a/n: hey guys! i know it's been a while since i've posted, i've been pretty busy these last two months but i should be getting some down time soon and i'll for sure be uploading again come august. in the interum though, i wrote this little chapter for the Spopera universe. I wanted to play around with different storytelling methods so I wrote this chapter in script form based on the podcast My Favorite Murder. Feel free to tell me if this sucks, you'll have a real chapter soon!
K: "Hi!"
G: "Hi!"
G: "I'm Georgia Hardstark."
K: "And I'm Karen Killgariff."
G: "And this is—"
K: "-My Favorite Murder!"
G: "-the Podcast." *Georgia giggles*
K: "Okay, so, Georgia."
G: "Yes Karin?"
K: "I have the story this week."
G: "Oh do you?"
K: "Yes because not only is it a murder—but it's also an 'I Survived'." *Georgia gasps* "It also has cannibalism,"
G: *double gasp*
K: "And badass females"
G: *triple gasps*
K: "And a surprise celebrity cameo, I mean what more could you ask for?"
G: "I don't know, and it honestly doesn't really sound familiar either— is it old?"
K: "No, actually, it's only about—actually less than ten years old. Okay, well, here goes. It's set in Seattle, Washington, November 13, 2010. Hana Samano, Amanda Sykes and Nancy Duke are staying late after school at Mercer Middle School—Wait, before I go any further, did you ever watch WrestleMania in the late 80's early 90's?"
G: "I mean, kinda,"
K: "it was usually the only thing on in the dive bars I would get blackout drunk in, so I've seen a fair share. Do you know the Duke of Hazard?"
G: "Yes, I keep track of all cute redheads."
K: "So, Nancy Duke is his kid! Which isn't prevalent to the story, but I thought it was cool."
G: "No way! Shut up."
K: "She was such a cute little kid; natural redhead with these big green eyes. Like, you can look up pictures of all three of them online and they're just like… little girls. They're all like twelve or thirteen and they've got the brightly colored braces and handmade friendship bracelets and razor flip phones. Like there was this one picture of Hana I found that was so nostalgic for me because her wrist is covered in those sillybands and she's flashing the peace sign but on one of her fingers you can clearly see a green line from one of those cheap mood rings that would always dye your skin after wearing it for like five minutes."
G: "Aw!"
K: "Anyways, Hana, Amanda, and Nancy are after school in the seventh-grade geometry room making up a test overseen by their teacher, Edward Fisher. Apparently, all three girls had been absent at some point during the last two weeks and Mr. Fisher had told them that they had missed a small test while they were out and would need to come in after school to make it up."
G: "Uh uh. Nope. I don't trust it. Corroborate with your friends, ask them if there was a test while you were out and if you can see their answers."
K: "Okay but see, here's the rub. It's your math teacher. Like, we inherently trust police officers or doctors or your math teacher that you see every other day for the last two months! Why would you not believe them?"
G: "I know, it just makes me mad. You can't trust anyone, not even the people you're supposed to trust."
K: "Okay, anyways, halfway through the test Fisher gets up, throws something into the trash and leaves the room, locking the door behind him. Within moments, the room is filled with a smoke that renders the girls unconscious."
G: "No!"
K: "When the girls come to, they are chained up in a windowless basement. Amanda and Hana are handcuffed to a furnace while Nancy is zip tied to the bedframe of this old-school wrought-iron bed that was down there with them. In my head I've placed them in, like, the basement from Silence of the Lambs."
G: "Oh, Buffalo Bill's basement?"
K: "Yeah, with all it's creepy accoutrements."
G: "Oh god."
K: "Meanwhile, the girls' parents arrive at the school to pick them up from the test and they're greeted by Fisher."
G: "MMMMmmmm nope what the fuck"
K: "Right? So they're like "what the fuck, where are our children" and he's all "I don't know I've just called school security, I had to step out for a bit and when I came back they were gone!"
G: "And nobody was suspicious of that? Couldn't they check security cameras or something?"
K: "Well here's the thing, the school isn't the most up-to-date so they didn't have security cameras installed in the hallways inside the school just surrounding the outside of the school building, and since it was after school and a Friday, they were down because they were doing some maintenance."
G: "How did they not notice him take them, or—how long was he gone?"
K: "Okay so here's the other thing, the girls were stored in two places during the time of their captivity, when he first abducts them, he keeps them in his home in his basement which is on the other side of the fence of the school grounds."
G: "Ohhhh so he was literally like, keeping them right next door."
K: "Yeah."
G: "That's so fucked up. Imagine being kidnapped to the house next door to where you live or something? Like you know safety is just a few yards away and you're being kept just right outside."
K: "Well he does eventually relocate them to his hunting cabin out in Eastern Washington."
G: "Oh."
K: "He initially has them in his basement, but I agree with you, it's messed up. Anyways—where was I… okay. So, the parents contact the police but the police are reluctant to do anything, saying that they could have just skipped out on their math test and turn up later—y'know, typical kid shit. But Hana Samano's mother, Marisa Samano, is just not having it. Hana comes from a first generation Philipino family, Amanda was hell bent on being the first person in her immediate family to go to college—"
G: "Hell yeah—"
K: "- and her mother is like 'Hana would never ditch school or intentionally miss a math test, this whole thing stinks to high heavens'. And then Jim Duke—"
G: "The Duke of Hazard?"
K: "-yes. He chimes in with the added fact that Nancy never goes anywhere without her cellphone and she always answers it and never goes anywhere without telling him first."
G: "Yeah, well… but that's a lot of faith to put in a pre-teen, Hana's mom had a stronger argument."
K: "Okay yes, but six years prior, Jim's wife and Nancy's mom was killed in a home invasion—"
G: "The Duchess of Hazard?"
K: *Karen laughs* "The Duchess of Hazard was killed in a robbery while Nancy was asleep upstairs."
G: *Georgia gasps* "Oh poor baby!"
K: "Thankfully nobody besides the mother was harmed, the robbers didn't even know there was anybody else in the house, I think they though the house was deserted because everyone else besides the mother and daughter were out of the house at the time—that family is like the Weasley's, they've got like six or seven children and is a family of all redheads."
G: "Really?"
K: "No, I think it's like four kids, and Nancy does have a twin. But anyways, because that robbery killed their mother, all the kids were brought up under pretty close supervision so I believe it when The Duke says his kid never goes anywhere without telling him first."
G: "Yeah, totally."
K: "So, all the parents are basically like, 'this doesn't sound like my kid, they would never do that, blah blah blah' and the police refuse to act which becomes a big deal later. Because by the time they do finally act, Fisher has already moved the girls out to his far more remote cabin in eastern Washington which is apparently just like wilderness and farmland and tiny redneck towns until you hit Spokane."
G: "Okay, so like central California, I got you."
K: "Over the course of seven days, the girls are fed Ipecac to purge their bodies and then fed only saltines and vegetable broth."
G: "Oh no."
K: "Fisher was under the delusion that the three girls were the reincarnation of his wife who had died ten years previously when she had been hit by a drunk driver."
G: "Oh no—does he not know how reincarnation works? Those girls would have been two or three already when his wife died."
K: "Well, he's crazy."
G: "True…—and was allowed around children! How the hell did he get a job at a middle school?!"
K: "Interesting that you should bring that up. It is later brought to light that Fisher was connected to two other unsolved murders in Idaho where some local girls had gone missing only for their bones to show up three months later with—and get this, teeth marks on the remains." *Georgia gasps* "However, since Fisher didn't have an arrest record, when they ran the dental work through the system nothing came up and the cases went cold. Those girls were also in junior high and Fisher was found to have worked at both schools as a PE teacher and a Math teacher."
G: "I smell a fetish. Like, cry reincarnated wife all you want but you keep going after twelve-year-old little girls…"
K: "Disgusting. But just wait."
G: "DOES IT GET WORSE?"
K: "Just wait." *Georgia makes anxious noises* "So after a week of captivity and near starvation, the girls had been held in his ridiculously giant hunting cabin, chained to the bed and Amanda is finally like 'well I've had just about enough of this crap, it's time to devise a way to get out of here' which I think is super badass. Fisher isn't there most of the time because he's still working at the school but he leaves surveillance cameras on them so he can still keep tabs on them while away but it's one of those super shitty ones with grainy footage and no sound so the girls are able to plot."
G: "I love these girls with all my heart already."
K: "So Amanda had noticed that Fisher seemed to give her special attention—brushing her hair more often than the other girls, clipping her toenails, other creepy things, that she devises this plan: when Fisher gets home, Amanda asks him out on a date to the living room being all like 'oh we can watch a movie if you want, have some dinner, blah blah blah' and through the date Amanda is able to get a better layout of this two-story cabin. The room the girls were being kept in had no windows so they couldn't climb out that way, but there were these giant air-vent they could crawl through. So, the plan was for Amanda to get a layout of the place to see of the vent lead out and then they would break out together once they were sure that Fisher was asleep."
G: "Oh, sweet babies. Oh, these little, little girls."
K: "That night, after Fisher has fallen asleep, the girls work together to pry the links in their chains open and remove the air-vent's grating. Amanda crawls in first and the vent emits this huge groan and starts making all this noise. In the 'I Survived' interview Nancy describes the sound the vent made as one of the most heart-stopping moments of her entire life. I almost started crying, see, this is why I don't like 'I Survived' because she's, like, sixteen in the interview. Within moments, Fisher is in the room with a butcher knife."
G: "Oh no."
K: "The girls panic. He stabs Nancy in the stomach and Hana in the abdomen before grabbing Amanda by the hair and slitting her throat. Hana and Nancy try to fight back but he manages to incapacitate them again and zip-ties them together before leaving them and taking Amanda's body. Over the course of the next three days the girls are left with their wounds untreated as Fisher proceeds to meticulously cook pieces of Amanda and eat her, feeding Hana and Nancy unbeknownst to them. After his arrest, Fisher explained that he ate his victims in order to absorb his wife's soul and it only made sense to feed Amanda to the other girls in order to consolidate the three parts of his late wife's soul into one body. He was planning on killing Hana next. She was suffering the most from her stab wound so he was planning on feeding her to Nancy."
"The girls have now been missing for two weeks; a statewide hunt to look for them has begun and police have started to look at Fisher as a person of interest. However, at the rate that the investigation was going, there was no way that the police would find the girls before they had all died. Growing desperate and weaker, Hana and Nancy devised a plan. In the interview, Nancy said that the two had argued for a long time on who should stay behind and who should go get help. Neither wanted to leave the other behind and Hana finally ended the argument saying 'I'm thirteen, so I'm older. Which means you have to do what I say. I'm going to make sure you get out'."
G: "Oh god, I'm like, gunna cry over here."
K: "When Fisher got home that day, Hana confided that she knew he was going to kill her next and that she was okay with it and said she just wanted to spend some time with him before he killed her. Fisher and Hana spend the evening watching 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and then—and this is probably my favorite thing—have a dance battle. In the interview, Hana said they danced to I'm So Excited by the Pointer Sisters and All I Want for Christmas by Mariah Carry.
G: *laughs* "Oh my god! Really? A dance off to late 80's and early 90's top hits?"
K: *laughing* "Apparently, yeah."
G: "That's the best thing I've heard all day."
K: "Anyways, meanwhile Hana and Fisher are having their 80's dance battle, Nancy is in the other room using a rusty corner of the bedframe she breaks free of her zip ties and crawls into the air-vent. Now knowing that the vent will be noisy, Hana blasts Mariah Carry to cover the noise of Nancy crawling."
G: "I can't imagine escaping certain death to the tune of All I Want for Christmas Is You."
K: "I can—I would totally escape to The Pointer Sisters. 'Tonight's the night we're gonna make it happen',"
G: *laughing* "'Tonight we're gonna put all other things aside,' that would be a great escaping song. I would be crawling away to the beat of the song."
K: "So Nancy, being the smallest of the three girls and under the protection of Mariah Carry, is able to successfully crawl through the vents and sneak out while Hana is busy distracting Fisher. She ends up running five miles barefoot in her underwear. In the interview, Nancy recalls that must have been the most and fastest she had ever run and 'I had no idea I had that kind of endurance—but I guess the adrenaline of survival will do that to you'."
G: "Man, I hope if I'm ever being chased by a serial killer I also suddenly find that kind of energy reserve. But I feel like after one yard I'll K.O."
K: "Literally the only thing that will motivate me to run on the treadmill is being able to run away from a serial killer. Anyways, she finally comes across a convenience store that calls the police for her. There's actually video footage from the convenience store that you can watch online, where you can see Nancy run up."
G: "Oh my god…"
K: Both the girls had lost so much weight in those two weeks, she didn't even look like herself when running up—all skin and bone…" *Georgia clears her throat* "Anyway, after calling the police, Nancy runs all the way back to the cabin—"
G: "WHAT. WHY."
K: "BECAUSE Hana was still there. In the interview, Nancy says she didn't really know what she was thinking but she knew she just couldn't sit there and wait for the police. She said 'I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I let anything happen to her, I couldn't be the only one to survive this. It didn't feel right to just sit there, I had to make sure that Han' would make it to. We were responsible for each other.'…"
G: "Then what?"
K: "Nancy makes it back to the house, sneaks back through the air-vent, back into the room. And she was talking about how it felt like she was crawling back into her own coffin. In the interview she was gripping at her chest a lot saying how counterintuitive it is, like, her whole body didn't want her to go back into that air-vent, all the air seemed to be sucked out of that house and the closer she got, the harder it became to breath."
"Meanwhile, through all this, Hana has entered like this fugue-state. She recalls the entire night as this, out-of-body experience. Like, she remembers dancing with Fisher and cuddling with him on the couch, but she remembers it all like she was watching it from across the room. Llike watching a very surreal television show of herself and the only time she felt truly panicked was when Hana had to quickly crank the music way up while Nancy was in the vents. While Nancy is getting the police, Hana has somehow convinced Fisher to watch another movie and this time its Talladega Nights. They lay down on the couch and Fisher actually ends up falling asleep. Hana had never been more startled than when he starts snoring and she realizes he's fallen asleep on the couch. Through some, like, fearless, badass woman reserve, Hana gently lifts his arms off her and slips out of the living room at the same time that Nancy is returning. Together, the girls sneak out the back door and Nancy carries Hana back to the convenience store."
G: "These girls fucking owned the shit outta this kidnapping."
K: "They really did. I think a lot of us would like to think we would be this resourceful when put in such a stressful situation, but there is really no telling how you would react. And the added fact that they were so young…"
G: "Yeah these girls don't fuck around."
K: "Unfortunately, no arrest is ever made. The girls make it safely back to the convenience store, but when the police show up at the cabin, Fisher is dead from a gunshot to the head. When he had woken up to find both girls gone and the backdoor wide open, he killed himself—which I think is so selfish."
G: "Yeah! Because he never faced any kind of punishment for his crimes!"
K: "They were, however, able to recover the remains of Amanda's mostly-eaten body and bone fragments that would end up linking him to the other two girls he killed back in Ohio."
G: "Well I guess that's something… God… I can't even imagine the psychological damage it would do to someone to be fed human flesh against their will—and your friend of all people."
K: "Yeah I found this really effed up quote from Nancy on it saying: 'I don't think I'll ever be able to eat meat again, now that I know just how much people taste like barbeque ribs from Outback Steakhouse'."
G: "And now I can never eat at Outback Steakhouse again!"
K: "Anyway, that is the case of the murder of Amanda Sykes, and the insane survival story of Nancy Duke and Hana Samano. That's all from us. G'byeeeeeeee!"
G: "Byeeeeeeee!"
