# 1 Hour of Cold Cases Too Chilling For Netflix | 275

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 14 Jul 2026, 1 h 01 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO4288765446.mp3

Join me for 1 hour of chilling cold cases too dark for Netflix. Episode 275 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, 5 true crime cases, cold case compilation, true crime compilation, fall asleep, sleep compilation, sleep video, true crime for sleep, sleepy true crime, bedtime true crime stories, relaxing true crime, calm crime narration, true crime sleep podcast, dark stories for sleep, soothing mystery stories, unsolved mysteries for sleep, quiet true crime, nighttime crime stories, true crime ambience, deep sleep stories, relaxing murder mysteries, slow true crime narration

## Transcript

[0:00] Just after 1:00 on a cold Thursday afternoon in January of
[0:03] 1983, in a hotel parking lot north of Chicago, two men walked
[0:08] up behind a 60 year old insurance executive.
[0:11] They announced it was a robbery, but the man allegedly being
[0:15] robbed had a treasure trove of dark secrets.
[0:18] Then, before any attempt to actually commit a robbery, one
[0:22] of them fired 8 times and both men walked away without taking a
[0:26] single thing. The man on the asphalt was three
[0:30] weeks from a federal sentencing that could have kept him in
[0:33] prison for the rest of his life. The robbery was fake, but the
[0:37] message was real and more than 40 years later, nobody's ever
[0:41] been charged, even though detectives know the organization
[0:45] behind the attack. In 1949, Allen Dorfman was
[0:50] teaching physical education at the University of Illinois for
[0:53] roughly $4000 a year. He was Chicago native, from a
[0:58] working class family, a graduate of Westside Marshall High
[1:01] School, and a decorated Marine who'd earned a Silver Star on
[1:05] Iwo Jima. Nothing about that life
[1:09] suggested that within five years he'd be a millionaire, or that
[1:13] his violent end would be called one of the biggest organized
[1:16] crime mystery Chicago had ever seen.
[1:19] What changed everything was his stepfather and the circles this
[1:23] man ran in. Red Dorfman ran the Chicago
[1:27] Waste Handlers Union, and congressional investigators
[1:30] would later describe him as the living link between the
[1:32] Teamsters union and the Chicago underworld.
[1:36] In 1949, an ambitious Teamsters leader out of Detroit named
[1:41] Jimmy Hoffa needed exactly the kind of introductions Red could
[1:45] provide. According to FBI files, the two
[1:49] men struck a deal that both their families would live off
[1:52] for the next 30 years. Red would open doors to the
[1:56] Chicago mob, and in exchange, Hoffa would steer the Teamsters
[2:00] insurance business to Red's family.
[2:03] That's how a gym teacher with no insurance experience whatsoever
[2:08] ended up running an insurance agency alongside his mother,
[2:12] Rose. The Teamsters first contract
[2:15] with the new agency arrived in 1950, and the money never
[2:20] stopped coming. During the first eight years of
[2:23] handling Union Welfare Fund business, the Dorfman's
[2:27] reportedly collected more than $3,000,000 in commissions and
[2:30] fees. Allen was a millionaire within
[2:34] five years of leaving the gym behind, a meteoric rise to
[2:38] wealth, Congress noticed. A House committee began asking
[2:43] questions about the arrangement as early as 1953, and both
[2:48] Dorfman's refused to cooperate. Six years later, the McClellan
[2:53] committee dug into the fees the Teamsters were paying the family
[2:56] and suspected that some of the cash flowing out of the agency
[3:00] was ending up in Hoffa's pockets.
[3:02] Nothing stuck, but it was the beginning of a pattern that
[3:06] would hold for most of Allen Dorfman's life.
[3:09] Dorfman's real power ran through the Central State's pension
[3:12] fund. It held the retirement money of
[3:15] hundreds of thousands of Teamsters, truck drivers and
[3:18] warehouse workers across the middle of the country.
[3:22] By the late 1950s, Dorfman had worked his way into the business
[3:27] of approving its loans. Borrowers the banks wouldn't
[3:31] touch had a habit of turning up at Central State's pension fund.
[3:35] The money Dorfman approved flowed out to real estate men
[3:38] with the right friends and casino operators with the right
[3:40] partners. When Hoffa went to prison in
[3:44] 1967, Dorfman effectively took control of the fund itself,
[3:49] vastly increasing his own power. Under his influence, the pension
[3:55] fund became something close to a private bank for organized
[3:59] crime. Money that was supposed to
[4:01] secure the retirements of working men flowed most famously
[4:06] into Las Vegas. The fund bankrolled the Argent
[4:10] Corporation, a company that owned a number of shady casinos
[4:13] in Vegas. Those casinos were being
[4:16] systematically skimmed, with profits siphoned off the top and
[4:20] carried back to crime families in the Midwest.
[4:24] It took until 1986 for the skimming convictions to land,
[4:28] and when they did, they took down the Outfits boss Joey Iupa
[4:34] and his underboss Jackie Cerrone.
[4:37] If you've seen the movie Casino, you've seen a dramatized version
[4:41] of this exact machine. The character Andy Stone, the
[4:45] smooth pension fund man played by Alan King, was based on
[4:49] Dorfman himself. The government kept trying to
[4:53] pull him down, and he kept slipping the hook.
[4:57] When Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering in 1964, Dorfman stood
[5:02] trial on the same charge and walked out acquitted.
[5:06] A Chicago Outfit boss was reportedly once overheard
[5:09] explaining Dorfman's position with unusual clarity.
[5:13] He said, in effect, that Alan himself was meek and harmless,
[5:17] but the people who owned a piece of him were anything but.
[5:20] That was the arrangement in a single sentence, and it's what
[5:24] made him such a valuable asset to the mob.
[5:28] Dorfman was the respectable face, the cool guy with the
[5:31] perpetual tan and the Immaculate suits who was on a first name
[5:36] basis with politicians and Hollywood stars.
[5:39] He wasn't the sort of person who got his hands dirty, but the men
[5:43] standing behind him were the Chicago Outfit.
[5:47] Only once in the 1st 50 years of his life did anything stick to
[5:51] Dorfman. In 1972, Dorfman was convicted
[5:55] of taking a $55,000 kickback on a pension fund loan, and he
[6:00] spent the better part of a year in federal prison.
[6:04] The more instructive story is the case that didn't stick.
[6:07] Right after his release in February of 1974, Dorfman was
[6:14] indicted over $1.4 million in pension fund loans to a plastics
[6:19] company in Deming, NM. His Co defendants were a who's
[6:23] who of the outfits Orbit, Joey Lombardo, one of the most
[6:28] powerful men in the outfit, and the mobs man in Las Vegas, Tony
[6:33] Spilotro were charged as well. A prominent bail bondsman named
[6:38] Irwin Weiner was also charged, a man whose circle of
[6:42] acquaintances famously included Jack Ruby.
[6:45] Remember that name? Not Jack Ruby, but Weiner.
[6:50] Because as we go on, there will be a lot more Weiner in this
[6:54] narrative. And Full disclosure, when I was
[6:58] writing the script for this video, I actually misread his
[7:01] name, believing it was Weiner. But I'm keeping the joke in
[7:05] despite the fact that it doesn't work.
[7:08] The government's key witness was a young businessman named Daniel
[7:12] Seifert, who'd run one of the companies involved and was
[7:15] prepared to testify against all of them.
[7:18] In September of 1974, months before trial, masked gunman cut
[7:24] Seifert down at his factory in Bensenville, IL in front of his
[7:28] wife and four year old son. With its star witness gone, the
[7:33] government's case collapsed and Dorfman and his Co defendants
[7:36] went free in 1975. It took 33 years for anyone to
[7:42] answer for it, and in 2007, the sprawling Family Secrets mob
[7:47] trial finally convicted Lombardo of Seifert's slaying.
[7:52] New pension laws formally stripped Dorfman of his role in
[7:55] the fund by 1977, but investigators never believed his
[7:59] grip had loosened. His company, Amalgamated
[8:03] Insurance Agency, still processed claims for the
[8:07] Teamsters, and the loans he'd blessed were still paying
[8:10] dividends to the outfit through intermediaries.
[8:14] Whatever the organizational chart said, Dorfman remained the
[8:17] man who knew how everything connected.
[8:21] In 1979, the FBI planted hidden microphones inside amalgamated
[8:26] Chicago offices. They were aiming squarely at
[8:29] Dorfman's role in steering Teamsters pension money toward
[8:32] mob connected casinos in Las Vegas.
[8:35] The operation got a name that told you exactly who the target
[8:38] was. Penndorf, short for Penetration
[8:42] of Dorfman. And yeah, in case you're
[8:46] wondering, that one took a few takes to get down in my
[8:49] signature style, but I digress. The bugs delivered a flood of
[8:54] conversations the government could only have dreamed about.
[8:59] Court records from the case describe intercepted talk of
[9:02] hidden interests in the Aladdin Hotel and Casino.
[9:06] The charges that finally stuck, though, came from a different
[9:09] direction entirely. In May of 1981, a federal grand
[9:14] jury indicted Dorfman and four others.
[9:17] And on December 15th, 1982, a jury convicted all of them.
[9:23] The conviction was for conspiring to bribe a sitting
[9:26] United States Senator, Howard Cannon of Nevada.
[9:30] Prosecutors laid out a January 1979 meeting in Cannon's Las
[9:34] Vegas office, where the conspirators allegedly offered
[9:37] him a choice piece of Teamster owned land at a bargain price.
[9:41] In exchange, Cannon was supposed to help stall a bill
[9:45] deregulating the trucking industry, legislation the
[9:48] Teamsters and their silent partners badly wanted quashed.
[9:53] Cannon himself denied that any bribe had ever been offered, and
[9:57] he was never charged with a crime.
[10:00] Dorfman now faced as much as 55 years in prison, with sentencing
[10:04] set for February 10th, 1983. The trial judge initially set
[10:10] his bond at $5,000,000, and an appeals court later cut it to
[10:14] 1,000,000, plus some of the stock in his company's as
[10:18] collateral. He posted it and went home to
[10:21] wait, something that would come to be seen as a fatal mistake.
[10:26] The pressure kept building. Through January.
[10:29] A federal judge froze Amalgamated's assets to keep
[10:32] Dorfman from liquidating everything and running, but the
[10:35] order was allowed to lapse in the third week of the month.
[10:39] A week before his sentencing date, prosecutors in San
[10:42] Francisco indicted him again, this time over an alleged scheme
[10:47] to loot a union's funds out West.
[10:50] He was also awaiting trial alongside Lombardo for allegedly
[10:55] extorting $800,000 from a Chicago area developer named
[11:00] Robert Kendler. And somewhere in Chicago,
[11:04] according to investigators, a conversation was happening about
[11:09] the cold calculus on what the Outfit should do with their old
[11:14] pal Dorfman. Dorfman was 60 years old and
[11:18] looking at what amounted to a life sentence.
[11:21] And men in that position make deals.
[11:24] Dorfman knew the pension fund, the skim, the bribes and the
[11:29] bodies. He even had a paper trail
[11:32] stretching back to Hoffa himself.
[11:35] He wasn't just a cog in the machine.
[11:37] He was one of the architects of the entire machinery that kept
[11:40] the money flowing. The outfit had watched the
[11:44] government flip witnesses before and reportedly concluded that a
[11:48] man with that much to trade couldn't be allowed to reach a
[11:51] bargaining table. January 20th, 1983 was a cold
[11:56] Thursday in Lincolnwood, a small suburb pressed against Chicago's
[12:00] northern edge. Dorfman spent the late morning
[12:03] running errands with his old friend Erwin Weiner, the same
[12:07] bail bondsman who'd been his Co defendant back in 1974.
[12:12] The two men finished a transaction at the First
[12:14] National Bank of Lincolnwood and drove Dorfman's Cadillac to the
[12:18] Hyatt House Hotel at TOWIE and Lincoln avenues.
[12:22] They had a lunch date at Tessie's, the restaurant.
[12:25] Inside, in the back seat of the car sat a video cassette of the
[12:29] verdict, the new Paul Newman picture about a broken down
[12:33] lawyer gambling everything on one last trial.
[12:37] While this may have been a complete coincidence, some
[12:40] investigators believe that this tape was deliberately placed
[12:44] there to send a message. From the parking spot to the
[12:47] door was about 100 feet, but Dorfman never covered that
[12:51] stretch. At one O 7 in the afternoon, as
[12:54] the two men passed between parked cars, 2 figures came up
[12:58] fast behind them and one shouted that this was a stick up.
[13:03] Police said the shooting began almost instantly, which is to
[13:06] say the robbery announcement was never a robbery at all.
[13:10] A 22 caliber fired 8 rounds at close range and at least seven
[13:14] of them struck Dorfman in the head.
[13:17] He collapsed between the cars and was pronounced dead a short
[13:20] time later at a hospital in neighboring Skokie.
[13:24] The attackers vanished, and they hadn't taken a thing again,
[13:28] immediately calling in to doubt the robbery motive, the head of
[13:32] the FBI Chicago office said as much publicly within hours.
[13:37] This was no robbery. It was a premeditated hit, even
[13:41] by Chicago standards. It was brazen, almost beyond
[13:44] precedent, carried out in broad daylight outside a busy hotel at
[13:48] lunchtime. Weiner, standing close enough to
[13:52] touch his friend when the shooting started, wasn't hit.
[13:56] By his own account and the accounts of witnesses at the
[13:59] scene, the assailants never even threatened him.
[14:04] The physical evidence surfaced quickly, and then the case went
[14:07] nowhere for four decades. Days after the shooting, a
[14:11] janitor emptying trash behind Saint Cornelius, a Catholic
[14:15] school on Chicago's Northwest Side, found a 22 with a silencer
[14:20] attached. He also found a set of
[14:23] incomplete Illinois license plates dumped in the same trash
[14:26] bin. Police believe they were holding
[14:29] the weapon that had shot Dorfman down, though the test results
[14:32] were never publicly released. The plates had been stolen off a
[14:36] car in Chinatown the previous summer, and investigators traced
[14:40] them to the getaway vehicle. The witnesses were independently
[14:44] able to confirm that the license plate matched the one in the
[14:46] trash there. The trail ended.
[14:50] At least 4 witnesses had seen the attackers, and none of it
[14:53] produced a single arrest. Attention fell immediately on
[14:57] Weiner, and police questioned him for hours in the wake of the
[15:00] events. While he was never named a
[15:03] suspect, investigators acknowledged that his actions
[15:07] were under scrutiny. He was a lifelong friend of mob
[15:10] figures. He'd walked Dorfman across that
[15:13] parking lot, and he'd been left untouched by men firing 8 rounds
[15:17] at point blank range. Writers on the Chicago Outfit
[15:21] have argued ever since that Weiner delivered his friend to
[15:24] the ambush, though these are simply allegations in the result
[15:28] of underworld chatter. Weiner was never charged with
[15:31] anything, and his account never got more elaborate than what he
[15:35] told police. That first afternoon, 2
[15:38] strangers announced a stick up and started shooting, and that
[15:41] was all he knew. Or at least that's all he would
[15:45] tell the cops. Some have questioned the
[15:48] narrative of his involvement, noting that Dorfman wasn't
[15:51] exactly a hard individual to find at the time.
[15:55] In fact, it's been floated that the whole thing was also a
[15:58] message to Weiner, a not so subtle way of telling him that
[16:02] he better keep in line. Weiner, for his part, passed
[16:05] away in 1996, so if he was at all involved in the ambush, then
[16:11] he's long beyond the reach of justice.
[16:14] Dorfman's own attorney offered a different accusation within
[16:17] hours, telling reporters, in effect that the federal
[16:20] government bore the blame for his clients demise.
[16:24] It's an odd theory, but in essence, publicly, this attorney
[16:28] professed A belief that the government wanted his client 6
[16:31] feet under. Personally, I find that a bit
[16:34] hard to believe given that Dorfman could have likely been
[16:38] flipped. What happened to Roy Williams,
[16:42] the Teamsters president, afterward only sharpened the
[16:45] theory that the Chicago Outfit had gotten Dorfman.
[16:48] The Teamsters president drew a 55 year sentence that spring,
[16:52] and within a few years he did exactly what the mob had feared
[16:56] Dorfman would do. He admitted he'd operated for
[16:59] years under the thumb of a Kansas City mob boss and became
[17:03] a cooperating government witness.
[17:06] His 55 years didn't survive the cooperation either.
[17:10] The sentence was cut to 10 and he was paroled before the decade
[17:14] was out. Every secret Williams gave up
[17:18] was a reminder of what Dorfman might have delivered, and
[17:22] Dorfman had known far more. Now, the timelines don't add up
[17:27] perfectly clearly, but high-ranking members of the
[17:31] Chicago Outfit clearly had an understanding for what I'll
[17:34] euphemistically call risk management.
[17:39] As with most of these mob hits, I highly doubt we'll be seeing
[17:42] any resolution to the case at any time in the near future.
[17:49] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy with my usual quick reminder to ring the
[17:52] notification bell and turn on all notifications.
[17:56] Also don't forget to check out my Instagram lazy chill zone
[18:00] where I post videos and pictures of my dog.
[18:07] Someone made the deposit that night.
[18:09] The bank's camera in downtown Gilmer, TX caught a figure at
[18:13] the night drop and the video stores money made it safely into
[18:17] the account. But the footage was grainy and
[18:20] to this day nobody can swear the person on that tape was Kelly
[18:23] Day Wilson. Whoever fed the store's money
[18:26] into that slot on January 5th, 1992 may have been the last
[18:30] person to ever see her, or it may have been somebody else's
[18:34] hands on the bag. That blur of videotape is the
[18:38] closest thing to a final trace of a 17 year old girl that
[18:41] exists, and it can't even confirm she was there.
[18:46] But this isn't your usual missing person case, and this
[18:49] one would come face to face with one of the most disturbing cases
[18:53] of mass hysteria in 20th century America.
[18:58] Gilmer sits in the Piney woods of Upshur County in East Texas,
[19:02] a town of around 5000 people arranged around a courthouse
[19:06] square in January 1992. Kelly Day Wilson was a student
[19:12] at Gilmer High School with a part time job at Northeast Texas
[19:15] Video on Buffalo St. She turned 17 the previous May,
[19:21] stood 5 foot 7, and weighed about 120 lbs.
[19:26] She'd bleached her naturally brown hair blonde sometime
[19:29] earlier, and that winter the dark roots were growing out.
[19:33] A detail that sounds trivial and turns out to matter enormously.
[19:39] Remember this going forward. Kelly was reported missing as a
[19:43] blonde young woman, but the vast majority of her hair was brown
[19:47] at the time she vanished. On the evening of Sunday,
[19:51] January 5th. Kelly closed the store with her
[19:54] manager, Joe Henry. And to jump ahead a bit, Joe
[19:58] Henry is a legitimately bad guy. For reasons I'll get into later
[20:03] in this segment, but keep that in mind at this point since it
[20:07] wasn't known to anyone yet. Around 8:30 they said goodnight,
[20:12] and part of her routine was carrying the day's cash to the
[20:15] bank around the corner and dropping it through the night
[20:18] slot. Henry locked up, Kelly headed
[20:21] toward the bank, and that's where the firm record of her
[20:24] life comes to a close. And as a quick aside, I find it
[20:29] somewhat unusual that a manager had a 17 year old trot over to
[20:33] the local bank at night with the day's cash.
[20:37] Perhaps I just grew up in a different time, but it seems to
[20:41] me that this is a task that's usually handled by the manager
[20:44] of a company or the owner of the business.
[20:48] Kelly never came home and the next morning her stepfather went
[20:51] looking and found her car still parked in the video store's lot.
[20:55] Joe Henry, the stores manager, had already opened up the store
[20:59] that morning and it actually seen the vehicle sitting there
[21:02] already, but more on that in a moment.
[21:06] Notably, 1 tire had been slashed while the other three sat
[21:10] untouched and apparently not tampered with.
[21:14] Her purse and personal belongings were inside the car,
[21:18] but her keys were gone and there was no sign of a struggle near
[21:21] the vehicle and nothing pointing toward where she went.
[21:25] Henry later said he'd figured at first that Kelly had simply
[21:28] stayed out all night, and that real worry only set in when she
[21:31] missed her noon shift. By then, the police were already
[21:35] involved thanks to her stepfather's call, and they
[21:38] moved quickly. Investigators made one early
[21:42] arrest. A 17 year old named Michael
[21:45] Bybee admitted to slashing the tire and was convicted of
[21:49] misdemeanor criminal mischief. He insisted he knew nothing
[21:52] about Kelly's disappearance, and it simply picked the worst
[21:56] imaginable night for a dumb prank.
[21:58] Nothing ever tied him to whatever happened afterward, but
[22:02] that tire has hungover the case for three decades.
[22:05] If it really was a prank, it's a brutal coincidence.
[22:09] If it wasn't, then someone deliberately disabled her car to
[22:13] make sure she couldn't drive away from them.
[22:17] The investigation fell largely to Sergeant James Brown of the
[22:20] Gilmer Police Department. By most accounts, Brown became
[22:24] consumed reportedly spending evenings and even his own
[22:29] vacation time chasing Leeds, despite the fact there weren't
[22:32] many to chase. Kelly's boyfriend, Chris Denton,
[22:37] drew the hardest early scrutiny because he reportedly had a hot
[22:41] temper, but no evidence ever connected him to that night.
[22:46] Henry, the last known person to see her, allegedly passed a
[22:51] polygraph and had alibis that have never been released but
[22:55] which cops claim held up. Detectives went over the bank
[22:59] footage and got nothing usable from it, and ultimately it was
[23:03] unclear if Kelly actually made it to the bank.
[23:07] Searches turned up no trace of her, and no credible sighting
[23:10] ever surfaced. Without a witness or a shred of
[23:14] physical evidence, the case sat open while the rumor mill did
[23:17] what rumor mills do in a town that size.
[23:21] To contextualize what happened next, you have to remember what
[23:25] era this was. Through the late 80s and early
[23:28] 90s, a wave of panic over supposed satanic rituals swept
[23:33] across America. This produced sprawling daycare
[23:37] prosecutions and televised warnings about devil worshippers
[23:40] hiding in ordinary neighborhoods.
[23:43] In the most ridiculed versions, heavy metal music and Dungeons
[23:47] and Dragons were accused of turning ordinary Americans into
[23:51] devoted servants of the Dark Lord.
[23:54] Almost none of it survived scrutiny, at least officially,
[23:58] and the whole thing has largely been dismissed as a case of mass
[24:01] hysteria that swept society. The Mcmartin case in California,
[24:07] at the time the most expensive criminal trial in American
[24:10] history, had already collapsed without producing a single
[24:14] conviction. Gilmer was about to become one
[24:17] of the last and strangest chapters of that whole episode.
[24:22] Between May 1993 and January 1994, an Upshur County Grand
[24:27] jury handed down 48 indictments accusing 9 adults of engaging in
[24:32] a cult ritual Crimes District Attorney Tim Cone recused
[24:36] himself and a Galveston attorney named Scott Lyford was appointed
[24:40] special prosecutor. Lyford assembled a team of
[24:44] caseworkers, hired a cult investigators, and the stories
[24:48] quickly became extremely bizarre and disconcerting.
[24:52] They spoke of individuals with dark robes, rituals, and a
[24:57] secret cult operating in the woods outside town.
[25:00] Then the young witnesses started talking about a blonde young
[25:03] woman who the cult had snatched up.
[25:07] In January 1994, almost exactly 2 years after Kelly vanished,
[25:12] Lyford's team charged eight people in her abduction and
[25:15] presumed death. Among them was Sergeant James
[25:19] Brown, the very officer who'd spent those two years leading
[25:22] the search for her. According to the indictments,
[25:26] the group had held Kelly captive for more than a week before
[25:29] ultimately sacrificing her in some sort of deranged ritual.
[25:33] The prosecution team's files reportedly went further still,
[25:37] describing rituals that read like something out of medieval
[25:40] manuscripts, though not one victim of any of it was ever
[25:44] produced. Coverage on Kelly's
[25:47] disappearance exploded nationwide and even
[25:49] internationally, which perhaps shouldn't be too surprising
[25:53] given the shocking nature of the claims.
[25:56] However, the problems were visible almost immediately, and
[26:00] the biggest problem was there was no genuine physical evidence
[26:04] connecting anyone to anything. Bone fragments recovered during
[26:09] searches were reportedly examined and turned out to be
[26:12] animal remains. Lyford reportedly took the
[26:16] position that the very absence of evidence showed how
[26:18] sophisticated these cultists were, which is the kind of
[26:22] reasoning that can never lose an argument.
[26:25] Every time evidence wasn't found.
[26:27] The idea that the cultists had been using dark magic and
[26:31] rituals to enhance their evil powers explained why there was
[26:35] no evidence. More problematically, one of the
[26:38] accused, a truck driver named Wendell Kerr, had trucking
[26:43] records placing him in Buffalo, NY.
[26:45] When the ritual supposedly took place.
[26:49] Brown's attorney alerted the Texas Attorney General's office,
[26:52] and in March 1994, Upshur County officials formally asked
[26:57] Attorney General Dan Morales to take over both sets of cases.
[27:02] Assistant Attorney General Shane Phelps began pulling the
[27:05] threads, and what the state found ended everything.
[27:09] The statements underpinning the charges had been manufactured
[27:13] through coercion by the apparent experts hired by the prosecution
[27:17] to help build the case. The young witnesses had been
[27:21] interviewed for hours at a stretch, coached by adults from
[27:24] the prosecution team. 1 foster family used what they called a
[27:29] holding technique, running their charges up and down stairs to
[27:33] exhaustion until they confessed to the alleged rituals they had
[27:37] seen. The family believed this
[27:40] exhaustion technique was a form of exorcism to ensure true
[27:44] evidence of the rituals came out.
[27:47] Doctor Bruce Perry, a psychiatrist brought in by the
[27:50] state, concluded the youngsters had been gravely harmed by the
[27:54] very system that claimed to be rescuing them.
[27:57] The charges over Kelly's presumed death were dismissed
[28:00] roughly 2 months after they were filed, and after that the state
[28:04] moved on the more generalized ritual cases too.
[28:08] In a 13 page motion filed in Judge James Zimmerman's court,
[28:13] the Attorney General's office wrote that the prosecution's had
[28:16] been so thoroughly poisoned by lies and coercion, it was all
[28:20] done in service of exposing an alleged cult.
[28:23] The Lyford team desperately wanted to believe in that no
[28:27] credible witness remained. The court was asked to dismiss
[28:31] all but three of the charges, and the state publicly
[28:34] apologized to Brown. Years later, one of the
[28:38] witnesses who said he'd seen Kelly Wilson said that he had
[28:41] been coached by adults to say that he saw a blonde woman
[28:44] matching her description captured by the cultists.
[28:48] Importantly, by the night she disappeared, her bleached hair
[28:52] had been growing out to its natural brown, with only the
[28:55] tips being blonde. Vindication didn't put anything
[28:59] back together, and James Brown's law enforcement career in Gilmer
[29:03] was over. His health reportedly collapsed
[29:06] under the strain, and he eventually left town while some
[29:09] neighbors still whispered that he'd gotten away with it.
[29:12] His lawsuit against the people who prosecuted him was thrown
[29:15] out on immunity grounds, and the Supreme Court declined to hear
[29:19] the case in 2002. The other names in the file
[29:23] faded out one by one to greater or lesser extents.
[29:27] Michael Beebe, the tire slasher, appears to have completely
[29:32] dropped out of the public record, and whatever happened to
[29:35] him remains unknown. Chris Denton, her boyfriend,
[29:40] passed from cancer in 2004, maintaining his innocence to the
[29:45] end. That same year, Joe Henry, the
[29:49] manager, was arrested on charges of possessing the most
[29:52] disgusting and objectionable images known to man.
[29:56] Notably, investigators claim that there's no evidence that
[30:00] Joe Henry was involved in Kelly's disappearance.
[30:03] Personally, though, I think given his criminal history and
[30:06] the fact that he was the last one to see her, the cops likely
[30:10] need to lean on him a little more heavily.
[30:12] I also find it highly unusual that he noticed her vehicle at
[30:15] the video store that morning and simply chose to believe that she
[30:19] left it there overnight. It just doesn't have the air of
[30:23] reality to me. Which isn't to say that he did
[30:26] it, but that he deserves a serious second look.
[30:34] The routine of a cruise ship is a meticulously choreographed
[30:37] performance of comfort and care. For a cabin steward aboard the
[30:41] Mercury in late August 2004, that routine included a small
[30:46] final touch each evening, placing a fresh chocolate on the
[30:49] pillow of each guest. But for five consecutive days,
[30:54] as the ship carved its way through the cold Alaskan waters,
[30:58] the steward performed this ritual in cabin 6064 with a
[31:02] growing sense of dread. The bed was always pristine, the
[31:07] chocolates from the previous night untouched.
[31:10] He knew his passenger, a 40 year old woman named Marion Carver,
[31:15] was gone. He reported his concerns to his
[31:18] supervisor each day, only to be told to focus on his job and get
[31:23] back to work. No one reported that Marian was
[31:26] gone, at least not immediately, and to this day her case remains
[31:31] A disturbing cruise ship mystery.
[31:35] Marian Carver was a 40 year old mother to a 13 year old daughter
[31:39] living in Cambridge, MA. Described as an independent and
[31:43] sometimes spontaneous woman, she had a background as an
[31:47] investment banker and had attended Harvard.
[31:51] True to her spontaneous spirit, she booked A7 day Alaskan cruise
[31:55] on the Mercury just two days before it was set to sail on
[32:00] August 27th, 2004. She boarded the vessel in
[32:04] Seattle alone and crucially, she didn't tell another soul that
[32:08] she would be doing it. The official timeline of her
[32:13] presence on the ship is brutally short.
[32:16] A cabin attendant last saw her on the evening of August 28th,
[32:20] only the second day of the voyage, and after that, Marian
[32:24] Carver vanished. Her bed went unused and she
[32:29] received no room service after the 28th, nor did she use her
[32:33] card for any purchases. The cruise line would later
[32:36] confirm that she never disembarked at any of the
[32:39] scheduled ports of call. For all intents and purposes,
[32:43] after her second night at sea, Marian Carver ceased to exist on
[32:47] the ship. On September 3rd, 2004, the
[32:53] Mercury completed its journey, docking in Vancouver, BC.
[32:58] To the surprise of no one watching this, Marian Carver
[33:01] didn't disembark. A supervisor instructed the
[33:05] cabin steward to box up her personal belongings left in the
[33:08] cabin. In a shocking breach of protocol
[33:12] and basic human decency, her clothes were reportedly donated
[33:16] to charity, while other personal effects were placed in a storage
[33:19] locker. No missing persons report was
[33:23] filed with the Vancouver police or any other authority.
[33:27] The cruise line made no attempt to contact Marian's family to
[33:30] inquire about her whereabouts or inform them she had not left the
[33:33] ship. The alarm was finally raised
[33:38] weeks later, not from the high seas, but from a phone call on
[33:42] land. Marian's 13 year old daughter
[33:45] became worried when she couldn't reach her mother for an extended
[33:48] period. She called her grandfather,
[33:51] Kendall Carver, sharing her concern.
[33:54] That call set in motion a search that would consume the rest of
[33:57] Kendall Carver's life. He contacted the Cambridge
[34:01] Police Department in Massachusetts, who opened a
[34:04] missing persons investigation. It took police three painstaking
[34:09] weeks to piece together Marian's last known movements, eventually
[34:13] tracing her credit card records to find out where she had went.
[34:18] And just to reiterate, she had never told anyone, not even her
[34:22] daughter, that she was going on this spontaneous cruise.
[34:27] When Kendall Carter finally contacted the cruise line, it
[34:31] was October and he was met with what he claimed was a wall of
[34:35] indifference. It took the company 3 full days
[34:38] just to confirm that Marian had been a passenger on the Mercury.
[34:42] By that, .26 days had passed since her disappearance.
[34:47] When a manager finally spoke with him, the explanation was
[34:51] allegedly dismissive. The representative suggested it
[34:54] was normal for passengers to leave belongings behind and that
[34:58] she may have just walked off the ship undocumented.
[35:01] In Vancouver. There was no mention of the
[35:04] cabin stewards. 5 days of reports.
[35:09] This response revealed a critical flaw in how incidents
[35:12] at sea were handled. Occurring outside the immediate
[35:16] jurisdiction of any single police force, a disappearance at
[35:20] sea created a legal and informational void.
[35:23] The cruise line became the sole gatekeeper of all evidence and
[35:27] information, including witnesses, internal reports, and
[35:32] the surveillance footage. A significant legal battle ended
[35:37] up taking place between Kendall Carver and the cruise line, and
[35:41] Carver would emerge victorious from this ordeal.
[35:44] Notably, through the discovery process, he was able to obtain
[35:49] all the internal evidence the cruise ship line wouldn't turn
[35:51] over. Despite this victory, he was
[35:54] unable to get any meaningful answers as to what happened to
[35:58] his daughter, which was ultimately what he wanted from
[36:01] the case. In February 2013, there was a
[36:06] startling development in the case.
[36:09] Remains were discovered on Merry Island, a small island in the
[36:12] Strait of Georgia in British Columbia, a province in Canada
[36:16] right next to Washington state. The location was geographically
[36:20] plausible, lying in the general region.
[36:23] The mercury would have passed on its way to or from Alaska.
[36:27] Canadian authorities suspected the remains could be those of
[36:30] Marion Carver. Police contacted Kendall Carver
[36:34] in Arizona, raising the possibility that DNA testing
[36:38] could finally provide a definitive answer to what
[36:40] happened to his daughter. Notably, it's unclear if these
[36:44] remains were hers, since while the initial finding was
[36:47] reported, nothing subsequent was, and Marion is still
[36:52] officially listed as missing. With no solid evidence of what
[36:58] happened to Marion, a number of theories have taken hold.
[37:02] One theory argues that a predator may have relied upon
[37:05] the transient population and the complex jurisdictional issues of
[37:09] a cruise ship to target Carver. According to some, cruise ships
[37:14] are targeted by these predators who see it as the place to
[37:17] commit the perfect crime, where legal complexities will simply
[37:21] shield them from consequences. Notably, some have suggested
[37:27] that Marian may have done it herself, given that she took the
[37:30] trip without informing anyone. However, her family denies this
[37:35] and confirmed that she would routinely travel at the absolute
[37:38] last minute without informing others.
[37:41] Personally, this seems odd to me, but people are allowed to
[37:45] have unusual character traits and we can't all be the same.
[37:50] Notably, she never expressed any ideas like that, and there was
[37:53] no note left behind or anything to indicate this could
[37:57] potentially be the case. Another common theory is that
[38:02] she accidentally fell overboard. People often become seasick on
[38:06] cruise ships, and this combination of being dizzy and
[38:09] throwing up over the deck can cause accidents to occur.
[38:13] Notably, I wasn't able to find the specific railing height for
[38:16] the Mercury, but it looks like the minimum railing on passenger
[38:20] vessels around that time was about 40 inches.
[38:24] I'm no expert on ocean going vessels, so I can't really say
[38:28] if this is enough to ensure an adult can't accidentally go
[38:31] overboard, but I suspect it isn't.
[38:35] This is doubly true if someone is seasick and is leaning over
[38:38] the edge. Marian's case continues to
[38:42] remain unsolved and heavily discussed, especially given the
[38:46] bizarre circumstances surrounding her case and the
[38:49] fact that it happened on a cruise ship.
[38:55] The night of January 3rd 18 O 4 was cold, damp and oppressively
[39:00] dark in the village of Hammersmith, then a small rural
[39:04] outpost on the western fringe of London.
[39:07] Its unlit passages, like the notorious Black Lion Lane, were
[39:11] narrow and enclosed by high hedges, making it difficult to
[39:15] see more than a few feet ahead, even on a clear night.
[39:19] But this was not a clear night, and a mist crept up from the
[39:23] river, and a deeper, more chilling fog of fear had settled
[39:28] over the community for months. This was a name terror, a
[39:33] phantom that stalked the churchyard and its surrounding
[39:35] lanes, a specter the locals called the Hammersmith Ghost.
[39:41] Just after 11:00, a lone figure dressed entirely in white moved
[39:46] through the gloom of Black Lion Lane.
[39:49] From the shadows another man emerged, armed to the teeth and
[39:53] potentially booze to the hilt, ready to face this so-called
[39:57] ghost. He levelled his weapon and
[40:00] shouted a challenge into the darkness, and when he got no
[40:03] response he started blasting the shooter.
[40:09] A 29 year old officer named Francis Smith cautiously
[40:13] approached what he believed was the vanquished specter that had
[40:16] terrorized his neighbors. But instead of a pile of
[40:19] ectoplasm, he found warm solid flesh.
[40:23] Instead of a shroud, he found the clean white work clothes of
[40:27] a local tradesman. The ghost was Thomas Millwood, a
[40:31] 22 year old bricklayer, his white flannel waistcoat and
[40:35] linen trousers now rapidly staining red.
[40:40] In a single panicked moment, a ghost story had been brutally
[40:44] inverted. The hunt for a supernatural
[40:46] monster had ended in a very human tragedy, and the true
[40:50] horror was not the phantom, but the violence born from the fear
[40:54] of it. This event would pose A profound
[40:57] question to the English legal system, one it was utterly
[41:01] unprepared to answer. Can a man be guilty for slaying
[41:05] a ghost he genuinely believed was real?
[41:10] The tragedy that unfolded in Black Lion Lane was not the
[41:13] result of a single man's rash action, but the culmination of a
[41:17] perfect storm of social hysteria and cultural superstition.
[41:22] For two months from November 18 O3, the community of Hammersmith
[41:27] had been gripped by a growing panic.
[41:30] The sightings began as whispers and escalated into terrifying
[41:34] tales. Witnesses gave inconsistent
[41:37] descriptions of the apparition, a common feature of collective
[41:41] delusion. Some saw a tall figure draped in
[41:44] a white burial shroud, while others reported a more monstrous
[41:48] creature wearing a calfskin hide, complete with horns and
[41:52] large ghastly glass eyes. Basically, think of a minotaur
[41:56] like monster and you wouldn't be far off at all.
[42:01] Notably, this phantom wasn't just some passive observer.
[42:05] A local Brewer later testified that the entity had leaped from
[42:08] behind a tombstone and seized him by the throat.
[42:13] Unsubstantiated but widely circulated rumors claimed that a
[42:16] pregnant woman had been slain by the ghost.
[42:19] Another story told of a wagon driver who, upon seeing the
[42:23] Spectre, abandoned his team of eight horses and 16 passengers
[42:28] to flee in terror. These stories found fertile
[42:32] ground in the cultural soil of the early 19th century, a time
[42:37] when scientific rationalism hadn't yet displaced deep seated
[42:41] folk traditions. The community quickly developed
[42:44] a back story for their tormentor and determined that he was a
[42:48] restless spirit of a man who did the deed to himself.
[42:52] According to prevailing religious doctrine, an
[42:55] individual such as this couldn't be buried in consecrated ground,
[43:00] as it was thought their soul would be unable to find eternal
[43:03] rest. This man, however, had been
[43:07] interred in the Hammersmith churchyard, so his malevolent
[43:11] presence was seen not just as a random haunting, but as a direct
[43:15] consequence of a spiritual transgression.
[43:19] And the entire community was going to pay for it.
[43:24] Compounding the cultural validation of this supernatural
[43:27] fear was a near total absence of effective law enforcement.
[43:32] The year was 18 O 4A full 25 years before Home Secretary
[43:37] Robert Peel would establish London's first professional,
[43:41] centrally organized police force.
[43:43] In this pre Peel era, maintaining order was a
[43:46] fragmented and often inadequate affair, reliant on a patchwork
[43:51] of elected parish constables and paid night Watchmen.
[43:55] These men were poorly equipped and lacked the organization to
[43:59] handle a widespread public panic.
[44:02] To give you a sense of the lack of professionality and
[44:05] organization, some of these Watchmen were partly paid in
[44:08] fringe benefits like access to alcohol while on the job.
[44:14] The night watchman on duty during the incident himself
[44:17] claimed to have chased the ghost on a previous night, only for it
[44:20] to escape by shooting off its white sheet into his face.
[44:24] And no, you don't have to rewind This watchman thought a real
[44:28] ghost threw a white sheet at him to escape, like some sort of
[44:32] salamander losing its tail. If you're wondering who was
[44:36] watching the night watchman, it was basically nobody.
[44:40] His response to the crisis wasn't a call for organized
[44:43] backup, but to agree to join Francis Smith's insane, drunken
[44:48] posse of clowns. Notably, while Smith was an
[44:52] officer in the armed forces, he had no official capacity when it
[44:56] came to community policing whatsoever.
[45:01] On the night of January 3rd, 2 men's paths converged in Black
[45:05] Lion Lane, set on a collision course by a combination of
[45:09] unfortunate choices and the pervasive atmosphere of fear.
[45:14] Thomas Millwood, the young bricklayer, had the profound
[45:17] misfortune of resembling a ghost.
[45:20] His trade required him to wear clothes that were uniformly
[45:23] white linen trousers, a flannel waistcoat and an apron, all kept
[45:30] meticulously clean. In the pitch black unlit lanes
[45:34] of a village on high alert for a white shrouded creature, this
[45:38] attire was a serious hazard. The tragedy is compounded by the
[45:42] fact that Millwood had been repeatedly warned about the
[45:45] danger. His family and even his landlord
[45:48] had seen the risk and begged him to wear a dark great coat over
[45:51] his work clothes when he went out at night.
[45:54] He had actually already been mistaken for the ghost on at
[45:56] least two previous occasions, but he basically wrote off the
[46:00] risks of anything serious happening.
[46:05] Francis Smith, the 29 year old officer, was by all accounts a
[46:09] respectable and mild mannered man who was eager to play the
[46:13] role of the hero in this tale. Multiple witnesses at his trial
[46:17] would testify to his humane and kind character, and he cared a
[46:21] lot about his community. He took it upon himself to take
[46:25] a leadership role in the posse that was patrolling the streets
[46:29] for the ghost. Francis was scared of ghosts, as
[46:34] was the style at the time when virtually everyone believed them
[46:37] to be a real threat. Because of this, the local pub
[46:41] offered him a strong drink or two to steal his nerves while he
[46:44] was out there on his ghost busting mission.
[46:49] After Francis Smith realized the gravity of what he had done, he
[46:53] immediately found help and confessed what happened to two
[46:56] men, one of whom was named John Locke, but you know, not that
[47:01] famous John Locke, since he would have been around 170 years
[47:04] old at the time. After transporting the body of
[47:08] Thomas Millwood to the Black Lion Inn with the help of the
[47:11] men, he immediately and promptly surrendered to a local constable
[47:15] expressing remorse. When Francis Smith stood trial
[47:21] at the Old Bailey just over a week later, he wasn't judged by
[47:25] the standards of a terrified villager, but by the cold, rigid
[47:28] logic of 19th century English law.
[47:32] The case exposed a deep chasm between common sense, morality
[47:36] and the strict letter of legal doctrine.
[47:39] Smith was charged with having ended the life of Millwood
[47:42] willfully and pleaded not guilty, his defense resting on
[47:46] the claim that he had made an honest and tragic mistake.
[47:50] He had believed he was confronting a dangerous
[47:52] supernatural entity and was in a state of mortal terror.
[47:58] The jury was clearly moved by this argument.
[48:01] They heard extensive testimony about the widespread panic the
[48:04] ghost had caused, the violent nature of its reported attacks,
[48:08] and Smith's own good character and profound remorse.
[48:12] After deliberating for an hour, they returned a verdict that
[48:15] reflected this sympathy. He was guilty of the much lesser
[48:19] crime of manslaughter, which acknowledged that he committed
[48:23] the ACT but had no malicious forethought whatsoever.
[48:26] It was a verdict that seemed to align with a sense of fairness
[48:30] and the tragedy that occurred. Literally nobody in the
[48:34] community thought Francis Smith committed this act intentionally
[48:38] in any way whatsoever. However, the presiding judge,
[48:45] Lord Chief Baron Sir Archibald MacDonald, flatly refused to
[48:49] accept the jury's finding. But before you think he's the
[48:52] villain in the case here, his actions would actually save the
[48:56] life of Smith. He informed the jury that under
[49:00] the law as it stood, there were no circumstances in the case
[49:04] that could reduce the crime. Their only options were to find
[49:08] Smith guilty or to acquit him entirely.
[49:12] McDonald's reasoning was a master class in the inflexible
[49:15] legal interpretation of the era. The judge held that Smith's
[49:19] actions met none of the criteria for the lesser charge.
[49:24] There was no evidence of self-defense, as Millwood had
[49:27] not attacked him and he had merely advanced down the lane
[49:31] without responding to a challenge.
[49:34] Smith's subjective belief that he was facing a ghost was
[49:37] legally irrelevant. The law judged the objective
[49:40] act, not the actor's mistaken perception.
[49:46] McDonald's most devastating point, however, was what became
[49:50] known as the best case fallacy. MacDonald, being an educated man
[49:54] of the Enlightenment, didn't accept the idea that a bullet
[49:58] could fell a ghost. The best case fallacy meant that
[50:01] Smith could have only reasonably believed that it was a human
[50:05] prankster impersonating a ghost. Impersonating a ghost and
[50:10] scaring people was a minor public nuisance offense at the
[50:13] time and was punishable with as little as a warning.
[50:18] It wasn't a felony that could have ever justified the use of
[50:21] such extreme force. This judicial instruction left
[50:27] the jury with no room to maneuver.
[50:29] Trapped by the law's rigid logic, they were forced to
[50:32] reverse their decision and return a verdict of guilty.
[50:36] And this was a capital offense. Francis Smith, the mild mannered
[50:42] man who set out to protect his community from a phantom, was
[50:46] sentenced to be hanged by the neck.
[50:49] The trial demonstrated how the legal system of the day operated
[50:53] like a machine incapable of processing the messy, irrational
[50:57] data of human fear and honest error.
[51:02] The verdict wasn't a failure of the judge who correctly applied
[51:05] the law, but a failure of the law itself to accommodate the
[51:09] complexities of the human mind. The legally correct but morally
[51:16] troubling verdict immediately set other forces in motion,
[51:20] revealing a more complex ecosystem of justice that
[51:23] operated beyond the courtroom walls.
[51:26] And just wait for it, because our friend Lord Justice McDonald
[51:30] is going to put on a true master class of getting the right
[51:34] result while working within the strict confines of the system.
[51:40] The public reaction to Smith's sentence was one of overwhelming
[51:43] sympathy. Contemporary accounts describe
[51:46] the courtroom spectators as being deeply moved by his
[51:50] obvious contrition and terror at his fate.
[51:55] The entire country became convinced that the law was going
[51:57] to eliminate an innocent man, and this groundswell of public
[52:01] feeling had an immediate effect. Lord MacDonald, despite his
[52:07] rigid application of the law during the trial, was sensitive
[52:11] to the unique circumstances, and he decided to put the concept of
[52:15] justice above the law. He announced in court that he
[52:18] would immediately report the case to the King, George the
[52:22] Third. As any fan of this period of
[52:24] history knows, George the Third was completely mentally
[52:28] incapable by this point, so all royal decisions were made by his
[52:32] son, Prince George. This engaged a parallel justice
[52:38] system, the royal prerogative of mercy, an ancient power allowing
[52:43] the monarch to temper the strict sentences of the courts.
[52:47] The Crown acted with remarkable speed, and the sentence was
[52:50] suspended almost immediately while the Crown figured out what
[52:54] to do. A few weeks later, Smith's
[52:56] sentence was officially commuted to one year of hard labor as an
[53:00] acknowledgement that you can't simply get wasted and start
[53:03] blasting in urban areas. He was ultimately granted a full
[53:06] pardon and released after serving only about 6 months of
[53:10] his sentence. This royal intervention was a
[53:12] tacit admission from the highest authority in the land that the
[53:15] law had produced an unjust outcome.
[53:20] While the formal legal system was grappling with the
[53:23] consequences of the shooting, an informal system of social
[53:27] pressure was solving the original mystery.
[53:30] The intense publicity surrounding the trial and the
[53:33] tragic slaying of Thomas Millwood weighed on the
[53:36] conscience of the real quote UN quote ghost.
[53:40] Two days after the shooting, a local boot and Shoemaker named
[53:44] John Graham came forward and confessed his motive was
[53:48] shockingly mundane and disproportionate to the terror
[53:51] he had caused. Graham explained that his
[53:54] apprentice had been scaring his young children with ghost
[53:57] stories as a form of revenge. Graham decided to dress in a
[54:02] white sheet and frighten The Apprentice on his way home
[54:05] through the churchyard. The prank was so successful that
[54:08] he apparently continued it for sport, becoming the infamous
[54:12] Hammersmith Ghost. When he surrendered to the local
[54:17] magistrates, they found themselves in a legal quandary.
[54:21] Given that his normally minor public nuisance offense had led
[54:24] to a tragedy, they were unsure exactly how to charge him.
[54:29] To bring a big case and leave the man with a fine seemed
[54:32] almost insulting to the legacy of Millwood, so they released
[54:36] him on the condition that he never impersonate a ghost again,
[54:39] and according to the historical record, he never did.
[54:45] In one final weird historical mystery arising from this case,
[54:49] something strange began to happen after people began to
[54:53] claim to see the true spirit of Thomas Millwood and Hammersmith
[54:57] and at the Black Lion Inn where his body was taken that night.
[55:02] This has raised the question whether John Graham, the
[55:05] so-called real Hammersmith ghost, was the only person
[55:09] dressing up and scaring people at the time.
[55:12] Given that the ghost sightings went on for years after, I have
[55:16] a few thoughts about this part of the Hammersmith enigma.
[55:21] I suspect John Graham may have continued being a public
[55:24] nuisance regardless of telling the authorities that he wouldn't
[55:27] be 1 after all. His initial story is quite odd
[55:31] since he managed to scare his apprentice but just kept doing
[55:34] it anyway. Further, given that the case had
[55:37] become a nationwide phenomenon, I also think that some thrill
[55:41] seekers may have tossed on a sheet in a one off event.
[55:46] As for the sightings within the Black Lion, in itself it seems
[55:50] like a mass hysteria event overlaid upon a sincere belief
[55:53] in ghosts. After all, if there was anyone
[55:57] who would be a vengeful spirit in this situation, it was Thomas
[56:01] Millwood, the innocent man who was walking home in his work
[56:05] mandated clothing. In April 1998, a disturbing
[56:13] discovery surfaced in a Texas lake.
[56:16] The body of an unidentified woman was found in a waterway
[56:19] between Lake Lavon and Lake Hubbard, just east of Dallas.
[56:24] The victim's face was unrecognizable after weeks in
[56:27] the water, and with no ID or clues to her identity, police
[56:32] categorized her as a Jane Doe, a nameless victim of a violent
[56:36] crime. From the start, authorities
[56:40] recognized that this woman had met a violent end.
[56:44] An autopsy confirmed she had been shot multiple times, and by
[56:48] the time her body was recovered, decomposition suggested she had
[56:52] been dead for one to four weeks. Investigators suspected she was
[56:56] slain elsewhere and dumped in Lake Lavon, and that her remains
[57:01] drifted through floodgates where she was ultimately found.
[57:05] Nothing obvious was missing, which meant robbery was probably
[57:08] not the motive, though the authorities couldn't say for
[57:11] sure. With no identification,
[57:15] detectives had little to go on. In 1998, they entered the case
[57:19] in national databases and dubbed her the Collin County Jane Doe,
[57:24] a name by which she would be known for decades.
[57:28] A forensic artist created a composite sketch of the victim's
[57:31] face to show the public, hoping someone might recognize her
[57:34] features. Despite circulating the sketch
[57:38] and the case details, no one came forward with a name.
[57:42] The mystery woman remained unidentified as months turned
[57:45] into years and her file slowly went cold.
[57:51] By the year 2024, a new forensic technology was giving hope to
[57:55] cold cases like this. And yeah, stop me if you've
[57:58] heard this one before. In 2024, the Collin County
[58:02] Medical Examiner's Office partnered with Othram and were
[58:05] able to extract a comprehensive genetic profile.
[58:09] From there, they were able to reconstruct her family tree and
[58:13] positively identify her as Penny Gunn in August 2025.
[58:19] The identification of Penny was a landmark moment, and she
[58:22] reclaimed her name after nearly 3 decades of anonymity.
[58:28] Once her identity was known, details of Penny's life began to
[58:32] emerge. Penny was born in 1962, and
[58:36] public records show she lived in multiple states, including Iowa
[58:41] and Washington, before eventually coming to Texas.
[58:46] She had married in the late 1980s and taken the last name
[58:49] Morris. By the late 1990s, Penny was
[58:54] living in the Dallas area, possibly in the city of Garland,
[58:58] just a few miles from where her body was found.
[59:02] This suggests that she was slain close to home.
[59:06] It's unclear whether a missing person report was ever filed for
[59:09] Penny at the time of her disappearance.
[59:12] Some online sleuths have speculated that she may have
[59:15] been reported under her maiden name, though this remains
[59:18] unclear at this time. With Penny's identity restored,
[59:25] the investigation into her slaying is picking up steam
[59:28] again. Detectives are now looking into
[59:31] her past and the people in her life for clues about who might
[59:34] have harmed her. Notably, while it appears from
[59:38] present evidence that she was still legally married at the
[59:41] time of her disappearance, it's unclear if she was separated or
[59:45] not. Investigators will presumably
[59:48] want to speak to her husband or ex-husband, since that
[59:52] individual will almost certainly be of high interest to the
[59:55] investigation. While we don't yet know what
[1:00:00] happened to Penny. What's clear is that after 27
[1:00:03] years, investigators are determined to get answers.
[1:00:07] They've advised that they're interviewing anyone who knew
[1:00:09] Penny and retracing her last known steps in Texas.
[1:00:14] If you knew Penny Morris, who may have gone by her maiden
[1:00:17] name, I would encourage you to reach out to the Collin County
[1:00:20] Sheriff's Office. Even if you knew her years prior
[1:00:24] to what happened, even the most seemingly insignificant piece of
[1:00:28] evidence could crack this case wide open.

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