544 - Everything Is Worth It

Hello, and welcome my favorite murder.

That's Georgia Hardstar.

That's Karen kil Gariff.

And this is what we like to call a ten year plan.

It's almost been eleven years now, we're gonna have to stop saying ten I know, it's pretty great, it's pretty crazy.

I feel like the luckiest person in the world. Same, but it is very surreal to be sitting in my house trying to figure out what to watch on TV in this podcast comes up on Netflix. It's so strange. Yeah, and so we're you know, hopefully the people at home understand. We're just pretending like this is normal and that we do it all the time.

Couldn't I tell you anything? Speaking of Netflix and this cute off that I'm worrying, did you know that when we were on break, I had Molly and Tess make a chart of all the outfits I've worn so I don't repeat an outfit.

I just want to see it.

I can't repeat an outfit. It's an old trauma wound of getting made fun of for wearing hand me downs. These polls, it's sound an amazing So thank you Molly and Tests for indulging my trauma and vanity I think those two things are.

Looks like you repeated that Steve Martin shirt a couple times. Those are minisodes, and so it repeats because it's the same day. Yeah, daring you. Why don't you get your ass up out of this chair and change outfits on the day.

I would do that. It's like you had been okay, like into it.

If we get you like a curtain that spins around you, and when you spin back out you have a different outfit.

It's such a relief. Like the first time and I was like, do you want to change outfits? And you're like fuck no, I'm like, really great, and now I need to like dazzle this and makes kind of amazing.

Literally, when I was leaving my house today, I was like, I have to put on a shirt. I was like, I have to cover my arm. I was saying all these things to myself, and I was like, I don't have to do shit, don't people don't Really, it's not like that anymore.

Well, Netflix has changed it for me a little bit. It's like up the game a little.

Well, there's the exposure aspect, right, we already had what we weren't really thinking about, right, But here's my thing. And if you're here for the glamour, don't look on this side of the table.

I had a side fucking jam Brady outfit.

Sure, Jan, But my thing was like, I'm trying to provide the Kim deal Patricia high Smith angle of we're busy and we're not doing that thing. I like that, and we represent those girls. I have those days you can see in the binder. I've lived that binder.

I know she has those hangovers and that PMS despite not having her fucking uterus, she still has.

Those All those hormones are in there.

And she puts on Steve Martin T shirt vintage, but she puts it on.

She puts it on.

You were gonna tell me a story?

Last weekend we went to Dollywood? Shut up? Yep, Me and Laura and Nora and my cousin Stevie and Kim and their daughters. Because Anna is the biggest fan of Dolly and she basically has been talking about would you go with me if I went to Dollywood? And we're all like, hell, yes, we'll go, and we finally did it.

Is it like a not Sperry Farm or is it more like a Disneyland?

I would say it's like right in between the two. Okay, so I was it's so funny you asked that because I was anticipating nots Berry Farm and maybe down.

Just so everyone knows, not Sperry Farm is like the southern California like mom and pop amusement park. So think of it as like your local amusement park, which is like charming and cute but a little jankie.

Right.

Well, it's like because it's farm based.

Yeah, and it's like like a state fair exactly.

They're doing kind of the hometowny vibe where it's like this used to be a berry farm, right, Like he's maybe a little politically incorrect maybe, yeah, but no, Dollywood is classy, it's home amazing, the food everybody get you to oh my god. Well every morning we had the breakfast buffet with some of the loveliest weight staff, the people that work there. They're going to say loveliest waffles and it was so beautiful biscuits, I mean they were there, everything was cooked perfectly. Yeah, Nora had all kinds of gluten free choices amazing, and the staff were like of course because my cousin Stevie was a waiter and ran restaurants and stuff, so he's immediately sassing with the waitresses who are immediately sassing back. And it was just the

most wholesome, like what we kept talking about walking around in the park, big roller coasters, fun roller coasters. Yeah, Dolly retrospective where we walked through and spoiler alert if you're going to go and you don't want to ruin for you, But through the retrospective, you come around a corner and I don't know if you've ever heard Dolly Parton's song Coat of Many Colors, which is about her mom making her the most beautiful coat in the world and she goes to school and they're like, yeah, poor, you come around a corner. The fucking Coat of Many Colors is behind glass. So if you grew up in like in the seventies, yeah, Dolly Parton was everywhere all the time. Is that country music trend that basically happened

on AM radio And she was everywhere, her and Kenny Rogers and everybody. But the Cot of Many Colors was like so down deep that it wasn't even like a thing. I didn't even think about it. But we come around this corner, my sister and I are just like like immediately start crying wow, because my sister turns and goes, it's the coat of it's actually the little girl's coat.

It's the little girl's coat.

And does she still have that?

That's beautiful. That's the lobby of the resort. We stayed at Heart Song the Smoky Mountains, which my sister I met them. They were there longer than me. My sister said, this Smoky Mountains are some of the most beautiful nature she's ever seen. I want to go when the leaves turn. Yeah, it's like every single tree.

Okay. Can we ask Dolly if we can do a live show at Dollywood? Do they have an amphitheater?

Yes they do.

We imagine Dolly's nieces do a live show, her relatives do a live music review of her music and other hits. And they were fucking great. It was like a one o'clock show. And I was like every song, I was clapping my ass off because I was like, they're busting their asses.

My favorite murderer residency at Dollywood.

Get out of town. But we need to go where the coat of Many Colors is. I'd wear that wright, it would go perfectly with what you have on right I do you think I would wear that? But also, isn't it beautiful?

Scourgeous? It's the cutest thing.

It doesn't matter because my sister doesn't watch this show, but I was like, I think I'm gonna try to sew her a coat of many colors for Christmas.

Her do it?

Uh huh. We're just like here here you can have your own either that or to have someone paint it and do a little painting of it.

Hey, Murderinos, do you paint? Oh my god, like a little little still life of just the coat would be so cute.

Coming around a corner and seeing your childhood.

And knowing Murderinos like, it's the artist who uses cat hair.

It's gonna make the most beautiful because that's how talented our fucking listeners are. They're gonna use something random like only using diet coat cans. Yeah, they're gonna make it the most beautiful because that's their thing and that's what they do, nail clippings. Whenever you can come up with.

We would love to see it. We would but highly recommend Dollywood. Every employee was lovely, amazing. The experience was just like we were just like.

What a great summer trip. Yeah, I love that and great merch amazing?

Would you do this weekend?

Oh I'm not drinking so nothing?

Oh are you white knuckle in it?

Over five weeks dude, the longest I've gone in decade and more.

How do you feel good? Of course? Duh? Yeah?

Yeah, turns out what do you do and instead reading? I'm just reading?

Are you really? Yeah?

I went to I madevens going to dinner with me to like, you know, like, this isn't non alcoholic dinner, let's try it. And I was just like the whole time, fucking this isn't fun with aud a martini yet, but it will be right.

Well, it's just have it.

Yeah, totally.

Have you heard of or read the book Yesteryear.

I told you to read that book?

God damn it.

Well I told you like two weeks I gotta read them, like sorry, it's.

Okod Well I didn't. I haven't started, but everybody on the trip had a copy. Yeah.

It's so fucking good.

I will always do that to you because you always tell me to read things and I just don't.

The audiobook is really good, okay, yeah, oh good check it out.

Yeah, I'm very excited about it.

Love it. It's the book of the summer.

Everybody's talking about trad wive regret, the whole.

Thing of like, why are there no grown dradwives because women of a certain age can't fucking handle that shit no more.

I mean the pure labor of being a wife and mother mental labor, physical labor, emotional labor, and then basically volunteering to do it alone. Yeah, wow, tough.

No, oh, do you have a true crime update?

There is a true crime update, but it's kind of a weird one, okay, And it's around the murders of this Fort University of Idaho students. Yeah, Madison Mogan, Kaylee Gonsalvez, Ethan Schapin, and Xanner Kernodle. Brian Coberger, who is convicted of all four murderers last year, is now wants to rescind his guilty please and get a new trial. I didn't hear that he claims he's innocent and that he was misled into confessing. They don't know if that's actually going to take place, but that's something he's petitioning for right now.

I was so happy that that fucking monster was just going to go away and we didn't have to look at him anymore? Right, But here we go. Yeah that sucks.

Yeah, we'll see what actually happens because people have the right to put that out there if they want to, and then they'll see who picks it up and what it actually means totally.

All right, Well should we get into it?

Yes? Should we talk about our network?

Yes? So we have a network. It's called exactly right media. Go listen to all our podcasts on it. There's so many good ones.

They're right out there for you.

Please. Here's some highlights this.

Week over on Ghosted. What's very exciting is the host ros Hernandez has a new audio book out called Peeing in an Empty Bottle. It's about her life on the road as a stand up comic. So you can go listen to an excerpt of that on her feed over on the Ghosted feed. If you like it, you can get the full audiobook available wherever you by your audio books.

I love it. Our newest limited series, Royal Swindle, Episode four, Good Cop, Bad Cop, is out now. Detective Jim Frost closes in on Evelyn and Layla as more of their past comes to light. But just when it looks like they're cornered, their loyal butler, Lars steps in.

They're loyal butler, Lars. This is the level of insanity this podcast gets too. And we're only on episode four.

It's amazing, We're.

Only halfway through, Lars. It's the craziest and roll Swindle's doing amazing on the charts. Thank you guys so much for supporting and downloading and listening and all of that, because it's going like gangbusters. Yeah. Also, if you've ever dreamed of solving crimes at sea, which we know you have, you're a murdering no Buried Bones and Disgraceland are heading aboard Virgin Voyage's True Crime Voyage this coming March. Bookings are open now at virgin voyages dot com. How badly do you want to just go on a cruise and have a drink with Jake Brennan, fucking Paul Holes and Kate and just just chop it up about facts and evidence.

Oh that's so that sounds like my dream? Yeah, it really? Do you want to go?

I get your ticket? I want to go. And then in merch corner, we still have a handful of proclensity items left. You have to check them out. Go to exactly rightstore dot com before they disappear for good.

Haven't you ever wanted to wear merch of your favorite psychiatric drug? Yeah, well now you can with proclensity, which is a word Georgia made up. It seems like something you'd run in a five k like and then at the end of the five k like they'd hand out merchlesity. Yeah, and like pro cleansity merch Yep, that's just what it makes me to go. We're also selling those silver blankets that you can wrap around your shoulders. Also, tomorrow, we've got a little treat for you because, in partnership with cars dot com, we're going to be releasing a bonus episode for you where we give listeners advice that was chaotic.

This is absolutely insane.

I'm so fun And speaking of that, we cannot stress enough that we're in no way equipped or certified to be giving anyone advice, So please take that advice at your own risk. Watch the full video of us leading the public astray exclusively on the fan Cult at fancult dot supercast dot com. Yeah, the end and the end, and I'm first, that's right. This one has a mystery element to it, which I know you hate cold case.

I hate cold case.

I mean, I wouldn't call it that, although I guess technically it's not.

Okay, okay.

So it's April nineteen sixty four, right when this dress was made, and we're at Michael Rhys's Hospital on the near south side of Chicago. So we're at this maternity ward nineteen sixty four April. Dora Franzac is happily feeding her two day old baby, a boy, her first child, named Paul. Her husband Chester has to return to work at the factory where he's a machinist, but he's planning to come back to the hospital that evening. They're so thrilled at their first baby, and that day at work, he's proudly handing out cigars to all his colleagues. Is feeding the baby. A nurse walks into the room. She doesn't say anything, and Dora and her roommate both think it's a little odd, but all she does is lit

the blue blanket away from baby Paul's face and look at him for a long moment, and then she walks out. But a half hour later she's back, and she tells Dora that the pediatrician would like to examine the baby and Dora hands over her brand new baby Paul, and it's the last time she'll ever see her newborn. This is the story of the Paul Franzac triple disappearance. Oh do you know this one?

I mean, I've heard stories of the babies that have been taken or you know, yeah whatever, but now I don't know what it is.

Get ready. The main source for this book is the book The Foundling by Paul Franzac, he.

Wrote about himself.

But we'll get into it, okay. So a student nurse sees this woman dressed as a nurse, walking out with this brand new baby into the stairwell. She doesn't recognize the nurse, and she knows that this is not usual protocol. Probably because she's a student and doesn't feel empowered to run up to a nurse who seems more senior than her.

She doesn't say anything to the nurse. Instead, she alerts her supervisor. They rushed to the nursery and realize that baby Paul is missing. At that point, no one can locate this mysterious woman and the baby. Even though they like acted immediately, there was no delay, you know. The hospital staff try and successfully for two hours to find Paul and the nurse, and then they call Chester at work and tell him what had happened. He has to break the heartbreaking news to Dora there in her hospital bed while hundreds of police and FBI officers descend upon the neighborhood.

H Hey, they should have had to go in and break the news. Yeah, oh yeah, I mean maybe not, though maybe he wanted to, because it's like coming from someone, you know what I mean, Yes, someone personal, and it's not yeah, someone that's going to be weird and cold and clinical about it, right, But god, I know, God.

All the figure out is this. The woman had hailed a cat on the street behind the hospital. The driver said he had driven her west away from the Lakefront where the hospital is, to thirty fifth Street and Halstead Avenue, about a ten minute ride. Then she had gotten out, and despite conducting hundreds of interviews and searching hundreds of buildings and homes, investigators never uncover any leads about where the woman took Paul next. And here's a sketch of what she looked like based on the people who saw her.

So it's just so vague. Woman wearing a nurse's uniform.

Do you think that kind of looks like me, that's my.

Haircut, it's not your baby.

When I'm like a little stressed out. Wait a second, what wait Karen, Wait, what are we going to do? Oh my god, I'm sorry. I kind of long for the days first of all, when we used to have newspapers and journalism, but that idea where it's kind of like, hey, have you seen this person? Imagine the kind of things that aren't getting out there and getting communicated and circulated.

Because although to say and TikTok's going crazy for it, Nancy Grace is back in a big way.

Really, yes she is.

She's taking up the Nolan Wells case like herself.

I didn't see that. Yes, I mean I've seen the case and it's just awful, but I didn't know she was getting into it.

She's getting people from like the local you know, officials, and getting them on the show and then just being way confrontational about you know, that doesn't seem right to me. And her fucking eyebrows are as arched as ever. I mean, yeah, it's a real return to form and that it's crazy.

Okay, that's great for that.

I mean, it's it's she's doing something.

Yeah, okay, Nancy, we see you.

Yeah.

So at the time when this in nineteen sixty four, it had not yet been hospital policy to take fingerprints and footprints for new babies. So the only tangible information the police have on file is the one photo of Paul that was taken right after he was born. They took a snapshot, and that's it. That photo is released to the press as well as those sketches of the woman who took him. So here's his photo. Is a little baby, I know, just tiny, just two days.

Old, I mean tiny, but all that hair.

Yeah, I mean, good thing they had that photo.

Yeah for real.

Oh it's so cute. The Franz Acts make a few desperate pleas to the press, begging for their baby back, but heartbreaking ly, in those statements, they ask for him to be well cared for. Dora tells a reporter, quote, take good care of him and see that he gets enough to eat. He's everything we built our hopes on for the future. Just so he is taken care of.

That's the main thing. So he's just hoping that whoever kidnapped him was doing so to, you know, just to have a baby. Yeah. And so here's a photo of the two of them in the newspaper with the plea she's in a wheelchair. She just looks devastated. I mean, look at their faces.

It's just such a bizarre crime and such a bizarre situation.

And not something you'd expect in a hospital. You think you're totally safe there. Yeah. So similarly, Paul's doctors give detailed instructions to the press about how he should be cared for and how his formula should be prepared because they suspect he might have a cow's milk allergy. So they're just hoping that it's someone who wants to take care of him, and over the next two years, the case goes completely cold. Then in June of nineteen sixty six, two years and two months after Paul's birth and disappearance, the Franzacs get the call they've been praying for every single day.

A two year old boy has been found in New Jersey, and authorities believe he might be Paul. So rewind the boy had been left a year earlier, in nineteen sixty five and a brand new stroller outside a department store in Newark. He had been dressed in a clean, bright blue suit, and the stroller, and the little boy had sat unattended in front of the store for two hours until people realize there's.

No parents with him. Then at five pm, an anonymous caller phones the Newark Police and tells him about the child. The child is designated a foundling, a term for an a pan of baby whose origins are unknown, which is like, gives you chills. The word the foundling. It sounds like a horror movie. Yeah, he does that one movie with Angelina Jolie. That's so good.

The baby it turns around and I just sangs, it has full set of teeth, little a mustache.

I think the movie you're thinking of as a changeling.

I did love that movie.

I meant the changeling. Thank you, Molly, Yes, yes, I love that movie was so good and it was based on the true story that I think you covered.

I covered it and it's so upsetting and it is That movie is the worst nightmare of any parent going through this, where it's like, oh, some absolute lunatic is keeping children in chicken coop out in the country.

She's put it an insane asylum.

Yes, because nobody wants to hear a lady be like you guys, fuck this up.

Yeah, okay, you guys go watch the change.

Watch it, my son. That's my favorite line.

I don't remember that line from it.

She screams my son about nineteen times. We could have edited this down a little bit, I think.

So he's a foundling. The police run ads in the local papers about the foundling to be like, does anyone in whose baby this is? And no one comes forward. So he's brought to live with a foster family in watching New Jersey. And he's a playful little boy. He has a good appetite. He loves to swim in the family's pool and help with grown up tasks like unloading the groceries. The only times he seems fearful or upset is when a young man suddenly enters the room, and this causes him to cower in fear and sob which makes the family who were watching him believe he's been abused by a young man. Here's a photo of the little boy with the nurse. He is so freaking cute.

My god, he's so cute, I know. And he looks a lot like that baby.

Yeah, I mean that looks like my nephew Micah. So much to me too.

Yeah, he looks like a perfect two year progression from that.

Total baby totally. The little boy's speech develops normally over the year he spends in foster care. Sometimes he playfully puts up his fists and says, want a box. But he's gentle with the littler babies in the home. When they cry, he comforts them, saying don't cry. When he himself falls or hurts himself in some minor way, he comforts himself with the same saying don't cry. So he remembers something from before. So this woman named Claire is the foster mom who cares for this little toddler, saying quote, he is one of the most perfect boys I've ever known.

He has charmed all of us with his dearness and kind little ways. He has such a great love of life, and he has made us aware of so many things. He was my special baby. End quote.

Also, God bless the foster parents who are actually doing it, totally doing it right, totally for real.

It's such an incredible act.

Okay.

When the baby had been found, the detective in Newark had alerted the FBI, and for the year that he spends in foster care, the FBI are in and out checking on him. They take molds of his ears, they take blood samples, they take hair samples to see if the baby is little Paul Franzac. They do this same thing to thousands of other little boys around the country hoping to find Paul, but they don't find anything. And we got an email from a murder reino, which I'll read in full at some point because it's really interesting.

I'll read it on a hometown in the future. But it says this quote. My dad was born and adopted on April twenty fourth, nineteen sixty four by my grandparents. On that same day, Paul Joseph Franzac was stolen from a Chicago hospital by a woman dressed as a nurse. So her dad is born the same day and adopted in Chicago.

That's wild.

She goes on to say the FBI tested and examined over ten thousand babies, one of which was my dad. They came back multiple times to examine my dad and took multiple hair and blood samples. The authorities were highly suspicious of my grandparents, as they weren't my dad's biological parents, and their lawyer was under suspicion of black market adoptions.

Oh and then she writes, uh, okay, And that's just an excerpt that's from Ali. The whole emails really great. I'll read at some point, but like, what are the chances that I'm Murderina? Who listens one of those babies is her dad.

On the exact same day, Like that adopted too, that's wild. What did they collect from babies who were just born that they would be able to test it against back then?

Yeah? Nothing, okay. So by March of nineteen sixty six, when baby is just about two years old, they conclude that they can't definitively say that the baby is Paul, this little baby in foster care, but they also can't rule it out. And of all the little boys who have been tested, this is the only time that they are kind of like it might be him. So in June of nineteen sixty six, the FBI makes the call to the franz Acs. Authorities believe the baby looks like Dora and Chester franz Ac, and when the couple arrive in New Jersey to meet him, they believe it's their son.

Dora cries out, oh my god, that's my baby. I know it's a joyous ending for everyone, though perhaps a little bittersweet for the Claire Eckert, the foster mother. She'd given the little boy the name Scott, and she writes a letter to Dora saying, quote, for all this sadness you have both known, you are in for so much joy, for you will now see things through Scott's eyes and he can make them lovely. I know it's not touching.

Yeah, So Scott becomes Paul, the baby that had been kidnapped, that they had lost, and life goes on and Paul lives a normal life in a working class neighborhood on the South side of Chicago.

He's never told about the first two years of his life.

That's very VC Andrews of those parents, like what I mean.

I saw the abuse and incest, r yes.

And creepy addicts and stuff. But I mean it makes sense that he's too young anyway at a total time. But that was you know, that feels like back in the time where it's like, oh, it's fine if he never knows about, right, his real origins.

And maybe so he's still a kid at this point, so maybe they would have told him when he's older. How is the kid going to wrap their head around that.

Sit down and just deal with it. Just like, face it straight.

You're a child, you're in a little adult right.

This is going to fuck up third grade for you. But just try to wrap your mind.

Around imagine this. Okay, So Dora had been pregnant when authorities told the frans Acts that they thought they had found Paul. So Paul comes home and just six months later, his little brother Dave is born. So like, what a mind fuck? Yeah for those parents, especially right in December of nineteen seventy four, when Paul is ten, he starts snooping around the house like we all did, looking for his Christmas presents. In the basement, he pulls a couch away from the wall. You always got to boop with the furniture.

Oh yeah, that's right.

He exposes a little curl space behind it and he shimmeys in and against the back wall. Hidden behind some frame paintings are three shoe boxes and a hat box. Oh to find.

Those, to move something and be like these have been hidden here totally.

Yeah, I found my grandma's and my grandpa's love letters to each other before they were married. Snooping, So sorry, Grandma.

Well, here's the thing all people should realize. Little kids snoop right, if you're not there, they're going to go through your night stand hours totally, that's just a way to pass the time. Don't keep your gross stuff in obvious places. Don't be such a.

Per So Paul of course opens the boxes and realizes they're full of newspaper clippings and letters, and he pulls out a clipping and sees a picture of a newborn and a picture from his parents ten years younger. That photo, he recognizes them and they're devastated, and the letters are all from wells and people who had been praying for the Franz acts. So Paul realizes that he's this baby.

He goes into the kitchen to the mom, like what the hell. She gets angry at him for snooping, and he's like, okay, but what you did is worse. What the hell's going on? And he asked if those articles are about him, and she says, quote, yes, those are about you. You were kidnapped, we found you, we love you, and that is all there is to know. End quote. Okay, mom, okay, mom, go watch TV. Of course, that's not all there is to know, and Paul pretty much lives the rest of his childhood and much of his adult life wondering if he really is his parents missing baby, or if he was for the first two years of his life someone else.

And while Paul does love his family, he says he always feels a bit distant from them, and he had felt that even before discovering all these newspaper clippings and finding out the truth. He says, he's always had this underlying suspicion that he's an outsider to his family, which I wish I felt that way too. I find those motherfuckers are my blood and I know that.

You say something, Janet says, Yeah, it's like I.

See where I got all my problems, right.

I mean it's also interesting because I wonder if he would always feel that, no matter if he was flesh and bleashure because of the right, Like, even if it turned out to be true, it just, yeah, those kind of foundational years he was in a different place, and that in and of itself, right, could just be creating that fel.

No, that makes letal sense. He doesn't get a satisfactory answer until much later in the interim he grows up. He graduates high school, moves to Arizona, gets married, gets divorced, works a bunch of different jobs, and never quite seems to figure out what the right thing for him is, as a lot of us fucking do. But at age forty, in around two thousand and five, he decides to give acting a try, and he actually makes a living at it.

Side note, he's fucking super handsome. Let's take a lick at you, like, I want to tell you what it looks like before you see it. He looks like I think Chris Hansen and a young Keith Morrison combined, And he looks like the perfect like twenty. He looks like a Dateline or twenty twenty host, like he could be telling you about his own crime. Oh so here he is, okay, hi, hi Fox. So he's based in Las Vegas at this point he gets a lot of commercial and print ad campaigns, and then he gets a nice gig as George Clooney's stand in on Ocean's eleven Nice. So like, clearly, don't you see Chris Hansen and Keith Morris.

That's a square jaw.

So he meets a woman named Michelle and they fall in love and get married, and then Michelle gets pregnant, and at this point, you know, Paul is forced to confront this question that snagged him his whole life, because his doctors start asking him about his family's medical history. I feel like a lot of people find out those stories that they send us for the hometown stories.

Yeah, like the ancestry dot com Yeah, type of curiosity that then unravels.

Speaking of Hello, this is before the explosion of DNA genealogy kits, but at home paternity tests are at this point available at drugstores Maribovich, So Paul buys one, and while his parents are in town visiting them, he asked them to take the test, and they do, but then they start to have regrets. They ask Paul not to send the swabs in for testing, like, just don't we don't even want to know. Paul agonizes over the decision for a week, but ultimately he sends the test in, and a few weeks later he gets to answer that no one wants to hear. But it feels like everyone kind of already knows Dora and Chester are not Paul's biological parents. I know, I mean, but.

It also has to be a little bit like, hey, at least I know I can trust my gut. Right if I feel something and I have this instinct, then I know there's no reason to follow it, like Limbo is not a place to live your hoole.

Paul's parents are at first furious at him for sending him the test, and they're devastated having their nightmare reopened and the realization that they have no idea where their biological son has been for more than forty years, like they could trick themselves into thinking they had him, and now yes, the devastation that it's all coming back coming true again, and this opens a rift between Paul and his family that lasts for the next several years, as Paul begins to piece things together on his own. At this point, Paul conducts exhaustive research about his own life.

He speaks with a woman named Mary Hendry, whose father, John T. Carton, had been a Chicago police lieutenant and had run the kidnapping investigation. Originally, she says, this woman says, quote, I remember my father standing in the kitchen of her home, shaking his head. He talked about what good people the franz Acs were, and how badly he felt for them, and what a good job they would do. Raising the baby.

But he also said that the child they took home was not their baby. He knew, he was certain it wasn't the right boy. My father told us The FBI and the police both agreed the child was not the kidnapped baby, but the frans Acts were such good people they agreed to let it unfold the way it did end. Quote, So there's a two year old baby missing. This two year old baby needs a family. That's all just what's a cognitive dissonance? What's it called?

Yeah, or just like selective? Yeah, so everyone denial Yeah, Yeah.

Isn't that sad?

And it reminds me of the change link. It's that same thing of like changeling version is much more sad because the mother immediately knew.

Yeah.

But yeah, when you're in that situation and someone's like the dates line up, the timing of this, that that then you just want to be out of your misery. I feel like you'd go, you'd be a little psychotic if your fucking baby was kidnapped, because then it makes sense how mad they are at him when he opens it back up, because they're like, we can't face the fact that then we gave up.

Paul shares the story with the media and it attracts a lot of attention. So the FBI reopens the Paul Fronsac case and in twenty thirteen he's contacted by Ancestry and they tell him about their new DNA genealogy project, and so Paul submits his DNA. There are a lot of false leads, and then a group of genetic genealogists called the DNA Detectives, led by our girl C. C. Moore, who's of course the head of Parabon Nanolab's genetic genealogy unit.

She winds up taking on Paul's case, and we know she can solve anything great. So in twenty fifteen, they finally figure out who Paul is. He was born the little baby who was found outside the store at the department store. He was born Jack Rosenthal and shockingly, it turns out he was a twin. Ooh, so this is probably the saddest twist in the story. Paul learns that he had been born in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Remember he was found in Newark, and that he and his twin sister Jill, so it was Jack and Joe had disappeared in nineteen sixty five. So he travels back to New Jersey.

He meets relatives who said that they had seen him and Jill as babies, and then suddenly his parents started making up excuses as to why he and his sister.

Were not around anymore.

What I know, like they just dropped them off in front of a store. Well, there are other relatives who say that they had seen Jack and Jill abused and neglected. Paul learns that his father had been a Korean War veteran and likely had PTSD. Remember he get scared when a younger man will walk into the room. He learns that his mother had been an alcoholic and both of Paul's biological parents had died in the nineties of cancer.

So Paul pursues multiple avenues to try to find his twin sister, including digging up the lot where his biological parents' house had been. Wow, he never finds anything.

Oh, he was digging up the lot like his sister could be buried.

Yeah. Wow, because after they were children, no one saw anything. He knows he survived and what happened to him, but no one knows what happened to Jill. The working theory is that Jill may have died in their biological parents care due to abuse or neglect, and that Paul was then abandoned at the same time because they both kind of disappeared together. So Paul also has a biological older sister who's only about two years older than him. He meets her, she has no memory of him or Jill.

He also has a brother who he emails and who says he doesn't want to be in contact. Both of these siblings, of course, had extremely difficult childhoods. So for about five years, this is where the investigation is at a stanstill. Paul publishes his book The Foundling in twenty seventeen, never having found the real little boy who was stolen from his parents. That's like he solved this mystery of who he was, but there's still this big question mark.

And so in twenty twenty it comes out that the FBI had identified the real baby of Dora and Chester a year before, in twenty nineteen. His name had been Kevin Ray Baby, but his existence is only reported on after his death of cancer, so he had found out shortly after finding the test results out. So he didn't really want anyone to know as him, I think, or we don't really know what was going on there. Kevin's children had seen reports about Paul's search for answers, and for reasons that are still unclear, had suspected that their father is the real Paul Franzac. Kevin had taken a DNA test and these suspicions were confirmed, and then he passes away from cancer, and then the FBI lets everyone know.

Kevin had lived in a small town in Michigan called Manton. Friends and neighbors remember him as a very kind man. So here's a photo of the baby picture and an age progression drawing of what he would look like. Oh okay, now here's the baby and what he actually looks like. So look at that guy. It looks just like him.

And then think of fake George.

Clooney, Like, that doesn't look anything like that. I guess you can tell what a baby's going to look like. But isn't that crazy? That's so close? Wait, go back, Yeah, that's that's wild.

Yeah, so that's their real baby. I know that's sad. Okay. Before Kevin's death, he had gotten to speak on the phone multiple times with Dora Franzac. At this point, the case is still considered open and very few details about Kevin and what happened to him after he was kidnaped from the hospital have been reported, but we do know this.

Kevin had been raised by a woman named Lorraine Fountain. She died in two thousand and four. And Lorraine had been dating a doctor from Chicago and then moved to Arkansas for about a year, and when she returned to Michigan, where her family lived, she had a baby with her. But Paul, who now has a podcast called The Franzac Files, and he's actively investigating his whole story and trying to figure everything out. Yeah, it's not funny. He doesn't believe that Lorraine was the one who kidnapped the baby. He believes that she had some kind of connection to organized crime in Chicago. And Paul believes that Lorraine was paid to forge a birth certificate and raise Kevin.

As her own. Why though, I don't know. It's almost like was there some black market for babies? Probably right, I don't know. Does the mafia trade in babies? That doesn't seem like their style, I know, but like maybe one of the mafioso's girlfriends wanted a baby and so they had kidnapped one and it didn't work out, and then they couldn't.

Just give it back right.

They had a like, yeah, that's going so far around the bend. It's easy, baby, not easy to get a baby. Take it from me, Georgia. It's really God, did you watch that documentary about the woman who would just go take them out of people's houses. No, it's even worse than that maternal instinct, internal instinct. Is it good?

It's so it's so troubling.

Okay, it's just you wouldn't because I saw something on TikTok talking about it, but the people were so freaked out that we're telling it. I was like, should I not?

You've covered a case very similar to Okay, it's so psychotic. You just couldn't.

You can't eat ladies that want to be pregnant and go after pregnant ladies something along those lines, lying about pregnancy and then the extremes that they go through when they get caught and just won't let it go. Here's the thing. We have a lot of shame about who we've been in our lives and the obsessions that we've had.

Absolutely the mistakes we've made so many, But every once in a while and maybe That's what this is all about, is looking at these extreme human beings. I'm going at least I never stole someone else's baby because I was obsessed with having a.

Baby totally and lied about being pregnant.

Why why?

I can't even understand why you would lie to it, which makes me think I'm a good person.

I mean, all I want to do is get drunk at the Rustic in and eat grilled cheese sandwiches all day long.

That sounds great.

I don't want anything to do with anybody's baby. No, same, No thanks, Paul. Are we allowed to say, send us your babies, we don't want anything to do stories?

Yeah, send us tell us how hard baby is. Paul Is recently put out a call for more information. He's hoping to hear from anyone who lived in Chicago from nineteen sixty two to nineteen sixty four who frequented an establishment known as Durkin's Bar. And I looked it up, and it was like the rustic dive bars.

It was one of those bars were like one o'clock in the afternoon, people were already drunk.

Kind of a place. It's not like that anymore. Unfortunately, it's a little more like college ros. But it still exists, So ask your dads everyone, what's the theory. I don't know. Listening to the podcast.

Somebody in there, Yeah, I want to listen to that.

Maybe that the dad, his actual dad used to go there, you know, the one who was had PTSD and maybe talked about his children.

Oh, you know, like in a drunken way.

We're doing him. Or his mom was an alcoholic, so maybe she fucking hung out there and just.

Totally Oh that's interesting, guys. Ask your grandfathers. Piece it together, dude.

The official FBI investigation into who exactly took Kevin aka Little Paul when he was just two days old also remains open, and that is the story of the Paul Franzac triple disappearance.

God, I know, wait, I have an idea. Why don't they Why don't they? How would you do it? Forward age the illustration of the lady in the newspaper, yeah, or or backwards age something. Do something with that information, because that's a that's a witness sighting.

Yeah, but it's so vague that I can't imagine. Yeah, it just looks like any it looks like a nurse, you know. Yeah, So bananas crazy.

I know you've done it again. I know.

I'm sorry. I told you.

Here's the thing. I think it's great that Paul Franzig has started a podcast. I think that's exactly where things like that belong. And then talk to people who listen to these podcasts and similar podcasts can get involved. Yeah, God, solve it.

Tell us we want to do a true crime update soon about this case. Please.

Luckily, my story is all about evidence and facts, collecting evidence and facts, and hey, it's a little bit of a turn, I see. I think you'll enjoy it. It begins in the mid eighties, which I know you like in southeastern Michigan, which you also like. He's just a mission in and around Flint, Okay, right, which is, if you don't know, not too far from Detroit. It's a difficult time. The mid eighties is a difficult time for many communities in this part of Michigan. General motors has begun closing local plants, costing thousands of people their livelihoods, and then the wave of crack cocaine hits the streets.

Over the last two decades, drugs like heroin have taken a toll on many Michiganders. But crack spawns a uniquely devastating crisis, and the States violent crime rates soars and peaks in nineteen eighty six. So it is around that time, and so of course when that happens, the Anti Drug Abuse Act of nineteen eighty six becomes federal law, and that kicks off Ronald Reagan's war on drugs. That's when I grew up as a little kid, like drilled it in your fucking head made me want to do drugs so bad it was, you know, it's funny. It makes me think it The first time anyone ever offered me Potter was a freshman in high school, and I burst into tears. Wow, that's how intense Nancy Reagan's She fucking bent little finger pointing at us. I mean, those.

People blight light on humanity.

Don't upset the ghost of my mother, who will come and haunt us forever because she agrees with it. She agrees with it to the point where she will cross back over to lecture both of us about how Ronald Reagan ruined this. Pay.

I will sit fucking Chris cross applesaws and listen to Nurse Pat tell me everything.

Dude, that is how I was raised. If you ever like, why is she the way she is? Because dinner was either my dad being hilarious or my mom literally predicting like an ancient Greek oracle the future, where it's like, who's going to take care of these people? These laws that they're passing like the insane, so much fear and intense pattern recognition, which I'm always very proud of she passed it down. All that is to say, war on drugs kicks off in this country, and it kicks into overdrive, introducing new laws like mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes.

In recent years, public health experts have criticized these policies as being racist, punitive, and not particularly effective at addressing drug use in any way. It's under lying issues or drug sales on the streets just didn't help really anything at all. But it was the eighties, so when Nancy Reagan appears in a telecast from the White House wearing her little red sweater and begging young Americans to quote just say no, the idea of the war on drugs becomes broadly popular. It's like, Oh, they're really doing something about these drug addicts and these people in this crime the messaging was inescapable. It was everywhere. Here she is, remember.

Fucking shampoo set and that mister t chain around her neck, fucking hate her.

Okay, that mister teaching. She was good friends with.

Mister That's right.

It's just so weird because like the first lady passing down, this, this is what we're all going to do about. It's just such a different time. It's like it was Victorian times or something. How we were all just in the monoculture going, yes, Nancy, you're right.

Your husband's an actor, so that makes you what.

That makes you also an actor?

That's right.

Okay. So by nineteen ninety, the war on drugs is in full swing, yet lots of people are still buying and selling drugs. It turns out, enter a man named Lacey Brown. He is a big, rough and tumble, chain smoking forty seven year old North Carolinian living in southeastern Michigan. He's got long hair, he's got a big beard, pierced ears.

His nickname is Moon, which is a double entendre. Not only does he stay up all night drinking, he also gets a kick out of dropping his pants and showing his bare ass to people at parties.

Which wasn't problematic back then. There was no height of humor back.

Then, streaking mooning people, being a peeping tom.

The amount a grown man's asses we saw as humor. Yes, this is unsettling.

It was NonStop.

Yeah.

So, and let's take a look at Moons just so we get the sense of the guy who likes mooning people so much. That's his nickname, the guy in the front. It's the front guy with the long hair in the beard and overalls. Essentially based on that appearance, you would assume he's either a drug dealer or maybe a drug purchaser.

Is he He's actually an undercover?

Oh fuck?

And he is in the area to bust drug rings. This is the story of Lacey Moon Brown and the nineteen ninety wedding sting.

Oh my god, I don't this is like a theme. I'm really fucking obsessed with that. We just don't hear enough of.

Yes, Tom foolery of the cops in the eighties. Yeah, undercover in a really dangerous situation. Yes, and like actually embedding yourself your whole life is that role? Yeah?

Like in the mafia too, and they have like I just find that so fascinating.

Yeah, like the movie Donnie Brasco. Right, It's just like he's in and he can't get out. It is such a crazy life. So this whole story that I'm about to tell you is based on a twenty fifteen Atlantic article by a reporter named Jeff Mash entitled The Wedding Sting. The rest of the sources are in our show notes, but that article is the primary source. So this man, Lacey Brown's personal journey that led him to law enforcement is unorthodox, to say the least. This is according to him.

This is his story. He starts drinking when he's six years old. He joins the Marines in his twenties, but gets kicked out for violent conduct in the marine as a civilian. I like that. I know, isn't that the point? As a civilian, he racks up charges for everything from a legal possession of moonshine to assault. In nineteen seventy two, when he's around thirty years old, he finds himself in a jail cell following yet another arrest for felony assault with a deadly weapon. This is rock bottom for him.

He's going through severe alcohol withdrawal and he begs for God's mercy. And then his felony is suddenly reduced to a misdemeanor and he's released from custody. He takes it as a sign that God is listening to him, and he vows to change his life. So he course corrects by becoming a police officer.

A little bit of laugh, bro, He's like, don't go fishing, don't just like take a sharp rite.

How about you could become a.

Plasterer, totally welder something. He's welder, help.

People, postman. That's perfect, yes, right, bring your beard around. You can moon people if you want. At the end of your shift. In nineteen seventy seven, against all odds, Moon graduates from the police academy and he gets his tart at a department just outside of Detroit.

Wait the violent guy.

Yeah, too violent for the Marines, right for the Marine Corps. Right now he's at your local police department. But he's not your typical police officer. Later on, one of his colleagues will say, quote, if you saw him, you'd never believe he was a cop. He had food stuck in his beard. I mean I buy it. That's way way to give a quote.

Yeah, way to talk about.

What's important, Like I slept with his wife or something something. He's just like, this guy's a pig. But another coworker describes him as quote more believable as a bad guy than he was as a police officer end quote. So Moon's unconventional look and wild disposition work for him, especially of course when he starts going undercover, and as he does, he is so effective that he basically becomes a free agent of sorts, doing contracted work for everyone from the DEA to the FBI to various drug units across Michigan.

So I'm sure that not very many cops looked like him or had that kind of built in there's no way you could be a cop energy, right, and the like he had so many years to practice being a bad guy.

Yeah you can't. If you're twenty one and you're a cop. You've never broken the law in your life. Maybe yeah, you're not. You don't know how they act, you haven't hung out with bad people. So he kind of knows that.

He knows he's drawing from a rich well of experience. And also it's the thing I think of on TikTok all the time, which is people don't understand what good acting is. They think that good acting is like the thing, and it's like no, no, no, you have to go way under and make people think you're not doing anything.

Yeah, I can't do that.

Yeah it's hard. It's very hard. It's a true skill. But for somebody that's actually going under cover, it's like, I'm sure they saw this guy. We're like, holy shit, he's so believable. Get him while you can, because the other guys are like, i'll put my part on the other side and then we'll get him Nancy. So it's dangerous work. Of course. Moon regularly works nights to ingratiate himself with the local criminals while investigating a full range of crimes. He gets shot at, he is robbed, he is beaten, but his legend grows with each new job, which usually ends in a big cinematic sting operation and multiple arrests. So he goes in and he does his time, and he makes his friends and then he all blows up.

And I love these though, because then he gets arrested on the scene too and taken away. I always was like, how does he move on to the next thing when they all know that he's the app the guy forget it? You get it with a.

Lot of Coca cola drink to that and power through it.

No, exactly, And I think that keeping people's cover is so crucial, But then again, you just I just want to keep on putting it in. The parameters of this was the War on drugs, which was logical kind of like the rebirth of like that cop culture of leave it to them they know best.

It's like the police state. That's what it. I mean, not that it's not now we all know that, but like, well, that's kind of when it was.

The source of it, where everyone jumped on board and said, no, this is the best way to handle our problems.

Yeah, if you're not doing anything wrong, then you shouldn't you know all that.

Shit that Now in twenty twenty six, it's like people are just like, oh, wait a second, did they not have our best interest? Right? As the robot dog with guns attached to its head walks down and.

The only the only good thing that came out of the War on drugs.

I have it at my house. Murderino gave it to me. It's the fucking case that you open up and they show you every kind of drug that you could get that they brought to an elementary school and showed all the kids what a do be looked like and what fucking quailus looked like, and so murdering knows dad was a cop when in her fucking garage. Yes, sent it to me. Here's the DARE program in a case.

Treasure I have to I'll bring it for a fan call video.

That's a great idea. That's a that was a true highlight of our early days.

Every time I see it, I'm like, this, everything's worth it. All the down's worth.

It for that and those haunted dolls that we had for a while that we really piqued. We'll get back there someday. Okay. So the thing about this guy is that he was really in it, and he was really doing it so like, for example, one of his most famous arrests was he goes to a local carnival and he follows a suspect onto the Zipper, my favorite ride at the carnival that I've talked about postil times. He actually like does stuff like that and arrest.

Go on, bro, No, the arrest stand over there.

He's like spinning in a circle chasing him, and the eternal like you'll always be behind him. Another time he posts a fake obituary for a living suspect that he's just apprehended and stages a fake funeral for him. And when that suspects criminal associates show upright and more in him, pays respects, moon arrests a bunch of so smart so for background. Officers in most cases are allowed to use deception to lure suspects to an arrest, but it becomes entrapment if the officer's actions directly result in a suspect committee a crime they otherwise would not have committed. Right, So there's a kind of a difference there where it's like that used to be the concern that's the surpaco world of like crooked cops versus the ones that are

trying to do.

Good planting you can't plant evidence, but no, blah blah blah.

And I think this is where all of that starts to flip in that serious way of there's this weird kind of trust of like, you know, your local authorities are going to fight a war on drugs and we're all going to support them in it, and that idea, Yeah, it's for the greater good. It's getting drugs out of children's hands. When it's like, that's not what's happening. It's not what happened being fucking lied to, and how did those drugs get onto the street in the first place? Right, Okay, So back to this undercover cop Moon, who is very dedicated.

He actually meets his wife while working undercover. He arrests her brother for making a bomb.

Does he trick her? I hate that part. They do get married and stuff, and like the wife doesn't know. Oh no, no she does, Oh she does.

Okay, yes, So basically he has to go undercover to meet the brother to arrest him for bomb making, and then he's like, well the once, once, that is over. So now we're in nineteen ninety. Moon is working undercover in the Flint, Michigan area, investigating the local drug trade, and based on reporting, it seems that this drug trade was much more pot focus than it was crack cocaine focused.

He is working alongside a thirty eight year old Flint police officer named Debbie Williams and Jeff Maish. The author from that Atlantic article describes Debbie as one of only a few women who quote crawled, shot, and boxed her way through the male dominated police academy. In Flint.

Oh yeah, and doctor Clary starling over here.

Right, she had to jump over that thing gray sweatshirt. So Moon and Debbie work undercover together, posing his boyfriend and girlfriend drug addicts. Okay, Debbie will later say quote, I had to tell Moon, you have to remember to pretend you're in love with me. He was kind of embarrassed by it all. So he wasn't a great actor.

I'm sure it was just like him as himself. But then Debbie comes long and they have to kind of set up these things. It was one of his characters was in a relationship, and so he had to pretend like he was in a relationship, and that's when his acting got stressed, strained, a little bit weird. Right, But to the people that they are regularly buying drugs from the couple is believable. Debbie has bright blonde hair and a stoner persona, and it seems like a natural fit with Moon's bearded, chainsmoking, kind of tough guy persona. Rounding out this team is Sergeant Vic was solition of the shiawassee County Sheriff's Department. Vix in his mid forties. He's essential to this operation because Basically, Moon and Debbie go

and they hang out, they make their drug deals and they buy and they talk to people, and then they meet covertly with Vic. They get into a car, usually in a remote parking lot. They do basically an info dump. Tell him everything they've just seen and heard in the names and the dates and everything into a recorder he has, and then that will later be kind of processed and used as evidence. Vic knows the undercover world himself. In the eighties, he worked as a when undercover is a biker named Animal to infiltrate the local cocaine trade. That was very dangerous. He found himself walking a tight line between not blowing his cover and not breaking the law.

Do they have to do drugs, Well, it's interesting that's illegal that they do drugs. But then of course testing people and making them do drugs to prove they're not cops is very common, so there are times where to keep covered they do have to do it. So, for example, once a man shoved a gun in Vic's face demanding he smoke a joint to prove he wasn't a cop.

Obviously he smoked the joint, but he usually found ways they got very creative about how to stay clean in those situations. He actually carried around a modified coke straw that had special blockage kind of compartment inside so he could snort coke and it would catch the coke in the straw but never go into his nose.

Wow, bummer, totally what a waste.

I mean, yeah, So, because then they would have to get drug tested. I mean, they couldn't lose people to become drug addicts, right, because drugs are bad for you.

Ye.

So Ultimately, Moon, Debbie, and Vic spend months building relationships with these local dealers and then criminal cases against them. But Moon has spent more than a decade in law enforcement at this point, and this high risk work isn't paying that much. He and his wife, Beth now have small children, and she will later say, quote, there were times we couldn't afford to eat and I felt bitter.

Wow yeah yeah. All I ever wanted was a roof over our head end quote. So together they dream of a quieter, easier life, maybe back in Moon's native North Carolina, where they could buy land and settle down. So that's kind of the plan that they come up with, But of course Moon wants to do one last big job.

You can never do one last big job.

They always have to. These men spend. The longer the beard, the more they have to do one last big So in September of nineteen ninety, Moon pulls Vick aside and says, quote, I'd kind of like to go out with a bang. Do you got any ideas? So Vic says, yes, I do, buddy, because Vick has come up with the ultimate drug sting, one that enables them to arrest all the suspects they've been investigating over the last several months in one big fell swoop, while saving the local cash strapped police departments big money, A wedding, A wedding, I love it, A fucking wedding. Oh they're gonna throw a fake wedding. What's crazy to me is reading the phrase the local cash strapped police departments, which here in twenty twenty six just

doesn't exist anymore, because they figured out politically, you take the war on drugs energy, you keep building that of we've got a fire time, fear, fear, fear, and now we have police budget lines that are one hundred times longer than any other budget, and the teachers make minus five hundred dollars a day. Curiously, it's fucking insanity, Okay, there to say that every time. So the same afternoon that Vic and Moon are having this discussion, Moon calls his partner, Debbie and asks her to fake marry him.

She says sure, And now the Shiawassee. County Sheriff's Department allots a very tight budget for this team to pull off this wedding sting, so they shift into planning mode. Writer Jeff Mash reports, quote, in the weeks leading up to the wedding, cops put aside crime reports and fingerprints to work on seating plans and floral arrangements.

What if one of them was like secretly.

Like this is all I've heard, I'm so good at this.

And then like quit to become a wedding planner.

Yeah, but they're the guy that's like standing there with the short cigar and like the you know, the comb over never know, and he just like taps into something beautiful. He has a true vision. Well, that didn't happen in this wedding because it's so hilariously bad and funny to me. So in the week's leading up to the wedding, the operations room began to sound like a wedding planner's office as grizzled lawman interrogated caterers. During briefings. They discussed whether the bride should wear her hair up or down, how much they would spend on food, and how they would squeeze Moon into a tuxedo.

Oh my god.

He's a little the beard got trimmed from that first picture you saw.

Yeah, he looks like a trucker, like a biker. Yeah, for sure, he's very tired. I like that tile in the bathroom that's neither here nor there.

That looks like every live show we've ever done where we're just like totally. I come out and I'm like, hey, can you pull these banks up? Help me pulls.

I don't know how I'm going to zip this.

Okay, So the wedding data set. It's September twenty first, this wedding's going to be held at a discreete modestly sized, and importantly inexpensive community hall near Owsa, Michigan.

The buffet tables, oh yeah, can just see them.

Those fold out? Yeah, great long numbers and they put a nice paper tablecloth over the top. Oh my god, debian Moon continue buying drugs and collecting evidence. Only now when they do it, they share the happy news with all of their drug friends and they start handing out wedding invitations to these people, aka the dozens of suspects that they're trying to and trap in this ring. Sure not in trap, sorry, that they're trying to invite to participate.

It's interesting in.

This kind of means thing because also I was thinking about it where it's like, so they're there buying pot. It sounds like buying coke here and there maybe who knows, and just kind of hanging out with people. And then these people they're like, hey, do you want to come and celebrate our love?

Oh my god, I'm so touched that you'd invite me, Like I didn't know we were that close, but like that really means a lot to me.

Yeah, and I'm just selling this pot because I'm trying to get by. And yeah, in forty years, HBO or Showtime is going to make a series about how it's cool if this mom is just selling some pot. But for right now, we have lived in a society that leaves we should go to jail for fifty.

Years because of it. Let me get you a wedding gift too. That's the most fucked up thing is they all arrive with a fucking blender. I mean, yes, I want my blenderback, is what I'd fucking say. They get thank you notes.

I will see, because who knows the level of dirt bag that this wedding truly goes to. It would be kind of fun to be able to see. But spoiler alert, it has been optioned to be made into a movie because of course this is that kind of like, only in America in nineteen ninety could this thing happen.

Amazing.

So now it's the night of September twenty first, and guests begin to show up to the venue just before six pm. VIC is posted in one of the cars out in the parking lot, clocking each suspect as they enter. Outside the venue, guests are greeted by a big sign telling them to check their weapons before entering. So smart and most people comply, leaving their guns, knives, and I added brass knuckles in their cars. They go back to the car unload everything, hammer a sigh they have, like.

But take your wedding gift and it's just a little baggy of coke. Yeah, it's like not entrapman or planting it if you took it and put it in your pocket.

Yeah, that's right. They take their coke and they put it in a beautiful wedding car with Jordan Almonds. Yeah, God damn, Jordan Almonds used to bum me out as a kid.

It's such a bummer.

First of all, I was like, are we allowed to open this netting? Why are we digging into nettings?

Disgusting?

And that's just for a shitty old almond okay, not even salted, okay, not salted, not chocolated. Once the guests get inside, there's an open bar, there's music, and there's dancing, and they're having a raffle. Okay for about one hundred dollars, which would be how much in today's money six hundred, two hundred and fifty Sully nineteen ninety. You can enter to win a chance to win an entire brick of marijuana. Okay.

A raffle at a wedding is like, fuck, yes, it's hilarious. I love it. And a brick of marijuana is not as cool.

Which is stacked nearby.

That's so funny.

I would like to think is it cush if I Walkeddica. What are we talking that? If I walked in, I'd be like, open bar raffle for weed in a brick. Yeah, this feels wrong. Yeah, this is all too good.

Totally. Yeah, but I do think we should start doing raffles at weddings. Hell yeah, are you listening, listener?

Are you listening? Brides? You selfish brides and bite us and also raffle off? Like what would be good to get at a wedding.

One of the gifts. Pick a gift of the gifts on the table.

You're like, oh my god, we got a new air fire.

You can't open it. You pick a gift off the fucking that's.

A really good idea. Or like your raffle wins you. You get to do the money dance move aside, bride you. I didn't know about money dances until the Italian I think a lot of cultures do it. I think so too.

It's fucking cool, not Irish Catholic.

We just get raised in a chair, which is pretty fucking awesome forbid Irish Catholics. Tod be like, we don't need your money. Assuming these bricks weigh about a pound each, the weed in the raffle would be worth on the street today in twenty twenty six, how much money a brick?

One hundred dollars for talking?

You said, yes, so if you only paid one hundred for this brick, and how much I don't know how much a brick's supposed to be? Yes, you do. We all know you went to read them. Not for fucking weed, not for selling bricks of weed street worth one thousand dollars.

Today in today's money entires money.

That's a lot, right, good for one hundred, Yeah, one hundred for a thousand Take it and back to the entrapment point from earlier. Right, Because they are not placing these pot bricks into suspects hands directly, it's fine. They're simply creating an opportunity for the suspects to bid on them on their own volition. Therefore, it's not in.

Trappen that is tricky, tricky, tricky. Whoever, whatever fucking police officer came up with that idea got a raise or whatever.

I mean. I think so got a brick of weed. It got a brick of weed. But all of it is a little bit like people really enjoying the school play energy too much. Yeah, because I'm like I would have been there, like, sorry, they don't have raffles or tables full of gifts, right that you're raffling at a wedding.

Boys gone wild.

It's a movie. It's a movie.

It's a movie of too many boys. And there's Debbie running around. She can't fix everything, you like, that's not really realistic.

It's Marca Robbie for sure. Right, it's like Margaret Robbie for like like Nancy what was her name, not Nancy Tanya Harding, Yes, Margo just like a little bit trashy, a.

Little trashy, a little bad perme because actually, well this is them from the day. So we have Debbie in her wedding dress that she that that actually Beth Moon's wife found for her at the Salvation Army.

Hell yeah, oh is so eighties but I know it's nineties. But is that him in the background? Is that Moon?

No, that's actually Vic in the background. Okay, yeah that's Vic.

Wow, she looks so happy.

Because she loves tricking people.

So okay, yeah, that's Margaret Robbie with a fucking right.

Yes, the wedding is convince to the saaspects that are slash guests that are there especially considering the room is crawling with law enforcement, who, unlike the unwitting guests, are carrying fire arms under their suit jackets and dresses.

Yes they are.

And there's at least one local reporter that Moon tipped off promising a big exciting drug bust, you know, because he wants us to go down. Right, So the wedding photographer is actually a photojournalist, amazing, right. Meanwhile, the wedding cake is just cardboard covered with frosting. Okay, all right, it's a cost saving measure that the police have taken.

But the frosting has been professionally decorated with little bees because it's the inside joke of this as a sting operation.

You guys.

So they very much fun. They're having fun, go to work. They really are, just like, that's funny. Let's ruin some lives and have a great time doing it. Yeah. The music provided for this wedding, the live wedding band is a bunch of dudes, and the band is called SPOC and it's short for Somebody Protect Our Crops?

Is it a real band?

But they are no, the crops being marijuana.

Yeah.

All of the members of the band are wearing matching pot leaf t shirts.

Oh but heavy handed.

Very very corny corn. Yeah, they didn't care about the corn. Also, it's an inside joke because Spocks well backwards as Copps and the band are cops from different departments in the area who.

They finally get to play their instruments.

And apparently they're fucking terrible. Everybody says, so good, Yes, here's a picture of that band, So.

I need that. That's got to be our merch.

I mean, but it's like, it's so sorry. But it's just like, hey, we're not cops. We love weed. And it says fucking cops on it, like no stone or would they go into the trouble to make fair? No? No, And no band has ever made band shirts that they then all wear. So Moon and Debbie invited about forty people in their drug dealing and doing life. Only a dozen or so show up. To those dozen that.

Did, that's such a pothead thing you can't invite.

Yes, exactly, it's just like, oh, it's all right, I meant to tell you today. The ones that are there, like, man, this is great. Yeah, So everyone takes their seats. The ceremony begins. Debbie is walked down the aisle by her father, who is actually an undercover cop. She's wearing a dress as I said that Beth founded the Salvation Army for seventeen dollars. Nice how much in today's money? For forty five? Oh? Yes, nice one. You knew that because it was about triping. Sure, I know how much is at the Also, Debbie's wearing a garter on her thigh that holds a small gun.

If she cries, then she gets bonus points.

She's such a good actress. Ye, just the one single tear. When they get to the altar, the minister who is actually Flint's police sergeant.

Come on, they'd recognize him.

He's also in costume, so fake vows are exchanged and Debbian Moon say I do okay, And once they do that, the band kicks off, and with one undercover guest later describing their performance as quote absolutely horrible. Okay, It's like you can just feel the lack of rhythm.

Foka.

They can only do PoCA. So the booze is flowing. Everyone's having a good time. Now the food is served, and while everyone eats, undercover officers pretending to be friends and family of the bride and groom start to stand up and give fake speeches and toasts to the happy couple. The wedding party even poses for photos. They did they do the whole thing now, yeah, they're already there, like, just don't just do it, just get it over with.

But no, they're in the school play and slash right their first time improvising, and they're having fun with it.

Yeah.

So now it's around nine o'clock. The began begins to play the song I Fought the Law and the law one right, so heavy handed, that's the cue.

It's so nucky way. Yes.

A guy jumps on stage like he's about to give a toast, but instead he says, let's have some fun, and then he asks that all the undercover officers stand and make themselves known, and the other guests start getting placed under arrest.

WHOA.

At first, there's disbelief among the guests. One person starts laughing as he's getting handcuffed, with an officer insisting that quote, we were not kidding, we have a warrant for your arrest. End quote. In all, fifteen people are taken into custody that day, and dozens of others that Moon, DeBie and Vick have been investigating, will be arrested elsewhere in the coming days. So it's all part of the same state.

Didn't have to do the fucking wedding in the first.

Wedding, clearly was you guys blowing off some scheme, right. You can imagine Once news of this sting hits the papers, it's viral. Nineties version of viral stories run with flourish, Like there's an Associated Press article with the subhead that reads, quote, here came the bride, all decked in white and a snubnose.

Where's the editor? Can I talk to the editor?

Please? And a snubnose revolt.

Now, let we're gonna shorten that up.

The rhythm's off. There's no internal anything. Okay. So Moon, for his part, becomes the subject of a Detroit Free Press profile the next year, in nineteen ninety and one, when he finally retires, the reporter writes, quote, his spirit and his health exhausted by two decades of undercover work, A legendary narc heads for the hills.

No, what's better.

That's way better. End quote.

It is a different crime. It could be here comes the bribe, but it's not. It's not that.

Though it's here comes the raffle. That's right, what's upon anybody? No big deal. It's like it your cousin's wedding and they raffled off the weed. You remember, the fucking weirdest Okay, okay. Part of this to me feels a lot like when I was in college and I was a theater major. So being a theater major, it was all about like hanging out in the theater department and like, do you need me to do anything? And what's up here?

And creative?

Yes, you just wanted to be You wanted to be identified as amongst these people. That's what I wanted. When you're new an improv that like UCB right, yeah, and you're like, I guess I got to sit in a cafe and write out my suggestions or whatever, nurse. But it seems to me that the energy with which they went into that it was because they liked hanging out and doing it. They liked working on it. I think that is going to prove out to be true later.

But please hold while I read you this part instead. And I told you this in twenty fifteen, Jeff Mash's article from the Atlantic gets optioned for film rights.

Going to the Chapelong. You're going to get arrested there it is.

I want to stop thinking about it. Just keep on pitching. When they come to you, you say them, it's been stuck in turnaround. But that idea, Like the second the article came out, they're like, we got to make a movie this Vince Vaughn. Whether this sting was successful by any measure, though, is tough to save because seen people. Yeah, yeah, fifteen people who were basically pot smokers.

There was not nice ones, it seems, because they came to a wedding.

I know, the nice carrying ones that were like friendships matter. At the time, Flint doesn't have digitized court records. They are on the paper system.

Still.

It's nineteen ninety. The week that many of the cases from the arrests from this sting go to court, a tornado hits the area and the important documents are scattered to the wind. That's God, that's right.

Fuck Nancy Reagan. Yeah, fuck you, fuck you, thuck you you're cool.

Same god that got Moon out of his initial thing right and got his thing made to a misdemeanor, That same God was here just like enough of this. You had your Yeah, you should have made a real kick. Decades later, Jeff Mash attempts to sess out the number of convictions and details on what happened to those involved.

But it's so murky because they don't have that actual paperwork.

They should throw at funeral and have everyone who showed up at that.

I mean, well, what's clear from the day reporting is that around thirty people are handed drug charges in connection with this investigation and this sting. It seems like very few suspects were given long or harsh sentences. Most probably resolved them through plea deals and basically got to go back to their regular lives. Vick will later say that some of the people they arrested took it all in stride, claiming, quote, there were no bad feelings. Everyone thought it was funny.

You got me.

And it's such a cop attitude of like they loved it. Here's a guy getting arrested, and you can tell. You can look at his face and see, Okay, it doesn't seem like he thinks it's.

All that wall. He looks shell shocked.

That's de Wian Moon.

Why because he wore a fucking acid What are those genes called?

Yeah?

Acid washed a wedding acid wash jeans and a Freddy Kruger sweater.

Well, and look at her, the bride with the gun in her hand.

That is a She pulled that right out of her thigh garter yam and said, how dare you smoke?

Pot? And he's got a joint in his mouth.

He's good.

Moon's got to join in this mail.

Moon's already lit up. That guy totally looks like he's like, Oh, that's what I get for it trying to be nice of people. I basically wrote here, I'd love to hear a twenty twenty six interview with the arrestees to see how true that statement is. That's the podcast we need to hear.

If anyone listening's dad or mom was in that sting, please email us immediately. Put it in the subject line my favorite murder at Gmail. Read it on a hometown.

It's going to get like a five alarm fire, straight to the microphone if we If you want to tell us your side of the story. Atlantic writer Jeff Mash notes, though that more importantly quote, for all the drama and creativity involved, the operation ultimately didn't do much to improve the grim outlook of the city and its surrounding areas end quote. So obviously, the idea that we're going to clean up the streets, this all just kind of turned it into fun times and cookiness, and it's like, and you just arrested a bunch of people that were able to plee out. Afterwards, In the years that follow and in spite of the War on drugs policing culture looming larger and larger, the scourge of drugs continues as the

broader region of this part of Michigan is left to grapple with severe economic hardship. So basically all of this is for naught. For his part in the sting, Moon gets a five thousand dollars bonus, which would be worth about how much.

In today's money, eight hundred and thirty.

It's a five thousand dollars bonus.

Not one hundred eight three hundred.

Closer, it's twelve thousand, eight hundred with an hour. Anyway, this bonus enables Moon to retire, get his get his family. You're right, yeah, retire, get his family together, and move back to North Carolina like he planned. In two thousand and six, Lacey Moon Brown passes away at just sixty three years old, with his obituary reading quote the moon shines no more in North Carolina. That's dramatic. His cause of death is unclear, but he was a heavy smoker, and who knows. There is one sweet, weird side note that I was talking about before, which is that during the fake wedding, when Sergeant Vick wasah Solition watches Officer Debbie Williams coming diant the Ale in her dress, in her Salvation Army dress. He realizes that night he has

feelings for her, and he says quote, I couldn't let her go. They end up falling in love and eventually marrying, and as best as Maren can tell from her research, they're still together to this day. So my thing is, I think that this idea where it was like it was for Moon to get one last kind of like ray for you in the papers and then all the other stuff was like when you like hanging out with people, so you're like, yeah, we better get together and figure out that raffle tomorrow. Oh right, Like it has that feeling I.

Wanted it to go on as long as possible kind of a thing.

But they have a fucking cop band plane, Like you can't just have a DJ like normal weddings.

That's so romanz.

They had cops fucking I fought the law rehearsal.

When did you know you were in love with mom?

Well, well, when she pulled out that little pistol from her thigh garter and fucking up against the wall. And that's the story of the nineteen ninety wedding sting.

That was fun.

Hey, we're not opposed to having fun on this podcast. If you have any ideas of how we could have more fun, please write it in my favorite murder at gmail dot com.

Or just comment on the Instagram. That's the only way I'll ever see like comments is if it's on Instagram and the fan cult.

Yes, we can't go looking for it anymore. People. We've been through so much.

My brain is like, you know, I have like my eyeballs like a cart and are filling up.

With I just have those ones from like twenty seventeen that I looked at one time and it's burned into my memory forever. The comments yeah never never, why is it them? We don't know, we don't know. Sorry about your freezing. You like it?

Go to get another free thing?

You You're a free thing.

Do you know how many free things.

There are free to like old Pine Elsewhere there's a post to be political. If you don't fucking know that, stay sexy, I don't get murdered.

Goodbye, Elvis, Do you want a cookie?

This has been an exactly right production.

Our managing producer is Molly Smith.

Our consulting producer is Kate Shellenbach.

Our creative lead is Alison Agosti.

Our associate producer is Tessa Hughes, and our editor is Aristotle Acevedo.

This episode was mixed by Leona Squalacci.

Our researchers are Marion McGlashan and Ali Elkin.

Email your hometowns to My Favorite Murder at gmail dot com and follow the show on Instagram at my Favorite Murder.

Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, or watch new episodes every week on Netflix. Search for My Favorite Murder, add us to your list and hit the double thumbs up button.

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544 - Everything Is Worth It

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