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Today's podcast features two stories about dysfunctional families.
The audio from both of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.
The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.
The first story you'll hear is called Morning Routine and it's about one of the most brutal true crime cases we have ever covered.
The second story you'll hear is called Lost Cause, and it's about a 70-year-old man who made a shocking confession on Reddit that quickly went viral.
But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast, because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, please deliver a Strange, Dark or Mysterious story to the Amazon Music Follow button, but in PDF format.
Okay, let's get into our first story called Morning Routine.
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In November of 2004, 52-year-old Peter Porco and his wife, 54-year-old Joan Porco were, like so many other middle-aged, middle-class Americans.
They lived in Del Mar, New York, in a comfortable two-story home and they worked for a living.
Peter was an appellate court clerk and Joan was a speech pathologist.
They had been married for over 30 years and they had two sons.
Christopher, was a 21-year-old student at the University of Rochester and his brother Jonathan, was a 23-year-old naval officer stationed at a submarine base in Groton, Connecticut.
On Monday, November 15, 2004, Peter woke up to start his typical Monday morning work routine.
He got up, he got out of bed, he went to the bathroom.
He relieved himself, he looked in the mirror, he shaved, he got dressed in his work clothes.
He went downstairs, he put on a pot of coffee.
While the coffee was brewing, he unloaded the dishwasher and then put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher and started it.
He wanted to get his newspaper.
So he went outside.
He got his newspaper but he realized he'd locked himself out of the front door.
So he got the spare key out from underneath the mat, opened the front door, went inside, he sat down, had some coffee, read the newspaper.
After a few minutes he put his coffee cup in the sink, he packed himself a lunch in his lunchbox and then he headed for the door to head for work.
Peter was known as a very reliable employee who was also very punctual and rarely missed work.
So when he didn't get to work that Monday morning, the court was a little bit confused.
They called him to see if he was okay.
He didn't pick up.
So they dispatched a court officer to go make sure he was okay.
And so the officer arrives at his house.
He sees cars in the driveway, front door shut.
He goes up, he knocks on the door.
Nobody answers.
He tries the handle of the front door.
He realizes it's open.
So he opens the door.
And he yells out, hey, I'm just looking for Peter.
And the door hits something on the ground.
Pokes his head inside and looks down.
And there on the ground, the thing blocking the door is Peter Porco's body.
He's clearly deceased.
And he clearly has a massive head wound.
The court officer steps outside immediately, calls 911.
Local police show up.
They go inside.
And sure enough, Peter is dead.
They go upstairs and they find his wife, Joan, in bed, also with a massive head wound.
But she was still alive.
Joan was rushed to a hospital, where she underwent emergency surgery and then was put into a medically induced coma.
Meanwhile, the police began their investigation into who could have done this.
They quickly discovered that the home's alarm system had been smashed and a phone line because there still was landlines at the time had been cut from the outside and a screen in one of the windows had been slashed.
That looked like the way someone climbed into the house.
However, nothing appeared to have been stolen, because police almost immediately found Peter's wallet with money inside of it still sitting in the house, as well as very expensive jewelry that belonged to Joan still sitting in the house.
As they continued to search the house, they discovered a fireman's ax that belonged to the Porcos, hidden inside of one of the bedroom closets.
And it was very clear this was the murder weapon.
The Porco sons had been away during this attack.
John was on his submarine in Connecticut and Chris was at the University of Rochester.
And in fact, Chris found out about the attack on his parents when he saw a news report, because this story of this innocent typical, seeming American couple in a quiet suburb getting struck down by some ax wielding maniac had gone totally viral and it was all over the news.
And so Chris called the police to get more information about his parents' death.
Here's the recording.
Hi, my name is Chris Borgo.
I was just called by the Times Union saying that my parents were found dead this afternoon.
I was wondering if you had any information for me.
Hey Chris, whereabouts are you?
I'm at school in Rochester, New York.
Okay, you're in Rochester?
Yes.
Okay, and you're hearing from the Times Union?
Yeah, they said my parents were found, I guess, I don't know, they didn't say how or anything.
As you can tell, Chris is extremely emotional.
He's beside himself.
He can barely speak.
He's so upset about what's happened to his parents.
No, actually, he sounds as calm as if he's ordering a pizza.
Because Chris Porco was actually a psychopath and he was the one who attacked his parents with the axe.
As it turns out, Chris was failing at school and taking out huge loans in his father's name by forging his signature.
His father found out about it.
So Mr and Mrs Porco write their son a strongly worded email where they tell him this behavior has to stop and they're very disappointed in him, but they love him and they will help him get back on his feet.
Chris responded by driving home in the middle of the night, sneaking into his house and attacking his parents with an ax.
While this case is already disturbing and horrific and tragic, it's what happens to Chris's father after the attack that makes it one of the most brutal cases of all time.
After being struck 16 times in the head and laying unconsciously in his bed as his son snuck out of his house, Peter suddenly sat up and began his morning routine.
He got dressed, he went to the bathroom, he shaved.
He went downstairs.
He made coffee, he did his chores.
He went outside to get the newspaper.
He got locked out.
He got the key from under the mat, went back inside, he packed his own lunch.
When he was finally ready to go, he headed for the door and then he collapsed and he died.
Due to the severity of Peter's head wound, his brain was basically broken and it was unable to recognize he had been gravely injured.
So in his final moments he believed it was just a typical Monday morning going about his work routine, when in reality he had a gaping head wound and he was basically dead after the 16th blow to his head.
One of the more surprising and heart-wrenching details of this case is that Joan Porco, she did survive the attack.
And after she came out of that medically induced coma, she said she forgot all the details of the attack, even though when she was discovered in her bed she did indicate that Chris, her son, was the attacker.
Nonetheless, she got together 250000 to post Chris's bail and she allowed him to come stay with her during his trial.
And the two attended the trial together, walking into the courthouse hand in hand.
Chris was very quickly found guilty of killing his father and attempting to kill his mother, and he was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison.
Despite the verdict, Joan Porco still speaks to Christopher over the phone and frequently visits him in prison.
It's unclear if she still believes he is innocent.
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There's a part of me that everyone sees.
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Chicago, March 2nd, 1976.
A savage double murder rocks the city.
Two young lives snuffed out in their prime.
And the killer?
A privileged, rich kid caught within four days, only to walk free through a web of influence and power.
For four years, the case gathered dust, the truth buried under the web of money, drugs and corruption, until an unlikely hero emerged, former rock musician turned star prosecutor, who refused to let the justice slip away.
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Our next and final story is called Lost Cause.
On the advice of his longtime therapist, a 70-year-old man named Art began writing about what happened to him and his family 30 years earlier, in 1989.
His therapist only knew Art had lost a child and felt very guilty about it, but the conditions under which the child was lost was always very gray.
Even though Art had been his patient for years and the therapist had repeatedly tried to get more information.
You know, was this a child that was lost in pregnancy?
Was it a child that was born and died or ran away?
Those details never emerged.
And every time the therapist tried to dig in, Art would back off, close up and he would not talk about it.
And so finally, his therapist said, Art, you just need to find a way to talk about this stuff.
If you're not going to talk about it with me, then perhaps you should write it all down in a private journal.
It'll be a very cathartic experience and it might help you get over that guilt you're feeling.
So Art reluctantly agrees.
He goes home, he gets out a piece of paper and he begins writing all the details of everything that happened leading up to that day in 1989 and what actually happened on that day in 1989.
And when he was done and he had a chance to look at what he had written, he didn't feel better.
He felt worse.
He felt more guilty.
But that's because Art had a secret that the therapist didn't know about.
And now that it was out on paper, Art suddenly felt like, you know what?
Before I die, I have to tell the world what me and my wife did.
So in 2019, he took all of those notes that he had written down about what had happened and he posted it to Reddit.
This is his confession story.
Art's son was very, very troubled.
Art would say if you've seen the movie, we need to talk about Kevin, where a couple's son turns out to be a total psychopath.
Art says that's a pretty good representation of what home life was like with our son.
From the day Art's son was born in 1971, it was like something was off about him.
Art and his wife Lisa had planned this pregnancy and they were ecstatic when their baby boy was welcomed to the world and they showered him with affection and love and did everything they possibly could to give him a warm, loving environment.
But no matter what they did, it just seemed like he was always miserable.
Their son cried constantly for the first 13 months of his life.
Now Art and Lisa understood that when you bring a baby home, there's a good chance they're going to cry.
But his crying was so constant and he could not be calmed down that they grew concerned that this was more than just a colicky baby, that there could be some underlying issue.
And so they brought their son to doctors and specialists and they tried every treatment under the sun.
They changed his diet.
They changed his room.
They sang him songs.
They changed everything they could, but it never stopped.
And so 13 months of grinding, grating, no sleep hell.
Finally, in the 14th month of his life, he seemed to get over the incessant crying stage.
And Art and Lisa were so relieved.
It seemed like finally, they could just be loving parents and not be so frustrated with their child all the time.
But it seemed like now that he wasn't crying, he still was just totally unhappy.
His body language and everything about him said, I'm not happy.
Always.
Art said that he never saw his son ever have a genuine, joyous smile.
The only time he saw something resembling a smile was when his son would grin after causing someone pain or breaking a rule or in some way being bad.
And then, once his son started walking, all he wanted to do was just destroy everything in front of him.
But again, Art and Lisa, they realize that this is all pretty typical child behavior, albeit maybe on the more extreme end of bad behavior, but it's still in the realm of normal child.
And they're thinking that they are the reason this is happening.
And so they're not blaming their son at this point.
They're still doing everything they can to take care of him and love him to the best of their ability.
When their son was about two years old, he learned how to take off his diaper.
And he began sneaking around the house and emptying the contents of his diaper into corners of the house underneath carpets, grinding it into the carpet, smearing it on the walls.
But again, Art and Lisa are looking inward and saying, our child is only two years old.
It can't be his fault he's acting this way.
It's our fault for not finding a way to correct this behavior.
But Art and Lisa started to drift away from that opinion when their son got a little bit older, got potty trained and wasn't using diapers anymore and still was going around the house and squatting down and going to the bathroom all over the house making a mess at every possible chance he could.
And not just when he was four, five, six years old.
All the way up until he was 15 years old, he was doing this.
And he stopped doing it in random corners and he began only going into his parents' bedroom every chance he got, opening up the sheets, going inside, going to the bathroom, shutting it back up and leaving.
It got to the point where Art and Lisa literally could not stop their son from doing this.
He was absolutely determined to do this.
So anytime they were away, he would even sneak in the windows to do this.
I mean, he was totally hellbent on going to the bathroom in their bed.
And so they had to start putting locks on the windows and the doors of their bedroom.
But when they had finally secured that room to where he really couldn't get in anymore, he began going to the bathroom right outside their door and in the other beds in the house.
And so they began investing in locks on all of the doors.
They even replaced the doors themselves because they were too flimsy and they thought there's a good chance he might kick these doors in to try to get them open.
So they put these big thick doors up all through their house and put these big locks with key locks all over the house to keep their son from going in and going to the bathroom all over their bedsheets.
As their son grew older, he became more and more unmanageable, well beyond just going to the bathroom in different places.
He became violent and he would bite and kick and scratch and spit on anybody that came near him.
He was like a wild animal.
Before he was nine years old, he had been kicked out of school two separate times.
And they let him back in a third time.
He apparently did something that was so bad that they effectively expelled him.
A nine-year-old is getting expelled from school.
So they had to enroll him at this other special school that would accept him with his history.
But part of the deal with this school is you don't have any interaction with other students.
He was considered too dangerous to be around other kids.
So he was totally isolated at school and it ultimately made him a lot worse.
Once he was enrolled in the school, he became really violent at home.
He would come home from school and he would go right to the kitchen and get a knife out.
And he would start threatening his parents to the point where they had to lock all the drawers in the kitchen.
Once all of the knives were under lock and key in Art's house, his son began stealing knives from the neighbor's house, smuggling them back into the house.
And at night, he would pull them out and try to stab Art.
And on two different occasions, he was successful and Art still has scars on his leg from it.
And Art's son was not just attacking his parents.
He was also turning on local animals that were helpless.
He blinded one of the local dogs that was running around the area by just stabbing it in the eye.
He went after one of the stray cats and he lit its tail on fire.
And honestly, Art doesn't even know the other damages he had done to other animals or even other people.
Even though Art and Lisa massively resented their son for how badly he treated them and how difficult he was making their lives, they recognized that this was a child that needed help.
And so they tried everything they could to help him by enrolling him in that special school that ultimately was isolating, but it was an attempt to try to help him or bringing him to different therapists and psychologists and doctors, putting him on different medications and bringing him to meditation consultants, i mean, you name it.
They tried everything they could to try to help this kid, but nothing worked.
He only got angrier and angrier and got bigger and stronger and more aggressive and violent and eventually art and lisa are like what do we do about this?
What ultimately started happening over the following years is Art and Lisa became prisoners of their own home.
But every time their son was around, they felt unsafe around him.
He was such a wild card and he had these crazy angry outbursts and he was clearly prone to extreme violence.
And so they began using those heavy doors and locks to lock themselves away from their son.
It was the only way they felt safe.
And so, with that in mind, fast forward to 1988, when Art's son is now 16 years old and Art and Lisa find out they're pregnant again.
It was a surprise and they were not happy about it.
In fact, because of how badly it had gone with their son, they were really scared that another child was going to be just as bad and they couldn't possibly go through this again.
And so they decided that they weren't going to terminate.
But if they noticed early on this child was a huge problem child, as horrible as they felt about it, they knew they would give it up for adoption.
They simply couldn't do this again.
This time they had a daughter and she was normal.
She was nothing like their son.
She didn't come home and cry constantly.
She smiled and laughed and after a few months she was sleeping through the night and she was hitting her milestones and she just seemed happy and she was easy.
And it was around this time that Art and Lisa began to realize just how bad their son was.
Seeing how wonderful their daughter was just amplified all of their son's atrocious behavior over the first 16 years of his life.
And so Art and Lisa really began to look at their son as more of a lost cause.
And they were less invested in going through the motions to try to find some way to help him when they knew it wasn't going to work.
It had never worked.
And he's only a couple years away from being 18 and he can go out on his own and figure it out for himself.
And now, since they didn't really care as much about him, suddenly his behavior was intolerable.
And anytime he acted up, they would never lay a hand on him.
But they were not afraid to tell him to basically get the F out of here.
We are not putting up with this.
Leave.
And so regularly Art and Lisa would have these horrific screaming matches with their son until their son would basically run away in a rage and then come back hours later or even a couple days later.
And Art said he began to look forward to fighting with his son because every time they fought it meant his son would be gone for a little while afterwards and there would be a little bit of peace and calm inside the house.
But at the same time, Art and Lisa were concerned.
One of these days he's going to come back in after one of these fights and he's going to kill us.
So it went on like this for about a year, until a rainy day in 1989, when their son was almost 18 and their daughter was almost one years old.
Now, the house they lived in was a single-story bungalow and their daughter's room was against a sidewall where there was a window leading to the outside.
That morning, Art and Lisa had got into one of the worst screaming matches with their son they'd ever had, and he left in a rage and they slammed and locked the door behind him.
After a couple of hours, their son is still gone and they don't expect to see him anytime soon.
And their daughter is starting to get fussy.
She seems tired.
And so they walk into her bedroom.
They put her in a crib for a nap.
And then Art and Lisa leave her room, shut the door behind them and go sit down in the kitchen.
A couple minutes later, they hear their daughter screaming at the top of her lungs.
And Art and Lisa immediately recognize this is not an ordinary cry.
This sounds like something is terribly wrong.
They get up and sprint down the hall to a room, and they try the door handle, but it's locked.
They run back out to the kitchen.
They get the keys, they go back.
They're fumbling with the keys.
They finally open it up and there in the back of the room, standing next to the crib, is their son.
He's holding a knife, and he's poking it into her face.
And Art said he looked at his daughter and he could see blood on her stomach and blood on her arm and she's screaming.
And so he thinks to himself, thank God she's still alive.
And instinctively Art starts running to try to put himself between his son and his daughter.
But before he could even get there, his wife had moved much faster and she charged over and smashes her son's hand.
The knife falls to the ground.
She pushes him as hard as she possibly can.
And he goes slamming into the wall and falls on the ground.
Art immediately reaches into the crib, picks his daughter up and runs to the other side of the room.
And he kind of looks her over.
She's crying, she's in pain, she's scared, but he can see the cuts on her are superficial.
He turns back around and he can see his wife is standing there with her fist balled, standing in front of her son.
Her son stands up and he's looking at her, no emotion on his face.
Art would even say that it was like he was looking at an alien.
This person wasn't human.
How could they do this to their own sister, to a baby?
And he stared at him and then he noticed his wife was moving towards her son, like she was going to attack him.
And this is where Art says he knew he was supposed to go over there and stop whatever was about to happen, but he didn't.
And this is the part of the story where Art reveals his wife.
She's this amazing boxer, and he knew that she could beat the living crap out of just about anybody.
The son is so stunned by how quickly this has happened that he's not doing anything.
He's not positioning himself to fight back or to even preemptively attack his mother.
He's just kind of standing there looking at his mother with no expression on his face.
And that's when Art's wife winds up and blasts him across the face, knocking his head back.
And Art said immediately he could tell his nose was broken.
Blood squirts all over his face and he falls to the ground.
Until this moment, neither Lisa nor Art had ever laid a hand on their son.
Even when he stabbed Art twice in the legs, they never physically struck their son.
But this was different.
Their son had crossed the line and he could never come back.
And so even though Art knew if he doesn't step in, his wife is going to beat their son to death.
Even though he knew that was going to happen, he remembers thinking, good.
He turns around and he leaves the room with his daughter.
As Art cleans up his daughter and puts band-aids on each of the cuts that were inflicted on her, he hears in the other room his son is yelling and screaming at their mother, saying I'm going to kill you.
And she is just ruthlessly punching, kicking, and smashing him.
It is not slowing down at all.
And Art remembers, by the time he picked his daughter back up after putting all her band-aids on and she'd kind of calmed down, he still heard his wife punching, kicking and smashing their son, who's now unconscious.
Again.
Art knows if I don't go in there now.
My unconscious son is getting his head kicked in by his mother.
If I don't go in there now, he's going to die for sure.
But Art wants that to happen.
So he doesn't go in there.
Instead, he just rocks his daughter until she falls asleep.
And by the time she's snoring in his arms.
His wife is still punching, kicking and smashing their son, who hasn't made a sound in a long time.
Art just sits down at the kitchen table, hoists his daughter onto his shoulder and just listens for his wife to finish what she's doing.
And finally it does go quiet in there and his wife emerges from the room and she's covered in blood.
Her hands are swollen and red and her chest is heaving like she's been running a race.
She comes into the kitchen and sits down at the table next to Art and looks at him and he looks back at her and he just says is he dead?
And she says, I hope so.
And he just goes, yeah, me too.
Art and Lisa sat at the kitchen table for a long time.
There was no sound coming from the room where their son was.
And eventually Lisa starts crying and goes and takes a shower.
At which point Art stands up and he goes into the bedroom where his son was.
And this is when he can tell his son is actually still alive.
He walks in and he can see his son still breathing, but he's covered in blood.
He's got vomit on him.
He's clearly wet his pants.
His teeth had been knocked out.
His whole face is bloodied and bruised and swollen.
And he goes up to him and he thinks there's no way he's going to live through this.
But Art has kind of an internal crisis because he wants him to die.
He doesn't want him to live.
And so that decision of should I call an ambulance or should I call police was a really difficult one to make, because really neither served the purpose that he or his wife wanted.
And so as he's standing there wondering what to do, he hears his wife come out of the shower.
And so he leaves the room and he confers with his wife and they decide we're not going to call the police.
We're not going to call an ambulance.
We're going to do nothing.
And so, right then and there they walked around their house, they gathered up a couple of things and they headed downstairs into the basement where they had an in-law suite, which basically was a little apartment that they didn't really use, but it had everything they needed.
And they moved down there and they locked the one door that led down there and they locked the side door as well.
They figured if he lived, there would be enough food to get him through a few weeks upstairs.
There's water up there, bedrooms, bathrooms.
He had all of that.
And at some point he would run out of food and he would have to leave.
Or he would die upstairs, and in a couple weeks, they would go up and they would deal with it.
Over the next week they began to hear movement upstairs, which signaled to them he was alive, but he wasn't moving around much.
It was just enough to know somebody was up there.
They figured that, okay, he's probably laying down most of the time, recovering.
And so Art began going back to work.
He would go out the side door and every time he went outside and he was on the driveway, he was expecting his son to come out and attack him.
But he never did.
And his wife, Lisa, she stayed with their daughter 24-7, stayed in the house.
And at no point did the son ever try to come downstairs and try to attack her or them at any point, probably because he was afraid of his mother.
About three weeks after the attack they were in bed in the basement and they heard him going absolutely ballistic upstairs screaming, punching walls, breaking things.
And they decided you know what, whatever he does up there, it's not worth going up there and confronting him.
Let him do whatever he wants.
And then the next day, it was totally quiet.
And for the next couple of days Art and Lisa would listen really intently to see if they could hear him moving around upstairs, but they couldn't.
And so finally, Art and Lisa decide to go up into the main floor and see if he's up there.
When they open the door, they find their entire upstairs has been absolutely wrecked.
Every piece of furniture is ruined.
Every window is broken.
There's glass all over the place.
There's brown smears all over the walls.
But their son isn't there.
And so they figured.
That night, when they heard him going crazy upstairs, he already knew he was going to leave.
He just wanted to ruin their house before he did.
Even though their son was gone, they had no idea if he was going to come back or not.
And so, for days and weeks and months, they lived in fear that their son was just going to show up one day and kill them.
But he never did.
And then three years after the incident, they moved and they weren't in contact with their son.
They hadn't seen him.
And so he had no idea where they were going and they have no way to contact him.
So that was it.
They just restarted somewhere else.
Fast forward to 2019, when Art is making this Reddit post and he says I haven't seen my son since 1989 and I don't want to see him again.
And Art goes on to say that, while he hopes his son was able to overcome his demons and live a normal life, he said if he wasn't able to do that, if he was out there still causing pain and misery to other people, Art says he hopes that whoever was on the receiving end of that finished the job and killed him.
This podcast airs every Monday and Thursday morning, but in the meantime you can always watch one of the hundreds of stories we have posted on our main YouTube channel, which is just called Mr Ballin.
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Go to mrballin.foundation and click get involved to join the Honor Them Society today.
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So that's going to do it.
I really appreciate your support.
Until next time, see ya.
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Olivia loves a challenge.
It's why she lifts heavy weights and likes complicated recipes.
But for booking a trip to Paris, Olivia chose the easy way with Expedia.
She bundled her flight with a hotel to save more.
Of course, she still climbed all 674 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
You were made to take the easy route.
We were made to easily package your trip.
Expedia.
Made to travel.
