The Serial Killer Shrine: The Shaye Groves and Frankie Fitzgerald Case

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Her bedroom looked like a shrine to serial killers, with framed photos of the Yorkshire

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Ripper, Myra Henley in Rose West, right there on the wall.

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And when her boyfriend ended up dead and her bed, prosecutors say that she used every

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trick she'd picked up from years of true crime obsession to try to walk away from it,

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and it almost worked.

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The country in the story we're talking about today is England.

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I've never been there.

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We speak the same language, but they pronounce things a little bit weird sometimes.

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And by weird, I mean just different from me.

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So if I say something wrong and you know that I've said it wrong, let's just agree to

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pretend I said it the correct way.

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Okay, thank you.

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Shea Groves grew up in Lee Park, on the edge of Havont in Hampshire, England, in a housing

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estate built after World War II to give bombed out Port Smouth family somewhere to live.

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By the time Shea was a kid there in the 1990s, it had become one of the most deprived neighborhoods

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in England.

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Top 5% country wide.

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That is where she grew up.

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Shea was partially deaf from a young age and she wore hearing aids in both years starting

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at around 11 years old, which made her of course an easy target for other kids.

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She leaned into horror instead of running away from it.

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She loved the child's play movies, you know, with Chuckie.

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She wore classmates started calling her Chuckie.

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By 13 or 14, the school had referred her for a mental health evaluation.

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As you came back out with a bipolar diagnosis, a judge would later call probably wrong.

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She started drinking and using drugs on and off started cutting her legs and at one point

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pulled a scalpel on a classmate.

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She left home as a teenager into a relationship with its own problems and things stayed rocky

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for years before a stretch where life kind of evened out for Shea.

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She had a daughter in 2017 with a man named Ashley Wingham.

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Who by all accounts was not violent toward her and around that time got a second diagnosis.

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Complex post-traumatic stress disorder pointing to trauma stacked up over years.

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She moved into a council house on botly drive in Lee Park with her friend Lauren White,

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another single mom and this is where her identity sharpened into something more extreme.

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Facial tattoos, piercings and a bedroom that looked like a horror movie prop closet.

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She had framed photos of Peter Suckliff, the Yorkshire Ripper, Myra Henley, Rose West,

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and Jeffrey Dahmer on the walls.

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All of those people by the way I've covered here on the podcast, they're all serial killers.

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Gangster biographies she had on the shelf.

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A Celtic dagger, a ball bearing gun, two Viking style axes, and a flick knife tucked into the

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heel of her boot.

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She told the court the dagger was for pagan rituals.

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The judge didn't buy it since there were zero evidence that she'd ever practiced anything

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pagan and said flat out those weapons were there to be used if she ever decided that she

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needed them.

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In February of 2022, Shea met a 25-year-old from Portsmouth named Frankie Fitzgerald on

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night out.

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Frankie had two young kids with a woman named Charlene Scott and his own history including

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a domestic violence conviction against her.

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These two fell hard and fast.

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The judge who would eventually sentence Shea called the relationship nothing if not passionate,

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meaning rough sex, filmed encounters, cocaine, alcohol, and jealousy ratcheting up on both sides.

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They even, by the way, signed a sex contract witnessed by Shea's friend Vicki and set up

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a bedroom camera, something they both agreed to at the time.

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And no, I don't know the details of this contract.

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I imagine it involves sex, obviously, but I didn't think it was pertinent to the story

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so I didn't do a whole lot of research on this sex contract.

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By March, we're a month in and it's already falling apart and flashes.

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Frankie did cocaine, got angry, kicked her stuff around the room, and that same night Shea

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cut her legs again.

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The old habit resurfacing.

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Around this stretch, she told Frankie, Lauren, and others close to her that she had cancer.

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She did not have cancer.

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Her old doctor confirmed no cancer diagnosis was ever on the record.

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A judge later called this lie a tool that she used to pull sympathy and money out of

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the people around her.

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By April, the jealousy had teeth.

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Frankie found out about a text from one of Shea's old boyfriends and he lost it.

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Shea became convinced that he still wanted his ex, the mother of his kids.

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All while she was still quietly on the DL, seeing an old boyfriend named Declan Payne, careful

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to keep the two men apart.

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Lauren, watching it all unfold in a group chat, called them "dead girls walking" if Frankie

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and Declan ever met.

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By June, Frankie had blocked Shea's number after suspecting that she'd been out with Declan

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again.

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His text got darker, threatening to snap her in half if she slept with someone else and

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telling her cancer would be the least of her worries.

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Vicki, her friend, saw some of these messages and was truly scared for her friend.

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Two weeks before the murder, Shea's own kitchen cameras caught her talking through a plan to

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have male friends jump Frankie in an alley, with a stage cut on herself to look like a victim.

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Police later investigated it as a possible conspiracy.

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No charges came, but it shows exactly where her head was already.

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A small detail worth mentioning, this is a woman running cameras through her own kitchen

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and living room, and it never occurs to her that all this footage could just as easily

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be used against her later on.

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On the night of July 16, 2022, Shea's five-year-old daughter was with her dad for the weekend.

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Frankie came over.

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Lauren was home too, and the three of them drank while Frankie and Shea snorted cocaine.

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Frankie more than Shea.

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Frankie spent part of the night gambling online trying to borrow money and messaged Declan

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Payne telling him to back off.

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At 1.20 in the morning, Frankie found Declan's name saved in Shea's Snapchat contacts.

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They argued, mostly upstairs in the bedroom, which no longer had a working camera since

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it had been taken down earlier that month.

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At some point, Shea picked up Frankie's phone while he wasn't watching and found a Facebook

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exchange between him and someone claiming to be 13.

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She photographed it at 3.12 in the morning, a time stamp that becomes huge later on since

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it proves this happened before anything violent, which she left out was the fact that Frankie

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had blocked that account the second the person said her age, and that person was actually

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17.

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Not that that makes it any better.

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Frankie came upstairs and fell asleep.

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While he slept, Shea took the Celtic dagger that she kept by the bed and she cut his throat.

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The pathologist said that it only took moderate force.

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His jugular vein was completely severed.

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His carotid artery partially severed, and that first cut alone would have killed him very

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fast.

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There were zero defensive wounds anywhere on his body because he had never had a chance

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to wake up and fight back.

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Shea then stabbed him 19 more times in the chest after he was already gone or nearly

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dead.

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In hours, Shea facetimed Vicki, who later testified Shea was giggling on the call.

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Shea turned the camera toward Frankie's body, wrapped in a bloody duvet, and told her, "I've

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done him."

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She wrapped him in trash bags, brought Lauren in as an accomplice, and floated, bearing him

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in the garden or staging a suicide.

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Suicide, with 19 stab wounds and a sliced throat.

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She texted Vicki, claiming that Frankie had left her house alive, and even invited another

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man over while his body was still upstairs.

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She cleaned with bleach, strong enough that the police smelled it when they walked in,

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and left the dagger in the bathroom sink.

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She told officers Frankie had attacked her, and that she had footage proving that he'd

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raped her, and sent Vicki clips from their bedroom recordings edited to make consensual

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sex look like an assault.

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Police later recovered the unedited originals, which told a very different story.

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It all came apart fast.

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The body cameras on the officers caught her building up this false account in real time,

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before she'd had a chance to practice it and smooth it all out.

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And that 312 AM timestamp anchored the whole timeline against her.

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Every piece of evidence she thought she controlled worked against her instead.

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At Winchester Crown Courts, the same courthouse where Rose West, whose photo hung on Shea's

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wall, had once stood trial, the case ran five weeks.

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Ray testified Frankie had raped her repeatedly, and that she grabbed a dagger in self-defense,

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striking his throat to stop him and stabbing his chest to stop what she called the bubbling.

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And the jury didn't buy it, deliberating almost 18 hours before a guilty verdict on February

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16, 2023, rejecting that self-defense, loss of control, and diminished responsibility.

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At sentencing, the judge did acknowledge her rough childhood, the abuse, the deafness,

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self-harm, and said it counted for something, just not much.

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He accepted emotionally unstable personality disorder.

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You might have heard it called borderline personality disorder, or BPD.

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He accepted that as more accurate than the earlier bipolar diagnosis, and said that

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it reduced her responsibility slightly.

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He also didn't let Frankie off the hook, calling him a violent man who had threatened and

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sexually assaulted her.

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Both things were true at once.

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The judge sentenced her to life with a minimum of 23 years, and left her with one line that

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a lot of people who followed this case still repeat.

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The damage you have done cannot be undone.

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Frankie left behind two kids that will grow up without him.

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Chase's daughter will grow up with her mother in prison until at least the mid-2040s.

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Lauren White, briefly a suspect herself, was completely cleared, since she told police

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Lauren had no part in the killing.

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What lingers about this case goes well beyond, well past the serial killers' posters on

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the wall.

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This is a woman who spent years absorbing true crime documentaries.

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Building what she must have believed was a playbook, were getting away with something terrible.

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And then watched every piece of it come apart under the same kind of evidence those documentaries

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are built on.

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

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I'm Joe, hello, I'm the host, and yeah, sometimes when I talk to my mouth pops and I don't know

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how to stop that.

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People have noticed, um, it did it just now in case you missed that.

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I wish I knew how to stop it, I think it's because my lips are big, but it is what it is.

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Anyway, here's an email, subject, this felt weird.

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Hi Joe, I was listening to one of your episodes while assembling an Ikea bookshelf.

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There was something strangely satisfying about solving furniture problems while hearing

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about detectives solving actual problems.

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Not sure what that says about me, Melissa and Rochester, Minnesota.

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Melissa, I would argue that you have an actual problem.

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Our furniture problem, especially from Ikea, and by the way, I love Ikea, no shade to them,

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but there's stuff not easy to build.

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It's to the point where I'll pay someone to build the thing because I just get too frustrated

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with it.

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So I don't know how you were listening to true crime, which is tense and suspenseful at

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times, and also building something which takes a little bit of nerve, a little bit of patience

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to be honest.

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But I'm glad you were doing it and I'm glad you were listening, Melissa, I appreciate

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it.

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If you're a brand new listener to this podcast, maybe you're building some furniture, like

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Melissa was doing, make sure you hit subscribe wherever you're listening right now.

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You can go to 10minutemurder.com, do several things there with the podcast, get links, get

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information, and also email me, Joe@10minutemurder.com.

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If you enjoy the podcast, please do share it with your friends and your family.

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That's how this show grows and reaches more and more people.

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And of course, also if you love it, make sure you rate it five stars anywhere that's

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possible.

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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.