The Digital Leash: Serial Murder Under Government Supervision

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Two registered sex offenders, both wearing GPS ankle monitors, both under active government

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supervision.

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And while the system was technically watching every move they made, they killed at least

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five women.

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Today, we're going inside the case that broke one of the biggest myths in corrections.

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There's a body on a conveyor belt.

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March 14, 2014, East and a Hime recycling facility.

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Doctors are sorting through a mountain of garbage rolling past them on a fast-moving belt

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when they see her.

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Jaree Nicole Eastep, 21 years old, a young mother originally from Oklahoma, discarded

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in the trash like she was nothing.

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As devastating as it is, it is also a mistake.

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The one thing that went wrong for two men who had been running a very clean operation for

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five months.

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This up until that Friday morning, nobody had noticed anything at all.

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Let's go back to the beginning.

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Steven Dean Gordon grew up in Linwood, California.

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He was a small kid.

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He was sick all the time, held back a year in school and he was bullied for most of his childhood.

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And it's the kind of bullying that either breaks you or it turns you into something mean.

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For Gordon, it went the second direction.

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By 1992, he had his first conviction for Lude and LaVaceus acts on a child under 14.

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He eventually tried to build something resembling a normal life.

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Married a woman named Lewis in 1995, had her daughter named Kayla in 1997.

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He worked two jobs.

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But the financial stress and the instability ate through the domestic routine pretty fast.

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He started making threats, talking about suicide.

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At one point, discussing how to fake his own death so his family could collect on his life insurance.

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Which, as far as schemes go, that's a lot of effort.

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Lewis left him in 2001 and got a protective order.

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Gordon's response to that was to repaint his car, swap the license plates, follow the family

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to a church in Riverside and show up on Sunday morning with a stun gun.

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He kidnapped his ex-wife and their four year old daughter in August of 2001, bound and gag

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Lewis, drove them both to Nevada.

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He was convicted of two counts of kidnapping in April 2002 and sentenced to 10 years, paroled

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in February 2010 with a GPS ankle monitor and restrictions on where he could go and who

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he could associate with.

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Frank Caino was born in Compton in 1986, 17 years younger than Gordon.

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Chronic asthma, severe exema, a child defined by isolation.

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Kids in his neighborhood spread rumors that he had AIDS at HIV.

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His family moved to a trailer park in Garden Grove when he was about eight, but by then

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the social damage was already settling in deep.

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In 2006, he was caught molesting a nine year old niece at a family gathering.

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During the police interview, he talked openly about being a virgin, about his complete

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inability to connect with women.

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But the loneliness that had been eating him up for years, he pleaded guilty in 2007 served

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16 months and was paroled in October 2009 with his own GPS ankle monitor and a lifetime sex

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offender registration requirement.

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These two meet at an Anaheim auto body shop where Gordon had landed work through a former

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supervisor.

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The connection was immediate and completely pathological despite the age difference there.

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One was aggressive, dominant and looking for someone to control.

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Caino was younger, sickly, socially invisible and looking for some protection.

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Co-workers thought they were in a relationship.

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What they actually were, more precisely, was two people whose worst qualities locked together

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like something out of a criminology textbook.

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Both homeless, both living out of Gordon's Toyota 4 runner, both wearing ankle monitors,

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were prohibited by the terms of their release from associating with each other.

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And nobody caught it.

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The federal system watched Gordon.

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The state system watched Caino.

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Nobody's software was comparing notes.

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There were no proximity alerts, no cross agency flags.

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The GPS trackers knew exactly where both of them were every minute and the two systems

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were completely blind to each other.

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They had also already demonstrated what they thought of those ankle monitors.

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In November 2010, Caino physically cut his off and Gordon walked away from his parole supervision

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early.

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They made it to Alabama before anyone caught them.

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Back to prison, back out, and then in 2012, they cut the monitors off again, boarded

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a Greyhound bus to Las Vegas under false names and spent two weeks there before federal

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agents tracked them down.

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Both times, the consequence was basically a return to the same electronic monitoring program.

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Keeping these two had shown their hand multiple times and the house kept dealing them back

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in.

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By October 2013, they had developed a system.

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They were living in an RV parked behind the auto body shop at Anaheim.

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They'd figured out that municipal trash pickup ran on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

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So they went hunting on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays.

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Commercial bins would be emptied before decomposition at time to alert anyone.

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One would drive.

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Caino hid in the back seat.

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When a woman got in, Caino came forward.

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Keana Jackson was 20 years old from Las Vegas visiting Santa Ana.

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Taken October 6, 2013.

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Her mother Kathy and grandmother Diane later spoke about what it meant to lose her before

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she got to watch her little brother grow up.

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Josephine Vargas was 34.

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Santa Ana resident.

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Taken October 24.

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Martha Ania was 28.

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A mother Taken November 12.

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Her 12 year old sister would later say in court, quote, "She also told me not to talk to

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strangers.

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Now, I realize why."

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Sable Pickett was 19.

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Taken from Beach Boulevard in Anaheim on Valentine's Day 2014.

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For years, she had no name attached to the case.

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Gordon knew her name.

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He just kept it.

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And then, Jere E. Step.

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The person I mentioned at the very beginning of this story, Taken March 13, 2014.

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The next morning, she turned up on the conveyor belt.

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Something had gone wrong with the disposal, the system that had worked four times over

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had failed on the fifth.

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Detective Jelissa Trap caught the case.

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She was at that time the only female homicide investigator in the Anaheim Police Department.

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And she had spent years in sex crimes before moving to homicide, which gave her a very

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specific set of instincts for this.

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Her team ran a retroactive GPS search, which registered sex offenders monitoring devices

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placed them near the recycling facilities resource routes on the night East have disappeared.

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Frank Kano's tracker put him at her last known location.

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Gordon's federal tracker mirrored Kano's movements exactly, across every single murder.

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The digital leash that had done nothing to stop these men had documented everything they

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did.

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On April 11, 2014, police moved on the auto shop.

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Somehow Gordon sensed they were coming, pulled off his ankle monitor, grabbed a backpack,

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and tried to leave on a bicycle.

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Officers tackled him.

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Kano was arrested without incident.

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After being arrested, Kano immediately asked for a lawyer.

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Gordon agreed to talk.

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What followed was 13 and a half hours with Jelissa Trap.

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And it became one of the most remarkable interrogation stories in recent true crime history.

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Gordon was intelligent, deeply controlling, and constantly watching her face for any sign

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of judgment.

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Trap later said that Gordon described the killings the way that someone would describe ordering

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a pizza.

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Just completely flat.

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If she flinched, though, if she even swallowed hard at the wrong moment, the interview ended.

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So she didn't flinch.

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She didn't do anything.

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She drew on her own personal history, her own grief, to build something in that room that

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felt like a genuine connection, not because she had any sympathy for what he had done, but

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because getting him to talk was the only way those women got acknowledgement of what happened

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to them.

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He confessed to all four murders, and then he looked at her and said, "You're missing

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one."

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Valentine's Day, a fifth woman.

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He could not or would not give a name.

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Trap spent years on it, missing person's databases, cell tower records, GPS logs from February

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14, 2014.

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A bail bondsman eventually pointed her toward a woman who had missed her court appearance.

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The description matched.

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Trap contacted the family.

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Her name was Sable Pickett, 19 years old from Compton.

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Her remains were never recovered, but her family did get an answer.

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In a trial in late 2016, Gordon fired his public defender and represented himself, saying

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"only cowards hide behind their attorneys."

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He conceded guilt from his opening statement until the jury he deserved to die.

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What he actually wanted was the platform.

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His argument was that he and Kano had repeatedly shown who they were, repeatedly walked away

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from supervision with minimal consequence, and the correction system had essentially cleared

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the path for them.

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The jury convicted him on December 15, 2016, after one hour of deliberation.

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He was sentenced to death on February 3, 2017, and is currently being housed at San Quentin,

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as California appeals process runs its course.

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Frank Kano pleaded guilty in December 2022, "Life without parole."

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The victim's families asked prosecutors not to pursue a second death sentence.

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They had already waited long enough.

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Melissa Trap moved to cold cases.

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She bought a rosary during each search for sabre tickets and prayed until she had a name.

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She has since solved at least one 40-year homicide.

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Five women.

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Keana.

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Josephine.

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Martha.

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Sable.

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Jere.

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The GPS was running the entire time.

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This was for listening to 10-minute murder, "Bingeable True Crime Stories."

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My name is Joe.

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I'm the host, and yeah, I'm still dealing with this cold thing, and I appreciate you,

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suffering through it with me.

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Here's an email, "Subject.

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A Recommendation Machine."

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Hey, Joe.

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I've recommended your podcast enough times that my friends have stopped asking me what

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I'm listening to, because they already know the answer.

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A couple of them are listeners now, too.

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So I guess this is my apology and my accomplishment.

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Random question.

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What's something that you've really gotten into in the last year that surprised you?

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Jessica in Bloomington, Indiana.

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Jessica, thank you for listening.

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First of all, thank you for sharing the podcast with your friends.

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I really appreciate that, and thank you to your friends that are new listeners to the

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podcast.

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That means a lot, too.

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And something that I've gotten into in the last year that surprised me.

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I don't know.

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I'm kind of a creature of habit, so I do the same things pretty often.

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But one thing that I have started doing is pickleball.

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I haven't played a whole bunch, but I've played a little bit enough to know that I'm going

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to continue to keep playing.

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I just don't have a ton of time to do it, but I really enjoy pickleball.

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I'm not good at it.

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I suck.

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It's like, to me, it's like ping pong on a larger scale, if that makes any sense.

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If you've never played pickleball, it's kind of like ping pong, but just larger.

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You get a little bit of cardio in while you're doing that.

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It's fun, but I suck at it, and I feel like at any moment I'm going to roll my ankle and

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break my body in half or something.

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I don't have like a middle gear.

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It's either I'm not playing or I'm playing wide open.

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So yeah, I'm a minress on the pickleball court.

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And that may be the widest thing I've ever said in my entire life.

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Hey, if you're a new listener to this podcast, welcome.

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Get comfortable.

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Back and listen to the hundreds of backlog episodes for you to listen to, and also catch up on the

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new ones as they come out.

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They usually come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays, usually twice a week.

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Sometimes I try to throw in the third one if I've got time to do that, but wherever you're

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listening right now, make sure you hit subscribe.

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And if you're enjoying the podcast, share it with your friends and your family.

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And that's it.

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That's your episode for today.

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Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder.