The Pine Barrens Body: Who Killed Cody MacPherson?

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A 20-year-old from Indiana moves to New Jersey for Fresh Start.

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He plays the bass guitar.

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He's got a little girl back home, falls asleep at a party, and six months later, a forest

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warden finds his remains in the Pine Barrens.

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The thing is, there were people around who knew exactly where he was the whole time.

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[Music]

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Cody McPherson had a bass guitar, a voice that could fill a church choir, and a daughter

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in Indiana named Olyana, who was waiting for him to get his footing.

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That was the plan in 2017.

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He was 20 years old, a Christian who took his faith seriously, someone who did theater

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and sang because he loved it, not because he thought it made him look cool.

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He'd grown up in Portage, Indiana, and he made the decision to move back to New Jersey

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where he was born to try to get his life into some kind of shape.

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He ended up in Brown's Mills, a community sitting right at the edge of the New Jersey

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Pine Barrens.

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And if you've ever been to the Pine Barrens, which I have, I lived there for a few years

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as a kid, it's 1.1 million acres of flat sandy dense forest where your GPS quietly gives

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up on you about 20 minutes in, and you're suddenly very alone with your thoughts.

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Cell service is more of a suggestion than a service.

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The locals have their own longstanding understanding of what happens inside those tree lines and

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what stays there.

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The generations of people have made use of that understanding in various ways.

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When I was a kid, I remember hearing about the legend of the Jersey Devil, scared the crap

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out of me.

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The Barrens have always had their way of holding on to things.

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Cody didn't have a map for any of that.

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He was a newcomer, and he was just trying to figure it all out.

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Alan McGinnis had no such uncertainty about where he stood.

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He was 26 years old, lived his entire life in the Pemberton Jackson Township Orbit, and

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he knew the Pine Barrens the way most of us know how to get to the grocery store.

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He had an ongoing relationship with a woman named Caitlin Herertes, with whom he shared

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two children.

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They were in one of those situations where they weren't together and they weren't exactly

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not together either.

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You know what that looks like.

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No one's giving it a name, no one's having the hard conversation, and the whole arrangement

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just keeps spinning forward because actually ending it would require more honesty than either

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person is prepared for.

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According to that situation, Cody McPherson arrived.

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Cody and Caitlin had spent the night of September 22 into the 23rd together at a local motel.

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McGinnis found out.

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He also believed with some basis that Caitlin might be pregnant with Cody's child.

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Then on September 23rd, Caitlin ended things finally with McGinnis.

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24 hours later, both men were in the same house.

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On the night of September 24th, 2017, a group gathered at 234 party Boulevard in Pemberton

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Township.

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It was drinking.

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There was a crowd, and at some point during the evening, Caitlin passed out on a couch

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after a lot of it.

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Cody McPherson, with no particular reason to feel unsafe, fell asleep on another couch in

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the same room.

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McGinnis walked in and announced to the other people in that house, out loud, with his

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whole chest, no hesitation that he was going to stab Cody McPherson.

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He said it to a room full of witnesses with a confidence that only exists when you genuinely

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believe nobody present is going to stop you or reach for a phone.

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Then he walked over to the couch and did exactly what he said he was going to do.

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He stabbed Cody in the throat and neck while he was sleeping.

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Despite those wounds, Cody got up and ran.

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He made it outside to the front lawn before McGinnis caught up to him and stabbed him again

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in the chest.

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Cody, still alive at this point, badly wounded and bleeding, but alive.

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McGinnis forced him into the trunk of a car and drove away.

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Around 3am, he pulled up to a relative's house in Jackson Township, about a mile from where

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this was going to end.

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He knocked on his cousin's window.

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His cousin came to that window at 3 in the morning because you hear a knock, you answer

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it.

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You don't know.

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Could be anything.

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This in particular was not anything good.

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McGinnis told him that he needed a shovel and explained why.

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His cousin said no and closed the window.

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That window closing is a detail I keep coming back to.

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Cody McPherson was in the trunk of a car in Jackson Township, New Jersey, still breathing,

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while the man who put him there was knocking on a family member's window asking for digging

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equipment.

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That cousin told him no and closed the window.

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McGinnis then drove alone to the Collier's Mills Wildlife Management Area.

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A remote stretch of state land off, South Stump Tavern Road, deep in the Pine Barrens.

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He pulled Cody from the trunk.

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Cody was still alive at this point.

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McGinnis stripped him of his clothes and his belongings, stabbed him once more in the

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chest and left him there.

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The medical examiner would later confirm that final chest wound was the one that killed him.

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McGinnis covered the body with logs and debris and walked back to the car.

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Back at the house on Party Boulevard, Caitlin's mother Kathleen Huertis, and at least

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one other person had already began cleaning.

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By the time Caitlin woke up the next morning, the blood was gone from the living room and

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the front lawn.

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And she was told Cody had simply left on his own.

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Cody's brother filed a missing persons report that very same day.

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For 176 days, the McPherson family lived in the specific kind of uncertainty that belongs

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to families of missing people.

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His parents, April and Donald, organized searches, ran social media campaigns, raised

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money, and kept their son's name in front of everyone who would pay attention.

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Early on, there was some reasonable speculation that maybe Cody had returned to Indiana on

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his own.

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Young men make sudden decisions.

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But as months passed, his family understood what the silence really meant.

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This was not something Cody would do.

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Allen McGinnis was present in that community the entire time.

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At some point during those six months, he reportedly told Caitlin exactly what he had done.

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Others in the community had pieces of it as well.

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Nobody contacted the police.

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On March 19, 2018, Richard Byrne was doing his job.

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He was a district warden with the New Jersey Forest Fire Service.

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Out at Collier's Mills Wildlife Management Area, preparing a section for a controlled Byrne.

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Control Byrne's or how New Jersey manages Pine Byrne's undergrowth before dry fuel

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accumulates into a wildfire waiting to happen.

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It's scheduled.

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It's necessary completely unglamorous work.

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And on essentially any other day in its history, nothing unusual happens during it.

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Warden Byrne was moving between Southstump Tavern Road and the forest interior when he noticed

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something under a pile of logs that didn't belong there.

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He stopped what he was doing, contacted a supervisor, and law enforcement was called

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then.

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If that Byrne had proceeded on schedule, what remained of Cody McPherson would have

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almost certainly been destroyed entirely.

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Cody's remains had been exposed to the elements for six months and were largely skeletal.

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For Inzig's match, the dental records to Cody McPherson.

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They analyzed the skeletal remains and provided biological profiling consistent with the victim.

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The New Jersey State Police Lab completed DNA analysis on April 17, 2018, confirming

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his identity.

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The autopsy documented a stab wound to the left abdomen despite the extent of decomposition

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and the manner of death was ruled a homicide.

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McGinnis was arrested on April 21, 2018.

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In December of 2018, he appeared before Superior Court.

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He pled guilty to first degree murder.

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On February 1, 2019, he was sentenced to 30 years without the possibility of parole under

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New Jersey's no early release act.

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At sentencing, prosecutors returned to the shovel to the fact that Cody McPherson was still

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breathing in that trunk when McGinnis knocked on his cousin's window.

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McGinnis had told Katelyn's relatives that he killed Cody because Cody was no good for

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her, that he was making her an unfit mother, that this was something he did for the family.

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He had talked himself into a moral framework where the killing made sense and then he

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set it out loud to people, which tells you exactly how thoroughly he believed it.

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McPherson family traveled from Indiana to sit in that courtroom.

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They watched a man receive a sentence for taking their son's future and then justifying

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it to himself as a service.

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Cody's daughter is growing up now.

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She has the stories her family keeps alive, his base guitar, his voice, his theater, the

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faith that he carried with him, his gentleness as a person.

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Those are the things that made it through and that's what she gets to carry forward.

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Allen McGinnis will not be eligible for release until his mid-50s.

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By that point Cody McPherson will have been gone for longer than he ever got to be alive.

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The Pine Barons gave up what they were holding on to in the end, but only because the forced

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warden was about to lie to scheduled burn on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday in March.

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The Barons keep their secrets right up until they don't.

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And at least, after 176 days in a routine land management procedure, a one warden who

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noticed something under a pile of logs, the world got to know exactly what happened to

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Cody McPherson.

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

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My name is Joe.

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Hello.

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Glad you're here.

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And here's an email, subject, a weird coincidence.

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Hey Joe, I was listening to one of your episodes while walking around in a cemetery close to

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my house, because I thought that would be a nice quiet place to get in some steps.

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Then I realized halfway through that maybe true crime, plus a cemetery was a little too

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on the nose, even for me.

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Still finished the episode though.

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Mark and Brooklyn.

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Mark?

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That's crazy work.

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I could do one or the other.

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I could walk through a cemetery during the daytime, by the way.

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Or I can listen to violent or scary things.

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I can't do both at the same time.

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And that's because I like to sleep without nightmares.

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Now you do you, but I'm going to not do that if you don't mind.

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But I do appreciate you listening and powering through and finishing that episode though.

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Appreciate it Mark.

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

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You can also go to 10minuteMurder.com and in the show notes of the episode that you're listening

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to right now, you're going to find links that will be where you can follow the podcast on

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social media, a link to the website.

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I think my email address is in there and also links to a new podcast that I've started.

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It's been out for a couple months now, but it's called True Crime Blueprint.

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And if you have not checked it out, please do that.

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It's similar to this one in that it's me and it's done by me and researched by me.

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It's longer.

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It's not 10 minutes.

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It's much, much longer.

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And it's not all murders, by the way.

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It's just a True Crime podcast.

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It's called, again, True Crime Blueprint and the links are in the show notes.

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Hey, that's going to do it.

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That's your episode for today.

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Again, thank you so much for listening to 10minuteMurder.