American Monsters: Frank Lindsay with Anson Maddocks

0:00 Speaker 1: Warning.

0:00 Speaker 2: Kind of Murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening.

0:09 Speaker 1: Now. I'm Zevan Odelberg and this is kind of murdery. Well, it's an exciting session for me today, guys, it's an exciting day because I am back with my good friend Anson Mattox for another episode of Hydra Double Headed hosted. Hmmm, kind of murdery. Hey, answer, how you doing today?

0:38 Speaker 2: I'm good.

0:41 Speaker 1: I'm not always as clever as I think, and I realized that in real time just now. So today I've got a story to tell called the Fry cook Killer, and I should mention in the interest of fairness and proper procedure, that I found this story in a great article on a website called on bunker Hill dot org and it's called, indeed the Fry cook Killer. And I tried to come up with an even more fun name for it, but you know, that's pretty evocative as it is, so I decided to go ahead and just just stick with it.

1:14 Speaker 1: So thank you on bunker Hill dot org for this Seattle murder story that I will be telling and to Anson and to you today. So, Anson, one of the reasons I wanted to pick Seattle is I believe that's a place that you lived for a for a good portion of your life.

1:31 Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, quite a bit of it actually, from the time I am was twenty until wow, I think it like six years ago I moved out of Seattle.

1:42 Speaker 1: So you know, since you're like one hundred and fifty years old now, gotten a long time.

1:47 Speaker 2: I actually have no idea, I am.

1:51 Speaker 1: It is a state of mind anyway, right, Yeah, that's what That's what we tell ourselves is the as the sand keeps falling and the clock keeps ticking, right, So yeah, I imagine all those years in Seattle you probably had a kind of murdery experience or two, did you not.

2:09 Speaker 2: Yeah, I stumbled into a few things.

2:11 Speaker 1: There you go. That's quite a tease where I'm not going to let Antson tell his story now, but you will be hearing a kind of murdery personal story from the legendary Anthon Maddox later in the show. And uh, I think and I will tease this as well. It also features your your very good friend Mark to Dean, does it not the story we're going to hear it is awesome. So the kind of murdery high jinks of Anson, Maddox and Mark to Dean are coming up. But sadly for all of you, you have to listen to the story that I've brought first.

2:40 Speaker 1: So hang in there and uh we'll get to Anson, I.

2:43 Speaker 2: Promise I'm looking forward to. All right, all.

2:46 Speaker 1: Right, answered, are you ready for the story of Frank Lindsay the Fry Cook Killer.

2:51 Speaker 2: Let's hear awesome?

2:52 Speaker 1: All right? Everyone, now please join me and Anson as we uncover what truths we can and solve what mysteries we may kind of murderies. The Fry Cook Killer starts now.

3:16 Speaker 1: It was a quiet February day in Seattle, Washington in nineteen thirty when Frank Lindsay, who had been arguing with his wife, his wife Aubrey, ended that argument by bashing her over the head with a hammer. Then, because that didn't seem permanent enough, he slashed her throat, sewed her body up in a burlap bag, and buried her behind the barn on the property. So that's how our story begins, with a brutal murdering of a wife by an apparently less than loving husband. The apparently is probably not necessary.

3:46 Speaker 1: Probably could just say by a less than loving husband.

3:51 Speaker 2: Would love in a way that we just don't understand.

3:54 Speaker 1: I suppose, so, I suppose so when they say Satan was the first humanist, he just wants you to do which you want and be happy. Right, So maybe it's maybe it's sort of that kind of love minus that doing what you want and happiness and inserting just dying horribly.

4:09 Speaker 2: Doctor Frankenstein. Kind of yeahavor.

4:12 Speaker 1: Indeed, indeed, so as anyone who has spent any amount of significant time in Seattle knows, it rains a lot, and in this story, metaphorically, when it rains, it pours. Because after murdering his wife, immediately after Frank Lindsay goes and he grabs his twelve year old there twelve year old foster daughter, a girl named Pearl Grant, and a few hastily packed bags, and he flees his home and he high tails itself. Now, he would later say that he took the girl with him because he thought that traveling with a child would give him a better cover story.

4:43 Speaker 1: But the thing about traveling with a child is you're traveling with a child. They have needs, They are not so quiet they tend to live more publicly than an outlaw on the lamp, and he quickly realized that being on the lamb with Pearl was a bad idea. So what's he do? Comes up with a solution and he abandons her in a rooming house in Oakland. Guy's not bucking for father of the Year here, that's for sure.

5:09 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'm yeah, I don't know much about kids.

5:14 Speaker 1: So Frank eventually lands in Napa and you know, here, here's where the story takes a little bit of a turn for the even creepier. He lands in Napa, California, where he befriends the parents of an eleven year old girl named Beatrice Delamore. He picks fruit alongside the family for several days, and eventually, and boy, I'm not sure how he pulled this off, but he must have been a magnetic man. Eventually he convinces the couple to turn their daughter, Beatrice over to him, saying that he knows a woman with money who could provide Beatrice with everything that she lacked as the child of itinerant laborers fruit pickers.

5:50 Speaker 2: Now, this is in the nineteen thirties, nineteen thirty yes, oh yeah, this makes sense.

5:55 Speaker 1: I suppose it does. But on the same hand I find it somewhat baffling that a single man could sort of show up, get off the bus, help you pick peaches for a couple days, and then say, why did you give you your daughter? I promise she'll have a better life. You know, it's all kinds of people have kids, so you never know that's true. And I mean, there were those parents who allowed their children to stay over at Michael Jackson's house and sleep in his bed. Although Michael being the biggest star in the world, that is somewhat more understandable, I think than just turning your daughter over to your fellow itinerant fruit picker for all you know.

6:32 Speaker 1: But hey, like you said, different strokes for different folks, all kinds of parents in the world. So, of course, spoiler alert, he was lying about knowing a wealthy woman who could give Beatrice a great life. What he actually does is he kidnaps her and takes her to Los Angeles, where he checks into the hotel Cecil for a few nights. I don't know if anybody listening who maybe is a fan of the paranormal or the kind to murdery has heard of the Hotel Cecil, But it's no surprise. In some ways, it seems like it's almost was a sure thing that Frank Lindsay was going to stay at the Hotel Cecil.

7:11 Speaker 1: The fact that he is a murderer means that he almost had to stay at the Hotel Cecil. You see, the Hotel Cecil, which is currently closed for renovations but still standing, is almost certainly haunted. In fact, it may be something close to being the real life Overlook Hotel. Are you familiar with the Overlook Hotel and.

7:28 Speaker 2: The Shining indeed?

7:30 Speaker 1: Indeed, man, what a good movie?

7:31 Speaker 2: What a good movie?

7:33 Speaker 1: So the Overlook Hotel is the lodge from the Shining which spoiler alert if you haven't seen The Shining, skip Ford ten seconds. But it's haunted by ravenous ghosts who drive people to commit murder the Overlook. Now, as tempting as it is to get sidetracked and tell you all about why the Hotel Cecil is psychically and spiritually fucked, it's probably better that we stay on track and continue with the story of the fry Cook Killer. We will say of the Hotel Cecil for a future episode, I will give you just a nibble or two on the Hotel Cecil though, because you're probably dying for it.

8:09 Speaker 1: There's any number of murders and suicides that occurred there. It was the regular haunt of Richard Ramirez, the nightstalker. The Black Dahlia was known to have been seen drinking there right before she was killed. There was a sweet old woman who was known for feeding the pigeons in MacArthur Park who in her sixties was suddenly murdered in the Hotel Cecil. There was a girl as recently as twenty thirteen who was bizarrely found dead after disappearing for days, drowned in the water tanks of the Hotel Cecil.

8:43 Speaker 1: And there are any number of other just awful things that happened there. And I will, as I said, I'm going to save the real story of the Hotel Cecil for a different episode because, frankly, we could spend the rest of this episode talking about it. It is Los Angeles' Overlook hotel. Let's get to the story of frank and currently. Anyway, Beatrice Delamore, have you ever encountered any haunted hotels in your ramblings? In case my wife and I are watching the Bridgerton Show, The Queen Charlotte Bridgerton Show, and there's this lord who loves to walk around his wilderness estate and he refers to his walks as rambles.

9:20 Speaker 1: So I just wanted to clarify that what I asked you if you'd ever encountered haunted properties in your ramblings. I didn't mean that you tend to ramble when you speak, but rather on your journeys through the world, have you ever encountered any haunted spaces? Anson, Well, first.

9:36 Speaker 2: Let me commend you on knowing that I'm always set like a trap, waiting to go off on the slightest possibility of being a.

9:46 Speaker 1: You're actually the opposite of that. I just didn't want to sound like a dick to the listeners.

9:53 Speaker 2: Actually, it's kind of it's disappointing. I think that the kind of work that I do, you know, doesn't give me better access to paranormal things. I Extreme coincidences, just bizarre coincidences is probably the closest I ever closest I ever come to experiencing something that seems a little beyond normal. So I've never experienced a ghost or a haunting, you know, element.

10:22 Speaker 1: But you have experienced maybe a glitch in the matrix. Oh yeah, do tail detail. I must know, I must know.

10:30 Speaker 2: This one's strange. I'll try to do it quickly. Here I was. This is back when cell phones were just new, you know, not many people had them. I had a cell phone and a pager. And these are.

10:42 Speaker 1: Drug dealing days, right sure, yeah, yeah.

10:45 Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. But because you don't necessarily want to pay for every call that comes into your phone, if you only give people the number of your pager, then you can call them back if you feel like it's worth it, right, right, So I get a while I'm at this Chinese restaurant on Broadway in Seattle, and I don't recognize the number, but I call it back while I'm sitting there, and the person picks up and they say hello. And I noticed that on the other side of the counter, you know, the kitchen's right there, there's a cook in there who's on his phone.

11:20 Speaker 2: And I could hear it in my other ear him say hello, And I was like, that's a weird coincidence. And I said, you called me, and he said, he goes, yeah, sorry, wrong number. I go, okay, and I hang up, and I see this guy in the kitchen hang up, and I'm like, oh, no way. So I get up and I go over to the counter, you know that has the sneeze guard, and I excuse me, excuse me? Did you just did you just dial? You know that? I told him my number and I showed him on my pager that it had his number, and he goes, yes, sorry, that's fine.

11:59 Speaker 2: Is that kind of weird?

12:01 Speaker 1: This is a what are the odds that you would happen to be in the exact place. By the way, it's not lost on me that you just told you're telling a story about a bizarre occurrence featuring none other than a fry cook. Well done, sir, That is some narrative synergy right there.

12:17 Speaker 2: I guess, yeah, if you're not talking about French fries. Yeah.

12:21 Speaker 1: So so then what.

12:24 Speaker 2: I tried to I said, don't you think that's really strange that you died a wrong number? But the person that picked up the phone was sitting in the same room basically, and he said, yes, sorry, wrong number.

12:42 Speaker 1: That is weird. Yeah, that's very szarre. For a second, I thought maybe that the signals were crossed or some such, but obviously not, because you showed him the number. And he was like, yes, that is the wrong number that I dialed. Wow, Wow, remarkable, remarkable. So let's talk about about Frank Lindsay. What did he do after he stayed at the hotel cecil Well, He then went and sought refuge at a rooming house in Bunker Hill, which is another neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles. Representing himself as an r F Williams, Mister r F Williams, he told people that Beatrice was his daughter.

13:18 Speaker 1: He then kept the girl for two weeks in the rooming house and then decided to put her back on a bus to Napa. I mean, I think in some ways, certainly the nineteen thirties were a simpler time, and maybe this shouldn't be surprising given that Lindsay is a murderer, but he seems to have no hesitation about just sort of abandoning young girls wherever Oakland boarding houses, throwing him on the bus to go from LA to Napa. I mean, I think no one would consider murderer or not would probably not consider doing that today.

13:50 Speaker 2: So it's just another one of his bullshit human attributes that make some even worse person.

13:55 Speaker 1: Yeah on your red flag checklist. Of how to identify a terrible guy. Willing nelly, abandoning eleven year old girls, murdering your wife with a claw hammer. Those are red flags. You want to leave those out of your dating profile. But upon her return home, Beatrice was able to provide information about Frank, but the elusive spouse slaughterer continued to evade capture.

14:19 Speaker 2: So they were after him. I mean, they knew he killed his wife.

14:23 Speaker 1: At this point, they were at the very least looking for him, because yes, they had discovered that the wife was dead. Okay, And to your point to your question, Audrey's brutal slaying and speculation about Frank's whereabouts were big news up and down the West Coast. However, interestingly, it wouldn't be professional law enforcement officers who would eventually find him, but rather an amateur detective. Perhaps we call him America Sherlock Holmes, although that may be a little bit rich, But an amateur detective named William Sanborn would be the one to finally track down Frank Lindsay.

15:00 Speaker 1: There's something about these old names that just I don't know, it makes everything more believable to me. It's like, Frank Lindsay killed his wife and ran off with a couple of eleven year olds. It's like, well, of course he did, and then a man named William Sanborn tracked him down. I mean, there's some these old fashioned names are just kind of evocative and make everyone sound capable of either good or extremely ill. But I don't know. These are the strange paths that my mind tends to wander down.

15:29 Speaker 2: Are you saying that from I mean the perspective of Zeven or Anson might make those names sound old fashioned. The yes, you can hear those names in modern times.

15:42 Speaker 1: I mean with with with no offense to either of us. Zevin and Anson don't strike me as a couple of guys that would be particularly excellent at murder, kidnapping children, or you know, tracking down killers. I don't know, perhaps perhaps we would, right, yes, exactly, oh man. So for the first few months that Frank Lindsay was on the run, he'd worked as a fry cook at a restaurant that Sanborne managed on Vermont in Los Angeles. Not the state of Vermont, but the street of Vermont. Now, when Frank left that job, William lost track of him.

16:19 Speaker 1: Now here's something that I have in common with William Sanborn. Sandborne, like myself, was a huge fan of the true detective magazines, and anyone who listens to this show knows that I'm a huge fan of the old true detective magazines from the twenties and thirties because I found some wonderful stories there. Sandborne he used to consume these religiously, and in one of them he read a lurid tale about the grizzly murder of none other than a Seattle housewife. And in the same magazine he found a description of the missing husband who was being sought for the killing, and he immediately suspected that the wanted man was none other than his former cook.

16:59 Speaker 1: Really, yeah, right, So I love that you just told that story about being in the Chinese restaurant in Seattle and how there was this weird, coincidental occurrence that you experienced. Because here, right here, and again it's about a short order cook. We have exactly the same thing happening also in real life. I almost said in real life, but of course your life is also real said that. Yeah, do you feel validated?

17:27 Speaker 2: You? Yeah, it helps me. It helps me feel less like I'm in the matrix.

17:31 Speaker 1: All right, So, yeah, could you believe it. He went and he got a job working at a restaurant on Vermont Street in Los Angeles, and his boss just happened to be a true crime nut like those of us talking and hope most people listening, I imagine, who just happened to read his favorite magazine and realized that he had been employing the wife killer that the country was looking for. I believe back in those days they used to often refer to wife killers as bluebeers. A little factoid there, because of the wives that the famous pirate Bluebeard murdered during his tenure as an asshole.

18:08 Speaker 2: Not because most of the wives were blue hairs.

18:11 Speaker 1: Ah, maybe I don't have the I don't have the knowledge to answer that question, but uh so, maybe he would shave their heads and glue the blue hair to his chin? Is that why they call it?

18:22 Speaker 2: I like yours.

18:27 Speaker 1: So here we have this crazy coincidence. Just happened to get hired by the true crime nott who realized who he was. But he'd already left the job, and so William Sanborn didn't know what had become of this murderer on the lamb. But then again, by chance, William bumped into Frank at another restaurant, still on Vermont, where the absconder was again employed as a fry cook man. I have to assume that he was on foot all the time or just inveterately lazy. But when he decided to flee one job, to make sure that he stayed unders covered, he went as far as walking a few feet down in the street before taking another job.

19:07 Speaker 2: It's about the address, yeah exactly, it's wow.

19:10 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all about the convenience of traveling on foot. So here he goes, and he runs into the same guy, this man, Franklins r Killer, who he suspects of being the Seattle wife killer that the whole country's looking for. And when he sees him the second time, it really captures his imagination. He's fueled by the exploits of the detectives that he idolized in his beloved magazines, and he vows that he will He's going to He's not going to let the police know about this. He's going to apprehend the killer on his own.

19:43 Speaker 2: Sounds like Hannibal, you know the movie Hannibal.

19:46 Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right, it does. It also sounds like a highly questionable decision. I mean, I was I was criticizing Frank Lindsay's decision making earlier, I now have to look askance at our good guy as well. But he does. He decides I'm going to do this myself. In his past conversations with Lindsay, when Lindsay was the cook at his restaurant, Sandborn had learned that Frank was a jack of all trades. He was not only a cook, he was also an accomplished plumber, and so he told him that he needed some work done at his home, and he sweetened the offer by offering to pay him under the table.

20:20 Speaker 1: We know one thing for sure about William Sanborn. He had balls of brass. He says, you know what I'm going to do. I'm not only going to capture this murderer on my own, but before I capture him, I'm going to make sure that he knows exactly where I live. That seems also smart.

20:39 Speaker 2: Look, he's just freshening the pot. I dig it. He's like giving himself some handicaps.

20:44 Speaker 1: Right, He's like, this is too easy.

20:47 Speaker 2: Yeah, Now we'll see if I get this done right here. Yeah.

20:50 Speaker 1: So so he offers him the plumbing job, and Lindsay takes him up on it. He doesn't mind getting a handful of cash for cleaning another man's pipes and a man also that was also just a terrible, the highly inappropriate version of a dad joke. So you know, William Sanborn is not only a thrill seeking attention addict. Sometimes the words that I want to use just don't enter my mind in time, and so I use others. But he's also an He's also an upstanding citizen and as we know, a detective wanna be and he wants to make sure that he's pursuing the right man.

21:32 Speaker 1: He calls the police and he says, I think I might know where this guy is. But he doesn't say he's in my house up to his elbows and muck right now. He says, I think I might know where this guy is. Can I come down to the station and talk to you about it? And they say sure. And then when he gets to the station, they hand him a photo of Frank Lindsay and he immediately identifies it as Yes, this is him, this is my former employee, the guy who's doing work in my home right now. In a move that could be described as sort of dangerous at best and completely insane at worst, and we've already sort of hinted that Sandborn's a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and telling the killer where you live is a questionable choice.

22:13 Speaker 1: Sandborn goes and he confronts Frank with the photo at later at the other restaurant while Frank is working. So Frank then takes the picture from him and holds it in his fingers to look at it to be like, hmm, is this me? I'm not sure. By doing so, he conveniently fingerprints himself. When the cops run the Princes, they match it to the runaway murderer, and they yeah, everything's falling into place, an episode of law and order. Really, I mean, if it weren't all true, it would seem awfully convenient.

22:43 Speaker 1: So detectives then turn up at the Stanley Apartments at two ten South Flower Street later that evening, and they take Lindsay into custody without incident. Underwhelming into the story. If that were the end, I know better. Yeah, there's more, there's more, a break no, okay again, In a somewhat unsurprising development, there were many facts about Frank that he hadn't been forthcoming with. For example, his real name, which it was discovered was actually Charles E. Murphy, as well as his place of birth, which was not Massachusetts as he'd claimed, but rather somewhere in the UK.

23:19 Speaker 1: But you have to give the devil his due, because he was at least truthful about having served in both the British and US armed forces. However, he neglected to mention that he'd actually deserted from both services, and if those weren't enough lies, it was also uncovered that Frank was already married when he met and married Audrey, so the wife he murdered was not in fact his legal wife. He was something else. He was a fly by night polygamist of sorts. So Frank's story about why he killed his wife was that she just nagged him so incessantly that he finally lost it and felt compelled to spontaneously murder her.

23:59 Speaker 1: Now, I don't know if he thought that that version of the story would make him somehow sympathetic, like detectives are going to be like, oh, yeah, of course, I mean, my wife nags me too, I want to murder her all the time. I mean, if you're going to come up with a reason to kill your spouse, telling the cops, well, she nagged me a bunch. I don't think that makes you look any better. I mean, but you know that's just me, I guess. But so basically, because he had been caught in so many other lies, the police didn't really buy his version, and they also didn't buy his subsequent version of the murder, not just because he changed his story, but apparently because he was such a liar.

24:40 Speaker 1: And his other version was that he was, of course not the attacker, but instead valiantly defending himself from certain death at the hands of his crazy wife. This guy was just a shameless, shameless prevaricator, although I suppose that was the least of his flaws. Of course, they don't buy these other versions of the attack because he's a liar. They also don't buy it because they're able to determine and I'm not sure exactly how, but I guess through forensics, but somehow they're able to determine that he had pre dug the grave into which he dumped Audrey's corpse prior to killing her.

25:18 Speaker 1: They're like, yeah, you were she nagged you till you snapped, and or you were defending yourself from being murdered at the hands of your wife. So why then did you dig a grave before all that happened? And nobody really believed that it was just another one of those coincidences like you had with the pager, or Frank had getting hired by a true crime net.

25:42 Speaker 2: They didn't believe that maybe she dug the grave for him and he just did a little switch around.

25:47 Speaker 1: I guess, I guess they didn't. That may have just been sex That may have just been sexism on their part, though, I mean, perhaps perhaps she did.

25:55 Speaker 2: So.

25:56 Speaker 1: It took him a while, but the police finally untangled Frank's web of life, and this is where the tone of the story gets much more grave and serious than it perhaps has been so far. Of course, wife murder is grave and serious, but it's about to get worse, folks. They basically they conclude that the fight with his wife, Audrey that had culminated in his murder of her, happened because she had accused him of criminal assault on several young girls in the Seattle area, including attacks on their foster daughters, and that she had threatened to turn him in and that's when he snapped and murdered her.

26:36 Speaker 1: So that is pretty horrible. I think we can all read between the lines there.

26:42 Speaker 2: Kudos to the police for getting that confession.

26:44 Speaker 1: Though, yeah yeah, yeah, and the week that he spent at the boarding house in Bunker Hill gets a whole hell of a lot darker. Of course. The one thing I will say that I am a little bit surprised by is that given that he a let both of those girls go oh and one of them basically took the bus back to her parents and was able to provide police information about Lindsey, it's surprising that this didn't come out sooner, that the girl wouldn't have told somebody that this was an awful man, etc. But I said, may perhaps she was ashamed, or I mean, we don't know the details of what he did or what kind of attacks his wife was talking about.

27:25 Speaker 1: I'm just sort of surmising that they were likely the sort that we would all fear the most. But did that didn't come out until later? Maybe it took Beatrice's parents a while to tell that the cops. So this absolute piece of shit Frank was shackled and extradited from Los Angeles back to Washington, where he was tried and convicted for his wife's murder and sentenced to sixty five years in Walla Walla prison. Justice prevails to an extent. Sixty five years seems like an awfully long time. It's likely to be the remain of his natural life, especially in nineteen thirty.

28:02 Speaker 1: However, story is still not finished. It's like an m Night Shyamalan movie, one twist after another. So you'd think that the sounds of those prison gates slamming shut and Walla Walla would have been the end of the story. You'd think that. But old Frank Lindsay, well alias Frank Lindsay. Did we ever find out what his real name was? Oh? That's right, Charles E. Murphy. He makes news again in nineteen forty seven. So he was in his best behavior for those seventeen sixteen years that he's spent in prison, and he eventually earned trustee privileges.

28:35 Speaker 1: So by January of nineteen forty seven, he was working you guessed it as a cook in the warden's home. Cush, Yeah, I'll say, especially because he's literally not on prison grounds. So one day he simply walks away from the prison and vanishes. He's on the run for most of a year, and he's finally captured in Denver colerad. Guess what he's doing when they find him. Not something awful, not cooking fries. You got it. He was working at a restaurant, plying his usual culinary trade. I guess no one had really taught Frank Lindsay about I don't know m modus operandi.

29:18 Speaker 1: Like, when they come looking for you, the first thing they're probably gonna do is look for recently arrived diner fry cooks.

29:26 Speaker 2: Yeah, especially if they are aware that that's his go to job title.

29:31 Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Well, and at this point they would have to be because he was functionally caught by the manager of one restaurant that he worked at and entrapped and gives up his fingerprints at another restaurant he worked at, so certainly they knew it was his go too after this unsuccessful I think unsuccessful was a little harsh. He was out for almost a year. Let's call it semi successful escape from prison. Although isn't it a successful escape if you just make it outside of the compound? Likew how long do you have to be escaped?

30:01 Speaker 1: Do you have to be escaped forever for it to be a successful escape? I feel like as soon as you're on the other side of those gates you've escaped.

30:08 Speaker 2: I think the harder it is for them to find you, the more successful they escape. I mean, going from wall Walla to Denver pretty far. You'd think he should have been in the clear, but just staying visible doesn't do him any good. Yeah.

30:22 Speaker 1: No, So basically what you're telling me is no, you want you want the full shashank. You want to In other words, not not that you want that for Frank Lindsay, but in your mind, a truly successful prison escape results in permanent freedom.

30:38 Speaker 2: Yeah. The ones that don't make you know, they don't make stories about, are probably the ones that are the most successful. You know. It's like you, if you know a ninja, you probably don't know a ninja, right right, right?

30:50 Speaker 1: Yeah. People that tell you how great they are tend to not be that great.

30:55 Speaker 2: Is it?

30:56 Speaker 1: Pretty pretty safe assumption like that.

30:59 Speaker 2: It's like if you run around telling people you're invisible, you're probably not right.

31:03 Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, you can't see me? Sure about that?

31:07 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a classic.

31:09 Speaker 1: All right. So I'm gonna say. I'm gonna say it's a successful prison escape if you're free at least until your next crime. Unrelated to the escape. That's that's the caveat I'm going to offer on that one. But after his I guess unsuccessful escape from prison, Frank would then disappear from the newspapers entirely, so for our purposes, that is, after two fake endings, we've now reached the end at least in pop culture awareness of the story of the fry Cook Killer one Frank Lindsay and or Charles E. Murphy.

31:44 Speaker 1: There you go. That is a kind of murdery story that began and in some sense finished in the city of Seattle or the state of Washington at the very least certainly began in Seattle, finished in the prison in Walla, Walla. Using Seattle as the narrative link, I'm now going to turn it over to Anson. Anson. You're going to tell us a kind of murdery story from your own life that took place in Seattle.

32:07 Speaker 2: Yes, sure, yeah, awesome. So around the time that Mark siden and I were both kind of working together every day doing work for the first.

32:18 Speaker 1: Cards for Magic, you are drawing the cards for limited Edition Alpha, which would be ninety two ninety three.

32:27 Speaker 2: I think this was in ninety two. That makes sense that, yeah, it would have to be. So we're on Capitol Hill in Seattle. We're both living on Broadway and just a few blocks apart, and you know, kind of small apartments. And so we would spend most of our work day by going to a coffee shop and what we call pain rent, just getting some coffee. Just keep getting coffee while you're sitting there, and we would work, you know, at the tables there.

32:55 Speaker 1: And so is this the time that you were talking about on an early your episode where you were watching Mark draw Lord of the Pit and kind of like going, whoa, that looks good awesome?

33:07 Speaker 2: I mean, I don't remember exactly when this was, so it could have been could have been the same day.

33:11 Speaker 1: For all I know, but that's a pretty good surrogate for what was happening at this time. You guys were just sitting there getting cranked off your asses on jitter beans, just drawing some of the most iconic art ever seen.

33:25 Speaker 2: I mean, we did. We worked a lot most of the day every day, and we would try to be social. You know, at night we'd go to you know, we go downtown First Avenue in downtown Seattle and you know, have some beer and people watch talk to people. But there was one night when we were walking from Capitol Hill down to First Avenue, which is, you know, more realistically a cab ride, but we walk.

33:52 Speaker 1: Well, you just spent eight ten hours drinking coffee. You better go for a walk, right, you're vibrating like a teacutu chiwawah, you're just yeah.

34:03 Speaker 2: I'm gonna use street names because people if anybody's listening to this and know Seattle, then they'll be able to relate to it. Sure, But we were walking down Denny Way as it crosses over I five and on this overpass overpass, if it's just a bridge for two lanes, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, that's okay. All right. So we're walking down the left side where the sidewalk is and we could see the lights on an ambulance. We see an ambulance, you know, parked next to the sidewalk.

34:37 Speaker 1: We're on something you just happened, yes.

34:40 Speaker 2: Right, right, So it's you know, it's in the right lane, and it's you know, it's lights are pointing up towards us, and we're curious to see what's going on because you know, it's an ambulance. And as we get closer, we see that on the sidewalk in our path is a white sheet, you know, and we both you know, stopped talking about what we were talking about, and we're just like silently trying to figure out what's going on. And we approach the sheet and we see that it is a body, but it's completely covered except for the shoes.

35:13 Speaker 2: There were new looking, you know, like basketball.

35:17 Speaker 1: Shoes, right, like maybe some Jordan ones or something. Those shoes are probably worth a lot of nineteen ninety two. Yeah, yeah, yeah, anyway, please, But.

35:28 Speaker 2: I remember the laces were pristine and they were tied neatly, you know, And I mean it's those kind of kinds of things that you're probably going to notice when you see something shocking, because I mean that's all we could see was the shape of the body. That we didn't see any blood, and saw these clean shoes sticking out, and I was thinking, the guy tied his laces for the last time. It's really a strange thought that everybody's going to do that if they lacer shoes. But what was really strange was there was nobody else around, even with the ambulance there and the lights on.

36:02 Speaker 2: I mean, you know, the back doors were open. We could see that there's nobody in there.

36:05 Speaker 1: There's no cops, and it's not like they were across the street from a morg or a hospital. This was just a spot on the street.

36:13 Speaker 2: Right right, and it's on the over So as we walked by it, Mark says, as a dead body, I said, yep, And we just kept We didn't stop and gawk or anything. We just walked on by it and it were quiet for a little while after that. But yeah, so we looked at the papers, you know, after that night.

36:32 Speaker 1: Let me ask you a question before you before you reveal what you found out in reality, what I was wondering one of my favorite pastimes still, and it annoys the hell out of my wife, and it annoys the hell out of a lot of people because now Google exists, but he's just supposing not knowing the answer to something and just trying to use my imagination to connect the one dot I have to the rest of the dots I don't and come up with something that sounds plausible to me as to what the heck's going on.

37:00 Speaker 1: And you know, someone will asked me, what's the yearly rainfall on the Amazon rainforest? And I have absolutely no clue, and I'm just the sort of overly confident ahole that'll be like, I don't know, but I bet it's about one hundred and fifty inches based on nothing. So where I'm going with this is, did you and Mark, before you found out what had happened, did you that night or subsequently spend any time just kind of imagining trying to figure out what the heck was going on there, particularly with the fact that the body had been, as far as you knew, abandoned by the authorities.

37:30 Speaker 2: Yeah, I was thinking that maybe the police were there and they took off to go, you know, see if they could track down who might have done it there being no paramedics was really baffling that they would just leave the vehicle there and the body, and it.

37:48 Speaker 1: Just it was exactly you could imagine that the police get a call for a shootout at a bank and they're like, well, this guy's already dead, we better go try to deal with that. And then the paramedics get a call for somebody having a heart attack at a high school and they go, we got to go help that person, okay, But then, as you just alluded to, the ambulance would not be there. This is an abandoned open ambulance, probably full of like syringes of adrenaline and all kinds of other fun drugs that you don't necessarily want to leave on the street, and they've just left it along with a expired human.

38:18 Speaker 1: It's baffling, baffling.

38:20 Speaker 2: Right, And maybe you know, we didn't know what the nature of, you know, the mishap was, and maybe it involved paramedics. You know, maybe somebody, maybe somebody who was you know, wielding a gun, you know, shot one of the paramedics. Maybe interesting, or maybe the paramedics saw something and they agreed to try to identify a suspect that you know, the police had pinned somewhere else.

38:45 Speaker 1: And it just or they screwed up and killed the guy and just were like, fuck, we gotta get out of here. Another thing that occurs to me, and I don't mean to be ageist or anything, but I feel like, as an amateur sleuth, it is likely that if this expired person had pristine basketball shoes perfectly laced up, they were probably a young person. Sadly, I mean, it's unlikely they were like somebody who would had died of old age just wearing clean basketball shoes. They're probably on the younger side, right.

39:20 Speaker 2: And what's sad about it is that it turns out that what we read in the paper, you know, a couple of days later, was that somebody on Denny stopped because he saw a man and a woman and the man was kind of roughen up the woman. He evidently stops to try to break it up, and the guy pulled out a gun and shot him. Oh geez, and then they then the man and the woman took off and were apprehended later. But it reminded me a little bit of myself and that I really have a real hard time staying out of an abusive situation like that, where somebody who is, you know, being overpowered by somebody else who doesn't need to be hitting them.

40:10 Speaker 2: You just walk away.

40:11 Speaker 1: So you're you're a good person, You've got that hero gene.

40:14 Speaker 2: Yeah, Well I don't know, but I was just thinking that's a good way to get yourself killed if you don't know your situation well enough.

40:20 Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I like to think that I well, I think I would have done the same thing that that guy did and probably gotten shot for it.

40:29 Speaker 2: It doesn't always boil down to actually making a decision. Sometimes you just react to something because there's a spontaneous, you know, trigger in you that that goes off and makes you act right and you can and you realize after the fact that you don't even remember making any decisions. You just were kind of on along for the riode.

40:48 Speaker 1: Right right, No, that's for sure. And you know somebody who's likely to make that decision. Then if they if they thought it through and they did nothing because they were like, oh boy, I might get shot, then you have to live with that too, because you don't know you're going to get shot. And then you have to live with your own sort of cowardice having felt like you should help a person who was victimized and choosing not to because of the possibility of being harmed yourself. Right, man, that's a rough.

41:17 Speaker 1: One summer after my sophomore year in college, I got my teeth, my two front teeth punched out. What had happened was I was sort of stupidly one of the older people at a high school party that my friend's younger brother was throwing, and my friend said, you want to come kind of keep an eye on these high school kids. Which public service announcement if you are over twenty one. Do not babysit high school kids doing illegal things. Just say no. So anyway, there was a rivalry at this particular high school between the football team and the soccer team, and what it boiled down to was the soccer kids were all from educated, professional families with money, and the football kids were from the opposite of that and lived in like a poorer part of town, and they hated each other.

42:06 Speaker 1: There was a particularly abusive football player who was hated by the whole soccer team, and he was denied injury tooth party. And the upshot of that he showed up around ten we we didn't let him in. The upshot of that was he came back at about four in the morning with friends. They busted into the house and I walked out of a bedroom to see these guys throw a punch at my friend's little brother. Now, the bad guys, as it were, were greatly outnumbered, but they also had a reputation for being real ass kickers.

42:36 Speaker 1: So essentially, the whole soccer team was cowering in fear while three football players were starting to beat on people. So I saw him throw a punch at my friend's little brother. And I ran up and I separated them, and I was just like, guys, guys, come on, don't let's not do this, because you know, sure, I'm twenty two, but in my mind these are little These are like little kids, these seventeen year olds. Of course they're not physically little kids, and so I'm just trying to hold apart. I'm not fighting anybody, and the football player starts.

43:03 Speaker 1: I had kind of longish hair at the time. He goes. He starts yelling at me, you dirty hippie, you crazy liberal, and then he steps forward and he just punched me right in the mouth. I looked down and I saw, like the basically the entirety of my two front teeth in a puddle of blood on the ground. I could say, I could proudly say that I didn't. I didn't like, didn't go down or anything. And I was an acting major in college, so my first thought was just I didn't care about revenge. I looked down and I saw my teeth, and I was like, how am I supposed to act with no teeth?

43:33 Speaker 1: So my entire priority became, Oh, I'm gonna somehow have a dentist reattach my teeth like right now at four am. But long story short, I at least tell myself getting that all repaired dental work is still basically medieval. It hasn't advanced a whole lot. It's horrible, it's horrible, horrible. Please don't get your teeth knocked out anyone. But I like to tell myself that I'm glad it happened because what I discovered was that I'm not a coward. Like I'm glad that my impulse was to step up and defend my friend's little brother.

44:11 Speaker 1: With all the knowledge I have of hindsight and everything I had to go through getting my teeth fixed, I probably would have let the guy kick his ass. But my impulse was otherwise.

44:23 Speaker 2: I think what you're saying is he took one for the team.

44:26 Speaker 1: Yeah, and by the.

44:28 Speaker 2: Way he escalated the situation.

44:30 Speaker 1: Well, what happened was as soon as my teeth were on the floor, the soccer team just realized that they outnumbered the bullies like fifteen to three and ejected them from the house. But that was sort of the inciting incident for everyone else discovering their spines, so to speak.

44:48 Speaker 2: It's climactic and blood was involved, so maybe that was enough to satisfy them.

44:52 Speaker 1: Yeah, but hey, I also survived, unlike the poor person in your story.

44:59 Speaker 2: Yeah.

45:00 Speaker 1: Well that was a great story Anson. Thank you so much for sharing it.

45:04 Speaker 2: You're welcome, Thanks for helping me experience it all right.

45:08 Speaker 1: Well there are our Seattle based kind of murdery stories Anson. As always, thank you so much for being here with me. It's a joy to spend time with you. Thank you for Anson, Maddox. I'm seven Odleberg and this has been kind of murdery.