Tired of ads interrupting your gripping investigations? Good news!

Ad-free listening on Amazon Music is included with your Prime Membership.

Ads shouldn't be the scariest thing about true crime podcasts.

To start listening, download the Amazon Music app or visit amazon.co.uk forward-slash-true-crime-ad-free.

That's amazon.co.uk forward-slash-true-crime-ad-free to catch up on the latest episodes, without the ads.

Content warning. This episode contains graphic descriptions of mass murder,

as well as discussions of violence and sexual assaults.

And, as always, we'll be breaking down our sources in depth at the end of the show.

We're going to do our best to pronounce all the names in this episode correctly,

but we apologize in advance if we mess anything up.

Patrick Castro spoke into the facts machine telephone, his mouth full of blood.

The killers had shot him through the cheek, smashing his teeth.

A few hours earlier, the 23-year-old had been wrapping up his fourth day on the job

at the Wendy's on 4012 Main Street in Flushing Queens.

Around closing that night, May 24, 2000, two strangers arrived.

They'd talked their way into the restaurant by name-dropping the manager, Jean Dumel August.

That's when the horror began. Soon, Castro and his co-workers found themselves

lured downstairs. The strangers held them at gunpoint. They bound everyone with duct tape.

They hooded their victims with plastic bags.

They forced the entire crew into a walk-in freezer. They shot them one by one.

Castro fainted. When he awoke, he felt his arms tightly bound behind his back,

and a strange weight on his legs. Castro freed himself, then ripped the plastic bag away from

...