Sandy and Tom Bird/Lorna and Marty Anderson - Part 2

0:00 Hi. I'm Rich and I'm Tina. If there's one thing we've learned in over twenty years of marriage, it's that. Some days and you'll feel like killing your husband, and some. Days you'll feel like killing your wife. Welcome to love, Mary Kill. Hey Tina, Hey Rich. How are you today? I am fabulous today. How are you? I am doing well. It's a beautiful day here in Michigan. Is a great saturday. Do you want to tell everyone what you just put out on the deck? I put some fruit out for our lovely. Birds and the vermin and the other creatures that you know, bump in the night in the neighborhood, the coyotes and I am raccoons. Nice that you want to support wildlife.

0:50 I'm confident that the birds will get it. The reason is well, two reasons. One is I saw Baltimore Oriole yesterday at our It was at our hummingbird feeder, actually, but they love like the sweet stuff. They love fruit and stuff like that. And I think Baltimore Orios. Though, because they don't have the hummingbird, you must just be a little bit. Of the outside they I don't know they do. Actually, at least we talked about it. That so long ago. Woodpeckers have really longed. Okay, yeah, but I don't know about regular other birds. But I saw this beautiful, beautiful Baltimore orioles. I thought, well, I want to encourage them to come back. We need to get some oranges, though, because they really they really like the oranges. Yeah. I have actually done that before. It was at our old house and they came to the humming grew feeder and they never touched the oranges. But you know, I'm sure your oranges will be cut in such a passion, it'll be so exciting. Sure.

1:40 But I also put it out because I was feeling guilty because I have not been taking good care of the birds. Now, I gave you one job, and you but it's hard because if you fill up the bird feeders, they're empty within seven hours later. Yeah. So, but I did fill them up today too. The birds have plenty, plenty. Of food, eats, And I said, you put the food on a plan. Yeah yeah, because birds. Well I'm making fun of you, but I have done all of these things before, and I don't think they've ever eaten off the plate. Oh really, I think if you maybe scatter them on the ground they might eat them, but I don't think that. And we'll see. I guess, well, I guess we'll spink in an hour. By the end of the podcast, we'll go see how much becauld you put like strawberries and grapes and grace.

2:21 That's it. Yeah, okay, I need to put a camera out though, to monitor their activity. We had this idea like twenty years ago, and we never did anything with it. But now there's tons of bird feeders with cameras. Yeah, I should should have done it. You have another business idea that we just never. Followed own initiative at all, except for this podcast that we keep coming back for. That's right. I wanted to tell you look nice today. I really like your new shirt. You new you have a new stripey blue shirt. The only reason you know that this is a new shirt is because I got it from Amazon. I know I shouldn't order shirts from Amazon, but I need some new summer clothes, so I ordered a few tea shir It's from Amazon, and when they're delivered, they're delivered in a clear a clear ziploc bags.

3:05 Everyone in the whole. Neighborhood knows that Tina is wearing a new shirt that she got yesterday. Well, it does look very nice though. It looks good on you. I know most people tell you you're a fall person because primarily your hair color. But I think summer. I think you you could give summer a run for its money. What are you? What are you talking about? I think you're you know, your personal style. Yeah, you look good in summer type colors and clothing. It's nice that you said the word personal style, because I really don't feel that I have a personal style. Well, I think you look very nice. Well that's very nice if you just that you look good too. And your skincare routine, it's poppened. It's definitely out there. We actually had this discussion already this morning that you have been using a few products and we still are using the led mask, which I've been breaking out, but I think it's because I got a new Oh my gosh, this is boring, isn't it. But I got a new SPF lotion and I feel like it's breaking me out. But the mask does make breakouts clear up faster. Yeah.

4:04 I definitely looked ten years younger, so I'm pretty happy about that. At least ten at least we would you like a snack. I have not eaten yet today. Okay, well it's not as exciting as our snack from part one. I made something, but this was a store bought snack. Okay, but I feel like the snack makers have gone crazy with flavors, Like they have just gone nuts, Like they put out one hundred different flavors and they do whatever do you do? You want to tell people what kind of chips you brought home the other day? Oh, I forgot about that. I put that, you know, out of my mind because it was so ridiculous. I went to Costco. And this is going to sound crazy to people, but we didn't really have any chips in the house, like potato chips, and you know, when we're having a sandwich, you want to I want chips in my sandwich. You want chips on the side. And I don't know what I was thinking. It was at Costco and I bought this bag of chips. They were called Hamburger chips, and I'm just so dumb sometimes I thought that they were just chips that you ate with the Hamburger or that was the brand names.

5:00 I don't think that's a bad assumption, but the. Chips were actually Hamburger cheeseburger flavor and not a fan. No, they were awful. They were horrible. We both ate one and we were. Like, nope, So I brought some. I bought some chips from Lays and they've made a couple of weird flavors. Yeah, I thought we're unusual. One is Brazilian style Garlic sauce flavor and the other is Argentinian style steak with Jimmy Turi. Okay, and I bought these before you bought your Hamburger flavor. Oh that must have made you really chuckle that. I think this is some sort of World Cup tie in, like I guess, but I don't know. They sound weird, but I thought, well, let's give them a try. You know, I've been off garlic lately. I feel like garlic believe we talk about all these things on the podcast.

5:45 By garlic cupsets my stomach sometimes. So I'll just have one little chick, I'll just have one little chip. What did you think of those? I thought they were both actually really really good. Oh really, I didn't really like much. I think they were both good. The garlic one, though, is eving like a like an icky after it taste him. But yeah, I think I have not eaten a morsel food yet today, so that's probably why they taste so good to me. But yeah, I thought they're both really good. I like the garlic ones, but the steak ones I thought were like as bad, almost as bad as the hamburger ones that you brought home. So no, I think they're both pretty pretty solid. I'd give them. Maybe the garlic ones were a little better, eight out of ten for those, seven out of ten for the other.

6:28 Wow, I'm going to give the garlic a six out of ten and the steak a three out of ten. So now, because I bought all those barbecue chips a few weeks ago, we are our chip were well stocked. You need to hire someone to come eat food in our house because now that the kids aren't really here very much. Yeah, we and we. Try something for a snack for the podcast, and if we don't really like it, it's sort of like, well, yeah, how about we get back to the story of Sandy and tom Bird and Lorna and Marty Anderson. Let's would you like to give us a recap of part one? Sure? Last ap is and so we introduced you to two couples living in Emporia, Kansas in the early nineteen eighties. Tom and Sandy Bird had come to Emporia in nineteen eighty two when Tom was called to lead a brand new Lutheran congregation. He was charismatic and tireless, the kind of pastor you could build something, who could build something from nothing. Sandy was his equal in every way, a mathematician, a teacher, a mother of three, just not the traditional pastor's wife that he seemed to want. By the spring of nineteen eighty three, the cracks in their marriage were beginning to show. The other couple was Marty and Lorna Anderson.

7:35 Marty was the chief lab technician at a local hospital, competent, proud of his work, devoted to his four daughters. Lorna was the woman the neighborhood called a supermom. She was also conducting a string of affairs that was, by nineteen eighty three, an open secret among their social circle. She told a friend the new man in her life was Tom Bird, who she was working for as church secretary. On the night of July sixteenth, eight eighty three, Sandy Bird's car went off a sixty five foot embankment into the Cottonwood River. She was found dead the next morning. The county corner ruled it an accident. Highway patrol man John Rule didn't believe it, but he couldn't get anyone to listen. Three and a half months later, Marty Anderson was shot three times in the head on a lonely stretch of Kansas Highway while his wife and four daughters waited nearby. Two deaths and two different counties, just waiting to be connected.

8:30 Anything I missed in the recap that would be worth adding. Nothing that you missed necessarily, But when Marty was shot, it was It just didn't make any sense, because why had they stopped. They stopped. She said that they stopped because she was sick to her stomach. She had eaten part of her daughter's strawberry Sunday and she was allergic to strawberries, and so she got out to go throw up in the field. Essentially, Yeah, and then some guy comes and shoots Marty. He demands his wallet, like, yeah, some you know robbers are hanging out in a Kansas cornfield waiting for someone to pull over. Yeah, And then they took him to the like the middle of the cornfield and shot him out of the site of the kids. So that just seemed very odd. Yeah, and the Sandy's accident seemed very odd too. It seems obvious in hindsight that it was not an accident because there was blood up in like trees, like on branches way off the ground. There was blood on top of the bridge like there had been an altercation on the bridge, and perhaps she had been thrown over the side and.

9:27 Her car went through this narrow place where there were no guards. Yeah, it was very like it was very carefully planned, like it went through this one space where it could have gone through Geary County where Marty had been shot. Was working its case Lyon County, where Sandy Bird had gone into the Cottonwood River almost four months earlier, had moved on from Sandy's death. But when Tom Bird's name surfaced in the Anderson investigation as Lorna's spokesperson, a Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent picked up the phone and called his counterpart in Geary County. Followed was a flurry of activity. So when I say that Tom Byrd was Lorna's spokesperson, not sure exactly what that means. I think he just came to see her in the hospital, and he may have spoken to the press one time outside of the hospital, but I don't think he was like a spokesperson. Officially, John Rule got a call from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

10:21 They wanted him back on the Rocky Ford Bridge case. By the end of November, people were coming forward in droves wanting to talk to the police about Lorna Anderson and Tom Byrd. Authorities in Geary County found themselves with more witnesses than they could process, individuals who wanted investigators to know that Lorna Anderson had approached them at one point or another about finding someone to kill her husband. The word circulating was that the reverend and his church secretary were lovers, and that Tom Byrd had gone so far as to help Lorna look for a hit man, and as we often see in these situations, no one went to the police. It drives me crazy. Apparently talked to a number of people about, you know, can you help me find a hit man to kill my husband?

11:05 In this small rural town. She's asking about hit men. It's just a really bad idea. If you want to get away with murder that you're just asking random people in your small town. Yeah, and yet no one talked until after it happened. As investigators dug into Lorna's background, her former lovers began to talk. Detectives followed the trail from one name to the next, compiling what would eventually grow into a list of one hundred and twenty five men. Are you kidding? I am not kidding. And she had romantic relationships with all of them. I believe that is what they are saying here. I don't think they were all long term relationships. I think some of them were probably just one night stands.

11:48 But yeah, I need to know the population of Emporia. Okay, so I did google it. The population of Emporia back then was about twenty five thousand, and half of those people would be men. A practim so sandy. About yeah, unless she ventured outside of the city limits, which she may have. Once they established that Tom Byrd was one of the men, he became a suspect. Reporters from Emporia and investigators from Geary County began comparing notes. The bigger pictures started to come into focus. A pastor and his church secretary romantically entangled and two dead spouses, one at the bottom of a bridge embankment on a road that went nowhere, one on his knees in a Flint Hills field.

12:32 I feel a little bad that we were shady about Lorna. If she were a single lady, go for it, right. She's married, so to you know, have relationships with that many men while. You're married, you know, Yeah, that's not cool. One day, a tip came in anonymously on the Kansas Bureau of Investigations hotline. A young woman said she knew that Danny Carter had been one of Laura's boyfriends and that Laurna had been calling him frequently over the past month. She thought he might be involved. Investigators would later learn that the caller was Danny's current girlfriend. Danny Carter was thirty six years old. He'd been Lorna's hairdresser before leaving the job to work construction at the Wolf Creek Nuclear Power Plant. He had no criminal record and no particular reputation for toughness. On November eighteenth, investigators brought Danny Carter in for about forty five minutes with a detective playing at friendly Carter held firm. He knew nothing about Marty Anderson's murder, and a second detective came in and played bad cop. The detective bluffed, suggesting he knew considerably more than he really did. Within five minutes, Carter was ready to talk. He told the detective that Lorna had asked him if he knew anyone who might be willing to kill her husband. Danny said he might. He knew a man named Donald Curry who claimed connections to organized crime.

13:55 Curry said he could arrange something. On the evening of September seventh, Lurna met Danny Carter outside of Emporia State Bank. She handed him an envelope containing five thousand dollars in cash, photographs of Marty's station wagon, and a computer print out of Marty's schedule for the next two weeks. Two weeks passed, but nothing happened. Danny reached out to Curry to find out why. Curry said he had passed the money along to a man in Mississippi. The man in Mississippi claimed that he knew nothing about any deal. Danny Carter was emphatic although they had discussed a deal, nothing had actually happened. Laurna must have found someone else to do the deed. It was a little bit convoluted here, but Lorna she was sleeping with Danny Carter, who was her hairdresser at the time. She talked to him and said, Hey, you know anyone who can do this? He said, oh, I know this guy, this Curry guy. She gave Danny Carter money.

14:48 He gave it to Curry. Curry gave it to another man who he said he knew, and this other man apparently said, I'm just going to keep the money. Who can blame him? Who were they going to call? Right long before Marty's murder did this money exchange hands? It was about two months. This happened in early September. Marty was killed in early November. When he heard that his brother Danny was arrested, Daryl Carter went to Danny's lawyer with the story. Daryl Carter was a lifelong Lion County resident, a self employed building contractor in his late thirties, married for nineteen years with three kids. He had known Marty and Lorna Anderson through a social circle, and he would eventually admit that he and Lorna had been more than casual acquaintances. He came forward.

15:31 He said to do anything he could to keep his brother out of prison. What he told investigators took the case in a new direction. Entirely it had started, Darrell said about two years before Marty's death, when Lorna had asked him if he knew anyone who would kill her husband. He told her that he was shocked. Marty was his friend. Three months later, she asked again, wanting to know if he'd found anyone. He said that he hadn't really looked. He didn't hear from her again on the subject for a long time. Then, in the third week of May nineteen eighty three, Lorna called him and asked him to stop by the church. Lorna brought him back to her office and they talked for a few minutes. Then a man Darrell had never met walked in. Lorna introduced him as Tom Bird. She announced that Tom was going to help her and Darrell kill her husband. Darryl said he was stunned, he had never agreed to any such thing.

16:22 The three of them sat together while Tom and Lorna laid out two plans. The first involved getting Marty drunk or drugged, putting him in a car and driving it off as steep embankment into a river. It would look like a drunk had missed a curve. Tom mentioned he had already found a good spot south of town where this could work. Darrell's rule would be to help get Marty into the car. The second plan didn't require Darrell at all. On a weekend, when Marty was staying at a relative's home for an army reserve drill, Tom would break into the house, toss the furniture around, and shoot Marty when he came home. It would look like he'd interrupted a burglary. Darryl recalled him, saying, plan to preside over the funeral because as the minister, no one would suspect him. When Darryl said he wasn't a cold blooded killer and had never done anything like that in his life, tom Bird looked at him and said, why haven't either.

17:14 I'm a man of God, and I'm going to kill Martin Anderson. It's interesting that this plotting actually started like two years before Marty's death, even before Lorna was having an affair with Tom Bird, and then she apparently brought Tom byrd in after they were having an affair, and then they called this Daryl guy who take it for what it's worth. Daryl was trying to save his brother. And you know, Daryl didn't report any of this to the police beforehand, but Darryl is saying that, you know, they brought him in six months before trying to get his help in killing Marty. So this was something that Lorna had been planning for a long time. How long had the affair been going on. Not very long at that point, Like, we don't know for sure, but we think it started in early nineteen eighty three, so the affair might have been going on for two or three months at this point. When they approached Daryl Carter.

18:05 Daryl left without committing to anything. Two days later, Tom tracked him down at a construction site and asked if he'd made up his mind. Darryl put him off, made another appointment, and deliberately didn't show up. He told a coworker what he'd heard and no one else. He didn't hear from Tom or Lorna again until six months later, after Marty was dead and his brother was in handcuffs for investigators. One detail in Darrell's account hit with particular force. The plan to get a man drunk, put him in a car and push it off an embankment into a river. Tom had said he'd already found a good spot south of town. South of town, rocky Ford Bridge, sat four miles south of Emporia, at the bottom of a sixty five foot drop into the Cottonwood River. The plot sounded exactly like what had happened to Sandy Bird. I just don't know why Darryl wouldn't have gone to the police, or would have, at a minimum set I want no part of this.

19:01 I mean, he might have been scared. You know, if you're pulled into a situation like that, you might you might not want to confront the person who is, you know, plotting a murder because you don't want to be next on the list. But but yeah, the fact that he didn't go to the police is a little disturbing. It's interesting. It seems that the way that Sandy was eventually killed was originally the plot to kill Marty. Or one of them will be back after a break. Three days after Daryl Carter came forward, police searched the Anderson home on Meadow Lark Lane. They were looking for a twenty two caliber weapon and Marty's missing wallet, they found neither. What they found instead was something intriguing in Lurna's lingerie drawer. Two envelopes, one marked Thursday, one marked Friday.

19:53 If you recall, Marty had been killed on a Friday. Inside each was a note, both signed from Tom. The Thursday note read, in part I love you and am confident of the future and that makes the present okay. Take care of the kids. Love you always, Tom, and then an excerpt from the Friday note said, Lorna, you are so very special. I hope time goes fast until Saturday evening. It should, with all the work and the children. I love you so very much and that's forever Tom. So it almost sounds like these were notes encouraging her, trying to support her getting through a difficult couple of days. There was also an unfinished letter, handwritten on notebook paper by Lorna, addressed to Tom. Part of it read, I want you to read this letter over and over whenever you have any doubts about my love for you, our future, our commitment to each other, or our commitment to God.

20:47 And I'm sure there will be times when you will need to remind me of what this says. So hide it somewhere safe, but try to keep it. I love you, and I know that you know that, just like I know you love me. Two days later, was arrested at a relative's home in Topeka, charged with conspiracy to commit first degree murder. She posted bond and moved to Hutchinson, staying with her parents around Emporia. The arrest didn't come as much of a surprise. By the end of November, Tom Bird was hearing things. The investigation was circling closer, and word had reached him that Daryl Carter was the reason why. On December first, Tom went looking for a woman he believed could get a message to Daryl, a woman who had been one of Carter's lovers. He told her that he wanted to reaffirm a trust with Daryl, but that he didn't want to use the phone. She passed the message along. Carter, in turn called his attorney.

21:42 Ten days later, Carter called Tom. A Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent was in the room with him and the call was being recorded. Darrel and Tom arranged to meet on December twelfth in the parking lot of a bowling alley on Sixth Avenue. Carter arrived wearing a bulletproof vest under his shirt and a radio transmitter on his body. KBI agents were parked nearby listening. They had coached Carter carefully make sure the conversation happens in Tom's car, because people don't generally shoot someone in their own vehicle, and get Tom to admit what had been planned that day at the church. Carter, however, was not a natural at this The two men ended up in Carter's pickup truck instead of Tom's car. Carter didn't ask a single direct question.

22:27 He never raised the meeting at the church, never mentioned the plot, never pushed Tom toward anything that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation was hoping to capture on tape. Instead, they talked around things Danny Carter's legal troubles, Lorna's arrest, the police investigation, the rumors about Tom and Lorna's relationship that Tom said were destroying his reputation. Tom was careful. He wanted Carter to understand why they'd met at the church back in the spring. It was about the youth group selling fireworks at one of Carter's stands. That was all it did been. At one point, Carter asked whether Tom thought Lorna had anything to do with Marty's death. Tom said he was pretty sure she hadn't. Carter pressed did he think she had done it? Tom paused, quote, I know she talked about it before. I don't. I can't tell you what I think you know, but I think she'd tell me, and she may one of these days.

23:21 Carter mentioned that the coincidence of Sandy's death and now Marty's made things look bad for both of them. Tom's response was quiet, There's nothing I can do about that. I'm just trying to exist and trying to build back my life. As the conversation wound down, Tom said, I don't think Laura will ever talk to me until it's all over. And then I think maybe she'll talk to me, but I don't know if it's ever going to be all over. It wasn't the confession that the KBI had been hoping for. Shortly after, Danny Carter pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of criminal solicitation, he was released on four years probation. A couple things interesting about this conversation. One something I never really thought of before. But they were worried that Tom could potentially shoot and kill Darryl, so they, you know, put him in a bulletproof vest.

24:10 But they told him make sure you go in Tom's car because someone's less likely to kill you in their own car. Which, yeah, that is interesting to know, so good. Good to keep in mind if you ever feel like someone might be planning to. Shoot you, Okay, not a concern I have offered, no. Same same. The other thing I found interesting about this conversation is that Tom truly didn't He acted like he really didn't know whether Laurna was involved in this or not, saying, well, she hasn't told me anything. She may tell me one day, which could have been just him being careful, like maybe he's specter. I mean, I don't, I don't know. But you didn't hear the recording though, right, you just have. The Oh, I just have the quotes from the recording.

24:50 Yeah, yeah, he knew. Yeah I think he did too. But it's just interesting that he was so careful about his words here. Around the end of December, Sandy's parents issued a statement through their attorney. They fully supported Tom. They said they believed he was innocent and were standing behind him completely. They thought Sandy's death was suspicious, but they didn't believe tom had anything to do with it. Interesting, he must have been quite the charmer. I think he must have been. In March of nineteen eighty four, Tom Bird was charged with criminal solicitation to commit murder in the death of Martin Andersen. He took a leave of absence from Faith Lutheran, returned to the pulpit about a month later, and then resigned for good in June. The case had by then spilled well beyond Emporia.

25:37 It reached across two counties and into a handful of states, eventually involving seven law enforcement agencies in Kansas alone. The headlines that followed were not subtle. A preacher's deadly sin and I'm a man of God, and I'm going to kill my lover's hubby. The congregation that had tripled in size because of Tom Bird was left to find its footing without him. I can only imagine how much this small town was just buzzing with gossip and umors. This is the preacher, right, It's got all these salacious elements. He's having an affair with this woman who is also having many, many affairs with multiple people. And when he came to town, people loved him. Yeah, exactly, the greatest. Yeah. He was probably very well known around town, very well respected. Tom Byrd went on trial in July of nineteen eighty four for criminal solicitation to commit first degree murder for his role in the initial plotting to kill Martin Anderson. So the charge is kind of important here because he wasn't actually charged with physically killing Martin. He was charged with solicitation, which was more about the planning of it, which is what Daryl Carter had the story that he had told Emporia residents lined up outside the courthouse to secure a spot in the gallery, some of them carrying their own stadium cushions. Women brought homemade cookies and cakes for the defendant.

26:55 So the women in town thought he was innocent. Well, I'm not saying everyone in town thought he was innocent, but apparently several of them must have refused to believe that a man of the cloth could commit this horrible act. At its core, the trial turned on a single question. Was Tom Bird having an affair with Lorna Anderson. If he was, there was a motive. If he wasn't, the case against him grew considerably harder to make the prosecution built its answer carefully. Phone records showed multiple conversations between Tom and Lorna every day. Witnesses described the electricity between them, the shoulders touching, the charged looks. Laurie Anderson, Laura's youngest daughter, testified that she had seen her mother kiss Tom on the lips. And then there were the two notes found in Laura's lingerie drawer, signed Tom, full of talk of love and forever and a shared future. Tom took the stand and denied any romance. The letters, he said were expressions of Christian love, nothing more. His attorney argued that the relationship existed primarily in Laurna's imagination, that she had developed feelings that Tom didn't share and hadn't encouraged. So Tom's basically saying, I was just counseling her. She was in a difficult marriage, and I was just you know, being supportive and all this.

28:13 I mean, it's the only defense that he really had, right. The jury didn't buy it. Tom Bird was found guilty of criminal solicitation to murder Martin Anderson. Four weeks later. He was sentenced to two and a half to seven years in prison. That does not seem like a long enough prison term. No, it really doesn't. But that's why I also mentioned earlier. This is not about the actual killing, it's about the plotting to kill, which I guess makes it the sentence a little bit lighter. But still other cases though, where you know, solicitation of murder is life in prison. Yeah, I mean you would think you're soliciting to kill someone, then you know it's basically the same as as killing them. With Tom convicted of soliciting Marty Anderson's murder, investigators turned their attention back to the rocky Ford Bridge. Sandy Bird's body was exhumed in the nineteen eighty four. A second autopsy told a fuller story than the first. The original examination, conducted in the days after her death, had concluded she died of chest and abdominal injuries consistent on its face with a car accident. The second autopsy went further. Marx on Sandy's wrists indicated someone had grabbed her. Marx on her ankles suggested she had been perhaps dragged. She had been struck on the head with a blunt object. The blow that likely killed her, examiners concluded, came to her back, probably the result of being thrown from the bridge. This time, the forensic pathologists concluded that Sandy did not die in a car accident, but rather was the victim of a homicide.

29:46 Just goes to show you how much your bias going into an autopsy must play a part in it, because I think the corner in the original autopsy assumed it was a car accident, and so that was what they found, but then re he examining it was like, no, this doesn't add up. That's an excellent point. A grand jury reviewed the evidence from the second autopsy, and in February nineteen eighty five, Tom Bird was charged with first degree murder in the death of his wife. The following month, something changed in Tom and Lorna's relationship. Bohen Records told the story quietly but clearly. Tom's collect calls from the prison to Laura's home simply stopped whatever had existed between them. It was over that coincided with Lorna deciding to tell her story to the police. She told investigators that Tom had confessed the details of Sandy's death to her at a rest stop on the Kansas Turnpike, shortly after he'd returned to Emporia from burying his wife at Arkansas. They'd driven there together to talk. Tom told her that he had driven Sandy out to the Rocky Ford Bridge that night. The two of them had walked out to the bridge together.

30:54 Tom had brought a tool from the car, and he struck Sandy with it when he tried to push her over the railing. She held on. He kicked her until she fell. Then he went down and dragged her body to the water's edge, put the car and gear and ran it off the embankment, jumping clear before it went over. Underneath his clothes, he had been wearing jogging shorts. He threw his shoes into the woods and ran home barefoot eight miles, dumping his outer clothing and trash cans along the way. A week later, Lorna said his feet were still bruised. It's pretty wild in this story. You know. One of the big questions that I think people had was if he did it, how did he get back? You know, did he He didn't drive a separate car, and he was a cross country runner, but running that far without his shoes on eight miles, that seems crazy.

31:43 I think people will do a lot to get away with murder. Yeah. As for Marty's murder. Lorna said Tom had been the one to pull the trigger. He used Marty's own gun, a weapon she had quietly removed from a cedar chest in her basement once before and passed it to Tom. Tom had justified it, she said, is the lesser of two evils. Killing Marty was less wrong than allowing Marty to slowly destroy Lorna and their daughters. Investigators drained a pond and found the gun exactly where Lorna said it would be. She also made the laughable claim that she hadn't known Tom killed Marty until he told her himself a year later, an assertion that no one was buying. Yeah, Tom just happened to be waiting at this place that she happened to pull off and stop.

32:27 Yeah, Oh my gosh. Almost exactly a year after his conviction for soliciting Marty Anderson's murder, Tom Bird was back in a courtroom. This time the charge was the murder of his wife. The county attorney laid out the prosecution's theory plainly. Sandy had been beaten on a bridge, thrown over the reeling, her body dragged to the water below. The car had been pushed down the embankment after her. Somewhere between the bridge and home, Tom had disposed of a bloody jogging suit and arrived back of the bird house in a three piece suit to drive his babysitting or home. Where was the three piece suit? I believe he stopped at the church first and kept there. That makes sense. And do you know where he disposed of the bloody jogging suit because.

33:11 It sounds like it was eight miles between the bridge and his home, so it could have been anywhere along that path, I suppose, but. It sounds like it was rural, So I'm just like he couldn't leave it in like a gas station. He wouldn't have been jogging by a gas station or something like that. Probably, Yeah, maybe just people's you know, had their trash out something like that. Perhaps. A fellow inmate from the Lancing State Penitentiary named Charles Henderson testified that Tom had told him in prison that he and Lorna had conspired to have Sandy killed and had talked about the insurance money they expected to collect. Another prisoner serving time for murder offered similar testimony. If I murdered someone, which I haven't, I'm pretty sure I could keep that secret to the grave. I don't think I would be telling anyone.

33:54 I know, especially yeah in prison. The defense pointed to what wasn't there? No, why wouldn't placed Tom at the bridge? No forensic evidence connected him to the scene. The only footprint found near the water was believed to be a woman's, and no one had thought to make a cast of it. There was no murder weapon, and there was no bloody jogging suit. And there was no satisfying explanation of how Tom had gotten back into town after leaving Sandy and her car in the river, only the implication that a former college distance runner might have simply run the eight miles back. The medical examiners had differing opinions. The prosecution's experts said that Sandy's injuries were consistent with the beating. The defenses experts said that they were consistent with a car accident. They disagreed on cause of death, accident reconstruction experts disagreed on the car's speed. Tom did not take the stand. The prosecution made one point that seemed to land with the jury.

34:50 On the night Sandy disappeared, when she failed to return, and Tom grew concerned his first call was not to their home, not to the university, but he called the police. The jury deliberated for less than six hours. When they began their four person a former minister called for our first vote on the question of whether it was an accident or murder. The vote was unanimous for murder. Five hours later it was unanimous that Tom had committed it. Two jurors later said that what guided them more than anything was the inconsistency of Tom's various accounts on his last night with his wife. In one statement, Tom had said that he and Sandy went to a private club for drinks after having a drink in the church office.

35:32 In another, he said Sandy left directly after having a drink at the church, And one story he said that she went to the university to pick up some things, but in another he said that she was in the habit of taking drives at night to relieve tension. So they are small inconsistencies, but they're you know, they're the kind of things that you would not get wrong. Did we go to a club or did we not go to a club? Well, and if they had gone to the club, someone would have seen them right exactly. For the murder of a wife. The judge sentenced tom Bird to life in prison. Back in Emporia, opinions remained divided. Many people had trouble getting past the holes and the evidence, but twelve of their peers had looked at the same holes and reached their verdict anyway. In under six hours. On the eve of tom Bird's second trial, Lorna Anderson got married. Her new husband was Randy Eldridge, a born again Christian from Hutchinson.

36:25 The wedding surprise nearly everyone who knew their situation. Lorna had spent the better part of two years professing her innocence through a succession of charges, dismissals, indictments, and delays, and shortly before she was finally said to go to trial, she decided to change course. On August twenty sixth, nineteen eighty five, Lorna pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal solicitation to commit the first degree murders of both her husband, Marty Anderson and tom Bird's wife, Sandy Bird. She had admitted that she had plotted with tom Bird to kill her husband. She admitted to the meeting with Dare Carter and Tom Bird at the church, where they shared ideas of how they would kill Marty. However, her version of the plans didn't quite line up with what Darryl Carter had told investigators, Where Carter described plans involving a drugged man driven off an embankment into a river. Laurna's version had them planning to drug Marty and lay him across railroad tracks, or to have someone drop a brick onto his car as he drove under a highway overpass.

37:25 I'm guessing that it is chilly. I'm just guessing that Lorna had trouble keeping all the plots safe because this is something she had been thinking about at least for two years before Marty was killed. So she probably had a lot of different plans. I have never once plotted your murder same. As part of her agreement, Lorna also told investigators what she knew about the night Sandybird died at the rocky Ford Bridge, though why then Tom had already been convicted of that murder and was serving a life sentence. The investigators, who had spent two years building the case against her, were skeptical about her motives for coming forward. She positioned it as purging her soul and getting rit right with God. But more likely it was the chance at getting a more favorable sentence, and it worked for her. Despite the seriousness of her crimes, Laurena was sentenced to five and a half to eighteen years in prison. That's quite a disspan.

38:18 It is, and it just seems really short for basically plotting to commit two murders. So do you know anything about this marriage? Like it seems like it came out of nowhere. Well, she was out on bail, so I'm assuming it was someone she met like out on bail, But I don't know much more about it than. That we'll be back after a break. The case had all the ingredients that true crime storytellers look for, which is why I did this case. And it wasn't long before Hollywood came calling. There was a bidding war for the movie rights, with notable names like Henry Winkler and Dick Clark among those vying for the story.

38:59 In nineteen eighty seven, and CBS aired Murder Ordained, a dramatization of the Bird and Anderson cases. Joe Beth Williams played Lorna, Terry Kinney played Tom. The supporting cast included Kathy Bates, John Goodman, and Keith Carradine as highway patrolman John Ruhle, who was portrayed as the hero in the story for not letting the case go. Almost the entire film was shot on location in Emporia, a strange experience for a town still processing what had happened within it. The state's governor even turned up for a walk on role. Some residents worried that director Mike Robe was taking too many liberties with the material, but the Emporia Gazette's editorial page offered its verdict Robe had been faithful to what mattered and had nothing to apologize for.

39:46 That is so interesting. The town must have just been so wild. I can only imagine. I really love the fact that they did this because it gave me a much better view into the bridge where Sandy died. If that was the movie started. Wow, and it was filmed actually. There, and it was crazy. Yeah, it really is kind of crazy that they did that. Meanwhile, the legal machinery ground on the Kansas Supreme Court upheld Tom's first conviction on appeal. His second conviction for Sandy's murder was still waiting appeal as nineteen eighty five came to a close. Tom's brother, Mark, who ran a restaurant and bar back in Little Rock, told anyone who would listen that his own investigation would eventually clear his brother's name.

40:29 He wasn't alone. Several people in Emporia remained firmly in Tom's corner, insisting that what he had been convicted of simply wasn't in his heart. In November of nineteen eighty eight, Lorna pleaded guilty a second time, this time to the murder itself, not merely the conspiracy that got her an additional sentence of fifteen years to life. Her husband, Randy Eldridge, the born again Christian from Hutchinson, whom she had married on the eve of Tom's trial, filed for divorce shortly after. While Tom and Laurna worked through their appeals and sentences, a parallel fight was taking place in civil court, one that would take years to resolve and ultimately turn on a question the criminal trials had never quite settled cleanly.

41:13 Had Marty Anderson's life insurance policy been fraudulently obtained? The New England Mutual Life Insurance Company thought so. They had issued a policy on Marty's life worth two hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and they wanted a court to declare that they didn't have to pay it. Lorna, by then remarried and going by Lorna Anderson Eldridge, filed a counterclaim seeking the proceeds, and when she later disclaimed any personal interest, she pursued the claim on behalf of her and Marty's four daughters. The insurance company's argument rested on the idea that the policy had been taken out as part of the plot against Marty's life, but the evidence painted a more complicated picture. Marty's brother testified that Marty had always been conscientious about life insurance. He had attended seminars on the subject and had carried policies since at least nineteen eighty.

42:03 A coworker said Marty regularly encouraged colleagues to increase their own coverage, practically acting as an informal insurance salesman. The second New England policy had come about in April of nineteen eighty three, when Laurna visited their agent, Chris Kimball, and picked up an application, but it was Marty himself who later met with Kimball after an Optimist club meeting, filled out the application, tendered the initial check, and submitted to the required medical examinations. The policy was issued on May twenty sixth, nineteen eighty three. Marty subsequently called Kimball to go over the details at his own request. In August of nineteen eighty seven, a jury found that the policy had not been fraudulently procured. New England Mutual was ordered to pay the full two hundred and seventy thousand dollars.

42:51 The company appealed, but in October of nineteen eighty nine, the ruling was affirmed. The money went to Marty Anderson's daughters. In today's money, that would be about eight hundred thousand dollars. Yeah, that's pretty significant. I'm glad it turned out the way it did, because obviously Lorna shouldn't have gotten any of that money, but having the kids at least have something was probably helpful. In March nineteen ninety, Tom Bird stood trial for a third time, this time for the murder of Martin Anderson Well. He had already been convicted of criminal solicitation to commit first degree murder for his role in the plot. This time he was on trial for actually pulling the trigger. Laura's confession and her subsequent court testimony pointed directly at Tom as the masked gunman who had stepped out of that Flint Hills field and shot Marty three times in the top of the head. Tom denied it, as he denied everything. The jury acquitted him. It was the one charge that didn't stick, the murder he had been most directly accused of committing with his own hands. Laura's testimony was really the only evidence there was, and it was clear that the jury didn't trust her word even a little bit.

43:58 Yeah, it seems like there was no real direct out evidence that he was actually the one pulling the trigger, although it seems like probably was the case. But yeah, yeah, and there have been so many plots that she had made with other hit men that they, you know, the jury just couldn't be sure. Yeah, I can understand that Lorna served her sentence at the Kansas State Correctional Institution in Lansing on a bluff that looked out over the Kansas State Penitentiary just a mile away, where Tom was serving his time. Tom did not stop being a minister because he was in prison. He gave sermons. He co founded a program called Convicts for Christ. He organized a tennis marathon to raise money for Ronald McDonald's house. For some reason, I just don't picture people in prison playing tennis. He and a school teacher named Terry, whom he had met at a church function not long after Sandy's death, married while he was incarcerated. Together, they started a marriage in Richmond seminar for inmates and their spouses in nineteen eighty eight. By all accounts, he was a model prisoner. That's so interesting. I knew that he was not going to stop preaching. After a murder ordained aired in nineteen eighty seven, Tom broke his silence and talked to the press for his first in depth interview on the case. The film, he said, had destroyed whatever chance he might have had at a fair retrial if his appeal succeeded. He admitted for the first time publicly that he and Lorna had been romantically involved, but insisted the relationship had not begun until after both Sandy

45:28 and Marty were dead. He said, I rose up as a knight in shining armor and felt that she was being mistreated and needed my help. I was alone, she was alone, and we had all these kids. Little did I know she would turn out to be the dragon herself. Okay, it's all Laurna's fault. Tom. His conviction, he maintained, had rested on nothing more than his relationship with Lorna and the small town rumor mill. In one interview, he acknowledged that his marriage to Sandy had been understrained in the mind months before her death. We had disagreements about how much time each of us was spending at our jobs, he said. We spent all this time at work, and then we had three kids under five. We didn't leave time for each other. He said that at some point the evening of Sandy's death, the two of them had words an argument about the amount of time Sandy was spending at the university's computers.

46:21 It was a common source of friction between them. Sandy liked working on the machines late at night, when the building was empty and she could focus. Tom still disputed the timeline investigators had built around that night. The babysitter had said that he called it one in the morning, but she was only fourteen years old, he pointed out, and may have fallen asleep without knowing what time it was. He said he had called home first and only called the police in campus security after the babysitter told him that Sandy hadn't been in touch. As for Sandy's death, he acknowledged that the facts as they stood didn't support an accident. Perhaps, he said, Lorna or one of her former boyfriend friends had been responsible. He didn't have evidence, he said, quote I just have to think that if all the evidence had been collected properly that day, I wouldn't have been charged. When Tom Byrd became eligible for parole in two thousand and one after fifteen years, he was, by any institutional measure, a strong candidate. During the hearing, board members thanked him for his contributions in prison. Then they asked him a direct question. Did he think Sandy's death had been an accident, a suicide, or a murder.

47:31 He chose his words carefully. He didn't think it was a suicide, he said, but he believed there was just as much evidence for suicide as there was that he had murdered her. It was not the answer of a man taking responsibility. Public hearings trew people from both sides Sandy's relatives came to speak against his release. His eldest daughter, Andrea, now twenty five years old and working for a mortgage company in Orange, California, came to speak for him. She said, I've stood by my dad the whole time. When I was in junior high, I decided for myself that he was innocent. It was a lot of circumstantial evidence and he should have had a change of venue. The press convicted him there in Emporia. Rumors swept the prison after the hearings that Tom would be released. He had let himself hope, but the board voted against it three to one, citing the seriousness of the crime, the objections from Sandy's family, and his refusal to accept responsibility. He would have to wait at least four more years. So you said that Sandy's family had supported him initially, but I guess as time passed they changed their mind, I think so.

48:37 I don't know specifically about her mom who was the one that originally came forward, but yeah, it sounds like they probably changed their mind as time went on. Earl Board chairwoman Marilyn Scave, who had cast the loane vote in Tom's favor, said that in two decades on the board, she had never seen a case divide its members so completely. Tom Byrd was eventually released on parole in June two thousand and four after nearly twenty years in prison, settling in Wyandot County with his wife, Terry. He was no longer ordained, but he kept preaching as a lay minister. His specialty in the years that followed was marriage counseling. A little bit ironic. His wife, Terry bird By then was working at a Lutheran school in Kansas City, Kansas. She had a master's degree in education, with a specialty in teaching children with learning disabilities. She had attended every trial. When people told her that she must be crazy to have married a convicted murderer, her answer was direct, I have both feet on the ground. Lorda's pathout was longer and harder. She had come before the parole board multiple times, and each time she'd been turned down. The votes, unlike Tom's, weren't close.

49:43 As one investigator had said years later, a lot of what she says is true, some is not, and there's a whole lot that she's not telling. The parole boards still believe that to be the case. She was denied parole five times between nineteen eighty eight and early two thousand and six. Her sixth time before the parole board in December two thousand and six was the charm. During that hearing, her husband, Terry Moore, whom she'd married in two thousand and four, her father, Lauren Slater, and three of her four daughters spoke in support of her release. Moore told the board that Laura had earned her associate's degree in prison, had been a leader in inmate drug treatment programs, and was active in the United Methodist Women's group behind Bars. Her work released employer called her the epitome of the perfect employee. Laura Anderson Moore was released on parole in February of two thousand and seven. She completed parole's supervision in February twenty fourteen and has since led a private life in Hutchinson, Kansas.

50:45 Interestingly, I have found her on Facebook. She is as a public profile on Facebook, and she seems to be reconnected with her family, regularly post pictures with her husband, kids, and grandkids. Not long after the trials ended, someone etched in concrete at rocky Ford Bridge. Two names joined by a plus sign Tom plus Lorna. It's still there. The bridge itself was eventually renamed. It's called Bird Bridge now not for Tom but for Sandy. In twenty twenty, it was approved for listing on the State Register of Historic Places and recommended for the National Register as well. Recognized for its Pratt Trust steel design and construction. The historical significance the nomination was careful to note, came from its architecture, not from what happened there on a July night in nineteen eighty three.

51:35 Who etched Tom plus Laurna in the bridge? To one of them? Do it? No? No, I think it was just some graffiti artists. But people in the area know the bridge because of Sandy's death. On humid summer nights, teenagers still drive out past the edge of Emporia, down the narrow County road that dissolves into farmland and darkness. They park near the bridge and wait. Some swear they've seen a figure walking the rails. Others say they hear splashing, as if a car had gone into the Cottonwood River. Again, the stories shift depending on who's telling them. An apparition in white headlights that appear and vanish footsteps on the planks when no one's there. The bridge appears on lists of Kansas's most haunted places.

52:16 Car Loads of teenagers dare each other to walk across it in the dark, and more often than not end up sprinting back to their cars. It's the kind of place that earns its ghost stories. A wooden bridge over a shallow river at the bottom of a road that goes from nowhere to nowhere, and somewhere in the concrete if you know where to look, you can find those two names. You can find online a lot of videos of like, you know, ghost s hunters out there, like we're here in the dark, we're waiting to see if anything happens. It's it's kind of I mean, it seems like a very spooky place because it's out in the middle of nowhere and it's this kind of you know, bridge over this creepy river. Road trip. Yeah. John Rule retired from the Kansas Highway Patrol in two thousand and four after twenty nine years working traffic accidents across the state. After murder ordained aired. Some people in Emporia were angry with him, so much so that he requested a transfer to Western Kansas. He told a reporter that when he would stop drivers for speeding and they saw his name, they didn't want to talk about the ticket anymore. So I just decided to start fresh, he said. As long as I was in Emporia, I was going to keep stirring the pot up. Every time the movie would air, Rule said he would get letters from all over the world. Before we leave the story, I want to pause on the two people at the center of it. Sandy Bird was a mathematician, a teacher, a woman who had been told that her ambitions were not befitting the wife of a minister, and who refused to accept that. She taught teenagers the Bible on Sunday mornings and wrote computer programs at night. She lost fifteen

53:50 pounds from the stress of a marriage that was collapsing around her. Told a neighbor it was just what stress does, but she kept going. She was thirty three years old with three children under ten. The last night of her life, she and her husband went to the movies to celebrate a promotion that she had just earned. Martin Anderson was a man who had been badly broken once found someone who helped put his life back together, and spent the rest of his life trying to hold on to what they had built. He coached his daughter's sports teams. He badgered hospital administrators for better equipment because he cared about doing his job right. He wanted more than anything else to be a good father. He was thirty four years old when he was shot execution style while kneeling in a Kansas field, sixty feet from the highway where his family was waiting. Rest in peace, Sandy and Marty. I wasn't able to find out much about the children in this case. Seven children. There's a lot of kids that were basically left without father or a mother because you know, one of them was in prison, the other was dead.

54:53 But it seems that a lot of the kids supported their parent who had lived, because they did come to parole hearing. Not all of them, but some of them came to parole hearings to support their parent, which I don't know, is that seems a little surprising, I guess, but I know we talk about this a lot when you're a child, such a difficult situation when one parent kills the other because you're left with only the only person you have left is right the killer. It makes me wonder what is better for them, you know, to have one parent that even though the parent is a murderer. I don't know. It sounds like Tom's kids believe that he is innocent, at least have told himself that. I don't think Laura's kids can believe that because she.

55:34 We said three of the four testified at her parole hearing. I think that was right. Yeah, yeah, so seventy percent of them support her. Then, right, but that especially means I think she's innocent. Right. We've talked about a lot along the way, but I have a couple other things I wanted to bring up before we go. One is the kind of their sentences, whether justice was served or not. So ultimately Tom ended up serving twenty years in prison, Laura ended up serving twenty one and a half. Do you think that was enough? Do you think that was the right sentence. I feel like if you take someone's life in such a selfish manner that you deserve to be in prison for life. Yeah. And it was certainly first degree murder, it was planned for Both murders were planned for a long time.

56:17 Just disgusting. Yeah, again, I mean we say this every week pretty much, but yeah, it just bothers me that people are so callous about taking someone else's life and you expect your kids to be okay after you do something like that. No, Yeah, I mean I guess I'm saying that I believe they're both guilty, which I do. So Yeah, and both of them got out of prison with, you know, relatively young, like they still have a lot of their lives left to live. And it really did finding Lorna's Facebook profile, it really, I have to say, it affected me, like, it really kind of bothered me. It's like she's just out there living her life, posting these pictures and I'm just like, you. Killed you want You're expecting people, everyone in your life to forget and forgive what. You've done, and it seems like they have.

56:59 I don't think that's forgivable. No, I don't think so either. So the fact that Tom has never admitted his guilt, even like to the parole board, to me, that should sort of be disqualifying if you go before a parole board. But you're saying, I really didn't do it, but I deserve to be out of here. Yeah. I think every parole board is different in every state. And it's tricky. I mean, if you truly are innocent, then you're putting an awkward position of being pressured to admit to something that didn't happen, right. I think people do admit sometimes their guilty, even if they're innocent, because they just want to get out of prison. But in his case, I feel pretty comfortable that he was involved in both of these murders directly.

57:39 Did you watch any of Murder Ordained. I did watch the first part of it when they found the car and Sandy's body in the river. I skimmed through a little bit of the rest of it. It seemed like it was actually very well done, and it did seem fairly true to the facts. The one thing I think they took liberties with is they wanted to make John Rule, the highway patrolman, into like a hero who was like tenaciously holding on and we're not gonna let go of this case. I felt like you kind of portrayed him like that. I mean, he definitely believed that it wasn't an accident, but he failed to get people to re look at the only reason they decided it was murder was because Marty Anderson was also killed and they made the connection. So I don't think he was really the He was a good, good guy, believe you know. I'm not saying he's not, and he did try to fight for it.

58:25 But I think the I think the movie made it a little more dramatized than it really was. Where can listeners find the movie? It is on YouTube, so if you just search for Murder Ordained and we'll put a link in our show notes. Okay, well, that is the story of Sandy and Tom Bird and Lorna and Marty Anderson. Let us know what you think. Well, it is early Saturday afternoon. We are done recording a two part episode. What do you want to do with the rest of our weekend? I have been not feeling amazing because of allergy season, so I pushed something on Instagram today that was like all I want to do this week and is eat chips or something like that.

59:09 I literally just saw that and it gave me a good laugh. We have chips, so but I really honestly don't feel like doing that. A couple of books that I'm so I know, I'm so boring. A couple of books that I'm reading that I'm excited to finish up. One of them is Yesteryear, which is a lot of people are talking about right now, and the other one I can't talk about because I'm embarrassed that i'm reading it. Oh now you have to talk about it. Come on, so everyone knows. I think that I am like a big fan of pop culture. And there is a show on Amazon Prime right now. It's another hockey show, but it's a straight hockey romance this time, and it's called Off Campus, and there are based on a series of books. So I'm reading part one or book one of the Off Campus series.

59:58 You usually seem embarrassed by this. I think you should be embarrassed. Oh well, I won't tell you why. Maybe there's it's a it's a little more like soft core porn that I thought it would be. Okay, So yeah, I. Was like, still nothing to be embarrassed about. Okay. Well yeah, well I'm still reading it by Stephen King. It's like my project for the year. I don't know. And I'm mad at you because you haven't finished The Road to Tender Hearts, which I finished like weeks ago at this point, so now I'm going to have forgotten everything about it. I'm just such a slow I've been such a slow reader lately, I just don't have an attention here pretty busy guy. I do. I am enjoying it, but it's so long. It's like twelve hundred pages long or something crazy like that.

1:00:45 And according to my Goodreads account, I have read it, but I don't really remember it unless I've lied in my country's about which I don't think I've done. Feeling like you would remember reading a twelve hundred page book, but maybe not. Well, what do you want to do this weekend? Well, it's funny because I was thinking about the movie Old School. Do you remember the scene. Where Will is like forty three times? Yeah? I don't think we. Yes, we have. We have talked about it many times, really hit up home Depot, Home Depot, and and every time I think about it every weekend literally because I mean, we're old and we're boring and we're married. So yes, that is. Maybe a bad bath and beyond. I don't know if we'll have time. I try and find one. You don't even see you are so out of touch.

1:01:28 You don't even know why in the movie. But where is the nearest bad bath and beyond? I have no they all closed. Oh well, we haven't. Gotten the twenty percent of coopon in the mail in like five years. Probably I do owe you a trip to Home Goods. Still I did. I did make that promise. We talk. We also have talked about this because yeah, we still haven't gone. What we need to do is it's almost June and we still haven't planted like our annual flowers. Put like these what do you what do you call those things that are on the railing, like the window boxes. Yeah, the planters that we have on our deck. We have to plant those. Yeah, that's why we should probably do that. I don't feel like doing it, but yeah, we need to do it. But in my defense, the reason we haven't done it is there's no more frost advisories. But the lows have been like in the low forties or the high thirties still, so today it's my favorite temperature.

1:02:19 It's like sixty eight degrees right now. Yeah, it's really nice. Anyway, let's go do that. Let's go buy some dirt and some plants. Can you just do it and I'll just direct you. No, it's not going to work that way, but I'm happy to help. So maybe we should go to a couple more open houses. This weekend we have been looking at new houses. Not new houses, but we've been thinking about maybe moving and downsizing, which I don't think either of us are really ready to do or want to do, but we are kind of thinking about that. And a couple of weekends ago, we seriously thought about buying the. House in ann Arbor, almost put an offer on it. Oh, actually it's gone. Did you erase that? I erased the white board.

1:02:59 White for it behind me? And we actually had we were so meeting. We had a pros and cons list, and the cons I believe outweighed the pros. There were a lot of things we found that the house was amazing. It was really a cool house in a great neighborhood, but there were enough things that I think we were like, yeah, this would get annoying after a while, or this would be frustrating. But and we decided to be a little more methodical rather than just impulsively putting an offer on a house. But we almost did it. We almost did. We've done it before. We yeah, but we could go look at a couple of week We have. Moved more than most people move, Like it's been like every probably average of every six years. How many houses have we had since we've met. This is our fifth house together, and some of them we've lived in for shorter times. But anyway, Yeah, a little spontaneous, impulsive, that's a good thing, or.

1:03:50 Not when Probably not when making a major purchase. But I feel like it's worked out for us. We'red out. We've always been pretty profitable. Yeah, and I think we've every time we've moved to a new house, we've always been like, yeah, this is this is the right place for us. Except for the one house it was not. Yeah which house, the house that we lived in before this house. Oh, yeah, it just needed more work than we. I still loved it, though, but yes, you're right it was. It had a lot of problems that were hard to deal with. But you are not all men, but you're kind of blind to some of the esthetic things that really bothered me. Yeah. Yeah, some of the design decisions were really bad. Right. Anyway, anyway, before we go, I think you had one more thing you wanted to talk about.

1:04:31 Oh, I was just listening to Paul McCartney came out with a brand new album today or yesterday, I think it came out, and I was just listening to it, and it's really good. Like Paul McCartney, he's eighty three. Years old, it looks amazing. He's everywhere, like, yeah, he's only doing the talk show circuits that he is. He turned off the lights on Stephen Colbert's Yeah. Yeah, and yeah, I just listened to the full album this morning, and I just I give it a big thumbs up. It's I've always liked huge Beatles fan. Obviously Paul McCartney's solo career I haven't been as big of a fan of, but this feels like a I don't think, I hope it's not going to be his last album, but it feels sort of like a like a farewell. He yeah, because he's looking back at the past and it.

1:05:14 Is crazy to think he's eighty three years old and he is releasing new music. That's amazing, you know, and it's still good. Being eighty today is not as scary as it was what our parents were our. Age, right, Yeah, no, I agree. His voice isn't quite as good as it used to be, but still still good. And he has a duet with Ringo, which is really the two surviving Beatles. So yeah, check it out, give it a listen. What's it called Boys of Dungeon Lane. I think it's called which I think Dungeon Lane is like a road that was by his and George Harrison's house and they. Used to all grew up together. I can't remember all grew up in Liverpool. I think they were in various like George was a little younger and they didn't know Ringo until later. But yeah, they all grew up in the same town. Well, once again, you've stay a perfectly good hour listening to Love Mary Kill.

1:06:03 If you enjoy the podcast and you want us to stick around, and you would like to support our work, please consider joining us on Patreon. Go to patreon dot com slash Love Marykill. For five dollars a month. You get early ad free access plus a monthly bonus episode. Find us on social media or YouTube, or go to our website, Lovemarykill dot com. You can leave us a message or you can request a case. You can listen to episodes there right you can until next time. Don't Kill your wife and Don't Kill your husband.

1:07:01 To pick the