Transcript of Last Call (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE) New

In the fall of 2010, a detective was digging through a dresser drawer in a bedroom near Paris, France. He was looking for evidence, and when he pulled open the last drawer, he found 5 cell phones hidden inside of it. So he powered one of them on, and he first checked the call history and then also the text messages. And then he opened up the photos app and he froze. There was this collection of photos on this phone.

They were all very similar. And there were just dozens of them, and they all showed the same disturbing thing. But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do. So if that's of interest to you, please take the follow button out to your local park and hop on the seesaw. And for a little while, just ride it like you normally would.

But at some point when the follow button is in the, the high position, go ahead and jump off so they smash to the ground. Okay, let's get into today's story.

On the night of October 14th, 2010, a 46-year-old woman named Natalie Viermet was standing behind the counter at the Rose Garden, a bar on the outskirts of Paris, France, that she owned. And currently she was counting that day's earnings from the register when a couple of regulars at a nearby table began shouting at each other. Natalie immediately, you know, yelled at them to keep things civil or she'd have the bartender cut them off. And the argument at that point did die immediately, and Natalie went back to counting the money. Natalie was used to, to drunks and to rough characters.

Because her bar and the boarding house attached to it that she also owned were full of people like that. Like, just last week, Natalie had caught one of her tenants, a very heavy drinker named Bruno Martin, sneaking money out of this cash register. Now, she'd banned Bruno from the bar for obvious reasons, but she'd stopped short of kicking him out of the boarding house completely. She knew she'd have to watch him closely, but She just couldn't bring herself to throw him out on the street because he really had nothing else. You know, as difficult as her tenants and the patrons at her bar could be, Natalie did really care about them.

She sort of felt like she was born to be a landlady, and she got real satisfaction out of putting a roof over the heads of people who really needed one, even if they were sort of rowdy and difficult. So even with all the headaches, Natalie wouldn't have traded the Rose Garden or, you know, the attached boarding house for anything. And so now she shut the cash register and she placed all the money that she had made into a zip-up pouch that she then put into her jacket pocket. Then she looked over at the clock and saw it was 8:30 PM. So she reached for the phone behind the bar and dialed the number for her own apartment.

After a few rings, Nathalie's long-term boyfriend answered. He was a 47-year-old man named Marc Détrebecq. So Nathalie and Marc had been together for 25 years and, you know, never got around to having a wedding. But Mark had actually recently begun talking about doing a ceremony to make things official, which caught Natalie off guard because in these 25 years they had been together, Mark had really never shown any real interest in getting married. And so this change in Mark, for the most part, Natalie was actually happy about it.

But every now and again, she sort of felt like, why is this happening now? What changed with Mark? But now she told Mark on the phone that she was getting ready to leave work and she was gonna head home now. And he said that he'd already eaten and might be asleep when she got there. And Natalie said that was fine and she would just heat up some leftovers and, you know, see him in the morning.

As she hung up, her bartender, a 47-year-old man named Patrice Chevalier, came out of the storage room and he was wheeling a keg on a hand truck. Patrice had turned up at the Rose Garden 2 years ago with practically nothing, and Natalie had given him a cheap room inside of the boarding house and a job behind the bar. And he turned out to be surprisingly reliable. And by now she thought of him less as an employee and more as a friend. Natalie asked Patrice as he was walking by with this keg if he still wanted a ride to his girlfriend's place that night, because if he did, she was getting ready to leave now.

And Patrice said, actually, yes, he did. And he would go grab his stuff right now. And then he put the keg away and he ducked into the back again. A moment later, when he came back out with his coat on, you know, ready to leave, Natalie nodded to him. And then she also checked that the waitress had the keys and was good to close up when they were gone.

And then Natalie grabbed her scarf off the hook by the door and headed out with Patrice right behind her. It was cold outside, so Natalie wrapped that scarf around her neck, and then she and Patrice headed across the parking lot toward her white van.

The next morning, around 11:25 AM on October 15th, a man was out for a walk along this wooded road about a 30-minute drive from the Rose Garden. And as he was walking, he happened to glance down into the ditch that was running alongside the road, and he spotted a pair of women's boots sticking out of a pile of branches. The man thought the boots might be worth something, so he stepped down into the ditch to get a better look. But as he got closer, he froze because through these branches he could see there was, there was more. There was patches of skin and clothing.

And he realized that these boots were not just lying there on their own, they were on the feet of a woman. And so at this point, the man scrambled right back outta the ditch, pulled out his phone, and he called the police. About 30 minutes later, Police Colonel Joel Ferry of the local Criminal Investigations Unit stepped down into that ditch to join a team of crime scene techs. He watched them clear away the last of the branches, and then he moved in closer for a better look at the body. The deceased was a middle-aged woman who was lying face down on the ground, and her hands were tied with a belt behind her back.

The techs checked her pockets for ID and came up empty. Then they carefully rolled her over, and Ferry winced at the sight. The victim's face was severely disfigured, like it had been smashed in by something really heavy. Now, there was a ton of blood on her face and her head, but very little around the rest of her body or really anywhere else in the ditch. And since head wounds do tend to bleed a lot, that told Ferry that this woman had very likely been killed somewhere else before being dumped here.

Ferry also noticed when he was looking at this woman's hands that there were signs of scratches on them, as if she had been in a struggle. And also we saw that her pants, her shirt and bra were all ripped open. So there had very likely been a sexual assault component to this attack. As Ferry was taking all this in, another officer called him over to a spot that was further down the ditch, about 50 yards away. And so Ferry walked over and he looked down at what they had found.

And it was this thick, heavy branch that was kind of like a, a big club with blood smeared along one end of it. It looked like it very likely was the murder weapon. And looking down at this, this huge piece of wood, you know, this big club, if you will, I mean, it really drove home just how brutal this murder really had been. I mean, smashing someone's face in with a branch, that's something that would take a lot of strength and probably a lot of rage. And so whoever killed this woman had wanted to destroy her.

Early the next morning, on October 16th, 2010, Colonel Joel Ferry walked into the interview room of a small-town police station near Paris. A lot had happened since yesterday, but the biggest development was that the body from the woods now had a name. The victim had been identified as Nathalie Villermet, a 46-year-old bar owner whose boyfriend had reported her missing yesterday morning. An autopsy had been completed overnight, and it confirmed that Nathalie was savagely beaten to death. That very likely the killer had used that bloody branch that was found 50 yards away from the body and had ultimately broken her skull, literally caved her head in.

However, the killer had not left any physical evidence on the body or, or in the body, which actually suggested that very likely sexual assault did not occur, which meant that Ferry's best shot at IDing the killer came down to that bloody branch that was believed to be the murder weapon. And also the belt that was used to bind Natalee's hands. And both of those items were currently on their way to the crime lab. But, you know, despite that, analyzing them would take a few weeks. So in the meantime, Ferry was just plowing ahead with the investigation in other ways.

One of his main priorities right now was finding Natalee's vehicle, which, according to her boyfriend who had filed the missing person report, was a white van. And so that van had still not turned up yet. And so Ferry's team was currently out searching the roads for the vehicle while Ferry was more focused on just speaking to the people that were closest to Natalee. And so now Ferry took a seat across from his first interview subject, Natalee's boyfriend, Mark Detsrebec. And so as the victim's partner and the one who actually called the police about her absence, Mark was an obvious suspect.

But right now, Ferry felt like he at least looked the part of a grieving boyfriend. He was pale, he was shaky, and he kept breaking into tears and saying he just couldn't believe Natalie was dead. And when he finally got himself together, Mark explained that he had last heard from Natalie 2 nights ago when she'd called around 8:30 PM to just say she was leaving work. He had gone to bed thinking, you know, he'd be asleep, she'd get home any minute, and then he'd wake up and he would see her. But when he woke up, The house was empty and her van was not there.

Mark instinctively immediately reported her missing, and then he'd driven over to the Rose Garden. But Natalie hadn't been there either. So Mark and a friend from the bar had gone out looking for her, and they'd still been driving around scanning the roads for Natalie or her white van when Mark had gotten the call that her body had been found. Colonel Ferry took detailed notes the whole time Mark was speaking. It seemed kind of strange that Mark wouldn't notice that his girlfriend who he lived with, was missing until the next day?

Like, even if you went to bed, it just sort of seems like if you expected her any minute, I mean, wouldn't you have sort of noticed if she just didn't show up? Wouldn't you have not been able to drift off to sleep? And also, Mark's story in general about just having been asleep at the time that his partner was killed is like the worst kind of alibi, really, because nobody is going to be able to confirm or disprove it. It's sort of like his word against everybody else's. And so now, Ferry began asking some sort of uncomfortable follow-up questions about Mark and Natalie's relationship, like, was there any infidelity?

Did they have any money problems? Had they been fighting? You know, that kind of thing. He was looking to see how Mark handled these questions as much as he was listening to his answers, because in Ferry's experience, guilty boyfriends or guilty partners tended to get really defensive when you started poking at their relationship. But Mark, he just looked sort of confused.

He said, "No, they were, they were really happy and they'd actually been talking about getting legally married soon. Finally, you know, after 25 years." And so Ferry wrote that down. And then he asked about the friend who had helped Mark look for Natalee on the morning that he discovered she was missing. And Mark explained that the man was actually Natalee's bartender. A guy named Patrice Chevalier.

Patrice didn't drive, so Nathalie would sometimes drop him off at his girlfriend's place on her way home from work. And from speaking to Patrice yesterday, Marc understood that she had given him a ride on the night she was ultimately killed. Ferry's pen immediately stopped when he heard that because this was the first time he was hearing that Nathalie hadn't been alone when she left the bar that night. And it meant that he needed to speak to Patrice as soon as possible.

Later that afternoon, Colonel Ferry sat in a corner of Natalie's bar, the Rose Garden. It was closed because of the murder, and so Ferry was now using the space for interviews, starting with the bartender Patrice. And Patrice confirmed what Mark had said, that Natalie did sometimes give him a ride after work to his girlfriend's place. And on the night that she was killed, she had done just that. Patrice said, you know, on the night that she was killed, you know, after he got dropped off, he said she just drove off and that was the last he saw of her.

He didn't think anything of it. It was sort of like business as usual. At this point, Ferry told Patrice that while he understood that from, you know, his POV, this seemed like, you know, hey, this is what happened. I don't remember anything else. Fine.

But at this point, You are officially the last known person to see Natalee alive and right before she likely was killed. And so because of that, the police needed to take his DNA and also they needed the contact information for his girlfriend so they could verify the time that Patrice had gotten home. And Patrice immediately nodded and said he understood and was genuinely happy to cooperate, you know, whatever they needed. He said he owed Natalee a lot for giving him a job and a place to live when he was really down on his luck. Now, he sounded very genuine as he said that, but Ferry couldn't help but feel really skeptical, and he wanted to see what Patrice would do if he gave him the chance to point the finger at somebody else.

So before ending the interview, Ferry asked Patrice if he was aware of anyone that Natalee was having trouble with, like in particular of late. Has she had any recent issues with anybody? And Patrice did not hesitate. He said there was one tenant in particular, a very mean drunk named Bruno Martin, who'd been giving Natalee problems really for months. Ferry made a note of the name and would follow up with him, but he also made a note that Patrice had taken the bait a bit too easily.

But either way, this Bruno was definitely somebody Ferry did need to speak with. An hour later, Ferry was still sitting in that same corner of the bar only now he was sitting across from this very scruffy-looking man in a stained jacket. This was Bruno Martin, the tenant that Patrice had mentioned that apparently had been giving Nathalie issue. And by now, a bunch of other tenants and employees had confirmed that Bruno was sort of like a, a violent alcoholic who really had clashed with Nathalie on a pretty regular basis. And in fact, just a week before the murder, Nathalie had apparently caught Bruno breaking into the bar's cash register, and she'd slapped him across the face before throwing him out of the bar, apparently for good this time.

Like, he was banned from the bar because of this. So it really did sound like Bruno might be a pretty suspicious guy here. He, he could have harbored a grudge. But there was something else Ferry had learned that made Bruno's history actually even more interesting, and that was that on the night of the murder, right before Natalie left the Rose Garden for the last time, she had emptied the cash register and taken the money with her. But no money had been found on or anywhere near her body, which meant that one possible motive for this crime was simply robbery.

And the fact that Bruno had recently been caught stealing, literally from the same register by the same woman who was murdered, was starting to make him look really suspicious. And so when Ferry pretty aggressively pressed Bruno on all of this, Bruno got really flustered. He snapped that, you know, he wasn't a thief and that Natalee had been wrong to blame him in the first place. You know, he thought it was just a cash register discrepancy, he called it. He admitted that he and Natalee had never really gotten along, that was true, but he still said that he hadn't killed her.

And that he'd spent the night of the murder alone in his room. Like, he wasn't out there doing anything. And so Bruno, you know, he diligently took these notes and he's just letting Bruno talk. And then at some point when there was a break, Ferry said, okay, well, will you give a DNA sample so you can be ruled out? He said that he was taking samples from everybody at the Rose Garden, tenants and staff included.

But right away, Ferry could see that Bruno did not like this idea. Bruno glared at Ferry with his teeth visibly clenched. And so Ferry is getting ready for this guy to refuse the DNA sample. But then, much to Ferry's surprise, Bruno, you know, with gritted teeth and with this angry look on his face, he nodded and said, "Fine." If that's what it took to get the police office back, he'd do it. So Ferry started getting out the DNA kit to swab Bruno while also processing everything he'd just learned.

The interviews so far had turned up 3 strong suspects. There was Bruno, the alcoholic with an apparent grudge. There was Patrice, the bartender who had left the bar with Natalee on the night she was killed. And there was Mark, the boyfriend with, you know, the sleeping alibi. At this point, any one of them could be the killer.

And Ferry knew he wasn't going to be able to rule any of them out by interviews alone. What he needed now was some real hard evidence.

About a week later, on the morning of October 24th, Ferry was standing in the police station's garage in front of what looked to be like an evidence goldmine. His team had finally found Natalee's missing white van. It had been abandoned on the side of a road about 5 miles or so from where her body had been dumped. And this van was covered in blood. On the hood and on the grill and inside on the floor.

And so now a blood spatter analyst took Ferry and was walking him around the vehicle explaining what they could learn from all the blood. The analyst explained that based on the shape of the droplets and the, the distance between them all, their team could tell that the blood on the van's front had sprayed onto the hood, which meant that Natalee's heart been beating when this blood left her body that wound up right here. Meanwhile, the blood that was inside the van, in the back of the van on the floor, had clearly leaked there rather than sprayed, implying that she was dead before she was loaded into the van because her heart was not beating. So for Ferry, you know, putting those details together, it actually told him quite a bit. It looked like someone had killed Natalee in front of her van And then after she was dead, they put her body in the back of the van and then drove her van with her in it to the ditch, dumped her, and then drove the vehicle away and dumped it nearby.

And so at this point, it was like Ferry had what he believed was like the clearest picture of the crime yet. But, you know, despite having this clarity, he still didn't know who killed Natalee. And so for that, Ferry had spent the last few days looking into his suspects' alibis, and two of them turned out to be pretty solid. Bruno's alibi checked out because several phone calls have been made from his room in the middle of the night, and so unless someone else had gone into his room and placed those calls, it looked very much like Bruno really had spent the night at home. Patrice's alibi had also held up.

His girlfriend had confirmed that Patrice really had been dropped off at her his apartment soon after leaving the Rose Garden, which left him virtually no time at all to kill Natalie, dump the body, dump the car, and get back. Like, it seemed virtually impossible. Now, Ferry knew that the girlfriend could definitely be covering for Patrice, but still, this was a stronger alibi than Mark's, the long-term boyfriend who had said he'd been home asleep all night with absolutely nobody there to confirm or deny it. And so Mark, by process of elimination, was really starting to look like the guy, like he is the killer. But still, all three suspects are still in play despite the two strong alibis.

And so now, Ferry really just needed the crime lab to get back to him with the results from the DNA testing. A few weeks later, in November of 2010, Colonel Ferry was in his office when he got the call he'd been waiting for. The crime lab had found DNA on the belt that was used to bind Natalee's hands, and the DNA belonged to one of Ferry's 3 suspects. So Ferry immediately made some phone calls, and later that same afternoon, he walked back into the police station's interview room and sat down across from the bartender, Patrice Chevalier. When Ferry told Patrice that his DNA was found on Natalee's belt, Patrice turned pale and put his face in his hands.

And for a second, Ferry thought he was about to confess. And when Patrice looked up again, he even did say that there was something he needed to tell Ferry that he had left out in the first interview, but it was not a confession. Patrice, who looked visibly pretty shaken up here, like he was sort of panicking, he said that he actually wasn't that surprised that his DNA was found on that belt. Because he said they'd been sleeping together for weeks before she was killed. This was shocking for Ferry.

I mean, he did not expect there to be like a secret affair going on. But instead of interrupting or asking questions, he just let Patrice keep going. And Patrice would go on to explain that Natalee had apparently been very frustrated with her long-term boyfriend, Mark. She thought that he was cheating on her and that his recent talk about them getting married was just a way to cover up his bad behavior. And he said that her suspicion around Mark had been the main driver that had prompted her to make a move on him, on Patrice.

Patrice said, you know, he was attracted to her, and when she came on to him, he just, he couldn't say no. Colonel Ferry just stared at Patrice as he finished this, the story he was telling. To Ferry, This, this had to be a lie. It just felt way too convenient, like Patrice was literally just spinning a story to explain away the DNA found on the dead body. I mean, this is, this is quite the convenient story here.

But if there was any chance that this was true, obviously Ferry had to know, because if Nathalie had been cheating, it gave Marc a very powerful motive. Like, if he knew about it, which meant the DNA on the belt had not closed the case at all. It had actually just shifted it in a new direction. And so Ferry would spend another hour questioning Patrice all about this affair and getting all the details he could before ultimately releasing him. And then he made a call to a local judge.

There was one way to know for sure if Mark was hiding something. Ferry was going to tap Mark's phone and spy him. One morning in November of 2010, about a month after Nathalie Villermet was murdered, Police Colonel Joel Ferry sat in his office at a police station near Paris reviewing a transcript from the wiretap on Marc's phone. And Ferry almost couldn't believe what he was reading, because it looked like Patrice had been telling the truth about Mark cheating on Natalie. The wiretap had recorded phone calls between Mark and a woman, and reading between the lines, it seemed like these two had been seeing each other for some time, maybe even for years.

On one of these calls, Mark had complained to this woman that he had always been the one who had had to travel to see her, like, in the past, and it was time that she came to him for a change. And then before they hung up during the same phone call, This woman signed off by calling Mark "my love." And so this completely upended Ferry's view of Mark, while Patrice's story suddenly seemed a lot more plausible. And if both Mark and Nathalie had been unfaithful like Patrice was saying, it gave Mark a really serious motive here. Around 9 AM the next morning, Ferry sat in the police station interview room across from Mark. Who was staring back at him with a truly stunned expression.

Ferry had just confronted Mark, revealing that he knew about the affair. When Mark finally found his voice, he stammered that Ferry had it all wrong. The woman he'd been talking to was just an old boss that he kept in touch with. And he insisted that, "Despite what you may think about what we were saying to each other, there had never been anything sexual between them." Ferry found this extremely hard to believe, and certainly based on how sort of frantic Mark seemed right now, it did seem like he was being overly defensive. And also, now that Ferry knew Mark, assuming this, this affair was real, that he was cheating on Natalie, that, that meant he had a real motive to get rid of Natalie.

And the fact that he didn't have an alibi for the night of the murder, that he was asleep, was really a glaring red flag at this point. But even so, Ferry knew he couldn't just arrest Mark on a hunch. Mark's DNA had not been recovered from the belt, from the body, from the murder weapon, or the van, so without any evidence actually tying him to the murder, Ferry had no choice but to eventually turn him loose. And after Mark left, Ferry just sat alone for a moment, just thinking over the case. The evidence of a potential affair between Mark and this former boss of his had certainly launched Mark to the very top of the suspect list.

But Ferry was still quite suspicious of the other two men on it, despite their alibis being much more solid. After all, Patrice's DNA had literally been found on Natalee's belt that was used to bind her arms. And no matter how plausible his affair story was, of his affair with Natalee, that fact doesn't just go away. I mean, your DNA was basically on on a dead body. And then there was Natalie's very difficult tenant Bruno.

The missing cash from the cash register had never turned up, which meant robbery was still very much a potential motive here. And Bruno had already been caught stealing from the same register once before, so it seemed like he really could have done this just for the money. And so after a little while, after thinking over these, these 3 suspects really closely, Ferry came to a decision. There one person he really needed to talk to, and if he was right, they could help clear all of this up. A few days later, Ferry was once again back inside of a police interview room, but this time he was sitting across from a woman.

He believed she held the key to this whole case. He just needed her to tell him the truth. At first, she was very hesitant, but Ferry, he kept on pushing and pushing, and eventually, She broke, and she told him everything he needed to know.

Based on forensic evidence and witness testimony, this is what police believe happened to Nathalie Viarme on the night of October 14th, 2010. The killer stood in the dark watching Natalee as she crossed in front of her van. The killer had been thinking about this for a long time, thinking about Natalee and thinking about the way things were supposed to be between them. And they'd prepared for this moment. Earlier that day, they had found this heavy branch that would make a perfect weapon, like a, like a big club, and they had stowed it away.

And that same afternoon, the killer had made a phone call to ensure they got away with what they were planning. So as Natalie passed by her van, the killer made their move. They rushed up and they grabbed Natalie from behind. And as she twisted around, the pouch with the cash register money fell from her pocket. Natalie, she fought back, thrashing and screaming as loud as she could, but the killer wrestled her to the ground and managed to strip off her belt and then bound her hands.

The killer tried to undress her further, but Natalie just would not stop fighting. And so the killer began to panic and they decided they needed to silence her before anybody heard. And so they tried strangling Natalee with her own scarf, but Natalee kept on fighting. She wasn't passing out. And so when this didn't work, they pulled out that heavy branch, their club, and they smashed Natalee in the face until she went still.

By the time it was all over, the front of Natalee's van was splattered all over the place with blood. The killer scooped up that money pouch off the road, and then they carried Natalie's body inside to the back of the van, loaded her inside, and then tossed the branch in with her. Then they took the keys to her van from her pockets, and then the killer climbed into the front seat and drove off looking for somewhere remote where the body might go unnoticed. When they found a spot that looked pretty good, they pulled over, they pulled her body out of the van, and dumped it into a ditch off the side of the road and then threw some branches on top of it. By the time the killer got back to the van, it was nearly 5:00 AM.

And so they hopped back in the van, they drove it a few miles down the road before they abandoned it. And so at that point, they just started the long walk back to the Rose Garden. And this same person was there at the Rose Garden when Mark, the longtime boyfriend, showed up saying that Natalee was missing. And that's when the killer volunteered to go help him look for her. It would turn out Natalie was murdered by Patrice Chevalier, the Rose Garden's bartender.

The crucial clue came from Patrice's own girlfriend, who was the woman Ferry had summoned to the police station for that critical interview. The girlfriend had previously confirmed Patrice's alibi, but when Ferry pressed her on it the second time she was brought in to be spoken to, She admitted that Patrice had asked her to lie, and she had. And apparently Patrice had not asked her to lie after the murder had been committed. No, Patrice called his girlfriend hours before he murdered Natalee and instructed her on exactly what to tell the police, which proved that he had planned Natalee's murder ahead of time. After his girlfriend came clean, investigators searched Patrice's room at the Rose Garden and they found a stash of hidden cell phones.

And on these phones were dozens and dozens of photos of Natalee that clearly had been taken secretly of her, like from under tables and, you know, from behind her, clearly designed to try to capture, you know, images of her that were sort of risqué. Patrice had never been Natalee's lover. He'd been obsessed with her for years, you know, secretly taking those photos of her watching her all the time. But his story about the two of them having an affair had been a total fabrication. One, it was a story that was designed to cover up the fact that his DNA was, was found on the belt used to bind her hands.

But also, one could assume that he was sort of living out this lie, 'cause he still, even after killing her, even after basically being caught for murder, was like pretending that he had this real relationship with Nathalie. And so maybe it gave him some satisfaction to pretend that they had had this affair because, you know, who's going to say otherwise? Nathalie at this point was dead. And so ultimately, Patrice Chevalier was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

A quick note about our stories. They are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes.

The Mr. Ballen Podcast: Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballen. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone and Cole Acasio. This episode was written by Andrew Kelleher, story editing by Luke Baratz. Research and fact-checking by Shelley Xu, Samantha Van Hoos, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Alex Paul, Ben Fasciano. Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear.

Audio editing and post-produced by Whit Lacascio and Jordan Stidham. Production support by Antonio Manata and Delaina Corley. Artwork by Jessica Clogston Kiner. Theme song, Something Wicked, by Ross Bugden. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballen Podcast.

And just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Ballen Podcast, you can also now watch on the Mr. Ballen YouTube channel that very same day. And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe. Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballen. If you want to listen to episodes one week early and ad-free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit siriusxm.com/podcast. Podcast Plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice.

So that's gonna do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see ya.