Latest news with #Mary
Daily Mirror
15 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Heartless schoolboy shot baby brother twice in head and gave chilling excuse
Mason Sisk brutally shot his dad, stepmum and three siblings in the head in a case that shocked the nation and was described as being 'draped in unmitigated evil' In the quiet backroads of Elkmont, Alabama - population just 500 - no one expected what would become one of the most chilling family massacres in recent American history. In 2019, Mason Sisk was a reserved 14-year-old, living with his father John, stepmother Mary, and three younger siblings - six-year-old Kane, four-year-old Rorrie, and baby Colson, just six months old. From the outside, the Sisk family looked content. John was a car dealership technician with a passion for motorbikes. Mary, a special education teacher known for her kindness and patience, had helped raise Mason since he was a toddler. After his biological mother died, Mary stepped in and treated him as her own - even describing herself online as a proud mum of four. But behind closed doors, signs of trouble were surfacing. Mason was causing concern - breaking into his school, reportedly torturing animals, and displaying worrying behavioural shifts. Even so, he often babysat his siblings and remained largely unnoticed by those around him. Then, on the night of September 2, 2019, everything changed. After a family trip to Florida, the Sisk household returned home and turned in early. Just before midnight, a call came into 911. It was Mason. He claimed there had been a shooting and said he'd been in the basement when he heard gunfire. Outside the house, he told police he'd seen a vehicle speeding away. But inside, officers found a gruesome scene: five members of the family shot in the head, apparently as they slept. John and Kane were taken to hospital but didn't survive. Mary, Rorrie, and Colson were pronounced dead at the scene. The infant had been cradled in his mother's arms. At first, Mason denied knowing anything. But detectives grew suspicious. He was the only survivor, showed little emotion, and his version of events didn't add up. After hours of questioning, he cracked - and admitted he'd done it. He'd used a 9mm handgun stolen during the family's Florida visit, then ditched the weapon by the roadside before calling for help. His motive? He said he was tired of the arguments at home. As investigators dug deeper, more disturbing details emerged. He had once allegedly spiked Mary's drink with peanut butter, knowing she was allergic. He was emotionless in custody. A probation officer noted he never spoke about his murdered family and showed no remorse. The murders sent shockwaves through Elkmont. The family were laid to rest in private services — baby Colson buried in Mary's arms. For her relatives, it was a loss beyond comprehension. Some had never even met the youngest child before he was taken from them. Because of his age at the time, Mason couldn't face the death penalty, but he was tried as an adult. His initial trial was thrown out when new evidence surfaced - messages recovered from Mary's phone. But in 2023, the retrial went ahead, painting a picture of a teenager with severe anger issues and a calculated plan. In court, the prosecution revealed Mason had sent chilling jailhouse messages to a girlfriend, bragging about the murders. 'I killed my family in under four seconds,' he wrote. 'All headshots.' He even claimed he wanted to become a contract killer. Prosecutors said he called the girl multiple times before phoning 911 the night of the killings. All five victims had been shot once - except Colson, who had been shot twice. In April, Mason was found guilty of capital murder. At his sentencing in September, the judge spared no words: the killings were 'pure evil.' With no evidence of mental illness, and no sign of remorse, he was handed life in prison without parole. Mary's brother gave a heartbreaking statement in court. 'We brought you into our lives, our home, our family,' he said. 'Mary loved you - and you repaid her with murder.' Mason showed no reaction. The defence insists they'll appeal, claiming his confession was coerced. But the facts remain stark: a family of five, destroyed by one of their own. And in the quiet Alabama town where neighbours once left doors unlocked, trust may never fully return.
Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
Garbo patriarch set to double his money in four years on $40m spread
Tony Tartak, founder of waste removal giant Bingo Industries, and his wife Mary are selling one half of their whole floor in Crown Towers for more than $40 million, which could see the couple double their money in just a few years. The stunning four-bedroom, four-bathroom has had a Rob Mills -redesign since the Barangaroo home was purchased off the plan, under Mary's name, with another lot on the same level for a combined $40 million in 2021. Lucky they kept it as two separate homes as it turns out it was not a bad investment. While they have no plans on moving from the building that they love, the size of the two units across the widest floor in the residential tower has become surplus to Tony and Mary's needs. It's not hard to see why. Spanning 420 square metres with majestic views over Sydney Harbour and beyond, the home, which offers house-sized proportions, packs a punch with two living rooms and two marble kitchens that have Sub Zero fridges, Wolf cooktops and ovens. It is selling through Steven Chen of The Agency and Luke Hayes of Colliers. Loading There have been a few apartments that have changed hands in the building with techie billionaire Robin Khuda and his wife Melea buying another pad between $20 million to $21 million from Carole Meers, the wife of former Sydney lord mayor, philanthropist and pub investor Nelson Meers AO, who passed away in 2022. Meanwhile, Ben Tilley, once right-hand man of James Packer, offloaded his apartment in the building too. It last had a price guide of $11 million. Bondi barristers
The Age
a day ago
- Business
- The Age
Garbo patriarch set to double his money in four years on $40m spread
Tony Tartak, founder of waste removal giant Bingo Industries, and his wife Mary are selling one half of their whole floor in Crown Towers for more than $40 million, which could see the couple double their money in just a few years. The stunning four-bedroom, four-bathroom has had a Rob Mills -redesign since the Barangaroo home was purchased off the plan, under Mary's name, with another lot on the same level for a combined $40 million in 2021. Lucky they kept it as two separate homes as it turns out it was not a bad investment. While they have no plans on moving from the building that they love, the size of the two units across the widest floor in the residential tower has become surplus to Tony and Mary's needs. It's not hard to see why. Spanning 420 square metres with majestic views over Sydney Harbour and beyond, the home, which offers house-sized proportions, packs a punch with two living rooms and two marble kitchens that have Sub Zero fridges, Wolf cooktops and ovens. It is selling through Steven Chen of The Agency and Luke Hayes of Colliers. Loading There have been a few apartments that have changed hands in the building with techie billionaire Robin Khuda and his wife Melea buying another pad between $20 million to $21 million from Carole Meers, the wife of former Sydney lord mayor, philanthropist and pub investor Nelson Meers AO, who passed away in 2022. Meanwhile, Ben Tilley, once right-hand man of James Packer, offloaded his apartment in the building too. It last had a price guide of $11 million. Bondi barristers
Time Out
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Oh, Mary! director Sam Pinkleton on comedy, truth and the right kind of wrong
"I'm obsessed with rollercoasters," says Sam Pinkleton, the director of the Broadway smash Oh, Mary!"Much more than theater, unfortunately." He's semi-joking about that last part, but it does give a sense of the sensibility he has brought to Cole Escola's zany pseudo-historical farce about Mary Todd Lincoln—who, in Escola's fevered comic vision, is a raging boozehound clinging to delusional hopes of stardom as a cabaret chanteuse. It has been Pinkleton's job to keep the play on track as, not unlike a rollercoaster, it races through Mary's wild highs and lows, evoking screams of laughter. The assignment is harder than the result makes it look: not only to keep the comedy rolling, nearly without stopping for breath, but also to sustain the right tonal balance of irreverence and celebration, and even to tease out latent strands of feeling. Pinkleton has worked on nine Broadway shows, but mostly as a movement director or choreographer; he earned his first Tony nomination for his excellent works Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. Oh, Mary!, his Broadway debut as a director, has earned him a second nomination this year. We talked with him about about actresses, camp and what makes Oh, Mary! such a wild ride. In advance of the Tony Awards on June 8, Time Out has conducted in-depth interviews with select nominees. We'll be rolling out those interviews every day this week; the full collection to date is here. You've had projects on Broadway before, but they've been as a choreographer. This is your Broadway debut as a director. And it seems to have gone very well! It has, definitely. It has objectively gone well. Because it's a farce, the movement is very tightly orchestrated. Would it be fair to call it choreographed? It's definitely rigorous and calculated. We're going after a very specific thing with it. But it felt—not to be reductive about it—it just felt like directing a play. It felt like directing a play that had a lot of extreme physical assignments and requirements that we wanted to approach with honesty and stupidity. Thinking about it as meticulously choreographed came after the fact. At no point at the beginning of it, when Cole and I were talking about it, was I thinking, "Well, I'm a highly experienced choreographer and that is gonna really come in handy." It was just, Oh, Let's roll our sleeves up and throw our bodies around. And Cole is only capable of performing at 125%, so with Cole at the center of it, it could only be a Super Bowl physical event. I had the pleasure of seeing Betty Gilpin as Mary during her stint as a replacement, and she gave an immensely physical performance as well. I mean, that shouldn't be a surprise—because she was in GLOW for goodness' sake, which couldn't be more physical—but it was interesting to see her in the part because she was a very different Mary. Betty Gilpin is an Olympian in every way. She is the most exacting and fierce—I mean, she learned how to wrestle professionally for a TV show, and that's the energy she came in with. She and Cole—and Tituss, in a way—are very similar in that they're athletes. They approached the play like athletes. And it's not pleasant psychological work. It's like working in a butcher shop. When Cole is playing Mary, it has a protective coloration of camp in a way that's just inherent to Cole's sensibility and presence on stage. Whereas with Betty, it felt really raw and emotional. She was still very funny, but she was really invested. Because Mary seems bipolar or something, if you take her literally. I keep saying I've had to direct the play four times now—which has been great. I hope to direct the play 30 times—but Betty, because she was the first, taught me how good the play is, if that makes sense. Because all of a sudden there's a great actress who shows up to work with a script and is taking it at face value, and it's like, Oh yeah, right! This is about a woman in crisis who has this incredible need, who will do anything she can to get what she wants. And that sounds like every play I've ever heard of before; it's the bones of good drama. And I totally agree with you: She played it straight. She just did it. And that made me really excited about seeing actresses do it. Because you know Cole; Cole loves an actress. And I don't even mean on Broadway—I mean seeing that lady in Cleveland who was amazing in Ibsen do this. Yes! I wanna see the regional theater ladies get their fingers on this because it's such a juicy part. I mean, Cole wrote it for themself and is glorious and perfect as Mary. But it turns out it can work well even without them. Completely. I think we've talked about this so much that people are tired of hearing about it, but it's true: In rehearsal, the thing we did was take it dead seriously. We tried to make it as honest and as deep as possible. The means of doing that were often completely idiotic, but we weren't trying to make gags. We were trying to really approach this woman with love. And I do think Betty really anchored it in gravity. But yeah, I wanna see all those regional theater ladies do it. I also wanna hear them say cunt. [Laughs.] They don't get to say cunt in Ibsen. Not as often as one would like! Someone should do it in Hedda Gabler, maybe. But Oh, Mary! is very much a comedy, which is one of the things that makes the Tony race for Best Place so interesting this year. I liked all five of the nominees a lot, but they are very, very different. It's always a crapshoot, but comedies are historically at a big disadvantage. Yasmina Reza won for Art and God of Carnage, but it's hard to think of others. Neil Simon never won until his late-career dramedies. Tom Stoppard won for Travesties and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which are sort of comedies I guess, but they have such a literary bent. Yes. We're like that, Adam! What's the difference? [ Laughs. ] I just mean that if Oh, Mary! were to win Best Play, that would really be kind of unprecedented for the kind of hard comedy it is. And yet it feels like the show is really in the running. As you say, it's a crapshoot. It's been an extraordinary season, and I love all of the plays that were nominated, which is strange and rare. Plays that are not regurgitated! So I don't know what's gonna happen, and I certainly can't try to predict that. But I have watched the play get taken really seriously by audiences over the life cycles of it. When we decided to come to Broadway, we were like, Okay, we're gonna do it for a very short amount of time just so that more dumb gay people can see it. But over the last year, I have watched tourist families enjoy our show and I've watched people who read The New Yorker and go to every play enjoy our show. And I'm sure there are people who don't enjoy our show, but it has been a really pleasant surprise—and frankly, quite moving—to see the show get embraced by an audience that is quite a bit broader than what Cole and I were thinking about when we started making it. Because the play is oddly sincere and uncynical, and it's made with a lot of love. It's made by people who—I am so tired of hearing myself say this, but it's unfortunately true—it's made by theater nerds. It's not like, "Fuck you! We're doing this play!" I think part of why it works is that Cole loves the form so much, and our designers love the form so much. The production strikes such a tricky balance, because to some extent it's gonna be tongue-in-cheek; it's designed and performed in a kind of low-tech style that knowingly verges on amateurism, which is part of its camp sensibility. You don't want it to be perfect, because then it just is the thing itself; it has to be something that aspires to be the thing but in some way isn't quite the thing. Camp is so complicated and we don't need to go down a long rabbit hole about it—I mean, I literally spent an hour at Julius' last week trying to explain to a straight Marine. Wow, that is a community service. Yeah. Well, first I said that something was kitsch, and he didn't know what that meant, so I said, Well, it's a little like camp for straight people, but not quite, and then he didn't understand that at all. So I had to step back and find some kind of beginning… But also you explaining all this to a stray Marine at Julius is camp. So the snake is just biting its tail. [ Laughs.] Right? But it's actual camp—it's not campy, if you know what I mean. And there really isn't an exact defining line for any of these things. The production deliberately seems a certain way. You have set designers who very much know what they're doing and would be capable of designing a more realistic set if they chose to. Same with the costumes: They should look like they're out of a trunk, and the beards shouldn't look like perfect fake beards. So where does that line approximately sit for you? I have to be honest, It's a real tightrope walk. It came from a ton of trial and error, and it has been refined a lot along the way. When I look back at the pictures from tech when we did it downtown, I'm like, This is embarrassing! This wasn't a good show! 'Cause it was the wrong kind of wrong, you know? And we've been trying to find the right kind of wrong. And one thing that's really important to me is that it doesn't feel like we're mocking something. It doesn't feel like we're rolling our eyes or taking the wind out of something. We're actually embracing it and loving it. In our first conversations, Cole and I talked about doing theater in high school, when you're like, This set is completely amazing! And you look back at it in pictures and actually that set was really shitty. But it was made with love. And we talked about going to community theater where people are putting effort into something. That was the biggest thing. When community-theater designers and directors and actors make a show, they're not making fun of it. They love it. They're doing the absolute best they can with the tools they have. So yes, the bookshelf is flat and painted, but it's cared for. I think that has really been the line. And we had the privilege of refining it Off Broadway; a lot of details really changed on Broadway, actually, even though I hope it still seems like the same show. But as a group of collaborators, we got very good at feeling like, Oh, that is the show, but that's a step too far or that feels cynical or that feels like we're just trying to make people laugh or that's too good, as you say. But I think that's every show: You find that weird sweet spot and it can be kind of chemical. There's a bit of a Mickey and Judy quality. The joy of it is that they're putting up a show in the barn, and if you go to that barn show and sniff that it's not up to Ziegfeld Follies standards, you're getting it wrong. The limitations of the Lortel informed a lot for us, and also the kind of big-eyed wonder—when you're making a show in a barn or your high school or whatever—of, 'We're gonna have a set change.' But you can really only have one, so that means you just spin the set around. And that worked at the Lortel. But when we moved to Broadway, one of the first things I said to the designers was, We can't apologize for being on Broadway. The Lyceum is so beautiful, and it looks like it was designed for the play. The theater itself is funny; it looks like The Muppet Show. So I want to embrace that we're on Broadway. I want to embrace that there are people on that top balcony as opposed to, 'Yeah, we're doing this crazy downtown thing uptown, 'cause it's a prank!' It's not a prank. It looks beautiful in that theater. And the big surprise at the end of the show—you know what it is—was completely redesigned on Broadway, because we wanted to embrace the scale of the room. And if we had done what we did downtown, it would've felt like, 'Ha ha, isn't this shitty? Ha ha ha.' And that's not the story. The story is that her dreams come true. Right? And if Cole were not themself like Mary in some sense—if Cole had not actually spent 15 years performing in cabarets around the city—then it would feel quite different, I think. It would feel false. It would feel like a lie. Cole has always been so magical. I was trying to think back to the last time I saw a lead performer in a Broadway comedy who commanded the stage and the audience so completely. I'm probably forgetting someone, but the one that came to mind for me was Linda Lavin in The Tale of the Allergist's Wife. I was just about to—! As you were saying this, I was like, It's really Linda Lavin. Yes, and then I remembered that you worked with Linda! The other major production I've seen that you've directed was You Will Get Sick with her in 2022. And you were also involved with The Lyons when it was on Broadway in 2011. What was your experience of working with her? I actually told this story very recently. I met her on The Lyons, which was at its heart a comedy but went to dark places. She's the hardest worker in show business. But she was so exacting about timing and physical comedy: If I turn my head here, they'll laugh, but if I do this, they won't. Like a mad scientist, obsessive with details. And it was the coolest thing in the world to watch—to sit between her and [the playwright] Nicky Silver, who is also super exacting about comedy, and old-school: bah-pah-da-pa-dah and boom, everybody laughs. That was grad school for me, especially because we got to do that play twice. So I spent a year watching Linda make comedy, and when I asked her to do You Will Get Sick, which was ultimately her last play, she said yes very quickly, which was cool, because she wanted to do weird, unexpected things with new writers. She was 85 and had three-page monologues and showed up on the first day off book. At the beginning of every rehearsal, I make everybody do an idiotic physical warmup to pop music—no opting out. And Linda Lavin at 85 was very happily jiggling around to Rihanna. I talked to Cole about her all the time because they sadly didn't know each other. After Cole, she's the funniest person I've ever met. She would do the show and then go to the bar and continue to make you laugh. She was a very major loss for me. She became a very good friend in the last few years of her life. Did you know her at all? No. I got to meet her a couple of times, but no. Well, all the rumors are true. We just finished the Linda Lavin memorial tour: four different events, each gayer than the last. And all anyone could say was just what a hard worker she was and how rigorous and not-accidental it was. I think that's a thing she really shares with Cole. It's easy to come see Oh, Mary! and say it's hilarious. Adam—it's so much work. And there is no detail too small. It's a very old-school thing. And there definitely is an old-school quality to Cole's sensibility. That's evident in every aspect of their personality. And that's part of the secret in this show, I think. Oh, Mary! seems like a weird new thing on Broadway, but it works because it has deep Broadway roots—like Hamilton does, or Company. These shows that change the game can't be completely off the map, because then they wouldn't work. Totally. This is made by theater people. Cole and I are theater people. When we were designing it and teching it, the things we were talking about were, like, Jerry Herman musicals and boulevard comedies and—plays! Plays. I probably shouldn't say this, but for something that has been lauded for being so unconventional, it's really conventional. It sort of sneaks in. By the end you realize, Oh wait! This is a play! It's a play with a couch! And I appreciate you asking about it being serious as a play, because that is a thing I really care about. I care about it because I think it's such an exacting piece of writing. It's certainly serious about being entertaining. But there isn't an obvious message. I mean, a lot of plays have a feeling of importance because they're about something important. Everything is an issue play now, or else people don't think it's important enough to be on Broadway. But I don't know what the issue is in Oh, Mary! I don't think there's an issue that's like, 'We're upset about healthcare policy so we gotta fight it out in the streets of Detroit.' But we talked a lot in rehearsal about how the story was gonna end for her. And there were a lot of different versions of it. And it became very important to me and Cole that she won. That she got it. And I have grown to be very moved—watching, like, my dad from Southern Virginia watch Oh, Mary! —by the very simple thing of, like: It's about a woman who wants something and everybody thinks she's crazy. Everybody thinks she's crazy and she's fucking not. And that is meaningful to me. Well, she's not un -crazy. She's not—well— I think I would say that it's not, for me, that she's not crazy. It's that crazy people deserve things too. Totally—yes. Yes. And I do feel very moved by that. There's a little speech in a scene in the middle of the play with Mary's teacher, where she talks about the highs being too high and the lows being too low, and how being with Abe is this steadying thing because she can't have a great day. I do think that if you peel back all the layers of total fucking buffoonery, she's a character that any weirdo or anyone who has felt like a weirdo can relate to. I think Cole has gone on the record about the oddly autobiographical nature of the character and of the show. So the bones of it are rooted in truth. That's cliché, but it's absolutely true. If they weren't, we would have a 10-minute sketch. It would be a delightful 10-minute sketch, but it would be a sketch and you would get tired of it pretty quickly. Right. And this somehow keeps a comic momentum for 85 minutes, which is almost impossible these days. The pacing is relentless. But I imagine there's no good way to answer the question of how you keep that up, because it's just moment by moment, I guess. Moment by moment. And not treating the audience like idiots. Cole and I are obsessed—capital-o Obsessed —with the game of staying ahead of the audience. Part of the development of the play—because we carve away at it through previews downtown and even through previews on Broadway—is that the minute it feels like the audience is ahead of it, move on, move on, move on. And that is a science. It can be hard because there might be things that you love doing, but the fun of the ride is staying ahead of the audience. I reread every Agatha Christie book during the pandemic, and I sometimes feel like many plays are secretly mysteries. Who did what, and when? Where is it going, and why? And like in a mystery, the show plants the clues as it goes along so you can look back at the end and it all makes sense. Totally. It's the theater. It shouldn't be a passive experience. Give people something to do. It's fun when it's a ride. But you don't want the clues to stick out too obviously, or it's boring. Yes. But the ride—I actually just ran into somebody on the street who was like, 'I've seen the play eight times.' And I was like, Well, first of all, you have a sickness. But I hear that a play has a ton of secrets, and part of the fun is discovering those secrets. But it's like riding a rollercoaster. And if you love a rollercoaster, you love to ride it over and over again, even if you know where it's gonna go.
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
Love for VB: Community invited to ceremony honoring lives lost in May 31, 2019 mass shooting
Above is WAVY coverage from 2019 remembering the victims of the Virginia Beach mass shooting. VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) – The City of Virginia Beach is inviting the community to show ' in remembrance of the lives lost in a mass shooting at the Municipal Center Complex on May 31, 2019. The city is hosting a six-year remembrance ceremony on Saturday, May 31, 2025 in honor of those killed and the survivors still healing from the unthinkable tragedy. The gathering will begin at 4 p.m. at the Mary C. Russo Volunteer Recognition Gazebo behind City Hall. The address is 2401 Courthouse Drive. Saturday's ceremony is open to the public and will take place rain or shine, the city said. The community is invited to wear blue, the color of remembrance, on Saturday and to participate in a moment of silence at 4:06 p.m., which is the time the first 911 call was received. 12 people were killed and four others were seriously injured in the Municipal Center Complex on May 31, 2019. A 5/31 memorial is currently under construction. It is being built at the corner of Princess Anne Road and Nimmo Parkway and is expected to be finished next year. Complete Coverage: Virginia Beach Mass Shooting For more information, visit . On May 30, 2025, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin ordered that all U.S. and Commonwealth of Virginia flags be flown at half-staff on all state and local buildings in memory of the victims of May 31 shooting. I hereby order that the flags shall be lowered at sunrise on Saturday, May 31, 2025, and remain at half-staff until sunset. Gov. Glenn Youngkin Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
