Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, I'm Jessi Prey. And I'm Andi Cassette. Welcome to Love Murder, where we unravel the darkest tales of romance turned deadly. Our episodes are long form, narrative driven, and deeply researched. Perfect for the true crime aficionados seeking stories beyond the headlines.
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I'm Brett. And I'm Alice. And we are The Prosecutors. Today on The Prosecutors, they call him the male Maura Murray. What happened to Bryce Lespisa? Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of The Prosecutors. I'm Brett, and I'm joined, as always, by my aimlessly wandering co-host... Alice. I am aimlessly wandering from closet to closet looking for recording space.
But it's not about me because we've always said that I think Brett's favorite types of cases are missing person cases. And boy, do we have one for you today, especially when you see how much aimless wandering there is. And it might just be like a meta way of all of us. Aren't we just all aimlessly wandering, trying to find our purpose in this life? And so is Bryce really lost or are we all lost?
Wow. That was deep. Have you been on like a spiritual retreat recently or something? No, I just told you that there was literally a four foot Raptor that my child put in my recording closet. So no, not exactly. Yeah. Well, before we get started on this journey into the soul, apparently is what it's going to be. I do have a few shout outs. I wanted to do Alice, if you don't mind, um, Let's see.
The first is to Hubby and Steffi Kays. They do woodworking. If you go on Facebook and you look up that, you'll find them. Those of you who are just listening, you can't see this. So, sorry. You'll just have to check out their Facebook page. But they sent me this awesome, like, woodworked Alabama flag thing. It's like an American flag. But, bam, it might be a little. This is, like, very cool.
Did they burn it in there? And it's, like, colored in. It's beautiful. I mean, I don't know. I don't know anything about woodworking. It's just really cool. So anyways, so if you're looking for sort of those specialized Christmas presents, because we're in that time of the year, check out hubby and Steffi K's Facebook page. Then they showed me a bunch of the stuff they've done. It's amazing.
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Chapter 2: What led to Bryce Laspisa's disappearance?
If you want to learn more. So that's enough of the business, as the captain would say, if we were on True Crime Garage. Alice, are you ready to dive in to the Bryce Les Pisa story? I really am.
Because, guys, when you walk through the timeline of this thing, it is just an absolute head scratcher and also makes me as a parent terrified because it seems like no matter what, there can be dangers around every corner and you can be left decades later with no answers. It's kind of funny. I can't, you know, I'm using this fancy Apple machine because we went to Apple at some point.
But I still haven't really figured out how to use it. So I can't find you. I don't know where you are. Oh, there you are. I found you. So if you do three fingers up, it shows you all your windows. Oh, it didn't work. Because sometimes if you change it, it's very customizable, which is bad if you don't know how you customized it. But I found you. Well, I'm glad you found me yet again.
Aimlessly wondering, are we going to be found? We can only hope. I'm reliably informed that people's favorite part of the podcast is our just random discussion. So this is going to be like a five star episode for everybody. I mean, we're. Oh, one star, you know, you know, all I know is that I don't want to leave this earth mediocre.
So I want people to hate me or love me because I'm not going to try to please people. I'm going to do what's right and chit chat with my best friend. If I feel like pontificating about who am I, where am I? My Zoolander thoughts.
Wow.
Alice has some deep thoughts right now. I mean, maybe we should just turn this into an after dark and just get your philosophy. I think it already is an after dark. We're already getting wasted in the chat. They're like, are we ever going to get to the chat? This is a big case in true crime.
So I know a lot of you actually, all of you who are listening for the first time, I promise it's not always like this. So anyways, let's dive in to this case. And I do want to say something about this. You know, we say we're never going to lie to you. We're going to lie to you in this case. We're going to tell you a lie. Now, before it's over, we're going to tell you what the lie is.
And you can decide for yourself whether or not the lie is significant. But it's a lie that is often told.
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Chapter 3: How did Bryce's behavior change before he vanished?
And there's going to be multiple times throughout this story where third parties tell him, you need to call your parents. And this is another one. So Kim is saying, call your mom, right?
Right.
That also, by the way, is something that I think is noteworthy in this story. This is a guy at college, seven hours from where his parents live. I'm not saying that you're not close to your parents at 19 years old, but... I will say when I was in school, in college, in law school, wherever, I went to schools that were very far from where my parents lived.
The first person that someone would say call would be like a best friend, but typically not a parent. And if we entered the parent, there's two things. It could be that this is such a large problem. This is not your typical problem. And you really need to invoke the largest authority that you can think of, which is usually... maybe someone's parent who maybe is paying the bills.
Another thing maybe, maybe they know more about what's going on between Bryce and his mom. You can imagine, and I don't know this is the case, but sometimes if I'm having a disagreement with someone, they're like, you need to call that person. There's just more to the story than we actually know right now.
I don't have any basis for these different points of reference, but I do note that the two closest people to him are calling his mom or saying, you need to call your mom. So at this point, Bryce and his mom talk. And according to his mom, she does something which is frankly out of step with everything else that's going to happen in this story from this point forward.
She offers to come down there. And he tells her, no, there's no need. I'm fine. I don't think this happened. Let's put my cards on the table. I don't think she offered that. I just don't think it happened. I think possibly after everything else happened, she said that maybe she even remembers that.
But it's just it's not in keeping with anything else we're going to see that she was ready to come down there.
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Chapter 4: What role did Bryce's friends play in his last days?
And frankly, Bryce saying, oh, no, I'm fine after his two closest people. I don't think that would have stopped her from coming if she was that concerned. So to me, I don't think that happened the next day. This seems super emergency. Like if she's saying, should I come the next day? Like, why not that night?
Chapter 5: What events occurred on the night Bryce went missing?
Why not right now? Like, this sounds like a real problem.
Yeah.
Yeah. And honestly, the bad decisions get even worse. Apparently, Bryce told her he did want to talk to her. He had some things he wanted to discuss with her, but he didn't really go into that any further. And apparently she did not press him. But whatever they talked about at this point. Despite Kim calling and despite Sean calling, Karen thinks he's fine.
So she gets on the phone with Kim and she says, he's fine. Give him back his keys so he can drive home. And so Kim does that. She gives him his keys and he leaves. I don't know what that conversation was, but what was Kim to do, but to give the keys back when the only thing like holding, you know, the leverage was to call your mom to keep the keys away from him.
The thing I'll say about Bryce, we talk about every time somebody disappears, they light up the room or whatever. Bryce, apparently just, he inspired some fierce loyalty from people. who cared about him.
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Chapter 6: What similarities exist between Bryce Laspisa and Maura Murray cases?
So Sean's going all out. He broke up with Kim by a text message. Kim would have had every reason to be angry at him, to be like, get out. Why are you even here? Get away from me. I don't want to talk to you. I'm sick of you. But she doesn't do that. She takes his keys. She's calling his mom, all this other stuff. She doesn't want to give him his keys back. She only does it when mom tells her to.
And we're going to see people later on who Bryce meets for much lesser amount of time who go out of their way to try and help him. And yet... We just see this where these opportunities to intervene are lost. So Karen, Bryce's mom says, give him his keys back. And so Kim gives the keys back to Bryce.
At 1130, Bryce leaves Kim's house in Chico, California to go back to his apartment in Rockland, California, 90 miles away. Already going to be a very late night drive. So this is going into the next morning past midnight, August 29th, but he's just driving. At 1 a.m., 90 minutes after he left Kim's house, that may be enough time for him to be almost back to his apartment.
He actually calls his mom again. They don't discuss anything particularly notable. He was just calling to check in. Okay, this is very interesting, because it's 1am calling, and the 1130 call was actually pretty heated. It was a fight between whether he was well enough to drive.
And so the one o'clock check in, it may be as simple as mom was like, you know, when you get on the road, make sure you're okay, call me. But I think that itself is notable, that there's a 1 a.m. call after an 1130 call where his ex-girlfriend is trying to wrestle the keys away from him.
So to say that this is not a notable call, I think is, again, kind of that narrative saying nothing, no big deal. I think the fact there is a 1 a.m. call at all is notable because of all the preceding events and not just because in hindsight, I think things have been heated for the past 90 minutes.
Now, Karen, because it's been about 90 minutes, assumed that at this point, Bryce is back in his apartment. But later, his phone pings and would prove that he was actually heading south past his apartment and towards the mountains. This I think is also interesting because I guess the assumption makes sense based on the timeline, but
But if I'm talking to someone who's just been very heated, was worried about them driving, I guess maybe Karen wasn't worried about him driving, but at least the person who was with him, Kim, was worried about Bryce driving. I wouldn't assume that he's back at his apartment. I would say, so you made it okay? You back home? Everything good?
At least from what I've read about this call, he told her he was at the apartment. It was just assumed. Again, if you know someone well enough, maybe you don't need to ask the direct questions. But the 1 a.m. call because of the 1130 fight between Kim and Bryce, I think warranted more than just an assumption.
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