The Explosive Enigma Murders - Naples, Florida

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1:02Learn online, train hands-on at our Center for Graduate Studies in Los Angeles, and prepare for real-world pharmacy practice. West Coast University, as real as it gets, visit westcoastuniversity.edu. WCU cannot guarantee employment. This week, in Naples, Florida, we go behind the curtain of a rich family with some grown children who just seem to want to waste the whole fortune. This family turns out to be victims of a massive explosion that causes carnage and chaos. Is this a long-standing feud, an act of revenge, or just pure greed? Welcome to Small Town Murder. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay! Yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petrogallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wiseman.

2:03Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today on another absolutely insane edition of Small Town Murder. This is a wild story. This is one of those. Like, if this was a movie, I would watch it. It's just crazy. It's really great. Can't wait to get into this. Just a crazy, crazy story. We will get to that first, though, head over to shut up and give me murder.com. Get everything you need. One, first of all, the merchandise you could possibly want. All of it. Anything that you've heard us say that you might think is funny. It's probably on a t-shirt or a skateboard or a coffee cup. But also tickets to live shows. That's what's important here. Oh, live shows coming up. Looks like Milwaukee is sold out at this point on September 18th. September 19th, though, Minneapolis State Theater still tickets left for that. Get them right now while they're hot. We have October 3rd in Dallas, October 16th and 17th in San Jose in Sacramento. And Terrytown, November 13th almost sold out and then Boston on the 14th actually Medford. So you don't even have to bother going into the city. So there you go.

3:04Just a few minutes to do that. Just a few minutes to do so. Come on out. Shut up and give me murder.com is where you get all of that stuff. Also, listen to our other shows, Crime and Sports and your stupid opinions. If you like this, trust us. You'll like that, probably. It's kind of, get yourself Patreon. That's what you need. Patreon.com slash crime in sports. That's where you get all the bonus material. Anybody $5 a month or above, you get every little last megabyte we put out. That's it. That's all you got to be. As soon as you subscribe, you're going to get almost 400 back bonus episodes immediately upon subscription. Then you're going to get new ones every other week. One crime in sports, one small town murder. And you're going to get it all everybody in crime. It's great. This week can't wait for what we're doing for small town murder here. Donner party. We want to talk about this for years. So we're going to talk about the Donner party. Obviously, famous group of people going across the country back in the day, got stuck in the snow and ate each other. So we'll talk all about that.

4:04Yeah, that's those are the cannibals. So we'll get into all of that and think a little good time with that. So patreon.com slash crime in sports. Just like the name of that show you should be listening to. Then on top of that, you get everything we put out crime in sports. Your stupid opinions, both small town murders, all add free with that Patreon as well. Not an ad among them. And then you get a shout out at the end of the show too. You've got Chimiel mispronounce your name. So there you go. I think that's a great deal. Patreon.com slash crime in sports. That's a disclaimer time. Yeah. This is a comedy show. People everybody. It's a comedy show. It's also a show about insane murder stories. That's the thing. And you go, well, how does that work? How do you mix those two things together? That sounds gross. It's not though. See, there's a there's a there's a tasteful way to do it. There really is. And the way we've chosen to do it is we don't make fun of the of the victims or the victims families. Why is that James? Because we're assholes, but but we're not scumbags.

5:04See how that works? It's pretty simple because there's plenty to make fun of. You can make fun of a small town who cares. We're all from somewhere that we make fun of all the time. We make fun of a police force that lets a murder go free to kill more people. That deserves to be made fun of. We make fun of murders. We're comedians. What else can we do? What are we going to do? Go down there and take the ramen noodles away? No, all we can do is make fun of them. That would be pretty funny. No, I'm sorry. You can't have this. We did a show about you and we didn't like you when we decided you're not allowed to have your beef flavored ramen tonight. Only the shrimp flavor. That's the only one you got. There's your shrimp in it. Oh, you're not going to get any shrimp. It's shrimp flavor. So yeah, you can do all of that. Yeah, do that. But either way though, that's what we're doing here. No complaining later. That's what it is. That's what it is basically. If you think that sounds good to you, and you're going to hear a wild story, if you think true crime and comedy should somehow never go together, give it a chance, but no complaining later. That said, I think it's time to sit back.

6:06Everybody. Here we go. Yeah. Clear the lungs here. What do you say? Arms to the sky. And let's all shout. Shout out. And give me murder. Let's do this, everybody. Let's go on a trip, Charlie. Where are we going? This is Naples. We're going to Florida. We're going to Florida. We're going to Naples, Florida. Which is a big retirement joint in it. Absolutely. This is I mean, Florida in general. Yes, I mean, there's a reason why. But Naples. God's waiting room. And it's right on the sign when you drive in there. Naples itself. Rich old people live here. This is rich old people with more golf clubs than years left to live essentially. And that's what's going on. It's in southwestern Florida. It's about two hours to Miami. It's about two and a half hours to Tampa. If you go north. Wow. So it's down pretty good in the South. Fort Myers over there. Kind of.

7:06Yeah. It's two hours and 45 minutes to plant city Florida, which is our last Florida episode episode 673, the unluckiest winner. Remember the guy who won the lottery and then. Right. Probably that was awful. I poor guy. I never had an ounce of luck as whole life wins the lottery. He's murdered for it. Too nice to everybody. Too nice. That's what it was. This is in Collier County. Area code 239. And it has two nicknames. One is Naples on the Gulf. Cause it's called Naples. It's on the Gulf of Mexico. They're making it sound way more fancy than that actually is in real life. If you know anything about the Gulf. And then the Gulf capital of the world. Of the world. Yeah. Which I know. Fuck Scott's do. Scott's gonna say, Scott's deal is rolling up its sleeves going. Would you say an ami bitch? Fuck Augusta. There's nothing else here but golf. Nothing. It's just deserts and golf. God damn it. Yeah. History. I swear I've heard the other one. Uh, uh, we misread this.

8:07I thought it said Napa. So a little bit of history here. It was founded in 1886 by a former Confederate general named John Stewart Williams. He was also a US senator from Kentucky. And him and his partner, who his partner was the guy who published the Louisville Courier Journal, which is their newspaper of record forever. Throughout the 70s, the 1870s and 1880s, magazines and newspapers ran all sorts of stories about the area's mild climate. It's hot as shit down there. Mild climate, abundant fish and likened it to Italy. Like I said, it's just like being in Italy. Naples except for the swamps and the trash people, you know. Just like an apple. Which gets just just like a napoli. Just like all the napoli like we all at a remember. Hey, um, so yeah, the name Naples caught on when promoters described the Bay as quote,

9:09surpassing the Bay in Naples, Italy much nicer. Yeah, really, really. Yeah. In 1888, they had approximately 80 people there. And then they opened a pier and then a hotel and then started going on here. Reviews of this town. Here we go. Here is five stars. Naples is one of those cities where once you explore everything in it, it either gets boring or it gets even more fun to live in. They haven't told us which one though. It's just either one. We're not sure which. That's all review. Here's three stars. Naples is an upscale city on the Gulf of Mexico. We're now in for its white sand beaches, luxury living and being the quote, golf capital of the world with over 80 courses. It's a haven for high end shopping and dining, particularly along Fifth Avenue South and Third Street South. Naples also serves as a gateway to the vast natural beauty and ecotourism of the everglades and corkscrew swamp sanctuary.

10:09Oh, I know. I've been saving up for years to take a big pilgrimage down to the swamp sanctuary there. Corkscrew swamp offering a mix of sophisticated culture and wild outdoor adventure. The historic Naples pier is an iconic spot for fishing and sunset views on the paradise coast. That's a three star review. That sounds like 12 stars. That doesn't sound like even five. That's way more. Yeah, corkscrew swamp sounds like there's no eggs. It sounds like a corn maze. It's fucking brutal, man. Brutal. Here's three stars. It can be pretty calm in the quiet parts and beaches can be amazing. However, there are many all caps, rude people who think they're entitled to do whatever they want. Retire here, I guess. Question marks, I guess. And here we go. One star. Don't like it at all. Too many young people on drugs. This is an old person that would expect it. No young people there. I worked with two.

11:11Collier County's... Collier County lets a retail puppy mill dogs be sold. I worked for one until I found out. No good jobs that pay enough for what they charge customers. Traffic is horrendous. People act like they're better than others. Town is water logged and moldy. Jesus Christ. I assume that if I think of a puppy mill, I think 70% of them are run... This is the Alabama Florida. Florida. Imagine there would be no laws against it in Florida. You know, against whatever. People here at 19187. It's not a huge place. Wow. Not small either. Way more women than men. And that will get to Y in a second here. It is 53.4% women, which is way out of whack. It's not normal. But that's because the median age here is 66.3. Women live longer than men. Hence in retirement community, you're going to go way more women than men. And if you can live to be like 75 and you're a widow or you've got divorced or so,

12:16or something, you're a guy, you're going to clean up. You can slaying it. You are going to kill that shuffleboard court. You're going to go down there and just wipe up the floor of all those old ladies. Is going to be so impressed with the bacteria culture in there. Yeah. You just got to keep your dick in operating condition and you're fine. Yeah. 30% of the people here are over 75 years old. And 53% are over 65. So think about that. That's a lot of retired people. It's about, it's over 62% married because they're all old and rich. So I'm going to get divorced. 4% single with children, which is way below the national average. And you don't find a lot of 75-year-old single mothers walking around out there. So it's rare. It's rare. You don't get that. It's about 4% of the pun. Yeah. A race here, 89.6% white, 5% black, 0.4% Asian, 4.1% Hispanic,

13:18religion, 35% religious. Either they've given up or they're so old they forgot they believed in anything, either one. But it's the highest one here appears. Yeah, appears to be Catholic. 15.6%. Usually Catholics are the Baptist of the North, but instead we flip it here just from all the people moving from the north to the south here. 0.6% Jewish, just missed it. We just missed our Havana Gila threshold there. The unemployment close, unemployment rate here, a little bit low. Median household income, very high. Median household income here, $125,300. And you're going to need it when I tell you the cost of living because holy shit, cost of living here, 100 is regular. Here it's 137. And the big thing is the housing. Median home cost here, $1,045,900. Yes. These people are not retiring to go live in trailers and Florida.

14:19They're retiring them. Huge funds are unbelievable. These are rich people that are moving to golf course condos and houses on golf courses. Oh, that's shit. These are wealthy people. And if that's they you've saved a whole bunch of money and you want to, you want to sweat for the rest of your days, we have for you the Naples Florida real estate report. Your average two bedroom rental here goes for $1890. So pretty steep. Who honestly? Here is house number one. This is the cheapest structure that you can live in that I could find. And I'm looking for single family homes here because there's a trillion condos and I was like, I'm not getting into that. Sure. So this is a three bedroom two bath, 1,440 square foot trailer. It's a nice trailer with a car port and you know, they tried to make it look like it's actually sitting in the ground and things like that. Built in 1974, $148,000 for that, a trailer.

15:24150 grand for a trailer. Just had a price cut of $2,000. Here's a three bedroom two bath, 2334 square foot, single family home. It's nowhere near the water. It looks like it's kind of in the woods almost. You get 2.27 acres in this as well, which is pretty big for this area. The house looks okay. It's not terrible. It's kind of a Spanish style. $398,400. Very specific price and they just had a $1,000 price reduction. That'll sell it. That was the problem. $399 instead of $398. And then finally, holy shit, a five bedroom six bath, tea ball for each and every beehole, 5,27 square feet on the ocean. I'm Arama Gull for whatever the hell it is. I'm talking to your houses here. You have a wall that is beach in front of it on the ocean.

16:280.7 acre lot too on the beach, which is a pretty big lot. Almost an acre. $39 million. $39 million. $39 million. Fuck you. $39 million. $39 million. The last place I'm going is Florida. Who is buying this pit bull? Who the fuck is buying this? You know what I mean? Who buys this house? Is the rest of the world on fire? Apparently so. Apparently it does not exist. If I want to spend $39, I buy like a fucking chalet off the coast of somewhere. You know what I mean? I wouldn't be buying this crap. I'll buy a boat and throw fucking anchor somewhere. $39 million. I mean it's a nice place but there's other houses on top of you. You're dealing with just trash at the beach and all this. $39 million.

17:28You're asking me. It's $39 million. I'm having guard towers. Not even with guns with hot oil to dump on people. We're going old school. So things to do in this town. A lot of things to do. $39 million. The Naples Winter Wine Festival. This is a Hoi-Di-Toy-Di-Snowbee. Upscale wine bullshit here. They call it the most exciting charity wine event in the world. Yeah. Charity wine. Yeah they can. Now we can write it off. You can go get shit face, spend tons of money and just give billet to the government. Isn't that great? The name of free money. And then the Naples Winter Wine Festival. Truly one of a kind experience from exquisite culinary encounters to a world-renowned auction that stirs both hearts and headlines. Wow. This festival brings together the very best in wine, cuisine and philanthropy. All to create brighter futures for Collier County's children. All 12 of them because everyone here is 100 years old.

18:31What kids live here? So the auction step into the tent at the Ritz Carlton Naples for heart pounding live auction to bid on rare collectibles of some of the world's most sought after wines, exotic travel adventures, limited edition cars and unique experiences. These are, this isn't an auction where people spend $100. These are, we have a bottle of 1947 blah blah blah that is, you know, $80,000. That's the type of auction that says. Unique experiences. Where's the like traffic children you can be? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Thailand. Oh yeah, there's a Cambodian sex tours. I believe nine year old boy sex tours they have, things like that. Yeah, they call it the full-time package as well. There's also the Everglades seafood festival, which is a little more our speed, I think. Enjoy, oh, maybe not. Enjoy three days of live country music, which about halfway into that, you find me fucking with my wrist slit somewhere.

19:35It features continuous live country music, rock and roll and swamp blues. Got me. I think you'd be, I think you'd be surprised by how close it was. I'd like that better than the country I would assume. Yeah. So they have a features opening blah blah blah, oh, they have a credence clear water revival tribute band called Fortune at Sun. Of course. There's also what is this? Country star Tyler Far. Okay, he's good. F-A-R-R and then regional Southern rock warship bands and high energy tribute headliners, like the meatloaf tribute band meatloaf M-E-E-T loaf. That's what's going on. Wow. Okay. Oh boy. Crime right in this town. Property crime right about the at the average, which if I had a $39 million house, I'd be really pissed if it wasn't

20:35percent of the give me. That's super dangerous for $39 million. $39 million. Then violent crime murder, rape robbery and of course a salt them out rush more of crime less than half the national average. So that's about what these old people aren't killing each other too much here. Who the fuck lives in that house now? That's what I want to know. Somebody who's furniture in it might be staged, but I don't know. Yeah, it's in there. I mean, who the fuck paid that the fuck it is? Yeah, to begin with, that's let's talk about some murder everybody. Let's get into this here. Here we go. We're going to start out hot today. We're going to start out hot and then we'll go back and talk. July 9th, 1985. This is about 917 AM. All right. This is a home on, I won't give the exact address because I'm sure it's worth millions of dollars. I don't want to fuck up there. We're $40 million today. It's on white violet way is the the street we're on here. It's a treeline street inside of Quail Creek, which is a gated golf course community with a guard at the entrance where

21:39there's a visitor log book and basically if someone comes, they have to call you and then they you they buzz them in. It's one of those places. So pain in the ass. I used to be a process server that's the biggest pain in the balls. Biggest pain in the balls because it's like this guy's now got to call them to alert them to my presence, which now they're not going to answer the door. Thanks, Dick. Appreciate it. The annoying part is when there's Yeah, right. That's one. That's what I do. The one that has a service entrance like desert mountain where you pull up to the to the residence entrance on accident and they treat you like you are a piece of shit and why are you here? Oh, yeah. They I know I'd go in there. They really do at least you are with. Yeah. At least you were going to do something that they wanted you to do. I'm coming in there to give them tell them they're being sued or their wife doesn't want to be with the many. I'm giving them bad news probably so they don't want me there at all. Like it was that. But I've got the company name on the fucking door of the truck and they're like, can I help you?

22:41Well, you can open that fucking gate. You can do that. I'm showing them I'm an officer of the court and I have judicial shit I need to and they're like, I don't know, man. Like it's that's something. I'm helping you. It's okay. You have an electric company written on the side of your truck. It's the worst. This guy's literally paid to not let me. Now if we are super rich and lived in one of these places, we'd probably think it was the best. But just being someone who's trying to penetrate this. Yeah. It's bad. So let's start out. They're going to do his job. Yeah. On this morning, there is the Benson family. Okay. They consist of the matriarch of the family, Margaret Benson, who's 63 years old, and her three adult children. Okay. We have Carol Lynn, who's about 40 at this point. We have Scott, who was the youngest. He is about 21 at this point. And then we have Steven, who is in his early 30s here. So in these 31 at this point. So they're all loading into a Chevy suburban owned by Margaret.

23:44To head to a property that they have purchased that their mother is building a house on. And by the way, she is building a fucking mansion, a $39 million type of house. She's building a crazy house. So it's a big family outing on a morning to go look at this property. And she's going to show them shit. Okay. So they all load into the car. 21 year old Scott is assigned to be the driver for some reason, which is usually the youngest. He's in the backseat somewhere. You know what I mean? So that's strange. But he's driving 21. They're still exuberant to drive. Yeah, you're not driving mom around. And if I'm his older brother, I'm like, move aside. You're getting back there. So either way, Scott turns the ignition to the suburban for this big family outing. And there is a massive fucking explosion. I mean a massive cub boom car like a tin can that got blown apart. Open this suburban. The suburban. Yeah, cub boom.

24:46Huge explosion. So violent that bodies are thrown clear out of the vehicle onto the lawn. Wow. The boom to launch a, you know, 200 pound person through the air, which is crazy. The explosion has heard for up to five miles. That's how bloud this is. That's a long distance. Debris reigns down over the yard and the adjoining golf course that the house sits on as well. So if you're on the 14th fairway, there is now debris coming down, spraying everywhere. Right. It's insane. There is, it's so bad. Pieces of the suburban and other things would later be recovered from yards, multiple houses away on top of screen porches and shit like that. Now in the back seat of the car was Carol Lynn. She is in the back seat. Carol is the oldest child. Oldest she's a, she was in the back seat. She had her door open at the time. The explosion happened.

25:47That's good. So she is blown out of the car onto the grass. She is conscious and currently on fire. A flame. Oh, okay. She's rolling around in the lawn trying to get the flames off. Stop drop and roll. Try to put them out. Trying to put a roll trying to get her burning shirt off. She's screaming. Nearby there's two golfers on the third hole. Okay, literally two golfers named Charles Meyer and Fred Merrill. And Fred Merrill knew the family. He was once Margaret the mother's realtor. So he saw the blast, heard it and came running. He goes to Margaret's side and finds her on the ground beside the vehicle, which is fully engulfed in flames and he grabs her by the ankles, the mother, and drags her away from the flames. At some point by the way, Carol was running around on fire, which is a, imagine watching a woman run around with her clothing and hair a flame screaming running, jumping on the hoods crazy.

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29:56Yours is next. Like I said, I absolutely love the stuff with the map of my woods on it. We got all sorts of cool stuff made with it and Zazzle makes it super easy to do that. I love it and I've even gotten stuff for other people for one of my cousins. You got a dog mug thing. They loved it. They love that stuff. People love personal gifts. It makes them know that you thought of them. So get it there and think of them. Do it right. Zazzle's going to help you right now. Save 25% on your first order at Zazzle.com. That's 25% savings on your first order at Zazzle.com. Go make something as amazing. Zazzle.com. Now back to the show. The other guy, Merrill, goes to the driver's side and sees Scott is still in the car. And then he sees Carol, Carol, alive, conscious and burning right beside the car and he tries to help her. Just as he bends down to help her, another explosion goes off in the car. It blows up again.

30:57It blows up again. Okay. We'll get into what happened there. But let's rewind. Okay. So that's about as chaotic of an opening as you can have to do anything. All right. The only way it could be worse is if it happened in the Reel itters backswing. Yeah. Well, I think it might have actually. He actually asked for a mulligan on that one because he said I'm doing a guy. I was coming. You know, I'm in the trap. Yeah. I need concentration. I was on my downswing and you know, I at least get something. And yeah, there was definitely some scoring made up for there. Now here is the family. Margaret Virginia Hitchcock Benson is the mother. Okay. Yeah. She's born Margaret Virginia Hitchcock. She's born January 6th, 1922. So she's 63 at the time. 60. Now we have to talk a little bit about her family to understand why everyone is in this position of exalted wealth and kind of idle living by 1985.

32:00Yeah. And adult children staying at home. Why the fuck would you leave? Yeah. Well, Carol didn't live at home as we'll talk about. The other two. No, okay. Perth around. But okay. Now the parents here, her parents are Harry Ross Hitchcock and Charlotte Hitchcock. And she has a sister named Janet who's two years older than her born in 1920. Her father is Harry Ross Hitchcock. Now he's born in Baltimore in 1897 and he's the nicest guy in this whole story, by the way. He's a nice man. He started in the tobacco business as an assistant bookkeeper. He got a job at some tobacco company as not even the bookkeeper, an assistant bookkeeper. So he's not, you know, high up on the chain or anything like that. He doesn't have any connections or anything. But he apparently worked really hard and climbed the company ladder over time. Very dedicated. And eventually the company offers him a shot at tobacco sales, which is how you make

33:01money in the business there. Yeah. Which the thing that's odd is Harry doesn't smoke. He doesn't chew. He doesn't have any connections to the back of. Doesn't use it at all. He's never smoked in his life. And he didn't know anything about tobacco at all. He just knew what it said on the sheet about these are the qualities of the leaves. He didn't know anything about it. New shit about it. So that's odd. So his strategy was rather than start smoking or something and figure it out, he'd just tell his customers, I don't know anything about tobacco. He'd tell, I don't smoke. I don't know anything about it. This is what it says on the sheet. I found that to be pretty accurate from what I've understood from people. But I know nothing. Yep. He'd literally walk in and go, I don't know much about this leaf beyond what's on this sales sheet. And the people actually, because salesmen are such scumbags, that was so refreshing that he became the salesman of the year.

34:02Everybody, all the customers loved him because he wasn't Mr. Let me tell you all about this and that. He goes, I don't know anything. And they go, all right, and then they just buy it from him because he wasn't a dick. Try that salespeople. If next time, try that, please. I wish car salesman would try that. It doesn't sound like it'll be successful. No, but it works. If I went into a car dealership and the guy, I had to like seek the guy out. I ask him about something. He goes, I mean, I don't know much about it, but it's a nice car. I go, all right, well, I go, I'm going to, this is now for me to decide whether I wanted or not. And he's not pressuring me. I like that. Or I'd say she, but it's usually a douchebag guy. But do you have this truck? No, no, no, no, no, I drive a Kia. I don't have, I don't even, I don't like trucks. I don't like sitting a pie like that. Turns me off, man. So, Harry salesman of the year. He's really great at it. The company sends him to open a subsidiary in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

35:03The subsidiary company is called Lancaster Leif. He said, yeah, good deal. And he said that he looked around and he saw a gap in the market here. He said, everybody else in tobacco is trying to sell the fanciest tobacco they can. This is the best tobacco. This is the Cadillac of tobacco. Like that's everybody else's strategy. He said, it's funny. When I look around the road, I don't see a lot of Cadillacs. So I see a lot of Chevy's, see a lot of Ford's. Don't see a lot of Cadillacs. So don't look like that many people are looking for a Cadillac. He goes, a lot of people are looking for something cheaper. So he basically said, I'm going to, I'm going to bid my tobacco as not the best tobacco, but just a decent tobacco that's affordable. It's the same strategy. It's a failure Cadillac. The layer tobacco. Yeah, it's the same strategy that he did with Salonet in the first place. Like, I don't know much about it.

36:04Here he's like, I mean, you can afford it. Isn't that, doesn't that the number one thing you should be looking at? He said it was a dark, air-cured leaf for every day cigars and chewing tobacco. And this is coming out of the great depression. So value turned out to be a really good thing to bank on rather than quality. And it became Lancaster leaf grew and eventually became the largest trader of dark leaf tobacco in the world. Holy shit. All because of him because he had this idea. Just by being honest. I mean, partially, but he doesn't have the other part. By the way, the Benson thing in this story, it's not Benson and Hages. Because people are going to hear Benson and they hear cigarettes and tobacco and they're going to think Benson and Hages. This has, they have, this whole family has nothing to do with that. That's a totally separate thing. Just so they know. So, but a lot of people later on when this story is being reported, they call people a Benson and Hages, Eris, which they're not actually a Benson and Hages, Eris. So now Margaret here is the Eris to Lancaster leaf.

37:07I mean, that's, she's the, she's the heron her sister or the daughters. Harry's on the road constantly up and down the East Coast going to Texas. So he doesn't see his kids a lot growing up. Filled in this brand, babe. No, but he does make a shitload of money. A shitload of money. And he's not a greedy guy and he doesn't care about money. Let's see other thing about Harry. He's not one of these guys that controls people with money or to him, he doesn't give a shit. He gives away tons of money. Gives away to charity, just to people he knows that need it. Just a nice guy. He's a big Methodist and he organizes prayer, breakfast and pays for everything and just the way he is. He likes to live more modestly too. Then he likes to live below his means and that sort of shit. He really, really likes church and his flower garden. Those are the two things he's super into. Yeah, he's a really exciting guy. Harry, very exciting. I mean, flower garden is fun though.

38:09He likes his church flower garden and the titty bar. Those are the three things he's super into. No, he doesn't like that. Are you being honest? No, I'm kidding. That's a joke here. Jimmy's face is like, oh no. Yeah, what an interesting fellow. So Harry didn't want his family to have to wait for him to die to enjoy money, by the way. He was one of those people. Okay. Most people use their money their whole life to control people. And it's so if you piss me off, you're going to get cut out of the will and I won't give you this or that. He doesn't think like that. Yeah, that's how most people do it. That's, I mean, especially rich people. Don't most people use the money to their own expenses and then at the end, they're like, you're going to have what's left, isn't that the idea? Yeah, but if you have a lot of money, you put aside this much money for this and this much money for that because you know you're going to have that. You know what I mean? If you have millions and millions of dollars, it is way different than, hey,

39:10you can have my couch when I die. Whatever's left over, I don't owe to the IRS you can have. Because that's our families are, you know, we're not getting anything. Yeah. Oh, I got a $2,500 motorcycle from my dad. I got nothing. It's going to say, didn't you buy that motorcycle for him to begin with? Yes. I think you, you know, what I did is bought him a more expensive one. It's a big one. So that he didn't have to get his leg over this bike because he had fucking bone cancer. Yeah. And then so he rode that one and then when he died, his new wife got that bike and then I get his old one. His old one. That makes sense. That makes perfect sense. So this guy, he wanted to give everybody something. Lancaster Leaf was a small privately held company. Harry took all of his shares and divided them between his wife, Charlotte and his two daughters, Margaret Janet. That was it. You take off. Everybody's got the shares and that's that.

40:11So they have them from the beginning. And it expanded into an international operation in 1967. The parent company converted that stock into publicly traded blue chip shares. So this stock, he's giving them blows up because it becomes part of the main company there. So it is a huge deal and makes them all insanely rich, all of them. So this is what's going on. Now Margaret grew up comfortable, but not like I said, wasn't lavish. Harry's a Baltimore guy. Like he's not a lavish guy. He's a, he considers himself a blue collar kind of cat. So he doesn't like to live lavishly. I'm sure he spends on things, but they're like, when I say spends, like he buys the $12 rose seeds rather than the $8 rose seeds. Yeah. Or when they buy like a couch, they buy a very high quality, very nice piece of furniture. Look at pass down through the generations, but they don't buy some big giant house that needs six couches.

41:12You know what I'm saying? It's quality old-timey type shit. So they didn't flaunt anything, but the kids have everything like a possibly need as well. They're not being denied anything. Margaret went to Goucher College. Jesus, in Baltimore and majored in biology. So she's in college and her junior year, Margaret meets a man. She meets a man named Edward Hewlett Benson. He's born in 1920, about two years older than her, and he goes by Benny, even though his name is Edward Hewlett. Benny Benson. He goes half of his last name. Half of his last, Benny Benson. Now Benny Benson was born in Baltimore as well. His parents were Roland and Marie Benson. Now she met him. He's a dashing figure here. He's going to be a captain in the US Army Air Corps during World War II, which is pretty cool. He graduated from Baltimore City College in 1940. Now Benny is not from this world, by the way. He is not one. No, he is not a private school guy.

42:14He's not a country club guy. None of that. He's a real blue collar, make your own way kind of guy. Sure. Yeah, Benny wasn't poor, but he had a hard time growing up. He had polio as a child. Fuck. Which left him bedridden for a long time, and as an adult, left him smaller than he should have been, and just less physically imposing than he could have been, basically. Stunster growth, that's a wild ass disease. It's a horrifying fucking disgusting disease that people are now, never mind, I'm not going to get into it. Okay. They're willing to roll the dice off. Yep. He, uh, my ex-girlfriend's uncle had it, James. He had one leg shorter than the other, and this poor man had to buy two different shoes. He had to buy two pairs of shoes every time he bought shoes, because he needed an eight and a ten. Yeah, that was gotten sometimes their legs would be the same length either, so they'd have one that was high.

43:14So he was by himself. He would get the eight and the ten, and then he would take the eight to his doctor who would put this giant fucking Frankenstein soul on it, and the poor bastard would limp around with that. And then he came out with a new deal, and now we're here. That's good. Yeah. Here we are. Anyway, he had to, he started college, then he had to withdraw from college, because his own father became disabled, so he had to help the family. Now on top of all this, Benny's father, and he's an addition of being sick, and disabled is also a severe alcoholic as well. So Benny is the family caretaker. He's got to deal with all this shit, basically. He has to take care of his dad, he has to come home from college, he has to do all this type of shit. He's the one. Okay, here's post polio. So Benny would take, this is what he would do. He'd take Margaret out on a date when he met her, drop her off at home, unmalested like a gentleman. What do you mean? You know, drop her off with her tits still in her bra and everything.

44:17Then he'd get on their family, he'd go get on the phone and start calling around to figure out which bar his father was drinking in that night. So he could go find him and get him and take him home before he passed out in the street, or crashed in a telephone pole, or some other way. So he's always the guy that is responsible and cleaning up after other people's messes. That's kind of his job here. December 1942, Margaret and Benny get married in Texas. Lovely. This is after Benny joined the Army Air Corps. And that seemed like a good deal too, do you get married and then you get more money back than I'm still to this day. So because of this, the lingering effects of polio, they never shipped him overseas. He never went overseas to fight. Oh, because he had polio. Instead, he was a trainer. He trained these people to go over and fight. Which is just as necessary, I would assume. They move around a lot during the war all over the US.

45:18Margaret had been offered a full scholarship to pursue a master's degree, but turned it down to be with her new husband. No interest. If she wants to get a master's and do whatever she wants, that's fine. But it's not like she needs this because she is very wealthy. It doesn't really matter. She doesn't need a job. You know, if she's interested in it, she could do it. But she chose marriage on July 8th, 1944, here at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma, Margaret and Benny have their first child, a daughter named Carol Lynn. Carol Lynn Benson, July 8th, 1944. Now the war ends. Benny's discharged. So Harry brings his son-in-law into the family business. Why not? Lancaster leaf. And Benny turns out to be a god damn good businessman. Pretty good at it. Way. Yeah, this guy thought he was just, you know, given his bum son-in-law job or whatever,

46:20and it turns out his son-in-law is the fucking best employee as. He's like this guy's perfect. So he can't lose there. He climbs up the ladder really fast. Everybody's in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Margaret's sister Janet and her family settled right around the corner from them. And so, you know, just they have kind of a little all families all live on the same street type of deal. Well, the clave, all right. Yeah. Little enclave. 1951, they have a son named Stephen Wayne Benson. July 26th, 1951, Stephen is born. Okay, he was one of the people in the car that morning. Now, Benny and his grandfather, Harry, both want, basically they hope Stephen will be the guy who's going to carry the company forward. He's the heir apparent of he's going to run this thing. Because it's the 50s and they're not even thinking about a daughter running anything. They're thinking about the son running something, even though he's a baby. So he's going to do it.

47:22That's what it is. So by 1959, Benny is in charge. Harry retires and Benny takes over the company by 59. 1963, they have a son here, Margaret and Benny have a son named Scott Roland Benson. He's the 21 year old who was driving who started the ignition. 1967, Benny expanded Lancaster leaf internationally. And he was the guy in charge when the privately held stock converted into this great blue chip. Stock that was going public. And so he helped make everybody even richer than he does. He really ups the value of the company. So Benny, not only here, is he accomplished at work, he's got a bunch of shit he does. This is a busy man. Okay, they say he resided in Lancaster since 1945, was associated with the tobacco company. He was on the board of directors of Universal Leaf tobacco company, also out of Richmond.

48:28Some Paraguay, Paraguay tobacco company, an Indonesian tobacco processor. He's also the past president of Lancaster Philippines and Verokwa Leaf tobacco in Wisconsin. He's also a member of the the cigar Institute of America and the cigar association of America. The past director of the Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association, I don't know where that fits in, but he was on the board of directors of the American Bank and Trust Company. He's a member of the board of trustees of Lebanon Valley College. He's a member of Lancaster Association of Commerce and Industry and the National Association of Manufacturers. He also goes to church. He's got a country club. The Lancaster Country Club, Lancaster Riding and Tennis Club. He founded a club called the Quadril Club. He belonged to the Port Royal Club of Naples

49:29and the Chesapeake Bay Yacht Club. Oh, and he's the past commander of the Lancaster. Lancaster Flo Tilla 52, US Coast Guard auxiliary and a former member of the benevolent protective order of the Elks 134. So he's the wonderful man. It does tons. The problem is he spends no time with his kids. Yeah, none. Yeah, welcome. Not a great, not a great father though. That's the thing. A nice father and a whatever, but just the problem. Yeah. Gray role model, but he's just never there. With Stephen, by the way, like they said, Stephen the oldest son. He was too busy to like play catch with them or take him fishing or do the normal father, son type of shit here. By the way, Stephen always called his parents mother and father, not mom and dad. The other kids said mom and dad. He called them mother and mother, father. Yeah, we're a weird shit here. So they said even when Benny was home, he didn't make a lot

50:35of effort to get close to his son, Stephen at all. So this this this hurt Stephen's feelings a lot everybody said. It was he was always kind of pissed off about that that he could have whatever he wants, but he can't hang out with his dad. Not too far. So Margaret felt bad. So what do you think she did? Mother, really hard. Yeah, spoiled the fuck out of these kids because she felt bad. So Christmas time it's described in this book. I'll give you the book title later. This is from a book quote, became an orgy of gift giving as Santa lavished present after present on the children. An orgy of gift giving. Yeah. Wow. She just would buy them everything. I mean, they were like the the fucking gemstone kids at Christmas. Kelvin open in his double dragon machine. So late 1970s here. Benny barbed Rob Margaret and the boys kind of do a part time Florida thing. They'll go down there.

51:39They buy a house and they live in Florida sometimes. They keep multiple homes. They have a big place in Lancaster that they built with a pool and a cabana. They have spots on the Jersey shore. They they have a place in ski country up by Montreal. This is they're wealthy. They winter places. They summer places. They're those people. Oh, we're we're summering here. This is yeah. Yeah. Wow. When when a season becomes a verb, that's crazy. Summering and wintering like that's a lot, dude. That's rich. I've never used I've never used a season as a verb before because I would enjoy it immensely. If I could. Yeah. We were lucky to have one place to live. You know, like this is this is a different thing. I'm thankful that I forevered somewhere. So the kids, Steven, Carol and Scott, they grow up inside this just, you know, they're spoiled right. Yeah. Wild life of money. And really they all know there's a lot of money in the future. And

52:45so they don't really have a lot of doesn't feel like they're that ambitious. It's interesting. Concerned. Yeah. No. November 5th, 1980. Dad dies. Okay. So dad's dead. Yeah. The big guy. Yeah. He's dead after an illness of three months. He dies. Okay. Now Margaret has the money. So Benny's dead. Benny Benson is no more. Margaret has all the money. And that's that's it. Now Benny, by the way, would tell people know when they want to money. The kids wanted some exorbitant amount of money for something crazy. He'd say, no, I'm not giving you that. That's stupid. Margaret does not do that. Margaret, whatever you want, indulges the kids, indulges them. She ends up selling the big house they had in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with the big pool and all that. And this is in 1981, $475,000 in 1981. In landcats. That is even with inflation,

53:51not even the fact that real estate's way more expensive than it was back then. Like if it was 475, then, you know, just the market, it would be, you know, 800 now. But with inflation, that's like, you know, millions and millions of dollars, right. Millions and millions of dollars. It's a crazy house. So they moved down to Florida full time. Two Naples. Here we go. So first they were in Port Royal and then about 18 months, and then about a year and a half later, 18 months, they built a brand new home inside Quail Creek, which is the one that's, you know, the car exploded in front of. So they never really worked. They summer. They went to her. They have, you know, sweaters and tied around their waist. And they play tennis. And, you know, they're just like, they're like the guy across the street from the rain, Bronco and Goodfell as a Henry Hill beats up with the butt of the God. That's so these guys are, you know what I mean? Yeah, except way richer than that even.

54:53Now there's an accountant named Wayne Kerr and he has to have a conversation with Margaret about her spending at one point. She's going too hard. Yeah. Too much. After about a year and a half of after Benny died, she'd burned through over a million and a half dollars in a year and a half. In a year and a half in 1981, which is hard to do. It's difficult. Now she had plenty of money. She had over $10 million. So that's not really a factor. But they tell them like, look at the rate you're spending, you're going to spend all your money. But before you go, you're only 63. Yeah, you're only 63. You're going to have nothing to live. You leave your kids. This is going to be crazy. So Margaret here, she also does stuff. She does a lot of volunteer work. She's a former chairman of the American Red Cross volunteers and a past president of the Quadril Dance Club. Oh boy. So as of 1985, which is when the explosion happened, let's let's do a roll call here and find out

55:56what everybody's up to. Shall we? All right. Oh boy. Let's start with the oldest and youngest sort of as we'll get into. Okay. Carol. Carolin. Very beautiful. Blonde. Pretty. Does beauty contest is a runner up as a runner up for Miss Florida. The second one. Yeah. Yeah. Second hottest chicken Florida, which means she's only missing two teeth. That's not I'm kidding. Actually, there's some plenty of attractive women in Florida joke. So she's a Miss Florida runner up. After all this, though, she ends up moving to the Boston area and getting married and having children. Okay. This is in the early 70s. She has kids and then she's ends up being divorced, but still lives in the Boston area with just teenage sons up there now. Okay. So that's Carol. Now Scott is an interesting fellow. He's the 21 year old here. Oh, he would like to he's the youngest,

56:57the 21 year old. He would like to be a professional tennis player. That's his goal. He's a total slacker. He's a good. He's a decent tennis player, but not he's not going to be a pro tennis player. He's not Roger. He's he's good for the country club, but not going to be on a pro tour or anything like that, but he would tell his friends that he's a pro tennis player. This is pre internet. So you could tell your friends. You can lie. He would tell his friends. I'm ranked like 60th in the world. You know, I'm not at the top or anything, but I'm hanging in there. And that's 60th is such a lie that you'd go no one would lie and say they were 60th. You'd say you were like eight or something 60th. That sounds like a truth. So they'd all believe him. And compared to them, if he was like, yeah. Yeah. And if you're playing him, he's going to smoke you see he's a pro. But I mean, yeah, you don't know the difference. Uh, problem is the association of tennis professionals, the ATP had never heard of him. He wasn't rated. He wasn't

57:58ranked. He's not even a pro. He's just a guy who's at the country club. Now he's good. A tennis pro at the Quail Creek Country Club described him as one of the most promising students in the area. You know, he practiced a lot every day. And, um, you know, he would hit with the pro whenever he could and all that kind of thing. But that doesn't make you a professional tennis player if they have a certain. Sure to make you to make you 60th. Yeah. Yeah. No, you have to have a certain at lettuce. There's so much that goes into being a top tier professional athlete. It's not just whether you try hard or are sort of talented. So the other thing he's really into is anything that spends a lot of money. He likes to piss money away. He is, he is like, yeah, dude, he's having a blast. Um, he loves buying expensive sports cars. He gets a lotus. He gets all this crazy. These, I mean, high end. Yeah. Super car type shit. Um, he was issued six traffic tickets on speeding charges and

58:59careless driving and also trying to allude police. This is from November 81 to December 83. He had all these problems. Loves expensive cars and drives them like shit. Drive them like an ass-all. Yeah. Oh, maybe the reason for that is because he's always on a shitload of nitrous. He loves nitrous. Real. Okay. To the point where he's like, like an addict at nitrous, which I didn't even know you could become an addict at nitrous. When you're a teenager, every, you know, four months or something, somebody has a bunch of them at a party and you do a few and that you don't be like, yeah, I got to go do that the next day is your scratch and that never happens because you're like, whoo, that took a lot of time. I had hurts Steve Martin in little shop of horrors. That's the only person that's ever like had a problem with it. No shit. I'm sure there's dentists that just take a head off and let me get a pull for that. There you go. So this is what it is. He loves it. He loves nitrous. A Naples psychiatrist named Dr. Jose Lombilo or was or Lombillo treated Scott

1:00:07for drug dependency and he said that he inhaled nitrous like you might drink Pepsi. That's what he said. It's just constant. He had tanks delivered to his house all the time. Tanks. We're not talking go to the head shop and buy a box of 24 of those things and you know, have a little party with your friends. We're going to go get a baggy whip. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Full tanks. He would rig scuba setups in his vehicles so he could hop while he drove around. He had a set up in his car where he just put the tank up. It's fucking insane, dude. I want to Google. Is that is that illegal? Fuck yeah, it's illegal. Absolutely. Yes. In toxicant while driving. Yes. Very illegal. I guess there's that. But is it illegal to own that though? It should be if you're not a doctor. No, because you can put it in your car. You can use it as that. You can use it as other things.

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1:06:19block all that out and just concentrate on doing it or whatever it is. Maybe you've had some bad things happen. You've had some tragedy, lost your job, you've gotten sick, things that are going on in your head. Sometimes it's just you can't get out of your own head. Whatever it is, BetterHelp can help you make it better. And that's the whole point here. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash small town murder. That's betterhelp.com slash small town murder. Now back to the show. So they said that he would he loved this. He would stash five foot tanks. We're not talking. It's a five foot fucking it's a huge tank. He would put them in his bedroom. He kept just tanks of nitrous in his bedroom and no one ever questioned that. That's just fine. Some of these kids could do anything. Every night he would inhale the shitloads of this and before he goes to sleep also smokes a shitload of weed and drinks like a fish. So he is loving his life.

1:07:25One psychiatrist, the Lombilo guy said that Scott told him in 1983 how he first began using nitrous. And he said eventually Scott used the gas routinely and heavily. He said that it was about 14. When Scott was about 14, he didn't like school when his family lived in Lancaster. And then he discovered that the little 50 cent canisters that his mother bought to supply nitrous to a whipped cream machine she had in the kitchen. So that's what it was for. So he realized you could do that. Someone told him that and he went, oh, this is fun. So this is the best. So he started using those canisters. Then he would ask his mother for money and so she would just give him money and then he would buy more. And as it grew, he told his friends about nitrous and started buying the small canisters by the case from specialty food stores. This is before they had him in head shops. And so he would then resell them to the other kids at a profit.

1:08:28Obviously, he'd go do it. So he got really into that and then he realized these small ones, these little canisters suck. The doctor said, yeah, the doctor said even a case of these weren't enough for him. So he needed more. So he started buying them from his mechanic on the pretext that he intended to use it as a high performance booster for his dots in 280Z. The little tiny fucking dots and Z card. I don't even know where you put a giant nitrous. Where would you put it on the back like a fucking parachute? I think those are a two gallon that you get for that. Anyway, it's a small tank. But to get the five footer 10 gallon tank, that's you can't fit that in that car. No, well eventually the scuba tanks he got from like the scuba sized tanks. That's how big they are. Or too small. They were too small for them. So then he started buying five foot tanks.

1:09:30Holy shit. I've never heard of this before. He's an obtained mask. He obtained masks from his dentist to attach to the hose to make it easier. Breathe the cat. So he had like a real dentist office setup going on. Full mask and everything. Yeah. Full mask. That's wild. His psychiatrist said that Scott was quote, extremely resourceful in the way he filled his growing drug habit. He was almost impressive. He was like, wow, he's he is smart. I'll give him that. He also, this psychiatrist said he was very proud of it. He was telling me how he got it. He was bragging because people used to pay a lot for drugs while he got this drug relatively cheap. See, if you buy it by the five gallon tank, it's way cheaper than buying it by the canister. I would imagine. He's the original house. He was building out. That's crazy. Yeah. No ridiculous. He's also building out a 30 foot cigarette

1:10:35style boat. He's putting together a cigarette racing boat. This fucking guy. Why? Come on. Because he's rich. That's what rich folks do. Yeah. Yeah. I'm building a speed boat. Um, 30 foot. And he had a nitrous. Yeah. He had a nitrous tank plumbed into it. What? So, you know, he could basically, he didn't have it. So it would boost the performance of the boat though. It's for him. But if you had it on there, it looked like it was for the boat. Yeah. Yeah. He had a red fucking lotus, a red lotus, dude. I mean, that's, I'm not buying my kid a red lotus, no matter how much money I have, how much money I have. A Porsche 928. Okay. A Porsche and a lotus and a pair of dots in 280's. Oh, he has two. He has four fancy sports cars, including one like high end supercar, basically. And a Porsche too, which is pretty got down nice too. So he would have, he would have champagne lunches with Don Perignon. And I mean,

1:11:38this is the type of lifestyle. He's like, he did anything in his life. This one is 21. He's 21. And he's done nothing. He's just living it up. Um, he has a hot girlfriend, a blonde chick, who's everybody says works as a stripper here and there, uh, throws money around all over the place. His friends describe him as a very generous, good time guy. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck it. He doesn't give a shit. He cares. There's an incident with Scott and a dog here in 1983. Scott's about 19. And this is an ugly incident here. Um, this is what gets up getting him into having a psychiatrist talk to him all the time. Okay. Scott had a big dog, a big like a guard dog, basically he kept in the house. I think it was a rockweiler. And one of the versions, the dog shit on Margaret's expensive light carpet, as they do, they know exactly where to shit. And it's on the, on the expensive light carpet. Not on the tile in the kitchen here.

1:12:41I think of a giant dog's giant shit. Exactly where you don't want it to be. Whenever your dog goes to throw up, they run to a carpet. You're like, get on, you get on the tiles to get off the rug. Stop. Go. Move over here. Stop doing that. Stop doing that. And they can't they're making faces. You're like, please stop. You're begging them. So Margaret ordered Scott to get rid of the dog entirely. I want that dog out of my fucking house. Okay. So Scott reasonably, and just obviously what one does here threaten to kill his mother as one does. Obviously. Yeah. Physically dragged her across the floor and then beat up his sister Carol with his fists. Okay. He snapped. In one of the accounts about this Scott grab Margaret shook her and told her that on his command, his dog would eat her. Basically, he'll, he'll tell me, dog will tear you apart if I tell him to. There's a tape recording of one of these incidents that, oh, we know what

1:13:43for sure stays around. Yeah. Yeah. And one of this, Scott is that he's called cold and controlling and telling Margaret that just because it's her house doesn't mean she got to do whatever she wanted with his dog. And then he's asking her over and over if she understood that. Oh, be like, you get no more money. Enjoy. Yeah. Enjoy working to keep a fucking one bedroom apartment by. Yeah. I know. My house kills brain cells. But does it kill him so much that you don't understand normal daily conversations anymore? I just think this kid has never had one consequence in his entire life. That's just like a moronic thing to say. It doesn't even, it's not even logical in the course of that conversation. It's crazy. So the police were called and Scott was held for five days by the police. And then Margaret had him taken to a drug's treatment center where that is where he met the psychiatrist that he's going to work with here

1:14:47for a while. It was September 12, 1983 when he was admitted against his will to the psychiatric ward of the Naples Community Hospital. His condition was acute psychotic organic mental disorder. The psychiatrist said that Scott was in acute distress from his laughing gas intoxication. He seemed disoriented and was sad, fearful and depressed. Now he'd explained that nitrous causes chemical changes in the brain like every drug here. He said though in Scott's case, it was temporary and didn't last more than five or ten minutes. During that time, he could become violent or paranoid, experience memory loss and lose touch with reality. He said prolonged use like that could lead to severe neurological effects, including long-term loss of coordination and tremors. Yeah, I'm worried about getting nitrous for an hour and a half when I'm getting a fucking root canal for Christ's sake. I do it anyway because I make the dentist.

1:15:49It's very safe for me to rest of the day. Right. It's very safe in that application. What's the dangers of it being used daily at like mass quarries where you have a five gallon tank in your bedroom? That can't be good for you. That's right. He's just sitting all the time every night. Yeah. But when a bed he hits it, it hits it and then it just passes out, it goes to bed. That's it's so dangerous for like the inhalants like that are really scary like the guy from the wild and wonderful. I mean that gasoline did that to him. Yeah, there's a story. I can't remember what a band told a story back in the day and I can't remember what band was like in the 90s. Is band told a story about a bunch of their friends who had a fucking nitrous tank in their car and they were hitting the nitrous tank in their car and they the tank leaked and filled the thing. And so they both passed out and they ended up fucking crashing the car and killing themselves because they don't pass out from the the tank was leaking and it was filling the car with

1:16:52nitrous and they didn't realize that they both passed out and crashed and died. Yeah. That's yeah, that's it's it's wild man. Dangerous. They said Scott showed no permanent effects though. They said that maybe because he's got he's really physically fit that might have helped him basically. So Margaret when he gets out of this goes right back to Kiss and Scott's ass. Right back to it. There's no consequence from this. It's you went to the hospital. You're all fixed now. Here's as much money as you want do whatever you want. So just doing whatever here by a lotus enjoy. So and they said it's kind of weird. They said like it didn't seem like anybody ever followed through on anything in this family like it would be you know we're going to get this one help and we got to do that and then nobody would do anything. They just give more give a more money and shut them up and everybody kind of did their own thing like a typical kind of like in a movie the way a rich family operates. You know. So two former employees of the of the house here said they saw

1:17:54Scott at the age of 19 pull his sister's hair and violently push her naked against the back of a couch. She was naked. Which I am not going near my naked sister number one. Yeah put some clothes on. I get to eat a brush up against me 19. This isn't 10 or eight. This is 19. And he's the baby. She's older. She's much older. We'll talk about it. Don't worry. So Dorothy. I got a big one there. Dorothy McCormick, a former bookkeeper for Margaret and Mrs. Benson. It's so I'm sorry. For Margaret said Mrs. Benson was afraid of Scott and his friends and had installed dead bolts on the hallway side of his bedroom door and to lock him in dead bolts on the outside of the door. They said he had his own door to the outside so he could leave to go to the outside of the house but couldn't get into that. She also had yeah she also had big heavy locks on her bedroom door

1:18:56to keep Scott away is what the friend said. She recalled one day this is the fight with Carol. When Scott fought with Carol here, Carol here was wearing just a towel when the fight began and by the time it was over she was nude and had been knocked to the floor. Jesus. She said that about Margaret that Margaret quote always had to control everything and tried to make her children do what she wanted by controlling the flow of money. Exactly. Scott here had a quote they said a rather peculiar relationship with Margaret noting that Scott was a quote rather spoiled young man, which I could have told you that just by the cars, they said that Scott was more or less a Stephen was more or less a father and a pacifier in the family. He took over the father's role of keeping the peace. That was always Benny's job. Remember he was the that kind of guy. They said

1:19:59Carol often spent long hours on the phone with Stephen discussing her problems with Scott. That was a thing. Okay with the little brother. Another woman Ruby Caston who worked as the housekeeper here from 84 to 85 recalled seeing the same incident where Scott attacked Carol and said there was a lot of screaming and shouting. She also recalled seeing the large tanks of nitrous that Scott kept in his bedroom. Two more things about Scott. Two more crazy things. One, there's a woman named Tracy Mullins that by June of 85, this is a woman from Northern Indiana files a paternity suit against Scott claiming he fathered her two-year-old daughter. Wow. She says she met Benson when he lived in clear water and she was there. So there's a no paternity suit. So Scott has every just cliche of spoiled rich kid. Every single one does it care about work, it's naughty, driving cars,

1:21:03doing drugs and he's every rich kid that you that sucks is Scott pretty much. Then there's the big secret, the big family secret that is held forever. Okay. Carol, Carol's born in 1944. Okay. Scott's born in 1963. When Carol was 18, she got pregnant. Scott is Carol's son, not Margaret's. Scott never knows that ever. They never tell anybody that. That's fucked up. That's again, some weird rich people shit. Yeah. That goes against our image. Incredibly poor people. Or incredibly poor people. Exactly. One of the two. Yeah. But the poor people is not about image. It's about I can't take care of them. She's 12. I guess I'll put this is yeah. She Carol could have had the baby. They could have taken care of

1:22:04it would have been fine. But they didn't want the scandal because Carol is this beauty queen and she's running, you know, doing all this shit. So they hid her away. She had Scott and Margaret a legally adopted Scott and never told Scott that she was actually his grandmother, not his mother. So when he's punching this 40 year old naked lady, he's punching his mom. He's beating up his naked mother and he doesn't even know which is so fucked up. And he thinks he just beat up a sister. Sister. Cause 1962 unmarried teen pregnancy. That's scandal if you're rich. You know what I mean? Oh my god. You're in church. Also, there are church people and all that. Modern is that scandal. So you can't have that. Yeah, this is what a story, Mark. So yeah. Wow. Now the father, Scott's natural father here was a water

1:23:07skier. A water skier associated with Cypress gardens, which is a central Florida tourist attraction, famous for its water ski shows. She hooked up with some water ski guy. And yeah. Some people say, oh, look at him go. I guess he's your shirtless. Maybe he's got a, maybe he's jacked. I don't know. So yeah, is she would, he grew up thinking that, you know, my fucking, my uncle is actually my brother, my grandma's my mom, my grandpa's my dad. So how he grew up? So he hung out at Stevens a lot as a teen, by the way, Scott did. He would run to Stevens house when he was about 14. He would show up glassy eyeed and incoherent all the time. Apparently, Steven told him stay away from drugs because he didn't even say you're going to get, it'll hurt you. He just said, you're going to get caught. You're going to get in trouble. So yeah, stop doing drugs. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's just, you know, interesting. Now, Steven, by the way,

1:24:16here, okay, Steven will talk about now. Here's the middle child, the family peacemaker as it would be thought of here. He's a failed everything. He's a complete failure. As competent as his dad was taking things over and being thrown into the mix, he is as incompetent. It's just, he's the, the air that just is going to bumble through it. He doesn't have it. He doesn't have it. You know what I mean? It's just he's, we're going to call him the, the broning of this story. Like he wants to be that, but it's just he's not quite, he doesn't quite get so hard. He's putting a lot of effort in and that's great, but he's not quite, he's never going to be that, you know what I'm saying? Boys, this all for the watch. Yeah, Jesus is hard to watch. So Steven obviously had all the money in the world, but just had no internal drive to do shit. His own father by the time Steven became a teenager, confided in a few people that he didn't believe, Steven would ever amount to anything.

1:25:19Because I think I got a dud here and my son here. Yeah. First born, I think he's a dud. He enrolled in Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster to study business, never graduated. Now he's a, he's a big tall, heavy set guy. He's about six foot two, two hundred thirty pounds. So he's a big guy, big imposing guy, clean cut glasses, mild mannered looks intellectually, you know, random, whatever, generally intellectual here. In 1975, when he was 24, he had a landscape company. And he ended up that one under funded by his parents, of course, that one under. Oh no. So I don't even know how you go under the ground, James. I don't know how you go under with a landscaping company, especially if you're rich, like you have all the equipment it was bought for. It's not like you're making payments on it. So you got to make a certain amount. What are we talking about here? Nobody calls. He just gloves the door. I don't know what you, you could run

1:26:22that business forever. Just have lawn mowers and a shed and if someone calls you to cut the lawn, it's weird. So anyway. So he joined Lancaster leaf. He had no choice. His dad said, why don't you just work here? And he said, no, no, I want to do this. And then when he failed, his dad was like, eh, and he was like, okay, fine. So his father was thrilled. Yeah. He said, now that he you're free of the bullshit and the distractions, maybe now you can buckle down and, you know, take, he said literally take hold of your birthright of this company, which is your birthright. As part of his apprenticeship here, Steven was assigned to the purchasing department, then to the technical side. And he ends up, he gets basically, he advises the company on how to best streamline its computer system and how to get rid of tobacco beetles in Lancaster leafs warehouse is by by installing an elaborate fogging system. So he has some ideas that are actually modernizing

1:27:23things. He comes in with a fresh with fresh eyes and goes, why don't we just do this in this and fix all that? What the fuck are we doing? But Steven said he felt the co-workers all resented him because he's the boss's son. It does. It's hard. Yeah. He had basically, he had a lot of big shoes between him and his grandfather, his father and his grandfather. He's got big shoes to fill. And everybody's looking at you like, this guy's not as good as his father and grandfather. You know, no matter what we all like his father and his grandfather. So he's got not just the shoes to fill for success, but personality. If we don't fucking like you, we don't fucking like you. That's it. It's a lot to fill. One of the guys who worked there said that he didn't like, Steven never liked working at the tobacco place. He said, Steven wanted to do something that he could say he had done on his own. He didn't want to follow in the family footsteps. He wanted to break away. Now, but he does. He stays at Lancaster Leaf for a while. And as a reward, Margaret and

1:28:24Edward offer to buy Steven and his first wife, a house, a bigger house. Because he's been doing so well. Margaret and Sistan on accompanying them, house hunting, of course. And there was one house that Margaret really loved, but Nancy, who is Steven's wife, didn't like it. Now, this is a house for Nancy and Steven and their children, not for Margaret, but Margaret liked it. And Nancy was like, I don't really like it. And so Margaret said, quote, you don't like this house, this beautiful expensive house. Maybe you forgot who's paying for it, Nancy dear. She's that lady. I'm going to control the situation. It's my money. And I want to make you understand that it's my money. Yeah. So anyway, she purchased a house. So they purchased a house that Margaret ended up picking out, of course, that was $77,655, which back then is a good fucking house, especially in Florida.

1:29:26That's a lot of money. It had a stone walled first floor, a nice address on Ridge Road, directly across the street from Benny and Margaret here. So in the same neighborhood, by the way, later on, they will buy a house around the corner for Carol and her two sons as well. Okay, they want to come down there. So now, when Margaret calls, Steven only has to go 50 feet across the street. Yeah. That's how that's going to work. Margaret told Nancy what old pieces of theirs would be retrieved from the attic and the family warehouse to furnish their home where she's going to put all the furniture. Margaret decides how Nancy's going to decorate her house and exactly where the couch goes and shit. Margaret decides how Nancy's going to spend Margaret's money. Yeah. Yeah. But that's wild to be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, you have to arrange the furniture the way I like, even though I don't live there because I paid for it. Like that's just weird. Yeah. Back to Steven and his failed fucking, yeah, it's exactly. Totally. Yeah. So back to Steven's

1:30:32failed life here. He keeps trying to landscaping the tobacco thing. He does import export for a little while. He does real estate, which is the land of the lost. We've discussed this before. It's only because I know realtors that have said this to me. Nobody go, nobody when they're 12 says, I'm going to be a real estate agent when I grow up. It's just it's a job you end up in because you find out that you have the skills that apparently work for it. So you end up doing it after a while. Burgler alarm sales, graphic design, advertising, this guy, because I can't figure out where he is. Now, all of these are his own businesses. He starts, which are all funded by Margaret. She would write a check. A lot of times she would co-own the venture, obviously, here too. So and give him the money. His business would fail. It would kind of die. And then he'd, and that, start another one. She'd pay a money. That's how it would work. Just over and over again.

1:31:36She series to finance a whole series of fuck up businesses that didn't amount to shit. Acquaintance has described Stephen as a loner who doesn't have any close friends. They said his adult life was dominated by his parents. And that was that. I mean, he was just in there, whatever. A friend of his said he struck me as a typical rich man's kid. Just kind of a fuck up. Never had to do anything on his own. Doesn't really know how to do it. Imagine the blessing that that must be to be able to start business after business fail all of them. And it doesn't fucking matter. It doesn't matter. I mean, it's great, but I could see why you could fail because you don't have to have this. Right. You got no passion in this because you got no skin in the game. No. When I started stand up, it was because I had to do this. This was all I had. It's all I had. If I didn't do well, you had a job, though. You had like a job with benefits of pension. I didn't have that. Like I had nothing when I started. You were the last to actually have

1:32:40a fucking your career up by doing stand up. You were fucking your real career up by doing that. Because you feel like on call and you'd come. Exactly. You know, it's true. I had no other talents at all to speak up to to make any sort of money that could get me out of a corporate career. Otherwise, I was going to be getting fired from every job for the rest of my life. And I was looking up at your corporate career with wide eyed fucking envy because I was serving goddamn papers and shit. Like waiting for someone to shoot me at their front door. Like it was horrible. So when I started stand up and when you started stand up, it was like this shit was for real to me. Like people would show up and they'd fuck off and they'd be drinking beer and hanging out with their friends. I'm like, I'm doing my set list. Fuck you. I'm in a fucking work. You know what I mean? I need this. This isn't a fun night out of the house for me. This is if I

1:33:42don't do this well, I'm in a fucking die at someone's doorstep and I don't want to do that. So and you were the same way with your thing. It's just fucking you know. And then we did this and it was like, yeah, thank God. And then we realized stand up. You have to have something before you can be anything and stand up. You can't just be funny and actually make a career off of that. You actually have to have a thing. And so then we dove into this and it was like this has to work. Right. Period. We have to have got to work. There are no choice. We are making them fucking work. And comedy is not even harder now being that you have to be something else. It's impossible now. Yeah. Just to get this a feature. You know, starts now. I don't understand what you what what the start is. No. What is it? The start is the start is start doing TikTok. Shit. Hope somebody notices it and then

1:34:44put together five minutes once your book somewhere. That seems to be the way people are doing this now, which is terrible for comedy, but good for their careers. I guess I don't know. Good for them. Now Steven, he's married. Yeah. Steven's married twice. First to Nancy Ferguson, who's the wife we're talking about saying, Hey, you know, you better like that house because I'm buying it. He's married to her from 72 to 79. All right. Now Nancy, every night would beg Steven to break free from his parents. Oh, please. Yeah. Well, she's our furniture is arranged in the way that her mother-in-law wants. That's not cool. So that's what they, you know, they'd say they'd sit there and they'd be watching TV and Nancy would tell him, you know, I really need you to do this. It's like our future depends on this. And she said he would just turn up the volume on the TV. Basically, I'm not listening. No thanks. There you go. That's amazing. That is fucking amazing. So one time here, she asked him if he was happy.

1:35:56She said, I'll try a different approach rather than attacking him, saying, Hey, do this. Do that. Maybe I'll ask him. Are you happy? Michael Jefferdy shut up. Yeah. Are you happy? What is it? Fucking hell. He said, quote, I've never even known what happiness is. And then she said, then Steven, what would make you happy? Really happy. Now she thinks she's broken through and he's going to sit and say that his true desires and what he wants to just do in life and whatever. And he paused. He sat thoughtfully for a minute and she expected something emotional and he said to make a million dollars before I'm 30. She was like, that's not what I was looking for. Never mind. Never mind. That's all it cares about. Two chicks in the same bed, baby. That's what I'm talking about. One of my fantasies is about two chicks, one bed, two chicks, one dick. And it's mine. Whoa, let's do it. Now, half five and Nancy's

1:36:57not high five. Wow. So then there's another thing that comes up. I guess when even when they're fighting Nancy and Steven, she never thought that Steven would cheat on her because he's kind of a dork and he's a homebody. So he never shared his feelings. So, you know, she knew that whatever. She thought that he was having a hard time or whatever, but she didn't know what he was exactly doing about it. She did a lot of traveling, though, to the Lancaster Leaf Processing Plant in Wisconsin where he was and when he was in town, he commuted to the Mount Joy operation, which is another place, which is a half hour away. He would also go out at night. So one evening, she followed him when he went out at night. Yeah. Okay. To the apartment of a young Brunette who worked as a secretary at the warehouse for one of the company's warehouses. All right. Nancy was distraught. Distraught. She does not confront

1:38:01Steven at the moment. She's dead. Goes back. No, no, no, she goes back home, goes across the street to his parents house and tells them about it. That's the only way it's ever going to get solved. If mom tells him you can't do it, then he won't do it. If she tells him it doesn't matter. So she said she's crying and she goes over and says, she's seeing another woman. And Margaret says, quote, we know, we know we know we've matter. We knew all about it. Yeah. Yeah. We know. That's it. And Nancy said that Margaret said it with a real self-satisfied look on her face. Why? But Edward's dad then says, we had him. Yeah. She's just a little slow on the uptake. Aren't you there, Nancy? Then dad Edward said, we had him followed some time ago. We know who she is. So Nancy was like, what the fuck? So then dad there, Benny said, oh, don't worry, Nancy. These

1:39:09things happen. It's just a fling. He'll get over it. So they tell her ignore it. Okay. It's fine. So she tries to follow their advice and just ignore this affair that she knows is going on. Oh my god. Which I have no idea how you do that. I guess you just count on it failing. Is that what she's hoping? Yeah. They said it. This happens. It's a fling. It'll be over it. But then he's going to move on to some other young chick he's banging. Yeah. He can't keep lawnmowering going. Don't worry. Yeah. It's fine. Well, I think he's like, I used to bang around a lot. They don't worry about it. He'll get over it's fine. So. But she noticed in the weeks, as this goes on, he's becoming even more and more brazen to what she calls rubber nose in this whole thing. Basically. So it's just like, what the fuck? Then at one point, he began telling Nancy to wrap up the dinner she took. She cooked. Okay. Wrap them up so I can take them with me when I go out.

1:40:16No, this is after he already ate. He'd eat and then say wrap up more food and he'd say, I'm going to leave. He was taking his wife's dinners to his girlfriend. No. That is wildly brazen. Imagine doing that. How cook for my. Would you please cook for my skank? Would you please? Yeah. My skank. You know, it's going to love these. The chick that sucks my dick. God, the chick whose drool is going to be on my balls by 10 o'clock tonight. That's so. Hey, everybody. Just going to take a quick break from the show to tell you the best home security that is possible to get simply safe, simply safe.com. That's IMPLI safe.com. That's right. We love simply safe and that is because they're on the cutting edge traditional home security systems alert you only after a break in is happening. Simply safe is designed to help stop the break in before it even starts. I'm telling you, so someone's trying to break into your house. So what if you have a

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1:43:30I'd like to see the look on her face when she takes a bite. See now I know she really likes it, you know. Yeah, I'm going to hide somewhere. You'll want to have a seat right there and Chris Hansen the fuck out of that. So Nancy's got her arms crossed. Like what do you think of that? And he goes, all right, come on. Let's go to chicks at the same time. Let's do it. To chicks one dick. Maybe let's do it. He thinks he has a salesman. I'll tell you that much. So when Nancy walks into this apartment, this small apartment where this other woman isn't even flustered by the fact that this guy brought his wife over. Comly introduces herself. They shake hands and politely offers Nancy a drink. Can I get you something to drink? I mean, that's mature. I guess so. We're all sophisticated adults here. So Nancy said she only allowed herself to cry once while she was behind the wheel of her car and driving home. After the bot. After she had a couple of drinks and after, you know, she said that chick's not bad at going down on you. She's not bad.

1:44:33I got to be honest with you. I didn't expect her to be any good at it, but it wasn't bad. No, just getting that. So she said that she thought that like this would be like a big moment where everybody would feel bad and she would say, look how fucked up this kid. But every this is and but everyone was just like, yeah, that's cool. You want a drink? I'm going to bang your husband. Like what do you want for me? No one cared. Now the affair soon fizzled out just like that said because that's just how affairs go. But he but she was over the whole thing by this. Now they degree to get a divorce Nancy and Stephen. Okay. Steven's going to be the one to file for the divorce because Nancy couldn't afford the legal fees. She said she would not contest it nor would she ask for Alimony or a property settlement. She just wanted out of the marriage, which this guy could not be luckier. No, she could nail his balls to the fucking wall on this shit and does blame his ass out and she just wanted out of this shit. Okay. So Stephen testified

1:45:35vastly and I quote, and this is from a book that I'll give you the title of at the end here. The problem with our marriage began approximately two years ago when suddenly it seemed that nothing I did satisfied my wife. She constantly criticized me the way I dressed my friends relatives just everything. Okay. I'm looking for I'm looking for the standout thing here. This all sounds like I believe that's in the vows to criticize to you know, to criticize friends relatives just everything dress and all that. Yeah. Yeah. Just kind of and sometimes we need it too because we're fucking idiots. We can't be we can't be trusted to our own devices. Yeah. Often her criticism was vicious in nature and was performed in front of friends and relatives. This was extremely humiliating and embarrassing to me. And when I would ask my wife to please stop criticizing me in front of my friends, she would go into fits of rage. Wow. Yelling and swearing at me. She used extremely

1:46:36vial language against me quote son of a bitch fucking asshole bastard. Those are the vial that's the vial as she got son of a bitch. Often her fits of rage and after her fits of rage, she would give me the quote silent treatment. And this would last for days on end. It's it's called fighting you idiot. You're in a fight. That's what it is. Yeah. That sounds like marriage. During the last year of my marriage, my wife refused to do anything with me. I would ask her to go places to dinner to parties. She would just simply refuse. She told me that she couldn't stand me anymore and didn't want to be married. You took her to your girlfriend's house, bro. What do you expect? What do you expect? You said your girlfriend, your wife's cooking without knowing that. Oh, now you're going to give me the silent treatment. Great. Perfect. Yeah. Wow. Although we did not need the money, she got a job. And when I asked her why she was working, she told me simply to get away from me. That's honest. During the last six months of our marriage

1:47:42before our separation, she completely refused to have marital relations with me. No fucking. Again, stating because she simply couldn't stand me. I can't believe she was fucking either previous six months before that. That's impressive. Wow. Hoof. Also during the last few months before our separation, my wife began staying out until the early hours of the morning. And when I would ask her where she had been, she would give me no explanation. She would simply state that it was none of my business and that she really did not consider herself married anymore. Okay. There you go. Yeah. It sounds like you're on the road to divorce and you should move on. That sounds great to me. So they get a divorce and in 1980, he finds another woman, Deborah Frank's Larson, which this is the craziest thing of all here. Deborah, her family is also a big tobacco family, which is weird as fuck. It's strange. Very strange. Yeah. This was on one of his trips to Wisconsin that he first encountered as the book describes it,

1:48:48the Bucksum Young Tobacco Sorter at the Lancaster Leaf Plant there. Debbie, the cumly blonde daughter of a dairy farmer, moved in with Stephen across the street from Margaret and Benny just three months after Nancy's departure from the scene. Despite the fact that Debbie was still very much married to someone else. Great. This is all just great. This is all fine. But if your daughter gets knocked up, we have to pretend your kids grandmother is their mother. Right. Rich people are fucking whacked, dude. You get a divorce three months later and go fuck a big titted blonde that's married to somebody else in another state. It's fine. I think I think Bucksum Brunette is how they describe Oh, no, no, Debbie, the cumly blonde. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Bucksum Young. Big titted blonde that's married to somebody else. That's right. A quick Dominican Republic divorce would prove a neat solution to this problem. And Stephen and Debbie married on June 7, 1980. Okay. Now, so he's going to end up

1:49:53having three children across all these marriages. And it's a mess. So by 1985, I've given you the lay of the land of the kids of the family. That he's dead. Margaret's controlling people with money. They're fucking up. Scott can do whatever he wants. No one pays attention to him. He does nitrous and drives around on a lotus. And, you know, it's crazy. You can understand why Margaret's trying to control everything because everybody's a fuck up. Yeah, but she doesn't control Scott. And he gets whatever he wants and lives in the house. And she's afraid of him. But this this one has to have his furniture arranged a certain way. Because you can control this one where Scott he'll take off if you try to control it. Well, there's that. But there's also, uh, it's that's almost like getting back at Carol Lynn is a Carol Lynn. Yeah, Carol Lynn. Yeah. For for having this child that's such a young agent leaving him to my responsibility. I'm not really even going to care for him. Oh, also, that's also how you treat your grandchildren. Your grandchildren can do no wrong. Yeah. And

1:50:56that's where I live. Do anything. Yeah. Yeah. Which yeah, you go, what the fuck? I wouldn't have been able to be allowed to do my responsibility. Yeah. Like, grand kid, I don't care. Let him do what they want. I'm sending him home with you at the end of the night. So have some more pixie sticks. Go ahead. You want him to behave? Well, won't you jump into a towel and get to fist fight? Yeah, do it up. So by the summer of 85, because remember, the explosion was July 9, 85 by the summer, there's so much money that's been put out. Stephen owes his mother tons of money close to $300,000 in shit. His sister's in that Carol Lynn owes over $100,000 as well. But it's just how it goes. Um, they're always borrowing. No one's ever paying back. And and Stephen figured if you're going to open a business that might fail, it's way better to borrow it from mom than the bank. The bank wants it back. Yeah. So yeah, the bank also wants to take other shit. Yeah. So then also Stephen figured out if you had the checkbook and mom wasn't reading the

1:51:59statements too closely, you could just write yourself checks and get as much money from them as you want from your mom as you want. So she did. And she, uh, her personal secretary Joyce Quinn pulled the numbers here at one point on who owed what? Because she liked to, you know, Lord, that over people. Sure. Um, she could give an allowance. She could take an allowance away. She could put you in. She could tell you she's going to cut you out of the will. She's very much using her money as strings here. Um, she is the family's, the bank of the family. Nobody else makes any money any other way. Um, so she started, you know, doing this. Um, and then she started getting into the books. Now Wayne Kerr, the accountant who told her to slow down a couple of years ago, he's on the scene as well. He's a family attorney at a Philadelphia and Margaret's lawyer, tax man, investment advisor, money man basically. Now Wayne Kerr was such close friends with Stephen that Stephen was best man at Wayne Kerr's wedding. Oh, fuck.

1:53:04So that's not great that no, her money man's all mixed up in that. Now Kerr flew down to Florida and 85 to handle Margaret's taxes. And he was like, holy shit. The businesses you own with Stephen are a fucking disaster. Yeah. A disaster, missing entries, checks that are just missing entirely have no idea where the fuck they went. No balances carried forward. He has no accountant in the company. So the books aren't done to where I can figure them out and know what the fuck to do. Yeah. So they said Stephen, not a good bookkeeper basically. Um, not a good bookkeeper. So the mess was so bad, he couldn't even do Margaret's taxes for 84. He had to file for an extension and said, Stephen's got to get his shit together. And basically, I'm going to be back in a couple months. We have to figure this money out. In the meantime, have Stephen clean all his shit up. And then when I come back, we'll do it again. Basically. So that's how many accountants fly to you to do your taxes. That means you're rich. Yeah. That's a good. We could even get our fucking account and a call

1:54:08us back for business shit. Not rich enough, apparently. Um, you know, the problem that they caused for fuck's sake. They caused. They didn't file something. It almost killed us both. So anyway, um, it all worked out by the way. So um, it's a lot. So basically this cur guy basically said that Margaret needed to stop being the bank for the kids. Listen, you need to worry about your other shit. If you want to leave them in her, it's as great, but either give it to him now and get it over with or don't give him shit till they have it. But don't stop them. Manage it. Stop being in the middle of it. Yes. Fall on their face. They fall on their face. Let it happen. Can't just be bleeding this whole time. Just hemorrhaging. So July 1985, I guess Carol comes down to Naples to visit her mother. Now, I know she has a house down there too that she bought for her. So I don't know what's up with that, but she's still in Boston. Um, then this is from early July this same week. The first week of July 1985. It's getting bad here. Um, the Wayne is in town and they're talking about the

1:55:12money and they're trying to figure out where the money went with Stephen and all that kind of shit. At this point, Stephen is president of Meridian Security Network Inc, which is a company that installs burglar alarms and Naples. And he's the he runs this one. Yeah. Yeah. He's been had a bank girl by mom. He's being sued locally by creditors claiming he owes them money as well. So not good. Um, so Margaret and Wayne Kerr are piecing this all together. Stephen had been given blank checks by his mother that she signed and left for him. Some while she was away on a cruise to cover payroll for the security business that they co-owned. Margaret figured a few thousand dollars here and there as needed. Instead, he was using these checks for a lot, staggering accounts of money, just moving them into his own accounts. Oh, God. Huge amounts. The exact figure, there's a couple of different figures here. There's a federal auditor later that would talk that Stephen appeared to have diverted the on the order of $180,000 and it was own personal accounts.

1:56:19Not even for the business. Just stole it. But wait. I don't get payroll going. Yeah. That ought to do it. But they said the misappropriation of everything over time between all the businesses, everything he stole, probably in the range of two to two and a half million dollars. Million dollars. Just drain from his mother. Stull it, drained it. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter because it's fucked. Stephen had just bought a big new house in Fort Myers somewhere between $215,000 and $235,000. As a swimming pool and tennis court and everything, he started the Meridian Marketing Company near his new house as well. And Stephen told his Meridian employees not to let anyone from the Naples-based company, the security firm know the name of the new business or what it did. That looks great. He's building all this secret money that July 7 is when Wayne Kerr flies into Naples and he's an overnight guest at Margaret's

1:57:24home in Krell Creek. There in the golf community. And Margaret takes Kerr to view the land she's buying. It's a lot where she's building a mansion that by the way, originally was going to be 17,000 square feet. That's the original plan, but she had to make some corrections and fixes and now it is up to 28,000 square feet. She's building a house. 28,000 square feet. That's 10 big houses. That's insane. That's insane. Normal, good size families too. Like doing okay family homes. Upper middle class family homes. It's 10 of them. That's acid. That's what that's this I think was 26,000 square feet is that unfinished mansion that Evander Holyfield was building with balling out. Remember that old crazy shit? That was what he was doing. And they were like,

1:58:24what an idiot. From one old lady. What is he? One old lady. 30,000 square feet. That is fucking she is planning on growing a giant Florida ass. Oh, huge. 27,000 square foot of ass. So she's going to grow. Wow. Now the outing plan for January 9th is going to stake the site, measure it, figure out what the best view is where the house should be all that kind of shit. So that's where they were all going on July 9th that morning. July 8th, 1985, Wayne Kerr and Margaret show up at Stevens business. Margaret and Wayne confront him at his company's headquarters about the money. Kerr said at the at times the discussion was heated. Then Margaret and Wayne Kerr drove without Stevens knowledge to look at his new house that he just bought and bought Myers to see what he was up to. Then Margaret sees a sports car in the driveway that pisses her off.

1:59:29Apparently she said, how'd you buy this house without robbing for me? He said, I sold my sports car to make the down payment on the house. Then she pulls in and there's the car he said he sold sold right in the driveway. So she's pissed off. So Margaret by then Wayne said was just talking about her son being a bad human being and said that she had great concerns about Stephen as a son. Just this guy, he's a piece of shit basically. She was openly talking of cutting Stephen off completely, which is interesting. Now the, she's talking about you have to produce the company books, answer for the money and then figure out what comes up next. Margaret tells Stephen she wanted to sit down and go through the business with him that night. Stephen told his mother he couldn't he had a business meeting and he couldn't do that. He said, excuse me. Yeah. Why this is a failing

2:00:31and I have to figure this out. I have to make some excuses. So he said, listen, tomorrow we're supposed to go to the house and do all that. After that, we'll figure out the book. So July 9th, after we go to the house and see that your mansion site will go there. That evening, Stephen called Carol, the sister Carolin to make sure that she and Scott would be there the next morning for the outing. You guys are coming too, right? Which makes sense because it's probably with like, I'm just going to be super uncomfortable with just me and mom. You guys have to come. He's getting yellow at me so much. Right. At least if Scott's there, I can go, well, he's a fuck up too. You know what I mean? At least there's something. Yeah. So she thought it was a little odd, but she thought maybe he just needed a buffer basically. And she said, Scott has no interest in looking at real estate, but he said, no, be there at 730. I'm going to be there. I'll be there at 730. So the next morning, 730 AM, Stephen Benson pulls up to the Quail Creek House and his beige work van. Okay. He is, which is

2:01:34strange because Stephen is from what we understand always late, always. Yeah, just always late for anything, especially anything in the early in the morning. He ain't going to be there on time. He's just not a morning person. Now, so no one's expecting him to pull in on time. So no one's even getting ready. Like, we got to leave at 730. They're like, they'll be here at 8 maybe. Well, we'll just whatever. So Wayne curries upstairs, getting dressed. He glances out the window. Sees the van, pull in right at 730. And he's surprised. He's like, Jesus Christ. He's here on time. Yeah. Bucks up with that. He's about to get an ass chewing and he shows up on time. On time. Carol and Margaret are still in pajamas. Like they didn't even get dressed yet. That's so, yeah. Scott is asleep. He's not even up. It's the first bit of nitrous yet. Fuck. Yeah. He hasn't even got that first fucking pull of the day. So Wayne cur comes downstairs looking for coffee and only finds Sanka, which is instant decaffeinated coffee, instant decaffe, which why would you drink that?

2:02:36Yeah. It gives none of the benefits of coffee. But yet still tastes terrible. This is terrific. Why would you want that? The instant is bad enough. Like Sanka, that freeze-dried shit is horrible. But decaffe, are you shitting me? That's like saying, do you have any non-alcoholic Scotch? Yeah. I mean, like, I wanted to taste terrible, burn, be awful, but also give me no benefits of actual Scotch. I'd like that to be if it's possible. Please give me THC free weed. I'd like that. Yes. Which some people do. They do that. And I don't get it. A hundred percent what? They do the shit that's like CBD only or like shit like I don't understand. Only. I don't get that because that doesn't do anything really. Yeah. Like in reality. I don't know. Free. THC free. I, I, I, there's some shit like that. Yeah. I'm not common, obviously. But yeah. So Steven here sees Kerr looking for coffee and he's like, there's instant decaffe.

2:03:39And Steven says, tell you what? I'll go out. I'll get caught. You're not even nobody's fucking ready yet. So I'll go out. I'll get coffee. I'll bring it back and I'll grab a fucking dozen donuts for everybody too for the right up. Oh, good dunks. Sure. Great. So he goes. He takes, goes on the donut run. He takes not his van. He says, my van's low on gas and I'll feel like stopping for gas too. So I'm just taking the suburban. Okay. I'll take that. So he takes Margaret suburban. There's like 10 cars in the driveway. I mean, four, Scott has four cars just on him. Yeah. So 2,280s for Christ. I'll take the lotus as what he should have said, I suppose. So about 730 to 840 AM here. Yeah. Is this coffee run? This should, it's the shop and go store. And this should have taken maybe 15 minutes tops to make this run. He's gone for 70 to 75 minutes. Yeah. Steven is. The family's housekeeper arrives at around 830 and Steven still isn't back with the coffee.

2:04:41So they're all joking in the kitchen about how long it's taken in this idiot to get coffee. He's such a moron. It takes, it takes him two hours to watch 60 minutes. Who's put terrible comics at that in 1983? I don't know. It's probably pretty clever then. It might have been, yeah. As I say, if Rodney Dangerfield didn't like 72, I'm sure it was, hadn't been done yet. So so there's jokes about 840 to 915 somewhere in there. He returns with coffee and donuts, hands it out to everybody. And then he starts arranging people. Normally when the whole family goes somewhere together, Steven drives. Yeah. Okay. That's how it works. But today, Steven wants Scott to drive for some reason. Oh, he insists. insists. And he wants Margaret in the front passenger seat. And he wants him and Carol to sit in the back, back seats of the car. That's the arrangement he has desired here. Now, Carol is very surprised. First of all, Scott never drives if they're all going

2:05:44somewhere. Second of all, Carol usually rides up front because she gets really car sick. So she's the, unless you want to stop to let me puke, let me sit up front. But she says she'll sit in the back just this once and climbs in behind Scott on the driver's side. She's carrying the plans for the house. She's got the plans in there. She stopped to grab a drink because Carol wasn't drink coffee, which is why she's a few steps behind everybody else because she stopped to get a drink while they were getting coffee in the front yard. So Steven, at this point is half in and half out of the back seat behind his mother on the passenger side. And they really go over later on exactly where he was, was he, how much on the seat, how much do they have one chic on one chic off was his leg vertical toward the ground or was it bent? One of those things. So Margaret says, who's got the keys? Yeah. And Steven says, I have them. Now he's, he is diagonal from Scott. Scott's driving. He's in the

2:06:50passenger back. So he could just hand them right like that to Scott. You walked all the way around this. Instead, he gets out of the car, yeah, walks around it around the back of the suburban. Yeah. Comes to Carol's side. And also boosts her seat, boosts her into the seat and moves her closer to the door there. Carol. Yeah. Okay. And goes to close it. And she says, no, no, leave it open. It's hot. I'm not, I'll close it when we actually leave. It's fucking stuffy. So he leaves, he leaves Carol's door open. Then he reaches through the window, hands the keys to Scott and says, oh, I forgot something inside. Steven says, I forgot the tape measure. We need that. I'll run inside and get it. He goes inside, jogs back to the house. Yeah. It's at that point. Scott turns the ignition and compoon. Yeah. The car explodes. Margaret and Scott are killed immediately, right? Right. Instantly, the bomb, it's, it's a huge blast. It hurls their bodies clear out of the vehicle

2:07:51on. Wow. Heard for five miles, like we said, debris raining on golf courses, pieces of the suburban pieces of flesh, pieces of things all over the neighborhood. Wayne Kerr hadn't got outside yet. Wayne Kerr is inside working on the books, I guess. I don't know. He wasn't going on the trip. He was going to be doing the books while they were gone. He hears Kaboom feels the whole house shake. And here's debris pelts the windows. Right. It's a shit raining down. He thought the first thing he thought was the lotus blew up because I guess the lotus has been backfiring super, super loudly. And he thought maybe there was something in it that caused it to explode. So he thought maybe the lotus blew up in the driveway. But it didn't happen. Too much nitrous. Come by the way. If my house exploded, nobody would say, I better lotus blew up in his driveway. Like that's a very specific thing. Let that misfiring lotus

2:08:54is the problem. Must be the problem. Yeah. But yeah, he said that must be it. Now Carol was in the backseat with the door open. She got blown out of the car and onto the grass. And she is conscious and on fire running around with her hair on fire rolling around trying to get the flames off of her screaming. The two golfers Charles Meyer and Fred Merrill run over. Remember Merrill was Margaret's realtor. They come over. They go to Margaret's side, find her on the ground beside the fully engulfed vehicle. Grab Wrangles, drag her away. Merrill goes to the driver's side, find Scott's body. Then sees Carol alive burning right beside the car and tries to help her. This is about 30 seconds to a minute after the first explosion. While this is going on, while he goes to help her, kaboom, it happens again. Yeah. It explodes again. Now this I guess apparently was right where this explosion went off right where Carol had been sitting under her seat.

2:09:58The second explosion throws shrapnel 200 feet and further. So the Merrill guy, he ends up getting a lot of the shrapnel on him. He was helping Carol away. He ends up losing part of his nose because of this. He got hit in the face. The chunk of something gets knocked off his feet and lands on top of Carol. Wow. Which either puts her out or sets them both on fire. So that's not great. Now Meyer, who had already tripped over some landscaping and was falling backwards when the second bomb blew, got shrapnel all across his chest here. He needed stitches and shit like that. That's not a gas tank. No, no, just but apparently the fact that he was falling down helped him. That stuff didn't hit it the same way. Yeah. They said if he'd been standing up, up right, the shrapnel would probably go into his chest instead of grazing it basically. So there's grounds keepers all over the place pulling the golfers back from the burning wreck.

2:11:00The golf course. Those are clients. Get those people out of there. Now Stephen, where's he? So when the first bomb went off, Stephen was jogging back toward the house. When the second bomb went off or second explosion, he was heading out of it. So somehow he is a voids any anything at all explosion here. Now the minutes after this, it is fucking chaos as you can imagine around here. I mean, there's still shit raining down. It's crazy. They said the suburban is completely open like a tin can completely engulfed in flames. There's two dead people on the grass. Carol is horribly burned and screaming and awful. Golfers are injured. Grounds keepers are getting shit on them. It's a mess. At this point, there is a neighborhood garbage man. This fucking idiot. He noticed that the burning suburban was close to Stephen's beige work van.

2:12:01He grabbed the keys to move it. You know, because you want to fuck with a crime scene, obviously. So yeah, I guess this guy had ran in and he said he had went to see if Stephen was okay. And he said he calmed down and Stephen asked this man if he could get him his cigarettes from the front of the beige van that Stephen had driven. I guess if you ever, there's a time we need to figure out it's probably now. I'm going to need a smoke. Yeah. I'm going to need a smoke. There he said that the van Stephen had driven. It was loaded with all the financial records that they wanted to see. The van was parked close to the suburban. So this guy said we'd better get it out of here. And he said before it blows up. So this guy hop behind the wheel of the van and reached to turn on the ignition when it struck him that, hey, maybe I shouldn't do this because maybe this will explode too. Yeah. How many of these are rigged? Exactly. So he didn't know. So he took the cigarettes off the seat and brought them back to Stephen. And then a law not long after a member of

2:13:02the bottom squad disengaged the ignition and scoured the van for anything else. And then when they re-connected the ignition, they found nothing. The tank was about a quarter full. So we have a quarter tank. So this is crazy. Now Wayne Kerr makes it as far as the front door, sees the carnage and concludes that I'm probably more useful calling 911 than jumping into this mess right now. So he does that. Well, he doesn't do it. He gets the housekeeper to call 911. Oh, yes. Somebody calls 911. Now Stephen is has shaking and having trouble talking, unable to give a dispatcher useful information here. Doesn't know. So paramedics, police, fire, ATF, everybody shows up here. Paramedics check Stephen over could not find a scratch on him. Not one scratch. Not a scratch. They urge him go to the hospital anyway. You might have shock. You could have internal injuries. Yeah. You know, get looked at. Now Carol is so critically burned

2:14:05that she'll be eventually flown to a Boston burn unit. They flared a can't even fixer. They have to fly her to Massachusetts to fix her ass. So this is a, in a in a burn unit, abort a lear jet outfitted with intensive care equipment. You wonder what the fuck you, how much did that cost? How much is that trip? That is a private jet with intensive care, like a hospital room and a private jet all in one. The private jet from Florida to Boston is 20 grand. Add in an intensive care unit on the bed. What is that cost? Holy shit. And the staff to do all the work. Wow. That is something else, man. So within hours, the police are joined by special agents from the federal Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms or Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. I should say they've been ordered to comb the area for anything that didn't grow, essentially. Anything that's not grass or plants, pick it up. They wore magnetic gloves

2:15:06and they squatted on the driveway, sifting the soil beneath and around the suburban for any fragments of metal that might pop up. They others found pieces of fabric, metal and flesh in the trees and even on the roof. Oh, fuck. Neighbors would later hire a special cleaning service to remove bits of flesh that have been blown onto their screens. No, it's gross. It's like if you get spaghetti sauce and a strainer, you know what I mean? You're fucked. That shit's going to harden in there. You're never getting it out. That's basically what they had at that point. So they needed special. It's crazy. Steven refuses to go to the hospital. He doesn't want to leave the house, which they say is probably in shock, whatever. So the lead investigator on this from the Collier County Sheriff's Department is named Harold Young. He's one of the first to respond and he said the suburban was blown to bits, bodies lying on each side and he goes into the house looking for the survivor here. Steven, he finds Steven on the telephone, smoking a cigarette. Yeah. Okay.

2:16:08We'll talk about in a second what he heard, but they talked for a minute and he, they said, well, why'd you take an hour to go to the store? And he says, well, I was going to buy coffee and I ran into two workers from the San Castle construction company. He said, I don't know their names. I don't know their names, but I was just chit-chatting with a couple of guys I knew. I can't I don't know their names. I just know them from around. Hey, you. I know I got five people waiting for me, but let's talk for 45 minutes or so while this coffee gets ice cold. What do you say? Two guys that I'm not even about to ask your names. So he does the detective describe Steven's demeanor as quote, calm as a cucumber. Okay. When he first walked up to him when Steven was on the phone, he was talking to a business associate and he heard the guy from the business that he's talking to. He heard Steven ask, quote, how much did we take in yesterday? Oh boy. This is before the initial responders have gotten there. He's already on the phone with his business asking how

2:17:11much money did we make yesterday? It shouldn't really matter right now. Yeah. So then his wife, Deborah, is brought into the scene here. Debbie's brought it. Okay. The big, did he blow and they go get her. Yeah. He goes, you'll want to do that. She has huge tits. You'll enjoy having her in the car. Don't worry about it. So Debbie seemed, they said, less concerned about what had happened. And she kept saying that someone's out to kill Steven. She said, Scott Margaret are at the wrong place at the wrong time. Steven's alive. And there's still someone lurking out there who wants him dead. He was the target. So this is this is scary. So anyway, they go in later on, they're looking around the house. Deborah had already been inside. When they go into search the house for additional bombs, because they don't know if maybe there's something in the house. Steven's wife Deborah emerges from a bathroom. And she's like, whoa, you guys are looking pretty serious. She said, here I am sitting on the pot and I could have blown up. You know, like lethal weapon style.

2:18:11Sit on the pot. Steven and everybody left. Also officers at one point brought Steven a lawn share. So he could sit comfortably in the front of the house. Well, you know, they clean up the corpses of his mother and brother, or nephew, I guess, be more accurate. The medical examiner says that Margaret and Scott died of multiple quote, overwhelming injuries from the explosion. It's an exploit. How they die exploded. A section torn apart. Yeah. Margaret had extensive injuries concentrated on the left side of her body and Scott, mostly on the right side, the middle of the car. Right in the center. Yeah. Yep. They said that Scott had a piece of wood driven into his chest, consistent with their positions in the front seat. When the center console, they think that's where the explosion came from. A sheriff's investigator described the scene as what appeared to be flesh and blood on the side of Steven's work van as well. And human remains thrown all the way across the street.

2:19:14So he's got his mother's, because it's on that side, he's got his mother's exploded flesh on his van too. Wow. Okay. The police said at the end, quote, we know it was an explosion. We haven't confirmed whether it was a bomb. We may, we may know tomorrow more information. Okay. The next day, July 10th, federal and local investigators reveal that two bombs were the cause of the blast. Two two bombs. Now Carol has been transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital by that point. And Steven has questioned about the explosion, but no details are released from a statement. But we know what he said. He said, I was talking to a couple of construction guys. The Collier County sheriff's lieutenant Eric Daniel said that the victims, quote, probably didn't have a chance to move before the vehicle exploded around 8 30 AM. So now the first bomb was positioned in the center

2:20:15console area between and just behind the front seats inside the vehicle in the console. Yeah. Those consoles and those vehicles and those suburban's ram charters Broncos, you could put a norm huge. Yeah. You put your car seat in there. If you're a few, James, I used to put two bombs in one. Yeah. They're huge. Gigantic. So, gigantic. Yeah. We don't know if it's from under it or in it though. The second bomb, this one had been positioned toward the left rear right where Carol had been sitting. Uh huh. Okay. Um, at and the delayed second blast, they said a piece of evidence here, a bomb expert would later conclude that the devices were designed to make certain that everyone in the vehicle died essentially. Right. They were placed and made that way. Police have said the second bomb was controlled by a timing device. Uh huh. This is complicated. Carol told investigators that the first blast appeared to happen when her brother turned the key in the ignition. That seemed

2:21:19to be the trigger for that one. But they said the second one is on a timer. Huh. Okay. Now the estate things are filed in court. The estate is worth over $10 million in cash securities in real estate. Mom's estate. Okay. Which is now down to his and Carol if she makes it. You know, we don't know. She's in a burn unit. July 11th, 1985. Kerr Wayne Kerr files the will. He filed it then, um, the will name Scott and Stephen and Carol as heirs and Kerr as executor and trustee. So I mean, he's a guy who would be distributing this shit. Okay. The next day, there's a challenge to that will. Oh, a guy named Guillaume de Loach, a Naples lawyer filed a will dated January 29th, 1985, which is two years after Kerr's will. Yeah. Naming the same heirs, all three kids, but excluding Kerr as executor. Oh, and Kerr out of this. Yeah. Because he's involved with, uh, maybe perhaps that's

2:22:25possible. That could be the reason. Uh, so a circuit court judge freezes all the assets of the estate until it can just be decided who is what and which will is valid and what the fuck's going on. So July 15th, Kerr announces that he will contest the validity of the second will, which leaves the state directly to the kids without him in the middle as an executor. I want to control the money now. Um, Stephen in the weeks after this talks to the press quite a bit, he even wrote to the press, uh, insisting he had no idea what the motive could be, no clue who would want his family dead. Um, now the papers and a lot of people are running hard with the theory of Scott must have pissed somebody off. Scott runs a wild loose life. His drug life, eternity suits, all-night parties, yeah, snap and hit in his sister mother with fucking beat like he must have pissed somebody off to the point where they said, all right, fuck this asshole. That's the real wildlife when your cars got

2:23:28gnaw in it and it's for you. That's just that's unbelievable. That is crazy. Yeah. So they have a wake in Naples and then the funeral will be in Lancaster later on because that's where they have the family, Muzzleium and all that shit. So in Naples, about 35 people as a the newspaper put it, many of them young and fashionably dressed attended a closed casket viewing in Naples. It was the hottest social event of the season, Jimmy. Investigators still have no leads. One of them said the whole thing is a mystery. Yeah. So funerals happen. Margaret and Scott were flown to Lancaster and interned in the family, Muzzleium. Only relatives and close friends were permitted to attend and police were there too watching just in case they do that when there's a murder. So you shows up on this day, the Reverend that they had called the deaths of Scott and Margaret, foolish, ugly and reprehensible in front of about by the way, close friends close friends and just families about 250 people.

2:24:30That's pretty nice. I mean, easy to make friends with your rich. Yeah, right. So they're placed there at the Woodward Hill cemetery. Now at the funeral, Steven sits between his wife, the big, titty blonde and his grandfather, Harry, who's still fucking alive by the way. What? Harry is still alive. Wow. So that's a big dad. Yes. If Harry had made them wait till he died to get the money, they'd be poor. They'd be middle class because they'd be working at stuff if there wouldn't be nitrous tanks and lowlases and all this crazy shit going on. So Harry, who still works on his tulips, it's all he cares about this poor man. I mean, this poor guy since 80s, right? Yeah, he's born in 1897. So he is 80 years old at this point. Oh my God, almost 90. Yeah. So during this, Steven leans over to his grandfather and asks him for a $20,000 loan during the funeral.

2:25:36Ah, that's a pro rea. Harry said, okay, he gives it to him. Oh, he doesn't know what he's got. He has no idea about all that other stuff. So he just thinks, oh, yeah, you probably need a couple of bucks to, you know, whatever. Here you go. So police talking to Steven, they keep pressing him on that missing hour. And he just says, I bumped into some people. I don't know their names. What more do you want from me? That's it. I'm real social. I'm just no people, damn it. July 17th, investigators fly to Boston to interview Carol in her hospital room to get because she's finally like less less medicated enough to get words out at this point off the morphine just enough. July 18th, 1985, Steven has an announcement. Okay. He announced that I, I cooperated with the investigators, but now his company issues a statement urging the public to help in the investigation. However, he says that I through his attorney, I will no longer be cooperating with them.

2:26:39You guys should, but I won't be. I'm going to take a powder on this whole shit. Cool. If you guys could cooperate on my, in my stead, that would be lovely. I mean, go for it. But not me. July 21st, Harry, grandpa, Harry does an interview with the newspaper where he says, he's, remember we said what a nice guy is. He said he's very, very sad and this hurts his heart and everything, but also that he forgives whoever killed his daughter and grandson. Wow. Because he's a church guy and he takes that shit seriously. Yeah. It's not just a social outing for him. He really like looks at this. Oh, okay, forgiveness. Sorry. You're great grandson. If we're being honest, it's be honest here. Yeah. It's great, grandson. No shit. So the investigation, here we go. The Collier County Sheriff's Office runs the local investigation with other people in the mix here. All right. So the home, it sits on a white violet way, like we said, treeline street inside Quail Creek and has the guard entrance that you

2:27:44have to even service people have to sign in people have to be phoned. This matters a lot because they're like, how the fuck does someone get in there and plan a goddamn car bomb when you have to go through a guard gate that takes your name down and calls the people. So they're like, that's that's interesting here. By the way, this country club, the golf club they live on, it's like tens of thousands of dollars a year just in membership fee. Oh, yeah. It's crazy. So they wonder also, who was the target here? Right. Which of the four? Who was the target? That's the thing. There's four different people living four different lives. So in the first hours and days here, they they're just baffled and then they said, you know, this was more of a mystery than most investigations. And they said they don't have any good leads like they normally have an murder case. Yeah. They're like, we don't have the, I saw the guy doing this or we don't have any of that. It's a bombing inside a gated golf course community with a guarded entrance of visitor log book,

2:28:44a low key widow. No one seems to have a grudge against. None of this shit makes sense. One local resident said he could imagine something like this happening in Miami among the gangsters or in Beirut because you know, Miami Beirut, same thing, but never Naples. Never. Not in this town. That's what's going on. Never here. So they said the vehicle was registered to both Margaret and Scott. Margaret was the money, but Scott was a wild kid with a crazy crowd and a temper and probably enemies and they might owe people money and he's an addict and he's involved in drugs and anything can happen. So the initial theory from all the investigators is that Scott was the intended victim. I'm at the bombing as tied to his drug world and that maybe he owed the wrong people money or maybe he saw something he shouldn't have. And that's what the press ran with. Hard party and rich kid named in person paternity suits with all these parties hanging out with strippers and drug dealers and it all catches up to you. 21 years old to anger that many people. Man, that's wild.

2:29:52So they chase every lead down. Everybody ever talked to. Everybody ever bought drugs from everything like that. Nothing comes of it. Nothing. That theory just goes away. They dig in with social circle, the drug enemy theory. That's a dead end. There's nothing. They can't figure it out. That's when the secret surface they found out that Scott was really carol sun and raised his Margaret's. The cops didn't even know that till they were made investigation here. Yeah. I don't think I think it was if I'm not mistaken, I think it might have been Margaret's sister that told them like that's not that's her kid, not Carol's kid in the middle of this. So they were like, what the fuck? Then they said holy shit. What if he found out about that? And got so fucking mad that everybody lied to him and said, fuck everybody. Fuck me and fuck everybody. Let's do this. And I'm going to blow the whole goddamn family up. Who knows? 21 years and you're an unstable guy to begin with a little bit. You might snap.

2:30:53So then they said, no, they said he never knew the secret. They know there's not ever any proof that he found out about. It's crazy. They talked to all his friends. He never said to any of his friends or his girlfriend that he found out about. He would have told somebody about it. So yeah. And they said the paternity rumors and the party rumors. They're all true, but they're not motives. And they couldn't find anybody that would want to kill him. They can't figure it out. The bomb in the vehicle requires access to the vehicle inside a gated community with a guard outside. That's the problem. They even looked into the well, the family dog, not about the bombing, but Scott kept a guard dog. And they said, no one reported the dog raising any alarm about a stranger near the cars that morning either. So if someone snuck in around the gator through the golf course or something, then what? So he was too busy. Shitting on the burger. Yeah, exactly. So if ATF agents will may get their look at the vehicle, one of them made the joke that it was either a murder or these people had one hell of a lawsuit against general motors. Because this

2:31:56is an explosion. Holy shit. The suburban, they said, had been reduced to what one first responder described as an open, a torn open beer can. That's how they described it. The hood blasted upward, the windshield blew out, the roof peeled back, everything. A team of around 20 investigators combed the gravel driveway and surrounding yards and recovered some 40 fragments of two suspected pipe bonds. Among the debris, they also found pieces of what looked like a circuit board, a mother board fragment. They theoryed theorized had come from a burglar alarm, which is a detail that is points in one certain very important. Yeah. The debris field was so intense. They said with fragments and everything else being thrown so far that the investigators had to keep widening their search perimeter. Wow. Because it kept going farther than they thought pulling pieces from screen porches and garrard, you know, houses down the street. And also they were scared of

2:33:02a third device. They were really afraid in the beginning there might be another bomb in one of the other cars in the driveway. So they used their remote control setup to turn on the ignition of the other vehicles from a safe distance, one at a time to see if any of them were rigged with explosions. That's how we find out if they're rigged. We've started. We you put a remote start thing on back away and see if it explodes. See if this if I'm in the neighborhood, I'm definitely gathering around for that. This is going to be interesting. Yeah. I'm going to keep my distance, but definitely then they're studying the catastrophic explosion and the pattern of injuries on the bodies. And that's how they're working out the sequence and the seeding Margaret had been in the right front passenger. The extensive damage was concentrated on her lights right side. Obviously the opposite with Scott two people sitting up front each shredded worse on the side facing the console. So duh. It's in the center console. Very easy. Second bomb position toward the left rear passenger area right where Carol had been sitting at the time of the timing of the second

2:34:07blast 30 seconds to a minute after the first is the detail that gives them a lot of information. A bomb expert concludes that the devices were designed to make sure everybody died the first blast to kill the front seat second blast to kill whoever sat in that back seat behind the driver. It was a two-stage kill engineered to kill everybody. And they said the only reason Carol survived is because her door was open. Yeah. It blew her away from the car out of it. Yep. Which helped her. Whereas the other thing they were trapped in there and got all the shit. It didn't the force was able to stay and injure them rather than to go all about. Right. Exactly. And that's only because she asked even to leave it open. It was hot. Right. Because of the AC. Yeah. So they said when the first bomb went off the open door and the blast dynamics blew her out of the vehicle and onto the grass before the second device, which was the one meant for her, could get her. So the golfers playing their game saw the family gathering at the car,

2:35:10expected to keep playing their round. Instead they saw this explosion. They said the call to 911 was a mess. They said because Wayne Kerr couldn't answer the dispatcher's questions because he genuinely didn't know what happened. He was doing numbers and then an explosion. Steven was too shaken to talk. So the housekeeper ended up on the line. Nobody in the house could tell the dispatcher what had exploded or why or how, which is interesting. Now they're trying to figure this all out. Then they figure out they find something. Because one thing they said why weren't you in the car to Steven? He said I went back to get the measuring tape. And so did Carol. He went back to get the measuring tape. What they find in the debris near the vehicle is a fucking measuring tape. It was in the truck the whole time. He didn't go back to get it. It was in the truck. So they're like what up with that? They go, I mean, he maybe he didn't know it was in the truck and thought he was in the house. Who knows? But that seems pretty suspicious. Sure enough. Then also Harold Young, the first

2:36:13investigator said that it was just weird. He took a 75 minute coffee run. He took the suburban with him and took way too long to get coffee rather than taking any of the other cars. He's the one who told everybody where to sit. Then he runs out of the car. It's very roughly. He's either the luckiest son of a bitch alive or he's got some splain into do here. So then they trace the bomb components, four inch galvanized pipe and matching end caps. They trace that to use supply, a construction and plumbing supplier, which is just a few yards from Steven's office. A few hundred yards. Sorry. The hardware store they find that on July 5th, 1985, a man matching Steven's description walked into use supply and buys two four inch galvanized steel end caps. He signs the receipt, the signature is illegible. He gives the company name as Delray Construction, which does not exist

2:37:17and wears a baseball hat and dark sunglasses while he purchases these. To make you look like the unibomber, you want to look as much like the unibomber as possible when you're buying bomb supplies. I want to look as suspicious as possible. Man. So July 8th, 1985, the day before the explosions, a man matching Steven's descriptions makes a second purchase two galvanized steel pipes, four inches in diameter, 12 inches long, pays in cash. So now he's got the end caps from the fifth. He's got the pipes from the eighth. That's a big ass pipe. It's big. I mean, these are big explosions. Giant bomb. The it was $36.00 and eight cents and then $28.00 and five cents total. So he spent possibly $64 to kill his family. What the fuck? That doesn't seem like enough. I mean, he got $64.00 and 32 cents. Yeah, that's what they're thinking. So they built a composite sketch from the salesman's description. It resembles Steven.

2:38:20Yeah. And the salesman said he couldn't rule Steven out. Didn't pick him out of the line up but said I can't rule him out. Six, two, big guy, 230 pounds. He fits the description. So he was supplied, by the way, was only technically supposed to sell to licensed contractors. But you got a guy standing there with cash in his hand and a couple of pipes and he's just trying to finish this job real quick. They're gonna fuck it whatever. That's fine. Just laying a little bit of pipe everybody. Then they get the, because I mean, that's the, his description's fine, but you need more proof. Then with a search warrant, investigators obtain Steven's Palm Prince and compare them against a Palm Print lifted from the paperwork that was signed. And it's a perfect match. Left-hand Palm Print on the receipt at a large number of points of identification. Not a lot of doubt. There's a lot. Plenty to really know it's his fingerprint or a Palm Print.

2:39:22So then there's trace evidence here on Steven's pants. Investigators recovered a single particle, a flake of zinc, a flake. One flake consistent with the galvanized coating on the pipe used in the bombs. They said, holy shit, it flaked off onto him when he was building the fucking bombs. That's what happened. Galvanized steel shed zinc and Steven had zinc on his clothing. There you go. Wow. So then the timers as well. The detonation method pointed back to Steven's skill set, which is computer shit, which is exactly what it does. A bomb technician concluded that the devices had probably been set off electronically or electrically a conclusion consistent with the two closely timed sequenced blasts and consistent with Steven's professional background of installing burglar alarms and security systems. Because this circuit board fragment they found is from a burglar alarm. And he has a company that does burglar alarms, which seems, yeah, he understood wiring,

2:40:26triggers, time circuits, he knew all that shit. That's all that stuff. So that's the one basically. They said that also this isn't his first homemade explosive. There's a backstory from a workman, a groundskeeper at the family's compound in Pennsylvania years ago. He said that he looked down from his ladder one day and saw Steven walking across the yard carrying copper tubes with wires attached. Then heard a huge explosion. What the fuck? He came off the ladder, walked toward the tennis courts, and saw Steven holding what looked like a remote controlled device with two buttons on it and laughing. He said he was just cracking up because he blew something up just for fun. Wow. There's also testimony that had a memorial gathering. Steven himself had spoken about previously making and setting off pipe bombs with copper pipe and gunpowder. Really? Jesus Christ. So then

2:41:26there's the money. Steven is, he's just bought that big house and now all the walls are collapsing on him. So the sports car. The federal auditor looks into this and said he stole at least $180,000 and into just personal accounts. Meanwhile, the total misappropriation is running well into the millions. This was all coming to light. That day he had to have an explanation for what he did literally two hours later when they got done with this trip. July 25th, 1985, Wayne Kerr attempts to have a Naples stock brokerage firm turn over more than $1 million in Benson stock and their stocks and the brokerage firm declines because it's still being fought in the courts. So even though it's well put on hold, Wayne is still, Wayne Kerr still trying to get moves made somehow. Meanwhile, Carol is improving. Oh, she has skin grafts that appear to be successful. And yeah, so they

2:42:32the two investigators that were up there returned to Florida after talking to her a whole bunch. July 27th, 1985, Steven Benson closes down his Florida businesses, telling his employees that funds to keep the operations going are tied up following the deaths of his mother and brother. I can't steal anymore from him. Yeah, yeah, can't steal. So he was also in addition to the burglar alarm and security firm. He was operating a public relations and marketing firm in Fort Myers as well. He could use some public relations at this point. July 29th, 1985, a Florida attorney charges that Margaret Benson never properly signed a 1983 will and that Wayne Kerr may have committed fraud upon the court and perjury when he told a probate court judge that he knew of no will written after May of 83. Oh, so they're saying she told you when she got her other will go and and you're trying to just be in control. What is that about? Well, it's because these the

2:43:32executors get gigantic fees for doing this. That's the thing. This isn't about stealing that money. You don't have to. That's why people want to be executors because they get massive fucking, you can charge massive amounts of fees to do that. So it's a huge deal. It's the best business you could be in July 30th to August 5th here. A Collier County judge freezes the Benson estate, barring any distribution of assets. A representative for Carol announces her presence for the January 85, her preference for January 85 will. She likes that will better. The one that just gives her the money right away rather than having to go through Kerr. And yeah, and also even though the will from May 83 leaves all of Margaret's jewelry to her, but the other one doesn't. She said, I'd rather take the other one anyway because I can buy jewelry with the massive amount of fees. I'm going to pay this guy. August 5th in separate requests, Stephen and Carol asked the judge to

2:44:37be joint administrators of their mother's estate. So they said, let us do it. Let us be the administrators. August 8th, detective say an arrest may be made by the end of the month. And that same day, Wayne Kerr is interviewed by three for three hours by investigators and Naples. August 10th, Carol is released from the burn center. Great. She's doing great. August 16th, 1985, Wayne Kerr says, fuck it and withdraws his request to administer the estate. Not worth my time. Fucking August 22nd, 1985 at 10 a.m. Steven is at his attorney's office when the police show up and arrest him. Wow. Absolute for murder. Double and attempted and all sorts of other shit. Yeah, there's a lot. Now when they arrest him, Steven had driven here in his work van. The bridge van. Yeah. The beige ones. That's very light. Some people call it white. So it's like a very

2:45:39light beige on his door. He still has blood and flesh from his mother. He never even cleaned his mother's fucking brain matter off the side of his car. When is this August 22nd? He's been driving around for a month and a half with with brain on his car with mom on the side. That is fucking insane. Six weeks. That is wild. I'm surprised the rain didn't take it off in that much. That is much rain. Florida. Shit. So he's a rain that enters a plea of not guilty to nine charges against him. And then they're talking about they have to change venues because there is renovations at the Collier County Courthouse. Also, there's a ton of publicity here. So you should probably move it anyway. Now Harry, grandpa, great grandpa in some cases is still alive. And he asked personally that the judge denies Stephen Baal. Yeah. This nice man, you've pushed him too far.

2:46:45He said anyone willing to murder his own mother and brother, quote, he brother for money, would be willing to murder his grandfather for the same money. Yeah. I don't feel safe. The charges are two counts of first degree murder. One count of attempted first degree murder, plus arson of a dwelling and a shitload of explosives related counts that are separate there. Because using explosives to commit a murder as a federal offense, there was a judicial and jurisdictional issue of where do we try and state or federal. At the time, though, there is no federal death penalty, but there is certainly one in Florida. So they decide, let's try and state level and get him a death penalty. He gets no bail, by the way. So July of 86 is the trial. So a year later, after the explosion and the deaths and everything else, it's a, it's in, imagine just this, even if these people were nobody's, this would be a crazy story that everybody covered. But the fact that they're rich on the golf course and all that is just the biggest story ever in Naples. Huge. So they have to move it to Lee County here. There's a big article here

2:47:52in the Philadelphia, Daily News, Stephen Benson murder trial draws Hollywood interest. Yeah. A Hollywood movie producer was in court yesterday to get a first hand look at the Stephen Benson murder trial in hopes of bringing the story to the silver screen. Elliot Geisinger, producer of the Amityville Har and other feature films has said the people from his, from his firm in attendance at the trial since it's start, but he's had his partners, him and his partners wanted to get a first hand look. He said, we think it's a fascinating case. He said he called it a soap opera aspect of the story is what interests him as a film producer conceiting the story might be better suited as a made for TV movie than a Hollywood feature. Might be right. Yeah, might be right. It's a huge circus. People magazine came, CNN came. This is 86. This isn't, you know, now reporters fly in from around the world and the country, local television is preempting regular programming to run live courtroom feeds. It's huge.

2:48:53One station cut away from a soap opera to go live to the Benson trial and it got 100 angry calls from people that are pissed off that the soap got cut off and then a record number of calls asking when they would go live with the trial again, because that was awesome. Can you please just skip days of our lives? Fuck it. Day now. This is way more dramatic. What we just told you is way better than two years of days of our lives or whatever the fuck it is. Palmer Cable Vision, the cable company ran a nightly hour long recap of each day's proceeding called the Benson Chronicles. Wow, at least three authors are in the gallery working on notes for the case as well to write books. The Brock Brothers who are prosecuting use more than 200 exhibits in this whole thing. Reporters by the way, because they have the Brock Brothers and then they have the defense team who are like Jaguar driving slick back guys. So they call this whole thing Miami Vice meets the Beverly Hillbillies. That's the defense team versus the Beverly Hillbillies and the prosecution team.

2:49:59Wow, they also did a weird thing where they picked the newspaper, put an ad out in the paper for six men and six women to be a mirror jury to go to the court and then the paper will ask them like if they were a jury, what they would do. Which is interesting, but the only thing is they would have to leave every time the jury gets dismissed or else you're hearing shit. They're not hearing. So that'll change your mind. You gotta keep them exposed to the same shit the jury's exposed to or nothing more. That's it. Yep. So they were paid the same hourly wage that they received for their regular jobs by the newspaper. They appeared to have little in common with the real article. One was a pink, coft high school English teacher from the Midwest, a younger woman with jet black long hair. Okay. And heavy mascara was dubbed Cleopatra by reporters. Well, another mirror jury, a juror was a bald man from Las Vegas with a white mustache and double pierced right earlobe. Oh, these are things nobody would even notice now about them. Back then it was like

2:51:01they're weird. It's a fascinating guy from Vegas. That's it. But they say by now the trial had more than its full complement of colorful regulars among them a soap opera writer and baggy pants and dark glasses, a red head with ruby studded ankle bracelet and a straw fan had an 83 year old retiree who always brought along tucked under his arm. One of his painted wooden duck decoys. No. Well, that's a guy with him brings it with him. I made this who wants ducks. I mean, shit. There's all that attention. On the physical evidence, the state walks the jury through everything. The receipts, the fake Delray construction, the name of disguise, the palm print, the zinc flake, the reconstructed devices, the fact that he has expertise, you know, all the evidence. There's a lot of evidence. Yeah. Fingerprint expert testifies that that's definitely his palm print on the invoice, recording the sale of the pipes that blew up. Another here, I am metallurgist and bomb technicians also testify to the construction, the galvanized steel pipes,

2:52:04roughly 12 inches long, four inches in diameter with matching galvanized end caps screwed on to contain the charge packed with nails and tax to maximize the shredding damage. Nails and like it's an Iraqi IED. What the fuck are you doing? This is your family. Wow. The last detail here about it was it wasn't really, it wasn't just a bomb. It was a shrapnel. It was meant to kill, not to explode. Wow. Later on, a juror would say that the horror was fathoming that someone had plotted and skimmed and told the people where to sit too. Like that seems gross. Really gross. The forensic testimony investigators reconstructed the pipe bombs dimensions from partial fragments since no intact pipe survived to measure, extrapolating diameters from partially reconstructed end caps or conferences, inferring length from threading dimensions that matched industry standards

2:53:05for 12 inch pipe of that width. Reasoning the caps had to have been screwed on because otherwise the device couldn't have contained gunpowder or functioned at all. Got to have something to keep it in. It is a gunpowder as the explosive filler, a smokeless powder in lab reconstructions confirmed through microscopic examinations of the recovered particles and thin layer chromatography comparing the residue against the powder standards. Okay. So Carol testifies. She takes the stand and it's like they call her and she hasn't been sitting there. So no one's seen her and they just know she's been horribly burned as all we've heard. So when they call her, everyone's like what's she going to look like? And the interesting thing is the way the book put it was very interesting. She was beautiful still, but had you could see the marks from the burns from the graphs. Yeah. But they said it she looked like a movie star who was playing someone who got burned a little bit. That's what she

2:54:09looked like. She said she was still still beautiful. And the pictures of her like from the newspaper from back then where you can't really see that kind of thing. She just looks like a pretty blonde lady. So by the way, now she refers to Scott as my son on the stand. She started out as runner up of Miss Florida. So it probably just looks like this is pretty. Yeah. Like what's the gen now? She's still hot. She just looks like Miss Mississippi. And that's that. So uh, Scott leaned down. She said, quote, Scott leaned down toward the front like he was ready to turn the key and immediately following that I was surrounded by this orange thing. I felt I was being pushed back in the seat. They said, did you know what happened? And she said, no, I didn't. I thought I was being electrocuted. There was this thing all around you. I don't know how to explain it. It was just awful. I pushed my eyes open and saw my son lying on the ground and I knew something was wrong. He had his eyes closed and a little blood on his face. There was blood

2:55:12on his face. And I suddenly thought he's dead. She said, I recalled looking up and seeing my brother Steven standing on the walk. He was facing the suburban and staring straight ahead. I couldn't understand why he wasn't coming over to help me. Yeah. Then Steven's eyes widened really wide, open really wide. He had been standing really still suddenly his eyes open and his mouth dropped and he raced toward the house. So they said, Mrs. Kendall, is it true that you're not sure at what point Scott gave the keys? This is a defense attorney. And she said, no, it's not true. They said, didn't you tell them that you weren't sure? And she said, I don't remember the question or the answer. Steven handed Scott the keys through the window of the automobile. Period. And they go back and forth. But didn't you tell this one agent that you weren't sure how the keys got past? And she goes, that was almost a year ago. Steven was in my line of sight. I could see him, but I wasn't looking directly at him. So they go back and forth for a while. You're going back with a

2:56:15burn lady. You got exploded, your brother is like, this is bad. You're going to ask a lady what she remembers a year ago versus what she can vividly remember and recall right now. Fuck yes. Wow. She said, I'm not going to have you distort the answer by not allowing me to answer the question completely. She said, yes, I did make that statement. However, at the time, the statement was made, I had already been informed that my mother's body had been thrown to the other side of the car. I was making the assumption with the knowledge she was going around to that side of the car to my mother. Okay. They said at the time was Steven screaming. And she said, I couldn't hear him. There was noise. It sounded as though he was making lamenting types of sounds. He was extremely agitated. He said, was he screaming? And she said, yeah, I guess she could put it that way. So she talked about Steven getting out, like boosting her into her seat and like basically trying to close her in. She said, no, don't talk about the fireball. By the way, little little break from

2:57:17testimony once she's off the stand, little something I just saw in the in the newspaper about the jury that was fascinating, quote, coffee maker installed. They got one of the, yeah, one of the jurors in the Stephen Benson murder trial has brought a coffee maker to the jury room to make breaks in the courtroom action a little more pleasant. The county pays for the jury's luncheats each day, but soft drinks and coffee are not provided. So I brought it in for everybody. All this talk about coffee made me want a coffee. I'm going to bring in my Mr. Coffee. Yeah, anybody got donuts in here. So the defense goes after Scott. Winchels. Yeah. Somebody, the defense goes after Scott, obviously, their defense is someone that was mad at Scott. He said he doesn't believe the prosecutor to the judge said he isn't believe Scott should be the focus of any testimony. They said, Scott's the victim of a crime. His character, we do not feel is relevant at all. But in this case, it kind of is. So they allow a lot of this stuff in a lot of

2:58:20the stuff we talked about the night rest drinking it like a Pepsi. Yeah, they used Mrs. Benson's secretary and a tape recording to try to show Scott as the true target. And later on, in his closing, they drew the contrast here, quote, on one side, one on poor unfortunate young man running a muck, threatening to kill his mother, dragging her across the house, beating his sister and biological mother, both with his fists, consuming enough narcotics to make violence probable, a kid who do anything for more drugs. And on the other side, Steven, the loving son who took over when his father's died, who never crossed a soul, the peacemaker, who only ever got angry when Scott abused their mother. That's it. Also a private investigator for the state or for the defense, who said that state prison inmate Dave Galloway told him Scott Benson once offered to put his sports car up as collateral on a large drug deal. I try to show that Scott can get in deep.

2:59:24Another guy, assistant defense attorney who put on was put on the stand to tell about a similar drug related conversation. He had another with another inmate about Scott. They bring in a boat captain who said a man who said he was a man who snorted cocaine with Scott on a boat trip. Hell yeah. Interesting. And he said that Scott looked like a composite drawing of the man seeing buying pipe bomb materials. He's like, I thought that was Scott. Yeah. Several other former associates of Scott who said that they smoke marijuana with Scott or saw him use cocaine, whatever. The two names pipe bomb builders. Yeah. They talk about Stevens unseen laughter. Because he made like a joke and made like a weird laughter thing at the scene. And the defense tried to frame it as that's people laugh in weird situations. That just happens. They said, have you ever studied what makes people laugh? And he said, no. A neighbor also said the police fell to examine part of a car bomb that still rests on top of his screened in porch across the

3:00:26street. There's some other witness they're trying to find. They can't find. Anyway, the defense finishes up their case and then they ask for an acquittal. They asked a judge. He said, it's a totally an entirely circumstantial case. It's besides the fact that his pomper and son are asleep and he has fucking zinc from a bomb on his goddamn. Aaronious. Totally. And so, you know, incidental and whatever. So the judge says, I don't think so. There's plenty here. So they also talk about in the paper that whether he, even if he's found not guilty, he's probably going to be sued. And he's probably going to face a bunch of suits about these bombings. His sister could sue him. They could sue him to cut him out of the will. They could say there's a bunch of shit going on here. Vertic comes in 10 women and two men on the jury. Okay. They deliberate somewhere in the range of 11 to 12 hours. Let's be the coffee keep them going. Yeah. Two days he has found guilty of all charges, all nine charges, everything.

3:01:32A juror later said that the panel convicted on the very first vote. So rather than do a straw poll, they did the whole, what do you build the thing first and then you'll vote. And then they did it. And so that's what they did. Now, sentencing death penalty on the table. Prosecutor argues, killing your mother is uniquely reprehensible. And that the deliberate murder of one's own mother basically is bottom tier human behavior. Just awful. The defense urged that there had been already been enough killing in this family. And the jury shouldn't add to the death toll. Let's not add to the roster. Now the jury comes back on the death penalty thing. All they need is a majority for a thing here. Seven to five would do it. No, they are deadlocked six six really six six. So at the time, you had to have a majority. So a tall a tie defaults to a recommendation of you,

3:02:33sir. Yeah. May fuck off two consecutive life sentences. Yeah. Which is a minimum of roughly 50 years before any parole consideration. Plus an additional, I believe 37 years tacked on consecutive based on the bomb shit as well. Oh, fuck. So quite a bit. They made them consecutive rather than concurrent, which was the wishes of the sister Carol who said she wanted to be as certain as the law could make it that her brother would never walk free because she said she was genuinely afraid if he ever came out. She's it. He would go after her and her children. Yeah. Harry grandpa lives still alive. Said quote, justice has been done. That's all he would say. So there's that 1988. There's an appeal. The first two two main counts on the appeal. First is that expert testimony about the pipe bombs, dimensions and construction had been improperly admitted.

3:03:34And the second argument was the circumstantial evidence was sufficient insufficient and the state had improperly piramitted interference or inference upon inference and failed to execute exclude Jesus. I can't read that every reasonable hypothesis of innocence. The court said, now he good. Yeah. I said, that's fine. Keep going. Keep fucking. So then there's the money. He can't. There's a slayer act. Yeah. So he can't get anything. Carol basically had it extended so that even Steven's children can't benefit from it. Even they won't get anything. Wow. Then he's got some prison problems. This guy's not a guy who's made for prison. If you think about it, spoiled rich kids soft. All these things not made for prison. Failure and everything in life. Yeah. The inmates hate him. Hate him. Hate him. Hate him. Hate him. He's a scumbag rich kid who killed his mother. They have no sympathy for them. These are all people who never met their mother or my mother. Smoked crack in

3:04:36front of me. My whole fucking life. I just wanted a good mom. That's all I wanted. So Steven is transferred constantly more than 20 times mainly for his own safety after strands of pissing everybody off. Pissing. He was stabbed by an inmate then transferred to another prison for a safety. Another time he was found to have an 11 inch knife in a vent in his cell in 1990. He was written up for fashioning a battery pack outside of his transistor radio. So he knows how to do that. Shit. He was selling legal services to other inmates using the prison computer to keep track of his customers. He stole ketchup and mayonnaise packets from Meal Time. And he had his unauthorized scrabble game confiscated lots of trouble. Yeah. He lost a cross pen set that was sent to him which are expensive nice pens that you get refillable things for leather. A leather belt some Clark shoes. You know the kind ghost face killer like to make different colors on. He got

3:05:38Clarks in prison game. Clark somebody sent them to him an extra pair of slide shoes all fine to be out all found to be outside regulations and taken away. He worked jobs from everything from a houseman to working in the laundry or painting. He was disciplined for running unauthorized legal services hustle. Like we said, 93 is wife Debbie divorced him and left the state and he changed his emergency contract a contact to one of his groomsmen from his first wedding because it's only personal talk to him. No more women. In 90 70 lost his real estate license. How long do you have to be in prison to lose your real estate license? He's been in prison for 12 years. He's got a sense of 80 years. He can keep it. He loves writing grievances against other inmates against officers against anyone he's pissed off about. Malice. He complained about inmates having to wear shirts in the television room. It's hot. He said he was concerned that a television room was used for Spanish program several hours each day when the Spanish speaking inmates just joined the other

3:06:40inmates to watch television anyway. So why should they wait to get to watch what they want? They're going to sit here anyway. And he wants to do this with his nipples out. That's right. Who is fucking Harry Nipple rings. He argued that the amount of sales tax charge at the commissary and had his account credited 95 cents. Yes. He protested when a book hacking exposed network security secrets and solutions was taking from him, taken from him. He said the title was misleading and that no one would listen to him that the book was about preventing hacking, not carrying it out. Which you have to know how it's done to prevent it. He spent several stints in segregation. He told prison officials he's trying to live a well-adjusted low-prie- I'll profile life. He never responds to interview questions either. Margaret sister Janet who was still fucking alive also. Rich people live a long time. Says that she does not want to see him get out of prison.

3:07:40She said, I would talk to him, I guess. I'm pretty sure Steven wouldn't want to talk to me. She says that he has been turning away people basically. One guy said he was trying to bring religion to Benson and Benson cut him off. Which I would do. I'm not listening. Not any listening to you. So anyway, the woman said he was always easy to talk to. He could find all the problems with the prison, but he can't see what he did wrong. That's right. Now there's no record of a single family visit across nearly 30 years. Wow. Nothing. That's it. July 3rd, 2015. Okay, couple of prisoners named Cordell Washington and Marvin Taylor. Soon after Steven's transfer to a northern Florida prison in June, Cordell Washington said, I remember that motherfucker and I hate him from a previous jail. I know him within days.

3:08:44Well, we'll find out some stuff that happened here. Okay, multiple times here in 2012, there's animosity between Benson and Washington, which stemmed from a series of prison assaults in 2012. Multiple inmates told investigators that Washington made plans to extort $1,000 from Steven within days after arriving at the Taylor Correctional Institute. When Benson refused to pay, Washington and another man, 26 year old Marvin Taylor, ambushed him and stabbed him in the head with a homemade knife. Oh, fuck. While on route to the hospital, he told staffers two men jumped him as he walked from the chow hall to his dorm room. He said he didn't know their name, but he recognized one of them from a print stint in Hardy County. Yeah. Washington and Taylor are both indicted because Steven dies at the hospital from his wounds. They're indicted on first-degree murder charges. Oh my god. He got stabbed in the fucking head. Yep. This all stems from other shit. November of 2012, Washington and another man jumped a fellow inmate identified by one prisoner

3:09:50as Benson's then boyfriend. So the dude Steven was hooking up with and jail got jumped by these two guys. A day later, several inmates assaulted Washington in the recreation yard, a retaliation ordered and paid for by Benson by Steve. Yeah. One inmate serving the life sentence for arm robbery, told investigators he knew Washington and Benson from their time together in Hardy County and said Nelson said he warned Benson that Washington could be trouble, but Benson already knew. He said he was demanding $1,000 from him. So anyway, he's dead. There you go. Now in the media, Dominic Dunn, who's done a ton of shit. He's the one whose daughter got murdered. Fucking horrible way. He devoted an hour for the case on his show, Dominic Dunn's Power, Privilege and Justice. There's been a bunch of books written on the family, Blood Relations by John Greenia, what is the money to burn, the true story of the Benson family murders, and the one we got some excerpts from The Serpent's Tooth by Christopher P. Anderson. Jesus.

3:10:56So there you go, everybody. That is Naples Florida. And one fucking hell of a weird story. No. No. The Serpent's Tooth, James. Serpent's Tooth, they, there you go. So there you go. If you like that story, please get on whatever app you're on. This helps so much. These are really hard to put together. So it takes 20 seconds to sign in whatever app you're on and give us five stars. It helps a ton. Netflix. That thumbs up. You're on your remote. Cool. I'm super easy to do. Yeah. Get someone else to do it on there, too. So there's an option for the W.A. Europe. Yeah. That's right. That's a double us up, everybody. So yeah, do that. Definitely follow on social media at small town murder on Instagram at small town pot on Facebook. Right. You can absolutely listen to our other two shows, Crime in sports, which there's a whole murderous thing going on. You don't have to like sports. Just trust us there. Then for small, for also your stupid opinions, yeah, where it's just hilarious. If you like a funny show, listen to your stupid opinions. It's hilarious. So do that. Check that out. Get yourself Patreon as well. Actually, go to shutup and give me murder.com first.

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3:13:06That joke was made a lot when Donner was killed. Oh, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of like the Donner party merchandise. Oh, him eating people. Yeah, that's like sense. It's too close. Otherwise, it's great. So you nailed it. But yeah, that's going to be amazing. We can't wait to do that episode. So check that out. Patreon.com slash crime in sports, just like the name of the show. And also in addition to that, you get all the shows we put out all ad free as well. And not just on Patreon, the regular shows all ad free. Then on top of that, you also get a shout out, which is right goddamn now. Jim, hit me with the names of the best fucking people in the world who would never explode us or not tell us who our real mother was. Jimmy, hit me with him right goddamn now. This week's executive producer Martha Taljard. I bought a 10-year sober. Good for you, Martha. Congrats. Congratulations. Congratulations. Heidi Griffin. It's her birthday month didn't give a day because happy birth month, Heidi. That's what women loved today. That's a lot. Let me kiss every day, please. I'm here and it's happened like fucking

3:14:12Hanukkah over here now. Happy hour in Monticello, Utah. That sounds nice. Gary Howard is in Ena, Illinois. Gary. Happy hour wins this week. Little more little nicer place. I don't know, we'd legal in Illinois. Maybe not. I've never been to Ena. Ena. It's probably Ena, right? I don't know. Weeds legal in the other's Utah. That's a great boy. Take Illinois all day, baby. These stones and stare at tagging. These sober and look at Utah. We're in Ena, we'll go to Taco Johns next to a farm field and fucking eat like we did and we're happy as yet. Yeah. Robin Perrier. Perrier. Perrier. Perrier. Perrier. Happy birthday. Oh, no, it's on a birthday. Happy birthday, Perrier. Happy birthday. Perrier. Ena. Perrier. Alicia Grant and other producers this week. Thank you guys so much by the way you guys. Thank you guys. Especially for all. Other producers this week are Annie Gula, he James. She's uh, yes. Honorable.

3:15:13She can't say it's her maiden name. Very nice. She used to call it Bad Billy Pratt. There you got to watch out. She got herself a brand new, uh, uh, uh, friend who closet. I love it. I see it. Peyton Meadows, Janice Hill, Scott Rechard in, uh, Maricopa. Poor son of a bit. He exoadates and gives his whole fucking address. Scott, you got to stop that. Don't we won't give that out, but don't put your address on the internet. It's a cry for help. I think he's in Maricopa, the poor bastard. He's like, help. Please do this address. Get me. Ali V. Knits race craft. JC is lost in diamond dart. James, whatever that is. John Scarpa, uh, Scarpa, uh, Scarpa Leone is about Carpenter Aquila with no last name. Daniel Land, Ryan Hart. No, that's Ryan Hall. Uh, Seth Klein, Fets, Fets Luck or Fets Luck. I don't know. 45. There's 44 bondage. Sarah Farley. What is it? Is that a bondage thing? I don't know.

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