Hi and welcome to Serial Sisters, a podcast where my sister and I tell each other true crime stories. I'm Kristin and I'm Devana and this week Devana has a story for me. Okay so we have a really short one this week but I was scrolling through TikTok, like as you do it was a 30 year old lady with nothing better to do and I saw a girl talking about a dominoes commercial that led me to this case so like really random really weird. Okay so the video is just a girl watching a recent ad and it's from February of this year so 2020 and she points out with the stop sign of the background of the commercial reads Noid instead of stop so Noid and OID.
Yes exactly. Okay so basically the video was about them bringing back this old advertising campaign from the 80s. Okay so basically she just mentioned that the campaign also caused a man named Kenneth Lamar Noid to hold his local dominoes hostage. What?
Yeah so I had never heard of this so I wanted to take a deeper look so there wasn't a ton of information but I got some from the 13th floor dot com and Wikipedia. I just the Wikipedia was just like I went to the Noid and that's where it was. The Noid was created in 1986 by group 243 an advertising agency employed by dominoes. The animated character who I read rabbit-eared body suit with the black end and a white circle on its chest.
The point of the Noid was to represent the physical manifestation of all the challenges involved in getting a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less. Okay yeah so the commercials always ended up with the Noid failing so basically he would try to just like you know ruin the delivery driver's night by not needing him get the pizza there. He always failed. Okay but here's my issue with that.
You it's so hard to get a pizza out in 30 minutes or less. That's your advertising campaign. Right. If it's so hard quit advertising that.
Which actually we're gonna circle back to that too. Okay a little bit later but so the campaign was popular for the company and they tried to milk it for all it was worth of course so in 1988 a Saturday morning cartoon series called the Noids was planned by CBS but was scrapped from complaints were raised that the that it was merely an advertising show and now it's over children. Yeah no shit right so in 1989 a computer game was released called avoid the Noid. The object of the game was delivered at pizza within 30 minutes in an apartment building storming with noise who had pizza seeking missiles or water balloons.
What the fuck right. So basically they just really love this campaign and they were like we're just gonna fucking use it for years. Apparently. But the noid wasn't just an annoying ad campaign for one man.
Kenneth Lamar Noid was a 22 or 23 multiple sites go between the two ages. Man who lived in Albany Georgia. On January 30th 1989 he entered a dominoes restaurant in Chambley Georgia armed with a 357 Magnum and held two hostages for over five hours. Jesus.
So Kenneth was convinced that the ad campaign was a personal attack on himself. He also alleged that the dominoes owner which I think his name is Tom Manahan had stolen his name and spied on him in his apartment. Oh sweetie. Yeah so he's obviously got some stuff going on.
Yeah. He ordered the dominoes employees to call dominoes headquarters to demand $100,000 and a white limo as a getaway car. That's a conspicuous. Yeah.
No one's gonna know it's you. And one of the hostages attempted to make the call and Kenneth fired one warning shot to the floor to show how serious he really was. Okay. When the police arrived he needed to exchange one hostage for a copy of the science fiction book The Widow's Son.
Apparently this book was about an all-powerful super elite who controlled the world. So sadly he suffered from mental illness of course and such conspiracy must have appealed to him. But when an officer fulfilled the request he changed his mind. There isn't a ton of information about what went on inside the dominoes from the majority of the five hours.
Real quick change his mind and didn't let anyone go. Yeah he didn't let anyone go. Okay. So but it doesn't seem so we don't really know what went on if the majority of the time he had the hostages but it doesn't seem like he took pleasure in like scaring or torturing them.
Other than shooting the warning shots into the floor he never fired the weapon at either the hostages or the police. Well that's good. Yeah. But hunger gets to the best of us.
So Kenneth asked the dominoes employees who had been terrorizing for the past few hours to make him a pizza. They made him two pizzas with everything on them. The articles thought it was important to always know what kind of pizza they made him. So he ate the pizzas but he let his guard down and he put the gun in his lap while doing so.
Yeah. The employees took a chance and they were able to escape from the restaurant. And finally after six hours Kenneth surrendered to the police. He was charged with kidnapping, aggravated assault, extortion and possession of a firearm during a crime.
He was diagnosed as a cutely psychotic by doctors and found innocent by reason of insanity at child and sent to the Georgia Mental Health Institute. Although dominoes wanted to keep the camping going they retired the noise from their ad rotation after a year due to the negative publicity surrounding the hostage situation. Yeah, no shit. Right.
Exactly. Like they're like no we're really just going to keep using it. And dominoes also force was forced to end their 30 minutes or less guaranteed because it was causing reckless driving and vehicular manslaughter. Jesus.
Yeah. So obviously not a great idea to begin with. I remember Jimmy Donce when we lived in Reno. They were one of the ones that was like oh we'll get your sandwich just do you quick.
There used to be yeah there used to be rumors that Jimmy Donce would pay your speeding tickets. Holy shit. If you were an employee. Yeah.
I had no idea if it was true. I didn't know anyone who worked there but that was always the rumor. They are really fast. Yeah.
I haven't delivered. Mm hmm. That's too. But they were also just right down the street from the college.
So. But yeah. So that obviously 30 minutes or less didn't always like encourage great behavior. Who did they kill?
I it doesn't even say it just said like they just continued it due to these two reasons. And I was like she's not me. They're drivers just like hit a person at a crosswalk and right just ran the fuck over. Sorry.
I got to get pizza there real quick. Yeah. Your pepper and pizza is bad important. Jesus.
So back to that. But sadly the next mention of Kenneth Neuite is that he completed suicide in 1995. Oh, and I wasn't able to find a ton of information about his life after the hostage situation. Mm hmm.
But it just seems like I know some people are gonna hear this story and they just think like oh like another crazy person who put other people in danger. But this one just seems so sad. Like I wondered if anybody else noticed that he needed some help. Right.
You know like it's not normal to think that the owner of a domino is a sneaking into your apartment and spying on you. Right. But of course you know I also started thinking like how this case would be reported today that happened. It could be reported differently.
Yeah. And of course like it's not like domino's it's not like domino's to be adding a scene you knew what was gonna happen. Yeah. You didn't even know that guy existed.
Mm hmm. And of course it doesn't be mentioned that there are plenty of people living with mental illness every single day that don't put innocent people in danger. Yeah. But his situation seemed like the perfect example of how broken our health care system is.
Yeah. You know then. And now and how much we have to go. But domino's apparently bringing the campaign back though.
I've seen in the TikTok video I saw so I thought it was a strange move considering. Yeah. Disrespectful to both the hostages and the family of Kenneth Lamar Neuite. Well yeah but I mean they clearly didn't care that much in the first place if they tried to keep it going.
Right. It's just it just seems so icky. I don't know. It does.
But I'm willing to bet most people don't know about it. Yeah. I know that they can get away with it. Responsible for what happened but like they've got to know about it.
So just yeah. Tactful. Mm hmm. So but yeah that's really it.
It was like short one but I just never heard of that. I'd never heard. That's really interesting though. Yeah.
I wish there was more information about like. I mean obviously he was sick but like what that why he thought the domino's was. Yeah what led to. I know his name was the same as the noise.
Kenneth Lamar Neuite. Yeah that was it. Oh interesting. Yeah.
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