Fan Favorite - "Death of a Ladies' Man"
episode
MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories
38 min
2 speakers
3 chapters
transcribed 5 months ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Today's episode is a fan favorite.
The audio in the story has been remastered for today's episode. One afternoon in January of 1998, a prosecutor for the state of Georgia sat in the very back row of seats in a courtroom where a divorce trial was unfolding. Now, this prosecutor was not involved in this divorce case. He handled murder trials. But he had still come here today because he had gotten a very surprising phone call about an unsolved murder case he had worked on a year and a half earlier. The caller had told him that the testimony in this divorce case could potentially solve that murder.
What surprising event leads a prosecutor to a divorce trial in 1998?
Now, in the courtroom, the prosecutor felt his heart rate pick up as the witness he had been waiting for finally took the stand. And as soon as the witness began talking, the prosecutor knew he had just solved that murder. But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, on the next very hot day, offer the follow button a nice ice-cold cup of water. Except don't tell them it's actually white vinegar.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
On August 7th, 1996, a 41-year-old entrepreneur named Lance Herndon woke up at 3.40 a.m. to the sound of his alarm clock going off inside of his mansion in Roswell, Georgia. The alarm was actually one of three alarms set to go off that morning. The first was at 3.40, the second at 3.50, and the third at 4 a.m. And this was actually how every workday began for Lance. He was the founder of an IT consulting company called Access, Inc., and his borderline compulsive work ethic not only made him millions of dollars, but also it had made him a trailblazer for the black business community in greater Atlanta. His company, Access, Inc., had actually been awarded the National Service Firm of the Year Award by President George H.W.
Bush. President Clinton had honored Lance with the Minority Entrepreneur of the Year Award and had appointed him to the 1995 White House Conference on Small Business. Lance sat up and slammed his hand down on the clock to stop the alarm and then shut off the other two alarms so they wouldn't ring. Then he threw aside his bedsheets and got up and walked over to the dresser to pull out some clothes. On top of his dresser, he kept a sexy lingerie photograph of one of his girlfriends, a woman he'd been seeing for years named Kathy Collins. Now, usually, when Lance saw this photograph, he would smile. But today, he flipped it face down so he wouldn't have to look at it. He was going to have to break up with Kathy, and he was not looking forward to it.
Lance and Kathy had been on again, off again, since they first met three years ago. But they'd rekindled things for real about seven months ago, and she had moved most of her stuff into his house. But for Lance, this progression sort of made the whole thing feel too serious. He sort of preferred to play the field. In fact, at that very moment, he didn't just have this one girlfriend. He had another steady girlfriend, a 27-year-old college student named Dionne Baugh, and he was also interested in another woman that he had just met who worked as a schoolteacher. Plus, he was also still dealing with the fallout from his divorce from his third wife, Janine Herndon, who he had a four-year-old son with.
Lance actually had to keep meticulous notes in his calendar just to keep all of this straight, and it was really starting to wear on him. Plus, in addition to dumping Kathy, something he knew he needed to do soon, he was also considering dumping Dion as well, because she was the jealous type and he just felt like he didn't need the drama. But for now, Lance threw on a shirt and a pair of pants and then headed downstairs into his basement, where he had a full working office set up for his IT company. Every day, Lance's small staff of full-time employees, plus his assistant, came to this basement office to do all their work.
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