Six Months of Warnings: What Rochester Missed Before the Brom Massacre

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In February 1988, an acquired suburb of Rochester, Minnesota, a 16-year-old killed his parents

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and two of his siblings with an axe.

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He'd been telling people for six months he was going to do it.

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They thought he was venting.

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He wasn't.

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[Music]

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Rochester, Minnesota, built its identity around the Mayo Clinic.

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People come from all over the world to have whatever is wrong with them,

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finally named and addressed.

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It's a city whose entire reputation rests on the idea that problems,

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given the right attention and the right people paying attention, can be soft,

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which makes it one of the more quietly haunting places for a story

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about a family where the problem was visible to almost everyone around it

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and identified far too late to matter.

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But art and pallet brawm were both 41 years old,

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raising four kids in a house that people drove past and felt good about the neighborhood.

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They lived in cascade township where deeply Catholic and ran an organized household

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where showing up on time and treating structure as a form of love

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were simply how things worked.

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Bernard held the family to clear expectations about what acceptable behavior looked like.

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Pallet was the devoted anchor of the whole thing.

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Joseph, the eldest at 18, was already making his own way.

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Diane was 13 and rolled at Lord's High School.

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Richard was 11 and then there was David, born October 3rd, 1971.

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16 years old, polite to adults and increasingly unreachable

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in the way that certain teenagers become when they are drowning in something they cannot name

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and nobody around them is thought to ask about it.

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Where David would later describe as a cloud had been sitting over him for years

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before any of this happened.

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And in the 1980s that description would have gotten you exactly nowhere, clinically.

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Adolescent depression was not on anyone's checklist.

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If a kid was withdrawn, that was just adolescence.

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Kids being kids.

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If he seemed detached, that was just his personality.

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A slow erosion of hope and connection,

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filling the emptiness with increasingly dark thoughts over the months and years.

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Didn't have a treatment pathway in suburban Rochester in 1988.

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David went unaddressed.

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The cloud got heavier and the thoughts inside it got louder.

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For at least six months before February 1988, David had been telling people, not hinting

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at it, but telling people outright.

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His classmates at Lord's High School heard him talk about killing his parents with enough

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regularity that it had become background noise in certain social circles.

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The academic term for this leakage, the pre-act communication of homicidal intent and researchers

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who study it constantly find that the people who received these statements almost never

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know what to do with them.

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In 1988, there were no threat assessment protocols, no trained personnel working through

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behavioral checklists.

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His peers heard it, processed it as frustrated venting from an unhappy kid.

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And they moved on.

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This cycle repeated for six months.

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On the evening of February 17th, Bernard and David argued over a music tape.

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This was the absolute peak of the satanic panic, by the way, which was America's full-scale

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moral meltdown over the idea that heavy metal music was actively recruiting teenagers into

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something dark.

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Tipper Gore, our Gore's wife, was holding congressional hearings about it.

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Parent groups were petitioning radio stations.

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Bernard Brahms, objecting to an unapproved tape in his teenager's hands and February 1988

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was completely normal Tuesday middle-class America.

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The argument happened around 11.30 at night.

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Then the house went quiet.

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David didn't sleep.

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He stayed awake until three o'clock in the morning, sitting alone in the silence with whatever

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was moving through his head.

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Those three hours matter enormously in understanding what happened next because they eliminate the

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idea of a sudden, impulsive break.

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Three hours is not necessarily a snap decision.

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The psychological picture that emerged during the trial described those three hours as

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deep rumination, a cold settling of something that had been building for years.

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At some point, during that window, David went down to the basement and retrieved a two to

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three-foot axe, then went back upstairs.

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He went to his parents' bedroom first.

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Bernard, according to what David later described to a friend, kept getting up after being

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struck with the axe.

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Paulette was attacked in the same room.

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Then David moved to Richard's bedroom.

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Richard was 11 years old and almost certainly asleep when it happened.

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Diane, 13 years old, was found in the upstairs hallway.

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She had apparently heard something and gotten out of bed.

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She was the last of the four.

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When investigators eventually processed the scene, they counted between 56 and 58 individual

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wounds spread across all four victims.

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The next morning, David did not leave Rochester.

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He found a female classmate named Patty Price and convinced her to skip school with him.

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He later told her calmly and in detail what happened the previous night.

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He described the sequence.

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He described his father getting back up.

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Price would later describe the conversation as something her brain simply could not reconcile

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with anything she understood to be real.

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At the school, the absence of David, Diane, and Richard had already been noticed.

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By mid-morning, rumors were moving through the student body.

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David killed his dad.

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David killed his whole family.

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The school administration contacted the Olmsted County Sheriff's Office.

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Deputies arrived at the Brahm home that evening, initially expecting a home invasion or kidnapping.

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Then they found the bodies.

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Kevin Torgerson, a young deputy on the scene that night, would eventually become the Olmsted

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County Sheriff.

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He has spoken in the years since about the sensory memory of that house, something he carried

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through 37 years of professional and personal life.

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David was spotted the following afternoon, February 19th, at a pay phone near a post office in

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Northwest Rochester.

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He surrendered without incident, a skinny teenager who had just committed the most notorious

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mass killing in Minnesota history.

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A trial ran in two phases under Minnesota procedure.

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Phase one established where their David committed the acts.

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The defense wanted psychiatric testimony about his capacity to pre-meditate, and the court

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refused under existing case law holding that psychiatric evidence is irrelevant to intent,

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which must be inferred from the physical evidence alone.

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He was found guilty.

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Phase two addressed his mental state at the time of the murders.

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Defense experts testified about visual hallucinations, psychotic features, and three distinct

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alter-egos they said governed his psychology.

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The prosecution acknowledged real, severe depression, but argued it didn't prevent David

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from understanding that killing four members of your family was wrong.

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The jury sided with the prosecution.

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On October 16th, 1989, David Brahms was sentenced to three consecutive life terms and one

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concurrent life term.

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A sentence that, under Minnesota's sentence in calculations, effectively meant dying in

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prison for actions he committed at 16 years old.

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Early coverage had vaguely referenced his music tape as the trigger for the arguments

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the night before the murders.

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An experimental music group called Negative Land decided to use that detail.

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They issued a fake press release claiming their song "Christianity is Stupid" had influenced

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David and that the FBI was now investigating them in connection with the case.

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This was 1988, pre-internet, and the hoax worked amazingly well.

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Major television affiliates and newspapers reported the connection as established fact.

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David's Land later used every piece of that fabricated coverage to build an album called

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"Helter Stupid," sampling actual news reports about the Brahm murders as a pointed critique

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of how readily society reaches for a cultural scapegoat rather than sitting with the harder

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questions about mental health access and domestic failure.

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There was absolutely zero evidence that David had ever even heard of Negative Land.

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The connection was invented wholesale and the press ran away with it.

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The Brahm spent more than 35 years at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Lino Lakes by every

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documented account the violence of February 18, 1988 did not re-occur behind those walls.

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Board members who reviewed his record over the years eventually described him as a model

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prisoner, someone who had engaged seriously with mental health treatment and developed the

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internal stability that nobody had helped him build when he was a teenager in cascade

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township.

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While David was serving as sentence, juvenile justice law was shifting at the highest levels.

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The US Supreme Court, through decisions in Miller vs. Alabama and Montgomery vs. Louisiana,

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established that mandatory life without parole sentences for juvenile offenders were unconstitutional.

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Grounded partly in research, demonstrating the adolescence brains genuine capacity for

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change over time.

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In 2023, the Minnesota legislature passed a law retroactively making juvenile offenders

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eligible for parole after 15 years.

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David Brahm was among those who became eligible under it.

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In January 2025, 53 years old David appeared before the supervised release board.

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He offered an apology to his surviving brother Joseph and to the Rochester community.

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He described his ongoing mental health management through a peer recovery support network.

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The board voted 5 to 1 to grant him a step down to work release.

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He was released on January 29, 2025, to a twin city's halfway house under GPS monitoring,

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with a condition permanently prohibiting him from returning to Almsted County.

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Sheriff Torgasin said publicly that the release was hard to accept, that 37 years hadn't

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changed what he walked into inside that house.

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Several lawmakers called the 2023 law dangerous and argued certain crimes should sit permanently

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outside the reach of second chances.

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He was appointed to the Supreme Court's reasoning and more to the three decades of documented

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behavioral record.

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Joseph Brahm, the surviving brother, had stayed largely outside of the public conversation

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through all of it.

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What happened in Cascade Township in the early hours of February 18, 1988 destroyed a family

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and produced questions that Rochester has been working through ever since.

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Some questions don't resolve cleanly.

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I just continue.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, bingeable true crime stories.

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Hello, I'm Joe, I'm the host, and here is an email, subject one that I hadn't heard before.

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Hi Joe, your episode on the Tylenol murders caught me off guard.

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I'd heard the name before, but I never understood how much it changed everyday life until you

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explained it the way you did.

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The ripple effect was the part that really stuck with me.

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I've since recommended your podcast to your few friends because of how clearly you broke

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that down.

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Brian in Illinois.

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And Brian, I tell you what, thanks for listening by the way.

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I was alive during that time.

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It's like 82, 81, 82.

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Maybe wrong about that, but I think it's the early 80s.

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I was very small.

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And obviously that's not something I would remember.

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I mean, I wasn't old enough to be forming those kind of memories at that time.

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But you would think that would be a story that you would hear about growing up.

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Oh, don't use Tylenol.

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It would still be a thing.

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You know, that's what I'm trying to say.

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But I never heard about it.

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It wasn't until I started doing this podcast and someone recommended that I look into that

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story that I was like, oh man, this was happening when I was a small child and this is something

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that I never knew about.

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Now you being from Illinois, you probably, if you're old enough, you probably heard about

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it growing up because that's mainly where it took place.

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But it affected nationwide.

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Yeah, crazy story.

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Hey, if you're a brand new listener to this podcast, make sure you hit subscribe right

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now.

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You can also go to the show notes of this episode and you'll find links to where you can

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find the podcast on social media.

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You'll find a link to my website, which is 10minuteMurder.com, and also links to where

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you can listen to my newest podcast.

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It's called True Crime Blueprint.

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It's kind of like this podcast, except a little more casual, a lot longer episodes.

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So check that out.

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It's True Crime Blueprint.

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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 10minuteMurder.

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See you next time.

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[Music]