Bobby Joe Long: The Serial Killer a 17-Year-Old Girl Took Down

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She's 17 years old, riding her bike home from a shift at Krispy Kreme.

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An stranger pulls her off that bike with a gun to her head.

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What she doesn't know yet is that surviving him is going to take everything she's got.

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And what he doesn't know is that she is about to memorize every single detail of the next 26 hours.

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This is the story of Bobby Joe Long and the girl who caught it.

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[Music]

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Robert Joseph Long, the guy everybody eventually knew as Bobby Joe, was born October 14th, 1953,

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in a little town in West Virginia called Kenova.

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And if you'd met him as a toddler, there's no way you would have guessed where this story ends up.

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His parents split when he was two.

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His mom moved him to Florida and his childhood became a back and forth of reunions,

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second divorces, and crashing with relatives until the family got its own place,

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in Hylaya in 1965.

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Money was always tight.

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And his mom worked as a waitress and a bartender, jobs that meant certain outfits,

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which left Bobby Joe carrying real shame about it.

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School wasn't kind either.

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He failed the first grade, got teased about a jaw that never really grew in right.

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He started skipping classes around 12, and he dropped out of school in the 10th grade,

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twice, he kept going back, and then he eventually just got expelled.

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And the story from here gets really strange.

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The kid physically could not stop getting hurt.

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He nearly drowned at a beach when he was four.

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At five, he fell off of a swing and a stick pierced his eyelid on the way down.

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At six, he got launched headfirst off of his bike into a parked car, and that made him

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lose some teeth.

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At seven, he fell off of a pony.

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He stayed dizzy after that fall for weeks.

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He also got hit by a car, possibly twice.

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One source sums it up, flat, saying he survived numerous blows to the skull.

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Bobby Joe was also born with an extra X chromosome, which raised his estrogen and gave him

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breast development at puberty.

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Kids, of course, as you can guess, were merciless about it.

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As a teenager, he had breast reduction surgery, and multiple sources land on the same detail.

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Roughly six pounds of tissue were removed.

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Any time he ever went swimming, he kept his shirt on.

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Then there's his mom, the most contested relationship in this whole biography.

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Bobby Joe later claimed that his mother would bring home a string of boyfriends, and he

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would get pulled out of the bed at night, because he slept in his mom's bed and stuck out on

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the couch so that one of them could take his spot in the bed.

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His mother has always flatly denied it, and nobody has ever exactly settled on who is

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telling the truth in this.

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What is documented is a pattern of resentment that built in him for years.

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Around age 13, he shot and killed the family dog.

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He shot this dog specifically in the genitals, reportedly because his mother fed the dog's

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steak while he ate hamburger.

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Bobby Joe met Cynthia, who everyone called Cindy when they were both around 13.

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They married in January of 1974 at a chapel on the Air Force Base where he was stationed.

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Six to eight weeks in, riding his motorcycle on US one, a driver who never saw him plowed

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straight into his bike.

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He was thrown somewhere between 60 and 100 feet, landed on his head, and his helmet split

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clean and half.

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The paramedics who showed up didn't think that he had made it.

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They thought he was dead.

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He survived, but according to Cindy, the man who walked out of that hospital wasn't the

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man that she married.

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Nurses reported him masturbating five or six times a day when they come in to check on

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him, even in a body cast.

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And he demanded sex from her constantly, from Cindy, not the nurses, every time that she

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would come to visit.

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Before the crash, their sex life had been normal, she said, a couple of times a week.

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For it, nothing about him settled back down.

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Cindy asked the doctors if this would pass.

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They told her to give it some time.

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It never did pass.

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This became the new normal.

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She said since that Bobby Joe just never came back from that hospital.

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What followed was years of abuse.

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Cindy has described him pinning her to the bed, choking her, punching her in the face while

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she couldn't even scream.

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One time he slammed her head into a TV and told her that if she told the truth about

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her stitches, he'd kill her the moment that she got home.

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She's admitted that she considered a far darker way out before choosing divorce, filing

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in June 1980.

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She said she sometimes wondered if she should have gone with Plan A.

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After the divorce, Bobby Joe drifted.

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Jobs came and went.

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Electricians assistant, X-ray technician, always fired within months for the same complaints.

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He was watching porn on shift, talking about sex constantly, being rude to female staff.

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During a stretching California in 1982, he picked up the method that would define him, answering

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classified ads for furniture or homes for sale to get inside women's houses while they

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were home alone.

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That's where his nickname came from, the classified ad rapist.

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By March of 1984, on probation for an unrelated assault, he raped and strangled a young

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woman named Artis Wick, whose age was reported as either 18 or 20 depending on the source.

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Over the following eight months, in a county that usually saw 30 to 35 homicides a year,

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long-killed roughly one woman every two weeks, ten women confirmed dead, most working

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Tampa's Nebraska Avenue corridor or hitchhiking.

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Several estranged enough from family that weeks passed before anyone filed a missing persons

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report.

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Then on November 3rd, 1984, the case tilts because Bobby Joe pulls a 17-year-old off of a bicycle.

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Her name was Lisa McVey, fresh off of an overnight shift at Krispy Kreme Donuts.

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He pressed a gun to her head and told her to shut up or he'd blow her brains out.

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But Bobby Joe had no way of knowing that surviving something unthinkable was not new territory

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for Lisa.

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She'd spent three years being abused by her grandmother's boyfriend and the night before

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this abduction she'd written a suicide note.

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Blindfolded in his car, she contorted her face, clenched her jaw just enough to open a small

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gap that she could see through the blindfold and started memorizing everything.

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The white seats, the dark red carpet, the word magnum on the dashboard.

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Inside his apartment she counted 19 steps and registered every turn.

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Over roughly 26 hours, she built an actual relationship with this man in real time.

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She gave him a fake name.

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She invented a sick father who desperately needed her home and asked to touch his face so that

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she could memorize his mustache and the shape of his nose.

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She left fingerprints on his walls on purpose, just in case her body ended up being the only

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evidence anyone would find.

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Bobby Joe let her go just before dawn near NATM, telling her that the only reason he didn't

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kill her was because of her made up father.

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When Lisa pulled off her blindfold, she later said that that was the moment she decided

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that she did actually want to live.

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She didn't want to take her own life anymore.

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Her memory is what cracked this case open.

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FBI fiber analysts linked the red carpet fibers from multiple murder scenes to fibers on

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her own clothing.

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Her memory of the word magnum led investigators pull every registered 1978 Dodge Magnum in the

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county by hand.

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Since this is 1984 and that meant a paper list and Bobby Joe's name was on it.

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There's traced an ATM withdrawal to almost the exact minute that Lisa remembered being

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let go.

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On November 16, 1984, they arrested Bobby Joe walking out of a movie theater.

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In the movie, he had just watched in a detail that sounds made up but isn't.

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Chuck Norris in the movie "Missing in Action".

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He ended up confessing to nine murders in a 45-page statement, but he only pled guilty

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to eight of them.

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The ninth, the murder of Michelle Sims, was carved out of that deal for a jury to decide

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separately.

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That jury recommended death.

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The legal fight afterward dragged on for over three decades, full of reverse convictions

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and technical arguments that had nothing to do whether or not he actually did it.

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Because everyone already knew that he did.

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The governor signed his death warrant April of 2019 and Bobby Joe was executed by lethal

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injection on May 23, 2019 at Florida State Prison.

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Asked for final words, he essentially said nothing.

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Lisa McVeigh, the girl he kidnapped at gunpoint after her shift at Krispy Kreme, sat in the front

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row that day, wearing a shirt that said "long overdue".

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Lisa had spent the decade since becoming a sheriff's deputy in the very same county that once

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arrested her attacker, working sex crimes and protecting kids.

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She read a statement naming all 10 victims out loud and thanked Bobby Joe, pointedly,

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were choosing her instead of another 17-year-old girl.

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Bobby Joe's daughter, Sarah, stood across the street that night at a vigil against the execution.

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She'd spent years defending her father, arguing his untreated head trauma explained the violence

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and waited until 2001 to visit him in prison.

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Afterward, she said that her father made her a victim the same way that he made those

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women and their family's victims.

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Five different psychiatrists offered five different explanations for what made Bobby Joe

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long capable of any of this.

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Or monodamage, brain injury, disassociation, a shattered childhood attachment, or calculated

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psychopathy.

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None of them ever fully agreed, and the jury didn't buy the psychiatric defense either.

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What's left isn't a tidy explanation wrapped up with a bow.

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It's a man who spent his whole life colliding with the world, and a 17-year-old girl who collided

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with him and came out on the other side and kept living for decades while he was put to death.

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Thanks for listening to 10-minute murder, binge-able true crime stories.

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Hello?

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I'm Joe.

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I'm the host.

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Here's an email subject.

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A very important update.

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Hi, Joe.

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Remember how people always say they fall asleep listening to podcasts, and more specifically,

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you've talked about on your podcast how people have written in and said that they fall asleep

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listening to yours?

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Well, I tried that with your show exactly one time.

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Turns out, hearing about murder isn't as relaxing as I thought.

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Lesson learned.

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Alicia and Yakim al-Washington.

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Alicia joined the club.

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Doing this podcast gives me nightmares sometimes.

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I talked about that on the podcast pretty extensively.

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I don't think it's a secret.

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When you dig into the details of all these crimes and these murders, as much as I have to

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to do this show, it's going to do some things to your brain.

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And that always manifests for me right as I'm about to fall asleep.

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It's like, "Oh, you're going to sleep now.

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How about we replay the details of this horrible murder that you just read about?"

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And so that's what goes through my brain sometimes, and I'm trying to fall asleep.

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So I totally get what you're saying.

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However, there are, I have evidence of literally hundreds of emails of people that have written

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in saying that they do listen to this podcast as they're falling asleep, and they love doing

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that.

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So I know it's possible.

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It's just not for everyone, I suppose.

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But I do really appreciate Alicia that you listen when you can listen.

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That means a lot.

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And hey, if you're a brand new listener to 10-minute murder, welcome, get comfortable,

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and do me one huge favor right now.

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Hit subscribe wherever you're listening to this podcast.

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You can also go to 10minuteMurder.com.

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There you're going to find links to where you can listen to the show on other platforms

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if you want to, links to where you can find the show on social media, a blog, and how to

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contact me all there at 10minuteMurder.com.

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And that's going to do it.

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That's your episode for today.

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Thank you again for listening to 10-minute murder.