Transcript of The Charming Susan Strangler - Demarest, New Jersey

This week in Demarest, New Jersey, when two women disappear, both found brutally murdered within days of each other, it turns out that both of their names were Susan, and that's not the only thing that connects them to a local troublemaker nicknamed The Charmer. Welcome to Small Town Murder. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder.

Because we're givers.

Just take them. We want you to have the things that we want you to have nice things. That's all it is. So that's what you're going to do here.

There's a lot of that going on today.

No. For Small Town Murder, I can't wait. We're going to talk about that documentary, the Widower Till Death Do Us Part documentary. The guy who had six wives and four of them are dead.

Oh.

Which, unless you're like 112 years old, that shouldn't be. You know what I mean? It's a little bit odd. So then we'll talk about how that all worked out. This guy's some kind of piece of work. Patreon.com/crimeinsports is where you get all of that. And on top of that, you get everything we put out. Crime in Sports, Your Stupid Opinions, and of course, both Small Town Murders, all ad-free.

We'll work on that. Yeah.

That said, disclaimer time. This is a comedy show, everybody. We're comedians. People are certainly going to die. The show's called Small Town Murder, so we don't want to rip you off there. The thing is, you go, well, how does that do those things go together? I don't understand that. I don't get it. Well, very easily. The way we do it is we never make fun of the victims or the victims' families.

Why, James?

Because we're assholes.

But.

But we're not scumbags.

There you have it.

That's it. That's how you do it like that. It's real easy. There's plenty of other stuff to make fun of. We all are from somewhere that deserves to be made fun of. It's fun to make fun of a town. That's good times. Some police force that bumbles around and doesn't do their jobs and lets somebody kill.

Oh, you suck around.

Let people go out and keep killing. That's something to be made fun of. And we make fun of murderers because fuck them. What else do we have? We have nothing else we can do with that. So do you think that sounds good? You're going to hear a hell of a story. Do you think true crime and comedy should never, ever go together? Maybe not. You might not like it, but we think you will. And we think you should.

You might.

Stick around and find out.

But.

Either way.

Say the fucking word.

No goddamn complaining afterward. That's how that works. So I think it's time, everybody. With that said, to sit back. Let me just say, clear the lungs. There we go. Arms to the sky. Let's all shout.

Shut up and give me murder.

Let's do this, everybody.

Oh.

What do you say? Everybody ready? Let's go on a trip. Shall we? Bag's packed, Jimmy? Okay, behind your chair.

As good as they're going to be. They're a little loose.

Jimmy's just got a glad bag. It's one of the ones where you pull it tight and everything like that.

But it's sitting in this milk crate that I put roller skate wheels on.

That's pretty good. Yeah. That's good luggage. And he just ties a string to it.

He ties a string from that to his belt loop, and he just drags it behind him in the airport. It's real nice.

Can't get lost. It's pretty fun stuff. We're going to Demarest, New Jersey this week. D-E-M-A-R-E-S-T. Demarest, which sounds like some sort of product.

Yeah. It's not Demer.

If it was Derma Rest, you'd be like it's some sort of skin thing where you put it on and it waxes your skin.

It sounds like a conventional there's a typo shampoo.

Totally does. Demarest. Yeah. Get your Demarest. Two for one right now. Shop right.

This side tingles.

This side, not so much. Not feeling anything. But this side, it tingles.

Oh, sell some blue with that.

Sell some blue or one of those. Yeah, they had I remember that.

Part down the middle. You got shampoo on either side.

This side.

Tingling over here.

Not so much.

Well, then that sounds like it's bad for you.

I was going to say, is tingling of the scalp good?

Tingling? Not good.

It seems bad. This is in Northeastern New Jersey. About 50 minutes to New York City, so you know it's going to be expensive because it is within commuter range. Very easy commuter range. About two hours to Philly, the other direction. And about an hour and 10 to our last New Jersey episode, Franklin, New Jersey, episode 702. I remember that one, the bloody pizza murders. Remember that? There was way more to it than that, but they come to the scene and find a corpse and a pizza. They're like, what? This is odd. This is in Bergen County, area code 201.

From jackets to glasses.

And then later, a piano factory.

Fucking out.

This building is.

It's like he's got a hobby, and he just changes the hobby every 10 years. He's like, I'm going to make these out.

I don't know if those were his, all of his, but I don't know how you'd have to completely retool a factory to make it.

Whole factory, yeah.

From wool to pianos.

Yeah.

It's a very different thing. In 1903, the borough of Demarest became a thing after they separated from the township of Harrington. They want to be with those fucking bums anymore. So the first mayor was John H.Z. Demarest.

Demarest, yep.

Makes sense. By this time, there was all sorts of new people coming in. They had a new church congregation. The Methodists were coming. They used to meet in the bowling alley, and then it burned down, so they had to figure out where to go. Everything burned down back then. The First World War had a lot of military activity around here. They had Camp Merritt, which was being built in Cresskill and Dumont. And while that was happening, troops were quartered in tents on the Demarest racetrack.

Like a horse track.

A big open area, I guess, for a lot of troops. And that's where the high school is now, apparently, where the racetrack was and where the troops were quartered. So a little bit of review time here. Here's some reviews of this town. Here's five stars. Demarest is a really quiet place with very friendly neighbors and community members. Yeah.

They're not the same people, huh?

No. Neighbors and community members are very separate. That's why I read it like neighbors and community members. We got everything here. Though it's an extremely small town, it has a gazebo downtown where many concerts and events are hosted free for the public over the summer.

What big is that fucking gazebo?

We'll find out what there is to do. Don't you worry. The downtown area is small, like the town, with few stores, but it's never an issue. As a few-minute drive to the neighboring towns, you'll get all the stores you need. And you're less than an hour from goddamn Manhattan.

Like New York City.

You can literally find anything you need within an hour of your house.

Yeah.

The schools are also above in education and have many achievements throughout the years. Not the students, the school themselves.

Just the school.

Just the school.

Students don't do shit.

The building, very impressive, though. Wins a lot of awards. Four stars, just very short. The crime isn't very bad in my town.

Good.

I guess that's good. We'll find out later with some stats about that. Here's three stars, finally. And this is the lowest review I could find is three stars. It's an all-right town. The schools here are decent enough, and there is care put into them. People here are genuinely nice and friendly. It also has a nature center, which is a plus. However, it is known to be, quote, one of the safest towns in New Jersey for a reason. If you're considering moving here, though, please consider for yourself, is there something such as too safe?

Oh, it's so safe.

That it sucks now.

The absolute place is just it lulls you into false sense of security.

Yeah. This is what people do. They have kids, and they move out to places they feel are too safe. Yeah. If you're like starting a band and you're 24, this might not be the best place for you. You might want to find an unused warehouse space where they used to make pianos and eyeglasses, and you can figure that out.

A little scarier place for some.

Yeah. And then just some food for thought.

Oh.

It's too nice is their complaint. People in this town, 4,977 crushed souls under the heel of being too nice around here.

Too safe, yeah.

Too safe. More men than women, which is odd for a town of this size. It's only 49% women. So a bit of a sausage party here in Demarest. Demarest is a kind of sausage in case you weren't in case you were wondering. I know. It might as well be. Median age here, 45, which you kind of see that with the burbs. People move out when they're a little older. Family here, this is one of the highest we've ever seen. It is 50-50 is normal for the rest of the country. And married, 76% married.

These are, yeah. It's a quaint, livable family community.

You moved here when you thought the city got when it was too hard to get your baby carriage down three flights of stairs and your walk up. You were like, okay, we're moving to fucking New Jersey.

Tired of dragging that shit down the stairs in the subway.

Too much. 76% married, 2% divorced. So these people have money, and they're like, we are not getting divorced. It will not breaking up this fortune.

I did have a nightmare the other night that I was still married and that they want whoever I was married to wanted to divorce. And I was like, oh, no.

It wasn't your ex-wife, which you were thrilled about.

No, it was just another one. I don't know who it was.

But they knew they didn't want you. That's all they knew.

But now I got to give away my house again.

Oh, man. I don't want to do that. But I just got it how I like it. I just put a garage in. 1.4% single with children. There are no single parents here. That is insane. Race in this town, 56.9% white, 0.3% black. That is very low. 32.6% Asian. You didn't expect that stat to fly out of there. I don't know what it is, but a lot of Asian people here. I mean, you can have as many as you want. Don't get me wrong.

You're allowed.

You're allowed. Go crazy. 7.9% Hispanic. So pretty diverse, I would say. 65% of the people here are religious. Normally, it's 50-50. And no shock with the runaway the runaway hit of the season is as far as religion is in Northeastern New Jersey. 49.6% of the people here are Catholic.

Those Asian Catholics, they're really something.

See, they even got the Asians being Catholic now. That's wild.

How'd they do that?

That is something. 4.3% Jewish. Oh, my goodness.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, we can sing. This is like two weeks in a row. Let's do it. Havanagila, havanagila, havanagila. I don't know the words. Hey.

Hey.

That's fun. Okay. Unemployment, about average. Median household income, well above average. Rest of the country. Yeah. About 69,000. Rest of the country here, $191,346 is median.

And they're broke.

Yeah. And they're stretching right now. The cost of living here, 100 is regular average. Here, it's 141. Pretty high. Everything is pretty normal except for housing, which is extreme. The median home cost here is $964,500.

Jesus.

Median is a million dollars.

Amazing.

Wild. So let's find out what's available if you've decided that you also would like to.

I got to be there.

Live in a very Catholic suburb of New York City. We have for you the Demarest, New Jersey real estate report. Here is, okay, a three-bedroom, one bath. None of these have square footage on them, by the way. I don't know.

Three-bedroom, one bath.

One bath, maybe one and a half, something. But three-bed, one bath. No, I don't know what the square footage is. I would say looking at it, about 1,500. It's a two-story house. Not huge. Vinyl siding. The inside needs a shitload of work.

Tons. Yeah.

It needs some work here. $849,000. That's the cheapest house in the area.

Oh, my God.

And that just had a price cut of $26,000. But that is the cheapest house in the area. It's $850,000, and it's a pretty small house that needs a bunch of work.

Almost can't live in it.

Yep. Here's one. Three-bedroom, two bath. Again, I'm not sure the square footage looks to be about the same. About 1,500. Two-story little box of a house. Inside's not great. Old carpeting, old shit. It even says that older three-bedroom, one and a half bath house in need of renovation or build new.

Or tear it apart.

Tear it to the ground, build a new one. $1,199,000 for a fucking teardown.

Maybe restart with this $1 million home.

Wow. Then I have the big one here. And this one, they actually listed the square foot in the listing, so it's in here. Six-bedroom, eight bath, tee-ball for each and every behold. Add a couple neighbors. 7,829 square feet. Huge. Modern-looking, pretty cool.

Castle.

Castle, very nice. $4,500,000. I mean, come on, man.

Is that on land? Is that.

No, this is you're not this is half an acre maybe.

You got a neighbor right there.

Oh, yeah. For sure. And their big giant rich house looking at you complaining that you're there. Things to do in this town. Here we go. Demarest day. Oh, boy. It's happening. It's happening now, it says.

Really?

It is happening, not right now. But that's what the poster says. It's happening right now. Here is from 1:30 or 1 o'clock to 2:30 PM, the coveted 1:00 PM spot at a festival here. Music with Marley.

Oh, boy.

Beats me. Not Bob. I know that.

Not Dan.

Not Dan. Not even Ziggy. We can't get anybody in here. 2:30 PM is the Tiger Kim Taekwondo. Which makes sense because there's it's a third Asian here, so maybe that's part of the I don't know. Not that you have to be Asian to do taekwondo, but most of the people that teach it are Asian. I'm not learning taekwondo from a white guy. I'll tell you that much right now. Not paying a white guy to tell me that. Yeah. Even if he knows it really well, I'd rather be snowed with some mystical Eastern shit.

Yeah. Tell me this is about a god somewhere.

Yeah. I don't know. Tell me about this connection with the earth. Something. Give me something to go on here. Make it mystical. I don't want some just dude from New Jersey going, "Hey, I'm Sal. I'm going to teach you how to kick and punch and shit."

Sal with a smoke bomb.

Yeah. No, thanks. Then after the Tiger Kim Taekwondo squad is the Holy Angels Dance Team.

Holy Angels.

The Holy Angels. But they come out but they still come out like a half-time in a basketball game.

Hammocking and everything.

Short shorts and have like a whole dance. They do the whole thing. This is the Holy Angels squad, baby.

It is fascinating how we just objectify women in sports like that. Still, it's like.

Dallas was the craziest.

I can't.

Hockey game.

Ice girls.

I'm looking out my hotel window at the front where they have this big thing where the guys are coming in because it was opening night. And there's a whole cheerleading squad. And I'm like.

You betcha.

It's freezing in there. What the fuck are these girls going to do?

And I went to the game. I'm inside watching these chicks dance and scoop ice at the same time. They're like they're so happy to be the ones that get to do it. That's the sad part, I think. I don't think it's that they just do it.

Yeah. In Dallas, I think people go, "Mommy, I want to grow up to be objectified." I think they tell them that. And they're like, "Well, that's good."

Mommy, can I have middle-aged men drool over my round ass?

Let's put some real blue eye shadow on you. There you go, sweetheart. Now they're going to objectify you.

They got Miss Texas doing it. Miss Texas was out there. Unbelievable.

So then there's the Shoreline Anthem. They play, which sounds like quick, but they play for an hour and 15 minutes. Followed by the DJ dance party with Roy Carmelli.

I want to see it.

When he's not teaching taekwondo, Roy Carmelli is spinning the fuck.

He's over there playing what he thinks are the hits.

He's working the Wheels of Steel when he's not fucking when he's not.

I don't know. Those ones and twos, babe.

Unbelievable. Roy Carmelli. Hey, come on, everybody. Let's dance. Put down your sausage and peppers for just a minute, everybody. Not too long. You know I don't want to go crazy here, but we're ready to dance. This is at the Alpine Country Club. That takes place. Then there's also the Ducky Drag Race.

Yeah. I bet that.

It sounds like you.

I bet it's just the rubber ducks.

It's rubber ducks.

Called Drag Races. Makes you want to go watch it, I guess.

That's it. Because they're moving fast. They have little cartoon drawings of the ducks, and they look really happy. And it looks kind of fun, by the way. The way they make the cartoon look, it looks like the ducks are really into it, even though they're made of rubber.

Are they moving? Is it like rapids or something?

No. There's just like a little they have a little thing set up, and you just drop it in. It's real simple.

Drag Race.

It's kids. It's all little kids doing it. That's all. Crime rate in this town here, property crime is less than one-third of the national average. So over two-thirds less than the national under the national average. Then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course, assault. The Mount Rushmore of crime is about one-quarter of the national average. So about three-quarters beneath the national average. And nothing goes on here. That guy's saying, "Is it too safe?"

Maybe.

I'm getting bored. Yeah. It might be a little boring. Well, let's find out a time when it was not boring at all. Let's talk about some murder here. Okay. Wow. We're going to start out hot with this one. October 14th, 1975. Okay. Let's think about this. Big collars.

Yeah.

Tight pants, big bushes. It's all happening on everybody too. Men, women.

Still got some pretty good music going on.

There's some decent music, and there's a lot of disco coming in and shit like that. This is '70s. Very mixed bag time here. Mid '70s.

I'm in the middle of it.

So on this day, a commuter bus stops at the corner of Country Road and Anderson Avenue in Demarest, New Jersey. This is not a well-populated area. This is not like in the downtown of the little town or anything. This is kind of off where there's trees and things like that. Now, it's somewhere between 6:05 and 6:10 in the evening. There is.

Sundown.

Sundown. A 22-year-old woman on the bus that gets off at this stop named Susan Reeve, R-E-E-V-E. She was born in 1953. She's from Inglewood, New Jersey. She's the oldest of four children of Arthur and Barbara Reeve. Now, Arthur, her dad, was an attorney and used to be a municipal judge.

Wow.

And Arthur said, "My family was two girls and two boys. Two girls came first, then the two boys." And that's when they moved to Demarest when they had four kids because this is burbs.

You need a quiet. Yeah.

Yep. Now, her father said that she, Susan, is always the family caretaker.

Oh.

Being one of the older sisters. She's the one you can depend on, which still, that's not real healthy to parentalize your kids and make them do that, but people do it. She was very creative. She would make her own clothes. She liked to do that. Her dad's an attorney. They can afford clothes, but she'd rather make her own.

Didn't even have an Instagram account to pimp that shit. Just doing it for funsies.

Just doing it because she likes it, which when's the last time someone on this earth did something just because they enjoyed it? Not to show everybody. Imagine that. Just enjoy it. So one person.

It is a nightmare that we do this and kind of rely on, depend on word-of-mouth social media stuff. And I don't want to do that. I have zero interest in that at all. I don't want to be I don't want to show things that I'm doing.

Yeah. But you're showing off a lot of what you do on social media.

I show more than I fucking want to. That's for sure. But I mean, I generally don't I mean, I leave the house almost every day. I'm not fucking talking about it.

No. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I get it. I mean, I agree. My last Instagram post was like a year ago. I just don't I'm not you know what I mean? I post like every six months. I'll post like I'm just not I don't care. I'm not into the whole thing. I don't give a shit. This is enough of being out for me.

Yeah. Instagram's about the most I can do anymore.

This camera is about the only camera I want to have. After this, I don't like cameras anymore. I'm on camera enough. Leave me alone. That's my general how I feel. And that's just because we're not like neither of us are like, "Hey, look at me. Look at this." That's just not how we are. So we're more like, "We'll be over here." At least I am.

There's also people that just fucking crave it, but that's a different story.

Yeah. They're missing something, and they do crave it. So one person who knew Susan says, "Susan was a delightful girl. Very attractive young lady and likable person. Everybody liked her very much. She was Susan Sunshine."

Oh, that's what we call her.

That's what we call her. She went to Hollin's College in Virginia, majored in art. One of her professors said, "Susan was a good student who loved art and made good use of her time at Hollin's." And also said, "She was always smiling and always very pleasant."

A creative type.

A creative. Yeah. She went to art school for art. Makes her own stuff.

Clothes. Yeah.

So they're usually fun and kind of loose. Not loose like that, but.

Interesting.

Personality. Yeah. One of her close friends here from high school said, "Sue was joyful, creative, self-assured, and just plain fun to be around." She ended up working as a receptionist at an advertising agency in Manhattan, which is what most people do after art school because there's not a lot of jobs in the art industry. And this was the stop that she used every day. She'd get off the commuter bus from Manhattan and stop. Her parents' house is just a short walk up Anderson Avenue.

Right now. Yeah.

So she graduated in May and spent a month traveling in Europe.

Wow.

And then started her first job as a receptionist at the Gray advertising agency in Manhattan. So she's like Madison Avenue doing admin.

She's figured out life. She cracked the fucking code.

She's doing it. And her dad being a judge too and a lawyer. He's probably got connections, which also helps, which you have to use everything you can use. But back then too, if you're a college-educated young lady who looks presentable and everything, you can dress to go in an office or whatever, you could get hired as a receptionist. It was if you could type, you could get a job as a receptionist back then, which was something that anybody could do, which is nice.

Also, traveling abroad then showed interest in being a go-getter and being worldly. So that helps too.

Culture. That helps too. She was engaged to a man named Daniel Olmstead, who was a Columbia graduate student.

Dang.

Doing well.

This motherfucker.

Yep. One family member said she was looking forward to being married, had just become engaged to be married right after college. So I mean, you can't get your life lining up better. Went to college, goes to Europe, gets a job. She's married to a Columbia graduate student. So I mean, you're going to be married to him, and that's going to be a thing. So for 1975, everything's fallen into place perfect for her.

Tops. Yeah.

She lived at home with her parents and took the commuter bus every day. One investigator later said it was convenient. The bus stop was just a short walk from her house. Her parents said she was always careful too. Her dad said she was not the type of girl who would irresponsibly stop off for a drink someplace without telling her parents about it at the very least. She's like 23 years old.

Yeah.

That's irresponsible just to.

I want to go have a gin because I'm irresponsible and tell nobody.

I should tell my parents when I'm 23 before I go out for a drink.

Yeah. Does she live at home still?

Yeah. She lives at home with her parents. And so.

Okay. So just letting them know, "Don't expect me right now. I'm having gin."

Yeah. Don't set a place for dinner. I'm drinking my dinner tonight.

I'm going to suck on some whiskey. Take that. See you around.

Doesn't happen though. So she gets off the bus. The driver remembers her getting off the bus. Another passenger remembers her too. She's an attractive young lady. People tend to remember them and what they do. They don't blend very well, attractive young ladies. A few minutes later.

In terms of left of place, some people probably didn't have a fucking clue I was even there.

They don't care when a guy leaves. Unless you're like 6'7", 350 pounds. No one notices when you leave anywhere if you're a guy. Whereas an attractive young woman, every guy's like, "Hey, look at her. There she goes."

Hey, there she goes.

Yep. There she goes. And they watched her walk away as she.

Yeah. They all say the same. Hate to see you go, that thing.

Yep. That's it. So a few minutes later, a local man driving his usual route at that time saw a young woman matching her description standing beside a parked vehicle talking with someone. Vehicle was a station wagon. Something about it looked wrong to him, apparently. He just thought the exchange looked weird, but.

Just too hot for that car.

Something. Yeah. Some dude in a station wagon. Just way too hot. Whatever.

She don't stand next to a truckster.

Yeah. No, it was more like the family truckster. It was just the look on her face or something. It was an odd exchange. But this guy, number one, what business is it of yours? That might be her ex-boyfriend or her uncle. You have no idea what the hell the conversation's about. And second, he was late to pick his kid up from school or a school event, an after-school thing. So he was like, "I'm not going to stop and go, 'Hey, what are you two doing?'."

Why is this weird?

Yeah. Just walk up to a random conversation in New Jersey and be like, "Is everything all right here?" They'd be like, "Get the fuck away from me. Mind your own fucking business. What's wrong with you?" Yeah.

Two of you don't match.

Yeah. You don't go. And that's not even what he said. So that's not it. The guy is not like an old man or an old weirdo or it's not like that. It was just they looked to be.

Just tense of some sort.

Something. Yeah. He came back a few minutes later, and she was gone, and so was the car. So he was like, "I don't know. Whatever."

Guess they're fine.

But Susan never made it home is the problem. She never comes home that night. October the 28th, 1975 is when they find Susan. They find her in a state park across the New York line. It's horrible too. She'd been pretty brutally murdered. She'd been raped and strangled with a pair of pantyhose.

Oh, Jesus.

Which is horrifying. Absolutely horrifying. Now, when police figure this out, they put their notes together and say, "That's weird because right before this Susan disappeared, another woman named Susan disappeared as well right before that from the town next town over from Demarest."

Has there ever been a serial killer that only killed women with the same name?

That's the fucking weird part.

Oh, boy.

They're like, "That has to be a coincidence, right?" But at the same time, they're like, "That can't be a coincidence. What the fuck?" And newspapers started calling them the Susan Strangulations.

Oh. That was the Suzie Slaughterer, but all right. This is better.

Yeah. It's a little more professional.

Yeah. Yeah. Less fun.

Yeah. Less fun. So now let's talk about a guy here, a young man, a man named Robert Ronald Reldan, R-E-L-D-A-N.

Robert Ronald?

Keep that in your head. Robert Ronald Reldan.

Jesus.

Triple R. It goes by Bobby. So Bobby Reldan. Now, remember the name spelling. He's born June 2nd, 1940. He's from Brooklyn. Now, Reldan is not his birth name. Reldan is the name he changed it to as early as he could. His actual birth name is Nadler.

What?

N-A-D-L-E-R.

He just turned it around?

He flipped his fucking name and did that. He's Reldan instead of Nadler.

Okay.

That's the strange thing.

Stupid.

Very. His parents are William and Marie Nadler, and he's their first child. They have two children. They have him, and then they have, in 1943, a daughter named Susan. Okay? Now, there's a documentary, by the way, later on called Born to Kill. I'll just mention that now that some quotes came out of. This quote came from there is that his younger sister then contracted polio as a child.

Oh, fuck.

Which would happen so often back then. And a lot of the parents' attention go to the sick child, obviously. And there's so many different psychological things where the first thing a shrink will ask you is, "Did you have a sick sibling or something?" Because that's what this does. You know what I mean? There's a bunch of different this affects people in a certain way. Now, William and Marie ran a luncheonette called the Sweet Sue Coffee Shop, which is right by Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Early brunch. Yeah.

Yeah. A luncheonette place. It's a lunch counter type of joint. And it was busy. It made money. It's in a very good location. So that helps. And both parents work there. They don't think that Bobby had much parental supervision because his mother and father worked all hours in this restaurant. These family restaurants like this, basically, the kids either I remember working for these when I was a teenager, and their kids would come in after school and be doing homework at the unoccupied tables, and then they'd be helping out because it was either that or they're sitting home by themselves.

Lillian?

Lillian. Yes. Aunt Lillian. It's his mother's sister. Now, she was an aspiring Broadway actress when she was younger. That was what she was trying to do, was break into Broadway. But she needed a day job, so she waited tables at the Sweet Sue. One of their regular customers was quite a much older man named Ferris Booth, known as Colonel Booth.

Filthy rich.

Filthy rich. And Ferris inherited this giant fortune and fell in love.

What a dream.

Fell in love with the waitress from the Sweet Sue, Lillian. So Ferris notices her. They get together.

That was a thing for a while, right, where you would.

Fuck yeah.

You'd be a regular and flirt so hard that you might get the girl, get the server?

You might get the server, but it helps if you have millions and millions of dollars.

That does help. Yeah.

It helps. It's one of those things. If you're just stopping off in between shifts at the welding, whatever the fuck, or at the mill, it might be harder. But if you come in there every day talking about, "Well, just got back from the islands, and oh boy, that was something. It was beautiful down there."

I think I got exhausted from that long private flight.

Oh, boy. I'll tell you what. My ties really take a toll on you.

Yeah. I had to get up from my seat to go get all of my own mixed drinks.

Didn't care for that much.

There was no flight attendant. Just me and the pilot. Very exhausting.

Me and the pilot.

My grandfather's dad, that's how he got his wife, was that she was a server, and he used to hide he'd go in every morning and hide dollars under each piece of shit on the table. And then when he left, she would be bussing the table and collecting his love, his monetary love.

That's both cute and degrading at the same time. I can't tell what I wouldn't be able to tell what he was going for. Is he trying to degrade me or is he trying.

If you clean this place up right, there might be something in it for you.

Yeah. Or it's like also, "Hey, poor bitch. Go on a scavenger hunt for your money." Or it's like, "Hey, notice me. I'm different. I do cute things." I can't tell.

I'm quirky and funny.

Yeah.

And I hope it's like.

I can't tell which one that is.

A lot. I hope it's not just like a couple of quarters here, a couple of quarters there.

And a dime under a little jukebox thing on the table.

Some of this shit better be in fucking paper money.

Oh, I hope so. Oh, man. So this is like in the mid-40s. This is just post-war, like '46.

Wow.

They get together. They're married, him and Lillian, and they're happy for about 10 years. And then Lillian gets the luckiest of fuck no. The money never runs out. The money just grows and grows and grows.

What?

In 1956, Ferris dies suddenly from a stroke. Boom.

And it's hers.

God. Every fucking dime is hers.

No more luncheonette.

Fuck no. She was about 40 years old. She inherited, and this is in.

50-something months.

$50 million.

That's the richest person in the world, right?

No, no, no. There's much richer people, but she's got very wealthy. I mean, very wealthy.

Disgusting.

You're not going to run out of money.

No. That's generational as fuck.

And she's also a very good investor and learned how to do all the financial shit.

Made more.

By 2007, she was worth almost $250 million. And this is after giving hundreds of millions of dollars to charities and to fucking everything else. This lady had a fortune. She was loaded.

Wow.

So that's your aunt. She's going to be your favorite aunt, I bet. You're going to get good Christmas presents from her.

Yeah. I mean, I might do everything all day just to make Lillian smile.

Does she need leaves raked, anything? Just I will go over there.

Yeah. I'm going to just take a break from work just to go tell her a new joke.

Just to do it.

Just try to make her smile.

So she gave away all this money to hospitals, churches, a retirement home for actors, charities, just giving money away. She had no children. No children.

She's amazing.

He's the closest thing to a child she has. She has her nieces and nephews, and that's who she lavishes her money and attention on. And by a wide margin, apparently, Bobby is her favorite niece or nephew. Just loves him. That's the favorite, always. She will pay for everything for him all the time.

Really?

In terms of if he needs if he has to go on a trip, if he needs a lawyer, which he will need plenty of those. Every lawyer we talk about, always Aunt Lillian paid for it in full. They would visit her estate. She didn't have a house. She had an estate in Alpine, New Jersey, which is.

That's not the name.

Yeah. Alpine, New Jersey is extremely wealthy. Even now. That's where Tracy Morgan moved after the Walmart truck hit him. And the comedians in Cars and Coffee goes, "Truck said Walmart on it." And that's what he was showing the house.

Yeah. What did he say? It said Walmart, not what did he say, Radio Shack or some shit?

I can't remember. Not Circuit City or some shit. Yeah. Whatever.

He has a joke about it that's pretty fucking good. Truck said Walmart, not Joe's Crab Shack or some shit.

Yeah. You sue the fuck out of them. Alpine's like where Chris Rock lives. Very wealthy people live in Alpine. Later on, someone said she would wear flashy jewelry. She was ostentatious about her wealth.

She was having fun.

Yeah. She's so wealthy. She's doing the old-timey Zsa Zsa Gabor thing with the diamonds and fur wrap and all that kind of shit. That's what she was about. One person said that Bobby himself lived a Playboy's life because his wealthy aunt financed horseback riding lessons and skiing trips and.

Just doing it.

So yeah, all the things that rich kids got to do, he got to do too.

Wow.

Even though he grew up in a normal environment with a normal family and a normal house, he got to live like a rich person every so often, which is pretty goddamn cool. But also, somebody else said that he seemed like he thought he was entitled to more than he was getting. Hey, she's still cheap with me, though, even though she sent me to Europe.

Ride horses.

Yeah. Sent me on a skiing trip in Vale. She's being a little she could have put me up in the Four Seasons, not the Ritz. I like the Four Seasons better. I don't know what the Four Seasons does, but I'm sure they do something specific and fancy.

And he's riding horses that are probably well taken care of, well-mannered. I was riding Fleabag, Bag of Bones, scared to death. We had family members bucked off these things that were never the same ever again. He's doing he's probably got all the equipment, helmets, and shit.

If we were near a horse, my family would say, "Don't touch that fucking horse. You're going to do something to it. It's going to cost us money. Get away from that fucking horse." We never went near a horse.

It's going to bite you or kick you, and we're going to have to go to the hospital.

Or you're going to fuck it up, and they're going to charge us. Just stay away from the horse.

You're going to break its leg.

You're going to break its leg.

You're going to have to put it down, and then it's on me.

If I saw a horse, there was a cop on top of it. That was the only horse I ever saw. That's one. Now, he's a juvenile delinquent also. And I use this term because it's the mid-50s, and they loved talking about juvenile delinquents back then. There's all sorts of movies about teen thugs and dudes with leather jackets and grease in their hair with a switchblade. Yeah. Picture the Thunderbirds from Greece, the T-birds, but actually tough.

Anything Elvis was trying to portray when he was 30.

Some of that. Yeah. One of those there. Well, no, they weren't trying to be black, these kids.

No.

Yeah. No. Elvis was just stealing from different people.

But he was doing Jailhouse Rock, where he was in jail in stripes, and he was in there because he's a juvenile delinquent. You're 30, sir.

He's a juvenile. Yeah. All the teen girls were swarming around him. So when he's 16 years old, January 11th, 1957, he goes into New York, into the city there, grabs a woman by the throat outside her apartment building, and steals her purse.

For no reason. He's got plenty of loot.

Yeah. We're talking base level. This is the most base level of dirty street crime you can get. Literally, stealing a purse from a woman after grabbing her by the throat is the lowest of the low. There's a lot of street criminals who are like, "I would never steal a purse from a woman. That's beneath me."

And what's in that purse? You know what I mean? It's not going to have a lot of money.

No. This is just a person who likes to be violent and steal things, it seems like. So two months later, he pleads guilty because he gets busted. The woman looked right in his face and told on him. He pleads guilty, and he's classified as a juvenile delinquent. He is adjudicated a juvenile delinquent. Sir.

Smacked the cigarettes out of his shirt sleeve.

Pop out of there, messed up your duckbill in the front. How do you think that now, huh?

Tussled your ducktail, motherfucker.

Now what? Yeah. So he's classified. He's put on "indefinite probation." So for a while, probation.

We'll see. When you're good, we'll take it away.

Yeah. Maybe till he's 18 because he's 16 at the time. October 1957, same year, he commits a series of residential burglaries, break-ins. A New Jersey judge again puts him on indefinite probation, which he's already on indefinite probation. So now we're on double secret indefinite probation.

But is that some institution of some sort?

Well, there is a mandate here for him to get a psychiatric examination at Menlo Park Hospital as well.

We're not sure he's okay if he's doing this kind of thing.

If he's this much of a delinquent, maybe it's a mental problem. Absolutely. Now, the doctors found a narcissistic character disorder and a "strong repressed hostility toward women."

Wild.

I could have told you that by choking and stealing a purse from one. There's something there for that.

But what the fuck is going on?

That's the thing. Yeah. Otherwise, you choose a guy to role. You know what I mean?

Yeah. You've got a lady that's a goddamn angel in your corner.

That's the thing. Well, and that's the problem too, is she paid for that lawyer. She pays for this lawyer. She's paying for all the lawyers. His senior picture in high school, this is because he's still in high school when all this is going on. In his senior picture in high school, his yearbook, class of 1958 here, there's a picture of him, and underneath it says, "Bob sports that collegiate look."

What does that mean?

I don't know.

He goes to college?

A flat top and a sweater? I'm not sure. In the '50s, what does that mean?

Please.

The blurb said that he's an amateur pilot who plans a stint in the Air Force and says that he has a "acid sense of humor."

Acid.

Which that meant he was just he had a.

A hot.

Yeah. Dark kind of a whatever.

Burns, baby.

It burns. He graduated 91st out of 128. So not bottom half, not bad, but I can't snipe at that.

Probably.

Yeah. Then in July '58, right after he graduates, he's arrested for stealing five cars. Not at the same time, obviously. Yeah. Well, that's very collegiate. He needed one for each day of the week at school there. He was sent to a state hospital for observation where a psychiatrist diagnosed him. I said it like Ricky Ricardo said it.

Yeah. Psychiatrics.

A psychiatrist. I'm looking for a psychiatrist. Diagnosed sociopathic personality disturbance with antisocial reaction.

These are early descriptions of a very dangerous kid.

Very. At 18?

Yeah.

Very dangerous.

Antisocial. What was the other one a minute ago?

Antisocial, sociopathic personality.

Sociopathic. Yeah.

Not good.

Not good. No.

These are all bad things. And it's one thing if he's just stealing cars because so far, he's done the one kind of violent act on the woman, and the rest of it's been burglaries.

Stealing.

Stealing is the thing. Yeah. On Christmas Eve, 1958, the hospital releases him into his parents' custody. You can't make the poor kid stay for Christmas. He's got no presents to open here. Come on.

You think he's crazy now?

Oh, forget about it.

He sits through the birth of the newborn king. Problems will arise.

You play Ave Maria. He'll go crazy. We got to send him home. So 1959, he's convicted of more auto theft.

All right.

And he gets more probation. Then he was arrested for auto theft in New York. Seems like a pattern here. He likes to steal cars. He's realized that's what he's good at.

What's he doing with the cars, though, is the other part.

Back then, car thieving was a totally different thing because parts were worth so much back then.

Okay. So that's what he was doing. He was parting out the car.

You can part it, and sometimes they would just because there's no VIN numbers or anything like that. They would repaint it a different color, sell it. Somebody would register it. That's the way it was back then. They didn't have all the things in place because they didn't have VINs till the late '60s, was it?

I don't know when they put VINs on cars. I mean, I've got a '58. It's got a VIN, but I don't know if that was I'm unversed in VINs.

An original VIN. I know they didn't always have VINs.

Yeah. Perhaps somebody stapled it got one, it got a plate. You know what I mean?

Maybe. Absolutely. So anyway, he violates his probation, is what he's doing.

Oh, boy.

So he finally gets a sentence. You, sir, young man, juvenile delinquent, sociopathic, antisocial asshole, may fuck off three years at Great Meadows, which is a reformatory in New York.

Sounds terrible too.

Doesn't sound nice. Not an adult prison. Still under 21, so it's still kept in that whole thing here.

Staying here.

Yeah. He is paroled in January '62 when he's 21 years old.

Oh, boy.

So they can either, I think, transfer him to an adult prison or let him go.

Give him another chance. Yeah.

Now, a psychologist later interviewed explained him like this, "There's no real gain in purse snatching from a monetary perspective, but there's a lot of psychological gain for a guy like him." So yeah, it's not about the he's not a crackhead who needs $3 in there. That's not what he's after. He likes to steal. He likes it.

Causing the woman or person to feel unsafe first, and then she has all this inconvenience of getting all that shit back.

Absolutely. And I think also, it's some people it's like in Goodfellas, when he said he actually liked to steal about Jimmy Conway. He actually enjoyed it. He liked it. He thought it was fun. So yeah. And from the time he's in high school, kind of from now on out, most of his crimes are going to be directed toward women, essentially. He stole a bunch of cars and shit like that. Probably realized that was easy to get caught from, maybe switches it up. Now, when he gets out of prison as a nice coming home present, like he's coming home from college or something, his aunt Lillian buys him a brand new Volkswagen convertible.

Now you don't have to steal.

Now you don't have to steal. Here's your own car. It's green, Volkswagen convertible, brand new. So at the time, this is what, '62?

Okay.

'62. So this is a hot shit little car at the time for a car.

It's a Volkswagen. It's probably a bug. That's all I think.

I would assume.

Yeah.

That was a convertible, I think.

Totally. Yeah.

Unless it was a fucking Carmen Gia.

Could have been a Carmen Gia.

Oh, my God. That's so spoiled. I'm assuming by his behavior, it's a bug because guys like him drive bugs. See Randall Woodfield, Ted Bundy.

Ted Bundy. Yeah.

More. The bug is John Douglas in the Mindhunter book did a whole chapter not a whole chapter, but a whole section talking about the serial killers and Volkswagen bugs and how they, for some reason, fucking love them.

Well, the allure of that car is that it's very easy to fix it if you break it. So if you're out doing some dangerous shit or doing something you don't want to get caught for, if you have a car that if something goes wrong and you can't fix it, then you're fucked.

Yeah. But it's not practical. That's not the point, is the practicality. Something in their psychology something in psychology attracts people to certain cars. And there's no way that all of them are just like, "I can repair this on the fly." None of them knew what the fuck they were. Randall Woodfield couldn't repair shit.

Yeah. That's a good point.

Neither could Ted Bundy. Neither of them knew what the fuck they were doing.

Or if you take somebody with you, I mean, they are literally on your lap driving the car. They can't get away.

Yeah. And also, it seems like psychologically-wise, at least John Douglas was saying that also, it might seem like a kind of a harmless car. It's very much associated with college students or professors or college-type things.

It sounds unthreatening too when it drives by.

Yes. It blends in. It does sound unthreatening. Yeah. Beep the horn on that fucking thing. It's not exactly, "Hey, get out of my way." It's more like, "Hey, how's it going?" That's the beep there. "Hey, how are you? Hey, nice to see you."

It sounds like it's working so hard just to stay alive.

That's it. So at this point, he's clean cut, six foot two, very well-spoken, has a brand new car. You wouldn't look at this guy and go, "I bet he's on parole." So February 25th, 1962. He's been out for a goddamn month. Okay. He and an accomplice of his break into a house in Fort Lee, New Jersey at 3:20 in the morning. The owners were away in Spain, but inside was a 14-year-old girl, her older sister, who I believe was watching the children, and the older sister's three-year-old son.

That was tied around his head?

Like a ghost, basically. Like a ghost costume. He put a towel over his head and put a not great. That was Bobby, by the way, the towel guy. So this is how bright he is. They ransacked the house looking for money and jewelry. Then Bobby took the 14-year-old up to her bedroom.

Oh, God.

Tied her up and didn't rape her, but started groping her and then started striking her several times in the head with an iron rod.

Oh, my God.

Maybe because she wasn't receptive to his advances as a 14-year-old girl. So much so that the accomplice heard what was going on and came in and pulled him off of her and said, "What are you doing? Leave her the fuck alone. That's not why we're in here."

So over here for a minute.

We're here to beat up teenage girl up. This is rape. This is crazy. So Bobby stopped, and they left. Now, that accomplice will never be identified, actually, but Bobby will. Then after the Fort Lee break-in, he feels like there might be some heat for that, understandably. So he leaves and goes to Florida.

Oh.

Florida by way of Connecticut and Missouri.

Oh, my God.

Yeah. In Missouri, he enrolls in a small college for a minute. Real weird.

On his way to Florida, he settled down for a sec.

We don't know if he intended to end up in Florida or if it doesn't sound like it. It sounds like he was looking for a place. His aunt Lillian pays for his trip, pays for him to go to college, pays for all this shit.

Oh, boy.

In November 1962, he shows up in South Florida. That's where he ends up. Now, Miami Beach police on November 30th, 1962, arrest him for impersonating a police officer. Why would you do that? Think about that. That's interesting.

He's killing people. Yeah.

Yeah. Also, women. Think about who used to do that. People who would pretend to be cops and pretend to be authority figures like that.

When Ted Bundy was arrested, he had police badges on him, right?

Oh, that's shit. He would approach the women and say a lot of times that he was a cop. The girl got away in the mall that had the new Camaro. He said, "Someone broke into your car. I'm a police officer. Will you come over here with me?" and all that. That's what they did.

And a handcuffed her.

And a handcuffer.

Handcuffs and shit too. Yeah.

Even the mob did that with guys. They had guys be fake cops and go in. It's a very common thing because people automatically, they're not fighting, usually. They think, "Oh, shit. I better let this person do what they want."

Yeah. We got blind trust for them.

Generally, yeah. So yeah. Now.

That's all right.

A little bit. So now a records check when he's arrested doesn't show anything because all of his earlier crimes had been in the juvenile system in another state, which isn't going to come up in Florida at all.

And the '60s.

And it's the '60s. It says 1962 for Christ's sake. It's not like they run it through the database. There is no database. You have to call.

It's all paper.

This is all paper. And the other crimes haven't been solved yet. So to Dade County, he was just a real well-spoken, clean-cut, first-time offender. Just who knows. So he pleads out five days later and gets a 90-day suspended sentence. A month after that, he's back in court in Dade County for breaking and entering.

Fuck.

And he pleads guilty and gets two years probation. So now he's on indefinite probation in one place and two years probation over here.

As an adult.

As an adult. So spring of '63, heads back to New Jersey. Back to Jersey.

Already fucked out.

All fucked out. Yeah. He's already gotten busted there a few times. In January or I'm sorry, July 27th, 1963, the Cluster police, the town he lives in or his parents live in, arrest him for carrying a concealed handgun in a car.

Oh, shit.

His parents post bail. Within a month, though, the North Arlington Police Department arrests him for breaking into a home and assaulting the woman who lived there with a tire iron.

Oh, boy.

He makes bail again. August of '63, they round him up and put him in a lineup for that Fort Lee home invasion where he tried to rape and beat a 14-year-old. Apparently.

He probably took the towel off at some point.

It kept falling off because it's a towel, and it has no way to stay on. And he's a moron.

That's not what I think.

So no, he'd move, grab her, it would fall off. He'd try to put it back. That's ridiculous. The guy's a moron. So she saw his face, and the girl picks him out of a lineup.

Wow.

As the guy. This is bad. December of '63, he goes to I call this the towel head robbery trial he goes to here. It's his first.

He didn't call it that, but all right.

He had a towel on his fucking head. He's a white guy with a towel on his head. He didn't call it that all he want. He's got a towel on his fucking head. It's the only time he can actually use that, and it's fine. So I'm taking advantage of it. Towel head robbery trial. Nothing at all. Just a clean-cut young man with a towel on his head. Jesus Christ. This is his first adult criminal trial. He made it. Everything else has been in the juvenile system. He's under 21. Yeah. He's finally stepping up here.

Very well paid for. Yeah.

Yep. He had no job. He had no money. Aunt Lillian paid for it all. The state puts on three witnesses: the girl, her sister, and somebody else who saw her. So basically, eyewitnesses who saw him break in there.

The victims. Yeah.

Yep. Now, there is no physical evidence at all of this, obviously, back then. There's no DNA or hairs or anything. The girl admits on cross-examination that the police had showed her Bobby's photo before the lineup. They tried to be cute.

Oh, no.

They tried to be cute and make sure they got the right guy. This girl is honest and didn't want to perjure herself. Said that, and it ends up a hung jury.

Shit.

Does not get convicted. So he's out and about for now because he's out on bail.

Yeah. We presented all evidence we have, and it's a hung jury.

These girls.

If we keep trying it, we're just going to keep getting the same shit.

Yep. So January 3rd, 1964, here, he's got some problems. Now, between or January 3rd, we'll go back a little bit to '63. Between June 4th and July 23rd, 1963, New York City detectives were working a pattern of robberies. Okay. One was in the Bronx. Five were in apartment buildings on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. This is the same neighborhood, by the way, as his grab-by-the-throat purse snatching in 1957, which in the late '50s in New York, there was tons of street crime.

Where there's people, that's the stuff that's going to happen.

That's what happens. Exactly. Now, the method here was the same of all of these. It was a neatly dressed, muscular young man, about six feet tall, give or take, who would follow a woman alone into an elevator, which is terrifying. We're in a lot of hotels. If ever there's just a woman in an elevator and it's past 10 o'clock at night.

It feels like I've never done it.

I won't even do it because I don't want to make her uncomfortable. I know she's going to be uncomfortable. I know. And I don't blame her. So I'm a big guy and shit. I come across real nice and everything, but I don't want to make this person feel like, "Oh, God. I'm going to be attacked in an elevator." Even though there's cameras, it doesn't matter.

I lean against the corner of the elevator.

Look at my phone.

Like lean on the shoulder and just text away.

I'll look at that. I'll laugh at shit.

I just open apps. I'm not doing shit. I just don't want to pay attention to this person at all.

I feel very uncomfortable. But if I see that because you can see they're like, "Oh, God. It's a guy, and I'm by myself and all that." So I'll just be like, "Oh, no. I'm going up," or whatever. I feel like they feel better about that. I don't want to be creepy. So even not creepy, just riding an elevator, but still, I get it.

That has got to be.

Uncomfortable.

A person that's vulnerable, the scariest I've seen too many movies where they hit the stop and stand in front of it and hurt people.

That's what I mean.

I stand in the opposite corner.

All the way over there. And the other thing I'll do.

I'm going to get raped.

I'm the one worried about this here. If we're in the hallway too, where it's empty in these big hotel hallways, I'll be on the far other end just looking at my phone and make just a real quick up and down like, "Okay. I see you. I'm not acting weird. I'm going to jump on you. I'm going to be over here. You can be over there. I don't have any interest."

How many shows have we done where the housekeeper is a victim? You know what I mean? I walk by those girls, and I feel like they're judging me. They think I'm going to hurt.

Absolutely. I say, "Hello."

Hi.

Yeah. "Hi." I try to be real friendly.

Say it real loud.

But not creepy. I don't want to feel like I'm trapping them in a room. So anyway, this is what they this is what happened with these elevator robberies. He would let her pick her floor first. "Oh, you, please. You go first, obviously." And then he would pick a lower floor than whatever floor they were going to. Once the doors closed, he would grab her by the throat, and he would take her purse and any jewelry he could snatch off her while he had her by the throat. At his floor, he stepped out and let the doors close behind him.

And he jumped down the stairs.

Then she would go up to her floor alone. So if they were going up, he'd pick a lower one and then let her go up. One of the victims said he had the look of someone who could kill without remorse, which even if you couldn't, that's what you're trying to portray if you're trying to rob somebody.

Yeah. I would assume that's.

You want somebody that wouldn't. You want to get that across. So detectives get a recent booking photo of Bobby from the Bergen County Sheriff's Office and put it in a photo array. All five women picked him out. All five.

Wow.

Yeah. So did the Bronx victim, who was a vending machine worker robbed at gunpoint while doing his night's collections. So this was actually for money. But that's a lot of money, a vending machine. You can get a bunch out of that. And so he did this, robbed a man at gunpoint. Woman, he grabs by the throat. A man, he brings a gun. That's a lot about his psychology there. January 3rd, '64 is when he's arrested and charged with all six robberies. He admits it. He tells police he needed the money.

Wow.

That's it, which is weird because his parents and aunt give him money. So it makes no sense. He doesn't need the money. But he pleads guilty to one of the elevator robberies and the Bronx robbery, and four other elevator cases are dismissed. They just kind of rolled them into one. He got two five-year terms at Great Meadows. So five years, fuck off, to run concurrently. So five years.

So he's doing five years in a children's home in his 20s.

Yeah. I'm sure there's a non-children's part of this.

Sure. But yeah.

Because this is an adult trial. Now, in New Jersey, his lawyer arranged another plea bargain. Bobby would plead guilty to the Cluster gun charge and the North Arlington burglary, and the tire iron assault would be dismissed. So the only one left is that Fort Lee home invasion, which was the hung jury. So this is a lot of serious crimes we're talking about here that he has rolled.

But they're cleaning them all up and getting rid of them.

Yep. He's rolled it all into a five-year sentence.

That's amazing.

All of these robberies. This is what having a very good paid lawyer gets you, and that's what he has. He'll end up serving just over half of that, by the way. Now, a New York parole evaluation warned it might be essential to consider this case carefully. In our opinion, he will be a poor risk for parole. He has considerable potential toward criminal acts, particularly assaults.

Right.

They nailed him. Nailed him.

He's a bad dude. Yeah.

In 1964, the plea deals also really I mean, think about all the things that were dismissed. Elevator assaults, tire iron attack. All this bad shit gets dismissed. That does not on his record. So when you look at his record, it looks like he had one robbery, one assault. It doesn't look like he's this big pattern, awful person. So it's interesting. But they were trying to basically just clean it up and get this guy figured out.

They don't do that now, right? So if it gets dismissed because it's all digital and computerized.

They know what you've.

I mean, yeah. They know what you've done and what's been dismissed, but can still, on future judgment, hold you accountable because you're fucking dangerous.

For sure. Absolutely. Here, I think it was much more sometimes you'd get a whole case or a whole picture of someone. Sometimes you didn't.

Yeah. Because I'm sure that paperwork, if it's dismissed, just out the window of the car gets dismissed.

You're dealing with paperwork. You're dealing with, at the time, 90% alcoholism on the police force and all this. A bunch of detectives that drink hard. It's just who knows what the hell people kept for paperwork.

And paperwork, just based on sheer mass and storage, if you're keeping track of the ones that are dismissed, that's got to be a warehouse of ungodly proportion. That's a huge place.

It's crazy. So he's paroled in September of 1966. He moves back in with his parents and gets a job at a clerk at a convenience store.

It has been a full life for this man up to 1996. Wow.

'66.

'66.

26 years. Yeah.

That's amazing.

Then he starts hooking up with women. He starts finding girlfriends. This is the first time this has really come up. But within a few months of getting out, he's got three women he's kind of going in between in his orbit. Because as you can imagine, he's not honest in relationships either. He doesn't treat women well at all. One is a woman named Beverly Moles, who's 21 years old and is a bank teller in Fort Lee who lived with her parents in Cluster. So near him. She walked into the food store to buy some groceries in October '66, about a month after his parole, and they hit it off right away.

Is that right?

And he's known as a handsome guy, 6'2", which is very tall back then. Muscular, strapping young man. She's into him. Problem is, she's also married. She's married to a guy who's involved in organized crime. Yeah. This is getting way more than you thought, right? Okay. Her husband, yeah, Allen Rosenberg was back in Chicago. He was under indictment and not allowed to leave Illinois, which is why Judy's in Florida without him.

What?

Yeah. My husband.

Is no more.

Dicked his fucking wick where he shouldn't have been or something. Yeah. My husband got a mob hit on him, essentially. She was terrified because she had because he had organized crime ties, and she didn't know if they were going to kill her too.

They were going to look at her dresses one day. Yeah.

You never know. So she begged Bobby, "Please come to Chicago. Please come to Chicago." So he went.

Come? No.

He went to see her, which was not approved by his parole officer. He never asked. He skipped work to go for a few days, and so they fired him at his job, which he has to have for parole. So that's not great.

He got reported. Yeah.

April of 1967, he's living on unemployment and $50 a month from a worker's compensation claim. And Aunt Lillian would give him like $1,000 every Christmas, which is a lot of money back then. And so he would live off of that for a while too. So he had that. Now, every gift from his aunt, by the way, would make him resentful that it wasn't a bigger gift. He wouldn't say, "Wow, $1,000. That's great. That's really generous." He would say, "She could afford 10.

Oh my God.

He's a certain mindset, that is.

Yeah. He's not the only one getting things from her either. She's probably supporting a lot of people.

Yeah. I don't know about supporting, but she's definitely helping.

Gifting.

Gifting and doing things for people and whatever. I mean, she can afford it, but also, it's her money. So what the fuck?

She doesn't have to. Right.

Exactly. So April 27th, 1967, Teaneck, New Jersey, a housewife named Bernice Kaplan comes home at about 3:10 in the afternoon. She'd been dropping off Passover cookies for her mother in Hackensack. Nice. She put the kettle on for tea and started gathering laundry. A little after 3:00, now, Bobby, who had left Renee Ross's house a few streets away, that is girlfriend number two, I believe.

Two. Yeah.

I think that's two, left her house after that, like we said, right around there. They believe that Bobby's route home crossed Bernice Kaplan's route home. He rings the doorbell. Now, there's a small window. She looks out, and she sees a well-groomed young man in a light-colored windbreaker and checkered pants holding dry cleaning still wrapped in plastic.

Yeah. He's got a cool car.

So she opened the door a crack, and he says, "Brantley? Is this Brantley?" And he's holding the things. And she said, "You have the wrong house." And he smiled, and he said, "Brantley? It's not Brantley. Thought it was." And he's being friendly.

Sure.

So he said, "Oh, man. Really? This is the address I have for this. I don't know what to do now because this is what my boss gave me. I'm supposed to drop this off, but I have the wrong house. Do you mind if I can I use your phone real quick to call my boss? Because I got to get the right address. And if I drive all the way back there, it's going to screw up all my deliveries, and I might get in trouble at work and all that." So she hesitated, but then said, "Yeah, right. Come in. Use the phone." Which is how my great-grandmother was murdered. Someone asked to use the phone, and she let him in, and they tied her up and cut her throat and ransacked the house.

Cell phone solved this problem in a blink, didn't it?

Yeah. Fuck, yeah. Absolutely. Now, the phone company later said that a call did go from her den, don't know to who, but it only lasted a second or two. So he got out and called somebody and then hung up the phone. He comes out of the den where the phone was, and he says, "Oh, my boss wasn't there." And he starts walking toward the front door. Everything's normal and fine. She's walking behind him. Out of nowhere, he spins around and basically gets her in a chokehold with his forearm around her throat and says, "Don't scream or I'll kill you."

It might also be a distraction and disarming to make them think of something else.

Yeah. Totally. Either one. So he's doing this. He keeps his hand on her throat the whole time.

Oh, God.

At one point, she says, "Why are you doing this?" A good question. He said, "I'm crazy. Don't you know?" That was his answer.

Oh, boy.

Which is not what you want to hear at all. She said, "Well, my son's going to be home from school soon." He said, "If the boy walks through that door, I'll kill him. I have a gun in my pocket."

Oh, boy.

Okay. And she later told police, "His fingers seem to be searching for something in my throat." Like he was really enjoying having.

Searching for something.

Wow. He then sent her into the bathroom because she had to go to the bathroom and told her not to go out the window in there. Stay in there. Don't go out the window. She comes out of the bathroom. He was standing by the front door staring at her. He was just by the front door making sure she came out of the bathroom. She came out of the bathroom, and then he left. Went, got in his car, drove away. She ran into the den, called the police, obviously. Now, while that was happening, a 14-year-old boy named Kenneth Strickland walked past the house on the way home from school.

Oh, a Farfuggnugen or something?

Yeah. I don't think they had that yet. Fucking should be called Rape Fuggnugen for all the serial killers that have this. So Teaneck's detectives started calling Volkswagen dealers and checking motor vehicle records for late-model green convertibles. They got one back in the area.

There's only one?

Just one. It's registered to Robert R. Reldon of Cluster. That's it.

That sucks.

That is he's like, "Fuck it. She got a more common car. God damn it."

What a dipshit. He had no idea. Oh, and then he's going to blame her for buying him a car that's so fucking.

So noticeable. Why'd you give me something so noticeable, damn it?

Why'd you give me something so unique?

So the Cluster police knew exactly who he was. He's a parolee. So they can order him to come into the police station. He has to come. If he doesn't come, they go arrest him and take him to fucking prison again. That's it. It's a violation. So on April 29th, 1967, they called him to headquarters. Didn't say what it was for. They said it was an unspecified police matter. Just got to come in. Bernice Kaplan, the housewife who was raped in her home, was brought to the station and looked through a one-way glass and said, "That's the guy for sure."

It is.

Yeah. Absolutely. She then looked out in the parking lot, saw the car, and said, "By the way, that's his car too. That green convertible is his car." And they wrote, "That sure is. You nailed that one." So thanks, Aunt Lillian, for that gift.

Damn it.

So June 2nd, 1967, it's his 27th birthday. "Happy birthday. You're indicted for rape." Hey. Isn't that nice? So they have a rape trial in July of '67.

Ah, good Lord.

They have her identification, her identification of both him and the car. They have the boy outside the 14-year-old identifying the car very specifically by the details of where it was and a state police lab technician too. I don't know if there was fingerprints or something. Oh, that's what it was. The technician testified that semen was found on Kaplan's dress and on a tissue paper in Bobby's windbreaker pocket. He keeps jiz rags in his pockets. That's.

Tissue paper? Oh, like a I got it.

Yeah. Like a tissue.

Like a clean-up.

Toilet paper or Kleenex or something.

Gross.

And that hair on the jacket matched hers in color and texture. So on his jacket with the semen, with this jiz rag in it, also had her hair on it, or at least matching characteristics back then. That's all they could do. So the defense called his two local girlfriends as alibi witnesses. Renee said he left her house at about 3:10. Her mother said closer to 3:05. And Beverly Moses said he showed up unexpectedly in the parking lot of her Fort Lee Bank at about 3:30, even though they had no plans.

25 minutes. Yeah.

20 minutes, 25. He couldn't have stopped there, roughed her up, raped her, did all that, and then got to the bank in time. It's impossible. That's their.

He'd have to be incredibly efficient at being a criminal.

Yeah. Those Volkswagens are not that fast.

No. Not particularly.

They're like lawnmowers. So the jury gets the case at 2:05 PM. In less than two hours, they come back and say, "We're deadlocked." Which you've been there two hours. You're not deadlocked. This is called.

You got to keep going.

Deliberations is what this is called. The judge said, "Get the fuck back in there." An hour later, they came out and said, "Deadlocked. We got nothing."

Nothing. We got nothing.

Nothing. So the judge declared it a mistrial, hung jury number two for him. Man, it helps to have a good lawyer, doesn't it?

Yeah.

So September of '67, two months later, they do a retrial. They're not letting him off on this one here. On the first morning of the trial, Bobby asks to fire his lawyer, citing, "Drastic changes in circumstances," but then he would not.

Not elaborate? Yeah.

He wouldn't elaborate. He wouldn't expand on at all what those changes were.

There's just no changes, man.

I got drastic changes. Just trust me. The judge said, "No. You got your lawyer. We're not delaying the trial anymore." This time, the prosecutor was first assistant prosecutor, who was higher up the ladder. This guy became a judge later. Same evidence. This time, the jury convicts on all counts, though.

Oh.

The pre-sentence report, because they do a pre-sentence report to figure out where to send somebody and what level of supervision they need.

Danger they are. Yeah.

The pre-sentence report quoted his parents. They said that they maintained their son's innocence in regard to the charge of rape. They have arranged for a private treatment facility in Canada if the court would keep him out of prison. "We'll ship him out of the " you won't even be in the country. "We'll ship him away."

We're going to get him help elsewhere and make him another country's problem.

Yeah. This is what rich people would do, though, all the time. People would get out of shit all the time because they would make some kind of deal. "Well, we'll send him to a facility, and it'll be out of your hair and jurisdiction. It won't cost the taxpayers anything." According.

If a cop or a judge is looking at recidivism and an opportunity we're going to send him to a different country where they have no word of this.

No.

That's so dangerous.

That's so dangerous. We'll pin a note to his sweater, but I mean, we don't know if they'll get it. "Look out. Rape." So it says, "Be careful, rapist." I don't know if they'll keep it there.

We're not sending him somewhere where there's no parole officers.

No. So according to the report, they "cannot picture their son committing this offense as he has many girlfriends, and further, he didn't need the money." So they're like, "He has girlfriends and doesn't need the money. Why would he go rob and rape somebody? That's crazy." Which so did Ted Bundy. Again, same thing.

The fact that he did, and the witness and the person that it happened to is right there and says he did it.

He did it.

The fact that he did is crazy.

They said now.

That's so much worse.

Can't be him. Can't be him, though. That's what they say. So under the state's sex offender law, the judge sentences him to an indeterminate term at Rahway Prison, not to exceed 30 years. So from.

From 0 to 30.

0 to 30, somewhere in there is what you got. In prison, he's classified as a "special sex offender."

What is that?

You're a real scumbag, I think, is what that.

Extra special.

Yeah.

Extra special.

Extra rapist.

He was moved into the treatment unit. The goal was to control what the reports called his repetitive compulsive pattern of sexual behavior. Now, he's a smart guy who knows what to do and knows how to operate in circles, basically. He becomes the main big shot of the program. He's the star pupil, man. He is the shining example of what this program can accomplish. He's smart. He's cooperative.

Yeah.

I can manipulate to turn it around or at least make them think I did because.

Absolutely.

I'm good at this.

He is good at this. There's even a guy.

I'm so smart.

There's skeptical staff members said that he had the Bobby Reldon fan club while in prison, basically. And these were several doctors who just loved him so much. The number one, two, and three guy is William Pendergast. Oh, man. He's the assistant superintendent of the Rahway treatment unit and later its director. They said that his staff worried that he was actually neglecting the other patients because he's basically acting as Bobby's full-time therapist.

A, I fixed him. B, told you so.

Exactly. He even said, "I find it hard to believe Bobby could have committed this crime."

Oh, my.

This is from the book we'll talk about later called The Charmer. There's a book on this. This is a November 1968 report to the Special Classification Review Board regarding Bobby's stated that he had personally given a patient 100 this is Pendergast said he personally gave him 100 hours of general therapy and 70 hours of intensive therapy.

Okay.

He said that he was required to issue semiannual reports on each inmate in the treatment center. The purpose was to detail the inmate's progress and recommend any continued treatment or parole consideration. Then they would make their own periodic evaluation of each individual and forward that to the New Jersey State Parole Board to review. Pendergast said that all these sessions with Reldon generated "terrific improvement and the development of a trusting relationship."

I mean, if you're doing it an hour a day I mean, if you did it eight hours a day like a job, that wouldn't take you very long. Maybe six weeks, seven weeks.

Yeah. Eight weeks it would take you.

But if you're doing it.

But if you're doing it.

Six weeks. Six weeks. Two, three hours a day.

Six weeks. Yeah.

That'd take you a long time.

Fucking long time. There's a lot of other prisoners there. Even fucking eight hours a day, six weeks is a long time for every single day. That's a lot. So he said that. He called Reldon the most intense individual the Rahway facility has ever treated. He said, "Insight flowed from him like water."

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now he's being honest?

He said the young man was able to ventilate his feelings for the first time in his life and to bring to light many repressions, hurts, and rejections that affected his overall social maladjustment. In other words, exactly what a shrink wants to hear.

Yeah.

"You've brought it all out of me." Now, he knows what people want. He knows how to con them, is what it is.

It's flowing now. So you turn the tap off at your leisure.

It's it. Well, no. He don't need to. He's flowed out all this stuff, and now that he knows where all this bad behavior came from, which I don't even think he did to begin with, but.

Now he can fix it.

Now he's fixed it because I'm brilliant. That's essentially what it is.

And I told you so. I told you I could.

Yeah. So he said after Reldon's original admittance to the diagnostic side of the facility, doctors there had concluded that the convicted rapist "showed a repetitive and compulsive pattern of aggressive sexual behavior." Pendergast was not a psychiatrist, though he held an MA degree in psychology. He supervised the treatment side of the center and now turned the diagnostic finding a little bit different. The Kaplan rape, Pendergast said, was the result of pure displaced hostility toward Bobby's mother and not sexual in content or purpose.

I guarantee she disagrees.

I mean, basically, he's just saying it's not sexual. It's violence, which is what rape is most of the time anyway. So especially a stranger rape. They said the May 1969 report ends with the chief therapist strongly recommending him for parole. Parole was not granted at that time. In November '69, Pendergast again issued his third report here. In his most effusive this is from the book. In his most effusive account yet, the therapist cited more than 350 hours of direct treatment he had given Reldon, noting the patient's tremendous "zeal and initiative."

We're going to line by line fix all of this.

Wow. The SBI reports can be quite deceiving. These are the rap sheets, is what he puts. Without close observation, Reldon's three sheets appear to indicate a rather long and extensive criminal history with almost 25 different offenses. However, when they're analyzed, there are only actually seven prior offenses. In reality, the Kaplan rape is only the second crime that involves any type of violence. Huh? Acknowledging that the rap sheets require an experienced eye for correct interpretation and disclosing that he did not seek corroboration from the Bergen County Prosecutor or any other law enforcement agency, this guy embarked on a concerted effort to downplay Robert Reldon's criminal history and win his release on parole, which is wild.

Pretty good guy.

If you take out all of his raping and all of his beating of women, he's fine.

Even with it, super fixable.

It should be fine. Yeah. He said that didn't mean Reldon had not committed them or that a therapist should have ignored them. Despite this guy's unwavering intervention on his behalf, in November 1969, they refused him parole again. They did not deter the chief therapist from taking up the cause once again in his next report, May of 1970, citing more than 440 hours of personally delivered therapy. Pendergast showed an even more determined effort to get his release.

Incredible.

Okay. One other person from the program said Reldon would be the poster child for the program because he was so good-looking. He said all the right things. He could shine in front of the whole world. So they're looking at this as he's.

He's handsome.

He's handsome and well-spoken.

Yeah. So he could.

If he looked like a crazy street person, then he wouldn't be a good spokesman because people are afraid of him. But this guy, he can go in and go, "I mean, they've turned me around. Now I'm doing great."

I mean, don't you want the guy that's hideous that's turned around? I want that guy.

I would want the guy who looks like he yeah, looks like the most scary, and you turn him around. This guy, yeah, looks like, oh, you turn around a rich kid who whatever.

I want a mug shot of a wily-haired street urchin that now is all clean.

But they want to send this guy out as a representative of the program so people will think this program works. They'll keep getting money for it, and they'll keep their jobs. That's all it is. It's all these prisons are all just keep your job.

And then the rat boys rape like crazy.

A lot. Another person from the program said Reldon was very smart, knew the right terms to throw back at the psychologist to show that the treatment was working. Yeah. And then they think, "I did it. Look, I fixed him." And they're excited.

I told you I could do it.

You're like a mechanic, and it turns over and really sounds good. And you're like, "I did it. Look at that." You don't know what the fuck if someone just plugged in a spark plug. You have no idea. So another longtime officer at Rahway who later wrote a book about the prison said he was such a good con man, which is he nailed it.

I guess so. Yeah.

October 20th, 1970, paroled.

Uh-oh.

He is paroled. Now, March 16th, 1971, William Pendergast, the guy from the prison who wrote all those glowing reports, goes into the hospital for back surgery. Reldon spent much of the day visiting him, sitting by his bedside. And he left mid to late afternoon. Now, about 8:00 PM, a 31-year-old woman drove into the garage of her apartment complex in Matutchin, New Jersey.

Oh, boy.

She later said, "So that I was completely muzzled and choked at the same time."

Oh, boy.

She pushed her purse toward him, and he said, "That's not what I'm after."

I'm not after the money.

Might be the most terrifying thing a person can say to a woman in that situation is, "That's not what I'm after." Oh, Christ, what are you after? She ended up squirming away because she's in the driver's side. She crawls over the fucking console into the passenger seat because he only had her by a hand and crawls out the driver's door and runs away.

Wow.

Or crawls out the passenger door and takes off. He sees, "Fuck, that's gone now." He doesn't want to be chasing a woman who's screaming through the streets because that'll draw attention. So he just walks away the other direction. A patrolman named Charles Moore took the radio call for an attempted rape at the apartment complex. Now, the woman gave a description. Moore sees this man matching the description and said, "The thing that got me was the eye contact. I immediately knew this is the guy."

We looked at each other right in the eyes.

Yeah. Everybody else just sees a cop who cares. He looked to see if the cop is looking at him. It's a certain look. It's called eye fucking, is what they call it.

It's called I know I did something bad. I mean, I don't look at cops when I'm driving usually unless I know that I was speeding.

That's it. It's called eye fucking. And the cops, they know when I'm fucking. They know when a guy on the street, they know he's up to something when he's eye fucking them. So he said, "I immediately knew this is the guy." The man, Bobby, ran into an ice cream store and slapped his hand on the counter. And they're like, "Hey, I'm here to get some ice cream. Service, please."

Here for the shakes.

The officer tells him to freeze, puts his hand on his gun. "You better freeze colder than that ice cream, pal."

Fucking ice.

"You're going to get shot." And walked him out because the store was full of people buying ice cream. Then Moore went back to the counter and found what had been stashed there, which was a blue-handled throwing knife. So he stashed a knife there. They said, "What are you doing here?" And Bobby said, "Well, I'm in the area visiting a friend in the hospital, Mr. Pendergast from the prison, the psychologist guy, blah, blah, blah." So Moore, this officer, and another officer went to the JFK Medical Center in Edison and asked Pendergast, "Do you know this guy?"

He's the best.

So he said, "Do you mean a teacher? Are you a teacher?" And he said, "No, no. I run the sex offender unit at Rahway." And they went, "Oh, perfect. This is our guy then." Our prized pupil, he thought like, "Oh, are you a community college professor or something?" "Oh, no. He's a rapist." Okay.

You're doing terrible.

Bad job. So March 23rd, '71, parole revoked, back to Rahway. By the way, he pleads guilty to the last case that was hanging in there somewhere. Pleads guilty. Oh, that's the one that he just attempted rape on that one. They sentenced him to five to seven years concurrent with the Kaplan sentence. So it's all part of this one sentence. Back in prison, he had worked again. Charming, charming, charming. He's on point. One of the inmates or one of the people there said he was entirely different than 99% of the inmates.

He knows how to get out of here.

Exactly. Another said, "All the sykes couldn't figure him out. In fact, he had them all fooled." That's what a prisoner said. Spring of '75. He's still in there now. He's been in for four years. He appears on a TV program hosted by David Frost.

What did David Frost host?

David Frost hosted tons of talk shows in the '70s. But the thing you're thinking of is the big Frost versus Nixon that they made a movie out of. David Frost had a multi-night interview with Richard Nixon after Nixon had quit and all that. But yeah. So by the way, it's a fucking great movie. Even if you're not interested in it, it's a really good movie. So David Frost is a very well-known guy internationally, too. He hosted shit in Australia and England and America, all over the place. I don't know about Trust. He wasn't a serious guy.

No?

No. That's why they were like, "Why are you doing a Nixon interview? You interview celebrities, and you're like a party showbiz guy. You're not a serious journalist." And he was like, "I know. Weird, right?"

Billy Busch.

Yeah. If you see the movie, it was him.

Mario Lopez.

Exactly. If you see the movie, it's him trying to figure out.

How do I do this for real? How do I quote this?

How do I not be a fucking joke, essentially? Because they're like, "He's going to run you over, dude. You're nobody. You're a loser. You're a fucking you're Mario Lopez. What do you think of that?"

You're not real.

"You're Kelly Rippa. What are we talking about?"

I think he's a straight hand.

So Spring of '75 is when he appears on that. It's a special about rape titled The Unspeakable Crime.

It's not really unspeakable.

I mean, we speak about it all the time. In it, Bobby speaks up for sex offenders and asks for more understanding and better treatment. You just don't get it. That's the problem. Oh, yeah. And people were so impressed with his progress. He was chosen by the prison to be the guy to be interviewed.

Oh, my God.

Because he sounds and looks the best. So you put him out there.

He's going to convince us that we got to have some sympathy for him, too.

Yep. And right after that, he's paroled. Right after.

Wow.

Right after, "You go out there. You make us look good. We'll let you out," I feel like is what it was. Quid pro quo there. So May 30th, '75, he's paroled again. So he's 34 at this point. And the supervision was ordinary parole supervision. He reported to an officer. He's expected to have a job. He can't leave New Jersey, which is a sentence right there. Later, also, they said when he gets out, he goes back into Bergen County.

And then he got out.

And now he's out. So anything that happens, they're going to look at him first because the guy is fucking disrupting the apple cart here. So June 17th, 1975, less than three weeks after he gets out of prison, he is going to get married. He gets married to Judy Rosenberg.

The lady who's from Chicago.

The dead mob husband. The dead mob husband who he met at the pool in Florida in '67. She waited through him the whole time through all this. They moved into an apartment on Central Avenue in Tenafly, New Jersey, with her then 12-year-old son, Eddie. "Hey, come in. I'm going to move my 12-year-old in with a convicted multi-time rapist. This is a very good decision."

Oh, my.

Her other husband's a gangster. I wonder what her upbringing was like. I'm sure her father was a wonderful, wonderful man, just a great guy.

My God, James.

So yeah. So I mean, I bet her father was a real piece of work. So one person interviewed said this about him. He had girlfriends here. He had girlfriends there. Women loved him. They were all over Robert Reldon. I'm telling you. He worked as a house painter at this point. And he also ran a small construction business around this time, just his own little handyman business. One job involved sandblasting, and he had to rent a bunch of sandblasting equipment.

Gloucester.

Gloucester? Whatever. She is trained as a midwife. That's what she's doing for a living here. Before she came to the United States, she'd worked in South Africa. She still has a bunch of friends there. She met her husband, Jonathan Haynes, at a party. And he said, "We met at a party, and we hit it off almost straight away. She was a very happy girl, a hugely warm, always had a smile, and very social. Lots and lots of friends. Made friends very easily."

He's British, too. Straight away is a British thing.

Yeah, straight away. Absolutely. Yeah, he's British. Her engagement ring came from Harrods in London. He said, "Looking at it sideways, it was shaped as an S and had a unique pattern of small diamonds and a central diamond. Not an overly expensive ring, but a particularly nice design, which we chose." And she never took it off. She loved it. She wanted to get married. She was totally into it. They got married in Warwickshire in England in a 13th-century church.

God damn.

So big deal. In 1975, Jonathan took a job in the United States, and they had to figure out where they were going to live.

How they're going to get, yeah.

He said, "We had the option of having an apartment in New York or moving out to New Jersey. And we drove around New Jersey, and Northern Bergen County was particularly lovely. And we picked a house, and it was a nice house."

There it is.

They were more into the leafy thing. The house was in Haworth or Hayworth, H-A-W-O-R-T-H. Susan was looking for work at this time. So October 6th, 1975, 8:00 AM at the house in Haworth or whatever it is, Jonathan Haynes leaves for work. Susan stays home. She had a stack of letters to mail, including, I guess, a birthday present for her mother in England.

Nice.

Okay. October 6th, same day, about 1:00 PM, Jonathan calls home from work. He said, "I telephoned Sue at about 1 o'clock, and everything was fine. And she was quite excited. She had a letter from good friends in Cape Town. One of the great friends was going to have a child. She was excited by that, and so we chatted for some length of time about that. I said, 'I think I'll be home slightly late tonight.'"

Sure.

So he comes home about 5:50 PM. And he said, "Normally, Sue would come to the door and say hi, but there was no one there. The house was locked, so I had to use my keys to get in."

Damn it.

I shouted, "Sue, Sue, Sue. You fucking bitch, where are you?"

Come say hello.

No. He said, "No, there was not a thing out of place." He goes through every room. Nothing's disturbed. There's folded laundry there. There's no knocked over shit. It doesn't look ransacked. He checks the garage, and he said, "The car was shut, but the driver's keys were in the ignition, I believe, and the house keys were on the passenger seat in her car." So he's like, "That's weird." So I'll read from the book here. Kind of gives you an idea.

That's awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. So they used the larger vehicle over the weekend to take their English friends to the Grand Prix Auto Races in Watkins Glen.

Hell yeah.

He then dropped the English guys off at their hotel on his way to work, and they were flying back home later that night. At work, he swapped the borrowed car for his own sports car, which had been repaired. Susan must have spent the morning cleaning up because he noticed nothing was out of place. Yesterday's paper was on the kitchen table, open to the jobs section, along with a felt-tip pen and a notepad. Job hunting in the '70s was what that looked like. He called to his wife, got no response. He went through the house room by room. In their bedroom, he saw a tampon on the dressing table, which he was like, "Why is there a tampon laying there?

Is this a new one?

Yes, a new one. Yeah. Yeah. That night, Susan was to go to the Bergen Field Adult School to attend a pottery class, which she really had fun with, and she did it every week. Jonathan saw her clothing for class neatly laid out on the bed. In the bathroom, he saw piles of folded towels and linens. So he's like, "Okay, she did the laundry." He went and checked outside and checked the garden. There's nothing there. So he went into the garage and looked in Susan's car. Her keys are on the driver's seat.

All right.

He said, "What did she seem like? Was she okay?" She said, "Seemed like her normal, cheerful self." I don't know. So her husband, Leland, accompanied Jonathan home to help him look through the house and just whatever. He said, "Maybe Susan fainted. Maybe she's lying out of sight in one of the rooms. Did you look like next did you go around the beds to make sure to see the other side of them?" And he said, "No, I guess not. Maybe not." So together, Jonathan and the next-door neighbor searched the house, found nothing. Mrs. Slater and another neighbor, Mr.

Right now, yeah.

Immediately, yeah. They look at him. One of the investigators said, "In any case of a missing woman, the first person that a police officer will think of as a possible perpetrator is spouse or boyfriend, obviously, or ex-boyfriend, even better." Jonathan, he only figured it out. He didn't realize that's what the cops were doing. He's English. It's different. He doesn't know what the hell American.

He's given information that he's, yeah.

Yeah. He said his friend pointed it out. He said, "My friend suggested that things might not be as easy as they seem to the police, and then it dawned on me I might well be a suspect." Like, "Oh, shit."

He's like, "Those aren't my friends."

"Fuck, yeah. They're not trying to help me." So after three days, they asked him, "Will you take a polygraph?" He said, quote, "Because this is the '70s. There's not true crime shows on every TV station." He said, "I had no idea what a polygraph test was. I wouldn't want to do it again under any sort of circumstances like that." But he took it anyway, and he passed with flying colors.

Right, because he didn't do it.

So the investigator said there was absolutely no concern that he was involved in this disappearance whatsoever after that.

Huh.

Because he didn't seem like it anyway. It didn't make sense, and his alibis all lined up and everything like that. But you add that with a polygraph, they go, "Okay, he's out."

Probably didn't do it. Yeah.

So now the search goes crazy. Police brought dogs in going everywhere. Hundreds of volunteers are walking fields arm in arm doing that whole thing by points and everything. At one point, they even brought a psychic in because they're out of ideas. Where could she be? We'll bring a psychic in. Jonathan said he rode along with the cops. He said, "I traveled for days in an unmarked police van with police going around New Jersey trying to find indications of where Susan might have been." He said nobody knew what they were dealing with.

She's wandering around questioning things?

Some were using a different accent, not even being English and shit. Who knows?

Weird questions.

Then he said, "Was this some kind of political kidnapping? Had she been kidnapped by a professional body?" He said, "Because at that time, the United Kingdom was having trouble in North Ireland, so they thought maybe just any English person they might take." So he said, "But there was no ransom call or anything." So you don't kidnap someone for no reason. You do it for ransoms.

For reasons, yeah.

Whatever your reason is, but it's not just, "I just want to keep you and look at you." That's not what not a political movement would do. A creep would, but not a movement. So October 9th and 10th, 1975, the disappearance makes the newspaper in the area. By the next day, the coverage is raising possibilities of a kidnapping. Investigators are reaching out to old contacts in Canada, England, South Africa. Has anyone heard from her? No one's heard from her. It's a crazy deal.

Oh, shit.

Which we know. Now, after she disappeared, about 40 feet from the corner, the only clue they found was an orange canvas mask used for sandblasting.

Oh.

Remember that. He's got a business where he rents equipment for sandblasting all the time to do things. Now, October 14th, 1975, Susan Reeve at her house. She doesn't come home. Her parents waited. Her father said, "As time went on, we began to wonder and called around to her fiancé and to other people to see if perhaps she had a date and had neglected to tell us about it." Nobody had seen her. Her parents walked down to the bus stop. Her parents called the police. Her father said, "I think we thought she might have been kidnapped, so we hoped we would receive a request for ransom."

I don't give a shit.

No, he doesn't care. People do that. So no request ever came. The dad kept searching almost every day.

Wow.

He said some clue would come about, and I would search an area, but to no avail. So about that night, that was beyond that, but we're still in October 14th. About 7:30 PM, so this would be an hour and a half after she disappeared, a car pulled up to a toll booth. And Eileen Dalton is the toll booth collector, and she is from the Port Authority, runs the George Washington Bridge. Other accounts, though, place her on the Palisades Interstate Parkway.

Oh, my God.

Also, "He's a maniac," she said. Now, a second attendant also heard this and believed that it was coming from his trunk or the back area of the station wagon type deal. He sped off the driver, which is.

After paying toll.

Wild. So then October 15th, 16th, the next day, and the day after that, the police are connecting these two disappearances immediately because they're close by too. Jonathan Haines said, "The police very quickly told me there's another young woman who had gone missing, and they very quickly put the two together. I don't think there was any hesitation." So I mean, this is a big deal. Now we're talking two young women disappearing from an area like this. Now there's helicopters overhead, door-to-door, canvassing.

Who are the people that do this kind of thing?

Yep. So they pulled out six mug shots of parolees and showed them to Eileen Dalton, the toll booth woman. She tentatively picked out Robert Reldon as the driver. Now, an investigator later explained that, quote, "They didn't have any firm suspicions about him. It was a routine matter. Record of sexual activity, bring him in." So when they brought him in, it was just because he was a sex offender in the area. It wasn't for any other purpose. Then they also have a witness that back on October 6th, when Susan Haines disappeared, a neighbor said that he saw her at 3:30 PM outside.

In the yard, okay.

At the time. So they gave extensive testimony explaining why he noticed the car and why it took him so long to understand what he'd seen because he didn't come forward right away. It took him a long time to figure out, "Oh, oh, shit. That's the same day." Now, about October 20th, 1975, so about a week after Susan Reeve disappears off the bus, a man walks into a Macy's department store. And I didn't know you could do this. I didn't know Macy's was like a pawn shop back then. You could sell them jewelry at Macy's.

Yeah, I think you could do that for quite some time, up until fairly recently because it's not worth anything anymore.

It's so weird. One particular piece caught the clerk's eye. She said it was a very unique ring. It was an engagement ring, but it was a different kind of ring. It was made specially.

Is it that ass?

It's the same thing. Two days later, the man came back and wanted the ring back.

Ah, shit. They're going to be looking for that.

Yeah, the store couldn't find it right away, and he got pissed. The person at the store said he had raised such a stink, made such a scene out of not being able to immediately get the ring back. He screamed, causing all kinds of problems so bad they bring store security up to calm him down. So he buys the ring back for $100 in cash. Don't know what he sold it to them for. Later on, they will identify this man as Robert Reldon, by the way. The ring was, by the way, identical when given a description of it.

Really? He did sell it, though.

Yeah. He sold it somewhere. So October or threw it in a river. October 21st and 22nd, police ask Robert to come in for questioning. As a parolee, he is required to come in, so he does. The interview is recorded. One investigator said he was very positive, and he said, "Here's a diary of what I've been doing the last six months. So if you want to know what I've been up to, here it is."

Robert did this?

Bobby did this, yeah. He told them he was in a strong financial position. He gave specific accounts of the days around the disappearances, except one. October 6th, the day Susan Haines disappeared from her house, was the only day he did not have any entry for. No account of that day. For October 14th, the day Susan Reeve disappeared, he gave an alibi that investigators later found out was at least partially false. He said he had a drink.

Oh, boy.

Bad dog.

You bastard.

Bad dog. You fucking ruined my day now. But it's a body of a woman who is nude and face down.

Oh, boy.

They describe her as partially hidden beneath some broken-off tree branches. Sprinkle some tree branches on her. That's disgusting. Sticks and leaves have been piled on top of her. Just whatever they could find.

Snatch some foliage around.

Yep. Around her neck was a pair of women's pantyhose. A stick had been threaded through it and twisted to tighten it. They used it so he didn't have to pull because that can take a while.

So lazy and gross.

Lazy. The news obviously gets to Jonathan Haines, and he remembered a friend's coming to him. He said, "He came quietly to me and said, 'A body has been found.'" And I think at the time, we all realized it was most likely to be Susan, and dental records confirmed it. He said, "I don't think many people in this world can imagine how bad that was. It was horrendous and something which has stuck with me forever."

Can't imagine.

He noticed, by the way, engagement ring missing off her finger.

Gone. Yeah.

Gone. The autopsy, they found out the homicide by strangulation. She'd been dead about three weeks, which put her close to around the day she disappeared. The key finding was her throat. The hyoid bone, small U-shaped bone at the top of the neck, was fractured. One investigator said the body had been guarded around the neck with a woman's hose, a stick tied in it and tightened. So the very next day, October 28th, 1975, at Tallman State Park, which is in Piermont, New York, there was employees there, state employees doing a job here.

He died.

He said, quote, "Well, the body was found off the park into the environments of the river there. Park employees were checking the pipe to make sure there was not a high chlorine level, and a body was found lying on its back in the water with the arm sticking up in the air."

Oh, fuck.

And one of the investigators said, "The arm was a big deal." He said, "But the body's not right. It could have been situated that way with the arm sticking up in the air. The arm would come down." So they knew that this body had been placed here. This is very specific. They said she was partially covered with broken-off swamp reeds and with a pantyhose ligature around her neck as well. So they found evidence she had been raped also, as well as Susan Haines, and that her body had been moved after death.

Yeah, 12 miles apart from each other.

Both of them. Yeah. So now the press, this is when they put out everything, the Susan strangulations. That's what this is called.

How about that?

So both named Susan. And remember, we don't know if this is psychologically anything to this, but his sister who got all the attention's name was Susan, if we remember. Little polio Susan there. So the doctor performs the autopsy. This is the same doctor who performed the other autopsy because it's a county coroner. Both women died of asphyxiation due to ligature strangulation. Both had fractured hyoid bones. He concluded that in both cases, death was caused by ligature assisted by the hand of the murderer.

Really?

Fewer than 1%, he said. He said two in one week from the same county with the same pantyhose garrote dumped a few miles apart in the same New York County is not a coincidence.

Same guy.

And he told the police they're both killed by the same person. This is crazy. So by the way, since 1966, no other homicide in Bergen County had involved strangulation with a pantyhose ligature. None.

Wow.

None. Of six unsolved strangulation homicides in the county over 12 years, only these two had involved injuries like this. So it's very specific what he was doing.

Incredible.

So Susan Reeve had been dead nearly two weeks, most of it being in water and marsh.

Yeah, that's not good.

You can imagine the condition her body's in.

In May?

This is October.

October.

But still in the water. Her father was asked about identifying her, and he said, "I can't even describe to you. She had been dead for almost a week." Actually, two weeks is more accurate. So it would have been very difficult for me to identify her, and it was impossible for her to have a normal funeral. She had to be cremated.

That's fucked up.

Her engagement ring and earrings were recovered from her body, though. Interesting. October 30th, two days later, Reldon tries to break into a home in Norwood, New Jersey. Okay. He had already been questioned about two dead women, and now he's out burglarizing houses. October 31st, Halloween night in Clouster, Reldon burglarizes a home. Police were alerted. They got an arrest warrant for him and a search warrant for his car.

Pretty sure he's doing it.

Yep. November 2nd, 1975, they announced to the press, though, he's not a suspect in these killings. Not a suspect. He's fine. He's fine.

He's down on something else.

Yeah. Meanwhile, they're putting together the orange canvas sandblasters mask that they found with him because he had rented one for a painting job very recently before that. And a court record lists a sandblasters mask among the shit that he had rented.

As warrant piece. Yeah.

November 13th, 1975, officers searched the apartment that he's living in with Judy. Now Judy Reldon was Judy Rosenberg. They're looking for jewelry taken from the murdered women. They didn't find anything. They do find a California driver's license with Robert's photo and a false name on it.

Oh, he's got fake IDs.

Again, that's right there, parole fucking revoked. He had several blank birth certificates and an address book.

How do you get those?

Now, I've heard of the way there's this one guy, I think Ghost in the Wires is the name of it. There's a guy named Kevin Mitnick. If you look him up, very interesting guy. He was like one of the first big giant hackers. He hacked into phone systems. He hacked into all this type of shit. And when he was wanted by the FBI, he went to some little tiny town in South Dakota, pretended to be a private investigator looking for something. They were super friendly, let him in there.

Took some bloodshed.

He stole stacked. He was looking for deceased babies that he could put that were around his age, that he could make that. So that's what he was doing. And he had their embosser. So he embossed like 50 fake birth certificates and took them with him and had them. At any time, he could change his fucking...

Turn into anybody right now.

Yeah. It's amazing. So anyway, it's a good book, by the way, if you want to listen to it. I got it on Audible. Very good stuff. So anyway, he's got an address book as well. In the address book was the name of a woman named Roberta Gimbel. She was later interviewed about her relationship with him, and they seized his address book. November '75, they realized that he had access to a vacant house.

Where?

His aunt owns a house that's vacant in Clouster. It's not her formal residence.

Lillian's going. She's not using.

Yep. So investigators bring in tracking dogs. The dogs detected Susan Reeve's scent in two areas of the house.

Oh, fuck.

In the garage where blood stains, which matched her blood type, were found, and in a second-floor bedroom directly above it. What do you think was going on in there?

He took her there.

This is fucking great. He had his own little private.

Rape studio.

Little rape studio. Yeah. The other one's a kid could come home. This could happen. No, no. This is his private little fucking place. So January 2nd, '76, investigators report evidence from his station wagon. Vacuum sweepings of the interior turned up hair strands exhibiting the same microscopic characteristics as the head hair of both victims. They've both been in his car. Also, tracking dogs detected Mrs. Haines' scent in his car as well.

Pretty sure she's been there.

Pretty sure. 1976, in June, he is sentenced to two to three years at Raway for the burglaries, but he's not charged with murder yet. But they got him in prison, and now they can put a case together here. So anyway, there's a woman named Irene Lippert. All right. Let's read from the book here quickly. Irene Lippert claimed to have survived imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland as a young girl. So it was ironic that she herself took a job as a prison guard in 1974.

Bend the rules a little bit.

A little bit. Make some work a little harder. The duties were light, typing menus, inventory reports, and internal memos mostly. And Irene Lippert was away from the office for hours at a time, leaving the staff largely unsupervised. Okay. After entering into a plea agreement for the two burglaries he committed the previous October, Reldon was sentenced in June 1976 to concurrent two to three-year terms at Raway. His pleasant, ingratiating manner might very well have landed him in a cushy prison job in the ODR, but he already had an in.

Oh, no.

Obviously. If true, it may have simply been a friendship. She later admitted, "I knew it was a rule. I didn't know it was a law." That's what I think the territory we're into.

It's a real deal.

Yeah. It's a real deal. She later admitted to taking a liking to Reldon personally and testified on his behalf at subsequent trials, which prison guards don't normally do that. So in early December '76, Reldon and his assistant clerk, Albert Barber, were sitting up in front of the prison auditorium waiting for the start of the Saturday night movie. This sounds like a party in here. What the fuck?

There's been nothing mentioned of sitting in a cell for 23 hours a day.

No, no. Lots of stuff going on. Food kicking. Fucking. When Barber felt a tap on his shoulder, it was Alison Williams, a man named Alison Williams. Not a lot of men named Alison that I found, really.

It's again, a cowboy name. It's very.

A cowboy? Alison?

Uh-huh.

No, that's not a cowboy name. That's a little girl's name in a skirt.

Look, I don't disagree with you.

They're cowboys.

I'm just saying there are a lot of cowboys named Alison and Carol.

Carol, I've heard tons of because that's also like an Irish name, too. But Alison, I've literally never heard of a man named Alison before in my entire fucking life. That's wild. Okay. Hey, you learn something new every day. Alison Williams, an old friend from Atlantic City. Real cowboy. Atlantic City.

Cowboy.

A cowboy name. This makes no sense. Whom Barber hadn't seen in years. The two men, smiling broadly, jostled each other in a show of playful exuberance. Alison explained that he and his brother Cliff, who was in the back of the room, had just been transferred to Raway to begin serving five to seven-year sentences for burglaries they'd done together. Barber gestured for Reldon to join him, started to walk with Alison to greet Cliff. He told Bobby, "Reldon, I have two friends I want you to meet."

Targets. Victims.

Yeah. They once targeted the wife of an elite Mexican official and also cased the ski resort digs of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for a possible jewelry score, which didn't work out.

Holy shit. Trying to get the crown jewels.

Yeah. These guys are pretty goddamn kind of infamous here. And he helps them get a job, better jobs, and Reldon helps them here. And by December '76, they're hanging out, Cliff and Alison. And Clifford's sworn statement said, quote, that Reldon said to him, "I shouldn't have put them both in the same spot or so near. I shouldn't have put them so near together." When they were talking about his case.

Yeah. A little regret.

Yeah. The same statement, he said that he felt the reason he did bring him up there was he felt that if he brought him up there, that Bergen County wouldn't have jurisdiction and it would be a big mess of who even would investigate this. Is it them? Is it New York? So that's what he said. So Reldon also said, he said, "Kill in New Jersey, dump in New York, and confuse who could do the prosecution." So that's what he was trying to do. That's what he told them.

Fuck.

Yes. Four days later, he's transferred to Trenton State Prison away from the two guys because they told on him. Because they're jewelry thieves. They're not murderers.

They want out.

They'll tell on a murderer to get a year off their sentence. Now, in Demarest, they said that everyone was freaked out. They said one guy said, "Everyone lost their spirit after the murder." And he talked about raising his own daughter, and he said, "I didn't want to make her paranoid, but I wanted to protect her. We've got to protect our young people."

Yeah. We need them to be aware of their surroundings, but not necessarily everything is a threat.

Well, yeah, not enjoy your life. That would be ideal. Arthur and Barbara Reeve, Susan's parents, moved to Florida eventually here because they both said they couldn't keep driving past the place where the daughter was taken from. They know exactly the corner she was taking. They can't keep doing it. It's right on their street. They can't go outside without looking at it. So February 19, '77. Okay. Albert Barber, who's a convicted bank robber, who we talked about, his prison buddy with Bobby here, he said, "I need some help with you, Albert.

So that I can bequeathed?

She's in her early 60s. She's got a house in Alpine. I need her killed there. The second target was her companion, a guy named Misha Dabich, a guy she hung out with. So he approached two fellow inmates. "Can you get someone to kill her? I'm going to need a big-time attorney to represent me. So I need you to kill her so I get money, at least my inheritance, my part of it, and then I'll be able to hire a good attorney." The inmates said, "We'll look into it." Instead of looking into it, they went right to the authorities and told on him immediately.

So he's got to pretend to be an inmate there.

Yeah. I'm a hit man. He's Donnie Brosco in the situation. According to this, he gave directions to his aunt's house on a wooded street in Alpine. He talked about payment. And this is why he thought he was the real deal, too, because he's not talking about five grand. He's talking about somewhere for a rich person in a neighborhood like that, somewhere between 100 and 150 grand this is going to cost in 1977.

That's real money.

That's a real hit man. He's like, "Oh, shit." They said, "Well, the payout also can be jewelry, too, because you can take a bunch of jewelry from her and whatever you get from that." They said the signal that he wanted to kill her was when he told the investigator that's what he wanted done with his aunt, to slash her across the throat. Now, I have the full transcripts from the book here of these conversations. We don't have time to read them all, but here's Gallow. "All right. Now listen." Oh, no. This is what he tells Gallow. "All right. Now listen. You do this like I tell you.

I need you to put it in your own handwriting if you could.

I really need you to put a conspiracy in your own handwriting if possible. Is that all right?

Just sign and date it.

So Reldon tore a few blank pages out of a small notebook and gave them to Gallow to take notes. He said, "I'm not writing it down, but you can write it down."

Oh, okay.

But he wasn't about to put anything down on paper himself. Reldon then proceeded to lay out the plan. He told him to expect no weapons in the house, and it's only his aunt in her 50s and her companion, a man about 40, who would be there. Oh, she is.

She's doing it.

She's fucking banging some younger guy. This is hilarious. She referred to his aunt's companion as a, quote, "stone cold punk" and said, "She'll give you more problems than he will."

Really?

Yeah. Yeah. Some dude.

He's a little bitch. He's just a boy toy.

Yeah. He wants to bang a Social Security-age woman for money. Yeah. He's not.

Smooth-chested man trying to get a retirement out of this.

That's it. I mean, there are a lot of trips to nice places. I mean, if it was going to go to a knockdown fight, she'd jump on you before he would. You know what I'm telling you? The woman, the female, is the deadlier of the species, he says. This is quotes from the thing.

All right.

Gallow said he is uneasy about carrying a gun on the job. And Bobby said, "Well, you got to take it. How else are you going to go there?" I mean, and Gallow said, "Do I have to use a gun?" And Bobby said, "It's the best." And Gallow said, "Well, what if I'm stopped on the way there carrying a gun? Then I'm going to get busted for that. That's stupid." So they continued to discuss the what weapon. It's going on and on. They draw out detail after detail and need you to do that. I mean, basically, Gallow would elicit he would disagree with him at times to get him to explain even more.

Getting him to roadmap the whole thing, not just the way to the place, but the actual event. This is how I want it done.

He said eventually that Reldon won the argument about using a gun, but only after he became visibly agitated is when the other guy gave in. He was like, "Okay. I don't want to knock him off the hook here." So Reldon said, "Yeah, but if you see if you get them both, get them both. If they split up on you and you got one going this way and one going that way, you can't start to chase one, then the other. Forget that part. Then you can take them down. Even if you don't take them with the first shot, you take them down, they don't get out of the house.

You've got to get rid of the fucking toolie. What do you want from me?

So now they were talking about specifics of the job. And he said, "Yeah, now, what are we talking about?" Gallow asks, "You show me a lot of figures before, so what are we talking about?" Reldon had written down and showed him during the window visit earlier. "You're talking about the ring alone is worth 100,000," Bobby said. "The ring alone that she's wearing is worth $100,000." So this guy said, "She's going to have this?" And he said, "She wears it all the time. She wears it to bed. She takes it off maybe to wash dishes.

Shit.

Rich.

What is that? The one from the Titanic?

It's crazy. 40 carats. You're talking about another 100,000. It's probably not 40 carats.

No way.

You're talking about another $100,000 minimum worth of jewelry. You're talking about a minimum. You're talking about retail, $250,000 of jewelry, wholesale. So Gallow says, "What about the cash in the house?" And he said, "You might get lucky and find some cash. It'd probably be in her pocketbook. She didn't have any other hiding places that I know of." And Gallow said, "Sounds strange. She must be a weirdo." And he said, "She is." Don't worry. So they discuss how the aunt got her money and all that kind of shit.

Your party.

Your party. He said, "You might have difficulty moving a 40-carat sapphire given its size, but here's a name of a fence in Chicago that might be able to handle it through his wife, I'm sure."

My wife knows some people. Yeah.

Yeah. So Gallow said, "You got no qualms about this broad now, like killing her?" And he said, "I would have done it myself. What qualms?" And he said, "Well, that's why I asked if she's a relative." He's like, "Mine, she's going to show how cold she is." He said, "She's an aunt, but only by marriage," which that's not true, actually. She's actually related to him. But he saw this Italian guy being like, "You want to kill your aunt? That's fucked up." You get that attitude. He's like, "Oh, no, no. By marriage. Don't worry. And she's a real bitch," quote unquote.

Yes, you do.

He said, "And all these other people, like every year, she gives them a couple thousand dollars for Christmas and does her bit, but she dribs and drabs it out so she can control them. And then if you don't do something she wants, oh, you're not getting your check this month. She told me once, I said to her, 'You know what you can do with that fucking check? Stick it up your ass. I may blow it in a poker game one night.'."

Oh, he's going to be a hardass about this. You rape people.

"Hey, how dare you only give me two grand this month? Fuck you." Wow. Reldon said, "That's why I'd say she'd be the first one that they would come to. I'm barely on speaking terms with her." He said that she had previously spent $75,000 for an initial retainer from her lawyers, for his lawyers. He said it came from his own funds, which is a complete load of horseshit.

He has no money.

He didn't have 75,000 fucking dollars. So anyway, it goes on and on and on. Reldon said, "There's no way I could have set up an airtight alibi and do this thing the same time. That's why I'm telling you, and that's why and they would have been dead in my ass." I don't know what that means. Dead on my ass.

Cops.

Dead in my ass. Dead up in my ass. Yeah. Gallow said, "You must have a good rep." And he said, "Yeah, I do. I've had a long run for years, and they knew I was doing shit. I was living on top of the world and never done no time, and then everything fell at once, and I've been doing time for the last fucking 10 years or more." So anyway, that's what we're talking about. He just completely whatever. He wouldn't talk about the exact details of his murders that he did.

He just lies over and over and over again.

He's got another murder to worry about here. Yeah. So yeah, he even talks about, "I can help you with a lawyer. I can do all this shit." So anyway, this is what's going on. So later on, a jury is going to hear four hours of this shit.

Of this shit. Yeah.

Okay. March 15th, 16th, 1977, Reldon wrote two letters in this week here. One indicated his plans for his aunt were progressing smoothly. The other discussed progress with his lawyers and progress toward his aunt's murders. We don't know the actual text of those letters, but that was the gist of it. 1977, March 18th, that's when authorities place a tap on Judy's phone, his wife.

Uh-oh.

Four days later, Reldon's lawyers visited him at Trenton to tell him that they put a wire tap on your wife, and they got a bunch of information. March 30th, 1977, he's arrested while already in prison for conspiring to murder his aunt and her companion. So now he's indicted, and there's that. April 11th, '77, he's got no lawyer. His attorney withdrew from the case.

Because he's got no money.

He's got no money. So he wrote to the prosecutor's office that he would continue without counsel. Three days later, the Williams brothers were transferred to another facility for their own safety. April 21st, 1977, they indict him on five counts. Two counts of advocating the death of Lillian Booth, two counts of advocating the death of Misha Dabich, and one count of conspiracy to murder them both. He said this is his excuse.

What?

By giving him evidence of a conspiracy to commit murder? That's not frustrating. That's handing him a gift.

That's just giving him more work.

You might as well have had a dozen roses delivered to his door. Thanks. It's all a hoax. He said that.

You gave him a slam dunk.

Wow, that is all a hoax. That is.

All right.

That's some shit here. Then Lillian came to court. She sat with him in court right behind him. She never removed him from her will, and she wrote a sentence and said, quote, "I did not believe my nephew would hurt me, nor do I today." She thought it was all bullshit, even though she listened to the fucking four hours of tapes. Still didn't buy it. Now, investigators believe from the beginning that everything he's done is sexual motives. It's all sexual.

Self-gratification.

He likes to choke women and rape them. That's what he does. Jewelry was taken, but then it wasn't taken off Susan Reeve, and it just doesn't he can get money, so it doesn't make sense. One guy said, "He just felt animosity toward women, and I think that this hatred caused him to reach out and rape." Reach out and rape someone. That was a bad commercial. They really.

MCI.

AT&T got rid of that one, or MCI, whatever it was. They're like, "This isn't good, right?"

This isn't positive at all.

I mean, it's a small group. It's a really small audience we're playing to here. We run everyone who can use our phone.

He really was going to kill her.

Yeah, oh yeah. Then he became the chief suspect. William Prendergast, the raw way treatment director who championed him, they asked him about it, and he said, "Bob Reldon is a brilliant man." That was his response.

Brilliant man.

Okay. So trial number one is the Aunt Lillian plot because that's what they do first. They have a shitload of evidence on tape. It's a stronger case. So apparently, Lillian was worth millions. He was facing murder charges and needed a big-time attorney. Killing her would get some money. That's the whole motive here. So all you really have to play is the goddamn.

Tapes.

Tapes. And you got pretty much everything here. The jury deliberates for about four hours over two days, which seems like too long. And they convict him on all five counts. Barber, his buddy there, was convicted on the single conspiracy count, and Reldon faces a maximum of 63 years for this. The judge sentences him to, you may fuck off, 20 to 25 years. Barber got two to three years.

Okay.

Yep. So right away, before the trial, he's trying to say, "Well, both bodies were found in New York. So New Jersey doesn't have jurisdiction over this," and all that kind of thing. But they said that both of them are from New Jersey, taken in a car. There is evidence at the aunt's house, sent evidence that they were there. So there is plenty of evidence to think they were killed in Jersey and dumped there. So it's Jersey's case, basically. Then there was severance. He wanted two separate trials, one for each Susan.

Oh.

Because he didn't want one jury hearing about the other murder while they're deciding. The court said no. Said no, both victims were in their 20s, similar size, taken from the same area, found nude in isolated spots close together in New York, same murder weapon, same MO, fractured hyoid bones. The judge wrote, "The manner of these two murders and the disposal of the victims in the case at the bar is so unusual and distinctive as to mark the crime as having been committed by a single individual."

Two Susan.

Do a Susans.

The Tusans.

All right. The Tusans. First murder trial here begins. It's largely circumstantial. The ring thing that they never found, people's recollections of the ring, the sandblasting mask near the bus stop, hairs in a station wagon, a diary with one day missing. Not a lot going on here. He has excuses as well.

Sure.

He's got plenty of excuses.

He's got reasons that his car would be seen with these people.

Yeah. He said that Reldon approached to sell the unique engagement ring purchased in London. The defense position was that it was a ring that looked like hers, not her ring. Very specific ring that he happened to try to sell right after she disappeared, but it's just a coincidence. The mask also, they said, there's plenty of masks out there. They said a rented mask is a common object. Many painters rent them. A mask near a bus stop proves that somebody was near a bus stop. So the prosecution said, "Well, this particular mask had been rented by the one recently paroled sex offender who had a gap in his diary out from that day."

God damn it.

Apparently, it was seven to five favoring conviction.

How does this guy keep doing it?

Keeps good lawyers. One observer said, quote, "He made an impression on many that encountered him. Good-looking young man, well-dressed, well-to-do family, polished, charming, looked like an everyday upper-class gentleman. He had a very commanding presence." That's all it is.

Unbelievable.

One said, "He was judged by many to have been the attorney, and his attorney was thought to have been the defendant when they walked in." They thought he was the attorney by the way he carried himself.

Wow.

That's something. Second murder trial. They fucking redo it. October '79. Sherry Ann Stevens here during this is a supporter he gains during this trial. We'll get back to her. A woman who likes him. So they're trying to figure out, trying to decide whether the jury can hear about basically a signature, saying that a signature in a murder is like a fingerprint almost. Same signature. So they were trying to figure that out.

God damn it.

So that's interesting. Either way, it was a sealed envelope of cash. So the judge met individually with each juror to find out who had seen or heard about the letter. Another bribery letter was found delivered to a different juror's home. In the end, five letters are recovered altogether.

Wow.

Only two had been seen by the jurors, and the prosecutor, of course, accused Robert of fucking sending these. Nobody was ever charged with sending them. The judge dismissed some jurors, but denied a mistrial, and then sequestered the rest of the panel and had their unopened mail confiscated by the court before they could see it, just in case. October 15th, 1979. This is fucking amazing. I'm telling you, Ted Bundy fucking these guys should have been written around the car together all over the country, like road tripping.

Thelma and Louise.

Oh, totally. Holding hands. Reldon was being held in a room off the courtroom, dressing for court. They let him go in there. According to a summary here, the guard who was guarding him, Joseph Voccolo, didn't frisk him after he dressed. Okay? Just didn't do it. Just habit and whatever. Okay. Reldon pulled out a chemical spray described in different accounts as mace or tear gas and sprayed the officer in the eyes.

Gone.

Just like Ted Bundy. Same shit. He leaped about 35 feet from a three-story window. Third story.

What the fuck?

Yeah. But then another person said it was a second-story window. From the documentary, someone said he jumped out the second-story window, broke both ankles, and still ran.

Ran away on numb ankles.

The crazy part is Jonathan Haines is there for his wife's murder trial. He said, "I ran down the stairs of the main part of the courthouse out into the car park. I was running trying to find the guy. I was going to get him."

I'm faster than you. My ankles are working.

Fuck that. Yeah, both my ankles work. Both my normally weak English ankles, they work now. They're only made for soccer, not for jumping out of things or any other sports. He did not get to him.

Did he say it was the third story? Because isn't that the third story from British in Britain? The second story?

No, yeah, we figured it's not that. It's just different accounts. That's what I thought at first too. I'm like, "Maybe he meant that, but no, it's not that." Yeah, we learned that from crime and sports. Reldon gets to a car. He carjacks somebody and takes their goddamn car.

Oh my God.

With police chasing him, he crossed into New York State, and finally, near Tuxedo, New York, the stolen car goes off the road into a ditch. He tried to get away. He's going to Canada. Who the fuck knows? He was taken into custody, taken to the hospital in Tuxedo. Wow. He was out for about an hour at large. He appeared back in court the next day in a wheelchair. So the verdict comes in. This is two days after his escape, which, by the way, doesn't look great to the jury.

Not much, no. It looks kind of bad.

We were here. Where were you, dickhead? Thanks a lot. Making us feel like we're fucking we don't matter here. Appreciate it. They find him guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Susan Reeve and guilty of second-degree murder in the death of Susan Haines. I don't know how they got to that, but they got to that. The judge said, quote, "Words are inadequate to describe the abject evil of these depraved acts of murder." He also called him his outrageous record and especially heinous and cruel and depraved manner of the killings.

That is a, oh man, regretful hour.

Life plus 52. Yeah.

Holy shit.

Plus 52.

An hour gets you 22 years.

Wow. Now, 18 months after the window incident, he was taken from Trenton State Prison to the emergency room at St. Francis Hospital in Trenton. In the hospital lobby, police found Sherry Ann Stevens, the chick he made friends with at that fucking trial. She was this supporter. She had a bag. In it were extra clothes and a loaded 20-gauge shotgun.

How big is this bag? This bitch was going to break him from the hospital.

Yep. They described it as a sawed-off shotgun in a shopping bag.

Oh, Jesus.

The authorities knew about it, and she was arrested before she could reach it. They figured it out. So that's pretty crazy. She pled guilty to conspiracy to commit an escape and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose. She got five years with three years of parole ineligibility. And he gets another 15 years for that. May 11th, 1982, both murder convictions are thrown out.

Why?

Reversed. This is fucking insane. Apparently, they did not agree that the 1967 rape and the 1971 knife attack were distinctive enough to count as a signature for him. So they told about past crimes that shouldn't have been there, is what they said. The court said, "We cannot view the error as harmless when, as here, the potential for prejudice in having two women describe defendant's brutal rape and assumed rape is so obvious." So the New Jersey Supreme Court declined to review the reversal in 1982.

Let's run it.

So they have another murder trial for him.

Oh, boy.

Another murder trial for him. It's fucking crazy. So the verdict comes in. They convict him again. Second-degree murder for Susan Haines, first-degree murder for Susan Reeve. Exact same thing. Sentencing USA may fuck off, life sentence for Reeve, consecutive 30-year term for Susan Haines. Exact same sentence. Go fuck yourself.

What does it do?

Just wasted a bunch of money. Then during appeals, it's affirmed in 1989. Supreme Court denies to review it. Early 1990s, he tries to change his name. The prison administrator, until '93, was a man named Howard L. Byer. Reldon petitioned to change his legal name. He wanted to be Howard B. Jr., and the B stood for Byer. He wanted to be Howard Byer Jr., just to fuck with the guy.

Wow.

Yeah. They said, "You can't do that." He said, "Well, it has nothing to do with the warden." And they were like, "Really? You're going to name yourself the warden? It just has nothing to do with it." The prosecutor said, "Yeah, it does." So New Jersey, normally, you can call yourself whatever you want. And courts deny formal name changes only for fraud. And they said that this could help him hatch another escape plot. So he doesn't get to be Howard Byer. They don't want that. They said one ACLU representative said, "If you wanted to change his name to Mickey Mouse, you might have had an easier time doing it."

Yeah, it might tell you that there's another person that we need to look for.

Yeah. No shit. Another victim. November 22nd, 2007, Aunt Lillian's dead at 92. Her estimated value is about $220 million at this point. She leaves Robert income from a trust worth $8.9 million. She gives this fucking idiot. Yep. His mother, Marie, was already dead, so her share passed to him as well.

Another 8 million.

I think something like that. So he's got all this fucking money. Obviously, the richest guy in Jersey prison, basically. Now, her longtime companion, though, Misha Dabich, pursued a claim against the estate and reached his own settlement as well. Like, "I should get something because he got left out." So they said, "Yeah, you should get something." So 2008, the Reeve family decides, "We're going to fucking sue this guy. Fuck him."

Yeah, he's got money. Let's sue him.

Yep. So they sue him. Now, the problem is she's been dead for 33 years. New Jersey law passed in 2000 had removed the statute of limitations for murder victims, but only for economic loss claims. Claims for pain and suffering still had a two-year deadline. So they went back to the lawmakers who wrote the law, got a sworn statement from the bill's original sponsors saying they never meant to make that distinction. So a new bill to fix it was passed in 2009. Okay.

Wow.

The Reeve estate would receive $700,000 upfront, plus the income from the $9 million trust for as long as Reldon lives.

Holy shit.

Yep. Reldon kept about $200,000, plus $2,080 a year deposited into his prison account and $50,000 a year for life if he was ever paroled.

Oh my God.

Yeah, which he's not going to be paroled.

He's just going to have all this money sitting there?

It's fucking crazy. And they said that they ended up giving it all to a scholarship. They didn't keep any of this fucking money. They kept it all. They gave it all away. The parole years here, he became eligible for parole in 2008. He's denied in 2009. Now, they've rated him as a moderate risk, a psychological evaluation. Well, all of his programs have dropped his risk assessment level too. But they keep looking at his shit and they're like, "Nope. Not this guy."

Not a good man.

Nope. And also, over time, he changed it. He started saying he did actually kill those women because he had to admit it, but he described it as spur of the moment. It was on impulse. And they were like, "No." He got so mad at one point during his hearing. He said, "You should have killed me if you wanted to get rid of me." He yelled at the fucking parole people here. 2023, the parole board denied again on a 36-month term. They said actual violent behavior by Reldon has not been demonstrated in four decades.

Yeah, he's never shown that he's violent while in prison. He does it when he gets out.

Exactly.

That's the whole point.

So anyway, that we know of, he is pretty fucked. He's 84 years old in 2025 when he's going for this. He's got hearing loss and enlarged prostate, arthritis and everything, and cataracts. And he's not eligible yet for compassionate release, which is for older people.

He's got $200 million sitting there probably, right?

I think so. Now, here is the main thing I wanted to get to also. When you look this guy up, if you look him up on Murderpedia, it says his victim count is six to eight victims and lists all these people. He did not kill these people. That is ridiculous. It's been falsely attributed. They tried to link him to six more killings. They even said one account of him said he liked to pick his victims off in pairs.

Oh, what?

So there's all these different things. Mary Ann Prior and Lorraine Kelly, 17 and a 16-year-old who disappeared from North Bergen in '74. Their bodies were found that same year. He was in prison during that. So he definitely did. They put that on his Murderpedia. He was in prison. In April 2021, a guy known as Richard Cottingham, known as the Torso Killer, pled guilty to those murders. We heard about that. Doreen Carlucci, 14, and Joanne Delardo, 15, vanished from a church youth center in December of '74.

Where are they doing it?

Well, another convicted killer, Robert Zarynski, was long considered the prime suspect and died without being charged. Also, Denise Evans and Carol Hedgespeth, both 15, disappeared from Wilmington, Delaware, and were found shot in Salem County, New Jersey. Reldon was free then, but they were shot, not strangled, and not raped. So it doesn't seem like that's his thing. So anyway, Susan Haines' body was sent home to England, where she was buried in the same church where she got married outside there, the 13th century.

13th century.

Yep. So yep, her husband said, "I'm extremely proud of Susan, and I know she'll be well remembered." He said, "To be confronted with murder, it stays with me for the rest of my life. I'm nearly 70, and it's still there."

It's fucked up, yeah.

The book is called The Charmer, the True Story of Robert Reldon, Rapist, Murderer, and Millionaire, and the Women Who Fell Victim to His Allure. Why don't you just have the whole book be the title? That's too long of a title. It's by Charles Buckley and Richard Moody.

This book, Once Upon a Time.

Yep. And they said they never interviewed him. And they said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, I knew if I interviewed him, he'd lie." But that's the point. You get the lies, and then you debunk them.

And then you just show what a piece of shit he is.

Yeah. Also, it shows a lot psychologically how he lies and what he lies about. It's interesting. But they didn't do it, but that's fine. The book was very good, though. Very thorough. And there you go, everybody, though. That is Robert Reldon and Susan Reeve and Susan Haines and the Susan strangulations. It's fucking crazy.

That's never happened before.

No, it's wild shit.

It's personal.

So weird. If you like that show, you like what we do to it, get on whatever app you're on, give us five stars. It helps so much. We don't know why. Netflix, if you double thumbs up us, we will love you forever. Just don't stick them anywhere where we might not want them. But double thumbs up us. It's fine. Do that. Definitely, definitely check out shutupandgivememurder.com. Get your tickets for live shows, everybody. Come on. We are next month. Tarrytown is just about sold out on November 13th. But November 14th in Medford, right outside Boston.

That's interesting.

Yeah, and he's not 130 years old. So that seems off there. It's crazy shit, and we'll get into that whole story. So patreon.com/crimeinsports. And in addition to all of that, you get all the shows we put out. Crime in Sports, Your Stupid Opinions, both Small Town Murders, all ad-free.

Get the fuck out of here.

Fuck out of here. Oh, no, Jimmy. We're giving it. We're throwing it down. All ad-free with your Patreon. And on top of that being ad-free, you also get a shout-out at the end of the show, which is right now, Jimmy, hit me with the names of the most wonderful goddamn people in the world who would do nothing that happened this episode. Really, never, never. Hit me with those people right fucking now.

There's a executive producer, Roy Koontz, I'm going to assume.

Roy.

Yeah. Otherwise, it's plural dirties. Gary Howard is in London, Ohio.

Oh, Gary.

There you go, my little friend.

Happy Hours in Midland, Texas. Elena Zemmel, Elena Zemmel is in Tokyo. Thomas Woodward is also a trucker. He didn't tell me where he is. The fuck.

Damn it.

Tommy.

Shout it out. Truckers, what you got?

Addie Murphy is somewhere also. Curtis is in Shreveport. Jenna Koontz's daughter, Olivia, turned 18. Happy birthday, Olivia.

Happy birthday.

What a great day.

Congrats.

And also, Carolyn Shelhorn, thank you for everything you're doing. Other producers this week, Liz Vasquez, Peyton Meadows, Janice Hill, Alyssa Tryon, Karen Z, Annie Johnston, Nicholas Renet, Andrea B, Mackenzie Bainbridge, William True.

One second. One second there. I just want to say we wanted to say this to everybody because otherwise, it gets staggered on the releases.

Oh, yeah.

And this will also same shouts are on Small Town Murder this week for both. Thank you to everyone who came out this week in San Jose and Sacramento.

Unbelievable.

Incredible this last weekend. Thank you. You guys were really, really excellent. Some of the nicest people and great crowds.

Great crowds.

Just want to really say we appreciate you guys.

Hang on. Every word. Listen to the show.

Fucking awesome.

Laughter was needed.

Fucking lovely.

Pegged some dudes afterwards. It was great.

Yeah, that's an inside joke if you were at the Sacramento show.

I didn't peg anyone even.

Sorry.

A lady wore a shirt that she enjoys pegging men.

Yeah, it's like, all right, right in the front row.

Good for her.

Got a lovely video.

William True, Emily Abbott, Jennifer Jane, Courtney Cotter, Deb Engelberg, Leticia Perez, Letitia perhaps. Ding Dong Ditch, what a fun game. TV, Showdorf Media, Phil B, Amanda with no last name, Charlotte Beatty, Pamela Catherine, Just Josh Belfie, Andrew Dewey, Scarlett D'Arc, Zach Murphy, Beatrice Perez, JB, hope that's smooth, Connor Stalnicker, Jamie Stanaway, Tim with no last name, Kelsey Taylor, Jennifer Moore, Samantha Simpson, Isaac Barajas, Amish, Mr.

Amish?

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Thank you so much, everybody. You're wonderful, wonderful bastards. We can't tell you how much we appreciate all that you do for us day in, day out. Thank you, thank you. Tell your friends, keep spreading the word. Come see us at a live show. Do that. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure.

Bye.