When beloved family patriarch, Gary Ferris went missing, his family looked everywhere on their

property until they came across something horrifying. It's a homicide.

Absolutely. The blame game in this family went round and round. This is Blood is Thicker,

the Ferris Wheel. I don't see how anyone can look at this story and think they were happy.

Follow and listen to Blood is Thicker, The Ferris Wheel on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your

podcast.

Welcome to Postmortem.

I'm 48 hours correspondent, Anne-Marie Green, and today we're discussing the murder of Harold Allen in Freetown, Indiana.

Now, in December of 2022, Harold was poisoned with a root beer float made by his wife, Marcia Allen,

and Marcia's adult daughter, Ashley Jones. His death was originally determined to be from natural causes, but then after a burglary at Marcia's home nine months later, police discovered

a string of damning text messages between Marcia and Ashley that prompted then to investigate Harold's death as a possible murder.

So Peter Vanceant is joining us. He was the correspondent on that hour. Peter, thanks again for joining us.

Hey, great to be here, Anne-Marie. And folks, you heard it right. Murder by Root Beer Float.

And the maliciousness of this case really struck me. Marcia and Ashley attempted to kill Harold multiple times during a three-month

period leading up to his death with a variety of exotic poisons. And something we didn't share in the

hour, investigators said that there was

evidence that Ashley was plotting other murders. Okay, so we definitely are going to get into that.

But first, a quick reminder for everyone. If you haven't watched or listened to this episode,

the Root Beer Float Murder, go check it out right now and then

come back for this conversation. All right, Peter, getting into it, there are a lot of really

strange elements in this case, and one that really stands out right away is Harold Allen's

original autopsy. It concluded that his death was caused by cardiac issues.

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