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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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We got a call to go check on her welfare and I'm at her home and she's passed away.
It's mid-September, 2023. 52-year-old widow Marsha Allen is away from her home in Freetown, Indiana. She's on a trip to Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, with her parents. She leaves on Saturday, planning to return a week later on the following Saturday. Before the trip, she does something she's been wanting to do for a while. She installs cameras.
She buys the system herself from Walmart and keeps it quiet. She wants to watch the house while she's away, mostly to keep an eye on her cats, and because she feels unsafe since her husband died about a year ago. She gets them because she's never left her cats alone that long. And she has a bad feeling in the gut of her stomach. So she wants to be able to check in on her pets wherever she is.
I've never left my cats alone for that long before. And I had a bad feeling. I thought maybe one of them would have died or something. And I felt bad if I didn't know about it. And I got them to keep an eye on my cats. I'm still scared. So I got the security surveillance cameras because Every time I hear noise, I jump.
I look at all outside cameras or even go outside of the door because I don't want anybody to come out and jump at me.
Right. Okay. And you can watch it on your phone? Yeah. Because you were actually out of town.
We went to Tennessee Fishing Forge because it's Mom and Dad's anniversary, and they wanted to go. And I knew I was going to start going to work, and it didn't take them long to get in.
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Chapter 2: What circumstances led to Harold Allen's death being ruled natural?
On her parents' couch, she scrolls through the camera app. Suddenly, there's a ping sound. Then another. The AI in the app is able to determine that there is a person in view. But no one should be inside her house. She nervously taps the first click, and the view of the camera pops up on her phone. A shape slides across the frame. She pinches to zoom. Then another alert lands.
Another clip queues. Her thumb keeps moving, save, save, save. She starts counting and she'll end up with 22 videos by the time this is over. One of them is nearly five minutes long. Obviously, she's in a state of panic. As she stares at her phone, there are two adult males wearing hoodies and moving towards her safe. And in that longer clip, a face suddenly turns towards the camera.
She watches more. The timestamps move towards six o'clock. A door that should be shut swings open and a view shifts down a hall she knows by heart. She studies the intruder's hands and clothing. The face flashes again, making her stomach drop. She recognizes it this time and says the name out loud, her eyes fixed on what she's seeing.
She calls the sheriff's office and says where she is and what the app is sending, along with how many clips she has of the break-in. She texts and emails what she can and then keeps the live view open to keep watching. Inside the house, drawers open and shut. In one camera angle, she sees the safe and catches her breath. She knows the sound that the safe makes when it opens.
The live feed hiccups, then streams again. A second figure passes through a doorway. She listens for anything, footsteps, a scrape, anything she can tell deputies later. Then, around 6pm, everything suddenly stops.
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Chapter 3: How did Marsha Allen prepare for her trip away from home?
The stream freezes up and drops. No more alerts, no more clips. She refreshes. Nothing. She switches to another camera. Nothing. She knows this means someone must have unplugged the router. She stares at the blank screen. The safe is massive, and she thinks about what's inside. Family rings, collectibles, and dozens of firearms kept for years. She starts a list in her head. She writes it down.
She tells herself she can pull serial numbers when she gets home. And then she calls the sheriff's office again to make sure they got the videos. She tells her parents she needs to go back early.
Okay, so... Did you get all the videos? I sent you 22.
I'm not sure if I got 22, but I got a lot of them. And I'm not sure that I've been all the way through all of them.
Well, the five minute one shows Stephen's face, full face. And what cracks me up is he looked in the bedroom and he saw the camera, but the other guy distracted him and he forgot all about it.
And... She only recognizes the voice of one of the suspects.
But the other? She saw his face and put a name to it. Stephen White. Deputies find him outside in the driveway at his parents' place in Scott County. The officer took Stephen away from the house to a garage where his maroon four-door sedan sat. Wearing a gray t-shirt and dark sweatpants, Stephen presented as nonchalant, smoking a cigarette and waving his arms as he spoke with an open posture.
After having his rights read to him, he gestured for his dog, Hank, to move along. And then he took off running. Not running with his legs, so much as his mouth.
So do you understand your rights? Yes, sir. Okay. So you have any idea why we're here today? Well, they said that y'all got me on camera last night burglarizing the place. Okay. And my husband. If that's the case, do you know anything about it? No. Okay. My husband and I set up last night until about 4 o'clock in the morning watching Nope. He's off work today. He works at Jim Patrick's.
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Chapter 4: What prompted the reexamination of Harold's final days?
How old is the lady that you're talking about? Marcia Buxton? Um, 50, 50, 51. Does she live there? Yeah, in that house. She got it because whenever she married the man. You know where it's at? Freetown, I reckon. She gave me an address. She said, hey, I need you to go up in here. I was going to grab someone and go up in here and she's trying to meet this dude up there. And I did.
And I went over there.
She wanted us to get rid of it. This woman has hated me for years. I'm best friends with her daughter.
She needed the life insurance money, but Harold's death certificate said he died of natural causes. He'd had a heart condition that was getting worse in the weeks before he died. It happened at about 2 in the afternoon on December 20th, the previous year.
9-1-1.
Yeah, this is 32-87 North State Road 135. My husband's in our bedroom floor. He's non-responsive and I need him to leave.
Okay, what's your address again?
32-87 North State Road 135. Okay, how old is he? I don't know. He is 52. He's 52. Okay.
Did you find him like that?
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Chapter 5: What unsettling discoveries did Marsha make while reviewing her home security footage?
No, you're fine. But I said, listen, bitch, I'm not fucking. I got two kids. My husband is schizophrenic. My dad is one of them. We got a lot of shit going on. I am not about to drive guns across this town. If you have shit that's antique, so be it.
I don't want no bullets and a load of fucking weapons in my car. And she took everything apart and she said everything exactly where it was supposed to fucking go.
And I got what I could get. She told me to go on Monday night and Tuesday night. And it sounds to me like she's setting me up real quick.
Stephen, being the sassy ass bitch that he is, was a felon and couldn't be caught with weapons. Also, he had a lot going on, clearly. A lot of problems, issues. Kind of a fucked up life already, it sounds like. But in the same breath, he said he did it anyway.
Her exact words, I want this to be removed from the house before I get back from Tennessee and set up my cameras. Because I need to be able to tell his brothers that all these things were gone because they're mine. And I don't want them to try to fight me in court over it. Over an inheritance. You know what? Probate. Probate. This was all done in a text?
Yeah, from a text mail number that she had.
Stephen already admitted that Marsha hated him. Apparently, she was a racist who didn't like him and blamed him in some way for coming between her and her daughter. Allegedly, that is. So was she setting him up or did she just want the inheritance she felt she deserved and knew he could get it for her? Or was it even Marsha that texted him in the first place?
Are you sure that Ashley's not the one that messaged you to go do that? I'm not. Because the information that we have or that we're getting could be a little bit conflicting on that part. Like Ashley, and if it is Ashley, just tell me it's Ashley. No, I'm not. I'm really not sure if it's Ashley or Marcia. That's the thing. They've been like this our whole fucking lives.
But do you have, your phone, is it labeled as Ashley if she was to text you? No. Not at all. But the person that texted said this is Marcia? Hey Russell, who is this? And I got a call from a TextNow number. This has been, look, a couple of months ago. And then it was supposed to go down on this day. Yes, pretty sure. Because it was TextNow. The call was on TextNow.
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Chapter 6: What accusations did Stephen White make against Marsha Allen?
Well, if that's what the autopsy said, that's what it said. But she was still being accused of setting up the burglary.
Do you, because I don't know, and I haven't been able to talk to her yet, do you think Ashley would have, I mean, because you said that only three people... Because the debts are worth a lot of money. Do you think Ashley would have had something to do with this?
She had to have. She's the only one other than me who knew the combination, and I would never give it out to anybody, ever.
Ashley and her fiancé had lived with Marsha and Harold for a while, but now Ashley was living in Missouri. The only way to get to the bottom of this was to call her. At the same time, detectives scoured Stephen White's phone and found some shocking evidence. Messages between Ashley and him that confirmed the burglary conspiracy. This is a montage of some of the things Ashley said.
I do have access next week to her home with a lot to steal and sell. It would be as simple as I load the truck, you go sell it, we look for more, rinse, repeat, I mean 100K worth of guns, lol. I already stole my guns to keep. She owes me. I'm about to grab the coins too. I just gotta get her out of the house. He only has AD&D and it will not pay out for natural causes.
Only thing they can do is say, yeah, you don't get it, or where do I send the 200K, lol. This was enough to bring Ashley in from Missouri for questioning. Meanwhile, detectives had access to Stephen's and Marsha's phones. The case went quiet for a few weeks. What surfaced wasn't another clip or a rumor.
It was an online order by Ashley with a shipping label in the family name Lynn Allen, all pointing to the Freetown address with dates, size, and price attached. And the item in the center of those records hinted at a much larger crime. Was Stephen telling the truth? The burglary thread had become a lead. The paper trail pointed back to Harold and to his murder.
When Marsha returned on October 16th, the first question was the order. Who bought it? Where was it shipped? And why? What phone number was on it? The detective shows her the paperwork.
So it was ordered through a place that was called Kim Boys LLC. What's that? It's some company. That's where the glycol was ordered from. So the order source was Peach Pay, so it was paid through Peach Pay. Do you have a Peach Pay account or anything?
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Chapter 7: How did detectives uncover the connection between Marsha and the burglary?
Ashley told Anita to take out Ashley, her fiance, and her fiance's little girl. That would be the same little girl who lived with both Ashleys. You see, Ashley Jones hated, hated her fiancé's little girl. So, why not take her out too while you're at it? In some of the text messages with Marsha, Ashley said, Let her starve. I hate the kid.
She just sits and just does nothing, looking fat, ugly, and stupid. Remember when they used to make fun of family values and the bigots that promoted them? Those were the days. Let's all just hope Ashley sits in prison for the next 50 years doing nothing but looking fat, ugly, and stupid. In the meantime, Detective Adam Nicholson is writing a book on this murder.
And who knows, if he digs harder, he might find even more bodies full of poison left in Ashley's wake. There's already speculation that she may have killed her ex-husband as well. Yeah, he's dead. Detective Nicholson told Sword Scale that this was one of the most bizarre cases he'd ever been involved with.
Or that there wouldn't have even been There wouldn't have even been a murder case at all. We would have never found out. Like, if it wouldn't have been for Ashley's greed and if Ashley wouldn't have, you know, had to have set up this burglary at her mom's house and Stephen getting caught. So what led me to Stephen was the burglary. It was Ashley's greed.
Ashley wanted this burglary to take place, and she trusted that Stephen would do it. She had no idea her mom had installed a security system. And, you know, Marsha would have never reported the burglary had she known that Stephen knew about the murder. If she knew that Stephen had been told by Ashley about the murder, there's no way that Marsha would have called in on Stephen and turned him in.
Ashley's genius knew no bounds. Her master plan from inside the prison? Hire total strangers to cross state lines and kill people for her for free. Smart. Real smart. You know what else is smart? Ordering your murder weapons off Amazon. You know what else is smart? Telling your flamboyant and loudmouthed gay friend that you and your mom murdered someone. You know, what else is smart?
Staging a fake robbery with that same friend who can't stop talking to steal from your own mother and murder accomplice because you're a greedy, narcissistic, and self-centered piece of shit? How's that saying go again? There is no honor amongst cold-hearted cunts? I forget.
Oh, and before some Karen out there sends me an angry email lecturing me and calling me a sexist for using that forbidden word, realize that words are meant to describe the universe we perceive around us so we can effectively communicate, even the four-letter ones. And I can't think of a better word to describe Ashley. She's what that word was made for. Hope you liked that.
And by the way, last week we put up a video explaining how I fucked up all the pricing for Sword and Scale television. Well, YouTube demonetized us. So there's only one place on earth you can find Sword and Scale television now, and that's swordandscale.com or our app.
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