# 2 Hours of Dark True Crime Cases | 271

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 9 Jul 2026, 2 h 00 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO6824932440.mp3

Join me for 2 hours of dark true crime cases. Episode 271 of the true crime podcast btw, and a compilation of a number of previous episodes in the series. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: ❤️ 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, cold cases, true crime, true crime solved, 5 true crime cases, cold case compilation, true crime compilation, fall asleep, sleep compilation, sleep video

## Transcript

[0:00] She was 45, a mother of two who'd just gone back to work
[0:04] after decades at home, and in the early morning hours of July
[0:08] 4th, 1997, she walked out of an Indianapolis cocktail lounge.
[0:14] She told her best friend she was good to drive, and she told the
[0:17] boyfriend she'd been hiding for months that she was heading
[0:20] home. Then she climbed into a blue
[0:22] Mercury Sable station wagon and drove off into the dark and
[0:26] nobody ever saw her again. Almost 3 decades on, the car has
[0:31] never turned up, her body has never been found, and no one has
[0:36] ever been charged. Bonnie Schultz had been married
[0:40] to Richard for 26 years by the summer of 1997.
[0:44] They lived on the northwest side of Indianapolis in a quiet
[0:48] stretch of Clayburn Dr. They had two children together, a 15 year
[0:54] old son named Josh and a 10 year old daughter named Gretchen.
[0:58] From the outside they looked like a stable middle class
[1:01] family, but from the inside the marriage had been hollowing out
[1:06] for years. Bonnie had spent most of her
[1:09] adult life as a stay at home mother, but only a few months
[1:13] before she vanished she took a part time job as an inventory
[1:17] clerk. The job itself was simple and
[1:20] straightforward, and it offered a way for her to build her
[1:23] resume and her savings and by association, her freedom from
[1:27] the marriage. For the first time in over 2
[1:31] decades, she was meeting people outside the orbit of her
[1:33] household, and one of those people was a man she worked
[1:36] with. He was younger, available, and
[1:40] apparently very interested. Bonnie began an affair with him,
[1:46] and by all later accounts, she fell hard.
[1:49] By the early summer of that year, she'd reached a decision
[1:53] She wanted out of the marriage. When she told Richard she wanted
[1:57] a divorce, he didn't take it. Well, he didn't take it at all,
[2:02] in fact, and refused to consent to the divorce.
[2:06] He wanted counseling and a chance to fight for the
[2:08] marriage, but Bonnie wanted neither.
[2:12] That argument was still hanging in the air on the night of July
[2:15] 3rd when she put on a striped blouse, Navy pants and sandals,
[2:21] picked up her tan purse, and drove out to meet her friends.
[2:26] The plan that night was a birthday celebration for one of
[2:29] Bonnie's Co workers from the inventory job.
[2:32] The group ended up at the Time Out Lounge, a bar near the
[2:36] intersection of 62nd St. and Allisonville Rd. on the city's
[2:40] north side. With her were two people who
[2:43] knew the deepest parts of her life at that moment, her best
[2:47] friend and her boyfriend, the same man from work she'd been
[2:51] seeing in secret for months. By the time she pulled into the
[2:54] parking lot, she was already a wreck.
[2:57] According to what those two later told police, she sat down
[3:01] and immediately unloaded on them.
[3:03] She and Richard had had a brutal verbal conflict earlier in the
[3:07] day, with Richard insisting that he wouldn't consent to a
[3:09] divorce. Then, slowly, the night did its
[3:13] work. There were drinks and
[3:15] conversation, the crowd loosened and the music kept playing.
[3:21] By the time last call rolled around, Bonnie had calmed down.
[3:26] The friend and the boyfriend both later said she seemed
[3:29] steady, even cheerful. When they walked her to the
[3:32] door, she told them she was driving straight home to deal
[3:36] with whatever came next. Claiborne Drive was a few miles
[3:40] to the West, an easy run down familiar streets at an hour when
[3:44] the city was effectively empty. But she never made it.
[3:49] When Richard woke up that morning, his wife wasn't there.
[3:53] According to the account he later gave investigators, he
[3:57] didn't panic. He assumed she'd been drinking,
[4:00] decided to crash at a Co worker's house and would surface
[4:04] during the day. He didn't call the police, and
[4:07] he didn't drive out looking for her.
[4:10] Hours passed. Their two kids were in the
[4:13] house. Lunchtime came and went.
[4:17] By late afternoon, she still hadn't come home.
[4:20] And around 5:00 in the evening on July 4th, roughly 13 hours
[4:24] after she was last seen, Richard finally filed a missing persons
[4:28] report. That delay would become one of
[4:31] the most chewed over details. For years, investigators have
[4:35] pointed out that even if Bonnie had simply crashed at a Co
[4:38] worker's place, she wouldn't have stayed gone all day without
[4:42] calling the kids. Richard's account of the night
[4:45] was straightforward on the surface.
[4:48] He said he and Bonnie had argued earlier that day about the
[4:50] divorce and that he'd gone to bed expecting her to come home.
[4:54] Eventually, he acknowledged the marriage was in trouble.
[4:57] But he insisted he didn't believe his wife would simply
[5:00] walk out without warning, especially without saying
[5:03] anything to the children. Investigators at first took that
[5:07] voluntary disappearance hypothesis seriously.
[5:11] The early theory was that Bonnie, exhausted by a marriage
[5:14] she couldn't get out of and apparently in love with someone
[5:17] else, had decided to disappear on her own terms.
[5:22] It's not unheard of, and adults vanish themselves out of bad
[5:26] lives all the time, though much less often in a situation like
[5:30] this where there are family members she cared about.
[5:34] The problem was that none of the practical mechanics of a
[5:37] voluntary disappearance held up. Bonnie's bank accounts were
[5:41] untouched and stayed that way. Her cell phone, the one she'd
[5:45] been carrying in her purse, went silent and stayed silent.
[5:50] There was no suitcase missing from the closet, no withdrawal
[5:54] of cash, no goodbye letter and no contact with the boyfriend
[5:59] she'd just been promising a future to a few hours earlier.
[6:04] Detectives quietly shifted their thinking, and the working theory
[6:08] inside the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department
[6:11] was that Bonnie hadn't run. She'd been taken in the early
[6:17] stages of the investigation. Police asked both of the men in
[6:21] Bonnie's life to sit for polygraph examinations.
[6:24] The boyfriend agreed. He sat down, answered the
[6:28] questions, and the examiner recorded his results as showing
[6:33] no deception. As far as the polygraph could
[6:36] tell, he didn't know what had happened to Bonnie that night,
[6:40] and he was effectively cleared as a person of interest.
[6:42] In the months that followed, Richard sat down, too, and his
[6:48] test came back the other way, with the examiner's report
[6:51] indicating deception on the questions that mattered most.
[6:55] Polygraphs aren't admissible in court, and they're famously
[6:59] imperfect even as investigative aides.
[7:03] Polygraphs don't measure truth or lies directly by any means
[7:06] whatsoever, but rather they measure physiological responses
[7:10] to questions. Someone who is stressed or
[7:14] anxious or otherwise under duress may, quote UN quote, fail
[7:18] a polygraph test. I also have to question why
[7:22] Richard would even consent to a polygraph test at all if he had
[7:26] in fact done it. But in a case with no body, no
[7:30] car, and no crime scene, that result fundamentally reshaped
[7:34] where investigators looked from then on for nearly 30 years, the
[7:39] Indianapolis detectives working the case have privately and
[7:43] publicly named Richard as their primary focus of the
[7:46] investigation. Personally, I think this was
[7:49] almost certainly a mistake. As I'll get into shortly, the
[7:54] 1990 Mercury Sable station wagon is the strangest part of this
[7:58] whole case. Cars are large, awkward objects,
[8:01] and they get logged when they're towed and flagged when they're
[8:04] impounded. And a vehicle with a registered
[8:07] Indiana plate doesn't usually evaporate.
[8:10] Yet from the morning Bonnie drove out of the Time Out Lounge
[8:13] parking lot, the Sable hasn't surfaced anywhere.
[8:17] Not in a salvage yard, not in an out of state registration
[8:21] database, not in a police impound, Not in any other corner
[8:26] of the country where stolen cars eventually surface.
[8:29] That absence has driven a long parade of theories, and the most
[8:34] popular is that the car ended up in water.
[8:37] Indianapolis sits on the White River and is laced with
[8:40] retention ponds, gravel pits and old quarries, and a sinking
[8:45] vehicle could plausibly stay hidden for decades.
[8:49] In April of 2022, a volunteer underwater recovery team that
[8:53] travels the country searching for missing persons vehicles
[8:57] came to Indianapolis to look for Bonnie's car.
[9:01] Over several days of sonar work and dives along the routes she
[9:05] might have taken, the team pulled a number of submerged
[9:08] cars out of local waterways, but none of them was hers.
[9:13] A second theory is that the sable was driven somewhere
[9:16] remote and either buried or crushed, which would have
[9:20] required help planning and a private place to put it. 1/3 is
[9:26] that it was simply dumped at the right chop shop operation,
[9:30] broken down for parts and resold piece by piece before anyone
[9:34] even knew Bonnie was missing. None of these has ever been
[9:38] corroborated, and none of them gets investigators any closer to
[9:42] the woman herself. The Indianapolis Metropolitan
[9:46] Police Department still has the Schultz case file open.
[9:50] It's been handed across more than one cold case unit over the
[9:53] decades, and despite a complete absence of physical evidence,
[9:57] nobody in the department seems willing to write it off.
[10:01] The detectives who've worked it most recently have said publicly
[10:05] that they believe Bonnie was the victim of foul play and that no
[10:09] one has been ruled out as a suspect.
[10:13] One possibility that deserves more weight is the simplest
[10:17] physical explanation. Bonnie Schultz may have
[10:20] accidentally driven into water. It sounds almost too mundane for
[10:24] a case that has been treated as suspicious for decades, but the
[10:28] missing car is the center of the mystery.
[10:32] Bonnie didn't vanish on foot. She left in a blue Mercury Sable
[10:36] station wagon, and from that moment forward, both Bonnie and
[10:40] the car disappeared. A person can be hidden fairly
[10:44] easily and a body can be moved, but a full size station wagon is
[10:49] much harder to erase unless it ends up somewhere no one can
[10:53] see. In that scenario, the late hour,
[10:57] the emotional stress of the night, alcohol consumption and
[11:01] dark roads all become important. Bonnie had been upset earlier,
[11:06] then apparently calmed down, and she told the people with her
[11:10] that she was going home. If she took a wrong turn, lost
[11:14] control, nodded off, misjudged a curve, or drifted into a pond,
[11:20] quarry, retention basin, or river access point, the car
[11:25] could have gone under easily. Indianapolis and its surrounding
[11:29] areas have enough waterways, ponds, gravel pits, and
[11:33] industrial water hazards that this isn't far fetched.
[11:38] The biggest point is this. Absolutely no physical evidence
[11:42] has ever tied Richard Schultz to any crime whatsoever.
[11:45] Nothing physical has ever connected him to any criminal
[11:48] act either. And suspicion isn't proof.
[11:51] A bad marriage, a failed polygraph, jealousy, or delayed
[11:56] reporting can make someone look questionable, but none of that
[12:00] proves anything on its own. And As for the failed polygraph
[12:04] test, Richard was under extreme psychological duress at the
[12:08] time, and besides, there was nothing compelling him to take a
[12:12] polygraph test regardless if he had been involved, it simply
[12:17] doesn't make sense to me that he would have cooperated with
[12:19] investigators at all, since he was under no obligation to do
[12:23] so. Until the car is found, the
[12:27] water accident theory remains one of the cleanest
[12:30] explanations. It accounts for Bonnie's
[12:33] disappearance and the vehicle's disappearance at the same time
[12:36] without requiring a hidden crime scene, a perfect clean up, or a
[12:41] decades long concealment. That said, it's always possible
[12:45] that the police are holding back additional evidence that
[12:48] contradicts this theory, given that this is an active and
[12:51] ongoing investigation. But given the period of time
[12:55] that's passed, I find this increasingly unlikely as this
[12:59] sort of closely held evidence generally eventually gets tossed
[13:03] out as a Hail Mary passed decades on.
[13:07] In the end, I believe that if this cold case mystery is going
[13:10] to be cracked, it'll be due to the effort of dive teams.
[13:18] She left a small house in Taniger in Norway sometime after
[13:21] midnight, and the circumstances of what happened and why it
[13:24] happened have never been fully explained. 2 people who knew her
[13:29] went with her walking down toward the container yard at
[13:32] Risavika on the southwestern Norwegian coast.
[13:37] Only two of them came back. And for the next three years,
[13:40] the official answer to what had happened to Lena Carlson was
[13:44] that nobody, anywhere knew a thing.
[13:49] The strangest part of the whole story is that the truth had been
[13:52] sitting in someone's living room the entire time, waiting for a
[13:56] marriage to fall apart. Lena Carlson was 35 in the
[14:00] spring of 2005. She'd grown up in Lillesond, A
[14:05] postcard pretty town along the southern coast, and was raising
[14:09] three children, all of them young enough to still need her
[14:12] every day. Her youngest daughter's father
[14:15] was a man named Helga Ivar Brayland Patterson, an
[14:20] ex-husband she still saw from time to time because of their
[14:23] shared child. They'd separated years earlier,
[14:27] but the two of them maintained the kind of slightly awkward
[14:29] arrangement that comes with shared parenting.
[14:33] Friends and relatives later described Lena as the kind of
[14:36] mother whose absence would be noticed within hours rather than
[14:39] days. She kept in regular contact with
[14:42] relatives back in Lillesonde, kept a routine, and rarely left
[14:47] a phone unanswered for long. On the evening of March 6th,
[14:52] 2005, she was visiting Pederson at his place in Tanninger, just
[14:57] north of Stavinger on the Rogaland coast.
[15:01] He had a new partner, now a fiance, he was about to marry,
[15:05] and the three of them spent the night together.
[15:08] There's no indication that the visit was unusual for her,
[15:12] though it sounds a little strange to me.
[15:15] People who knew the family later described the arrangement as
[15:18] some kind of post relationship truce.
[15:22] That said, I'm working from sources auto translated from
[15:25] Norwegian here, so I do admit that something may have been
[15:28] lost in that process. At some point, the group decided
[15:33] to head down to the sea, and that short walk would be the
[15:36] last confirmed sighting of Lena Carlson anywhere on Earth.
[15:42] Here's the strange thing about how this case began.
[15:45] Lena wasn't reported missing for weeks.
[15:47] Her family in Lillesan started raising the alarm only on April
[15:51] 14th, more than a month after the night in Tanninger.
[15:55] It tells you something about how carefully the people who saw her
[15:58] last had managed the situation because they simply went on with
[16:03] their lives as though nothing had happened.
[16:07] It also gave whoever was responsible an enormous head
[16:11] start on the kind of clean up work that becomes harder once
[16:15] the police start asking questions.
[16:18] When Norwegian police did open a missing persons inquiry, they
[16:22] hit a wall almost immediately. Lena had no obvious reason to
[16:27] walk away from her life. Her bank account wasn't being
[16:30] touched, no border crossing had pinged her name, and her
[16:33] children weren't being contacted.
[16:36] Officers questioned more than 70 witnesses over the following
[16:39] months and came up with rumors and a few uncomfortable looks
[16:42] from people who knew Peterson, but nothing they recovered was
[16:46] solid enough to put in front of a prosecutor, at least at that
[16:50] point. The harbor itself was searched.
[16:54] Divers went into the water around Reesevika, and the
[16:57] surrounding shoreline was walked again and again, but nothing
[17:01] surfaced. By February 2006, less than a
[17:05] year after the disappearance, the active investigation was
[17:09] effectively shut down, and by November of that same year, the
[17:14] case was formally shelved. As far as the Norwegian justice
[17:18] system was concerned, Lena Carlson had walked into the dark
[17:23] and never come back. The break came in the summer of
[17:27] 2008. Peterson's then fiance had
[17:30] become his wife in the years since Lena vanished, and the
[17:33] marriage hadn't lasted. After the relationship fell
[17:37] apart, she walked into a police station and told officers
[17:41] something they hadn't been able to extract from anyone else.
[17:45] She'd been there and she'd watched the whole thing.
[17:47] And according to the account she gave investigators, the night
[17:51] had unfolded something like this.
[17:54] For reasons that haven't fully been explained, the three of
[17:57] them had walked down to the harbor in Risavika together.
[18:01] Once they were there, Peterson had attacked Lena with a hammer,
[18:05] struck her several times and then strangled her until she
[18:08] stopped moving. The witness described the body
[18:12] being weighted down with concrete blocks and dropped into
[18:15] the sea, allegedly dragged out behind a boat to deeper water
[18:20] before being released. She also explained why she
[18:24] hadn't gone to the police at the time.
[18:26] She'd been terrified of Peterson, financially dependent
[18:30] on the household they shared and unsure whether anyone would have
[18:33] believed her if she'd spoken up. By 2008, all of that had
[18:38] changed, and investigators went back through the original 2005
[18:42] case file. They cross checked her timeline
[18:45] against the few details they'd nailed down at the time, and
[18:49] found that her story slotted into the existing record with
[18:52] uncomfortable precision. Peterson was arrested and
[18:56] charged with the slaying of Lena Carlson.
[18:59] The case that prosecutors took into Stavanger District Court
[19:02] was, by Norwegian standards, deeply unusual.
[19:07] There was no body, no forensic trail, no recovered weapon, and
[19:11] no scene that could be processed for fresh evidence five years
[19:14] after the fact. The harbor at Rusevika had been
[19:18] searched time and time again without yielding anything that
[19:21] could be tied to Lena specifically.
[19:24] Everything the state had in terms of evidence came down to
[19:27] one woman's recollection of a night she'd spent five years
[19:30] trying to forget. She was also someone who had an
[19:34] incentive to downplay any role she may have had in that night,
[19:38] which complicated the evidence she gave even further.
[19:42] That's a fragile foundation for any prosecution, and in most
[19:46] Western legal systems, the body of the victim has historically
[19:50] been treated as something close to a prerequisite for a
[19:53] successful trial. The fear is obvious, since
[19:57] without a body you can't be entirely certain a crime even
[20:00] took place. Norway, in case you were
[20:04] wondering, has the equivalent of our common law double jeopardy
[20:08] rule. That means that if Peterson was
[20:11] charged initially and the prosecution failed for lack of a
[20:14] body, if it was discovered later, prosecutors would be out
[20:19] of luck. It was a massive gamble for the
[20:22] prosecution, and the defense leaned hard on exactly this
[20:25] point. They argued that Lena could
[20:28] still be alive somewhere, that the witness was lying or
[20:31] mistaken, and that without physical proof there was
[20:36] reasonable doubt by definition. However, unlike in our system,
[20:41] Norway doesn't have traditional juries, so judges alone decide
[20:45] the case. I'd argue that in this case,
[20:48] that fact came down in favor of the prosecution.
[20:51] As you're about to see, the judge spent significant time
[20:55] reconstructing the witness's account in open court.
[20:59] The judge noted the specificity of the details she'd provided
[21:03] and the absence of any plausible motive for her to invent the
[21:05] story. In 2010, Peterson was convicted
[21:10] of the slaying, and his initial sentence was 19 years in the
[21:14] slammer. Apparently, this is an unusually
[21:17] long term in the Norwegian system that reflected how
[21:20] dangerous the court considered him to be on release.
[21:24] Personally, I thought it was quite light given the gravity of
[21:28] his actions. Notably, that decision broke new
[21:32] ground. It was the first time a
[21:34] Norwegian court had convicted someone where the victim's
[21:37] remains had never been recovered.
[21:40] Legal scholars around the country took note, and the case
[21:43] became a reference point for prosecutors considering whether
[21:46] to bring charges and other investigations with no body.
[21:51] For a country that had historically required physical
[21:54] evidence in cases of this gravity, that was a significant
[21:57] shift. The conviction wasn't the end of
[22:01] the legal story. Peterson appealed, and the Court
[22:05] of Appeals re examined the evidence.
[22:06] The following year, the appellate panel reached the same
[22:10] conclusion about his guilt but adjusted the sentence downward,
[22:14] settling on 15 years in prison with a minimum term of 10 years.
[22:20] The reduction apparently reflected procedural
[22:22] considerations more than any new doubt about what had happened on
[22:26] the harbor that night. Peterson never revealed the
[22:30] location of Lena's body, and she still remains missing until this
[22:34] day, with Peterson maintaining that he didn't do it.
[22:39] Disturbingly, he was released in 2019 and has been in and out of
[22:43] prison since that time for parole violations.
[22:50] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here with my usual reminder to hit
[22:53] the subscribe button and the notification bell.
[22:56] Also, remember to hit that share button and send this video to
[22:59] any of your friends and family members that enjoy true crime
[23:03] content and unsolved Mysteries. There's a black and white
[23:10] mugshot from 1979 of a young man with long dark hair and the kind
[23:15] of face you wouldn't think twice about if you passed it in a
[23:17] small town diner. His name is Jimmy Long, and
[23:21] sometime on a cool November evening in north Louisiana, he
[23:25] climbed into a stranger's car at a truck stop along the highway.
[23:29] He was seen saying something to two men he'd never met.
[23:33] And then, just like that, he was never seen again.
[23:37] Calhoun, LA, is a sleepy little stretch of homes, gas stations
[23:43] and timberland sitting just West of Monroe along the corridor
[23:48] that would later become Interstate 20.
[23:51] It's the kind of place where the highways, the loudest thing for
[23:54] miles and trucks rolling east West between Dallas and Atlanta,
[23:59] are part of the background hum of life.
[24:03] In 1979, the town wasn't even incorporated.
[24:06] It was just a name on a map and an exit sign.
[24:10] The truck stop where Jimmy was last seen was one of those off
[24:14] ramp hubs that fed and fueled long haul drivers passing
[24:18] through the Deep South. By all accounts, Jimmy was a
[24:21] fairly ordinary or even unremarkable young man, though
[24:25] that detail, or lack of one may simply be a function of how
[24:30] obscure his case is. He'd been born on August 15th,
[24:35] 1953 in Louisiana, which made him 26 years old that autumn.
[24:41] He stood 6 foot 1 and weighed about 175 lbs with brown hair,
[24:46] blue eyes, and a bill that records describe as average.
[24:51] His dental information would be filed away after he disappeared,
[24:55] which was standard for the era, but there's no genetic sample on
[24:59] file. We know he was arrested at some
[25:02] point in 1979, which is how we have a picture of Jimmy, but
[25:07] even that element is mysterious. We have no idea why he was
[25:11] arrested, what he was doing at the truck stop that night, and
[25:15] where he was supposed to be going next.
[25:17] None of that ever made it into the public record in a way
[25:20] investigators have been willing to share.
[25:24] The day Jimmy vanished was Sunday, November 18th, 1979.
[25:30] According to what's been pieced together from the original
[25:32] reporting, he was seen at the truck stop in Calhoun, and at
[25:36] some point he got into a vehicle with two other men.
[25:40] The car was a late model Ford in a soft shade of brown with a
[25:44] vinyl top, a detail that puts it firmly in its decade.
[25:48] The two men inside were white, and they were strangers to him,
[25:52] at least as far as anyone has ever been able to determine.
[25:56] One detail from the early case file has stuck around in every
[25:59] retelling since. The men reportedly told someone
[26:02] at the stop that they were from Mississippi.
[26:05] That's it, That's everything. He got in.
[26:09] The doors closed and the car pulled away from the truck stop
[26:13] in the direction of whatever they had planned next.
[26:16] No one ever saw Jimmy Long again.
[26:19] A missing person case in 1979 didn't move the way one would
[26:23] today. There were no surveillance
[26:25] cameras at truck stops, no cell tower pings to pull, and no
[26:30] national database that could flag a name within hours.
[26:34] Police agencies often wouldn't even open a missing adult case
[26:37] for days, on the theory that a healthy man in his 20s might
[26:41] have simply walked off and started a new life.
[26:45] By the time anyone was sure Jimmy hadn't taken off on his
[26:48] own, the trail was already cooling, and whatever physical
[26:52] evidence might have been at that truck stop was long gone.
[26:56] And that's another thing about this case that can't be
[26:58] pinpointed from the limited details on file.
[27:02] We have absolutely no idea who even reported him missing or
[27:05] why. Anyway, unfortunately, that's
[27:09] really all there is to say about this case since there's just not
[27:12] much out there on it. I'm not going to speculate too
[27:15] much here, since ultimately we have virtually no evidence to
[27:19] work with. Since the case never achieved
[27:21] much beyond minimal local coverage, it's possible that the
[27:25] two men, if they were from Mississippi, simply never knew
[27:29] they were being looked for. It's also very easy to assume
[27:32] these two had something to do with whatever befell Jimmy, but
[27:36] again, due to the lack of evidence, it's impossible to
[27:41] even say that much. In an age where nothing was
[27:45] really monitored and anyone could reinvent themselves, Jimmy
[27:49] could have hitchhiked 50 more times before something happened.
[27:53] And based on the evidence we have, it's not even clear to me
[27:57] that he met with a grim fate at all.
[28:01] It's possible that for reasons that we can't know, he simply
[28:04] wanted to have nothing to do with his old life anymore, which
[28:08] may have been why he was hitch hiking to begin with.
[28:12] After all, we know at the very least that he got mixed up with
[28:15] the law, which may have given him an incentive to start fresh
[28:19] elsewhere. There's been a number of cases
[28:23] recently where people who have been missing for 40 or 50 years
[28:27] have turned up alive and well, having left entirely
[28:30] voluntarily. While the circumstances of
[28:34] Jimmy's last known movement certainly seemed suspicious,
[28:38] there's really no evidence that he wasn't just moving along to
[28:41] the next place the road took him.
[28:43] Also, I just realized as I was editing that I said that I
[28:47] wasn't going to speculate, and then I went totally off script
[28:50] and speculated for like 2 minutes.
[28:56] On a spring morning in 19 O 8, the gates of the Oregon State
[29:00] Penitentiary swung open and a stooped, white haired Irishman
[29:04] shuffled out into the Salem sunshine.
[29:07] He was somewhere on the far side of 60, depending on which census
[29:11] you trusted, and he just spent 13 years inside for a crime he'd
[29:16] always insisted he hadn't done. A handful of reporters were
[29:20] waiting at the curb. He gave them a few lines, tucked
[29:24] A manuscript under one arm, and walked off down the road.
[29:29] After that, the historical record just stops.
[29:33] Joseph Kelly, better known to the Wharf rats of the Pacific
[29:36] Northwest as Bunco, simply vanishes.
[29:41] No reliable source has ever pinned down where he went, when
[29:44] he passed, or whether he even made it out of that year alive.
[29:49] In the late 19th century, every busy seaport on Earth ran into
[29:53] the same trouble. Ships needed crews, and crews
[29:57] didn't want to go. That's where a guy like Joseph
[30:00] Kelly came into play, and let's just say he probably made more
[30:04] than a few enemies. A voyage out of Portland OR San
[30:08] Francisco could last two or three years.
[30:10] The food was foul, the discipline brutal, and the pay
[30:14] miserable. Captain's preparing to sail
[30:17] almost always found themselves short of warm bodies, and that's
[30:20] where the crimps came in. A crimp was a man, or
[30:25] occasionally a woman, who ran a sailor's boarding house and made
[30:28] his money by delivering able bodied men to outbound ships, no
[30:32] questions asked. The captain paid a fairly
[30:36] handsome sum of money, usually a large slice of the sailor's
[30:40] advance wages, and the crimp pocketed it.
[30:44] If the man happened to be drugged, beaten, or unconscious
[30:48] when he arrived, that was simply a detail that could be worked
[30:52] out while they were on the ship. The boarding house economy
[30:56] around the whole business was its own ecosystem.
[30:59] A crimps house took in board, lodging and clothing on credit
[31:03] against a sailor's future wages. By the time the man was put
[31:08] aboard ship, his books were so deep in arrears that the entire
[31:12] advance from the captain went straight to the crimp.
[31:16] The sailor woke up at sea, broke and bound to a long voyage, and
[31:20] started the cycle all over again at the other end.
[31:24] The trade had its own grim toolkit.
[31:27] Crimps spiked drinks with laudanum or chloral hydrate,
[31:30] pulled men through trapdoors, and stuffed them into carts
[31:33] bound for the docks. The verb Shanghai came into
[31:36] English specifically to describe this practice, since Shanghai
[31:40] was one of the longest and most dreaded destinations a sailor
[31:44] could wake up bound for. By the 1880s, Portland had
[31:49] earned A reputation as one of the worst ports in the country
[31:52] for it, thanks to an almost total lack of meaningful
[31:55] policing. There was also the fact that the
[31:59] law itself hadn't properly addressed the practice, likely
[32:03] because it was considered a necessary evil for international
[32:06] commerce. Federal legislation in the early
[32:09] 1900s eventually clamped down hard on the practice, but in the
[32:14] years Kelly was working, the whole business was wide open.
[32:20] Kelly drifted into Portland in the 1870s, having come from
[32:24] Liverpool by way of the East Coast.
[32:27] He was Irish born, slight and physically unimpressive, but he
[32:31] had feral charisma and a real gift for running a good swindle.
[32:35] The nickname Bunco came from the slang of the day for con games,
[32:40] and Kelly ironically earned it. Honestly, at least in the
[32:44] framework of his own world. He ran boarding houses near the
[32:48] riverfront, the most famous of them in what's now Old Town, and
[32:52] kept a stable of runners who haunted the salons looking for
[32:55] marks. His operation leaned on a tight
[32:58] little network of bartenders, ladies of negotiable affections,
[33:03] sympathetic landlords, and the occasional corrupt constable.
[33:08] All of these individuals could be relied on to point men his
[33:11] way or hold them somewhere quiet until a ship was ready.
[33:16] The legends that grew up around him in the local press were
[33:19] lurid even by the standards of 19th century crime reporting.
[33:24] The most famous claimed that Kelly once stumbled across a
[33:27] group of men who'd broken into the basement of a funeral
[33:31] parlor, thinking they'd found a hidden saloon.
[33:35] They'd help themselves to what turned out to be embalming
[33:38] fluid, and several were already deceased by the time he found
[33:42] them. According to the story, Kelly
[33:45] bundled the corpses and the survivors alike onto a waiting
[33:49] ship and collected payment on the lot.
[33:52] Kelly was already halfway home before the captain realized half
[33:56] his so-called crew wasn't breathing.
[33:58] The captain, for his part, had no recourse since Kelly and his
[34:02] associates had a stranglehold on the provision of additional men
[34:06] for ships. Simply put, if Kelly wouldn't do
[34:09] business with you, your ship may not be leaving port anytime soon
[34:14] for lack of manpower. Whether this event actually
[34:17] happened or not isn't actually clear, but what's not debatable
[34:22] is that people who knew him thought this was true.
[34:26] Personally, I think it sounds a little too perfect, which is why
[34:30] out of all the stories about him, it's so tempting to retell.
[34:35] Better documented is the sheer volume of the trade that Kelly
[34:38] was taking part in. Court records and contemporary
[34:41] newspaper accounts show that Kelly was, for roughly 15 years,
[34:46] one of the busiest crimps in the Pacific Northwest.
[34:50] He moved men by the dozen through his houses and onto the
[34:53] deep water merchant fleets headed to Asia.
[34:58] In the autumn of 1894, the streak finally broke when a man
[35:01] named George Sayers was found beaten to death and Kelly was
[35:04] arrested for the slaying. The prosecution leaned heavily
[35:09] on the testimony of a young dock worker who described being
[35:12] present when the attack took place and named Kelly as the
[35:16] attacker. The defense leaned on character
[35:19] witnesses and on the argument that the alleged motive, a
[35:23] quarrel over a relatively small sum of money, made no sense.
[35:28] They claimed that since his quote UN quote business turned
[35:31] over far larger amounts of money every day, it wouldn't have made
[35:35] any sense to commit the crime. Interestingly, they admitted
[35:40] that his day-to-day operations were built on an inherent sort
[35:43] of violence. There's something inherently
[35:46] humorous about this sort of defense, since it almost implies
[35:50] that Kelly was the kind of guy who would beat someone to death
[35:53] for a larger sum. Kelly insisted from the first
[35:56] day to the last that he'd been framed, possibly by rival
[36:01] crimps, possibly by police officers who'd grown tired of
[36:05] him. Unsurprisingly, the jury didn't
[36:09] believe a word of it, and he was convicted and sentenced to life
[36:12] at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.
[36:16] The trial split public opinion sharply.
[36:19] Some saw it as overdue justice for a man who'd grown rich on
[36:23] human misery, while others detected the distinct smell of a
[36:27] fix. And to be honest, we really
[36:30] don't know whether he did it or not, since the world he operated
[36:33] in was extremely dark, to say the least.
[36:37] Inside, by all accounts, he was a quiet, cooperative prisoner.
[36:42] He worked, kept to himself, and spent a fair portion of his free
[36:46] hours writing. The result was a slim, self
[36:50] justifying memoir titled 13 Years in the Oregon
[36:53] Penitentiary, which he managed to get into print shortly before
[36:57] his release. It's part autobiography, part
[37:01] complaint about the prison system, part theatrical
[37:05] performance, and the closest thing to a primary source we
[37:09] have in his own voice about the crime.
[37:12] And I say closest thing here because he had a strong motive
[37:14] to make himself look as good as possible.
[37:17] Various petitions for clemency made their way to successive
[37:20] governors over the years, and in March of 19 O 8, the governor
[37:25] signed an order commuting his sentence.
[37:29] And here's where the trail goes properly cold.
[37:32] The Portland Papers ran a few short pieces on the release.
[37:36] They mostly focused on noting that the old crimper planned to
[37:39] leave the area and try his luck somewhere new.
[37:42] One account had him talking about San Francisco, another
[37:46] mentioned New York, and a third claimed he'd been spotted
[37:50] boarding a Chicago bound train just a few days later.
[37:54] None of those leads ever produced a confirmed sighting,
[37:57] and it's unclear how true any of these accounts were.
[38:01] Newspapers at the time were eager for Joseph Kelly stories,
[38:05] and journalistic standards at the time were questionable to
[38:08] say the least. There's no death certificate
[38:11] filed in Oregon under his name for 19 O 8 or any year close to
[38:15] it, and the major Pacific Coast papers never ran an obituary.
[38:20] The cities he'd supposedly mentioned turned up no later
[38:23] arrest and no boarding house registration in his name.
[38:28] He simply walked out of the penitentiary and out of the
[38:30] documentary record at the very same moment.
[38:34] Here was a man whose name had been printed thousands of times
[38:37] in the newspapers over the better part of two decades, and
[38:42] in his mid 60s he managed to disappear so completely that no
[38:46] one's retraced his steps in over 100 years of looking.
[38:50] My own personal theory is that Kelly never made it very far at
[38:54] all. He had spent years in a trade
[38:56] built on betrayal, violence, debt, and humiliation, and men
[39:02] like that don't leave clean ledgers behind.
[39:05] Every sailor he tricked onto a ship, every rival he undercut,
[39:09] and every family that lost someone to the waterfront
[39:12] machine became a possible source of burning hatred.
[39:16] Prison may have protected him from those old enemies for 13
[39:20] years, but release put him back into the world as an old man
[39:24] with a notorious name and very few allies.
[39:28] And I think that last part is important because when he went
[39:31] in the slammer he had an organization and people to
[39:34] protect him, but when he got out, it was all gone.
[39:39] If someone he had wronged heard he was free, it wouldn't have
[39:42] required a grand plan. It could have been a single
[39:46] former victim, A relative, A rival crimp, or someone from the
[39:51] Sayers orbit who believed Kelly had escaped full justice.
[39:56] Maybe Kelly walked out of prison and someone from his past was
[39:59] waiting close enough to make sure the old crimper never
[40:02] started over. It was Father's Day morning
[40:05] 1991, and four security guards punched in at one of the tallest
[40:09] buildings in downtown Denver. They drank coffee and a few of
[40:13] them watched a little television in the break area.
[40:16] Between rounds, they walked their patrol routes through
[40:19] corridors that on a normal weekday held thousands of office
[40:23] workers. But on this Sunday held almost
[40:26] no one at all. By the time the city woke up
[40:29] Monday morning, every one of them was deceased in a basement
[40:32] vault room, and a bag of cash was gone.
[40:36] The man Denver police are convinced committed this act
[40:39] would walk out of a courthouse a free man.
[40:41] Less than a year later, and the case remains a truly disturbing
[40:45] unsolved mystery. the United Bank tower sat at 17th and
[40:50] Broadway, a bronze glass slab that for a brief stretch in the
[40:54] 1980s was the tallest building in Colorado.
[40:58] Bank operations occupied the lowest floors, with a vault
[41:01] complex and processing rooms tucked into the basement levels
[41:05] and a banking lobby on the floors just above.
[41:09] Office tenants filled the rest of the tower.
[41:12] On weekdays. The place hummed with thousands
[41:14] of workers and customers on Sundays, though it was nearly
[41:18] empty, with most offices dark from Friday evening until Monday
[41:22] morning. That's the world the four guards
[41:26] walked into on June 16th. No customers, no tellers,
[41:30] nothing on the calendar except a vault that had been loaded with
[41:33] cash on Saturday. The senior man on shift that day
[41:37] was Philip Mankoff, a long time guard at the building who knew
[41:40] every corridor and stairwell by memory.
[41:43] He was in his 40s and reportedly well liked by both his crew and
[41:48] the Banks full time staff. Working alongside him was
[41:52] William Renee McCullum Junior, a guard in his early 30s who often
[41:56] pulled the late in weekend shifts.
[41:59] He was known by the Banks full time staff as the most outgoing
[42:02] of the group, the easygoing 1 who'd swap a joke in the staff
[42:06] lounge before heading back into the corridors.
[42:10] Rounding out the team were two younger men.
[42:13] Scott McCarthy was in his early 20s and relatively new to the
[42:17] post, but he'd already developed a reputation for being
[42:20] meticulous about his patrol logs and his check insurance.
[42:25] Todd Wilson, also in his early 20s and the newest of the four,
[42:29] had reportedly been considering a future in law enforcement.
[42:34] He saw the guard job as a stepping stone towards something
[42:37] more permanent. But of course, that wasn't to
[42:40] be. By every account that
[42:43] investigators were later able to reconstruct, the morning of June
[42:47] 16th began without incident. Patrol logs and witness
[42:51] statements paint a picture of routine, the slow rhythm of a
[42:55] quiet weekend shift built around coffee, breakfast, and casual
[42:59] chatter. Mankoff and McCullum took the
[43:02] early hours together, and McCarthy and Wilson came on
[43:06] later in the morning. Cameras inside and around the
[43:09] building recorded portions of those early hours, footage that
[43:13] detectives would later comb through looking for a single
[43:16] glimpse of an unwelcome visitor. The vault on the lower level had
[43:21] been loaded with currency on Saturday for processing the
[43:24] following week. Estimates of how much cash sat
[43:27] behind those steel doors that morning have varied over the
[43:30] years, but the figure has consistently landed in the low
[43:34] hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[43:37] What investigators eventually pieced together is that the
[43:41] gunman, or possibly more than one, somehow made it past the
[43:45] building's substantial layers of security.
[43:49] He then ended up face to face with the four guards on the
[43:52] lower level of the bank. There's no consensus on how that
[43:55] initial contact happened. 1 theory holds that the guards
[43:59] were summoned down to the vault area one at a time, under the
[44:02] pretense of routine work. Another holds that whoever did
[44:07] this had keys, codes, and intimate knowledge of the patrol
[44:11] schedule, and simply met the guards in spaces where they'd
[44:15] ordinarily expect to be working. A third, more disturbing
[44:19] possibility is that the gunman was somebody the guards
[44:23] recognized and trusted, and that they let him in themselves.
[44:27] He may have even identified himself as a cop, and for
[44:31] reasons that are about to become apparent, at least two of the
[44:35] suspects could have pulled that off.
[44:38] What's certain is that all four guards ended up in the same
[44:41] room. They were forced to lie face
[44:44] down on the floor, and then, one by one, each of them was shot in
[44:48] the head at close range. The gunman pulled a quantity of
[44:53] cash from the vault, made his way back through the building's
[44:56] locked doors and disappeared into a Denver Sunday that was
[45:00] just starting to come alive. The first call to Denver police
[45:04] came shortly after 8:00 on Monday, when bank staff arriving
[45:08] for the start of the work week noticed that something wasn't
[45:11] right. A few doors that should have
[45:13] been secured were open, and surveillance equipment had been
[45:17] disrupted in places. The morning shift of guards who
[45:21] were supposed to relieve their counterparts were nowhere to be
[45:25] found. When officers entered the lower
[45:28] level, they found the bodies of all four men together.
[45:32] Each had been bound and forced into the same position, and each
[45:36] had been cut down with a single round at point blank range.
[45:40] The scene was, by every account, exceptionally controlled and
[45:44] almost clinical in nature. There were no signs of a chase
[45:48] or prolonged struggle, and no evidence that any of the guards
[45:52] had fought back in any meaningful way.
[45:55] Whoever had handled the four of them had done so with a level of
[45:58] calm that veteran detectives found chilling.
[46:02] The vault had been opened and partially emptied, and that
[46:05] partial robbery would really send this case in a particular
[46:08] direction for investigators. The perpetrator had been
[46:12] selective about what he took, leaving behind sealed bundles
[46:16] that would have been traceable and grabbing loose circulated
[46:19] bills that wouldn't. That kind of selectivity
[46:23] required familiarity, the sort of knowledge a casual stick up
[46:27] man simply wouldn't possess. It was the first hint that this
[46:31] hadn't been an outside job at all, but rather the work of
[46:34] somebody whose understanding of the bank's procedures ran much
[46:38] deeper than a stranger could fake.
[46:42] From the very first hours of the investigation, the focus began
[46:46] to drift toward people who had once worked in the building.
[46:50] Denver detectives recognized almost immediately that they
[46:53] weren't looking at a typical robbery gone wrong.
[46:57] Whoever had walked into that bank had known the building, the
[47:00] procedures and the personnel involved with a level of
[47:03] intimacy you can't fake. He'd known where the cameras
[47:07] were, which ones to disrupt and how to move through the building
[47:11] without setting off the systems that should have flagged him.
[47:15] He'd known the codes or had a way around them.
[47:18] And he'd known that on a Sunday morning, the building would be
[47:22] at its most vulnerable. That last detail narrowed the
[47:26] suspect pool considerably. The number of people who'd ever
[47:30] held that level of access to the United Bank Towers secure areas
[47:34] was a finite list, and most of the names on it were obvious
[47:38] dead ends. Current employees had ironclad
[47:41] alibis, and many retirees were living out of state.
[47:46] But a few names sat uneasily in the middle of the list, and
[47:50] investigators kept circling back to one in particular.
[47:53] That name was James William King.
[47:57] King was a former Denver cop who'd retired from the
[48:00] department years earlier and gone to work at the bank as a
[48:03] security supervisor. He was in his 50s by 1991, with
[48:08] a long career in law enforcement behind him and the kind of deep
[48:13] institutional familiarity with the building that comes from
[48:16] years of weekend shifts. He'd been employed at the United
[48:20] Bank Tower for several years before being let go in early
[48:24] 1991, only months before the slayings.
[48:28] According to bank management, the parting hadn't been
[48:31] amicable, and he seemed to have a chip on his shoulder.
[48:35] King reportedly believed he'd been treated unfairly and that
[48:38] the bank had effectively pushed him out of a job he'd performed
[48:41] competently. In the eyes of investigators, he
[48:45] had something almost no other suspect could claim, a working
[48:49] knowledge of the building's security protocols combined with
[48:53] a fresh, identifiable grievance. Within weeks, detectives had
[48:58] built a circumstantial case that they considered strong.
[49:01] Witnesses placed a man matching King's general description near
[49:05] the building that weekend. A bank employee thought she'd
[49:09] recognized him during a brief Saturday encounter on the 2nd
[49:12] floor banking lobby. Other employees who were working
[49:16] there on the day and saw him also identified him.
[49:19] But there was a serious problem with this.
[49:22] None of these individuals identified him on the first try,
[49:26] instead identifying him on the second try.
[49:28] After a rather bizarre move, detectives presented the
[49:32] witnesses with a photo lineup where they drew a hat and
[49:35] sunglasses on the members of the line up.
[49:38] Even then, some of the witnesses didn't believe it was him.
[49:42] There were patterns of behavior in the days before and after the
[49:45] slayings that struck investigators as suspicious as
[49:48] well. There was a sense that all of
[49:51] these threads woven together would be enough to put the right
[49:54] man on trial. By September of 1991, King was
[49:59] in custody and charged with the robbery and the much worse
[50:03] offenses. But as you may have guessed from
[50:06] my introduction and the title of this video, this trial was going
[50:10] to be a real problem. The case that went to trial in
[50:14] 1992 was, on paper, quite strong, at least according to
[50:20] prosecutors at the time. Personally, and perhaps this is
[50:25] hindsight speaking, but I really don't see how they thought that.
[50:30] The state claimed they had a defendant with motive,
[50:33] opportunity, and operational knowledge that virtually nobody
[50:37] else in Denver possessed. Prosecutors had a fairly weak
[50:41] and seemingly biased eyewitness identification, but it was
[50:46] theoretically better than nothing.
[50:49] They had behavioral anomalies in the days surrounding the crime,
[50:52] which they believed indicated King was planning something
[50:55] sinister. For instance, he had a blueprint
[50:58] of the building in his possession and it was in a
[51:01] folder that was labeled Plans. Yes, he had a floor plan of the
[51:07] building he used to work security in located in a folder
[51:11] labeled plans, and this was a key piece of evidence for the
[51:15] prosecution in the industry. That's what we call a Hail Mary
[51:19] pass. He also shaved his mustache
[51:23] after the event, which prosecutors believed was him
[51:26] trying to alter his appearance. They had a profile of a
[51:30] disgruntled former employee with the rare combination of police
[51:33] training and inside knowledge. And they had a story that, in
[51:38] the prosecutor's framing, accounted for nearly every
[51:41] troubling detail at the scene. What they didn't have was much
[51:45] in the way of physical evidence. And when you're trying to prove
[51:49] your case beyond a reasonable doubt, that's a bit of a
[51:52] problem. Now, I have to say here that
[51:55] King, as a veteran cop, would obviously know a thing or two
[52:00] about the rules of evidence at trial.
[52:03] It seems to me that the prosecution attempted to infer
[52:06] that this absence of physical evidence was actually evidence
[52:09] he did it, which is obviously extremely problematic.
[52:14] There were no fingerprints tying King to the bank.
[52:17] There was no genetic material, no fibers, no recovered weapon,
[52:22] and crucially, no recovered cash.
[52:26] The bag of bills that the perp had walked out with on Father's
[52:29] Day morning had simply evaporated.
[52:33] Nothing in King's home, vehicle, or financial records gave
[52:37] investigators any physical evidence whatsoever.
[52:41] The prosecution was left-leaning hard on circumstantial threads
[52:45] and on identifications that the defense was ready to attack.
[52:50] King's attorneys hit back, and they hit back extremely hard in
[52:54] such a way that makes me question why this prosecution
[52:57] went ahead anyway. Remember that the double
[53:00] jeopardy rule was in play here, so this was, in essence, the
[53:04] prosecution's one chance to make their case that King was the
[53:08] guy. It's also notable that the
[53:11] defense only has a very narrow disclosure duty, so it's
[53:14] possible that the prosecution was blindsided by certain
[53:18] evidence, at least to some degree.
[53:21] King's attorneys argued that the eyewitness identifications were
[53:25] unreliable, the product of a fleeting glimpse and powerful
[53:29] suggestion in the days afterward.
[53:31] They argued that the timing didn't add up, that King had
[53:35] alibi witnesses placing him elsewhere during portions of the
[53:38] relevant window. They highlighted the absence of
[53:42] physical evidence, relentlessly asking the jury how a man could
[53:46] have committed such a controlled surgical operation without
[53:49] leaving behind a single trace. They pointed out that the
[53:53] building's security, as airtight as it had appeared on paper, had
[53:58] vulnerabilities that other former employees and contractors
[54:01] might have exploited just as easily.
[54:05] They brought in one of his neighbors, who testified that
[54:07] she had seen him mowing the lawn on the morning the crime was
[54:10] committed. She specifically remembered what
[54:13] day it was because she gave him a Father's Day greeting.
[54:18] Then there were the alternative suspects that the defense
[54:20] trotted out. The first one was a convicted
[54:24] bank robber who had confessed to the crime.
[54:27] He later changed his story and claimed he wasn't involved,
[54:30] claiming that he had essentially invented the story for
[54:33] underworld clout. The other was far more
[54:36] interesting since he was a former bank guard who had been
[54:40] accused of stealing a large sum of money from the bank.
[54:44] When federal agents went to investigate him, they found ammo
[54:47] consistent with what was used at the scene, as well as some fake
[54:51] police badges and replica grenades.
[54:55] He had no alibi for the time of the robbery and was described as
[54:58] an angry loner with an axe to grind.
[55:03] The trial itself drew enormous attention in Denver.
[55:06] Local media covered every day of testimony, and the courtroom
[55:10] filled with relatives of the four guards who wanted to look
[55:13] the accused in the eye for themselves.
[55:16] Through weeks of arguments, King maintained the same composed,
[55:20] almost detached demeanor, which some took his callousness and
[55:25] others took his righteousness. The jury deliberated for several
[55:30] days, and when they came back, they delivered a verdict that
[55:35] stunned the prosecution and rocked the city.
[55:40] King was acquitted on every count.
[55:42] He walked out of the courthouse a free man, and he stayed free
[55:46] for the rest of his life. He never faced charges related
[55:50] to the case again and went to his grave maintaining that he
[55:53] hadn't done what investigators had spent the better part of a
[55:56] year trying to prove he'd done. In the years after the
[56:01] acquittal, the case settled into a peculiar limbo.
[56:05] Officially, it remained open, but practically no one was
[56:09] actively pursuing new leads. The investigators who'd built
[56:13] the case against King mostly believed they'd had the right
[56:16] man, and that the rules of double jeopardy now made any
[56:20] further attempt at conviction impossible.
[56:23] The cash, as far as anyone has publicly disclosed, was never
[56:28] recovered, and neither was the weapon.
[56:31] No accomplice has come forward, and no deathbed confession has
[56:35] surfaced from any of the people once tied, however loosely, to
[56:40] the case. And so, after more than 35
[56:44] years, the file on the Father's Day Bank massacre remains
[56:48] exactly where it's at after the 1992 verdict, open, cold and
[56:54] waiting for an answer. In the last days of July 1993, a
[57:02] young Hollywood nightclub owner was found slain inside his own
[57:06] home in the Hollywood Hills. He was 26 years old, Co ran one
[57:11] of the most fashionable venues in Los Angeles and counted
[57:14] musicians, actors and entertainment industry insiders
[57:19] among his close friends. There were no signs of forced
[57:23] entry, nothing of obvious value was taken, and no clear answer
[57:27] to the question of who'd walked into his home and walked back
[57:30] out again. When the city was rocked by
[57:33] another attack that would dominate American and world
[57:36] headlines, Brett Cantor's name started surfacing in
[57:40] conversations that have never quite gone away.
[57:44] Brett Cantor grew up around Los Angeles and moved into the
[57:47] nightclub scene as a young man. By his mid 20s, he'd Co founded
[57:52] The Dragonfly, a venue on Santa Monica Blvd. that opened in the
[57:57] early 90s and quickly became one of the destinations of the
[58:01] moment. The club drew a steady mix of
[58:04] musicians, actors and industry hangers on.
[58:08] It hosted live performances by acts moving through Los Angeles
[58:11] on tour, with a heavy focus on the alt rock scene that was
[58:15] breaking through nationally at that time.
[58:18] By all accounts, Cantor was a natural at the work, absolutely
[58:22] oozing a natural sort of charisma that's necessary in
[58:26] that industry. People who knew him described
[58:29] him as magnetic and easy to talk to, the sort of person who
[58:33] remembered names and made a room feel a little better when he
[58:36] walked into it. He was reportedly well connected
[58:40] to an operator who knew people across music, film and nightlife
[58:45] more broadly. Cantor's life touched a lot of
[58:48] people, and any of them, in theory, could have known where
[58:52] he lived and what time he tended to come home.
[58:55] On the morning of July 30th, 1993, someone close to Cantor
[59:00] went to check on him. After he'd gone silent for some
[59:02] time, they let themselves into his home in the Laurel Canyon
[59:06] area and found him on the floor of his bedroom.
[59:10] Patrol officers and detectives from the Los Angeles Police
[59:13] Department responded, and the scene gave them an unusual mix
[59:17] of signals. There was no sign of forced
[59:20] entry, and the condition of the home suggested Cantor had likely
[59:24] let his attacker inside, or that the attacker had keys or some
[59:28] other means of access. Nothing obvious had been taken,
[59:32] and the stab wounds were close range and numerous, the kind of
[59:36] attack investigators tend to read as personal.
[59:40] Investigators photographed the scene, collected what physical
[59:43] evidence they could, and began the long process of working
[59:47] backward through Cantor's final days and the people he'd been
[59:51] near. They interviewed friends,
[59:54] family, club staff and business contacts, and they looked at his
[59:59] finances and his relationships. They looked at the dragonfly
[1:00:04] itself, where he'd been spending most of his waking hours.
[1:00:09] The club had its share of normal friction, since busy Los Angeles
[1:00:13] nightclubs in the early 90s tended to attract a complicated
[1:00:16] cast. Unfortunately though, nothing
[1:00:19] provided any insight into who could have possibly committed
[1:00:22] this sick act. Less than a year later, on June
[1:00:26] 12th, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were stabbed to
[1:00:31] death outside Nicole's condo in Brentwood.
[1:00:34] The case became the most watched criminal trial in American
[1:00:37] history, dominating headlines, talk shows, and televised
[1:00:41] proceedings for the better part of two years.
[1:00:44] OJ Simpson was tried and acquitted of the criminal
[1:00:47] charges in 1995, then found liable for the deaths in a 1997
[1:00:52] civil trial. Notably, in a criminal case, the
[1:00:58] elements of the offense need to be proven beyond a reasonable
[1:01:01] doubt. In a civil case, the ACT simply
[1:01:04] needs to be proven on the basis of a balance of probabilities, a
[1:01:08] much lower standard. Over the years, a strange thread
[1:01:12] began drawing the Brentwood case and the Cantor case together,
[1:01:16] and Brett Cantor and Nicole Brown Simpson had moved in
[1:01:20] overlapping social circles. According to people who knew
[1:01:24] them, both Cantor and Nicole were at the very least
[1:01:27] acquainted. Some accounts go further,
[1:01:30] suggesting the two were friends or that Nicole had visited the
[1:01:34] Dragonfly. The exact nature of their
[1:01:37] relationship has never been fully established in public, and
[1:01:41] a lot of the specifics rely on the memories of friends speaking
[1:01:45] many years after the fact. The crimes also had surface
[1:01:49] similarities, given that both attacks were committed with a
[1:01:52] knife in a residential setting in Los Angeles within a year of
[1:01:56] one another. None of that is proof of a
[1:01:59] connection, since knife attacks happen and the city is enormous
[1:02:04] and patterns tend to look stronger in hindsight than they
[1:02:07] really are. But it was enough to keep the
[1:02:10] two cases LinkedIn the public imagination for decades.
[1:02:14] Though in my opinion, I can't see any evidence whatsoever that
[1:02:17] connects the two cases. And Speaking of the OJ trial,
[1:02:22] the Cantor case was raised during a pretrial hearing, but
[1:02:26] never actually raised by the defense before the jury at the
[1:02:29] trial itself. The judge at a pretrial hearing
[1:02:33] allowed O JS team to review the evidence from the Cantor file
[1:02:36] for potential exculpatory material.
[1:02:39] That basically means that there was enough evidence to suggest
[1:02:43] there was some potential Nexus between the cases, but not that
[1:02:47] an actual connection existed. Despite having access to
[1:02:50] everything, and despite raising the alternative killer theory at
[1:02:54] trial, the defense never actually linked Cantor before
[1:02:58] the jury. Personally, I think this should
[1:03:01] say everything that needs to be said about the credibility of
[1:03:04] this theory, since the defense would have raised it at trial if
[1:03:08] there were any possible connections.
[1:03:11] Strip the speculation away and you're left with what
[1:03:14] investigators had. On the morning of July 30th.
[1:03:18] A young man was dead in his bedroom.
[1:03:21] The door was undisturbed. He'd been stabbed repeatedly
[1:03:25] with his throat cut. Nothing of value was missing,
[1:03:29] and there were no witnesses inside or out.
[1:03:32] He had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, and yet no
[1:03:36] clean suspect emerged among any of them.
[1:03:40] Detectives reportedly leaned toward the theory that whoever
[1:03:43] attacked Cantor was someone he knew.
[1:03:46] The intimacy of the wounds suggested a personal motive of
[1:03:49] some kind, though personal for someone with such a wide social
[1:03:53] and business circle could mean many things.
[1:03:56] It might have meant a soured friendship, a business dispute,
[1:04:01] an entanglement nobody else knew about, or something more random
[1:04:05] that had nothing to do with the dragonfly at all.
[1:04:09] In the decades since, the case has lived in a strange space
[1:04:12] where it's been mentioned largely in relation to the OJ
[1:04:15] Simpson saga, which is how I found out about the case.
[1:04:19] Because of this connection, and the fact that the Simpson saga
[1:04:23] is such a behemoth in the world of true crime, Brett Cantor's
[1:04:27] cold case, even though only loosely related, is never
[1:04:31] forgotten. The Los Angeles Police
[1:04:34] Department has at times indicated that the case remains
[1:04:36] technically open, though they haven't named any suspects.
[1:04:41] Importantly though, they have openly stated that they don't
[1:04:45] believe the case has any connection whatsoever with
[1:04:48] Nicole Brown Simpson or Ron Golden.
[1:04:52] And personally, I agree with this assessment, and I think the
[1:04:56] best indicator of this is that even O JS team didn't think the
[1:05:00] connection was worth putting forward to a jury.
[1:05:06] On a cold morning in November of 19 O 4A Denver streetcar
[1:05:10] conductor reportedly noticed something strange on the rails.
[1:05:15] A man was lying motionless beside the line, his head split
[1:05:18] open and his pockets turned out. He looked, by every account,
[1:05:23] like just another vagrant in a city full of them.
[1:05:26] But this man wasn't a vagrant at all.
[1:05:29] He was Al Swearengen, once the wealthiest and most feared
[1:05:32] saloon keeper in the Dakota Territory.
[1:05:36] He was the man who'd built Deadwoods Gem Variety Theater
[1:05:39] into the most profitable den of sin West of the Mississippi.
[1:05:44] How he ended up bleeding out beside A streetcar track, broke
[1:05:47] and forgotten, is a question nobody's ever answered.
[1:05:51] Swearengen was born on July 8th, 1845 in Oskaloosa, IA, the son
[1:05:58] of a relatively prosperous Dutch American farming family.
[1:06:02] He had a twin brother named Lemuel, and the two of them came
[1:06:06] of age in a county that valued the kind of quiet respectability
[1:06:10] that Al would spend the rest of his life setting fire to.
[1:06:14] He drifted through a few small business attempts in his 20s,
[1:06:18] and around 1876 he made his way West into the Black Hills with
[1:06:23] one of the early waves of fortune seekers.
[1:06:26] These prospectors had been pouring in after the Custer
[1:06:29] expedition all but confirmed gold in the region, but Al
[1:06:32] didn't bother with a pan or a pickaxe.
[1:06:36] Al understood from the start that the real money in a gold
[1:06:39] rush isn't in the dirt. It's in the men coming out of
[1:06:43] the dirt with money in their pockets and nothing to spend it
[1:06:46] on. By the spring of 1877, he'd
[1:06:51] opened a small dance hall on Deadwood's Lower Main St.
[1:06:55] This venue was so successful that within months he replaced
[1:06:59] it with a larger purpose built structure he named the Gem
[1:07:02] Variety Theater. On paper, it was a respectable
[1:07:05] establishment, offering vaudeville acts, comedy routines
[1:07:09] and live music. In practice, the entertainment
[1:07:13] was a thin curtain in front of an industrial scale House of ill
[1:07:16] repute, where any vice you could imagine was freely for sale.
[1:07:21] Most contemporary accounts agree women were lured to Deadwood
[1:07:24] under false pretenses, often promised legitimate stage work
[1:07:28] or marriage prospects. They were then trapped at the
[1:07:31] gym under conditions that ranged from coercive to outright
[1:07:35] violent. It was, in our modern terms, a
[1:07:40] human trafficking operation. But Al didn't care because the
[1:07:44] gem made him rich. By the early 1880s, he was
[1:07:48] reportedly clearing several $1000 on a busy night, which in
[1:07:52] modern terms put him well into the 1,000,000 per year.
[1:07:56] He moved among the most powerful men in the territory, paid off
[1:08:00] the people who needed paying off, and built a reputation as
[1:08:04] somebody who could make problems disappear.
[1:08:08] His marriage to a young woman named Nettie Ross ended in
[1:08:11] divorce within about a year, with her sighting his cruel
[1:08:15] nature, and his subsequent marriages followed a similar
[1:08:19] pattern. Whatever quote UN quote charm he
[1:08:22] possessed in business clearly didn't translate to the home,
[1:08:27] which perhaps shouldn't be surprising given the true nature
[1:08:30] of his operation. The gem itself kept Catching
[1:08:34] Fire, and it burned down in September of 1879.
[1:08:38] That time, Al rebuilt almost immediately, but when it burned
[1:08:42] down again in December of 1899, he didn't.
[1:08:46] He simply walked away from Deadwood, walked away from the
[1:08:49] trade he dominated for over 20 years, and effectively vanished
[1:08:53] from the public record for long stretches.
[1:08:57] There were rumors at the time that he'd been quietly forced
[1:09:00] out by enemies he'd spent two decades accumulating, and other
[1:09:04] rumors that he'd simply run out of money and credit.
[1:09:08] The years between the second fire and his death are murky,
[1:09:12] and that's putting it generously.
[1:09:14] Swearengen seems to have drifted, attempting various
[1:09:18] small ventures and allegedly losing money in mining
[1:09:21] speculation. He's believed to have bounced
[1:09:25] between relatives in Iowa, old business contacts in Colorado
[1:09:29] and acquaintances scattered across the West.
[1:09:33] By the early 1900s, the man who'd once owned the most
[1:09:37] lucrative property in Deadwood was effectively destitute.
[1:09:41] He was in his late 50s, his health was reportedly failing,
[1:09:46] and the political winds had shifted hard against him.
[1:09:50] Deadwood had cleaned itself up, at least on the surface, and
[1:09:54] there wasn't really a place anymore for somebody like Al
[1:09:57] Swearingen, even if he returned. He was last reportedly seen
[1:10:02] alive in Denver during the first half of November 19 O 4, where
[1:10:07] he was apparently looking for work and possibly trying to
[1:10:10] reconnect with old contacts. Whether he found any of those
[1:10:14] contacts and what they wanted with him is the heart of this
[1:10:17] unsolved mystery. What we do know is that on the
[1:10:21] morning of November 15th, his body was found near the
[1:10:25] streetcar tracks in the city's downtown.
[1:10:28] The official version of events, as it filtered out through
[1:10:32] newspaper coverage in the days that followed, was that
[1:10:35] Swearengen had been struck down by a moving streetcar.
[1:10:39] He had, the story went, either fallen onto the tracks while
[1:10:43] drunk, suffered some kind of medical episode or simply been
[1:10:47] careless, crossing the line in poor light.
[1:10:51] The injuries to his head were consistent, A coroner reportedly
[1:10:54] suggested with being thrown by the impact of the streetcar, and
[1:10:59] there was no further inquest of any consequence.
[1:11:03] The body was identified, the death was logged, and the matter
[1:11:07] was effectively closed within 48 hours.
[1:11:11] But almost nothing about that explanation held up to even
[1:11:14] casual scrutiny, and the people who knew him said so almost
[1:11:18] immediately. Old Owl's pockets were empty
[1:11:21] when he was found, which would be unremarkable except that he'd
[1:11:24] reportedly been seen with cash on him the day before.
[1:11:28] The wounds to his head were described in some accounts as
[1:11:31] crushing injuries to the skull. These were more consistent with
[1:11:36] a heavy object swung deliberately than with being
[1:11:39] clipped by the front of a streetcar at low speeds in an
[1:11:42] urban environment. His body was put on a train back
[1:11:45] to Iowa, and he was buried in a family plot in Oskaloosa beside
[1:11:50] relatives he'd spent most of his adult life avoiding.
[1:11:55] The Denver of 19 O 4 was a city with newspapers, police records,
[1:12:00] hospital admissions, coroner's logs and A streetcar company
[1:12:04] that kept meticulous documentation.
[1:12:07] And yet, for an event as supposedly straightforward as a
[1:12:10] man being struck by A streetcar in the middle of downtown, the
[1:12:14] documentary trail is remarkably thin.
[1:12:17] The streetcar in question is never clearly identified in any
[1:12:21] surviving record, and the conductor who supposedly
[1:12:25] reported the body is unknown. The coroner's full report, if
[1:12:30] one was ever filed in any detail, is now missing, only
[1:12:35] known from contemporary reporting.
[1:12:38] What we know about his final months comes mostly from a
[1:12:41] handful of brief newspaper articles in the Denver and Black
[1:12:44] Hills press. What's more, the people back in
[1:12:48] Deadwood and around the country had reason to remember Al
[1:12:51] Swearingen. Swearingen had spent close to 30
[1:12:55] years cultivating grievances among minors he'd cheated, women
[1:13:00] he'd trafficked and business partners he'd betrayed.
[1:13:04] He had also been in the business of paying off lawmen and
[1:13:07] politicians. And Swearingen, as a man who now
[1:13:10] had nothing to lose, was a danger to these folks as well.
[1:13:16] What's clear is that in his final years of life, the
[1:13:19] organization that he had built up around himself had crumbled.
[1:13:24] Any one of them, none of them or somebody we've never even heard
[1:13:28] of, could have been there in Denver that November.
[1:13:33] The Pinkertons were active in Colorado at the time, and they
[1:13:36] weren't above cracking skulls. Quite literally.
[1:13:40] So were freelance enforcers working for mining interests,
[1:13:44] gambling syndicates and assorted private parties with reasons to
[1:13:48] settle old accounts. The theory I buy into is that Al
[1:13:53] didn't die in a random streetcar accident, but was eliminated,
[1:13:57] robbed and left beside the tracks to make the death look
[1:14:00] ordinary. The empty pockets matter because
[1:14:03] he had allegedly been seen with money shortly before his body
[1:14:06] was found. A skull crushed by a heavy
[1:14:09] object can be made to resemble impact trauma, especially if
[1:14:14] investigators were already inclined to accept the simplest
[1:14:17] explanation. Swearingen had enemies
[1:14:20] everywhere, and by 19 O four he was no longer powerful,
[1:14:24] protected, or useful to anyone. He was a broke, aging liability
[1:14:29] with a past full of dangerous secrets.
[1:14:32] And because he was so widely despised, police may not have
[1:14:36] felt much pressure to dig anyway.
[1:14:39] With that said, I can't recommend the show Deadwood
[1:14:42] enough, and Ian Mcshane's performance as Al Swearingen is
[1:14:46] timeless. When her two bosses unlocked the
[1:14:51] office on Manhattan Blvd. just after noon on August 4th, 1981,
[1:14:55] the radio was still ominously playing.
[1:14:59] Mail had been pushed through the slot and lay scattered on the
[1:15:02] carpet. A romance novel sat face down on
[1:15:05] Cynthia Anderson's desk, open to the only violent passage in the
[1:15:10] entire book, the scene where the female protagonist is taken
[1:15:14] against her will. As investigators dug into her
[1:15:18] case more, they would uncover one of the most disturbing and
[1:15:22] unusual set of circumstances in Ohio criminal history.
[1:15:27] Cynthia Anderson was 20 years old that summer, and she'd grown
[1:15:31] up in Toledo, the only child of doting parents.
[1:15:35] She had a steady boyfriend, Jeff Lemka, whom she planned to
[1:15:39] marry, and she also had a tight circle of friends from church
[1:15:42] and high school. She worked as a legal secretary
[1:15:46] at a small 2 attorney firm on East Manhattan Blvd. tucked into
[1:15:50] a strip mall storefront alongside other tenants.
[1:15:54] Her bosses, James Rabbit and Jay Feldstein, considered her
[1:15:58] bright, careful, and unfailingly reliable.
[1:16:02] She also had a plan, and in two weeks, Cindy was going to leave
[1:16:06] the firm and start the next chapter of her life.
[1:16:09] She'd recently been accepted to a college, and Jeff, her
[1:16:13] boyfriend, was coming along with her for almost a year before
[1:16:18] her. Last morning at work, though,
[1:16:20] something had been wrong, and the people closest to her hadn't
[1:16:24] quite known what to do with it. It started with the dreams,
[1:16:30] according to interviews her family later gave.
[1:16:33] Cindy had been having recurring nightmares since the previous
[1:16:36] year, vivid and consistent. A man wood forest his way into
[1:16:41] her home, take her somewhere and harm her.
[1:16:45] She told her mother, Margaret, about them more than once, but
[1:16:49] Margaret reassured her this was just her anxiety manifesting and
[1:16:53] it didn't mean anything more. Cindy had also told friends she
[1:16:58] sometimes felt watched, especially in the parking lot at
[1:17:01] the end of the day, although she could never point to anyone in
[1:17:05] particular watching her. Then the mysterious phone calls
[1:17:09] began. Cindy worked alone at the front
[1:17:12] of the law office during the mornings, and the calls came in
[1:17:15] while she was by herself at her desk.
[1:17:18] There was heavy breathing on the line, strange messages, and a
[1:17:23] voice that wouldn't identify itself.
[1:17:26] The calls disturbed her enough that her bosses noticed, and
[1:17:29] during the summer of 1981, the firm took two precautions that,
[1:17:34] in hindsight, sound almost prophetic.
[1:17:38] They told her to keep the front door locked at all times, even
[1:17:42] during business hours, and they had an emergency buzzer
[1:17:46] installed at her desk. That buzzer was also wired to
[1:17:50] alert the businesses next door if she ever needed help fast.
[1:17:55] There was something else, too, that seemed to be a clear
[1:17:58] indication that something more was going on here.
[1:18:02] About 10 months before that final August morning, someone
[1:18:06] had spray painted a message on a window across the street from
[1:18:09] the office on a building that faced Cindy's desk.
[1:18:13] It read I Love You Cindy by GW. For half a year, those words
[1:18:19] stared back at her every time she looked up from her
[1:18:22] typewriter. Eventually, the building's
[1:18:24] owners painted over them, but a few weeks later the same message
[1:18:29] reappeared in fresh paint in roughly the same spot.
[1:18:34] Police never identified who this could be, and Cindy didn't know
[1:18:38] anyone with those initials. Nobody then or since has come
[1:18:43] forward to claim authorship of either painting, and the second
[1:18:47] appearance, by all accounts, frightened her more than the
[1:18:50] first. When it appeared again, it
[1:18:53] seemed to her that this couldn't just be written off as a weird
[1:18:56] coincidence. On the morning of Tuesday,
[1:18:59] August 4th, 1981, Cindy left her parents house and drove the
[1:19:04] short distance to Manhattan Blvd.
[1:19:07] She arrived at her normal time and went through the small
[1:19:09] ritual she did every day. She unlocked the front door,
[1:19:13] turned on the lights and the radio and the air conditioning,
[1:19:17] and prepared the desks for her two bosses who'd be coming in
[1:19:20] later. She sorted the morning's first
[1:19:23] batch of mail, and at some point she opened her romance novel and
[1:19:27] read a few pages on her break. Then, somewhere in a window of
[1:19:32] less than three hours, she vanished.
[1:19:35] Rabbit and Feldstein arrived around midday, expecting their
[1:19:39] secretary to greet them at the front desk.
[1:19:43] They found everything just as Cindy had left it, and
[1:19:46] absolutely nothing as it should have been.
[1:19:49] The office looked alive. The radio kept playing.
[1:19:53] A Toledo newspaper sat on the desk.
[1:19:56] The novel was open on her workspace, face down to the
[1:19:59] abduction scene, as if she'd looked up from it for a moment
[1:20:03] and never looked back. There was no sign of any
[1:20:06] struggle, nothing tipped over and no furniture out of place.
[1:20:12] The emergency buzzer, which the lawyers had installed, hadn't
[1:20:15] been pressed, and the phone remained in its place,
[1:20:18] undisturbed, indicating she didn't try to call the cops.
[1:20:23] Whatever had happened had been quick and, perhaps more
[1:20:26] importantly, quiet, since no one in the neighboring businesses
[1:20:30] heard a peep. Cindy's prints were on the door,
[1:20:34] on the desk, on the romance novel, and whoever else might
[1:20:38] have been in the office hadn't left, the kind of evidence that
[1:20:41] 1981 forensics could lift. But the door behind them had
[1:20:45] been locked from the inside, and Cindy had taken her purse and
[1:20:48] her keys with her, Yet her car was still in the lot.
[1:20:52] The doors locked either. She'd walked out willingly with
[1:20:56] someone she trusted enough to leave her car behind, or someone
[1:20:59] had taken her against her will and then locked the office
[1:21:02] behind themselves. The Toledo Police Department
[1:21:06] went to work immediately trying to locate Cindy.
[1:21:10] Officers canvassed the neighborhood, tracked down
[1:21:13] former boyfriends, ran the harassing call lead, and
[1:21:17] interviewed anyone who'd ever made Cindy uncomfortable.
[1:21:20] They cleared Jeff almost at once, in part because his alibi
[1:21:24] held, and in part because everyone who knew the couple
[1:21:28] agreed that the relationship was, by all visible measures, a
[1:21:32] happy one. They pulled the law firm's case
[1:21:36] files looking for anybody who might have held a grudge against
[1:21:39] the attorneys or someone connected to them.
[1:21:43] Cindy's family, for their part, handed out Flyers and made
[1:21:47] appearances on local television stations, trying to drum up any
[1:21:51] tips. Then, in early September, about
[1:21:55] 5 weeks after Cindy vanished, investigators got their
[1:21:58] strangest lead. A woman called the police
[1:22:02] anonymously, and she was whispering, tense, plainly,
[1:22:07] quite frightened. She told investigators that
[1:22:10] Cindy was alive, being held in the basement of a White House.
[1:22:15] The White House, the caller said, was one of two on the same
[1:22:20] property, both owned by the same family.
[1:22:24] She claimed that the parents were out of town and their adult
[1:22:28] son was holding Cindy hostage. The caller wouldn't say where
[1:22:32] the property was, and she wouldn't give her name.
[1:22:35] And just like that, she hung up. Detectives tried to trace the
[1:22:40] call, but in 1981 there wasn't much they could do.
[1:22:43] With an anonymous tip from a pay phone or a private line, they
[1:22:47] followed up on every plausible White House lead they received
[1:22:50] afterward and obtained the warrants they could justify.
[1:22:54] None of them led to Cindy, and the mysterious Whispering Woman
[1:22:58] never called back. Over the next 4 decades, several
[1:23:03] names rose to the top of the suspect list and stayed there.
[1:23:07] The most enduring belonged to Anthony and Nathaniel Cook, two
[1:23:11] brothers who together account for 9 confirmed slayings across
[1:23:14] Northwest Ohio in the 70s and early 80's.
[1:23:19] The Cook brothers were operating in and around Toledo at the time
[1:23:22] Cindy disappeared, and their pattern of abducting young women
[1:23:26] fit her case enough to keep investigators interested.
[1:23:30] Both have denied any involvement, and neither has
[1:23:33] ever been formally tied to her by physical evidence.
[1:23:37] The cleanness of Cindy's scene also doesn't quite match the
[1:23:40] chaos they typically left behind either, which has LED some
[1:23:44] investigators to doubt their involvement.
[1:23:47] A second theory points in a very different direction.
[1:23:50] A convicted drug trafficker named Jose Rodriguez and his
[1:23:54] defense attorney Richard Kneller became suspects because Kneller
[1:23:58] had a working relationship with Cindy's law office.
[1:24:00] In 1981, Kneller had unfortunately begun to Fillmore
[1:24:05] of a Saul Goodman like role for Rodriguez, something that came
[1:24:09] as a shock to the local legal community.
[1:24:12] And just to be clear here, the relationship between Kneller and
[1:24:16] Cindy's firm was entirely above board and professional in
[1:24:19] nature. However, he rented space in the
[1:24:23] law office and, of course, met his clients there.
[1:24:26] The thinking advanced by some in law enforcement is that Cindy
[1:24:30] had overheard something she wasn't supposed to and that what
[1:24:34] she knew got her taken. At Rodriguez's 1995 trial on
[1:24:39] unrelated charges, an informant testified that Rodriguez had
[1:24:43] confessed to the abduction, but the court ruled the testimony
[1:24:47] unreliable. No charges have ever been filed
[1:24:50] in connection with her case, and both Rodriguez and Neller
[1:24:54] maintained that they weren't involved whatsoever.
[1:24:58] Then there are the smaller, weirder threads.
[1:25:00] The graffiti, the harassing caller, the dreams that had been
[1:25:04] gnawing at her for a year before she vanished, and the woman's
[1:25:08] mysterious call. None of them has ever resolved
[1:25:11] into anything whatsoever, with some believing these could just
[1:25:15] be coincidences or, in the case of the woman's call, a sick
[1:25:20] hoax. Her parents live the rest of
[1:25:23] their lives in vain, waiting for any word of what happened to
[1:25:26] Cindy. Her mother passed in 1983, less
[1:25:31] than two years after Cindy vanished, of a cancer that those
[1:25:35] closest to her believed had been hastened by grief.
[1:25:40] Her father kept Cindy's bedroom exactly as she'd left it for the
[1:25:43] next 27 years, holding on to her belongings in case she ever came
[1:25:47] back through the door. He passed in 2008, alone in the
[1:25:52] house Cindy had grown up in and grieving for his missing
[1:25:56] daughter. My personal theory is that
[1:25:59] Cynthia Anderson was likely targeted by an unidentified
[1:26:02] stalker, and that this person may have been someone close
[1:26:05] enough to lower her guard. The strongest reason is the
[1:26:08] pattern. Before she vanished, Cindy had
[1:26:12] recurring nightmares about being abducted, told friends she felt
[1:26:16] watched and received disturbing phone calls while alone at work.
[1:26:21] She was also frightened by the repeated graffiti facing her
[1:26:24] office window. That pattern feels less like a
[1:26:27] random abduction and more like fixation, and I think the locked
[1:26:31] door detail also matters. There was no sign of a struggle,
[1:26:36] the emergency buzzer wasn't pressed, and her purse and keys
[1:26:39] were gone while her locked car remained in the lot.
[1:26:43] That suggests she may have stepped outside willingly, at
[1:26:46] least at first, perhaps to meet someone she thought she knew and
[1:26:50] trusted. If the person was someone from
[1:26:53] high school, church or her broader social circle, that
[1:26:58] could explain how he got her to open the door despite being
[1:27:01] afraid. A stranger would probably have
[1:27:04] triggered panic, and we know she had the alarm there to press if
[1:27:08] she felt scared. Someone she believed she knew
[1:27:11] well could have created a brief moment of trust just long enough
[1:27:15] to get her outside. She may have even felt
[1:27:18] comfortable enough to get into a vehicle with him.
[1:27:21] And if that was the case, it explains why no one saw anything
[1:27:29] On the Leeward side of Kauai in the spring of 2000, a man walked
[1:27:34] up to a stranger working in her own yard, told her his name was
[1:27:38] John, and said he was homeless. Within minutes he launched A
[1:27:42] brutal assault on her and despite his best efforts, she
[1:27:46] fought back and survived. Sadly, 2 other women who were
[1:27:50] attacked in nearly identical fashion in the same 6 month
[1:27:53] window didn't. More than two decades later, his
[1:27:56] genetic material sits in a Hawaii crime lab, waiting for a
[1:28:00] match that for some reason, hasn't come.
[1:28:04] Kauai's West side feels remote, even by the standards of the
[1:28:08] Hawaiian Islands. The coastline runs in a long arc
[1:28:12] from Hanapepe and Waimea up through Kakaha and out to
[1:28:16] Polihal, where the road eventually turns to red dirt and
[1:28:21] fades into the dunes of the Nepali cliffs.
[1:28:25] The communities strung along that road are small, working
[1:28:28] class and largely Native Hawaiian and local Filipino.
[1:28:32] The tourists tend to be day trippers heading to the Canyon
[1:28:36] or to the remote beach located in the area.
[1:28:40] Anyone living there in 2000 would have told you it wasn't
[1:28:43] the kind of place where strangers blended in for long,
[1:28:47] which is part of what makes the case so unsettling.
[1:28:51] In a span of less than five months that year, three women
[1:28:55] were attacked along that stretch of coast.
[1:28:58] They were all middle-aged, white, alone and stabbed by an
[1:29:02] attacker who committed the most heinous acts to them before or
[1:29:06] during the attacks. The West side of Kauai had
[1:29:10] something it hadn't had before and hasn't had since.
[1:29:14] A serial offender working a single narrow corridor of the
[1:29:17] island and apparently working it on foot.
[1:29:22] The first victim found was Lisa Bissell.
[1:29:24] She was 38 and lived in Hana Pepe.
[1:29:28] On April 7th, 2000, her body turned up in a ditch off the
[1:29:32] dirt Rd. that leads out to Polly Hale State Park.
[1:29:36] She'd been subjected to a disturbing form of assault,
[1:29:40] beaten and stabbed, and her throat had been cut.
[1:29:45] And while I don't usually get into that sort of granular
[1:29:48] detail on the crimes, given that this is a case that I believe
[1:29:52] can be cracked right now with the right attention on it, it
[1:29:55] needs to be said. Some of her belongings were
[1:29:58] later recovered along a road in Waimea.
[1:30:01] This suggested to investigators that she'd been grabbed there
[1:30:04] and either driven or made to walk the rest of the way out
[1:30:07] toward the dunes. The location matters.
[1:30:10] The road to Polly Hale runs through old cane fields and
[1:30:14] fields in places like the end of the road in the literal sense.
[1:30:18] Since there's nothing past it but Ocean, Whoever left her
[1:30:22] there knew the area well enough to know she might not be found
[1:30:25] quickly. And while the medical examiner's
[1:30:28] findings were never released in full, the wounds described in
[1:30:32] court filings and police summaries point to an attack
[1:30:36] that wasn't impulsive. For a community of a few
[1:30:40] thousand people, Bissell's slaying was a Thunder clap.
[1:30:44] But because her death didn't immediately fit a known pattern,
[1:30:47] the Kauai Police Department investigated it as a one off.
[1:30:52] That assumption would last about six weeks.
[1:30:56] On May 22nd a 52 year old woman was working in her yard in
[1:31:01] Kekaha, about 10 miles up the coast from where Bissell's body
[1:31:05] had been found. A man approached her on foot and
[1:31:09] he told her his name was John and that he was homeless.
[1:31:14] She expected that he was going to ask her for money or food,
[1:31:17] but instead he attacked her where she stood.
[1:31:21] What followed is the only first hand account of this offender's
[1:31:24] methods that exists, and it's the reason the case has any
[1:31:28] forward motion at all. He indecently assaulted her,
[1:31:32] beat her, broke her arm, and stabbed her in the abdomen with
[1:31:35] such force that the blade snapped off inside her body.
[1:31:39] She was bleeding out in her own yard with a knife tip lodged in
[1:31:43] her. And yet somehow, through some
[1:31:46] miracle, she survived. She gave investigators a
[1:31:51] description, a name that was almost certainly an alias, and
[1:31:55] eventually a composite sketch. He was a man in his 30s or 40s,
[1:32:01] average build, deeply tanned skin, dark hair, the kind of
[1:32:06] face that could belong to dozens of men along that coast.
[1:32:11] Crucially, the fact that she survived rather than being
[1:32:14] discovered much later allowed the cops to collect his DNA.
[1:32:19] From that day forward, this predator wasn't a theoretical
[1:32:23] figure. He was a profile in a database
[1:32:26] waiting to be caught. The third attack came on August
[1:32:30] 30th of the same summer. A decomposing body was found at
[1:32:34] a remote campsite near Pakala Point, a stretch of beach
[1:32:38] popular with local fishermen and surfers, but not heavily
[1:32:41] trafficked otherwise. The victim was Darren, our
[1:32:44] Singer, 43 years old, originally from Maui.
[1:32:49] She'd been assaulted, stabbed in the throat, and beaten so badly
[1:32:53] that her face was barely recognizable to the officers who
[1:32:56] recovered her. By the time Singer was found,
[1:33:00] she'd been deceased for some time, which made forensic work
[1:33:03] harder, especially with the forensic science as it existed
[1:33:07] at the time. But the Kauai investigators had
[1:33:10] something they didn't have in April.
[1:33:13] They had the May Survivors offender profile to compare
[1:33:16] against. When Singer's case was
[1:33:19] processed, the genetic profile matched the same man who'd
[1:33:23] attacked the woman in Kekaha had attacked Singer at Pakala Point.
[1:33:28] And once that link was established, the Bissell case
[1:33:31] from April fell into place too. The pattern wasn't a hypothesis
[1:33:35] anymore. It was 3 brutal attacks, all on
[1:33:38] the same 15 mile stretch of West side coastline, all inside 1
[1:33:43] summer. Hawaii had its first confirmed
[1:33:46] serial offender of the modern era working a small slice of one
[1:33:50] of its smallest inhabited islands, and almost no one
[1:33:53] outside Kauai ever heard about it.
[1:33:57] The Kauai Police Department by most accounts was severely
[1:34:00] overwhelmed and under qualified for a case of this magnitude.
[1:34:04] The department was small, the island was barely populated, and
[1:34:09] a case of this complexity was unprecedented locally.
[1:34:13] State investigators were called in and the FBI consulted, and a
[1:34:16] reward fund set up by a victim's family eventually grew into the
[1:34:20] 10s of thousands of dollars. Officers canvassed campsites,
[1:34:25] beaches and rural roads on the West side, knocking on doors and
[1:34:31] asking about transient men matching the sketch.
[1:34:35] Some of the residents who were interviewed had their own
[1:34:37] theories about a man they thought they'd seen, but most of
[1:34:40] those leads dissolved on closer examination.
[1:34:44] What they kept hearing was that the West Side had a lot of those
[1:34:47] men drifting about. The sugar cane industry in the
[1:34:51] region collapsed only a few years earlier, and the corridor
[1:34:54] between Hana Pepe and Polly Hale had pockets of homeless camps.
[1:34:59] A composite sketch, even a good one, wasn't going to be enough.
[1:35:04] And what they needed was the forensics to match somebody on
[1:35:07] file or somebody they could swab.
[1:35:11] Within months, attention turned to a man named Waldorf Wilson, a
[1:35:15] registered offender with an extremely dark history.
[1:35:19] He'd been convicted in 1983 of attacking and kidnapping of a
[1:35:23] woman on Oahu, served his sentence and been paroled in
[1:35:27] January of 1999, roughly a year before the attacks began.
[1:35:32] He'd moved to Kauai and was living on the West side in the
[1:35:36] corridor where all three women had been attacked.
[1:35:40] He allegedly bore a strong resemblance to the composite.
[1:35:44] He had the right kind of history, and on paper at least,
[1:35:48] the cops thought they got their man.
[1:35:51] And I say allegedly here because I can't find a picture of the
[1:35:54] man anywhere online to either confirm or deny this.
[1:35:59] The cops questioned him in September of 2000 and took ADNA
[1:36:03] sample. The lab compared his profile
[1:36:06] against the offender profile from the May survivor and the
[1:36:09] singer scene. The result, according to the
[1:36:12] investigation file as it's been reported in subsequent local
[1:36:15] coverage, came back inconclusive.
[1:36:18] It wasn't a clear exclusion, but it wasn't a match either.
[1:36:23] And that single word would do a lot of damage in the years that
[1:36:26] followed. To investigators, inconclusive
[1:36:30] meant they couldn't charge him even if they strongly suspected
[1:36:34] him. To Wilson, who was publicly
[1:36:37] named an island media as a prime suspect, it meant his name was
[1:36:41] permanently attached to three of the most notorious attacks in
[1:36:45] Kawhi's history. He sued the Police Department,
[1:36:48] the chief, and several news outlets for defamation, but the
[1:36:52] lawsuits were dismissed and the dismissals were upheld on
[1:36:56] appeal. If he committed these horrendous
[1:36:59] acts, that's an extremely bizarre move given that starting
[1:37:03] a civil suit opens up the plaintiff to mandatory cross
[1:37:07] examination. OK, so I'm a bit unclear as to
[1:37:11] why this case hasn't been cracked just yet, and I suspect
[1:37:14] that if it was a high profile case it would have been closed
[1:37:17] ages ago. We have all the genetic evidence
[1:37:20] we could ever need. Still secure in an evidence
[1:37:24] locker somewhere. Meanwhile, genetic testing has
[1:37:27] advanced at lightning speed in the quarter century since this
[1:37:31] crime occurred. A sample that wasn't sufficient
[1:37:34] to yield a conclusive result around the turn of the millennia
[1:37:38] may now be sufficient to do so. There's also the matter of
[1:37:42] genetic genealogy, which could potentially identify new
[1:37:47] suspects that haven't yet been identified or named in the
[1:37:50] investigation. Personally, I think this case
[1:37:54] should be bumped up to the absolute highest priority in
[1:37:57] terms of genetic testing so that justice can finally be had for
[1:38:01] the three victims. The fact that it hasn't been is
[1:38:05] honestly somewhat disturbing because the predator responsible
[1:38:09] for these attacks may very well still be alive.
[1:38:16] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here with a reminder to hit the
[1:38:18] subscribe button and the notification bell.
[1:38:21] Also, remember to hit that share button and send this video to
[1:38:24] any of your friends and family members that enjoy true crime
[1:38:28] content and unsolved mysteries. Also, if you want to take your
[1:38:33] support to the next level, check out the Patreon or the
[1:38:37] membership. It was just past one in the
[1:38:42] morning on March 18th, 1990 when two men dressed as Boston police
[1:38:47] officers walked up to the side entrance of a museum and press
[1:38:51] the night buzzer. They told the young guard inside
[1:38:54] that they were responding to a disturbance call and he let them
[1:38:58] in. 81 minutes later they walked out into the cold air carrying
[1:39:04] thirteen pieces of priceless art.
[1:39:07] These include a Vermeer the world hasn't seen since 3
[1:39:11] Rembrandts, A Manet, a handful of Degas sketches, and a Chinese
[1:39:17] bronze cup older than the Roman Empire.
[1:39:21] The frames they cut the canvases out of are still hanging on the
[1:39:24] walls, empty, exactly as the museum's founder once required
[1:39:29] her collection to be preserved forever.
[1:39:33] To this day, it remains the largest unsolved property theft
[1:39:37] in history. Despite a $10 million reward,
[1:39:41] decades of FBI work, and tips funneled in from informants
[1:39:45] across three separate mob families, not a single one of
[1:39:48] those pieces has ever turned back up.
[1:39:52] Isabella Stewart Gardner was a Bostonian by marriage and a New
[1:39:55] Yorker by birth. An heiress with a sharp eye and
[1:39:59] a sharper personality, she spent the late 19th century traveling
[1:40:04] Europe and acquiring whatever caught her attention.
[1:40:07] Vermeer's, Rembrandts, Botticelli's Titians.
[1:40:12] By the time she stopped, the collection rivaled some national
[1:40:15] museums. And when she built her own
[1:40:18] museum on the Fenway in 19 O3 to house it all, she did something
[1:40:22] deeply unusual. She dictated in her will that
[1:40:26] nothing in the building could ever be moved, sold, lent out,
[1:40:30] or rearranged. If a single object were changed,
[1:40:34] the entire collection was to be auctioned off and the proceeds
[1:40:38] given to Harvard. So when the thieves cut those
[1:40:42] canvases out of their frames in 1990, those frames legally
[1:40:48] couldn't be removed or filled with substitutes.
[1:40:51] The empty spots have been part of the permanent display ever
[1:40:54] since. Like wounds, the institution
[1:40:57] isn't allowed to dress that detail alone reshaped the way
[1:41:01] this case sits in public memory. Since most stolen art simply
[1:41:05] disappears from view here, the absence itself has been
[1:41:09] preserved as a fixture of the building to stay in accordance
[1:41:13] with the will of the founder. The two men working the
[1:41:17] overnight shift on March 17th into March 18th, 1990 were a 23
[1:41:22] year old part timer named Rick A Bath and a younger colleague
[1:41:26] named Randy Heston. A Bath was a long haired
[1:41:30] musician who'd graduated from Berkeley College of Music.
[1:41:34] He pulled night shifts at the museum because they paid the
[1:41:36] bills and gave him time to play in his band.
[1:41:40] He had a habit of opening the side door during his rounds to
[1:41:43] check it was secure, an idiosyncrasy that's going to
[1:41:47] matter later. Around 1:20 in the morning, the
[1:41:51] front desk's external buzzer rang.
[1:41:54] The voice on the intercom claimed there'd been a
[1:41:56] disturbance reported in the courtyard.
[1:41:59] Abaath looked at the security monitor and saw two men in
[1:42:02] Boston Police Department uniforms, one with a bushy
[1:42:06] mustache, the other clean shaven, both wearing officer
[1:42:10] caps pulled low. He buzzed them in, which
[1:42:13] technically violated standing protocol.
[1:42:17] The young guards weren't supposed to admit anyone, real
[1:42:20] cops included, without first contacting their supervisor.
[1:42:24] A Bath admitted later that the two men looked legitimate enough
[1:42:28] that he didn't think twice about it.
[1:42:31] What happened next moved with the kind of practice deficiency
[1:42:35] that suggests these two thieves had rehearsed.
[1:42:38] They told A Bath there was a warrant out for him and asked
[1:42:41] him to step away from the desk, which meant stepping away from
[1:42:45] the only alarm button. The moment he complied, they
[1:42:48] told him he was being arrested, walked him to the side and
[1:42:53] ordered him to call his partner over the radio.
[1:42:56] When Heston arrived, both guards were handcuffed, walked into the
[1:43:01] basement and bound to pipes more than 100 feet apart with their
[1:43:05] eyes, mouths and hands bound in duct tape.
[1:43:10] Then the real work began. The two men were inside the
[1:43:14] building for roughly 81 minutes, moving methodically through the
[1:43:18] 2nd floor galleries in the Dutch Room.
[1:43:22] They cut Rembrandt's only known seascape, a 1633 painting called
[1:43:28] The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, out of its heavy frame with a
[1:43:32] box cutter. They did the same to A Lady and
[1:43:35] Gentleman in Black, a Rembrandt portrait that had been part of
[1:43:39] the museum since the building opened.
[1:43:42] They unscrewed Vermeer's The Concert from the wall and took a
[1:43:45] tiny Rembrandt self-portrait, etching about the size of a
[1:43:48] postage stamp. They also pulled down a
[1:43:51] landscape that was attributed at the time to Rembrandt and was
[1:43:55] later reassigned to his student, Govart Flink.
[1:43:59] In the short gallery, they ignored a row of objects worth
[1:44:02] millions and instead took five Degas sketches off the wall.
[1:44:07] Bizarrely, in this room, they also took a relatively worthless
[1:44:12] eagle off the top of a Napoleonic era flag.
[1:44:16] Down in the blue room, they took Manet's Chez Tortoni, slipping
[1:44:20] it out of a frame that turned up later.
[1:44:22] Sitting on the security supervisor's chair rather than
[1:44:25] near where the painting had hung.
[1:44:28] And in a detail that's puzzled investigators since the morning
[1:44:32] of the theft, they took an ancient Chinese goo.
[1:44:37] This is a ceremonial bronze beaker from the Shang dynasty,
[1:44:41] more than 3000 years old and of relatively modest market value
[1:44:46] compared to the paintings around it.
[1:44:49] They left far more valuable pieces nearby untouched,
[1:44:52] including a Titian, widely considered the most precious
[1:44:55] painting in the building. The selection was strange enough
[1:44:58] that experts have argued ever since about what this could
[1:45:01] mean. Some believe the thieves were
[1:45:04] following a specific list, others that they were artistic
[1:45:08] illiterates grabbing what looked easiest, or perhaps some
[1:45:12] combination of the two. By 2:45, the two men had loaded
[1:45:17] their haul into a vehicle parked outside and driven off into the
[1:45:20] dark. Abbott and Heston weren't
[1:45:23] discovered until the morning shift arrived shortly after 8.
[1:45:28] When the FBI arrived at the museum hours later, they found a
[1:45:32] scene that didn't quite hold together.
[1:45:34] The building's motion detectors had logged the thieves movements
[1:45:38] through the galleries in granular detail, but that same
[1:45:42] print out also showed footsteps in the blue Room before the
[1:45:45] buzzer was ever pressed. A Bath had walked through the
[1:45:49] Blue Room on his earlier rounds that night, but the timing of
[1:45:53] his patrol, combined with the fact that the empty Manet frame
[1:45:57] had been left on the security desk chair rather than at the
[1:46:00] scene, raised an awkward question.
[1:46:04] Some detectives questioned whether the Monet painting was
[1:46:07] already off the wall before the thieves walked in, which
[1:46:10] wouldn't look good for old Ricky Abbott.
[1:46:13] Investigators have circled that anomaly for more than 30 years
[1:46:16] without resolving it. Rick A Bath also did something
[1:46:20] apparently weird the night before.
[1:46:22] He led an unknown person into the museum and had a brief
[1:46:26] discussion with him. The feds actually kept this in
[1:46:29] their back pocket for 25 years, believing that a Bath may have
[1:46:33] had a role in the heist. Funny enough, though, when the
[1:46:37] tape was released to the public in 2015, it turned out that the
[1:46:42] quote UN quote unknown man was positively identified as the
[1:46:46] museum's deputy security director.
[1:46:49] A Bath maintained until his passing in early 2024 that he
[1:46:53] had nothing to do with the theft, and he passed multiple
[1:46:57] polygraph examinations, but the suspicion never fully went away.
[1:47:03] The thieves themselves left almost nothing physical behind,
[1:47:06] suggesting that these two were real professionals.
[1:47:10] A few strips of duct tape with hairs stuck to them were
[1:47:13] collected, but in 1990 the Bureau didn't have the DNA
[1:47:17] infrastructure to do anything useful with them.
[1:47:21] By the time the technology had caught up, the evidence had been
[1:47:24] handled too many times to yield a clean profile.
[1:47:28] It also appears that there's a good chance that this genetic
[1:47:31] evidence actually comes from one of the two security guards, in
[1:47:35] which case it wouldn't be useful.
[1:47:36] Regardless, within weeks of the theft, leads were drying up fast
[1:47:42] and the case quickly went cold. In the years that followed, the
[1:47:47] museum offered a $1 million reward for the safe return of
[1:47:50] the works. That figure rose to 5 million in
[1:47:53] 1997 and then to 10 million in 2017, which is where it sits
[1:48:00] today. The Massachusetts statute of
[1:48:03] limitations on the original theft ran out in 1995, meaning
[1:48:08] that the men who actually carried out the heist can no
[1:48:11] longer be charged for it under state law.
[1:48:14] Possession of stolen property remains a crime, but the Bureau
[1:48:18] has long signaled that it's far more interested in getting the
[1:48:21] art back than in prosecuting whoever's currently holding it.
[1:48:26] Despite this rather lenient policy to those responsible for
[1:48:29] the heist, none of that has shaken anything loose.
[1:48:33] There have been false leads, hoaxes and ransom demands,
[1:48:37] including an anonymous letter in 1994 that promised the return of
[1:48:42] all 13 works in exchange for two and a half million dollars.
[1:48:47] The museum was prepared to entertain it, but the writer
[1:48:50] went silent. There have also been scattered
[1:48:53] sightings reported over the years, but none of them could be
[1:48:56] confirmed, and none of the tips has produced a single recovered
[1:49:00] piece of fine art. In 2013, the FBI publicly
[1:49:06] announced that it had identified the men who carried out the
[1:49:09] theft and that they had been members of a criminal
[1:49:12] organization based in New England.
[1:49:15] The Bureau declined to name them, citing the ongoing
[1:49:18] investigation, but a series of leaks, sentencings and informant
[1:49:24] statements over the years has filled in much of the picture.
[1:49:29] The two leading suspects most often named in connection with
[1:49:31] the theft are Robert Donati, a Boston associate of the
[1:49:36] patriarchal crime family. The other was David Houghton,
[1:49:40] another associate with deep ties to the same underworld.
[1:49:44] Donati was found in the trunk of his own Cadillac in 1991, having
[1:49:49] met a violent end widely believed to be tied to either
[1:49:52] the heist or his broader mob involvement.
[1:49:55] Houghton passed of natural causes in 1992, so both were
[1:50:00] gone within two years of the theft.
[1:50:03] Investigators have also focused on Carmelo Merlino, who ran an
[1:50:07] auto Body Shop in Dorchester that the Bureau came to see as a
[1:50:11] hub for trafficking the stolen works.
[1:50:15] Merlino was caught in a federal sting attempting to rob an
[1:50:18] armored car depot in 1999 and passed in federal prison in
[1:50:22] 2005. He reportedly told associates he
[1:50:26] could deliver the paintings in exchange for leniency, only to
[1:50:30] fail to produce them when pressed.
[1:50:33] Robert Gentel, a Connecticut mob figure linked to the
[1:50:36] Philadelphia faction, was the last surviving person of
[1:50:40] interest. Federal agents searched his
[1:50:43] property repeatedly, and they found a list of the stolen
[1:50:46] artworks, with what appeared to be black market valuations
[1:50:50] scribbled beside them. But they didn't find any of the
[1:50:54] missing art, and the man himself passed in 2021, denying to the
[1:51:00] end that he ever had the paintings.
[1:51:03] This remained the case even when the Bureau offered to drop
[1:51:05] unrelated weapons charges in exchange for information.
[1:51:09] The most likely chain of custody, based on what
[1:51:12] investigators have pieced together, runs from the thieves
[1:51:16] themselves through Boston area mob connections.
[1:51:19] It then goes S through a New England associate named Robert
[1:51:23] Guarente, whose widow told the feds in 2010 that her husband
[1:51:28] had handed two of the paintings off to Gentel in 2003.
[1:51:32] Another theory which has now largely been discredited but was
[1:51:36] once popular, was that Whitey Bulger, the infamous Boston mob
[1:51:40] boss, was responsible. One of the reasons for this
[1:51:44] connection was the highly accurate police uniforms worn by
[1:51:48] the robbers. Let's just say that Bulger had
[1:51:51] what could euphemistically be described as a pretty close
[1:51:55] relationship with local law and federal law enforcement.
[1:52:00] Ultimately, though, the evidence doesn't seem to line up, and at
[1:52:03] the time of the heist, Bulger's outfit was in a heated rivalry
[1:52:07] with the Patriarcha crime family.
[1:52:10] Also, as usual, no high level Boston Crime Story would be
[1:52:15] complete without a mention of Bulger's organization and the
[1:52:18] Patriarcha family. Theories about where the works
[1:52:22] are currently sitting right now range from the plausible to
[1:52:26] highly speculative. The most grounded view is that
[1:52:30] they were used as collateral for underworld deals and were never
[1:52:34] sold openly because they were too famous to fence.
[1:52:38] Under this theory, they've likely been stashed somewhere
[1:52:42] and they're slowly deteriorating from the decades of neglect.
[1:52:46] A more romantic version has them sitting on the wall of a private
[1:52:50] collector's secret gallery. This is the so-called Doctor.
[1:52:54] No hypothesis, though most experts consider that scenario
[1:52:59] more popular in fiction than in life.
[1:53:03] The grimmest possibility is that the paintings were destroyed by
[1:53:06] whoever ended up holding them, either because the heat got
[1:53:10] unbearable or because they didn't understand how to store
[1:53:13] them. The Vermeer in particular, a
[1:53:17] panel more than 3 centuries old, wouldn't survive long in a damp
[1:53:21] basement or a humid storage unit.
[1:53:25] Investigators speaking to museum staff over the years have
[1:53:28] generally said they believe at least some of the 13 works still
[1:53:33] exist somewhere, but no one will say so with confidence.
[1:53:38] The longer the works stay missing, the more uncertain that
[1:53:41] increasingly faint hope becomes. A pedestrian on Michigan Ave.
[1:53:49] looked up on a December morning in 1996 and saw a body hanging
[1:53:54] 14 stories above the sidewalk. The man wasn't falling.
[1:53:59] He was suspended by an electrical cord tied to the leg
[1:54:02] of a desk inside the office above, swinging gently in the
[1:54:06] wind. He was wearing a bulletproof
[1:54:09] vest and in his pockets were brass knuckles, a can of Mace, 3
[1:54:15] computer discs, and a folded note bearing the name of an
[1:54:18] Indiana militia group. His name was Eugene Izzy, and he
[1:54:23] was one of the most promising hard boiled crime novelists in
[1:54:26] America. Izzy grew up in Hegewish, a
[1:54:30] working class steel neighborhood tucked into the southeastern
[1:54:33] corner of Chicago. He served in the Army during the
[1:54:36] closing years of the Vietnam era, came home and went to work
[1:54:40] in the mills, the same mills his father had worked before him.
[1:54:45] By his late 20s he was drinking heavily, married to a young
[1:54:49] woman named Teresa, and trying to write fiction in the few
[1:54:52] hours each night when he wasn't working.
[1:54:55] The mills shut down in the early 80s and Izzy found himself out
[1:54:59] of work with a family to support no degree and not many
[1:55:03] conventional options. He took that as a sign, and
[1:55:07] rather than going out to look for steady work, he used his new
[1:55:11] found free time to focus on his writing.
[1:55:15] In 1987 he sold his first novel, a lean Chicago Crime Story
[1:55:20] called The Take, and over the nine years that followed, he
[1:55:24] produced more than a dozen more. His books were brutal pieces of
[1:55:28] St. fiction populated by hustlers, bookmakers, ex cons
[1:55:33] and dirty cops. Reviewers compared him to Elmore
[1:55:37] Leonard, though his voice was darker and more
[1:55:40] autobiographical, drawn from corners of the city he'd
[1:55:43] actually walked. By the early 90s, his name was
[1:55:47] showing up on national lists, and by the mid 90s he had moved
[1:55:51] his family into an apartment in the South Loop and was living
[1:55:55] comfortably on his fiction. In the autumn of 1996, Izzy was
[1:56:01] 42, sober for over a decade, and renting a small office on the
[1:56:05] 14th floor of 6 N Michigan Ave. He just signed with a new
[1:56:10] publisher and was deep into what he hoped would be his
[1:56:13] breakthrough thriller. His routine was steady.
[1:56:18] He'd leave the apartment around dawn, walk the few blocks to the
[1:56:21] office, write all morning, and come home in the afternoon to be
[1:56:25] with his family. On Friday, December 6th, he told
[1:56:30] Teresa he had to go to the office that night to meet a
[1:56:32] source, and she later said he sounded uneasy when he left.
[1:56:37] He didn't come home that night, and he didn't come home the next
[1:56:40] morning. Around 8:00 on Saturday morning,
[1:56:44] people walking down Michigan Ave. noticed something dangling
[1:56:47] from a window high above the street.
[1:56:50] At first they thought it was a mannequin or some kind of stunt,
[1:56:54] but then somebody called the police.
[1:56:57] The officers who arrived found Izzy suspended outside the
[1:57:00] building, an electrical cord knotted around his neck, the
[1:57:04] other end tied to the leg of a heavy desk.
[1:57:06] Inside his office, his feet hung about a dozen feet below the
[1:57:11] window sill. The office itself was
[1:57:13] undisturbed. There was no sign of forced
[1:57:17] entry, the furniture hadn't been overturned, and there was no
[1:57:21] blood. Izzy had no defensive wounds on
[1:57:24] his hands, either, and the whole scene looked, on first glance,
[1:57:28] like a man who'd done it to himself.
[1:57:30] But then things got strange. The cops examined his body and
[1:57:35] found that Izzy was wearing a bulletproof vest underneath his
[1:57:38] jacket. He was carrying a pair of brass
[1:57:41] knuckles, a canister of pepper spray, three 3.5 inch floppy
[1:57:46] disks, and a folded slip of paper with the name of a militia
[1:57:51] organization in Indiana. People who knew him said he'd
[1:57:55] never carried any of those items before that fall, and he'd
[1:57:59] recently bought the vest. He told friends and his agent
[1:58:03] that he was researching real militia groups for the new book,
[1:58:07] and that members of one of them had started threatening him by
[1:58:09] phone. He'd reportedly asked a federal
[1:58:13] agent he knew socially whether the threats were credible,
[1:58:16] though it's not clear if they were.
[1:58:19] Izzy told another writer he believed he was being followed,
[1:58:22] perhaps by someone from that group.
[1:58:25] The disks turned out to be the strangest piece of the scene.
[1:58:29] When investigators examined them, they contained the working
[1:58:33] draft of the unfinished novel Izzy had been writing for the
[1:58:36] last several months. The manuscript described a
[1:58:39] Chicago writer who becomes the target of a militia after
[1:58:43] publishing a book that exposes their operations.
[1:58:47] In the draft, the militia tracks him to his downtown office,
[1:58:51] ambushes him there, and stages his death to look like he hanged
[1:58:55] himself from a 14th floor window.
[1:58:58] That was the entire plot. The fictional writer's office
[1:59:02] was on a high downtown floor. The fictional staging used a
[1:59:06] cord and a window open from inside.
[1:59:10] Investigators reportedly puzzled over the parallels for weeks,
[1:59:14] and some read the draft as Izzy, telegraphing his own intentions.
[1:59:18] Others read it as a sketch of what he feared was coming for
[1:59:21] him, perhaps based upon some of the threats that he had
[1:59:24] received. But there were other factors as
[1:59:28] well. Investigators found no second
[1:59:30] set of footprints, no fingerprints that didn't belong,
[1:59:34] and no missing files in his office.
[1:59:37] Nothing showed that anyone else had been in the room, and the
[1:59:40] Cook County Medical examiner ruled that Izzy did this
[1:59:43] himself. Izzy's family rejected that
[1:59:46] finding immediately, and they've rejected it every year since.
[1:59:51] Teresa pointed out that he'd left no note, that he had a
[1:59:54] fresh contract for a new book, and that he loved his family.
[1:59:58] In the end, that's where the case stands.
[2:00:01] Technically not unsolved, but with numerous open questions
[2:00:05] that are difficult to rationally explain.

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