Listen Now: My Mom’s Murder

Lauren Malloy (0:00)

Hi, I'm Lauren Malloy, the host of the podcast My Mom's Murder. For 30 years, I thought my mom died of natural causes. That's what everyone told me and what I believed. Until one day, I got a phone call that changed everything. A woman claiming to be my mom's best friend told me my mother was murdered, and no one had ever investigated it. So I did what the detectives wouldn't. I pulled the threads, I knocked on doors that had been shut for decades, and I confronted the contradictions. And what I found, it's worse than I imagined. Something happened to my mom. Someone killed her, and I won't stop until I find out who. The system may have given up on my mom, but I never will. I'm about to play a clip from My Mom's Murder. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

My name is Lauren Lee Malloy, and I grew up without my mom. For the first 27 years of my life, I was told that my mom, Lori Lee Malloy, died at age 30 from heart disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy to be exact. I was only 18 months old when my mother died.

I've lived in Rhode Island my entire life, mostly around the capital city of Providence. And though I've traveled outside the state, Rhode Island has just always been home. Rhode Island is tiny, and Providence is even smaller. It's a unique place where somebody always knows somebody who can help with whatever you need, and the phrase, how you doing, is a standard greeting. We have good food and bad roads, and directions are given with long gone landmarks mixed in. For example, you try that new taco spot, it's where the old Benny's used to be. So aside from a few adventures in my younger years, like the time I spontaneously booked a solo trip to California without telling my family, or the time I helped move a friend and her two dogs from Texas back home to Rhode Island in a Chevy Tahoe, driving continuously for 29 hours, or the time I went cliff-jumping at 17 years old, still can't believe I did that one. I'm sort of a creature of habit. I used to work in finance and now work in communications for a large tech company. My life has pretty much always been about work, my family and my friends. My day-to-day has just never been anything out of the ordinary.

Then in June of 2020, a few months into the global pandemic that had us all in lockdown, something happened that changed my life forever.

I got this Facebook message from a woman asking me if I was the daughter of Lori Malloy, if I had an aunt Allison from East Providence, Rhode Island, and I was like, sorry, but who are you? And like, what is this? She tells me her name is Louise and some info about my family that I don't understand how she knows. She keeps messaging me and tells me she and my mom were so close that she knows I'm named Lauren after my mom's favorite perfume. She even says I was almost named Louise after her.

She tries to call me on Facebook Messenger, but this is still all too strange, so I don't answer. Who is this woman? If she was my mom's best friend, why have I never met her, let alone heard of her?

But then a couple of days after I received the message, I remember something. I have a photograph of my mom smiling and posing with another woman. They're standing side by side in someone's kitchen. My mom looks like she's in her early to mid 20s and is wearing a blue dress. The other woman is wearing a skirt and a white sweater with a heart on it. On the back, my mom had written, Me and Louise on our way to a busy town. I send the photo to Louise and she confirms that it's her. Yup, me and your mom on the way to New York City, she writes. Then she sends me a couple pictures she has of my mom, including one from her wedding day to her ex-husband. I mean, how would she have gotten that if she hadn't actually known my mother?

So I finally get Louise's phone number and agree to talk to her. When I get on the phone with her, Louise tells me she was my mom's best friend from middle school. But the interesting part is what she says next. Louise tells me that my mom hadn't died from heart disease. She'd been murdered.

That was a clip from my podcast, My Mom's Murder. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all 10 episodes early and ad free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple podcasts.