Marvin Heemyer had come to the end of his tether. The welder and muffler repairman had moved to the small town of Granby, Colorado, around 1990. In 1992, he bought 2 acres of land for $42,000 to build a muffler repair shop. He subsequently agreed to sell the land to a man named Cody Docheff, who wanted to build a concrete plant. Around 2001, he became embroiled in an arcane zoning dispute that left him completely unhinged.
Heemyer, 53, began to plan a vigilante attack. He bought a heavy-duty bulldozer, armored it with steel and concrete, and cut a portal in the back through which he mounted an arsenal of guns. On June 4, 2004, following what he believed to be God’s will, Marvin drove his “killdozer” into the town of Granby, destroying the homes of his enemies: the town hall, the former mayor’s house, the library, and the hardware store. When the police began moving in, Marvin shot himself.
Heemyer may have been deluded, but his intense conviction is difficult to condemn, and it’s hard not to admire the violent insanity of his indignant rampage.
Dan Brophy, 63, was a well-known chef and popular teacher at the Oregon Culinary Institute in Portland, Oregon. In the morning of June 2, 2018, Dan was gunned down while he was prepping for the day’s work in the school’s kitchen. He had no known enemies. However, Dan and his wife, Nancy, were having serious financial problems and to shore up the couple’s finances, Nancy, a self-published romance novelist, had taken a job selling life insurance. Friends of the couple testified that their marriage was strong and stable; others noted that Nancy was tired of Dan’s hoarding and messiness.
This episode contains testimony from the trial of Andy McCauley for the murder of his girlfriend’s 15-year-old daughter, Riley Crossman. The crime took place in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, a small working-class community blighted by Opiods and other drugs. Riley and her boyfriend, Hayden, always stayed in close contact by text and social media, even “sleeping together” at night on Facetime. On the night of May 7, 2019, at 11:01 p.m., Riley was in bed when something disturbing happened. She sent Hayden a text that said, “Andy’s in my room and I’m scared,” but Hayden had fallen asleep.
This episode contains the long, grueling interrogation of Cat Mellender, 21, the girlfriend of 23-year-old Chandler Halderson. As she testified at trial in January 2022, Cat had always believed that Chandler was a recent college graduate who worked for an insurance company, volunteered as a rescue scuba diver, and was had recently been offered a job in Florida with SpaceX. But when Chandler’s parents, Bart and Krista Halderson, went missing in July 2021, his web of lies came undone.
In November 2007, Adam Kaufman, a prominent Florida real estate salesman, woke to find his wife Lina, 33, draped by the neck, dead, over a magazine rack by the toilet in the couple’s ritzy waterfront home. There was suspicious bruising on Lina’s neck, although the marriage was apparently untroubled. A year-and-a-half later, the Miami-Dade County medical examiner ruled Lina’s death a homicide by mechanical strangulation, and Adam was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The defense argued that a spray tan Lina got the day before may have caused her to pass out and slump over that magazine rack, where she was strangled to death by gravity.
These are four calls to the National UFO Reporting Center, directed by Robert Gribble. The first call is a conversation with an alleged abductee in John Day, Oregon, who claims to have been abducted in June 1976 by four entities with large black eyes and dumped in an empty parking lot. On the face of it, the story is plausible, but the abductee is disoriented, intoxicated, and clearly unreliable. The second call is from a gentleman named Robert Estes, who, in September 1978, encountered a UFO and its occupant who said to him, “Bob, what do you think of this?” The third call is from a witness who describes an incident that occurred in Klamath Falls, Oregon in January 1979, and the fourth relates to a UFO landing in Yukon, Oklahoma in August 1978. The hotline host, Robert Gribble, is always gentlemanly and polite, no matter how bizarre or unusual the caller’s account.
Lyle and Erik Menéndez were convicted in 1996 for the murders of their parents, José and Mary Louise (“Kitty”) Menéndez. They claimed the murders were self-defense after years of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
On November 13, 2004, the charred body of teacher’s aide Lauri Waterman, 48, was found on the back seat of her minivan on a remote area on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska. Her body had been beaten, and police concluded the death was a murder.
On September 20, 2015, after being called to an apartment in Sunrise, Florida, police found the naked body of Maria Nemeth, 31, was found disemboweled; the apartment had been destroyed, and on the floor were tequila, blood, human tissue and guts. The perpetrator was Maria’s boyfriend Fidel Lopez, 24, who said that he and Maria had got drunk on tequila and Maria wanted to have “rough sex” in the closet.
It’s difficult to keep things straight in this complex and ongoing case, but here’s the short story. Lori and Charles Vallow were members of the LDS church who lived in Arizona with their five children from Lori’s four previous marriages. In 2015, Lori became obsessed with a series of apocalyptic books by Chad Daybell, an LDS renegade who documented his unconventional spiritual beliefs through pamphlets and podcasts. In 2018, she attended one of Daybell’s seminars, and was immediately drawn into the cult. Daybell said he’d lived 31 different lives on various earth-like planets, and believed in zombies and demon possession. According to those present, Chad referred to the photogenic Lori as an “eternal being” of 21 separate lives, only five of which had occurred on this planet. The couple then vanished for 58 days.
