It was a Friday night on March 11, 2005, when 29-year-old Jason Gage walked into Kings & Queens, a local gay bar in Waterloo, Iowa. Jason Gage was probably just looking forward to meeting some friends and having a fun night out, but that's not how the night would end.For that would be the night Jason Gage was murdered. 

Gabriel Fernandez was eight years old. In photographs, he often has close-cropped dark brown hair, which accentuates his sharp features and almond-shaped eyes. Those features soften when his face opens up into a smile, revealing two missing front teeth. In one, he sits on the floor at home, wearing a bright yellow t-shirt with the face of the cartoon character Sponge Bob Squarepants on it.

One final picture is a close-up of Gabriel's face as he lies in a hospital bed. His almond-eyes are swollen shut, his face is bruised, and tubes have been inserted in his nose and mouth.

On June 20, 2018, paramedics found 10-year-old Anthony Avalos unresponsive in the Mohave Desert, California apartment he shared with his mother, 29-year-old Heather Barron, her 32-year-old boyfriend Kareem Leiva, and his eight other siblings. Barron had called 911 claiming that Anthony had been injured in a fall.

What the paramedics found when they arrived told a very different story.

Michelle Abdill and Roxanne Ellis were coworkers when they met in Colorado Springs in 1983 and eventually became a couple. In 1990, they moved to Medford, Oregon to escape anti-LGBT hostility in Colorado Springs. They wouldn't avoid it entirely. In 1995, they were murdered by Robert Acremant, in part because they were lesbians.

This episode introduces the podcast and offers some background.