Speaker 1: We wanted to see if we could solve Australia's worst unsolved crime, and.
00:00:04
Speaker 2: The episode from two days ago and Lender's escape changes everything.
00:00:09
Speaker 1: What we suspected is now coming true. We believe we've found multiple new victims.
00:00:14
Speaker 3: Welcome to the Sees the Yay Podcast. Busy and happy are not the same thing. We too rarely question what makes the heart seeing. We work, then we rest, but rarely we play and often don't realize there's more than one way. So this is the platforms to hear and explore the stories of those who found lives they adore, the good, bad and ugly, The best and worst day will bear all the facets of seizing your Yay. I'm Sarah Davidson or a spoonful of Sarah, a lawyer turned funentrepreneur who swapped the suits and heels to co found matcha Maiden and matcha Milk Bark. Ces Ya is a series of conversations on finding a life you love and exploring the self doubt, challenge, joy and fulfillment along the way. Every now and then, we're lucky to record with a guest at a pivotal moment in their life where a chapter is unraveling in real time. So often we tell the story backwards and with hindsight, but sometimes we catch the magic of how they're feeling in the actual moment. Today, we're lucky to have two of those guests just weeks after the explosive launch of their investigative podcast, while the project is not only in full swing but actually unraveling new leads in a way that might change history. While the subject matter of their work is historical in that it involves cold cases, the nature of its impact is extremely current and they're only just getting started. Andy Byrne and Mark Lewellan are the incredible journalists behind Catching Evil, revisiting the chilling crimes of Christopher Wilder, the so called Beauty Queen Killer, across both Australia and the USA. In just the first thirty days of the podcast, they have amassed over one hundred thousand downloads with an unheard of consumption rate of close to one hundred percent. But more importantly, they've already uncovered new leads in one of Australia's worst unsolved murders on Wanda Beach, as well as uncovering never before heard evidence that may break the Wilder case wide open. You may already know their names from their formidable media careers prior to the podcast. Andy as an award winning investigative journalist and producer with extensive experience in true crime, and Mark as a highly decorated television executive, leading landmark investigative in current affairs programming across Australian TV. And yet, like most of our guests, neither of them ever thought they'd end up with a podcast, that it would have already changed so many lives, and that they may, in fact, with an entire season still ahead, solve one of the country's worst unsolved crimes. A quick content warning given the nature of their investigation, this is obviously a bit of a heavier episode than usual, covering serious themes, so please do take care while listening, But it also demonstrates a different form of fulfillment or yate to be gained from a career path yay. As meaningful as this, the very purpose of this show is always to remind you that we all find our fulfillment or our purpose in very different ways, and of course this isn't everyone's piece of cake, but it is certainly one example of a way to leave a great legacy and create some seriously positive impact for a lot of people who have been affected by this story. I feel so lucky to have sat down with Mark and Andy after just six episodes so far, to hear their reaction to launch the huge developments that they already have in motion. It's been fascinating to hear how an investigation like this unravels and the true impact that investigative podcasts can have on criminal investigations and cold cases that have remained unsolved for so many years. You guys know this is a personal fascination for me, but it takes just so much more than you could imagine to bring an investigation to life. And I hope that some of you also enjoyed this one as much as I did. Andy and Mark, Welcome to the show.
00:03:55
Speaker 1: Great to see it.
00:03:56
Speaker 3: It is such an honor to have you two on particular, because I have been listening to you hours and hours of your two voices, and it's always surreal. I think when you actually get to have a real time conversation, you guys are like you've been in my ears for weeks.
00:04:12
Speaker 1: Only what you expected whenever what people expect.
00:04:16
Speaker 3: I mean, I did say when we first came on, I was like, this is like a married couple.
00:04:19
Speaker 1: We're all into the marriage, probably into the division of property part of it. To be honest, we do like each other look. To be honest, I think our friendship has been a big part of why we've been able to continue, because I don't think I could have done this on my own, and I don't know whether Andy could have as well. And it's like that mutual support. When we were talking to you just prior of coming on, you mentioned you gave us some really nice feedback, which is cool, and we took it like we deserved it. But it's freaking great. But when you're working alone for eighteen months two years and all you've got is each other in a medium that you're inexperienced in, even though you've got a bit of experience doing other stuff, you have to boy each other up. Nobody's up the whole time. So on the days when I'm feeling okay, it might be that I say no, no, we're on the right track, or it could be the other way around with Andy, But either way, it's pushed us both to where we are, and I think that's sort of a testimony to our friendship or the fact that we're so wedded together that we can't find an escape. But either way it's worked.
00:05:22
Speaker 3: It's just an interdependent relationship at this point where there's no turning back.
00:05:27
Speaker 1: Like a toxic relationship, you know.
00:05:28
Speaker 2: It's I love that ups and down.
00:05:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean this is very special because at this moment there have been hundreds and thousands of Australians who have been listening to your voices. As we're only six episodes in at the moment into Catching Evil, but you guys have had I mean one hundred thousand downloads in the first thirty days, unheard of statistics that have just blown up. Is the landscape and absolutely.
00:05:57
Speaker 2: Everyone keeps telling us that, and we can't look at my another and we can't quite believe it.
00:06:02
Speaker 1: We no, we can't. We didn't know on day one what the heck we'd get. Look, it wasn't a risk in one sense. We always knew right from the top when Andy played me some of the interviews that he'd done over in America and he said, I might have something here. One of the interviews is an episode about to go to where very soon about a woman called Linda who escapes Wilder in the most extraordinary circumstances, probably the most courageous woman you'll ever meet, with a situation where there are no good options, but she chooses the best one. And Andy had interviewed her in America with this mobile phone that he carried around and he records this extraordinary interview, and that really, for me was the beginning when he said, oh, I've got this amazing interview stored on my phone that have never been played from people who've never spoken. And we thought, well, we might turn that into a podcast, you know, And then in discussion with Andy, we thought, well, look, if we're going to do it properly, we really should go over and following the footsteps of Wilder. And then it just took us into areas that we never expected. So to get to this point where we're saying you got one hundred thousand listeners, we came from a point where we had just each other and had never tried this before. So it's been you said before, sorry, and you said before, no journeys linear. This is the perfect example, you know, you know, we've taken a journey that's sort of like branched out like a tree. Sorry, no, I was just going to.
00:07:30
Speaker 2: Say, and when Mark says we only had each other for all that time, we're very much independent here in terms of we funded this entire project ourselves. You know, there's been no big network behind us. There's been no you know, big marketing money or advertising when we've done it ourselves. So if we have been a success, you know, I take a lot of pride in them.
00:07:52
Speaker 1: I think it's probably about fifty one forty nine percent just in terms of the division of the success boils. But people can.
00:07:59
Speaker 3: Get which way it's splits.
00:08:05
Speaker 1: Well.
00:08:06
Speaker 3: Looking back at both of your incredible careers in media, of course, it makes sense why you do make such a powerful duo in covering this story and in fact changing the course of history and doing so. And I cannot wait to get more into that. There's so much you've achieved in six episodes already, and I know there's a lot more to dive into. But just quickly coming back to that idea of no journey being linear, A huge part of this show is that idea that it can take a lot of chapters before you get to the big successful one that people often know you for. So for you two, a lot of people huge audiences might be meeting you for the first time through this story where you have such clear direction, You've got a lot of resources, you've got great reputations, but not a lot of airtime is given to the way that you developed your careers, who you were when you were younger, how many steps there have been along the way, And I'm sure that there's been twists and turns you never expected. Even when you started this story, I was reading that you had no idea where it had end up, and that it was originally planned to be just a retelling of the story but ended up unearthing so many leads that it's become a live investigation. So usually I'd spend a lot more time on your earlier careers, but can you just quickly touch on your younger selves and maybe what you would say to any young aspiring journalists who might be listening about making it in this industry and how you get to this big story, what does it take you to get there along the way.
00:09:35
Speaker 1: We were both having a really interesting conversation about a week ago. We went up to Hunter Valley, and we went up primarily because a tip has come through via this podcast that is really critical to placing Wilder on wander Beach, and so that's the end part of the conversation. But that night, having done an amazing interview with a woman he approached three times and asked to go to wander Beach who looks exactly like one of the victims and has never told her story other than to the police who ignored it at the time. That night we sat down and had a bit of a chat about where we are, and the one thing that we share in common about this journey is as journalists. We started because we love the game and we're hungry to be journalists. We love journalism, and so that's the one linear part of this. We never expected to end up doing this and having the one hundred thousand downloads and your nice comments and hopefully more to come. We never expected that. But the one thing is we both have a passion for journalism, telling storytelling, telling stories. My best advice is bite off more than you can chew. I love that, learn everything.
00:10:52
Speaker 2: Over to and yeah, absolutely on the younger me, I should have been a professional footballer.
00:10:59
Speaker 3: I thought that you could see that, couldn't you from a mile away? I thought, what a waste, what a waste of talent.
00:11:05
Speaker 1: You know, he was trialed by a major Premier League club in the UK and he had a brilliant what is your left Foot's a good one?
00:11:13
Speaker 4: Right.
00:11:13
Speaker 1: He wanted to plan on the right wing, but these people recognized that and so stuck him on the left wing.
00:11:19
Speaker 2: So it was the end of my career.
00:11:20
Speaker 1: That was the end of a budding career. Only they'd stuck him on the right wing. That's why he always sits on the right. But I'll tell you this, he's a brilliant journalist. He was in the papers in the UK and came up through the trades. I was started in radio and Australia and then ended up in TV so and then we ended up together on television some years back, where we became colleagues and friends. But although the journalism paths is different, I think the same things that sort of like get the juices go a similar He's a great writer and a really good investigator, so all of which is great for me.
00:11:56
Speaker 2: Which of the relationship works, I mean we laugh all the time about the Lennon and McCartney kind of thing, and who's Lenan and who's McCartney.
00:12:06
Speaker 1: Because he's from Liverpool, has to be the Beatles right stop.
00:12:10
Speaker 3: So you were going to be an Everton star.
00:12:12
Speaker 2: How did you know?
00:12:15
Speaker 3: Well, it's Everton's loss and the media industry's gained that your football career didn't work out. And just so you know, we have skated over the detail here, but I will have read out both of your stellar bios in the introduction. But of course it is Catching Evil that has really put your decades of investigative experience and journalistic skills at work and is really keeping all of us holding our breath. After the six episodes you've released so far, I feel like most people who are listening to this show probably have already binged them. But just in case, before we dive into the behind the scenes of bringing the show together and what it's like on the road, can you give us an introduction to the case it investigates, but also the incredible breakthroughs you have already unearthed.
00:12:59
Speaker 1: The case is around. This begins with Christopher Wilder, who was a race car driving, charismatic construction business owning serial killer. Wilder had dual passports. He was an Australian mum American father and so could slide between both countries. We believe he is the person who committed Australia's worst unsolved double murder on wander Beach, and then in nineteen eighty four he goes on a rampage which is today still the biggest FBI manhunt in American history and kills multiple women. What we're looking at is everything from the original murder, which we're going to prove to what happened in that intervening twenty years to the rampage itself. And so we've gone from wander Beach but certainly not finished it, and we're now into the very beginning of the rampage, having done the lead up to the disappearances of a woman who was temporarily or briefly instead of way putting his girlfriendinion and then the disappearance of another girl called Rosario Gonzalez in Miami at the Grand Prix there in eighty four, and after that he goes on the run. So where we are now is that we're going to the point just before he goes on the run where the police are kind of like sitting on their hands despite the desperate pleas and begging of the parents and loved ones of two of the girls who've been taken to do something, and in between times he's about to take some other girls.
00:14:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the episode from two days ago and Linda's escape changes everything. Because Linda escapes, she's interviewed by the FBI, she gives them incredible detail about him, picks Wilder out of the lineup. Yeah, so finally there's no excuses. The FBI can take over the case because he crossed state lines with her, they can take it over. And it becomes, as Mark says, the biggest man hunt in US history, six and a half thousand miles, forty odd days and they can't catch him. Fifteen hundred FBI agents chase him from one side of the country out here there, then all the way back again and they can't catch him.
00:15:09
Speaker 1: That escape, though, changes everything.
00:15:11
Speaker 3: And you have so kind of given us an exclusive snippet and preview, So for anyone who wants a taser and hasn't already caught up on that episode, I'll throw to it now and you guys can have a listen.
00:15:23
Speaker 1: I had heard that he had stopped me for two days beforehand. What the fuck am I going to do? That? He intercepted me in the parking lot as I'm walking through my car and I realize.
00:15:35
Speaker 2: Like, all shit, he's a big guy. He picks her up in the sleeping bag and it's one, two, three, four, five, six seven, and he's in.
00:15:46
Speaker 1: He's in the room.
00:15:47
Speaker 4: I could just see thee.
00:15:48
Speaker 2: And then for the next few hours he tortures Linda.
00:15:52
Speaker 1: He had tied me up to an electrical outlet in both my pinkies and my toes, and he had superglued my eyes shine.
00:15:57
Speaker 2: All she's thinking about is survival, going to die, trying where I'm going to get out of here.
00:16:06
Speaker 3: Absolute goosebumps. And it's so crazy to think how many times along the way of this investigation originally things weren't unearthed, all questions weren't asked, and it's you, guys, off your own back, going to revisit and reinvestigate that's actually making headway in this decade's long investigation. But I think the question that comes up so much now that there are so many true crime investigations and that podcasting has become such an important tool, when do you know you have a podcast worthy story? And I know for you guys, it was brewing for eight years, you had written on the subject before. When do you reach this critical point? Of we're going to make a show, especially having never done it before. And then once you do decide that, how do you even know how to structure the episodes? And you were on the road in the US. Are you doing your interviews and putting them straight into into the show? Is there a lead time like this? The episodes are so dense as well, between interviews and your commentary. How do you bring a show like Catching Evil together?
00:17:14
Speaker 2: Let Mark take the second half, because how it's how it's made and how it's pulled together. I call him mister Jigsaw Man because there's a every week he's presented with, you know, a thousand piece jigsaw and he's got, like, you know, a couple of days to pull it all together, and there's no one better at it.
00:17:31
Speaker 1: He's brilliant. Adic Yeah, like Dustin Hoffman and Rayin Men.
00:17:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, we were both in on it from from the from the beginning. So eight years ago, we were launching a new crime show for Channel seven, Channel seven, and I was pulling together potential stories and one of them was kristenpher Wilder and I thought, that's a good story, but it's America. Are we really that interested? And then I discovered that he grew up with his family literally around the corner from where I was living and raising my kids, and I became fascinated in how you know that particular suburb could have produced a monster like him. Mark said, yeah, let's do the story. I went to America, and I was a bit naughty. I used the trip and we made a documentary on Wilder, but that was very much centered on him, as was the book I then wrote, which was really centered on him, very traditional the way that most true crime is done. It's the perpetrator who gets all the focus, particularly when it's someone as colorful as Wilder. But then returning and thinking about the book afterwards, and long after it had come out, I was still in contact with a lot of the families who'd lost someone, who lost girls, and it became apparent to me that they were lost and their daughters and their sisters and their fiances had all been kind of forgotten. They were just a newspaper clipping, you know, their stories had never been spoken. So that's when Mark and I had the idea of going back to America and following in wild As footsteps. But he's not the focus. The focus are those girls and giving them a voice.
00:19:06
Speaker 1: The first conversation we had back in the time when we were doing the documentary, we had a kind of bold idea. We wanted to see if we could solve Australia's worst unsolved crime. You set a little bar too high, and that's how it came about. But then that journey took Andy to do the preliminary interviews, some which he recorded later for a book. And when we had that subsequent conversation he's played me some of the audio. It just thought, oh well, we could usefully do a podcast and feel some about time. And then it really really grew, which is quite like an acorn being planted and growing to a big a big tree. But AND's Andy's right, And even on the road, Look, this is one of the extraordinary things. It's not unusual for journalists to find stories that you didn't expect out of the mouths of people you didn't expect to talk to. But I'll give an example of why this kind of excited us so much. We're on the road, and also one from last week as well, but on the road, with an episode that's about to come up, we met a woman called Mindy. Mendy's mother was taken and killed by Wilder when he just launched his escapade across the States, and she was taken just outside Houston in a town called Beaumont. Mendy was four and a half at the time, and she'd never heard her mother speak for forty years, and she had a cassette tape. And so along the way while we're driving out in the head of a ninety five degree fahrenheit day in Texas, and he rings up somebody via EBA, gets a cassette player, and we play that cassette tape with her mum's voice for the very first time in forty years, and stead of get this hugely emotional reaction, and it sort of tells a lot about her affection and love for a mum and what the generational impact is of people like Wilder when they do these things. But then at the conclusion of the interview, because we were late, we'd basically come in said today, set up the podcast and started talking to Mindy and set a load to her partner who was standing in the corner. He was a really nice guy, but never really met him. At the conclusion of the interview, I say he's standing in the corner, I so how do you think Mindy meant? And he goes, I love her so much. You know, we're two sides of the same coin. Go, what do you mean? While her mummy was killed by a bad man and my daddy's a murderer. And then the truth about how they met. His father had killed his best friend, and they all knew each other in the same circles, and so they shared this kind of strange but very strong bond of having their lives completely ripped apart by an horrendous and terrible act and had fallen in love. And now we're each other's not only partners, but support. Now that came out of nowhere, and that's the beauty of this podcast. It becomes a very signific part of this episode that's upcoming. But I'll tell you another example, which is sorry to bang on, but he had a long crack before good at banging on. Yeah, but Andy, through this podcast, there is a person who's critical in the Wilder story because he helped the FBI track him when he's on the run. He was a man who a forensic sort of accountant who was able to follow his visa, not his visa, the fake visa that he was using all the wrong visa that he was using across the states, and it was critical at the very last moment in getting the police to get to him. And so his role and he came out of the blue because of the podcast, and he approached and we did a phone interview the other day. During the course of this interview, I asked him how he felt when Wilder was killed, and he said, I felt great, felt really good. And you know, it's not the first serial killer I've had contact with. We both look at each other and what many says? Who was the other serial killer? And he goes, well, you know X years before I was in a bar with my girlfriend. I was distracted and there was a man trying to look at her and pick her up. And that man was Ted Bundy. And we're going what And that man was making a beeline to his girlfriend and clearly with evil intent. Subsequently, in the next twenty four to forty eight hours, two people from that same town, two girls, were taken and killed by Bundy. So they had a narrow miss. He knew both of them, Yeah, he knew both of the victims. And then subsequently, in this conversation, and we didn't we didn't didn't know about this attends Bundy's execution. So that's kind of like the power of this podcast, the unexpected power. It's taking us places that we never expected to go.
00:23:52
Speaker 3: The momentum that you must get from being on the ground and following it leeds as they're coming. But from a logistical perspective, especially because this isn't really a career path that has existed for very long, true crime podcast investigative podcaster is such a new thing. No one really understands, Like do you buy your own flights, land on the ground and then just call people and start recording? Like how do you even outside of their structure of an organization like the FBI or like the police. Are you literally just going he was here, I'm going to fly there and see what happens? Is that literally how the investigation starts?
00:24:32
Speaker 2: Almost? I mean there is a tremendous amount of research and work that goes into you know, before you step on that plane, so you know where you're going, you know who you're after. Yeah, but you've always got a remaining flexible too as to who you'll meet along the way. And both Mark and I are very experienced, you know, we've done it for years, and we kind of leave time and we've got an idea that there is this person out there and we'll find them when we get there. You know, a lot of it is set up beforehand. I mean that Mindy story was remarkable for a number of reasons. Mindy's life had been awful up to that point. She'd made decisions in her life things like she never went to college, she never went to university. Why because their mum has abducted from the university campus, and so she never wanted to go near that building. And she looks back now now that she's with Kyle and she's with I mean, who better to understand what she's going through from someone who's gone through exactly the same thing. But she said to us that, you know, if that would have happened earlier in her life and her life, she'd been a very different place now, she would have got a self a better education, got her self a better job. You know. So when Mark talks about the generational impacts of some of these crimes, we've witnessed and seen them firsthand, you know, And it's quite remarkable.
00:25:49
Speaker 1: In fact, people ask us about approaching people like Mindy. They're almost concerned that we'd do so, but we think of it differently from experience, and every person that we speak to is relieved that they're finally getting the opportunity to talk. It's the most significant event in their life, and somehow people just avoid it. And even worse for so Mindy's mom, she was in the headlines for a day before he moved on and killed another girl, and then moved on and killed another girl. So they've forgotten apart from the people whose lives are being blown up by this event, and to be able to speak with love about somebody they adore or miss, and also to talk about you know why. They all ask the question why why my mom? Why did he take them? All of them, without exception, have become true crime adherents. They really really get into it. They watch every documentary they try and to get into the mind of wilder and serial killers. They're really desperate, thirsting for knowledge, but they also want recognition, recognition of their story, recognition of the importance of the mum or their sister, or their daughter or their loved one. And you know, it's been quite rumbling, I would say, to be witnessed to that in a participant in some way and allowing that to unfold. And also they're really they're good too, because they're offering an insight into how women in particular might be able to protect themselves or how authorities need to do better at which they do, you know, and so they offer these really important insights and that's been fascinating too, as well as sort of like them leading in the direction of bigger solutions to unsolved answers that have remained unsolved for forty years, so you know, it's in the case of Wonder for sixty years. So it's been a cracking thing to do. And by liberating in the podcast space, which is different to anything we've done before.
00:27:44
Speaker 3: I think that's one of the most beautiful things about the show is that, particularly given it's not even the first time that you have told this story before, it's been told by you guys in different formats before, but that this is victim centric and that's so beautiful because you can hear the Catharsis in their voices to be able to tell their story in a way that it's not been listened to, particularly from this perspective, it's not been you know, they haven't been allowed to feel close to that person in such a long time in the way that you have allowed them to do, which is beautiful, but it's also revealing leads to you all the time. So can you talk to us about in the background, like what is the sort of overlay of your week? Are you on it full time? How much is research? And then once you've done the interviews, how much is working out the structure of an episode. What's the turnaround time for you to release something when you've broken a lead, like the week before, you know, like, tell us about how it actually comes together.
00:28:44
Speaker 2: At the moment, we're in our home office and that sounds pretty grand, but I've got to tell you, for a show that's called Catching Evil, our office is a timely little office in a church. So are we Well, it's it's pretty fraught, we said. Opposite one. Mark is furiously editing and the profanities because we can't work the system that we used.
00:29:08
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, I'm on the other side.
00:29:09
Speaker 2: Frantically trying to call America and talk to people and message cops and this kind of thing. Because to finish this series, we have to return to America next month to do some absolutely critical interviews.
00:29:25
Speaker 1: What we suspected early on in our first trip, particularly from Andy's investigations, is that while there's no way that Wilder sort of did wander Beach sixty five and then went on this extraordinary rampage in eighty four, that for nineteen twenty years that he was just calling his heels going yeah, I won't kill for twenty years. Absolutely way, what we suspected is now coming true. We believe we found not only multiple new victims, some of whom still lie as Jane does in Morgues, but we found two new killing zones. One is in New York State in America, where he was seen and acted well before that eighty four to three, and the other is in northern New South Wales, where we've had a really significant lead, where we leave half a dozen maybe more young women were taken by Wilder and killed. So these are all big deals. The problem is with the authorities. In eighty four they basically shut up shop. They said, well, that's it, he's dead, don't investigate. So there's all these unsolved crimes and all these families still wanting to know what happened to their daughters, and the same in New South Wales. Is all these unsolved crimes. What the authorities have done next to nothing. So he basically put a full stop on what is still a continuing story. And if we go to the States, we've now got not only significant leads, but it looks like we're going to meet up with a couple of police forces who are really interested in what we've discovered, and that gives us the confidence to sort of like go there and state the case that we believe that he is. To be honest, he's up there now with Ted Bundy in kind of numbers and the way you operate it.
00:31:05
Speaker 2: There's two unsolved homicide units in New York State, separate police departments who are desperate for us to go there and sit down with them. They suspect that Wilder is the killer in two cases that they have, and they believe with what we've been able to tell them that we have the critical information that will allow them to close the case and that would bring enormous comfort to the surviving relatives.
00:31:27
Speaker 3: You know, it's just extraordinary how podcasting has become this invaluable tool.
00:31:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's amazing.
00:31:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, leveraging the ability of the public attention to create leads that just weren't there in cases before that could could solve, genuinely solve cases that have been open for decades. For you, guys, how many episodes from now do you know what the premise of them is going to be? Versus like, you have no idea how the season's going to finish right now?
00:31:59
Speaker 1: Do you?
00:31:59
Speaker 3: How many ahead are you right now that you know they out of Well that's.
00:32:04
Speaker 2: A trade secret and a bit scary, actually, Chicken, we can't tell you all wear a little bit ahead.
00:32:12
Speaker 1: But because because things are changing, for instance, the new information, we're tossing up whether we should do a new Wonder episode maybe within the next couple of weeks because it's so significant and that's where we started, which would mean probably throwing out our schedule and tossing things aside. I just need to make one aside. If you hear therahaka coming through, it's because it's beautiful. Well, that's it. We happen to hear it maybe one hundred times every two weeks from the French class behind.
00:32:42
Speaker 2: It, French classes behind us.
00:32:44
Speaker 3: I love it.
00:32:45
Speaker 4: We don't love it as much as you do. Yeah, wondering whether you're introduced to a podcast, But if you hear it like a hundred times over. This is the kind of thing that trades, you know, in terms of how far ahead.
00:33:00
Speaker 1: We have an idea maybe for the next six or seven episodes, but things aren't changing. And that is, as you say, the sort of like the beauty of the podcast is that we have, if we have the discipline, we have the ability to go and really really do some stuff that we didn't anticipate, and that is very important, and we'll change lives and probably will change history in terms of this case and this person, these families and what we know about everything.
00:33:28
Speaker 2: See, what we've just discovered is that Wilder hadn't thought I hadn't thought about this before. But it now seems that Wilder, when he was going on his rampage, everyone's just assumed that he was maybe heading for the Mexican border, or he was heading for the Canadian board.
00:33:43
Speaker 1: Yea, it was all a bit Brando, it's all a bit random.
00:33:45
Speaker 2: But the path that he followed takes him very close and actually into a number of towns where Bundy had victims. So there's almost this on the current of he was trying to emulate Bundy. He was trying to, you know, get his kill counter to Bundy levels. And so we're now going backwards again to look at some of those early victims to see if there's another Bundy connection.
00:34:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, we think that he may have either saw him as a competitor or somebody to emulate. But either way, we know that of a few murders, that's interesting. And so yet another person that we interviewed about a month or so ago who said, oh, yeah, yeah, this friend of mine was taken. It's funny because Ted Bundy visited this talent and did exactly the same thing. And so we think, wow, there may be a connection. So you know, it's another thing. It's also in America. There's one other thing that's really always been on our mind. It's hard to get, but it's very important. Before he died a year before he went on his rampage, a bit more than a year, wasn't it, Wila went made a confession one drunken night and he didn't drink much often to amember Heavy's racecoa team that he had in fact previously killed eleven women. Wh extraordinary and it's contained it's a line contained in some FBI notes that Andy came into the possession of Yeah.
00:35:06
Speaker 2: We've interviewed the FBI agent who led the manhunt who became aware of this, but not too much work was put into it again once Wilder had been killed. But this confession was you know, a couple of years before the rampage, so it predates all those women, and we know there are about twelve victims there. So if this confession was accurate, you know, if it's genuine, that then puts him well over twenty victims.
00:35:32
Speaker 1: Oh, can I give the bit of the break that we should. You know that the headline we have failed to drop. The person who confessed to currently sits in San Quentin on death right also another person who committed a violent murder after Wilder's rampage, which kind of makes sense. I mean, who else are you going to confess to other than somebody you share similar passions and hobbies with I a murder. So we've andy it's been to use their new expression reaching out to see whether we can get an interview with on death row because he holds a critical secret to all of this. And one other thing we found in the research when we went to the States is that they shared he had to for his submission to prior to the sentencing have a psychological profile, and the psychologist's records are available publicly. In fact, one of the DA's on the case was Kamala Harris. But the psychological profile reveals this guy I had a fascination for white slavery and holding girls captive and a whole lot of things that Wilder also had a similar fascination. So you know, he has just draw these extraordinary links. So here's a guy who while confessed to killing eleven women that nobody has ever investigated.
00:36:54
Speaker 3: That's crazy. One of the things I find so interesting, particularly because the premise of this show is sees the ya so finding your joy, but your purpose, but your north star, whatever that may be. And often the conversation is focused on joy, but sometimes there are subject matters in humanity that are obviously heavy and unfathomable and evil, so to speak. And you guys are constantly now surrounded by the worst of humanity and words like murder, and you know, we're quite desensitized to it because we watch it in Hollywood. We listened to a crime podcast, whereas you guys are actually breaking stories and sitting down with people who who are real humans whose lives have truly been touched by this stuff. So I just want to ask a little bit about the emotional side of Obviously you're not sitting there feeling joy every day about what you're doing, but I think it's a source of fulfillment. Perhaps that is you are making a difference in humanity. You are truly doing something that is going to change history for the better. But are you also facing fear? Do you get the chills when there's a break in the case, Like, what is the feeling around what you're doing? How are you feeling when you're like, talk to me maybe about a chilling moment where you've realized, shit, we are onto something, Like what does that feel like?
00:38:22
Speaker 1: Oh? Okay, well onto something. I'll talk to you about a chilling moment. There was a moment where we met a woman called Francis Ferguson and her daughter was taken by Wilder and probably because she wanted to be she was insecure, according to a mum, wanted to be a model, fell for his pattern and then was taken and killed after visiting a mall. And her daughter looked very much like Jennifer Bills from the movie Flashdands, and so during the course of the interview, mum says that, and then both of us look at each other because Jennifer Bills was one of the movie actresses that was obsessed with, like I'm literally obsessed with and Flashdance was, you know, a movie he knew and loved. So clearly that is now, as we said to the mum who had heard this, only this was the first time she had heard this. It gave some clarity to her by why her daughter was picked because he saw his type, that's who he went after. But that moment was chilling because we both remember looking at Andy and you know, we both recognized it. But in that same interview, Francis, who was sharp as a whip in her eighties but just you know, all her marbles has come out the other side, believes very much in reincarnation that she will be with her daughter again sometime in the future. As to a lot of the people we spoke to, sort of reincarnation and people from past lives, visiting became a huge and again unexpected part of it. But here's the bit. So we are dealing with this very heavy subject. We have found out this information and then at the end, I ask, you know, it's been a heavy interview, but she's a lovely person. I ask her, you know, do you think you'll be reunited with your daughter? And she goes, does the Pope were a beanie? That's her humanity? And we found it in every single person we spoke to that even in all this gloom and this evil, the sort of light still shines, the love still shines for the people that they care and love, and so that's kind of kept us, you know, from being absolutely too mortal and too gloomy, because they're brilliant people. To meet them and talk to them and have them in their houses and is you know, really good.
00:40:37
Speaker 2: Yeah. You talked as well about the emotional impact and that's where actually sometimes it does bring joy. Because the episode that's coming up next week on Linda, this is the ninety y years old who was abducted violently in a shopping mall car park after turning down his you know, offer to photograph her several times, driven across a state line into a romie motel where for the next ten hours she was tortured, electrocuted, sexually assaulted. The most incredible escape you will ever hear recounted. Then she does escape, she gets to hospital, and she then describes everybody treated her with kid gloved. She said, no one you know, could look her in the eye, but they were all furtively looking at her and talking about her. And even her friends from college who came to be with her were kind of the same. The only thing that saved her and she credits this with saving the rest of her life basically in terms of having a successful life after something like this was there was a nurse. There was a nurse called Glenda Linda, and Glenda said to watch some of this in the room and then said to her friends, you come outside with me. She took the friends outside and she said, book yourselves up, go back in there and just listen to her. And Linda says that was the best advice you can give. You have to talk about these things and you just need someone to listen to you. And Mark and I have met an awful lot of families. In fact, there's another episode coming off. Two brothers, Oh yeah, two big strong American military for thirty years each career guys, and their parents banned them from ever mentioning their daughter's name because they thought that was the best way of coping with you. Yeah, forty years later, on the eve of the interview with them, the brother says to me, I'm glad we're doing this. We haven't had a conversation about our sister for forty.
00:42:33
Speaker 1: Years, even amongst themselves.
00:42:35
Speaker 3: Can you imagine, Yeah, it makes you want a cry.
00:42:38
Speaker 2: So I think that I'm hoping people will take we'll hear this and take something good from it, and if they do, that's going to bring me joly.
00:42:46
Speaker 1: Linda's observation was kind of interesting. She said, this is part of my life. Tell them remember it. I just was listening to it last night, to be honest, And she says, if a date triggers me, like the date he took me, or a smell, because smells just stay with you for the rest of the life, or you know, just how somebody looks it might be somebody who looks like him. I don't want you to say, don't say that, or I don't want I want you to be part of my life. This is my life, you know, it's very important for me to acknowledge that. And she said, not only do it help me become a better person, you know, particularly amongst the people who ended up being my friends, who acknowledged. It made become a better mother. You know, it sort of like centered me rather than ignored or sublimated. You know, you deal with it. Now, we've got Irish news Iris.
00:43:32
Speaker 3: It's a world tour, this is a global podcast. You know, it's funny. I do think that the depths of evil, the positive to pull out of it is that you find the greatest displays of kindness and humanity like it. It's the both ends of the spectrum are often found together. But from a personal perspective, was there a moment, because I know this has happened for other true crime podcasters, has there been any moments along the investigation where you've felt scared or where something you've uncovered might have put you at risk? Like have you been worried, especially in the States when you've been on the road, you know, have there been moments where you've thought, oh my god, what have we done?
00:44:13
Speaker 2: I think that because there's two of us, yes, I think that negates a lot of that. And you know, to be honest, I had a thought the other day that maybe, you know, it could be a bit dangerous, but then I thought, well, look, serial killers particularly and we kind of specialize in serial killers. They like to plan things and they research how they're going to do things. Yeah, and if you think about it, look at us, Sarah, if you're a serial kid, if you're not us too off, how the hell are you going to dispose of the body?
00:44:40
Speaker 1: That's so cruel? You meets six people, you know, so seriously, I'll tell you there was one time I was scared. I'll give you an honest answer to that. It was when we arrived in Boston late at night and Andy took us to the worst part of town, to the wrong hotel at about midnight.
00:44:59
Speaker 3: Was unrelated to the sh that was just Anie's bad choices.
00:45:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, And we went to two hotels in that trip that were truly horrifying. One was the motel that Linda was held an escape from, which truly is a motel out of central casting for serial killers. Exactly. It'srendous. It should be isily tourist attracts. Yeah, yeah, exactly the same.
00:45:21
Speaker 3: You should do it catching evil tour where you take people on like a tourism and you take them to I'm not even joking. I'm not even joking. I could talk to you both for hours. This has been such a joy but to finish up. I think one of the things that makes us best at the jobs that we do is getting a little bit of distance from it and being able to switch off, which is easier said than done. But when you do need to kind of get get a little bit of a refresher and you know, at the end of the day, when you finish recording and you come home, is there anything that you do for pure joy? I feel like there's a G and T and an Irish wolf found in there somewhere. But what do you guys do for pure pure yea yeah, yeah, and.
00:46:02
Speaker 2: Then watch out and get beat on the TV.
00:46:04
Speaker 1: Yeah that's me.
00:46:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
00:46:06
Speaker 1: He's got a man cave where he watches Everton in the gloom to replicate home. I have bold and unrealizable dreams to be a tennis star. So I played tennis. Tennis is my love. So you know, So if you if you're looking for, you know a person who dreams of competing in the Australian Open, you know, an unrealistic dream to sort of one day hold up the cup on that person.
00:46:32
Speaker 3: You know, never say never, Mark, never say never.
00:46:35
Speaker 1: I don't. I just like I go to sleep dreaming of the crowd during my expectance drink achieve a chief and you have musk can put us on mark sure that you can get me to win Wimbledon.
00:46:49
Speaker 3: Oh well, thank you to so much, not only for your time, but for the incredible work that you were doing on this case in areas where really not no one else has been able to make headway for decades and provide so much solace and closure I think for a lot of families around the world. And I can't wait to see how the rest of your investigations and the season go. You know I will be listening keenly. I cannot wait to everyone listening. You will have just heard the Linda episode two days ago at the time this release is, and a whole rest of the season to see what unravels.
00:47:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, thank you so much, thank you.
00:47:29
Speaker 3: Well, we all know this was personally motivated by my love of true crime and crime fiction. I always wondered if I might have a true crime investigative podcast in my system, and this was definitely enlightening. I found it absolutely fascinating. I'd actually been listening to Catching Evil since the very first episode, right on the day that they launched. Before I knew that we had a mutual connection and that I would be able to sit down with Mark and Andy, but then being able to dive into the behind the scenes of what it takes to bring the show to life was just an absolute joy. And even if you're not a true crime nut, you can't not be fascinated by the power of podcasting to change history, the importance of grit and curiosity in any career path, and also how finding the right partner can make or break the impact of a project in any industry. I found that really fascinating, how much they referred back to each other and what a great team they make. I truly found this so fascinating, And if you're interested in the actual case as well, I'll of course pop links to Catching Evil in the show notes for you. As you've heard, there is so much more to come. We will have just heard episode seven a couple of days ago at the time of the release of this episode, but of course there is a whole season to come in the meantime. I hope you're all having a great week. This year is absolutely flying by. There is so much exciting stuff happening at the moment. I hope you're all keeping safe and well and are seizing your da