Podcasts

In this episode, I’ll introduce you to my family, the Halls. We were a lower tier crime family. We weren’t the Corleones, but back in the 1980’s and 90’s, we made national headlines! My mom – Phyllis – went from flirting with criminality to actually sleeping with it. She spent 6 months in prison for child endangerment. My stepdad – John Hall – was the Philadelphia PD’s favorite snitch. By the time he was done, he’d insert my family into two of Philly’s biggest unsolved murders. Ah, but first,…

Surviving one’s mother is a universal experience – if one survives. In this episode, I’ll tell you how I survived my mother – Phyllis Hall – a candidate for Worst Mom Ever. While the headline is her six months in prison for abandoning my younger sister, Phyllis did plenty of other awful things to fully earn that title….

It was hard enough growing up in a lower tier crime family. But, imagine growing up and feeling the whole time like you didn’t “belong” – like somehow you ended up with the wrong family. When I was 40, I learned that I was right – my actual biological dad was a sperm donor and none of the various men my mom and my family’s stories told me was my dad. But, I would also learn that the other family to which I did belong – my family of…

John Hall changed my family in many ways, none of them good. Once John and Phyllis hooked up, the Halls went from being petty criminals to “players”. John Hall would plunge our family into two of Philadelphia’s most notorious recent murders. But, first, John would change Phyllis from being just a really terrible mom into a flat out criminal one. Or, as the newspapers called her “The Home Alone Mom From Bucks County”….

THROUGH THE KEYHOLE: How lifelong criminal John Hall seduced my mom Phyllis into one – and then more – of his phony jailhouse confessions as a way to reduce his own considerable legal exposure. In this episode, an innocent man named WALTER OGROD pays a terrible price for thinking John Hall was his friend….

THROUGH THE KEYHOLE: Without a doubt, the very worst thing criminal mastermind John Hall did to my family was what he did to my brother Herb. He put Herb in prison for 18 months and made him stand trial for a brutal rape and murder he absolutely did not commit. And all because Herb had done the right thing – reporting to the authorities that John and my mom had been leaving our 12 year old youngest sister “home alone” (that’s how the newspapers reported it) in a dangerously…