169: Cold French Fries & a Texas A&M Professor

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Cindy Reese had a bad feeling. The second she opened her front door, she saw that her house had been ransacked. She called for her husband, Michael, but he didn’t answer. Clearly, something was wrong. So Cindy called the police. When they arrived, police discovered Michael Reese dead on the kitchen floor. He’d been shot execution style. Cindy was stunned. As she told it, she’d narrowly missed encountering the murderer herself. She and Michael had been to church that evening, and afterward they got some fast food. When they arrived home, Cindy remembered she needed some orange juice and ham from the grocery store. She told Michael to take their dinner inside. She’d eat with him after she got back from the Piggly Wiggly. But investigators didn’t buy Cindy’s story.

Then Kristin tells us about the suicide of a Texas A&M professor. James Aune was a pretty big deal. He was a tenured professor who’d authored two books on rhetoric. He had the respect of his peers and his students. But James had a dark side. He spent a lot of time online, mostly in chat rooms. One day, he met an 18-year-old woman named Karen. James was smitten. He opened up to the teenager, and she did the same. Eventually, Karen confessed that she wasn’t 18. She was 16. James didn’t have a problem with that. In fact, he exchanged nude pictures with her. Then it backfired.

And now for a note about our process. For each episode, Kristin reads a bunch of articles, then spits them back out in her very limited vocabulary. Brandi copies and pastes from the best sources on the web. And sometimes Wikipedia. (No shade, Wikipedia. We love you.) We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the real experts who covered these cases.

In this episode, Kristin pulled from:
“Web of Lies” ID show, titled, “Online Education”
“The strange and sordid end of an A&M professor,” by Ross Dubois for Texas Monthly
“Man accused of blackmailing Texas A&M professor pleads not guilty,” by Maggie Kiely for The Eagle
“FBI says man was blackmailing Texas A&M professor before suicide,” by Maggie Kiely for The Eagle
“Man gets year in prison for extorting Texas A&M professor,” Associated Press

In this episode, Brandi pulled from:
“Even The Devil Went To Church” episode Dateline
“Cindy Reese” episode Snapped
“Michael Reese’s Wife Shot & Killed Him to Be With Her Pastor” by Caroline Warnock, heavy.com
“Church-goer and her pastor lover killed her husband so they could be together” by Gail Shortland, The Mirror
“Cindy Reese sentenced to prison for 2015 murder of her Morris husband” by Ivana Hrynkiw, AL.com
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