Episode 42: Stunning: A Very 80s Story of Love, Lies and Murder, Pt 2

In part 1, we introduced you to John Hawkins, a movie-star handsome young party guy with an endless appetite for sex and scamming—and Gene Hanson, his much older friend/business partner/possible lover. After a few years of unsuccessful scams, the two men had finally launched a successful, legitimate business selling workout gear. But then it all went to hell when, after a year of supposed health problems, Gene turned up dead of a heart attack on his doctor’s exam room floor. John Hawkins was left to pick up the pieces and move on, albeit $1.5 million richer from Gene’s life insurance policies. However, when we left you at the end of part 1, a routine investigation by the life insurance company had alerted detectives to the astounding fact that the man who had died in that doctor’s office was NOT Gene Hanson after all. Now investigators were scrambling to figure out who the hell he was—and where the hell Gene Hanson was hiding.

Sources:

Vanity Fair, "The Murder Hustle" by Ann Bardach. October 1989. Timeline of the case from "Forensic Files Now:" https://forensicfilesnow.com/index.php/2017/06/29/just-sweats-fraud-murder/ LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-10-14-me-56965-story.html AP News: https://apnews.com/6056d3bf876f8f4989241f55f32b3831 Oxygen's "Snapped: Killer Couples," episode "John Hawkins and Gene Hanson" Columbus Dispatch: https://www.dispatch.com/article/20140521/NEWS/305219823

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