Simeonette Mapes and Jonathan Crupi

0:00 When Simonette Mapes, a beloved schoolteacher, was found brutally stabbed to death inside her own home. It was initially written off as a random burglary gone wrong, but as investigators dug deeper into a marriage that looked perfect from the outside, they uncovered a web of secrets and lies. I'm Tina and I'm Rich. Welcome to Love Mary Kill. Hey Tina, Hey Rich. How are you today? I am good? How are you? I am doing good. I'm a little tired, still recuperating from vacation.

0:44 It turns out you come back from a vacation really tired. I know I need another vacation, but I'm not complaining. It was a nice vacation. Yeah, we had a good time. Yeah. Did you notice something different about our opening? I hope you noticed. Well, at first I noticed. I wonder if our listeners noticed. So we talked about. This, and I'm not sure everyone's going to be super duper happy about that. We talked about it a few episodes ago, and we have decided to change it up after almost four. Years, and some people said that's a good idea, and other people said, please don't change it. You like it the way it is. We are trying to appeal to a wider audience, and we're afraid that our other introduction might be a little often.

1:24 Yeah, we never want to make light of you know. No, everyone knows we take these cases very seriously. Before we go any further, I want to give a heartfelt thank you to our friends Andy and Jesse at the Love Murder podcast. They gave us a shout out on a recent episode and I just love them. I think they're amazing. Yeah, awesome. So if you have not listened to Love Murder, please go give them a listen the last they. Are one last thing before we have a snack. I wanted to remind people if you weren't already aware, we do have another version of Love Mary Kill called Love Mary Kill Just the Facts. So if you're not into banter or our snack discussion, I am not. Well, you are a perfect candidate then to listen to love to.

2:07 Listen to just the Facts. And it's the same episode. We just cut off the opening banter and the end before we leave segment and yeah, it's just the facts. I do have a snack that I'm very excited about because once again, our good friend Carla has sent us a really awesome package. Okay, let me tell you how kind and generous our friend Carla is. She was having surgery, and before she was having surgery, she made sure to send us a snack. I mean, how thoughtful is that? And she saved your behind I know. Yeah, we just got back, so I didn't have time to go shopping for a snack and I just opened this. You haven't seen it yet, I have not seen it. I'm super excited about this. So Carla sent us four kinds of peanut butter from a company called the Peanut Butter Passport.

2:54 Oh my goodness. And these flavors sound really interesting. So there is a kick how and a gave flavor. There is an Ethiopian espresso flavor, a Texas Honey peanut butter flavor, and the one I'm most excited about, a Strup waffle peanut butter flavor. I really do. So that's the one I'm gonna try. Yeah, but let's yeah, let's give them a try. Okay, what did you think of the Peanut Butter Passport? Just kidding? They were delicious, really good, and they tasted so fresh. Yeah, you could really taste the peanuts in there.

3:35 Yeah, really really good. So these are They're made in Texas, which is where our friend Carla is. If you're interested, you can go to peanut Butter passport dot com and check them out. Thank you so much, Carla. We love you and we hope you are healing quickly. Today we're going to tell the story of Simonette Mapes and Jonathan Croopy. Thank you Leslie for recommending today's case. Almost everyone has teachers that they remember as being special. The one who saw something in you before you saw it in yourself, who showed up for the kids nobody else was showing up for, who made a rough year feel a little less rough. Teachers like that don't just teach a subject. They shape how their students see what's possible for their own lives, sometimes in ways that takes years to truly appreciate. Simonett Mapes Creepy was that kind of teacher. She taught social studies at a high school in one of Brooklyn's tougher neighborhoods, the kind of place a lot of teachers try to transfer out of, not into, but she stayed because she cared. She paid for graduation caps and gowns out of her own pocket when families couldn't afford them. She started a program that gave prom dresses to students who would otherwise never have had one.

4:44 Her students called her Mommy Mapes, and it was a nickname she had earned and that she loved. But on the afternoon of Thursday, July fifth, twenty twelve, Simonette's husband, thirty year old Jonathan Croopy, arrived home to find his twenty nine year old wife dead in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs. He called nine one one, barely able to get the words out. I just came home. My wife is dead. I think my house was robbed. It was just two days shy of their fifth wedding anniversary. Simonette's death seemed to make no sense. She didn't have enemies. She was universally loved by her students, their parents, by people who had known her for years and people who had only just met her. And her marriage, by every outward appearance, was a strong one. Friends and family described Jonathan and Symonette as devoted to each other, the kind of couple people pointed to as a model.

5:38 So who would want to hurt her? Was it a random act of violence? A burglary gone wrong, or did someone target her for reasons unknown. This is the story of Symonet Mapes Croupy, the life she built, the students she shaped, and the death that no one saw coming and no one could explain. This one is going to make me cry, isn't it? It probably is. She sounds like a wonderful person. She was. Siminet Mapes was born on September twenty fifth, nineteen eighty two, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the second of two children. Her father, John Mapes, was a career member of the US Air Force, and the family moved often when she was a kid. They relocated to Staten Island, New York in nineteen eighty eight, then lived for a stretch at the Fort Hamilton Army Base in Brooklyn, then spent two years in Florida before coming back to Brooklyn, where she graduated from Fort Hamilton High School. Deeply spiritual, Siminet seriously considered devoting her life to religion by becoming a nun, but ultimately she chose to channel her immense empathy and desire to serve others into a career in education. She enrolled in the Educational Studies program at the College of Staten Island's Willow Brook Campus with the goal of becoming a teacher.

6:52 Do you know anything about her name? That's a very unusual name. I really don't. It is an unusual name. I know her family referred to her as Sissy as a nickname, but I don't know where the name Simonette came from. It was at college that Simonette met Jonathan Croopy, who had also grown up in Brooklyn and was working toward the same goal of becoming a teacher. Simonette was immediately smitten with Jonathan, telling her mom, Teresa Mapes, that he was the one Teresa protested, but you just met him. Simonette acknowledged that was true, but she said, sometimes you just know. And they did seem like an ideal match. They not only shared the same ambitions, but they had similar values and a shared sense of humor and playfulness.

7:36 People who spent time with them could see that they would be together forever. Jonathan wrote her love letters on an almost daily basis. Once they got to know him. Simonette's family fell for Jonathan as well. Teresa would later say she couldn't have picked a better son in law. After finishing college, Symonette and Jonathan started building a life together. She got her first teaching job in Brooklyn in two thousand and six, teaching social studies. In July two thousand and seven, she and Jonathan married. After a couple of years bouncing between schools, she landed in two thousand and nine at the School for Classics, an academy of thinkers, writers, and performers, a high school in the East New York section of Brooklyn. She helped Jonathan land a job there as well, teaching English right alongside her social studies classes.

8:26 Students genuinely loved both Synonette and Jonathan. He had a reputation as a bit of a goofball, a big kid in many ways. He would break out in cartoon voices in class, and one year he dressed up as Wolverine for a school event. He could relate to teenagers in a way that many adults couldn't. Simonette was also fun in the classroom. If she sensed that students were feeling bored, she might break out into song. Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid was a favorite. But even more than being fun, she became known for her generous spirit and her death medication to her students. One year, fifteen students in the graduating class couldn't afford caps and gowns, so she quietly covered it herself. She ran the girl's leadership club, and she founded a program of her own called the Fairy Godmother's Project, which supplied prom dresses to students who otherwise wouldn't have had one, some who were living in shelters, some who didn't have parents in the picture at all. Her students called her Mommy Mapes. She was the kind of teacher who would notice the kids that other adults may have given up on. One student, a young man who had been bullied and was ready to drop out, later said that Simonette was the one who talked him out of it and that her encouragement literally changed the trajectory of his life. When researching this case, I was just so moved by her generosity. Teachers don't make a lot of money, and here she is buying caps and gowns for other students and just do it, you know, going way over and above.

9:56 So many teachers spend their own money on their students and their classroom. Outside of school, Symonette and Jonathan developed a full life together as well. Simonette volunteered with the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and was active in the Leukemia Foundation. She was also active at Our Lady of Pity Roman Catholic Church, which she attended regularly in the Bullshead neighborhood of Staten Island. Jonathan had his own hobbies that kept him occupied outside of school. He collected high end designer sneakers, shoes that could run anywhere from three hundred dollars to five hundred dollars a pair, which he stockpiled by the dozen on the top floor of their new Springville condo, alongside a growing comic book collection. I noticed you're shaking your head.

10:44 Well, Simonette is so generous and giving, so selfless me and here you have her husband who is building a sneaker collection. Living in New York on two teachers' salaries must be very challenging. Yeah, it is quite a contrast between the two of them, for sure. She and Jonathan adopted two dogs. They talked about having children, but for now the dogs were enough, and every summer, once the summer session of school ended, the couple would make a trip to Walt Disney World. Their seventh consecutive trip was just around the corner when Symonette was killed. Busy and full lives a dedication to their students passions, both individually and together, it seemed like the ideal marriage.

11:26 In two thousand and nine, Simonette and Jonathan settled into a townhouse in the New Springville section of Staten Island. Staten Island tends to get overlooked, even by New Yorkers. Separated from Manhattan by a ferry ride across the harbor, it's the quietest and most suburban of the city's five boroughs, a place of single family homes, strip malls, and golf courses. Locals have long joked that it's the forgotten Borough, a world away from the hustle and bustle most people picture when they think of New York City. New Springville, where Semonet and Jonathan lived. That image to a tee, a tidy, unremarkable residential pocket, where as one neighbor would later put it, nothing ever, really happens. It was a sharp contrast to the location of the school where they spent their days.

12:13 The School for Classics sat directly across the street from the Cypress Hill Housing project, one of the rougher areas of Brooklyn, with a lot of gang activity in the area. In fact, just two and a half weeks before her death, Semonette and Jonathan were walking to their car after school when gunfire broke out nearby the duck behind the vehicle until it stopped. The next day, Semonette posted about it on Facebook, writing that she and Jonathan had survived to shootout and thanked God that they were okay. She added a message aimed at kids in the area who liked to act tougher than they were, writing that the Cypress Hill projects are no joke. Simonette's family implored her more than once to transfer somewhere safer, but she was devoted to the kids at her school. There was nowhere else where she thought she could have a bigger impact. While Simonette's path to teaching seemed to come easy for her, Jonathan's road was much bumpier. He struggled to pass the required certification exams, failing multiple times before finally succeeding. This was more than just an inconvenience. His struggles to pass the exams resulted in Jonathan racking up twenty five thousand dollars in debt, which would hang over the marriage for years to come. Then came a second bigger problem. New York City requires public school teachers to complete a master's degree within five years of their initial certification in order to keep their jobs, so both Jonathan and Simonette enrolled

13:44 at the College of Staten Island. Semonet sailed through the program and got her master's in adolescent education. Jonathan did not, and it wasn't just that he'd fallen behind. It turns out that he registered for courses but never actually attended a single class. After that first semester, he didn't even bother to register for classes, but he kept up the charade that he was working hard toward a degree. By the time of Simonette's death, his failure was coming to a head. His principal had given him an ultimatum, finished the degree or lose the job. On July second, twenty twelve, three days before Semonette was killed, she found out the truth.

14:25 Her husband hadn't set foot in a classroom. This was a massive betrayal, which put additional financial strain on the marriage. Semonette had even been taking on extra work assignments to help pay for his tuition, and now she learned that it was all a lie. Can you imagine finding that out? That's shocking. And the fact that he was actingly he was still going to classes, just disappearing and coming back, you know, saying, oh, class was great, just MiG. Soon after learning of Jonathan's deception, Sibbonette spoke with her mom on the phone. She told Teresa about her discovery and said that she was going to confront Jonathan. She wanted answers not only as to why he hadn't been attending classes, but also where had the money gone. On the evening of July fourth, the couple attended a holiday gathering with some friends, but ended up leaving early. People at the party noticed that Simonette seemed upset. Later that night, she called her mother in tears, saying that she didn't feel well. Theresa made her daughter promise that if she wasn't feeling better by the next morning, she'd see a doctor.

15:34 It turned out to be the last conversation the two of them would ever have. The next morning, Thursday, July fifth, twenty twelve, Jonathan left the town house around seven thirty a m. He had a bunch of errands on his agenda, a stop at school to pick up books and supplies for the summer session. He and Simonette were both teaching, a scheduled car inspection, a stop at a sneaker store, and a plan trip to home Depot by paint for a bathroom project Semonet him been wanting done. After finishing his other errands, he texted Semonet that he was headed to home Depot, but when he pulled into the parking lot and hadn't heard back from her, he decided to skip it and just had home. He got back to the townhouse in the early afternoon and found Semonette flying in a pool of blood. The house was in disarray, drawers pulled open and furniture disturbed. It had the look of a robbery. Jonathan called nine one one at one fifty pm. No one operator. It was emergency. I just came home.

16:33 My wife had said, oh my god, I think one house was robbed. I know you're scared, but what, like, why do you say she's dead? Like if she did, Oh my god, he's a giant out of blood. I should mention that was two parts of the call. There was a gap in the middle there, but in the first party sounded somewhat calm, I would say, and then just like totally freaked out in the second part of the call. And he takeaways from listening to that. The one thing that stood out to me was he was saying, my wife is dead, my house has been robbed. I feel like if I was dead, you wouldn't even mention the house being robbed. Yeah, that's a really good point. Officers arrived to find Simonette's body face down on the main floor of the townhouse, near the bottom of the stairs.

17:18 Anne appeared that she had been pushed down the staircase and then stabbed in the back, neck, and chest. There were no bullet holes, no shell casings, just a lot of stab wounds fifteen of them in total. That seemed highly unusual for a supposed burglary gone wrong. The house was extremely disheveled. Drawers were pulled out in the kitchen and bedroom, and dressers had been rifled through. It was the kind of mess you'd expect from someone tearing through a home looking for valuables. A sliding glass door at the back of the townhouse was standing open two or three inches. The only apparent point of entry, since there was no sign of forest entry anywhere else. But as investigators processed the scene, it seemed that almost no nothing of real value was actually missing. Simonette's engagement ring was untouched, so were the cash, the credit cards, and, notably, given how much they were worth, Jonathan's sneaker collection. Investigators swabbed the sliding door, along with knives pulled from the dishwasher and other items around the house, and sent everything out for DNA testing. Trace DNA from an unidentified person turned up on a jewelry box inside the condo, a detail that on its own kept the door open to a stranger having been inside the home. Even more significantly, a mixture of two DNA profiles were found on the handle of the sliding glass door. One belonged to Jonathan, which wasn't as surprise as he lived there. The other belonged to an unknown female. It didn't match Simonette or anyone

18:48 else close to the couple. Investigators also noticed something on Jonathan himself, a small cut on his right middle finger, red marks across his left hand and fingers, and a linear abrasion on his left forearm. When a detective asked him about it. The same day, he said he'd cut his hand on a milk crate while collecting books and materials from his classroom. As far a separate bruise on his shin, Jonathan had an explanation ready for that too. He said he'd banged his leg a couple of days earlier while helping someone removed old carpet from a recreational vehicle, an oddly specific story that investigators filed away without being able to disprove it outright. So all these wounds and bruising on him, was he subjected to a body search?

19:37 Yeah? I think he voluntarily submitted to a search of his body. As the police were processing the scene, words started spreading that something terrible had happened inside the townhouse on Forest Hill Road. Family members showed up, creating a chaotic scene on the front lawn. Overwhelmed with grief, People were crying, screaming, passing out on the lawn and asking when did this happen? Adding to the chaos, the press showed up as well. Semonette's uncle, Anthony Casarino, screamed at the gathered reporters, demanding their turn off their cameras he had to be physically calmed down by a police officer. What time did Anthony leave and what time did he return to the condo?

20:18 He left the house of the condo around seven thirty am. He got back He called nine to one one at one fifty, so I think he got back a couple of minutes before then. So a condo here, sometimes a condo can be called a house. Is this condo like a freestanding condo? Or is it in a complex? From what I could tell by looking at Google Maps, it looks like it's a It's like a house with two units in it, maybe like a duplex, I think so. I was just thinking how unlikely it would be to be robbed during the day if you lived inside a building with. Multiple units, right, Yeah, that makes sense. We'll be back after a break.

21:00 In the initial days of the investigation, detectives had to consider every possibility. Was this a burglary that had turned violent. Was somebody after Jonathan's sneaker collection, even though it appeared none had been taken. Did it connect back to the shooting near the school a couple weeks earlier. Did a gang member see Simonette's Facebook post and decide that she was a possible witness who needed to be dealt with. Detective Michael Burdick from the New York Police Department's Homicide Squad took the lead on the investigation, alongside Detective Joseph Metsopolis, who had been one of the first officers on the scene. Something about it bothered Burdick from the start. Fifteen stab wounds would typically point to a crime of passion, something personal, the kind of violence that comes from rage, not from a stranger interrupted mid Burglary. Jonathan, for his part, was interviewed at the one hundred and twenty second precinct less than two hours after the body was discovered. Urtic said that he came across as calm and collected, matter of fact, non emotional, articulate, while Metsopolis described him as looking a bit like he was in shock. Both were simply describing what they observed. Neither detective could say with any certainty what it meant. New Springville isn't the kind of place that people associate with violent crime. The block on Forest Hill Road sat across the street from a golf course and was home to a mix of doctors, pharmacists, and store managers. It was a quiet, well kept Street, where

22:33 neighbors said they'd never seen so much as a car accident. When words spread that a young school teacher had been stabbed to death inside her own home, people who lived nearby described it as something closer to disbelief than fear. It was surreal, the last thing anyone would expect to happen here. Five days after the murder, Simonette's funeral was held at her church, Our Lady of Pity Roman Catholic Church in Bullshead, with a Mass at nine thirty in the morning and burial following at Resurrection Cemetery in Pleasant Plains. Hundreds of people came. Students from the School for Classics turned out in force, many of them from the toughest blocks of East New York. Family members later described roughly fifty members of the Bloods and the Crypts among the mourners, two gangs that were by definition enemies, who called an informal truce that day out of respect for a teacher who had never treated any of them like the enemy.

23:28 Reporters were there too, along with the police, quietly watching the crowd, hoping someone might let something slip. Synonette's uncle, Nicholas Liverani, spoke to a Staten Island Advance reporter outside, saying he wanted his niece's killer found and that he was looking for justice. Her mother, Teresa, was even more direct, vowing to an interviewer that she would find whoever did this and they would pay. It wouldn't bring her daughter back, but somewhere Symonette would know that her mother would not leave any stone unturned in seeking justice. While Simonette's family had loved Jonathan, the relationship between the Mapes and Croopy families fractured almost immediately after Symonette's death. In the days leading up to the funeral, while the two sides of the family were together making arrangements, Jonathan seemed emotionally distant.

24:19 He was unable to look any of Symonette's family members in the eye, and he seemed strangely determined to avoid being in the same room as the rest of them. Her uncle said, when we were downstairs, he was upstairs. When we were upstairs, he was downstairs. At the time, it seemed like it could have been grief or awkwardness, or just two families who didn't know how to be around each other in the worst week of their lives. There was another thing that struck investigators and Symonette's family as strange. The day after the murder, Jonathan went to the Staten Island mall and bought new sneakers and clothes. A cashier at the Finish Line store there remembered him well out of nowhere. He volunteered, completely unprompted that his wife had just been killed. The moment stuck with the store manager. People process emotions differently, she reasoned, But something about how he had blurted it out to a stranger, ringing up a pair of sneakers felt very strange to her.

25:18 After the funeral, the two sides of the family stopped speaking completely. Over the following days and weeks, detectives went through Jonathan's account of his July fifth activities piece by piece. Surveillance video placed him at the school that morning, right where he said he was, and a time stamped receipt backed up his stop to get the car inspected. So far, his alibi held up, but two things didn't add up. First, the books that he said he needed for summer school had already been moved out of his classroom days earlier. By all accounts, Simonett already had all the books and materials she needed to teach her summer classes, so there was no real reason for that particular stop up. Second, nobody could find any record that he had actually gone to home depot. You remember. His story was that he had pulled into the parking lot and seeing that Simonette hadn't texted him back about the painting project, he decided not to go in and just went home instead. But a search through the parking lot surveillance footage didn't turn up any sign of his car. That part of his day had a hole in it, and for the moment, investigators couldn't say what filled it. Weeks went by without a lot of progress in the investigation. Simonette's mother expressed her mounting frustration, telling reporters, I'm leaving it in their hands and I hope to God they find this son of a bitch. Investigators decided to dig deeper into the couple's electronic devices, and that's when they got the first big break in the case. In digging through records pulled

26:49 from Symonette's phone, they noticed something curious in her contacts list, an entry saved simply as woman with no other name attached to it, detectives did some searching to find out who the number belonged to. That led them to an advertisement on the classified ad website called Backpage. The familiar with Backpage no a. Backpage had started out as an ordinary classified site, the kind of place that people went to sell furniture or post apartment listings, kind of similar to Craigslist. But after Craigslist shut down its adult services section in twenty ten under pressure from law enforcement, a lot of that traffic migrated over to Backpage, and its adult ads section grew into one of the largest of its kind on the Internet. For years, it was also one of the most heavily scrutinized corners of the web, with federal and state investigators across the country treating it as a go to resource. The site would eventually be seized and shut down by federal authorities in twenty eighteen.

27:51 Its founders were indicted on charges related to facilitating prostitution, but in the summer of twenty twelve it was still very much in operation. The listing they found on Backpage, which was tied to the mystery phone number in Simonette's contacts, belonged to a sex worker who advertised under the name Miss Pumpkin or ad described herself as a twenty three year old escort with a curvy body type. Detectives knew they would need to talk to Miss Pumpkin, but they were worried about scaring her away. So the detectives booked a session with her through the website, posing as a typical client, and arranged to meet her at the Staten Island Inn. Detectives Burdick and Cosenza showed up and immediately identified themselves as police. They needn't have worried about scaring her.

28:38 Miss Pumpkin was fully cooperative from the start. She told them that she had never heard the name Simonette mates Croopy, and she had never heard of Jonathan Croopy either, not until they described him and showed her a photo. That is, then she recognized him instantly, But she knew him as Mike. She told detectives he was a longtime regular, some one who she had been seeing for years at a rate of three hundred dollars an hour. Now, that might explain where the money went that Jonathan was supposed to be using for tuition. Holy cow, what a dirt bag, they. Asked, When she had last seen him, and her answer floored the detectives. It was July fifth, she said, the same day that Jonathan Croupy had claimed to be out running errands before coming home to discover his wife's body on the floor of their townhouse. Ms Pumpkins said that normally Jonathan would schedule their dates far in advance, sometimes weeks, but on this occasion, he had called her the same day and insisted on meeting her right away. She met him at a nearby motel. It didn't take long for detectives to realize what that meant the exact window when Jonathan claimed he had been standing in a home depot parking lot. The one part of his alibi nobody could confirm was the same time period he had actually spent with the woman known as MS. Pumpkin. A hunch, investigators tested ms pumpkins DNA and compared it to the unidentified female profile recovered from the sliding glass door. It was

30:09 a match that raised an obvious question. Had she been inside the house herself and was she involved in Simonette's murder. She admitted that she had met Jonathan at his house before, but not on July fifth. In fact, it had been over a year since she had been there, and her cell phone records supported her story. Detectives concluded that her DNA had simply traveled home on Jonathan after their encounter and transferred onto the door when he touched it. Later. She was cleared as a suspect but remained an important witness. It's been a while since we talked about this, but transferred DNA. The DNA testing has gotten so good and so accurate that when they test for DNA, it's very possible that you know, you touched something, then touched something else, and it just ends up, you know, getting there through indirect content.

31:00 Yeah. Ms Pumpkin gave investigators proof that Simonett and Jonathan Croopy's marriage wasn't what it looked like from the outside. It was also proof that he had lied to police about exactly where he was before discovering his wife's body. It was powerful evidence, but still wasn't quite what detectives needed. In some ways, it helped Jonathan because now his whereabouts could be fully accounted for from the time he left that townhouse at seven thirty am on July fifth until he came home around one forty five pm. Detectives decided to go back and examine the crime scene again. They'd kept the townhouse sealed off since July fifth, preserved exactly as it was on the day of the murder. This time, they discovered a green shoulder bag shoved out of sight in a closet on the main floor, which contained a laptop they hadn't discovered during their initial processing of the crime scene. This finding was critical for two reasons. One was what they found on the laptop itself, which we'll talk about in a minute, but perhaps more importantly, in reviewing the surveillance footage of Jonathan from that day, they saw that he had the bag with him while he was out running errands. That was a problem because Simonette's body was found directly in front of the closet containing the green bag. Jonathan must have had the bag with him when he came home, which meant that he had to step over his wife's body to shove the bag into the corner of the closet before calling nine one one.

32:30 It didn't seem like something an innocent man would do. On the laptop, forensic examiners found incriminating search terms from the months leading up to the murder. How to slit a throat, what destroys DNA, how to clean up a crime scene. One search in particular, stopped investigator's cold, given exactly how Simonette had died. Does a fall actually break someone's back? Symonette had been pushed down a flight of stairs before she was stabbed. The green bag yielded even more compelling evidence. Alongside the laptop was a second phone, a disposable, prepaid device that he'd used to call Miss Pumpkin on the day of Simonet's death and to arrange encounters with other sex workers over the years. Records from that phone showed ten calls to sex workers On July fifth.

33:22 Alone called ten sex workers of the day his wife was found, Oh my god, murdered. I wanted to talk just for a minute about the discovery of this green bag. So I don't know the exact date when they did this second search of the condo, but it was I believe it was weeks after her death, maybe even a couple of months after her death, So. They were holding the condo for that long. Yeah, So I think they kind of screwed up by not finding it on the first search, right, that would be an important piece of evidence, and I'm sure it was tucked away in a closet, you know, maybe hidden a little bit, But the fact that they didn't find it on the first search a little concerning. But the fact that they preserved this crime scene for that long surprised me as well. Yeah, and it's really fortunate that they did, because otherwise, you know, if they had let Jonathan back in, who knows what might have happened.

34:13 Christ he wouldn't have snuck back in and taken the bag. Yeah. Piecing it together with what Theresa had already told them about that tearful phone call in the night of July fourth, detectives believed they understood what had happened. Simonette had confronted her husband first about the master's degree, and they suspected about the money and the woman whose number she had discovered, and it had ended in violence. That still left the question of how Jonathan could have done it, since he had an alibi from seven thirty am until the time he called nine one one. But by that time, the Medical Examiner's office had concluded that Semonette's time of death was likely before seven thirty am, so it seemed that Jonathan had pushed Simonette down the stairs earlier that more morning, brutally stabbed her fifteen times, and then gone about his day running errands and meeting up with Miss Pumpkin for sex.

35:08 So obviously this is already disturbing enough, you know, thinking what Jonathan did to his wife, but the fact that he killed her that morning and then is out calling sex workers and meeting up with Miss Pumpkin to have an encounter with her, it's just so so disturbing. For four months after the murder, Jonathan Croopy lived at his parents' house in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn. Publicly, he gave almost no comment beyond telling one reporter who came to the door that he had nothing to say, and November thirteen to twenty twelve, police arrested him and charged him with second degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon. The criminal complaint alleged he'd stabbed his wife early on the morning of July fifth inside their New Springville condominium. The day after his arrest, Jonathan was escorted from the one hundred and twentieth Precinct to face a rain in Staten Island Criminal Court, wearing a bright yellow jacket a green shirt and black pants. He walked past a crowd that included some of Semonette's relatives and former students.

36:11 Several jeered at him as he passed, yelling things like piece of crap, that's too generous. During the arraignment, Jonathan's lawyer asked the judge for protective custody and medical attention for Jonathan, saying that his client was suffering from high blood pressure. The request elicited derisive laughter from Semonette's family members in the gallery. One man was ejected from the courtroom after shouting an insult and being caught taking photos with his phone. Jonathan was held without bail. His attorney, Mario Galucci, told reporters his client was innocent and distraught over the loss of his wife. Teresa Mapes had her own reaction to the arrest, one that had been building for four months. She called her son in law a soulless demon and pointed out that in all that time, he had never once reached out to her, never called to say he hadn't done it, never offered so much as a word. In his own defense to the woman who had once said that she couldn't have picked a better son, in law herself. At the formal arraignment on the grand jury indictment the following month, Jonathan entered a not guilty plea through his lawyer and made no statement of his own. The case then sat for years while pretrial motions worked their way through the courts. The most significant of those involved a defense challenge to the warrants investigators had used to search Jonathan's home, computers, vehicles, and phones.

37:37 His attorney argued that some of the warrants contained address errors. One listed one four four six Forest Hill Road, not one four four six Dash one, which was the actual address. Another listed Richmond Hill Road as the street name. They argued that the mistakes should have invalidated everything seized under them. Please. In April twenty fifteen, the State Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that the heirs were purely typographical errors. Given how obviously the couple's home swarmed with police, with Simonette's body still visible through the front door, was the intented location of every search, it was one more procedural hurdle cleared on the long road to trial for Simonette's family. Those years of motions and delays were a painful ordeal her uncle, Nicholas Laverani put words to the exhaustion the whole family was feeling when he told a reporter, there are no winners in this situation. We'll be back after a break.

38:46 The trial finally began in June of twenty fifteen, nearly three years after Simonette's death. Assistant District attorneys Wanda di'alla vera and Guy Tartaniko led the prosecution. Mario Galuti represented Jonathan. The two sides had faced off in several homicide trials before. During jury selection, Galuchi pushed for a panel with more men than women on it, on the theory that a male jur would be more likely to understand and forgive a husband lying to police to hide an affair with a sex worker, even if that same juror wouldn't excuse a lie told to Hede a murder. The prosecution's case was almost entirely circumstantial. Investigators had not found the murder weapon, they had no eye witness, and there was no direct forensic link placing a knife in Jonathan's hand. So the prosecutors built their case around motive, a marriage crumbling under the weight of infidelity, debt, and a lie about a master's degree that was about to cost Jonathan his job.

39:46 They reminded jurors that nothing of real value had been taken from a house supposedly ransacked by a burglar. The woman known as Miss Pumpkin took the stand under her real name, which has not been disclosed, and testified to the same account that she had given detectives years earlier, the standing arrangement, the alias Mike, and the July fifth phone call that pulled her into a motel room during the time that Jonathan claimed to be running an errand at home depot. The prosecutor, Wanda Diallavera, later noted that Ms. Pumpkins surprised the courtroom by being quote a lovely woman, very pleasant, very well put together, and obviously educated, shattering the stereotype of sex workers and making her a highly credible, devastating witness for the prosecution.

40:32 I guess I don't love how the prosecutor is describing Miss Pumpkin here, like, why wouldn't she be a lovely woman? Yeah? I think that is absolutely a fair comment. Detectives walked the jury through the laptop searches, the disposable phone, and the cell tower records. Detective Michael Cosenza, who had examined Jonathan's work issued laptop, testified that the machine had been used for more than sixty thousand Internet searches over the years. Investigators reviewed everything from sneaker releases to hip hop message boards to comic book forums. Under cross examination, Galucchi pressed him to acknowledge that the handful of searches about killing methods and DNA were a tiny fraction of the total. Cosenza didn't dispute the math, but he also wouldn't concede that the point mattered. Investigators, he said, were focused on what those particular searches showed about intent, not on what percentage of the browsing history they represented. I feel like the defense was kind of grasping its straws here.

41:31 They're basically saying, well, he only searched a few searches about how to kill someone, and he had all these others, Like, so what does that matter? The defense introduced an alternate explanation for the incriminating internet searches. Galucci argued that Jonathan had been teaching Macbeth to his students that year, and that queries like how to slit a Throat reflected classroom research, not premeditation. I'm not quite sure why he would search for what destroys DNA, because I don't think they had DNA testing in Macbeth. But he also pointed the jury back toward that trace DNA recovered from the jewelry box inside the condo, DNA that had never been matched to anyone, arguing that it was proof that an intruder had been in the house and that investigators had simply stopped looking once they had settled on Jonathan as their suspect. How much do you think if you searched on random objects in our house, unknown DNA would show up on things.

42:29 I don't know, but finding unidentified DNA on a jewelry box is kind of surprising, because certain areas of your home, like your guest bathroom, for example, you would expect to find unknown DNA possibly, but not in your private quarters. Yeah. I think that's probably true, although again, with the quality of DNA testing nowadays, DNA can get transferred from one person to another so easily that I truly wonder how common it would be just to take a random object in someone's home and find, you know, someone's unknown DNA on it. Well, I think we need to point out here that unknown DNA doesn't mean that it's unknown DNA. Sometimes it means that it's it's not the best quality DNA, so it can't be identified.

43:12 Right, Yeah, that's true too. Jonathan's defense attorney also challenged the medical examiner's estimated time of death. If the murder took place any later than seven point thirty that morning, that would have left Jonathan's tightly documented schedule of errands and his rendezvous with a sex worker no real time to commit the murder at all. Finally, the defense worked to reframe the physical evidence found on Jonathan's body the day of the murder. The cut on his finger, the abrasions on his hand and shin. They said they were all consistent with his own explanation a minor accident while boxing up classroom materials, rather than a struggle. None of it moved the jury. After five weeks of testimony, they deliberated for less than two hours before finding Jonathan Creepy guilty of second degree murder. By the time the verdict was read, Simonette's family had been waiting more than three years for justice. Simonette's mother had said for years that she wouldn't rest until this moment came. Now that it had, there was little celebration in it, just quiet, exhausted relief.

44:16 At sentencing on September twenty third, twenty fifteen, in a packed Saint George courtroom, Symonette's father, John Mapes, delivered an emotionally charged victim impact statement. Fighting back tears, he spoke movingly of the relentless pain, sorrow, and heartbreak that his family endured every single day since his daughter's brutal murder. While he spoke, a handcuffed Jonathan Croopy sat at the defense table, looking straight ahead without making eye contact. Jonathan stood and read from his own handwritten statement. He apologized for lying, He apologized for cheating on his wife, and he apologized to his parents for having to sit through a trial in which his infidelities were recounted in exhaustive, humiliating detail. But he stopped short of the one apology everyone in the courtroom was waiting for. I did not kill her, he told the judge. I am an innocent man.

45:10 Justice Mario Mattei wasn't moved. He told Croopy that the evidence of his guilt was every bit as powerful as his total lack of remorse. He called the killing a selfish act committed against a woman who had done nothing but bring joy and inspiration to the people around her. He handed down the maximum sentence available, twenty five years to life. Acting District Attorney Daniel Master said in a statement that the sentence delivered just punishment for such a horrific crime. Outside the courthouse, Nicholas Liverani said the family had watched the proceedings closely. They were happy with the outcome, but he emphasized that no sentence could undo what had been taken from them. Galucci, still representing his client at sentencing, told reporters afterward that Jonathan remained heartbroken to imagine that he was even considered a suspect, and that he continued to maintain his innocence. Whatever the jury and the judge believed.

46:06 Jonathan's lawyer was not walking that position back regardless, Jonathan was led away in handcuffs to serve a quarter century or more behind bars. Jonathan Croopy didn't stop fighting the conviction after his sentencing. He appealed, arguing, among other things, that the search warrants used to seize his devices had been improperly broad, and that the trial judge had wrongly limited his lawyer's ability to cross examine one of the cases law enforcement witnesses about an unrelated civil lawsuit that might have undercut the officer's credibility. In May twenty nineteen, New York's Appellate Division rejected both arguments and affirmed the conviction, finding that the warrants were supported by sufficient probable cause and that the trial court had acted within its discretion.

46:53 A few years later, in twenty twenty three, Jonathan petitioned the same court again, this time claiming his appellate aturne Erny had been ineffective the first time around. That appeal was also denied. Jonathan Croopy, now forty four, is incarcerated at Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in dan Mora, New York, near the Canadian border. Under the terms of his sentence, he won't be eligible for parole until twenty thirty seven, when he will be fifty two, which still seems very young. In the years since her death, Simonette's family has worked hard to make sure that she is remembered for the life that she lived, not just the way it ended. Just ten weeks after the murder, with the case still unsolved, her parents launched Sissy's Angels, named for Simonette's family nickname. It started with a memorial motorcycle ride that crossed the Verizano Bridge from Staten Island to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, one of Simonette's favorite places. What began as a single tribute ride grew into a registered nonprofit that today supports victims of domestic violence regardless of age or gender, offering shelter, clothing, funding, legal guidance, and scholarships to high school students, along with holiday food baskets and free babysitting services for military families at Fort Hamilton.

48:14 In September twenty fourteen, the city co named the corner of Forest Hill Road and Travis Avenue in New Springville Symonet mapes Way. Family, friends, and former colleagues gathered for the unveiling. A representative from the Teachers Union, Donna Coppola, spoke about the enormous impact that Simonet had on both her colleagues and her students. Her uncle, Frank Liverani, described how she used to pay for things to help students quietly out of her own pocket, without any fuss. By twenty fifteen, Teresa had spent eleven years working as a security assistant at the Department of Energy Services on the Fort Hamilton Army Base in Brooklyn, the same base where Simonette had once lived as a kid, and Teresa folded that connection into her nonprofit's work, running a thrift shop and providing babysitting services there for military families at no charge.

49:08 In March twenty fifteen, the Staten Island Advance named Teresa the Burrough's Top inspirational Islander for that work. She told the newspaper quote, I am overwhelmed and shocked and so happy. She's continued that work in her daughter's name ever since, saying her goal now is to be her daughter's voice for anyone still affected by domestic violence. Years before any of that recognition, in the fall of twenty twelve, with the case still unsolved and a killer walking free, Teresa and her husband John sat down for a local television interview and said, we had a beautiful daughter inside and out who didn't deserve to die like this. She has said that she is thankful that God gave her the gift of having Synonet as her daughter for the time that they had her, everyone who knew Synonet Mapes described her in similar terms. Warm, extremely empathetic, a bit of a dreamer, someone who believed in Disney movies, in second chances, and in angels. Just twenty nine years old when she died.

50:09 Simonett is buried at Resurrection Cemetery in Pleasant Plains, Saten Island. Rest in peace, Simonette. It sounds like she had such a wonderful family and her mom, I mean, how inspirational, Like after that significant loss, she just wants to do good in her daughter's name. Like that's so beautiful. It really is. Yeah, and her family just seems really lovely. They're like kind of a classic New York family. Like the interviews I saw with them, they are very very New York, you know, but they just seem like they were so close and so, you know, just a really lovely family. So a few things I wanted to talk about. One is that it seems like you have no doubt that Johnathan is guilty. Here I'm just I'm guessing, right, but there really was no evidence that was directly linking him.

50:56 It was all circumstantial. But what do you think was the most convey and sing piece of the evidence that was against Jonathan. One of the things that stands out to me is the timeline. She had just found out that he was lying about getting his master's degree. That's pretty damning. But then she he left so early that morning, and it seemed likely that she was killed. You know, she had been right right. The murder weapon was never found. Yeah, which seemed a little strange to me. I mean, maybe he just cleaned it really well. They did find knives in the dishwasher. I was going to ask you about that at the time. Yeah, I don't know how easy it would be to clean a knife.

51:37 I think a night Well depends if it was on you know, I guess what kind of knife it was, because if the handles would I would think that that would be harder than it was. Yeah. I don't know if maybe he was able to hide it somewhere. Or if it just got a big place. Yeah, that's that's true. I do think the timeline, like you said, it seems very clear that things came to a head between them. She had talked to her mom earlier, you know, saying and she was very upset, and she had discovered this about him. So it seemed like likely they had an argument, that things came to a head, and that you know, he pushed her down the stairs. So do you think it was a crime of passion? I kind of do, yeah. I mean, I think second degree murder is probably the right conclusion in this case.

52:19 It doesn't seem like it was. Although he did have internet searches, I guess, so you know, there was some premeditation there, but I guess there wasn't enough evidence of premeditation to go for first degree. Like the internet searches were done in the days before her death, or had they been done. I think they were, it was over a longer period. I didn't find the exact timeline of the internet searches. What it seemed to me is that they were over a period of months leading up. So I'm not really sure. Though. Did it surprise you that the police didn't find this green bag? I mean that ended up being the key to the case, and they didn't find it until they came back and searched the house a second time. And I don't know how common it is when you're searching the crime scene, Like, I don't know how meticulous they are, but I would think they would go through every nook and cranny of a crime scene like that.

53:08 Well, we are watching a TV show right now, and they just had a police search and it was very, very thorough, like the house was trashed after And I've never had anyone search our house before, so I am curious how thorough the searches really are. But it was more surprising to me that they didn't release the crime scene for you said at least two months after. Yeah. Sure, Jonathan was chomping at the bit. Yeah, and you hear all the time, like a lot of the stories that we've done before, the police turned the crime scene back over. To twenty four to seventy two hours. Yeah, and a lot of times it seems like, wow, that was really way too fast because they couldn't have processed everything. So yeah, that was also very surprising.

53:48 Did you see any pictures of the bag? Was it like a messenger bag or. A I did not see any pictures. I'm wondering if they thought possibly it was a purse or something. Maybe Yeah, I don't know. I didn't see pictures of it. One thing I found interesting about this case is just the level of the secrets that Jonathan had so not only was he seeing sex workers multiple times, spending hundreds of dollars, but also pretending to attend classes towards his master's degree, like keeping this up for I don't know how long, but I would presume a. Couple of years, right, Yeah, And it. Just surprises me that someone can be so audacious to be married and have secrets that are that big.

54:30 Not that our marriage is perfect, but I feel like two people like us who are in a healthy relationship that don't lie to each other, it is hard for us to believe, but there are plenty of people out there that are also in bad marriages. They're probably like, oh, that's not surprising to me at all. Right, you know, my husband has lied about X, Y and Z for you know, a long time. Yeah, very true. It breaks my heart though, because Simonette was such a lovely person and she really wanted to make the world a better place, and hear her husband is just to just garbage. I know, it's so unfair to her to. Yeah, she deserves so much better than that. A lot of times we tell these stories, and obviously we always respect the victims and we always want to honor the victims.

55:14 The victims aren't always great people, but in this case, she just seemed like almost the saint, Like she was just such a good person. And well, let me clarify your comments a little bit, because no one deserves to be killed by their Absolutely. Yeah, I'm not trying to imply that at all. But I just do feel like she was such a purely good person that it just makes me really angry. That one of the grossest things about this case was that he called Ms. Pumpkin to have, you know, a date after he killed his wife, Right, And you said, like, I don't know if it was because it was like a holiday weekend or something that he had called all those other people. Right, Yeah, I assume he called a bunch. You don't really know why he called tene.

55:55 I don't. I just assume he was trying to find line someone up, you know. But it seemed odd that if Ms Pumpkin was his tenth call, the one that he finally got through, Like, did he have nine other sex workers that he was seeing regularly over the years. Yeah, it's really hard to wrap your head around, it really is. But did he get off on killing his wife? Do you think that's why he needed a date? I have no idea. I don't even like to think about that. It may have been that he was, you know, under feeling stressed. I don't know. That's just so disgusting. Though. You probably don't know the answer to this, but do you have any idea how much his shoe collection was worth? I really don't. Sounds like there were quite a few shoes and the value was like between three and five hundred dollars each pair, So yeah, probably quite a bit.

56:43 How do you think Jonathan likes the shoes in prison? I hope that he doesn't like them at all. It really bothers me a little bit too, that he you know, he got twenty five years to life, which could mean it could mean as little as twenty five years, which would mean that he could get out of prison as early as fifty two. And that's you know, that's still you've got a lot of life ahead of you, yea, at fifty two. I hope he doesn't get out of prison then. But yeah, another thing I wanted to mention that I thought was really gross was the jury selection. This always bothers me, like, you know, the prosecution is like, well it's no, I'm sorry. It was the defense yeah, they wanted men. Yeah, they wanted men like, yeah, not all met are gross.

57:25 That's really unfair. But yeah, do you think that there's truth in that. I don't see how that would have really helped him. I know, you know, attorneys have to do what they think is the best for their client, and I think they were desperate, maybe because some of the arguments that we talked about that they were trying to put out there just felt more like desperation, like they really didn't have much of a leg to stand on. So I like to think that was the case, But yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And what about all these poor students. You know, they lost both, like, you know, two teachers from the same school. That must have been really devastating to these young Yeah. I'm sure. Well, that is the story of Semonet Mapes.

58:10 One of the things that really stuck with me researching the story was just how much Siminet poured into her students, buying prom dresses out of her own pocket, staying after hours, making sure that kids who had almost nothing still felt like they mattered. Teachers like that, they don't just teach a subject, They shape how a kids sees themselves, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Teachers can have an impact on students in a lot of different ways. For Simonet, I think it was her generosity, but others might spark like intellectual curiosity, or challenge you to think in ways that you never thought of, or just show up when you need someone there. So it got me thinking about my own teachers. I think we all have teachers that left a mark for better or worse. Who were the most memorable teachers that you if you think back on your school days.

58:58 I had a lot, a lot of really wonderful teachers. I was a pretty quiet kid. I think just a couple of weeks ago, I talked about how I had a teacher that taught me how to read essentially, and she was amazing. I had a really great school from first grade to sixth grade, and it was a smaller school and I felt like everyone knew each other and it was just a really warm, loving environment and just a lot of nurturing teachers. And yeah, I know miss Jenkins who later got married. I had her for two years and she was my favorite. I was just but yeah, I mean I had a lot of great ones, but yeah. I also a lot of great ones, but when I was thinking back about this, the one that stood out for me is it's kind of an odd choice. My chemistry teacher in high school his name was mister Bryce, and he could be really tough, Like a lot of people did not like him at all. He regularly could he could make people cry in the classroom because he would be kind of he would just be very tough.

59:56 I remember one time he used to call people up to the chalk word randomly and he'd be like asked, He'd put a problem up and you would have to solve it in front of the class. And one day I went up and I had no idea what I was doing. I hadn't done my homework. And I remember he said to me, little studying goes a long way, hey, rich And I said, I said, I wouldn't know, sir, because I didn't do the study. And it was he was so tough, But at the same time, like after the end of the semester, I was like, you know, he really made me. He challenged me in ways that I don't think other people had challenged me, and he made me think in different ways, and it really like I don't know it left the mark on me for sure. When you were such a good kid, I think, in a really good student, So I imagine any time a teacher called you out on saying it made a huge impact because you wanted to be the best and the times.

1:00:47 Well, one of the things he did to that I thought was really interesting is he said, at the beginning of the year, chemistry is cumulative, So if you get bad grades throughout the year, but you ace your final exam, I'm going to change all your grades to A. And that's exactly what happened to me. I was like going with like a CB minus through the entire school year. You were now in chemistry. I was, and then I studied really hard for the final exam and I aced it. He changed all my grades to an A. What was your high school GPA? I know, you know it was like three points seven maybe something like that. Okay, I thought you would be slightly closer to four points. It was your high school GPA.

1:01:27 I really have no idea, but it wasn't a sportifinal. Okay. I have another story, and I hope he's listening, but my no doubt. My trigonometry teacher, who was also the football coach. I blame him because I thought he was not like the best teacher, but I could have studied harder and I wanted to drop the class and my mom was like, oh, yeah, sure, you don't need to go ahead. I don't care to drop it. And so I went to him with my drop slip and he was furious. He was like, I'm not going to let you drop this class and I was like, well, I don't want it, I don't need it, you know, blah blah blah, and he was like adamant that I shouldn't drop it, and I feel like he did. I don't know.

1:02:09 I had to like do another step or two because he refused to sign it. Did you end up dropping it? Still? I did? And he was right, yeah, So well it's good that you can look back at it. Yeah, like I should have tried harder, and he yeah, he was right. I do think it is interesting how you know, teacher, it's not just when you're teaching and you have an impact. It's not just about being nice and thoughtful. It's also about challenging your students and you know, sometimes disagreeing or you know, coming down on them a little bit. So it is important. Well, good luck to all the teachers that are listening. We love you and support you, and you're amazing. You are amazing. And it is back to school time now. Yeah, good luck to all the parents, good luck to all the teachers, good luck to all the students. Well.

1:02:53 Shout out to the state of Michigan for being such a beautiful state. We spent yet anotheration in our beautiful state. I mean it really is a beautiful state. So we went to the up and we visited a couple of places. It stands for Upper Peninsula. Those are across the Mighty Mac. That's that's another. Story bridge, yes, way up north. Yeah, so we crossed over to uh, you could call it like Wisconsin East. It is attached to it and that attached to Michigan. But beautiful area. But we went to We've been through through Munising, but we have never done the pictured rocks. You have to take a boat to see the pictured rocks or a kayak out there.

1:03:36 And we finally took the boat right and saw the pictured rocks, which were beautiful. Yeah. But we also went to Taekwanamon Falls, which was stunning. I'm so glad we did that. Yeah, really incredible. Yeah, So if you ever have the opportunity to go to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, definitely check those two things out. Absolutely. It really is a beautiful state. And that actually leads me to one final thing I wanted to just briefly mentioned, and it may not sound related, but I'm a little bit angry with the Detroit Tigers organization right now. Organization. So, there are these influencers from the UK named Josh and Jase, and they travel around to different places and make videos, and they've been in Michigan for like quite a while and they came here last winter and I just actually watched a video where they were summing up their trip to Michigan and it really is lovely. If you have a chance, check it out and show I can do that.

1:04:29 Yeah. But they were invited by the Detroit Tigers organization to throw out the first pitch at a Tigers game. And this is not the first time podcasters or other folks have been invited to throw out the first pitch. There was the Chef Reactions guy who I follow also, he also has adopted Detroit as his second home. He got to throw out the first pitch, And here you have a podcaster who lives in the state of Michigan, who has been a Tigers fan his entire life and has never been asked to throw out the first pitch at a Tiger's game. So I am putting a plea out there for any of you who work for the Tigers organization know somebody that works for the Tigers organization. I think it would be only fair to have the hosts of Love Mary Kill out to throw the first pitch.

1:05:18 Prayer. I hope that works out for you, sir. I know we're not quite as big as maybe Josh and Jace or the or the food the Chef Reactions guy, but can confirm we are not. But I'm definitely a bigger Tigers fan than all of those folks. Well, it was really a rude awakening to come home, you know how Like you talking about influencers, and I've followed you know, some influencers throughout the years who have really gotten very popular, and they'll go from you know, a thousand followers to five million, and then you can see the changes in their life because their trips are no longer you know, their vacations are to Europe or and then you see them moving and their homes are like, you know, these beautiful, elaborate homes. And you know, we've been at this for a few years and definitely we're so grateful for all the support that we've had, but we still like the change that you'll see in our life is we'll talk about if we become, you know, hit it big, we will have a new ice maker and our freezer, because coming home after staying in airbnbs that have ice makers, I'm like such a lunch gosh darted.

1:06:25 We still have this stupid ice maker situation that we still have to make. I know, someday, honey, we'll get a well, get a nice, nice freezer. Well. And I also say a lot of that is also environmental, because I can't justify throwing a face away. Yeah, maybe we'll get that. We have talked about getting the countertop ice maker, but we still have done it. I guess it just thanks just escape my brain. But anyway, we love you guys, Thank you so much for listening. If you love our show and would like to support us, please consider supporting us on page go to patreon dot com slash love Marykill. We only have one tier. We keep it nice and easy for five dollars a month, you got early ad free access and a monthly bonus episode.

1:07:11 Find us on social media, send us an email at Lovemarykill at gmail dot com, or go to our website at Lovemarykill dot com and leave us a voice message. Until next time, don't kill your wife and don't kill your husband.