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Chapter 1: What happened to the farm couple in Highmore, South Dakota?
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder Express. Yay and choo-choo! 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 edition of Small Town Murder Express. They're always crazy. Oh, yeah. And this is no exception.
We got some wild stuff for you in a real rural... You know, kind of salt of the earth kind of area where there's some bad stuff going on. I love that. That's so great. I love when it's just this place where they're like, oh, it's just everyone here is so nice and everybody treats each other so well and then they murder each other and then we talk about it.
Except for this guy.
Except for this guy. So we'll get into that in a minute. Before we do, certainly head over to shutupandgivememurder.com. Get your tickets for live shows, everybody. After the summer is when they start up again. September the 18th at the Pabst in Milwaukee. Not a ton of tickets left for that. So if you want to get in there, I'd get those tickets now.
And then the next night, September 19th, we are in Minneapolis at the State Theater. Get those yesterday. Get those also. Listen, Minneapolis, you don't want Milwaukee people to embarrass you by coming out stronger, so do that.
And then also September 3rd, or I'm sorry, October 3rd in Dallas, October 16th and 17th in San Jose and Sacramento, and then Tarrytown on November 13th, Boston November 14th.
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Chapter 2: What were the circumstances surrounding the wife's death?
Amazing. That is the schedule. Get your tickets. Shut up and give me murder.com. Listen to our other two shows, two crime in sports, which if you like cult stuff, you want to check out the series we're currently doing on crime and sports on the Yahweh Ben Yahweh cult. And because one of the main enforcers and murderers of that cult was an NFL football player. So. It's real good.
Not a lot of sports involved in that. Just a lot of murder and cult stuff. So that's a lot of fun. Check that out. Also, your stupid opinions. It's just the funniest show going. You got to check it out. You know what it is. It's hilarious. We make fun of people's reviews of things. So that's good stuff. Get yourself Patreon as well. You need it.
Patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get all the bonus material. There's a ton of it. Anybody $5 a month or above, you're going to get everything we've ever put out, including as soon as you subscribe, hundreds of back bonus episodes you've never heard before. It's like almost 400. It's a whole feed in its own.
And then you get new ones every other week, one crime and sports, one small town murder. You get them all. Just take them. Every bit. It's all yours. This week, what we're going to do for crime and sports, it has nothing to do with sports. We're going to talk about hostage situations that have happened in the past and some crazy shit that occurs during them because –
After we did that Stockholm one, I started getting deeper into it, and it's pretty interesting.
Remember when that band held that radio station hostage?
Oh, I do. I do remember that. They just wanted to get their tape played. That's all they wanted. But that girl stole the master coffee. Unbelievable. What are you going to do? Dog pissed on it. If you're younger or older than us, you will not understand this at all, what we're talking about. But it's a movie reference.
For a small town murder, we're going to do Corey Richens part three because there's so much to cover. Her sentencing was wild because all of her kids' statements came in, which completely contradicted all of her statements to the police.
All of them.
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Chapter 3: How did the autopsy reveal the truth about the murder?
Get in there. Patreon.com slash crime in sports. That said, I think it's time, everybody. Here we go. I think it's time to clear the lungs here. What do you say? Arms to the sky. And let's all shout. Shout. And give me murder. Let's do this, everybody. Okay. Let's go on a trip, shall we? We are doing it. Where to? We're going to South Dakota this week.
Yeah?
Oh, yeah. We haven't been there in a while, and South Dakota is interesting. So this is Highmore, South Dakota. And we haven't done a ton in central South Dakota. That's the thing. A lot of it is kind of on the edges, like Deadwood on the one side. This place is right smack in the middle of South Dakota. I mean the middle of nowhere.
It's about three hours to Sioux Falls to the east, about four hours to Deadwood to the west. And then it's about 50 minutes to our last South Dakota episode, which was in Pierre, which is how they pronounce Pierre. Pierre, yeah. They hate French people, I assume.
Is this bordered by Idaho?
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Chapter 4: What evidence pointed to the husband's involvement in the crime?
This is bordered by a lot of South Dakota. It's right smack in the middle.
Okay.
Yeah.
In the west side. What's over there on the west? Deadwood.
Oh, yeah, yeah, Wyoming and Montana and all that stuff. Montana. Yeah, Montana's between that and Idaho. The last episode was episode 650, so it's been a bit. That was a deadly blame game was the name of that.
Sure was.
That was a wild episode. This is in Hyde County, H-Y-D-E. So it could be high. You never know, like High Park. Area code 605, although they hate the French and anybody else like that, so I doubt they're pronouncing it. Area code 605, population 779 here. Not a lot.
pretty people people well i have way more cattle probably 779 not a lot a median household income here slightly below the national average it's usually 69 000 here it is 60 208 dollars but that's affordable if you look at the housing the housing prices here median home price here 111 300 dollars That's amazing. Less than one-third of the national average is what that is. That's incredible.
The motto, and I'm telling you, some ad company back in the day went around and said, we can make money just giving the same motto to every town that hires us. A great place to, what do you think, Jimmy?
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Chapter 5: What were the key details from the husband's police interviews?
Someone out there in small-town murder listenerdom, Please compile how many towns have had that motto. And I bet it's – And where they pay for it. Yeah. I bet it's – and see if you can trace it back to an ad agency here. Now, history of this town, the reason it's called Highmoor is because it is – in the high plains, it's a high elevation. So they call it Highmoor for some reason.
Apparently – The founding had some rivalry here, which is pretty normal for the late 1800s. In 1882, developers A.E. Van Camp and E.O. Parker – why did no one have a first name back then, by the way? No one had one – established competing business districts along parallel streets. So mine's here and yours is here and we're going to fight it out.
Iowa Avenue and Commercial Avenue creating a unique kind of a dual main street layout. Back to back. Yeah, most small towns don't have like double main streets and they do. They still have it. So the county's formal organization here. It was in 1883, and there was a lot of disputes over where the county seat was going to be and all that crap, as we know. By 1884, they smoothed it all out.
Now, this place, Highmore, was the place that the South Dakota attorney general, so the attorney general of the state, Jason Ravensborg, struck and killed a pedestrian in 2020. Oh, fuck. Absolutely. Yeah. He said that he discovered this is crazy. There's a guy walking on a rural stretch of highway and he fucking hit him and killed him. And how? With his car. Yeah, I get that.
That's the joke, yeah. Not with a clothesline out the window, obviously.
How the fuck do you do that?
On accident? He was driving home from a fundraiser and apparently hit this guy. He said he called 911 after the crash and didn't realize he'd hit a man until returning to the scene the next morning, he said, to look for the deer he thought he hit. which is weird. He was... He knows.
And he had a 55-year-old man named Joseph Bover, which is pretty fucking... What a... Yeah, there's still investigation going on into it, and he's coming home from a fundraiser, which you know what they have at fundraisers. Do they have the alcohol there, too? A little bit of booze. I'm not saying that's what happened, but you know what I mean? He's driving home in a rural area, you know.
Perhaps giving somebody a ride home that was leaned over the seat while he was... We could have a Ted Kennedy situation. There's so many speculations you could make here. You could have a lot.
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Chapter 6: How did the trial unfold and what were the key arguments?
She might be trying to do that. And there's also a sunflower festival, which is just sunflowers.
No Little Miss Sunflower?
I mean, it's just come look at the sunflowers, really. I think there's like sunflower seeds. You can get like a sunflower smoothie.
Well, sunflowers run wild. And sunflower season is so awesome in some areas of the country. You're just driving down the freeway. It's just as far as the eye can see down the stretch.
It's beautiful. It's amazing. So that said, let's talk about some murder here. Okay. Okay. Let's talk about Tanya Jean Bushler. B-U-E-C-H-L-E-R. She'll only be Bushler for a very short time in our story anyway, and then she'll be Aesop. Aesop? Oh. Like Aesop, like the guy who writes the – A-E-S-O-P. Yeah, but with an H. So I'm going to say Aesop. Now, she's born October 8, 1949, Tanya is.
She grows up, seems to have a pretty uneventful life from what I can gather. Nothing crazy happened to her. She grew up here? No, in South Dakota, yeah. I can't find a lot on her childhood or anything like that, so usually that means uneventful for the most part. Yeah. I'm assuming 4-H and Sadie Hawkins and all that good shit, and that's what's going on.
We'll go to FFA later.
So October 1975 is when she marries David George Asaph. He's about three years older than her. And essentially, they build their life on a farm outside Highmore. It's a pretty big farm. They have five kids.
Holy.
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Chapter 7: What was the outcome of the trial for the husband?
I mean, I guess if you live out here, you kind of have to be, too. It's kind of the middle of nowhere.
You've got to learn some first aid stuff.
They own and lease 4,844 acres of land. 5,000 acres. 7.5 square miles. That's enormous. That's so big.
Square miles?
Think about that. You own 7.5 square miles of shit. Holy. That is too much. So the thing is, that's their life. So it seems like they have a pretty uneventful life. You know, they're that old picture, the American Gothic there with the pitchfork and the guy. That's who they are is essentially what you're picturing with their kids in the background here.
But by the 90s, things start to kind of unravel a little bit here for them. I mean, they've been married 20 years at this point almost.
It's pretty easy to have some baggage.
Apparently, Tanya, she wanted something on the record. What do you mean? She went to the police, the Division of Criminal Investigation she went to in 1993 and says she wants something on the record. She's not reporting a crime. She doesn't want anything done or any arrests made, but she wants to put something on the record. And this is the DCI agent Dan Jahala.
And he said, quote, she had fears that she thought her husband may try to kill her if she tried to divorce him or that he knew people that would have that done if she tried to leave him.
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Chapter 8: What impact did this case have on the community and legal system?
So she's like, I don't know. I just want to let you know that. Yeah. And even if he doesn't put it on the record, if she ends up dead, he can go, that's the same lady who talked to me and said this. So it's something, you know, to look at. So she told the agent that David demanded she account for every penny she spent. And so the DCI agent advised her, well, why don't you leave the marriage?
It sounds like you're not happy. You should probably leave the marriage. And she said she wasn't ready because she was afraid of what would happen if she tried. So she sounds like she needs a counselor, not some cop to talk to at this point.
You know what I mean?
Sounds like she needs somebody to encourage her to go. Because this guy's just telling her, well, why don't you leave then? And she goes, well, I can't. And he goes, all right, I guess I'll write it down. So the agent said she wanted us to be aware that this was going on, what her life was like.
So in the event that something happened, we were already aware of the issues in her relationship with her husband. Does that answer everything? She needs a friend. She needs a friend, yeah. A friend, a fucking therapist, a – I don't know. A particularly friendly cow she can talk to? Somebody.
Well, he may have already. She thinks he knows people that get people gone. I think a farmer, all he knows are bulls.
But how many degenerate farmhands that go from place to place, does he know? Transient.
There are rumors in small towns about ranches that there's a lot.
The man's got seven and a half square miles to make her disappear. That too. And he's probably hired 150 criminals over the last 25 years that he can go back in his little crime Rolodex.
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