I TOLD YOU I WOULD KILL HIM - The Lobster Boy Murders - Episode 2

A jury convicted him of murder. Then a judge asked the state where to put him, and the state said it couldn't take him.

Pittsburgh. September 27, 1978. A fifteen-year-old named Donna Stiles buys her wedding dress at the Allegheny Center Mall with her stepmother and her eighteen-year-old fiancé. The ceremony is the next morning. Eight hours later that boy is dead on the sidewalk in front of her, and her father is watching from the living room window.

His name was Jack Layne. He was eighteen. He lived four blocks away on Peralta Street on Pittsburgh's North Side. And twenty-four hours before he died, Grady Stiles Jr. had pulled a gun out of his wheelchair, pointed it at him in front of a witness, and told him he would not live to marry his daughter.

Jack Layne heard that. And the next afternoon he went dress shopping with the man's daughter and then walked into that man's house anyway, because he was eighteen years old and he thought he could get her out.

This is the second of three episodes, and it is not really about a shooting. The shooting takes ninety seconds, and there was never any question who did it — Stiles told police "take me, I'm ready" and gave a full confession on the spot. This episode is about the five months afterward, when the American legal system looked at a man it had just convicted of murder and could not work out what a punishment even was.

After the verdict, a newspaper reporter walked into the judge's chambers and asked how he intended to punish this guy. The judge said he hadn't thought about it. What happened next set the fuse for everything in Episode Three.

IN THIS EPISODE 00:00 — Foreland Street. September 27, 1978. 06:00 — Welcome in, and a catch-up if you're starting here 09:00 — The girl who wanted out: who Donna Stiles was 18:00 — Jack Layne: the person nobody writes about 24:00 — The house on Foreland Street 31:00 — The escalation: the pawn shop, the six days, the phone call 40:00 — "Take me, I'm ready" 45:00 — The strangest trial in Pittsburgh 53:00 — "I hadn't thought of that" 61:00 — Where everybody went 66:00 — Time Killer Files 68:00 — Close

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN Why a fifteen-year-old girl treated marriage as an escape route, and what her father's own defense attorney said about that household. The three-week escalation the prosecution built its case on. What third-degree murder means in Pennsylvania. Why the guilty-plea version of this story that circulates online is wrong. Why a Pittsburgh courtroom in February 1979 filled up with sideshow performers as character witnesses. And how a man convicted of murder came to serve zero days in custody.

SOURCES Pittsburgh Post-Gazette archive reporting, including interviews with prosecutor Robert Vincler, defense attorney Anthony DeCello, and reporters Gabriel Ireton and Paul Maryniak. Post-Gazette contemporaneous trial coverage from February 1979. The Associated Press. Fred Rosen, "Lobster Boy" (1995). Joe Nickell, "Secrets of the Sideshows" (University Press of Kentucky, 2005).

Where the sources conflict, I say so on the record and tell you which way I lean and why.

TIME KILLER FILES Jack Layne was eighteen years old. He lived at 1041 Peralta Street and he had a sister in the neighborhood. He is the only person in this entire story who did nothing wrong, and there is not one paragraph written about his life anywhere I can find. If you know anything about him, or about the Layne family, please reach out. I would like to fix that.

ABOUT Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton covers true crime, conspiracies, and hidden history — researched properly and told straight. Hosted from Derby, Kansas.

Follow the show so the finale arrives automatically. And if this one stayed with you, a rating and a review is the single biggest thing you can do to help somebody else find it.

Content note: this episode discusses homicide and domestic violence.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

There's a wedding dress in the back of a car in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and it is the last good thing that is going to happen to anyone in this story. It's a Wednesday afternoon. Three people are driving home from the Allegheny Center Mall, and if you were standing on that sidewalk watching them, you would just see ordinary people in America. It was a fifteen year old girl, her stepmother, and an eighteen year old boy she is marrying in the morning. They picked out the dress together. She's a ninth grader and tomorrow she puts it on. They go inside the house at five one Four Lynn Street, and her father is sitting in the living room out of his wheelchair. Which is strange, because the chair sh be right there. So the girl and her stepmother turn around and go back out to look for it. And that is the door. That's the seven or eight seconds for both of them are out of the room, and her father calls the boy back inside. There is an armchair in that living room, and under the cushion of that chair is a thirty two caliber revolver that this man bought at a pawn shop on East Ohio Street a few weeks earlier. He bought it with his daughter standing next to him at the counter. He made a joke while he was paying about who he planned to use it on. He says six words to the boy. He says You got her now, don't laugh about it. And the boy, according to what Grady later told police says, I told you I'd get her. Grady Stiles reaches under the cushion and shoots him in the chest. The boy turns to run and he shoots him in the back. Jack Lane, eighteen years old, dropped out of high school, lived four blocks away on Peralta Street, and makes it out the front door and onto the sidewalk. He says three words He says he shot me. And then he goes down on the concrete in front of the girl he was supposed to marry in sixteen hours. He dies in her arms. Her father is at the window watching, and according to what Donna told the Associated Press, he is smiling at her and he says I told you I would kill him. She screams back I'll see you in your grave as she runs down the street. Now Jacqueline is pronounced dead about thirty minutes later at Algany General Hospital. And when the police arrive, Stiles doesn't run. He doesn't lie and he doesn't lawyer up. He tells them Take me, I'm ready. One of the homicide detectives, Frank Amity, says decades later that he was completely cooperative, no trouble at all. Five months later a jury convicts him of murder. And then he goes home. Not to a prison, not to a hospital, not to a locked ward, home to his own front door, to his own family where he stays free for the next fourteen years. Because nobody in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania could work out what to do with a man who had no hands and no feet. Welcome back to Just Killing Time. I'm your host, Elizabeth Stanton. This is a true crime conspiracies, stories that keep us up at night, and a little hidden history. This is the middle of a three-part series, and if you're jumping in here, that's fine. I'll catch you up in two minutes, and you'll be completely up to speed. And if you heard the first one, this is a refresher, and we're into brand new material for this episode. The man in the living room was Grady Styles Jr. He was born in Pittsburgh in 1937 with a condition called extraacty, where his hands and feet they developed with a deep cleft down the middle, and the remaining digits they kind of fused together. And it ran in his family for something like six or seven generations back to the early 1800s. His father was a sideshow performer and put him in the act somewhere around six to seven years old, and he performed under the name Lobster Boy. He couldn't walk. He got around by dragging himself with his arms, which made him ferociously strong through his upper body. He and his family spent the season on the carnival circuit and wintered in Gibson, Florida, a town outside of Tampa that was the winter home of the entire American sideshow. With zoning laws that will let you keep an elephant in the front yard and a post office counter that was built low enough for the little people to reach. Now, Grady Stiles, he was a working businessman with a real income. He was also a serious alcoholic and he beat his family. Last episode was that kind of world. Today is the day it produced a body. And I'll tell you what today is really about so you know where we're going. And it's not really about the shooting. The shooting takes 90 seconds, and there was never any doubt who did it. It's about what happened in the four months after when the American legal system looked at a man it had just convicted of murder and could not figure out what the punishment even was. So new here, follow the show so that the last one shows up in your feed because the payoff in episode three is great, so stay to the end, time killers. Now let's start with Donna. This is the daughter of Grady Stones Jr. Because every telling of this story I've ever seen treats her as a plot device. And she's actually the protagonist. Donna Stiles was 15 years old in the fall of 1978. She was a ninth grader. The papers described her as pretty and petite. She was the oldest of Grady's children, and she did not inherit the condition, which I think matters enormously, and here's why. In that family, the condition was business. It was an inheritance, the act, the billing, the money. Her brother had it and her sister had it. Her father had it, her grandfather had it, and the line went back to before photography even existed. Donna didn't. Donna was in the family trade, ordinary. And I thought about this a lot because in a normal family, being the kid without the genetic condition is the lucky draw. And every kind just you know exhales when they see the baby, and it's perfect in its own normal way. In that family, though, the condition was the family's business. It was the thing that made you valuable and made you belong. And Donna was the one who came out with nothing to sell. And I'm not saying that's why she wanted out. I'm saying she was the only one in that house whose way out didn't cost her the family trade. Because the trade was never going to be hers anyways. She had less to lose, which is maybe why she was the one who moved. Now, how bad was that house? You do not have to take my word for it, and you do not have to take the prosecution's word for it. You can take his own lawyers. Grady's defense attorney was a man named Anthony DiCello. Talking about the case decades later, DiCello says Donna was embarrassed by her father as well as frightened of him. He said that when her father said something, she joked. And he said she probably had a living hell in that house. So catch what just happened, because it's important. That's the defense attorney. That's the one person in the entire courthouse whose actual job was to make this man look sympathetic to twelve strangers. And what he said about the household was living hell. When the best angle your own lawyer can find is yeah, you should have seen the house. That's not a great defense. That's more of a witness statement. Now DiCello didn't think much of his client generally. He said Stiles wasn't a dummy, that he was pretty sharp, but that he was a very violent person. He said the other performers hated him. And then he said the line that I cannot shake. He said he never shook Grady Stiles' hand because he didn't trust him. His own attorney would not shake his hand. The prosecutor and an assistant district attorney named Robert Winkler put Donna's situation just about as plainly as it can be put. He said she felt trapped in her hole and she wanted out, and this boy was the way out. Fifteen years old and marriage is the exit. That's not a love story, that's an escape plan with a boy attached to it. Noah spend real time here because Jacqueline is the person whose this whole series keeps forgetting, and I'm not wanting to do that. He was eighteen. He dropped out of high school. He lived at 1041 Peralta Street on the north side, about four blocks from the Stiles house. He had a sister nearby who was going to matter in a few minutes. And most of what this documentary record gives us about his life, and I want to be honest that there isn't much. He was a working class kid from the north side of Pittsburgh in 1978 who fell for a girl and asked her to marry him. But we do get one thing about his character, and it comes from an unlikely direction. There are two competing explanations for why Grady Stiles hated Jack Lane. And they come from the two lawyers who tried the case against each other. Winkler, the prosecutor, thought it was control that Lane made it plain to Grady. Sorry, that Lane made it plain Grady was not going to be the one deciding who married his daughter. Now DiCello, the defense attorney, said it was a mockery. His account was that the kid made fun of Grady, called him a freak, and that Grady never forgave anybody who did that. And that he carried that hate badly. Here's the thing, I don't think that those two different explanations. I think they're the same kind of 18-year-old boy from two different angles. And a kid who won't back down from a violent man who runs his mouth, maybe. Those are the same kid. That's a teenager with more nerve than since standing between a girl and the person who was hurting her. Not a great strategy, but it also might be the bravest thing anybody in this story ever did. And if DiCello's version is true, and he did call him a freak, I'm not going to pretend that's nothing. That's an ugly thing to say to a man who's been stared at since he was seven. Now two people can be wrong and only one of them ends up on the sidewalk dead. Here's the part I want you to hold on to about Jack Lane. He knew twenty four hours before he died, this man pointed a gun at him and told him he'd kill him before the wedding. Jack Lane heard that in front of a witness. And then the next afternoon he went shopping for a wedding dress with the man's daughter. And then he walked into that man's house. He didn't run. He was eighteen years old, and he thought he could get her out. So who else was in that house? And how did they get there? Because the household arrangement here is genuinely complicated, and it explains some of the pressure in the room. By nineteen seventy eight, Grady and Marit and Mary Teresa were divorced. And she had not left quietly. She had married another sideshow performer, a little person named Harry Glenn Newman, billed as the world's smallest man. Now think, how do you think that may have landed on a man like Grady Styles? His wife left him for another performer in their world, where the winter town is a few blocks wide, and every single person in it knows both of you and has seen both your acts. There is no anonymous divorce when you're with it. And that's Lingo from The Carnival. Now Grady had remarried. A woman named Barbara. He and Barbara and several of his children were living in the North Side Robe House at 511 Four Lynn Street. So the household in September of 1978 is a convicted in five months murderer who doesn't know it yet, his second wife, and a group of children who are variously his by two different mothers. And Mary Teresa, she is down in Florida with her new husband, which means in a few weeks she is going to drive north with the world's smallest man to sit in a Pittsburgh courtroom and watch her ex-husband be tried for killing her daughter's fiance. Now, a quick bit of carnival vocabulary because it's about to be useful. The banner line is the row of hand-painted canvas banners hung across the front of a sideshow. They're usually enormous, gorgeous, and very wildly exaggerated. The painted version of you was always more dramatic than the real one. So that's of the performers that are inside the sideshow. And that's not a lie, exactly. It's a promise the show has to keep just enough love. And every single person in the Styles family grew up understanding that the version of you on the canvas and the version of you behind it are two different products. So keep that in mind for the trial because Grady Styles is about to walk into a courtroom and hang a banner. This is the part that determines everything legally. So I'm gonna walk it step by step the whole question at trials whether this was a moment or a plan. Step one, Grady started threatening Jacqueline's life out loud. Not privately, but very openly. Step two, he took Donna with him to the pawn shop on East Ohio Street and bought a 32 caliber revolver. And at the counter, with his 15-year-old daughter standing right there, he joked that he'd use it on Jack. He brought her along. That was not incidental. He wanted her to watch him buy it. That's a message, and it was delivered. I I think about that. And um my take on it, he knew exactly what he was doing. He enjoyed torturing those around him. He enjoyed being mean to his family. He enjoyed seeing the pain and the fear in their eyes. He was not a nice person, Apple. Now, if you go looking this case up, you're going to run into a real contradiction here. And I want to be upfront about it. A lot of modern write-ups, and I mean a lot, including some very popular ones, say Grady Stiles shot Jack Lane with a shotgun. Now, contemporaneous Pittsburgh Forting says it was a 32 caliber revolver. Purchased at a pawn shop on East Ohio Street with Donna Present. It describes him pulling it out from under a chair cushion, and it describes the pawn shop purchase in detail, including the joke he made. It came out at trial. A shotgun would have made the premeditation argument even stronger for prosecution. So there's no reason for the papers to kind of downgrade that. My guess on my guess on how the shotgun got into circulation. Somebody wrote it once, and then the internet copied it for like 25 years, and that happens constantly with old cases, and it's exactly why I try to read the old papers. Now, step three. Donna ran. She went and stayed six days at the home of Jack Lane's sister, also on the north side. Oh god. Six days. A fifteen-year-old girl left home and stayed gone for almost a week at her boyfriend's sister's house, four blocks away, and everyone in that neighborhood knew exactly where she was. And from there, she called her father. Here's what he said to her according to the Post Gazette's account. Green Styles Jr. said to Don If you don't get home in five minutes, I'm going to beat the hell out of you, and then I'm going to kill him. Now watch what the girls do, because it's the smartest and most desperate thing in this whole file. She's 15, she's six days out of the house. She's on the phone with the man who has just promised to beat her and then kill her boyfriend, and she has exactly one card left. She tells him, Fine, I'll live with Jack. No wedding, no permission, no ceremony, I'll just move in. And it works. Styles backed down. He said, I'd rather they get married than live together. Because for a man like that, the unbearable thing was never the marriage. It was losing control in public. The shame of the neighborhood knowing his daughter was shacked up because he wouldn't sign. That's a fifteen year old girl reading a violent man correctly, under maximum pressure and finding that one lever that moves him. She figured out that his pride was bigger than his hatred. And she pulled it. And I want to be careful here because I know where people's minds go. Nothing she did for the honest. What happened next? Nothing. She did not provoke this. But I do think about her sitting in somebody else's kitchen making that phone call, doing the math on her own father and getting it right. That's a kid who's been studying him her entire life. Now the wedding was set for september twenty eighth, nineteen seventy eight. And then the day before the shooting, a friend of Jack Lane's watched Grady Sowes pull a gun out of the left side of his wheelchair, point it at Lane, and say according to the news accounts of the testimony this I will kill you before you marry my daughter. So the record now contains a purchase weapon, a stated intention, a witness, and a deadline, all of it inside about three weeks. Remember every bit of that because in five months he's going to stand up in a courtroom figuratively and tell him. People, the twelve people, it was self-defense. So let's go back to the sidewalk because what happens in the next hour tells you who this man actually was. Jack Lane walked out under his own power, said he'd been shot, and then collapsed. He was pronounced dead about half an hour later at Algany General Hospital. Grady Stiles did not attempt to leave. He did not hide the weapon and when police came through the door, he said, Take me, I'm ready. And then he gave them a full confession at the station. Detective Frank Immediate, he described him as cooperative and no trouble at all. And I want you to notice what that is and what it isn't. That is not remorse. Remorse looks way different. That's a man who has just done a thing he had announced he was going to do in his own house, in front of his whole family, and he does not believe for one second that it's going to cost him anything. And here's the truly disturbing part. He was right. On October 7, 1978, a post Gazette photographer captured him being helped out of the van on his way to the coroner's hearing. The photographs from this case are worth finding, by the way. There's another one from February 22nd, 1978, by a photographer named Harry Koffenauer. It was taken the day of the conviction. Grady Styles in his chair with Farber beside him. They ran that photo because it was extraordinary. It also became permanently how America pictures this case, which is its own problem. But we'll get to that. The trial ran a few days in February of nineteen seventy nine, and by the account of every person who was in that room, Pittsburgh had never seen anything like it, because the character witnesses came in from the show. A circus fat lady testified and got stuck in the witness chair. A bearded woman testified. Mary Teresa came up from Florida with her new husband, the world's smallest man, and Donna, who had fled Pittsburgh to go live with her mother, came back to testify against her father. A post Gazette reporter named Gabriel Ierton covered it, and decades later he said it was one of the weirdest trials he had ever covered. So quick vocabulary note, because this room only makes sense if you know it. In the carnival, if you're with it, you belong. You travel, you tear down, you don't explain the business now to outsiders, and the road is your home rather than the place you visit. That's why the courtroom filled up. Those weren't gawkers and they weren't fans, those were his people. And then one of your own is in trouble, you show up even for Kit. Even though by his lawyer's account most of them couldn't stand him. That's what being with it meant. You showed up anyways. Remember that because in fourteen years these same people are going to decline to carry his coffin. It takes a lot to get thrown out of a family like that. And here's what actually bothers me about this room, and about every article read about it since. A boy is dead, eighteen years old, shot in the back running out the door, and the coverage in 1979 and in 2026 can't stop talking about who was sitting in the galley. The fat lady got stuck in the chair. That's the detail that survived fifty years. As kind of a joke, you know? Not Jack Lane's name. And the sideshow followed that man all the way into a homicide courtroom. And it turned his victim's murder trial into one more medway. And every single one of us retelling this story is standing on the ballet helping. And I'm including myself. I'm doing it right now. I just don't want to do it without saying so. Now here's Grady's defense. Hold it up against the timeline we just built, he pled not guilty and claimed self-defense. That Jacqueline had lunged at him. He predicted himself from his wheelchair as a concerned father protecting an underage daughter from an anger mate. We're talking an 18-year-old and a 15-year-old. That's the predatory like age gap he was protecting her from. And the mechanics of the self-defense claim require you to believe that in the seven or eight seconds his wife and daughter were outside looking for his wheelchair. An unarmed teenager attacked a man who was already sitting on a loaded revolver he'd brought three weeks earlier specifically to use Juan Hen. The jury did not fight. And his arms were incredibly strong. Same with his shoulders and his chest. And I'm going to dare say his pincer hands. Okay? So he used them like a pincer. And he could grab you in an instant. And if he wanted to, he could crush your throat. This was not um this was not somebody who was a delicate victim. This was somebody who was a very, very dangerous, very strong, and very violent man. Okay. So back to the story. This one is worth stopping on because you will see it wrong constantly. And the difference actually matters. A large number of accounts, including some very widely read ones, say Grady Stiles confessed openly or pleaded guilty, and that is why the trial was short. Now contemporaneous Pittsburgh reporting and interviews with the attorney say something more specific. He confessed at the scene and gave a full statement to the police, and then he pleaded not guilty at trial and argued self-defense. He testified. He told the jury, the boy lunged. Both things happened. He confessed on the sidewalk and then he fought it in court and lost. That matters because a man who confesses it and accepts it is different from a man who confesses and then tries to sell twelve strangers on a story. The second one is a performer. And the second one is who he was. On February 22nd, 1979, Grady Stiles Jr. was convicted of third degree murder. And for anybody outside Pennsylvania, third degree murder there is essentially the malice category that isn't premeditated. It is not manslaughter. It is murder, and it carries serious prison time. So that's it. Convicted murderer, sentencing prison, roll credits. No, that's not how that works. What comes next is the reason I gave this story three episodes instead of just one. And it did not come out of a legal filing or an appellate opinion. It came out of a reporter who couldn't leave it alone. Did something after the verdict that he says he does not normally do. He went into the judge's chambers and asked him directly how he intended to punish this guy. The judge was a common plea and judge named Thomas A. Harper. A jury has just convicted a man of murder, and the judge has not yet considered where that man is going to go. I don't read that as incompetence. Honestly, I just read it as the opposite. I think that's a judge realizing in real time that he is about to walk into a wall the law has never put a door in, and that a reporter just made him look at it. So Harper contacted state prison officials and asked, and the answer came back that the Commonwealth's facilities could not accommodate Grady Suttles Jr. There are two accounts upon how this decision got made, and they do not match. And I think the gap between them is the most interesting thing in this episode. Ireton, the reporter, says, it happened the way I just described. He walked into the chambers, asked the question, the judge said, Well, I hadn't thought of that. And then he went and asked the prison sentence system. Now DiCello, the defense attorney, he remembered it differently. His account is that he, Judge Harper, and another judge sat down in Decello's own living room and worked out what to do with the defendant. I don't think either man is lying. I think both of these things probably actually did happen in some work. And I think that's probably worse because in neither version is this a legal process. In one version, a murderer sentence gets triggered by a reporter's curiosity. And then in the other, it gets defined decided over coffee in a defense attorney's living room. Nobody researched like an alternative. Nobody thought to even ask where and maybe another state could take him or whether a secure medical facility existed anywhere in the country. So two or three men in a room decided this was just too hard of a question to answer, and that was the end of it. On the record, George Harper, sorry, Judge Harper, laid out the full medical picture. Beyond the Ectodactylae, Siles had emphysema, and he had kidney disease, and he had cirrhosis of the liver, which he earned the honest way, you know, drinking over decades. And Judge Harper sentenced him to 15 years of probation. One more split and this one is small, but I'd rather flag it than just kind of smooth over it. Some accounts say the fit the sentence was fifteen years probation. Others say house arrest plus fifteen years probation. Have not found a copy of the sentencing order, so I can't tell you which. What every source agrees on is the bottom line, and the bottom line is the only part that matters. He did not go to prison. Not one day, not one night for killing Jack Lane. Grady Styles Jr. served zero time in custody. Another reporter who covered the trial, Paul, his name was Paul Mariniac. He described Judge Farperer as a kind of a softie in a lot of ways. And Grady Stiles went home. Okay, so this is the center of the whole series, and it's easy to say something dumb here, so let me be careful. I'm not arguing that a man should be tortured by a prison system that wasn't built for his body. I'm not. A state that genuinely cannot house someone safely has a real serious problem. And let him suffer is not an answer that I'm going to take part in. But look at what actually happened. The state's inability became his freedom. And nobody built anything, nobody adapted anything, nobody found a middle option or even looked really hard for one. He was just handed back to that same house to those children with the same temper and the same bottle of boobs. And here's the part that will not leave me alone. Six years earlier, in 1972, the Florida Supreme Court had ruled that a man with an unusual body has the same right to work as anybody else. His difference did not put him outside the rules in that case. And in 1979, a Pennsylvania court decided his difference did put him outside the rules, specifically the part where you go to prison for murder. Same body, same decade, in one courtroom. It brought him a right, and then the other an exemption. And the lesson he took home from that second courtroom and taught to everybody who lived with him for the next 14 years was that the rules were something that happened to other people. Now let's account for everybody because this is where the second half of the story gets up. And almost nobody explains what happened. Donna refused to keep living with her father. Good for her. She went to Florida to live with her mother, which, because the story has no mercy in it, is exactly where Grady went to after the trial. Barbara, the second wife, she eventually divorced him. Grady Styles moved to Gibson Tonne, Florida, the carnival town. It's the winter town just outside of Tampa. And he kept working. He ran his own shows, and by the accounts of the people in the business, he was a genuinely shrewd operator. And he stopped drinking. Every source agrees on that. After the trial, he got so. Then in 1989, Grady Stiles and Mary Teresa, they divorced their spouses and remarried each other. I'm holding my head in my hands at the moment because like what the what the what the I'm we should all just choke on that little nugget for a moment. Eleven years after he shot his daughter's fiancee in the chest and then in the back, she married him again. Knowing exactly what he had done. She'd been in that courtroom, she'd dribble up from Florida for it. But more importantly, she knew what he was like when no one was around to see the monster. That frames me the most. She was okay with it. Everybody wants to ask why. And everybody asks it in a tone I just, you know, I don't care for. So we're going to actually answer that question next time properly with what her defense team later put on record. She brought her son with her when she came back, a grown man from her marriage, to Harry Newman, who by then was working the business himself under the name The Human Blockhead. He was driving nails into his own nostrils on stage. So the household reassembles sorry, reassembles. The household reassembles in a trailer in Gimtown. Grady, Mary Teresa, her son, kids and stepkids around. And then he starts drinking again. Her family's account is that the sobriety lasted about two weeks after the marriage. Two weeks. And then four years, and at the end of those four years, there's a 17-year-old at the window with a gun. He wasn't even enough to buy. Now time killers. Here's where I need you this week. And it's a Pittsburgh episode, so I'm looking at my Pennsylvania people. One, I want the 1979 trial coverage. The Post Gazette ran it and the Pittsburgh Press ran it. If you've got access to a newspaper archive for your grandparents' clipping file, I want to know exactly what Donald said on the stand. Two, the sentencing world. Want to settle probation versus house arrest for good. And three, this is the one that matters to me the most, Jack Lane, 18 years old, 1041, Peralta Street on the north side. He had a sister in the neighborhood. Somebody out there is related to that boy, or went to school with him or remembers the family. He is the only person in this entire story who did nothing wrong. And he is the one nobody has written a single paragraph about. And I'd love to fix that. If you know anything about Jacqueline, anything at all, please send it in. And then four, this is a standing ask from last time. Gibson ton families, carnival families, anybody who was with it. I want the ordinary version of that towel. Time killer files, you know how to reach via just killing time podcast at gmail.com. So we know now Jack Lane was only 18 years old. He bought that wedding dress with his fiancee on a Wednesday afternoon in September, and he was dead before dinner. And the man who killed him never spent a night in a cell for it. Everything that happens in the next 14 years happens because of that sentence. Everyone who gets hurt after February 22nd, 1979 gets hurt in a house where the man in charge had been shown by a court of law that the rules did not reach him. Next time, the trailer in Gibson 10. Four years of what looked like from the inside, a 17-year-old kid, $1,500, three trials, a legal defense, Florida has never seen work quite that way. And a judge who said out loud and on record that he believed every word this woman said. And then sent you to prison anyway. If you're new here, follow the story so that this new one comes for you. And if this got under your skin, tell somebody about it. That's genuinely how the story grows. I'm Elizabeth Stanta, thank you for killing time with me today.

SPEAKER_01 42:54

Alexa, what is a chemtrail? Chemtrail. Trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.