Chapter 1: What is the background of the murders in Farmington, New Mexico?
This week in Farmington, New Mexico, a series of strange murders, all very brutal but very different from each other, happen over the course of a couple years until a tow truck driver's phone found near a murder scene leads to a serial killer and his two accomplices. Welcome to Small Town Murder. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay! Yay, indeed, Jimmy. Yay, indeed.
My name is James Petrigallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today on another crazy, wild, I mean, really awful... Just bad edition of Spall Tower.
This is so funny. It's a bad story. I've spent so much time here.
In Farmington, New Mexico? For work, right?
Yeah.
For APS. Yes, for the electric company.
Don't say that.
Well, that's where you worked for years. Fuck them. You're not working for them anymore. Jimmy worked for them for years. Fucking didn't do half his work. They still paid him. It doesn't matter. They can't do a damn thing about it now.
It's all over.
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Chapter 2: What details about the victims and crime scene are revealed?
You did it. They would do all that. Turns out it was more, thank you, anabolic steroids. And also there's some scandal that happens. Some tricks. Some tricks. Then for small town murder, it is internet salad time, everybody.
We're going to go all over the internet and find everything that we find entertaining to make fun of, except for politics, because we feel like you probably get enough of that everywhere else. So we'll fill in the gaps. It's so fun. It's a lot of fun. Patreon.com slash Crime in Sports.
And you get everything we put out, all the shows, Crime in Sports, Your Stupid Opinion, Small Town Murder, all ad-free with your Patreon. Ad-free. Ad-free with your Patreon. And you get a shout-out at the end of the show, too. Jimmy, I'll mispronounce your name all sorts of different ways. That said, disclaimer time. Hey, everybody, we're comedians. This is a comedy show.
We're going to make jokes, and there's going to be dead people because it'd be a really weird show if it was called Small Town Murder and it had no dead people. So that's how it works. And you go, why does that work? That sounds awful. Why would you guys do that?
Well, to me, I think it's a little easier way to digest the murder, to get some jokes around it, rather than the odd murder porn way some people go about it. And that's fine if that's what you're into, but I mean... And then her head was removed from her body. I'm a little creeped out while, like, you know, scary music plays. No, no, no. We try to put a little humor in it.
What we don't do, though, what we go out of our way not to do is we don't make fun of the victims or the victims' families.
Why is that, James?
Because we're assholes. But. But we're not scumbags. See how that works? It's very easy. It's a very easy thing to do there. So that's all it is. There's plenty other stuff to make fun of. Small towns. Who cares? We're all from somewhere that's worthy of being made fun of. Maybe a police force that lets a murderer go free for years, killing more people.
Maybe a murderer we'll make fun of because fuck them. And what recourse do we have other than make fun of them? We're comedians. We can't go to the jail and. you know, get their honey buns taken away. They won't let us get their ramen taken away. All we can do is make fun of them. So if that sounds good to you, you're going to hear a crazy show.
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Chapter 3: How do the hosts introduce humor in discussing serious topics?
I don't disagree with that. Everybody there was very nice every time I've gone through.
At least they're friendly. That's good. Well, if they're not friendly, no one's ever stopping there again.
And if you stay in a hotel in Farmington, ask to see it before you pay.
Oh, I bet.
Oh, man. I can't imagine. I spent my whole per diem on the weekend paying for a room, getting into it, and going, nope, and going to another one.
I think you're replacing an M with an H also there.
A hundred percent.
There's a lot of motels here.
There's not a lot of hotels there.
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Chapter 4: What happens when Bobby and Harley encounter trouble after a night out?
Sound like you're 100 years old. That's fine.
Hal's wild, too. I didn't know that was short for Harold. I would have gone with Harry.
Absolutely. Harry would be the first one, but nobody wants to be Harry. Nobody wants to be Harry. So, Hal, I'll give you. I see an H. I see an A. I see an L in there. Great. You can be Harold if you want. You can't be Harley, though. That is not a nickname of Harold. It is absolutely not a nickname of Harold. Never.
And also, a nickname or a for short is supposed to be at least less letters. Same shit. Same thing.
Harley. Well, not really. James and Jimmy are the same fucking amount of letters, too. I guess. Yeah, and James is one syllable. Why do you guys make it harder by going with two syllables? No idea. That's crazy. So here is – he's a couple years older than Bobby, and he's also pretty dumb from what a lot of people say.
All right.
Pretty dumb. Now, on September, I'm sorry, Sunday, November 24th, 1996. Yeah. Okay. This is four days before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving week.
Yeah.
It's a Sunday. So we have Bobby hanging out with old Harley Pollack there. Jesus Christ. So stupid. He's hanging out down by the mall, the Animus Valley Mall, I guess. So I guess he he runs into old Harold there and Harold's already there doing something. Bobby starts drinking some beers. Everybody said that he'd drink five beers to your one. Bobby. Harley would. No, Bobby would. Down and shit.
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Chapter 5: Why do Bobby and Leslie decide to target Donald Tosi?
Then he gets drunk real quick, and then he becomes real boisterous and agitated and tells you about how old people he stabbed. Now, Hal Pollack said that night, he said, quote, we all partied and kicked back. I'm not sure how much I drank, but I wasn't sober. Bobby, at one point, offered to find a prostitute and bring her back to the apartment. Is there at some apartment near the mall? Okay.
That's some offer. No. Gee, thanks. You're going to bring a stranger into my house that you picked up off the street and paid money for sex for.
Well, calm down. I'm going to give her money.
Yeah.
Don't be so judgmental.
Use my bed. Wait, let me put some of my valuables out first. Let me make sure to lay them out so she doesn't feel uncomfortable.
That is some offer.
Thanks a lot. So Hal said he wasn't particularly into that, not into that idea.
Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How does the situation escalate with Betty at the 7-Eleven?
Yep, and hit the streets of Farmington looking for some ladies of the evening here.
A six-foot-one, healthily overweight man jams it into an Aspire?
In the passenger side, too, on this one. But everybody says that that's a funny sight, watching Bobby stuff himself into the Aspire. I believe every word of it. Absolutely. So they're driving. They're not finding any ladies out at this point. And they pass the Eclectic, the store they both hang out at here. And it's one of their favorite hangouts. They're always there doing whatever.
So Bobby saw lights on in the store and told Pollack to stop the car. He said, I need to take a piss. And this is the only place that's open that I can go in there and they'll let me piss.
Hit the brakes.
Let me go piss. So now normally he would have just pissed in an alley, but apparently the fact that this place was open and he can piss in a bathroom made it better because it was a cold night. Yeah. So he knew, uh, that the people in the store that were in there, uh, would let him in cause they knew him even if it's locked up. Um, there's a guy named Joseph Fleming who's 24 years old.
Um, and, uh, He technically, I guess, works there. He's a security guard for a company that patrols the mall area and did security work at local events. He's not really working security that night, I don't think. I think he's just hanging out playing video games. At the Eclectic? At the Eclectic. Then there's 18-year-old Matt Trecker, T-R-E-C-K-E-R. There's a lot of dudes.
It's just a couple of dudes hanging out in the back of the store. Yeah. Um, and truckers asleep in one of the back rooms. And this is every, all of this group, they've all spent the night at the eclectic from time to time, falling asleep in one of the back rooms. Nobody cares. Um, So, Fleming, here again, I believe it's Joseph Aaron Fleming, he's 24 and a security guard, and he's hanging out.
He's a former U.S. Army soldier, Sergeant First Class, you know, honorable discharge. Didn't get kicked out, probably doesn't tell crazy stories. And Matt Trecker, Matthew, he's an 18-year-old kid who likes hanging out in the store. He likes role-playing books and all that kind of shit. He's into that. So everybody is very loose about this. The manager even is loose about the whole thing.
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Chapter 7: What evidence connects Bobby Fry to the murders?
Because it's a Ford Aspire. And they call Bobby's parents, Gloria and James Fry, who are asleep at home. They get a call at 4 a.m. By the way, they believe the call that he made was using Gloria's county-issued cell phone for her job. Oh, my God. Okay. So they said, can you come pick us up? We're out near a dirt road by the Twin Mounds. The car's stuck.
So they show up in a pickup truck, which also gets stuck in the soft sand. Shit. Son of a bitch. So now they're like, what the fuck do we do here? We're all fucked. So what they do is – and by the way, they're all standing –
Feet. Feet away from a body.
From where they just put a body. Yeah. With mom and dad, okay? So this is fucking crazy. Now, here's a different thing. There's two different versions of what happened here. One is the forensic files, and one is from the Albuquerque Journal newspaper. So whichever one is right.
But the forensic files version says that all three of the vehicles, the Aspire, the pickup, and the tow truck all got stuck. Oh, okay. Ultimately, the owner of Bloomfield Towing, Charlie Bergen, the guy with the phone from the beginning, had to come out and pull all three of them out. Got it. That's one story.
But the Albuquerque Journal reports that they reported that Gloria and James Fry, the parents, didn't initially get stuck. Okay. They pulled up, got Bobby out, and drove Bobby home so he could change clothes, clean up, and drive Leslie Eng home. And then they went out separately to the desert again to retrieve the Aspire. So mom and dad were definitely out there post-murder anyway.
Either once or twice. That's the only thing we don't know.
And these two men that just stabbed and bludgeoned a woman – They had to have had blood on them, right?
They're covered in blood.
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Chapter 8: What were the outcomes of the trials for Bobby Fry and Leslie Eng?
So they go home. Bobby cleans up fresh clothes and gets dropped off at his place. Gloria and James. Go to whatever, get the, you know, retrieve the car and everything like that. We have Charlie Bergen either dragging two or three vehicles out of the soft sand, depending on whichever there. Either way, Charlie Bergen saw Bobby, saw Leslie, saw the Ford Aspire.
He didn't know what was going on, but then later on he figured it out because he dropped his cell phone while he's doing all this. If he didn't drop his cell phone, the cops have nothing. The fact that he dropped his cell phone was the only connection they had to go on.
Also insane that this man dropped his cell phone within fucking feet of a murdered body and had nothing to do with it.
That's the first time that's ever happened. That's what I mean. They were like, we got our suspect. Here he is. It's always that guy. And he's like, yeah, I was out there towing. Sure. Thanks for finding my phone. And they're like, hold on a minute here. Love to have it back. Yeah. So Bobby and Leslie, either way, they got home before sunrise, changed their clothes, did all that shit.
Bobby threw the bloody black T-shirt and his work boots just into a pile in his bedroom, just on the floor there. No, that's how much he was so confident. You get away with this. Then he went to sleep. They never talked to him ever. May as well. Yeah, so that same day is when the electrical line inspector finds the body that we talked about here, being a little too curious.
Now, the evidence that they find here is way different than the Tosi or Tosi crime scene here. That was like in the desert, no DNA, no preservation. It was there for a month. He was there for a month. The eclectic scene had been cleaned up, evidence and shit like that. This was totally different. Yeah.
Fresh body, still warm, blood everywhere, three sets of footprints, fresh tire tracks, a still bloody knife off in the bushes, a still bloody sledgehammer near the road, articles of women's clothing that belong to the victim on the side of the road. I mean, this is a different story.
It's messy, and it's messy because the man drives a Ford Aspire, and Aspires are going to do Aspire things.
Yeah. They're going to aspire to do something. If you see anybody with three different tires, that is a window into their soul. It's probably a Ford Aspire. It's a window into their soul. They have mismatched shit going on in their brain. That's what's going on.
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