# 4 Horrifying Unsolved Mysteries | 211

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 23 Apr 2026, 42 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO9787515673.mp3

Don't forget to hit follow button and turn on the notification bell. Episode 211 of the true crime podcast btw. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: 🛍️ Merch: https://lazy-chill-zone-shop.fourthwall.com ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw 🍏 True Crime Podcast on Apple 🍎: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lazy-chill-true-crime/id1815534472 unsolved mysteries, true crime, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, missing persons, murder investigation, forensic evidence, serial killers, crime scene analysis, dark history, criminal psychology, real life horror, police investigations, DNA breakthroughs, forensic genealogy, crime documentaries, criminal profiling, mysterious disappearances, solved cases, justice system, law enforcement stories, cold case files, creepy mysteries, true crime storytelling, crime reconstruction, chilling cases, investigative reporting, modern forensics, victim advocacy, unidentified remains, crime scene forensics, disturbing cases, true crime analysis, hidden clues, infamous crimes, real crime stories, forensic evidence, heists, art theft

## Transcript

[0:00] For 29 days in the spring of 1992, a predator walked into
[0:04] small shops along 1000 mile stretch of Interstate 70 and
[0:09] committed ruthless acts for no apparent reason. 6 clerks at 5
[0:14] crime scenes, all bound together by a thin stranger with sandy
[0:18] hair and a rare weapon. And that was it.
[0:22] Then he stopped cold and more than 30 years later, he still
[0:26] hasn't been found. Robin Fuldauer was 26 years old
[0:31] and working alone at a Payless shoe store on Pendleton Pike in
[0:34] Indianapolis. It was Wednesday, April 8th,
[0:37] 1992, and business was slow. Around 1:30 in the afternoon, a
[0:43] man walked in. He waited until she turned her
[0:46] back, took her into the stockroom and shot her once in
[0:49] the back of the head with a 22 caliber.
[0:52] The register was barely touched, and whoever had done it left
[0:55] with less than $100 in cash. Detectives found a single spent
[1:00] casing and not much else, and for a few days it looked like a
[1:05] botched robbery. Strange and disturbing, but not
[1:09] unprecedented by any means. Nobody watching the scene that
[1:13] afternoon could have guessed that the man who'd done it was
[1:17] already heading West across the plains, and that he'd do it
[1:21] again within 72 hours. Three days later, on April 11th,
[1:27] the unknown man walked into a bridal shop called Labrie
[1:30] Delegantz on East Kellogg in Wichita.
[1:33] Inside were two women, Patricia Magers, the 31 year old woman
[1:38] who owned the place, and Patricia Smith, 23, who worked
[1:43] there part time. Both were shot in the back of
[1:47] the head with the same caliber weapon as in the previous
[1:49] attack, and again, the register was mostly ignored.
[1:53] This time, 2 spent casings sat on the floor, and within days,
[1:58] forensic scientists in Wichita compared the casings to the one
[2:02] from Indianapolis and the marks on the brass lined up.
[2:07] It was the same weapon twice in one week, about 685 miles apart.
[2:14] Wichita police actually caught a break of sorts.
[2:18] The bridal shop normally closed at six, but that day a customer
[2:22] had called asking the women to stay late.
[2:25] He'd forgotten an accessory for his tuxedo and wanted to swing
[2:29] by a bit late. By the time he got there, both
[2:32] women were already deceased in the backroom, and he walked
[2:36] straight into the killer. The stranger had a weapon that
[2:40] the customer described as looking something like an Uzi.
[2:43] He told the customer to follow him to the back, and when the
[2:46] customer refused, the perpetrator simply told him to
[2:49] leave. The customer sat down with
[2:52] police that night and gave them the face that would form the
[2:55] basis for the composite sketches.
[2:58] The predator was a thin white male, 5-7 or five eight, with
[3:04] sandy blonde or reddish hair and heavy drooping eyelids.
[3:09] By the time the sketch hit the papers, the man was already
[3:12] somewhere back on the highway and the pattern had only just
[3:16] begun to form. On April 27th, the maniac drove
[3:21] E back into Indiana and he ended up at a small storefront called
[3:25] Sylvia's Ceramics in Terra Oat. At roughly 4 in the afternoon, a
[3:30] customer walked in and found the clerk, Michael McCown, lying
[3:35] deceased behind the counter. McCown was 40 years old, and
[3:39] he's often described as the only male victim, which is accurate
[3:43] but potentially a little misleading.
[3:46] McCown wore his hair long and wore earrings, and from behind,
[3:49] investigators believe that the predator may have mistaken him
[3:53] for a woman. If this theory is correct, he
[3:57] figured out his mistake only after the fact.
[4:00] Mccown's wallet was taken, and it's estimated that there was
[4:03] less than $50 inside. Again, confirming robbery
[4:07] couldn't have been the primary motive.
[4:10] The same casing from a 22 lay on the ground, which was again tied
[4:15] back to the other attacks. Sylvia's ceramics sat barely a
[4:19] block from Interstate 70. And here's the detail that
[4:23] started to spook detectives. Every scene had been within easy
[4:27] reach of the Interstate, and the shooter had already shown he'd
[4:30] cover hundreds of miles in a matter of days to do this again.
[4:35] The problem with this for public safety purposes was that the
[4:39] potential targets likely included 10s of thousands of
[4:43] businesses. It was around this time that the
[4:46] serial Predator acquired the ominous nickname by which he's
[4:49] still known, the I-70 Killer. On May 3rd, the Predator
[4:56] surfaced in St. Charles, MO, just West across
[4:59] the state line. The store there was called Boot
[5:03] Village, a small footwear shop just off the Interstate.
[5:07] Nancy Kitzmiller, 24, was working alone, and she was shot
[5:11] in the back of the head, found around 2:30 that afternoon by
[5:15] customers who walked in. The Ballistics came back within
[5:19] days, and the forensic scientists confirmed it was the
[5:22] same rare weapon with the same ammunition, almost certainly in
[5:26] the same hand. By then, detectives from three
[5:30] states were comparing notes and bracing for another one.
[5:34] But it wasn't enough. Four days later, on May 7th, he
[5:39] did it again in Raytown, a suburb on the southern edge of
[5:42] Kansas City. The store was called Store of
[5:46] Many Colors, a gift shop tucked into the Woodson Village
[5:49] Shopping Center. The clerk was Sarah Blessing,
[5:53] 37, a well liked local woman working alone behind the
[5:57] counter. That evening, in the video store
[6:00] next door, a man named Tim Hickman saw a stranger in a
[6:03] Sport coat walking across the lot around 6:15.
[6:09] A couple of minutes later, he heard what sounded like a
[6:11] firecracker, looked up, and saw the same man leave.
[6:16] Hickman ran next door, and he found Blessing on the floor,
[6:19] mortally wounded. That was May 7th. 6 victims, 5
[6:25] scenes, 3 states. And then, for reasons nobody has
[6:30] ever understood, the attacks along the Interstate abruptly
[6:33] stopped. One thing tied every scene
[6:37] together, and it wasn't just the geography surrounding the
[6:40] Interstate system, it was the weapon.
[6:44] Ballistics matched every shell casing to the same firearm,
[6:47] which was believed to be an Irma Worka ET 22.
[6:51] This is a German made machine pistol, so uncommon in the
[6:54] United States that investigators still hope it'll be the thread
[6:58] that pulls the whole thing apart.
[7:01] And if you're not familiar with weaponry, while it is a pistol,
[7:05] this weapon ain't your granddaddy's old Roscoe.
[7:08] It's capable of fully automatic fire.
[7:11] It also bears a striking resemblance to the much more
[7:14] famous Uzi, which explains the witness description.
[7:19] The bullets were copper clad lead rounds, a very ordinary
[7:23] choice, but something unusual kept turning up on the spent
[7:26] brass. There were tiny traces of
[7:29] jeweler's Rouge, a fine red polishing compound used in metal
[7:34] work and optics. That detail has fed 2 theories
[7:38] for more than 30 years. One theory has the shooter
[7:42] working in a trade that uses the stuff, a jeweler, a weapon
[7:46] Smith, or a machinist. Another theory has him polishing
[7:51] his own cartridges before loading them, perhaps a ritual
[7:54] attached to the weapon itself. Either reading says roughly the
[7:59] same thing. This wasn't a spontaneous spree,
[8:03] and this highly unusual weapon meant something to the owner.
[8:08] Roughly 20 months later, on January 15th, 1994, a small shop
[8:13] in Houston called Alternatives opened for the day.
[8:17] The owner, a woman named Vicki Webb, was alone behind the
[8:21] counter when a customer walked in.
[8:24] She later described him as a short man, bow legged, with long
[8:28] shaggy blonde hair and tanned skin, wearing an old fashioned
[8:32] cardigan. He asked a lot of questions
[8:35] about traffic patterns on the street outside and said he was
[8:39] waiting to meet his niece. Webb turned to check something
[8:43] on the counter and he pulled out a weapon and started blasting,
[8:47] striking her in the back of the neck.
[8:49] The bullet struck A vertebra, but thankfully didn't reach her
[8:52] brain. Vicki was a quick thinker under
[8:56] extreme pressure, and when she went down she decided to play
[8:59] dead. But despite her quick thinking,
[9:03] what happened next was a psychological nightmare of
[9:06] unparalleled proportions combined with what seems to be
[9:10] some sort of divine intervention.
[9:13] He dragged her body behind the counter, crouched over her, and
[9:17] press the barrel against her forehead.
[9:20] Vicki was fully aware of what was happening, but stayed
[9:23] perfectly still, not letting on at all that she was still alive.
[9:28] Then this absolute psychopath pulled the trigger with the
[9:32] barrel stuffed right into her forehead.
[9:35] But as it turns out, it wasn't Vicky's time to go.
[9:40] The weapon jammed and the predator began to laugh like a
[9:44] maniac in a way that Vicky described as being genuinely
[9:47] cruel. And then just like that,
[9:51] something outside spooked him and he ran and Vicki survived.
[9:57] Ballistics later excluded her shooting from the 1992 cases,
[10:02] which means either it wasn't the same man or he'd swapped
[10:05] weapons. Some investigators still believe
[10:08] it was him, and the description fits, but the evidence never
[10:12] closed the loop. A 2021 age progression placed
[10:17] him, if he's still alive, somewhere between 52 and 70 and
[10:22] provided 2 updated sketches. In the same year, a Saint
[10:28] Charles police captain pulled together a task force linking
[10:31] all the relevant local forces plus federal agencies to reopen
[10:37] the file. The purpose is to look at all
[10:40] the evidence from the cold case once again, but this time with
[10:44] modern forensic tools. A detective was assigned to the
[10:47] task force full time, and evidence went out for testing in
[10:51] 2022, though the exact nature of what was sent out still isn't
[10:55] clear. Results have reportedly come
[10:59] back, though investigators haven't said publicly what those
[11:03] results show. This could mean that detectives
[11:07] are still building the case against the potential suspect,
[11:10] and I suspect that they'll want to have enough to arrest him
[11:13] after the initial questioning. After all, this isn't someone
[11:18] you'd want released back into the public, especially if he
[11:21] thinks that the walls are falling in on him rapidly.
[11:25] What we're left with for the time being is a serial predator
[11:28] who could still be in the prime of his life and who's
[11:31] potentially committed many more sick acts throughout the years.
[11:38] On a warm Thursday night in July of 1975, a 36 year old actress
[11:43] with a fresh sitcom contract walked out of an acting class in
[11:47] the Palms district of Los Angeles and into a crime scene.
[11:51] Her name was Barbara Colby and she'd just recently filmed 3
[11:55] episodes of a Mary Tyler Moore Show spin off.
[11:59] Unfortunately for her, at about 10 minutes before midnight,
[12:04] somewhere near the edge of Venice Blvd. somebody put a
[12:07] bullet in her chest and disappeared into the traffic. 50
[12:12] years later, nobody's been charged and nobody's even been
[12:15] named publicly as a suspect. And not one solid piece of this
[12:19] case has ever been particularly easy to explain.
[12:24] Barbara was born in New York City on July 2nd, 1939, and
[12:29] spent most of her childhood in New Orleans after her family
[12:31] moved to the South. She was a theater kid in the
[12:35] fullest sense of the phrase, and she joined a community group in
[12:39] high school, fell hard for the craft, and turned that obsession
[12:43] into a scholarship at Bard College.
[12:47] She then studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and when she came back
[12:51] to New York, she picked up serious Off Broadway work.
[12:55] According to her colleagues, she was the kind of stage actress
[12:58] who earned respect from directors who didn't hand it out
[13:01] lightly. She spent two years as a leading
[13:04] member of the American Conservatory Theatre in San
[13:07] Francisco, where the daily grind gave her a range few television
[13:11] actresses of her generation could match.
[13:14] In 1968, she married Robert Levitt Junior, the son of
[13:18] Broadway legend Ethel Merman. That marriage was rocky and by
[13:23] the summer of 1975 she and Levitt were separated and by all
[13:27] accounts they were both happy to move on with life apart from
[13:30] each other. Colby then moved W permanently
[13:34] to chase the screen work that New York theatre alone couldn't
[13:37] sustain. Her first major on camera moment
[13:40] came in September of 1971 in an early Columbo episode.
[13:46] The episode was directed by a 24 year old Steven Spielberg and
[13:50] Colby played a lonely shop owner who recognizes a criminal, tries
[13:54] to blackmail him, and pays for it with her life.
[13:59] According to the sources, it was a very good performance despite
[14:03] how small the role was and casting directors noticed.
[14:08] Bookings followed and she turned up on The Odd Couple, Kung Fu
[14:12] and more iconic shows of the era.
[14:15] In 1974, she guest starred on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in a
[14:20] role that was incredibly well received when producers spun off
[14:24] Cloris Leachman's character into a new sitcom series called
[14:27] Phyllis. This marked a new opportunity
[14:29] for the stage actress. Colby was cast as Julie Erskine,
[14:34] the no nonsense owner of a commercial photography studio
[14:38] where Leachman's character worked.
[14:41] Colleagues who worked with her in that last year later said the
[14:44] same thing in different words, which was that she'd been on the
[14:48] verge of being a household name and living her dream.
[14:53] And considering that her acting work had personally impressed
[14:56] Steven Spielberg, her potential for future big screen roles was
[15:00] unusually high for a television actor of the period.
[15:05] On the night of July 24th, 1975, Colby had been teaching an
[15:09] acting class in the Palms neighborhood, a working class
[15:13] pocket of West Los Angeles wedged between Culver City and
[15:16] the freeway. Palms in the mid 70s was the
[15:19] kind of place that made sense for an actress who wanted to put
[15:22] her nose to the grindstone and make a name for herself.
[15:25] The rent was cheap and this meant that she didn't have to
[15:28] spend as much time supporting herself with work outside of
[15:32] acting. In fact, she had a bit of an
[15:34] entrepreneurial spirit to her that combined both her acting
[15:38] craft and the need to generate extra income.
[15:42] She'd been running private classes out of a rented studio
[15:45] space in the area for some time. The session ran late and around
[15:50] 11:50 that night she walked out with a 35 year old actor named
[15:55] James Kiernan. Different sources described
[15:59] Kiernan as an acting student, a colleague, a friend, or even a
[16:03] romantic partner. The precise nature of their
[16:06] relationship isn't clear from the surviving record, but what's
[16:10] certain is that the two of them left the building together and
[16:13] crossed a parking area toward her car.
[16:17] Two men were waiting near a light colored van, and according
[16:20] to what Kiernan told responding officers in the minutes after
[16:24] the attack, they didn't attempt to conceal their identity.
[16:28] They didn't demand a wallet or a purse, and in fact, they didn't
[16:32] say anything at all. They simply approached at close
[16:36] range. And then, for reasons which
[16:39] remain a total mystery, one of the men started firing on Colby
[16:43] and Kiernan. A single round struck Colby,
[16:47] with the bullet entering through her arm and traveling into her
[16:50] chest, puncturing her left lung. She was gone before paramedics
[16:55] reached the parking lot. Kiernan, for his part, took a
[16:58] few rounds of his own, but was still conscious when officers
[17:02] arrived. He gave the only description the
[17:05] investigation would ever have to work with.
[17:08] The two men were black, but he couldn't meaningfully describe
[17:11] them any further than that aside from the fact that they were in
[17:15] a light colored van. He told them he didn't recognize
[17:18] either shooter, and that the attack had come without any
[17:21] warning he could identify. Kiernan was taken to a hospital
[17:26] in critical condition, and by the following morning he was
[17:29] gone as well. Had Kiernan recovered, it's
[17:34] possible that he would have been able to work with forensic
[17:37] artists to create an approximation of what the two
[17:40] men looked like. Unfortunately though, that
[17:43] wasn't fated to be, and given Kiernan was mortally wounded, I
[17:48] do have to question the clarity he had surrounding the event and
[17:52] if his reports were accurate. Notably, neither Colby nor
[17:57] Kiernan had been robbed and her purse was still on her,
[18:00] completely untouched, as was his wallet.
[18:04] Whatever the two men had come for, it clearly wasn't cash, and
[18:09] to many the attack seemed targeted.
[18:13] The Los Angeles Police Department initially treated the
[18:16] shooting as a probable St. crime.
[18:18] Palms and the surrounding neighborhoods weren't the safest
[18:21] corners of the city in the mid 70s, and incidents such as this
[18:25] weren't that uncommon. But the details didn't really
[18:29] cooperate since there was no dispute on the record from what
[18:32] Kiernan mentioned, and the facts didn't suggest it was a botched
[18:36] robbery. The attack had been quiet,
[18:39] close, and disciplined, the sort of work of men who might be
[18:44] doing this for a living. The detective who caught the
[18:47] case put his team on every angle the evidence allowed.
[18:51] They spoke with hundreds of witnesses, classmates,
[18:54] neighbors, acquaintances, former students, and anyone who'd had
[18:58] business with Colby or Kiernan in the weeks leading up to the
[19:02] event. Nobody in the class had seen the
[19:04] van at all, and the description that Kiernan gave of the men was
[19:08] far too vague to be useful. Despite all evidence to the
[19:12] contrary. For whatever reason, the
[19:15] notoriously not corrupt Los Angeles Police Department of the
[19:18] 1970s never moved beyond the street crime theory.
[19:23] And yeah, by the way, that was a little bit of sarcasm on my
[19:26] part. I figure I should clarify that
[19:29] before I get the inevitable angry comments.
[19:33] The LAPD of the 1970s was an incredibly corrupt organization,
[19:38] with certain members having pretty strong connections to
[19:41] organized crime. Three main theories have
[19:45] survived the last 50 years, and none of them are satisfying in
[19:49] the least. The first is the mistaken
[19:52] identity theory, and under this reading, Colby and Kiernan
[19:56] weren't the intended targets at all.
[19:59] The hit men had been sent for someone else who parked in the
[20:01] same lot. Took the same class or drove a
[20:05] similar vehicle and two innocent people paid the price.
[20:10] It fits the facts and broad strokes, but proves almost
[20:13] nothing because no candidate for the real target has ever been
[20:17] named publicly. The second theory suggests it
[20:21] was a hit, but one or both of them was the intended target of
[20:25] the attack. The shooters didn't hesitate,
[20:28] and they didn't escalate into panic or chaos.
[20:31] They placed careful rounds into each victim, returned to their
[20:35] van, and vanished into a city of millions of people.
[20:39] The trouble with this theory is motive, since neither of the
[20:42] supposed targets had any meaningful enemies.
[20:45] Nobody has ever offered a convincing reason why Barbara
[20:48] Colby, a character actress 3 episodes into a new sitcom,
[20:53] would be targeted. Her ex-husband was investigated
[20:56] but cleared of any involvement, and while some theorists online
[21:00] suggest he had a financial motive, there's no proof of
[21:03] this. As for Kiernan, much less is
[21:07] known about him, but what we do know publicly suggests that he
[21:11] also had no conventional reason to be targeted.
[21:14] The third is the random violence theory, which is essentially
[21:17] what the cops initially wrote the case off as two men out
[21:21] driving that night decided, for reasons of their own or for no
[21:25] reason at all, to shoot whoever walked into the parking lot
[21:29] next. This reading has the advantage
[21:32] of fitting A narrative about big city violence in the 1970s, but
[21:37] it doesn't seem to fit the case at all.
[21:40] Random shooters don't tend to work in pairs like the two of
[21:43] them did because doing so would vastly increase the chances of
[21:47] getting clapped in cuffs. They also tend to act, for lack
[21:52] of a better word, much less efficiently than these two did.
[21:56] They carried it out like 2 professionals hired to do a job,
[22:00] and when they were done they calmly got back in their van and
[22:04] drove away. Personally, I strongly believe
[22:08] that this was a professional job and likely a mob hit, and I'm
[22:12] basing this largely on the conduct of the two men.
[22:16] Mob hits, if these two were hired by the Mafia, often use
[22:20] two men because it reduces risk and increases control.
[22:24] One acts as the shooter, while the other serves as a driver or
[22:27] lookout, keeping eyes on the surroundings and handling the
[22:30] escape. This division of roles makes the
[22:33] attack faster and more efficient, and it also provides
[22:36] redundancy, ensuring the job is completed if something goes
[22:40] wrong. Two participants can also manage
[22:43] witnesses and unexpected complications more effectively
[22:47] than one. From an organizational
[22:49] standpoint, having a partner creates accountability, making
[22:54] it harder for either person to lie about what happened or fail
[22:58] without consequences. Having two hitmen also reduces
[23:02] the likelihood of a cold feet situation where a single shooter
[23:06] may decide the risks aren't worth it.
[23:09] I suspect that Police Department corruption at the hands of
[23:12] powerful organized crime figures may have intentionally sabotaged
[23:17] the original investigation. After all, once the initial
[23:21] investigators determined it was random St. crime, despite all
[23:25] evidence to the contrary, the case was essentially rendered
[23:29] unsolvable, perhaps intentionally so.
[23:33] That said, of course, even though these general facts seem
[23:36] to line up with this theory about how underworld hits and
[23:39] corruption tend to go, there's no apparent reason why they were
[23:43] targeted. Notably, the television show
[23:47] Colby was on, Phyllis, tried to absorb the loss.
[23:51] The show's writers quietly wrote Colby's character out, cast a
[23:55] new actress to work a similar corner of the story, and
[23:58] rearrange the show around her absence.
[24:01] The series itself ran two seasons before CBS canceled it
[24:05] in 1977, becoming a forgotten relic of a bygone age.
[24:10] The case file, for its part, is still technically open and is
[24:14] still just as cold as ever with no new leads whatsoever.
[24:22] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here with my usual reminder to hit
[24:25] the subscribe button if you're enjoying the video.
[24:28] Also remember to hit the share button and send my content to
[24:31] your friends and family members that enjoy true crime and
[24:33] mysteries. Rodger Ellis was born in October
[24:40] 1954 in Wisconsin Rapids, a paper mill town tucked along a
[24:45] bend of the Wisconsin River. He grew up with younger siblings
[24:50] in a household that, by every available account, was perfectly
[24:54] ordinary. By the mid 1970s, Rodger was in
[24:58] his early 20s, living a life that looked a lot like plenty of
[25:02] other young men in central Wisconsin.
[25:05] Then, in 1976, his trajectory took a sharp turn that his
[25:11] family would spend the next 46 years trying to understand.
[25:15] You see, Rodger was going to commit the most unforgivable
[25:18] crime theoretically known to man and use a substance so powerful,
[25:23] so dangerous, that bags of chips tremble in fear.
[25:27] Roger had been arrested on a cannabis possession charge, and
[25:31] he was facing the prospect of jail time.
[25:34] In 2026 that might sound completely ridiculous, but in
[25:38] 1976 Wisconsin it could absolutely send a young man into
[25:43] a state facility. Roger, for his part, wasn't
[25:47] interested in finding out what that felt like first hand,
[25:50] especially not over something as minor as possession of a little
[25:54] bit of St. cabbage. He told his family in plain
[25:57] terms that he wouldn't be doing the time and that he was going
[26:01] West instead. Exactly when he slipped out of
[26:05] town is one of the stubborn details that's never been locked
[26:08] down. Some missing persons records
[26:11] associated with his case place his last confirmed sighting
[26:15] around June 1976. Investigators working the cold
[26:20] case in later years believed he was still thumbing his way along
[26:23] a highway somewhere as late as December of that same year.
[26:28] What's certain is that once he left, the silence was absolute
[26:32] and there were no letters or phone calls.
[26:35] His mother waited the rest of her life for any word from him,
[26:39] but that sadly never came. Before he left, Rodger had
[26:44] reportedly pulled together a decent amount of cash, which
[26:48] made sense for someone planning to live on the road.
[26:51] He told different people different things about where he
[26:53] was headed, and a few friends thought he was aiming for
[26:56] Chicago. Others remembered him mentioning
[26:59] California, or perhaps the Pacific Northwest.
[27:04] It's possible he didn't really know where he was going himself,
[27:08] or that he was being deliberately vague so no one
[27:10] could point the authorities in the right direction later.
[27:13] And I do just need to emphasize here that Rodger was forced to
[27:17] go on the Lam due to a pot charge, and this life on the Lam
[27:21] would eventually lead to his slaying.
[27:24] Hitchhiking in the mid 1970s was already a dicey way to move
[27:28] around the country, even if it hadn't yet picked up the full
[27:31] grim cultural reputation it would carry.
[27:33] By the 1980s, the Interstate system was mature, and a young
[27:38] man with a backpack and his thumb out could cross half a
[27:41] dozen states in a week if the rides broke right.
[27:45] It was also, notably, the era in which a number of serial
[27:49] predators were actively working the American highways.
[27:53] The narrative is now shockingly familiar.
[27:56] They picked up naive riders and made sure their passengers never
[28:00] arrived where they thought they were going.
[28:03] Rodgers route, in so far as anyone can reconstruct, it, took
[28:08] him out of Wisconsin and eventually on to US Hwy. 212.
[28:14] This is a long ribbon of Rd. that runs across the northern
[28:17] Plains and climbs toward the Beartooth Mountains in southern
[28:21] Montana. Somewhere along that stretch,
[28:25] for reasons which remain a mystery at this time, Rodgers
[28:29] Luck ran out. Investigators have said for
[28:32] years that they believe he was cut down by someone he was
[28:36] traveling with and that whoever it was simply left him behind
[28:41] and kept moving. That stretch of Rd. cuts through
[28:45] country where a person could vanish and stay gone for a very
[28:48] long time, which is exactly what happened to Roger.
[28:53] Fast forward to June 20th, 2004, when a hiker walking a patch of
[28:58] rough country roughly 15 miles South of Red Lodge, Mt came
[29:02] across a skull lying in the brush near 212.
[29:06] Deputies swept the area and recovered additional bone
[29:09] fragments nearby, including a femur and part of a pelvis.
[29:14] Forensic analysis determined that all the remains came from
[29:17] the same person, a male somewhere between 20 and 30
[29:21] years old. There was nothing recovered with
[29:24] the bones that could pin them to a name, just bones that had
[29:28] spent decades in the Montana weather, enduring the seasons
[29:32] for the next 18 years. He was a John Doe, and initial
[29:36] genetic testing did little to help give his name back.
[29:41] In 2022, the Carbon County Sheriff's Office teamed up with
[29:45] federal agencies and a private forensic lab that specializes in
[29:49] building detailed genetic profiles from degraded samples.
[29:54] This genome sequence provided a profile that could be matched to
[29:57] a family who had been waiting nearly half a century for any
[30:00] scrap of news. Sadly, when the call finally
[30:05] came, Roger's mother was already long gone, having passed without
[30:10] ever knowing what happened to her son.
[30:13] His siblings, along with the friends who had always assumed
[30:16] the worst but never had proof, finally had somewhere to put
[30:20] their grief. The case has since been
[30:23] reclassified as an active cold case, and Carbon County
[30:27] investigators are now working backward through Rogers last
[30:31] known movements. Unfortunately, the passage of
[30:34] time makes it unlikely that this case will be solved.
[30:38] But unlikely doesn't mean impossible.
[30:41] It's possible that with enough publicity, someone will
[30:44] recognize Roger and remember who he was traveling with in his
[30:48] last days. Even a single thread like that
[30:51] may be enough to crack open a case like this that currently
[30:55] looks extremely difficult to solve.
[31:01] Somewhere in the interior of Antarctica, more than 800 miles
[31:05] from the nearest coast, a rope ran between two buildings.
[31:10] That rope was the only thing standing between a young
[31:12] scientist and the white Nothing on either side of him.
[31:17] On the morning of May 8th, 1965, Carl Dish let go of that rope
[31:22] and nobody knows why. 60 years later, nobody knows where he
[31:27] went. But what we do know is that for
[31:29] six days the search crews on the coldest continent on earth
[31:33] chewed through immense resources looking for him.
[31:37] Carl Dish came from Monroe, WI, a small dairy town with more
[31:41] cows than people. He was 26 that winter, trained
[31:45] as an ionospheric physicist and working for the Central Radio
[31:49] Propagation Laboratory, an arm of what was then the National
[31:53] Bureau of Standards. His specialty was forward
[31:57] scatter, A technique that bounces radio waves off the
[32:01] ionosphere to send signals far beyond the horizon.
[32:05] It's the kind of quiet, precise science that doesn't get statues
[32:09] built for it. But in the global political
[32:12] climate at the time, it mattered enormously.
[32:16] If you wanted to talk to a submarine near the pole or catch
[32:19] the electromagnetic echo of a distant nuclear test, you needed
[32:23] people like Dish measuring the atmosphere from the bottom of
[32:26] the planet. Wintering in the Arctic meant
[32:30] two things, a small team of scientists and Navy support
[32:34] staff, and a long stretch of months in which no aircraft
[32:37] could come in or out. If something went wrong, you
[32:40] were on your own until spring, and Dish had signed on for that
[32:44] that winter. For him, that meant he wasn't
[32:47] going to be seeing much except for Byrd Station.
[32:50] It was named for famed Admiral Richard Byrd, and the base sat
[32:54] at roughly 80° S deep in the West Antarctic interior.
[33:00] It was at an elevation where the air was thin, the sky was
[33:04] frequently gone, and the sun wouldn't rise again for months.
[33:09] The station had something of a grim reputation among Antarctic
[33:12] veterans. Winds came off the polar plateau
[33:15] in long, bruising gusts, and the original surface buildings had
[33:19] already been buried by the relentless snowfall.
[33:23] By 1965, a replacement complex had been tunneled below the ice,
[33:28] essentially a series of corrugated steel arches running
[33:31] beneath the surface. This linked dormitories, a mess
[33:36] hall, the power plant, and the science buildings to one
[33:39] another. What you saw above the surface
[33:43] was just a few antennas, vent pipes, and the glint of a radio
[33:47] mast. Roughly a mile and 1/4 from the
[33:51] main camps at the Radio Noise Laboratory, a small outbuilding
[33:55] where Dish ran his forward scatter experiments, the two
[33:59] structures were linked by a taut safety line, a hand rope you
[34:03] were supposed to grip tight with a mitten fist.
[34:06] Step by step, through whatever the weather threw at you, the
[34:12] morning Dish disappeared. The weather was bad, but nothing
[34:15] incredibly unusual by the standards of the region.
[34:18] Station logs put the temperature near 44° below 0 and the wind
[34:23] around 30 miles an hour. At 80 S in May, that qualifies
[34:29] as a manageable day, perhaps even a fairly nice one, all
[34:33] things considered. Dish had made the walk many
[34:36] times, and that morning he set out to do his ordinary
[34:39] scientific work forward. Scatter experiments involve
[34:43] sending radio pulses at a low angle and listening for the
[34:47] faint reflections that come back after bouncing off the charge
[34:50] layers of the upper atmosphere. You need patience, good
[34:55] equipment and long shifts alone in a quiet building, and Dish
[34:59] had stood those shifts all winter.
[35:02] He finished his at around 9:15 in the morning and clipped out
[35:05] into the dark for the trip back to the main complex, which was
[35:09] about 7000 feet away through blowing snow.
[35:13] But here's the thing. Despite being well equipped and
[35:16] prepared for the journey, he never arrived back at base.
[35:21] Exactly what happened in the minutes after he shut the
[35:24] laboratory door is the central mystery of this case.
[35:29] The leading theory, and the one the authorities eventually
[35:32] settled on, is that Dish let go of the hand line or was blown
[35:36] off it and became disoriented within seconds.
[35:40] In that kind of white out the ground in the sky are the same
[35:44] color, and you can pass within 10 feet of a building you know
[35:47] by heart and never see it. The best guess from those on
[35:52] site was that he turned in the wrong direction and simply
[35:54] started walking, hoping to reach the rope when dish failed to
[35:59] check in. The minute bird did what you do
[36:02] in that environment, they went looking fast because every
[36:06] minute at that temperature shaves your odds.
[36:11] The standard missing person drill at an Antarctic station is
[36:15] grim and efficient, as even small delays usually turn a
[36:19] rescue mission into a recovery. Radio operators tried to reach
[36:24] him on the handheld set he was believed to be carrying, but
[36:27] there was no reply. He hadn't been equipped with any
[36:31] form of emergency shelter, just a parka, mittens and the tools
[36:36] of a physicist. Walking between two buildings,
[36:40] the station fired flares to mark its position against the dark
[36:43] sky, and they rigged extra floodlights anywhere the
[36:47] structures poked above the snow. Teams formed a human chain and
[36:51] swept outward, methodically walking the drifted surface
[36:55] where his Prince seemed to lead. And for a while they had a
[36:59] trail. Faint boot impressions ran out
[37:02] past the hand line, cutting at an angle as if he'd overshot the
[37:07] main camp and kept going. But then the search party had to
[37:11] turn back due to the conditions, and by the time they returned,
[37:16] drifting snow had quietly erased the tracks and with them any
[37:21] chance of catching Carl. Downwind conditions only got
[37:26] worse and over the following days the temperature fell to
[37:29] roughly 79° below 0. The search stretched through
[37:34] from May 9th to May 14th when after six days with no sign of
[37:39] him, the search was officially called off.
[37:43] Dish was presumed to have perished of exposure somewhere
[37:46] on the plateau, and back in Monroe, a memorial service was
[37:50] held for a young man with no coffin to bury.
[37:54] The story might have ended there.
[37:56] It almost did, actually. But then things took a seriously
[37:59] bizarre turn. Six years after he vanished,
[38:04] something strange started showing up in the message queue
[38:07] at McMurdo Station, the main American base on the Ross Sea in
[38:11] the Antarctic. The timing is worth noting, and
[38:14] by then Dish had been missing for almost half a decade and his
[38:19] case was solidly closed. During the long winter of 1971,
[38:25] the teletype at Mcmurdo's message center began printing
[38:28] short transmissions relayed through foreign Antarctic
[38:31] stations. They came in under a call sign
[38:34] that was supposedly Brockton Station, a small American
[38:38] outpost only manned for part of the year, and the sender claimed
[38:42] to be Carl Dish. He claimed to be alive, and he
[38:46] was writing in the first person. And for the men wintering over
[38:50] at McMurdo that year, the transmissions became an
[38:53] obsession. By some accounts, the author
[38:56] described walking away from Bird on purpose, framed himself as
[39:01] someone who'd rejected the ordinary world and made
[39:04] references to his own youth. The messages ran for weeks,
[39:09] reprinted more or less as a curiosity in Mcmurdo's internal
[39:13] newsletter, and then stopped abruptly around the time flights
[39:17] resumed in the spring. No one was ever identified as
[39:21] the sender, and officially the transmissions were dismissed as
[39:25] a hoax. There are good reasons to think
[39:28] that's right, since nobody survived 6 years alone on the
[39:31] Antarctic plateau without resupply.
[39:34] Further, the call sign used belonged to a station that
[39:38] couldn't plausibly have been operating in deep winter.
[39:41] The messages also had a theatrical, confessional tone
[39:45] more suited to a board radio operator with a dark sense of
[39:49] humor than a man clinging to life.
[39:52] Somebody wanted the story reopened, and they had a working
[39:56] inside knowledge of how U.S. military message traffic moved
[40:00] through the Antarctic. Whoever composed them knew
[40:03] enough about the station, the man and the protocols to slip
[40:08] the messages into an official circuit.
[40:11] This has LED some to theorize that it may have been possible
[40:14] that Karl Dish defected to the Soviet Union, that rather than
[40:18] perishing that day, he had somehow liaised with Soviet
[40:21] scientists or intelligence officials.
[40:24] Ultimately, though, while he would have been the sort of
[40:27] person the Soviets would have clearly welcomed with open arms,
[40:31] there are some serious problems with this theory.
[40:35] The closest Soviet base was over 1000 miles away, over terrain
[40:39] that was virtually completely impassable.
[40:42] There was also no signs whatsoever that Carl had any
[40:45] Soviet sympathies or was unhappy with his life in America.
[40:50] Another variant on this theory suggests that Carl was perhaps
[40:53] abducted on the journey back, but again, there's simply no
[40:57] evidence for this, and the distances and the geography
[41:00] don't make sense. If we remove the teletype
[41:04] narrative from the picture and dismiss it as a hoax, what we're
[41:08] still left with is still deeply unsettling.
[41:10] Regardless, Carl was a bright young scientist who planned to
[41:15] walk a route he'd walked dozens of times, and he simply vanished
[41:19] into the wastes of the Antarctic.
[41:22] Somewhere out there, under 60 years of new snow and new ice,
[41:27] there's presumably the remains of a man in a parka still
[41:31] waiting to be found and brought back home to America.

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