You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand, KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. This is Unsolved with Steve Gregory. Welcome to our special edition Holiday Homicides. In the next couple hours, we're going to review some homicides that happened during the traditional holiday season, beginning around Thanksgiving and
going through Christmas and ending New Year's Day. Typically, overall crime tends to slow down during the holiday season, but when there's a murder during the holidays, it attracts more attention because it's unusual, especially because it's a time of celebration, family and self reflection. But if there is a planned connection, a premeditation between the holidays and a murder, that makes it even more heinous.
Sociologist and author Richard Gels says there are three primary reasons for holiday violence. The first, money, which impacts a struggling family during the holiday season, spending on Thanksgiving dinn Christmas dinner, gifts, and it's worse if the couple or the family had been struggling for a long time. Number two, something Gels calls forced intimacy, with most stores and restaurants closed and relatives who are already stressed out feel an obligation to be together all day and that stress
can compound. And the third reason, he says, is the happiness gap. Gels says that all the TV advertisements, all the TV specials are about how loving and wonderful families are and how life seems so bliss and wonderful, which of course is a bit of a myth. So we're going to walk you through some cases that happened from Thanksgiving to New Year's and whilst some have apparent motives, others don't, but they all have one thing in common.
They're one of the holiday homicides. And caution, some of this material is very graphic. Our first case comes out of Knoxville, Tennessee. Thanksgiving twenty sixteen, twenty eight year old Joel Michael Guy Junior traveled from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, back home to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he reunited with his three sisters and their parents for Thanksgiving festivities. At the end of the evening, the three daughters, who all lived in Tennessee, returned to their homes.
Junior was left alone with his parents. Joel Guy Senior, who was sixty one and Lisa Guy, who was fifty five. Junior and his three half sisters attended what was to be the last event at the Knoxville House Thanksgiving on Thursday, November twenty fourth, twenty sixteen. Now Here is some background on all of the principles. Joel Michael Guy Senior was a pipeline engineering designer.
Now Lisa Guy. The mom was a human resources account's payable administrator. The son, Joel Michael Guy Junior, graduated from the Louisiana School from Math, Science and the Arts in natchetochis in twenty oh six. He previously attended Hanville High School. He'd never worked and had always been supported by his family. Junior was described by others as distant, an outsider, never bothered to establish a relationship with anyone in or outside of his family. His mother doated on
him and bragged about him quite a bit. He spent a semester at George Washington University, then attended Louisiana State University. As a student. He lived in Baton Rouge until the murders in twenty sixteen. He wanted to become a plastic surgeon. The Guys had recently sold their Knoxville house and planned to retire and move out of town. They also planned to stop providing money to Junior. Now, in the event of the parent's death, the son was to
receive five hundred thousand dollars in life insurance money. Prosecutors say Junior hatched an elaborate plot to stab both parents, dismember and dissolve their remains clean, and burn down some of the house, as well as framed the father for the crime. Again another warning, some of this is very graphic. So let's
go back to November twenty sixth. Officials say that's when Junior attacked and killed his father with a knife in a second floor exercise room while his mother was out shopping for groceries at Walmart. The scene showed evidence of a struggle, with torn blinds, blood on the wall corner, and an overturned bowflex machine. The mom, Lisa Guy, arriving home. She entered through the front door, dropped the groceries on the floor of the foyer, proceeded upstairs.
She was attacked then killed with a knife. Nine of her ribs were severed. Now, this all started because Lisa's boss was suspicious of her absence from work and called police for a welfare check. At first, Knox County officers Stephen Ballard and Jeremy McCord found a seemingly empty house on Golden View Lane. The property had been for sale. Remember they were retired and wanted to move out of town, but there was no real estate lock on the front door.
They found that the doorknob of a back door had been removed and installed on the front door. Through the front door, they could see groceries on the floor, including perishable items such as bacon, sausage, and ice cream, and through the hole left by the missing back door knob, they could sense heat and a strange smell coming from the house. An officer used a garage door opener in one of the cars to gain access to the house.
Now. When they first walked in, they found a table with the wallets from the parents and a sledgehammer on top, and then another table with long guns. Downstairs, the stove was on and the contents of a pot were boiling. At the bottom of the stairs were the grocery items that were seen earlier. The officers went up the stairs and they heard a barking dog. They looked down a hallway and they saw the father's hands on the floor and
discovered the dismembered corpses in solution in a bathroom. Among other items investigators found upstairs were sewer line cleaner, a bag of baking soda, drain cleaner, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen peroxide, bleach, and a bleached sprayer and drain opener. Investigators say they also noticed a note in an open suitcase with the name and address of a Louisiana Ace hardware store with a notation about sewer line cleaner.
Investigators soon discovered the father's hands were removed at the wrists and left nearby on the exercise room floor. The head of Junior's mother was removed. It was carried downstairs, placed in a pot on the stove, and at the trial, the forensic examiner testified the head was not just severed, but broken off with force. Both the mom and the dad also had their arms and legs disarticulated, that means broken apart from the joints. The father was disjointed
at the waist, the mother at the knees. Their limbs and torsos were placed in a bin full of chemicals to dissolve. Each body had a large gash inflicted after death so that the chemicals would more quickly seep into the body's mean cavities. Now through all of this, Junior had sustained several cuts to his hands, including a deep cut to his left thumb. Later that afternoon, he was seen in walmart in the first aid section, buying bandages and
ointment for the wounds to his hands. He also purchased alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. On that Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend, Junior drove back to Baton Rouge to have his