She paid fifteen hundred dollars to have her husband killed. Then she sent flowers to his funeral. The banner on them read: "From your loving wife."
Gibsonton, Florida. November 29, 1992. A fifty-five-year-old man sits on his couch in his underwear watching a movie, cigarette going, glass of iced tea beside him. At some point he pauses the tape, and nobody has ever been able to tell me why.
Outside in the dark, a seventeen-year-old neighbor is looking at him through the window.
The man on that couch was Grady Stiles Jr., the sideshow performer billed as Lobster Boy. Fourteen years earlier he had shot his fifteen-year-old daughter's fiancé to death in Pittsburgh, been convicted of third-degree murder by a jury, and served zero days in prison — because no Pennsylvania facility could accommodate his condition. He came home. And every single person in that trailer knew exactly what that meant.
This is the finale of a three-part series, and it's the hardest thing I've written.
Because this is a murder. A man was killed in his own home for money and I'm not going to soften that. But it's also the only case I've ever covered where the judge who sentenced the killer said on the record that he had no doubt she was telling the truth — and then sentenced her anyway. He told her there's a price that has to be paid, as unjust as that may seem to you.
Both of those things stay true for the next hour. Try to hold both.
IN THIS EPISODE 00:00 — Gibsonton, Florida. November 29, 1992. 06:30 — Welcome in, and a full catch-up if you're starting here 10:00 — Why did she go back? Who Mary Teresa actually was 19:00 — Four years: what that trailer looked like from inside 27:00 — The kid: Chris Wyant, seventeen years old, and the $1,500 34:00 — The night, and the morning after 39:00 — How the law sorted the blame 44:00 — Tampa, July 1994 52:00 — The verdict and the sentence 58:00 — The family's version 62:00 — What happened to everybody 67:00 — The question underneath 71:00 — Time Killer Files 73:00 — Close
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN Why a woman remarried a man convicted of murdering her own daughter's fiancé. Why the man who pulled the trigger got twenty-seven years and the man who never touched the gun got life. What the battered woman defense argued in Florida in 1994, and why the prosecutor's answer was legally airtight. What happened at Grady Stiles' funeral, and why it means something specific in a carnival town.
And one contradiction I cannot resolve — a claim about that night that comes from the carnival industry's own museum and appears nowhere in the court record.
SOURCES Tampa Bay Times (then St. Petersburg Times), July 1994. Associated Press sentencing coverage, August 1994. The Washington Post, July 1994. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette archive reporting. The International Independent Showmen's Museum. Fred Rosen, "Lobster Boy" (1995). Joe Nickell, "Secrets of the Sideshows" (2005). AMC's "Freakshow" interviews with Grady Stiles III.
Where sources conflict, I say so on the record and tell you which way I lean and why.
TIME KILLER FILES Four asks. The medical examiner's report. Any record that confirms or kills the window-tap claim. Gibsonton family stories — the ordinary ones, not the sensational ones. And anything at all about Jack Layne, the eighteen-year-old who died in Pittsburgh in 1978. He is the only person in three episodes who did nothing wrong.
ABOUT Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton covers true crime, conspiracies, and hidden history — researched properly and told straight. Hosted from Derby, Kansas.
If you came in at the finale, go back and start with Episode One. It will change how this one sits. And if this series stayed with you, a rating and a review is the biggest thing you can do to help somebody else find it.
Content note: this episode discusses homicide, domestic violence, and sexual abuse.
