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Decomposing Body Found in Storage Garage Surrounded By Books on Sat · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I want to take you to a well, to a
• 0:02
  very specific place today, and I don't mean just a
• 0:04
  general location on a map. I really want you to
• 0:06
  feel the temperature.
• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Oh, that is crucial for this one.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Right. So it is February five, two thousand and one.
• 0:12
  We are in Las Vegas, Nevada. But I want you
• 0:15
  to completely forget the fountains at the Bellagio, forget the
• 0:19
  air conditioned casinos.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's not the Vegas we're dealing with, tip not
• 0:23
  at all.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: We are on West Sahara Avenue. It is the middle
• 0:25
  of the day, and even though it's February, the sun
• 0:28
  in the desert hits the pavement in a way that
• 0:30
  just feels it feels heavy. It's a dry, dusty, relentless kind.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Of environment, and it's the kind of environment that preserves
• 0:37
  things usually, right. I mean, the desert is famous for mummification,
• 0:41
  for drying things out, But on this specific day, at
• 0:44
  a self storage facility on West Sahara, something very different
• 0:47
  was happening.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Exactly. So, we're standing outside of a specific unit, Unit
• 0:51
  three seventeen. It's a standard beige metal door in a
• 0:54
  long row of identical doors. But there's a problem with
• 0:57
  unit three seventeen A big problem. The manager of the
• 1:00
  has been getting complaints. People are walking by and crinkling
• 1:02
  their noses.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: There's a smell, and anyone who has worked in law
• 1:06
  enforcement or sanitation for that matter, knows that there is
• 1:09
  a very specific spectrum of bad smells. Right, you have
• 1:13
  rotting garbage, you have sewage, and then you have decomposition.
• 1:17
  They are completely distinct chemical profiles.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: And the manager knows this isn't just someone's old gym
• 1:24
  clothes locked in a unit. So the police get involved.
• 1:26
  They come down to cut the lock. Now, I try
• 1:29
  to put myself in the shoes of those officers. You're
• 1:31
  expecting I don't know, maybe a dead dog, yeah, or.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Maybe someone was living in there and just left behind
• 1:35
  a massive.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Mess, right, a squatter situation.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: That's usually the worst case scenario for a storage unit call.
• 1:40
  But when they rolled up that metal door, the smell
• 1:43
  hit them like a physical wall.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: But it was the visual that stopped them in their tracks.
• 1:48
  It wasn't a mess. It was well, it was curated.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: Curated is a disturbing word to use here, but it
• 1:53
  perfectly fits. It really does, because in the center of
• 1:57
  the unit, sitting entirely by itself is a fifty five
• 2:00
  gallon industrial trash can, gray plastic. But someone has gone
• 2:05
  to town on this thing with duct tape, sealed completely shut, yes,
• 2:10
  sealed shut, and arranged around the can almost like it's
• 2:13
  the centerpiece of an exhibit. Are books, and.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: We aren't talking about a random box of old paperbacks
• 2:19
  or romance novels. These were stacked with real intent, and
• 2:24
  the titles were incredibly specific, like what you had the
• 2:28
  Satanic Bible. You had books on witchcraft, black magic, casting, spells,
• 2:32
  the occult.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: It looks like a movie set. Honestly, if I walked
• 2:34
  in there, I'd think I was being pranked, or that
• 2:36
  I had just stumbled onto a horror movie shoe. It's
• 2:38
  almost two on the nose. You have the cauldron in
• 2:40
  the middle and the spell books around.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: It exactly, and that staging is what initially drove the
• 2:45
  massive media frenzy. But the police, specifically Detective David Mezzinar,
• 2:51
  they had to deal with the reality of the can itself, right,
• 2:53
  They have to open it, so they pry off the
• 2:55
  duct tape. They opened the lid, and inside wrapped in
• 2:58
  heavy layers of plastic and so hell of fane is
• 3:00
  the body of sixty eight year old Christine Smith.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: And this is exactly where the headline the witch killer
• 3:05
  comes from. The media sees the books, they see the
• 3:08
  body in the barrel, and boom, you have a satanic
• 3:10
  panic narrative. It just writes itself.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: It does and it sells papers, it gets viewers. But
• 3:16
  here is the issue with that headline. It's why we're
• 3:18
  doing this deep dive today.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: It's lazy, very lazy.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: It distracts from the actual horror of the case. When
• 3:24
  you look at the evidence as we're going to do,
• 3:27
  you don't find a supernatural event. You don't find a
• 3:30
  demon summoning. You find something much more grounded in human psychology.
• 3:34
  You find a story of generational abuse, a lifetime of grifting,
• 3:38
  and honestly some of the most fascinating forensic science I
• 3:41
  have ever come across.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: And we are pulling from a variety of amazing sources
• 3:45
  for this, including the recently revisited coverage from Oxygen Snapped,
• 3:48
  which just aired a brand new look at this case
• 3:50
  in January twenty twenty six. This brings fresh eyes to
• 3:55
  a twenty five year old mystery.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: It's a perfect time to break it all down.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: So our mission today is to the truth from the
• 4:01
  tabloid sensationalism. But I do want to start with the
• 4:04
  visceral reality of that storage unit. Detective Messinar said, I've
• 4:08
  never seen one like that in my life. What specifically
• 4:11
  was so unique about the state of the body, because
• 4:14
  sadly police find bodies and trunks and containers more often
• 4:17
  than we'd like to think.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: It was the condition of the remains. Christine Smith hadn't
• 4:22
  just decomposed, She had transformed. She had been in that airtight,
• 4:26
  hot environment for at least six months, possibly a lot longer.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: Okay, stop right there. Transformed?
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: How well? We need to talk about chemistry for a second.
• 4:34
  When a body decomposes in the open air, it dries
• 4:38
  out or is consumed by insects fairly quickly. But inside
• 4:42
  a sealed plastic drum in the Nevada heat, the moisture
• 4:45
  has absolutely nowhere to go. It creates a humid anaerobic environment,
• 4:50
  meaning an environment with almost no oxygen.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: So it's basically like a pressure cooker.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: The slow cooker is probably a much better analogy. This
• 4:56
  leads to a process called liquefaction. The soft tissues essentially
• 5:00
  melt down. But then because of the specific chemical reaction
• 5:03
  of the body fat breaking down in that moist, airless environment,
• 5:06
  you get the formation of adipac here.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: I've heard that term on other cases, but I've never
• 5:11
  really understood it. Is it a fluid, No.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: It's actually a solid. It's often called grave wax or
• 5:15
  corpse wax. The fat undergoes a process called hydrolysis and
• 5:19
  turns into a soap like waxy substance. It's grayish white.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: Oh wow.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: And the bizarre thing is it can actually preserve the
• 5:26
  shape of the body to some extent, almost like a
• 5:28
  crude casting. Now, it usually happens in wet graves or
• 5:32
  bodies submerged in cold water. Finding it in the middle
• 5:35
  of this scorching Nevada desert is incredibly.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: Rare because it's so dry out there normally.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: Exactly, it speaks to just how effectively that cane was sealed.
• 5:44
  The killer created a completely closed moist ecosystem inside that
• 5:48
  drum that.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: Is absolutely nightmarish to visualize. So she's preserved in this
• 5:53
  grave wax inside a plastic drum. But beyond the biology
• 5:57
  of it, there was the way she was wrapped. This
• 5:59
  wasn't just a careless.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: Not at all. It was deeply meticulous. She was wrapped
• 6:02
  in heavy duty plastic trash bags. Then layers of celfane,
• 6:06
  like the exact kind you use in the kitchen to
• 6:08
  wrap leftovers, were wound tightly around her.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: It sounds exhausting to even do.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: Then duct tape endless amounts of duct tape. It took time,
• 6:16
  It took significant physical effort. But there was one detail
• 6:19
  that the prosecution focused on incredibly heavily during the trial.
• 6:22
  What was that there was a plastic bag knodded specifically
• 6:26
  over her face, tight hastily at the back of her head.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: Ugh, that detail really bothers me. If you're just trying
• 6:31
  to contain the smell or the fluids, you wrap the
• 6:33
  whole body, Why specifically bag the head and tie it
• 6:36
  off like that?
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: That's the million dollar question for you to ponder. If,
• 6:41
  as her daughter Brookie Lee West later claimed, Christine died
• 6:44
  of natural causes and this was just a panic disposal,
• 6:47
  why the bag over the head, right?
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: That doesn't fit.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: It suggests suffocation, or psychologically speaking, it suggests a profound
• 6:55
  need to depersonalize the victim. You cover the face so
• 6:59
  you don't have the look the eyes of the person
• 7:01
  you're discarding.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense. Let's look at the
• 7:03
  shrine aspect again. Though. You mentioned the occult books, but
• 7:06
  there were also completely normal things in there, right.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: Yes, and that juxtaposition is totally key to understanding the scene.
• 7:13
  You had Christine's handbag, her ID card, basically the mundane
• 7:18
  detritus of a sixty eight year old woman's life, and
• 7:22
  right next to it books with titles about summoning actual demons.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: The defense attorney Scott Coffee had a really interesting quote
• 7:28
  about this. He said, you see those sorts of books,
• 7:31
  and monsters come out from underneath the bed.
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: He's completely right about the optical effect. It instantly primes
• 7:38
  the jury and the public to see evil with a
• 7:41
  capital e. It makes you think of ritual sacrifice. But
• 7:45
  I really want to challenge that narrative for our listeners today.
• 7:48
  I don't think those books were a shrine at all.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: You don't think they were set up to cast a
• 7:52
  spell on the barrel?
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: No?
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: I don't, Then why are they there?
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: I think they were baggage, literal and metaphorical baggage. You
• 8:00
  have to understand the woman who rented this unit Brookie
• 8:03
  Lee West didn't just run out and buy these books
• 8:06
  for a murder ritual. She grew up with them.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: They were normal to her.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: They were as much a part of her household furniture
• 8:12
  as a toaster.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: Is.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: For us to understand why those books were sitting in
• 8:16
  Unit three seventeen, we have to leave two thousand and
• 8:18
  one and go back about seventy years.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: We're going back to the Great Depression.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: We are. Christine Smith, the woman in the barrel, was
• 8:24
  born in nineteen thirty two. She was the child of
• 8:27
  Eastern European immigrants, and by absolutely all accounts, her childhood
• 8:31
  was a complete catalog of horrors.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: Now we hear hard childhood a lot when we look
• 8:35
  into these sources, but what does that actually mean in
• 8:37
  this specific case.
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: It means extreme poverty, yes, but also severe exploitation. There
• 8:43
  are strong indications in historical allegations that her parents forced
• 8:48
  her into prostitution when she was just a teenager.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: Her own parents, yes, she was.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: A commodity to them, a way to survive.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: So from day one her worldview is formed. She learns
• 8:58
  family uses you, family sells you exactly.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: That is her absolute baseline for love and trust and
• 9:04
  Then in nineteen fifty six, she meets a man named
• 9:07
  LaRoy Smith. Now on paper, LaRoy looks like a massive
• 9:10
  step up. He's a US Army veteran. He becomes a
• 9:13
  police officer in El Paso, Texas. He wears a badge.
• 9:17
  He's a figure of order and safety.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: I'm guessing, given where we end up with the barrel
• 9:21
  in the books, that LaRoy wasn't exactly officer friendly.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: Deroy was a man of terrifying contradictions. By day, he's
• 9:27
  enforcing the law on the streets of El Paso. By night,
• 9:31
  he is a virulent white supremacist and a practicing Satanist.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: Wait a Satanist in the nineteen fifties, And I don't.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: Mean he just dabbled or read a spooky book. He
• 9:39
  genuinely considered himself a warlock. He held rituals in the.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Home a Satnus cop in nineteen fifties Texas. That genuinely
• 9:45
  sounds like a fictional character from a pulp novel.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: It really does. But this was the very real environment
• 9:51
  that Brookie Lee West was born into. Brookie was born
• 9:54
  in nineteen fifty three, and her brother Travis followed in
• 9:57
  nineteen fifty six. They didn't grow up with normal bedtime stories.
• 10:01
  They grew up with their father teaching them that dark
• 10:04
  magic was real, that they had innate power, and that
• 10:06
  violence was a perfectly valid tool to use against the world.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: And what about Christine? Was she a victim in this
• 10:13
  marriage to Leroy or was she a willing participant?
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: She was both? And this is where the psychology gets
• 10:18
  incredibly complicated. We often want victims to be perfect, innocent martyrs.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: Right, it makes a story easier to digest exactly.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: But Christine was a victim of her parents and her husband. Yes, However,
• 10:30
  she absorbed that toxicity and redirected it outward. In nineteen
• 10:34
  sixty one, when Brookie was just a little girl, Christine
• 10:37
  was having a torrid affair with a married man.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: Okay, things are escalating.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: This man eventually refused to leave his wife for Christine.
• 10:43
  Christine didn't take that well at all. She didn't just
• 10:46
  slash his tires or yell at him. She walked right
• 10:48
  into a local bar where he was sitting carrying a
• 10:51
  loaded shotgun.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: In a bar, a crowded bar.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: In a public bar. She walked right up to him
• 10:56
  and shot him point blank.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: My god, did the guy die miraculously.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: No, he survived the blast, but Christine was arrested, convicted
• 11:05
  of assault, and set to prison for two years.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Let's just pause and imagine being young Brookie. Your dad
• 11:12
  is a Satanist who hates everyone, and your mom just
• 11:15
  shotgunned to guy in a crowded bar and went to
• 11:18
  state prison. Who even takes care of you?
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: At that point, the state steps in. The kids were
• 11:23
  put into state care for a while. But when Christine
• 11:26
  got out of prison, she didn't come back to bake
• 11:28
  cookies and make up for lost time. She reunited with
• 11:31
  her children, but she initiated them into her world. She
• 11:34
  became a.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Mentor, but not a good mentor, not a girl Scout
• 11:36
  troop leader.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: No, she taught Brookie the family trade, and the family
• 11:40
  trade was grifting, shoplifting, swindling, people writing bad checks. It
• 11:44
  was all about how to extract money from a hospital world.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: So they essentially became business partners.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: That's the perfect word for it. It wasn't a traditional
• 11:52
  mother daughter hierarchy of care and discipline. It was a
• 11:55
  strict partnership bonded by crime. It was very much us
• 11:59
  again against the world. Because think about it, if you
• 12:02
  and I commit a crime together, we share a deep, secret.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: Right mutual destruction that.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: Bonds us tighter than just blood ever could. Brookie learned
• 12:12
  very early on that her main value to her mother
• 12:15
  was her ability to help her run scams successfully.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: That is such a warped foundation for a relationship. I
• 12:21
  can't even fathom what that does to a developing brain.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: It creates what psychologists call a fully a due dynamic,
• 12:28
  a shared madness. They are constantly validating each other's antisocial behavior.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: So let's jump forward a bit. Brookie grows up, she
• 12:35
  leaves this completely chaotic criminal childhood, and surprisingly she actually
• 12:39
  lands on her feet. She moves to Silicon Valley. She
• 12:42
  becomes a technical writer.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: Because she's smart. That's the crucial thing you have to
• 12:46
  realize about Brooki Lee West. She's highly intelligent, very articulate,
• 12:50
  and incredibly.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: Organized, which you'd have to be for that job.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: Technical writing requires extreme precision. It requires building structure out
• 12:57
  of chaos. She could present herself as a very respectable,
• 13:01
  middle class professional to anyone who met her.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: She's a chameleon completely.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: She could wear the mask of sanity perfectly at the office,
• 13:09
  but behind closed doors, she was still de roy Smith's daughter.
• 13:14
  She was still Christine Smith's partner in crime, and she
• 13:17
  had developed a very specific, very lethal way of dealing
• 13:21
  with people who became quote unquote problems.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: The sources sometimes call her a black widow figure, but
• 13:26
  that usually implies killing a string of husbands for insurance money.
• 13:30
  Brookie seems, I don't know different. Her motives are darker.
• 13:33
  Let's talk about her husband, Howard Simon Saint John Right.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: This happens in nineteen ninety four. Brookie is in her forties.
• 13:40
  She's actually taking her mother, Christine, to alcoholics anonymous meetings,
• 13:44
  mostly trying to keep up appearances and manage her mom's drinking,
• 13:47
  and she meets Howard at one of these meetings. They
• 13:50
  end up getting married.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: Was it a whirlwind romance?
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: More like a whirlwind disaster. The violence in their home
• 13:56
  started almost immediately. Howard actually went to the police. He
• 14:01
  filed a formal documented report stating that Brookie had physically
• 14:05
  attacked him, and not with a slapper a shove. She
• 14:08
  attacked him with a point three to two caliber handgun.
• 14:11
  She shot at him, She threatened him directly with a pistol,
• 14:14
  whipped him. It was an aggravated armed assault.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: And he didn't press the charges.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: He did initially he wanted her locked up, but as
• 14:20
  we see so often in domestic abuse cycles, and yes
• 14:23
  it is vital to note that men can certainly be
• 14:25
  victims of this too, he eventually recanted. He dropped the charges.
• 14:30
  Maybe she promised to change, maybe he was just terrified, hmm.
• 14:34
  But the legal charges were dropped.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: And from the timeline and the sources, that was a
• 14:37
  fatal mistake.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: Exactly two weeks later, just fourteen days after the legal
• 14:41
  system stepped away, Howard Simon Saint John was found dead.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: Where did they find him?
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: In the Sequoia National Forest. This is extremely rugged, isolated terrain.
• 14:51
  His body was basically dumped off a remote roadside. He
• 14:55
  had been shot in the back. But here is the
• 14:57
  detail that should make the hairs on the back of
• 14:59
  your next and straight up. He was found with a
• 15:02
  plastic bag over his head.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: There it is the signature we talked about earlier.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: It's the exact same memo that we see later. Shot
• 15:08
  in the back, which is cowardly but highly efficient, and
• 15:11
  then the bagging of the head to hide the face.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: So why wasn't she arrested right then and there? If
• 15:16
  her husband had just filed charges against her for assault
• 15:20
  with a deadly weapon.
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: You have to remember it was nineteen ninety four. We
• 15:23
  didn't have the robust DNA testing like we have today.
• 15:27
  There was no CCTV out in the national forest. It
• 15:30
  was a vast, remote area. She was absolutely the prime suspect. Sure,
• 15:34
  the police strongly suspected she did it, But knowing someone
• 15:38
  did something and proving it beyond a reasonable doubt in
• 15:41
  a court of law are two entirely different things. Without
• 15:44
  an eyewitness or the actual murder weapon, they just couldn't
• 15:47
  nail her down.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: So she walks away. She gets away with murder, literally.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: And that completely emboldens her. If you get away with
• 15:54
  the ultimate crime once, the psychological barrier to doing it
• 15:57
  again drops significantly. And he wasn't the only person quietly
• 16:01
  disappearing from her life. Her own brother, Travis. He vanished
• 16:05
  without a trace in nineteen ninety.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: Three, The ghost Brother. The sources barely have any information
• 16:10
  on him.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: Travis had a really hard life, severe mental illness, deep
• 16:15
  drug addiction. He was incredibly vulnerable. He just he'd dropped
• 16:18
  right off the map. Nobody was ever found to this day,
• 16:22
  but shortly after he disappeared. Hospital bills for his various
• 16:25
  medical treatments started showing up at Brookie's personal address.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: So she's intercepting his mail or pretending to the hospitals
• 16:32
  that he's still around.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: Or she was actively controlling his identity and finances even
• 16:36
  before he vanished. It strongly suggests she was managing his decline,
• 16:40
  just waiting for him to be out of the picture.
• 16:41
  And then there's the horrifying incident with her father's partner.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: This one is wild to me. The stun gun attack.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: Right it's nineteen ninety six. Leroy Smith, the Satanist father
• 16:52
  who started all this, is finally dying. He has terminal cancer.
• 16:56
  Brookie goes to visit him in the hospital and she
• 16:58
  gets into a verbal altercation with his partner, Diane Smith.
• 17:02
  Brookie pulls out a stun gun right there and attacks her.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: I mean, who brings a stun gun to a hospital visit,
• 17:07
  let alone uses it on an elderly woman.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: Someone who fully anticipates violence, someone who uses extreme physical
• 17:13
  force as a first resort, not a last. It shows
• 17:16
  a clear pattern of escalation. She moves from handguns to
• 17:19
  stun guns and eventually to suffocation.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: So by nineteen ninety seven. Brookie is essentially a ticking
• 17:25
  time bomb. She's very likely killed her husband, her brother
• 17:28
  is completely gone, she's brutally assaulted her dying father's partner,
• 17:31
  and now she brings her aging mother, Christine, to live
• 17:34
  in Las Vegas.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: It's the final act of their lifelong partnership. Christine is
• 17:39
  sixty five years old. Now, she's in terrible physical shape.
• 17:42
  She has severe asthma. She's a heavy lifelong drinker, she
• 17:45
  has emphysema. She can barely breathe on her own. Brookie
• 17:48
  sets her up in an apartment in Vegas, but Brookie
• 17:50
  is the one who pays for.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: It, which instantly creates a power dynamic dependent on.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: Complete absolute control and the neighbors, specifically, a woman named
• 17:59
  Ali Wilsey, who testified later watched this toxic dynamic play
• 18:04
  out daily. She called their relationship a rollercoaster of love
• 18:08
  and hate. They would scream at each other vicious, hateful,
• 18:11
  unforgivable things, and then literally five minutes later they'd be
• 18:15
  sitting together plotting a new scam.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: But the main friction point was always the money. It
• 18:20
  always comes back to the money always.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: Christine received a government social security check it was about
• 18:25
  one thousand dollars a month for Brookie, who is living
• 18:29
  an increasingly chaotic and disjointed life. Despite her intelligence that
• 18:33
  thousand dollars was a vital, steady income stream, she fully
• 18:37
  controlled Christine's bank accounts.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: So February nineteen ninety eight comes around and Christine disappears.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: The screaming matches in the apartment finally stopped, the place
• 18:44
  goes completely quiet.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: And Brookie immediately starts spinning tails to anyone who asks.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: Oh, Mom decided to move to Texas or Mom is
• 18:51
  out in California living with Travis.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: Which is such a bold, insane lie, considering Travis has
• 18:55
  been missing for five years by that point.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: It's a very desperate lie. But it actually worked for
• 19:00
  a while. Because Christine was a recluse, she didn't have
• 19:02
  a bridge club or a church group checking on her,
• 19:05
  and financially, the checks just kept coming in. Bank records
• 19:09
  later showed thousands and thousands of dollars in ATM withdrawals
• 19:12
  from Christine's account long after the date she supposedly packed
• 19:16
  up and moved away.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: So if you follow the money, you find the motive exactly.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: The money tells the true.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: Story Eventually, in two thousand and one, as we discuss,
• 19:24
  at the top of the deep dive, the storage unit
• 19:26
  is opened, the smell leads them to the body. Rookie
• 19:29
  is promptly arrested. Now we have to talk about her
• 19:32
  defense strategy, because remarkably, she didn't deny putting her mother
• 19:36
  in the trash can.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: She couldn't deny it. The forensic evidence tied her directly
• 19:41
  to the scene. Her fingerprints were all over the plastic wrapping.
• 19:44
  The physical key to the padlock on the sword unit
• 19:46
  was found on her personal keyring, So she pivoted her story.
• 19:50
  She claimed, I didn't kill her. I came home one
• 19:52
  day and just found her dead. It was her asthma
• 19:55
  in natural causes. But because of my past I panicked, panicked.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: We hear this exact phrase so much in true crime sources.
• 20:04
  I was afraid the police wouldn't believe me because of
• 20:06
  my criminal records, so I decided to hide the body.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: It's a highly plausible narrative on the surface, jury sometimes
• 20:13
  buy it, but when you apply actual logic to the timeline,
• 20:16
  the whole thing crumbles to dust. If you walk in
• 20:19
  and find your mother dead, you call nine one one
• 20:21
  even if you have a shady record. But let's play
• 20:24
  devil's advocate. Let's say you genuinely panic. Maybe you run
• 20:27
  away from the apartment. Maybe you just leave the body
• 20:29
  there and flee the state. You do not go out
• 20:32
  to a hardware store by a massive fifty five gallon
• 20:34
  industrial drum, by specific heavy duty chemical cleaners, by rolls
• 20:38
  of cellophane and duct tape. Return to the apartment, wrap
• 20:41
  the body with the meticulous precision of a surgeon, stuffer
• 20:44
  into the can, rent a U haul truck, rent a
• 20:46
  storage unit, move the heavy drum by yourself, and then
• 20:49
  meticulously pay the monthly rent on that unit for three
• 20:51
  straight years.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that is definitely not panic. That is a very
• 20:54
  focused project.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: That is a complex logistical operation. Panic is an impulsive,
• 20:59
  chaotic emotion. This was cold and calculated, But.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: The prosecution knew they needed more than just saying this
• 21:05
  looks highly suspicious to get a murder conviction. They needed
• 21:08
  to definitively prove she was dead before she went into
• 21:11
  the can, or at the very least, proof she didn't
• 21:13
  die the way Brookie claims she did. And this brings
• 21:17
  us to the bugs.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: Yes, the silent witnesses of the natural world.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: I found this part of the research absolutely fascinating, but also,
• 21:25
  I have to warn you incredibly gross. So bear with us.
• 21:28
  We really need to talk about forensic entomology.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: It's absolutely crucial to this case. The prosecution brought in
• 21:33
  doctor Neil Haskell as an expert witness. He's an absolute
• 21:37
  legend in the field of forensic entomology. He looks at
• 21:40
  what specific insects are present on a decomposing body, and
• 21:44
  almost more importantly, what insects are completely absent.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: So for the lay person, what usually shows up first
• 21:49
  at a fresh crime scene blowflies.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: Everyone knows them. They're the big metallic blue or green
• 21:54
  flies you constantly see buzzing around garbage cans in the summer.
• 21:58
  They're incredibly efficient biologue sensors. If a person dies and
• 22:02
  is exposed to the air, even inside a closed, locked department,
• 22:05
  blowflies will locate that body within minutes to maybe a
• 22:09
  few hours. They land, they lay eggs, and those eggs
• 22:12
  rapidly become maggots. It's the standard unavoidable decomposition cycle.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: So doctor Haskell takes a microscopic look at the contents
• 22:20
  of the trash can, from Unit three seventeen and he
• 22:23
  finds absolutely zero blowflies, not a single one. No maggots,
• 22:27
  no empty pupa casings left behind, nothing.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: What does that scientifically prove?
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Christine
• 22:35
  Smith's body was never exposed to the environment for any
• 22:38
  significant amount of time after she died. It proves she
• 22:41
  wasn't lying dead in the apartment for a day or
• 22:42
  two while Brookie supposedly panicked and figured out what to do.
• 22:46
  It proves she wasn't temporarily dumped in an alley dumpster
• 22:49
  and then retrieved later.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: So she basically went from being alive to being sealed
• 22:53
  in an airtight can almost immediately, within a.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: Very tight window of about four to eight hours maximum.
• 22:58
  But here is where doctor had Scull's testimony gets even
• 23:01
  more specific and chilling. He did find flies inside the barrel,
• 23:06
  but they weren't blowflies. They were forward flies forid flies.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: I've never heard of those.
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: They are also known colloquially as coffin flies or scuttle flies.
• 23:15
  These things are almost microscopic. They are about the size
• 23:18
  of a tiny fruit fly, and they have a terrifying
• 23:21
  evolutionary ability. They can literally burrow down through six solid
• 23:25
  feet of soil to get to a buried coffin. They
• 23:28
  can crawl through the tiniest microscopic gaps. We're talking about
• 23:31
  squeezing through the threaded grooves of a screw on a
• 23:34
  sealed coffin lid.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: That is wow, that is incredibly persistent.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: It really is. Doctor Haskell found entire generations of these
• 23:42
  coffin flies living inside the duct taped seal. This told
• 23:45
  him that the body was sealed tight enough immediately to
• 23:47
  keep out the big blowflies. But over the course of
• 23:49
  three baking years in that storage unit, these microscopic invaders
• 23:53
  managed to penetrate the microscopic gaps in the adhesive of
• 23:56
  the duct tape.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: So the total absence of the big flies definitively proves
• 23:59
  the panel story was a complete fabrication.
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: Correct. It proved immediate, purposeful containment. And that leads to
• 24:08
  the darker, much more terrifying possibility that I mentioned earlier.
• 24:12
  If she was sealed up that incredibly quickly and there
• 24:16
  was no outward sign of a physical struggle, was she
• 24:19
  already dead when she went into the drum or was
• 24:22
  she just unconscious?
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: Wait? Mean, she could have suffocated actually inside the can.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: It's a very real possibility, the experts considered, or alternatively,
• 24:30
  the plastic bag tied over the head was the actual
• 24:33
  method of death. Doctor Gary Tolgenhoff, a forensic pathologist on
• 24:36
  the case, testified that while the body was far too
• 24:39
  decomposed to show soft tissue evidence of a heart attack
• 24:42
  or a stroke, the bag firmly k nodded over the
• 24:44
  head is completely inconsistent with a natural death. You simply
• 24:47
  don't bag your mom's head and tie it shut if
• 24:49
  she tragiously dies of an asthma attack, You just don't
• 24:52
  do that.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: It's such a cold, brutal, calculated image. And speaking of cold,
• 24:56
  let's go back to the occult books for a minute.
• 24:58
  The prosecution had all this solid physical evidence, the incredible
• 25:00
  insect timeline, the plastic bag, the fingerprints, but they also
• 25:03
  clearly had the witch angle to play with. Did they
• 25:06
  actually use it in court?
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: They did, but they used it very carefully. They didn't
• 25:10
  stand up and argue that Brookie was casting literal magic spells.
• 25:14
  They argued that her dark belief system fundamentally made her dangerous.
• 25:18
  Frank Kumo, the lead prosecutor, had a very poetic chilling
• 25:22
  interpretation of the plastic bag. He suggested to the jury
• 25:26
  that covering the eyes was a specific ritualistic act. He said,
• 25:30
  covering the eyes damns the person to their demons.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: Wow, that's an incredibly powerful line to drop on a jury.
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: It really is. It frames the murder not just as
• 25:39
  a greedy grab for social security checks, but as a
• 25:41
  form of spiritual warfare. It paints Brookie not just as
• 25:44
  a petty thief for a grifter, but as an actual monster.
• 25:48
  And frankly, with those specific books sitting right there as
• 25:51
  visual evidence, the jury didn't have to stretch their imagination
• 25:54
  very far to believe it.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: But I want to push back on that narrative just
• 25:56
  a bit, because we promised to distill the truth here.
• 25:59
  Was it really siritual warfare or was she just a
• 26:01
  brutally practical killer who just happened to own some really
• 26:04
  weird books from her dad.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: I think the reality is a blend of both. I
• 26:07
  think the occult books were the dark furniture of her mind.
• 26:10
  Like we said earlier, it was her normal. But the
• 26:12
  actual methodology, the plastic bags, of precise ceiling of the barrel,
• 26:16
  the ongoing financial theft is pure calculating psychopath behavior. That's
• 26:21
  the chameleon side of her that worked in Silicon Valley.
• 26:24
  The books were just the set dressing of her own
• 26:27
  twisted reality.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: So the trial finally happens in two thousand and one.
• 26:32
  The defense desperately tries the natural causes and panic argument.
• 26:36
  The prosecution pushes hard on premeditated murder for profit, using
• 26:40
  the bug evidence to destroy the timeline.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: And the jury really didn't hesitate. They saw the can,
• 26:45
  they saw the grizzly photos of the atipacre, they heard
• 26:48
  all the math about the stolen money. They found her
• 26:51
  guilty of first degree murder. She was ultimately sentenced to
• 26:54
  life in prison without the possibility of corol.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: And Clark County officials openly called her true evil in
• 26:59
  the press.
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: It's a very rare label for a seasoned prosecutor to
• 27:03
  use so bluntly. Usually they use legal terms like depraved
• 27:06
  or violent. But calling someone true evil implies something innate,
• 27:11
  something that is fundamentally broken and can't ever be fixed.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: And Brookie really proved them right, didn't she, Because she
• 27:16
  didn't just go to prison and quietly knit sweaters for
• 27:19
  the next twenty years.
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: No, she absolutely did not and this is the bizarre
• 27:23
  coda to the whole story that really shows you exactly
• 27:26
  who she is at her core. It's twenty twelve, she's
• 27:30
  been locked up in prison for over a decade. She
• 27:32
  is nearly sixty years old. She has housed at the
• 27:35
  Florence McClure Women's Correctional Center, and she suddenly decides she's
• 27:40
  checking out.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: A prison break as sixty years old.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: And importantly not a violent, guns blazing break, a con
• 27:46
  artist's break, a grifter's escape. She works in the prison
• 27:50
  industry area, right she somehow manages to covertly dye her
• 27:53
  hair to perfectly match the color of the correctional staff uniforms.
• 27:57
  She steals a guard's official shirt and pants, dresses up
• 28:00
  as a prison guard, and casually tries to walk right
• 28:03
  out the front gate of the facility.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: That is just unbelievably bold, just strolling out like I'm
• 28:08
  heading home after my shift.
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: It almost worked too, she was caught on the grounds
• 28:12
  just before she cleared the final parimeter. But really think
• 28:15
  about the sheer confidence and delusion that takes the ability
• 28:19
  to completely assume a role under immense pressure. It's the
• 28:23
  exact same skill she used to be a respected technical
• 28:26
  writer in Silicon Valley while secretly terrorizing and killing her husband.
• 28:31
  It's the exact same skill she used to smile and
• 28:33
  tell her neighbors her dead mother was happily living in Texas.
• 28:37
  She is always constantly playing a character.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: So where is she today?
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: She is seventy two years old. Now she is still incarcerated.
• 28:45
  She's housed in an out of state facility currently, which
• 28:48
  sometimes happens for high security risks or specific medical reasons,
• 28:51
  but she remains firmly under Nevada jurisdiction. She will die
• 28:55
  in a prison cell.
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: It really feels like the end of a very very
• 28:58
  dark family lineage.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: It is, and honestly, that's the real tragedy at the
• 29:02
  heart of this case. We started this deep dive talking
• 29:05
  about a sensationalized witch killer, but what we really found
• 29:09
  when we dug into the sources was a curse. Not
• 29:12
  a magic curse with a wand, but a generational curse
• 29:15
  of learned behavior. Christine's parents brutally abused her, So Christine
• 29:19
  abused Brookie and taught her how to be a hardened criminal.
• 29:23
  Then Brookie used those lessons to kill her husband and
• 29:25
  eventually her own mother. It's a completely closed loop of destruction.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: A snake constantly eating its own tail.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: Exactly the human our boros.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: You know, I keep thinking about that storage unit. If
• 29:37
  you strip away all the media sensationalism, the satanic panic,
• 29:40
  the screaming headlines, what you ultimately have is a daughter
• 29:44
  who just couldn't let go. I mean, she couldn't let
• 29:46
  go of the monthly money, sure, but she also couldn't
• 29:49
  let go of the physical body. She carefully kept her
• 29:51
  mother in a box right alongside her father's dark books.
• 29:54
  It's almost like she boxed up all her childhood trauma
• 29:57
  and just stored it.
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: And just hope that the metal door would stay locked forever.
• 30:01
  But in Las Vegas, especially in that kind of heat,
• 30:04
  nothing stays hidden forever. The corruption always always rots its
• 30:08
  way out eventually.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: That is a very grim but incredibly fitting thought to
• 30:13
  end our discussion on. Now. If you want to dive
• 30:16
  even deeper into the absolute minutia of the trial and
• 30:19
  the testimonies, there is a very comprehensive book called Which
• 30:23
  by Glenn Putt. It came out in two thousand and five,
• 30:26
  and it really covers the core case in exhaustive detail.
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: It's definitely a tough read emotionally speaking, but it's the
• 30:31
  definitive account if you want the raw facts of the trial.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: But before we wrap up, I want to leave you
• 30:36
  with a final thought. Team all over. We talked about
• 30:38
  the books and the body and the trauma, but think
• 30:41
  about the physical legacy left behind when someone like Brookie
• 30:44
  is finally caught. What happens to those actual items. That's
• 30:47
  a fascinating angle, right those books, that cauldron of a trash.
• 30:52
  Can they sit in an evidence locker for years? They
• 30:55
  become someone else's responsibility to inventory, to handle. The tama
• 31:00
  of that family didn't just vanish when Brookie was locked up.
• 31:03
  It was physically inherited by the detectives, the clerks, the
• 31:06
  people who had to touch the remnants of that dark history.
• 31:10
  The monsters under the bed were family members, yes, but
• 31:13
  the physical artifacts of those monsters outlive them all. It
• 31:17
  really makes you wonder about the lingering energy of the
• 31:19
  things we leave behind.
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: It absolutely does.
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to this deep dive. It was
• 31:24
  a really heavy one. We looked deep into the Abyss
• 31:27
  today and I think the Abyss definitely stared back at
• 31:29
  us a little bit.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: It certainly felt like it.
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: Stay safe out there. Please check on your neighbors and
• 31:34
  maybe if you have a storage unit, go clean it
• 31:36
  out once in a while.
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: Take care everyone,