Have you ever wondered what happens to a town when it finds out that it has unknowingly been housing a serial killer?
Or what about the businesses that employed them?
The children who have to grow up balancing the love they have for the parent they knew with the terror they have of the person that parent has been revealed to be.
We see some of this in fiction, the shows Prodigal Son and Dexter: New Blood focus on the aftermath of a serial killer’s crimes on his children. Stephen King’s “A Good Marriage” and Riley Sager’s “The House Across the Lake” look at what happens when a woman discovers her husband is so far from the man she thought he was it has terrifying consequences.
But Vera Crowder isn’t a fictional character. She is a very real girl who, at age 13, watched her father get arrested for and confess to the murders of multiple men. One of whom was her best friend’s father.
You can imagine the kind of adolescence Vera had after her father was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. This man Vera had loved and admired, who she’d seen in the best parts of herself, was—in the court of public opinion—objectively and unforgivably evil.
As soon as she’s able, Vera leaves home. So when her mother, Daphne, calls her back home because she’s dying, it is the last place Vera wants to go back to.
But when she does, she is forced to confront—as an adult—her father’s crimes. And while many true crime authors have mined Francis Crowder’s life for content, most notable Hammet Duvall, who built his career on a tell-all true crime book on Francis Crowder’s murders, this is the first time we have Vera’s perspective on what it was to grow up as the daughter of a serial killer, and who that man was, as a father.
Today's episode explores Francis Crowder and the Crowder House Murders.
Reader, I Murdered Him is a real podcast about fake crimes. Each episode features a fictional crime from a fabulous book, but it's not spoiler free, so listen at your own risk.
Today's episode is based on Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey.
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