True Crime Books

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 class="center" id="c3">CHAPTER 1</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <h2 class="center sigil_not_in_toc">The Early Years</h2> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>I graduated from the Philadelphia Police Academy in class 294 on March 25, 1991. My grandmother—“Nan,” as I liked to call her—threw a party for me at her home in the Mayfair section of Philadelphia. There was a big cake with my badge number, 4487. As I observed family, friends, and loved ones celebrating this turning point, I couldn’t help but reflect on what led me there.</div> <div class="indent">Lexington Park, Philadelphia, is where I grew up with my parents. But some of my fondest memories are from Nan’s summer home. In the summer of 1977, I was a skinny seven-year-old kid. The Wildwoods were, and still are, known as one of the most popular places along the South Jersey shoreline. Nan’s place was right next door to the North Wildwood Police Department, and from the time I was about four years old, I would watch the police officers from our front porch. I loved spending summers at my Nan’s because it was much more fun than the neighborhood in Philly. You can always enjoy five miles of beach and boardwalk rides, arcades, and shops.</div> <div class="indent">On a typical hot and humid summer day at the Jersey Shore, I was riding my bike in front of Nan’s house when I fell. Two officers saw me and got out of their patrol car to help. They recognized me as the kid who lived in the house next to the police station. From that day forward, the same two officers always waved at me when they passed by. They were genuinely good guys. I remember seeing their cruiser up close with the door open, and hearing the crackle of the police radio amazed me. Day in and day out, summer after summer, I watched the officers of the North Wildwood Police Department protect and serve their community.</div> <div class="indent">Fast forward ten years later to May 7, 1987, the day of my junior prom. My beautiful daughter, Caitlin, was born. Needless to say, I didn’t go to the dance. I was seventeen and in eleventh grade, so I had another year until graduation. I attended Catholic school, and some priests broke my balls over being a teen parent. They had to play the role, after all. They felt they were doing the right thing. We named our daughter after Caitlin Davies from the popular 1980s television series <i>Miami Vice</i>. Actress and singer Sheena Easton played this role of Sonny Crockett’s wife on the show.</div> <div class="indent">Caitlin’s mom, “Marie,” and I met through mutual friends in the spring of 1986. I’ve decided to use a false name in this bio for her and her family’s privacy. I was sixteen years old. My parents were divorced, and I lived with my father in Northeast Philadelphia. For the record, I didn’t choose my father over my mom; I didn’t want to leave home. My father refused to leave our house in Northeast Philly for years. Because of this, my mother had no choice but to move out.</div> <div class="indent">One summer night, when I was eleven or twelve years old, my parents and I were driving to the shore in my dad’s ‘76 Cadillac Coupe Deville. I fell asleep in the backseat because it was late and dark. When I woke up, my parents were arguing but trying to keep it down so they wouldn’t wake me. They could have been more successful. I didn’t sit up; I just lay there pretending to be asleep in the back seat. I was afraid if I sat up, I’d get yelled at. I could feel the tenacity and anger in my mom’s voice as they went back and forth at each other; she was practically spitting venom at him. My father was driving and didn’t say as much, but he clearly was disgusted as it radiated through his voice when he responded. Have you ever heard two people try to argue quietly? It doesn’t work. That was the first time I heard the song “Hearts” by Marty Balin, and now, any time I hear it, it reminds me of that night in my dad’s car—it has stuck with me forever.</div> <div class="indent">When Marie and I got together, she lived in the nearby Mayfair section, and her parents had split up by then too. It was my first real relationship. When she got pregnant, our lives changed forever. I remember she had a pregnancy test done at the local free clinic, and, as it turned out, she was nineteen weeks along. It was clear she had been holding out on me. I panicked initially; I knew I had to tell my parents.</div> <div class="indent">Thanksgiving Eve 1986, we told my father about the pregnancy—he was the first to know. He was disgusted with us and called my mom first, then Marie’s parents. Everyone gathered at my father’s house, and our mothers were very emotional; they both cried and fell apart. Our fathers were even-tempered yet heavy-handed. They laid down the law and told us we would put the baby up for adoption. They didn’t ask or suggest; they just told us. I disagreed with the “plans,” but we were too afraid to speak up against them. We were kids; we couldn’t provide for a baby and hadn’t even graduated high school. I only agreed to the adoption to get them off our backs. I told Marie to play along with them, and she did. Workers from the adoption agency visited us every week, but we never met the people who planned to adopt Caitlin.</div> <div class="indent">Nan was the only person I could talk to in our family. She knew I didn’t want to give up the baby, but I was scared. I didn’t know how we would take care of a baby. Where would we live? How could I pay the bills? I’ll never forget the day my Nan turned to look at me and said sternly, “We will pay the bills. Don’t let that be a reason to give up the baby.” I had no intention of going through with the adoption, but I dreaded facing our fathers over it.</div> <div class="indent">Each of our mothers showed up at the hospital the day Marie went into labor, but our fathers were absent. We were at the hospital all night as she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Caitlin. Our decision to keep the baby caused a huge wedge between my dad and me. Eventually, I moved out to live with Nan in the neighboring Mayfair section of Philadelphia. Caitlin stayed with her mother, who lived just two blocks from Nan’s house.</div> <div class="indent">I <i>attended</i> Father Judge Catholic High School in Northeast Philadelphia. I emphasize “attended” because I didn’t learn a thing there, except how to talk my way out of detention, aka JUG—“Justice Under God.” I was a terrible student and went to summer school two out of my four years there. The nuns at St. Hubert’s High School wouldn’t let Marie attend school once she started showing. But after Caitlin was born, she returned to school and graduated on time.</div> <div class="indent">Father Kilty, academic dean, and my English teacher was very good to me while the other priests looked down on me. He was the kind of guy who would sit me down with a cigarette in his mouth and have casual heart-to-heart talks. Occasionally I’d bum a smoke off him too.</div> <div class="indent">He also baptized Caitlin. That day played out interestingly with my dysfunctional family. Imagine: My mother and Nan weren’t talking to my father. My father and his girlfriend sat on the other side of the church. On top of that, Marie’s parents were separated and didn’t want to sit next to one another. It was so awkward that at one point, Father Kilty announced, “Let’s remember Caitlin is here for a purpose.”</div> <div>Twenty years later, Caitlin was attending nursing school while Nan was dying. Caitlin jumped in and took fantastic care of Nan. My mother and I would never have been able to go through it without Caitlin. Father Kilty’s declaration ultimately rang true.</div> <div class="indent">Father Kilty was different from the other priests—he never lectured or shamed me in any way. He didn’t speak down to me as an adolescent. Instead, he was honest with me. I always knew where I stood with him and never left the room confused. When I learned I would be a father, I sat down with him and said, “I fucked up.” And he replied, “Yeah, you did fuck up. But you fucked up once, and you could’ve fucked up twice by getting an abortion, and you didn’t.” I felt like a man in his presence, not an irresponsible teenager who got a girl pregnant.</div> <div class="indent">Father Kilty would tell me stories about my great-uncle, who was in the priesthood. Monsignor Joseph McMullin died when I was four years old. I have no memory of him, but he did baptize me. He taught at Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia.</div> <div class="indent">Monsignor McMullin, or “Holy Joe The Hammer,” as they called him, spoke thirteen languages. Father Kilty was one of his students at the seminary before he was ordained. I understood the nickname “Holy Joe,” but I asked Father Kilty why they called him “The Hammer.” Kilty laughed and said my great-uncle enjoyed telling jokes and was known for knocking a firm elbow into the recipient’s arm and saying, “Did you get it, did you get it, did you get it?” Hence, “The Hammer.” Years later, Father Kilty transferred to a different school, and we eventually lost touch. However, he left a lifelong impression on me, and I will always be grateful for the time we spent getting to know each other.</div> <div class="indent">When I graduated high school, I knew I wanted to become a police officer. All those years sitting on the front porch in North Wildwood lit a fire in me, and I no longer wanted to watch the cops; I wanted to be one. My father and I were now on good terms, although he didn’t like where I was in life. Nan still had her summer house in North Wildwood and her primary home in Mayfair. I was able to live with her while going to college part-time. I worked at the Friendship Pharmacy and Spitzer’s Mobil Station. I also mowed lawns to help support Caitlin financially.</div> <div class="indent">In the summer of 1989, I interviewed for a seasonal dispatcher position at the North Wildwood Police Department (NWPD) with Captain Gary Sloan. He was in his forties and stood about six feet tall. He had a calm demeanor about him. During the interview, he questioned why I wanted to be in law enforcement, and I replied, “I want to help people.” Captain Sloan then asked, “Do you have any relatives in law enforcement?” I answered, “None that I’ve ever met.” Nan had told me about relatives I never knew in New York City who were on the job. She once mentioned that I had a great uncle, Mickey Finnigan, who was in the NYPD and walked a beat in Harlem.</div> <div class="indent">“Are you ready to work for the North Wildwood Police Department?” asked Captain Sloan. I smiled and said, “Yes, I am.” Captain Sloan emphasized the importance of getting to know the town’s citizens and, in his words, stated, “Do little things, too… like helping little kids up when they fall off their bikes.” He smiled, then told me I had the job. If you haven’t caught on yet, he was one of the police officers who helped me when I fell off my bike in 1977. He remembered me, and I began working as a seasonal dispatcher for the NWPD.</div> <div class="indent">The second officer who helped me when I fell off my bike that day was Anthony J. Sittineri. He had since become the chief of police. He was an old-school street cop described by other cops as “a cop’s cop.” One evening, I was working in dispatch and received a call from Chief Sittineri’s youngest daughter, Sharon. Her older sister had just given birth to her first child. Sharon asked if I could announce over the police radio that Chief Sittineri had just become a grandfather.</div> <div class="indent">I was the new guy and hadn’t been working there long. I didn’t know if I should make a broadcast over the police radio about the chief’s family, but on the flip side, I didn’t want to refuse a request from the chief’s daughter, so I told her I would do it. I figured he would either be pleased or fire me. I keyed up the mic and said, “Two to 200.” (NWPD was District Two, and the chief’s call sign was 200). He responded, “200.” As you may have guessed from the name Sittineri, he was Italian and had that old-school Italian way about him that I loved. I replied, “Your youngest daughter called; congratulations, you’re a grandfather.” He didn’t acknowledge the announcement immediately, and I got scared, thinking he would fire me or have me whacked out. After a few seconds, he finally replied with a typical “Ten-four.”</div> <div class="indent">A few minutes later, Lieutenant Jake Stevenson walked into HQ, and I again thought I was toast. Instead, he approached the dispatch window and commented, “That’s great!” As it turned out, he, and more importantly, the chief, was happy I had broadcast the news.</div> <div class="indent">One year later, I began working as a part-time police officer for the NWPD. May 14, 1990 marked the day I started training at the Cape May County Police Academy as a North Wildwood Class II Officer cadet. Being a cadet was a whole new ball game compared to working as a dispatcher. I had no idea what I was in for. It was grueling, military-style training, six days a week for seven weeks. The course was not as long as full-time police officer academies, but it was strict with a military atmosphere.</div> <div class="indent">We were required to have crew cuts, be clean-shaven, and wear khaki uniforms. We marched and got yelled at by the drill instructors constantly. I laugh about it now but was not too fond of it back then; actually, I hated it.</div> <div class="indent">Day one at the academy started with seventy-two cadets from all over the tri-state area assembled as the 5th Special Class. Only forty-two of us made it to graduation day. Thirty cadets washed out for a variety of reasons. Some couldn’t handle the physical training. I recall one guy who failed the drug screening. Some couldn’t qualify with their firearms. The rest quit.</div> <div class="indent">The physical training was demanding. The instructors pushed and ran us until we fell or puked, sometimes both. I was never a star athlete but managed to hang in there. I refused to give up and forced myself to suck it up. If you’ve ever watched the movie <i>An Officer and a Gentleman</i>, I adopted the dialogue and mentality portrayed by Richard Gere’s character, Zack Mayo: “You can kick me out, but I ain’t quitting!”</div> <div class="indent">During our workouts, we wore white T-shirts with our last names in black lettering on the front and dark blue sweatpants with our last names in white lettering on our asses. That way, no matter which direction we were facing, the drill instructors could yell at us by name, and they did so constantly.</div> <div class="indent">In the gym, we had a formation to abide by, and we each had a designated spot to stand in. At any given time, a drill instructor would yell out your name, and you would have to respond loud and clear, “Yes, sir!” If he ordered you to “take the stand,” then you would run like hell to the front of the class. Then he would say, “McMullin, lead the class in squat thrust exercises.” The proper way to do this would be to address the class loudly and say, “Class, squat thrust exercises, starting positions… move! Ready… by the numbers… exercise! One-two-three, ONE! One-two-three, TWO! One-two-three, THREE!” and so on. If whoever was on the stand did not give the exercise order using those exact words, the instructors would punish the rest of the class with additional exercises, which sucked! I was in excellent physical condition by the time we graduated—I wish I were in such good shape now.</div> <div class="indent">When the time came to go to the shooting range, I was nervous. I had never fired a handgun in my life. My father had taught me how to shoot shotguns and rifles before, but handguns were a new experience. By the grace of God, I shot well enough to score a passing grade.</div> <div class="indent">Later that September, I was hired by the Philadelphia Police Department. One good thing about the intensity of the Cape May County Academy was that it prepared me for the Philadelphia Police Academy. Since my new job would be in a different state, I had to attend their academy before I could work there.</div> <div class="indent">I began my training at the Philadelphia Police Academy in October. Although Philly was hard, it was not nearly as grueling as Cape May. The stressful environment they created at the Cape May County Academy was so much harsher. Drill instructors constantly scrutinized and yelled at the cadets to try to break us down. They were shaping us into rugged individuals, mentally and physically.</div> <div class="indent">The day after I graduated from the Philadelphia Police Academy, I bought a house in the Holmesburg neighborhood of Philadelphia. I moved Caitlin and her mother in with me. Marie wanted to get married even though we weren’t getting along. Our parents knew we didn’t belong together, but, despite their opposition, we got married at a courthouse. It was for all the wrong reasons—mainly so Marie could have medical coverage under my health benefits. She had recently sustained a life-threatening asthma attack that had put her in the hospital for ten days, and I wanted to provide her with the best medical care possible.</div> <div class="indent">The marriage lasted less than a year. Marie later met another guy, who she married and settled down with. They’re still together, and I’m happy for them.</div> <div class="indent">During the graduation party Nan threw for me, I found my mother on the second floor of Nan’s house, crying. She was afraid something terrible would happen to me as a police officer. At first, I didn’t understand. But I soon realized that my two summers as a seasonal cop in North Wildwood didn’t concern her nearly as much as me working in Philadelphia. She grew up in the Bronx, New York, and my dad is from Philadelphia. When they were engaged, my dad got accepted into the NYPD and made plans to move to NYC. But my mother didn’t want him to be a cop, so they moved to Philly instead, and my dad kept his job as a machinist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.</div> <div class="indent">So there I was, doing exactly what she had kept my father from doing, which devastated her. From that point on, I understood why it bothered her so much. I could only assure her I would be safe, and I’ve kept that promise so far.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

Chris McMullin

3 Decades Cold $19.99

Detective Chris McMullin's career of finding missing people and solving murders wasn't just his job. It was his passion and dedication to helping victims. For thirty years, Chris worked at the Bensalem Police Department in Pennsylvania. He started as a patrol officer and became a detective in the Special Victims Unit, where he handled cases involving murderers, sexual predators, and violent criminals. Some of his most important cases included Lisa Todd, Christian Rojas, Tracy Byrd, and Barbara Rowan, a 14-year-old girl who was murdered in 1984 and whose case wasn't solved for 31 years. The Rowan case was especially important to Chris and motivated him to work on cold cases. 3 Decades Cold tells the story of Chris's impressive career, from joining the police academy in 1991 to his retirement and beyond. Today, Chris McMullin works as a Lieutenant for the Bucks County Sheriff's Office in Pennsylvania. He now leads a nonprofit organization to work on cold cases and has a true crime TV show in development.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 id="c1">Case Briefing</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>Welcome to the incident room. This is your case briefing.</div> <div class="indent">“Congratulations on your promotion to homicide detective,” the Detective Major tells you. “You and your partner will be assigned to our major cases. As a team, you will uncover evidence, interview suspects and witnesses, and, if there’s enough conclusive evidence, send the case to the DA. Good luck, we’re all counting on you.”</div> <div class="indent">As a reader in the role of a member of the somewhat fictionalized investigative team, you will face several challenges. You will uncover the evidence based upon historical crimes as an actual investigator would—as they present themselves in the course of the investigation. The crimes are real, and the evidence comes from the actual case files. Your partners are fictional characters based on a composite of real detectives and others who investigated these crimes. All the evidence that is uncovered is based on police reports, interviews, court transcripts, and contemporary news reports.</div> <div class="indent">These cases are truly a collaboration between you, the reader, and the rest of the investigative team at the crime scenes. At the conclusion of each case, you will provide an assessment of the evidence and decide for yourself where the evidence leads you.</div> <div class="indent">As you work your way through these crimes, keep in mind there was a diligent endeavor to maintain important interviews and the evidence for these real cases as accurate as possible. Most of the conversations of the individuals involved were taken from actual interviews and transcripts of the cases. The conversations between you and the fictional detectives are, of course, invented to propel the story forward.</div> <div class="indent">The evidence discovered is based on diligent research. Some of the specifics may surprise you, as they have not been highly publicized, such as new suspects or a new approach to analyzing the evidence.</div> <div class="indent">The stories have been adapted to allow you, as the main character, to uncover pertinent evidence. All other aspects of the real cases have been maintained for accuracy.</div> <div class="indent">As you read through the case and follow the evidence, remember that each step in a criminal investigation is a conscious choice. What is the evidence telling you? Would you have proceeded as these detectives did? Does the totality and circumstances of the case warrant the steps taken by these detectives? Are there any bits of evidence that you would have given more weight to than these detectives did?</div> <div class="indent">In these stories, you are also challenged to consider some new approaches that have not been previously presented before. See if you agree with the conclusions of the detectives you are “partnered” with.</div> <div class="indent">You are also challenged to test your knowledge of true crime and use the evidence, locations, and crime scenes to name the actual cases behind the re-creations. The names have been changed but, again, the evidence from these true crimes reflects the actual evidence.</div> <div class="indent">In many true crime cases, there can be a definitive turning point in the investigation that alters the judgment of the investigating detective. A piece of evidence that changes the trajectory of the case. It flips the switch on the case, it is the ignition point. It changes the case from questionable to convincing in the mind of the detective, and clearly points to the one perpetrator. Since you are the detective in all the cases that are contained in this book, an additional challenge is for you to find that ignition point that will help you solve each of these cases.</div> <div class="indent">As you become more experienced as an investigator, your partners, first starting out as your trainer, gradually gives you more freedom to explore the evidence on your own. As your expertise grows, your partner more frequently asks your advice about the evidence and the suspects you will encounter. You will learn the value of not jumping to conclusions. Even if you are familiar with the suspects, you only go where the evidence takes you. You often contribute suggestions during the investigation but, like every great investigator who has come before you, you always wait until all the evidence has been tested and the investigation concludes to render your opinion on the case.</div> <div class="indent">You are not required to agree with your team. You are encouraged to take notes along the way and come to your own conclusions about which suspect, if any, should be sent to the DA for prosecution.</div> <div class="indent">Now get to work.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

Steve Scarborough

True Crime in Real Time $15.50

“Welcome to the Incident Room. This is your Case Briefing.”Congratulations on your first day as a police detective. You have been partnered with an experienced detective who will walk you through some of the toughest and most infamous crimes in American history. You will visit the crime scene, review the evidence, search for clues, interview witnesses, read the news reports, and decide with your partner who’s the most likely culprit and send the case off to the DA’s office. This is true crime in real time.As you gain experience, you will be given more autonomy in investigating the cases. Your partner will be there to guide and observe you, but it will be up to you to not only decide who to prosecute, but also name the famous case based on the facts and circumstances. Your investigative skills will be challenged, and so will your knowledge of historical cases throughout the decades, from the late 19th century to the present.Follow the evidence wherever it takes you, don’t jump to conclusions, and use the experience you gain through these investigations to make your case. Even if you recognize the case and think you know the answers, think again. These cases were selected to challenge and surprise you.Now get to work.

Billy The Liquor Guy

The Making of Billy The Liquor Guy $20.99

Billy The Liquor Guy spent twelve years as an undercover investigator working for New York’s Petroleum, Alcohol, and Tobacco Bureau (PATB), which enforces tax laws for imports into the state. Sounds pretty tame, right? In fact, it was challenging, harrowing, and life-threatening, leading Billy and his team to develop PTSD on the job and for years to come. Much of this is detailed in Billy’s first book, Under Too Long. The Making of Billy the Liquor Guy fills in the rest of the story. It is a wide-ranging saga of undercover operations, criminal takedowns, and wild successes—as well as internal affairs investigations, betrayals, and serious repercussions stemming from the lack of trust and political game-playing in the bureau. Not exactly a prequel, The Making of Billy the Liquor Guy gives the backstory behind Under Too Long, introduces familiar characters, and explains who Billy was when he began his career as an undercover operator, as well as what he became as a result of the stress, deception, and treachery he experienced in the PATB. The Making of Billy the Liquor Guy is a must read for anyone who wants to know what undercover operations, often romanticized in the media, are truly like, as well as anyone who enjoyed Billy’s first book, Under Too Long.

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1, .h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 id="c2">Chapter 1: Back to December</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>A sense of dread tugged at my heart as I pulled into the narrow parking space of the Bowling World parking lot. I turned off the ignition as retired detectives Jay C. Rider and Chris Boyd looked up, acknowledging my arrival with a wave. “Well, here I am,” I said out loud as my shoes hit the pavement with a loud thud. I slammed my Suburban door shut and slowly made my way toward them. Even from across the parking lot their somber expressions told a story: The two men were standing in the very spot where Melissa Witt had parked her white Mitsubishi on that fateful December night in 1994.</div> <div class="indent">“Let’s get started,” Rider directed. He pointed at the stained and worn asphalt as we made eye contact. “This is it. This is where Melissa parked that night.”</div> <div class="indent">I scanned the pavement, almost expecting to see the bloodstains left behind from the blitz attack that had left Melissa Witt critically injured. I let out a gasp at the thought, and then immediately turned away from the detectives. I yanked at the oversized sunglasses that were perched on top of my head and quickly put them on in an attempt to hide the tears that were forming. “I’m…” my voice trailed off as I rapidly surveyed the expansive parking lot. “I’m stunned.”</div> <div class="indent">Boyd nodded. “It’s hard to believe that the son of a bitch attacked her in such close proximity to the building, isn’t it?” he barked.</div> <div class="indent">“He was bold,” I offered back.</div> <div class="indent">“That he was,” Rider added.</div> <div class="indent">As Rider and Boyd dove into a serious discussion about the details surrounding Melissa’s abduction and murder, I slipped away quietly. There was something I needed to do. With my head down, I slowly made my way to the entrance of Bowling World. “Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…” I counted. How many steps had separated Melissa Witt from safety on the night she was attacked? “Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two.” I needed to know. At “forty-five” I stopped abruptly in front of the glass doors of Bowling World. “Forty-five steps away from safety.” My thoughts shifted into overdrive. Forty-five was also the number of days between the date of Melissa’s abduction—December 1, 1994—and the date her body was recovered in the Ozark National Forest—January 13, 1995.</div> <div class="indent">Unsettled by the strange coincidence, I bypassed the retired detectives and hurried back to my Suburban. Inside the safety of my SUV, I slumped down in the driver’s seat and reached for a notebook resting on the dashboard. Months earlier, I had carefully written the title “Witt Case” across its cover. I flipped through the pages before landing on what I was looking for—a crude outline of events from December 1, 1994:</div> <div class="indent">6:30-6:40pm—Witness hears a woman shouting “Help me” in the Bowling World parking lot. A young boy, Jeremy, was with his mother at the bowling alley that night. Jeremy reported leaving Bowling World to retrieve a book from his mother’s car. He heard a woman scream “Help! Help me!” Underneath the words “Help me” I had written: MELISSA WITT CALLS FOR HELP WHILE SHE IS ATTACKED in bold, red ink.</div> <div class="indent">Directly under those words I had also jotted down this note: Melissa Witt’s car keys were located in the parking lot of Bowling World at approximately 7:45pm. The keys were immediately turned in to the front desk inside the building. In the column to the left of these notes I had written: NOBODY noticed the blood spatter on Melissa’s keys.</div> <div class="indent">I stared at the words, willing an answer to suddenly appear among my copious notes. “Back to the beginning,” I whispered to myself. “If we want answers to this case, we need to go back to the beginning.”</div> <div class="indent">A knock on my window interrupted my train of thought. I rolled down the window when I saw Rider standing there. As usual, the exceptionally dressed retired detective was all business. “You coming?” Rider asked. “I want to walk through the timeline of events once again,” he said.</div> <div class="indent">I leaned across the console to place the notebook back in its original place on the dashboard.</div> <div class="indent">“I’m coming,” I assured him.</div> <div class="indent">“Good. I want to go back to the beginning.” My head snapped quickly back in Rider’s direction at the sound of his words.</div> <div class="indent">Astounded by the second strange coincidence of the morning, I responded by slowly repeating Rider’s own words back to him as I nodded: “Back to the beginning.”</div> <div class="center">?</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>As I drove home, Rider’s words continued to echo in my head. When I arrived at my office, I decided to once again take a closer look at the events that unfolded on the day Melissa disappeared. From all reports, the day started off routinely. She spent the first part of the morning with her mother, Mary Ann. The honor student would head to Westark Community College next. After that, she went to lunch at the Chick-fil-a in Central Mall with her friend, John, then off to her job as a dental assistant.</div> <div class="indent">Before she left that morning in 1994, Melissa had a minor disagreement with her mother. She had asked to borrow money, and Mary Ann, in an effort to teach her daughter money management, had told her no. Melissa and her mother were especially close. They shared the same beautiful smile, kind heart, and innocent outlook on life. So this argument, while minor, was unusual for them.</div> <div class="indent">Panged with guilt, before Mary Ann left for work that morning, she left a note for Melissa reminding her she would be bowling with her league that evening and offered to buy her a hamburger. She signed the note, “<i>Love, Mom.</i>”</div> <div class="indent">At five o’clock that evening, after clocking out of her job as a dental assistant, Melissa discovered that her 1995 Mitsubishi Mirage wouldn’t start. After trying to start the car a few times, Melissa gave up and waited with a co-worker until a local businessman, later dubbed the Good Samaritan, gave her car a jump.</div> <div class="indent">Police reports explain how Melissa’s dome light was left on by mistake, draining the car battery. Investigators tracked down the Good Samaritan and interviewed him multiple times before ultimately clearing him in the teenager’s disappearance and murder.</div> <div class="indent">“<i>People ask about the Good Samaritan all the time because those events leading up to Melissa’s abduction seem suspicious</i>,” Rider once explained.<i> “I mean, the Good Samaritan seems suspicious until you realize how many times he was questioned</i>. <i>He was cleared of any suspicion in Melissa’s murder</i>.”</div> <div class="indent">We know that, once Melissa’s car started, she went home to change out of her uniform. Those clothes were found crumpled on her bedroom floor. Mary Ann Witt was able to determine that her daughter had then donned a white V-neck sweater and jeans.</div> <div class="indent">Melissa must have seen her mom’s note, because authorities believe she headed to Bowling World, arriving between 6:30 and 7:00pm. She parked in the northwest corner of the lot, but she never made it inside. There were no cameras to record the events that unfolded in that parking lot that night. Witnesses would later tell police they heard a woman screaming “<i>Help me!</i>”</div> <div class="indent">Since Melissa never entered the bowling alley that night, her mother simply thought she had decided to go out with friends instead. Mary Ann went home expecting to see her daughter later that evening. Hours passed and Thursday slowly turned into Friday.</div> <div class="indent">At nine o’clock on Friday morning, Mary Ann reported Melissa as a missing person. When the patrolman took the report that December morning, one of the very first things he asked Melissa’s mother was if she and Melissa had argued. Mary Ann told him there had been a small dispute over money. Once he knew about the argument, according to Jay C. Rider, the officer chalked it up to a routine missing person situation. After all, Melissa was considered an adult and it wasn’t illegal for her to decide not to come home.</div> <div class="indent">However, Melissa’s friends and family knew that it was not like Melissa to take off without telling her mom where she would be. So by Saturday, Melissa’s friends and family were frantically passing out flyers, blanketing the River Valley with over 6,000 pleas for help in finding the missing teenager.</div> <div class="indent">Once news stations picked up the story on the search for Melissa Witt, the Fort Smith Police Major Crimes Unit, led by Jay C. Rider, asked to see the missing person report that had been filed. The report had little information. The patrolman knew little more than a 19-year-old girl didn’t come home after an argument with her mother. There was no evidence to suggest that Melissa had been abducted. The officer had seen this type of scenario play out hundreds of times before. He was certain Melissa would return home soon. Three days after the initial report of the teenage girl affectionately called “Missy” by her friends and family was marked as a “runaway case,” the tide shifted and the Fort Smith Major Crimes Unit had boots on the ground actively searching for the missing teen.</div> <div class="indent">Almost immediately, investigators received a shocking phone call from a bowling alley employee. This call would turn the Witt case upside down. The employee described how at approximately 7:45pm, a set of car keys were found in the parking lot and were turned in to the front desk of Bowling World. The keys held an important clue. The name spelled out on the keychain was “Missy.” Even more shocking, no one had noticed the spatters of blood that were slowly drying on the metal keys.</div> <div class="indent">Immediately, investigators began a search to find the person who turned in Melissa’s keys on December 1, 1994. After making repeated pleas in partnership with area news stations, after nearly two months, the construction worker who found the car keys came forward. Curtis McCormick had been working at a Tennessee construction site since he had turned in the keys and he had no idea about Melissa’s abduction until he returned home to Arkansas.</div> <div class="indent">After his arrival, McCormick’s brother was discussing the Witt case with him and that’s when the two realized that Curtis was the person police were looking for. When interviewed by investigators, McCormick described how he had spotted the keys when he was distracted by a car with its headlights left on when he arrived at the bowling alley sometime between 7:30 and 8:00 p.m. with his wife and teenage son. According to McCormick, he found the keys laying on the pavement where police later found Witt’s car abandoned.</div> <div class="indent">As I reviewed the details of Melissa’s disappearance over two decades later, I sat on the floor of my living room, poring over the news footage that captured Melissa’s friends and family distributing flyers with her smiling photo and identifying information. I could feel their sorrow. <i>Where is Melissa? </i>That question loomed with each news piece. I watched what started out as hopeful interviews with friends and family slowly turned into desperation, despair, and sadness. The answer to their most pressing question “Where is Melissa Witt” had an answer. Her friends and family just didn’t know it yet. December would slip quietly into January before the Ozark National Forest would give up the secret that was hidden amongst its dense trees and thorny undergrowth. Melissa Witt was dead. But the smiling faces of her friends and family in this early December news footage had no idea of the horrors that awaited.</div> <div class="indent">I closed my laptop and wondered aloud if Melissa’s killer had watched this same footage in the days after her disappearance. I envision him huddled on his mother’s expensive couch that cold December weekend, glued to the television, wondering if his terrible secret was safe. When I close my eyes, I can see his smug face, reliving every gruesome detail of Melissa’s murder. I imagine him running his murderous fingertips along the steel of her Mickey Mouse watch. I opened my eyes and reached for my iPhone. I opened the Facebook app and scrolled briefly until I found the profile of the man I believe is responsible for killing Melissa Witt. “There you are,” I say out loud as I enlarge his profile photo on my phone. I stare at his smiling face and steely eyes. <i>Did you do it?</i> I think to myself. <i>Did you kill Melissa Witt?</i></div> <div class="indent">I close the Facebook app as Jay C. Rider’s words from our meeting in the bowling alley parking lot flood my mind. “<i>Back to the Beginning</i>,” he had said. Instinctively, I grabbed one of my notebooks. This one, titled “December 2016,” stored a wrinkled copy of an email I had received on December 28, 2016. The one sentence email packed a punch: “<i>Probably not relevant, but my old college roommate told me he was meeting Melissa the night she disappeared.” </i>He had no way of knowing it at the time, but this email was beyond relevant. It turns out, his college roommate knew Melissa Witt. Stranger still, his college roommate had actively been contacting me about the Melissa Witt case.</div> <div class="indent">I sank back into the worn and cracked leather of my black office chair and thought back to a description of the Bowling World parking lot given by law enforcement regarding that cold December night. Despite the fact that the dark bowling alley was teeming with cars, there was very little activity happening outside. Inside, however, Bowling World was bustling with bowlers, friends sharing a beer after work, and kids playing video games or pool. The empty parking lot provided the perfect opportunity for a 19-year-old girl to be spirited away under the cloak of darkness.</div> <div class="indent">Like a predator carefully stalking his prey, he watched and waited. His eyes intensely focused on her every move as an unsuspecting Melissa parked her 1995 Mitsubishi Mirage, turned off the engine, and stepped out into the shadows of the Bowling World parking lot. Suddenly, Melissa is caught off guard. She looks up in a mix of fear and surprise. But it’s too late. His sharp eyes are locked on the target. He is ready to strike. And then, it happens. The hunter makes his move.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

LaDonna Humphrey

Connected by Fate $15.50 $17.95

Connected by Fate unfolds against the haunting backdrop of the Ozark National Forest, where the unresolved murder of Melissa Witt has cast a long shadow over the dense woodlands for almost three decades. The mystery, woven into the fabric of the remote mountaintop, has become a part of the lore of the land, with the true identity of the murderer eluding capture, concealed by the forest's imposing presence. Enter LaDonna Humphrey, driven by a profound sense of justice and a personal commitment to uncovering the truth, despite never having met Melissa Witt. LaDonna's connection to the case transcends the ordinary, fueling her with a relentless determination that has defined her life for almost a decade.LaDonna's investigation is a riveting narrative of courage, resilience, and an unwavering pursuit of truth in the face of overwhelming odds. Each breakthrough and setback, each clue unearthed and lead followed, draws her deeper into a web of intrigue that extends far beyond the initial crime.Connected by Fate is more than a true crime story; it's a testament to the power of human spirit and determination fueled by the knowledge that solving Melissa's murder is not just about bringing a killer to justice—it's about restoring dignity to a life cut tragically short, and offering closure to a community haunted by the specter of an unsolved crime.

Dead End: Inside the Hunt for the I-70 Serial Killer

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 id="c6">CHAPTER 1</h1> <div><b>“And then I started wondering, was Robin really the first? Could there have been others before her?”</b></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="indent">The phone rings every April 8 in Susan Fuldauer’s Indianapolis home. She will pause what she is doing, look at the incoming number, glance quickly at the calendar, and smile. Mike Crooke never, ever forgets.</div> <div class="indent">“I just pick up the phone every April 8 and I call her,” Crooke says. “And I say to her ‘Hey Susan, I am not calling you because I have some good news to report about.’ It is more like ‘Hey Susan, I have not forgotten about you, your family or your sister Robin, and I never will. I am still out here plugging away. I am still out here trying to do my best.’ I always call her on the anniversary of that day and just remind her that she and her family are still in my thoughts, and they always will be.”</div> <div class="indent">Crooke, the longtime sergeant of the Indianapolis Police Department, has remembered since April 8, 1992, the day the Robin Fuldauer nightmare began. He is long since retired, but he has never, ever forgotten.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="center">***</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="indent">November 2021. Our crew left St. Louis in the early morning and headed east, photographer Chuck Delaney driving, producer JJ Bailey riding shotgun, and me in the backseat taking notes of the scenery along Interstate 70. As we drive along the highway I picture in my mind what the killer saw 30 years ago. Pick an exit to get off, quickly find a small store in a strip mall, make sure a woman is working alone, get in and get out without being seen, and leave a body behind. Surely it is not that easy. It simply can’t be.</div> <div class="indent">Our first stop, like the killer’s, was Indianapolis. Interstate 70 east through Indy to the 465 loop, then a quick jaunt north. The killer wasn’t patient, he took the first possible exit, Pendleton Pike. He could have headed east or west. He could have picked any woman, anywhere, to kill. He chose to turn left at the light and go west. And then he immediately had options to kill on both his right and left. He picked the Payless shoe store.</div> <div class="indent">The Indianapolis police detectives still working the Robin Fuldauer case were waiting for us when we arrived. Like other major cities, Indianapolis had seen a huge spike in homicide cases recently. Their staff was spread thin trying to solve not only murders that seemed to be happening daily, but cold cases that had piled up over the years. Clearance rates, or rates of solving homicides, ranged around 50 percent. That meant hundreds of unsolved cases piled up each year. After 30 years, an unsolved homicide is often a file, in a box, in a closet, never to be opened again.</div> <div class="indent">“We have thousands of unsolved cases over the years,” said Captain Roger Spurgeon of the Indianapolis Police Department. “And more are coming every week. It is overwhelming. You do the best you can do, and then another case lands on your desk.”</div> <div class="indent">Spurgeon and I looked around the busy Pendleton Pike area and I knew we were reading each other’s minds: The killer could have stopped anywhere.</div> <div class="indent">“Why here, do you think?” I voiced to the detectives. “He could have stopped anywhere. Why do you think he stopped here?”</div> <div class="indent">The men looked at each other and shook their heads. A question that has never been answered here, or at any of the other crime scenes.</div> <div class="indent">“This would be one of the last places you would think he would strike,” said Columbus Ricks, one of the Indianapolis detectives. “Look at how busy this area is.”</div> <div class="indent">But Spurgeon guessed there was a method in the killer’s madness. “I think there would have been a variety of stores for him to choose from in the area,” Spurgeon said. “It was just a matter of whatever our suspect was looking for at the time. You have all of this busy traffic around this area, all of this movement, all of these people coming and going so quickly. Unless somebody really stood out to someone as behaving oddly or looking oddly, you could really go about your business with relative anonymity and nobody would ever really pay you any attention.”</div> <div class="indent">I pointed to the busy Speedway gas station that was literally steps from the Payless shoe store. Customers were filling their tanks, and numerous people were coming and going inside the store by the minute.</div> <div class="indent">“Was the gas station there in 1992?” I asked Spurgeon.</div> <div class="indent">He nodded yes.</div> <div class="indent">“That does not make any sense,” I said. “You would have to be a fool to kill somebody with this many potential witnesses around.”</div> <div class="indent">Ricks and fellow detective David Ellison both laughed.</div> <div class="indent">Spurgeon nodded again. “Welcome to the world of the I-70 serial killer where nothing makes any sense.”</div> <div class="indent">I walked up to the front door of the gas station, and then took a few steps to the Payless store. It took me less than 20 seconds. Ellison and Ricks stood alongside Spurgeon and watched me make the walk.</div> <div class="indent">“Twenty seconds,” I hollered at them. “No way somebody is killing somebody with all of these people just 20 seconds away.”</div> <div class="indent">I looked at Spurgeon again. He nodded and I shook my head. “No way,” I muttered to myself.</div> <div class="indent">I kept walking between the gas station and shoe store, and then returned to the detectives.</div> <div class="indent">“Let me make sure I have this right,” I said. “He somehow chooses this busy location in the middle of the day. Then he kills Robin with all these people around. And then what, he just disappears?”</div> <div class="indent">“Pretty much,” said Ellison. “Pretty much.”</div> <div class="indent">Robin Fuldauer was not sure where life was taking her yet, but she was moving very quickly. She was the salutatorian of her Lawrence Central High School class, located just down the street from the Payless shoe store. She graduated a few years later from Indiana University. And now she had already risen to become a manager for Payless.</div> <div class="indent">Sometime around 1pm on that April day, a serial killer was about to embark on a month-long journey, one that would take him to five cities, leaving six body bags behind. He was patrolling Pendleton Pike Road, looking for his first victim.</div> <div class="indent">Receipts from the store show the last purchase was made at 1:12pm. Police believe the killer was likely in the store at the time, saw the only other customer leave, and then made his move. He forced Fuldauer into a storage room in the back of the store, made her kneel, then shot her twice in the back of the head, execution style, with a .22 caliber handgun. There was no sign of any struggle inside the store. The killer then rummaged through the cash register, taking less than $100. Police believe he left through a back door by 1:30pm, leaving Fuldauer lying dead behind a closed door. For the next hour, Payless customers would have their run of the store, with nobody in sight.</div> <div class="indent">“I don’t believe there was an opportunity for anybody to go inside the store and observe that there was a body there,” Spurgeon said.</div> <div class="indent">The Payless store had little in the way of store security. Just a bell that would ring when a new customer arrived.</div> <div class="indent">Police records showed a woman named Lucretia Gullett was working at the Speedway gas station the day Fuldauer was killed. It was Gullett who discovered Robin’s body and called police.</div> <div class="indent">Before arriving in Indianapolis, I began the task of searching for Lucretia Gullet.</div> <div class="indent">“Is this Lucretia Gullet?” I asked the woman on the other end of the phone.</div> <div class="indent">“It is,” she said.</div> <div class="indent">“Ma’am,” I said, “I am a reporter working on a serial killer from 1992. And I believe you found the body of his first victim. A woman named Robin Fuldauer in the Payless shoe store.”</div> <div class="indent">Gullett paused on the other end. “I did not really find her body. But yes, I was there, and I called the police. But what did you say about a serial killer?”</div> <div class="indent">I told Gullett her Payless killer went on to kill numerous other women across the country.</div> <div class="indent">“What?!” she screamed into the phone.</div> <div class="indent">And I realized she was unaware. “Do you still live around Indy?” I asked her.</div> <div class="indent">“I do,” she said.</div> <div class="indent">“I am coming to town,” I told her. “Would you meet with me?”</div> <div class="indent">“I will,” she said. “And did you say serial killer?” Apparently, she was still coming to grips with this.</div> <div class="indent">I stood by the Speedway gas station with my crew and the police detectives, and watched as a woman parked her car and walked toward us.</div> <div class="indent">“I am looking for Bob,” she said.</div> <div class="indent">“Hi Lucretia,” I said, and we shook hands.</div> <div class="indent">We began walking around the area. “This brings back a lot of memories,” she said.</div> <div class="indent">“Have you been back here since…?” I asked.</div> <div class="indent">“No,” she said as she looked around. “Thirty years is a long time. I just avoided coming around here.”</div> <div class="indent">I asked Gullett to take me back to that day, as best she could.</div> <div class="indent">“My shift at the Speedway gas station was ending at 3pm. I was almost getting off work to go home when I received a phone call from a man who said he was the district manager of the Payless store. It was probably around 2pm,” Gullett remembered. “He told me that he had been calling the shoe store for quite a while, but that no one was answering the phone there. He was really concerned, so I told him I would go next door to Payless and see what was going on over there.”</div> <div class="indent">Gullett and I made the 20 second walk from one store to the other. “What happened when you walked in?” I asked.</div> <div class="indent">Gullett paused at the door. “This is hard,” she said. “I walked up to the front door, opened it up and looked around. I did not see anybody. No manager, no customers. I looked over to the left and noticed that the cash register was open and then I went through the aisles, but nobody was around. I really was not sure what was going on, but I knew it was not right. Then I heard someone talking in the back of the store, so I went back there and I saw a woman who had a child with her. They were looking at some shoes. I asked her to please leave, and told her something was wrong. I did not know what was happening, but I knew something was wrong. So I just immediately stopped looking around and called the police. I was probably only in the store for about 10 minutes. And then I just waited for the police to arrive.”</div> <div class="indent">Police records show they arrived at the scene around 3pm. When they did, Gullett said she then stood watch over the front door while detectives made their way inside. She watched them search the store before heading towards the back. And then she saw them open a closed door and look inside.</div> <div class="indent">“One officer looked down to the right,” Gullett said, “and I could tell he was shocked at what he saw.”</div> <div class="indent">Incredibly, some 30 years after Robin Fuldauer was murdered, Gullett says she was not aware the homicide scene she walked into three decades ago became linked to a serial killer, or that it was not solved all these years earlier. “I just became aware of that when you called me,” she said.</div> <div class="indent">“You did not follow the case over the years as it exploded?” I asked.</div> <div class="indent">“No,” she said. “I was shocked when you told me it was a serial killer. I was like, whoa! That is when I put two and two together, and like, wow!”</div> <div class="indent">Brought back to the scene, and meeting new detectives for the first time. Gullett is now spending time detailing the case to police again.</div> <div class="indent">“They wanted to know if there was anything else I ever came up with or thought about.” And then she winked and smiled. “Maybe. Maybe. It might just be a coincidence. But yes, I hope I can help.”</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="center">***</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="indent">Roger Spurgeon was an Indianapolis police officer at the time of Robin Fuldauer’s murder, not yet working in homicide. Now, he has been with the police department more than 25 years, most of them in the homicide unit. He would inherit the Fuldauer case, and says that in spite of the busy area, and in spite of the busy time of the day, early leads in the case quickly fizzled. “At first, because there was a small amount of cash taken, detectives thought it was likely a robbery that somehow turned into a homicide. They had a variety of potential suspects they were looking at in the very beginning. But If you describe a suspect as somebody you really have a keen interest in because of some sort of an evidentiary link or eyewitnesses, no, there was nothing there which stood out to the investigators at that time.”</div> <div class="indent">Detectives immediately began canvassing the area on Pendleton Pike. The first witness they found was the store manager at MAB paint, across the street from the Payless, He told police he saw a strange looking man carrying a long bag. The witness said he watched the man repeatedly circling the Payless store, and then watched as the man sat down at a curb nearby for nearly 30 minutes. And then around 2pm, he suddenly disappeared from sight. The witness told police the man appeared to either be on drugs or had a mental problem.</div> <div class="indent">Police would only locate less than a half dozen potential witnesses. One of them said they saw a man who matched what the earlier witness said calmly trying to hitch a ride along the highway. Police found a couple of other witnesses in the area who thought they saw something, but none of those leads panned out.</div> <div class="indent">Detective Columbus Ricks is part of the Indianapolis Unsolved Homicide Unit. Like Spurgeon, he was also an Indianapolis police officer at the time of the Fuldauer murder. “The homicide investigators tracked down almost everybody that was said to have seen something in the area or had been seen by someone. They all had enough of an alibi to eliminate them. The descriptions of the suspect were all black males…” Ricks said, shaking his head. “And within days, after Wichita, the detectives knew the killer was a white male.”</div> <div class="indent">I looked at Ricks and laughed. “How stupid,” I said.</div> <div class="indent">“Not as easy as it seems on TV,” Ricks laughed again.</div> <div class="indent">And then came the question: How did the killer get away? How did he simply walk out of the store in the middle of the day, with people all around, and disappear into thin air?</div> <div class="indent">“I think he could have easily parked a vehicle on one of these residential side streets and casually walked to it,” Spurgeon said. “And nobody would have paid any attention to him unless he was acting strangely. Obviously, he had to have some sort of wheels to get from point A to point B. But we still do not have a good handle on that. Detectives had a lot of different theories at the time.”</div> <div class="indent">Our crew walked around the area near the store. Busy streets in front, a side street on the side, and an older residential section behind it. Spurgeon appeared to be on target. The most likely answer was the killer parked a car on one of the residential streets, walked calmly to the Payless store, murdered Robin Fuldauer, and then walked back to his car.</div> <div class="indent">Time moves forward. Today, a Batteries Plus store sits where the Payless Shoe store stood in 1992. But what has not changed is that police departments in five cities are still digging, talking to each other, and hoping for a DNA match.</div> <div class="indent">“Science was not as developed then as it is now,” said Ricks. “We are going to see if DNA and new technology can assist us in solving this case.” Ricks added that another new witness may have recently emerged. Until then, we wait. The police. The families. Everyone. And they all understand that they are waiting for an answer that may never come.</div> <div class="indent">Robin’s sister Susan will never forget that day. You can still hear the sadness in her voice. “My husband found out about Robin first. He came home and told me. It was just so incredibly hard to process. It was something completely out of the realm of expectations. I immediately went to pick up my daughter and then we went to the Payless store. There was so much activity at the scene it was hard to believe. It is just a nightmare that you live through and cannot possibly process. It is just very hard to describe.”</div> <div class="indent">And then just a few days later, the bombshell of Wichita came, where 700 miles away and just three days after Robin Fuldauer was murdered, Patricia Magers and Patricia Smith were killed in the same fashion. And almost immediately, police were hit with a stunning reality: The same gun used in Indianapolis was used in Wichita. It seemed impossible with the time frame. But, suddenly, Indianapolis and Wichita had a serial killer on their hands.</div> <div class="indent">“Then it all became just surreal,” Susan said. “Wichita was connected to my Robin? And again, look at the pattern. So cold blooded. Another busy, noisy store. And then the others soon came rolling in. And then I started wondering, was Robin really the first? Could there have been others before her? This was now totally beyond belief. And then our family began grieving not just for Robin, but for all of these other families going through the same exact nightmare that we were going through.”</div> <div class="indent">There is another heartbreaking twist of fate to Robin’s story. She was not supposed to work that day, but another employee called in sick. The Payless store was short-staffed, so Robin came in to cover the shift, as she had so many times before.</div> <div class="indent">After all these years, one thought keeps sticking in Susan’s mind. “I know you cannot turn the clock back. But I usually went by Robin’s store on most days after I got off of work, just to make sure she was okay. For some reason, I did not go by that day. And I always ask myself, ‘Could I have possibly done something? Could I have possibly stopped something?’”</div> <div class="indent">Susan Fuldauer is realistic about the chances of finding the killer after all these years. But she says she will always remain hopeful. “We have always maintained hope that Robin’s murder will someday be solved. Maybe the killer is in jail somewhere. Maybe he is no longer alive. But, like the detectives tell us, we have new technology now. We have new DNA techniques. We have hope. It does not bring Robin or the other victims back. But to know that he might be stopped, and he can never do anything like this again, that would be a major victory for our family.”</div> <div class="indent">Mike Crooke, who has seen everything in his 52 years in law enforcement, insists the case can someday be solved. “I am still hopeful we will resolve this. We did not have the advances in science 30 years ago that we have now.”</div> <div class="indent">Robin Fuldauer was 26 years old. She was the first known victim of the I-70 serial killer. And while it all began in Indy, sadly, it did not end there. And on April 8, pick a year, any year, Mike Crooke will pick up the phone and call Susan Fuldauer. She will smile. They will talk. And they will cry. “It is so kind and considerate of Mike to reach out to my family,” Susan said. “He reminds us that Robin will never ever be forgotten. I appreciate that so very much. We do not talk about the what ifs, because this was such a heinous crime. It is just very comforting to know that Mike remembers us each year. That amount of kindness is really wonderful and will never be forgotten.”</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

Bob Cyphers

Dead End: Inside the Hunt for the I-70 Serial Killer $15.50

In 1992, a store clerk was found shot to death in broad daylight at the Boot Village in St. Charles, Missouri. Nothing was stolen and there was no sexual assault. This bizarre and seemingly isolated murder was quickly connected with others in Indianapolis, Wichita, Terre Haute, and Raytown. The media dubbed the suspect “The I-70 Serial Killer.” He has never been captured, and the story quickly fell out of the media’s attention. But the cases never went cold for the officers in those cities. In 2021, with the advancements in DNA, St. Charles Police Captain Raymond Floyd launched a task force, bringing all jurisdictions together along with federal agencies to take one final crack at solving the crimes. The task force selected Bob Cyphers of KMOV-TV to follow them along, city by city, in the hunt for the killer. Cyphers and his KMOV crew produced a seven-part award winning series called “Chasing the I-70 Serial Killer.” Their work led to national exposure of the case in People magazine and on the Discovery Channel, winning an Edward R. Murrow Award and being nominated for an Emmy. Dead End: Inside the Hunt for the I-70 Serial Killer follows on the work done by the task force with the important goal of keeping the story alive in the public eye. New evidence, never before available to the public, is revealed here, with the hopes of triggering a memory or revealing a new lead. The task force may be closed, but the drive to find this killer is alive and well. Anyone who may have information about the case should contact the I-70 hotline at 1-800-800-3510.

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Things Aren't Right: The Disappearance of the Yuba County Five

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 id="c5">CHAPTER ONE: THEIR WORLD</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>Working on this book required a great deal of research about the five men and the case itself. I also needed to gain a better understanding of intellectual disabilities and mental illness. Countless hours were spent watching videos and documentaries about people living with schizophrenia or an intellectual disability. A majority of what I watched was created by people diagnosed with a mental illness or an intellectual disability. What I learned is that there are challenges, but people live productive lives. Some have careers and families. People might count them out, but they have proved their critics wrong.</div> <div class="indent">While Gary Mathias was diagnosed with schizophrenia, there was not a clear diagnosis for Weiher, Madruga, Sterling, or Huett. All four were rubber-stamped as “disabled.” Some information was provided about Madruga and Sterling. It is difficult to understand a disability if you have limited resources. Family members clarified the disabilities of the four to the best of their abilities, but they wish they had an actual diagnosis at the time.</div> <div class="indent">Weiher, Madruga, Sterling, Huett, and Mathias grew up in a time when intellectual disabilities and mental illness were swept under the rug or treated with complete disdain. Special education classes were available to some but not everyone with a disability. Some were sent away to institutions that ranged from acceptable to downright inhuman.</div> <div class="indent">The 1970s were a time of deinstitutionalization for psychiatric hospitals due to legal and economic factors. Another change was the 1973 Rehabilitation Act passed by Congress. Section 504 of the act stated that employers and organizations that received federal funds had to provide equal opportunity benefits and services to people with disabilities. It was in the books, but it did not mean life changed instantly for those with disabilities. For the five, they had dealt with years of obstacles and other personal difficulties long before that law was signed.</div> <div class="indent">In 1975, Congress passed the Education for all Handicapped Children Act. At the time, it was estimated that there were eight million children with disabilities in the United States, and one million of those children were excluded from the public school system. The act would provide a free “appropriate” public education to these children. The five were out of high school when that was passed. Their families do not recall if the men faced major obstacles with their education.</div> <div class="indent">During the interview process, I didn’t press the families too hard about intellectual disabilities or mental illness. Some discussed the topic without me bringing up the issue, and for others I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to press my luck. From what I gathered, the men’s families dealt with their intellectual disabilities to the best of their abilities. The men were not treated differently from their siblings. I spoke with someone about this, and they wondered if it was the parents treating their children as equals or some sort of unconscious denial that there was something wrong.</div> <div class="indent">Discussing mental illness was harder since Gary Mathias’s schizophrenia was viewed by many as the reason behind the men’s disappearance. His family was on the defensive, and rightly so. It’s hard to know if the person interviewing you is using the information to shed light on mental illness or to use the information as data to prove Mathias was the villain.</div> <div class="indent">Without a doubt, the families of Weiher, Madruga, Sterling, Huett, and Mathias did their best to raise their children. During the 1960s and 1970s, Yuba County and neighboring Sutter County provided certain services for the five, and they were part of programs including the Gateway Projects.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="center">***</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>I grew up in Ohio, which is basically a Midwestern state where people drive through or fly over to get to somewhere more interesting or exciting. My hometown of Springfield, Ohio, was once a city with the potential to be something bigger, but it never happened due to a variety of circumstances. In 1983, the 50th anniversary edition of <i>Newsweek</i> featured a story about some families in Springfield. “The American Dream” was the title of the article, and some 30 years after that <i>Newsweek </i>story ran, Springfield was in the press again, but this time, it was being examined as the American city with the biggest decline of middle-class residents from 2000-2014.</div> <div class="indent">As I began studying the history of Yuba County for this book, I noticed some curious similarities. Marysville, the county seat for Yuba County, and my hometown were visioned at one time as becoming major cities, but it was not their destiny. Both are very blue-collar and pretty much filled with conservative, God-fearing folk. Perhaps Springfield and Marysville had already experienced the best of times, but both towns have citizens who believe that the best is yet to come.</div> <div class="indent">My research also focused on the histories of neighboring communities like Olivehurst and Yuba City in Sutter County. As I studied the Yuba County area, I realized that my understanding of California was just Southern California and the Bay Area. Sure, I was familiar with Napa Valley, the mountains, and the giant sequoias in Northern California, but I knew nothing of the communities north of Sacramento. I began to expand my knowledge of a region of California that’s not always depicted in movies or television.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="center">***</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>At the time they went missing, Weiher, Madruga, Huett, and Mathias resided in Linda and Olivehurst, communities in Yuba County east of the confluence of the Yuba and Feather Rivers. Sterling lived west of the Feather River in Yuba City. Located some forty-five minutes north of Sacramento, life in the Yuba County region was vastly different from the faster-paced lifestyles of Southern California with its glitz, glamour, sun, surf, and beaches.</div> <div class="indent">“I grew up in Marysville when it was a vibrant and diverse regional ‘hub’ of an agriculturally rich three-county region,” said Mike Geniella, a former employee of the <i>Appeal-Democrat</i>, the local newspaper for Marysville and Yuba City. “Marysville had a vibrant business center, great restaurants, a bar on practically every corner, and a rich history dating to the gold rush era. It was a mercantile center for the northern gold mines.”</div> <div class="indent">Agriculture was a way of life for many, and some residents were descendants of the old gold rush while newer residents left places in the Central Plains or South, with a few considered true “Okies” from the Dust Bowl. The five may have had a small-town upbringing, but they lived over an hour’s drive away from the Plumas National Forest, while Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, and Reno were anywhere from two to three hours away by car.</div> <div class="indent">Marysville and Yuba City have been part of an area of great agricultural importance known as the Central Valley. From Redding down past Bakersfield, the Central Valley covers some twenty-thousand square miles and is bounded by the Cascade Range to the north, the Tehachapi Mountains to the south, the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east, and the Coast Ranges to the west. Two major rivers, the Sacramento and San Joaquin, run through the Central Valley.</div> <div class="indent">To the west of Yuba City, the Sutter Buttes are visible to those in the region. Remnants of an ancient volcano, they are two thousand feet in height and run roughly eleven miles going north to south while measuring roughly ten miles from east to west. The Sutter Buttes are not classified as a mountain range, although they are referred to in the area as “the world’s smallest mountain range.”</div> <div class="indent">Marysville was named in honor of Mary Murphy, a survivor of the infamous Donner Party. A group of settlers, led in part by the Donner family, left Independence, Missouri, during the spring of 1846 to claim fertile land in California. By the time they reached Fort Laramie (in modern-day Wyoming), they had learned of a shortcut to California, which turned out to be a lie that cost numerous lives and allegedly resulted in some of the survivors choosing cannibalism to survive. One of the factors that brought them to that last resort was the same unforgiving winter conditions of the Sierra Nevada that sadly also took the lives of the Yuba County Five.</div> <div class="indent">Gold put Marysville on the map during the 1850s, and some believed the town had the potential to be the state capital of California. Marysville was along the Feather River that flowed to Sacramento, and it became a popular shipping route for miners. A lust for gold led to the practice of hydraulic mining, which caused an environmental disaster that raised river levels. Flooding became an issue. A levee system was built in Marysville for protection, but it boxed in the city, limiting its growth. Hydraulic mining also made the rivers less navigable, leading to Marysville, which ended the fairytale for the town that some envisioned as “the New York of the Pacific.”</div> <div class="indent">When the gold boom came to an end, the area would turn to a new business. Agriculture flourished in the region and is still a major business today. Rice, almonds, walnuts, plums, and peaches are a few examples of the hundreds of crops that are grown in the Central Valley. Orchards are visible in the region to this day, along with the rice fields that make up most of the rice produced in the state. Yuba City is home to Sunsweet Growers, Inc., a major producer of dried tree fruits.</div> <div class="indent">Marysville’s neighbor to the west is Yuba City, the county seat of Sutter County. Located along the banks of the Feather River, Yuba City had similar beginnings to Marysville. It was an area of interest during the California Gold Rush. By 1856, it would become the seat of Sutter County, which was one of the original twenty-seven counties in California.</div> <div class="indent">To the Southeast of Marysville is a census-designated area known as Olivehurst. It was settled mostly by people looking for work in California to escape the Great Depression. Some of those people were true Okies, and there are streets in Olivehurst named after communities in Oklahoma. This is where some of the Yuba County Five resided.</div> <div class="indent">“Social tensions existed for a long time between the townsfolk and the new arrivals, the ‘Okies,’” said Geniella, who added, “Even though we were blue-collar, my parents, their families, and neighbors scorned anyone from Olivehurst.”</div> <div class="indent">Agriculture would drive the economy of both Sutter and Yuba Counties. Commercial agriculture would be successful in California during the late 1800s, and the state would lead the way in exporting grain. Technology and innovation allowed California to thrive, but it was also at this time that many farmers saw the potential in growing other crops like fruits and vegetables. Refrigerated cars and an impressive irrigation system were contributing factors to their success.</div> <div class="indent">It was mid-December of 1955 when a historic rainfall hit Northern California. Beginning on December 18th, the Sierra Nevada had areas that measured over thirty inches of rain, while the valley and coastal regions would record twenty inches of rain in areas. Runoff from the Sierra Nevada flooded the region, and the result was roads being washed away, farmland destroyed, and towns flooded.</div> <div class="indent">The floods did a great deal of damage from Christmas Eve into the new year, where some eighty people were killed, over four thousand injured, some fifteen hundred homes were destroyed, while an additional estimated four thousand were badly damaged beyond repair, resulting in an estimated $225 million in property damages. Marysville and Yuba City would be the worst hit cities during this flood.</div> <div class="center">***</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>For ten years, I taught modern American history classes part time at a community college. It covered our nation’s history from 1865 to the present, and students learned about topics such as the migration West during the late 1800s, the Great Depression, and the post-World War II era. After doing some genealogical research on all five families, I learned that the Yuba County Five were born to families that hoped to find a better life in California. Some of the five’s grandparents and parents came from places like Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Virginia. A few were Okies leaving areas of the United States known as “the Dust Bowl” during the Great Depression, while others were just dirt-poor individuals sold on the dream of success in California. The families knew how to work the land, and their skills were a definite advantage in living in the Central Valley. It was a place where the families could escape poverty and live an idyllic American dream type of life. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, there were some disturbing incidents in the Yuba City-Marysville area that shattered the quiet, all-American appearance of those communities.</div> <div class="indent">It was May 20, 1971 when a shallow grave was discovered in an orchard north of Yuba City. The victim was believed to be a transient worker in their mid-thirties, and they died a horrible death by a hatchet or machete. A freshly dug hole was found by the property owner on May 19th, and the next day, they noticed the hole had been filled with dirt. The police were contacted immediately.</div> <div class="indent">As investigators searched the area days after the discovery, they found more graves. One body became a dozen, and it was just the beginning. A grand total of twenty-five victims were discovered, and clues found during the investigation were linked to a man named Juan Corona. Married and the father of four children, Corona was a farm labor contractor who had been committed in 1956 to the DeWitt General Hospital in Auburn, California, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Apparently, the horrors of the 1955 flood had disturbed him greatly. He later found work recruiting farmhands, which was the way he met his victims. On January 18, 1973, Corona was convicted of the deaths of twenty-five men, and he would later be sentenced to life in prison. At that time, Corona was considered one of the worst serial killers in the history of the United States.</div> <div class="indent">Less than ten months after Corona was sentenced, the Yuba City-Marysville area was shocked by the murders of two young girls named Doris Derryberry and Valerie Lane. Both were thirteen and were close friends who attended the Yuba Gardens Intermediate School. Derryberry and Lane had left their homes sometime on Sunday, January 11th, and were reported missing the next day. Their bodies were discovered in a wooded area southeast of Marysville, and both had been shot at point-blank range and were assaulted. Very little was found in the way of clues, suspects were nowhere to be found, and the case would remain cold for decades.</div> <div class="indent">Somehow, the area could not release itself from the grasp of tragedy. On May 21, 1976, a school bus carrying some fifty-seven Yuba City High School students and adults crashed through a guardrail on an on-ramp and plunged some thirty feet, landing upside down. The crash occurred in Martinez, California, and twenty-nine people on the bus died. It would end up being one of the worst bus accidents in United States history.</div> <div class="indent">Murders and tragedies should not be the legacy of a community or region, but Yuba City and Marysville had their fair share of heartbreaking incidents. Although the area had a rich agricultural history and was seen as a quiet getaway from bigger cities, Yuba City and Marysville also faced issues with unemployment, illegal drug activities, and crime during the 1970s. Ted Weiher, Jack Madruga, Bill Sterling, Jackie Huett, and Gary Mathias lived in the area, were educated in the area, worked in the area, and enjoyed many sports-related activities in the area. They were loved and respected by family, friends, and coworkers. Their families were hardworking people proud to be blue-collar and, in some cases, proud to be devoted to their faith and God. Somehow, through some cruel twist of fate, an incident on February 24, 1978, added their names to yet another tragedy linked to the area. They would forever be known as the Yuba County Five.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

Tony Wright

Things Aren't Right: The Disappearance of the Yuba County Five $17.95 $22.95

Things Aren’t Right: The Disappearance of the Yuba County Five explores the bizarre and tragic 1978 disappearance of Ted Weiher, Jack Madruga, Bill Sterling, Jackie Huett, and Gary Mathias in the Plumas National Forest in Northern California. Four of these men had intellectual disabilities while one was diagnosed with schizophrenia. On Friday, February 24, 1978, they left the Yuba County, California area in Madruga’s 1969 Mercury Montego to attend a basketball game in Chico, California. Four days later the car they were traveling in was found abandoned on a snow-covered road in the mountains of the Plumas National Forest, some 75 miles in the wrong direction from home. Four jurisdictions of law enforcement would investigate and search for the missing men. Psychics were brought in, and there were strange reports of sightings of the five from numerous people. One witness came forward with an incredible story of seeing the men disappear into the forest that night. Yet every lead came to a dead end. About four months after they vanished, four of the five men’s remains were found some 12 miles from the car, with one discovered in a US Forest Service trailer with plenty of food and fuel to keep them alive for months. Once described as “bizarre as hell,” the case of the Yuba County Five has baffled law enforcement and the families of the missing men for over 45 years. Tony Wright has meticulously researched this case, earning himself the reputation of being one of the foremost authorities on the subject, and his conclusions are likely as close as anyone will come to making sense of this tragedy.

Alexandra Kitty

Murder in a Sundown Town $15.50

In Murder in a Sundown Town, author Alexandra Kitty looks at the shocking 1968 homicide of Carol Jenkins, a sweet and resilient 21-year-old woman stabbed in the heart on her first day on the job selling encyclopedias in Martinsville, Indiana. What seemed to be an easily solved homicide turned into a four-decade cold case and became a tragic story about racism, sexism, gossip, and walls of silence. It is a case of injustice and persistence that still leaves as many questions as answers. In an age of both “true crime” fascination and modern social politics holding equal attention, this book looks at an old case in a contemporary light. From the clues to its racial and gender politics, investigation, resolution, and cultural impact, the book takes an in-depth look at a young woman’s frightening last hours and why Carol’s case is as relevant today as it was in the ‘60s.

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Monty Orrick

The Crater Lake Murders $17.95

When two General Motors executives drove into Crater Lake National Park in July 1952, no one could predict they would be dead within an hour—not even their killers. It was a crime of opportunity, a botched robbery during the middle of summer in a crowded national park. When Albert Jones and Charles Culhane were found shot to death two days later, the story became a national obsession. The FBI used every resource and available agent but, as time wore on, the investigation ran out of steam. A lack of evidence worked to the killer’s advantage. He had committed a perfect crime. The FBI tried hard to solve the case. Their 2,000+ page report details a staggeringly complex, multi-agency effort: 200 ballistic tests, 1000 interviews, 466 license plate identifications. The man hours were beyond calculation, and yielded valuable information— buried within the individual reports of the FBI, Oregon State Police and local agencies are many clues to the nature and identity of the perpetrator. The FBI file has rarely been seen by anyone outside the Bureau until December 2015 when the author received it on two discs, satisfying a Freedom of Information Act request submitted three years before. This book summarizes all the information: the FBI file, Oregon State Police reports, fresh research and interviews, county records, rare first hand accounts, reaction from one victim’s family and an obscure college thesis that first named the killer. Add to this, the personal account of a man to whom the killer confessed. Before the confessor died, he swore his wife to secrecy, reminding her about “the things that nobody talks about.” The Crater Lake Murders tells the true narrative: four men with nothing in common until the day they met and, after that, the Fate all Men share.

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James Kirkpatrick Davis

Prescription For Evil $16.50

"Prescription for Evil" is the story of the most horrifying FBI case in American medical history. It begins on May 27, 2001, when a nurse in a Kansas City doctor's office sends a vial of chemotherapy medicine called Taxol to a lab. When the results come back on June 12, 2001, it's a shocking revelation. The Taxol sample from the lab contains only about one-third of the amount of medication the doctor had prescribed. This is a dangerous situation because diluted medicine could lead to severe, even deadly consequences. In September 2001, the FBI starts a new case called "Diluted Trust," which quickly became their top priority under the leadership of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. As they dig deeper, they uncover a disturbing truth. A pharmacist named Robert Ray Courtney had been diluting chemotherapy drugs for years, making a huge profit. But the real tragedy lies in the human cost. More than 4,200 patients were affected, with at least 40 known deaths. This was an unprecedented case in American medical history. "Prescription for Evil" takes you on a heart-pounding journey through the FBI's pursuit of Robert Ray Courtney and the devastating impact he had on thousands of patients and their families. “Prescription for Evil” is a must-read that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

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Steve Rush

Kill Your Characters: Crime Scene Tips for Writers $17.95

"Kill Your Characters" is a critical handbook for crime writers everywhere. Imagine you have a dead body on the floor, and your detective character needs to solve the crime and catch the killer. But, if you're not an expert in forensic investigation, how can you describe the death accurately, so the clues make sense? This book, written by former detective and forensic investigator Steve Rush, equips you with the tools you need to impress not only armchair detectives but also real ones. It's your ultimate guide to crafting a gripping opening incident for your story. No more hours wasted searching for accurate information elsewhere. In "Kill Your Characters," you'll find an accurate guide to crucial questions like: How did your character meet their end? What were the circumstances of the murder? Which weapon did the killer use? What evidence did they leave behind? How can you build an airtight case against the suspect? With this book, you'll have the facts to make your fiction stand out. Whether you're plotting your next murder scene or tackling challenges like determining the time of death or understanding forensic evidence from a gunshot wound, Steve Rush's extensive experience is packed into practical tips and activities that will enhance your storytelling. "Kill Your Characters" is a valuable resource for any author aiming to bring credibility and authenticity to their murder scenes.

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12/26/75 (Twelve Twenty-Six Seventy-Five)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} li {padding-bottom: 0.5em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 id="c5">CHAPTER ONE</h1> <div><i>“We’ll catch the guy”</i></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="indent">“I’ll be driving my wife’s orange Jeep, you won’t be able to miss me.” Retired VPD Sgt. John Vaughan is a master of understatement.</div> <div class="indent">I chose the Black Bear Diner because it seemed like the kind of place where cops eat. They serve all-day breakfast, steaks, and bottomless cups of coffee in their signature white mugs. I was afraid that if I suggested a place more suited for a vegan from Los Angeles, I might make an already awkward meeting totally unbearable for both of us.</div> <div class="indent">The Jeep was the brightest thing in the parking lot, maybe in the entire county, now turned brown after years of endless drought. As I drove into town, the only color was the green from irrigated groves of citrus trees. Although it was still early, the day was quickly heading over 100 degrees. Visalia is a small city stuck in time. It prides itself on pretending that it is still 1950. The A&W brews its own homemade root beer, and sells it in jugs that you can take home. However, it was impossible to miss the racist graffiti scrawled on the wall of the Indian grocery store on the edge of the A&W parking lot.</div> <div class="indent">I understood Visalia, and its power structure. My great-grandparents chased the American farming dream across the country at the turn of the 20th century, going from Kansas to North Dakota, then to the newly planted orange trees of Southern California. My great-grandfather was a pacifist, and they fled to Canada during WWI, finally returning to the apple and cherry trees of northeastern Washington State. My great-uncle, “Buck,” was the police chief of a small farming city a lot like Visalia. Rumors were that he ran the town as his own personal criminal empire. He took a cut of every illegal enterprise, and black and brown suspects ended up dead in the river, rather than in a jail cell or courtroom. According to my mother, the rumors were all true. As soon as she could, she left for Seattle, and never looked back. Her sister took the other path, became a police dispatcher, and married the son of a homicide detective in Spokane.</div> <div class="indent">I never planned on becoming an attorney, but somehow my internal need for fairness found a practical profession. Handling criminal appeals immediately put me in direct conflict with law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges. It’s a specialized area of the law that requires endless hours of research on each case. The best appellate attorneys start at the beginning, with the events leading up to the crime, not the trial itself. That means digging into original police reports, witness statements, and forensic lab bench notes. Overworked and underfunded public defenders are rarely granted money for investigators and forensic experts, and critical details can easily be missed.</div> <div class="indent">Although my office is staffed by licensed attorneys and private investigators, we each bring unique life experiences and skills. I spent summers on drilling rigs in the Arctic Circle and in Montana. Guns were a necessity in camps accessible only by helicopter, and stalked by grizzly bears and wolves. We have dirt bike riders, and a pilot who can conduct surveillance via small plane or drone. One of our attorneys is a forensics expert, who studied criminology at Oxford University, and can build a complete family tree for a subject while you wait in the field for the next address to check out or vehicle to follow. Two of us lost close friends to serial offenders, and we are guided by what we know they would want us to do if we were pursing their killers. Terri and Laurie would want the truth—no matter how long it takes, or how difficult it may be to accept.</div> <div class="indent">My first phone call to John Vaughan went pretty much exactly as I expected. John had retired as a sergeant with VPD in 1996 after 35 years of service, and 20 years later, he had little interest in revisiting a 40-year-old unsolved crime spree. However, I wasn’t calling about just <i>any case</i>—it was the longest and most expensive investigation in VPD history, and Sgt. Vaughan had been the lead detective. I asked him if I could just email a few documents, and he finally agreed to let me mail him an envelope. The day he got the documents he called back, and asked if we could meet to discuss the information. Now here we were in the parking lot of the Black Bear Diner.</div> <div class="indent">Even twenty years after retirement, John still looked like he could topple his wife’s Jeep with one hand, and the expression on his face as I pulled up made me think he was considering it. Walking into the restaurant together, we made small talk, and the mood hadn’t really improved by the time we were done ordering. John was a wall of skepticism, built over 40 long years of listening to an endless number of overly excited “theories” about his biggest case. Between March 1974 and December 1975, a man dubbed the “Visalia Ransacker” had terrorized his city. There had been over 150 residential burglaries with a very weird and specific MO.</div> <div class="indent">The burglar ignored expensive jewelry and electronics, and instead stole Blue Chip trading stamps, piggy banks, food, coins, cameras, two dollar bills, knives, and single earrings from a pair. He took guns, but only if they were older or foreign, and therefore lacked traceable registration numbers. Immediately upon entering the home, he opened multiple escape routes, and placed the window screens in odd places, like on the bed. He also put chain locks across doors, or blocked them with chairs, to delay the homeowner should he return during the burglary. He displayed undergarments and jewelry boxes on beds and pillows, and stole photos of the attractive teen girls who lived in the rooms. All areas, including the kitchens, were heavily ransacked. Drawers were left pulled out, or contents dumped on the floor. Sometimes he placed stacks of undies and nightgowns in rows down the hallway.</div> <div class="indent">The VR always struck in the early evening, while the residents were out to dinner, a movie, or the local football game. He confined his activities to a small area of single story homes, often on cul-de-sacs, owned by middle class professionals. The houses were usually locked, and the VR favored prying and chiseling locks on sliding glass doors or back doors to garages, then going into the kitchens. The VR traveled almost exclusively through backyards, ditches, open spaces, alleys, and greenbelts—always careful to avoid sidewalks and streets. The burglaries got little press attention or police investigation, and were treated like a nuisance, not a threat.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="indent">At 2:24 am on Thursday, September 11, 1975, VPD received an emergency call to respond to a shooting at the Snelling home. When they arrived two minutes later they found Claude Snelling lying mortally wounded inside his front door. His wife explained that he had been shot by a man who had kidnapped their 16-year-old daughter, Beth. Forty-five year-old Claude, a journalism professor at nearby College of the Sequoias, was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital.</div> <div class="indent">The killer had entered the house by removing the screen on an open window, and unlocking the back door. The air conditioning unit had stopped working that evening, likely due to intentional tampering. Beth awoke to find the masked man on top of her, pinning her arms, and holding his hand across her mouth. In a clenched teeth whisper, he ordered her to get up and go with him, or he would stab her. As they walked through the house, Beth struggled with the kidnapper, and her father got up to investigate the noise. Claude called out: “Where are you taking my daughter?” Rather than running away, the man let go of Beth, and walked back a few feet to get a clear shot at Claude as he exited the back door. As he stepped into the yard, the man fired two shots, both hitting Claude. The kidnapper then pointed the gun at Beth’s head, kicked her three times in the face, and calmly walked away towards the street. He just disappeared into the darkness.</div> <div class="indent">Sgt. Vaughan was assigned as lead investigator, and his team quickly determined that the gun used to kill Claude had been stolen in a recent VR burglary. The gun owner was able to show them where he had done some target practice, and ballistics examination of the spent rounds matched the bullets that killed Claude. The investigation showed that the VR had arrived on a stolen bike, which he left in a yard a block away, and departed on foot, using a landscaped ditch along the highway. Sgt. Vaughan quickly realized that Beth, and her friends at Mt. Whitney High School, had been the Ransacker’s targets all along. They had been stalked and terrorized for nearly two years by a man whose true plan was kidnapping and murder. The VR was suddenly front page news, but the more that Sgt. Vaughan and his team promised to catch him, the more brazen the VR became.</div> <div class="indent">On October 21, 1975, The <i>Visalia Times-Delta </i>published an update story on the Snelling homicide:</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="margin-indent">Presently, Sgt. John Vaughan and agents William McGowen and Duane Shipley are handling the investigation. All are confident they will succeed. “We are getting a lot of leads and tips. Lots of things are being worked on,” Vaughan said. “We’ll catch the guy,” McGowen said.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="indent">Just as that story hit newsstands and porches that afternoon, the most recent VR burglary victim, Ruth Swanson (a pseudonym), returned home for the day to an empty house. Suddenly, she heard someone trying to open the front door. When she checked the peephole, all she saw was a hand covering it. She ran to the living room window, but saw nobody on the front porch. A few minutes later, she received a couple of hang up phone calls, followed by an obscene one, using her name. VPD responded, and installed a trap on her phone.</div> <div class="indent">On Friday, October 24th, the VR committed four burglaries. It appeared from witness reports and footprints that he started with two homes on W. Campus Avenue. At around 10:30 pm, while Sgt. Vaughan and his team were responding to those burglaries, the VR moved on to Whitney Lane. A neighbor saw the VR cutting through yards to S. Redwood, where he committed a third burglary—325 feet from the Snelling house. The VR then crossed Redwood to the house where he had left the stolen bike on the night of the Snelling homicide, passed through that yard, and across the back fence. He then burglarized the home on the other side of the fence.</div> <div class="indent">The burglaries seemed to serve no real purpose other than to commit signature ransacking, sure to be recognized by VPD: kitchen drawers were pulled out evenly, but not disturbed; women’s undergarments were displayed with jewelry boxes on the bed pillows; lotion was left out; and the chain was thrown across the front door. Sgt. Vaughan noted in his report that the only motive for much of the ransacking appeared to be to “draw attention” and “to leave his calling card.” Sgt. Vaughan believed that they were being taunted for their comments to the newspaper.</div> <div class="indent">It quickly became clear to Vaughan’s team that the VR was working with a deep knowledge of police procedure, their patrol rotation schedule, and even their planned stakeouts. He knew exactly when and where to strike to avoid all of the police efforts to catch him. The only advantage they had was their newfound knowledge of the VR’s true motive—he was stalking particular girls and young women in a set zone. Earlier that year, another teenage girl, Debbie Ward, had encountered the masked VR after he had just burglarized the apartment of their tenant, who lived over the garage. He pushed Debbie aside to escape, but she was unharmed.</div> <div class="indent">Agent Bill McGowen was assigned to contact the Ward family and several other prior VR victims. He told them to look for signs of a prowler in their yards, and to report any strange noises. It paid off. Mrs. Ward found fresh footprints under Debbie’s bedroom window, and upon further investigation, Agent McGowen saw a circular impression next to the prints. He found a matching flowerpot in the neighbor’s yard that had been used as a step stool to look in Debbie’s window, and then had carefully been put back in place.</div> <div class="indent">Sgt. Vaughan was heading to Los Angeles for PERT training, but he was able to plan the stakeout of Debbie’s house. It was agreed that Agent McGowen would hide in the neighbor’s garage, next to Debbie’s bedroom window. Agent Duane Shipley would be placed across the street to watch from that angle. The rest of the team would be positioned in the surrounding area to look for the VR, and create a net around the neighborhood should he appear. Sgt. Vaughan said that he was worried about not being there, but he trusted Agent McGowen. McGowen had been chosen because of his honesty and morality; he didn’t cut corners, swear, or drink. McGowen’s father, C.E. McGowen, was a police captain in the city of Tulare, and his brother, Richard, was a sergeant with the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO). Sgt. Vaughan said that he knew Bill McGowen would always do the right thing, no matter how dire the circumstances.</div> <div class="indent">The biggest change in the Ward stakeout was its silence. Not only were the officers ordered to stay off the radio, their entire operation was kept top secret within the department. The only people who knew what they were doing were the team members themselves, and they were not allowed to discuss it with anyone. Sgt. Vaughan had become convinced that the VR was a member of law enforcement, who not only listened to their radio frequency but also talked directly to officers on his squad—it was the only possible way he could have avoided all of the prior stakeouts.</div> <div class="indent">At 7:00 pm on Wednesday, December 10, 1975, the stakeout of the Ward house began. Agents McGowen and Shipley were in place, while four other officers in two cars and on foot covered the surrounding neighborhood. Agent Hartman oversaw the operation in a roving, unmarked car. At 8:38 pm, a frantic call broke radio silence, “Shots fired, officers need assistance.”—Agent McGowen was down.</div> <div class="indent">A few minutes before, the VR had been spotted at Debbie Ward’s window, and McGowen had confronted him at gunpoint in the side yard. The VR was wearing a mask, which he took off, and put in his right jacket pocket to show McGowen that he was complying. He then turned, jumped the gate, and ran into the backyard screaming, “Please don’t hurt me, oh my god, no.” McGowen fired a warning shot into the ground to try to make the VR stop moving, and to attract the attention of Agent Shipley. The VR then jumped the fence into the Ward yard, raised his right hand, and said, “See, my hands are up.” As he reached his left hand into his pocket, he pulled out a gun, and fired at McGowen through the fence slats, hitting his flashlight dead center. Mr. Ward looked out of his patio door just in time to see the VR hop over his back fence, and disappear into the night.</div> <div class="indent">Agent Shipley found Bill McGowen on the ground, saw blood on his face, and thought he was dead. Glass from the flashlight lens had hit McGowen’s eye, knocking him to the ground, but he had not been shot. Agent Hartman then called in the California Highway Patrol, TCSO, and all VPD units to help seal off the area and try to prevent the VR from escaping. It did no good—he was gone. Investigators found a sock full of loot dropped by the VR on the Ward’s patio. The stolen items were quickly tied to a nearby home burglary that had occurred shortly before the shooting. There was no doubt, the man who had killed Claude Snelling, shot at McGowen, and committed the VR burglaries was the same offender.</div> <div class="indent">McGowen created a composite sketch of the suspect. Sgt. Vaughan’s team investigated and eventually cleared nearly one hundred suspects, but by September 1976 they had run out of new clues to follow. Then the Criminal Investigation and Identification (CII) system notified them of an MO and suspect match to a serial rapist in Sacramento who had started his crimes in June 1976. John immediately saw the connection. He requested the burglary and rape case reports from the SSD for the offender whom media had dubbed the “East Area Rapist.” (EAR). In May 1977, Detectives Shipley and McGowen traveled to Sacramento and met with EAR investigator Detective Richard Shelby, who felt the VR was a good lead. Unfortunately, nobody else in Sacramento agreed, and Shelby was taken off the case a month later. In 2001, DNA connected the EAR to ten murders in Orange, Ventura, and Santa Barbara Counties (Original Night Stalker-ONS); that killer had never been caught.</div> <div class="indent">The EAR/ONS crimes were profiled on the A&E show “<i>Cold Case Files</i>” in 2000, and that led to multiple online discussion boards dedicated to the cases. A&E eventually shut down their board after users started naming and harassing “persons of interest” in real life. Several of the people involved in the discussions were convinced that they were experts<i>,</i> and repeatedly contacted different members of law enforcement to tell them how they should be running their investigation and exactly who they should consider as suspects. Generally, five minutes’ worth of research could prove that their “suspect” could not have committed the crimes. Although law enforcement officers tried to be patient and have an open mind so that they didn’t miss an important tip, many of these case theories from internet investigators proved to be exhausting.</div> <div class="indent">It would be wrong to put all internet sleuths or armchair detectives into the same group. Some individuals who become interested in a cold case bring unique research skills, or real life investigative experience, while others simply like to go with crowd sourcing, guesses, or theories, rather than with hard facts. As an attorney and private investigator, I didn’t fit into either group. I was relying on original police and forensic reports, witness statements, and court records, not the internet. Also, I was looking for evidence that could meet a higher standard—evidence that could support probable cause for a search warrant, arrest, and conviction.</div> <div class="indent">I could tell that John Vaughan was not entirely convinced that my ideas were grounded in facts rather than hunches, and he asked me if I had ever talked to some of the other people who had approached him about the case. I hadn’t, and he seem relieved. He was not in the mood for a manic recitation of disconnected stories that added up to nothing. He was also a bit suspicious of my work as a defense attorney—generally a cop’s natural enemy. Nobody likes to have their work scrutinized, criticized, and second-guessed.</div> <div class="indent">I opened our conversation by telling him how impressed I was with the forward thinking, professionalism, and thoroughness of his original investigation into the VR. It was textbook police work, with complete canvasses of the neighborhoods, and no potential suspect off limits. My only criticism was the hypnosis of Beth Snelling and Agent McGowen, which seemed to have changed their original suspect descriptions and thrown the case off track. Making “suggestions” to witnesses creates false memories that feel real, which is why hypnotized witnesses cannot testify in court. However, in 1975, it was considered cutting edge science. I also pointed out to John that his team was the only one to ever catch the suspect; nobody else had even come close. It turned out that he was a lot harder on himself than I ever could have been.</div> <div class="indent">Sgt. Vaughan expressed an enormous amount of regret for being in Los Angeles during the McGowen shootout. He felt responsible for letting the VR get away, and later hurting and killing so many innocent people. Even after 40 years he was still immensely frustrated that he hadn’t been able to convince Sacramento that they were looking for the same suspect. He believed that Sacramento should have focused on men who had been in Tulare County between 1974-1976, with law enforcement training. John also thought that if Sacramento had utilized secret stakeouts, the VR/EAR could have been caught in 1977, and… <i>at least</i> twelve homicides could have been prevented.</div> <div class="indent">To John, it wasn’t just a theory; he knew that the VR was the EAR. He explained the uniqueness of the MO, and the utter creepiness that he never felt or saw in any other case. If I had doubted the connection before, I didn’t after I looked into John’s eyes. I also had complete certainty that the Visalia Ransacker and East Area Rapist were the same person.</div> <div class="indent">We finally got to the reason for our meeting—the information in the envelope I had mailed to him. I was worried and hesitant to start, but he had no problem barking out questions faster than I could answer them. I asked him what his working relationship with TCSO had been during the VR investigation, and he said simply that there hadn’t been one. They never worked cases together if they could help it—the feelings of dislike were mutual. I asked about a particular officer, TCSO Sgt. Bob Byrd. John’s eyes flashed. He recited a couple of unflattering names for Byrd, including “DBO” (Ditch Bank Okie), and said Byrd wasn’t an educated or trained police officer, and he had no business investigating real crimes. I carefully suggested that perhaps Byrd had manipulated and destroyed evidence, and John said, “Oh, it must have been a Tuesday.”</div> <div class="indent">I felt a huge weight off my shoulders as one of my biggest fears lifted. If John had not been willing to believe that Byrd was both a terrible investigator and a rule breaker, our meeting would have been over. Instead, we moved on to discussing the homicide of Jennifer Armour, a name he barely recognized. At 7:30 pm on Friday, November 15, 1974, Jennifer, a 15 year old sophomore, disappeared while walking from her house to the Visalia K-Mart. She was meeting friends for a ride to the homecoming football game between her school, Mt. Whitney, and the rival Redwood High. Jennifer’s friends waited an extra fifteen minutes, then headed to the game. When they were unable to locate her there, they figured she hadn’t gotten permission from her mom and had stayed home.</div> <div class="indent">When Jennifer didn’t return home that night, her mother assumed she was staying with a friend, and it wasn’t until Saturday morning that she realized that Jennifer had been missing for more than 12 hours. She called VPD, but in the 1970s, possible runaway teen cases got little attention. There was no sign that Jennifer had been harmed or was in danger. Had she told her mom she was meeting her girlfriends, but really run off?</div> <div class="indent">The answer came on the morning of Sunday, November 24, 1974. A rancher found Jennifer’s body in the Friant-Kern canal, just north of Exeter. TCSO made it sound like an accidental drowning, and when Sgt. Vaughan got the Snelling case ten months later, Jennifer was not listed as a missing person or a homicide victim.</div> <div class="indent">In the Black Bear Diner, John and I went over some maps I had printed out for the meeting. I showed him the two November 1974 VR burglaries that had immediately preceded Jennifer’s disappearance—they were three blocks from where Jennifer was last seen. We discussed how Jennifer and Beth Snelling were the same age, physical type, in the same class at Mt. Whitney High School, and were kidnapped just four blocks apart. Had Jennifer been one of the VR’s Mt. Whitney stalking victims? I asked John how many other Mt. Whitney students had ever been kidnapped in their homes, or off the street, in all of the years he had lived in Visalia. He didn’t know of any others. John had always assumed that Beth Snelling’s kidnapping was going to end in rape and murder in some remote, dark location—just like an orange grove out in Exeter.</div> <div class="indent">I asked John about something else that was the hallmark of both the EAR and VR— his taunting of police. The EAR was perhaps most infamous for responding to two different public “challenges.” The first was in March 1977, when <i>The Sacramento Bee </i>published a story stating that the EAR “has never attacked while there is a man in the home.” The next attack, on April 2nd, was on a sleeping couple, and that soon became his signature. Then, on May 17, 1977, the EAR attacked a couple in the Del Dayo neighborhood. Detective Shelby immediately realized that the husband was the same man who had stood up and yelled at him at a community meeting on November 3, 1976. The man had berated Shelby for not catching the EAR, and said that in his native Italy, the men would never let their wives get hurt like that. Clearly, the EAR had been at that meeting, took the man’s comments as a challenge, and targeted him. In fact, almost every single time that SSD issued a statement to the press about the EAR, he would respond with another rape. It was a constant call and response.</div> <div class="indent">I had noticed that the VR had done the same thing after Sgt. Vaughan and Agent McGowen had made statements to the press about “catching” him. In fact, the VR went right back to the Snelling neighborhood, and burglarized their block again. John confirmed that the VR had clearly taunted them after every public statement, and gone out of his way to embarrass his team. That took me back to the days after Jennifer Armour was found. Tulare County Sheriff, Bob Wiley, declared to the press that “there is no reason to believe that the girl may have been murdered.” Jennifer’s public service was on that Friday, November 29th, and that night the VR hit five homes in Visalia, and thirteen on Saturday night. This was an insane spree, even by VR standards—there was nothing else like it in the series, before or after. Eighteen burglaries in two nights. Clearly the VR was trying to get the attention of VPD, but it fell flat. It was almost a year before John took over the case, and the officers working the burglaries back in 1974 didn’t catch on to it—at all.</div> <div class="indent">I took out some additional maps. Now we were looking at the Friant-Kern Canal, just north of the Exeter city limits. The area where Jennifer had been killed was easily accessed from the highway, yet totally secluded, with no homes or lights nearby. The killer kidnapped Jennifer right by the highway on-ramp in Visalia, drove east eleven miles, turned left and headed north, then right heading east again, and finally a left onto the same grove siding road the rancher was driving when he found Jennifer’s body. Those actions were deliberate, specific, and planned by someone who knew the area <i>extremely</i> well. Most of the agricultural property close to Exeter surrounds the owners’ ranch homes. When you turn off the road onto a dirt drive, you don’t know if you’re heading into trees or are on a driveway leading to a home full of people—and a shotgun.</div> <div class="indent">I showed Sgt. Vaughan the grove, siding road, and spot in the Friant-Kern Canal where Jennifer was killed in November 1974. Then, I moved my finger just slightly to the southeast on the map to a different orange grove along the same canal, Neel Ranch. “And, <i>that’s</i> where Donna Richmond was killed in December 1975,” I told John. The distance was less than two miles, with a straight line of sight between the two groves.</div> <div class="indent">Neel Ranch was owned by Hank Neel, who lived in Ventura. The property was purely agricultural, with no ranch house, and it could be accessed from the siding road along the Friant-Kern Canal. Like Jennifer, Donna had disappeared while she was alone on a Friday evening. Both girls had long blonde hair and blue eyes. Donna was a 14-year-old freshman at Exeter High, and like Jennifer, she had simply disappeared into a vehicle without any witness seeing or hearing a kidnapping.</div> <div class="indent">At this point, I was expecting an eye roll, sigh, or some sign of frustration from John, but the moment passed quickly. A man named Oscar Clifton had been convicted of Donna’s murder, and had died in prison three years earlier, but John was unfazed: “So that guy Clifton didn’t do it.” He asked how Clifton had been eliminated in Jennifer’s murder, and I said that he and his family lived in Las Vegas—TCSO had fully checked his alibi since they really wanted to clear both cases with one suspect if they could. John agreed that it was now apparent that the same person had killed both Jennifer and Donna, and that the evidence in Exeter seemed to point <i>directly</i> back to Visalia and the VR.</div> <div class="indent">I had originally wanted to talk to John because I believed that there were four things about Donna’s murder that were meant to be tied to the VR but had been totally missed by TCSO in their rush to convict an innocent man. The first was a ski mask that was collected into evidence on Neel Ranch. It was described by the forensics tech as a “multi-colored ‘ski cap’ with possible hairs adhering.” The description of the ski mask worn by the VR, as described by Beth Snelling, was “having white stripes and having multi-color zigzag design.” Obviously, there was no photo of the VR’s ski mask, but there is one from Neel Ranch. It is crumpled on the ground, but it clearly has white stripes, a zigzag pattern, and what appear to be eye holes. There would be no reason for Donna’s killer to leave the mask at the homicide scene unless he wanted it to be found and matched back to the Snelling case, and to the VR.</div> <div class="indent">There was also no question that TCSO investigators were supposed to connect Jennifer and Donna’s murders, and then follow the cases back to Visalia and the VR. Kidnapping similarly aged blonde girls, in safe public areas on a Friday evening, and then leaving their bodies in orange groves on the Friant-Kern Canal, just north of Exeter, was a highly specific MO, and a lead that was meant to be seen and pursued. Sgt. Vaughan agreed, and said that it felt exactly like the offender he had been chasing for so many years—always taunting the police, and daring them to catch him. That brought me to a quote of John’s from <i>The Sacramento Union </i>newspaper: “Both men have been known to have this peculiarity of taking things—not of special value—from one house—and leaving them at other houses.”</div> <div class="indent">He was correct. In October 1976, the EAR had even gone so far as to plant a bag of jewelry (stolen from EAR victims) in a house, then he attacked the next door neighbor and made statements to her indicating that he lived nearby. Sacramento Detective Shelby had the innocent neighbor, John Dority, put under surveillance, and that helped clear him when he was seen at home during the next EAR attack. The EAR had framed Dority with planted evidence, and it almost worked.</div> <div class="indent">I had two more sets of maps for John to see, and I put them side by side. One showed the area where Donna’s bike had been found, three miles from Neel Ranch, at what appeared to be a staged kidnapping scene. The other map showed an area John knew well, an irrigation ditch on Ave 256, between Visalia and Exeter. About a week after the Snelling kidnapping and homicide, a man called VPD to report finding a gun in an irrigation ditch on Ave 256. It was <i>not</i> the missing murder weapon, but it was a Taurus revolver, identified by its serial number, that had been stolen by the VR from a residence on Mountain Drive in May 1975. That prompted John’s team to search the other irrigation ditches along the same road, where they found a large screwdriver and some ammunition wrapped in a clear raincoat. The gun had been located near a large fertilizer plant. John checked out those employees, and a few of them stayed on the suspect list. However, the location of the raincoat items was more of a mystery, and no suspects were developed there.</div> <div class="indent">I told John I thought I knew the suspect that the VR was trying to frame with the raincoat—the same person he implicated with an invoice book found next to Donna’s bike at the staged kidnapping scene. John had found the raincoat across the road from a small dead-end street called Hypericum, a name I had seen in Donna’s homicide case file. One of the homes on Hypericum belonged to the parents of Oscar Clifton, and had been staked out by TCSO on the night they found Donna’s bike. According to TCSO, they found the invoice book used for Clifton’s repair business near the bike. I told John I believed the VR had tried to frame Clifton after the Snelling homicide, and then again after Donna’s murder. The VR was hoping that Clifton would be convicted of Snelling, McGowen, Jennifer, Donna, and all of the burglaries, and… the VR would be in the clear.</div> <div class="indent">I asked John how he had eliminated Clifton as the VR, and he just laughed. Clifton was 6´2? and 150 pounds dripping wet—“<i>he was a beanpole.</i>” He also had a distinctive limp from a ruined knee, wore a metal brace, and had a thick Okie accent. The VR was more like 5´10? and 170 pounds, with strong arms and shoulders. John said that he gave Clifton one glance, and knew that he could not have been their suspect. Obviously, when the EAR attacks started six months later, John was proven right. Why the VR would choose to frame Clifton was more of a mystery, but clearly he didn’t know about the bad knee or his recent return after eight years of living out of state. It seemed like a question that couldn’t be easily answered until we identified the VR.</div> <div class="indent">Sgt. Vaughan and I talked about TCSO Sgt. Byrd a bit more, and I detailed the misconduct I had found, and the total and complete lack of physical evidence. There was nothing that tied Clifton to Donna or the homicide scene. She had not been kidnapped where her bike was found, so the planting of Clifton’s invoice book (stolen from his unlocked truck) near the bike was just more staging. Clifton had a solid alibi, with multiple witnesses, and the state’s case and timeline were physically impossible—barring time travel and cloning.</div> <div class="indent">I told John that when he identified the VR as being the EAR, and gave the timeline for the suspect leaving Tulare County as the summer of 1976, Sgt. Byrd had immediately ordered the destruction of the case evidence in Donna’s murder. It had only been five months since Clifton had been sent to death row. Not only was that highly illegal, it violated multiple court orders in place to preserve the evidence pending Clifton’s appeal.</div> <div class="indent">I had finally told John something that truly shocked him. He simply could not believe that any police officer would intentionally destroy case evidence, especially evidence that would be needed if Clifton won his appeal and a retrial was ordered. Clifton would have walked free. John and I agreed that whatever truth Sgt. Byrd was hiding had to be worth the risk of getting fired, going to jail, or letting Clifton out of prison. We came to the same conclusions—Byrd knew who really killed Donna, was covering for him, and was afraid that either Sacramento or Visalia would match their suspect to the evidence in Donna’s murder.</div> <div class="indent">We also agreed that we should be looking for VR suspects <i>in Exeter</i>. In 1975, the town had a population of 5,000 residents. Roughly half were men, and many were Latino. We knew we were looking for a white male, within a specific height and weight range, 20-30 years old, left-handed, with blue eyes. He was either active duty law enforcement in Tulare County, or was very close to someone who was. He seemed to want both Jennifer’s and Donna’s homicides investigated by TCSO, so we felt that he likely lived within the city limits of Exeter, not in TCSO jurisdiction. The man went unnoticed in solidly middle-class, professional neighborhoods, so he didn’t look like an obvious creep or criminal.</div> <div class="indent">John said he would contact Detective Shelby, the EAR Task Force, VPD major crimes, and the TCSO forensics officer who worked Donna’s homicide. I agreed to work on a list of people of interest that fit our criteria. They had a solid suspect DNA profile, so all we needed to do was go down the list and eliminate them, one by one. It was going to be hard going without more help. The <i>Exeter Sun </i>newspaper microfilm reels had been sent for digitization, and nobody could find a copy of the local 1975 Exeter census. The phone books had to be accessed in person, during library hours. Assistance from law enforcement, with their vast resources, could really speed things up. John and I didn’t think it would be easy, but we never imagined the force and effectiveness of the backlash we would face.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <h2 class="center sigil_not_in_toc" id="c6">Chapter One Sources</h2> <div class="indent"><b>1. VPD Reports 1974-1977</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>2. VPD Report - Gomes September 11, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>3. VPD Reports - Shipley & Arnold September 15, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>4. Visalia Times-Delta - October 21, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>5. VPD Report - Shipley October 24, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>6. VPD Report - Vaughan October 28, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>7. VPD Report - McGowen October 2, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>8. VPD Report - McGowen December 19, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>9. VPD Report - Hartman December 13, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>10. VPD Report - Vaughan December 17, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>11. VPD Report - Vaughan November 20, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>12. Visalia Times-Delta - May 18, 1977</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>13. Sacramento Bee - April 5, 2001</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>14. Visalia Times-Delta - November 26, 1974</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>15. Visalia Times-Delta - December 2, 1974</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>16. VPD Report - Vaughan October 8, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>17. Sacramento Bee - March 20, 1977</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>18. SSD EAR Report - April 2, 1977</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>19. Sacramento Bee - April 5, 1977</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>20. SSD EAR Report - May 17, 1977</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>21. TCSO Report - Johnson December 26, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>22. Sacramento Union - July 22, 1978</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>23. SSD EAR Reports - October 9 & 18, 1976</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>24. VPD Report - Vaughan September 25, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>25. VPD Report - McGowen September 28, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>26. TCSO Report - M. Richmond December 28, 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>27. Mt. Whitney Yearbook 1975</b></div> <div class="indent"><b>28. Photo of ski mask at Neel Ranch</b></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

Tony Reid

12/26/75 $17.95

“12/26/75” is more than a story about a murder. It is a case of wrongful conviction, prosecutorial misconduct, corruption, and a serial killer. For Tony Reid, this case began with a claim of innocence in the 1975 murder of Donna Jo Richmond. The original investigation and flawed trial resulted in a guilty verdict, but a reevaluation revealed that the defendant had been wrongly accused and railroaded. The question then shifted to who framed him. With a new team of investigators, including two original detectives, a startling possibility emerged: Could the real culprit be a serial offender? Mr. Reid launched the "12/26/75" podcast, seeking information from the public. Based on primary evidence and new interviews related to Donna Jo's murder in Exeter, California, the team delved into every angle. What they found was more than a miscarriage of justice. They uncovered connections to the unsolved murders of Jennifer Armour and Claude Snelling, as well as links to The Visalia Ransacker/East Area Rapist. They exposed corruption by the lead investigator who destroyed trial evidence, and they investigated the mysterious death of the original defense attorney. This led them back to Exeter, where a new suspect emerged: Joseph DeAngelo, a sergeant with the local police department at the time, in charge of violent crimes and burglary investigations. "12/26/75" goes beyond being a mere adaptation of the podcast. It offers fresh insights from the investigation, providing a firsthand view of the crimes and revealing the flawed evidence that led to the wrongful conviction. Most importantly, it highlights the grave consequences of letting a serial killer go free, compounded by mistakes, internal conflicts, and blame-shifting among different jurisdictions. The book makes it clear that reforms are urgently needed to prevent such tragedies from happening again, now that the truth of how it all unfolded is exposed.

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} .letter {font-family: monospace;} li {padding-bottom: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 class="center" id="c3">Chapter One—THE DISCOVERY</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>On January 13, 1995, the world, consumed by the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, eagerly awaited the results of a hearing that would determine if evidence challenging Detective Mark Fuhrman’s credibility would be admitted in the O.J. Simpson trial.</div> <div class="indent">As I made my way along the winding roads leading to Fort Smith, Arkansas, I listened as the local radio station announced how prosecutors believed that O.J. dropped a glove as he attempted to sneak back to his mansion the night of the Simpson and Goldman murders. Judge Lance Ito was also expected to rule whether O.J. Simpson’s former wife would be required to appear in court.</div> <div class="indent">The unspeakable events surrounding the murders proved to be sensational, dark, and shocking. It was the perfect storm for a true crime addict. And I was hooked. At 21-years-old, I was already deep into my obsession. My fascination with murder mysteries gave me an adrenaline rush. The fix of the “who,” “what,” “when,” and “where” kept me reading every true crime novel I could get my hands on.</div> <div class="indent">On this particular day, as my obsession kept me tuned in to the radio for the O.J. Simpson case, another announcement caught my attention. A body had been found in the Ozark National Forest and authorities were on the scene. They suspected the body could be that of 19-year-old Melissa Witt.</div> <div class="indent">As my Nissan Altima crept along the two-lane highway of U.S. 71 that was at the time the main route between Fayetteville and Fort Smith, Arkansas, I gazed into the Boston Mountains and watched dark clouds roll in.</div> <div class="indent">At the same time, a chill settled in across the Ozarks. The clouds opened up and unleashed torrents of furious rain on a remote and lonely crime scene. As it turns out, roughly 56 miles away in the Ozark National Forest, a beautiful landscape of trees and mountains had been hiding a terrible secret.</div> <div class="indent">On January 13, 1995 at 9:40am, about 15 miles north of Ozark, two animal trappers stumbled upon what they believed could be a mannequin lying face down in the woods about 30 feet off the main road. The two men, avid outdoorsmen, had walked this very path the day before. There had been nothing there.</div> <div class="indent">As they approached the strange figure lying in the woods, it became clear that what they found was something much more sinister. After 45 long days, the remote Forest Service Road 1551 in the Ozark National Forest had finally unearthed the unthinkable: the decomposing nude body of a young, white female.</div> <div class="indent">Frantic, the pair immediately called the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. Upon receiving the news, Sheriff Kenneth Ross contacted Detective Sergeant Chris Boyd with the Fort Smith Police Department Major Crimes Unit.</div> <div class="indent">Over 20 years later, as I sat down to interview the now former Detective Boyd for a documentary I was producing on the Melissa Witt case, he could still vividly recall that cold and rainy morning.</div> <div class="indent">“At the time, the police department was in the Sebastian County Courthouse and I distinctly recall walking through the basement to get to my office in the Detective Division. That’s when I received a phone call from Sheriff Ross.”</div> <div class="indent">As the retired detective described the phone call, his expression turned serious and somber. I’d seen this look before. It was the expression of a man haunted by the unsolved murder of an innocent young woman.</div> <div class="indent">“Sheriff Ross told me on that call that he thought he had found the body of Melissa Witt. And knowing him as I did at the time, I figured he was probably right. I had him describe to me what he was seeing and what the body looked like. Once he gave me the description… well, I knew I had to rally the troops at that point. We needed crime scene techs and detectives at that scene immediately.”</div> <div class="indent">As the former detective described the events that unfolded the morning of Friday, January 13, 1995, my own memories flooded back. When I close my eyes, I can still feel the icy chill in the air. I remember arriving in Fort Smith that morning, and as I stepped out of my car, the rain came down in heavy thuds, hard and fast, soaking my clothes as I ran across the parking lot. Another memory of me complaining to my coworkers about the miserable weather conditions on that day also replayed in my mind: “Why did this beautiful day take a drastic turn for the worst?” My words unknowingly foreshadowed events that would haunt me almost two decades later.</div> <div class="indent">As the former lead detective on the Melissa Witt murder investigation, Jay C. Rider entered the room, I nervously stood to greet him. As we shook hands, Rider asked if Melissa and I had been friends, an assumption others often make to describe my passion for finding justice for a girl I never knew.</div> <div class="indent">“No sir. I never knew her. We had mutual friends, but we never met.” Rider eyed me skeptically, nodded, and said, “I guess that makes two of us.”</div> <div class="indent">“Tell me about January 13, 1995,” I said. “The day you found Melissa Witt’s body.”</div> <div class="indent">Rider described the day as normal, even for a Friday the 13th. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a superstitious guy. It was a normal day. It started off sunny—a perfect day. I decided to get some work done around the office. When the phone call came in from Sheriff Ross, as you can imagine, all hell broke loose. We all headed out to that crime scene. We feared the worst… that this body was Melissa Witt.”</div> <div class="indent">News reports of the crime scene describe a lonely, remote logging road near Turner Bend just north of Ozark. I knew the location of Melissa’s body would reveal details about her killer.</div> <div class="indent">“Can you tell me more about the location?” I asked.</div> <div class="indent">“It was a logging road. More or less a single lane road, rough terrain, off the main gravel area. The road was mainly accessed by loggers clearing and cutting the national forest,” Rider explained. “Trappers, hunters, campers and sometimes local kids looking to party used that road. Believe it or not, the logging road ended—like a cul de sac—so it was a dead end. A remote, hopeless dead end.”</div> <div class="indent">“What else do you remember about that day?” I asked.</div> <div class="indent">“I will never forget that day,” Rider said. “We started working the crime scene and the temperature dropped drastically. It started to rain—hard rain—rain that was actually coming in sideways. The wind was blowing hard and it was miserable. None of us had jackets or anything else because it had started off as such a perfect day. I remember finding a raincoat in my car and trying to find a warmer shirt or something to change into so I could stay warm.”</div> <div class="indent">Rider’s description of that fateful morning closely paralleled my own memories. But now it seemed that what we had witnessed was so much more than just a rainstorm. Instead, maybe we experienced the heavens releasing an unrelenting stream of tears for a girl we never knew.</div> <div class="indent">The medical examiner’s report revealed that the official cause of death was “asphyxiation by strangulation.” Leaves and soil found in Melissa’s airway indicated she had been strangled face down and she had inhaled debris from the forest floor as she fought for her life.</div> <div class="indent">Laboratory testing on the debris found in Melissa’s airway gave investigators an important clue: the debris was native to the Ozark National Forest. This told investigators that she had been killed at or near the location where her body was discovered. The medical examiner’s report also yielded another important clue: Melissa had non-fatal trauma on the side of her head that was believed to have been caused by a blow or a fall.</div> <div class="indent">Armed with this information, investigators began to put together a profile of Melissa Witt’s killer. Two scenarios emerged: The killer was either a local or someone who frequented the area from out of state to hunt, hike, camp, or fish. Melissa’s body could have been disposed of in many places but her killer chose this remote location. An area so isolated that if you had never been there before, it would be almost impossible to find.</div> <div class="indent">A more detailed examination of the crime scene shocked investigators. Indentations behind a large headstone-like rock positioned between two small trees revealed that her body had initially been hidden there.</div> <div class="indent">According to police records, Melissa had visible marks where someone, presumably the killer, had grabbed hold of her in order to drag her decomposing body closer to the road.</div> <div class="indent">“It would have been a gruesome task,” Jay C. Rider said flatly. “Think about it. Melissa’s body had been out in the elements for 45 days and was in advanced stages of decomposition. There was small animal activity on the body and the scene was… it was brutal. Whoever moved that body did it so it could be found more easily. Maybe so her mama could give her a proper burial. Regardless, the task was gruesome and we are still trying to figure out who moved her body and why.”</div> <div class="indent">A strange phone call made to police a day or two prior to the discovery of Melissa’s body may have provided a different clue. The caller left a voice message at the Fort Smith Major Crimes unit one evening. On the recording, a lady with a thick Southern accent could be heard saying, “Go ahead and tell them what you found.” Then there was a younger male voice, also with a thick Southern accent who was reported saying, “No, I can’t,” and then the phone disconnected. Did the young man who was part of the mysterious phone call discover Melissa’s body in the woods and move it from behind the rock so she could be found? Was he scared he could be blamed for the murder? Sadly, we may never know. Despite extensive efforts to identify the people responsible for that phone call, their identities remain a mystery.</div> <div class="indent">Determined to learn more about the psychology of this type of killer and crime, I obsessively began to research homicidal strangulation. I discovered that in a high percentage of cases, the offender and the victim are related or in a romantic relationship. Seventy-five percent of strangulation victims are females, with the most frequent motives being rape, sexual jealousy, or personal rivalry. Research also suggests that females are predominantly the victims in homicidal strangulation because they are more likely to be the targets of sexual assaults.</div> <div class="indent">Could this be why her body was found nude? Was she sexually assaulted? Unfortunately, we may never know for certain. According to the medical examiner’s report, it was impossible to determine if she had been raped.</div> <div class="indent">I kept researching. I found that a high percentage of female victims in homicidal strangulation are murdered due to a quarrel in their relationship and/or due to unrehearsed violence applied by bare hands to put the victim at a physical disadvantage and render the victim incapable of resisting. In 86% of the strangulation cases the victim was found at the scene of the killing. In 22% of these cases, the victim was found outdoors. In 17% of these cases, the offender stole something from the victim. In 14% of these cases, the victim was first hit with a blunt instrument.</div> <div class="indent">A cold chill went down my spine. Did Melissa know her killer?</div> <div class="indent">I compared these facts to what I had learned about her gruesome murder:</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <ol><li>According to the autopsy report, Melissa was hit in the head with a blunt instrument.</li> <li>She was found strangled, outdoors, and naked—her clothing and personal belongings had been taken from her.</li> <li>The remote location was familiar to her killer. Authorities believe he had been there before.</li> </ol> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="indent">I began to look even closer at events that had unfolded on the day Melissa disappeared. From all reports, the day started off routinely. She spent the first part of the morning with her mother, Mary Ann Witt. The honor student headed to Westark Community College next. After that, she went to lunch with a friend and then off to her job as a dental assistant.</div> <div class="indent">Before she left that morning, Melissa had a minor disagreement with her mother. She had asked to borrow money, and Mary Ann, in an effort to teach her daughter money management, had told her no.</div> <div class="indent">Before Mary Ann left for work that morning, she left a note for Melissa reminding her she would be bowling with her league that evening and offering to buy her a hamburger. She signed the note, “Love, Mom.”</div> <div class="indent">At five o’clock that night, after clocking out at her dental assistant job, Melissa discovered that her 1995 Mitsubishi Mirage wouldn’t start. After a few tries, she gave up and waited with a coworker until a local businessman, later dubbed the Good Samaritan, gave her car a jump.</div> <div class="indent">Police reports detail how Melissa’s dome light was left on by mistake, draining the car battery. Investigators tracked down the Good Samaritan and interviewed him multiple times before ultimately clearing him in the teenager’s disappearance and murder.</div> <div class="indent">“People ask about the Good Samaritan all the time because those events leading up to Melissa’s abduction seem suspicious,” Rider said. “The Good Samaritan does seem suspicious, until you realize how many times he was questioned. He was cleared of any suspicion in Melissa’s murder.”</div> <div class="indent">We know that, once Melissa’s car started, she went home to change out of her uniform. Those clothes were found crumpled on her bedroom floor. Mary Ann was able to determine that her daughter had then donned a white V-neck sweater and blue jeans.</div> <div class="indent">Melissa must have seen her mom’s note, because authorities believe she headed to Bowling World, arriving between 6:30pm and 7:00pm. She parked in the northwest corner of the lot, but never made it inside. There were no cameras to record the events that unfolded in the parking lot that night. Witnesses would later tell police they heard a woman screaming, “Help me!”</div> <div class="indent">Two decades later, as I pored over police files and news footage, my heart broke to learn that Mary Ann was haunted by the note she left for Melissa that fateful Thursday. In one interview she is quoted as saying, “I try not to think about how our lives would be different if I had not invited Melissa to Bowling World that night. There is no use thinking about it. I know she is gone. But my heart…. You know, as a mom… I sometimes wonder what if I had done something differently.”</div> <div class="indent">At approximately 7:45pm, Melissa’s car keys were found in the parking lot and were turned in to the front desk of Bowling World. No one noticed the splatters of blood that were slowly drying on the metal keys.</div> <div class="indent">Since Melissa never entered the bowling alley that night, her mother simply thought she had decided to go out with friends instead. Mary Ann went home expecting to see her daughter later that evening. Hours passed and Thursday slowly turned into Friday.</div> <div class="indent">At nine o’clock on Friday morning, Mary Ann reported Melissa as a missing person. By Saturday, Melissa’s friends and family were passing out flyers, blanketing the River Valley with over 6,000 pleas for help in finding the missing teenager.</div> <div class="indent">I lived in Northwest Arkansas at the time, and remember seeing the story of Melissa’s disappearance light up news channels. Her picture seemed to be everywhere. Curious, I reached out to my friends in the River Valley. It turns out they knew her. Their voices trembled as they shared their worst fears with me:</div> <div class="indent">“Melissa would not just disappear like this.”</div> <div class="indent">“Where could she be? This is not like Melissa at all.”</div> <div class="indent">“I hope she’s okay. I am scared she’s been hurt.”</div> <div class="indent">Christmas passed and the new year rang in but there was still no Melissa Witt.</div> <div class="indent">For more than a month, I, like the rest of the community, sat on the edge of my seat questioning what had happened to the beautiful All American Girl. None of us expected the story to turn into what it did.</div> <div class="indent">A quote by the late Michelle McNamara, in her book <i>I’ll be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer</i>, resonates with me. She wrote, “He loses his power when we know his face.” These words sum up the rationale behind the countless hours I’ve spent investigating the Melissa Witt case. I want to see his face.</div> <div class="indent">For over two decades the identity of Melissa’s killer has been hidden among the dense trees and thorny undergrowth rooted deeply in the uneven ground of a remote mountaintop in the Ozark National Forest. I envision him, a shadow-like figure, dark and dreadful, his confidence anchored in the predictability of a murder case slowly growing cold.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

LaDonna Humphrey

The Girl I Never Knew - Who Killed Melissa Witt by LaDonna Humphrey $15.50 $17.95

Justice for Melissa Witt For over two decades the identity of Melissa Witt’s killer has been hidden among the dense trees and thorny undergrowth rooted deeply in the uneven ground of a remote mountaintop in the Ozark National Forest. Determined to find answers, LaDonna Humphrey has spent the past seven years hunting for Melissa’s killer. Her investigation, both thrilling and unpredictable, has led her on a journey like no other. The Girl I Never Knew is an edge-of-your-seat account of LaDonna Humphrey's passionate fight for justice in the decades-old murder case of a girl she never knew. Her unstoppable quest for the truth has gained the attention of some incredibly dangerous people, some of whom would like to keep Melissa’s murder a mystery forever.

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Leya Booth

True Crime Activity Book $9.99 $11.99

Are you entertained by Sudoku and serial killers? Crosswords and crime? Then play detective and solve these entertaining puzzles! Alongside some of your favorite brain teasers are facts about infamous true crime cases. From word searches and encrypted messages to coloring Ted Bundy in court, the True Crime Activity Book will test your puzzle-solving skills and feed your need for true crime. In line with Genius Books' philosophy, this book honors the victims and celebrates the heroes who fight for them.

Eve Carson

Simple, Safe & Secret $17.95

Imagine a chilly April morning in 1990. A woman walking her dog suddenly stops in her tracks, shocked and disturbed. What made her pause? A human skull blocking a drainage tile. It turns out to be the remains of Joan Webster, a 25-year-old Harvard graduate student who had been missing over eight years ago, leaving the community baffled and investigators puzzled. The prosecutors had a suspect, Leonard Paradiso, who had been tried and convicted for another local woman's murder. The only connection between these tangled cases was that both victims had long, dark hair. Assistant District Attorney Tim Burke was determined to prove Paradiso guilty of both murders. However, with limited evidence and constantly changing stories, the circumstances surrounding Joan Webster's death remain a mystery to this day. But there's hope. Joan's sister-in-law, Eve Carson, has relentlessly pursued her quest for justice. "Simple, Safe & Secret" reveals the disturbing details and flaws in the system that have hindered justice in solving Joan Webster's murder. The truth about the bungled investigation and the wrongful conviction may be even darker than the story of Joan's murder itself. If you're a fan of crime thriller books and crime mystery books, this is a story that will grip you from start to finish.

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Alyson Camus

A Question Mark $19.99

“A Question Mark” tells the story of the alleged suicide of Elliot Smith, and dives into the circumstances of the case to reveal the truth. Back in the early 2000s, Elliott Smith was a rising star in the Indie music scene. He was a talented musician, but he carried a heavy burden—a drug addiction and a bleak view of life. His music expressed both his pain and his hopes. Then, in 2003, tragedy struck. Elliott Smith was found dead, and it looked like suicide. The media and his fans were quick to accept this explanation. However, as more details emerged, things got murkier. His girlfriend claimed they had a heated argument, and while she was locked in the bathroom, Elliott allegedly stabbed himself twice in the chest, ending his life. Hours later, he passed away in the hospital from his injuries. The Los Angeles County Coroner, after examining the evidence, couldn't definitively say it was suicide. Fast forward eighteen years, and the case is still unresolved. Alyson Camus, a dedicated Elliott Smith fan, couldn't let it rest. She wanted to uncover the truth. "A Question Mark" chronicles her relentless investigation into the alleged suicide of this Oscar-nominated singer. What she discovered reveals that the truth about his death might be an even bigger mystery than anyone could have imagined. This is a story that will keep you guessing until the very end.

Jim Berkenstadt

Mysteries in the Music $19.99

"Mysteries in Music: Case Closed" is a book that uncovers the hidden, strange, and fascinating stories in the history of rock and roll. Jim Berkenstadt, known as The Rock And Roll Detective®, has spent years digging into these mysteries. You'll travel back to the 1950s to find out who really discovered Elvis Presley. In the 1960s, a famous folk musician tried to create a supergroup with members from The Beatles and The Rolling Stones—what happened? Learn how some big-name artists used fake names to hide who they were. Explore a mysterious CIA situation in Jamaica in 1976, involving an election and the reggae legend Bob Marley. Did The Beach Boys really steal a song and its copyright from the infamous cult leader Charles Manson, keeping all the money? And dive into the secrets behind Nirvana's "Nevermind" album, which many consider the most influential rock album of the 1990s. These mysteries have fascinated rock and roll fans for a long time because no one has asked the right questions or looked deeply into the evidence—until now. After many years, the untold stories of pop and rock music history are finally uncovered, revealing the truth in "Mysteries in Music: Case Closed." See the review of Mysteries in the Music on CultureSonar.

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Barney Terrell

Cold Wrath $14.36 $17.95

"Cold Wrath: The 1896 Rampage of James C. Dunham" is a book that delves into a chilling crime from 125 years ago. On May 26, 1896, Jim Dunham killed six people, including his wife, her parents, his brother-in-law, and two farmhands. What remains a mystery even today is why he did it and why he spared his three-week-old son, leaving him beside his murdered mother. Back in those days, Santa Clara, California was a small farming community near San Francisco, and Jim Dunham was a family man with big dreams. But something went terribly wrong that spring, derailing his plans. We are certain that Jim Dunham committed these gruesome murders, but the unsettling truth is that we may never fully understand why. "Cold Wrath" by Barney Terrell takes us through the known facts, eyewitness accounts, the intense manhunt, and the enduring questions surrounding this horrifying event. Even after all these years, it's important to grasp the motivations that drove Jim Dunham to unleash his wrath upon his victims.

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Monique Patterson

United in Grief $12.00 $16.00

Stephanie Scott had never been happier. She was about to marry the man of her dreams and celebrate with all her family and friends. She had worked for hours to add personal touches to the special day. When her fiancé asked her to head out of town for a party she told him she had a few more things to tick off her to-do list. One was to head into Leeton High School, where she was a teacher, to finalise plans for her replacement while she was on her honeymoon. No one thought twice when Stephanie told them of her plans. No one could predict what would happen that fateful day. No one ever thought that evil could break the heart of a town and a nation. But a psychopath had been hiding in plain sight all along, waiting to make his move. After finishing university, Stephanie Scott moved to Leeton, New South Wales, to take a position as a teacher at the local high school. She and her fiancé were making plans to spend the rest of their lives in the quiet town. Stephanie was a beloved teacher, a source of encouragement and joy for everyone she met. A week before her wedding, she decided to spend a few hours preparing for her replacement while she was on her upcoming honeymoon. When her fiancé and family couldn’t find her later that day or the days following, no one really believed anything could have happened to their cherished friend and teacher. But someone knew where she was, and he would be the last person to see her alive. United in Grief tells the story of Stephanie Scott’s murder and how the town of Leeton and indeed the entire nation of Australia was affected by her disappearance, and the grief that followed such a tragic loss.

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Eric Garrett

Unprosecuted $13.50 $17.95

“Everybody knows who did it!” In the aftermath of a horrific murder of a mother in front of her four-year-old son, the entire close-knit community knew the murderer could only be one man. Several witnesses—including Eric, the boy left for dead—placed the murderer at the crime scene. But in Muncie, Indiana—also known as Little Chicago for its corruption, gambling, and attraction for criminal enterprise—during the late 1970s, nothing in the criminal justice system was that simple. After the county prosecutor declared the case “open and shut,” some very important people in town became nervous that if the murderer was convicted, he would start naming names and telling stories about the criminal activities in the area. After the prosecutor received a visit from the head of the local Teamsters union, suddenly there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed, and the suspect was set free, never to be prosecuted or held accountable. Forty years have passed, and Paula Garrett’s family, friends, and community have had to live every day knowing that a murderer is walking among them. To this day, the murderer is still being protected. Eric Garrett no longer expects justice. This murder is not unsolved, it is unprosecuted, and probably never will be. But the time has come to stop accepting the status quo. Unprosecuted: My Mother’s Murder and the Search for Accountability is the story of corruption, cover-ups, and a son’s frustration at knowing that the man who brutally murdered his mother and left him for dead may never be made to account for his crimes. "Mr. Garrett's tragic story is yet another reminder why we must demand criminal justice reform." --Tristin Engels, PsyD, Forensic Psychologist

Monique Patterson

Tears for Tyler $14.00

In late 2017, Tyler Dean was full of hope and dreams. He had just landed his dream job as an apprentice panel beater in Geelong, Victoria, Australia at the age of 18. He worked in Geelong and commuted home to Winchelsea by train every day. But on October 18, things took a tragic turn. His mom, Jeynelle Dean-Hayes, asked him to stay in Geelong to help set up scenes for a short film her husband Josh was working on. Tyler, feeling tired, wanted to go home instead. That night, when Jeynelle and Josh got home, Tyler wasn't there. Their world shattered when two police officers knocked on their door. Tyler had been struck by a car and left to die. Their beloved son's life was cut short, and the person responsible fled the scene. The pain they felt never went away, and their quest for justice faced many obstacles. Tyler Dean was not the only one let down by hit-and-run laws. This tragedy prompted Jeynelle and Josh to advocate for changes in Australia's laws regarding drivers who flee accidents. They believe there's much more work to be done because, as Jeynelle puts it, "car crime is a joke." If you're interested in reading real-life stories related to crime thriller books, this is a heart-wrenching account of a family's fight for justice and change.

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