171: Tangled Web: The Shootings of Alfred and Rosemary Podgis

Episode 171 – Rosemary Podgis, 56, and her husband Alfred, 58, were found in a Pennsylvania Ravine. They had been fatally shot in their Loch Arbour, New Jersey home over the Fourth of July weekend in 1982. The apparent perpetrators arrested by police 5 days later were two 18-year-olds: Scott Robert Franz, Rosemary’s son from a previous marriage, and Scott’s Canadian friend Bruce Anthony Curtis, who had been Scott’s classmate at King’s Edgehill private school in Nova Scotia where the pair had just graduated.

The events leading up to the deaths of Rosemary and Alfred Podgis would be extremely important in establishing what led two teens, both with promising futures ahead of them, to kill Scott Franz’s mother and stepfather. Was it cold-blooded murder or, as Bruce would later claim, a tragic accident caused by a faulty firearm?

Sources:
[Blood Knot: The Trial and Conviction of Bruce Curtis by David Hayes]
[State v. Curtis :: 1984 :: New Jersey Superior Court, Appellate Division :: Justia]
[Two 18-year-olds, one from Nova Scotia, were held today… – UPI Archives]
[A disputed killing in New Jersey | Maclean’s | APRIL 16, 1984]
[Curtis’s long trip home | Maclean’s | MARCH 7, 1988]
[National Film Board of Canada – Journey Into Darkness: The Bruce Curtis Story]
[Dalhousie – The Gazette – Volume 117, Number 22 – February 21, 1985]
[Canadians Mount Campaign To Obtain Man in New Jersey Prison]
[YouTube – Deadly Betrayal: The Bruce Curtis Story – 1992 NBC Sunday Night Movie]
[Crime-Sep-24-1989-947717 | NewspaperArchive]
[Scott Franz’s Home – GoogleMaps]
[Bruce Curtis and Scott Franz case – MemoryNS]
[Shootings of Alfred and Rosemary Podgis – Wikipedia]

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