“Hi, everybody. I’m Guy Fieri, and we’re rollin’ out, lookin’ for America’s greatest solved murders.
“Now, when somebody says ‘triple homicide,’ you don’t immediately think of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. But that’s exactly where we are today. Here in Oshkosh, they are taking an American staple like murder to a whole new level.
“Meet Glenda and Roy Gardner and their son Travis—they were living in this joint for years, after the old owner retired and moved to Florida. On the morning of October 10, 1993, a 911 call came through the Oshkosh dispatch. A neighbor reported that the Gardner house on Cardinal Drive was on fire. Once the fire department finally extinguished the blaze, they made a gruesome discovery: all three Gardner family members were found dead.
“And I know what you’re thinking: ‘Guy, I’ve seen this story time and time again.’ Not like this you haven’t. Trust me. You see, Glenda and Roy were considered the ideal couple, and they were widely respected in their community. When the people of Oshkosh discovered their deaths had been a ruled a homicide, it hit the city like a rumor explosion.
“Now, we’re taking the bus to Murder Town! Roy Gardner ran his own construction company and recently had a falling out with one of his partners, William Stack. Gardner caught Stack funneling money to himself through phony bid margins on projects, so he forced Stack to abandon his stake in the company and leave, or he was calling the police. But the Gardners were murdered before any paperwork could be signed.
“Here, you have all the traditional ingredients for murder, but with a twist. Police interviewed Stack and discovered he had a rock-solid alibi: he was in Chicago visiting his brother and his wife, and both backed up his account. Shut the front door!
“Stack then took over Gardner’s company, closed it down, and liquefied the assets. To those suspicious of him, it looked like the perfect crime. And perhaps even Stack thought so, but he never counted on the field of forensic cartography.
“Dude, that’s out of bounds! Forensic cartography? You got be to kidding, right? No! Meet Professor Gill Cunningham of the Cartography Institute of the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay. Doctor Cunningham has been solving murders using maps for twenty-five years. And after creating a map based on the geographic layout of Wisconsin and northern Illinois, he discovered that it was virtually impossible for Stack to have been in Oshkosh and Chicago at the same time. Stack and his brother had to be lying.
“That’s straight up gangsta. Armed with this new information, police took William Stack’s brother, Ernest in for questioning. Before long, he cracked and revealed that he and his brother had hired a guy from the carwash to kill Roy Gardner. But the hitman, Crow Langley, didn’t know the entire family would be there and panicked.
“Police had heard enough and arrested William Stack, his brother Ernest, and Ernest’s wife, Sherryl. They eventually captured Crow Langley trying to cross the Canadian border under the name Ignatius Plume. If not for the advances in forensic cartography, none of these individuals would have been brought to justice. Talk about off the hook!
“So that’s it for this time. There are good murders all over this great country. Next time, maybe we’ll be in your neck of the woods.”