# 74: Teacher Murdered By Her Own Student

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 2 Jul 2024, 41 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO3522866155.mp3

For today's case we're dipping into the archive as we look back at the murder of Colleen Ritzer, a teacher from Danvers High School, Massachusetts and the 14 year old student that was seen dragging a large bin around the school following his teacher's disappearance... Trigger Warning: rape, psychosis Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:00] Hello, usual disclaimer listeners.
[0:02] This week we're going to be revisiting a case that I first
[0:05] covered on my YouTube channel back in 2022.
[0:08] Today we're going to delve into the life and murder of Colleen
[0:12] Ritzer, a Massachusetts high school teacher and the 14 year
[0:15] old student who came into suspicion when he was seen
[0:18] dragging a large bin around the school following his teacher's
[0:23] mysterious disappearance. I'll be back with another case
[0:26] for you very soon, but in the meantime, I hope you appreciate
[0:29] this, Bernie. Back through the archive.
[0:34] Miss Ritzer was a 9th grade math teacher at Denver's high school.
[0:38] But on one October evening in 2013, Miss Ritzer failed to
[0:43] return home from work. Later that evening, her
[0:46] brutalised dead body would be found in a woods not far away
[0:50] from the school. And the killer wasn't so far
[0:53] away either. Now, before we get into it, I do
[0:59] just want to give my usual disclaimer that I mean
[1:01] absolutely no disrespect to anyone that I talk about in this
[1:04] video. This video is for educational
[1:06] purposes and everything that I'm about to say is just information
[1:09] that I have found on the Internet and I'm compiling into
[1:12] one video. Just a couple of content
[1:14] warnings before we get into this one.
[1:16] In this case, we will be discussing themes of rape and
[1:19] psychosis. So if either of those are things
[1:21] that you don't want to hear about right now, feel free to
[1:24] click out of this video. I'm sure I'll see you again some
[1:26] other time with a case. But with all that being said,
[1:29] let's get into the case. Colleen Ritzer was a 24 year old
[1:32] high school teacher from Massachusetts.
[1:35] She was born on May 13th, 1989, the first child to Peggy and
[1:39] Thomas Ritzer. She would later get a younger
[1:42] brother named Daniel and a younger sister named Laura.
[1:45] And she was super close with both of them and with both of
[1:47] her parents. She was, she was a really family
[1:50] oriented girl right from being young.
[1:52] She was, she was a homebody. She loved her family and she had
[1:55] a super happy childhood. Growing up.
[1:57] Colleen was very academic. She was very intelligent.
[2:01] She always got good grades, did really well at school.
[2:03] She really enjoyed school as well, which is quite unusual for
[2:07] kids her age. But she liked learning.
[2:09] She loved reading and her dream job when she grew up one day was
[2:13] to become a teacher. Because when she was young, she
[2:16] was so inspired by her teachers. She loved her teachers that she
[2:20] knew that she wanted to be able to do that for other kids.
[2:23] And so she worked really, really hard to get that goal because
[2:26] she knew she needed good grades, kids if she wanted to become a
[2:28] teacher. So she did.
[2:29] She studied really hard, got really good grades, graduated
[2:33] high school and then went off to college.
[2:35] In college she studied maths. Maths was always colleen's
[2:38] subject. She loved it, she was really
[2:40] passionate about it. And when she went to college to
[2:43] study, this was like a really transformative time in her life.
[2:47] I feel like it is for most people that go to uni.
[2:50] After school she moved into the college dorms.
[2:52] She made loads of new friends, picked up some new like hobbies
[2:56] and interests. She was doing new things.
[2:58] She became a little bit of a party girl as most people do
[3:01] when they go to uni. And one thing about Colleen
[3:04] Ritzer, she loved Halloween. She was super, super into it
[3:07] every single year. She always had been ever since
[3:10] she was a kid, she cared about her costume more than most.
[3:13] Every year her mother would help her pick out like the perfect
[3:16] costume or help her make her costumes.
[3:19] And so this year when she went off to college, this was the
[3:22] first year, her first Halloween without her mum, the first
[3:26] Halloween that she would be like doing her own thing.
[3:28] And for her first Halloween away from home, Colleen dressed up a
[3:32] little bit more revealing this year.
[3:34] She wore like a little mini dress, a little brown mini
[3:37] dress. I think she was supposed to be a
[3:38] bear, honestly. It really wouldn't be considered
[3:41] revealing by most people's standards, especially when it
[3:44] comes to Halloween costumes, because they can get, they can
[3:46] get a little bit crazy. But regardless, to Colleen's
[3:49] mother Peggy, it was quite revealing compared to all the
[3:53] other costumes she'd always helped her make and buy all her
[3:56] life. She was now seeing her baby
[3:58] daughter in this like mini dress going out for Halloween and her
[4:02] mum had a sense of humor about it.
[4:03] I love this. She commented on a picture on
[4:05] social media saying Colleen, as they get older, the costumes
[4:08] take on a different look. I just thought that was really
[4:11] funny because like, her mum had watched her Halloween costumes
[4:14] like evolve over the years and now she was away at college.
[4:16] I don't know. Her mum knew that she was having
[4:18] a great time either way. And once Colleen finished
[4:20] university, she was offered her dream job right out of the gate
[4:25] to be a high school maths teacher at Denver's high school
[4:28] in Massachusetts. It was only about a 25 mile
[4:31] journey from where she lived with her parents.
[4:33] So this was kind of ideal. She didn't live too close to the
[4:36] school where she'd be like living near students, but she
[4:40] didn't live too far away that it was a hell of a commute.
[4:42] It just seemed perfect. And she felt so lucky to have
[4:45] been offered her dream job straight away.
[4:47] And so of course, she took it. This also meant that she didn't
[4:50] have to move away from her parents because that was what
[4:53] she was worried about. I mean, she did it for
[4:55] university. She moved away for university,
[4:57] but now that she'd come back home and she was living there,
[5:00] she didn't really want to leave again because she was a
[5:02] homebody. And she loved her family.
[5:04] They were like her closest friends were her family.
[5:06] So yeah, this job meant that she didn't have to move away.
[5:09] It was good pay. It was a good location.
[5:11] Everything about it was perfect. And fun fact about this area,
[5:14] Danvers, where the high school was, where she was offered this
[5:16] job, Danvers is actually Salem. You know Salem from the witch
[5:21] trials. Well, it was renamed to Danvers
[5:24] after all of that to kind of disconnect the area from its
[5:28] like negative history I guess. But yeah, Danvers is Salem.
[5:32] So yeah, Colleen starts her new job at Danvers High School.
[5:36] She's teaching mainly algebra there, which is one of her
[5:39] favorite topics within maths. She was such a maths girl, but
[5:42] specifically algebra. So again, she was over the moon.
[5:46] She settled into this job really, really well, started
[5:48] making friends with other tea. She was getting on really well
[5:51] with her students. In fact, the kids loved her.
[5:54] She was really, really popular in that school.
[5:56] I think probably because she was such a young teacher.
[5:58] The young teachers are always the favourites because they're
[6:01] like a bit more relatable to the kids.
[6:03] You know, she was only like 6 years older than a lot of her
[6:06] students, so she would have conversations with them on a
[6:09] level that they wouldn't be able to have with other teachers.
[6:12] You know, she understood them and they understood her.
[6:14] And she always made it very clear to her students that she
[6:17] was more than just a teacher for them.
[6:19] She was a friend. And if they ever needed to talk
[6:21] about like personal stuff or home stuff, not even just their
[6:25] maths homework, then she was there.
[6:27] She always told them she was available.
[6:29] Her classroom was a no judgement zone.
[6:32] She just wanted everyone to feel like they had someone to talk
[6:35] to. Colleen Ritzer was just such a
[6:37] kind, caring person, exactly the kind of person that you would
[6:40] want as a teacher because she saw her students as people, as
[6:46] complex individuals with home lives.
[6:49] You know, she didn't just see them as test scores and stats.
[6:53] She saw these kids as young, impressionable people that she
[6:56] wanted to make a positive impact on.
[6:58] And Colleen really went above and beyond for her students.
[7:02] Like, of course, during the school day, as I've been saying,
[7:05] but even outside of school, Colleen made a public Twitter
[7:08] account where she would tweet just like help for her students
[7:12] like help on the homework revision tips, any like useful
[7:16] links or websites that she would find.
[7:19] She would tweet like little reminders like make sure you're
[7:21] wearing comfy shoes tomorrow because we're going on a school
[7:23] trip. Like she was just such an Angel.
[7:26] And her bio on Twitter as well was so cute.
[7:28] It was math teacher often too excited about the topics I'm
[7:32] teaching. In October of 2013, Miss Ritzer
[7:35] had a new student in her algebra class and he wasn't doing very
[7:40] well. She could tell that he was
[7:41] struggling. He was like lagging behind all
[7:43] the other students in the class. His name was Philip Chisholm.
[7:46] He was 14 years old and he was new to the area because he was
[7:50] originally from Tennessee, but his parents were in the middle
[7:54] of a really messy divorce at this point in time.
[7:56] His mother had got in custody of Philip, and so she'd moved the
[7:59] two of them over 1000 miles away to Massachusetts.
[8:03] I don't know why she decided to move so far, but this was a
[8:06] huge, huge change for Philip, as I'm sure you can imagine, for a
[8:09] 14 year old kid to be like up to move to the other side of the
[8:13] country. Like he's got no friends, he
[8:15] doesn't know anyone here, new school.
[8:17] It was all so overwhelmed for Philip and Colleen because she
[8:22] was so attentive to all of her students.
[8:24] She'd noticed that Philip didn't seem to be settling in very
[8:28] easily. He didn't seem to have like a
[8:30] group of friends that he would like walk to and from classes
[8:33] with or sit with at lunch. It just didn't seem like he was
[8:36] finding his feet very quickly. He had joined the football team.
[8:40] What? The soccer team?
[8:43] So he joined this team. But again, I think they were
[8:45] quite clicky on the football team and they didn't really like
[8:49] welcome Philip Phillip into their group as well as you would
[8:52] hope. But Phillip was super, super
[8:54] talented at football. He was really, really good.
[8:56] Even back in Tennessee, he'd been on his school's football
[8:59] team there. And so when he joined this
[9:01] school, he tried out and he got on the football team immediately
[9:04] because he was he was really good.
[9:06] But even that hadn't helped him to make friends.
[9:08] And Colleen could tell that he was struggling not only just in
[9:12] general, but also with his algebra work.
[9:14] And she just really wanted to help this kid.
[9:16] She had a lot of empathy for her students and so she asked him
[9:20] one day on October 22nd, she asked him to stay back after
[9:24] class because she wanted to have a bit of a chat with him.
[9:26] The school day ended at around 4:00 PM, and so every single
[9:29] day, Philip's mother expected him home at about 4:30.
[9:33] You know, give him a bit of time to walk home.
[9:35] But on this particular day, October 22nd, 2013, Philip
[9:40] wasn't home at the usual time. So his mum just hung about and
[9:44] waited for a bit, just expecting him to be home any minute.
[9:47] Maybe he was just taking a bit longer walking on this
[9:49] particular the day, but as time went on, it was getting to like
[9:52] six PM 630. And now his mom's worried
[9:56] because she knows that he doesn't really have friends.
[9:59] So like, who could he be with? Is he just out by himself for
[10:03] two hours after school? Eventually his mom got so
[10:05] worried that at 6:34 PM she called the local Police
[10:09] Department and filed her son as missing.
[10:12] She told them that the last time she'd seen her son was when she
[10:15] dropped him off at school that morning and she hadn't seen or
[10:18] heard from him since. And so that's where police
[10:20] started. They went to Phillips School,
[10:22] Danvers High School, and they started asking round
[10:25] immediately. They went to his football coach
[10:27] because I think he was supposed to have football after school
[10:30] that day or like at lunchtime or whatever.
[10:32] And his coach said that Phillip never showed up for football
[10:35] practice that day, which was really unusual.
[10:37] He'd never missed because he was super, super passionate about
[10:41] the sport. He was good at it.
[10:42] He didn't want to miss his football lessons, football
[10:45] lessons, football practice, That's it.
[10:48] Football lessons. Everyone was even more worried.
[10:51] It seemed like no one had seen or heard from Philip in a while.
[10:54] He hadn't been at all the things that he's supposed to have been
[10:57] since about halfway through the day.
[10:59] So that evening the head teacher sat down and she wrote this big
[11:02] mass e-mail to all of the teachers in Danvers High School
[11:06] just basically telling them the situation.
[11:08] We've got this new student, Philip Chisholm, he's missing,
[11:11] hasn't been seen or heard from since halfway through the day.
[11:13] Do you know anything? Have you seen anything?
[11:15] And very quickly the head teacher received a response from
[11:18] one of the maths teachers at the school.
[11:20] But it wasn't exactly relating to Philip Chisholm, but to
[11:24] something quite similar actually.
[11:26] And that was that one of the teachers had also been reported
[11:30] missing that evening. It was Miss Colleen Ritzer.
[11:33] She too hadn't returned home that evening.
[11:36] And when she didn't, her parents got worried and contacted the
[11:39] school. So the school informed police of
[11:41] these two parallel disappearance cases.
[11:44] And naturally police started making connections between the
[11:47] two. Philip Chisholm was in Colleen
[11:50] Ritz's maths class and that day they had had a lesson together.
[11:54] So they were connected, they knew each other.
[11:57] Was there a chance that they could be together?
[11:59] They could be missing together By now, Colleen's parents had
[12:03] been looking for her for quite some time.
[12:04] They'd just been like driving around, ringing around all her
[12:07] friends. And at this point, her dad had
[12:09] driven all the way down to Danvers High School.
[12:11] As soon as he drove into the car park, he saw Colleen's car still
[12:15] parked there, which really worried him because school
[12:18] finished at what, like 4:00 PM and it was now 9:00 PM.
[12:22] What reason would there be for her car to still be in the car
[12:25] park so far out after hours? She lived 25 miles away.
[12:29] She definitely didn't walk home. Her parents had already been in
[12:33] contact with all of her friends, so it wasn't like she went to
[12:35] meet a friend after work and just left her car there.
[12:38] There was no explanation for her car still being there.
[12:40] And so her family went up to Colleen's classroom to have a
[12:43] look around, you know, the room that she taught maths in, and
[12:46] none of her belongings were there.
[12:48] It was as if she had actually left work that day and taken
[12:51] everything with her. Her bag wasn't there, her phone
[12:53] wasn't there, jacket wasn't there, like nothing.
[12:56] Everything that she'd brought in, she'd also seemingly taken
[12:59] away with her. So they're getting some really
[13:01] contrasting, confusing evidence here.
[13:04] All her belongings are gone, but she hadn't left in her car.
[13:07] So police got in touch with both Colleen Ritz's and Philip
[13:10] Chisholm's phone network companies, and they asked them
[13:14] to ping the location. Well, the last known location of
[13:17] both of their phones, the last hit that they got on Colleen's
[13:20] phone was from about 20 minutes, a 20 minute walk away from the
[13:24] school, so really not that far at all.
[13:27] And so they started searches in that area, just like manual
[13:30] searches, people walking up and down the roads looking either
[13:33] for Colleen or for this phone. And the last hit that police got
[13:37] on Philip Chisholm's phone was actually in a cinema about half
[13:41] an hour away, like 1/2 an hour drive away from the school.
[13:44] And so again, searches were started there.
[13:46] Police were sent there to try and find Philip.
[13:48] Unfortunately police had had no look at the cinema.
[13:51] They also had no look in the general area where Colleens
[13:54] phone was last pinged. But they did find something in
[13:58] the nearby area, maybe a few streets away from the school.
[14:01] Colleen Ritz handbag was found just laying on the floor and it
[14:05] was completely emptied. Everything had been taken,
[14:10] presumably her credit cards, her ID, her money, her phone,
[14:14] everything. Everything was gone out of this
[14:16] bag. As all of this had been going
[14:18] on, of course searches had been going on inside the school in
[14:21] Colleen's classroom and things like that and police had found
[14:25] something there even more concerning than the handbag.
[14:29] So Colleen's classroom was on the 1st floor and on the very
[14:32] end of that corridor there was 2 toilets, boys toilets, girls
[14:36] toilets. And in the girls toilet at the
[14:39] end of that hallway police found very small red smears on the
[14:44] tiles. It looked like blood.
[14:55] So police started grabbing all the CCTV footage they could from
[14:58] around the school because they wanted to pinpoint the last time
[15:02] that both Philip and Colleen were seen as they were seen
[15:05] leaving the school that day. The first camera that they
[15:07] tapped into was the one from right outside Colleen's
[15:10] classroom so it could see the the doorway, the entrance to and
[15:13] from her classroom. And just from this one camera
[15:17] alone, a very clear story starts to emerge.
[15:20] The footage that police were most interested in started
[15:23] around 3:00 PM, which she's around the time that Colleen
[15:27] Ritzer would have asked Philip Chisholm to stay back after
[15:30] class to speak to her for a while.
[15:31] Just after 3:00 PM, Colleen Ritzer leaves her classroom and
[15:34] walks a little down the hallway. She's smiling, Everything's
[15:37] fine. And then you see a shadow in the
[15:40] doorway of her classroom. A boy then leaves the classroom,
[15:44] hovers outside for a moment, and it looks as though he's looking
[15:47] around, seeing who's around. And that boy was 14 year old
[15:52] Philip Chisholm. He lingers for a moment,
[15:54] watching in the direction that Colleen's just walked.
[15:57] He's watching her walking into the girls bathrooms at the end
[16:01] of the hallway. Philip walks back into the
[16:03] classroom, just for a brief moment, and then emerges again.
[16:06] But now he has his hood pulled up and he is walking in the
[16:11] direction that he just saw Colleen leave in.
[16:14] As he gets closer to the bathroom, you can clearly see
[16:16] that he's holding a pair of gloves in his hands and he puts
[16:20] them on as he enters the room where Colleen is.
[16:24] The cameras then don't don't catch any more movement for
[16:26] about 11 minutes. The area where Philip and
[16:29] Colleen are in the bathroom is covered.
[16:32] It's a blind spot. But 11 minutes later, the next
[16:35] movement that they see on camera was another student, another
[16:39] female student walking into those girls bathrooms.
[16:42] She gets in there and very quickly seems to turn around and
[16:45] head straight back out again. This was later explained by the
[16:48] girl. She said that she walked into
[16:50] those bathrooms, she was just going to use them normally, but
[16:53] then she saw one of the bathroom stalls was open slightly and
[16:57] there was a person in there exposed from the waist down.
[17:00] She saw like a pile of clothes on the floor and this person was
[17:03] naked from the waist down. And so she thought, Oh my God,
[17:06] I've just seen someone getting changed and you know, for their
[17:09] own privacy. And because she was feeling a
[17:11] little bit embarrassed, she just turned and walked straight out.
[17:14] She said that was all she saw. That's all she thought it was,
[17:17] someone getting changed in the toilets.
[17:18] Very quickly after that, the camera catches Phillip Chisholm
[17:22] leaving the girls bathrooms in quite a hurry, still with his
[17:25] hood up. He walks all the way down the
[17:27] corridor, down the stairs and out of the building.
[17:30] And he looks like he's in a hurry.
[17:31] He's like keeping his head down. He doesn't want anyone to see
[17:34] him. He runs outside, takes his blue
[17:37] hoodie off, and then when we see him again, he's changed into a
[17:40] red jacket. And after that, he's just kind
[17:42] of like running around the school.
[17:44] It doesn't seem as though he has any like major purpose.
[17:46] He's just like running around looking around.
[17:49] And bear in mind, this whole time Colleen Ritzer has not been
[17:53] seen leaving the girls bathroom for about 5 minutes.
[17:56] On the rest of the CCTV footage, Philip Chisholm is just running
[17:59] around. He doesn't look like he knows
[18:01] what he's doing. He doesn't look like he's got
[18:03] any major direction. He's like taking his jacket off
[18:05] one minute. I think he had it round his head
[18:07] at one minute like he doesn't know what he's doing.
[18:10] Then eventually after about 10 minutes, Philip leaves the
[18:13] school again. And then he's caught on cameras
[18:16] dragging A wheelie bin back into the school.
[18:19] He drags it inside up the stairs to the first floor and drags it
[18:24] into to the girls bathroom. He's not seen on camera for
[18:28] about 6 minutes after that and then when he is seen again he is
[18:32] dragging the bin out of the girls bathrooms with a mask on
[18:36] now. So he drags this wheelie bin
[18:38] again down the stairs and out of the school.
[18:41] Which I just want to say he didn't get questioned or stopped
[18:44] once which I find insane. This kid has just brought a
[18:48] whole wheelie bin in and he's just dragging it up and down
[18:51] stairs as well. That would have been noisy, it
[18:53] would have been disruptive. He didn't get stopped or
[18:55] questioned once, dragged it all the way back outside and on his
[18:59] way out. Philip seems to be noticeably
[19:02] struggling to drag the bin a lot more than he was when he was
[19:06] bringing it in, almost as if it was heavier now and a bit harder
[19:10] to control. The cameras follow him, dragging
[19:13] it all the way outside the school, down the street and
[19:16] towards a nearby woods. About 25 minutes later, Philip
[19:21] Chisholm comes out of the woods, now without the bin.
[19:24] Colleen Ritzer was never seen on any of the CCTV again after she
[19:30] entered that girl's bathroom. She was not seen leaving again
[19:34] and so this footage of the wheelie bin was insanely
[19:38] concerning because that's the only explanation was Colleen
[19:42] Ritzer in that bin. After ditching the bin in the
[19:45] woods, Philip Chisholm then returns to school for 1/3 time
[19:49] and again he's dressed differently again.
[19:52] This time he doesn't have socks and shoes on.
[19:54] He's wearing jeans and they're just covered in what looks like
[19:57] blood stains. He just openly walked into
[20:00] school like this when there's students still around.
[20:04] And again, no one questioned him.
[20:05] So now he went into a different. Bathroom, not the girls
[20:08] bathroom, the same one where he was before.
[20:10] He went into a different bathroom and got changed again,
[20:13] this time into an all black outfit.
[20:15] After that, I think he went into the girls bathroom one last
[20:18] time, the bathroom where he'd been with Colleen Ritzer.
[20:21] And then when he came out, he left the school for the final
[20:25] time and then he's not seen again on CCTV.
[20:27] So now police had to figure out where he was.
[20:31] The last hit that they had on his mobile phone was at that
[20:33] cinema, but that was hours ago and they'd already searched
[20:36] there and he he wasn't there now, so they had no idea where
[20:39] he could be and they still didn't know where Colleen was.
[20:43] But they had a pretty good idea after seeing this CCTV footage.
[20:47] So searches began in that woods just by the school.
[20:51] And this is the same night that Colleen's gone missing.
[20:53] These searches are happening quickly.
[20:55] Meanwhile, other police officers are trying to get some Intel on
[20:58] Philip Chisholm, try and find out where he is.
[21:01] Just after midnight that night, police received a concerned
[21:05] phone call from just a member of the public who said they'd seen
[21:09] a young man walking the opposite way down like a highway or
[21:14] something. And he had his hood up and he
[21:16] just seemed like he was up to no good.
[21:17] There was just something about this guy.
[21:20] He was up to no good. And so this person called police
[21:22] just to ask them to check on him.
[21:24] When police arrived at the scene and they went to go and speak to
[21:27] this hooded man, they found out that it was actually 14 year old
[21:31] Philip Chisholm. He'd just been walking down this
[21:33] road and he didn't have his phone on him anymore.
[21:36] And where he was found at this point in time was 5 miles away
[21:39] from the cinema, and it's believed that he'd just walked
[21:43] that whole 5 miles. He'd just been walking since he
[21:45] left the cinema. They searched him on the spot,
[21:48] and Philip was found to have a knife on him.
[21:51] A knife that still had dried blood on it.
[21:54] But inside of his backpack was even worse.
[21:57] They found a box cutter, again, still with blood on it.
[22:01] They found a mask. And, and they found Colleen
[22:04] Ritz's credit cards and ID. There was also a pair of women's
[22:08] underwear in that bag. And they had a pretty good idea
[22:12] of who's this was. A few days later, it was
[22:14] confirmed to be Colleen Ritz's underwear.
[22:17] So police asked Philip where he'd gotten all these items
[22:21] from. And Philip said that he'd
[22:22] actually just found them on the floor outside a shop.
[22:25] And he recognized Colleen Ritzer as his algebra teacher.
[22:28] And so he picked it all up. And he was thinking, oh, just
[22:31] give her it all at school tomorrow.
[22:32] Of course, police didn't believe that for a minute.
[22:34] And so they kept pressing Philip and they're like, come on, tell
[22:37] us the truth. Tell us how you actually found
[22:39] all of this stuff. And he was like, fine, fine.
[22:41] I'll tell you the truth. I broke into her car and I stole
[22:44] it all. Of course, they still don't
[22:46] believe him. They've seen the CCTV.
[22:48] At this point, they're just wanting a confession out of him.
[22:50] They know that the car theft story isn't real either.
[22:53] And so to be able to try and get these answers out of him because
[22:57] he was just going to keep lying if he was prompted again.
[23:00] So to try and get the correct answers out of him, they asked
[23:04] him, well, where's all this blood come from?
[23:06] There's blood inside your bag. There's blood on this knife, on
[23:08] this box cutter. Whose blood is this?
[23:11] And Phillip just responded, the girls.
[23:13] So Philip Chisholm was driven back to Denver's police station,
[23:17] where his mother met him there so that she could sit in on his
[23:20] interview. And police noticed that as soon
[23:23] as he was, like, reunited with his mother and he was sat there
[23:26] with her, he wasn't the same boy.
[23:29] Like, this seemed to have really put a barrier up in how he was
[23:33] talking. He wouldn't say much when his
[23:35] mother was there. It was clear that this made him
[23:37] quite uncomfortable. And actually, after a little
[23:39] while, he asked if he could be questioned without his mother
[23:42] present, which was granted because police felt it would be
[23:46] for the best. We'll get back to the, like,
[23:48] details of the questioning a bit later.
[23:50] But right now in the case, it's like the early hours of the
[23:53] morning. They had been questioning Philip
[23:56] for a little while up until this point with his mother present,
[23:58] but he really wasn't giving them much at all.
[24:01] He wasn't, he wasn't a talker. He was a no comment.
[24:05] But then, just after 3:00 AM, officers that were searching the
[24:09] woods made a gruesome discovery. Under a pile of leaves, they
[24:13] found the brutalized dead body of 24 year old Colleen Ritzer.
[24:19] She was naked from the waist down and absolutely covered in
[24:23] blood. She'd clearly been very savagely
[24:26] murdered. There were so many visible stab
[24:29] wounds all over her. It seemed as though she'd had
[24:32] her throat slit. And there were a lot of smaller
[24:35] like cuts and grazes all over her.
[24:37] There was mud all over her suggesting that she'd really
[24:40] fought for her life, like there'd been a big struggle here
[24:43] she was trying to save herself. And right next to Colleen's body
[24:47] was a note. And it was very clear that this
[24:50] note had been left intentionally.
[24:52] It was right by the body and scribbled on it was I hate you
[24:55] all. Police also felt as though
[24:57] Colleen's body had been left intentionally posed in a
[25:01] sexually suggestive position. And she also had a tree branch
[25:07] still inside of her. Colleen Ritz's autopsy showed
[25:11] that she'd been strangled. She'd been stabbed at least 16
[25:15] times. Her throat seemed to have been
[25:17] slit. They couldn't tell if it was
[25:19] like a slit or like multiple stab wounds in the same area
[25:22] because a lot of her stab wounds seemed to be like focused chest
[25:26] and neck area. They did find evidence of her
[25:29] being raped not only by a person, but also with this tree
[25:34] branch that was found still inside of her.
[25:36] And the worst part of all of this was that the pathologist
[25:40] thought there was quite a good chance that Colleen had been
[25:43] alive through all of this, and that she'd actually died from
[25:48] blood loss very slowly after the attack.
[25:51] They believed it was likely that she'd just been laying in that
[25:54] woods for quite some time after the attack had actually
[25:57] finished, but she was just too weak and injured to be able to
[26:00] get herself up and get some help.
[26:02] It's believed that she bled out so slowly because a lot of the
[26:06] stab wounds that had been done were done with seemingly the box
[26:10] cutter that was found in Phillips bag.
[26:12] Because a box cutter has only a really tiny blade, it wouldn't
[26:16] make that deep of a stab wound deep enough for you to
[26:19] eventually bleed out if there's enough done.
[26:22] But none of them were really deep enough to like sever nerves
[26:25] or veins. In fact, there were only three
[26:27] veins that were actually severed, no three blood vessels
[26:31] that were severed due to what they believed to be the slit on
[26:35] her throat. And that was where most of the
[26:37] blood loss came from, about 20 yards away from where they'd
[26:40] found Colleens body. They also found that wheelie bin
[26:44] that they'd seen Phillip dragging around on the CCTV
[26:47] footage, and when they opened it, there was blood inside.
[26:51] And not far away from that there were a pair of gloves just
[26:55] laying on the ground in the woods, again with blood all over
[26:59] them. Another interesting piece of
[27:00] evidence that was found maybe a little bit later on in the night
[27:04] was a couple of drops of blood. I think one was on the street
[27:07] that connected the school and the woods, and one of them was
[27:11] in the entrance way of the school.
[27:14] And so this really helped to, like, solidify police's theory
[27:18] that Colleen Ritzer was inside that bin.
[27:21] I mean, I'm sure they had enough evidence at this point in time,
[27:24] but that was physical proof of the journey that her body had
[27:28] taken as she was severely bleeding.
[27:31] And they can connect it to the CCTV of him dragging the bin.
[27:41] So now police had a very clear picture of what they thought had
[27:45] happened. 14 year old Philip Chisholm had raped, murdered and
[27:50] robbed his teacher and then ditched her body in the woods
[27:54] before going on the run and going to watch a movie.
[27:56] Yeah, as soon as he ditched the body in the woods, he went to
[28:00] this cinema using Colleen's credit card, paid for himself to
[28:04] go and see a new Woody Allen movie.
[28:07] He then went to Wendy's and again, using Colleen's credit
[28:10] card, bought himself some dinner and then he just went for a five
[28:13] mile walk until he was eventually found by police later
[28:16] that evening. But why had he done all of this?
[28:20] Because Philip wasn't really talking in his interview.
[28:22] So police couldn't understand where this had come from.
[28:26] Why? Why had this new student just
[28:29] turn around and wanted to murder his teacher one day?
[28:31] Police wanted to get a bit of an idea of a motive and Philip
[28:35] wasn't giving him it. So they decided to go and speak
[28:37] to anyone else in the school that might have been close to
[28:40] Philip or close to Colleen Ritzer.
[28:42] And they found out that on this particular day, you know, when
[28:45] Colleen had asked Philip to stay back after class, he wasn't the
[28:49] only one that stayed back after class.
[28:51] There was another girl in that room with them, a girl called
[28:54] Autumn. And so she was called in for a
[28:56] police interview as well. They basically wanted to know
[28:58] kind of what the atmosphere was like in that room.
[29:01] Had anything happened in the lead up to the murder that they
[29:04] should be aware of? And some of the things that
[29:06] Autumn told them were very, very interesting.
[29:09] She said that she'd overheard Miss Ritzer because she wasn't
[29:13] part of this conversation. By the way, Autumn, she I think
[29:15] she was just like doodling in her book.
[29:17] And she overheard the conversation between Colleen
[29:20] Ritzer and Philip Chisholm. And Colleen was just kind of
[29:22] asking him how he was settling in, you know, how he was doing.
[29:26] And he seemed fine in this conversation.
[29:29] And then Colleen started asking him about Tennessee, you know,
[29:33] his life before he came here. What was it like there?
[29:36] You know, how was he dealing with his parents, divorce,
[29:38] things like that. She was asking him because she
[29:40] cared. And Autumn said that it was at
[29:42] this point that Philips energy just comes completely changed.
[29:47] She could tell that he was very visibly angered or distressed by
[29:52] the conversation topic. He started getting snappy and
[29:55] Moody. And apparently Colleen picked up
[29:57] on this quite quickly. And so she changed the subject
[29:59] really quickly. They started talking about
[30:01] something else, but Philip's mood wasn't picking up.
[30:04] Colleen was trying. She was talking about other
[30:06] things, she was trying to joke with him.
[30:08] But no, he was in. He was in a really bad mood now.
[30:11] And so eventually Colleen just excused herself and went to the
[30:14] bathroom. And, and that was when we see
[30:16] her leave the classroom. And then Philip followed her.
[30:20] So could it have been that brief conversation about Tennessee
[30:24] that triggered the murder? Because it certainly seemed to
[30:27] have triggered something in Philip Chisholm?
[30:29] Not entirely sure what, but he didn't like that topic of
[30:32] conversation, and it made him very angry.
[30:35] Some people think that that is what triggered the murder.
[30:38] But I think it's important to remember that Philip Chisholm
[30:42] turned up to school that day with the following things in his
[30:45] backpack. A knife, a box cutter, a mask, a
[30:49] pair of gloves. He came with a plan did he not?
[30:53] I don't know about any of yous but I didn't take half of that
[30:56] to school with me. Maybe gloves every now and
[30:58] again. Not a box cutter or a knife.
[31:00] Don't forget he had like 3 changes of clothes as well.
[31:03] He had like two different jackets, an all black outfit to
[31:06] get changed into like he was prepared.
[31:09] Does that mean that this was premeditated?
[31:12] Had he come to school that day planning to kill Miss Rick?
[31:16] That or was Colleen Ritzer always his intended target?
[31:20] There's a couple of different theories here.
[31:23] Could he have gone to school just wanting to murder someone,
[31:27] anyone. And then maybe Colleen Ritzer
[31:29] was the one that triggered him with that Tennessee
[31:32] conversation. Was he just waiting for someone
[31:35] to piss him off? And was he just going to kill
[31:37] the first person that that put him in a mood?
[31:39] And unfortunately that was Colleen.
[31:41] Or did he go there specifically waiting to target Miss Ritzer?
[31:45] Was he just waiting to get her alone?
[31:46] And it just so happened that this was the opportunity that he
[31:50] got. There was another student that
[31:51] spoke to police at one point, a girl called Rania.
[31:54] Rania. Yeah.
[31:56] She said that she sat next to Philip in their actual maths
[31:59] class that was taught by Miss Ritzer.
[32:02] And she said that during the whole class, Philip had just
[32:04] been doodling some really dark drawings.
[32:08] I don't know what dark drawings means, but yeah, Rania said that
[32:12] he just seemed like he was in a bit of a, a bit of a mood, a bit
[32:15] of a like dark mood, you know? So maybe he was already feeling
[32:19] volatile before the Tennessee conversation with Miss Ritzer
[32:23] even happened. And then that just, like,
[32:24] triggered him on another level. I don't know.
[32:27] But we can't forget that he raped Colleen Ritzer.
[32:31] So a sexual motive is a huge part of this crime.
[32:34] He did it twice, seemingly. And I'm sorry, I feel like this
[32:38] could sound quite morbid, but he could have achieved that with
[32:43] any female victim. So why did he specifically
[32:47] choose Colleen Ritzer? He could have murdered one of
[32:50] his female schoolmates and done that exact same thing.
[32:54] He could have carried it out the exact same way.
[32:56] So I wonder why he chose his teacher over any other female
[33:01] victim. You know, Was it that he was
[33:04] infatuated with Colleen Ritzer? Did he have a thing for her?
[33:07] And did did it manifest in an awful way like this?
[33:11] Did it? Was it the opposite?
[33:12] Did he hate her? Did he really not like Colleen
[33:15] Ritzer and want to hurt her? Or was it not even about Colleen
[33:19] but maybe more so about his schoolwork or his maths work?
[33:23] Was he struggling in the subject or was she just like a
[33:27] representation of school to him? Because he was having a hard
[33:31] time at school. He wasn't fitting in.
[33:32] So maybe he saw Colleen as something to take that anger out
[33:36] on. She represented school or maths
[33:40] to him. Maybe maybe that was a factor in
[33:42] it. We really don't know because
[33:44] like I said, he was not talking to police at all.
[33:47] They really couldn't get any specifics out of him.
[33:50] But all they knew was that this boy needed charging for murder
[33:54] right now. And they had enough proof.
[33:55] They had enough proof, and they could do it.
[33:57] So Philip Chisholm was officially charged with the
[34:00] murder of Colleen Ritzer, awaiting his trial.
[34:03] Philip was sent to a youth detention center.
[34:05] Obviously, they didn't want him just, I don't know, walking the
[34:07] earth at the same time as everyone else.
[34:09] That was scary. So they sent him to a youth
[34:11] detention center. And you would be thinking that
[34:14] as you're waiting for your murder trial, you're going to be
[34:16] on your best behaviour, aren't you?
[34:17] Because you don't want to make things any worse for yourself.
[34:19] But no, not Phillip Chisholm. While he was at the detention
[34:23] centre, he actually attacked a female member of staff in an
[34:27] eerily similar way to the way that he attacked Colleen Ritzer.
[34:31] He followed this one particular member of staff to a store room
[34:35] and then walked inside and attacked her.
[34:38] I think he was using a really sharpened pencil that was like
[34:41] the only weapon that he could get hold of.
[34:44] He was as well just beating her up with his hands, doing
[34:47] anything that he could to this woman without a weapon.
[34:49] Honestly who knows what would have happened if he had had a
[34:53] bladed weapon. Maybe that woman would have lost
[34:55] her life as well. But luckily she managed to
[34:57] scream for help and other staff came and saved her.
[35:00] I don't know if Phillip saw any extra like charges or
[35:03] punishments for this, I couldn't find anything but hopefully you
[35:07] would assume that he would. So because Phillip Chisholm was
[35:10] 14 at the time of committing the murder, that meant that he would
[35:13] be tried as an adults. But first they needed to see if
[35:16] he could trial at all. They needed to see if he was fit
[35:19] for trial. So they put him through loads of
[35:21] different psychiatric tests, psychology assessments, all that
[35:24] kind of stuff to see if he had any degree of mental illness.
[35:27] The first assessment came back with nothing really to note.
[35:31] I mean, the psychiatrist acknowledged that Philip did
[35:34] seem quite down. He seemed a little bit depressed
[35:37] maybe, like he wasn't settling in very well.
[35:40] But no mental illness that this guy could note anyway.
[35:45] Philip did, however, say to this psychiatrist that he experienced
[35:49] hallucinations quite a bit and from time to time he believed
[35:52] that he was a ninja. But the psychologist didn't
[35:55] think that that was like a mental illness or anything.
[35:57] He just thought, I don't, I don't know.
[35:59] I don't know. I mean, they did give it like a
[36:01] second and third opinion. Philip went to see a couple of
[36:04] other psychiatrists, psychologists, and all of them
[36:07] said they couldn't see any mental illness in this guy.
[36:10] He was deemed fit to stand trial and the insanity plea was out of
[36:14] the window because he was perfectly sane at the time that
[36:17] he did this. So at the end of 2015, Philip
[36:20] Chisholm's trial began and he pled not guilty to the murder of
[36:24] Colleen Ritzer. And although he couldn't exactly
[36:26] use the insanity plea to get away with murder, his defense
[36:30] team still did try and say that his mental health was the main
[36:34] factor in why he did this, that he had really, really poor
[36:37] mental health after the divorce and after the move.
[36:40] And his family had a history of poor mental health as well.
[36:44] But like so do most families. And that's not an excuse for
[36:48] murder. It's not even a reason.
[36:50] They were basically just trying to say that he was like a
[36:52] teenager acting out after his parents divorce.
[36:55] But I wouldn't say rape and murder is exactly acting out
[36:58] after your parents divorce. That would be like getting into
[37:00] a fight at school. Not raping, murdering and
[37:03] disposing of your teacher's body.
[37:05] And his defence team even tried to blame Colleen for her own
[37:09] murder, saying that because she brought up Tennessee in a
[37:12] conversation with him, it triggered him and that's what
[37:14] led to her murder. It must have sent him into some
[37:17] sort of like psychotic episode. They believe, although he he was
[37:21] never diagnosed with anything, but they think that this
[37:24] conversation was the trigger. The prosecution came back and
[37:27] said that this was a sexually motivated homicide that Philip
[37:30] Chisholm had planned and premeditated, proving that he
[37:33] knew right from wrong. They even had all of the
[37:36] psychologists and psychiatrists that had tested him and assessed
[37:39] him stand up there in court and say, yeah, I know he's got
[37:43] nothing wrong with him. We didn't diagnose him with
[37:45] anything. He was of sound mind at the time
[37:48] of the murder. One of them even said that his
[37:50] symptoms of like hallucination and thinking that he was a ninja
[37:54] were inconsistent, AKA they think he faked.
[37:58] At the end of the trial, the jury went and deliberated for
[38:01] two whole days and eventually came back and found Phillip
[38:05] Chisholm guilty of the rape, murder, and robbery of his
[38:09] teacher Colleen Ritzer. He was, however, found not
[38:12] guilty of the second rape charge pertaining to the tree branch
[38:17] that was found still inside Colleen's body when she was
[38:20] found. And this is really, really
[38:21] frustrating, but the law in Massachusetts, at least at the
[38:25] time, I don't know if it's still like this, but it required that
[38:28] a victim of sexual assault had to be alive at the time that
[38:32] they were sexually assaulted. Otherwise that's just like abuse
[38:35] of a cops otherwise. And the coroner said in court
[38:39] that they couldn't determine whether Colleen was alive or
[38:43] dead when she was assaulted with that tree branch.
[38:46] There's no way for them to know. And so for that reason, he can't
[38:50] be found guilty of sexually assaulting her with that tree
[38:53] branch because technically we don't have the proof that it
[38:57] fits that criteria. Does that make sense?
[39:01] And it's equally as frustrating because for that same reason,
[39:05] they can't find him guilty of abuse of a cops either because
[39:08] they can't prove that she was dead when he did that.
[39:12] So basically, they know that he did it, but he can't be found
[39:15] guilty of anything because we don't know if she was alive or
[39:18] dead at the time that it happened.
[39:20] Thank God he's got all those other charges and been found
[39:23] guilty of them, because if it was not based on that alone,
[39:27] there would be riots because I think that's crazy.
[39:29] But anyway, as all of the verdicts were read out loud in
[39:32] court, Philip literally just sat there with the most blank stare
[39:36] on his face. No emotion, no guilt, no
[39:39] remorse. He was just staring
[39:40] straightforward, just hearing that he was guilty because he
[39:43] was so young, his sentencing was going to be a little lenient,
[39:48] meaning that he couldn't get whole life in prison or the
[39:51] death penalty. The highest amount of, well, the
[39:54] highest minimum that he could get in prison was 40 years.
[39:58] So he is going to serve a minimum of 40 years in prison.
[40:01] The soonest that he could get out on parole is 2055, when I
[40:05] think he'll be in his 50s. But yeah, that is all I have for
[40:09] this case. Thank you so much for listening
[40:15] to usual disclaimer. At this point, I just want to
[40:17] say that if you've been affected by any of the topics we
[40:20] discussed today, please check the description where we've left
[40:23] some helpful resources. If you want to hear more cases
[40:26] like this one, make sure to follow Usual Disclaimer on your
[40:29] podcast app so that you get notifications when we post new
[40:32] episodes. And if you really enjoyed, I'd
[40:35] love it if you could leave a rating and a review too.
[40:38] Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor Neil is an Audio Boom Studios
[40:42] production. See you next time.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.