Late one night in November of 1975, a man came home and parked his car at the end of his driveway, which looped around the back of his house.
And after sitting in his seat for a minute, he turned his car off and then hopped outside into the cold night air.
From there he walked towards the side of his house where there was a path that led around to the front door.
But before this man could reach his front door, he heard a voice call out to him from somewhere off to his right.
The man stopped and stared into the darkness, wondering if he really had just heard a voice at all.
But then, as he stared, this voice called his name again.
Confused, the man walked to the fence at the edge of his property and looked over it to see who was there.
Little did he know he had just walked into a trap.
But before we get into that story, 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 invite the five-star review button to come along for a ride with you in your personal private airplane.
But once you're up at altitude, without saying anything, put on the only parachute onboard the craft and then jump out.
Also, please subscribe to the Mr Ballin Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
It begins here.
From the director of It comes It.
Welcome to Derry, the chilling new HBO original series exploring one of horror's biggest terrors, Pennywise the Clown.
Set in 1960s Derry, Maine, the new HBO original series is streaming Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO Max.
Also, you can listen to the official It Welcome to Dairy podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
We've all been there.
It's almost dinnertime, the kids are hungry, and the fridge is practically empty.
But there's a solution that's changing how families handle mealtime.
Little Spoon.
Little Spoon delivers fresh, nutritious meals for babies, toddlers and big kids right to your door.
Their recipes are developed with pediatricians packed with hidden vegetables and contain zero artificial flavors, sweeteners or dyes.
They're even the first company to set strict public standards for heavy metals and pesticides.
Plus, Target has an exclusive frozen line.
Think their cult favorite chicken nuggets, meatballs, and sliders.
Find them in the snack and freezer aisles.
We are obsessed.
Little Spoon is the mealtime hack parents can't stop talking about.
Try their no-prep, nutrient-packed meals and snacks for babies, toddlers, and big kids.
Get 50% off your first online order at littlespoon.com slash wondery with code wondery at checkout.
That's L-I-T-T-L-E-S-P-O-O-N dot com slash wondery.
And don't forget to use our show's code for 50% off your first order.
32-year-old Morris Blankenbaker was a very happy man.
The gymnasium at Wapato Intermediate School in Yakima County Washington, echoed with the sound of young teenage boys practicing their wrestling moves on thick green mats.
And Morris was right there with them, whistle on a chord around his neck, shouting directions and encouragement as he moved from one group of kids to another.
As far back as he could remember the thump of bodies hitting the mats and the rhythm of other youngsters in a tight line at the edge of the gym.
Doing calisthenics had always been music to Morris's ears.
It had been 14 years since Morris himself had graduated from high school 15 miles to the north, along with his armload of sports trophies, the title of best athlete of 1961 and a four-year scholarship to play football in college.
But even though he had not achieved his dream of becoming a professional football player, Morris had never for a second lost his love of sports, both playing them and coaching them.
But on this particular day, Friday November 21st 1975, Morris' sense of happiness and satisfaction with his life went much deeper than normal.
Because the last two years of Morris' life had taught the former golden boy of Yakima County that the really important things in life were the two things he had come so close to losing his marriage to his high school sweetheart Deanne, and the joy of living under the same roof with her and their two young children.
Though no one, not even Deanne and definitely not Morris himself, could ever have predicted the chain of events that had temporarily led to his separation and divorce from Deanne.
And while Morris knew the shockwaves from those events were still reverberating throughout his work and social circles, the last few days had brought both Morris and Deanne a very rare feeling of calm and peace.
And as they both looked forward to Thanksgiving together, just six days away, Morris had to believe that all the turmoil of the last two years was finally ebbing out of their lives and that, going forward, he and Deanne would never again take each other for granted.
The sudden ring of the school bell pulled Morris back to the present.
With a quick glance at the clock on the wall.
He raised the whistle around his neck up to his mouth and he blew two sharp blasts to signal the end of the practice.
A moment later and the boys were hauling their mats back to the hooks on the walls at either end of the gym.
Hearing their respectful thanks coach goodbyes.
As the teenagers filed past him on their way into the locker room to change, Morris remembered an earlier scene from his own adolescence and he felt a stab of pain.
He had been just a few years older than these kids when he had first met his own favorite coach, Talmadge Glenn Moore, back in Davis High School 16 years ago.
Known to everyone in Yakima County by his nickname Gabby, and known to all the boys he had coached in everything from wrestling to track to football, as just Coach Gabby was one of Yakima's local celebrities.
Ever since getting his first job coaching at Washington Junior High School back in 1958, Gabby had quickly moved up the career ladder and by 1969 he'd made a name for himself as one of the most outstanding wrestling coaches in the entire country.
And in 1972, at the very height of his career, Gabby had coached the David High School wrestling team all the way to first place in the Washington State Championships.
But instead of accepting any offers to coach at the collegiate level, Gabby and his wife had chosen to stay in Yakima, a small agricultural town separated from the much larger city of Seattle to the north by the beautiful Cascade Mountain Range.
And it wasn't just Gabi's coaching talent that had made him so popular in Yakima.
It was also his ability to motivate and mentor even the most disadvantaged young men who went on to find purpose and promise as members of Gabi's various sports teams.
When Morris had returned to Yakima in 1969, he and his former coach had reconnected.
As adults now, rather than coach and student, they had struck up a friendship that included going hunting together as well as going whitewater rafting, boating and spearfishing.
For Morris especially, life had changed a lot since he had graduated from high school.
Despite getting that four-year college football scholarship, Morris wound up dropping out of Washington State University and joining the Marine Corps Reserves instead.
That was also when Morris and his longtime sweetheart Deanne, who had just graduated from high school in Yakima, got married and settled down in Tacoma, a city of 109000 perched alongside the Puget Sound on the west coast, under the shadow of the huge snow-capped mountain called Mount Rainier.
But by the time Morris was honorably discharged from the Marine Corps Reserves at the age of 27, and when Deanne was 24, the young couple was ready to move back to Yakima, where they would be closer to their families.
And over the next four years, Morris would eventually finish his degree by studying part-time at a community college 35 miles away and while working several jobs until he landed the position he had now at Wapato Intermediate School.
In the meantime, Deanne had found a good job with a local bank in Yakima and they had two young children, a little boy and a little girl.
Morris had always felt like their marriage was as close to perfection as anything he'd ever known.
Both he and Deanne were children of divorce.
Morris had been raised from the age of two by his single mother, who had carved out a modest living for herself and her beloved only child as a highly trained court reporter.
Deanne had come from a much wealthier family, but her parents' divorce had left her with a deep longing to find permanence and stability in a family of her own.
And in Morris, the strong and gentle man she had first laid eyes on when she was just 14.
Deanne was sure she had found her life partner.
And in Deanne, Morris knew he had found the one and only person he would ever love.
But all that would change starting in December of 1973.
That's when Gabby, Morris' good friend and the coach she had admired for so many years, asked to come live with Morris and Deanne and their two kids.
Morris had been stunned when Gabby explained that his wife of 20 years had kicked him out of the family home.
To Morris, his coach's marriage had also seemed perfect.
Gabby and his wife had three happy kids.
They were financially well off and they both shared the same passion sports.
Also, Gabby was just a total straight arrow, a complete stickler for modeling the behavior that he expected of the young men he coached.
No drinking, no smoking, no drugs, and no messing around with girls.
When Morris asked his former coach what had gone wrong, Gabby said that, like a lot of couples, he and his wife had just sort of drifted apart.
But Gabby was sure he could win his wife back and persuade her not to file for a divorce.
He just needed a place to live for a few weeks so he could pull himself together and then launch his campaign to save his marriage.
Morris had not hesitated.
This was the man who had inspired Morris' own decision to become a coach and physical education instructor.
This was the man who had helped Morris become one of the best football players Yakima County had ever seen.
And, most importantly, this man was Morris' friend, and Gabby obviously needed Morris' help.
But delivering that help had been harder than Morris expected.
In the end it had taken Morris almost a month to override Deanne's objections to this plan of Morris' former coach coming to live with them.
While Gabby had been one of Morris' friends, Deanne hardly even knew the 41-year-old wrestling coach, and her life was already hard enough.
Money was tight, she was juggling a job and taking care of the kids.
The last thing Deanne wanted was yet another person in the house that she would need to feed and clean up after.
But by January of 1974, Deanne had finally agreed.
Now, as Morris walked out of Wapato Intermediate School into the chilly, cloudy November afternoon, he wished he had listened to Deanne and found some other way to help his old coach.
Getting into his car in the school parking lot, Morris glanced again at his watch.
Deanne was working at the bank until about 6 that evening, so Morris would have the afternoon with their kids before they all ate dinner together.
And then Morris headed off to his second job as a bouncer at a local tavern in Yakima called the Lion's Share.
There from 8pm until 2am.
Morris would check IDs, so the bar wouldn't be serving any underage drinkers and Morris would also just keep the peace.
It had been years since he'd played college football, but at 5 foot 11 inches tall and weighing 210 pounds, Morris was not only still in great physical shape, but he also had a patient temperament and a knack for diffusing tense situations.
Not that either of those qualities had been of any use to Morris back in January of 1974, when Gabby had arrived on their doorstep with his suitcases and his charming smile.
It had only taken a couple of weeks for Morris to realize that his old coach was a very different man than the one who had preached such high standards of clean living and integrity to his students.
It turned out Gappy had a very serious drinking problem.
But at the same time that Morris realized his coach was headed at top speed down the road to full-blown alcoholism, Deanne's objections to Gabby's presence had strangely, totally vanished.
Gabby was good at holding the whiskey.
He had started drinking by the bottleful secretly during the day and not so secretly at night after Deanne had gone to bed.
And Gabby soon charmed Deanne by the help he offered with the kids, the sympathetic ear he offered to Deanne as she told him about the stress of never having quite enough money, how quick he was to lend a hand with laundry and grocery shopping, and the way he looked at her.
Deanne had met Morris when she was 14 and when he was 17, and they had been a couple since Deanne had turned 16.
By the time Gabby, the legendary local celebrity, arrived on the scene, Deanne was 27 and most of the passion and all the romance had drained out of her marriage with Morris.
And even if Morris did not seem to notice at all, it was crystal clear to Deanne that Gabby found her captivating and sexy.
So when Gabby taught Deanne how to drive his late model golden brown MG sports car and their hands happened to touch as Gabby showed her how to use the stick shift, Deanne welcomed the thrill and sense of excitement she felt.
It didn't take long for Gabby to forget any plans he had made to win back his wife of 20 years.
Instead, he could hardly wait for his divorce to become final.
And it took Deanne just two and a half months of knowing Gabby to trade Morris's steadfast devotion and predictability for Gabby's promises of a beautiful house in the best part of town and a daring and exciting love life.
So just halfway through April, when the Yakima County apple orchards were starting to bloom, and just ten weeks after Gabby had first arrived on the Blankenbaker's doorstep, Deanne left her husband of nine years and moved in with his former coach and trusted friend, Gabby.
Gabby had recently left the Blankenbaker residence and got a place of his own.
Deanne took Morris' two young children with her to the new house where Gabby's own three children were regular visitors.
As Morris pulled his car into the driveway of his home at 210 North 6th Street, he remembered the total shock he had felt when Deanne had told him she was leaving.
Morris had been so busy working and so focused on the ways in which his old coach seemed to be falling apart in front of his eyes that he had been completely blind to the betrayal that was taking place right under his nose.
Unlike Deanne, Morris had discovered why Gabby's wife had kicked Gabby out in the first place.
Gabby had apparently become totally obsessed with his wife, and that obsession drove him to become paranoid that she was being unfaithful.
Fed up with Gabby's accusations and his increasingly controlling behavior, his wife had ended their relationship, kicked him out of the house and started a new life on her own.
Looking back, Morris wished he had told Deanne about that side of Gabby.
But at the time, given his wife's initial objections to Gabby coming and staying with them, Morris had not wanted to pile on and make his old friend look even worse in Deanne's eyes.
Even through his shock and hurt when Deanne told him about her affair with Gabby Morris, couldn't help but think that Deanne's decision to leave was so impulsive and sudden that maybe someday she would change her mind and come back to him.
So, instead of losing his temper and destroying whatever feelings he and Deanne had left for one another, Morris had dug deep into his soul and told his wife that, no matter what happened, he loved her and he would always be there for her.
But once Deanne and the children had gone, Morris was totally devastated.
And when Deanne and Gabby had announced they were going to get married on September 14th, 1974, Just three months after Deanne officially divorced Morris, and just nine months after Gabby had first moved in with the Blankenbakers, Morris promptly packed up his stuff and moved to Hawaii.
Four months later though, Morris was back in Yakima.
He just couldn't stand to be that far away from his two kids and from his mother Olive, who had just been through an illness serious enough that she had wound up in the hospital.
Once back in town, Morris began picking up the pieces of his life.
That's when he bought the four-bedroom house at North and Sixth Street and rented out rooms to some of his friends to help pay for the mortgage.
And in the meantime, Deanne's storybook romance with the man who was 14 years her senior had already begun to fall apart.
Once Gabby and Deanne were living together.
Gabby did not try to hide his drinking and Deanne was horrified as her new husband knocked off an entire fifth of whiskey at least three or four nights a week, sometimes locking Deanne out of the house and screaming accusations that she was seeing other men.
After three separations from Gabby, the longest lasting two weeks, Deanne had had enough.
And in July of 1975, 10 months after getting married to Gabby, Deanne was filing for her second divorce.
And this time, when she left her dream home on the better side of Yakima, Deanne took her kids straight back to her ex-husband Morris and his much less glamorous wooden frame house on North and 6th that was separated by just a little alleyway from a hodgepodge assortment of apartments and two family homes.
Even as Morris and Deanne made plans to remarry as soon as Deanne's divorce from Gabby was finalized, Deanne dropped Gabby's last name, trading more for Blankenbaker.
As Morris led himself into the house he now shared again with Deanne and his two kids, he told himself that he should have known that his old coach, competitive to the bone, would not let Deanne go without a fight.
But what neither Deanne nor Morris had expected was the intensity of Gabby's anger and jealousy when Deanne left him.
To go back to Morris.
Just a week earlier in mid-November, while Morris had been working at the lion's share, he'd received a terrified phone call from Deanne telling him that Gabby had let himself into their house through an unlocked door, and he was now at the door of the master bedroom where Deanne had been sleeping.
Deanne had heard someone inside the house and had had just enough time to lock the bedroom door before Gabby arrived and started pounding on the door, begging Deanne to take him back and threatening to kick the door down.
Morris had grabbed one of his good friends who was at the tavern, and the two of them jumped into Morris's car and they drove at high speed from the lion's share back to Morris's house.
There they found Gabby, completely drunk, staggering around the outside of the Blankenbaker home, pounding on the downstairs windows, waving a gun and threatening to kill himself or Morris.
The friend that Morris had brought with him from the lion's share.
Joey Watkins, another former student of Coach Gabby's, expected a fight between these two men.
He was also stunned at the change in his former coach, who had always lectured everyone about self-control and the importance of staying away from alcohol.
But instead of busting Gabby in the mouth, Morris went up to his old coach and talked to him quietly, getting him to stow the gun, get back into his car and go back to the apartment that Gabby now shared with his 16-year-old son, Mike.
To Joey Morris had just shrugged his shoulders and said I could have hit him, but he was my coach too.
I just can't do it.
There was also another bond between Morris and Coach Gabby.
Morris had once saved his coach's life.
On one of the river trips that Gabby and Morris used to take together.
Their boat had capsized and both men had been pulled underwater by a deep current.
Morris made it to the surface, but Gabby had been caught underwater in a tangle of vines and roots near the Yakima riverbank.
Always an excellent swimmer, Morris had managed to dive down and free Gabby's legs and bring his former coach safely back to land, where Gabby coughed up the water in his lungs that had come so close to killing him.
This event was yet another reason why Gabby's later betrayal in starting an affair with Morris' wife had hurt Morris so deeply.
But it had also given Morris a sense that on some level he had assumed a kind of responsibility for this man whose life was so obviously coming completely undone.
And besides, not long after that night, when Morris had confronted Gabby out in the yard, it seemed like Gabby had finally gotten the message and was leaving Morris and Deanne alone.
Starting on November 18th, neither Morris nor Deanne had seen or heard from Gabby.
And that was when Deanne and Morris had finally begun to feel that both the turmoil and the gossip around Deanne divorcing two different husbands in less than a year and a half was actually over.
With that final thought, Morris turned his full attention back to his children.
And by the time Deanne arrived home from work at around 630 on the evening of November 21st, the whole family was ready to go out for Friday night pizza at Shakey's Restaurant before Morris headed off to his night shift at the Lion's Share.
At 5 a.m. the next morning, November 22nd, Deanne suddenly woke up feeling totally alarmed.
She realized even before her eyes had adjusted to the dark that Morris was not in bed next to her.
Getting out of bed and pulling on her bathrobe, Deanne hustled down the stairs and stepped out onto the front porch of the house to see if her husband's car was outside.
And it was.
Morris always parked at the end of their driveway that sort of wrapped around the back of the house, and so Deanne had walked over to the far side of their front porch and looked back in that direction and she saw his car.
Wondering if her husband had just fallen asleep in his car after coming home very late from his shift.
At the lion's share, Deanne walked down the porch steps and took a left and walked around the house towards the back, where she peered inside of her husband's car, but Morris was not inside.
Puzzled, Deanne retraced her steps back to the front of the house and then, after going inside, she put on her contact lenses and then began searching every room of the house for Morris.
But after searching every room, it was clear Morris was not inside.
So, grabbing the collar of the family dog, Deanne went back outside and this time, after going down the front porch steps onto the front lawn, she turned right and walked around that side of the house to reach the backyard.
This side of the house, which was the left side if you were facing the house from the street, butted up against an alleyway.
This alleyway was only separated from the house's property by a flimsy, short chicken wire fence, a barrier that was more psychological than physical.
Between that chicken wire fence and the side of the house was a narrow stretch of grass that ran from the front yard straight back to the backyard.
So after Deanne turned the corner and started walking down that stretch of grass, she suddenly stopped because there on the ground, near the open gate that separated the front yard from the backyard, was the figure of a man lying face down on the grass.
A moment later, two neighbors who were waiting on the curb outside their nearby apartments to catch their rides to go out duck hunting heard a woman's frantic screams from across the alley.
Morris, Morris, oh my God, he's dead.
Hey, listeners, big news for true crime lovers.
You can now enjoy this podcast ad free on Amazon Music with your Prime membership.
Listen to all episodes of my podcasts Mr Ballin's Medical Mysteries and Mr Ballin's Strange, Dark and Mysterious Stories, along with a huge collection of top true crime podcasts, completely ad free.
No more wading through cliffhangers or dealing with ads because, let's be honest, ads shouldn't be the most nerve-wracking part of true crime.
To start your ad-free listening journey, download the Amazon Music app for free or head to amazoncom.
Slash ballin.
That's amazon.com slash b-a-l-l-e-n.
Dive into uninterrupted true crime stories today.
By 525 am, Yakima police and medical personnel had already started arriving at the scene, lining up out front of the house on 210 North and 6th Street.
And even before Yakima's chief homicide, detective Robert Brimmer, arrived 15 minutes later, first responders already knew three things.
One.
The dead man laid out on the grass under the first thin layer of falling snow was Yakima's popular intermediate school coach, 32-year-old Morris Blankenbaker.
Two.
Given the stiffness of the body, Morris must have been killed hours before Deanne had dialed 911.
And three, the obvious cause of Morris' death was gunshot wounds.
By the time Sergeant Brimmer pulled up, officers were already surrounding the Blankenbaker property with yellow crime scene tape and Deanne was inside the house with her wide-eyed children crying hysterically.
Using flashlights, police officers searched every inch of the south side of the house where Morris' body had been discovered, hoping that the flashlight beams might glint off the shiny metal of a shell casing buried in the three to four inch deep grass.
They also searched the nearby alleyway and all the trash barrels in case the killer had thrown the murder weapon into one of them.
But all police found at the crime scene was a mostly empty bottle of beer that Morris had probably been carrying in his hand when he got out of his car.
By 830 am Morris's body had been taken to the county morgue where an autopsy would be performed at 7 pm that night and Detective Brimmer and his investigators were at the Yakima police station and fanning out through the Blankenbaker's neighborhood, interviewing witnesses and putting together a list of possible suspects.
In most murders, the victim's spouse is at the top of that list.
But it didn't take detectives long to rule Deanne out as a suspect.
There was no trace of gun residue on her hands or clothing.
Morris did not have a life insurance policy that might have given Deanne a financial motive for murder.
And, as the whole town knew, Deanne had just recently reconciled with Morris and the two were planning to remarry.
But what Deanne did have for police was the name of the man she was certain had to be behind Morris' death.
And that was Morris's one-time friend and mentor, Gabby Moore, the man Deanne herself had only recently divorced.
Deanne wasted no time telling Detective Brimmer about the incident just the week before, when the coach had shown up with a gun one night, when Morris was working at the tavern, and how Gabby had entered the Blankenbaker house and threatened to break down the door to her bedroom.
Deanne also told them about the harassing phone calls Gabby had made to their house almost every day and Gabby's attempts to get his children and Deanne's own sister to try to pressure and guilt trip Deanne into going back to Gabby.
But even after hearing these details about what sounded like Gabby's obsession with winning back Deanne, Detective Brimmer just could not believe that Gabby, who literally owed his life to Morris, would have just walked up to Morris and shot him in cold blood.
But lacking any other obvious suspects and having no evidence from the crime scene that provided police with any other leads in the case, Detective Brimmer picked up the phone and called Gabby, asking him to come to the police station and bring along any firearms he owned.
Coach Gabby did come to the police station that Saturday afternoon, but he brought along an attorney and he had nothing he wanted to say to police except to point out that he could not possibly have committed this murder, since he had been in the hospital from November 18th until hours after Morris' body had been discovered.
It would turn out that the peaceful interlude that Morris and Deanne had enjoyed for the last few days, when Gabby had finally seemed ready to leave them alone, it was actually just the result of Gabby experiencing such stress-related high blood pressure that his doctor had ordered Gabby into the hospital for treatment and observation.
And after interviewing hospital and nursing staff and even checking the windows and doors of the hospital for any possible way that Gabby might have slipped out to commit the murder, investigators would confirm Gabby's alibi.
Over the next three weeks, police worked every possible lead and motive in the homicide case.
They investigated any arguments Morris may have had with customers at the lion's share, arguments he might have had with parents, with students or other teachers at the middle school where Morris worked, and every single one of those avenues led nowhere.
Meanwhile, now that Gabby was out of the hospital, he picked up right where he had left off, trying to win Deanne back.
He called her almost every day.
And any time one of Gabby's friends or a student on one of his teams or a fellow coach or teacher stopped by to visit.
The coach seemed oblivious to Morris' murder.
Instead, all he could talk about was how much he missed Deanne and how much he wanted and needed her back.
By early December, Gabby's drinking had gotten so bad that even the efforts of his assistant coach to cover for Gabby's failure to show up for practices and even meets were just not enough.
Despite the awards and acclaim that Gabby's outstanding talents as a coach and mentor had brought to Yakima County and to so many young men who had Gabby to thank for college sports scholarships, Yakima school administrators informed Gabby that they would be ending his teaching contract at the end of that school year.
But even this blow to Gabby's ego and his reputation hardly seemed to register, because there was something else now worrying Coach Gabby, and this time he didn't call his lawyer before talking to Detective Brimmer.
According to Gabby, someone was now threatening his life.
The coach told police that he had received a phone call from someone whose voice he didn't recognize.
Telling the coach I got Morris and I'm going to get you next.
But despite these reports and despite Gabby's airtight alibi for the time of Morris' murder, there was one detective who just couldn't shake the feeling that the coach had to have been involved in some way in Morris' murder and that Gabby was now making up these threats to direct police attention away from himself.
And that detective was Morris' best friend, Vern Henderson.
Vern and Morris had gone to high school together, and they had both been Coach Gabby's protégés.
But while Gabby had never made it into professional football, Vern had realized his dream of becoming a cop and on the day that Morris had been found murdered, 32-year-old Vern Henderson had sworn to Morris' mother Olive that Vern would find her son's killer.
So in those weeks after his best friend's death, Detective Henderson had started casually chatting up some of Gabby's current and former team members, hoping that someone might have heard or seen something, anything that might connect Gabby to Morris' murder.
But then at about 1 am on December 25th 1975, early Christmas morning, Yakima police received a 911 call that turned Detective Henderson's theory and Deanne's suspicions about Coach Gabby upside down.
At about 8 pm on Christmas Eve, Coach Gabby's 16-year-old son Mike, said goodbye to his father before leaving to join his girlfriend's family for a Christmas Eve dinner.
Mike had done his best to cheer his father up that day, and even Gabby's first ex-wife had come over to the apartment Gabby and Mike shared to clean and vacuum and wash the stack of dirty dishes piling up in the sink.
And later that evening, right through to 12 15 am, other people who cared about gabby, his daughter and the same doctor who had ordered gabby into the hospital just a month ago, all called to check in and see how gabby was managing over the holidays.
Gabby, who was an expert at covering up just how much he was drinking, had told them he was doing okay and that he wasn't completely alone, since he expected more members of his wrestling teams to come by and visit.
It wasn't until 1am on Christmas Day, December 25th, when Mike and his girlfriend came back to Gabby's apartment, that anyone realized Gabby was anything but okay.
The first sign of trouble was the fact that the back door into Gabby's kitchen was propped wide open.
And when Mike walked through that door he saw his father's body lying sprawled between the kitchen and living rooms.
Gabby was face down and not moving.
Despite the fact that there was a 22 caliber shell casing lying about two feet away from Gabby's body, there was no blood anywhere and no sign of a struggle.
It wasn't until the medics who answered Mike's 911 call put Gabby's body onto a stretcher that they realized that Gabby had not died of a heart attack or other natural causes.
Because as soon as they had turned Gabby over, blood began pouring out of a bullet hole just under his left armpit.
An autopsy would later reveal that a small caliber bullet that matched the shell casing found near Gabby's body, as well as the bullets that had killed Morris Blankenbaker one month earlier, had entered somewhere under Coach's shoulder, ricocheted off of his fourth rib and torn across the inside of his chest, ripping through his heart and both lungs.
By the time the medics arrived, six pints of blood had collected in Gappy's chest cavity and as soon as his body was moved, that blood more than half of all the blood in Gappy's body started draining out quickly, soaking the small throw rug under the coach's chest.
Suddenly, Detective Brimmer and Fern Henderson realized that Gabby's reports that he was being threatened had likely been true.
On the day after Christmas, Yakima residents woke up to yet another shocking front page headline.
Quote, End quote.
Meanwhile, Detectives Brimmer and Henderson didn't need reporters to tell them that the murders of the city's two coaches, both recently married to the same woman and both shot with the same 22 caliber handgun, had to be related.
And the first person they wanted to talk to was Deanne.
Even if Deanne did not kill Morris, Maybe she was so convinced that Gabby had a hand in that murder that she shot Gabby out of hatred and revenge.
They also wondered if maybe Deanne had yet a third admirer, another person so obsessed with wanting her that they would kill both Morris and Gabby.
But within 48 hours, detectives were back to square one.
Not only did Deanne deny any involvement in Gabby's murder and the existence of some third mystery lover, she had an airtight alibi for the time of Gabby's murder.
She and her children had spent all of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with family.
And, as far as anyone knew, the only two serious relationships Deanne had had since the age of 16 were with Morris and Gabby.
Now, investigators were back to their original theory that revolved around a single killer, who may or may not have been known and trusted by both victims.
Maybe this person had surprised Morris so completely that Morris never even tried to fight off the shooter.
As for Gabby, the autopsy showed that at the time of death he had three times the legal limit of alcohol in his bloodstream, which means he probably would have been too drunk to defend himself from an attacker.
Frustrated and baffled, Detective Henderson turned once again to the people who were among the last to see Gabby alive.
That group included several members of the coach's so-called wrestling posse, who were a combination of current and former student athletes who had stopped in to visit Gabby on Christmas Eve.
According to the boys from this posse, once they were at Gabby's place, they had tried to convince Gabby to come out with them and have some fun, but Gabby had repeatedly said no, he was going to stay put.
And so by 1215 am, Gabby's posse gave up and they left, leaving Gabby all alone in his apartment sitting in his favorite chair listening to sad love songs.
It would not be until Monday, February 23rd 1976, three months after Morris was gunned down outside of his house and two months after Gabby was murdered, that police received the tip that would break the double homicide investigation wide open.
Two days earlier, two teenage brothers, out fishing off a small island under the twin bridges that crossed the Natchez River, had made a totally unexpected discovery.
Lying on the bank of that island in about three inches of water.
The boys had found a rusty, older model 22 caliber automatic pistol with a long barrel.
By Monday, their father was standing in Detective Brimmer's office.
When the man placed the gun down on the investigator's desk, Detective Brimmer knew immediately that he must be staring at the weapon that had been used to murder both Morris and Gabby.
That same day, the Yakima Herald Republic newspaper reported that a gun had been found in the Natchez River.
A few days later, Yakima law enforcement got a visit from the person who claimed not only to own that gun, but who also knew how the gun had turned up in the Natchez River and why.
Based on that new information and follow-up interviews conducted by Detectives Brimmer and Henderson and other investigators, here is a reconstruction of what happened on the night Morris Blankenbaker was killed and the night one month later when Gabby Moore was also shot to death inside of his apartment.
It would turn out that Coach Gabby had spent a lot of time talking to a lot of people about how horrible his life had become since Deanne had left him to go back to her first husband, Morris Blankenbaker.
And one of those people was listening very carefully to what Gabby had to say.
After this person approached Gabby and asked if there was any way to help, Gabby said actually yes, there is a way.
And by mid-November Gabby had outlined for this person an entire plan that he felt sure would result in Deanne taking him back.
And on the evening of November 21st, when Gabby was in the hospital being treated for the repeated nosebleeds that were a result of his high blood pressure, he decided to put this plan into action.
At about 7 pm the coach got out of his hospital bed and walked down the corridor to the payphone near the visitor's lobby.
He placed one call and then went straight back to his room.
Seven hours later, Morris arrived home from his shift as a bouncer at the Lion's Share Tavern.
After parking his car in its usual place on the driveway behind his house, Morris sat in the driver's seat for a few minutes, enjoying the bottle of beer that he'd brought with him from work.
Looking up at the upstairs windows of his house, he thought of the Thanksgiving that he and Deanne would share together with their kids next week.
Suddenly, he was just eager to get inside and slip into bed and hold Deanne tightly in his arms.
So he turned off the engine and dropped the car keys onto the floor in front of the passenger seat, and then he got out and closed the driver's side door behind him and began walking toward the front of the house.
To get there, he walked alongside the south side of the house, the same side of the house that was closest to that alleyway, separated from his property only by a short chicken wire fence.
When Morris reached the little gate on his property on the south side of his house that separated his backyard from his front yard.
He was about to walk through that gate when he heard a voice off to his right, somewhere in the alleyway, calling out his name.
Morris stopped where he was and turned with the beer bottle still in his hand and stared out at the alleyway to see if someone was actually there or if he had just imagined someone calling his name.
But sure enough, when he looked at the alleyway, standing there was someone he knew well.
Before Morris could react to them.
This person told Morris that they had actually just run out of gas and they gestured toward the end of the alleyway, kind of beckoning Morris to come over and help them.
As morris stepped closer to the chicken wire fence to look down the alleyway toward this person's car, the person in the alleyway raised a hidden pistol, aimed it directly at morris's face and fired.
The first bullet hit Morris just above his front teeth and the force of the bullets spun him sideways as he fell to the ground.
The second two bullets came in quick succession, hitting Morris just behind his left ear.
Without saying another word, Morris' killer turned and ran down the alleyway out of sight.
One of the Blankenbaker's neighbors would later tell police that at about 2 10 am on November 22nd She'd heard what she thought were firecrackers and then the sound of someone in heavy shoes running past her ground floor window.
One month later and Gabby was more desperate than ever.
His plan to eliminate his rival Morris had succeeded, but instead of delivering Deanne back into Gabby's arms, Deanne wanted nothing to do with Gabby.
And despite his alibi, Deanne kept telling police that she believed Gabby must have been involved in Morris' murder.
And neither Deanne nor investigators seemed to take Gabby's story about him being threatened by the supposed killer all that seriously.
So Gabby hatched another, even more complicated plan.
And in the first hour of Christmas morning, Gabby was ready to put that plan into effect.
By that time, in the first hour of Christmas morning, all the student wrestlers who had dropped by to check on Gabby and to see if he wanted to go out with them that night the so-called wrestling posse they had gone.
But Gabby knew that one of his visitors would come back.
And when that person did arrive, everything would be in place and Gabby himself would be physically ready for what lay ahead.
He had actually been preparing for this moment all evening, all by steadily drinking so much alcohol that he was sure he would hardly feel any pain from what was about to happen.
When Gabby's visitor arrived at the coach's house a few minutes later, the two men talked briefly to one another, and then Gabby made his final preparations.
Taking the telephone receiver off its hook.
He placed it on the living room floor so that it would be easier to reach when he needed to dial 911.
And then he went over the plan one more time, with Morris' killer telling him exactly where to aim.
So when the bullet hit Gabby in the shoulder, it would pass right through him without hitting any critical organs.
Gabby was sure that once the public discovered that he himself had been the victim of attempted murder, the police and Deanne would no longer suspect him in Morris' murder.
And Gabi was sure that seeing how close he had come to death would reawaken Deanne's love for him.
And then, finally, Gabi maneuvered his body into place.
Getting down on his hands and knees on the floor, he assumed a wrestling position, known as the referee position.
And when the gunman the most brilliant high school wrestler, Gabby Moore, had ever coached Just stood there, maybe seven feet away from Gabby, looking like he might refuse to go through with this.
After all, Gabby turned to look at him and started repeating one word over and over again.
Shoot, shoot, shoot.
But just as the young man raised the pistol and finally pulled the trigger Gabby, too drunk to hold the referee position, lost his balance and started to fall to the side, exposing the area under his left armpit.
And instead of the bullet passing cleanly through Gabby's shoulder, the small 22 caliber round ricocheted off one of his ribs and started tumbling through his chest cavity, literally ripping apart his lungs and his heart.
It wouldn't be until he heard the news report on Christmas Day that Gabby's accomplice would realize that, instead of wounding his coach as planned, the single bullet the young man had fired had actually killed his beloved mentor and friend.
It would turn out that the man who killed both Morris and Gabby was Gabby's assistant wrestling coach, a 22-year-old college student named Angelo Pleasant, who went by the nickname Tuffy.
Early in the summer of 1975, Tuffy had come back to Yakima to ask his former high school coach if Gabby could help him get the extra credits Tuffy needed in order to get his degree in physical education at Central Washington College in nearby Ellensburg.
Gabby was more than happy to pull some strings and offer Tuffy a job as Gabby's assistant wrestling coach.
Tuffy, who worshipped his former coach, was deeply upset by the obvious distress Gabby felt over the loss of Deanne, although he wanted to help Gabby and even asked Gabby you know what can I do?
It wasn't until his coach threatened to fire Tuffy from his assistant coaching position, something that would mean the end of Tuffy's college career, that Tuffy finally agreed to Gabby's plan to eliminate Morris Blankenbaker as a way for Gabby to get Deanne back.
Tuffy agreed to this despite Morris being one of his friends who he had known for years.
And when Tuffy later refused to cooperate with Gabby's plan to have Tuffy shoot and just wound Gabby, Gabby threatened to tell police that Tuffy had murdered Morris.
In a confession to police on February 28th, Tuffy described how he had felt backed into a corner, with no choice but to carry out Gabby's plan.
And when Tuffy left Gabby's apartment shortly after midnight on Christmas Day, he had no idea that, instead of just wounding Gabby, Tuffy had accidentally killed him.
Tuffy didn't even pause after firing that fatal shot.
Instead, he had immediately ran out of the apartment and gone to his cousin's house to return the 22 caliber automatic pistol to her.
When Tuffy's cousin Loretta Scott read about Gabby's death in the newspaper a few hours later, she panicked.
She worried that Tuffy may have used her gun to commit these two homicides that were now obviously linked through this gun, and that gun would be traced back to her.
So on December 26 1975, the day after Christmas, Loretta and her brother drove to the twin bridges over the Natchez River and threw the pistol into the water.
They had no way of knowing that, instead of the gun sinking to the bottom of the river, where it never would have been found, the gun landed on a small island temporarily submerged by the runoff from winter snow and rain.
But two months later, when Loretta read that short article in the Yakima Herald Republic reporting that a gun had been found under the bridge in the Natchez River, Loretta decided it was time to go to police and tell them everything she knew.
On August 29 1976, Angelo Tuffy Pleasant was convicted of first-degree murder in the premeditated death of Morris Blankenbaker and sentenced to life in prison.
Tuffy was also convicted of second-degree murder for the unintentional death of his coach, Gabby Moore, and sentenced to an additional 20 years in prison.
But despite these lengthy sentence terms, Tuffy was released from prison in 1996.
On April 18 1976, five months after the murder of her first husband Morris, and four months after the murder of her second husband Gabby, Deanne Blankenbaker Moore would get married for a third time.
This time, the petite brunette with the big dark eyes and soft voice would choose one of the pallbearers who had helped carry Morris' casket down the church aisle at Morris' funeral service less than a half a year earlier.
Seven years younger than Deanne.
Deanne's new husband would go on to become a successful business person, and Deanne would go on to become a successful stockbroker.
Thanks again to the late crime writer Anne Rule, whose 1996 book Fever in the Heart helped us to create this podcast.
Other sources for this episode include contemporary newspaper articles documentaries, official records and magazine articles.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
If you got something out of this episode and you haven't done this already, please invite the five-star review button to come along for a ride with you in your personal private airplane.
But once you're up at altitude, without saying anything, put on the only parachute on board the craft and then jump out.
Also, please subscribe to the Mr Ballin Podcast on YouTube Spotify, Apple Podcasts Amazon, Google and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
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.
We now have a registered 501c3 charitable organization called the Mr Ballin Foundation.
That makes it as easy as possible for you to join me, my family and my team in supporting those whose lives have been most impacted by violent and heinous crimes.
Monthly donors to the Mr Ballin Foundation, Honor Them Society will receive free gifts and exclusive invites to special live events.
But the real reward is helping to create a new ending to the story for victims of violent crime.
Go to mrballinfoundation and click, get involved to join the honor them society today.
If you want to get in touch with me, please follow me on any major social media platform and then send me a direct message.
My username is just at mr ballin and i really do read the majority of my dms.
Lastly, we have some really cool merchandise, so head on over to shopmrballincom to have a look.
So, that's going to do it.
I really appreciate your support.
Until next time, see ya.
Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free, on Amazon Music.
Download the Amazon Music app today.
And before you go, please tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wonderycom slash survey.
