Speaker 1: This series is inspired by true events. The stories you're
Speaker 1: about to hear are fictional, and so are the characters
Speaker 1: who are played by actors. In the late summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven, days after escape convict Stephen Hartford is
Speaker 1: captured and sent back to prison, my friends and I
Speaker 1: leave for our first year at college. We're so excited
Speaker 1: to go and have a fresh start, but putting in
Speaker 1: the past four years of tragedies behind us isn't easy.
Speaker 1: Tatiana remembers that time pretty clearly.
Speaker 2: All of the murders that happened in Mount Pine from
Speaker 2: our freshman year through our senior year changed us radically.
Speaker 3: I mean really, or at least they changed me.
Speaker 2: I mean, I moved to New York City for art school,
Speaker 2: and my parents were not thrilled about it. They bought
Speaker 2: me mace for my key chain, they signed me up
Speaker 2: for self defense classes, and in their minds, New York
Speaker 2: work was way more terrifying than Mount Pine. I wasn't
Speaker 2: so sure about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I remember that first semester at college. I had
Speaker 4: a night class and I actually wrote this in my journal. Here,
Speaker 4: I'll read it. I wrote, I'm scared walking through the
Speaker 4: quad on Wednesday nights, I'm constantly looking over my shoulder,
Speaker 4: preparing myself to be attacked.
Speaker 3: Maybe I should drop the class.
Speaker 5: I was studying fashion merchandising at school and enjoying my freedom,
Speaker 5: maybe a little too much. I actually went wild, if
Speaker 5: I'm being honest, I was drinking a lot and dating
Speaker 5: a lot, if that's what you even call that. And now,
Speaker 5: looking back, I think I was trying to drown my
Speaker 5: sadness and my pain from all those years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we all had our ways of coping. I tried
Speaker 1: to do the long distance thing with my high school
Speaker 1: boyfriend Ethan, but that ends up fizzling out. I throw
Speaker 1: myself into my classes, and the first few months we
Speaker 1: were away, I'd call home and my parents would say
Speaker 1: everything in Mount Pine seemed to have calmed down. Not
Speaker 1: a single murder, suicide, or freak accident for thirty years.
Speaker 1: It seemed as if the curse or whatever it was,
Speaker 1: had been lifted or simply vanished. Thirty years of peace
Speaker 1: and quiet. Mount Pine became the idyllic town it was
Speaker 1: always meant to be, until it wasn't, and terror reigned
Speaker 1: again like a hibernating bear. A thirty year hibernation the
Speaker 1: Curse woke up and the murders started again. I'm Nancy Clark.
Speaker 1: This is The Murder Years, Episode eight.
Speaker 3: The Curse.
Speaker 1: So back to college for a minute. My group of
Speaker 1: friends continues on with our college studies. I focus on school.
Speaker 1: I love my communication classes a lot.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 3: I thought I.
Speaker 1: Would go on to be an interviewer of some kind,
Speaker 1: maybe on a show like Entertainment Tonight or maybe even
Speaker 1: Sixty Minutes. But I eventually find my niche as a
Speaker 1: magazine contributor and end up traveling around the country in
Speaker 1: search of good stories. Tatiana studies art in New York
Speaker 1: and after a few years moves back to Mount Pine.
Speaker 2: I learned so much, and living in New York was
Speaker 2: my real education. Eventually I graduated, but after a few
Speaker 2: years of waiting tables and doing the struggling artist thing,
Speaker 2: I moved out of the city. Yeah, I got married.
Speaker 2: I started teaching art at our local community college.
Speaker 1: Lauren goes to school in Dallas. Then after graduation, relocates
Speaker 1: to Houston.
Speaker 7: Marketing, and then I ended up getting a job at
Speaker 7: this high end hotel spot worked my way up to manager.
Speaker 7: I like making people feel good. I guess I never
Speaker 7: could have imagined ending up there, but I really love it.
Speaker 1: Carla eventually graduates with a degree in sociology.
Speaker 4: The highlight of my college years was meeting the guy
Speaker 4: who would become my husband. Shortly after graduation, we got married,
Speaker 4: then started having kids. Then we moved back to Mount
Speaker 4: Pine in twenty twenty four. Boys, yeah, oh, no joke.
Speaker 3: They were a lot of work.
Speaker 4: Once they were all in school and I had my
Speaker 4: days free, I went to work at a nonprofit, then
Speaker 4: decided to go back to school and become a paralegal.
Speaker 1: Melanie also ends up back in Mount Pine.
Speaker 5: I studied fashion merchandising, but you kind of have to
Speaker 5: live in New York to make a real go of
Speaker 5: that career, and so I moved back to Mount Pine
Speaker 5: to be closer to my family.
Speaker 1: So we're all living our lives, and then in twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: Mount Pine calls me back. My mom is diagnosed with
Speaker 1: cancer and needs me to come home. We had already
Speaker 1: lost my dad back in twenty ten. That was awful,
Speaker 1: so of course I drop everything and come home to
Speaker 1: take care of her.
Speaker 3: It was good to have you back in town.
Speaker 4: You'd been back for visits over the years, but when
Speaker 4: you moved back. I remember how shocked you were at
Speaker 4: how big Mount Pine and the surrounding areas had become.
Speaker 4: We had new housing developments, new shopping centers, tons of
Speaker 4: new restaurants.
Speaker 3: I mean we even got a sushi please.
Speaker 5: Oh wow. The population exploded, like tripled. And while I
Speaker 5: missed the small town feel of the Mount Pine that
Speaker 5: we all grew up in, it was kind of exciting
Speaker 5: to see all the growth. I mean, new movie theaters,
Speaker 5: new boutiques, the Bowling Alley was remodeled.
Speaker 1: So Melanie, Carla and I are busy, but we see
Speaker 1: each other when we can, and before you know it,
Speaker 1: ten years has passed. It's twenty twenty two and my
Speaker 1: mom finally succumbs to cancer. All of the girls come
Speaker 1: back for her funeral, and it means so much to me.
Speaker 3: It was just so sad. I loved your mom.
Speaker 7: No one can prepare you for how much it hurts
Speaker 7: to lose a parent. We were all happy to have
Speaker 7: each other no matter what.
Speaker 1: So I plan on leaving right after the funeral, but strangely,
Speaker 1: something tells me not to go just yet. It's the
Speaker 1: first time the five of us have been together since
Speaker 1: we left Mount Pine for College. And the next day.
Speaker 2: The woman's body has been found in the woods behind
Speaker 2: Mount Pine Community College.
Speaker 3: And a week after that.
Speaker 1: A gruesome discovery in a north Side home.
Speaker 8: And ten days after that, I'm at the scene of
Speaker 8: yet another murder.
Speaker 1: It's deja vu all over again. The five of us
Speaker 1: are devastated by the news. More murder, multiple murders. This
Speaker 1: hasn't happened in thirty years. We had a murder reprieve
Speaker 1: for thirty years. I mean, is it us? Is it
Speaker 1: the fact that the five of us are together? Is
Speaker 1: that what sets the curse in motion? We all meet
Speaker 1: at Millie's Diner to talk.
Speaker 5: We were sitting in Millie's, a cute little outdoor cafe
Speaker 5: on Main Street, and the talk was all about the news.
Speaker 7: All of a sudden, a lot of sirens went by.
Speaker 7: What was with all the sirens? What was happening?
Speaker 1: I take up my phone and google Mount Pine a
Speaker 1: headline two young children murdered by their deranged mother.
Speaker 4: I called my dad. He was a paramedic, he would
Speaker 4: know what was going on.
Speaker 1: The sirens drown out Carla's voice on the phone. When
Speaker 1: we all sit there in silence, watching the fear grow
Speaker 1: on her face as she listens to her father. Eventually,
Speaker 1: Carla hangs up the phone.
Speaker 4: What my dad told me was horrible, so so horrible.
Speaker 3: His unit was called that morning. The scene was gruesome.
Speaker 4: He said that a single mother killed her two young children.
Speaker 8: A single mother killed her two young children, and she
Speaker 8: confessed it seems late the night before, while the children
Speaker 8: were still asleep, the mother carried them to the garage,
Speaker 8: put them in their car seats in the car, buckled
Speaker 8: them in. Then she turned on the ignition, locked the doors,
Speaker 8: and went into the house. Two hours later, she called
Speaker 8: nine to one one. The children were three and four
Speaker 8: years old. When I got there, the two boys were
Speaker 8: already dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Speaker 1: Carla's dad says the woman admitted to suffering from depression
Speaker 1: after having her second child, and she just couldn't take
Speaker 1: it anymore. And she did it because she believed her
Speaker 1: kids would be better off dead than being raised by her.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just don't have any words.
Speaker 7: I couldn't believe it. Two dead kids and their mom
Speaker 7: is the one who killed them.
Speaker 5: I mean, today we know so much more about postpartum depression,
Speaker 5: but back then not so much. I just remember wanting
Speaker 5: to get the hell out of Mount Vine.
Speaker 1: It's been almost two months since my mom's funeral. My
Speaker 1: plan was to leave Mount Pine and go back to work,
Speaker 1: but now everything's changed in six weeks. There's a new
Speaker 1: wave of evil and I want answers.
Speaker 3: I need to know.
Speaker 1: Can anything from the past help make sense or stop
Speaker 1: what's happening today?
Speaker 3: I am determined to find out. I'm staying.
Speaker 4: I couldn't believe what was happening to us again. It
Speaker 4: took me back to high school. I felt it viscerally
Speaker 4: and I.
Speaker 3: Didn't like it. It was unsettling.
Speaker 4: And now that I had kids, my mama barons thinks
Speaker 4: for coming out. I had to protect them at all costs.
Speaker 1: One case that absolutely blows my mind is one just
Speaker 1: four blocks away from me. A forty something year old
Speaker 1: guy strangles to death his long term girlfriend, shoots her
Speaker 1: two dogs, then drives them one hundred miles away and
Speaker 1: buries them all in a shallow.
Speaker 5: That story was so insane. I mean, that guy was
Speaker 5: a monster. I think a hunter stumbled onto their shallow
Speaker 5: grave a few weeks later, so I mean, they found
Speaker 5: the bodies, but they couldn't find the killer.
Speaker 1: My friends and I are glued to our TVs, wondering
Speaker 1: where the guy is and if cops are going to
Speaker 1: catch him anytime soon.
Speaker 4: I was so relieved when they caught him. It was
Speaker 4: actually crazy. One night, a driver saw him standing on
Speaker 4: the edge of a bridge about to jump off. He
Speaker 4: was about to commit suicide, but instead he was persuaded
Speaker 4: to come down and cops arrested him without any problems.
Speaker 1: Then two months later there are all these random attacks
Speaker 1: on joggers around town. Three women are beaten and sexually assaulted.
Speaker 1: The masked man attacks women early in the morning and
Speaker 1: late in the evening.
Speaker 3: I had to stop running.
Speaker 4: It was just to scary to be out there, and
Speaker 4: it was upsetting because police couldn't catch this guy, even
Speaker 4: with the descriptions the women were giving. I couldn't take
Speaker 4: it anymore. Who is this guy living amongst us? Is
Speaker 4: it the guy checking me out at the grocery store,
Speaker 4: or the guy fixing my car, or is it my
Speaker 4: next door neighbor. Nobody knew who it was or how
Speaker 4: he kept getting away with it.
Speaker 3: We weren't safe anywhere.
Speaker 5: Then he actually killed someone. He killed a young woman.
Speaker 5: She was a kindergarten teacher. She had only moved him
Speaker 5: out Pine about five months before he raped her, and
Speaker 5: they finally got his DNA and it matched. He was
Speaker 5: a married ex cop from Northgate, an ex cop.
Speaker 1: And as if all this isn't enough, stuff keeps happening.
Speaker 1: A woman poisons her husband, a sixteen year old girl
Speaker 1: dies in a motorcycle accident, a firefighter accidentally runs over
Speaker 1: and kills his young son, and the mayor's brother commits suicide.
Speaker 5: I was ready to close my business and move far,
Speaker 5: far away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm almost ready to leave with Melanie. But again,
Speaker 1: why why do we have so many tragedies in Mount Pine?
Speaker 1: Why us can we chuck all of this up to
Speaker 1: the influx of people like maybe they're they're the ones
Speaker 1: who have brought these problems to our town. No, because
Speaker 1: we had the same problems back when Mount Pine had
Speaker 1: a population of just twelve thousand people. I ask some
Speaker 1: of the detectives who talked with me about the cases
Speaker 1: from the eighties, what's their take on this new wave
Speaker 1: of crimes.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was unbelievable. It was happening again, and they
Speaker 6: were all so violent. You know. I was starting to
Speaker 6: come around to agreeing with people that maybe Mount Pine
Speaker 6: was cursed. I didn't believe mount Pine was cursed, I
Speaker 6: mean cursed. How do you even prove.
Speaker 9: That bad things can and do happen all the time
Speaker 9: in places like Mount Pine. I mean, it's often related
Speaker 9: to poverty and drugs, but Mount Pine didn't really have
Speaker 9: too big of a problem with either, So I don't know.
Speaker 1: After this new string of crimes, I'm more convinced than
Speaker 1: ever that we're cursed. We grew up hearing the story
Speaker 1: that Mount Pine was supposedly built on sacred Native American land,
Speaker 1: especially at where mister Billingsley lived in that new subdivision.
Speaker 1: Remember he was our history teacher who was murdered by
Speaker 1: his girlfriend's ex. If the stories are true, then he
Speaker 1: lived right in the middle of that stolen sacred land.
Speaker 3: But are they true?
Speaker 1: Maybe it all links back to that, to some horrible
Speaker 1: thing the towns founders did on the land, some horrible
Speaker 1: thing we're still paying for today. Since I'm the person
Speaker 1: who needs to know everything, I talked Tatiana into going
Speaker 1: with me to the Mount Pine Library to help me
Speaker 1: learn more about this.
Speaker 2: The libraryan told us where the Native American history and
Speaker 2: culture books would be, and we just dug in.
Speaker 1: We PLoP ourselves down and start reading, and we learn
Speaker 1: a lot like legend has it when a building is
Speaker 1: built on an ancient Indian burial ground, the building and
Speaker 1: its inhabitants get terrorized by vengeful spirits. Oh, and there's
Speaker 1: this one tale I read about from Vermont. Some of
Speaker 1: the details and dates vary. Some say it's from the
Speaker 1: mid seventeen hundreds, others the late eighteen hundreds. In any case,
Speaker 1: suppose the Brunswick Springs in Vermont are considered sacred and
Speaker 1: have healing powers, And at one point the Abenaki tribe
Speaker 1: took an injured soldier to the spring and the water
Speaker 1: healed him. The soldier later returned because he wanted to
Speaker 1: bottle the water and sell it, and he ended up
Speaker 1: killing a Native American man and his child who tried
Speaker 1: to stop him. Someone in the tribe then placed a
Speaker 1: curse on the springs, and buildings in town gave way
Speaker 1: to inexplicable forces of nature, like fires in sinkholes.
Speaker 2: Here's another story we found. It happened in Charles Island
Speaker 2: in Connecticut. Legend has that the land there is sacred
Speaker 2: and anyone who tried to build on it would be cursed.
Speaker 1: We can't find anything official that says Mount Pine was
Speaker 1: built on sacred Native American land or that it's cursed.
Speaker 1: I wonder if the Mount Pine Historical Society has any
Speaker 1: information that could be useful. I probably should have gone
Speaker 1: there first. I wonder, am I about to learn that
Speaker 1: all the bad stuff in Mount Pine was in his
Speaker 1: payback for?
Speaker 6: What?
Speaker 1: For what the white man has done to the Native
Speaker 1: Americans in the area. That would make perfect sense to me.
Speaker 10: I wanted to help in any way I could. There
Speaker 10: were so many tragedies in town. I wanted to know
Speaker 10: why they happened too.
Speaker 1: Doris Winslow and I went to school together. Well, she
Speaker 1: was two years older than I was today. She basically
Speaker 1: is the Mount Pine Historical Society, which is run out
Speaker 1: of the old Victorian house in the center of town. Thankfully,
Speaker 1: she agrees to talk with me.
Speaker 10: So, knowing you were coming, I pulled what information I
Speaker 10: could find, and there wasn't a lot, but this was
Speaker 10: interesting to me. So there were these mound builders. They
Speaker 10: were ancient Native Americans who built large mounds out of
Speaker 10: the earth, and it's been said they lived and built
Speaker 10: the mounds from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf
Speaker 10: of Mexico and the Mississippi River all the way to
Speaker 10: the Appalachian Mountains, and reportedly the earliest ones stayed back
Speaker 10: to around it was three thousand BC, and many people
Speaker 10: believe the mounds were used for a variety of reasons,
Speaker 10: burials and ceremonies, religious ceremonies, and some were also used
Speaker 10: for centers where government work was conducted. So anyway, there
Speaker 10: were a lot of stories associated with these mounds. But
Speaker 10: basically once the Europeans showed up, diseases and war followed,
Speaker 10: and some believed that there was a fear of the
Speaker 10: mounds and ghosts roamed them. And it seems like there
Speaker 10: may have been some mounds in Mount Pine. So does
Speaker 10: that mean there's any connection to all that's happened in
Speaker 10: Mount Pine. I have absolutely no idea, but I do
Speaker 10: find it interesting.
Speaker 1: I do too. Detective Peters is right, there's no way
Speaker 1: to prove a curse.
Speaker 3: I wish there was. God.
Speaker 1: Maybe we're the curse, us girls whenever we're together, or
Speaker 1: maybe I'm the curse. It's like all the murders happen
Speaker 1: when I was in high school, they stop when I
Speaker 1: left for college. Then I return to town and so
Speaker 1: do they, or maybe it's just a bunch of messed
Speaker 1: up people doing truly messed up things. The sad fact
Speaker 1: is that we may never know why these murders happened,
Speaker 1: back then, why they're happening, and today all we want
Speaker 1: is for to stop.
Speaker 4: But I don't care that you aren't able to solve
Speaker 4: this mystery, this mystery that is Mount Pine.
Speaker 3: I'm so glad you did this.
Speaker 4: Even though it brought back a lot of painful memories,
Speaker 4: it helped me to process and deal with it all.
Speaker 4: I pushed a lot of my feelings down and this
Speaker 4: helped give me closure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it helped me too.
Speaker 7: I think it helped all of us, and I hope
Speaker 7: we were able to honor the memories of the victims.
Speaker 5: Yeah, our friends, classmates, our teacher, and our fellow Mount pineers.
Speaker 5: So here's de Lisa Anderson, Don Cartwright, Daniel Walters, Charlotte Murphy,
Speaker 5: Victoria Brown.
Speaker 2: Mister Billingsley, Buster Charles, the brave women who were able
Speaker 2: to outsmart that escaped convict, and the most recent victims
Speaker 2: of Mount Pine.
Speaker 1: All we can do really is hope to put the
Speaker 1: murder years past and present behind us. Mount Pine deserves
Speaker 1: some peace. We all deserve some peace, but I'm not
Speaker 1: sure we'll ever have it.
Speaker 8: I heard what you're doing, talking to people, digging up
Speaker 8: all these old crimes. All I gotta say is you
Speaker 8: better be careful because you might be next.
Speaker 1: The Murder Years is a production of a y R
Speaker 1: Media and iHeartMedia. Executive producer Elisa Rosen for AYR Media
Speaker 1: co executive producer Paulina Williams. Written by Leah Rothman, directed
Speaker 1: by Michael Selditch. Original concept developed in partnership with Anne,
Speaker 1: Margaret Johns and Greg Spring. Casting by Eisenberg Beans Casting
Speaker 1: Senior Associate producer Eric Newman, Associate producer Jill Pushesnik. Editing
Speaker 1: and sound design by Tristan Bankston. Mastering by Cameron Taggie,
Speaker 1: Audio engineering by Matt Jacobson. Studio engineering by Jay Brannan.
Speaker 1: Legal counsel for AYR Media. Jeanni Douglas, Executive producer for iHeartMedia,
Speaker 1: Maya Howard. Performances for this episode by Gabrielle Carteris as
Speaker 1: Nancy Clark, Kelly Deadman as Tatiana, or La Cassidy as Melanie,
Speaker 1: Maricilda Garcia as Carla, April Adams as Hilda Dathan B.
Speaker 1: Williams as Detective Peters H. Richard Greene as Detective Wallace,
Speaker 1: Jesse Hendricks as Lauren Collins, John Ralston Craig as Reporter
Speaker 1: Number one, John Ralston Craig as voicemail Caller Number one,
Speaker 1: Lisil Copp as Doris Winslow, Tu d Rouch as Detective Thompson.
Speaker 1: Eudonna Daniels as Reporter Number two. Additional voices by Alex Salem.