# 47: Homicide at the Hospital: The Death of Dr Margo Prade

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 26 Sep 2023, 1 h 12 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/105f723ac/podcast/play/103880331/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-9%2F401851574-44100-2-8f8f1da2f7785451.mp3

Today's episode is on the murder of Dr. Margo Prade. It could be one of 3 suspects: her best friend Denise, her boyfriend Thomas or her ex husband Doug Prade.... but who will be convicted? Trigger Warning: gun violence Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:05] Hello everyone, and welcome to Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[0:09] Neil, a true crime podcast where we crack open some of the most
[0:12] notorious cases in history. Given the topics that we'll be
[0:16] investigating, it goes without saying that this show comes with
[0:20] a content warning. The details can get a bit heavy
[0:23] and you might find some of the themes we discuss triggering.
[0:26] Listener discretion is strongly advised and check the
[0:29] description for some resources and further information.
[0:38] Before we get into this case, I just want to give my usual
[0:41] disclaimer that I mean absolutely no disrespect to
[0:44] anyone that I talk about in this video.
[0:45] This video is for educational purposes and everything I'm
[0:48] about to say is just information that I have found on the
[0:51] Internet and I'm compiling into one video.
[0:54] So today we're going to be talking about the murder of
[0:57] Margot Pride. Born Margot Shamburger on
[0:59] September 17th, 1956 in Akron, OH.
[1:03] She was the youngest of seven siblings.
[1:06] She was very intelligent from a very early She was yards ahead
[1:10] of all of her classmates, so much so that she even skipped
[1:13] the 5th grade in high school. She was known as very graceful,
[1:18] very classy, very of course, very intelligent still, but also
[1:22] just very graceful. Very, I don't know how to word
[1:25] it, very classy. She was just a classy girl.
[1:28] She was very focused on her studies all the way through her
[1:31] teenage years. So much so that she never got a
[1:34] boyfriend in her teenage years because it just wasn't her
[1:37] focus. She was much more set on getting
[1:40] her education done, getting a good career.
[1:42] Don't get me wrong, she did go on dates here and there, but
[1:45] none of them were really worth the distraction from her work.
[1:49] That was until she met one man in particular, a man named
[1:52] Douglas Pride. Douglas Pride was a young police
[1:55] officer in Akron. The two of them met at a charity
[1:58] event. And he caught Margot's eye
[2:00] straight away. And he was exactly Margot's
[2:03] type, exactly what she was looking for.
[2:04] He was tall, he was handsome, he was strong, he was brave, he was
[2:09] athletic. But he also had this, like,
[2:12] sweet and sensitive side to him. He'd previously served in the
[2:16] Navy but was discharged for medical reasons.
[2:19] And he was quite a bit older than Margot, like a decade older
[2:23] than Margot. He was 28 and she, he was just
[2:25] in her senior year of high school, so I think that's around
[2:28] 18 years old. And she liked that he was so
[2:31] mature and that he was so, like, experienced in life and that
[2:35] he'd done so much and had so many stories.
[2:38] Shortly after meeting Doug, Margot graduated high school in
[2:41] 1974, valedictorian of her class.
[2:45] She began studying at Kent University, where she was
[2:48] studying two different things at once.
[2:50] It was all to do with medical stuff.
[2:53] Can you tell I never went to university?
[2:54] And I don't understand university?
[2:56] She was studying for her medical degree and a bachelor's degree
[3:00] at the same time. I don't know if they're the same
[3:02] thing, but one day she wanted to become a doctor.
[3:05] That's what she was working towards.
[3:07] Margot and Douglas quickly became an official couple, and
[3:11] as soon as she finished university, Doug proposed and
[3:14] the two of them got married. They had two children together,
[3:17] two daughters named Kenya and Sahara.
[3:20] And at this point in their lives, both Margot and Douglas
[3:23] were both very advanced in their careers.
[3:26] They were very in very high up positions.
[3:29] They were very well known and well respected in their area.
[3:32] Douglas had been moving up in the police force the whole time
[3:35] that he'd been with Margot. And by now he was just one
[3:39] promotion away from being the next police chief.
[3:42] And Margot actually went on to open her own medical practice in
[3:46] the area. And because she was so
[3:48] intelligent, everyone wanted to be seen by her because they knew
[3:51] that she was going to be a good doctor.
[3:52] You know, she was incredibly successful, and because of the
[3:56] high demand to see Margot, she began working longer and longer
[3:59] hours. She was earning a lot more
[4:01] money, but this came at the consequence of spending less
[4:04] time with her family. Anytime that she did have spare,
[4:08] she made sure to spend it with her two daughters who were still
[4:11] growing up. They were still very young.
[4:12] And of course, every spare minute she had, she wanted to
[4:15] spend with them. But this meant that she was
[4:17] spending barely anytime with her husband, Doug.
[4:20] And Doug was also working pretty long hours now that he was high
[4:24] up in the police. And sometimes they would even
[4:26] work alternate hours. So Margo would work through the
[4:29] day. Sometimes Doug would be working
[4:31] into the night. So they didn't get chance to
[4:35] spend quality time with each other anymore.
[4:37] And this really took a toll on their relationship, as it would
[4:41] with anyone. They felt really disconnected
[4:43] from each other, like they just didn't really have anything in
[4:46] common anymore. They've just kind of grown
[4:48] apart. And so after 20 years of
[4:51] marriage, Margot decided to file for divorce.
[4:55] The two of them remained on decent terms because, of course,
[4:59] they had children together. This wasn't a very bitter end.
[5:02] They weren't exactly friends after their divorce, as you can
[5:05] imagine, But you know, they kept it very amicable whenever they
[5:09] saw each other. They shared custody of both
[5:12] their daughters, Kenya and Sahara, and they cooperated very
[5:16] well bringing them up. And they would spend like equal
[5:19] time at their mothers and their fathers and Margot and Doug just
[5:23] still had that same level of respect for each other.
[5:26] After the divorce, everything was fine.
[5:28] And now 40 year old Margot prayed, decided that she wanted
[5:33] to get back out there. She wanted to get back into the
[5:35] dating game. And so she started going on a
[5:37] few dates with like mutual friends, people that have
[5:40] friends, etcetera up with. And that was when she met Thomas
[5:44] Houston and everything just clicked for Margot.
[5:48] He was very well educated. He was very successful.
[5:52] He earned a lot of money as a lawyer, and all of that
[5:55] attracted Margot to him. He had that same very sweet,
[5:58] sensitive, polite side that Doug had as well.
[6:02] This man was perfect for her. And a lot of Margot Friends have
[6:06] described this connection between Margot and Thomas as one
[6:09] of those very like when you know, you know, kind of
[6:12] connections Like they met each other and they just kind of knew
[6:16] that they were supposed to spend the rest of their lives
[6:18] together. Within just a few months of
[6:20] knowing each other, they were already talking about marriage
[6:23] and it just seemed as though she'd found her one.
[6:28] As time went on, Margot's medical practice was just doing
[6:31] better and better. She was hiring other doctors and
[6:35] nurses to come and work for her, and at one point she had over
[6:38] 9000 patients on her register. Everything was just going
[6:42] perfectly for Margot Parade. That was until the morning of
[6:46] November 26th, 1997. It was the day before
[6:49] Thanksgiving and Margot's medical practice was open as
[6:53] usual. Around 1025 AMA doctor named
[6:56] Laurie walks outside of the medical practice around the back
[7:01] to go and have a cigarette break.
[7:03] And she's out there in the car park.
[7:04] She's just kind of people watching.
[7:06] And then she notices Margot's van parked in the car park.
[7:11] Which was odd because Margot hadn't turned up for work that
[7:15] morning. She'd called in at around 8:50
[7:18] AM. So she was due in at 9:00 AM and
[7:20] she called in around 10 minutes earlier, saying that she was on
[7:23] her way and that they could expect her within like 5
[7:26] minutes. But they hadn't heard from her
[7:28] since she hadn't arrived, she hadn't called again.
[7:31] They'd called her to see if she was just in traffic or
[7:34] something, but she hadn't answered.
[7:36] And so when Laurie noticed the van, she walked up to it to go
[7:39] and see if Margot was inside or whatever.
[7:41] And when she peered in through the window, she saw Margot
[7:44] Prayed slumped over in the drivers seat covered in blood.
[7:49] So Laurie panicked and she ran back inside the medical practice
[7:53] and called for police and an ambulance.
[7:55] However, when paramedics arrived, they couldn't find
[7:58] Margot's pulse. Margot prayed was pronounced
[8:01] dead at the scene. And it was very clear that this
[8:04] had been a homicide. Even though there was blood all
[8:07] over her. There was number murder weapon
[8:10] around. So this can't have been a
[8:11] suicide. There was number gun.
[8:13] There was nothing. It was clear that someone had
[8:16] done this to Margot and then taken the murder weapon away
[8:20] with them again. So immediately police set out
[8:23] finding who had done this to Margot Parade.
[8:26] One of the first things that detectives noticed on a search
[8:30] of Margot Parade's van was a diamond bracelet in the footwell
[8:34] of the passenger side. So it was kind of like this
[8:38] bracelet had fallen off in a struggle.
[8:40] Maybe this had been an attempted robbery.
[8:42] Maybe that is why Margot was killed, because someone was
[8:46] after this bracelet and maybe they just dropped it as they
[8:49] fled the scene. And it did seem likely that a
[8:51] struggle had taken place in the van that morning because of how
[8:55] Margot's clothes were left. She was already wearing her lab
[8:58] coat, which she wore for work as a doctor every single day.
[9:02] However, some of the buttons had popped off this lab coat.
[9:06] But the more evidence police found in Margot's van, the more
[9:11] an attempted robbery seemed unlikely.
[9:14] So her purse was just on the back seat with her money in,
[9:18] with her credit cards in. Had this been a robbery, would
[9:22] that not be one of the first things they took as well as the
[9:25] bracelet? Why would they just drop the
[9:27] bracelet after murdering a woman trying to get it?
[9:31] Why would you then just drop it quickly?
[9:32] As the case was unfolding, this seemed less like an
[9:37] opportunistic robbery gone wrong and maybe more like Margot was
[9:41] intentionally targeted. Maybe someone had wanted to kill
[9:45] her that morning. So detectives tried to piece
[9:48] together a timeline of what Margot had been doing that
[9:51] morning, hoping that maybe that might point towards her meeting
[9:56] someone or, you know, just give them a better idea of what she
[9:59] was doing that day. Her usual daily routine
[10:01] consisted of her stopping off at a local hospital that she had a
[10:05] few patients at. She would do that around 8 AM,
[10:09] 8:30-ish, and then she would go from there to her medical
[10:13] practitioners on office, which was where she was.
[10:16] She was in the parking lot of her medical practitioners.
[10:19] So police got in contact with that hospital who confirmed that
[10:23] Margot had been there that morning and she'd left around
[10:27] 8:45 AM. Everything had gone fine up
[10:30] until that point. And like I said earlier, she
[10:32] called the receptionist at her medical practice at 8:50 AM,
[10:37] letting her know that she was on her way and Margot was due to
[10:40] start work at 9:00 AM. She did every single day.
[10:43] She was always on time. This was her medical practice.
[10:46] She had to be on time. So it seemed as though anything
[10:49] could have happened to Margot from around 8:50 until 10:30 AM
[10:53] when her body was found. But to me it seems more likely
[10:57] that this must have happened around 9:00 AM, otherwise she
[11:00] probably would have gone into work.
[11:02] So investigations continued at the crime scene and as times
[11:06] going on, more and more officers are arriving and kind of looking
[11:10] over the situation, including Margot's ex-husband.
[11:14] Doug prayed he was at the gym that morning when he got a phone
[11:17] call from one of his fellow police officers saying that his
[11:21] ex-wife had been shot and killed at work.
[11:25] So he arrived at the scene, and weirdly enough, none of the
[11:29] other police officers knew that Margot and Doug had divorced.
[11:33] Now, I don't know if he was intentionally keeping this a
[11:37] secret because he was ashamed or embarrassed that his wife had
[11:40] left him, or maybe it just never came up.
[11:43] After all, they'd only been divorced around six months at
[11:46] this point. And I don't know, the police
[11:49] officers often talk about things like that.
[11:52] I don't know. I think there might have been
[11:53] like one or two people on the police force that knew, like his
[11:56] closest friends knew that he'd been divorced, but it wasn't
[11:59] like widely known knowledge at this point.
[12:01] So to a lot of police officers that did.
[12:04] This was Doug Pride's wife that had been murdered.
[12:07] Regardless. This was a woman that he'd loved
[12:10] and shared his life with for 20 years, and they'd only been
[12:14] split up for six months. They had two children together.
[12:17] She was such a huge part of his life, and I'm sure there was
[12:19] still a lot of feeling there. Doug Pride arrives at the scene,
[12:23] and at the sight of Margo's dead body inside her van, he loses
[12:28] it. He, he starts sobbing.
[12:30] He's holding his head. He's collapsing to the ground.
[12:33] I believe he fainted at one point.
[12:35] You know, there's a real scene of just clear overwhelming
[12:39] emotion in this man. A lot of his fellow officers
[12:43] were kind of giving him support, saying just wait a few minutes
[12:46] and then we'll speak to you, like compose yourself.
[12:49] Take as much time as you need. Eventually, when he kind of
[12:52] stopped crying and he was a little bit less overwhelmed, he
[12:56] knew he wanted to help out. He knew he wanted to be as much
[12:59] help as he possibly could in solving his ex wife's murder.
[13:03] And so he said anything. You need me for questioning.
[13:06] You know, if you want me to be on the case, I can be on the
[13:08] case. He wasn't even in the homicide
[13:10] team. I don't know what he actually
[13:12] did inside the police force, but he was volunteering his time,
[13:16] his resources, anything he had to be able to solve this murder
[13:20] of his ex-wife. So of course with any murder
[13:23] case, one of the first points of action is to question those
[13:26] close to the victim, to kind of get an idea of their life and
[13:30] who's in it and if anyone might have wanted to hurt them.
[13:33] So that's current boyfriend, family, you know, even her work
[13:38] colleagues and her ex-husband. Doug prayed, but naturally none
[13:43] of his Co workers wanted to be the one to question this very
[13:47] clearly emotionally overwhelmed man about the murder of his
[13:51] ex-wife. But someone had to do it.
[13:54] Eventually one woman in the police force stood forward and
[13:57] said look, I'll do it. And she began questioning him.
[14:00] She got his alibi. Doug said that he was in the gym
[14:04] on the morning of the murder. He said that he'd been in the
[14:07] gym that morning in his apartment complex when he'd
[14:10] received that phone call from his Co worker informing him of
[14:14] this incident. And so he grabbed his stuff and
[14:17] he left for the crime scene immediately.
[14:19] Of course, this kind of alibi can't really be confirmed
[14:24] because it's not like these days when you've got like clocking in
[14:28] cards and stuff at Jim's and the CCTV everywhere.
[14:31] This was back in 97 and Jim's were kind of done on like a
[14:35] checking in sheet so anyone could write anyone's name and
[14:39] anyone's time that they checked in.
[14:41] So this wasn't too much of an alibi.
[14:44] However, Doug said that while he was in the gym working out,
[14:47] there was also a blonde woman in there at the same time as him,
[14:51] and so if police were able to track down this blonde woman,
[14:54] she would be able to confirm or deny whether she'd seen Doug
[14:58] that morning. Also in Doug praise questioning,
[15:01] the officer asked him if there was anyone else in Margos life
[15:05] that either might want to hurt her or might know some kind of
[15:09] information, just anyone else that they might want to question
[15:12] as part of this investigation. And Doug prayed, said well yeah,
[15:16] I think she's got a new boyfriend.
[15:18] He said he didn't know the boyfriend's full name and so
[15:20] police would just have to ask Margot's friends or family for
[15:23] that. However, you know, this
[15:25] boyfriend was in Margot's life currently.
[15:28] Doug wasn't. So he didn't really know what
[15:30] was going on with Margot at the time of her death, whereas this
[15:33] man probably would. Before letting him go, police
[15:43] did a quick gunshot residue test on Doug Prayed's hands, and this
[15:47] test is designed to tell whether the person has fired a handgun
[15:52] recently. And so that would easily either
[15:54] rule him out or rule him in as a suspect.
[15:56] They're not always 100% accurate, so it's not enough to
[16:00] fully rule him out as a suspect. However, his test came back
[16:04] negative. It said that he hadn't shot a
[16:06] handgun that morning and so he was lower down on the people of
[16:10] interest list, but he was still her ex-husband and ex partners
[16:15] are always quite high up. Anyway, police wrap up the
[16:18] question in with Doug Praed. They're pretty confident that
[16:20] they've got everything out of him at this point.
[16:22] And if they need him later, he was totally happy to come back
[16:25] in and speak with them again. And so police move on to
[16:28] Margot's Co workers, not just her Co workers, but her friends
[16:32] and her family. But of course her Co workers
[16:34] might have seen or heard something that morning since
[16:37] this happened in the car park of her business.
[16:40] Meanwhile, an autopsy had begun on MAGA Pride's body and
[16:44] police's assumptions were correct that her death was
[16:48] caused by gunshot wounds. 6 of them to be exact.
[16:51] She was shot 6 times and this pretty much confirmed to them
[16:55] that this wasn't a robbery gone wrong.
[16:58] You don't shoot someone six times in a robbery gone wrong.
[17:02] If you shoot in six times, then you're making sure that that
[17:05] person is dead. Whoever had killed Margot wanted
[17:09] her dead. It's believed that the murder
[17:11] weapon was a 38 caliber revolver due to the bullet fragments that
[17:15] were found at the crime scene. They also believed that these
[17:18] bullets that were fired at Margot had gone all the way
[17:21] through her body, so in one side and out the other.
[17:24] There was even a bullet fragment found in the palm of Margot's
[17:28] hand. So it seemed as though she'd
[17:30] kind of put her hand up at her attacker, maybe covered the gun
[17:33] or something, and that bullet, they believe, went through her
[17:36] hand and then into her head. But then the pathologist found
[17:41] something else that pointed towards this being a very savage
[17:46] attack. There was a bite mark found on
[17:50] Margos kind of shoulder upper arm area.
[17:54] But there was something odd about this bite mark.
[17:57] It wasn't a full bite mark, it was just of the bottom row of
[18:01] teeth, which is kind of hard to do.
[18:03] If you're biting something, you're doing kind of equal force
[18:05] with both sets of teeth. The bite had kind of gone
[18:09] through her lab coat and then onto her arm because, of course,
[18:12] she was wearing the lab coat. So there were indents in the lab
[18:15] coat. So now the police know that
[18:17] Margot was bitten during this attack.
[18:21] This shows that it was a very personal, very angry attack.
[18:24] Like they were wanting to really harm this woman.
[18:28] It wasn't just a case of I just want a gun.
[18:30] I just want a dead. It was I want to kill her and I
[18:33] want her to be in pain. So now they're looking at people
[18:37] close to Margot or people that didn't really like her, people
[18:41] that she'd had disagreements with.
[18:43] But there weren't many. Like I said, Margot was a very
[18:47] liked person. She was very popular in her
[18:49] area, very well respected. There weren't many people that
[18:53] had an issue with Margot Parade. And so objectively, in cases
[18:57] like these, like I said, the ex-husband or the ex partner is
[19:01] always quite high up on the people of interest just because
[19:04] obviously relationship had gone bitter.
[19:07] It doesn't matter how good terms they say they're on now, there
[19:10] might still be some resentment inside.
[19:12] And so objectively, the police force had to investigate.
[19:17] Doug prayed a little bit more. So they decided to try and check
[19:20] his alibi of being at the gym that morning.
[19:23] So police went to his gym and they had a look on this checking
[19:26] in sheet. And sure enough, Doug prayed's
[19:29] name was on the sheet on that morning.
[19:31] And so was a woman's name, a woman named Kathy.
[19:34] So this must have been the blonde woman that was in the gym
[19:37] at the same time as him. So police tracked down this
[19:39] woman and brought her into the police station for questioning.
[19:43] And they said, was anyone in the gym with you on that morning?
[19:46] And she said she remembered a bald man being in there with her
[19:50] that morning. So police showed this woman a
[19:53] picture of Doug prayed and said, is this the man that you saw in
[19:56] the gym? And she said, Yep, that's him.
[19:58] And with that, Doug prayed was pretty much ruled out of the
[20:01] investigation. Not only did he have a pretty
[20:04] solid alibi with a witness. He also took the gunshot residue
[20:07] test and it was negative. So now police decided to look
[20:11] elsewhere at other suspects. Naturally, the investigation
[20:14] then led to Margot's current boyfriend, Thomas Houston.
[20:18] He lived around 2 hours away from Margot in a place called
[20:22] Columbus. He told police that he had been
[20:25] in Columbus that morning. He had plans to come and see
[20:28] Margot later that day. But before he'd even set off
[20:31] from Columbus, he got that call from her friends and family
[20:34] informing him of her murder. He said that they didn't really
[20:38] have any issues at all in the relationship and that things
[20:41] were going really well. He said that he was planning on
[20:44] proposing to her and that they were going to spend the rest of
[20:46] their lives together. And like I said, he was going to
[20:49] come to her house on the day that she was murdered so that he
[20:51] could stay overnight and then spend Thanksgiving with her the
[20:54] next day. He said that morning when he was
[20:57] in Columbus, before he planned to drive to Marga, he was just
[21:01] running some errands, just some personal errands.
[21:03] However, this meant that it would be pretty hard had to
[21:07] confirm that alibi because he was alone.
[21:09] He was running these errands by himself.
[21:11] However, police pretty much believed his alibi due to the
[21:14] distance and the fact that he drove back from Columbus to
[21:17] Akron for this police questioning on the same day that
[21:20] Margot was murdered. It would be unlikely that he
[21:23] drove to Akron, killed her back to Columbus, got the call, and
[21:27] then went back to Akron. You know what I mean?
[21:29] There wasn't really enough time to fit all three of those
[21:32] journeys, plus a murder, plus a phone call, you know?
[21:36] But just like with Doug Prayed, they didn't fully rule him out.
[21:39] They just thought it's unlikely, and so they decided to move on
[21:43] and look elsewhere for now. Police decided that one of the
[21:46] easiest ways to rule out a lot of people in this investigation
[21:50] was to make everyone that had been in recent contact with
[21:54] Margot right before her murder go for dental impressions so
[21:58] that everyone's teeth could be compared to the bite mark on
[22:02] Margot's body. So everyone she knew had to go
[22:05] and get dental impressions. Her Co workers, friends, family,
[22:09] Thomas, Houston, Doug Prayed. However it would take quite a
[22:13] while to get the results of these dental impressions back.
[22:16] Around a week after the murder Margot Prayed's funeral took
[22:20] place and the turn out was huge. The line wrapped all the way
[22:25] around the church. It was very clear that Margot
[22:28] had had a huge impact on a lot of people.
[22:31] Her daughters, Kenya and Sahara, who were only 8 and 12 years old
[22:35] at the time, sat with their father, Doug, prayed and sobbed.
[22:40] All three of them sobbed through the whole thing.
[22:42] And the youngest of the two daughters went around the church
[22:45] handing out little purple remembrance ribbons for people
[22:48] to wear in Margot's honor. Thomas Houston also attended the
[22:52] funeral that day. And this was actually the first
[22:55] time he'd ever met any of Margot's family at her funeral.
[22:59] That same day. Police were back at the police
[23:02] station still working on this case when they received a letter
[23:06] to the station with no name, no return address, no nothing.
[23:10] This letter was from an anonymous source that claimed
[23:14] that they knew who had murdered Margot, prayed, and they said it
[23:18] was Margot's best friend. Now, I'm not 100% sure what this
[23:22] friend's name was because I believe fake names are sometimes
[23:27] used for this particular person in the case and I'm not sure
[23:30] why. So I'm just going to call her
[23:32] Denise because that's what I've read in a couple of sources, but
[23:36] other sources say different things.
[23:38] This letter stated that Denise, Margot's best friend, had been
[23:42] the one to set up Margot and Thomas Houston.
[23:46] And Denise was happy for them at first, but now she was kind of
[23:51] growing resentful and she was jealous of the connection that
[23:54] Margot and Thomas had. And Thomas Houston was a lawyer,
[23:58] so it made sense that that would be how they knew Thomas and, you
[24:02] know, introduced him to their newly single friend, Margot.
[24:06] And soon after this letter arrived, police also got a
[24:09] number of calls from a number of different people in Akron saying
[24:13] that they'd had posters left on their car windshields that said
[24:18] the exact same thing that implicated Denise and her
[24:21] husband in the murder of Margot Parade.
[24:24] This letter claimed that Denise was planning to flee from Akron
[24:29] to avoid, you know, being caught for this murder and that her
[24:33] wealthy, powerful, loyal husband was helping her get away with
[24:37] it. And this was all in the plans.
[24:39] So the letter said if police wanted to catch them, then they
[24:42] had to act fast. And even though there was
[24:44] absolutely no evidence to say that this best friend and her
[24:48] husband had anything to do with the murder, police still kind of
[24:51] had to go down that Ave. And so they tracked them down
[24:55] and they went to go question Denise and her husband.
[24:58] In this questioning, they found out that this couple had been
[25:01] friends with Margot for over 10 years.
[25:03] And they got on very well. They didn't have any problems.
[25:06] There were no arguments. There was number feud, there was
[25:09] number resentment. There was nothing.
[25:11] And when police informed them of this letter that they'd
[25:14] received, the couple were very offended, saying, well, this is
[25:17] one of our closest friends that we've known for so long, why on
[25:20] earth would we do that? And who on earth would say that
[25:23] about us? Police seemed satisfied with the
[25:25] questioning that they'd done of Denise and her husband.
[25:28] They gave their alibis. I don't know what the alibis
[25:31] were, but police seemed happy with it.
[25:33] However, they did want them to do a dental impression just like
[25:36] everyone else. Of course, the results were
[25:38] going to take a while to come back, but police were happy to
[25:41] move on with the investigation and look elsewhere.
[25:44] This definitely seemed as though the real killer was just trying
[25:48] to frame someone else, you know? As all of this was going on,
[25:52] other officers on the investigation were trying to
[25:54] find some sort of like CCTV footage, security camera
[25:58] footage, anything that might help them identify a person or
[26:02] even a car of interest. Unfortunately, Margot Pride's
[26:06] doctor's office didn't have any security cameras on it, so they
[26:10] didn't catch their own car park. However, there was a car
[26:14] dealership next door that had a camera that only just caught the
[26:19] homicide taking place. So here you see Margot's van
[26:23] arrive in the car park of her office around 909 AMA.
[26:27] Car then approaches and parks diagonally, although they
[26:30] believe this car had been hanging around the car park for
[26:33] around 10 minutes prior to approaching Margot's van.
[26:36] A figure then gets out of the car and lets themselves into the
[26:39] passenger side of Margot's van. After about a minute and a half,
[26:43] the figure then gets back out of the car, gets into their car and
[26:47] drives away. This CCTV footage really wasn't
[26:50] going to help in the investigation at all.
[26:52] They couldn't identify a person, they couldn't identify a
[26:55] specific car, not a make, not a model.
[26:58] All they could really tell was that it was a light color.
[27:01] Notice I said the word light instead of a particular color,
[27:04] because this could be any light color.
[27:07] It could be white, it could be silver, it could be Gray, it
[27:10] could be any form of light color.
[27:12] This really didn't help too much in the investigation.
[27:16] Police actually even sent this security footage to NASA for
[27:20] them to try and like clear it up a bit.
[27:22] Maybe they could make out a make or a model of the car.
[27:25] However, they couldn't do much with it, although it did help
[27:29] with the timeline of the investigation.
[27:31] So now because this security footage had the exact time on
[27:36] it, they know that this murder began at 9:10, lasted for two
[27:41] minutes and finished around 9:12 AM.
[27:44] And that was when the murderer got back in their car and speed
[27:47] away. So police continued to speak
[27:49] with the owner of the car dealership, who said he'd
[27:52] actually spoken with Margot, prayed on the morning of her
[27:56] murder. She was buying a new car from
[27:58] his dealership at the time of her murder.
[28:01] And so that morning, she'd just called him up because she'd
[28:03] already ordered it, but she was just waiting for it to get to
[28:06] the dealership so that she could have it.
[28:08] So she was just calling him for an update on, like, where it
[28:10] was, how long it was going to be.
[28:12] But this wasn't the first car that Margot had bought from this
[28:16] car dealership. She'd actually bought the van
[28:18] that she was driving, the van that she was murdered in from
[28:22] this same guy. The guy at the dealership then
[28:24] told police some very interesting information about a
[28:28] very specific safety feature that Margot's van had that he'd
[28:33] installed himself. When the van went above 50 miles
[28:37] an hour, the doors would automatically lock so that they
[28:41] couldn't, you know, be accidentally opened at really
[28:43] high speeds. Margot had requested this when
[28:46] she first bought the van because because she had two young
[28:49] children. But even when the car stops, or
[28:52] even when it's going really slow, the doors don't unlock
[28:55] themselves. So when they get to their
[28:57] destination, Margot has got to unlock the car before anyone can
[29:01] get out of it. Now this means that whoever
[29:03] murdered Margot prayed that morning had to have the door
[29:07] unlocked somehow because they got inside the van from the
[29:10] passenger side and sat in the passenger seat.
[29:13] Now this could be done one of two ways.
[29:15] Maybe Margot saw her killer out outside her van but didn't see
[29:19] them as a threat. Maybe it was a friend, maybe it
[29:21] was a family member, and maybe she just unlocked her car door
[29:24] so that the person could get in and sit with her.
[29:26] Or #2 maybe the killer had their own key to the van and let them
[29:32] self in. So now police are circling back
[29:35] to their initial suspects. Those top three suspects.
[29:39] Doug prayed. Her ex-husband Thomas Houston,
[29:42] her current boyfriend, and Denise, her best friend.
[29:46] Doug Prid probably still had a key to the van so he could have
[29:50] let himself in. After all, this was his ex-wife.
[29:53] They probably shared that van at one point, and it makes sense
[29:56] that he might just have an old key somewhere so he could have
[30:00] let himself in. As for Thomas Houston and her
[30:02] friend Denise, this was her current boyfriend and her best
[30:05] friend. If she sees them outside the
[30:07] van, of course she's going to unlock the door and let them in.
[30:10] So all three of them could have got in that van somehow.
[30:13] So police decided to keep going with this new information in
[30:16] mind. This just kind of solidified
[30:19] everything that they already thought that someone close to
[30:22] Margot had been the killer. So now police decided to do a
[30:25] search of Margot Praed's home to see if they could find any clues
[30:30] that might lead to a perpetrator in there.
[30:32] They didn't really know in particular what they were
[30:35] looking for. They were just kind of keeping
[30:36] their eyes open for anything. Of course, from the obvious of,
[30:39] like, threatening letters, maybe she was receiving threatening
[30:43] letters from her murderer before this happened.
[30:45] Or maybe even less obvious things that might turn out to be
[30:48] clues, like phone records. Maybe she was getting calls from
[30:52] a certain number every single day.
[30:54] So then they would look into that.
[30:55] But one thing police found in Margot's home that they found
[30:59] rather odd was that she had a tape recorder hooked up to her
[31:03] home phone. So every single phone call that
[31:05] she would get into the house would be recorded.
[31:08] Police wondered why Margot might have this.
[31:11] And so they asked Doug Prayed who was her ex-husband.
[31:14] Of course, he lived with her for 20 years.
[31:16] So maybe this was something that she'd always had for a good
[31:19] reason. And it was Doug said, that
[31:21] Margot had this kind of tape recorder installed herself
[31:25] because sometimes she would give her patients her home phone
[31:28] number. Of course, some patients that
[31:30] required like urgent advice, urgent information, they could
[31:33] just call her when she was out of work hours in her home and
[31:37] she would be able to give that kind of medical advice.
[31:40] However, because this was medical advice, it needed
[31:43] recording and to put on proper records that she'd told patients
[31:47] certain things and that they'd told her things.
[31:50] So she had this tape recording thing so that she could record
[31:54] all the calls that happened instead of just sitting there
[31:56] and taking notes every time she answered the phone.
[31:58] So police decided to take this tape recorder and a bunch of
[32:02] tapes that they found back to the police station and they
[32:06] decided to listen through pretty much everything in the run up to
[32:10] Margot's death to see if anything had happened, if there
[32:13] were any kind of suspicious phone calls.
[32:15] And while they didn't find anything overly suspicious, they
[32:19] did find some pretty interesting phone calls between Margot and
[32:23] some of her friends, particularly talking about Doug,
[32:27] her ex-husband. And in one of these
[32:28] conversations, there was a particular name that was brought
[32:31] up over and over again, a woman named Carla Smith.
[32:35] And they were Speaking of Carla Smith in a very negative way.
[32:38] One of them even saying that Carla Smith made her sick.
[32:42] And as soon as the officers heard this name, they knew
[32:45] exactly who Carla Smith was. She actually worked on the
[32:49] police force. Carla Smith worked alongside
[32:59] Doug, prayed and the two of them were very close.
[33:02] They would always go for breaks together, always go for lunch
[33:05] together and there had been some rumours in the Police Department
[33:09] that the two of them were maybe seeing each other.
[33:12] Maybe Doug was being unfaithful to his wife.
[33:14] I believe Carla also had a spouse, so they were being
[33:18] unfaithful together. And Carla Smith actually had a
[33:22] son during her time at the police station.
[33:25] And these rumours even extended some so far that some people
[33:29] were speculating that the father of Carla Smith's child could
[33:33] even be Doug prayed. So maybe Carla Smith had
[33:37] something to do with this. Maybe she was jealous, maybe she
[33:40] was falling for Doug prayed and she wanted to leave her husband
[33:44] and be with Doug. But the only thing getting in
[33:46] between that was Margot. Maybe Carla killed Margot out of
[33:51] jealousy. Maybe Doug even helped Carla
[33:54] kill Margot so that the two of them could be together.
[33:57] So police decided that they needed to question Carla as
[34:01] well. In her questioning, Carla Smith
[34:03] said that she'd been at work on the morning of Margot Parade's
[34:07] murder. Her shift started at 8:30 in the
[34:10] morning, and the murder took place at 9:10 AM.
[34:13] So she couldn't have done it. She was in work.
[34:16] In fact, Carla was actually one of the bonding officers to the
[34:19] murder scene that morning. She was the officer that had
[34:22] called Doug, prayed when he was at the gym and informed him of
[34:26] his ex wife's murder. So the homicide team began
[34:29] tracing Carla Smith's work day right up until before the murder
[34:34] because of course they knew she was there once the murder had
[34:36] happened. But what had she been doing from
[34:38] 8:30 AM at work that morning until 9:10?
[34:42] So the homicide unit began tracing Carla Smith's work
[34:46] morning timeline. She got into work at 8:30 in the
[34:50] morning, and police began responding to the murder scene
[34:54] at around 10:30 AM. And of course, the murder
[34:56] happened around 9:00 AM. So what was Carla Smith doing
[35:00] that morning? Can she be accounted for?
[35:02] Was she with people that can confirm her alibi?
[35:05] But as the homicide team were kind of looking for any record
[35:08] of Carla in the police station that morning, maybe she'd kind
[35:11] of logged on to the database. Maybe she'd submitted records or
[35:15] something like that, anything that said her name was on the
[35:17] database that morning, so she was in the office, but they
[35:20] couldn't find anything. There was no record of Carla
[35:23] Smith after she clocked in at 8:30 that morning up until she
[35:28] responded to the murder scene at about 10:30.
[35:31] So that's two hours where she just kind of missing for a
[35:35] while. There was no record of her,
[35:37] which is, of course, very suspicious.
[35:39] So police decided it might be of use to search Carla Smith's home
[35:43] to see if there was anything in there that maybe pointed towards
[35:47] her involvement in this murder. And from the contents of her
[35:50] home, it was very clear that Doug and Carla had been seeing
[35:54] each other and they were very comfortable with each other, so
[35:57] much so to the point where Doug Prayed's kind of financial
[36:02] papers were in Carla Smith's home.
[36:05] They found like a full folder of like, bank statements and just,
[36:10] you know, other financial records, receipts, anything that
[36:12] you might need for like tax purposes.
[36:15] Which first of all, this was immediately odd.
[36:17] Why do you need to be taking your financial papers, a full
[36:21] folder of like, bank statements and receipts and stuff to your
[36:24] girlfriend's house? That's something you would keep
[36:26] at your own house, is it not, Unless you were trying to hide
[36:29] it or, you know, keep it away from your space that you think
[36:33] could possibly be searched. So police took this folder of
[36:37] Doug's financial papers back to the police station.
[36:40] And they were looking through it.
[36:42] And very quickly they noticed that Doug prayed was in a lot of
[36:46] debt. He wasn't doing very well
[36:47] financially ever since he split from Margot.
[36:50] Margot was the main breadwinner of the family.
[36:53] They had a huge house with, I think they had a pool.
[36:56] It was really nice. They lived a very comfortable
[36:59] lifestyle, but now Doug had a fraction of that money, Margot,
[37:04] and most of the money. And Doug wants to maintain that
[37:07] lifestyle that he once had just for kind of reputation purposes.
[37:12] But he doesn't have the money to do that.
[37:14] And so he's getting further and further in debt trying to pay
[37:16] for this car that he can't afford, trying to pay for a
[37:19] house he can't afford. He even had to sell his car
[37:22] along with multiple other belongings that he'd kind of
[37:25] amassed over time to try and make this debt.
[37:29] So maybe a potential motive if Doug was the killer was
[37:33] bitterness. Margot had taken his lifestyle
[37:36] away from him, his financial support away from him, and now
[37:40] he was left with next or nothing.
[37:42] Maybe it wasn't even bitterness, but maybe finances were the
[37:46] motive. Maybe he was trying to murder
[37:48] Margot for some kind of monetary value.
[37:51] Maybe he thought that he would inherit things from her being
[37:55] her ex-husband. So police to scan a quick
[37:57] investigation to see if Doug would gain anything financially
[38:01] if anything was to happen to Margot.
[38:03] So see if his name was on life insurance policies or you know,
[38:07] if he was in her will and they found that he was.
[38:10] Margot Prayed had a life insurance policy for $75,000 and
[38:16] the sole beneficiary of that amount of money was her
[38:20] ex-husband. Doug prayed she hadn't taken him
[38:22] off it yet. Now that is suspicious enough in
[38:25] itself that this man is desperate for money, he's in a
[38:28] lot of debt and then something suddenly happens to his wife
[38:32] that meant that he would inherit £75,000.
[38:35] That's suspicious circumstances as it is.
[38:38] But this was only made worse for Doug Prayed when police were
[38:42] looking through this folder of all of his financial records
[38:45] that they found in Carla Smith's home and they found a receipt in
[38:49] them. On the back of this receipt
[38:51] there were about 5 or 6 sums of money in the thousands that were
[38:56] subtracted from 75,000. It seemed as though Doug had
[39:01] been doing some working out on the back of this receipt to see
[39:05] what he could pay for with the $75,000 from Margot's life
[39:11] insurance policy. So following this new piece of
[39:14] evidence, Doug prayed was brought back into the police
[39:17] station for questioning. They wanted to know what this
[39:19] receipt was all about, and Doug didn't even try and pretend that
[39:23] that wasn't what it was. He admitted straight up that
[39:26] that 75,000 was referring to Margot's life insurance policy,
[39:31] but he'd made those calculations after she'd already died.
[39:34] So police saw this receipt and they thought that was written
[39:38] before he killed her. And he was just calculating what
[39:41] he could spend the money on if he did kill her.
[39:44] But Doug was saying, no, she was already passed away.
[39:46] And he was just trying to figure out like funeral costs, costs
[39:50] for their children to kind of put them through college and
[39:52] stuff. And that was what he was doing
[39:54] straight after the murder, which, you know, is perfectly
[39:58] reasonable. The police couldn't determine
[40:01] when he'd written on that receipt, so they just kind of
[40:03] had to take his word for it. It's a reasonable explanation
[40:07] that he was trying to. Price up the funeral and other
[40:11] costs that he couldn't afford and that is what a life
[40:14] insurance policy is for at the end of the day.
[40:16] And besides Doug prayed was being very cooperative in this
[40:20] investigation. He came in for every questioning
[40:22] they wanted him for. He would explain everything that
[40:25] he possibly could to do with Margot and her life.
[40:28] And so police was satisfied with Doug's explanation of this
[40:33] receipt and so they moved on. However, for about a month, the
[40:37] investigation was pretty quiet. That was until the dentist got
[40:41] in touch with the police station and said that they'd finally
[40:44] completed all of the dental impressions of all these people
[40:48] of interest that police wanted them to take.
[40:50] However, they hadn't been taking impressions.
[40:54] It turns out that the dentist had just been looking at these
[40:58] people's teeth and kind of taking pictures and stuff.
[41:01] To be able to take an impression of every single person that the
[41:05] police wanted them to. It would have cost a lot of
[41:08] money. It would have taken a lot of
[41:09] time. And so the dentist just kind of
[41:11] looked at these people's teeth, looked at the bite mark, the
[41:15] picture of the bite mark on Margot's arm, and determined
[41:18] whether he thought in his head that they could be a match or
[41:21] not. So it's not 100% accurate, but
[41:24] this is still a professional. He still looks at teeth every
[41:27] single day for a living. And so he has a pretty good idea
[41:31] of what teeth sets could make what kind of bite marks, you
[41:36] know, So he had kind of crossed off a lot of names on this list
[41:40] that he thought were not a match.
[41:42] And there were a few names that he wanted to have a better look
[41:45] at and actually take impressions of.
[41:47] One of the names that this dentist had crossed off the
[41:50] list, he did not think that this person's teeth were a match to
[41:54] the bite mark. And that was Carla Smith.
[41:57] However, there were three names left on the list that he wanted
[42:00] to take impressions of because they were very similar to the
[42:03] bite mark. And these three people were Doug
[42:06] prayed, Margot's ex-husband, Thomas Houston, her current
[42:10] boyfriend, and Denise, her best friend, coincidentally the three
[42:14] biggest suspects in the case. So this didn't really narrow
[42:18] much down for police. So these three people went back
[42:22] to the dentist and they had like proper impressions taken of
[42:25] their teeth. They had like molds done and
[42:27] everything. So that was going to take a
[42:29] while for those results to come back as well.
[42:32] So police just continued in the investigation until then.
[42:35] At this point, police in that department were kind of off the
[42:40] record gossiping about who they thought could be the killer out
[42:45] of the three main suspects, and a lot of them thought it was one
[42:48] of their own. Doug prayed there was just way
[42:50] more evidence for him than there was any of the other suspects.
[42:54] There was a motive there when there wasn't really for the
[42:58] other suspects. There were some people on the
[43:00] police force that didn't want to believe it and they didn't
[43:03] really want to get involved. They didn't want to talk about
[43:05] it. They didn't think Doug Prayed
[43:07] was a murderer. However, there were a lot of
[43:09] people that were pretty convinced and so the homicide
[43:13] team decided to kind of double down on his alibi that morning
[43:17] to make sure that that was fully checked out.
[43:20] So they went and spoke with Kathy one more time, who was the
[43:23] woman that was at the gym at the same time as Doug prayed and
[43:26] they confirmed the times that she was there.
[43:28] She said she was there from 9:30 until 10 AM on the morning of
[43:32] the murder. But now police knew that the
[43:34] murder took place at 9:10 until 9:12 AM because because of that
[43:40] security footage that they had with the time printed on the
[43:43] video, they knew that the murder happened 20 minutes before she
[43:48] saw Doug prayed in the gym. This means that Doug prayed,
[43:51] could have easily committed the murder at 9:10 AM and been at
[43:55] Margot's medical practice at 9:10 and then got in his car,
[43:59] driven straight back to his apartment which was only 6
[44:02] minutes away from the murder scene, got changed really
[44:05] quickly, disposed of the murder weapon, whatever, and then been
[44:09] in the gym by 9:30 AM that morning in order to be seen and
[44:13] have an alibi. So now things are mounting up
[44:17] against Doug. So police decided to go back and
[44:20] look at that gunshot residue test one more time just in case
[44:23] they may be missed. Anything.
[44:25] Maybe he'd just like washed his hands very well afterwards and
[44:29] maybe there was a little bit of gunshot residue because this had
[44:32] been one of the reasons that Doug prayed was practically
[44:35] ruled out from the start. He was never ruled out per SE,
[44:40] but he was looked at in a lot less detail because of this
[44:44] gunshot residue test that showed up negative.
[44:47] However, when police went back and looked at this gunshot
[44:50] residue test, they found that it hadn't been carried out
[44:54] properly. Whoever had set up this test kit
[44:58] had not taken the tip off of the tester, so they tested him with
[45:02] tip on it, which kind of acted as a barrier between the tester
[45:07] and his hand. So if there was any gunshot
[45:09] residue on his hands, it wouldn't have got onto the
[45:12] tester. So this test that they thought
[45:15] was negative this whole time was never actually negative, it just
[45:20] had no results. So now this was no longer a
[45:23] piece of evidence in dough favour.
[45:25] It wasn't that this test was negative, it was that it didn't
[45:29] have any results at all. And so now not only did Doug
[45:33] look very suspicious, the evidence in his favour was also
[45:38] dwindling by the hour. So police decided to go and
[45:41] speak with all of Margos friends and family one more time,
[45:44] because now they were very suspicious of Doug and they
[45:47] wanted to know more about their marriage, more about their
[45:49] divorce. They didn't let on in these
[45:52] questionings that they were suspicious of Doug, but that's
[45:56] why they were doing it. And in Doug Prid's initial
[45:59] questioning, when he told them that he and Margot were actually
[46:02] divorced, because remember, police didn't know that they
[46:05] were divorced. When he told police that they
[46:08] were divorced, he said it had been a very amicable, very
[46:11] friendly divorce because it was just for the better of both of
[46:15] them and they were both kind of mutually agreeing to part ways
[46:19] and move on with their life and it had just been very calm.
[46:23] However, after speaking with Margot's friends and family,
[46:27] police learned that it wasn't a mutual divorce at all.
[46:31] It actually turned very sour towards the end of it and it
[46:36] wasn't necessarily what both of them wanted.
[46:39] Margot prayed, found out that Doug, her husband that she'd
[46:43] been with for 20 years, had been cheating on her with multiple
[46:48] women for a long period of time. And it was then that she
[46:51] realized that this man that she had loved and respected and
[46:56] raised two children with did not love her and respect her back in
[47:02] the way that she did to him. And Margot knew in her heart
[47:06] that she deserved better than that.
[47:07] She didn't deserve to be treated like that.
[47:10] And so she decided to leave Doug.
[47:13] Of course, this was met with a lot of protest from him.
[47:17] He did didn't want to split up with Margot.
[47:18] He wanted his wife, but he also wanted his girlfriends, which
[47:24] she was not going to have. And so she told him that she was
[47:26] getting a divorce and she got the divorce papers sent out to
[47:30] him and everything, but he just pretended like this wasn't
[47:34] happening. He just didn't sign any of the
[47:36] papers, didn't go to any of the meetings.
[47:38] He refused to acknowledge that she was trying to divorce him.
[47:42] And it got to the point where of course Margot wants this
[47:46] divorce. He doesn't.
[47:48] But the court has to award the person that wants the divorce,
[47:51] the divorce because, you know, they can't force them to stay in
[47:56] this marriage that they don't want to be in just because the
[47:59] other person is refusing to acknowledge the whole court
[48:02] proceedings. So the court granted this
[48:04] divorce and they also awarded Margot prayed the family home.
[48:08] However, it didn't stop there, still had a key to the house and
[48:14] of course him being in denial about the divorce, pretending it
[48:18] wasn't happening, he would still use this key and he would come
[48:21] in the house whenever he wanted. And Margot at first was very
[48:26] patient with him. She understood that he was
[48:29] upset. And after all, this was the
[48:31] house that the they were raising their children in.
[48:34] And so she was kind of, she was very patient with him at first.
[48:38] He would let himself in the house and she'd be like, look,
[48:40] you can't do that. I'll let you come over and see
[48:42] the kids whenever you want, but you can't let yourself in.
[48:45] This is not your house anymore. And when their daughters, Kenya
[48:48] and Sahara, would go to Doug's house, he would interrogate them
[48:52] about Margot, asking like where she'd been, who she'd been
[48:56] seeing. Does she have a new boyfriend
[48:57] yet? What's her new boyfriend like?
[48:59] And when Doug found out that Margot was seeing Thomas Houston
[49:03] and that they were in a relationship and that things
[49:05] were going well, he blew up. And he drove to Margot's home,
[49:10] let himself in as he often did. Margot was just sat with her
[49:14] nephew in the house. And Doug comes in and he begins
[49:17] screaming at Margot. And her nephew remembers seeing
[49:21] this pure rage in his face. And until now, Margot had not
[49:27] wanted to get the police involved.
[49:28] She hadn't wanted to change the locks because she wanted to
[49:32] trust Doug with a key to the house because that was where his
[49:35] daughters were. And she was hoping that maybe
[49:37] this was just his initial reaction to the divorce and that
[49:41] maybe he would calm down over time and then she could trust
[49:44] him with a key to the house. But after this incident, when he
[49:47] let himself in and began screaming at her, she knew that
[49:50] she had to do something. So Margot got in touch with her
[49:53] lawyer who got her a court order against Doug that said he was
[49:57] not allowed at Margot's house. And she also wanted to try get
[50:01] the joint custody of of their two daughters revoked.
[50:05] She wanted full custody of the children because Doug would
[50:08] often use that as an excuse. He would use the girls as an
[50:11] excuse to come round to the house to speak to Margot, to
[50:14] kind of intimidate Margot. And so that is what was going on
[50:18] in the background at the time of her murder is that she was in
[50:21] talks with her lawyer to change custody of both their daughters
[50:25] to just her. And she also wanted more child
[50:28] support money from Doug. I don't know what for and I
[50:30] don't know why, but that is what was going on behind the scenes.
[50:35] She also asked her lawyer if there was anything that they
[50:38] could do about Doug using her van.
[50:41] Like I said, Doug had a key to this van, the same van that
[50:45] Margot was murdered in. He would often come round to the
[50:48] house and and just use it whenever he wanted.
[50:51] This was Margot's car, Margot's only car.
[50:55] And he would just kind of let himself in and drive away in it,
[50:58] which he was not allowed to do. And she wanted to try and put a
[51:01] stop to that as well. So now suspicion is mounting
[51:04] higher and higher against Doug prayed.
[51:06] And officers on the homicide team decided it might be of use
[51:10] to search his locker at work. Because if you're going to hide
[51:13] anything, hiding it in the locker at a police station seems
[51:18] most logical because who's going to search there, you know?
[51:20] And they were right, because inside this locker they found a
[51:25] bag of cassette tapes from Margos home phone.
[51:29] So logged calls of Margos between her and Doug, and these
[51:34] were relatively normal phone calls between an ex-husband and
[51:38] an ex-wife. They were talking about like the
[51:40] kids and picking the kids up at certain times and stuff.
[51:43] However, there was a very hostile tone to all of these
[51:47] phone calls. They were very snappy, very
[51:49] short, very, you know, you could tell that there was a lot of
[51:52] negative energy between these two people, which is not what
[51:56] Doug presented to the police at first in his initial questioning
[52:01] when he said that he was on good terms with his ex-wife.
[52:04] Another one of these cassette tapes that they found in Doug
[52:07] Prid's locker actually had a phone conversation between
[52:10] Margot and her mother on it. When Margot was expressing
[52:13] concerns to her mother that she thought that Doug had tapped her
[52:18] phone, Margot told her mother that Doug had brought something
[52:22] up in conversation with her that he technically could not have
[52:26] known about. It was something that she'd
[52:28] spoken about on the phone with her friend a few days before
[52:31] that, and that was the only time she'd ever spoken about it.
[52:34] So how did Doug prayed know about that unless he was
[52:38] listening in to her phone calls? And Margot's suspicions were
[52:41] correct. He had tapped her phone and he
[52:44] was recording every single phone call on these cassettes.
[52:47] This wasn't something that Margot had set up herself for
[52:51] her medical business purposes. This was something Doug had set
[52:55] up to keep tabs on Margot and to listen in on her conversations.
[52:59] And there was also another recording from that phone call
[53:03] with her mother where Margot says that she feels very
[53:07] intimidated by Doug and that there'd been an incident
[53:09] recently where he'd got all up in her face.
[53:12] He was shouting he was too close to her and she was scared of
[53:17] him. However, frustratingly, none of
[53:19] this proves that Doug murdered Doctor Margot prayed.
[53:23] None of it. It's all very suspicious.
[53:26] Incredibly suspicious. But none of these pieces of
[53:29] evidence prove that Doug prayed, got into Margot's van that
[53:33] morning, picked up a gun, and shot her six times.
[53:36] And that is what police needed. They needed solid evidence of
[53:40] that physical act of murder. At this point, the Police
[53:50] Department was not doing well because of this case.
[53:56] I'm sure you can imagine a case like this where one of their own
[53:59] is being accused of murder, of murdering their ex-wife.
[54:03] It's very polarizing. There were a lot of people on
[54:06] the police force that saw all this evidence and thought, well,
[54:10] it's got to be him. We're just looking for some
[54:12] physical evidence now, like he everything is so suspicious in
[54:15] relation to. But then there were other
[54:17] officers on the police force that were very loyal to Doug and
[54:22] they insisted that he couldn't be guilty, that he was not
[54:25] guilty, and that the homicide team were looking in the wrong
[54:28] places. They were wasting time.
[54:30] They were doing their jobs wrong.
[54:31] And these officers that were very loyal to Doug and believed
[54:35] in his innocence, they were allegedly trying to make the
[54:39] homicide detective's job as hard as it could possibly be And as
[54:44] uncomfortable as it could possibly be to make them not
[54:47] want to do it, to make them give up and focus on someone else,
[54:51] the homicide team would have to hide their paperwork on Doug
[54:55] prayed. They used to have to take it
[54:57] everywhere with them because if they left it on their desk while
[55:00] they went for a break, who knows what Doug's friends could do.
[55:04] So that paperwork, it could go missing, it could be sabotaged
[55:07] somehow. And there was one young female
[55:10] officer on the homicide team that was kind of one of the main
[55:13] people in this whole investigation, one of the main
[55:16] officers trying to solve this case who was suspicious of Doug.
[55:19] And she had to take her paperwork everywhere with her to
[55:22] breaks to lunch, even home with her on an evening.
[55:25] She would have these very important documents in her house
[55:29] with her when she lived alone, which is very dangerous because
[55:33] who knows the lengths that these people could have gone to to
[55:37] sabotage that evidence. Luckily, nothing ever happened
[55:41] to evidence or paperwork or anything like that.
[55:44] But this was supposedly a very hostile environment to work in
[55:49] for a long time as they were trying to solve this case.
[55:51] So anyway, police are still pushing for people to come
[55:55] forward with any information to do with this murder in general,
[55:59] not even just Doug prayed. But if they saw anything that
[56:02] day, if they heard anything that day, they were still appealing
[56:05] for witnesses. And one man named Howard Brooks
[56:08] comes forward and said that he saw something on the morning of
[56:12] the murder. However, he hadn't come forward
[56:14] before now because he didn't think it was really much of
[56:17] anything. However, after he'd told his
[56:19] friends about this thing that he saw, they urged him to go to the
[56:22] police because it could be important.
[56:24] So Howard Brooks had been a patient at Margot's medical
[56:28] practitioners that morning. He'd been to see a different
[56:31] doctor. He'd had his appointment and
[56:33] then he was outside of the building after his appointment
[56:36] waiting for his cab home. And that put him in the car park
[56:41] of the medical practitioners around 9:10 AM, just as the
[56:45] murder was happening. Howard recalled seeing a white
[56:49] car speeding through the car park that day.
[56:52] And this is something that you would quickly forget about.
[56:55] You know, you see cars speeding all the time.
[56:57] It's never normally a big deal. So he kind of just forgot about
[57:01] it completely. But it wasn't until a few days
[57:03] later when Howard learned of the murder of Margot prayed that he
[57:08] remembered being there that morning.
[57:10] And suddenly, this image of this white car speeding through the
[57:14] car park comes back to it. So Howard went to the police
[57:17] station with this new information and they asked him
[57:21] if he got a good look at the driver of the car, and he
[57:24] believed that he had. And so police showed him
[57:26] pictures of all of their suspects and said was it any of
[57:30] these that was driving the car? Howard took a brief look at all
[57:34] of these pictures and then pointed to one in particular and
[57:37] said that's them. That was who was driving the
[57:39] car. And this picture was of Doug
[57:41] preyed. Police asked a few more
[57:43] questions and Howard said he thought someone else could have
[57:47] been in the car with Doug that day, but he wasn't too sure.
[57:50] He didn't exactly see another person's face, so he couldn't
[57:53] tell them for sure. Police asked Howard a couple
[57:55] more questions. He said that he thought someone
[57:58] else might have been in the car, but you couldn't say for sure.
[58:01] He didn't see a second face. So like that was all he could
[58:04] really tell them. So now police have even more
[58:08] evidence and this time it puts Doug prayed at the scene of the
[58:12] murder. At the time of the murder, this
[58:15] was the best evidence that they had so far.
[58:17] However, because Howard said he thought someone else might have
[58:22] been in the car, this kind of throws that evidence off a
[58:26] little bit because yes, it puts Doug prayed at the scene of the
[58:29] murder at the time of the murder, but it doesn't say he
[58:32] pulled the trigger. And if someone else was in that
[58:34] car with him, maybe they pulled the trigger so they couldn't
[58:37] charge. Doug prayed with murder just
[58:40] yet. So police called in, Doug prayed
[58:42] for yet another interview. And the plan with this was to
[58:46] just present all the information, all the evidence
[58:49] that they had against him and see how he reacts if he tried to
[58:54] defend himself, if he seemed suspicious, if he didn't have
[58:57] anything to say. But the way that he did react in
[59:00] this interview was rather unexpected.
[59:02] So like I've been saying, he's been very cooperative all the
[59:06] way through this. Every time they wanted him to
[59:08] come in for questioning, he would do it.
[59:10] Every time they needed anything from him, he was happy to help
[59:13] because he wanted to help them solve this murder.
[59:16] In this interview, he was the complete opposite.
[59:19] He got angry. He was raising his voice.
[59:21] He was telling them that they weren't doing their jobs
[59:23] properly and that they need to stop focusing on him and get out
[59:26] there and find the real killer. And this shift in Doug's
[59:29] attitude towards the investigation as soon as he
[59:32] realized all of this evidence was mounting up against him was
[59:35] very telling. Not long after that interview,
[59:38] the Police Department gets a phone call.
[59:40] It was the dentist getting back to them with the results of the
[59:43] dental impressions of the three main suspects, Doug, Thomas and
[59:49] Denise. And the dentist said that they
[59:51] had good news. They'd found a match.
[59:54] One of these three suspects teeth matched the bite mark on
[59:58] Margot Parade's body. There was one match and the
[1:00:00] other two didn't fit it at all. And that one match was Douglas.
[1:00:05] Parade and it was also found that Doug Pride actually had a
[1:00:10] partial denture. So his whole top row of teeth
[1:00:14] was a denture that he could just take out and put back in
[1:00:17] whenever he wanted. And if you remember that bite
[1:00:20] mark on Margot Parade body was of just the bottom set of teeth
[1:00:25] and that was it. That was enough evidence to say
[1:00:28] that Doug prayed had to be the murderer.
[1:00:32] Not only had he been seen at the murder scene, his face at the
[1:00:35] murder scene, but he'd also been in a vicious struggle with
[1:00:39] Margot. So on February 23rd, 1998,
[1:00:43] almost four months after the murder, Douglas Prayed was
[1:00:46] arrested on suspicion of the murder of his ex-wife Margot
[1:00:51] Prayed and with within hours of this arrest, this case was
[1:00:56] citywide news. This was a very high-ranking
[1:00:59] police officer, a man that is paid his job is to protect, was
[1:01:05] being arrested on suspicion of murder.
[1:01:08] In his first court appearance, Doug prayed, pled not guilty to
[1:01:12] the murder of Margot prayed. And so that meant that a trial
[1:01:15] must go ahead. If he would have pled guilty,
[1:01:17] then he would have just, you know, gone to prison straight
[1:01:19] away. He could have easily just
[1:01:21] admitted it, but he said that he wasn't guilty.
[1:01:23] So this went to trial. And there in trial, all of the
[1:01:26] evidence was presented for the jury as well as a theorized
[1:01:30] timeline of events. So no one knows exactly what
[1:01:34] happened in the car that morning because there were only two
[1:01:37] people there, Margot and her killer.
[1:01:39] Based on physical evidence and stuff like that, and of course
[1:01:42] the CCTV footage, the homicide team can theorize a timeline of
[1:01:47] events. And that was told to the jury.
[1:01:50] They believed that Doug prayed had been waiting in the car park
[1:01:53] of Margot's medical facility in his white car for around 10
[1:01:57] minutes before Margot actually arrived.
[1:01:59] So he got there around 9:00 AM and parked at like the other
[1:02:04] side of the car park and just watched and waited for her to
[1:02:07] come in. He could have easily killed
[1:02:09] Margot in her home, after all, he had a key.
[1:02:12] However, he knew that if he did it in a car park at her work,
[1:02:16] then it could look like a robbery, whereas if he'd done it
[1:02:19] in Margot's own home, then that would have led back to him a lot
[1:02:23] easier and a lot quicker. So anyway, he drives over to
[1:02:27] where Margot is now parked in her van.
[1:02:29] He parks his car, gets out, walks over to the van, and it's
[1:02:34] unknown whether he used his own key to get in the van or whether
[1:02:37] Margot let him in. But either way, he gets in on
[1:02:40] the passenger side and sits in the van with Margot.
[1:02:44] They believe that he was sat in this van with a gun pulled on
[1:02:47] Margot, just talking to her for about a minute.
[1:02:51] Of course, they don't know what he was saying, whether he was,
[1:02:53] you know, telling her that he was going to kill her or maybe
[1:02:56] why he was doing it, who knows. And Margot realizes that she's
[1:03:01] in a lot of danger, and so she puts her hand up, grabs the gun
[1:03:05] by the barrel, and a struggle takes place where he's trying to
[1:03:10] gain control back of this gun. Margot's trying to get it off
[1:03:13] him to protect herself. And Doug realizes that Margot is
[1:03:17] a lot stronger than he thought, and that he might lose this
[1:03:20] struggle. She might gain control of this
[1:03:22] gun. And so that is when he leans
[1:03:24] over and bites her arm so that she will lose grip of the gun
[1:03:28] and he can take back control. Now he finally has the gun
[1:03:31] again. He decides that now is his time
[1:03:34] to murder Margo. He shoots her six times and then
[1:03:38] gets out of the van, jumps back in his white car and speeds
[1:03:42] away. He then disposed of the clothes
[1:03:44] that he was wearing and the murder weapon, the gun somewhere
[1:03:47] they don't know where. They've actually never found his
[1:03:50] clothes that he was wearing or the murder weapon, so no one
[1:03:53] knows where he disposed of those.
[1:03:55] He then gets his workout gear on and heads straight to the gym in
[1:03:59] his apartment complex to lock in his alibi.
[1:04:02] He made sure that people saw him working out in the gym that day.
[1:04:06] So that was the theorized timeline that the jury was told.
[1:04:10] They were also told of his believed motive for killing
[1:04:14] Margot. This was a controlling, bitter
[1:04:17] ex-husband fresh out of a very ugly divorce with his very
[1:04:22] successful, very wealthy independent doctor wife.
[1:04:26] He was very much in debt. He missed the life that he used
[1:04:30] to live, and he knew that his ex-wife, that he now held a lot
[1:04:34] of resentment or had a life insurance policy with a lot of
[1:04:38] money that would go to him if anything happened to her.
[1:04:42] On top of that, there was the evidence of the bite mark that
[1:04:45] matched Doug Praed's teeth perfectly.
[1:04:48] There was his disproven alibi where he wasn't at the gym that
[1:04:51] morning at the time of the murder.
[1:04:53] There was Howard Brooks, who had seen Doug Praed's face as he was
[1:04:57] speeding away from the murder scene that day.
[1:04:59] There was the questionable cassette tapes that he'd stolen
[1:05:04] from Margot's Ford and kept in his locker.
[1:05:06] So Doug prayed, was called up to the stand to testify, and he
[1:05:10] said that he didn't hold any resentment for Margot prayed at
[1:05:14] all. He actually felt he had a very
[1:05:16] good relationship with the mother of his children.
[1:05:18] He also denied ever fathering a child to Carla Smith.
[1:05:23] After three weeks of trial, the jury went to deliberate and
[1:05:27] after four hours of discussion, they came back and found Doug
[1:05:31] prayed guilty of the murder of Margot Praed and he was
[1:05:36] sentenced to life in prison. But the case doesn't end there.
[1:05:40] Around 15 years into Doug's prison sentence.
[1:05:44] So he'd spent 15 years behind bars.
[1:05:47] It was now 2000 and twelve 2013 time.
[1:05:50] And of course, technology is a lot better these days than it
[1:05:54] was at the time of the murder in the 90s.
[1:05:57] And so Doug Praed's team insisted that they got evidence
[1:06:01] retested to see if they could find any DNA evidence because,
[1:06:05] you know, they could pick up a lot smaller samples in 2012 than
[1:06:09] they could in the 90s. So this might help find a
[1:06:12] different suspect. So they took Margot's lab coat
[1:06:15] because she was actually wearing the lab coat when she was
[1:06:18] murdered and when she was bitten.
[1:06:20] So that bite mark had gone through her lab coat and onto
[1:06:24] her skin. So on her lab coat, surely there
[1:06:26] would have been some saliva from this person, from her killer.
[1:06:30] And so the lab coat was DNA tested and, and they found a DNA
[1:06:34] sample, but it was not a match to Doug Pride.
[1:06:37] It was a male's DNA sample, but it wasn't Doug's.
[1:06:42] So was it the real murderers? Had there been a real murderer
[1:06:45] this whole time? And Doug had been falsely
[1:06:48] convicted? So with this new evidence, Doug
[1:06:50] Pride's team decided to try and appeal his prison sentence and
[1:06:54] get him exonerated, get him out of prison because he was clearly
[1:06:58] innocent now. So in order to meet the criteria
[1:07:01] to be exonerated, the evidence, this new evidence that's being
[1:07:04] presented, the DNA has to be so solid that no reasonable juror
[1:07:11] would ever find this person guilty of murder had it been
[1:07:14] presented at the original trial. So say this trial had gone down
[1:07:18] and they had this conflict in DNA evidence at the time, would
[1:07:22] any single one of those jurors find him guilty?
[1:07:25] And in January of 2000 and 13, a judge named Judge Hunter decided
[1:07:30] that no reasonable juror would ever find Doug prayed guilty of
[1:07:34] this murder, had that evidence been presented at the time, and
[1:07:37] he was exonerated and let out of prison.
[1:07:41] Now, this was met with mixed opinions.
[1:07:43] There were a lot of people that felt really bad for Douglas
[1:07:47] prayed he'd just spent 15 years of his life in jail for a crime
[1:07:52] that he now didn't commit. It seemed as though he didn't
[1:07:55] commit it. But there were other people that
[1:07:56] were saying, well, no, hang on, there's still so much evidence
[1:08:00] that says that he's guilty. His false alibi, the fact that
[1:08:03] the bite mark is exactly the same as his teeth and only the
[1:08:07] bottom set of his teeth. Who else only has one set of
[1:08:11] teeth? Just the bottom set?
[1:08:12] There was him being seen at the crime.
[1:08:14] There was his motive, the receipt of her life insurance
[1:08:18] policy money. And so the prosecution came back
[1:08:21] and said, we really don't think that Doug should be out of
[1:08:24] prison for this. Just because someone else's DNA
[1:08:28] was on Margoprid's lab cut that day doesn't cancel out all of
[1:08:32] the other evidence that originally helped to convict
[1:08:35] Doug in the 1st place. And besides, that lab cut had
[1:08:39] been just in an evidence locker for 15 years.
[1:08:42] This could be anyone's DNA. It could be a crime scene
[1:08:46] investigators, it could be a police officers during, you
[1:08:49] know, like handling of it or whatever.
[1:08:51] Yes, they're supposed to wear gloves and it's supposed to be
[1:08:54] ultimately protected at all times.
[1:08:56] But one of if it hadn't, you know, there's plenty chance for
[1:09:00] it to get contaminated during 15 years in an evidence locker,
[1:09:04] even if it wasn't a police officers or a crime scene
[1:09:07] investigators. What if that evidence on
[1:09:10] Margot's lab coat was just from one of her patients from the day
[1:09:13] before? What if she hadn't washed it
[1:09:15] before she put it on that morning?
[1:09:16] And, you know, it could have been anyone's.
[1:09:19] Basically, what I'm trying to say is just because another
[1:09:23] man's DNA was on her lab coat that day doesn't mean it's the
[1:09:27] killer's DNA. So how can it possibly rule Doug
[1:09:31] out completely and say that he's innocent?
[1:09:33] And so the prosecution got to work trying to get Doug prayed
[1:09:37] back into prison. And all they really needed to do
[1:09:39] was pass this evidence around to a few different professionals
[1:09:43] and get them all to say that this evidence is unreliable.
[1:09:48] And that'd be it. Doug would be back in prison.
[1:09:50] And in October of 2014, what do you know, they all found this
[1:09:54] evidence unreliable. It was decided that the judge
[1:09:57] had abused her discretion in exonerating Doug and that that
[1:10:02] verdict should be thrown out. And the evidence wasn't enough
[1:10:06] to free him. So after two years as a freeman,
[1:10:09] Douglas Prayed was ordered to resume his life sentence for the
[1:10:13] murder of Margot Prayed. Of course, Doug and his team are
[1:10:17] not happy with him being sent back to prison, so I have no
[1:10:21] doubt that they're working on another appeal right now to try
[1:10:25] and find some other way to get him out.
[1:10:26] But I really think it's unlikely that that will happen.
[1:10:29] If the prosecution's been able to put him in jail twice now, I
[1:10:32] really doubt there'll be any evidence that is powerful enough
[1:10:35] to say that he's innocent. The couple's daughters, Kenya
[1:10:38] and Sahara Prayed, have always maintained their father's
[1:10:42] innocence. They believe that he was wrongly
[1:10:44] convicted and that there's just a murderer on the loose out
[1:10:48] there somewhere that hasn't been found or charged.
[1:10:51] And sadly, just last year, Kenya Prayed passed away after
[1:10:55] struggling for months with a very serious illness.
[1:10:58] She was a doctor just like her mother had been, and she had
[1:11:02] kids of her own. Thank you so much for listening
[1:11:08] to Usual Disclaimer. At this point, I just want to
[1:11:10] say that if you've been affected by any of the topics we
[1:11:13] discussed today, please check the description where we've left
[1:11:16] some helpful resources. If you want to hear more cases
[1:11:19] like this one, make sure to follow Usual Disclaimer on your
[1:11:22] podcast app so that you get notifications when we post new
[1:11:25] episodes. And if you really enjoyed, I'd
[1:11:28] love it if you could leave a rating and a review too.
[1:11:31] Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor Neil is an Audio Boom Studios
[1:11:35] production. See you next time.

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