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A Package Bomb Blew Apart a California Spa. Then a Love Triangle Led Detectives to the Killer · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So it is Saturday, July four, twenty twenty six, and
• 0:05
  depending on where you are right now, you know, you
• 0:07
  might be gearing up for a barbecue, yeah, or.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: Like hauling a cooler to a park somewhere.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Right, or sticking out a spot to watch the fireworks tonight.
• 0:14
  It's just a day we universally associate with a predictable
• 0:17
  booming spectacle in the sky.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: Controlled spectacle is exactly.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: But today I really want you to cast your mind
• 0:23
  to a very different kind of explosion.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: One that definitely didn't happen in the sky, no.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: Not at all, and one that was entirely just horrifyingly unexpected.
• 0:33
  So I want you to picture Aliso Viejo, California.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, such a specific vibe there, right.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: If you haven't been there, just imagine the quintessential sun
• 0:43
  drenched suburban dream. The streets are lined with palm trees,
• 0:46
  the neighborhoods are just aggressively family friendly.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: You can practically feel the ocean breeze from the nearby
• 0:52
  Orange County beaches. It's it's tranquil, it's safe.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it is the absolute last place you'd expect.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: A bomb to go off without a doubt.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: But on a Tuesday afternoon in May of twenty eighteen,
• 1:03
  that pristine tranquility was quite literally shattered to pieces.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: It is a really profound and unsettling contrast. You know,
• 1:11
  you have this idyllic southern California backdrop.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Like the absolute epitome of ordinary life.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: Exactly peaceful, everyday life. People are getting coffee, picking up
• 1:20
  dry cleaning, just going to appointments, and in an instant
• 1:24
  that reality is a violently overwritten, wiped out yeah, by
• 1:28
  a detonation so powerful it completely tears a two story
• 1:31
  commercial building apart.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: It's just so hard to even picture that in a
• 1:34
  place like that.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: It is. When first responders arrived at the scene, they
• 1:38
  weren't greeted by the California sun. They were confronted with
• 1:41
  this massive, catastrophic debris fields, unimaginable yeah, severed human remains
• 1:46
  and thick toxic black smoke literally blocking out the.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Sky, which is just so dark.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: The sheer, calculated violence of it painted against that canvas
• 1:55
  of suburban safety is deeply chilling.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: It really is, and that jarring contrast is exactly why
• 2:00
  we are bringing this to you today. In this deep dive,
• 2:03
  we are going to unpack the horrific reality of what
• 2:06
  came to be known as the SPA bombing.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: We really need to look closely at all the sources
• 2:10
  we have on this, from Department of Justice releases to court.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: Record yeah, and oxygen and dateline coverage too. And I
• 2:17
  want to make a promise to you right up front,
• 2:19
  this is not just a tragic recap of a crime,
• 2:21
  not at all. We are doing this because it is
• 2:24
  an absolute masterclass in forensic psychology. It is a terrifying
• 2:28
  study of the unseen complexities of human relationships, and.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: It really showcases the incredibly intricate modern investigative techniques that
• 2:38
  law enforcement has to deploy.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: Right to untangle a web of ultimate betrayal.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: Because that is the core of this entire event. We're
• 2:46
  looking at a case where the weapon itself tells a
• 2:49
  highly specific story.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: It wasn't just a random act of terror.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: No, And it wasn't a tragic infrastructure failure like a
• 2:55
  gas Maine rupture either. It was a targeted surgical strike.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Which is so scary, right.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: And to understand how an investigation like that is even built,
• 3:04
  you have to look at not just the physical evidence
• 3:06
  left in the ashes.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: You have to look at the psychological profiling, exactly the
• 3:10
  behavioral red flags and the incredible legal hurdles the prosecutors face.
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: When a case is built on a mountain of circumstantial evidence.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. We have to start with the
• 3:21
  center of gravity in this entire story.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: The victim, yes Ildiko Kreshniak. Right.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Her name was Ildi Ko Kreshnak. She was forty eight
• 3:28
  years old, a Hungarian immigrant who came to the United
• 3:32
  States and essentially willed her own version of the American
• 3:35
  dream into existence.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: You really did.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: She was an esthetician, an entrepreneur, and she owned and
• 3:41
  operated a business called Magyar Cosmetica, which was a.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: Day spa right in the heart of Aliso Viejo.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and by all accounts, she was a force of nature, vibrant,
• 3:51
  hard working, charismatic. Friends and clients constantly described her as
• 3:56
  someone who was always smiling.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: You really have to consider this specific name sure of
• 4:00
  her business to understand her place in the community.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: I mean, oh, for sure, it's so personal.
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: Exactly, as an esthetician, you are operating in a space
• 4:08
  of extreme intimacy and trust. Her clients viewed her as
• 4:12
  much more than just a service provider.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: Right, like Sarah Thomas, who had literally just been in
• 4:17
  the spa for Lash Extensions that very morning.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah. In that kind of environment, the esthetician becomes a confidant.
• 4:24
  You are working hands on with people you know, listening to.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: Their stories, giving advice, sharing secrets.
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: Right. She was a deeply beloved figure, fiercely protected by
• 4:34
  her friends. She was this highly successful public facing business
• 4:38
  woman who made people feel beautiful and heard.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: But like so many people, that public facing persona was
• 4:46
  only one half of the equation usually is yeah, And
• 4:49
  this brings us to what investigators quickly discovered when they
• 4:52
  started peeling back the layers of her life. Ildego had
• 4:55
  a fiercely protected private life.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: She was married, right, she was.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she had been married for over two few decades
• 5:00
  to a man named Ronilo Vestil. But according to interviews
• 5:05
  with her inner circle, this was a highly unconventional open arrangement,
• 5:09
  very unconventional. Yeah. Her friend Holly told investigators that Ilico
• 5:13
  essentially had a rotation of boyfriends on the side.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: Like a good five or six at any given time.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: Right. Exactly. She wanted to be loved. She thrived on
• 5:21
  attention from men and within the specific context of her marriage.
• 5:25
  This was consensual and understood.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: Which is a crucial point we need to emphasize here.
• 5:31
  When we discuss this aspect of her life, it isn't
• 5:34
  to moralize or pass judgment at all.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: No, not at all.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: From a purely investigative standpoint, you have to understand the
• 5:41
  immediate monumental nightmare this creates for law enforcement.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: I can't even imagine being the detective walking up to
• 5:48
  that whiteboard.
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: Right, Because when a detective arrives at a homicide scene,
• 5:51
  the very first thing they do is map the victim's.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: Inner circle, which is usually pretty straightforward.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: Usually, yeah, that geometry is fairly simple. Of a spouse,
• 6:01
  maybe a recent ex partner, close colleagues, family, It's a
• 6:04
  tight radius.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: But not in this case.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: No, when a victim has a wider, highly active romantic
• 6:09
  circle involving multiple ongoing partners, your suspect list doesn't just.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Double, It just exponentially expands exactly, and the intersecting motives
• 6:17
  become a completely tangled mess. I mean, how do investigators
• 6:21
  even begin to prioritize suspects when the victim's social circle
• 6:25
  is built on compartmentalized secrets. It's like untangling a massive
• 6:29
  not a fishing line.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it right.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: Just when detectives pull one thread like a husband or
• 6:35
  a lover, it just tightens another one somewhere else.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: It really requires an incredibly methodical, almost sterile approach to
• 6:42
  a highly emotional situation. Investigators have to establish alibis, cross
• 6:48
  reference digital communications, and.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: Look for recent changes in behavior.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: Right among a half dozen different individuals simultaneously, all while
• 6:56
  trying not to alert the actual perpetrator that they are closing.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: In which sounds impossible.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: It's extremely difficult. But the duality of Ildico's life, you know,
• 7:05
  being so publicly accessible but having such intensely complicated private
• 7:10
  entanglements told investigators one very important thing right away. What
• 7:14
  was that whoever did this, whoever targeted her, did so
• 7:17
  with highly personalized, deliberate precision.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Because there were so many people involved in her.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: Life, right because she was the focal point of so
• 7:25
  many intense relationships, law enforcement knew they were looking for
• 7:29
  someone who felt a profound, perhaps twisted sense of ownership
• 7:32
  or grievance.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: And that personalized precision is what leads us directly to
• 7:36
  the weapon itself, the bomb. Yeah, let's look at the
• 7:39
  timeline of that Tuesday, so it's May fifteenth, twenty eighteen.
• 7:43
  It's approximately one point zero five pm. First responders get
• 7:47
  the nine to one one call and they rush.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: In, and initially, because this is a day spa in
• 7:51
  a standard commercial building, they are thinking it's an.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: Accident, right like they expected, ghastly.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: Or maybe an industrial accident involving some of the chemicals
• 7:59
  used in this lawns. But what they find is just apocalyptic.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: The building is literally shredded. There are human remains.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: And there were other people there too, just innocent bystanders.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, a mother and a daughter who were simply there
• 8:11
  as clients receiving treatments in another room, suffer permanent life
• 8:16
  altering injuries.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: It's so tragic, it is.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: The blast was so concussive that Ildico's friend Holly Salcido
• 8:23
  actually heard the boom from a full mile away.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: The sheer physics of the blast are staggering, and as
• 8:29
  the smoke physically clears, the reality sets in for the
• 8:33
  bomb technicians and investigators on the ground.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: It definitely wasn't a ruptured pipe.
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: No, and it wasn't a random act of mass terror either.
• 8:41
  If you recall around this time, in twenty eighteen, there
• 8:44
  had been a terrifying series of package bombings in Austin, Texas.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: Oh right, that was making national news everywhere exactly, So
• 8:52
  investigators initially had to pause and consider if this was connected,
• 8:58
  like if there was a serial bomber getting random businesses
• 9:01
  across the country. But the chemical signature pointed somewhere else,
• 9:04
  didn't it.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, The chemical signature and the mechanics of the device
• 9:07
  quickly pointed to a completely different, much more intimate reality, right.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: Because when they start analyzing the fragments, they realize they
• 9:14
  aren't looking at military grade C four or something you'd
• 9:17
  see in an action movie. They are looking at a
• 9:20
  homemade device hidden inside a standard cardboard box. It utilized
• 9:24
  flash powder, and it was wired to a simple nine
• 9:27
  bolt battery.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: Just household items essentially.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But the most chilling detail to me is the
• 9:33
  delivery method. It wasn't mailed through the postal service.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: It was physically carried in exactly.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: It was physically carried inside the spa and placed there.
• 9:42
  It was a victim activated device, literally waiting on the
• 9:46
  counter for Ildeco to return from a trip she had
• 9:49
  been taking to Hungary.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: It was literally designed to detonate the second she opened
• 9:54
  the flaps.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: What's fascinating here is what the bomb's design tells us
• 9:57
  about the builder's profile. We really need need to explain
• 10:00
  the mechanics of a victim activated device to understand the
• 10:03
  psychology behind it.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not a simple thing to make.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: No, this isn't someone who just threw a Molotov cocktail
• 10:09
  through a window in a fit of rage. A victim
• 10:12
  activated bomb using flash powder requires a specific elevated skill level.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: Flashpowder is a low explosive.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: Rect yes, meaning it defligrates, it burns incredibly fast, rather
• 10:22
  than detonating with a supersonic shockwave of like high explosives do.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: So how do they make it so destructive?
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: Well, to make flash power lethal, you have to confine
• 10:30
  it perfectly. If the container's two weak, it just pops
• 10:33
  and burns. But if it's contained precisely, the pressure builds
• 10:36
  instantly until the container fails catastrophically.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: Creating a massive concussive wave.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: Exactly and turning everything around it into shrapnel.
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: So they didn't just throw some powder in a box.
• 10:47
  They engineered a pressure vessel. They did, and then they
• 10:50
  had to wire the trigger. How does a cardboard box
• 10:54
  even act as a trigger.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: It's actually done by creating a physical circuit breaker. The
• 10:58
  builder would wire the nine volt battery to an initiator
• 11:02
  something that gets hot enough to ignite the powder, But
• 11:05
  they leave the circuit open.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: Ah, I see.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah. They attach one side of the electrical contact to
• 11:10
  the flap of the cardboard box and the other side
• 11:12
  to the base.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: So when the box is closed, the circuit is physically broken. Noh,
• 11:16
  the electricity.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: Can't flow exactly, but the moment the victim lifts that
• 11:20
  cardboard flap, the movement causes the two metal contexts to touch.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: The circuit completes.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: The electricity from the nine volt battery hits the initiator,
• 11:30
  it flashes, ignites the tightly confined powder, and the device
• 11:33
  explodes in a fraction of a second.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: That is exactly what gets me. The chilling, terrifying patience
• 11:40
  required for this crime.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: It's so calculated, right.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: Think about the difference between a crime of passion and this.
• 11:46
  A crime of passion is a sudden physical altercation someone
• 11:50
  loses control in the heat of the moment. It's visceral.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: But this is the exact opposite.
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: This person had to source the chemicals. They had to
• 11:58
  sit quietly at a work bench and carefully meticulously wire
• 12:02
  a battery to a contact switch, knowing exactly what it
• 12:05
  was meant to do.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: They had to physically walk into that spa place, the
• 12:09
  box where only she would open it. And then they
• 12:11
  just walked away.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: They went to get a coffee, they went home.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they lived their normal life knowing that a lethal
• 12:17
  mechanical trap was just sitting there in the dark, waiting
• 12:20
  for a woman they presumably once cared about to return
• 12:24
  from Europe, walk into her business and snap it shut.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: It requires a profound level of psychological compartmentalization and absolute
• 12:32
  cold bloodedness.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: It really does.
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: You are entirely removing yourself from the immediate visceral reality
• 12:38
  of the murder you were setting in motion. You don't
• 12:40
  have to look the victim in the eye, you don't
• 12:42
  have to hear them.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: You essentially outsource the violence to a machine.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: Right And because of the sophisticated nature of that machine
• 12:49
  and the fact that it was placed internally without forced entry,
• 12:52
  investigators immediately narrowed their profile.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: They weren't looking for a random disgruntled client.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: No, they needed to find someone with both the technical
• 13:00
  know how to build a confined flash powder circuit and
• 13:04
  intimate access to Ildeko's inner.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: Circle, which brings us to a man who didn't even
• 13:09
  wait for the police to come knocking.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: He just walked right in.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: He quite literally volunteered himself to the police. So enter
• 13:16
  Stephen Beal.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: Stephen Bial.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he was a resident of Long Beach, an ex
• 13:20
  boyfriend of Ildeko's, and critically he was her partner in
• 13:24
  the spa business.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: That's a lot of connections a ton.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: And almost immediately after the news of the bombing breaks
• 13:31
  Beale contacts the authorities.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: Which is interesting in itself.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: He plays the role of the grieving partner flawlessly. At first,
• 13:38
  he's telling them, you know, she was always smiling, she
• 13:41
  cared so much about people.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: He claims he has absolutely no knowledge of anyone who
• 13:46
  would ever want.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: To harm her, which on paper is a classic move.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: It really is. In the world of behavioral analysis, there's
• 13:53
  a phenomenon often referred to as investigative embedding.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: I've heard of that. It's when they insert themselves right.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: Yes, Perpetrators, especially those who view themselves as highly intelligent,
• 14:05
  will voluntarily contact the police to inject themselves into the
• 14:10
  center of the investigation.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: What's the goal there, Well, it serves.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: Two purposes for them. First, they believe acting helpful makes
• 14:16
  them look innocently. Second, and more importantly, it allows them
• 14:20
  to monitor the investigation from the inside. They want to
• 14:23
  know what the cops know.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: But it was during his actual sit down interview with
• 14:27
  Orange County Sheriff's investigator Jack Ackerman that Beale's carefully constructed
• 14:31
  facade began.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: To crack right oh, in incredibly bizarre ways. Bizarre doesn't
• 14:36
  even begin to cover it.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: The interrogation room transcripts and descriptions from this interview are
• 14:42
  just mind boggling.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: Truly. Here is a man whose business partner and ex
• 14:46
  girlfriend has just been blown to pieces in a horrific,
• 14:50
  devastating explosion, and.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: What is he doing while sitting across from a homicide investigator.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: He is pitching a screenplay.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: Wait, really a screenplay?
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Yes, he literally starts pitching a movie idea about a
• 15:04
  soccer mom who is secretly an assassin.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: That is insane.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: It gets weirder. He is cracking jokes. At one point,
• 15:10
  he leans over and performs a magic trick. He pretends
• 15:13
  to pull a coin from behind the investigator's ear.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: In a homicide interview.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: Yes, he even casually mentions that his current girlfriend suggested
• 15:20
  he should do stand up comedy about being a murder suspect.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: I can't even process that.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: Investigator Ackerman later went on record saying it was one
• 15:28
  of the strangest, most surreal interviews of his entire career.
• 15:32
  I bet he noted a very specific psychological trait radiating
• 15:36
  from Beale. In that room, Ackerman said, he thinks he's
• 15:40
  outsmarting everybody.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: We really have to look at the psychology of this archetype.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: I mean, oh, definitely. Perpetrators who possess technical skills, whether
• 15:48
  it's bomb making, complex hacking, or elaborate financial fraud, frequently
• 15:53
  suffer from a massive god complex.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: They genuinely believe they possess an intellectu vastly superior to
• 15:59
  law enforcement.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: They view the interrogation room not as a search for
• 16:03
  truth or a place of jeopardy, but as a stage
• 16:07
  like a game of chess. Exactly, it's a game of
• 16:09
  chess that they are convinced they are winning, and they
• 16:11
  just can't resist showing off.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: Wait, but hang on, I have to ask, because trauma
• 16:15
  does weird things to the brain it does. Is it
• 16:18
  possible that we are retroactively applying a God complex to
• 16:22
  what might just be a total psychological short circuit. What
• 16:25
  do you mean, Well, a woman he knows was just killed.
• 16:28
  He's sitting in a police station. Could his brain just
• 16:31
  be misfiring under extreme stress, like people who start hysterically
• 16:34
  laughing at funeral.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: That's a really fair question, because.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: Pitching a screenplay in an interrogation room is so far
• 16:40
  outside the bounds of normal human behavior that it almost
• 16:43
  feels like a nervous breakdown response rather than calculated arrogance.
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: You think so, right, yeah, because you're absolutely correct that
• 16:50
  trauma can scramble our coping mechanisms, resulting in an inappropriate effect. However,
• 16:56
  to determine if this is shock or arrogance, behavioral analysis
• 17:00
  don't just look at the interview in isolation.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: They look at the baseline exactly.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: They look at the baseline behavior before and after. If
• 17:08
  Beale had been in a state of shock, that disorganized
• 17:12
  behavior would bleed into the rest of his life.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: But it didn't.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: No, it didn't. His actions before the bombing were highly
• 17:18
  calculated and organized. His actions after the interview were deliberate
• 17:22
  and self preserving.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: So when you zoom out, the arrogance theory is really
• 17:26
  the only one that holds water.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: Precisely, this wasn't a man having a breakdown. This is
• 17:31
  a man who felt so entirely insulated from consequences that
• 17:35
  he was actively trying to entertain himself at the expense
• 17:38
  of a homicide detective.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: Wow, and his attempt to look like the cooperative, eccentric, harmless,
• 17:43
  grieving partner completely backfired. By volunteering himself and showing off,
• 17:48
  he basically painted a massive, glowing target on his own back.
• 17:53
  The authority said, Okay, you want to be helpful, Let's
• 17:56
  take a look at your life, and that led.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: Them straight to his physical and digital footprint.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: Let's look at what happened when they executed a search
• 18:02
  warrant on his home in Long Beach. They find massive
• 18:06
  quantities of bomb making materials in his house. Yeah, they
• 18:09
  find unregistered destructive devices. They find literal, actual dynamite.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: To a layperson, finding dynamite in the home of a
• 18:17
  man suspected of a bombing seems like case closed.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Put the handcuffs on exactly, just knock them up.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: But here is where the strict mechanics of the legal
• 18:25
  system create a massive hurdle for prosecutors. Finding dynamite in
• 18:29
  someone's garage is a serious federal crime on its own,
• 18:32
  for sure, but it doesn't automatically prove they built a
• 18:36
  specific flash powder bomb that killed Ildeco in a neighboring.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: City because they're different materials, right.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: Dynamite is a high explosive. The SPA bomb was a
• 18:44
  low explosive, and Biel's defense team was ready for this.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: Of course they were.
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: He claimed that all of these materials were strictly for
• 18:51
  his long standing, well documented hobbies in model rocketry and
• 18:56
  advanced fireworks.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: He argued they had just been sitting there unused for years.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and initially, because prosecutors could not definitively chemically link
• 19:06
  the materials in his garage to the precise chemical signature
• 19:10
  of the blast and the Liso viejo, the initial charges
• 19:14
  regarding the destructive devices were actually dropped.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: He was released. He was released, which is just insane
• 19:20
  to think about. He literally walks out, just walks out
• 19:22
  the door. But he is absolutely not off the hook
• 19:24
  because the physical chemicals were only one part of the trail, right.
• 19:28
  The digital footprint is where things get genuinely chilling. Investigators
• 19:32
  start digging into his Internet history, looking for anything that
• 19:36
  connects him to the crime.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: And what do they find him searching for.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: Well, he isn't searching for news about the bombing, which
• 19:42
  is what you'd expect, right, He is searching online for
• 19:44
  how a narcissist can pass a polygraph test.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: That is an incredibly revealing search query. Notice the specific phrasing.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: There, it's so specific.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: He isn't searching how an innocent person passes a polygraph,
• 19:57
  which is something a genuinely wrongfully accused my panic search.
• 20:01
  Oh for sure, he is searching how a narcissist passes it.
• 20:05
  This implies a startling level of self awareness about his
• 20:08
  own psychological makeup.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: Like he knows exactly what he is.
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: Yes, he recognizes that his personality type, you know, his
• 20:16
  lack of empathy, he's inflated ego, might trigger abnormal physiological
• 20:20
  responses on a machine designed to measure stress and deception.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: He's trying to figure out how to beat the machine
• 20:26
  using his own psychological profile as a variable.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: Exactly. But the internet searches are just the appetizer.
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: Really, Yeah, the main course of the evidence is the
• 20:34
  surveillance video detectives hit the pavement and managed to track
• 20:38
  down store security footage showing Stephen Beiale making some very
• 20:41
  specific purchases shortly before the bombing.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: Well, me, guess yeah.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: He is buying a single nine volt battery and a
• 20:48
  very specific cardboard box that perfectly matched the exact dimensions
• 20:52
  and packaging of the bomb fragments recovered from the SPA.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: This brings us squarely to the legal battleground of circumstantial evidence.
• 21:00
  It's so tricky, it really is. In a case like this,
• 21:03
  defense attorneys will attempt to isolate every single piece of
• 21:07
  evidence and explain it away in a vacuum.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: They will say, the chemicals, Oh, that's just his rocketry hobby, right.
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: The battery, everyone buys batteries, He needed it for a
• 21:16
  smoke detector.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: The box he was shipping a gift to a relative.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: Exactly. If you look at them one by one, you
• 21:22
  can almost manufacture reasonable doubt. But the prosecution has to
• 21:27
  rely on the compounding weight of these pieces.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: Prosecutor Mark Talklave famously stated, in this case, when do
• 21:33
  the coincidences stop?
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: It's a great question.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting for me. I always
• 21:39
  think about circumstantial evidence, not like a chain where one
• 21:43
  broken link ruins the whole thing. It's more like a
• 21:46
  rope woven from hundreds of tiny, fragile threads.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: That's a really good analogy.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: If the defense snaps one thread, like coming up with
• 21:53
  a summer plausible excuse for buying the battery, it doesn't
• 21:55
  break the rope.
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: No, the rope is still intact.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: Because by the time you add the box, the explosives
• 22:01
  in the house, the google searches about polygraphs, the magic
• 22:04
  tricks in the interrogation room, that rope is thick enough
• 22:08
  and strong enough to hang a conviction on.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: That is the perfect analogy. Honestly, the sheer volume of
• 22:14
  threads becomes impossible to sever all at once. Right and
• 22:18
  beyond the physical and digital threads, investigators finally crystallized the
• 22:22
  psychological thread, which is the motive.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: And it all routed right back to the complex private
• 22:27
  life we discussed earlier.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: It was pure distilled jealousy.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: Biale and Ildeco's romantic relationship had been on and off,
• 22:34
  but they remained deeply legally tethered through their financial partnership
• 22:38
  in the.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: Spot, which creates so much tension so much.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: And investigators learned that Ildaco had recently been talking to
• 22:45
  another man, which violently reignited Beale's old romantic grudges.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: The financial tension of their struggling business partnership was the kindling.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: But her romantic interest in someone else, her moving on
• 22:56
  and finding happiness elsewhere, was the spark that set it up.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: He just couldn't handle the loss of control.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: But here is the maddening part for law enforcement. Despite
• 23:06
  the massive rope of circumstantial evidence, the battery, the box,
• 23:09
  the motive, the weird behavior, they still lacked the one
• 23:14
  thing they desperately needed to secure a murder charge in
• 23:17
  a complex indirect bombing.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: Case, a smoking gun confession.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Exactly, they needed him to say the words, and they
• 23:25
  realized pretty quickly that they couldn't get it from the outside.
• 23:28
  Bale was too smart, too guarded against the police, So
• 23:31
  they had to go inside to trap a guy who
• 23:33
  thinks he's smarter than the cops. You have to do
• 23:35
  it from the inside, from the bed he sleeps in,
• 23:37
  which brings us to a woman named Valerie Stone.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: Valerie Stone is a critical and frankly deeply tragic figure
• 23:44
  in this narrative. She was Beale's new girlfriend.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: Initially, she was completely in the dark. She was standing
• 23:50
  by him, believing she was supporting a good man who
• 23:53
  was going through a horrific, wrongful accusation by an over
• 23:57
  zealous police department.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: But then the FBI intercepts her. Imagine that moment for her.
• 24:01
  You were living your life, you think you found a
• 24:04
  nice guy, and suddenly federal agents sit you down and
• 24:07
  lay out the terrifying reality of the man you were
• 24:10
  sleeping next to.
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: They show her the rope of evidence.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: And Valerie faces an unimaginable moral pivot. She has to
• 24:17
  decide who she is, and she ultimately decides to cooperate,
• 24:20
  telling the agents if it was Stephen, it was Stephen.
• 24:24
  She agrees to act as a civilian informant for the
• 24:26
  federal government.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: We really need to pause and highlight the immense psychological
• 24:31
  toll and the raw visceral bravery required for a civilian
• 24:35
  to do this.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: It's unreal.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: She isn't a trained undercover operative who knows how to
• 24:39
  control her heart rate and manage a blown cover. She's
• 24:42
  an ordinary woman who has to go back to her home,
• 24:45
  look this man in the eye, and pretend absolutely everything
• 24:48
  is normal.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: Knowing with near certainty that he is a meticulous bomb
• 24:52
  maker who blew his last girlfriend to pieces.
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: Right, so the FBI wires her up. They plant listening
• 24:59
  devices in their hotel rooms and their cars on their
• 25:02
  personal phones.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: They orchestrate this during a plan romantic getaway, right.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: Yes, hoping that in a moment of relaxed intimacy, away
• 25:10
  from the stress of his home, Beale might let his
• 25:12
  guard down and confess.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: Put yourself in Valerie's shoes for just ten seconds. Imagine
• 25:18
  the sheer, suffocating adrenaline of that reality.
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: I can't even imagine.
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: It is like living inside a tense spy thriller. But
• 25:26
  the stakes aren't geopolitical. They are intimately terrifyingly personal.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: You are on a romantic vacation.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: You were having dinner across from him, you are sharing
• 25:34
  a bathroom, you are sleeping in the same.
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: Bed, and all the while you know there's wire taped
• 25:39
  to your body or a microphone hidden in the lamp.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: You are trying to act naturally, trying to delicately steer
• 25:44
  the conversation toward a murder without tipping off a man
• 25:48
  who you already know is incredibly paranoid. Highly observant and
• 25:52
  technically proficient.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: If his hand brushes against the wire, or if he
• 25:56
  notices a shift in your tone, you are trapped in
• 25:58
  a hotel room with a killer.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: The psychological pressure of that environment would be crushing.
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: Every silence would feel like an accusation.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: So what happens? Does he confess?
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: Ultimately, the operation did not yield the Hollywood ending deal.
• 26:11
  Did not break down in tears and give a direct
• 26:14
  smoking gun confession on tape.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: He didn't.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: No, he was too guarded, and perhaps given his narcissism
• 26:21
  and paranoia, he was hyper aware of the possibility that
• 26:24
  he was being surveiled.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: So the whole thing was a failure.
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: Oh No, the operation was far from a failure. The
• 26:30
  wire taps provided incredibly crucial behavioral insights I see to
• 26:35
  a lie the FBI to map his mindset, capture his
• 26:38
  ongoing arrogance, and document his complete and utter lack of
• 26:42
  genuine empathy for Ildeco's death when he thought no police
• 26:45
  were listening.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: It was a massive piece of a broader, highly coordinated,
• 26:49
  multi agency effort.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: He had the Orange County Sheriff's Department, the ATF, and
• 26:53
  the FBI all working in tandem. Treating this with the
• 26:56
  severity and resource allocation of a domestic terrorism.
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: Case, and the culmination of all of this, the exhaustive
• 27:02
  physical evidence, the behavioral red flags from the sting operation,
• 27:05
  the digital footprint of his polygraph searches finally gave prosecutors
• 27:09
  enough confidence to make their move fine. In March of
• 27:12
  twenty nineteen, Stephen Beale is re arrested, and this time
• 27:15
  there is no walking out. The charges are devastating malicious
• 27:20
  destruction of a building resulting in death, among others.
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: But if you think the arrest was the end of
• 27:24
  the story, the legal battle was really just beginning, and
• 27:28
  it was incredibly fraught.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: It was an agonizingly long road for the victims' families,
• 27:33
  wasn't it.
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: It really was. The first trial didn't take place until
• 27:36
  twenty twenty two, and remarkably, it ended in a mistrial.
• 27:41
  A mistrial, Yes, the jury deliberated, but simply could not
• 27:45
  reach a unanimous verdict.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: Which, to an outside observer who just listened to us
• 27:49
  lay out the battery, the box, the dynamite, and the
• 27:51
  motive might seem utterly baffling.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: It is entirely baffling.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: I'm looking at this timeline thinking, how on earth does
• 27:57
  a jury sit in a room hear about the PolyGram
• 28:00
  of Google searches, see the video of him buying the
• 28:02
  exact battery used in the bomb, and say, yeah, we
• 28:05
  aren't sure.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: It's hard to grasp.
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: How does a defense attorney successfully manufacture reasonable doubt in
• 28:11
  the face of such an overwhelming rope of coincidences.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: Well, they do it by expertly exploiting the very complexities
• 28:18
  of the victim's life that we discussed at the very
• 28:20
  beginning of this deep dive.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: Oh right, the open marriage and the boyfriends exactly.
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: Defense attorney Craig Harbaugh ran a very strategic, very aggressive defense.
• 28:31
  He didn't just try to explain away Beale's actions. He
• 28:34
  pointed directly at Ildeko's private life.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: He used it against the prosecution.
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: He highlighted the other men, the complex open marriage, the
• 28:42
  rotating boyfriends, and he argued to the jury that law
• 28:45
  enforcement developed severe tunnel vision.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: Ah I see.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: He painted a picture where the cops locked onto Beal
• 28:51
  simply because he was the easiest target, the guy with
• 28:53
  the quirky rocketry hobbies and the awkward interview.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: While completely ignoring a half dozen other visible suspects who
• 29:01
  might have had equally strong motives exactly.
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: Furthermore, the defense presented friendly text messages sent between Beale
• 29:07
  and Ildigo in the days leading up to the bombing.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: Friendly texts.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they argued, look at these texts. He still loved her,
• 29:14
  They were friendly, He harbored no lethal ill will.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? The jury is sitting
• 29:20
  in that box trying to process this massive, jarring cognitive dissonance.
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: It's a lot to process.
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: The defense is asking them to believe that a human
• 29:28
  being could be sending perfectly normal, friendly text messages about
• 29:33
  business or daily life while simultaneously sitting in his garage
• 29:37
  carefully wiring a lethal bomb meant to tear her apart.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: That is a really hard psychological leap for an ordinary
• 29:44
  juror to make.
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: Most people just can't fathom that level of duplicity.
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: They really can't.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: And when the defense is waiving a half dozen other
• 29:51
  potential suspects in the air saying it could have been
• 29:53
  any of them, you only need one or two jurors
• 29:55
  to feel a shadow of a doubt.
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: Exactly. The defense basically weaponiz as the natural human reluctance
• 30:02
  to believe in pure compartmentalized evil.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: But the prosecution learned a hard lesson from them miss trial.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: They absolutely did. When the second trial commenced in twenty
• 30:10
  twenty three, they changed their strategy completely.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: They became relentlessly aggressive.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: Yes, they realized they couldn't just present the circumstantial evidence clinically.
• 30:20
  They had to make the jury feel the physical horror
• 30:23
  of the event to counteract the defense's narrative.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: They practically brought the bomb into the courtroom.
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: They recreated the explosion for the jury. They showed highly graphic,
• 30:32
  harrowing footage and photographs of the aftermass.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: They made it absolutely impossible for the jury to abstract
• 30:38
  the crime as a simple puzzle.
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: And after seven grueling weeks and dozens of witnesses, the
• 30:44
  strategy worked. The jury convicted Stephen Beale on four federal felonies.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: And one of those felonies is something we really need
• 30:51
  to pause on because it is staggering, it really is.
• 30:53
  He was convicted of the use of a weapon of
• 30:55
  mass destruction resulting in death, a WMD charge. Yeah. On
• 31:00
  January nineteenth, twenty twenty four, Judge Jasphine Stateton sentenced him
• 31:05
  to life in prison plus an additional thirty years, officially
• 31:08
  calling the crime calculated and chilling.
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture of the
• 31:13
  American justice system, the application of a weapon of mass
• 31:17
  destruction charge in what is, at its absolute core, a
• 31:21
  domestic dispute involving an ex partner is highly unusual and
• 31:26
  incredibly significant.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: Because normally WMD charges are for like international terrorism.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: Right Historically, when we hear WMD charges, we think of
• 31:34
  al Qaeda or math of anti government strikes like Timothy
• 31:38
  McVeigh in Oklahoma.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: City, not a bad breakup in the suburbs exactly.
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: Using a WMD charge here represents a massive paradigm shift
• 31:45
  in how the federal government treats homemade explosives used in personal,
• 31:49
  localized grievances.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: It elevates the crime.
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: It acknowledges that the terror inflicted on the community, the
• 31:55
  utter destruction of a commercial building, and the collateral damage
• 31:58
  to the innocent clients and first responders elevates the crime
• 32:02
  far beyond a standard homicide.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: It is a loud, undeniable message from the DOJ.
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: It is bringing battlefield tactics into suburban neighborhoods to settle
• 32:10
  a breakup will be met with the absolute heaviest hammer
• 32:13
  the federal government possesses.
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: And as if this entire case wasn't dark enough, as
• 32:18
  if the WMD charge doesn't say enough about his character,
• 32:22
  the records point to a truly chilling footnote that hangs
• 32:25
  over this entire story.
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this part is incredibly unsettling.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: Stephen Beale had been married previously, and his wife from
• 32:33
  that first marriage died years earlier in what the official
• 32:36
  records describe as a mysterious case.
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: Mysterious now to.
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: Be absolutely legally clear, no charges were ever filed, and
• 32:44
  Stephen deal was never formally implicated or convicted in her
• 32:48
  death right.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: We have to state there clearly based on the sources
• 32:50
  we do.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: But knowing what we know now about his capabilities, his
• 32:54
  endless patience, his ability to compartmentalize, and his hidden darkness,
• 32:59
  it adds. It's an incredibly unsettling layer of scrutiny to
• 33:02
  his past.
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: It raises profound, deeply disturbing questions about what else might
• 33:07
  have gone undetected in his life.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: It really does.
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: When you look at that interrogation room footage again, it
• 33:12
  forces you to wonder if the extreme arrogance he displayed,
• 33:16
  you know, the magic tricks the movie Pitches. Wasn't just
• 33:19
  the standard narcissism of a man who thought he was smart.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: What if it was something else?
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: What if it was the supreme relaxed confidence of a
• 33:27
  man who genuinely believed he had already beaten the system
• 33:30
  once before and thought he could easily do it again.
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: Ah, that makes your blood run cold.
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: It's terrifying.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: And as we step back and try to distill the
• 33:38
  key takeaways from all these sources we've looked at today,
• 33:41
  I think the most glaring lesson is a stark, terrifying
• 33:45
  reminder of the limbal escalation of domestic violence.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: That's so true.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: This wasn't a shadowy stranger in an alley. This wasn't
• 33:53
  a random act of gang violence. This was an intimate partner,
• 33:57
  a business partner, someone deeply embedded in the fabric of
• 34:00
  her daily life.
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: It shows how unchecked jealousy, combined with financial resentment can
• 34:06
  quietly fester and mutate into something monstrous right under everyone's noses.
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: For you listening, It emphasizes the vital, everyday importance of
• 34:13
  situational awareness.
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: We so often fall into the trap of assuming that
• 34:17
  the people in our immediate communities. The quaint businesses we
• 34:20
  frequent in safe, affluent neighborhoods are somehow immune to this
• 34:24
  kind of extreme calculated violence.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: But this case proves that behind the closed doors of
• 34:29
  our neighbors, behind the smiling faces of the people we
• 34:32
  work with, there are massive unseen complexities.
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: It really underscores the absolute necessity of thorough background checks,
• 34:41
  not just informing business partnerships, but in recognizing and acting
• 34:45
  on the behavioral red flags and relationships long before the
• 34:48
  tension reaches a breaking point.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: Think about the survivors of this blast, the mother and
• 34:54
  daughter who just went in for a relaxing SPA day.
• 34:57
  Their lives are forever altered, their bodies, permit scarred because
• 35:01
  of a private grievance they had absolutely nothing to do with.
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: It's entirely unfair, which leaves me.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: With one final, incredibly provocative thought from all of this.
• 35:09
  Something I really want you to mull over when this
• 35:11
  deep dive is done, is that this case highlights a
• 35:14
  terrifying modern reality, which is the democratization of destruction.
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: Ah.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: Yes, we live in an era where the highly technical,
• 35:22
  specialized knowledge required to build a lethal device isn't hidden
• 35:25
  in some classified manual. It is freely available with a
• 35:28
  few key strokes on the Internet.
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: And the physical components. They aren't locked away in some
• 35:33
  high security military bunker.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: No, they can be bought on a routine Tuesday afternoon
• 35:37
  trip to the local hardware store and the battery aisle
• 35:41
  at the grocery store.
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: It's all just sitting there on the shelves.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: When you realize that the practical barriers to creating mass
• 35:48
  violence are essentially nonexistent, you realize what truly separates our
• 35:52
  society from absolute chaos.
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: It isn't a lack of access to weapons.
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: No, it is the fragile social contract. It is this
• 36:00
  basic human empathy. It is the silent collective agreement we
• 36:04
  all make every single day and not to destroy each other.
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: And when you see a case like this where a
• 36:09
  seemingly normal man simply opts out of that social contract
• 36:13
  to satisfy his own ego.
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: It makes you wonder what happens as those social bonds
• 36:17
  continue to fray in our society.
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: It is a profoundly sobering question, because when the internal
• 36:23
  infrastructure of empathy fails, the physical tools of destruction are
• 36:27
  unfortunately waiting right there on the shelf.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: It changes how you look at the people around you,
• 36:32
  and it certainly changes how you think about an ordinary
• 36:35
  cardboard box sitting on a counter. Thank you for joining
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  us on this incredibly complex journey of love, betrayal, and justice.
• 36:43
  We will catch you on the next deep dive.