don't really interrogate their own past actions.
They don't try to undo the harm they did.
They don't apologize.
They just stop actively becoming worse.
And that's much more common.
I think that happens all the time.
But there's no news story when a guy gets bored of posting race war memes and drops out of the terrorism planning chat.
And I want to be clear.
I'm not talking about absolution.
I don't mean that I believe every mass shooter has within him the possibility of becoming the kind of guy you'd enjoy hanging out with or trust with your children.
It doesn't mean anyone has to forgive him.
I don't mean that their crimes should go unpunished if they take back all the stuff they said about Hitler.
But I think we have to leave the door open.
The question one of you posted on the subreddit reads, Do you think there is a point of no return for a person?
When former friends and family have to give up trying to bring a person back on the right track?
And if so, what defines that point?
And this is a question you have to answer for yourselves individually.
I don't think there exists a specific definitive goalpost here, a point of no return.
But if there is someone like this in your life, this question is yours to answer.
Because there may come a point where you don't feel safe continuing to engage with a friend or a loved one who has turned towards extremism.
And that's valid.
But I don't think that means that person is lost forever.
This is an opinion of mine that makes people pretty mad sometimes.
And that's okay.
I won't tell you what should be in your heart.
I will never ask you to forgive any of these men.
Hell, I don't.
But I do try to approach my work with hard eyes and a soft heart.
And what I mean by that is, I want to look clearly at the harm a man has done, but hope for the day that he sees that harm too.
With that out of the way, let's get to some questions I do have answers for.
One of you asked, Do you ever find information about how the families of weird little guys feel about or react to their actions?
Do more of these guys get cut off or willingly cut off ties with their relatives?
Or is it more of a family affair, like driving your uncle to the insurrection?
And this is a question with a lot of answers.
It sort of reminds me of the opening line of Anna Karenina, right?
All happy families are alike.
Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
And every Nazi's family deals with the problem in their own way.
But there are some broad categories here.
You've got movement families, families where the weird little guy was raised in an environment where his beliefs were normal and encouraged.
There are families in denial, where the parents don't believe it's that serious, they don't want to acknowledge it, or they claim to have had no idea what was going on.
And then there are the families that do cut ties or make public disavowals of their relatives' beliefs and actions.
For listeners who may have missed the episode the question asker is referring to there, driving your uncle to the insurrection is a reference to Matthew and Dale Huddle, the subjects of the episode A Short-Lived Pardon from back in February.
Matthew Huddle was the recently pardoned January 6th defendant who was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop earlier this year.
He wasn't really a true believer in anything, but he went to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, with his uncle Dale.
And Dale Huddle was a man who had some pretty strong beliefs about the government.
His case is a bit of an outlier within that first category, though, because I wouldn't call the Huddles a movement family.
Matthew just sort of went along for the ride.
But movement families are a very real thing.
There are plenty of people who didn't need 4chan or Telegram to get radicalized, because it's just how they were raised.
I'm sure plenty of parents were surprised when they saw photos of their sons on the news after the Unite the Right rally.
But not all of them.
Jacob Goodwin, one of the men convicted for the brutal beating of a counter-protester, got a ride to the rally from his mother.
After his arrest, she went on a Nazi podcast to talk about his case, and she said that during her last visit with him in prison, she told him, quote, A lot of the movement families I can think of off the top of my head are ones that deserve their own episodes.
I know at least one listener on the subreddit is absolutely...
Dying for me to finally do an episode about the Arkansas-based neo-Nazi Billy Roper.
He was raised in a Klan family, and now he's trying to start a white separatist community for other movement families.
And there are families like the Bellogs.
Alan Bellog was a member of the American Nazi Party in the 70s, and he joined National Alliance in its very earliest days.
He worked for David Duke's campaign in 1988, and he was the Pennsylvania unit leader for National Alliance in the 80s.
National Alliance founder William Luther Pierce told his biographer, Alan Bellog's son,
Warren, was raised in the movement.
The father and son duo were, in recent years, Founding members of the now-defunct neo-Nazi group the National Justice Party.
When National Justice Party collapsed in 2023, the current leader of National Alliance, Will Williams, wrote, Alan Bellog had been a dedicated Alliance member for years and is a good man.
I met him and his son Warren when Warren was 12 years old.
The Alliance will leave the door cracked for good men like the Bellogs to rejoin.
The Bellogs attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally here in Charlottesville.
Together. But only Warren signed his name to a federal lawsuit against the city for failing to proactively facilitate the Nazi rally.
His case was dismissed by the Western District of Virginia, and that decision was upheld by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals last year.
It's a very silly little lawsuit, with no legal merit, so I don't expect his recent petition to have it heard by the Supreme Court will go anywhere.
But the complaint itself is...
So laughable that maybe I'll do a minisode on it.
I think most families fall into the second category.
The ones who neither share nor denounce the views of their family member.
They either didn't know, didn't understand, didn't think it was serious, didn't think he meant it, or they just didn't want to see it.
Some of them are embarrassed by it, but others are indignant.
They don't understand why everyone is making such a big deal out of this thing that they'd convinced themselves was just a harmless quirk of their otherwise very wonderful son.
I see this most often in the letters that mothers write to the judge after their son is convicted of something horrible but before he's sentenced.
A lot of these letters avoid the subject altogether and they're just sort of a list of his positive qualities.
He's a Boy Scout.
He had a Black best friend in middle school.
He mows his grandmother's lawn.
He's a good boy.
I can think of two cases, actually, where a defendant's parent told the court that their son isn't actually a Nazi.
It's just that he's autistic, and this is his special interest.
It's such a profoundly weird thing to say, and it's wild that I've seen it twice.
For the record, I do know some people whose special interest is Nazi stuff.
But they aren't out there being Nazis.
They're some of the best anti-fascist researchers.
I think the most satisfying part of this answer for the listener is going to be the third category.
Families who publicly disavow their Nazi relative.
I'm sure there are plenty of families who disown a relative.
But a lot of that happens quietly.
It's ugly business, and most people don't air this kind of dirty laundry.
One of these stories made national news back in 2017.
On the Monday morning after the deadly Nazi rally here in Charlottesville, a newspaper in Fargo, North Dakota published an open letter from a father.
The letter begins, My name is Pierce Teft, and I am writing to all with regards to my youngest son, Peter Teft, an avowed white nationalist.
He doesn't mince words, writing, It's a pretty striking letter.
Like I said, most families stay quiet about this sort of thing.
But Teff's father felt it was his responsibility to denounce his son.
We have been silent up until now, but we see now this was a mistake.
It was the silence of good people that allowed the Nazis to flourish the first time around, and it is the silence of good people that is allowing them to flourish now.
Peter Teft, my son, is not welcome at our family gatherings any longer.
I pray my prodigal son will renounce his hateful beliefs and return home.
Then and only then will I lay out the feast.
His hateful opinions are bringing hateful rhetoric to his siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews, as well as his parents.
Why must we be guilty by association?
Again, none of his beliefs were learned at home.
We do not, never have, and never will accept his twisted worldview.
He once joked, the thing about us fascists is, it's not that we don't believe in freedom of speech.
You can say whatever you want.
We'll just throw you in an oven.
Peter, you will have to shovel our bodies into the oven, too.
Please, son, renounce the hate.
Accept and love all.
And that's kind of what I was getting at earlier, about leaving the door open.
His family isn't saying they hate him, just that they can't love him while he's busy hating everyone else.
The door is open.
It's his choice.
As C.S. Lewis said, The doors of hell are locked from the inside.
And in the years since his father wrote that letter, Peter Teft has continued to choose white nationalism over his family.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Scofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid.
Long, silent voices from his past.
And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share.
I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley, Season 2. Jeremy.
Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s.
Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day she took a daily walk along a towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood...
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back, behind the heart.
The police arrived in a heartbeat.
Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested.
He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black.
Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree.
Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist.
Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarky, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past.
The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s.
Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death.
Hear the story of the gentleman robber, the romantic darling of the ladies.
And a tale about a wager over a sack of potatoes, but you'll have to tune in to learn who won that one.
Some highwaymen were well-mannered, or faked it.
People were concerned about the romanticism of robbers, but most were just thugs.
Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season.
Call them robbers or bandits.
Some are legendary figures.
Listen to stories about historical crimes on Criminalia now, plus the cocktails and mocktails inspired by each.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Courtside with Laura Carrente, the podcast that's changing the game and breaking down the business of women's sports like never before.
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Courtside with Laura Carrente is an iHeart Women's Sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment.
Listen to Courtside with Laura Carrente starting April 3rd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports Network.
*Music*
Most of the white supremacists I can think of whose families have publicly spoken out against them are movement leaders.
That's obviously because there just aren't news stories about random racists getting disowned.
It's only in the news if the Nazi is newsworthy.
And most families wouldn't make a public announcement about it unless the situation was already public against their will.
So the examples that come most readily to mind are people like Don Black, William Luther Pierce, and Jared Taylor.
I will, at some point, have to do some episodes about Don Black, the Klansman who founded the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront.
That's going to be a whole ordeal.
It's a very long story.
But when it comes to public disavowals of a racist parent, it's hard to beat the story of Adrienne Black.
Her recent book, The Klansman's Son, is a fascinating read, and I'll have to save the details for another day.
But she was as raised in the movement as it is possible to be.
Don Black was a movement leader, and he was raising his son to be his successor.
As a child, Adrienne Black learned to code so she could run the children's section of her father's Nazi website.
She attended conferences and rallies and co-hosted a Nazi radio show with her father.
She was a true believer.
Until she wasn't.
She went away to college and met people out in the real world that led her to question the beliefs she'd been raised with.
And then she publicly denounced those beliefs in 2013 in an open letter published by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
If you're looking for her book, The Klansman's Son, it's published under her former name, R. Derek Black.
The book was her public coming out as a trans woman.
William Luther Pierce, the founder of National Alliance and the author of the Turner Diaries, had twin sons.
One of them is very private.
But one of them, Kelvin Pierce, published a memoir in 2020 called Sins of My Father.
And it is very much a...
It's about his childhood and his recollection and the way he perceived his father as a child.
But it is a very clear picture of a terrible man.
And it's interesting that both Kelvin Pierce and Adrian Black pivoted from private reflection on their fathers to loud public denunciation at around the same time.
They both point to the Unite the Right rally in 2017 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 as turning points.
Helen Pierce wrote in his book, The swastikas and flaming torches brought back so many memories, such visceral feelings, that I knew I had to speak out about the racism still so deeply rooted in our society.
In a New York Times opinion piece published right after the 2016 election, Adrienne Black wrote, That after hearing Trump's campaign launch speech, in which he called Mexican immigrants rapists, quote, I spent the rest of the election wondering how much my movement had set the stage for his.
Now I see the anger I was raised with rocking the nation.
And then there's Jared Taylor.
I've mentioned him a handful of times in passing.
He's the white supremacist writer behind American Renaissance.
His father's disavowal of his son's beliefs was less public than entire memoirs written by Kelvin Pierce and Adrienne Black.
But it's worth mentioning.
Jared Taylor's parents were Presbyterian missionaries.
His mother's described in an old newspaper article as a die-hard liberal.
His father, Reverend Archibald Taylor, told a newspaper in 1996 that he could no longer discuss politics with his son.
And the Reverend attempted to set up meetings between his son and black civil rights leaders like Reverend Louis Coleman in the hopes of changing his son's mind.
That article from 1996 doesn't say if that meeting actually took place, but if it did, I don't think Jared Taylor learned anything from it.
Another chunk of the questions you all sent in were about the process.
How do I pick a weird little guy?
Where do I start?
How do I organize my notes?
The answer to this is embarrassing.
I mean, do other people have a good answer for this?
Am I supposed to have a coherent process?
There are whole university courses on things like research methodology, so I guess there probably is a correct answer, but that's not how I do things.
I dropped out of college because I'm not great at deadlines or following directions, so I'm sure I missed some vital instruction on...
No, I fear one of you hit on the truth in your question.
Someone submitted the question, What is the journey of finding a new weird little guy to putting out a new episode?
Do you have a process or a flowchart of sorts that you follow?
Or do you just go off vibes and end up with a finished product?
It's vibes.
I'm so sorry, but it is just vibes.
When I was talking to those university students, I wanted...
So badly to be able to offer them some kind of useful advice for doing this kind of research.
But I have absolutely no idea how I could advise you to proceed with a similar project because I have no idea what I'm doing.
As far as topic selection, months ago, when the show was still really new, I was a little worried that I might not be able to come up with a good idea every single week.
I know there are plenty of weird little guys out there, sure, but how many of them would make a good story?
So I made a list of potential episode ideas.
And I've got 50 or 60 potential episode topics on that list.
And some of them would definitely be multi-episode arcs.
I mean, that's probably two years worth of episodes on the list.
And I've never once pulled a single idea off that list to actually do an episode about.
I just sort of float down the river of my curiosity, and whatever little fragment of an idea I get stuck on ends up as the starting point for an episode.
It's a little chaotic.
Back in December, I was trying to do a couple of episodes about a group called The Order, a Nazi gang that hoped to finance the race war through armed robbery.
But I never did.
Because as I was putting together my notes on their ringleader, Robert Matthews.
It got distracted.
I mean, there's a whole story about the robberies, the murder of Allen Berg in Colorado, the informant who betrayed them, Robert Matthews burned to death during a standoff with federal agents, there were trials and appeals, there's David Lane's prison writings, and I'm going to circle back to all that,
because there's a lot there.
But back in December, when I thought that's what I was going to write, I didn't write it at all.
I asked myself one little question about whatever happened to all that money they stole.
And then I had no choice.
I floated down the river and landed on a different idea entirely.
That group, the Order, robbed a Brinks-armored car in the summer of 1984 and made off with millions of dollars.
And that money ended up in a lot of hands.
Robert Matthews himself drove cross-country, handing out bags of cash to movement leaders.
And one of those bags of cash ended up with Tom Metzger.
And it was that bag of cash that knocked me off course for nearly two months.
First, I got curious about Metzger's public access TV show, and that made me curious about other Nazis doing public access TV shows in the 80s and 90s.
And that led me to Herb Poinsett.
The Florida chiropractor who not only hosted his own racist public access TV show, but he was the shareholder representative for that neo-Nazi group who tried to get AT&T to end its diversity programs in 1988.
And down that same rabbit hole was another racist cable access TV show.
A single episode of a program called Clans's City Cable, hosted by Dennis Mahon.
And then I got really lost.
I spent five episodes tracking Dennis Mahon's career as a professional racist, from his early days in the Klan, to his relationship with an ATF informant who accused him of helping plan the Oklahoma City bombing, to his eventual conviction for sending a mail bomb to the diversity office of Scottsdale,
Arizona. And then suddenly it's two months later, and I never wrote the episode I started about Robert Matthews.
And the same thing happened again in February.
I really did.
To the person who keeps asking me to write about Billy Roper, I really did start.
I started my notes.
I was mapping out the timeline of his life.
And then I got hung up.
I saw a picture of Billy at a rally in Arkansas in 2012.
And I thought I'd get a little background information about that rally and it would get a paragraph or two in the episode.
And then all of a sudden...
I'm six episodes deep into a story about terrorism and apartheid South Africa.
It just happens.
So to the people asking if I think I might ever run out of episode ideas, no, absolutely not.
I will never run out of episode ideas.
The list of potential episodes is actually growing exponentially because every episode turns up a new side character and I'm starting to realize every guy in these stories has his own entire weird situation going on.
if you know how to dig deep enough to find it.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid.
Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share.
Gilbert came.
I'm the son of Jeremy Linscott.
I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley, Season 2. Jeremy.
Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s.
Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along a towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood...
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back, behind the heart.
...the police arrived in a heartbeat.
Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested.
He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black.
Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree.
Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist.
Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarki, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past.
The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s.
Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death.
Hear the story of the gentleman robber, the romantic darling of the ladies, and a tale about a wager over a sack of potatoes, but you'll have to tune in to learn who won that one.
Some highwaymen were well-mannered or faked it.
People were concerned about the romanticism of robbers, but most were just thugs.
Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season.
Call them robbers or bandits, some are legendary figures.
Listen to stories about historical crimes on Criminalia now, plus the cocktails and mocktails inspired by each.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
*Sigh*
Well, I just found out that my dad lived a secret life as a hitman for the Chicago Mafia for all these years.
It doesn't make any sense.
He was a firefighter paramedic.
How the hell can he be a hitman?
I need answers, so I am currently on a plane back to Chicago to interview everybody.
Anybody that knows anything about this.
I'm in shock.
This is absolutely insane.
I just don't understand.
I need to figure this out.
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As for organizing my research, this is a similarly disappointing answer for anyone who thought I might have any useful advice.
I take all my notes in Google Docs these days, and I don't know when they added this feature.
I feel like it was kind of recently.
But they let you add little tabs in the sidebar.
So I'll have a tab where I toss in all the links to my sources, a tab where I just...
List the names of every guy I come across so I can organize details about them as I see them come up.
I'll put notes related to a particular significant incident or theme in the story in its own tab so I can keep track of it.
But the most important tab is the timeline.
I started doing this a few years ago when I was doing a particularly deep dive on an individual that I won't be doing an episode about until his story is over.
And that might be a while.
But it's become my go-to starting point.
I don't know what I'm looking for until I find it.
So when I start building out a story about a guy, I just throw every detail into a timeline.
Just a bulleted list in chronological order of every single piece of information that I can find about his life, no matter how insignificant.
Sometimes there's huge gaps in the timeline.
Just large swaths of a man's life where he's just not on paper.
But sometimes a guy has had enough contact with the system that you can damn near pin him down day by day for most of his adult life.
I comb through newspaper archives, court records, genealogical records, social media accounts, forum posts, old blogs, anything and everything that I can get my hands on.
I won't use most of it.
I know that.
A lot of it's useless.
But I need the whole picture in front of me before anything comes into focus.
I collect obituaries of family members, childhood yearbook photos, every parking ticket he's ever gotten, things like a guy's mom's lawsuit against her local McDonald's after she slipped and fell on a wet floor, bankruptcy filings, filings in an ex-wife's divorce from her second husband,
disciplinary records from the Board of Nursing, bar complaints.
Paperwork filed with the state for a small business, IRS forms for a nonprofit he was on the board of, every donation made to any political candidate by everyone in his immediate family.
Everything. Every piece of paper with his name on it.
From an old newspaper article about Frank Sweeney's childhood pet armadillo to Dennis Mahon's brother's weird letters to the editor of their hometown newspaper.
It all goes on the timeline.
And usually by the time I've got...
Five or ten pages of bullet points.
I have a much clearer idea of what the story is.
And it's rarely the story I thought I was writing.
Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever written an episode that was even close to what I sat down expecting to write.
I've gotten a lot of really generous offers from you guys about wanting to help with the research.
I mean, even my producer Sophie has offered several times to hire someone to help with the research.
But I don't think it would help.
I don't need someone to run down a particular set of facts or summarize a book.
There isn't a specific concrete task I could even assign to someone.
I mean, if I didn't waste half the week chasing down every loose end or writing page-long biographies in my notes about every tertiary character in the story...
I would miss a lot of what ends up being important.
I mean, think about those German mercenaries in the Monica Huggett episodes.
When I started fleshing out the story, I knew those Germans got arrested in 1994 after a shootout with the police in South Africa and that they'd been staying at Monica's house.
And that was probably enough information for what ended up being a pretty brief moment in the story I sat down to write.
But digging around in their lives took me in some incredible and very unexpected directions.
One of those Germans, Horst Klens, had been involved in a government-backed terrorist organization in Namibia.
Another one of them, Alexander Niedlein, is still involved in right-wing politics in Germany today.
And I was able to find and embed in the episode audio of him attending a Nazi rally in Croatia in 2017.
I wasn't looking for any of that.
I couldn't have asked someone else to find it.
I just had to go on my own adventure and collect everything along the way.
The most important part of the process for me is doing the research myself, because I don't know what I'm looking for.
I spend most of the week just sort of browsing, casting a wide net and pulling in mostly garbage.
But I have to collect everything and put it in order before the story presents itself to me.
I don't know what the story is until I'm done finding it.
I'm sure there are better ways of going about this, but this is how I have to do it.
So if you were one of the people asking questions about my process and you hoped the answer would be some kind of usable advice, I'm sorry.
It really is just a sort of relentless...
Aimless rooting around.
And vibes.
It's mostly vibes.
There were also some questions about what kinds of material I might recommend to people who are interested in these subjects.
Books, podcasts, other researchers whose work I enjoy.
There are a lot of books on the subject of white nationalism, white supremacy, domestic extremism, what have you.
And a lot of them are really bad.
The topic got popular in recent years, and it became marketable.
And then a lot of people with no business writing about it sold books.
So you can't just pick up any book off the shelf and expect it to be valuable to you.
But if you want to read a book about the white power movement in America, you have to read Kathleen Ballou's Bring the War Home.
It's rare for rigorously researched academic writing.
To also be a thrill to read.
So you're really doing yourself a disservice if you haven't read it.
I've read it more than once, and I keep my copy on the floor next to the chair that I write in.
There are probably half a dozen episodes where I've picked it up and flipped to the index and found what I needed.
And if you're really interested in the nitty-gritty, you can't go wrong with Leonard Zeskin's Blood and Politics.
It's more of an encyclopedia than a beach read.
But it's probably the most comprehensive text out there on the subject of American white nationalism.
Zeskind was a giant in this space.
He founded the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights in 1983.
He was the U.S. correspondent for Searchlight magazine.
He was the research director at the Anti-Klan Network, and he was an activist and a human rights advocate, and he really shaped the way that researchers think and write about the far right in the United States.
I was...
Deeply saddened to hear he'd passed away just a few days ago.
And as long as I'm recommending books, if you missed the interview I did with Spencer Sunshine a few months back, do give it a listen.
His book, Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism, is the first real exploration of Siege, a Nazi terrorism handbook by James Mason.
And I can't miss an opportunity to recommend my dear friend Talia Levin's books.
Culture Warlords and Wild Faith.
They both trace the ideological roots of different strains of American extremism.
As far as podcasts go, there are so many podcasts.
Everybody has one these days.
Even me.
And there are a lot of really good ones out there, so I hope everyone will forgive me if I only recommend one.
I'm not snubbing everyone else.
I just can't let myself ramble on about podcasts on a podcast.
That's just too much.
I like to have a little audio going in my headphones when I'm puttering around the house, so I listen to a lot of podcasts.
But I never miss an episode of Knowledge Fight.
If you've never listened to it, the premise might sound a little off-putting.
It's one guy telling another guy about episodes of Infowars.
Just two comedians talking about Alex Jones.
It's fun and funny, and it's so easy to listen to that you might not even notice at first.
That Dan Friesen has painstakingly researched every single lie that comes out of Jones' mouth.
And he can not only tell you what isn't true, he breaks down why it isn't true and how that particular lie functions in the right-wing narrative that's being constructed.
It's been going on for years at this point, and he's become probably the world's leading expert on Alex Jones, which is probably not a title he aspired to as a child.
Oh, and actually, I lied.
I also have to recommend Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
If you haven't heard Margaret Kiljoy's show, imagine the opposite of Weird Little Guys.
Aside from the fact that it's just nice sometimes to hear a story about people who aren't monsters, as someone who spends way too much time researching, I know what it sounds like when someone really digs deep to get the context to bring a story to life.
And I just love Margaret's passion for stories of people who struggle to build a better world.
Okay, let's wrap things up with some fun ones.
You guys are honestly really sweet.
A lot of the questions on the Reddit weren't even about researching racists.
They were things like, what's your favorite flavor of ice cream?
And I'll address that one head on.
I like cookies and cream, but not from the store.
You don't like to buy store-bought cookies and cream.
I like to get plain vanilla ice cream and add the cookies myself.
It's just better that way.
Plus, I have celiac disease, so it's much cheaper to buy gluten-free Oreos and add them to regular ice cream.
There were several questions about sweet treats, actually, so I'm going to let you in on one of my most important life philosophies.
I call it the little treat.
It's very simple.
If you have an opportunity for a little treat, You have to have the little treat.
Life is just too hard and overwhelming.
Just have a little treat sometimes.
And little treat can be anything.
It doesn't have to be a sweet treat.
It can be putting on a fuzzy sweater right out of the dryer.
Going around the block just one more time because the dogs are really enjoying the sunshine.
The important part of little treat philosophy is recognizing in the moment that you have chosen to enjoy a little treat.
It's the only way to live.
You have to do it.
One of you wrote on the subreddit that a question you like to ask people is, what scared you as a kid?
And I love that.
I bet you get a lot of really weird answers to that.
I was never afraid of the monster in the closet.
I actually loved hanging out in my bedroom closet as a kid.
I made it into sort of a cozy, private cave where I liked to read.
But I was so, so unbelievably scared of Bloody Mary.
Very specifically, I was traumatized at a very young age by the version of the Bloody Mary story in the children's book Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
I think everyone my age was traumatized by that book in one way or another.
But I couldn't keep a mirror in my bedroom until I was in, like, high school.
I wish I was kidding.
I still don't like to go in the bathroom with the lights off.
I'm 35 years old, and I have shrugged off very real death threats from guys in very real murder cults.
But I am, in fact...
A little bit scared of going in the bathroom with the lights off.
I don't know what to tell you.
And, of course, several of you asked about my dogs.
They are the most important employees on the show.
I couldn't do it without them.
I have two dachshunds, brothers named Otto and Buck.
They'll be nine this summer, which is kind of crazy because they're really just puppies.
I don't know how they could be puppies for nine years.
I post pictures of them from time to time on Blue Sky if you'd like to see their sweet little faces.
There were so many questions I didn't get to.
I'm sure I'll do another Q&A episode eventually, but I am thrilled to be wrapping this up before 3am, which is something I have not managed to do in months.
I've got to go see a man about some peonies first thing in the morning, and I need to start packing for my honeymoon.
There will be a regular episode next week, but there'll be a couple of reruns after that.
I am so sorry.
I'm trying to put together a couple of mini-sodes, like little bite-sized side stories that I'd like to get out while I'm gone, but as I have just revealed to you over the course of this Q&A, I have no idea where I'm going or where I'll end up.
So it's hard to say what I'll end up writing.
Either way, there are plenty more weird little guys, and I will tell you about them eventually.
Music. Music.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conker.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's gonna make you one of my weird little guys.
*music*
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad is, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back.
It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarki, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past.
The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s.
Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death.
Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season.
Find more crime and cocktails on Criminalia.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You Feeling This Too is a horror anthology podcast.
It brings different creators to tell ten vile, grotesque, horrific stories on what scares them the most.
You Feeling This Too.
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