# Dark Cases… That Shock Veteran Detectives | 242

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 28 May 2026, 28 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO1644659120.mp3

Episode 242 of the true crime podcast btw. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: ❤️ 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

## Transcript

[0:00] At 10:44 on a Saturday morning in February 2008, a woman lying
[0:05] face down on the carpet of a clothing store in suburban
[0:07] Chicago managed to dial 911 from a Bluetooth earpiece.
[0:13] Her hands were taped behind her back.
[0:15] Five other women were in the room with her, and there was a
[0:18] more sinister presence there as well.
[0:21] Within minutes, five of those women would be gone.
[0:25] And in the 18 years since that morning, no one's been able to
[0:28] determine who the shooter was. Tinley Park sits about 30 miles
[0:33] South of downtown Chicago. The Brookside Marketplace, an
[0:38] outdoor shopping Plaza on West 191st St., was a few years old
[0:43] at the time. It had the usual line up with a
[0:46] Target across the lot, a few sit down restaurants, and a handful
[0:51] of clothing stores. One of those stores was a Lane
[0:54] Bryant, a national chain that sells women's plus size
[0:58] clothing. On the morning of February 2nd,
[1:02] 2008, the Lane Bryant opened a little before 10.
[1:07] The manager that day was a 42 year old woman from Joliet named
[1:12] Rhoda McFarland. She'd been with the company for
[1:15] years, the kind of employee Co workers described as warm and
[1:19] competent. With her was one part time
[1:23] employee, a 33 year old nursing student who worked weekend
[1:27] shifts. She's never been publicly
[1:30] identified, and for reasons that'll become clear, that's a
[1:34] name still being protected. The store was quiet that
[1:37] morning. February in Chicagoland isn't
[1:41] peak retail season, and the parking lot wasn't full yet.
[1:45] Sometime not long after the doors opened, two customers came
[1:48] in to browse. They were Jennifer Bishop, 34,
[1:52] who'd driven up from South Bend, IN, and Carrie Hudak Chiuso, 33,
[1:58] of Frankfurt. Two women in a clothing store on
[2:01] a slow Saturday and nothing about it would have registered
[2:04] to anyone watching from the street.
[2:08] Just after 10 that morning, a man walked through the front
[2:11] door. He was tall, somewhere between 6
[2:14] feet and six, two with broad shoulders and a Husky build.
[2:18] He was African American, somewhere in his late 20s or
[2:22] early 30s. He had three to five thick corn
[2:25] rows pulled toward the back of his head and one of those braids
[2:29] hung down past his right cheek with four light green beads on
[2:33] the end. He was wearing a dark waist
[2:36] length jacket, a charcoal ski cap, and black jeans with what
[2:41] looked like a cursive G stitched into the back pockets.
[2:45] He told the employees he had a delivery problem, and he said
[2:48] something about paperwork that needed signing.
[2:51] Something about needing the managers attention.
[2:54] Whatever the cover story was, it was good enough to keep the room
[2:58] calm for a few minutes. After all, there was nothing yet
[3:02] to suggest the horror to come. The women at the front of the
[3:06] store treated him the way anyone treats a delivery driver on a
[3:09] Saturday morning. But he was stalling and he was
[3:12] waiting for the room to fill out.
[3:14] Or maybe waiting until he had everyone's positioning right in
[3:17] his head. According to the timeline police
[3:21] later assembled, 2 more customers came through the door
[3:24] while he was still standing there in his fake delivery guy
[3:27] role. Those customers were Sarah
[3:30] Safransky, just 22, from Oak Forest, and Connie Woolfolk, 37,
[3:37] of Flossmoor. Sarah was the youngest person in
[3:41] the building, and Connie, by every account, was a fighter.
[3:45] And you're going to want to keep that in mind because it'll be
[3:47] important. At some point, the man stopped
[3:51] pretending to be a delivery driver, and he pulled out a
[3:54] pistol and announced that this was a robbery.
[3:58] He told everyone to walk to the back of the store and everyone
[4:01] complied, believing that if they just did as he said, the
[4:05] nightmare would be over quickly. The stockroom of Elaine Bryant
[4:10] isn't a big space. It's the kind of place you'd
[4:13] walk past without noticing, full of bins and racks and folded
[4:17] inventory. He marched six women into it,
[4:21] the manager, Rhoda McFarland, the part time employee, and the
[4:25] four customers, meaning Bishop Chiuso, Safransky and Woolfolk.
[4:33] He had them lie face down on the floor, and then he used duct
[4:37] tape to bind them hands and feet.
[4:40] He moved methodically still, and he wasn't panicked, at least not
[4:44] yet. The survivor would later
[4:47] describe him as calm in those first few minutes, almost
[4:50] business like, the way someone might be while changing a tire.
[4:55] Whatever robbery he was supposedly running, the math of
[4:59] it stops making sense pretty quickly.
[5:02] There wasn't much to steal at a Lane Bryant on a Saturday
[5:04] morning, since the register hadn't been open long, there
[5:08] weren't safes full of cash sitting in the stockroom, and at
[5:11] any rate, a clothing store generally isn't the sort of
[5:14] business that robbers hit. But here's where the case takes
[5:18] its first hard turn. While he was distracted moving
[5:22] between victims and doing whatever it was he was doing,
[5:26] Rhoda MacFarlane did something extraordinary.
[5:29] She was wearing a Bluetooth earpiece that morning, and
[5:32] despite her hands being taped and her face on the floor, she
[5:35] could speak into the earpiece without lifting a finger.
[5:38] The 911 audio from that morning is publicly available on the
[5:42] Tinley Park Police Department's website, and it's one of the
[5:46] eeriest pieces of evidence in any unsolved case.
[5:50] McFarland whispers into the earpiece, and she gives the
[5:53] dispatcher the name of the store and the address.
[5:56] She tells them to hurry. She doesn't have time to explain
[5:59] what's happening, and she doesn't have to.
[6:03] In the background, you can hear him, and he's not whispering.
[6:06] He's working through some kind of escalating internal
[6:09] monologue, the voice of a man whose composure is slipping.
[6:14] At one point he can apparently be heard saying that he's losing
[6:17] his grip, though I personally find the audio too difficult to
[6:21] make out. McFarlane, naturally, never got
[6:24] the dispatcher into a full conversation, and the line
[6:28] stayed open even as she couldn't keep speaking.
[6:31] What follows on the tape is what police later confirmed, namely a
[6:36] man methodically shooting 5 women in the back of a clothing
[6:39] store. He shot each one in the head.
[6:42] Execution style is the term police have used publicly, and
[6:47] as ugly as that term is, it's the accurate 1/5 of the six
[6:51] women were eliminated where they lay.
[6:54] He emptied his weapon and walked out the back of the store.
[6:58] Here's the part of the story that haunts every detective who
[7:01] worked the case, and, to be honest, pretty much anyone who
[7:04] has dug into it even a bit. A patrol unit happened to be in
[7:08] the Target parking lot directly across the Plaza when the 911
[7:12] dispatch went out, and the officer responded immediately.
[7:17] From the moment that call hit the radio to the moment a cop
[7:20] was walking through the front door of the Lane Bryant, the
[7:23] elapsed time was about two minutes.
[7:25] But he still missed him. The perpetrator had walked out a
[7:29] back exit, and by the time officers entered the store and
[7:33] pushed toward the stockroom, the assailant was already gone.
[7:37] Whether he had a vehicle waiting, whether he ran on foot
[7:41] to a different part of the Plaza, or whether he simply
[7:44] walked away into the residential streets, none of that is
[7:48] settled. There were no witnesses outside
[7:52] and there were no security cameras with a usable angle on
[7:55] the back of the building, which seems odd for 2008, but those
[8:00] are the facts. Within minutes of the dispatch,
[8:04] every available unit in Tinley Park was responding, but by then
[8:09] the perp had a head start of at least two or three minutes.
[8:12] The first paramedics arrived seconds behind the first officer
[8:16] and they found the women in the backroom.
[8:19] Five of the six women in that room wouldn't survive their
[8:21] wounds. And then there was the 6th,
[8:24] alive but still pretending not to be the part time employee is
[8:30] the only reason police have a description of the attacker at
[8:33] all. As he moved through the line of
[8:35] women methodically shooting, she did the only thing she could
[8:39] think to do. She turned her head a fraction
[8:42] of an inch at the last moment, and the bullet grazed her neck
[8:45] instead of going through her skull.
[8:47] She bled, but didn't move or make a sound.
[8:51] And then she listened to him walk away.
[8:54] She was taken to a local hospital and treated for her
[8:57] wounds. And then, while still in the
[9:00] rawest possible state, she sat down with detectives and gave
[9:04] them everything she had. She gave them his build, his
[9:08] description, the four green beads on the right braid, the
[9:12] embroidered jeans, a description of his hat, and his tone of
[9:16] voice. The composite sketch police
[9:19] released on February 11th of 2008 was built entirely from her
[9:23] account. Thankfully, she's never been
[9:26] named in the press and her identity has been kept out of
[9:29] all court filings and public releases.
[9:33] Multiple investigators over the years have said publicly that
[9:36] protecting her remains a top priority of the case.
[9:40] Her testimony will one day hopefully be what lands this
[9:44] monster under lock and key for the rest of his days.
[9:48] The original 2008 sketch shows a man who looks, frankly, like he
[9:52] could be 5000 other men in the area, and that's part of the
[9:56] problem. The composite was specific in
[9:59] some places, like the cornrows, the beads and the build, and
[10:03] generic and others. Police circulated it widely and
[10:07] tips flooded in claiming they knew who the guy was.
[10:12] Unfortunately though, as I said, the sketch created at the time
[10:16] was sufficiently generic aside from a few defining features.
[10:20] Those defining features, though, weren't immutable
[10:23] characteristics, and he could easily change his hairstyle, for
[10:26] instance. Within weeks of the slayings,
[10:29] the case was featured on the long running National Crime show
[10:32] America's Most Wanted, which generated another wave of public
[10:36] leads. A slightly updated composite
[10:39] sketch was released later that year, though this one wasn't too
[10:43] much different from the original.
[10:45] Each milestone drew a fresh round of national attention and
[10:49] each 1 ended the same way. In 2018, the Tinley Park Police
[10:54] partnered with the Michigan State Police on a new 3D modeled
[10:58] composite. This used updated facial
[11:01] identification technology and the survivors original
[11:04] description to produce a more photo realistic image.
[11:08] It's the version most people have seen since and it hasn't
[11:11] cracked the case either. If this image is accurate then I
[11:14] think that this should have been enough to break the case.
[11:17] I have to think that during the extreme stress of the situation
[11:21] it's possible that the witness got some features wrong, which
[11:24] may explain why he hasn't yet been clapped in cuffs.
[11:29] There's also forensic evidence police haven't disclosed in
[11:32] full, and this may be what ultimately breaks the case.
[11:36] Investigators have confirmed the perpetrator wasn't wearing
[11:39] gloves, which means latent fingerprints likely existed
[11:43] somewhere in the back of that store.
[11:45] However, whether these were actually recovered or not
[11:50] remains unknown at this point. But as you'll see, that may be
[11:55] largely immaterial. Connie Woolfolk, the 37 year old
[12:00] customer from Flossmoor, fought back.
[12:02] During the attack, blood believed to belong to the killer
[12:06] was reportedly recovered from underneath her fingernails.
[12:10] That genetic information has been run against the standard
[12:13] criminal databases for nearly two decades, but it still hasn't
[12:17] matched anyone. That means that whoever this
[12:21] shooter was likely didn't have a criminal record and hasn't been
[12:25] booked for any serious offenses after.
[12:29] Personally, that leads me to believe there's a chance that
[12:31] he's no longer alive, since I don't think someone who commits
[12:35] such an act can just integrate back into normal society.
[12:40] That said, I'll admit that's entirely speculative on my part,
[12:45] and he may have intentionally been keeping a low profile in
[12:48] the years after. This is also the point where I
[12:51] have to mention the potential for genetic genealogy to crack
[12:56] this case wide open, and honestly, I'm a bit surprised
[13:00] this hasn't happened yet. Genetic genealogy has been used
[13:04] to crack numerous cases of much less severity than this one.
[13:08] I would have thought this case would have been top priority for
[13:11] this cutting edge forensic technique, though for whatever
[13:14] reason it apparently hasn't been.
[13:18] A reward for information leading to an arrest was announced in
[13:21] the days after the slayings, and it's been raised more than once
[13:24] over the years. The figure posted by Tinley Park
[13:28] Police is $100,000, and family pledges have pushed the publicly
[13:33] cited total as high as $200,000. Tinley Park has assigned new
[13:39] detectives to the case at regular intervals.
[13:42] The most recent set brought in to look at the file and bring
[13:45] new forensic techniques to bear. And I'll say it again very
[13:50] directly, retain the best genetic genealogy lab in the
[13:55] country and get some justice for these victims and take this guy
[13:59] off the street. If he's still alive.
[14:02] Someone like this could strike again at any time, even if he's
[14:06] been staying out of trouble. A documentary on the case called
[14:10] The Tinley Park 5 was released early in 2026, and police are
[14:15] openly hoping it'll shake a tip loose from somebody who's been
[14:18] sitting on something for years. So far it's too early to tell if
[14:23] this is panned out at all, but given that the documentary is
[14:26] fairly obscure, I wouldn't count on it.
[14:30] I think the motive for this attack is perhaps one of the
[14:33] biggest open questions in the case, aside from who the
[14:36] perpetrator actually was. No one in their right mind would
[14:41] have chosen to rob this store at this time of day in that season.
[14:46] It also makes no sense whatsoever why he appeared to
[14:49] wait for more people to enter the store if this was a simple
[14:52] robbery. Generally people in these
[14:55] situations want less witnesses and less factors at play rather
[14:59] than more. Personally, I think while he
[15:02] announced it as a robbery, this was just his way to ensure
[15:06] compliance from the staff and the customers.
[15:09] The general logic is that anyone who's sticking up a store just
[15:13] wants the money, not life in prison, so the natural response
[15:17] is simply to comply. I think he exploited that
[15:20] natural response in an effort to lull the victims into compliance
[15:24] before he did what he came there to do.
[15:27] Why anyone would try to eliminate 6 innocent people like
[15:30] this is entirely beyond my reasoning though.
[15:35] In the end, some people are just really sick individuals.
[15:41] As I was recording this, I just thought of something else as
[15:43] well and I'm just going to toss this in at the end rather than
[15:47] trying to fit it in. I think the perpetrator was
[15:51] likely not from the Chicago area that he may have traveled there
[15:55] to commit the crime. This could explain why, even
[15:59] with the updated composite image, that no one has put two
[16:03] and two together on who this guy is.
[16:06] That said, this is just purely speculation on my part and I
[16:10] have no real evidence to back up this theory.
[16:17] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy with a quick reminder to hit the
[16:20] notification bell in the subscribe button for more
[16:22] content. Also, don't forget to check out
[16:25] the Patreon or the membership if you want to support my channel
[16:29] more directly. The man slipped in through an
[16:35] unlocked door and walked past six dogs that should have torn
[16:39] him apart. He then climbed the staircase of
[16:42] a log home tucked into the trees outside one of Colorado's most
[16:46] picture perfect resort towns. Upstairs, a 44 year old
[16:51] Norwegian woman lay sleeping a few feet from her two young
[16:54] kids. He fired one round into her
[16:57] back, walked back out into the dark, drove S for hours and
[17:03] tossed most of his clothes out the car window as he crossed
[17:06] into New Mexico. For more than three years,
[17:10] nobody knew his name. The dead woman's father-in-law,
[17:14] meanwhile, was on national television making some very
[17:17] unusual allegations. Eva Berg Schoen had built the
[17:23] kind of life that, from the outside, looked like a dream.
[17:28] She'd been born in Norway in 1946, met an American somewhere
[17:32] along the way, and ended up married to Sam Schoen.
[17:36] He was the oldest son of one of the most famous self-made men in
[17:41] America. Sam's father, Leonard Shown, had
[17:46] launched U-Haul in 1945. With a single trailer and a
[17:51] concept so obvious in hindsight it's hard to believe nobody had
[17:55] cornered it yet. He had the idea to rent the
[17:58] moving truck to the people doing the moving.
[18:01] By the late 1980s, U-Haul was a billion dollar empire and the
[18:06] Showns were one of the wealthiest families in Arizona.
[18:10] But they were also behind closed doors, openly in conflict with
[18:14] themselves, and things were getting extremely acrimonious.
[18:18] Sam and Ava wanted no part of any of it, and in 1987 Sam
[18:24] resigned from the company, allegedly in protest after a
[18:29] faction of his own brothers allegedly forced their father
[18:32] out of the boardroom. He packed up Eva, their two
[18:36] young daughters, and bought a $400,000 log house on a private
[18:40] road called Skunk Creek Drive. This somewhat unattractively
[18:44] named address was about four miles outside the town of
[18:47] Telluride, and despite the name, it was beautiful.
[18:51] The houses there had no St. numbers and no St. lights.
[18:55] There were aspens, spruce trees, six dogs running the property
[19:00] and a few horses Eva kept in a paddock behind the house.
[19:03] She trained dogs and she skied doing the kinds of normal things
[19:07] Telluride newcomers do. To understand why anyone would
[19:12] assume this was something other than a botched break in, we need
[19:16] to look at where the Shown family was leading up to that
[19:18] August, Leonard Shown had fathered 12 children across 3
[19:22] marriages and gradually transferred U-Haul stock to
[19:26] those children as part of a long term succession plan.
[19:30] In November 1986, a coalition of his sons, led by Joe and Mark
[19:35] Schoen launched a takeover of the business, correctly
[19:39] believing they had the secret sauce to expand the company.
[19:43] Leonard wasn't the CEO of the company he'd founded anymore,
[19:47] and he wasn't the president either, a fact that apparently
[19:51] made him quite bitter. Sam, the eldest, sided with his
[19:55] father, and he quit U-Haul in 1987 in solidarity with him.
[20:01] He kept fighting through shareholder lawsuits against Joe
[20:04] and Mark, and by the time Eva moved to Telluride, the family
[20:07] had effectively split into two camps.
[20:10] There were sworn depositions, private investigators on
[20:14] retainer for both sides, and this bitterness ran incredibly
[20:18] deep in one court decision from 1993.
[20:23] The judge characterized it as a bitter family feud pitting the
[20:27] patriarch versus Mark and Joe shown it wasn't the kind of feud
[20:32] that gets resolved over a Turkey and some stuffing at
[20:36] Thanksgiving. It was the kind that ends up in
[20:39] court for years. When Eva was found dead in
[20:43] August 1990, it shaped many people's first instinct about
[20:47] what had happened. A wealthy woman shot in the back
[20:51] inside a remote log home on a private road, with no obvious
[20:55] signs of robbery and no obvious motive at the scene, looked
[20:59] unusual to the local sheriff, to the press, and eventually to
[21:04] Leonard, shown himself. It looked like something else
[21:07] more sinister entirely. Of course, that instinct would
[21:11] be entirely incorrect and Leonard would make some serious,
[21:15] unfounded allegations that are quite disturbing.
[21:20] Sam was in Phoenix on business that week and Ava was alone in
[21:23] the house with their two kids and the dogs.
[21:26] Sometime in the early hours of August 6th, an intruder slipped
[21:30] inside. The Shone's had six dogs on the
[21:34] property and none of them barked loud enough or long enough to
[21:37] wake the house. The intruder made it up the
[21:40] staircase to the second floor, where Ava was in bed.
[21:45] A single round was fired into her back from a small caliber
[21:48] weapon, which investigators later concluded had probably
[21:52] been fitted with a silencer. That detail, more than any
[21:56] other, shaped what some people incorrectly believed about the
[21:59] case. For years afterward, Ava somehow
[22:02] managed to get up after being shot.
[22:05] She made it as far as the top of the staircase before she
[22:08] collapsed, and that's where her older daughter found her in the
[22:12] morning. The dogs were still alive and
[22:15] everyone else was physically unharmed, but whoever had been
[22:19] inside the house was long gone. The local sheriff, Bill Masters
[22:25] irresponsibly called it a quasi professional hit when he first
[22:29] addressed reporters, and that phrase would echo through
[22:32] coverage for years. He didn't have a suspect or a
[22:36] weapon, and within a few days he didn't really have a working
[22:39] theory either. What he had was a body and an
[22:43] angry, terrified family hundreds of miles away in Phoenix,
[22:47] already starting to ask hard questions of one another.
[22:51] Telluride in 1990 wasn't the celebrity playground it has
[22:55] since become, but it wasn't a stranger to money, either.
[22:59] The Ski Ranches subdivision where the Shown's lived was the
[23:03] kind of place where people moved precisely so they wouldn't have
[23:06] to lock their doors at night. The Sheriff's Office didn't have
[23:10] a deep bench of detectives, and the county didn't have its own
[23:14] crime lab. Within days of the slaying,
[23:17] investigators were leaning heavily on outside agencies,
[23:21] including the feds. They worked through the obvious
[23:25] questions first. There had been no forced entry
[23:29] and no ransacking on the scale you'd expect from a burglar.
[23:33] There had been no indecent assault, and numerous valuable
[23:37] items in Plainview were apparently untouched.
[23:41] Some in law enforcement floated the idea that whoever had come
[23:44] into that house seemed to have come in for one purpose
[23:47] specifically, and to have left as soon as the job was done.
[23:52] Leonard, shown by then in his mid 70s, went on national
[23:56] television and falsely accused 2 of his own sons of being
[24:00] involved in his daughter in law's death.
[24:03] He sat for interviews and helped write a book telling anyone
[24:07] who'd listen that he believed Mark and Joe were involved,
[24:11] despite no evidence whatsoever indicating this was the case.
[24:15] And you're never going to guess what they did next.
[24:18] Facing these wild, unfounded allegations, his son sued their
[24:22] father for defamation in 1990 and 1991, respectively, over
[24:27] these statements, and given the eventual resolution of the case,
[24:32] you'll see why. Investigators, for their part,
[24:36] never found any evidence linking the slaying to the family
[24:39] dispute in any way whatsoever. They found that they were a
[24:42] family who was in deep conflict, but that they were solving their
[24:46] disputes through legal means only.
[24:49] Unfortunately, investigators would burn through valuable
[24:53] resources investigating since the sheriff seemed to have it in
[24:56] his mind that this was a professional job.
[25:01] And as it turns out, it was actually the furthest thing from
[25:04] it. In December 1992, the case got
[25:08] picked up by Unsolved Mysteries and the first broadcast
[25:11] generated leads, but nothing that stuck.
[25:15] This segment is actually pretty hard to find now because there
[25:18] are a lot of allegations that were made that turned out to be
[25:21] completely false. When the segment was rerun the
[25:24] following year, a viewer in New Mexico picked up the phone.
[25:28] His name was Kelly Lemons, and he'd been sitting on something
[25:32] for nearly three years. His brother-in-law, he told the
[25:36] producers, had been bragging since 1990 about shooting a
[25:40] woman in Telluride during a break in that had gone sideways.
[25:45] The brother-in-law was a 38 year old auto repairman from Santa Fe
[25:48] named Frank Marquis. He had a long record of
[25:52] burglaries and other serious offenses from the 1980s, and he
[25:56] was on parole at the time of the August 1990 slaying.
[26:01] He'd been moving through Colorado that summer, breaking
[26:04] into vacation homes along the Western Slope when the owners
[26:07] were out. He knew how to read a property
[26:09] from the road and tell whether anyone was inside.
[26:12] He worked alone, and by all accounts, he was generally good
[26:16] at picking vacation houses that weren't occupied.
[26:20] The shown house had been on his list, and he hadn't expected
[26:23] anyone to be home that night. Eva had heard him moving around
[26:27] downstairs, gotten up and started for the stairs to see
[26:32] what was happening. He'd panicked, fired one shot,
[26:35] and run without taking anything. On July 20th, 1993,
[26:40] investigators in Santa Fe arrested him, and he denied
[26:44] everything for more than a year while the evidence built against
[26:47] him. What broke him in the end was a
[26:51] single strand of hair found in one of the most unlikely ways
[26:54] possible. After firing the shot, Marquis
[26:58] had driven back to New Mexico and tossed pieces of his
[27:01] clothing out the car window along the way.
[27:04] In A twist that sounds unbelievable, investigators
[27:07] working backward from his root eventually recovered some of the
[27:11] discarded clothes. A forensic trace expert analyzed
[27:15] a hair found on one of the shirts and concluded it was
[27:19] consistent with Eva's. When detectives put that finding
[27:23] in front of Marquis in October 1994, he finally admitted what
[27:28] he'd done. He had no idea who the Shone
[27:30] family was, and he'd simply been working through a list of empty
[27:34] looking mountain homes that summer.
[27:36] In November 1994, Marquis pleaded guilty to manslaughter
[27:41] and 2nd degree burglary as part of a deal that took the first
[27:45] degree charge off the table. The judge handed him 24 years
[27:50] and he served roughly 17 of them inside the New Mexico prison
[27:53] system and was released on parole in November 2011.

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