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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader Spencer Henry and boy, am I happy to see you? Don't look at me like that. Listen, we were gone last week. Took the week off to mourn my 20s. I needed a breather, but here I am. I'm 30. Flirty. I'm new. I spent pretty much the last month in Palm Springs with Olivia. It was so nice.

I used to get a true solid break and now I'm home. In my office for the first time, I have an office now. Please, won't you step into my office? Can I get you an outtoyed from my drawer of my desk? Case closed. Anywho, I'll say initially when we decided to go for a month, we were like, are we gonna get bored here? But to be honest, it went by really fast. What is this? What is my eat prey love podcast? Welcome to my eat prey.

I'm a eat prey love podcast. Listen in on one man's journey from discovering myself from within and without Namaste. We stopped by this little store in downtown Palm Springs while I was there and we were just grabbing something and I ended up buying this book called Palm Springs True Crime by Eric Meeks because, well, of course I did.

To be honest, our family has always spent so much time in Palm Springs. So I've always wanted to do a story from Palm Springs, but none of them ever really stood out for me. I think I was always just doing like a quick Google search while I was down there, like Palm Springs murder. And nothing, nothing ever really caught my fancy, but this book, I'll tell you guys, I was like, if I get this, maybe I'll get some good spooky inspo and would you believe it? I did. Reading.

In my life changing, everyone read a book. Last episode we covered one of the most infamous cases, like ever. And while I love a notorious true crime story, I'm usually so much more interested in the stories that I haven't heard of. Stories that frankly just need to be shared. So that's where we are headed today. Now Palm Springs, it's an interesting place. It's interesting in the sense that it's very much a mixed bag.

You have very working class neighborhoods, these spread out cities full of locals, and then you have all of these like country club gated communities thrown about in like Rancho Maraj, and I feel like it's very vacation vibes in that sense, right? Like a lot of places that are notable travel destinations are usually surrounded by neighborhoods that are nothing like the resorts or second homes or hotels.

I've always thought of Palm Springs as this like safe little bubble. So it's actually really surprised to see that it has a really high crime rate when I was doing my research, I was like, holy shit, but as I started deep diving into the crimes statistics, a lot of it is like property crimes, which actually makes a lot of sense because there's a lot of people that have second homes there.

So there's a lot of neighborhoods, especially within the gates where probably more than half of the houses are empty on any given day, which also equates to a lot of break ins, which you'd think like, oh, okay, well, I guess it makes sense. Rob the house is no one's there.

But like most of the houses probably don't have anything of insane value. Like people don't really keep things in their vacation homes. So like maybe you'll get a TV or something, but if you're looking for cash, probably not the place.

The biggest draw to Palm Springs personally for me has always been the architecture. Not always, okay, not when I was a baby. I wasn't a baby looking at that saying, hey, that city bank used to be a cool mid-century building, but a lot of my life.

A lot of the homes have kept or emulated 1950s, 1960s architecture and just looks so dreamy and perfect like these perfect mid-century, Eichler homes. And it's gone through waves of popularity. I feel like, but a lot of Palm Springs history stems from the 1950s and 1960s where a lot of actors, musicians, socialites began purchasing properties out there.

Because it's in such like a close vicinity to LA, but still far enough, a lot of actors purchased homes out there because it was really as far as they were allowed to travel. So I'll like make up an example, but like Marilyn Monroe, right? She's famous.

Say she was signed with a studio like MGM, she had to be at their back-end call and stay within a certain mile or hour radius of the studios. Should they need her for some things? These actors would like escape to Palm Springs in order to find some peace in the desert oasis, but still be within proximity.

Alright, so going back to that book I read, there was this one story in particular that really stood out to me. It was called Cliff Lambert and The Boys, B-O-I-Z. It's hip, it's young, it's fresh, we love it.

It initially seemed like a very simple story, but the more that I read and the more I looked into the case, I was like, holy shit, because the people that were involved all have these like really insane, twisted backgrounds and connections with one another.

And I'll get to all of this for now. Let's just journey back to December of 2008. December 7, 2008, Cliff Limerick noticed something odd at his neighbor's house across the street.

The gate that protected the mid-century estate had been left partially open for the second day in a row, something the home's owner Cliff Lambert was pretty rigid about keeping closed.

While he didn't know his neighbors who well, other than the fact that they shared a name, he did know that Cliff was, quote, rather, per-snickety about neatness and security.

The neighbor decides to pop over just to ensure everything was alright, and then he noticed something else peculiar. The home's front door had been left open. He knocks. Hello?

Though he was tempted to go inside and make sure everything was alright, he felt uneasy and decided, you know what, I'm gonna let the cops handle it, so he caused the authorities and asked them to come check in on his neighbor.

Two officers, Detective Min and a cramped in from the Palm Springs Police Department arrived shortly after the call.

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