135: Love Stories

This week, we covered two romantic entanglements that’ll have you reaching for the puke bucket. Burt Pugach was a wealthy, married lawyer when he met 21-year-old Linda Riss on a park bench in New York City. Linda wasn’t particularly attracted to Burt, but he was pushy. They’d been dating a while when Linda discovered that Burt was married. Burt had a million excuses, but Linda didn’t buy any of them. She decided to move on with her life. But Burt made that impossible. Then Kristin tells us a truly revolting catfishing tale. In 2005, Thomas Montgomery was living the life of a married suburban dad. But Tom was unfulfilled. So he got online. He quickly fell into conversation with an 18-year-old high school student who went by the screenname Talhotblond. She sent him pictures of herself. She was gorgeous, and she wanted to see pictures of him. What was a balding, 40-something man to do? Lie his ass off.  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. In this episode, Kristin pulled from: The documentary “Talhotblond” And several unsuccessful google searches In this episode, Brandi pulled from: “Crazy Love” Documentary “It’s Me and Burt Against The World” by Paul Schwartzman, The Washington Post “Meet the Pugachs” by Marianne Macdonald, The Guardian “Linda Riss Pugach, Whose Life Was Ripped From Headlines, Dies at 75” by Margalit Fox, The New York Times