Have you heard the Disgraceland podcast? Do you know about Jerry Lee Lewis wanting to murder Elvis? Or the hip-hop star who cannibalized his roommate? What about the murders ACDC was blamed for? Or the suspicious deaths of Brittany Murphy and River Phoenix? These stories and more are told in the award-winning Disgraceland podcast hosted by me, Jake Brennan, every Tuesday, where I dive deep into the dark side of entertainment and the connection between music history and true crime.
Londi's lead singer, Debbie Harry, was shocked when she saw the man's photo in the newspaper. She recognized him. How could she forget? He'd given her a ride years ago. A ride she'd barely escaped from with her life. And now... Here he was, right there on the front page, accused of kidnapping and killing at least 30 women. And now, Debbie Harry finally knew his name. Ted Bundy. Follow and listen to Disgraceland on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Get Adobe Express for free. Search for Adobe Express to find out more. So I moved here to Alabama with my husband. We moved from Indiana. In Indiana, I went to school for entrepreneurship from Ball State University and had a big desire for the startup world, entrepreneurship. Anything where people were starting a company, making a product, I was very fascinated by all of that. This is Emily Boss. In 2012, she moved to Opelika, Alabama.
a quaint former railroad hub of 30,000 people near the Georgia border. Her husband had taken a job for an auto engineering firm in town. But Emily wasn't sure how to put her entrepreneurship degree to work in a small town known mostly for its antique shops and Victorian-era architecture. I was a little concerned about moving here.
And I was really searching for connection in my community. And when I heard about this opportunity that there was an incubator space in my town, I was like, what? That's amazing. I didn't expect that to be in Opelika. I was like immediately like, I got to go find out about this. The space she found was called The Roundhouse. Its website described it as a startup incubator.
a place where entrepreneurs could come to grow their businesses. According to its website, its founder was a former tech executive named Kyle Sandler. I Facebook messaged Kyle, and he immediately responds within seconds. and said, come in, come in. We have our new location. We just got in here. You know, come meet me right now. And I thought, wow, OK, let me go see what this is about. I blindly walk in here and it's a big, huge open space, very undeveloped, but giant, lots of offices.
and kyle brings me into his office and i start telling him about myself and here's ball state university entrepreneurship program and his like eyes light up and he's like that's fascinating like you would be perfect for this position let's hire you right now It was so quick and so fast that I felt like I had this opportunity to be a part of something. And it was just like a dream almost too good to be true, you know? Like there was a catch to it.
I'm Jed Lipinski. This is Gone South. Before Emily Boss arrived in Opelika, the city was struggling to redefine itself. To lure industry and startups and to prevent young people from moving away, Opelika had invested millions in a citywide fiber-optic internet network. Upon its completion, Opelika had rebranded itself as Alabama's first gig city for its new one gigabit per second internet connection. But the one gig didn't immediately attract talent. The network was also crazily expensive.
$500 per month, more than twice the former rate. Only a handful of families signed up. It seemed like a failed experiment until Kyle Sandler appeared. Kyle was the entrepreneur-in-residence at nearby Auburn University. In a meeting with the mayor, Kyle proposed creating a startup incubator to exploit Opelika's new lightning-fast internet.
So the mayor, Gary Fuller, and I, we hit it off. This is Kyle Sandler. And I was talking to him about what was going on in other cities, especially like Chattanooga and Kansas, where they were capitalizing on the internet and Opelika was not. And it was a great thing, but it was going nowhere. And how could he use it for economic development? Kyle can't remember exactly what was said in that initial meeting with the mayor.
He might have mentioned the Droid Guy, a popular tech blog he founded that reviewed Android devices. He may have talked about Niblets.com. a small digital media company he launched to cover startups outside major tech hubs like Silicon Valley in New York. But at some point, the subject of his employment at Google came up.
I don't remember if I had told him that I went to Google or worked at Google or if other people had told him. But at that time, it had come into conversation and I never denied it. Kyle had never actually worked at Google. But he'd been to Google's headquarters many times as a tech blogger. His Facebook page was littered with photos of the place. When the mayor and others assumed that he worked there, Kyle didn't bother correcting them.
He also allowed them to think that he'd cashed out with an eight-figure payday and sold some other lucrative startups before settling in Auburn. Kyle seemed qualified and genuinely passionate about local entrepreneurship. The mayor was impressed. He helped Kyle find some empty office space near the town square and offered him free internet, plus some generous tax benefits. They named the place The Roundhouse and painted the words Alabama's fastest startup space above the entrance.
Kyle's first hire was Emily Boss. So what were your first impressions of Kyle when you met him at the Roundhouse? When I first met Kyle... I thought he was a very kind of nerdy, geeky kind of guy. He was short and he had kind of an unkemptness of him. But he had this ability to use his words. He was able to use these big words that Silicon Valley kind of startup tech people would use, not the type of language that you would hear in Alabama.
Kyle told Emily the same thing he told the mayor, that he'd been an early employee at Google and launched a few Silicon Valley startups that had huge exits. He now wanted to move to a city where he could... create something that he couldn't do in Silicon Valley. He needed a smaller town to recruit talent and find the next startup that could make millions.
But he wanted to share it with the community by building a portfolio of investors who would all contribute. And one day we'd have one payout from at least one company that would make it big. To make their communities dream a reality, they needed two things. Local entrepreneurs with big ideas and local investors to support them. Kyle and Emily immediately began scheduling pitch meetings.
His doors were wide open. If anyone wanted a meeting, they were allowed in. We would listen to four or five pitches a day and we would sit in there, you know. like a game show and listen to these. Sometimes good, sometimes interesting. Sometimes, you know, we would Google it and be like, this product already exists. It's on Amazon right now. But then there were some great ideas too. I mean, we had...
So many different companies that would come in and promote their idea and look for help. In between pitch meetings, Kyle sought out investors. His first stop was Opelika's Rotary Club. where local businessmen got together about once a week. So they were excited that we were doing something with this incredibly expensive internet, and we ended up staying over an hour and a half talking to all these different people.
I didn't pitch the investors like, hey, hey, hey, I need some money, I need some money. I created so much excitement, they would come up to me and be like, how can I get in? The way they got in was simple. An investment of $10,000 earned you one point of equity in the roundhouse. If a company went public or cashed out, that equity would get dispersed among the point holders, who would make a healthy return.
So a lot of these guys from the Rotary Club kind of understood this concept because many of them were business owners. So it was relatively easy to get that buy-in at $10,000. And then it becomes, that's all I can get? Well, no. I mean, if you want five, you can give me 50. You want 10. How much can I get for $100,000? 10 points of equity. All right, let's do that. So people were wanting to become part of our investment group in the roundhouse.
for anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000. Pretty soon, the formerly abandoned building was a hive of entrepreneurial activity, like something right out of Silicon Valley. Kyle made the place fun. I mean, we had a whole room of arcade machines. There was hoverboards everywhere. a giant snack bar that was free for anyone to take energy drinks, snacks, all that was included. The place was buzzing with people and kind of just a youthful...
vibe to it. The local media fawned over Kyle. An innovation-centered podcast, Ignite Alabama, featured him as its first guest. Kyle, in turn, played the role of hotshot tech CEO in small-town Alabama. He carried three iPhones at all times. He dined out constantly and seemed to drive a different luxury car every month. The very first thing that I bought with roundhouse money that may have been an iffy thing was a Hummer.
We got an H2 Hummer, but I got it wrapped around house. So it was like a promotional thing. And, you know, that was my daily driver for a little bit of time. And then I wanted to make that the work vehicle and needed another daily driver. So obviously I bought another car and then another car. One day he'd be driving a Porsche and the next day he's like going to get a Tesla. And then the next week he's driving a Maserati.
I was, you know, acting as if acting as if I was truly this big tech savant that had just transplanted myself into Opelika. In Kyle's mind. acting as if he were a millionaire tech CEO, might eventually turn him into one. And at the very least, it would draw attention to the roundhouse. Then, in the summer of 2015, Kyle saw an opportunity to align himself with an actual millionaire tech CEO, albeit one who had recently been accused of murder.
Hi, I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast unlike any other. Why? Because every case I cover comes from the heart of my home, New England. From the rocky Maine coast. to the historic streets of Boston, to the quiet corners of Vermont and beyond. I investigate stories filled with untold twists, enduring questions, and voices that deserve to be heard.
So if you're ready to explore the darker side of New England, join me every week for Dark Down East. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. College holds a mythic place in American culture. It's often considered the best four years of your life and hailed as a beacon of integrity and excellence. But beyond the polished campus tours, there are stories you won't find in the admissions pamphlets. The higher-ups are concerned about one thing, and that is avoiding scandal.
It's no wonder that college campuses capture the nation's attention, especially in moments of upheaval. I'm Margot Gray. Each week on the Campus Files podcast, we bring you a new story. It was the biggest academic scandal in the history of college sports and probably in the history of academia. On Campus Files, we cover...
Everything from rigged admissions to the drama of Greek life. A chancellor having a pornographic double life is an extremely rare case. Listen to and follow Campus Files, an Odyssey original podcast. Available now on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. What happens when fear and prejudice are ignited by the hysteria of war?
I'm Sharon McMing, host of Here's Where It Gets Interesting. I answer that question in my new series, 9066, and dig into the stories of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry. who were imprisoned in the United States during World War II. Find Here's Where It Gets Interesting in the free Odyssey app and everywhere you get your podcasts.
We begin with breaking news in the increasingly strange case of American software multimillionaire John McAfee, wanted for questioning in the Central American country of Belize for his neighbor's mysterious murder. If the name John McAfee doesn't ring a bell, you'd probably recognize the McAfee antivirus software logo on your computer screen. McAfee was an eccentric entrepreneur and computer programmer, best known for his cybersecurity program.
He died in 2021. But in 2012, as Opelika was laying the last miles of fiber optic cable, he was busy fleeing Belize, where authorities had accused him of killing his next-door neighbor. It is the latest in the bizarre tale of John McAfee, the software tycoon who's been on the lam for three weeks in a cat and mouse game with authorities in Belize. But tonight, McAfee was arrested by immigration authorities in Guatemala's capital.
McAfee was ultimately deported to the U.S. and cleared of any charges. He was living in seclusion in Tennessee and trying to launch a smartphone security company when Kyle reached out. Kyle knew that John was trying to rehabilitate his career after years of controversy and legal issues. He offered McAfee office space at the Roundhouse in exchange for mentoring some of his entrepreneurs. McAfee took him up on it.
Emily remembers being in awe of McAfee's presence. John McAfee had an extremely powerful, commanding voice. When he spoke, everyone in the room listened. He was also very paranoid. His big thing was you need to be covering up your cameras on your laptop like a sticker over where the camera is because people can turn that on without you knowing.
you know, never bring your phone into the shower with you, like very paranoid type of commentary. But also you were just kind of like, couldn't stop watching it or listening to it. Initially, McAfee brought an air of gravitas to the scrappy startup space. He invested $125,000 in the roundhouse, and he got it some serious media exposure. Not long after his arrival,
A reporter from USA Today heard that McAfee was working out of a tiny startup incubator in Alabama. When Kyle learned the story was running on the front page, he was ecstatic. Then he saw the photo they planned to run. Now, the photo that they took for this front page story has John in front of my roundhouse, in front of my building, where the marquee says, welcome Opelika Middle School. And he has two guns across his chest. Guns out in the picture.
John McAfee holding a pair of AR-15s outside the roundhouse wasn't the sort of PR they were hoping for. Emily says McAfee's presence caused the town's opinion of the roundhouse to shift. There's people that... did not like John McAfee and immediately thought of us poorly because of that element. As the space's community manager...
Emily found herself fielding questions from people concerned about the image Kyle was creating. Emily always defended him, partly because she'd seen his generosity up close. There was a little boy named Wendell who passed away and... We got 99 red balloons and we let them off for him. There was another little boy who had cancer and he took him to Toys R Us and let him go on a shopping spree. Kyle seemed to love the people of Opelika.
At the same time, his need to publicize every little act of generosity made Emily question his sincerity. So we would give the shopping spree to this little boy, but he invited news cameras there to... film it and to really, truly have self-promotion in his giving. And that kind of struck me. It made me one of the first things I was like, oh, that's weird.
Are we like doing this because we're doing this or are we doing this because we're getting publicity out of it? Still, local suspicions of Kyle were outweighed by his contributions to Opelika. After years of brain drain, ambitious young people were moving back to town. The energy was palpable. In appreciation for Kyle's efforts, the mayor of Opelika held a public ceremony declaring November 24, 2015,
Kyle's 40th birthday, as Kyle Sandler Day in Opelika. Meanwhile, one of the roundhouse's startups was starting to take off. It was called RecMed. Its inventor was a redheaded 13-year-old named Taylor Rosenthal. who Kyle had discovered through a young entrepreneurship program at Opelika Middle School. Here's how Kyle describes the idea.
He originally had an idea to set up pop-up tents at sporting events to sell band-aids and first aid materials for... spectators to these events because injuries happen when you're at tournaments and things and we evolved that idea through him coming at the roundhouse
to let's find a way to do it as a vending machine so that we can put it in amusement parks and baseball parks and things of that nature. At its core, RecMed was a vending machine for first aid kits. There were similar products out there. But in 2016, Kyle managed to secure RecMed a spot at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Taylor pitched the idea to Mark Cuban. Taylor later became the youngest person ever accepted into TechCrunch Disrupt.
a major annual tech conference in New York City. When he got the news, Kyle wrote up a glowing press release. He claimed Taylor had already turned down a $30 million offer from an unnamed consumer products company in the home and healthcare space. Taylor and Roundhouse investors took his word for it. So did a bunch of major TV networks.
Fox Business has called. Fox and Friends has called. CNBC has called. So, you know, we end up doing all of the media while we're in New York. Here's Taylor talking to journalist Stuart Varney on Fox Business.
I said earlier that you were a very smart young man. What are you doing turning down $30 million at the age of 14? It took a while to think about it, but we had... felt like the time wasn't right we kind of wanted to grow and develop the company a little bit more and maybe later in the run it'd be worth a little bit more there we go really i hate to do this but if somebody offered you 50 million dollars today
According to Kyle, the idea wasn't just smoke and mirrors. They got genuine interest from some big healthcare brands. We did take a trip to New York on Johnson & Johnson's dime so that Taylor could preach rec med to Johnson & Johnson, and they saw some value. We also were talking by phone and email to Walgreens.
RecMed seemed like the kind of big idea that had first convinced locals to invest in the roundhouse. Investors were thrilled to think it might soon make an exit. But then, nothing happened. RecMed didn't sell. Investors were appalled that Kyle had turned down a $30 million offer. They began to think that there'd never been an offer in the first place, that Kyle was lying, which begged the question, what else was he lying about?
By the spring of 2016, Kyle Sandler was spending less and less time at the roundhouse. There were a couple reasons for this. The first was that John McAfee had decided to launch a different kind of startup. Is it official? Are you running for president? Have you filed the papers to run for president? I filed the papers on Tuesday. I'm officially running. Yes, ma'am. And what is your party? It's the cyber party.
When McAfee announced his bid for the presidency under his own political banner, he decided to appoint Kyle as his campaign manager. Kyle is like, yes, like this is good press for us that, you know, a presidential candidate is running from the roundhouse. I mean, how wild does that sound? And so again, he brings in the news cameras.
Emily remembers the circus-like atmosphere that McAfee's campaign brought to Opelika. And to me, I'm thinking, well, this isn't really important to our mission here. You know, we're supposed to be fostering startup companies. Meanwhile, Kyle had opened a new roundhouse location in Mobile, 200 miles away. And rumor had it, he'd found a girlfriend there. The demands of running McAfee's campaign...
Launching a new incubator and his budding romance kept Kyle away from Opelika for weeks on end. By now, more than 50 investors had poured close to $2 million into Kyle and the roundhouse. They'd produced some promising startups. but nothing remotely on the verge of cashing out. Investors wanted to know, where is all our money actually going?
We had a lot of the investors from Opelika come down and asking me what's going on with RecMed, what's going on with Opelika, why am I not ever in Opelika? I'm starting to get uncomfortable. So as people begin to be more angry or anxious, Kyle and I have some hard conversations about what are the next steps? How are we going to get...
roundhouse to be on the track of the dream that you painted for me. And I'm saying, you got to work with people to get there. You need to come and meet us, meet them at the table. Let's have a meeting and get some questions answered. So Kyle scheduled a shareholders meeting to allay investors' concerns. So at the beginning of October of 2016, I do come back up from Mobile for a few days. I have a shareholders meeting.
Everybody comes in and I did a presentation on the video board that I was getting an annuity every year on my birthday of a million dollars. And I say, anybody that wants to be bought out, I'll buy you back out for what you put in.
right after my birthday, which is November 24th. So, you know, right around the 1st of December, I will get you guys squared away if you want to get out. Like 30 of them had said they did. Kyle told investors that the million dollar annuity was from his days at Google. But of course, Kyle had never worked at Google. There was no annuity. When you're up there talking at the shareholders meeting and you tell them that you have this.
annual annuity that comes to you from Google. What's going on in your head as you're telling the shareholders that? At this point in time, it's over and I know it. And I'm just trying to delay. The 1st of December came and went with no news of a buyout. In Kyle's absence, Emily had taken over the roundhouse's day-to-day operations.
She did all the marketing, promotions, and membership contracts. Everything except the accounting, because Kyle wouldn't give her access to the books. Which was a problem, because a parade of bill collectors had started showing up. Opelika Power Service threatened to turn off the lights. Emily demanded that Kyle come and meet with her in person. Finally, Kyle comes to the roundhouse.
And he's very kind of jittery. He sits down in the coworking space and starts like kind of typing on his computer. And then he calls me and my colleague, who was our chief technical officer, brings us into the office and sits us down. And he slides this piece of paper across the counter to me and my colleague.
And he says, look, this is my Fidelity report. Like I have a lot of money in the bank. My annuity's here. Like, don't worry. Everything's going to be fine. We're going to buy out everybody. And my colleague looks at me and looks at Kyle and he says, that is fake. That isn't real. I saw you just now in the coworking space.
on Photoshop, putting that Fidelity logo on there. This isn't real, Kyle. You're not real. I have... never felt like a pain in my chest the way I felt in that moment because that's when I knew that he was a fraud. Kyle gathered the Roundhouse employees together a few days later to announce that he was shutting the space down. At that time, you know, I confirmed to Emily, there is no money. There is no money coming in. Everything's over.
Emily may have been convinced that Kyle was a fraud, but she still had trouble accepting that there was no money left. I still thought, okay, but... Like you have the money that everyone gave you. Like, don't you? I even had to pull him aside one more time. And I'm like, so you don't, you really don't have the money. Like you don't have the money. And he was like, no, I don't.
And did he say what he'd spend it on? No, he never said that to me. Years after that meeting with Emily, I asked Kyle the same question. Just to clarify. Where had all the money gone? Where had the $2 million investment gone? I was living a lifestyle that was well beyond my means, trying to portray an image I didn't have. And earlier we spoke about having different cars. When it's all said and done, when I look through some of the discovery with the FBI and everything, there was...
24 cars, two houses, like 50 trips, and anything that I wanted to buy, I bought. Outside of paying the few people that worked for me at the roundhouse, I spent like every last dime on pretty much personal stuff. Not long after the Photoshop incident, Emily and the Roundhouse's two dozen small business owners showed up to find the doors locked. Kyle was nowhere to be found. Hours later,
A handful of irate investors descended on the place and managed to get inside. They came in like a fury. I mean I have never seen anything like it. They tore apart his office. They tore apart his file, pulling all his files out. They were clearly very upset and out for blood, honestly.
At that point, the Roundhouse crew finally began digging into Kyle's background, something that, in retrospect, they wished they'd done a lot sooner. A lot of people get their, you know... google investigator skills on and you know we're just sitting around like trying to piece together who this man was that we actually believed in this whole time
A quick Google search revealed that Kyle had grown up in Baltimore and had a history of fraudulent activities. He'd been convicted for attempted theft and forgery in 2010, though he'd avoided prison time. A few years later, He'd stiffed dozens of vendors and contractors for a botched tech conference he'd organized in Memphis. Kyle had founded a few small media companies, TheDroidGuy and Niblets.com, but they didn't sell for the millions he'd claimed.
and there was no evidence he'd ever worked for Google. When people went looking for Kyle, they found his house empty. He appeared to have skipped town. A few weeks later, Emily got a surprise visit from a local FBI agent. And we sit and it's a four hour meeting with this FBI lady and she's not what you think at all. She's wearing this like pink tweed suit and she's got blonde hair. I just remember thinking to myself like.
This is not what I expected. And at this point, you know, I was unsure if they were going to catch him or not. You know, he was on the run. But when I left the meeting, I remember her kind of giving me this like look like, don't worry, we got him. It would take another 18 months, but the FBI did finally get him. They set a trap at a car dealership in Bryan, Texas, and Kyle walked right into it. I go to the dealership to see this vehicle.
And a detective from the Bryan Police Department says, hey, Kyle, can I talk to you for a second? I'm Detective Shua from the Bryan Police. And I turn around and there's 20 agents back there. And that was it. That was the end. It turns out Kyle had been living under an assumed name in a small town outside Houston. The AP reported that he and a young woman had formed a startup media company with plans to sell as much as $650 million in shares.
with a minimum investment of $10,000. News of Kyle's arrest quickly reached Opelika. So on the day that they arrested Kyle, my phone starts blowing up. I mean, someone actually sends me the video of him getting arrested and we're all just like, yeah. There were people at the bar who were cheersing to his imprisonment.
Kyle ultimately pled guilty to wire fraud and securities fraud. The judge sentenced him to five years in federal prison and ordered him to return $1.9 million to his investors. By then, the investors had learned what Kyle spent their money on. The local DA told reporters that Kyle knew exactly what he was doing when he came to Opelika. John McAfee, who was then living on a boat in the Caribbean to avoid prosecution for failing to pay his taxes,
tweeted a video commenting on Kyle's arrest. Good morning, everyone. The Washington Post today did a story about one of the slickest con artists I've ever met named Kyle Sandler. I met him in Opelika, Alabama. We became friends, and I got sucked into his scams like everybody else. In prison, Kyle had a lot of time to reflect on his days in Opelika.
He thought about all the people who'd believed in him and his vision for turning Opelika into a startup capital of the South. No one had believed in him more than Emily. So when I was sitting in the county jail in Montgomery, Alabama... I wrote her a letter apologizing to her for lying to her so much and how if I hadn't been so reckless and so greedy and so deceitful.
that this could have been a very good thing. Emily, meanwhile, was traumatized by Kyle's deceits and the death of the roundhouse. She felt that Kyle had exploited her ability to foster community for his own gain. So he used me to do that. And that's what I felt like he robbed from me was I became very closed off from the world. I became very scared to share myself with people.
But with time, Emily managed to open herself back up. A local businessman leased the old roundhouse building and tapped Emily to help turn it into a co-working space instead of a business incubator. So it was like... I knew what the business model needed to be from Kyle's failures, but it was actually very hard because now we have the stain on us. The community is looking at us like, well, you guys were led by a con artist. How do you turn that around?
But they did turn it around. The space, now known as Colab Opelika, is thriving. They've expanded to three additional locations in town, with 92 companies and close to 200 members. Way more than the Roundhouse ever had. I've witnessed these small businesses grow and mature. And move on to bigger and better spaces because we gave them a start. We gave them a very low overhead. And it's been so great for our community. And what it is now is just like the most beautiful.
most proud thing I can be of, you know. It really is a community that Kyle gave me the dream. He just didn't know how to make it happen. And I did. If you have information, story tips, or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone South team, please email us at gonesouthpodcast at gmail.com. That's gonesouthpodcast at gmail.com.
We're on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram at gone south podcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on Substack at gone south with Jed Lipinski. Gone South is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created, written, and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman, Maddie Sprung-Kaiser, Tom Lipinski, Lloyd Lockridge, and me. Our story editors are Tom Lipinski,
Maddie Sprung-Kaiser, and Joel Lovell. Gone South is edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Basil and Andy Jaskiewicz. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to J.D. Crowley, Leah Reese Dennis, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. If you want to hear more of Gone South, please take a few seconds to rate and review the show. It really helps.