# 4 Chilling Cold Cases That Netflix Won't Cover | 224

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 7 May 2026, 40 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO5806012172.mp3

Join me for 4 chilling cold cases that are too dark for Netflix. Episode 224 of the true crime podcast btw. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: 🛍️ Merch: https://lazy-chill-zone-shop.fourthwall.com ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw 🍏 True Crime Podcast on Apple 🍎: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lazy-chill-true-crime/id1815534472 unsolved mysteries, true crime, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, missing persons, murder investigation, forensic evidence, serial killers, crime scene analysis, dark history, criminal psychology, real life horror, police investigations, DNA breakthroughs, forensic genealogy, crime documentaries, criminal profiling, mysterious disappearances, solved cases, justice system, law enforcement stories, cold case files, creepy mysteries, true crime storytelling, crime reconstruction, chilling cases, investigative reporting, modern forensics, victim advocacy, unidentified remains, crime scene forensics, disturbing cases, true crime analysis, hidden clues, infamous crimes, real crime stories, forensic evidence, heists, art theft

## Transcript

[0:00] 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, they
[0:44] lived on the northwest side of Indianapolis in a quiet stretch
[0:49] of Claiborne Drive. They had two children together,
[0:53] a 15 year old son named Josh and a 10 year old daughter named
[0:57] Gretchen. From the outside they looked
[1:00] like a stable middle class family, but from the inside the
[1:04] marriage had been hollowing out for years.
[1:08] Bonnie had spent most of her adult life as a stay at home
[1:11] mother, but only a few months before she vanished she took a
[1:15] part time job as an inventory clerk.
[1:18] The job itself was simple and straightforward, and it offered
[1:21] a way for her to build her resume and her savings and by
[1:25] association, her freedom from the marriage.
[1:29] For the first time in over 2 decades, she was meeting people
[1:32] outside the orbit of her household, and one of those
[1:35] people was a man she worked with.
[1:38] He was younger, available, and apparently very interested.
[1:43] Bonnie began an affair with him, and by all later accounts, she
[1:47] fell hard. By the early summer of that
[1:50] year, she'd reached a decision She wanted out of the marriage.
[1:56] When she told Richard she wanted a divorce, he didn't take it.
[1:59] Well, he didn't take it at all, in fact, and refused to consent
[2:04] to the divorce. He wanted counseling and a
[2:07] chance to fight for the marriage, but Bonnie wanted
[2:10] neither. That argument was still hanging
[2:14] in the air on the night of July 3rd when she put on a striped
[2:18] blouse, Navy pants and sandals, picked up her tan purse, and
[2:22] drove out to meet her friends. The plan that night was a
[2:27] birthday celebration for one of Bonnie's Co workers from the
[2:30] inventory job. The group ended up at the Time
[2:33] Out Lounge, a bar near the intersection of 62nd St. and
[2:38] Allisonville Rd. on the city's north side.
[2:42] With her were two people who knew the deepest parts of her
[2:44] life at that moment, her best friend and her boyfriend, the
[2:49] same man from work she'd been seeing in secret for months.
[2:53] By the time she pulled into the parking lot, she was already a
[2:56] wreck. According to what those two
[2:58] later told police, she sat down and immediately unloaded on
[3:02] them. She and Richard had had a brutal
[3:05] verbal conflict earlier in the day, with Richard insisting that
[3:08] he wouldn't consent to a divorce.
[3:11] Then, slowly, the night did its work.
[3:14] There were drinks and conversation, the crowd loosened
[3:18] and the music kept playing. By the time last call rolled
[3:22] around, Bonnie had calmed down. The friend and the boyfriend
[3:27] both later said she seemed steady, even cheerful.
[3:31] When they walked her to the door, she told them she was
[3:34] driving straight home to deal with whatever came next.
[3:38] Claiborne Drive was a few miles to the West, an easy run down
[3:42] familiar streets at an hour when the city was effectively empty.
[3:46] But she never made it. When Richard woke up that
[3:50] morning, his wife wasn't there. According to the account he
[3:55] later gave investigators, he didn't panic.
[3:58] He assumed she'd been drinking, decided to crash at a Co
[4:02] worker's house and would surface during the day.
[4:05] He didn't call the police, and he didn't drive out looking for
[4:09] her. Hours passed.
[4:12] Their two kids were in the house.
[4:15] Lunchtime came and went. By late afternoon, she still
[4:19] hadn't come home. And around 5:00 in the evening
[4:21] on July 4th, roughly 13 hours after she was last seen, Richard
[4:27] finally filed a missing persons report.
[4:30] That delay would become one of the most chewed over details.
[4:33] For years, investigators have pointed out that even if Bonnie
[4:37] had simply crashed at a Co worker's place, she wouldn't
[4:40] have stayed gone all day without calling the kids.
[4:44] Richard's account of the night was straightforward on the
[4:47] surface. He said he and Bonnie had argued
[4:49] earlier that day about the divorce and that he'd gone to
[4:52] bed expecting her to come home. Eventually, he acknowledged the
[4:56] marriage was in trouble. But he insisted he didn't
[4:59] believe his wife would simply walk out without warning,
[5:02] especially without saying anything to the children.
[5:06] Investigators at first took that voluntary disappearance
[5:09] hypothesis seriously. The early theory was that
[5:12] Bonnie, exhausted by a marriage she couldn't get out of and
[5:16] apparently in love with someone else, had decided to disappear
[5:20] on her own terms. It's not unheard of, and adults
[5:24] vanish themselves out of bad lives all the time, though much
[5:28] less often in a situation like this where there are family
[5:32] members she cared about. The problem was that none of the
[5:35] practical mechanics of a voluntary disappearance held up.
[5:40] Bonnie's bank accounts were untouched and stayed that way.
[5:43] Her cell phone, the one she'd been carrying in her purse, went
[5:47] silent and stayed silent. There was no suitcase missing
[5:52] from the closet, no withdrawal of cash, no goodbye letter and
[5:57] no contact with the boyfriend she'd just been promising a
[6:00] future to a few hours earlier. Detectives quietly shifted their
[6:06] thinking, and the working theory inside the Indianapolis
[6:09] Metropolitan Police Department was that Bonnie hadn't run.
[6:14] She'd been taken in the early stages of the investigation.
[6:19] Police asked both of the men in Bonnie's life to sit for
[6:22] polygraph examinations. The boyfriend agreed.
[6:26] He sat down, answered the questions, and the examiner
[6:31] recorded his results as showing no deception.
[6:35] As far as the polygraph could tell, he didn't know what had
[6:38] happened to Bonnie that night, and he was effectively cleared
[6:41] as a person of interest. In the months that followed,
[6:45] Richard sat down, too, and his test came back the other way,
[6:50] with the examiner's report indicating deception on the
[6:53] questions that mattered most. Polygraphs aren't admissible in
[6:57] court, and they're famously imperfect even as investigative
[7:01] aides. Polygraphs don't measure truth
[7:04] or lies directly by any means whatsoever, but rather they
[7:08] measure physiological responses to questions.
[7:12] Someone who is stressed or anxious or otherwise under
[7:15] duress may, quote UN quote, fail a polygraph test.
[7:21] I also have to question why Richard would even consent to a
[7:24] polygraph test at all if he had in fact done it.
[7:27] But in a case with no body, no car, and no crime scene, that
[7:32] result fundamentally reshaped where investigators looked from
[7:36] then on for nearly 30 years, the Indianapolis detectives working
[7:41] the case have privately and publicly named Richard as their
[7:45] primary focus of the investigation.
[7:48] Personally, I think this was almost certainly a mistake.
[7:51] As I'll get into shortly, the 1990 Mercury Sable station wagon
[7:57] is the strangest part of this whole case.
[7:59] Cars are large, awkward objects, and they get logged when they're
[8:03] towed and flagged when they're impounded.
[8:05] And a vehicle with a registered Indiana plate doesn't usually
[8:09] evaporate. Yet from the morning Bonnie
[8:12] drove out of the Time Out Lounge parking lot, the Sable hasn't
[8:15] surfaced anywhere. Not in a salvage yard, not in an
[8:20] out of state registration database, not in a police
[8:23] impound, Not in any other corner of the country where stolen cars
[8:27] eventually surface. That absence has driven a long
[8:31] parade of theories, and the most popular is that the car ended up
[8:35] in water. Indianapolis sits on the White
[8:39] River and is laced with retention ponds, gravel pits and
[8:43] old quarries, and a sinking vehicle could plausibly stay
[8:46] hidden for decades. In April of 2022, a volunteer
[8:52] underwater recovery team that travels the country searching
[8:55] for missing persons vehicles came to Indianapolis to look for
[8:59] Bonnie's car. Over several days of sonar work
[9:03] and dives along the routes she might have taken, the team
[9:07] pulled a number of submerged cars out of local waterways, but
[9:11] none of them was hers. A second theory is that the
[9:15] sable was driven somewhere remote and either buried or
[9:18] crushed, which would have required help planning and a
[9:22] private place to put it. 1/3 is that it was simply dumped at the
[9:27] right chop shop operation, broken down for parts and resold
[9:32] piece by piece before anyone even knew Bonnie was missing.
[9:37] None of these has ever been corroborated, and none of them
[9:40] gets investigators any closer to the woman herself.
[9:44] The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department still has the
[9:47] Schultz case file open. It's been handed across more
[9:51] than one cold case unit over the decades, and despite a complete
[9:56] absence of physical evidence, nobody in the department seems
[9:59] willing to write it off. The detectives who've worked it
[10:03] most recently have said publicly that they believe Bonnie was the
[10:07] victim of foul play and that no one has been ruled out as a
[10:10] suspect. One possibility that deserves
[10:15] more weight is the simplest physical explanation.
[10:19] Bonnie Schultz may have accidentally driven into water.
[10:22] It sounds almost too mundane for a case that has been treated as
[10:26] suspicious for decades, but the missing car is the center of the
[10:30] mystery. Bonnie didn't vanish on foot.
[10:34] She left in a blue Mercury Sable station wagon, and from that
[10:38] moment forward, both Bonnie and the car disappeared.
[10:42] A person can be hidden fairly easily and a body can be moved,
[10:47] but a full size station wagon is much harder to erase unless it
[10:51] ends up somewhere no one can see.
[10:54] In that scenario, the late hour, the emotional stress of the
[10:58] night, alcohol consumption and dark roads all become important.
[11:04] Bonnie had been upset earlier, then apparently calmed down, and
[11:09] she told the people with her that she was going home.
[11:12] If she took a wrong turn, lost control, nodded off, misjudged a
[11:17] curve, or drifted into a pond, quarry, retention basin, or
[11:22] river access point, the car could have gone under easily.
[11:27] Indianapolis and its surrounding areas have enough waterways,
[11:31] ponds, gravel pits, and industrial water hazards that
[11:35] this isn't far fetched. The biggest point is this.
[11:40] Absolutely no physical evidence has ever tied Richard Schultz to
[11:43] any crime whatsoever. Nothing physical has ever
[11:46] connected him to any criminal act either.
[11:49] And suspicion isn't proof. A bad marriage, a failed
[11:53] polygraph, jealousy, or delayed reporting can make someone look
[11:58] questionable, but none of that proves anything on its own.
[12:03] And As for the failed polygraph test, Richard was under extreme
[12:07] psychological duress at the time, and besides, there was
[12:11] nothing compelling him to take a polygraph test regardless if he
[12:16] had been involved, it simply doesn't make sense to me that he
[12:18] would have cooperated with investigators at all, since he
[12:22] was under no obligation to do so.
[12:25] Until the car is found, the water accident theory remains
[12:29] one of the cleanest explanations.
[12:31] It accounts for Bonnie's disappearance and the vehicle's
[12:34] disappearance at the same time without requiring a hidden crime
[12:38] scene, a perfect clean up, or a decades long concealment.
[12:43] That said, it's always possible that the police are holding back
[12:47] additional evidence that contradicts this theory, given
[12:50] that this is an active and ongoing investigation.
[12:54] But given the period of time that's passed, I find this
[12:57] increasingly unlikely as this sort of closely held evidence
[13:01] generally eventually gets tossed out as a Hail Mary passed
[13:05] decades on. In the end, I believe that if
[13:09] this cold case mystery is going to be cracked, it'll be due to
[13:13] the effort of dive teams. She left a small house in
[13:19] Taniger in Norway sometime after midnight, and the circumstances
[13:23] of what happened and why it happened have never been fully
[13:26] explained. 2 people who knew her went with her walking down
[13:31] toward the container yard at Risa Vica on the southwestern
[13:35] Norwegian coast. Only two of them came back.
[13:39] And for the next three years, the official answer to what had
[13:42] happened to Lena Carlson was that nobody, anywhere knew a
[13:47] thing. The strangest part of the whole
[13:50] story is that the truth had been sitting in someone's living room
[13:53] the entire time, waiting for a marriage to fall apart.
[13:58] Lena Carlson was 35 in the spring of 2005.
[14:03] She'd grown up in Lillesond, A postcard pretty town along the
[14:07] southern coast, and was raising three children, all of them
[14:10] young enough to still need her every day.
[14:14] Her youngest daughter's father was a man named Helga Ivar
[14:18] Brayland Patterson, an ex-husband she still saw from
[14:21] time to time because of their shared child.
[14:25] They'd separated years earlier, but the two of them maintained
[14:28] the kind of slightly awkward arrangement that comes with
[14:31] shared parenting. Friends and relatives later
[14:34] described Lena as the kind of mother whose absence would be
[14:37] noticed within hours rather than days.
[14:41] She kept in regular contact with relatives back in Lillesonde,
[14:45] kept a routine, and rarely left a phone unanswered for long.
[14:50] On the evening of March 6th, 2005, she was visiting Pederson
[14:55] at his place in Tanninger, just north of Stavinger on the
[14:59] Rogaland coast. He had a new partner, now a
[15:03] fiance, he was about to marry, and the three of them spent the
[15:06] night together. There's no indication that the
[15:10] visit was unusual for her, though it sounds a little
[15:13] strange to me. People who knew the family later
[15:17] described the arrangement as some kind of post relationship
[15:20] truce. That said, I'm working from
[15:23] sources auto translated from Norwegian here, so I do admit
[15:27] that something may have been lost in that process.
[15:31] At some point, the group decided to head down to the sea, and
[15:35] that short walk would be the last confirmed sighting of Lena
[15:38] Carlson anywhere on Earth. Here's the strange thing about
[15:43] how this case began. Lena wasn't reported missing for
[15:46] weeks. Her family in Lillesan started
[15:49] raising the alarm only on April 14th, more than a month after
[15:53] the night in Tanninger. It tells you something about how
[15:57] carefully the people who saw her last had managed the situation
[16:02] because they simply went on with their lives as though nothing
[16:05] had happened. It also gave whoever was
[16:08] responsible an enormous head start on the kind of clean up
[16:13] work that becomes harder once the police start asking
[16:16] questions. When Norwegian police did open a
[16:20] missing persons inquiry, they hit a wall almost immediately.
[16:25] Lena had no obvious reason to walk away from her life.
[16:28] Her bank account wasn't being touched, no border crossing had
[16:32] pinged her name, and her children weren't being
[16:34] contacted. Officers questioned more than 70
[16:37] witnesses over the following months and came up with rumors
[16:41] and a few uncomfortable looks from people who knew Peterson,
[16:45] but nothing they recovered was solid enough to put in front of
[16:48] a prosecutor, at least at that point.
[16:52] The harbor itself was searched. Divers went into the water
[16:55] around Reesevika, and the surrounding shoreline was walked
[16:59] again and again, but nothing surfaced.
[17:03] By February 2006, less than a year after the disappearance,
[17:08] the active investigation was effectively shut down, and by
[17:12] November of that same year, the case was formally shelved.
[17:17] As far as the Norwegian justice system was concerned, Lena
[17:20] Carlson had walked into the dark and never come back.
[17:25] The break came in the summer of 2008.
[17:28] Peterson's then fiance had become his wife in the years
[17:32] since Lena vanished, and the marriage hadn't lasted.
[17:36] After the relationship fell apart, she walked into a police
[17:39] station and told officers something they hadn't been able
[17:42] to extract from anyone else. She'd been there and she'd
[17:46] watched the whole thing. And according to the account she
[17:48] gave investigators, the night had unfolded something like
[17:52] this. For reasons that haven't fully
[17:55] been explained, the three of them had walked down to the
[17:58] harbor in Risavika together. Once they were there, Peterson
[18:03] had attacked Lena with a hammer, struck her several times and
[18:07] then strangled her until she stopped moving.
[18:10] The witness described the body being weighted down with
[18:13] concrete blocks and dropped into the sea, allegedly dragged out
[18:18] behind a boat to deeper water before being released.
[18:22] She also explained why she hadn't gone to the police at the
[18:25] time. She'd been terrified of
[18:27] Peterson, financially dependent on the household they shared and
[18:32] unsure whether anyone would have believed her if she'd spoken up.
[18:36] By 2008, all of that had changed, and investigators went
[18:40] back through the original 2005 case file.
[18:44] They cross checked her timeline against the few details they'd
[18:47] nailed down at the time, and found that her story slotted
[18:50] into the existing record with uncomfortable precision.
[18:55] Peterson was arrested and charged with the slaying of Lena
[18:58] Carlson. The case that prosecutors took
[19:01] into Stavanger District Court was, by Norwegian standards,
[19:05] deeply unusual. There was no body, no forensic
[19:08] trail, no recovered weapon, and no scene that could be processed
[19:13] for fresh evidence five years after the fact.
[19:16] The harbor at Rusevika had been searched time and time again
[19:20] without yielding anything that could be tied to Lena
[19:23] specifically. Everything the state had in
[19:26] terms of evidence came down to one woman's recollection of a
[19:29] night she'd spent five years trying to forget.
[19:32] She was also someone who had an incentive to downplay any role
[19:36] she may have had in that night, which complicated the evidence
[19:40] she gave even further. That's a fragile foundation for
[19:44] any prosecution, and in most Western legal systems, the body
[19:48] of the victim has historically been treated as something close
[19:52] to a prerequisite for a successful trial.
[19:55] The fear is obvious, since without a body you can't be
[19:59] entirely certain a crime even took place.
[20:02] Norway, in case you were wondering, has the equivalent of
[20:06] our common law double jeopardy rule.
[20:09] That means that if Peterson was charged initially and the
[20:12] prosecution failed for lack of a body, if it was discovered
[20:16] later, prosecutors would be out of luck.
[20:20] It was a massive gamble for the prosecution, and the defense
[20:24] leaned hard on exactly this point.
[20:26] They argued that Lena could still be alive somewhere, that
[20:30] the witness was lying or mistaken, and that without
[20:34] physical proof there was reasonable doubt by definition.
[20:39] However, unlike in our system, Norway doesn't have traditional
[20:43] juries, so judges alone decide the case.
[20:47] I'd argue that in this case, that fact came down in favor of
[20:50] the prosecution. As you're about to see, the
[20:54] judge spent significant time reconstructing the witness's
[20:57] account in open court. The judge noted the specificity
[21:01] of the details she'd provided and the absence of any plausible
[21:04] motive for her to invent the story.
[21:07] In 2010, Peterson was convicted of the slaying, and his initial
[21:12] sentence was 19 years in the slammer.
[21:15] Apparently, this is an unusually long term in the Norwegian
[21:18] system that reflected how dangerous the court considered
[21:22] him to be on release. Personally, I thought it was
[21:26] quite light given the gravity of his actions.
[21:30] Notably, that decision broke new ground.
[21:33] It was the first time a Norwegian court had convicted
[21:36] someone where the victim's remains had never been
[21:38] recovered. Legal scholars around the
[21:41] country took note, and the case became a reference point for
[21:44] prosecutors considering whether to bring charges and other
[21:47] investigations with no body. For a country that had
[21:52] historically required physical evidence in cases of this
[21:55] gravity, that was a significant shift.
[21:59] The conviction wasn't the end of the legal story.
[22:03] Peterson appealed, and the Court of Appeals re examined the
[22:06] evidence. The following year, the
[22:08] appellate panel reached the same conclusion about his guilt but
[22:12] adjusted the sentence downward, settling on 15 years in prison
[22:17] with a minimum term of 10 years. The reduction apparently
[22:21] reflected procedural considerations more than any new
[22:24] doubt about what had happened on the harbor that night.
[22:28] Peterson never revealed the location of Lena's body, and she
[22:32] still remains missing until this day, with Peterson maintaining
[22:36] that he didn't do it. Disturbingly, he was released in
[22:41] 2019 and has been in and out of prison since that time for
[22:44] parole violations. Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here
[22:51] with my usual reminder to hit the subscribe button and the
[22:54] notification bell. Also, remember to hit that share
[22:57] button and send this video to any of your friends and family
[23:01] members that enjoy true crime content and unsolved Mysteries.
[23:09] There's a black and white mug shot from 1979 of a young man
[23:13] with long dark hair and the kind of face you wouldn't think twice
[23:16] about if you passed it in a small town diner.
[23:19] His name is Jimmy Long, and sometime on a cool November
[23:23] evening in North Louisiana, he climbed into a stranger's car at
[23:27] a truck stop along the highway. He was seen saying something to
[23:31] two men he'd never met. And then, just like that, he was
[23:35] never seen again. Calhoun, LA, is a sleepy little
[23:40] stretch of homes, gas stations and timberland sitting just West
[23:45] of Monroe along the corridor that would later become
[23:49] Interstate 20. It's the kind of place where the
[23:53] highways, the loudest thing for miles and trucks rolling east
[23:57] West between Dallas and Atlanta, are part of the background hum
[24:01] of life. In 1979, the town wasn't even
[24:05] incorporated, 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 hitchhiking 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 seem 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'd 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.
[29:28] 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. Captains 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
[30:24] 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 crimp's 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.
[31:22] At the other end, the trade had its own grim tool kit.
[31:27] Crimps spiked drinks with laudanum or chloral hydrate,
[31:30] pulled men through trap doors, 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
[31:58] 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
[33:12] 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 dockworker 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.
[38:27] 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
[38:41] 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
[39:01] 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.

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