S04E08: THE MURDER OF GARNETT SPEARS

Stephanie: Coming up on this episode of Crime Family.

Like I said, friends and family never really thought that he was that sick, but you wouldn't know that from all the social media postings and on the blogs and the communities that she was a part of trying to find answers for her son and just looking for attention.

People were starting to get concerned about Garnett and his health, but more they were getting concerned about Lacey and her mental state as well.

She did something that no other mother would ever think of doing, but you can be the judge of whether she had a mental illness or it was more sinister than that.

Katie: Super sad.

AJ: Yeah, it is so sad. Yeah, so sad. Just a helpless child, five years old.

Stephanie: Are you ready for some shocking news?

AJ: Hi everyone. Welcome back to Crime Family. I'm your co-host, AJ, and I'm here with my sisters, Stephanie and Katie as always. Thank you so much for tuning in and this week Steph is gonna be sharing a case with us that I don't think Katie or I know anything about. So yeah, Steph, tell us about the case you're gonna be sharing with us.

Stephanie: Hi guys. So the case I'm doing today is Garnett Spears, a five-year-old boy who tragically lost his life. I first learned about this case just recently when I watched a documentary on a bunch of other different cases, and this was one of the episodes on the documentary. The case itself, I don't know, it's been in the media quite a bit when it happened, and it got a lot of media attention on TikTok as I'll get into, but...

AJ: is it Canadian or no?

Stephanie: No. This woman in the case goes by the name of "Salt Mom" is her name in the news.

AJ: Oh my God, did Nancy Grace give her that title? I feel like Nancy Grace always gives people title.

Stephanie: No, it was not Nancy Grace. No.

Katie: It's just so funny.

AJ: Okay.

Stephanie: Anyways, it's just a tragic story. She did something that no other mother would ever think of doing, but you can be the judge of whether she had a mental illness or was it more sinister than that? But I'll get into all that when I start the case, so I'm just gonna get right into it. Like I said, this case is about a five year old boy named Garnett Spears and his mother was named Lacey Spears, and Lacey had a bright future. She was born and raised in Decatur, Alabama. She was very shy as a child growing up. She had little friends and was very closed off to the rest of the world. She was an introvert and she didn't really interact with a lot of friends or a lot of people in her community. But the one thing that Lacey really wanted to be in her life was a mom, and when she became pregnant with a little boy, she was over the moon, and her friends were super excited for her because they knew that she was going to be this great mom, and they knew that she had just a bright future ahead of her. Garnett Spears was born and he was this little spitfire of a kid. He was super adventurous and loved the outdoors. Because Lacey was shy growing up, she did look to social media for advice on parenting and stuff like that, and she also had a very big obsession about posting pictures of Garnett on social media and everything that they would be doing, just like what parents do today. She seemed to be loving motherhood and everything seemed to be going fine. People were just over the moon for her, and they just thought that this was a great thing for her, and they never thought anything of it. They always thought Garnett looked healthy. They always said that he was just this cute little boy who just loved adventure. Deep down, Lacey was feeling really lonely and was desperately looking for attention. Even though she was posting stuff on social media and everything looked great, she didn't really hang out with a whole lot of people. She only hung out with a few friends here and there, but she just felt like she needed more attention in her life and more people to recognize her. Like I said, she started to post more pictures of Garnett on social media. When Garnett was just a little baby she started posting pictures of his health. According to the documentary that I watched...

AJ: What was the documentary? You never said what it was.

Stephanie: Oh, it was called, Devils in Suburbia, or I think that's what it's called. It was on Discovery Plus. It was just an episode that they aired. On Crime Watch Daily I also watched a little interview with her, with Lacey about her son as well. Early on in Garnett's life Garnett was struggling with a little bit of health issues, and the doctors never really could pinpoint what was going on. Lacey would always take him into the doctors quite often to say like, "He wasn't eating well. He seemed very lethargic. He didn't seem like his spunky self like he used to be." Doctors diagnosed him with " failure to thrive", he wasn't thriving like a normal child would. So this is when her obsession with social media started. She started posting a lot of pictures of his health struggles and trying to get a community to get together to support her and trying to just get that attention that she needed cuz she didn't really have anybody to help her with Garnett. She had her grandmother, but when anybody asked about the father of Garnett, she just brushed it off, didn't really say who he was or where he was. Later on into the investigation I'll get into more of her backstory about the father and stuff like that. So for friends and family, they didn't really know who the father of Garnett was. At the time of his health struggles Lacey started a blog to chronicle her search to find a cure for whatever was making her child sick because she didn't know what was making her child sick. The doctors really couldn't understand why he wasn't eating or why he wasn't thriving like he should. At this time she told friends that she wanted to leave Alabama and to move to Florida with Garnett to live with her maternal grandmother, Peggy, but that didn't end up happening. She ended up just moving to a little town called Chestnut Ridge, New York. Lacey and Garnett lived in this little community called Fellowship for the Elderly and Disabled. Upon moving to this little community, Lacey decided to make up a story about Garnett's father because when she went into this community, cuz this is also the community where she worked with the elderly. When Garnett went to school they needed to know the background history of Garnett and who his father was. She made up the story that Garnett's dad was named Blake and he was a police officer who died in a car accident. Later on during the investigation we find out that that was actually a lie. The real father of Garnett, his name was Chris Hill. She says that she didn't understand why her son was getting sick. She never stuck around in the communities that she lived for Garnett to get the actual help he needed because she constantly was moving around because she was trying to look for a job or she was just not getting the answers that she needed. She figured that she'd go to different doctors, so Garnett never really got the proper healthcare that he needed. Like I said, Lacey took Garnett to over a dozen medical facilities and in her only interview with 48 Hours, she says, "Garnett has suffered from severe ear infections and he couldn't gain weight or he couldn't eat." While all of this is going on she was posting everything about her son on social media, the times in the hospitals, when she was moving, then she would show pictures of him feeling okay and running around in the park and then the next post him in the hospital sick with tubes and stuff. People were starting to get concerned about Garnett and his health, but more they were getting concerned about Lacey and her mental state as well. When Garnett was nine weeks old, he would end up getting a feeding tube to help him eat. At 10 weeks old, when he went to the doctors, the doctors had noticed that his sodium levels seemed high for an infant. His were 180 when the normal range is 140. They never really thought anything of it. They just said, "Oh, it's on the high side. We'll monitor it and he has a feeding tube now, so maybe he'll get better nutrients and start to feel better." Nothing really suspicious was going on at the time. They just thought he was just not eating or gaining any weight.

AJ: I feel like that's a common thing, right? I mean, maybe not common, but it does happen to infants, young children, if they're picky or they're not eating. I feel like for me, that was a thing, wasn't it? I was very picky and didn't eat a lot and mom had to gimme ensure or something, or boost or whatever to make it so I would get the nutrients. So I feel like it's common if babies are just really picky that they would think they're just not eating enough. They're whatever.

Stephanie: Yeah, that part is pretty common, but for an infant to have really high sodium levels, it was...

AJ: Yeah, that's weird.

Stephanie: They looked at it like...

Katie: Yeah, but infants aren't picky. Infants eat breast milk or formula, and that's enough to keep them sustained. So that wouldn't be an issue at this stage.

AJ: Well, I don't know anything about kids, infants or toddlers. I don't know.

Katie: Infants are below one and they don't even eat solid food until they're six months, so.

AJ: Oh yeah.

Katie: I don't think that's an issue unless there's an actual medical reason why you're not absorbing nutrients.

AJ: Oh yeah, I get it. You said he was nine weeks, right, so he was very...

Stephanie: He was nine weeks when the sodium levels were high, then he was 10 weeks when he got the G-tube. But I feel the doctors at the time didn't really look into what could be causing his high sodium levels, because for an infant to have that high sodium levels, unless she was breastfeeding and she was eating a lot of salted things, but to me it's not...

AJ: Yeah. How was her sodium? Did they check her sodium levels ?

Stephanie: No they never really talked about her health, and the research that I did, it was mostly focused on this little boy. I just feel like sodium levels shouldn't be that high in a child that young. Most of Lacey's friends from Alabama and Florida said that Garnett seemed to be a healthy boy. One friend said that when they came to visit, Garnett seemed like a normal, full of energy and spunky two year old. She continues to say that he was running around and he seemed okay. When it came to lunchtime, Garnett would be eating like a normal two year old would eat. Like I said, friends and family never really thought that he was that sick, but you wouldn't know that from all the social media postings that she would post and on the blogs and the communities that she was a part of trying to find answers for her son and just looking for attention. So Garnett went to school in this little town called Chestnut Ridge, New York, and Lacey also worked in this little community. She worked with the elderly at a senior's home. When they moved here, Lacey seemed like a great mom. She seemed to be really enjoying motherhood. When Garnett started school, everything seemed to be going fine. He didn't seem to be sick anymore. But when Garnett turned five, he returned to the hospital. This time things turned worse. Garnett started having seizures. At this time she was still posting stuff on social media. She posts videos of him having seizures and posts him hooked up to EEG machines.

AJ: Why would she just stand there and take a video of him as he's having a seizure instead of doing something about it? Or is that him in the hospital having a seizure?

Stephanie: In the hospital.

AJ: Oh, okay. Cause I was like, why would you just stand there and film him seizing instead of doing something?

Stephanie: You can see in the photos that are posted, that when he is having these seizures, she's just sitting on the bed and Garnett is set up with an EEG machine to help him with his seizures. When he came into the hospital, usually they have to get medical reports from other places where he was at the hospital, and they could see that he was in and out of the hospital a lot from the time he was a newborn to the time he was five. The doctors at this time were getting a little bit suspicious as to why this child was in and out of the hospital so many times. When you see pictures of him on social media, he seems fine for the most part, but then you see him also in the hospital. So the doctors, with Lacey's consent, just asked if they could have a camera in the room just because they wanted to monitor Garnett and wanted to watch him for 24 hours to see how he does. I think what, was really going on is they were trying to watch her, they were getting suspicious of why he was in and outta the hospital so much.

AJ: Yeah. Well I'm assuming she wasn't into that idea?

Stephanie: No, she consented to it.

AJ: Oh.

Stephanie: Everything seemed to be going okay in the hospital and he was thriving again and the seizures subsided and he just seemed like he was getting healthier. Two days before Garnett was supposed to get discharged from the hospital, things took a turn for the worse. This time when the doctors tested his sodium levels, when he got to the hospital prior to this, his levels were 132, which were normal, but then two days before he was supposed to be discharged, his sodium levels rose to a dangerous level of 184. This is when Garnett was then airlifted to Maria Fareri Children's Hospital in New York. So once he was at the Children's Hospital, his conditions improved, but that only lasted for 24 hours. With that high amount of sodium in his system, his brain was starting to swell. This is when he went downhill and was put on life support. Most of the people who knew Lacey, whether it was from her social media community or her friends, felt really bad for her and wanted to help. They would post advice, they would donate money to her to help her with her financial state. They just wanted to help. Other moms who had sick children would help her out and just give her some advice and some parenting advice, but no one could see what was to come next. This is what haunts her friends and family to this day, and the doctors as well. As Garnett got sicker and sicker doctors struggled to find out why and what was causing his sodium levels to come so high. The doctors had some suspicions about Lacey because even though she seemed like a grieving mother, her body language and the things that she would say didn't really sit well with them, which is why they, at the time, consented to put a camera in her room. They said it was to monitor Garnett, but it was actually to monitor her to see how she would react. They couldn't understand why his sodium levels were so high when he had a feeding tube and he was only supposed to be eating the food that he was given at the hospital. There is a video that I'm going to show you and I want you to watch it carefully, and I want you to tell me what you think is going on in this video.

So what do you guys think about that video?

AJ: I don't know. I, I think it looks like she's walking in and she's trying to hide something. What's in her hands? It doesn't look like a natural way you would walk with something. Don't you think that? It looks like she knows there's cameras, right? Because she said that they asked if they could film and she's walking in looking like she's trying to cover something that's in her hand, which doesn't seem like a natural way that you would walk in with something unless you're trying to hide it.

Katie: Yeah, it definitely looks like she's hiding something. Facing the camera.

AJ: But just the way her hand is played. Yeah. It's weird. Why doesn't she just, I don't know, walk backwards.

Katie: Put it on the other side of her body. I dunno.

AJ: Yeah. It's weird. Yeah, she tries to hide it, but badly.

Katie: Yeah.

Stephanie: Are you ready for some shocking news? Anyway, so the video that I just played shows the nurse checking on Garnett and telling Lacey that he seems healthy enough to go home. After the nurses leave the room, you can see Lacey takes Garnett to the bathroom, which is off camera, and then when she comes back you can see, according to police documents, it looks like she's holding what appears to be a feeding tube in her hand. I don't know how you could tell from the video, but I guess they looked at it long enough to know.

AJ: Well, yeah. I couldn't like really tell, I was trying to look at what it looked like she was trying to hide, but I couldn't tell what it was. So maybe she did do a good job at hiding it then, because I couldn't tell what it was really.

Stephanie: Then once she comes back with what the police say looks like a feeding tube, this is when, like minutes later, Garnett starts looking sick. He's burying his head into the bed. He's trying to vomit, but he actually can't. Nothing's coming up. This is where things just turn for the worst. So again, Garnett is now having more seizures and this time Lacey's looking frantic and upset, and the nurse tried to help Garnett, but he ends up slipping into a coma. Then he dies a few days later and like you can see in the video, he comes back from the bathroom and he just looks uncomfortable. Also in the video you can see Lacey on the other side of the bed just sitting there looking frantic, but she's not really getting up to help the nurses out. You know how a frantic mom would be, trying to touch the baby as the nurses are trying to do something and they're trying to hold her back. She's just sitting there. So after Garnett passes away, the police look into Lacey and they search her home, and in their home they find a number of salt cans, I guess, table salt cans around the house. A lot of them were opened. That just looked really suspicious to them cuz like who in their right mind uses all this salt? They said there was salt in Garnett's bedroom in a can. There was salt in her bedroom. There was salt just laying on the kitchen counter. There just seemed to be salt cans everywhere throughout the house. After their investigation, Lacey was arrested five months later on suspicion of poisoning her five year old son with table salt and she pleaded not guilty to the charge. When the case went to trial, the jury deliberated for a very short amount of time. It was three hours, I believe. Lacey was found guilty of second degree murder by poisoning him with table salt. So once the trial was over and Lacey was sentenced, the judge goes on to say that he didn't give her the maximum sentence of 25 years because he says Lacey suffers from. Munchausen by proxy syndrome, and this is a condition where the parent or caregiver purposely harms a child to seek attention. He felt this was the reason why Garnett had died.

AJ: That's a weird reasoning. Even if she did have that she still did it.

Katie: It's a mental illness I guess. , but I mean, still.

AJ: Yeah. Oh, I actually didn't know it was a mental illness. I thought it was just something that happened, like that situation was called that. I didn't know that it was actually a mental illness. So the police said what? What was the argument that they said that she was holding in that video? It was a feeding tube.

Stephanie: It's feeding tube that was full of salt.

AJ: So when she took him to the bathroom, she did it?

Stephanie: Yeah.

AJ: In the bathroom?

Stephanie: Yeah.

AJ: Okay. I thought, for some reason I was looking for, in that video, a box of salt or something. That's what I thought. But it's a feeding tube.

Stephanie: Because prior to that the nurses came in and checked him and said that he was good to go home. With people who suffer from this syndrome they're seeking for attention. They want more attention. Her sending him home wasn't an option cuz she wanted that extra attention of like, "Look at me, my child's sick." That type of thing. So once the nurses left, she took him into the washroom, cuz he still had a G-tube in from when he was a baby, and she hooked him up to the thing, gave him a bunch of salt, and then brought him back out to the bed.

AJ: I don't really know how a G tube works, but you just dump salt down the tube and that's what happened.

Stephanie: Well, it's just a syringe into a tube. Because your body can't absorb that much salt.

AJ: She would've been doing that for years then?

Stephanie: Yes.

AJ: Even when he was nine weeks, he had high sodium, so she had been doing that for? How old was he when he died? Five?

Stephanie: Five.

AJ: So she had been doing that for almost five years? That's crazy!

Stephanie: But it wasn't enough when he was younger, I mean it was enough to make him sick, but not enough for anybody to really care, I guess. I don't know.

AJ: Enough for it to show up as high on a test.

Stephanie: He would get sick and then a day later he would be better and then he'd be sent home.

AJ: But that should have been a red flag. Like you said, no child that young is gonna have sodium levels that high.

Stephanie: This is why she moved a lot because she'd go from hospital to hospital to hospital and seeing doctors upon doctors. They would just send him home and that's not what she was looking for. She wanted that attention. She needed that, I guess that feeling of being wanted or feeling of being noticed. "Look, my child is sick."

AJ: There's a horror movie called Run that is basically that. This woman lies to her child. Did you see that movie?

Stephanie: No, I didn't see it.

AJ: It's crazy. I actually like that movie. It's good. With Sarah Paulson.

Katie: Yeah, I did see it.

Stephanie: I didn't see it.

Katie: She gives her medication so she can't walk. So this girl thinks she couldn't walk her whole life. It's actually like poison she's been giving her.

AJ: Just so that she won't leave her or something. But yeah.

Stephanie: So, like I said at the beginning of this case, you guys can be the judge. Was it a mental illness? I mean, it is considered a mental illness, but I mean, she killed her son. So second degree murder is not really justice for her poisoning her son all these years.

AJ: I remember we've done other cases, like the Andrea Yates case, where she, not the same Munchausen by proxy, but she was mentally ill and killed her children. I feel like there's different levels of mental illness though, right? If you have a mental illness, you have a mental illness.

Katie: Yeah.

AJ: It doesn't all have to be the same mental illness, but if it's on the, you know what I mean? So I feel, in the same way, I forget what Andrea Yates, what her sentence was. If it's considered a mental illness and she has that and that's what happened, then that's what it is. Right? I feel like that is what it is. I mean, it falls under that category for sure.

Katie: Yeah. I think you have to have some sort of something wrong with you if you're gonna do that to your kid and I think it's second degree because she didn't probably mean to kill her kid, she just wanted to keep him sick enough so that he was in the hospital. So maybe she didn't mean to kill him, actually, but she did. So that's why it's second degree. But I don't know. What an awful way to go though, to be tortured, basically poisoned with salt for that many years and then finally just have this huge overdose. Like, ugh. It's, it's an awful way to go.

AJ: It's just frustrating too because you see stories of kids who get sick with cancer and stuff, and it's like this child was perfectly healthy and the mother's making him sick by doing all of this. When there's other families where it's their children get cancer.

Katie: Yeah. They're not choosing for their kid to be sick and this woman wants her child sick. Yeah. It's super disturbing.

AJ: Yeah. Like she's putting herself through what all these other families go through with a chronically ill child. Completely preventable.

Katie: Mm-hmm.

AJ: Cause she's doing it.

Stephanie: To me, what frustrates me about this case and Lacey in general, is that I feel like she could have sought attention elsewhere. Why hurt your child just to get attention from the media? Like I just feel like there's so many other ways.

Katie: Yeah, there are. I mean there's lots of TikTok accounts and stuff where it's just kids being super cute and they have millions of followers. That's another option, you know? So, yeah.

AJ: Was it that she wanted attention or was it just that she didn't want her child anymore? Which is still terrible, but maybe if she's doing it since he's nine weeks old, maybe she's like, "Oh, I don't want this child." I guess if she didn't mean to kill him.

Katie: Well, honestly, I think Munchausen by proxy, I think in general, is just to get the attention. When I think of the, the Gypsy Rose Case, her mother did it for 18 years and then that's basically how she made her living because people donated money to her. I forget some charity gave them an entire house to live in. They got trips to Disneyland. So that's just how she lived, by making her kids sick and getting all this stuff from other people. She didn't want her kid to die because then she wouldn't be getting free stuff.

AJ: Yeah. There's also other cases I've heard of too, where people will do it like, but with themselves, like people will fake that they have cancer or people will do things to themselves to get the attention.

Katie: Yeah, that's Munchausen syndrome and then Munchausen by proxy is when you do it to somebody else. So yeah.

AJ: Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. I feel like I watched a True Crime Daily episode or something of a different case of a woman who pretended to have cancer for six years and then got a million dollars. She fundraised a million dollars or people raised all this money for her treatment and she was just pocketing the money. She wasn't even sick. It's crazy just in general. Then the added layer of doing it to an innocent child. I don't know.

Katie: When people do it to themselves, that woman who pretended she had cancer, she wasn't poisoning herself, right? She was just saying she had cancer. So it's another level when you're actually physically harming your kid.

AJ: Okay, true. It's also sad too, I mean, if someone's that desperate for attention that they're willing to do that. Like you said, there's other ways to get attention. You can get positive attention like Katie said, millions of followers on TikTok, posting videos of your child doing a dance or something.

Katie: Yeah, and obviously, and why do people need that kind of attention? I don't know, it's fulfilling, I guess. Mm. I don't know. Something wrong with that, I think too, though, ?

AJ: Yeah. It's just weird. They're addicted to attention or they're just attention seeking, but at like the worst level. Where they're willing...

Katie: Yeah. That dopamine, when you see the likes on a post. When you get 500,000 likes, it's a huge thing for some people.

AJ: Yeah. I wonder if, I mean obviously Munchausen by proxy was a thing before social media, but I wonder how social media impacted that. I feel like now with social media where you can put it out there and everyone knows about it, that's more incentive for people to do that versus before social media when you could still do it to get attention from doctors, but it's not out there on a wide scale.

Katie: Yeah, that's true.

AJ: So I feel social media definitely plays into that. Like you said, you get the dopamine with all the likes and she probably started getting a lot of likes and a lot of sympathy on her posts and stuff, so she needed to keep that going, I guess.

Stephanie: And one other thing that she got sympathy for was when she said that Garnett's Dad was a police officer and he died in a car accident. That turned out not to be true. The actual thing was that his real dad, who was her neighbor at the time she became pregnant, his name was Chris Hill. She threatened him to destroy his family and destroy his life. She didn't want him in the picture for that reason because he would've found out that she was poisoning him. Basically, she wanted to be by herself with Garnett. Nobody else around her. Closed off to the rest of the world so she could...

AJ: I feel like that was another case.

Katie: She seems like a bad person.

AJ: Yeah. Yeah. But I feel like that was similar in the other cases of that, that I've heard. It's always a single mother who has time to be alone with her child. And I also find it too that it's every case I've known, it's mothers doing it to their child. I've never seen one of a father doing it to their child.

Katie: Yeah, that's true. I can't think of a one that has a father doing it. It's always a mother.

AJ: Yeah, which is interesting. I mean, obviously there probably are cases, where it's a father, but the only ones I've ever heard of was a mother. It's weird.

Katie: Mm-hmm. Yeah same.

Stephanie: So this case went viral on TikTok and Twitter after the documentary came out that aired on Investigation Discovery, and a lot of people just wanted to know why she did it. I mean, we know for attention, but they just couldn't wrap their head around it and they just wanted to know what was the number one reason why she did it. People were also very fascinated on this case. It gained a lot of attention and she was the "salt mom", is what when you look up a lot of articles, the first thing that is said is "salt mom." If you were to talk to Lacey today, having that attention after her case also probably made her happy inside because she was getting attention after the fact as well. What I'm saying is she probably loved the attention after the fact. "Oh, look at me. This got so much attention from TikTok and Twitter."

Katie: Yeah, that's true, but I wonder how she feels now when she can't be on social media, getting more attention. That's probably the worst part about this for her. Not that her kids dead, but that she has no more attention.

Stephanie: Yeah. So she's serving 20 years in prison at the state prison for women in Bedford Hills. She'll be 46 years old when she's eligible for parole. If she does get out, then she still has a whole entire life ahead of her.

AJ: Now she's got the attention, but she also has a jail sentence to go with it. So hopefully it's worth it.

Katie: Yeah. Really.

Stephanie: For some reason, I thought I knew about this case, but there have been so many similar cases like this. Like Katie said earlier, to poison your child with salt, what an awful way to die, because it's a slow death.

AJ: It's just weird that salt would be the choice that she would use. What was it about salt that was the thing that she decided?

Katie: Maybe cuz it's a natural thing in your body so if it came up high levels they weren't too concerned about it. If there was something else like arsenic or something, they would know right away.

AJ: Yeah, that's true.

Katie: You know, so maybe it was cuz it was a natural, a natural thing.

AJ: I watched a Forensic Files episode about Munchausen by proxy, and that's how I first heard of the term. This was 10 years ago or however long ago. So ever since then, it's stuck in my mind , and there's been so many cases of that since I heard about that, but yeah, it's crazy.

Katie: Yeah, I've heard a few other ones where they were killed with salt as well, so not an uncommon thing.

AJ: Yeah. I guess for the reason that you said too, It's naturally occurring.

Katie: Easy to get.

AJ: Yeah.

Katie: I mean, someone buying arsenic is a little bit sketched, but I mean, buying a bunch of salt is okay.

AJ: Yeah, and obviously, like you said, it worked. It showed up on the tests, but it was sodium, so not...

Stephanie: But when they went into her house, they found salt in his room. They found salt in her room and salt in the living room. Salt on the kitchen counter.

Katie: Fucking salt in every...

Stephanie: Yeah. To a normal person, why would you have salt in your room? You're drinking tequila through the night. Why would you have that salt? Do you know what I mean? It's not natural to have salt in a child's room. I was gonna go on to say one of her friends that she met during her time in New York was saying that sometimes when they would go out to eat with Garnett, they noticed that he was eating, but it looked like he was shoveling it all in his mouth. It was almost like he was starving, but they never really thought that because he looked healthy and he was running around and he was doing what all normal five year olds would do.

Katie: Super sad. Poor kid.

AJ: Yeah, it is so sad. A helpless child, like five years old and totally preventable too, which is so annoying. Like I was saying before, there's so many other things that can go wrong and this is an intentional thing that could be avoided. Sad.

Okay, so that's it for this week's episode. If you like the show, you can follow us on all the social medias @crimefamilypodcast on Instagram. We're @crimefamilypod1 on Twitter, and our Facebook is Crime Family Podcast. You can also email us your case suggestions and your feedback for the show at crimefamilypodcast@gmail.com. Check out our website@crimefamilypodcast.ca. Also we just recently started a Patreon page. Join us at the tier one, two, or three levels. You get exclusive extras such as mini episodes, free merch, or a new crime series Doc Talk. You can find us on patreon.com/crime family podcast. We also have our merch store on Red Bubble where you can get our crime family logo on lots of different items. We're very excited to have that open. That link will be in the show notes as well. Yeah, thank you so much for listening to this episode. Join us next week for part one of a four part mini-series. Every season we do a miniseries and we are going to be doing a mini-series this season on Canadian serial killers. So yeah, it's it's gonna be a really good series. It's next week will be our first part for that. Check it out next week. We'll see you next week for that. Thanks so much and until then, take care. Bye

Katie: Bye.

Stephanie: See ya.