Transcript
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The following is for mature audiences only.
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So if you aren't cool with dark, disturbing and depraved, you might want to keep it moving.
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Welcome to 10 Minute Murder.
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10 Minute Murder.
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When Peter Porco woke up on November 15th, 2004, he went about his morning routine like nothing happened.
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Brushed his teeth, packed a lunch, even wrote a check for his son.
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The problem? He had been hit in the head with an axe, 16 times.
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Upstairs, his wife Joan was found in their bed, clinging to life after a similar attack.
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Before slipping into a coma, Joan named her attacker, and it wasn't a stranger.
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It was someone she knew, someone she loved.
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But here's where things get messy.
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Alibis, yellow jeeps, fraud, and a web of lies that had been building long before the attack ever happened.
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This is the story of the Porco family, a tragic crime, and the son at the center of it all.
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But before we get into that story, if you like your true crime brief and bingeable, you have found the right podcast.
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Tap the follow button for access to at least two episodes per week.
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Now, let's get into it.
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For Peter Porco, November 15th, 2004, wasn't supposed to be memorable.
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It was just another Monday.
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The kind of day you'd coast right through without a second thought.
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The 52-year-old court clerk in Del Mar New York started his morning like he always did.
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One steady step after the next.
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He freshened up in the bathroom mirror, ran through his mental to-do list, packed his lunch, and loaded the dishwasher.
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Somewhere between these small, unremarkable tasks, he even found time to write a check for one of his sons in college.
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A small act of care nestled into the routine.
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And then, like countless mornings before, Peter stepped outside to grab the paper.
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The front door locked behind him.
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A small inconvenience, sure, but Peter was the kind of man who planned ahead.
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He walked to the hidden spot where the family kept their spare key, retrieved it, and let himself back inside the house.
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That's where his morning and his life veered sharply off course.
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Peter collapsed just a few steps into his home. His body hitting the floor.
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But here's where the story stops resembling anything you'd expect.
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Peter wasn't dead. Not yet. He wasn't even entirely aware he was dying.
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The truth was that Peter had been attacked hours earlier.
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Struck 16 times in the head with an axe.
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One of those blows split his skull.
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Another took a piece of his jaw, but not a single one of those injuries alone was enough to kill him.
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By some impossible twist of biology or sheer stubbornness, Peter woke up that morning.
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His body, operating on autopilot, carried him through the mundane steps of a day he wouldn't live to see.
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For hours, Peter moved as though nothing had happened.
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It's almost incomprehensible. His skull fractured. His body struggled to hold itself together.
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Yet still going through the motions.
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When Peter didn't show up at the courthouse, his co-workers grew concerned.
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It wasn't like him to be late. Let alone a no-show.
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They sent a courthouse to perform a welfare check at his house.
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And that's when the grim truth came into focus.
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Peter's body was found sprawled in the foyer. His morning routine ended where it began.
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But this wasn't the only horror the officer would uncover.
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Upstairs was something worse, waiting. Something that would turn an already shocking case into a true nightmare.
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While Peter Porco's body lay in the foyer, a nightmare continued upstairs.
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And the couple's blood-soaked bed was Joan Porco, barely clinging to life.
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The attack on Joan had been devastating. Her skull fractured, her left eye destroyed.
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But against all odds, she was alive.
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Even more astonishing was what she managed to do. On her way to the hospital, Joan identified her attacker.
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A revelation that added another layer of horror to an already unthinkable crime.
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The person she named wasn't a stranger or a random intruder.
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It was her youngest son, Christopher Porco.
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Christopher, then a college student, wasn't a stranger to law enforcement.
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Or to his parents' patients being tested.
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His name was already tied to a series of burglaries and fraud schemes, including one particularly brazen incident at his own family's home.
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During that break-in, Christopher had stalled in two laptops, cleverly removing the security camera beforehand.
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But his cleverness only went so far. He'd made a rookie mistake, disabling the family security system with their own access code.
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Investigators immediately noted this wasn't an outsider doing it.
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It was someone who knew the house and knew the systems inside and out.
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Christopher's creative problem-solving didn't end there.
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He was also known for running scams on eBay, selling items he didn't actually own, or simply pocketing the money and ghosting the buyers.
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By the time his account was suspended, he had already swindled hundreds of dollars from unsuspecting victims.
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For Christopher, lying wasn't just a habit. It was practically a second language.
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He dodged his parents' calls so often they resorted to emailing him.
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Those emails, in turn, created a digital breadcrumb trail of his deceptions.
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Explain yourself.
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One email demanded, after Peter and Joan received Christopher's abysmal report card from Hudson Valley Community College.
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Christopher's grades had tanked again.
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And he'd already been expelled from the University of Rochester for similar reasons.
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When Christopher finally responded days later, he deflected blame with a confidence of someone who had been perfecting this craft for years.
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"Don't jump to conclusions," he wrote.
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"Obviously, they are incorrect. My lowest grade that I got on anything was a B."
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Christopher's charm and audacity kept him one step ahead of his parents, at least for a while.
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Christopher Porco didn't just lie his way back into his parents' good graces.
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He lied his way back into the University of Rochester, too.
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Armed with forged transcripts from Community College, Christopher managed to con his way into a second chance at a higher education.
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But instead of using this opportunity to clean up his act, he went all in on his double life of deceit.
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To explain his earlier expulsion from Rochester, Christopher spun a tale as bold as it was fake.
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He claimed a professor had misplaced one of his finals papers.
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And once the University realized their mistake, they supposedly begged him to return.
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Oh, and as a goodwill gesture, they even offered to cover his tuition.
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Of course, none of that was true.
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To pay for his tuition, Christopher forged his father Peter's signature on a loan application.
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Then, clearly satisfied with his handiwork, he forged another loan.
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This time to buy himself a bright yellow Jeep.
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A kind of vehicle that doesn't exactly blend into the crowd.
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Peter Porco discovered Christopher's fraud just two weeks before his murder.
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His frustration came through loud and clear in an email to his son.
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"I'm calling city bank this morning."
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He didn't stop there.
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In another email he added, "I want you to know that if you abuse my credit again, I will be forced to file for Jury Affidavits."
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But even in the face of such betrayal, Peter couldn't bring himself to be so harsh.
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He softened his words with a reminder of unconditional love.
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We may be disappointed with you, but your mother and I still love you and care about your future.
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Little did Peter know, those words would be some of the last he would ever write to his son.
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Not long after the attack on Peter and Joan, investigators turned their attention to Christopher.
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In an interview with the police, Christopher claimed that he had been asleep on a dorm sofa three hours away from his parents' home on the night of the attack.
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Convenient? Yeah, sure.
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Beliefable? Not quite.
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Interviews with his fellow students yielded no one who could confirm seeing him asleep that night.
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But security footage told a very different story.
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At 10.30pm, a yellow Jeep, the same one Christopher had purchased with a forged loan, was caught leaving the university parking lot.
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A toll booth worker remembered seeing the bright vehicle pass through their station roughly 15 minutes later.
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Another recalled spotting it in Albany around 2am, eerily close to the time of the attack.
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By 8.30am, the same Jeep was seen returning to the campus parking lot right before the news of the attack broke.
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Investigators pieced together what they believed happened.
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Christopher had driven the three hour stretch from his dorm to his parents' home, committed the attack, and driven back before sunrise, hoping to solidify an alibi.
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Initially, Joan Porco pointed investigators directly at her son, identifying Christopher as the attacker before she was placed into a medically-induced coma.
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But after she woke up, Joan's story changed.
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She now claimed Christopher was innocent and begged authorities to search for her husband's real killer.
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Despite Joan's reversal, the evidence against Christopher kept piling up.
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DNA from a toll booth placed him on the road that night, and neighbors reported seeing the unmistakable yellow Jeep outside of his parents' house.
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Christopher's defense team tried a bold strategy.
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They argued that Peter's murder might have been nothing to do with Christopher at all.
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Instead, they pointed the finger at Peter's extended family.
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Peter's uncle, Frank, had once been a captain and notorious banana crime family, earning the nickname "The Fireman."
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The murder weapon, a fireman's axe found in the Porco's garage, added an air of possibility to this theory.
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The problem, the axe bore no fingerprints or DNA to tie it to a specific person, leaving the theory little more than speculation.
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The jury did not take very long to deliberate.
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Christopher Porco, just 23 years old, was convicted of second-degree murder for his father's death and attempted murder for the attack on his mother.
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He was sentenced to 50 years to life on each count and won't be eligible for parole until 2052.
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In 2023, Christopher spoke to a reporter, claiming he had filed a motion for ineffective counsel.
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According to him, his defense team had lost crucial paperwork that could exonerate him.
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Is this the truth or another of Christopher's well-rehearsed fabrications to escape accountability?
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Time will tell if his latest claim holds up or if it crumbles like the lies that came before it.
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[Music]
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That is 10-minute murder for today.
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Brief and bingeable true crime.
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I'm Joe. I'm the host. Thank you for taking the time to listen to my little podcast.
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And I call it little. And to me, it is small. There's a ton of you that listen.
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If you look at the yearly numbers, we're talking about seven figures here.
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They're a bunch of you that listen.
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However, to me, it's just me in this little room, not you aren't in this room.
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I can, I'm visually, I'm seeing your face. You right there that I'm talking to you.
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I'm talking to you. Why are you looking away? You. I'm talking to you.
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Not me, not Hermione. You.
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That's, I'm imagining your face as I'm telling the story.
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So to me, it seems small. I'm in a small room and I'm talking to an imaginary person in front of my face here.
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That's the way I prefer it. If you, if thousands of people were sitting all around me while I'm telling the story,
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it'd be a little bit weird. So I'm glad that it feels small for me.
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That's what she said.
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But you get what I'm saying. I really do appreciate you listening to this podcast.
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That feels small but is actually pretty big.
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However, I would like for it to continue to get larger and larger.
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And the only way to do that is for you to share this podcast with your friends and family.
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It's kind of a partnership that you and I have here.
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I tell the story, you listen to the story, and then tell your friends and family about the story.
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Let me explain how you would do that.
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And I'll use something else that I also do to help you.
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Let's, let's roleplay for a second.
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Hey, what's up?
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Yeah, not much. I've just been, you know, hanging out, working, you know, doing a little thing.
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Hey, I did. I was listening to this thing the other day on this podcast called "Ten Minute Mystery."
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The guy was talking about giants and stuff from the Bible and if the Bible mentions giants and by the way it does,
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it's a crazy episode. You should check it out. It's a podcast called "Ten Minute Mystery."
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See what I did there?
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That's, that is how you would tell your friends and family maybe about this podcast or about "Ten Minute Mystery,"
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that other podcast that I do.
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Alright.
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That is your episode for today.
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If you're off to binge more, don't let me stop you.
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Or you could check out "Ten Minute Mystery," if you've caught up on all the "Ten Minute Murder" episodes.
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But again, thank you so much for listening. Bye.
