The Tesco Bomber & a Sinister Minister

John Purnell was having a pretty normal day at his job as head of security for Great Britain’s biggest supermarket chain. Then he got a bizarre phone call from a local newscaster. The newscaster said they’d found a troubling document in their photocopier. The document was an extortion letter, aimed at Tesco. In it, a person calling themselves “SALLY,” threatened to send bombs to Tesco customers. The bombs would get bigger, and deadlier, unless Tesco paid up.

Then Brandi tells us about Joe Musante, who was discovered dead in his pastor’s office. Investigators determined Joe’s death to be a suicide, but his sister, Rose, had questions. Hadn’t her brother and his wife recently been seeing their minister, AB Schirmer for marital counseling? When investigators looked into AB’s history, they discovered his wife had died tragically. And so had the one before her.

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.

The documentary “Real Crime: Supermarket Heist”
“Forgive me, says baby food poisoner as he goes free,” The Free Library.com
“Tesco blackmail ‘bomber’ jailed,” BBC News

“Inside the capture of Robert Dyer the supermarket blackmailer who threatened to bomb Tesco customers,” by Jennifer Newton for The Sun

“Sinister Minister” episode Accident Murder or Suicide

“Death At The Parsonage” episode 48 Hours

“DA Describes Prosecuting The ‘Sinister Minister,’ Who Had 2 Wives Die Under Mysterious Circumstances” by Benjamin H. Smith, oxygen.com

“Former Lebanon pastor A.B. Schirmer sentenced in first wife's death” by Barbara Miller, Penn Live

“Porn-addict pastor killed two wives and managed to make them look like accidents for years” by Akshay Pai, meaww.com

 

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