Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Set Designer, Husband Found Dead Hours Apart

Transcript

Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Set Designer, Husband Found Dead Hours Apart · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Welcome to the deep dive. I want you to just
0:02
take a second and picture the last time you got
0:05
completely lost in a television show.
0:06
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, like one of those massive prestige streaming series.
0:10
Speaker 1: Right exactly, the ones where every single detail on the
0:14
screen feels incredibly intentional, like the wallpaper perfectly matches the
0:18
character's mood, or.
0:19
Speaker 2: The clutter on a desk tells you exactly who the
0:21
person is before they even speak a single line of dialogue.
0:24
Speaker 1: Yes, when we watch these shows, we are basically buying
0:28
into an illusion of total, meticulous control.
0:31
Speaker 2: Everything is exactly where it is supposed to be.
0:33
Speaker 1: But today we are looking at the horrifying collision between
0:37
that perfectly controlled, beautiful fiction and a reality that was
0:41
well chaotic, uncontrollable, and ultimately fatal.
0:45
Speaker 2: It's an incredibly heavy topic.
0:47
Speaker 1: It is. Our mission today is to untangle the timeline
0:50
of a truly devastating event from July of twenty twenty six.
0:54
This is the murder suicide of Hollywood set decorator Mary
0:57
Kate Golding and her husband Joseph.
0:59
Speaker 2: As a we're going to be exploring the grueling, really
1:03
invisible labor behind our favorite TV shows while also confronting
1:07
the very dark realities of intimate partner violence.
1:10
Speaker 1: And it is a profound contrast, right, That contrast really
1:14
frames this entire discussion.
1:15
Speaker 2: For us, It absolutely does. We aren't just looking at
1:19
a crime timeline today. We are exploring the jarring distance
1:22
between the escapism that you and I consume on our
1:25
screens and the very real, sometimes deeply tragic lives of
1:29
the unseen individuals who build that escapism.
1:32
Speaker 1: For us and Mary Kate Golding, I mean, she was
1:34
one of the absolute best at building.
1:36
Speaker 2: As she really was.
1:37
Speaker 1: She spent her professional life meticulously constructing these worlds. She
1:41
worked on massive cultural touchstones shows like The Marvelous Missus
1:45
masl and Marvel's Hawkeye.
1:46
Speaker 2: On her sets, every lamp, every book, every ashtray was
1:50
chosen to tell a highly specific story exactly.
1:53
Speaker 1: It was a life completely defined by visual perfection. Yet
1:57
her own life ended in the violent reality of a
1:59
basement of apartment and queens.
2:01
Speaker 2: It's a very sharp, deeply unsettling reality check about the
2:04
actual people whose names scroll by in the end credits, right.
2:07
Speaker 1: It forces us to reevaluate the entire ecosystem of the
2:12
entertainment industry, the people working behind the scenes are navigating
2:16
these immense, high stakes pressures in a gig.
2:19
Speaker 2: Economy, a gig economy that basically demands absolute perfection but
2:22
offers very very little stability in return.
2:25
Speaker 1: So to truly understand the magnitude of what was lost here,
2:29
we have to look closely at both the extraordinary work
2:31
Mary Kate produced and the psychological and environmental pressure cooker
2:36
that preceded her death.
2:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, and to ground all of this, we really have
2:39
to start on the night it all shattered.
2:41
Speaker 1: We do. We need to walk through the factual sequence
2:44
of events as they unfold it on that night in July,
2:47
because it's a timeline that raises incredibly difficult questions about
2:50
human psychology and.
2:51
Speaker 2: The mechanics of a crisis. Really, the timeline is critical here.
2:55
We are looking at the early hours of Tuesday, July
2:57
twenty first, twenty twenty six.
2:59
Speaker 1: Okay set the scene for us.
3:00
Speaker 2: So the location is a basement apartment on forty first
3:03
Street near nineteenth Avenue in Astoria, Queens.
3:06
Speaker 1: And his story is generally a pretty quiet residential neighborhood,
3:09
right it is.
3:10
Speaker 2: Though it does have a heavy concentration of folks working
3:13
in the New York film and television industry, mostly because
3:16
of its proximity to major studios.
3:18
Speaker 1: It's a neighborhood of creatives essentially. But shortly after midnight
3:22
on this particular Tuesday, an argument broke out between thirty
3:25
four year old Mary Kay Golding and her thirty three
3:28
year old husband, Joseph A.
3:29
Speaker 2: Zeretto, and this argument escalated to a fatal point. Azuretto
3:34
stabbed his wife.
3:36
Speaker 1: God When the police eventually arrived, they found her deceased
3:40
with a fatal stab wound to her back and the weapon,
3:43
a knife, was actually still lodged in the wound.
3:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that specific detail the weapon left at the
3:49
scene embedded like that, it indicates a sudden, highly volatile
3:53
explosion of.
3:54
Speaker 1: Violence rather than something heavily premeditated exactly.
3:57
Speaker 2: But what Azeretto did in the immediate aftermath of this
4:00
horrific act, that is where the timeline becomes incredibly complex
4:03
from a psychological standpoint.
4:05
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, let's unpack this. Because he didn't just run
4:08
out the door immediately, No, he didn't. The couple had
4:09
an eleven month old son. Azaretto left the infant entirely
4:14
unharmed in the apartment with Mary Kate's body, and then
4:18
he picked up the phone.
4:19
Speaker 2: He called a family member, and he also called one
4:22
of Mary Kate's friends.
4:23
Speaker 1: And he confessed to what he had just done on
4:25
those calls.
4:26
Speaker 2: Yes, he explicitly confessed to the killing. And it was
4:29
because of that specific phone call to Mary Kid's friend
4:33
that the friend rushed over to the apartment.
4:35
Speaker 1: They discovered the horrific scene, managed to get the baby
4:38
out safely, and called nine to one one.
4:40
Speaker 2: Right, and the police arrived rapidly between twelve two four
4:43
am and twelve thirty am.
4:45
Speaker 1: And this is where I really need to stop and
4:47
push back on how we usually interpret these timelines, because
4:51
the tendency is to say, well, he called someone to
4:53
save the baby, so he had this moment of terrifying
4:56
lucidity he realized what he did.
4:58
Speaker 2: That is the common narrative.
4:59
Speaker 1: Yes, but I really push back on that framing. I mean,
5:02
fleeing the scene and leaving an eleven month old infant
5:05
in a room with his murdered mother. That doesn't sound
5:08
lucid to me at all. It sounds like absolute dissociative panic.
5:11
Speaker 2: It's incredibly jarring.
5:12
Speaker 1: Our investigators entirely sure this wasn't some kind of psychotic break, Like,
5:17
how do we differentiate between a moment of clarity and
5:19
sheer adrenaline fueled panic.
5:22
Speaker 2: Well, that is a crucial distinction to make when behavioral
5:25
analysts look at the aftermath of intimate partner homicides. A
5:28
psychotic break usually involves a complete detachment from reality meaning
5:33
what exactly, meaning a failure to understand that an act
5:36
was wrong, or a deep delusion driving the act. Azuretto's
5:39
actions making those phone calls specifically targeting people who could
5:43
intervene for the child and confessing they demonstrate an acute
5:47
awareness of reality and consequence.
5:50
Speaker 1: Oh wow, so he knew exactly what he had done.
5:52
Speaker 2: He knew exactly what he had done, and he knew
5:53
the baby was in danger, not necessarily from him, but
5:56
from being abandoned in that environment.
5:59
Speaker 1: So it's not loosey in the sense of calmness. It's
6:02
more of a frantic, desperate recognition of the catastrophe.
6:05
Speaker 2: Precisely, it is the adrenaline of the violence immediately giving
6:09
way to the unbearable, crushing reality of the outcome. He
6:13
makes sure the child is secured by a third party,
6:15
and then he flees.
6:16
Speaker 1: And when the police arrived at that apartment to secure
6:18
the scene. The juxtaposition of Mary Kate's professional life and
6:22
her personal tragedy was sitting right there in plain sight.
6:26
Speaker 2: The details of the scene are just haunting.
6:28
Speaker 1: They really are. Outside in the driveway there was a
6:30
bloody dustpan, and sitting inside a vehicle parked at the
6:34
scene was a production bag associated with the Goosebumps TV.
6:37
Speaker 2: Series, which was one of the major Disney Plus shows
6:40
Mary Kate had been working on.
6:41
Speaker 1: Right, you have this mundane branded piece of production gear,
6:45
a literal symbol of this spooky, fabricated made for TV horror,
6:51
sitting dormant right next to an actual, visceral, irreversible, real
6:55
world horror.
6:57
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate tragic collision of those two worlds.
7:00
The visual of that is staggering. The everyday objects of
7:03
her massive professional success left behind while her personal life
7:07
was violently dismantled, and.
7:09
Speaker 1: While the police are at the scene processing this discovery
7:12
azretto is basically in the wind.
7:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, the timeline goes completely dark for about six hours.
7:17
It isn't until six thirty nine am that the NYPD
7:20
responds to another nine to one one call, this time
7:22
about an unconscious person.
7:24
Speaker 1: This was at a story of Park South and Shore Boulevards.
7:26
Speaker 2: Right, Yes, responders found a man matching Azuretta's description. He
7:31
had hanged himself from a tree in the park and
7:33
was pronounced dead at the scene.
7:35
Speaker 1: God And while the NYPD didn't immediately put out a
7:39
press release labeling it a murder suicide, investigators in internal
7:43
police sources confirmed there was no doubt.
7:45
Speaker 2: Right Azretto killed Golding, fled to the park and took
7:48
his own life.
7:49
Speaker 1: You know, you look at that six hour gap between
7:51
the murder and the suicide and you just have to
7:54
wonder about the sheer geography of that despair.
7:56
Speaker 2: What do you mean by that?
7:58
Speaker 1: Well, Astoria Park is this massive, beautiful public space right
8:02
on the East River, looking out at the Rfkbridge. To
8:05
flee a cramped basement apartment, navigate through the dark, quiet
8:09
streets of Queen's arrive at this sprawling park and make
8:13
that final, irreversible choice as the sun is coming up.
8:16
Speaker 2: It's a horrifying sequence, and it highlights the ultimate trajectory
8:20
of domestic homicides of this nature. The initial act is
8:23
often driven by a toxic mix of rage, loss of control,
8:27
and extreme environmental stressors, but the subsequent suicide is driven
8:31
by total despair and the complete inability to face the
8:35
consequences of that lost control.
8:37
Speaker 1: And the consequence here is an eleven month old boy
8:40
orphaned in a matter of hours. Yeah, the finality of
8:43
it is just so heavy. But if we stop the
8:46
story here, just at the crime scene, we are doing
8:49
a massive disservice to you with the listener, Because Mary
8:53
Kate Golding was not just a name on a police blodder.
8:56
Speaker 2: No, she certainly wasn't. She was a creator.
8:58
Speaker 1: Exactly, and to really grasp the void left in the
9:02
world that morning, we have to understand exactly what she
9:04
did for a living, because her work was incredible.
9:07
Speaker 2: She was, in every sense of the word, an architect
9:10
of illusion, and understanding her career requires us to look
9:13
at a corner of the filmmaking industry that is foundational,
9:17
incredibly demanding, and rarely celebrated by the people who actually
9:20
watched the final product.
9:21
Speaker 1: Let's talk about how she got there. So she was
9:23
originally from Pennsylvania. She graduated from New York University in
9:26
twenty fifteen.
9:27
Speaker 2: And from there she entered the New York film and
9:30
television production scene.
9:31
Speaker 1: Which for anyone who hasn't been near that world. Breaking
9:34
into the art department in New York is notoriously brutal,
9:37
Oh it is.
9:38
Speaker 2: You don't just hand in a resume and get a
9:39
job on a Marvel show, right.
9:41
Speaker 1: You start at the very bottom, working unimaginable hours for
9:45
very little pay, just trying to prove you can handle
9:47
the stress.
9:48
Speaker 2: The gig economy of television production is uniquely punishing. You
9:52
are entirely freelance. Your next paycheck depends entirely on your reputation,
9:58
your liability, and your ability to solve seemingly impossible logistical
10:02
problems under extreme time constraints, and.
10:05
Speaker 1: Mary Kate's trajectory shows this very deliberate, hard fought ascent.
10:10
She started as an art department production assistant on the
10:12
twenty seventeen film The Big Sick.
10:14
Speaker 2: Which is a fantastic movie by the way.
10:16
Speaker 1: Oh it's such a good movie. But from there she
10:18
ground her way up through a short lived ABC series,
10:21
and by twenty eighteen she had secured her role as
10:23
an art department coordinator on a Netflix sketch comedy show.
10:26
Speaker 2: But her true breakthrough the place where she really cemented
10:30
her reputation in the industry was her work on Amazon's
10:34
The Marvelous Missus Mazel.
10:36
Speaker 1: Okay, if you have seen Missus Mazel, you know that
10:39
the visual aesthetic of that show is half the reason
10:42
it's so beloved.
10:43
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
10:44
Speaker 1: She served as a set decoration coordinator for multiple episodes,
10:47
and I think a lot of people confuse production design
10:49
with set decoration.
10:50
Speaker 2: He do constantly.
10:52
Speaker 1: The production designer is the overarching visionary, maybe designing the
10:56
actual physical walls of the room. Yeah, But the set
10:59
decorator and their coordinators are the people who figure out
11:02
exactly what goes inside that room to make it look
11:04
like a human being actually lives there. Yeah, explain the
11:07
mechanics of this to us, because it is fascinating.
11:10
Speaker 2: The mechanics of set decoration are mind boggling when you
11:13
actually break them down. A set decorator doesn't just go
11:16
to a furniture store and buy a couch. They are
11:18
engaged in deep psychological and historical profiling. For a show
11:23
like Missus Mazel, which is this hyper detailed recreation of
11:26
late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties New York, the
11:30
set decoration team has to source, place, and maintain thousands
11:34
of specific objects, right.
11:36
Speaker 1: It's never just a generic lamp.
11:37
Speaker 2: No, we are talking about the exact correct upholstery fabric
11:40
for a nineteen fifty eight upper West side apartment, the
11:44
specific brand of cigarettes a character would smoke, the exact
11:48
title of a book that would be sitting on a
11:49
bedside table, the ash trays, the lampshades, and as.
11:53
Speaker 1: A coordinator, Mary Kate was the logistical hub of all
11:56
that chaos.
11:57
Speaker 2: Yes, she's managing the spreadsheets, tracking the budget. It's coordinating
12:00
with prop houses all over the five.
12:02
Speaker 1: Boroughs, just making sure that when the director yells action,
12:06
that nineteen fifty eight apartment feels utterly, flawlessly real. It's
12:10
almost like an exercise in manipulating viewer psychology. It really is,
12:13
because if he does her job perfectly, you, the viewer,
12:16
never consciously noticed the lampshade. You just feel instinctively that
12:20
you have time travel exactly.
12:21
Speaker 2: It is invisible labor by design. If you notice the
12:24
set decoration, it often means it was done poorly because
12:26
it distracted you from the narrative.
12:28
Speaker 1: That makes total sense.
12:29
Speaker 2: The production design on Missus Mazel won multiple Emmy Awards
12:33
specifically because of this obsessive eye for detail. But what's
12:36
truly remarkable about Golding's career is that she didn't just
12:39
get pigeonholed into mid century period pieces. The sheer variety
12:44
of her resume is astounding, it really is.
12:47
Speaker 1: I mean, she was the Arts apartment coordinator on the
12:49
Batman prequel series Gotham. She worked on the HBO psychological
12:54
thriller The Undoing, and The Flight Attendant.
12:56
Speaker 2: She also worked on Marvel's Hawkeye for the New York
12:58
unit pilding gritty contemporary superhero Hideouts, and she was.
13:02
Speaker 1: A buyer for the Jennifer Lopez movie Marry Me. Most recently,
13:07
she had moved up to assistant set decorator on the
13:10
Amazon reboot of Mister and Missus Smith and that Disney
13:13
plus Goosebump series.
13:15
Speaker 2: And she was even slated to work on an upcoming
13:17
feature film called Deep Cuts, which.
13:18
Speaker 1: Tells us everything we need to know about her standing
13:21
in the industry right.
13:22
Speaker 2: Absolutely, moving up from an art department PA to a
13:26
coordinator and then to a buyer and an assistant decorator
13:29
on massive one hundred million dollar union projects, I mean,
13:33
you do not achieve that unless you are exceptionally talented,
13:36
highly organized, and capable of maintaining calm in a perpetual
13:40
state of manufactured.
13:41
Speaker 1: Crisis, because television production is basically a daily crisis.
13:45
Speaker 2: It is exactly that.
13:46
Speaker 1: And this is where the contrast just hits you like
13:48
a freight train. Let's talk about the psychological toll of
13:52
what we might call context switching.
13:54
Speaker 2: Context switching.
13:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, she spends her fourteen hour workdays metigulously controlling every
13:59
single element of a lavish, multimillion dollar fictional world. She's
14:03
dressing penthouses and curating perfection. But then the director calls cut.
14:09
The day ends, right, the day ends, she leaves that controlled,
14:12
beautiful environment, and she has to commute home to a
14:14
reality that was the exact opposite.
14:16
Speaker 2: It was a very stark reality. The environmental factor surrounding
14:20
the couple's living situation in Queen's are a crucial component
14:23
of understanding the intense pressure cooker they were operating within.
14:27
Just two months prior to the murder suicide, Mary, Kate,
14:30
Joseph and their infant son had relocated from Pennsylvania to
14:35
Astoria and.
14:36
Speaker 1: They moved into a basement apartment. Now, as we mentioned earlier,
14:39
a story is a great culturally rich neighborhood, but Living
14:43
in a basement unit in New York City is a
14:45
very specific kind of existence.
14:47
Speaker 2: It really is.
14:48
Speaker 1: I think people hear Hollywood set decorator and they instantly
14:51
envisioned glamour, red carpets, massive paychecks. But the reality for
14:56
many below the line crew members, even those working on
14:59
prestige Marvel shows, is intense financial instability.
15:03
Speaker 2: The reality of the gig economy is that you are
15:05
only paid when you are actively on a project. Between shows,
15:08
the income stops, but the rent in New York City
15:11
definitely does not.
15:12
Speaker 1: No, it does not.
15:13
Speaker 2: Basement apartments are sought after because they offer a slightly
15:15
more affordable footprint, but that affordability comes with severe psychological
15:19
trade offs. You are often dealing with heavily restricted natural light,
15:23
low ceilings, potential dampness, and a pervasive sense of claustrophobia.
15:28
Speaker 1: Think about holding your breath underwater. You can do it
15:31
for a little while, knowing you'll eventually come up for air.
15:34
Living in a cramp dark space while working grueling hours
15:38
and trying to raise a newborn baby, that is like
15:41
holding your breath.
15:42
Speaker 2: It requires immen's emotional regulation exactly.
15:45
Speaker 1: But if an unexpected current hits you while you're down there.
15:48
Panic sets in immediately, and based on what neighbors were saying,
15:53
as Auretta was already panicking.
15:55
Speaker 2: The observations from the community paint a very concerning picture
15:58
of his baseline state. While while some reports suggested Azeretto
16:01
had vague connections to the film industry, he didn't have
16:04
the verifiable, steady resume that his wife did. What was
16:08
highly visible to the neighborhood, however, was his volatility. A
16:12
worker in the area told local media that Azuretto displayed
16:15
a volatile temper and seemed quote mentally disturbed, noting that
16:19
this had been apparent basically from the moment the family
16:21
arrived in Astoria two months earlier, and.
16:23
Speaker 1: It wasn't just vague grumbling or bad moods. There was
16:26
a specific, acute incident. Azaretto had recently engaged in a
16:31
physical altercation, like a literal fight with REPO men over
16:36
a vehicle, which is.
16:37
Speaker 2: An incredibly significant data point for us to look at.
16:41
A vehicle repossession is not just a financial blow. It
16:44
is a public, humiliating loss of control. It signifies acute
16:49
financial ruin.
16:51
Speaker 1: Let's pause on that confrontation for a second. Fighting a reboman.
16:55
I mean, if a tow trek shows up to take
16:56
your car because you haven't paid the bills, the logical
16:59
rational response, even if you're completely devastated, is to understand
17:03
that fighting the driver isn't going to get your car
17:05
back right.
17:06
Speaker 2: It's just going to get you arrested exactly.
17:08
Speaker 1: Resorting to physical violence against a repoman means your executive function,
17:13
your ability to reason through a stressful situation, has completely collapsed.
17:17
Speaker 2: It shows a complete breakdown in coping mechanisms. If we
17:20
synthesize these environmental factors, the pressure cooker becomes terrifyingly clear.
17:25
Speaker 1: Walk us through that synthesis.
17:26
Speaker 2: You have the inherent, profound stress of a recent relocation.
17:30
You add an eleven month old infant, bringing sleep deprivation
17:33
and immense anxiety. You place that family in a claustrophobic,
17:37
subterranean living space. You layer on the financial instability of
17:41
freelance film work, and finally the acute, immediate crisis of
17:46
a vehicle repossession.
17:47
Speaker 1: So the margin for error in their daily lives was
17:50
absolute zero. One unexpected expense, one bad day, and the
17:54
whole system collapses.
17:55
Speaker 2: Now I want to be unequivocally clear here environmental stress,
17:59
financial straying, claustrophobia, and demanding jobs never, under any circumstances
18:05
justify intimate partner violence.
18:08
Speaker 1: Absolutely not. Millions of families face these exact same economic
18:11
and environmental pressures and never resort to harming each other exactly.
18:16
Speaker 2: But from a sociological standpoint, these factors set the stage.
18:19
They strip away a person's emotional buffering. They create an
18:23
environment where existing domestic volatility can rapidly escalate into a
18:27
lethal crisis.
18:28
Speaker 1: And that existing domestic volatility wasn't just creating that Queen's basement,
18:32
was it.
18:32
Speaker 2: No, it wasn't.
18:33
Speaker 1: When you dig into the sources, you find a deeply
18:35
troubling pre existing history in Azaretta's family. The timeline of
18:39
tragedy actually starts years before they even moved to New York,
18:42
and this where the psychology of this case gets incredibly
18:46
dark and complex.
18:47
Speaker 2: You are referring to the events of February twenty twenty
18:50
in Monroe County, Pennsylvania. This is a crucial piece of
18:54
the broader context surrounding Jason Azaretto's background. Six years before
18:58
the murder, suicide, and astoria tragedy struck the Azuretta family home.
19:03
Joseph's younger brother, Nicholas Azuretto, who was twenty years old
19:07
at the time, shot and killed their fifty eight year
19:10
old father, Frank.
19:11
Speaker 1: It's almost impossible to comprehend a single family experiencing two
19:15
entirely separate lethal domestic incidents within six years.
19:19
Speaker 2: It's staggering.
19:20
Speaker 1: The details of that twenty twenty shooting are meticulous in
19:23
the court records. The father, Frank, had become violent during
19:26
an argument with his wife, Joseph and Nicholas's mother, and
19:29
the trigger for this argument a telephone.
19:31
Speaker 2: Bill, a seemingly mundane financial stressor, but it escalated into
19:35
physical threats. The reports detailed that the father was pacing,
19:39
throwing objects and threatening physical harm to.
19:41
Speaker 1: His wife, and that's when Nicholas intervened.
19:43
Speaker 2: Yes, Nicholas, the younger brother, was in a basement bedroom.
19:48
He emerged, confronted the escalating situation, and ultimately retweeved a shotgun.
19:54
He shot his father in the chest in the family kitchen.
19:56
The father was pronounced dead at the hospital.
19:59
Speaker 1: Wait a phone bill that really stops me in my tracks,
20:03
because an argument over a phone bill that escalates to
20:05
throwing objects and death threats I mean that implies the
20:08
violence wasn't actually about the money at all.
20:10
Speaker 2: What do you think it was about?
20:11
Speaker 1: It was about a desperate need for total control and
20:13
dominance within the household. If that is the baseline environment
20:17
that Joseph and his brother grew up in, how does
20:19
a person ever learn to process normal marital friction?
20:23
Speaker 2: That is the central psychological question, and the legal outcome
20:27
of that twenty twenty case gives us some insight into
20:29
the home environment what I have with to wimickloss. In
20:32
November twenty twenty one, Nicholas pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter,
20:37
but he didn't serve prison time. A judge sentenced him
20:39
to ten years of probation, which included electronic monitoring.
20:43
Speaker 1: That's a relatively lenient sentence for a homicide.
20:45
Speaker 2: It is the reason for this relatively lenient sentence was
20:50
that the defense attorney successfully argued and the court recognized
20:53
a long documented history of abuse within that family, directed
20:57
by the father.
20:58
Speaker 1: So the justice system was essentially acknowledged that this wasn't
21:01
an isolated, out of the blue murder, but rather the
21:04
explosive culmination of an abusive, terrifying household.
21:09
Speaker 2: Dynamic correct and when reporters managed to reach Nicholas after
21:13
his brother Joseph's murder suicide in twenty twenty six, he
21:16
declined to comment at length. He simply expressed regret that
21:20
he couldn't be more helpful he had already lived through
21:23
the unthinkable once.
21:24
Speaker 1: I have to ask you, how do we process this
21:27
mathematically in terms of human behavior. I'm trying to wrap
21:29
my head around the rewiring of a human brain.
21:32
Speaker 2: It's a lot to process.
21:33
Speaker 1: If you grow up in a house where abuse is
21:34
a constant undercurrent, and then you actually witness lethal violence
21:38
successfully stop that abuse. Because the brothers shooting the father
21:42
essentially ended the immediate threat to the mother.
21:44
Speaker 2: Right, it's stopped the immediate threat.
21:46
Speaker 1: How much does that permanently warp your baseline for conflict resolution? Like,
21:51
does it establish violence as a viable tool?
21:54
Speaker 2: We have to tread very carefully into the psychological literature here.
21:58
It is paramount to state that the earth R tragedy
22:00
does not excuse Joseph Hazaretto's actions. Every individual is ultimately
22:05
responsible for their own violence.
22:07
Speaker 1: Absolutely, the accountability remains solely on Joseph.
22:10
Speaker 2: Nicholas's actions in defense of his mother. Do not excuse
22:13
Joseph's unprovoked murder of his wife. However, when we analyze
22:17
behavioral patterns through the lens of intergenerational trauma, the impact
22:22
is devastating.
22:23
Speaker 1: Because it normalizes the extreme.
22:24
Speaker 2: Exactly when you grew up in a household where rage
22:27
is normalized, where physical threats are the standard response to
22:31
a minor stressor like a phone bill, your nervous system
22:34
is permanently altered. You live in a constant state of hypervigilance.
22:38
More importantly, your template for conflict resolution is profoundly corrupted.
22:42
Speaker 1: Because the unthinkable isn't unthinkable anymore.
22:45
Speaker 2: Exactly, for most people, the threshold for lethal violence is
22:49
an insurmountable wall. But in the Azaretto family, that wall
22:52
had already been breached. The precedent was set that extreme
22:56
lethal violence is what happens when household tension boils over.
23:00
Speaker 1: Wow.
23:01
Speaker 2: So when Joseph Azaretto faced his own domestic, financial, and
23:04
environmental pressures in that claustrophobic a story, abasement, the repoman,
23:09
the baby, the lack of space, his internal blueprint for
23:13
handling that crisis was already structurally compromised by his family's history.
23:17
Speaker 1: It's like trying to build a new, healthy relationship on
23:19
a foundation that was poured with poisoned concrete. The structural
23:23
flaws were there from the very beginning.
23:25
Speaker 2: That's a very apt analogy, and connecting.
23:27
Speaker 1: That specific micro level family history to the broader world,
23:30
it forces us to realize that this horrific event in
23:33
Queen's is actually just one data point in a massive,
23:37
systemic public health crisis.
23:39
Speaker 2: It is a staggering crisis. The deaths of Mary Kay
23:42
Goulding and Joseph Azeretto fit a pattern of intimate partner
23:45
homicide that experts and law enforcement see repeatedly across the
23:49
United States. It is a systemic issue woven into the
23:53
fabric of criminal justice and public health.
23:55
Speaker 1: The statistics are just sobering. A substantial percentage of all
23:59
female homicide victims in the US are killed by current
24:03
or former intimate partners.
24:04
Speaker 2: And when you look at the common triggers identified by
24:07
researchers escalating arguments, impending separation, acute financial stress, and untreated
24:12
mental health crisis.
24:13
Speaker 1: They line up almost exactly with what we saw escalating
24:16
in that basement apartment and on the street with the
24:19
REPO men.
24:19
Speaker 2: They really do what is crucial to understand is the
24:22
concept of the blast radius. Intimate partner violence is often
24:26
viewed as a private, closed door issue, but the aftermath
24:30
of these events is never contained to just the two
24:32
people involved. The blast radius is catastrophic and generational.
24:36
Speaker 1: Think about the most vulnerable person in this specific blast radius, right,
24:40
They're eleven month old son Nolan. In a single night,
24:43
over the course of a few hours, this infant is
24:46
left entirely orphaned.
24:47
Speaker 2: Yes, he is now in the care of Mary Kate's parents.
24:51
Speaker 1: The psychological literature on infants surviving this kind of trauma
24:54
is heartbreaking. Even if he doesn't consciously remember the night,
24:58
the body remembers the trauma absolutely does. The sudden absence
25:01
of his mother, the chaos, the involvement of child protective services,
25:06
the family courts. His entire developmental trajectory is instantly altered.
25:10
Speaker 2: It will be a lifelong process of navigation for that
25:13
child and the surviving family members. The generational trauma theoretically
25:18
begins anew but the blast radius also extends violently outward
25:22
into the community.
25:23
Speaker 1: You mean the film community.
25:24
Speaker 2: Yes, the tight knit New York film crew community was
25:27
left completely reeling.
25:28
Speaker 1: From this, and if you've never worked on a film set.
25:31
It's hard to overstate how close these crews get. When
25:34
you are a freelancer working fourteen to sixteen hour days,
25:38
standing in the freezing rain in Brooklyn, trying to dress
25:40
a set, or frantically sourcing props at three am.
25:43
Speaker 2: The people you work with become your surrogate family. You
25:45
rely on them entirely, and.
25:46
Speaker 1: When a sudden, violent tragedy like this strikes, the initial
25:50
response is usually private, stunned mourning, but it inevitably forces
25:56
a wider, often painful reckoning within that professionally ecosystem.
26:00
Speaker 2: Colleagues are left looking back at everyday interactions wondering if
26:04
they missed a sign exactly.
26:06
Speaker 1: It prompts necessary difficult discussions about the extreme stresses of
26:10
production life, the brutal difficulty of balancing a demanding freelance
26:14
career with a healthy family life, and the desperate need
26:17
for accessible mental health resources within a gig economy.
26:20
Speaker 2: Because when you hear about a tragedy like this, the
26:22
immediate comforting instinct is to look for monsters. You want
26:26
to believe that the perpetrator was obviously cartoonishly evil because
26:29
that makes the world feel safe.
26:31
Speaker 1: But The terrifying truth for anyone listening right now is
26:33
that the warning signs a heated argument, financial stress, a
26:37
spat with a repoman. They usually just look like everyday
26:40
neighborhood stress until it's entirely too late.
26:43
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the most critical point of intervention.
26:46
The vast majority of people experiencing extreme financial ruin, severe
26:51
mental health struggles, or toxic relationship issues do not commit
26:54
murder right but when the escalation happens, the devastation is permanent.
26:59
This is why DC stigmatizing and publicizing resources is a
27:02
matter of life and death.
27:04
Speaker 1: We have to mention those lifelines. The National Domestic Violence
27:07
Hotline is available two four seven. It's one eight hundred
27:09
seven nine nine seven two three three, or you can
27:12
text the word start to eight eight seven eight eight.
27:15
Speaker 2: And the nine eight eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is
27:18
available for anyone experiencing a mental health emergency.
27:21
Speaker 1: The goal of these resources is to interrupt the escalation.
27:24
They have to be utilized before an argument turns lethal,
27:27
before a mental health crisis in a basement apartment spirals
27:30
into a murder suicide.
27:31
Speaker 2: The objective is to shrink the blast radius by preventing
27:34
the explosion entirely.
27:35
Speaker 1: As we start to wrap up this deep dive, I
27:38
keep coming back to the permanence of the void that
27:40
was left that night in July.
27:41
Speaker 2: The human cost is just immense.
27:44
Speaker 1: It is there is the very real, visceral void, a
27:47
child without parents, families that will never be whole again.
27:50
But there is also a void in the fictional worlds
27:53
that Mary Kate Golding was so brilliant at building.
27:56
Speaker 2: The brutal reality of the entertainment industry is that it
27:58
is a machine will march on. New series will be greenlit,
28:02
a new assistant set decorator will be hired for the
28:04
feature film Deep Cuts. They will build new sets and
28:07
the cameras will keep rolling. But the human cost of
28:10
this tragedy remains immovable.
28:12
Speaker 1: It is a profound, tragic irony. When you think about
28:15
her legacy, her professional legacy, the meticulously curated, absolutely perfect
28:21
mid century apartments of Missus masl, the greedy, dynamic hideouts
28:25
of Hawkeye. That work is captured on film.
28:28
Speaker 2: It will outlive her.
28:29
Speaker 1: It will it'll sit on servers and be available to
28:31
stream forever, frozen in time, beautiful and completely controlled. And
28:34
it is entirely, utterly disconnected from the chaotic, uncontrollable reality
28:39
of her final moments.
28:40
Speaker 2: It forces us to confront the true cost of the
28:43
escapism we consume. The art remains pristine while the life
28:47
of the artist was lost to a deeply human, systemic tragedy,
28:50
And that.
28:51
Speaker 1: Leaves you with one final lingering question to turn over
28:54
in your mind. The next time you sit down on
28:56
your couch, you pull up a streaming service and you
28:58
get lost in the beautiful, stylized perfection of a prestige
29:01
TV show, consider the invisible labor behind the screen. Yes,
29:06
if art is truly meant to reflect the human condition,
29:10
how do we reconcile the beautiful, controlled perfection of the
29:12
world we escape into with the messy, unpredictable, and sometimes
29:16
tragic lives of the unseen hands that build them. Can
29:20
we ever truly separate the art from the very real
29:23
human cost of its creation.