# 54: Serial Killer Fangirl Becomes a Murderer

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 19 Oct 2023, 51 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO3541702562.mp3

Today's episode is on Shaye Groves - a woman whose obsession with true crime would turn deadly when she stabbed her boyfriend, Frankie Fitzgerald, in her home. Trigger Warning: physical and sexual abuse of a child, mental illness, self-harm, suicide, sexual assault, rape, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, emotional abuse, psychological abuse Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:00] Shay Groves was a true crime fangirl, with Etsy posters of
[0:04] serial killers lining the walls of her bedroom.
[0:08] She studied true crime documentaries for two years,
[0:11] analysing the ways these people avoided police detection.
[0:15] And then Shay went on to murder someone herself in that exact
[0:19] bedroom, surrounded by her favorite killers, She tried to
[0:23] use her knowledge of true crime to get away with it.
[0:26] Today we're going to be discussing the insane story.
[0:30] Of shade Groves before we get into the case I do just want to
[0:36] give my usual disclaimer that I mean absolutely no disrespect to
[0:39] anyone that I talk about in this video.
[0:41] This video is for educational purposes and everything that I'm
[0:44] about to say is publicly available information that
[0:47] myself and my team have found online and compiled into this
[0:51] video This video will cover a lot of sensitive topics.
[0:54] This is a very heavy one, including but not limited to the
[0:58] physical and sexual abuse of a child, mental illness including
[1:02] depression, PTSD and bipolar, self harm, suicide, sexual
[1:07] assault, rape, drug and alcohol abuse, emotional and
[1:10] psychological abuse. Like I say, a very, very heavy
[1:14] one. While we make every effort to
[1:16] Fact Check our sources and make sure that all of the information
[1:19] in this video is correct, no action should be taken in
[1:22] reliance upon the information in this video.
[1:25] And I want to take this opportunity to remind you all
[1:27] that these are real people's lives that we're talking about.
[1:31] So please keep the comments section respectful and kind.
[1:35] All opinions in this video are mine and mine alone.
[1:38] And with that being said, let's get into the case.
[1:40] So today's case is actually a very recent one.
[1:43] It only wrapped up earlier this year, and it took place in July
[1:47] 2022. So just coming out of the
[1:49] pandemic. It takes place in a town called
[1:51] Havant in the South of England. And this was home to Shay
[1:55] Groves, who was 27 years old at the time of this case.
[1:58] Born in January 1996, Shay Groves had a terribly sad
[2:03] childhood filled with physical and sexual abuse.
[2:07] And when she joined school, she was relentlessly bullied.
[2:10] She never fit in. Just every aspect of her life
[2:14] was so sad to read about. She was considered a goth by her
[2:18] peers. She'd always been kind of into
[2:20] darker things. People called her a weirder.
[2:22] So she was bullied for that. But she was also bullied for
[2:25] having a hearing aid. She was partially deaf.
[2:28] And so she started wearing a hearing in aid at like 11 years
[2:31] old. And you know what kids are like,
[2:33] they can be cruel about anything that they don't understand about
[2:37] anything that's slightly different to them.
[2:40] And Cher was bullied for having a hearing aid at 11 years old.
[2:44] At the age of 13, she began self harming to deal with her
[2:48] depression that she'd been feeling pretty much her whole
[2:51] entire life. I don't know if there was ever a
[2:53] period of Shay Grove's life where she wasn't terribly
[2:56] depressed. And when this turned into self
[2:59] harming in, in her teen years, she was sent for her first
[3:02] mental health assessment. The psychiatrist diagnosed her
[3:05] with bipolar disorder. And it was around this same time
[3:08] when she was only about 13 years old, that Shay started turning
[3:12] to drugs and alcohol to self Medicare.
[3:15] Like I said, she was picked on quite a bit for being a goth.
[3:19] But this is something that Shay liked about herself.
[3:22] She was, she was quite a goth stereotype.
[3:24] I have to say. She was into horror.
[3:26] She was always wearing like pentagrams and like chains and
[3:29] stuff. She was into heavy metal music.
[3:32] All her friends called her Chucky as a nickname after, you
[3:35] know, Chucky from child's play. Although her friends.
[3:39] To be fair, I don't even think she had that many friends.
[3:42] I think these are more acquaintances.
[3:43] People that knew her at school. They would always say that Cher
[3:47] was quite manipulative. She was very withdrawn socially.
[3:50] She only really had like 2 close friends, 2 girls named Lauren
[3:54] White and Vicky Bitup. Cher was super, super close with
[3:58] Lauren but less with Vicki. Vicki was a bit like a third
[4:02] wheel on Shay and Lauren's friendship.
[4:04] She's since spoken on this dynamic of this friendship trio
[4:08] when they were younger and she said that it was it was quite a
[4:11] manipulative like power dynamic between Cher and the two other
[4:16] girls. She was clearly the leader of
[4:18] the group and while Vicki wasn't as susceptible to being
[4:22] manipulated, Lauren really was. Lauren became like a follower to
[4:28] Cher. Vicki believes that this is
[4:29] because Lauren didn't have any friends really until she met
[4:33] Cher, so she felt like she really owed Cher something.
[4:36] Like Cher was doing her a favour just being friends with her.
[4:39] And so Lauren would do whatever Shay asked of her.
[4:43] In her mid teens, Shay Groves actually ran away from home, ran
[4:47] away from her abusive situation, hoping that she would be able to
[4:50] just find something, anything better than the abusive
[4:54] household that she was leaving behind.
[4:56] But unfortunately, she didn't really find stability for a long
[5:00] time. She was like couch surfing.
[5:03] She was living with different boyfriends, all of which were
[5:06] abusive. She just had a string of abusive
[5:08] partners that she would live with and then get kicked out of
[5:11] the house and then find another one.
[5:12] And yeah, nothing was stable for her.
[5:15] She was still very, very mentally ill and she was still
[5:18] doing a lot of drugs and drink to be able to deal with that.
[5:22] She was stuck in a very, very vicious cycle of this where her
[5:25] mental health was so bad that she felt the need to self
[5:28] medicate. But then being intoxicated so
[5:31] much of the time was really not helping her brain health.
[5:34] Until finally at the age of 20 Shay met a man named Ashley and
[5:39] they had what seemed to be quite a healthy relationship.
[5:43] I mean we don't know exact details but he didn't seem to be
[5:46] like the last ones. They get into this stable
[5:49] relationship that is supposedly abuse free and Shay begins her
[5:55] healing process. Over the months she became a lot
[5:58] happier until eventually she found out that she was pregnant
[6:01] with his child and this changed everything for her.
[6:05] She quit the drugs, she quit the drink.
[6:08] Of course, she wanted what was best for her baby and she
[6:11] decided that she was really going to dedicate herself to
[6:14] this. She'd fallen pregnant
[6:16] unexpectedly, but this was about to change her life.
[6:19] She starts getting mental health support from doctors as well.
[6:22] And it was around this time that she was diagnosed with complex
[6:25] PTSD on top of her bipolar disorder from all the shit that
[6:30] she had been through in her childhood.
[6:31] I'm really not surprised, but that was really affecting her
[6:35] day-to-day as well. I imagine it's really hard to
[6:37] have both of those things, bipolar disorder and CPTSD.
[6:42] It would be really, really hard for her to regulate her
[6:44] emotions. But she was trying her best, you
[6:47] know, she was, she was on her path to mending.
[6:49] And then in April 2017, Cher gave birth to a baby girl and
[6:54] she thrived being a mother. She loved having someone to care
[7:00] for and she adored her daughter. She was a really good mum by the
[7:04] sounds of things. However, not long after the
[7:07] birth of her daughter Cher and Ashley, the father broke up.
[7:11] And so now she was kind of left almost homeless.
[7:15] I mean, she took the child and yeah, they didn't really have
[7:19] anywhere to go at first. She went to a women's refuge
[7:22] centre. And then eventually.
[7:24] She ended up reconnecting with her childhood friend Lauren, and
[7:27] they moved in together because Lauren had also since had a baby
[7:31] girl who was around the same age as Cher's baby girl.
[7:35] So they thought, perfect, we're both single mothers trying to
[7:38] raise two daughters. Why not do it together?
[7:41] So she moves in with Lauren, and it's these two mothers and their
[7:44] two daughters. And the girls get on really,
[7:46] really well. They go to the same school as
[7:48] each other. They're like best friends.
[7:50] They're like, live in best friends, pretty much.
[7:52] Sisters Shay and Lauren end up getting council housing.
[7:56] They've been waiting a little while for this.
[7:58] I don't know where they were living beforehand, but yeah,
[8:01] they ended up getting council housing in Lee Park in
[8:04] Hampshire. So Shay's life has changed a lot
[8:07] in the space of just a year. But to say that her
[8:10] circumstances. Senses have changed a lot.
[8:12] Shea herself hasn't changed all that much.
[8:14] She's still that self-proclaimed goth girl wearing all black,
[8:18] wearing pentagrams. Into the horror, into heavy
[8:21] metal. That was who she was and she
[8:23] loved it. She liked being kind of an
[8:26] intimidating presence. She started to get like tattoos
[8:30] and face tattoos. She had a dagger that looked as
[8:32] though it was like going through her eye.
[8:34] She was going full force with this like very gothic punk rock
[8:39] kind of image. I sound like an old lady trying
[8:43] to describe the youth. But like I say, even though
[8:46] nothing about her really changed, or at least nothing
[8:48] about her physicality or her interests changed, she really
[8:52] changed on the inside, or it seemed that way when she had her
[8:56] baby. She became a lot happier.
[8:58] She became a lot more stable. She kind of knew what was
[9:01] important in life. She decided it wasn't drugs and
[9:04] drink anymore. It was her baby girl.
[9:06] On her daughter's first full day at school, Cher posted a very
[9:10] proud mum Facebook status, calling her a beautiful
[9:14] independent girl with a whole lot of attitude and she said
[9:17] that she would be always there to guide her.
[9:19] Life was pretty good as far as we can tell in terms of their
[9:22] like mother daughter relationship.
[9:24] But Shea's relationship with her best friend Lauren was just as
[9:28] flawed as it always had been. Well, it was even worse now that
[9:32] they live together, now that they were adults.
[9:34] Shea could manipulate. Her very easily still to this
[9:38] day and Lauren still felt very inferior to her.
[9:42] And Shay definitely used this to her advantage.
[9:44] She would get Lauren to wash and fold her clothes for her, roll
[9:49] her cigarettes, even put her socks on for her which is crazy.
[9:54] Lauren was literally like her servant, like her little
[9:57] Cinderella. She was caring for her own child
[10:00] as well. Think about this, she was also a
[10:02] single mother, caring for her own child, caring for Shay's
[10:06] child and also caring for Shay who is a full grown woman.
[10:10] She really did take Lauren's kindness for granted.
[10:13] And there were even a couple of occasions, and I don't know the
[10:15] details here, I really did try, but there were a couple of
[10:18] occasions where Shay got physically violent against
[10:22] Lauren. She was very, very controlling.
[10:24] It was always a power thing for Shay.
[10:27] She needed to feel superior. She needed to feel in control of
[10:30] everything. And Speaking of control, she
[10:32] went so far as to get CTTV cameras put into all of the
[10:37] common areas of the house so that she could watch.
[10:41] I don't, that's insane to me to not allow your roommate and her
[10:45] daughter privacy because you're just so nosy that you need to
[10:50] know what's going on in all rooms of the house at all times.
[10:52] That's insane. And then the pandemic hit.
[10:55] So let me set the scene for you. It's 2020.
[10:58] We have just been put under a national lockdown, just been
[11:01] told that we're not allowed to leave the house.
[11:03] So what do you do? Well, as most people did, myself
[11:05] included, you fall down a true crime rabbit hole by the sounds
[11:09] of the things, I feel like we all went through a joint true
[11:12] crime phase throughout the pandemic, and some of us never
[11:15] left. And Shay was one of those many.
[11:18] I mean, she'd always been interested in true crime.
[11:21] She'd always watched the documentaries and read the books
[11:23] and stuff. But now it began consuming her.
[11:27] She would stay up into the late hours of the night watching true
[11:30] crime documentaries, reading books.
[11:32] She read this one book on Charles Bronson.
[11:34] Cover to cover so many times, and that's not to say that being
[11:39] very. Interested in true crime is
[11:41] necessarily a bad thing. I actually think it's very
[11:44] normal and natural to be interested in things that you
[11:47] don't understand. That's kind of where this comes
[11:49] from in me is like I'm really interested in killers psychology
[11:53] because it's something that I could just never imagine myself
[11:57] doing or anyone that I know to want to take someone else's life
[12:01] is just insane to me. So I really want to dig into
[12:04] that and I want to, I want to figure out how these people are
[12:07] from the same species as me. But they don't act like, and it
[12:10] can be hard to spot where the line is between a healthy
[12:14] interest in a particular genre of content versus an unhinged,
[12:19] unstable individual becoming consumed with true crime content
[12:24] to the point where it becomes very normalized.
[12:26] For them. Violence is just another part of
[12:28] everyday life because they're just hearing it constantly,
[12:31] constantly. And that's how a lot of copycat
[12:34] killers are made. These people that are
[12:36] predisposed to becoming violent or whatever see a shit ton of
[12:40] this content and they become inspired by it.
[12:43] Or like I say, violence just becomes so normal to them that
[12:46] they get desensitized with it. And then when they're faced with
[12:49] a real life situation, you know, like a fight or something, the
[12:52] thought pops into their head to murder someone because that's
[12:55] what they hear about people doing all the time.
[12:57] I mean, I know it's very rich me sitting here on this channel
[13:00] saying all of this, but that's why you have to make sure that
[13:03] you're staying just healthy in general, mentally healthy, and
[13:06] that you're having breaks from content like this.
[13:09] And I think what made Shade different to just your average
[13:13] true crime enthusiast is that she was very interested in the
[13:17] killer and how they'd gone about things and she was inspired by
[13:21] them. She admired their work.
[13:23] She didn't think, Oh my God, that person is so horrific.
[13:26] I want to kind of know what made them like that.
[13:29] She was like, wow, that person was very dedicated.
[13:32] That person was very smart, managed to get away with it for
[13:34] so long. You know, she idolized killers.
[13:38] It came to the point where she was literally just like a Stan
[13:42] for murderers. She became a fan of their work
[13:45] and a fan of them as people. She had literal posters of
[13:50] serial killers on the walls of her bedroom like a teenage girl
[13:54] obsessed with a boy band. It was a whole lineup of eight
[13:58] of the most notorious criminals in history.
[14:01] They were like prints bought from Etsy that were like cutesy
[14:05] and artsy and they had like blood dripping from their eyes.
[14:09] Insane. So of these 8 criminals on her
[14:11] wall, they were Eileen Warnos, Charles Manson, Rose W, Richard
[14:16] Ramirez, The Night Stalker, Myra Hindley, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey
[14:21] Dahmer and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.
[14:24] All of these serial killers on her.
[14:25] Wall had over 100 kills between them.
[14:29] Shay claimed that the reason she had these posters, she tried to
[14:32] say it was like dark humor or like it was ironic, and I
[14:37] really, really don't think it is.
[14:38] I don't think there was any part of this that was ironic for her.
[14:41] I think she was a genuine fan with admiration for these people
[14:46] and the way that they managed to elude the police and things like
[14:50] that. She thought that they were cool.
[14:51] She admired them. She tried to say that it was
[14:53] just art. You know, they weren't actually
[14:56] pictures of the killers. They were artistic depictions.
[15:00] And it's like, I don't know what's worse, to have a straight
[15:04] up picture of a serial killer or to have a cutesy drawn up one
[15:08] where it's eyes are literally dripping with blood.
[15:10] The way you've taken this notorious killer and cutesified
[15:14] it to go on your wall. Like, I don't think there was
[15:18] even an element of irony in this at all.
[15:20] Those drawings were in her aesthetic.
[15:22] It very much aligned with how she presented herself.
[15:25] I think she liked her little posters.
[15:27] Hey, she also had a collection of daggers.
[15:30] Well, a whole collection of weapons, but most of the ones
[15:33] that she had were daggers. And they were all like
[15:36] decorative Celtic daggers. A lot of the times she said that
[15:40] they were for use in her rituals.
[15:42] She was a Pagan, and she did Pagan rituals.
[15:44] And I don't know what you're doing with a dagger, but she
[15:47] said that she was. But like I say, it was all kinds
[15:50] of weapons. She had axes, she had guns like
[15:53] BB guns. And she even had like, uh, just
[15:56] a lot of different types of blades and knives, one of which
[15:59] was a flick knife that she kept in her boot, like Alex Russo
[16:04] with her wand just so that she could like flick it out of her
[16:06] boot whenever she needed a knife.
[16:08] This woman was seriously a walking red flag in so many
[16:12] different ways. Serial killer, idolization,
[16:16] collection of weapons, manipulates the people around
[16:19] her. All of these are the warning
[16:21] signs that we come across in cases like this.
[16:24] And it's just very creepy to know that she was also watching
[16:28] along with cases like this and taking inspiration.
[16:32] And then it all came to a head when Shay Groves met her next
[16:35] boyfriend, 25 year old Frankie Fitzgerald.
[16:38] He was a little bit younger than her.
[16:40] She ran into him at a pub one night.
[16:42] She saw him across the room and she thought that he was
[16:44] gorgeous. So she went over and introduced
[16:47] herself. This was in February 2022.
[16:50] As the two of them got talking, they realized that they had a
[16:52] lot in common. Actually, they were both young
[16:54] single parents. Frankie actually had two kids
[16:57] and of course Cher had her own daughter.
[16:59] She found out that Frankie only lived like around the corner
[17:02] from her. He was super local and like I
[17:04] say, they had so much in common. They got on so well that from
[17:07] that night on they were a thing. They were dating.
[17:10] Their common interests included their kids, the pub, drugs,
[17:15] being violent with each other after too much drink, and drugs
[17:18] and BDSM, slash kink play, quite heavy kink play.
[17:24] In fact, that last thing was a huge part of their relationship.
[17:27] They really, really bonded on that very quickly about how hard
[17:30] it is to find someone else who's into as rough sex as you are
[17:35] into the kinks that you're into, which again, is one of the
[17:38] reasons that they very quickly kind of got along.
[17:42] Around this time when she met Frankie, Shay ended up getting
[17:45] back into drugs. And some people say that it was
[17:48] because of Frankie. He did cooking a lot and would
[17:52] encourage her to get back on it. She'd quit after having her
[17:56] baby. Well, while she was pregnant
[17:57] with her baby and she'd started drinking again, but she hadn't
[18:00] picked up the drugs until she met Frankie.
[18:03] And while her relationship with him was really short, it was
[18:06] only about 5 in total. She started to decline very,
[18:11] very quickly. She was using drugs more often
[18:14] than she ever had done before. She wasn't seeing her friends as
[18:18] much. A lot of their time was spent
[18:20] having sex, quite violent sex, which seemed consensual in the
[18:25] beginning. From like what I can find in my
[18:27] research and what Shay has admitted and what her friends
[18:30] say about what they would say about their sex lives, they had
[18:34] violent BDSM sex that was consensual in the beginning.
[18:45] As time went on, the lines of this BDSM relationship started
[18:50] to blur and consent wasn't always explicitly given, wasn't
[18:55] always explicitly asked for, and parts of their relationship
[18:59] turned into just straight up domestic violence.
[19:02] Once consent is taken out of the equation, that is no longer
[19:05] BDSM, it's no longer kink player.
[19:07] That is abuse. And that started happening in
[19:10] their relationship on both ends actually.
[19:13] They started having a lot of issues outside.
[19:15] Of the bedroom. Just general arguments.
[19:17] Everyone said that the both of them were just as bad as each
[19:20] other when it came to jealousy, possessiveness, being
[19:23] controlling, they always wanted to read each other's phones,
[19:26] they were always accusing each other of cheating, and they were
[19:29] having so many arguments outside of the bedroom that then when
[19:33] they would have sex and they would be consensually violent
[19:37] with each other it it was as if they were taking out this very
[19:41] real anger under the guise of BDSM.
[19:44] It was almost like they had an excuse to be able to hurt each
[19:48] other because they had this prior established consensual
[19:51] BDSM, but at this point they were just using that BDSM as an
[19:56] excuse to hurt each other because they wanted to hurt each
[19:59] other. Like I said, their relationship
[20:01] was very short. It was only about 5 months long,
[20:04] but so much happened in such a short space of time.
[20:07] For example, there was this one day where Cher sat down Frankie
[20:11] and her best friend Lauren that she lived with, and she told
[20:14] them both that she'd been diagnosed with cancer and it was
[20:18] very serious and they were going to have to help her a lot, you
[20:21] know, with. Everything with childcare, with
[20:24] hospital appointments. And they did.
[20:27] The two of them were obviously devastated to hear this.
[20:30] They were really worried for her and they did everything they
[20:32] could, including support her financially, look after her
[20:36] daughter when she didn't feel up to it, or whatever.
[20:39] And I'm sure you can kind of tell where this is going,
[20:41] considering the lack of sympathy in my voice.
[20:43] It was all a lie. Shane made it up.
[20:46] It was just another one of her manipulation tactics to be able
[20:49] to get whatever she wanted out of other people.
[20:51] She was willing to use any methods, any tactics to get
[20:55] there, whether it was sympathy over a fake illness or whether
[21:00] it was BDSM. And this like consensual, non
[21:04] consensual. Wait no, the other way around.
[21:06] Non consensual, Hey, non consensual BDSM anyway, come on.
[21:10] I don't want to confuse consensual non consent.
[21:13] That's something we're going to dip into in a second because
[21:15] that was quite a big part of their relationship.
[21:18] And you know, it can get quite confusing, especially because
[21:21] the word consent is in there twice.
[21:23] I just want to kind of round off the non sexual parts of their
[21:27] brief relationship now before we do dig back into all of that
[21:30] stuff because it it gets very heavy.
[21:32] Not that what I'm about to say isn't heavy, because it is.
[21:35] It's this is a really, really intense five months for the two
[21:40] of them. Shea became very, very depressed
[21:42] once again and she started self harming again.
[21:45] She actually stopped self harming around the time that she
[21:48] met Frankie. She was so happy that she kind
[21:51] of managed to stop herself using that as a coping mechanism.
[21:55] But now, now that she was like fully back on drugs and the
[21:58] argument was worse than ever, she resorted to her old coping
[22:02] mechanisms. Their relationship was getting
[22:04] more and more abusive outside of sex, and that was very, very
[22:09] apparent when they would have like BDSM violent sex that may
[22:13] or may not have been consensual because they didn't really seem
[22:16] to care about each other afterwards.
[22:18] It's like you just beat each other up and then they just kind
[22:22] of moved on with their day. It wasn't like you have to be
[22:24] really careful having a BDSM relationship like that, that you
[22:27] do in like aftercare and making sure each other's feelings are
[22:31] OK and stuff like that, you know?
[22:32] But they weren't because they didn't give a shit about each
[22:35] other really. They just kind of saw each other
[22:37] as sex objects, punching bags, I don't know.
[22:41] OK so let's talk about consensual non consent.
[22:44] I have tried to do as much research into this as I possibly
[22:48] can because this isn't. I feel like this is going to be
[22:51] quite hard for me to get right so I'd want to apologize in
[22:54] advance if anything I say is. I mean, I'm not in this world,
[22:58] I'm not in the consensual non consent world, so this is what I
[23:01] found anyway. Consensual non consent is also
[23:04] known as rape play. It's a kink where people
[23:08] basically agree to act as though they're being forced into it,
[23:13] act as though there was no consent, but they give prior
[23:16] consent. So how it's supposed to work is
[23:19] partners that are going to be involved in this.
[23:21] It can be two people. I'm going to kind of talk about
[23:23] it as if it is two people. But of course it can be as many
[23:26] people as are joining in. But it usually starts with the
[23:28] couple sitting down and having a very full and open discussion
[23:33] beforehand about what they feel comfortable giving blanket
[23:37] consent to. So they have this conversation
[23:39] and they say, OK, it's OK for you to do this, this and this to
[23:42] me, but I don't consent to you doing this thing.
[23:46] And the idea is they have this prior discussed consent and the
[23:50] part partner says for the foreseeable future until I tell
[23:53] you otherwise, I'm happy for you to do any of these things to me
[23:56] pretty much at any time. So then when the time comes and
[24:00] the partner wants to rape play, their partner can act as though
[24:07] they are not giving consent in that moment, saying things like
[24:10] no stop, but they don't actually mean that they have given the
[24:14] prior consent. The way that things like this
[24:16] usually go is they have like a safe word.
[24:19] A lot of the things I read online, they have like a traffic
[24:21] light system of like red means I don't like this stop.
[24:24] Like we quit now. Yellow means like, OK, this is
[24:28] getting a little bit like for me, but like I don't want to
[24:31] stop. We just need to like re evaluate
[24:33] the situation. So there is very much a way of
[24:37] consenting built into this seemingly or like acted out non
[24:44] consensual performance. Does this make sense?
[24:49] I really really hope. Basically what I gathered from
[24:51] my research is that there is a safe and consensual way to have
[24:56] this kink and a lot of couples will manage to do this
[25:00] successfully and with kindness to each other when they have
[25:04] these conversations. But that is not what Frankie and
[25:08] Cher had. That's what they kind of acted
[25:10] like they had this consensual non consent relationship but
[25:13] they weren't caring about each other and having these
[25:15] conversations outside of it. It was just like a oh I'm sure
[25:20] she'll be fine with this or I'm sure he'll be fine with this.
[25:22] It was actually Frankie that would do this to share.
[25:25] More often than not he would go from one type of sex to another
[25:30] without asking first. So he would just go straight in
[25:33] with anal, which you can't do. Share made it clear to him that
[25:37] she was uncomfortable with what he'd just done on this one
[25:41] particular instance when he'd done this, she I think she said
[25:44] to him something along the lines of no babe, Like, no, but
[25:47] because she wasn't crying, because she wasn't, you know,
[25:51] because she'd used the word babe and done it in a softer way.
[25:55] He didn't listen. He didn't think it was serious.
[25:58] They later had a conversation about this particular event and
[26:01] Frankie says to her, and I quote, it was a bit rapey,
[26:04] wasn't it? So he knows he knows that he is
[26:08] being rapey with his girlfriend. He admits it.
[26:11] And he doesn't really seem, he doesn't seem upset with himself
[26:15] or like it was a misunderstanding.
[26:18] Like there was, there was, there's no like remorse there
[26:20] for making a feel that way. He's just like, oh God, yeah,
[26:22] that were a bit rapey of me, wasn't it?
[26:24] Shay's response to him was that it hadn't been rape, but it had
[26:27] been as close to non rape rape as I can get to.
[26:30] And remember, they didn't have a proper agreement beforehand.
[26:33] They both hadn't like agreed with each other on this
[26:36] particular day that they were going to do consensual, non
[26:39] consensual sex. He had just done it and he
[26:43] realized it was rapey. And she, you know, tried to make
[26:47] him feel a bit better about it, saying that like, if you had
[26:50] raped me, like I wouldn't feel safe around you and I wouldn't
[26:53] let you around my child. So she didn't see it as rape,
[26:57] even though it is, but I think it's important to kind of see it
[27:01] from shares POV for the sake of this video.
[27:05] She didn't feel that she had been raped, but she felt like it
[27:08] was pretty damn close. She didn't like the lack of
[27:11] communication, the lack of asking for consent.
[27:14] By the way, we the way that we know about a lot of these
[27:17] specific conversations and the the specific quotes is because
[27:21] Shay had a CCTV camera set up in her bedroom.
[27:24] She got them put in the communal areas of the house, but she also
[27:27] had one put in her bedroom specifically actually to
[27:31] download videos of them having sex Afterwards, she would put
[27:34] the footage onto her laptop. Sometimes she would even edit
[27:37] together clips of them to make like, you know, a feature length
[27:41] film, which was actually really useful for this case and for the
[27:45] whole police proceedings because they had footage of this non
[27:49] consensual sex or the the BDSM that wasn't actually BDSM.
[27:55] It wasn't consensual. And they also have a bunch of
[27:57] quotes and they have the couple's exact wording of
[28:01] things, which is so valuable. During one of these sessions
[28:04] that had been recorded on Cher's CCTV, Frankie brings up her
[28:08] dagger collection because she actually kept one under her
[28:12] pillow. And as they were having sex, it
[28:14] kind of like slipped out a bit. And so the conversation comes up
[28:18] as they're having sex. And so he asks her if she was
[28:20] planning on grabbing him in the throat with that, and Shea says
[28:24] no, the knife is just there for protection, but not against him,
[28:28] just in general if there's like an intruder around June 2022, so
[28:32] a month before this case took place.
[28:35] They're only four months into their relationship.
[28:37] At this point in time, things are reaching new heights.
[28:41] They'd always both accused each other of cheating, but now it
[28:44] was. So, so serious.
[28:46] Like they both had specific people that they accused the
[28:49] other one of cheating with And, and honestly, I think there was
[28:52] cheating going on. I don't think these claims were
[28:55] unfounded. Frankie was specifically
[28:58] accusing Shay of cheating with her ex, I think her daughter's
[29:01] father, and they were spending a lot of time together.
[29:05] I think she was. And then Shay was accusing
[29:08] Frankie of cheating on her with just some girl that he'd met in
[29:11] the pub. I don't know about where the
[29:14] truth lies with that one. One of the main reasons that
[29:17] Shay believed he had cheated on her was because she got thrush
[29:21] in her vagina, and she thought that Frankie must have caught it
[29:25] off someone else and then given it to her like an STI.
[29:29] And I think thrush can work like that, but it's not really
[29:33] evidence of cheating. Sometimes women just be getting
[29:37] thrush, you know? But yeah, her friend said that
[29:39] around this point in time, her negative feelings towards
[29:42] Frankie were off the charts. She'd always bitched about him,
[29:46] she'd always been mad at him, they'd always had arguments.
[29:48] But at this point she was determined to hurt him.
[29:52] She wanted him to suffer. She was talking about
[29:55] potentially releasing the videos, the CCTV videos of them
[30:00] having sex and editing them to make it look fully non
[30:05] consensual because that could ruin his life.
[30:08] That would look like physical proof of him being a rapist and
[30:12] she was talking about how she could release that.
[30:14] She could post it online. She was talking about attacking
[30:18] him, physically attacking him or getting someone else to do it.
[30:21] Calling in one of her male friends to like find him and
[30:25] beat him up. Around this time, they broke up
[30:29] and then very quickly got back together.
[30:30] I think this is something that happened quite often for them.
[30:33] But this one was like, it seemed like it was going to be quite a
[30:36] serious breakup and then it wasn't.
[30:39] But it was Shea that had broken up with Frankie and I think she
[30:42] did it over the phone or something.
[30:43] And then she called her ex-boyfriend that I think she
[30:47] was seeing again. I think she was cheating on
[30:49] Frankie with her ex. She calls her ex-boyfriend to
[30:52] come down to the house, her house where she is alone at this
[30:55] point in time. They pack up all of Frankie's
[30:58] shit from her bedroom and then they go and dump it all on his
[31:03] ex girlfriend's front lawn. So now Frankie's shit is out of
[31:07] his current girlfriend's bedroom and on the lawn of his
[31:10] ex-girlfriend, and he has to go and collect that shit.
[31:15] And then a couple of days later, him and Sheer make friends
[31:17] again. And then they're back together.
[31:18] And then he moves all his shit back in the house again.
[31:20] On July 14th, 2022, Frankie found proof that Sheer was
[31:25] seeing her ex-boyfriend again. He'd gone through a phone, as
[31:29] they both often did to each other, and he had found texts
[31:32] between them. Sects.
[31:33] In fact, he flipped out and confronted her about it.
[31:36] He even threatened physical violence against her.
[31:39] But he didn't actually end up hitting her.
[31:41] He just punched a couple of walls and then left.
[31:44] Which brings us to two days later, July 16th, 2022, The day
[31:49] that this case took place, it was a Tuesday.
[31:52] Shay's daughter was not in the house at this point in time.
[31:55] She was actually staying at her dad's house and Shay was home
[31:59] alone. Well, I think Lauren was home,
[32:01] but Shay was home alone and so she calls up Frankie and asks
[32:05] him to come round. Despite how explosive their last
[32:09] few nights together had been, they were both very willing to
[32:12] see each other again and tried to talk it out, I guess, which
[32:16] did end up going horribly. The two of them both just got
[32:20] drunk, did a load of coke. They were shouting at each
[32:22] other, they were scouring each other's phones.
[32:25] He begged her for money to gamble with, and she gave him
[32:30] it. The atmosphere was just
[32:31] incredibly odd and tense, and it was just the same it always had
[32:36] been. Nothing had changed for them at
[32:38] all. Shit just only got worse and
[32:40] worse. Eventually, Frankie took himself
[32:42] off to Cher's bedroom and fell asleep on her bed while she
[32:45] stayed up, still drunk, still doing coke, still scrolling
[32:50] through his phone. And then she found something on
[32:53] there. Text between him and a girl who
[32:56] claimed that she was 13 years old and Frankie was 25.
[33:00] He wasn't just cheating on her with other girls.
[33:02] Now she was convinced that he was a paedophile as well.
[33:06] Shay was overcome with rage after reading this text and that
[33:11] rage was coming from a lot of different places.
[33:13] Of course, this is her boyfriend and she's just found out he's
[33:16] been unfaithful and she's just found out he's potentially A
[33:18] paedophile. I say potentially because we're
[33:22] going to kind of disprove that age thingy in a bit.
[33:24] But for her right now, she's read this text supposedly from a
[33:27] 13 year old girl and she thinks her boyfriend is a paedophile,
[33:30] he's cheating on her. And it all kind of came back to
[33:34] her about her childhood, about how she was sexually abused as a
[33:38] young kid and it really fucked with her mental and she could
[33:42] also just feel sympathy for this young girl.
[33:46] The girl that this message was from was later found to be 17,
[33:49] which is still a child don't get me wrong, but it was also found
[33:53] that Frankie blocked her when he found out her age or when she
[33:58] said that she was 13 when she liked.
[34:00] I think it was like a joke where she said that she was 13 and he
[34:03] blocked her. So as dodge as it is that there
[34:06] were some messages there, as far as I'm aware nothing too gross
[34:12] actually happened. But from Cher's point of view,
[34:15] she has just read texts between her 25 year old boyfriend and a
[34:19] 13 year old child. She was so overwhelmed with
[34:23] anger that she just flew into a fit of rage.
[34:26] She slammed the phone down, ran to her bedroom where Frankie was
[34:31] asleep on the bed. She grabbed one of her
[34:34] decorative daggers from the display and she stabbed her
[34:39] boyfriend in the neck as he slept.
[34:42] In fact, this one singular stab wound would have been enough to
[34:45] kill him. It would have been fatal if
[34:47] she'd stopped there. She'd sliced his left carotid
[34:50] artery, partly severed his jugular.
[34:53] There was no patching up an injury that serious.
[34:55] Even if she would have called 999 and got on an ambulance
[34:58] there right then, he would have still died.
[35:01] Although at this point in time, Shay doesn't know how seriously
[35:04] she has just stabbed him. And so she kept going.
[35:07] She didn't know that he was going to die anyway, so she kept
[35:09] going. She was making sure that he was
[35:12] going to die tonight. It was a completely frenzied
[35:15] attack. She stabbed him a few more times
[35:17] in the neck, but mostly in the chest, actually 22 times in
[35:22] total. When she was done, she sat there
[35:24] and collected herself, knowing that she had definitely just
[35:28] killed him. Definitely.
[35:29] He wasn't moving. He'd stopped gurgling.
[35:33] She said that there were giggling sounds coming from his
[35:35] throat that stopped before she stopped stabbing him.
[35:45] So now Shay Grove's true crime fangirl is now a murderer
[35:50] herself. She's sitting there next to her
[35:53] victim's dead body and she's going over everything in her
[35:57] head that she's learnt from all the true crime documentaries
[36:00] she's watched. She knows the importance of
[36:03] setting up an alibi immediately. She knew how to clean up the
[36:06] crime scene. She was debating how she was
[36:09] going to get rid of the body because so someone was going to
[36:12] have to find this body. She was going to have to come up
[36:14] with some sort of excuse. So she starts setting her alibi.
[36:18] She texted I think her ex-boyfriend asking if he wanted
[36:22] to come round that night, which he didn't end up doing.
[36:26] But like I really want to know what her plan would have been
[36:28] there. Would she have told him
[36:30] everything? Would she have gotten him
[36:31] involved in the in the aftermath in the clean up?
[36:34] But honestly, I think that text was more so like, you know, just
[36:38] covering her tracks. I think she was hoping that if
[36:40] police did come sniffing around, then her ex-boyfriend would just
[36:44] vouch for her that he was with her that night and so she
[36:47] couldn't have killed him. You know?
[36:48] She then texted her friend Vicky to say that Frankie had just
[36:52] left her house, which is a kind of a pointless text in
[36:56] day-to-day life. But like I say, if police come
[36:59] sniffing around, then this is almost like proof that he had
[37:03] left her house safe and sound that day and then something else
[37:07] must have happened to him later on.
[37:09] So she's setting all of these like text alibis up and then she
[37:13] decides it's time to tell someone what she's done.
[37:16] She went to her roommate Laurens bedroom, knocked on the door and
[37:20] told her that she'd just done him.
[37:23] She just killed him. I'm not entirely sure where
[37:25] Lauren's daughter was at this point in time.
[37:27] We know that Shay's daughter was with her dad, and I really,
[37:31] really hope that Lauren's child was also somewhere else.
[37:34] From what happens next in this case, I'm inclined to believe
[37:37] that the kid wasn't in the house because I don't know how they
[37:40] would do what they're about to do whilst trying to hide it from
[37:44] a child. But anyway, Shay goes and tells
[37:47] Lauren essentially what had happened, that she had killed
[37:50] Frankie, and they both look at his dead body still laying there
[37:55] on the bed. And they start discussing what
[37:59] they're going to do, what they're going to do with it.
[38:00] They thought about burying him in the garden.
[38:03] Shay also suggested that they could try and frame it as a
[38:06] suicide, as if 22 stab wounds would ever be considered a
[38:10] suicide. Like anyone is going to look at
[38:13] that body and say, right, Well, they definitely didn't do that
[38:15] to themselves. And you would think with Shay
[38:17] Groves being such a true crime fan, you would think that she
[38:20] wouldn't be so daft as to think that.
[38:22] But anyway, as they brainstormed what they were going to do with
[38:25] the body, they start trying to clean up the house a little bit.
[38:28] They start scrubbing away the blood.
[38:30] They get out a bunch of bin bags and lay them on the floor and
[38:33] then pick up Frankie body and put it on the bin bags so then
[38:37] they can start cleaning up the bed.
[38:38] And it was at this point that Shea turned on the manipulation
[38:42] with Lauren. She told her that she needed to
[38:44] help her clear up this murder because she was an accomplice
[38:49] now. She'd already helped to wipe up
[38:50] some of the blood. She'd already helped her pick up
[38:53] Frankie's body and move it onto the bin bags.
[38:55] Shea said that if Lauren ever dead snitch on her or tell the
[38:59] police or tell anyone anything, then she would be going down
[39:02] too. Lauren said that she was very
[39:04] scared of Cher. She was scared of what she might
[39:07] do to her. You know, if she didn't go along
[39:09] with it, then would she turn around and kill her too?
[39:11] So she just kind of went along with everything that Shea was
[39:14] saying and everything that Shea was telling her to do.
[39:17] But despite all the effort that went into covering up this
[39:20] crime, police would be informed. Less than six hours after the
[39:24] murder took place, they were already arriving at Shay's
[39:27] house. The way that police found out
[39:30] was through Shay's third friend, Vicki.
[39:33] You know, they were a trio, Shay, Lauren and Vicki.
[39:37] Well, obviously Shay and Lauren knew about this whole thing.
[39:40] They lived together. And so they wanted to get Vicki
[39:43] in on it. They wanted to let her know what
[39:45] had gone down. So Shay Facetimes her and
[39:49] literally shows her close-ups, different angles of Frankie
[39:54] Fitzgerald's dead body. Vicki said that she did freak
[39:57] out over this and she started kind of shouting at Shay a
[40:00] little bit, but Shay wasn't taking any of it seriously.
[40:03] She was giggling, she was smiling, she was making jokes,
[40:07] and Vicki didn't really know what to do.
[40:09] Like, what the fuck would you do in this situation?
[40:11] I can't imagine getting a first time call off my friend and then
[40:14] showing me their murder victim like Vicki didn't.
[40:18] Really know what to do. As soon as she got off that
[40:20] first time call, she called the police and told them exactly
[40:23] what had just happened. Police arrived at her house that
[40:26] same morning. So all of this had kind of gone
[40:28] down in the early hours of the morning, late at night.
[40:31] And by the time police arrived, it was the next morning.
[40:34] And Cher came and answered the door and she seemed so chill.
[40:38] She was in her pink fluffy dressing gown, cigarette in
[40:41] hand, without a care in the world, six hours after brutally
[40:46] stabbing someone to death. As soon as Shay opened the door
[40:49] to the police, they were hit with the overwhelming smell of
[40:53] bleach coming out of that house. They immediately knew that a
[40:56] cleanup had been well underway. Police were very straight up
[40:59] with her. They just said we're here to
[41:01] investigate reports of a murder. We've heard that someone has
[41:04] been shown a dead body at your address and we need to look
[41:07] around. And at this point, Cher couldn't
[41:10] really do anything. Of course, she just let them in.
[41:12] It seemed that she had managed to clean up a decent amount of
[41:16] the crime scene because she'd only had like a few hours to do
[41:19] it, but she hadn't gotten rid of the body yet.
[41:22] When police walked into Cher's bedroom, there they saw the
[41:25] corpse of Frankie Fitzgerald laying on a bunch of bin bags.
[41:29] When they went into the bathroom, they found the dagger
[41:32] that they presume was used to kill Frankie, although at this
[41:35] point it had been washed and it had just been left in the sink.
[41:38] And that was the only one of Shea's daggers that was out of
[41:41] its usual decorative place. So we can be pretty sure that
[41:45] that one was the murder weapon. So both of the women were
[41:47] arrested then and there at the scene, because, of course,
[41:50] police couldn't be sure how much Lauren had had to do with all of
[41:53] this, how much Shea had done. So they just arrested both of
[41:56] them, took them down to the police station for questioning.
[41:59] Shea didn't even try to deny the murder.
[42:01] She kind of admitted that yes, she did kill Frankie, but she
[42:04] tried to say that it was in self defence.
[42:07] She told officers that they'd gotten into a huge physical
[42:10] fight that night where she genuinely feared for her life
[42:13] from Frankie. She said that he had pinned her
[42:16] up by the neck on on the bed to the point where she was like
[42:19] losing vision, losing consciousness and she knew she
[42:22] had to do something to get him off of her.
[42:25] So that's when she said she reached to one of her shelves
[42:28] next to her and just grabbed something and hit him with it.
[42:32] And that was when she realized that it was a dagger that she'd
[42:35] picked up and she'd hit him with it, blade first in the neck.
[42:40] She said that all of this had come about after she'd found
[42:42] these texts to a 13 year old girl on his phone.
[42:45] She hated him for being a paedophile.
[42:48] She hated him for cheating on her.
[42:49] She hated him for doing this to a child.
[42:52] And so that's kind of what sparked this physical fight that
[42:56] night and then meant that she had to defend her own life in
[43:01] the end. But Shay's self-defense story
[43:03] just does not line up with any of the crime scene evidence.
[43:07] I mean, for example, she stabbed him 22 times.
[43:10] That's not once in the side of the neck in self-defense.
[43:13] She say, for example, the first one was in self-defense.
[43:17] Why would you keep going after that point?
[43:20] In fact, police actually confronted her on that and said,
[43:22] well, why did you keep going? And she said it was because she
[43:26] could hear him gurgling blood through his throat.
[43:29] And she thought that it was kind of the humane thing to do, to
[43:33] just essentially put him out of his misery and kill him quicker.
[43:36] But there was also. The fact that Frankie like his
[43:39] autopsy and the way that the evidence was found and stuff, it
[43:43] was more than likely that he was asleep when he was attacked.
[43:47] He was laying down on the bed asleep.
[43:49] He was not pinning her up by the neck and a threat to her life.
[43:53] They weren't fighting. He was asleep.
[43:56] She found these texts. She was so mad that she went and
[43:59] stabbed him in his sleep. A lot of it started to make
[44:01] sense when police were speaking to Lauren and Lauren said that
[44:05] her friend is just like this. She's a very angry, violent
[44:09] woman who has had issues with her boyfriend for months now.
[44:13] Literally since they got together.
[44:14] Nothing had ever been good between them.
[44:17] She said that her friend was very, very manipulative.
[44:19] She was always controlling the people around her to do things
[44:22] for her. And actually, that's how she'd
[44:24] got swept up in all of this that night, because she had been
[44:27] manipulating her into helping clean up the crime scene.
[44:31] Lauren actually ended up getting a few charges herself.
[44:33] Of course, the first one was kind of for being an accessory
[44:35] to murder and helping to clean up the crime scene.
[44:38] But also on top of that, when she was in her police
[44:41] questioning, she actually refused to give give over the
[44:43] passcode on her phone. So police, I think they ended up
[44:47] getting in there eventually some other way, but it really
[44:50] hindered the investigation for a little while.
[44:52] All of these charges, though, were eventually dropped when
[44:56] police kind of sussed out the situation and they realized that
[44:59] she was manipulated. She didn't actually have
[45:01] anything to do with the actual murder.
[45:03] She had just kind of acted out of duress.
[45:05] She was scared that Cher was going to kill her too.
[45:08] And so she did just help to clean up the crime scene a
[45:10] little bit. The charges were dropped because
[45:12] they kind of understood the situation and also because she
[45:15] agreed to give evidence against Cher and say everything that
[45:19] she'd seen in the house that night.
[45:21] And actually, even Cher admitted to the police that Lauren had
[45:24] nothing to do with the murder itself.
[45:26] Like she wasn't even in the room when Frankie died, which I think
[45:29] is interesting to say. Like despite how manipulative
[45:34] Cher had been previously saying that, oh, now you're involved,
[45:37] I'm dragging you down with me. When it actually comes down to
[45:40] it, she didn't DOB Lauren and she was was actually very honest
[45:44] and fair about Lauren's involvement.
[45:46] So seven months later, Shay Grove's trial begins and she was
[45:50] still very much clinging to that self-defense claim.
[45:53] Her side presented videos from the CCTV camera in her bedroom
[45:58] that supposedly showed Frankie sexually assaulting her and
[46:02] being violent with her without her consent.
[46:05] Although when these videos were like actually properly studied.
[46:09] And like the raw files were studied, it was found that they
[46:12] had been edited. There were sections that had
[46:15] been cut out where the couple had had some level of
[46:19] discussion. Don't get me wrong, the consent
[46:21] and the conversations that they would have were never very
[46:23] sufficient, but when these parts are added back into the video
[46:28] within the context, you can see that they just have a very
[46:31] poorly thought out BDSM relationship.
[46:35] Once these little sections are put back into the original clip,
[46:39] it makes a bit more sense and it doesn't look quite so evil.
[46:46] You know, the footage already didn't look very good, but the
[46:49] way that it had been edited made Frankie Fitzgerald look evil.
[46:53] Lauren and Vicki also gave evidence in court because
[46:56] obviously Lauren had been there the whole time and Vicki had
[47:00] been there for that first time conversation.
[47:03] And there were certain things that Shay was saying throughout
[47:06] the clean up, things that hinted that he was asleep when she
[47:10] killed him. They told the courts about how
[47:12] she was smiling and giggling as she was cleaning up the crime
[47:15] scene. She was figuring out how she was
[47:17] going to get rid of the body, saying that well, he was
[47:20] suicidal anyway, which what the hell did she mean by that?
[47:25] That it's like OK to kill him because he he would have wanted
[47:28] it? Like he would have been OK with
[47:30] it? Or does she mean like she could
[47:32] try to pass it off as a suicide then and no one would really
[47:35] question it because he was suicidal anyway?
[47:37] Not one part of the trial looked good for Cher.
[47:41] I mean, there was fabricated evidence.
[47:43] She had said certain things to her friends that just kind of
[47:46] foiled her own self-defense story where she'd made little
[47:50] comments about how he'd been laying there and stuff.
[47:53] So at the end of the trial, Shay's self-defense claim was
[47:56] actually thrown out by the judge and she was found guilty of
[48:01] murder. She was given a life sentence
[48:03] with a minimum of 23 years, which means she will be eligible
[48:06] for release at the age of 50. And that is all I have on this
[48:10] case. A crazy one to think that this
[48:12] is someone that got very much into true crime during the
[48:16] pandemic. Like I said earlier, I feel like
[48:19] a lot of us are in that boat and it feels very weird to know that
[48:23] someone that was kind of watching the same content that
[48:25] we were back then has ended up like this.
[48:28] So I feel like it's quite important for me to maybe say in
[48:30] the end of this, make sure you're consuming true crime
[48:33] sensibly and safely and healthily.
[48:36] Have breaks. Understand why you're watching,
[48:39] understand how you're feeling about killers and about victims
[48:43] and stuff. Just really have a bit of a
[48:45] conversation in your head with yourself because I think it's
[48:48] important to check yourself so that things like this don't just
[48:51] snowball and become too normalized for you.
[48:55] You know, like if you have decorative pictures of serial
[48:58] killers up on your wall, then I think you need to be having a
[49:01] conversation with yourself because that then treads into
[49:06] admiration territory. I feel like it's one thing to
[49:09] have like a badge that says true crime fan or like a mug that
[49:14] says probably watching a true crime documentary right now or
[49:17] somewhat like that. Something about your interest in
[49:20] it, but no specific merch about serial killers or murderers,
[49:25] please. That's crazy.
[49:26] Crazy. You probably need to question
[49:27] why you want that specific piece and what that says about how
[49:31] you're consuming true crime content.
[49:33] And are you really realizing that this is real?
[49:36] It is true crime. Real human beings have lost
[49:40] their lives to these heinous, evil people.
[49:43] If anything, try to put yourself in the victim's shoes or the
[49:47] victim's family's shoes and imagine that one of your loved
[49:50] ones, I was taken by such an evil person.
[49:53] And then there's people out there that want to build a
[49:55] shrine to that, post pictures of them on their wall and talk
[49:58] about how hot they are and stuff.
[50:00] I just think, you know, it's a, it's a very touchy subject,
[50:05] especially because I am literally making this kind of
[50:07] content. And I'm sure there's going to be
[50:09] a lot of people that don't like what I just said about like
[50:12] serial killer merch. But I don't know.
[50:14] I'm just very scared of cases like this happening.
[50:17] I want you to check your own mental health when it comes to
[50:20] true crime content. Anyway, sorry I really went off
[50:23] on one there. Thank you so much for listening
[50:28] to Usual Disclaimer. At this point, I just want to
[50:31] say that if you've been affected by any of the topics we
[50:34] discussed today, please check the description where we've left
[50:36] some helpful resources. If you want to hear more cases
[50:40] like this one, make sure to follow Usual Disclaimer on your
[50:43] podcast app so that you get notifications when we post new
[50:46] episodes. And if you really enjoyed, I'd
[50:49] love it if you could leave a rating and a review too.
[50:52] Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor Neil is an Audio Boom Studios
[50:55] production. See you next time.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.