Buried Motives

Matt Cundill  0:01  
You may also like a show about the things you may also like things like buried motives. Have you ever wanted to discuss true crime with someone who has the same level of enthusiasm as you? Let me introduce you to Christy and Melissa, two gal pals who get together every week to discuss dirt bags. It's a conversational show that digs deep into the lives and motives behind some of the most heinous killers. The devil is in the details, or maybe the dirt bag is in the details. Each chilling crime discussed with all things murder. The show is called buried motives. Christy and Melissa are your true crime friends. Their reactions not scripted. So what you hear is honest and genuine. Grab your earbuds and settle in for a weekly wild ride amongst friends as they discuss the ins and outs of the cases you thought you knew as well as the ones you've never heard before. How did you two first meet? Well, it's

Christie  1:07  
been a long time since we've met, but we met through church. Actually, Melissa moved into our area, and we kind of instantly became friends. Our kids around

Melissa  1:19  
this ain't eight.

Matt Cundill  1:19  
How did the two of you bond around true crime?

Christie  1:24  
I don't know if you could say that we specifically bonded over true crime, but we kind of bonded over creepy things, maybe yes, and over just doing crazy things together. So

Melissa  1:35  
Christy and I have a long history of doing some really wacky adventures. Give me the wackiest, probably

Christie  1:43  
planning and developing escape rooms, like those locked rooms that you can go to. We've done a few of those, and they actually turned out pretty good, believe it or not. And we were even asked to do them as fundraisers for some different organizations, and that was probably one of the wackiest things. Yeah,

Melissa  2:03  
just tell somebody that you have a full size jail cell set up in your basement, and you invite people to come over and lock them in. Is it's an interesting conversation starter sometimes.

Christie  2:13  
Yeah,

Matt Cundill  2:14  
what are the two of you do together on Halloween? We

Christie  2:17  
actually don't spend Halloween together, because usually that's about our kids. We're off doing things with our kids and whatnot, but we have done certain things together to, you know, celebrate the season, or even just different holidays in general. Once in a while, I can talk Melissa into a scary movie with me, but usually she spends the time covering her eyes, and

Melissa  2:40  
Chrissy is usually too busy handing out two liter bottles of pop on Halloween. Sometimes

Christie  2:44  
during COVID, I did that.

Melissa  2:48  
That's gonna weight the bag down exactly. It's a trick and a treat exactly.

Christie  2:52  
I only had one parent get angry at me, and I was like, okay, don't take the pop. It's okay, not a big deal. And then I had a few kids who were coming back a second time, trying to swindle more out of me, so they weren't too worried about it.

Matt Cundill  3:06  
I'm always worried about people who complain about getting something for free,

Christie  3:11  
right? He was upset because his daughter was little, and I was like, Well, you don't have to take it. You can skip our house. It's okay. The neighborhood kids were pretty excited when I did do that. Do

Matt Cundill  3:21  
you find when it comes to scary movies that there's always one person who has a different threshold than another person,

Christie  3:28  
definitely, and those two people usually become friends? Yes, that

Melissa  3:32  
is definitely the dynamic between Christy and I. She has a much, much higher tolerance. It's true. Because I'm her friend, she'll drag me out to the movie theater, and honestly, I miss the majority of the movie. I get the first five minutes, and then as soon as the scary music starts, I'm covering my eyes.

Christie  3:49  
Often I'll look at her and see her covering her eyes or plugging her ears.

Matt Cundill  3:56  
Before there was true crime podcasts. How did you get your true crime

Christie  4:00  
on TV, I guess I would say mysteries, Dateline, yeah, my mom was always into true crime and those kinds of shows. So from pretty little I would sit there with her and would be pretty fascinated with that type of thing. I love the CSI shows, yeah, they're good. Surprisingly, CSI takes a lot of inspiration from real, true crime cases, because, as I've researched some, I will discover that they have had episodes done on this killer.

Matt Cundill  4:31  
Is there a Dateline episode that you remember fondly from your youth?

Melissa  4:35  
I can't pick out one in particular. No, I

Christie  4:39  
do remember from my youth, though, having to do a report, and I might have only been grade six, and I chose Jack the Ripper, and that was the first time I really dove into a serial killer. And I was so disturbed and so fascinated at the same time. So I've had that interest from a pretty. Young age. Yeah, that

Melissa  5:01  
is something that Christy and I both share. I remember doing a report on the blood analysis of the JFK assassination for my physics project.

Matt Cundill  5:10  
Has there ever been a TV court case that you've been fixated on?

Christie  5:14  
I haven't, in real time, one that I've watched as it's developing, but in researching, I wish I would have had the time to sit down and watch the Menendez brothers trial. From start to finish, I watched as much as I could, but I just didn't have enough hours to sit for a whole month and watch the trial, and that's one that I wish I could have watched everything.

Melissa  5:35  
Ronnie O'Neill, I watched in real time, and that was wild. Why did you decide to start a podcast? Well, like every other crazy idea that we've had, we thought we'd give it a go. Why not? Matt, that's true.

Christie  5:49  
And for our podcast in particular, we really dive into the motives behind the crimes, and we feel like that can help to bring awareness as to what's happening. Most people who consume true crime are females, and they have said that they listen to true crime because they want to be aware of what's happening around them, looking out for those red flags, feeling empathy for the victims. And so that's really our goal, is to understand the why and how this is happening, but still being able to treat that with a delicate balance focusing on the victims, even though we do dive into the backgrounds of these killers, we want to know, how does this little baby get born, and 25 years later, they've turned into a dirt bag. How does that happen? Do you know any dirt bags personally?

Melissa  6:42  
Well, I think we

Christie  6:44  
all probably know a few Dirt Bags personally, but statistics do say that in your lifetime, you will walk past more than one serial killer in your life. Chances are so we just never know. That's one thing I do joke about, is that we've learned while doing this, is that anybody can kill you. You think your grandma won't kill you? She could, they have.

Unknown Speaker  7:04  
I think a lot

Matt Cundill  7:05  
of people are surprised by the number of times that murder happens within a family.

Christie  7:10  
Oh, definitely, those types of cases really fascinate. Melissa,

Melissa  7:15  
yeah. How do you murder somebody that you're supposed to love and cherish and care for? How do you get from point A to point B? And that thought process is fascinating to me.

Matt Cundill  7:25  
I'm always surprised by the people I went to school with, so been to school, maybe University, with hundreds of people. And why do some people wind up turning into dirt bags and other people wind up perhaps being Prime Minister, right?

Melissa  7:42  
It is interesting, and it's fun to get feedback from our audience and be like I went to school with that person. I remember them like this, and it's interesting to hear their take on what I was already seeing that then, or, Oh, I had no idea he was just the nicest piano player. Kind of thing

Matt Cundill  8:02  
that's fascinating to me, by the way that you're getting feedback after the show is coming back about the people that you're talking and researching. Have you ever thought, or have you ever had to go back into an episode to add in a little bit more because you received new information about a case.

Melissa  8:21  
We've done that with the Bruce MacArthur case. We don't necessarily go back and add it into the case, but we kind of provide little updates occasionally. It has been interesting when we get our listener feedback. And maybe it's not necessarily about knowing the dirt bag or knowing the victim. That happens a lot, but the ones that always shock me are the listeners that resonate with the victims, and I was in a similar situation, especially when we cover the domestic violence or intimate partner violence, there are so many of our listeners that reach out and talk about, oh, yeah, that was a pattern that I experienced, and this is how I was able to get out that is always shocking to me.

Christie  9:07  
It means that this is more rampant in our society than we maybe are aware of.

Matt Cundill  9:14  
Tell me about how you decide to do an episode on a particular dirt bag comes

Melissa  9:19  
through all sorts of kind of avenues. Sometimes the victims families reach out to us and they want us to cover a case. Or sometimes it's the victim themselves that really speaks to you, and you just want to tell that case. I know that I had that experience recently with the Ashley Wadsworth case. I just thought the world of who this person was and her case needed to be told for me, I just needed to tell it. Tell

Christie  9:46  
me about the research

Matt Cundill  9:48  
that goes into that particular case because you were eager to do it. So what is it that you need to do in order to do a full episode? Maybe it starts with Google. But what else is there? Yeah.

Melissa  10:00  
Yeah, oh, there's so much else, so lots of Google searches. But then we're using our databases for looking at the actual court cases, things like that. There's been cases where we've actually traveled to the sites or the scenes to get a real feel for what's happened there, the towns where they've lived in, things like

Christie  10:22  
that. It takes a lot of research, because there's the surface stuff when you first just Google someone's name or a case, but then as you go through it, like Melissa said, if we can find autopsy reports or court transcripts or often appeal documents are easier to find, which will have a summary of the case in there. We try to stick to documents and sources that we know are reliable, because you can find misinformation out there as well. Yeah,

Melissa  10:51  
a lot of our research is actually fact checking. The newspaper said this. But was this actually the case? Have

Matt Cundill  10:59  
you had to roll anything back, because you found out after you published an episode that that wasn't quite right,

Melissa  11:05  
not yet, not yet. Fingers crossed. Knock on wood. Yeah,

Christie  11:09  
I'm sure it will happen eventually. And if there's ever something that I'm not 100% sure on, and maybe, if it's just even a trivial thing of how many brothers and sisters they had, I will say there's differing reports of how many siblings they had, but this is what I'm going with, and this is why. So why do you try to put in and Melissa does as well, those little disclaimers if we're not 100% certain on a certain aspect of the case,

Melissa  11:35  
and a lot of the times too, sometimes it doesn't come down to the fact of the case, but it's the perception of what people had about a situation. And so it's not necessarily that we're presenting misinformation. We're actually presenting just a different perception. And that does happen on quite a lot in our cases, because we focus so much on the dirt bank themselves. This is what they thought, and this is what how they perceived the situation, and so this is why they reacted that way, that kind of thing

Christie  12:04  
going off of their own testimonies, which sometimes aren't factual.

Matt Cundill  12:09  
Tell me about the writing process. So one of you will write the story, and I just feel like somebody's reading part of the story, and then there's a reaction to it. I feel like this is a scripted show, but it's not that scripted. It's scripted conversationally,

Christie  12:24  
right? So Melissa and I, we each research and write our own episodes, and so even when we're doing that, we don't even tell the other person the name of the person that we're covering. So when we go to record if it's my turn to do an episode, Melissa doesn't even know until we hit record who I'm going to be talking about or what my case is about. So then I will use my notes that I have spent hours writing to tell her about this case, and so any reactions and conversations that we have throughout the episode is not scripted because she has no idea what I'm going to say, and so it's very authentic our interactions on the episode. But of course, we have to have notes. It's too much information to have all of that stored up in our brains to be able to tell it all correctly, right, and

Melissa  13:16  
get the facts straight. And I think when we were developing the podcast, that was a really important part for us when we were deciding how we wanted to do this was that, yeah, we were going to use a partial script, because there's certain aspects of the case that sometimes in conversation you lose just with the flow of a conversation. And so with having part of our episode scripted or our personal Show Notes scripted, we're able to hit on those parts that we really felt needed to be talked about,

Christie  13:43  
so then we don't have to go back and add things in that we forgot. We have all our facts right there with us, like for example, again, going back to the Ashley Wadsworth case,

Melissa  13:54  
we really wanted to talk about and touch on how dangerous it is for a victim if they tell their abuser They're leaving. And so it had that come out, and we just kind of flowed through natural conversations.

Speaker 1  14:07  
Sometimes those aspects are missed because you forget about them, or you you don't quite touch on them the way you wanted to. And so having a partial script actually allows us to make sure we're hitting the points that we want to hit definitely. And after that episode, we actually had a listener comment about how that was the most dangerous time was when she was trying to leave her abuser.

Matt Cundill  14:29  
Yeah, so that's a life hack. And that's kind of the business that you're in when you're telling these stories, is people are really here for the life hacks about how not to get murdered. And that's a scary one. I never really thought. I guess the danger zone is that period while I'm leaving you,

Melissa  14:46  
right? And Matt, you're not alone. There's so many that don't actually recognize that. And so that's part of the exciting part of the podcast for Christy and I, because we can share that information in a way that's digestible and. People are willing to learn about it resonates a little bit more with them, because

Christie  15:04  
also, in that case is it called Claire's law.

Melissa  15:07  
Yes,

Christie  15:08  
there's I had no idea that Canada had adopted this. Claire's law, where, if you are with somebody and you're not 100% sure, you can request information to find out if they have had a violent past, and police can also volunteer that information to you. If they know you're in a situation they've been called for the first time for domestic violence call, they can share that information with you, and that's not the case in all countries, and a lot of people aren't aware of that, that they have that resource right here in Canada.

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Matt Cundill  15:59  
Do you know what your most popular episode is this year?

Christie  16:03  
It actually is the Menendez brothers, I think because their documentary came out months after we had covered it. And so I think that happens a lot. Sometimes we will cover a case and we'll get, you know, just regular listens on it, but then a documentary or something else will come out, and it will boost those numbers, because I feel like true crime fans are the ones who want to do deep dives. They're not going to listen to just one case that interests them. After they listen to your episode, they're probably going to go listen to another or look up a documentary see if there's a Dateline episode. Just to try and get all of those facts and all that understanding,

Matt Cundill  16:42  
what would you say no to? We're not doing that

Christie  16:44  
one. There is a few that Melissa and I have in our folders that we have maybe started some research on, and it has maybe been a little bit too much for us, or we just don't feel like the time is right, and so those have been put on the back burner. Will we ever get to them? We don't know it has to feel right for us at the time to cover that case. And there's

Melissa  17:07  
also a certain criteria to meet for how much information we have available to us. So we want to be able to deliver that kind of background, motive type discussion to our listeners.

Christie  17:19  
That's true, because sometimes there has been a case that I have found so much information about the actual murder, the trial, but I can't even find a birth date to the dirt Bay. I know nothing about their background, that type of thing, and so then I don't cover that one, because that's what we do want to focus on, is the motives and how they became this way.

Matt Cundill  17:41  
Did you do the Menendez brothers before or after the documentary was released?

Christie  17:46  
We did it before, a few months before it came out.

Matt Cundill  17:50  
So that leads to the question, What did you think of the documentary?

Melissa  17:53  
She loves to consume all

Christie  17:55  
true crime. Like I said, I was so enthralled in that way, because there's such a divide in people's opinions. Some people think, okay, they've served their time. Some people don't believe that they were abused as children. Other people wholeheartedly believe it. And so that changes your perspective on that case. And so I just found it super fascinating, and that's why afterwards, even though I had spent hours and hours and hours digging into that case. I still wanted to see the documentaries afterwards about it. That's

Melissa  18:26  
what's so interesting about digging in to the motives and what actual facts are going on behind the scenes, instead of just the sensational cases that we're seeing on TV, like I remember with Lance Butterfield, had you not known what had happened in his family prior to him killing his father, it would have just looked like a spoiled kid angry that he didn't get his own way. But that was not the case at all, and it does change people's perspectives on their crime and punishment and and what we should do with them in society.

Matt Cundill  19:01  
So we got new information about the Menendez brothers from a member of Menudo who said he was sexually assaulted by manager dad, as it were, in this case, that's rather new information. Does that sort of change your opinion about whether or not you think that children

Christie  19:19  
were abused? I actually had that information in my episode. I had discovered that before I had put it in my episode, and so I personally do believe that they were abused. They did kill their parents. Should they have killed their parents? No, but I do believe that they were abused. I think that did happen. I do believe that they felt that they didn't have a way out, not to excuse what they did, but I also feel like maybe the fact that they were young men, they were treated a little bit differently, because there's a female murderer who talked her boyfriend into murdering her mother and has recently been released from prison and. Became a celebrity over it. So I do feel that in this case, there's a bit of a double standard that way.

Matt Cundill  20:06  
One of the things that really strikes me about your show is that every six months, there's an episode where I might have encountered or known somebody, either the murderer, but largely the victim. And so this true crime community, it's like, I feel like the world is pretty small. If I could pick out three of your episodes where I've come into contact with victims,

Christie  20:31  
it's a small world. It really is. These crimes have touched so many of us. It's true, and I think what can happen sometimes in the true crime community is the stories can be sensationalized, and they start to feel like just stories. And so when we do tell the cases, we want to reiterate that these were real people, that people did know them, did go to school with them, did have relationships and care about them, and that this really happened to them, their families, to the family of the dirt bag. Sometimes we talk about how much it has affected first responders that they've had to deal with the aftermath of this as well. And so it is far reaching. Absolutely.

Matt Cundill  21:19  
What are you working on for 2025

Melissa  21:22  
are you trying to get a drop about cases that

Matt Cundill  21:25  
we're covering? By all means, and you don't need to part with that information. I just wondering if, yeah, I was actually fishing for a little sneak peek.

Melissa  21:33  
Yeah, yeah. No, I can't tell you that, because then Christy would know, and that's her reactions would not be genuine, understood.

Christie  21:42  
I will say, though, that my first episode back in January after we take our little break, is a big one, and it's one of those classic serial killer cases that I feel like I couldn't even make up this information if I had tried.

Melissa  21:57  
I've got a shocking one for you too.

Christie  21:59  
Okay, great.

Matt Cundill  22:00  
Tell me about the editing and the production of the show. It's one thing to get together, to have the conversation, and it's like, Okay, now we've got a lot of material here to edit. Now what happens?

Christie  22:11  
So just like we do our own show notes, we do our own editing, but we each we take our raw notes, our episode that we've recorded, and then we edit that down, take out information that doesn't need to be in there. Sometimes we get off on a tangent, we go down a rabbit hole, and we talk maybe a little bit too long about something, and we don't want to waste our listeners time. We know that that's valuable, so we'll cut that back and just keep in the key points of that. We're pretty particular when it comes to the sound of our episode, so taking out mouth noises and that type of thing, and then once we've gone through it ourselves, that's when we send it off to the other person and have them do a quick proof of it before uploading it and getting it ready for our audience.

Melissa  22:58  
All that boils down to is it's a huge process. It is. It's a lot of work.

Matt Cundill  23:03  
So what's one piece of advice you would give somebody who wants to start their own true crime podcast and be like you, just

Christie  23:12  
keep at it. Yeah, and it helps to have a co host, because then we can split up that work a little bit too. But when I was researching about starting the true crime podcast. One of the key things that I kept reading was write out an idea of your first at least 10 episodes. Can you come up with 10 episodes of what you would want to talk about? And that I was able to do easily, I came up with 100 episodes that I would want to talk about. But basically the idea is, if you are struggling to just think of what you could do for 10 episodes, maybe that's not the right avenue for you to go down. If you can come up with a lot and know what you would want to talk about for at least that many then, yeah, go for it.

Melissa  23:55  
Yeah. And if you're just starting out, make sure you do do your research, because there is so much more than just recording your voice and telling a story or telling it talking about a case. There's all the behind the scenes stuff that we weren't exactly prepared for. It was a lot of learning. It's a steep learning curve to start up a podcast.

Matt Cundill  24:16  
So what's one thing that you have learned about starting a podcast that you're very surprised about.

Christie  24:23  
It's way more work than I thought it was going to be. And I think maybe because of the type of podcast that we have, because it's not that we just write down a few key points that we want to talk about and then sit down and have a chat, there's a lot of research and time that goes into finding that information, and then figuring out how to tell that information, writing that down, and then the sharing of it is the fun part. That's the part we love the most, is getting together, recording, discussing it. Yeah,

Melissa  24:52  
it's usually, we're usually 20 to 30 hours, a minimum, days, yeah, minimum,

Christie  24:57  
sometimes a lot more than that. Especially. If we're reading books for the case, I think it can even creep up to over 3035, 40 hours, sometimes in a week that we're spending on it. And that's just the research part. One of the surprising things that I have found is that I love the editing part of it, that is the technical side of actually doing that work in the programs. I love that part, and I do not. I enjoy the creative part of writing the episodes, and this is what we even found when we did our escape rooms together. Is Melissa's very logical, and she was able to come up with a lot of the puzzles. And I was more creative in the fact of coming up with the storyline and putting it all together. So I feel like our two personalities work well in doing this type of a podcast, because we are very different in our views and in our opinion sometimes. And so I feel like that lends for a nice conversation sometimes about these cases, and then it's interesting to see what our listeners think as well.

Matt Cundill  26:03  
I think it's great that you two have found each other and that you can do podcasts and compliment one another so well, the chemistry is obviously there. I would ask you to leave our audience with some advice, but I think the advice is, don't be a dirt bag.

Melissa  26:16  
That's exactly it. Just don't be a dirt bag. If you've accomplished nothing in life, just accomplish that. Don't be a dirt bag. If

Christie  26:24  
you're thinking about doing something, ask yourself, Is this something a dirt bag would do? If you think they would? Don't do it. It just comes down to that you don't have to be a dirt bag.

Matt Cundill  26:32  
Thanks so much for doing this and being on the show. Thank

Christie  26:36  
you so much for having us. Thanks Matt,

Matt Cundill  26:40  
my thanks to Christy and Melissa for joining me. They can be reached through their website@barrymotives.com and all connection points to their show is on our episode page at You may also like.net this episode was produced by Evan ster Minsky and edited by Taylor MacLean, and it's built with love by everyone at the sound off media company.