The High Priest of New Castle: Frank Costal and the Kadunce Ritual Murders

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In Newcastle, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1978, Kathy Cadens and her four-year-old daughter,

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Dawn, were found murdered in their home.

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Her infant son was left in the same house completely untouched.

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Police spent three years on this before a convicted killer sitting in a county jail

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finally started talking, and what he had to say reshaped everything investigators thought

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they understood about what happened that morning.

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[Music]

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Newcastle, Pennsylvania had a particular feeling in 1978.

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People had lived on the same blocks for three or four generations.

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Everyone attended the same handful of churches.

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The social fabric was woven tight around steelwork, neighborhood loyalty, and the reassuring predictability

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of knowing your neighbor's names, their parents' names, and exactly what their cars sounded

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like pulling into the driveway at night.

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The city ran on the familiar, and the familiar felt like safety.

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That Newcastle didn't fully understand was that the most dangerous person in its recent

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history had been living among them for years without anyone recognizing what they were actually

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looking at.

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To understand how it all happened, you have to go back not eight years, not twenty, but

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fifty-five years to a woman named Beatrice Costle and a lizard.

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In 1923, Beatrice Costle walked into the offices of the Newcastle news, carrying an eight-inch

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brown lizard with yellow markings that she thought someone should know about.

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She had already lost a leg in an automobile accident, and her household had a known reputation

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for unexplained fires.

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The lizard visit was, by the standards of her life, a fairly calm afternoon.

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That is the public record of Beatrice Costle, nine years before things became something

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else entirely.

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In 1932, Beatrice shot her husband in the back with a twenty-five caliber pistol and then

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turned the gun on herself.

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At the time, Frank Costle Jr. was four years old.

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The father who remained was reportedly violence and abusive.

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Growing up in a house where the defining event of your earliest years was a murder suicide.

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Frank carried all of that forward into everything he eventually became.

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By seventeen, he dropped out of high school and had been picked up on suspicion of stealing

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a bicycle.

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By eighteen, he had joined the United States Army and trained as a military policeman.

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You heard me right?

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A military policeman.

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I guess he was trying.

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You can see it in the record, a young man reaching for something with structure, for a

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life that looked different from the one he had been handed.

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A life away from Beatrice and her weird lizard, sporadic unexplained fires at the house, and

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then Beatrice shooting her husband before taking her own life.

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Frank was trying to get away from all of that.

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But the army couldn't hold him.

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He went AWOL and disappeared into the traveling carnival circuit.

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Which in the late 1940s was one of the few places in America that a person with Frank's

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history could kind of dissolve completely into a different version of himself.

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Frank built a new identity on that circuit.

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He performed under the name Frankie Francine, building himself as a hermaphrodite in a freak

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show, with a signature act that involved appearing to give birth to a live baby on stage.

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He learned to sew showgirl costumes.

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He studied fortune telling, which at its core requires one specific ability.

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Reading what a person desperately needs to hear, and then delivering it back to them with

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enough theater that they feel understood rather than strategically managed.

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Frank became unusually good at this, and he became a careful student of how fear and fascination

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operate on people who have come to see something that they can't explain.

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He filed all those lessons somewhere they would surface again later.

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He eventually settled in Pittsburgh and spent years working as an industrial painter and

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laborer.

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That chapter closed in 1970 when a workplace accident left him permanently disabled, collecting

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$240 a month.

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He was 42 years old, finished with physical labor, and he returned to Newcastle with something

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entirely different in mind.

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The man who came back was not interested in existing quietly.

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He grew long black hair and a shaggy beard, and began wearing a bright, red suit to the local

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shopping mall, where he gathered the young people who felt pushed to the edges of the city's

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conservative mainstream.

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Local merchants noted his striking resemblance to Rasputin, the infamous Russian mystic who

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wielded extraordinary influence through charisma, theatrics, and everyone sustained uncertainty

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about what he was capable of.

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Frank loved this comparison.

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People police initially wrote him off as Newcastle's first hippie.

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His neighbors eventually arrived at something more precise, calling him "the High Priest of

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Satan" and "The Witch of Highland Avenue."

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His apartment on Highland Avenue was built to project authority and invoke an unease

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in equal measure.

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Black curtains covered every wall, plastic bats, and miniature skeletons hung from the ceiling.

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He constructed an altar decorated with inverted crucifixes and plastic skulls.

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He claimed the ability to perform astral projection, sending his consciousness out of his

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body to observe and influence people at remote locations around the city.

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He maintained voodoo dolls of personal enemies, a list that included a librarian who refused

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to lend him a book, and restaurant owners who banned him over hygiene.

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A wide-ranging list of grievances meticulously kept.

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Expert testimony at his later trial established that Frank's rituals aligned with practices

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outlined an Anton Le Vais Satanic Bible.

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Prosecutors argue that he used "sustain psychological pressure and drug use to build an environment

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where his authority felt absolute."

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A witness named Steve Hamburg testified about the control Frank maintained over his followers,

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sobbing in atmosphere where compliance felt less like a choice, and more like the only option

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that felt safe.

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Young men came to Highland Avenue and stayed.

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One of them was a married man named Lou Cadence.

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Lou Cadence was married to a woman named Kathy, a had two children, a four-year-old daughter

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named Don and an infant son.

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Later testimony alleged that Lou and Frank were romantically involved, and that Kathy had

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been noticing things inside her marriage that she could not fully account for.

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In the weeks before July 11, 1978, Kathy found drugs in the house, drugs that Frank had given

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to Lou to sell, and she flushed them.

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According to testimony that would not surface for three more years, Frank Costel treated

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that act as a transgression requiring a ritualized response.

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On the morning of July 11, someone entered the Cadence home on Wilmington Avenue, Don,

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who was four years old, was stabbed 17 times.

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Kathy, 25 years old, was stabbed 18 times and shot once in the head.

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Their infant son was found alive and completely unharmed.

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The deliberate choice to leave one child untouched while the violence visited the others was

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so precise that it moved investigators away from any random home invasion theory almost

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immediately.

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Lou told police he'd been at work.

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For three years, that's where the case stayed.

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In 1981, Michael Atkinson, a convicted serial killer sitting in a Lawrence County jail, began

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providing investigators with details about the Cadence murders that only someone present

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at the scene could plausibly know.

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He said he had driven Frank Costel, Lou Cadence, and a man named John DuDohic to Wilmington

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Avenue that morning.

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He waited outside, heard a gunshot, and watched Lou exit the home carrying a rifle.

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The detail that reframed everything was something Atkinson said Frank had once told him

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directly.

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17 was the ritual number of stab wounds in his practice of Satanism.

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When investigators confirmed that Don had been stabbed exactly 17 times, the premeditated

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ritual theory became very difficult to argue away.

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An expert witness testified about the occult framework Frank had constructed over years.

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The prosecution argued these were planned, ritualized acts executed with religious intent

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rather than anything born of impulse.

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The resulting trial became a regional media event, with the Pittsburgh press providing extensive

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coverage of what it called "mystery and the devil" in Newcastle.

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Frank Costel took the stand in his own defense and attempted to reduce everything about his

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Highland Avenue life to theater, props, and performance without real consequence.

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And then came the detail that quietly reshapes everything about this story.

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Frank admitted that he had developed his oratorical style, the specific cadence he used to hold

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his followers in place and convince them of his supernatural authority by watching televangelist

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Oral Roberts on television and carefully studying his delivery.

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He described astral projection as a personal belief he had never actually been able to perform.

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The props were props.

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The man who had built a following on claims of mystical power had developed his entire

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method by watching a Christian preacher and applying that technique toward a completely

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different mythology.

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The occult was window dressing.

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Frank Costel's actual instrument was a precise understanding of human psychology, specifically

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the vulnerability of people who felt discarded by their communities, and he wielded that

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understanding without any internal limit at all.

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The jury convicted him on two counts of first degree murder and sentenced him to two consecutive

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life terms.

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Luke Caden's was tried separately and acquitted, with a reliance on a convicted serial killer

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as primary witness creating enough reasonable doubt.

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Luke left Newcastle after the verdict and disappeared from public record entirely.

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John Dudowick committed suicide before investigators could reach him.

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Frank Costel spent the rest of his life in the Pennsylvania prison system.

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By the late 1990s he had been moved to a geriatric unit, semi-comatose, skeletal beneath a thin

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blanket.

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He died in December 1999 at 71 years old, and whatever he knew about the morning of July

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11, 1978, he took it with him.

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

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Hello, I'm Joe, the host, and here's an email from one of you.

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Subjects recording time, hey Joe, roughly how long does it take you to record a 10 minute

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episode?

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I'm guessing it's not actually 10 minutes from start to finish.

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Just curious how many takes usually go into one.

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Trevor in Lincoln, Nebraska.

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Trevor, man, it varies so wildly.

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This one that you just listened to took me maybe 40 minutes, 30, 40 minutes or so.

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And that does not include all the research and reading up on what the case is all about

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time.

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There's no way to calculate that.

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This is just, I've got it.

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It's just a record and go.

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Now some of the reasons that I have to stop and go back is because I screw up a lot.

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I mess up words, I say things wrong.

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If you're an OG listener, you know that I have a hard time with names.

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So I do actually try to go and find out how to pronounce people's names because I think

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that matters, but I do occasionally get it wrong.

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And that takes time.

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And then you've got days like today where I've got allergies attacking me from the waste

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up.

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You have to pause, take a couple drinks of water, sneeze, whatever, whatever I'll take

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to do.

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So that obviously takes time too.

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

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Put your feet up, get comfortable because there are literally hundreds of episodes where

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you to catch up on.

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You can go to 10minuteMurder.com, figure out what's going on with the show there.

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Also send me an email if you go to the website.

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And if you're new and you're like, yeah, the 10 minute thing is cool, but I kind of want

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something longer.

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If you've got a longer podcast, that'd be great.

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Good news, I do.

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It's pretty new.

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It's called True Crime Blueprint.

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It's available just about every place that this podcast is available.

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And if you're interested in longer episodes, you can go to True Crime Blueprint.

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By the way, I put the links in the show notes of this episode.

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If you want to check it out, make it easier instead of searching it.

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You just click the link and it'll pop up.

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True Crime Blueprint, again, is the name.

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And that's going to do it.

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For episode 4 today, thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder.

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See you next time.