# 2 Hours of Twisted Cold Cases | True Crime Compilation | 280

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 21 Jul 2026, 2 h 03 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO8755642275.mp3

Join me for 2 hours of twisted cold cases. Episode 280 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, cases too dark for MrBallen, chilling cases, investigative reporting, modern forensics, victim advocacy, unidentified remains, crime scene forensics, cold cases, true crime, true crime solved, 5 true crime cases, solved cases, sleep cases, too dark for netflix, too dark for youtube, too dark for amazon prime video

## Transcript

[0:00] She was 19 years old, scrubbing lamp covers in the parking lot
[0:04] of an apartment complex on a Monday morning in late May.
[0:08] The sun was already warm, the air still the kind of slow
[0:12] college town quiet you get when most of the student population
[0:16] has cleared out for summer. Her sister had stepped away for
[0:20] a few minutes to run an errand, but when she came back, the
[0:23] bucket was still on the asphalt. The flip flop sandals were still
[0:27] there too, sitting near the curb the way you'd leave them if you
[0:31] meant to come right back. Brooke Wilberger was gone, And
[0:35] within the hour, every promising lead in her case would feed into
[0:40] a question Oregon investigators couldn't answer for the next 5
[0:45] years. Brooke grew up in Veneta, a
[0:48] small town tucked into the timber country West of Eugene.
[0:52] Her father worked as a process engineer at a chemical plant,
[0:56] and her mother taught school. She was one of several Will
[1:00] Burger kids, and she just finished her freshman year at
[1:03] Brigham Young University in Utah.
[1:06] By May of 2004, she was back in Oregon for the summer, picking
[1:11] up paying work where she could find it.
[1:14] Her older sister Stephanie, and Stephanie's husband were
[1:16] managing an apartment complex in Corvallis.
[1:20] They had a job ready for her, cleaning the breezeways,
[1:24] scrubbing the light fixtures and tidying up the grounds.
[1:28] It was supposed to be a couple of weeks of easy outdoor work
[1:31] before she went back to school. The morning started at the
[1:34] apartment Stephanie shared with her husband, where Brooke had
[1:37] stayed the night before. She got up early, walked over to
[1:41] the Oak Park Apartments in southwest Corvallis, and got to
[1:45] work in the parking lot with a step stool and cleaning
[1:48] supplies. The complex sat in a residential
[1:51] pocket near Oregon State University.
[1:54] Most of the student population had already cleared out for the
[1:57] term, so foot traffic was minimal.
[2:00] It wasn't the kind of place a predator would pick if he were
[2:03] planning an abduction with no witnesses, but it wasn't far off
[2:07] a main road. Unfortunately, most of the
[2:11] apartment windows looked the wrong direction to see the back
[2:13] corner of the lot. Around 11:00 in the morning, a
[2:18] man called 911 to report a green minivan being driven recklessly
[2:22] on a road just South of Corvallis.
[2:25] The driver was weaving and speeding, and the caller gave
[2:28] only a first name, Brian, before hanging up.
[2:32] Detectives would eventually try to get Brian to come forward to
[2:35] get more information about what he had seen.
[2:38] But I'm getting ahead of myself. That report was logged and
[2:42] largely forgotten, and it would take more than a year before
[2:46] anyone in the investigation understood what they've been
[2:48] looking at. For now, keep this call in mind
[2:53] because we'll be coming back to it shortly, since it's one of
[2:56] the clues that would break this case wide open.
[3:00] Stephanie came back from her errand a little after 11, and
[3:03] the cleaning supplies were where Brooke had left them.
[3:07] Brooke's wallet and purse was still back in the apartment, as
[3:10] was her apartment. Stephanie looked around and
[3:13] found that Brooke's car was also still parked in the area.
[3:17] The only thing missing was Brooke herself.
[3:21] Corvallis police treated the Brooks case as an abduction
[3:24] almost immediately, despite Stephanie having been gone only
[3:28] about 20 minutes. Brooke was a careful young woman
[3:32] with no history of running off, no boyfriend trouble, no issues
[3:36] of any kind. There were no signs of
[3:39] unhappiness in any of the people who knew her well, and by the
[3:42] afternoon, dozens of officers were searching.
[3:46] By the next morning, hundreds of volunteers were combing fields,
[3:50] parking structures, drainage ditches, and the wooded slopes
[3:54] that ring the Willamette Valley. The Will Burgers gave interviews
[3:58] on every camera they could find, and they built a website, set up
[4:02] a tip line and flew between Oregon and Utah, meeting with
[4:06] anyone who could help. The story climbed from local
[4:10] news to regional news to national news, and America's
[4:13] Most Wanted ran a segment on her case.
[4:16] Investigators worked through the obvious suspects, hoping to find
[4:20] a boyfriend or ex-boyfriend who was responsible.
[4:24] It turned out that Brooke had only had one boyfriend ever, and
[4:28] at the time the abduction occurred, he was in Venezuela on
[4:31] a Mormon missionary trip. Every lead that detectives
[4:35] pursued soon went cold, as did the case itself.
[4:40] The break didn't come from Oregon.
[4:42] Rather, it came from a parking lot in New Mexico, roughly 1500
[4:46] miles South. In late November of 2004, a
[4:51] young woman who'd come to the University of New Mexico on an
[4:54] exchange program from Russia was walking back to her car in
[4:58] Albuquerque. A man approached her with a
[5:01] knife and forced her into a red Honda.
[5:04] He drove her to a deserted lot, bound her hands with a scarf and
[5:08] her ankles with a shoelace, and assaulted her in the back of the
[5:12] car. At some point, he stepped
[5:14] outside the vehicle and she wriggled her hands free, then
[5:18] her ankles, opened the door, and ran for her life.
[5:23] She made it, and Albuquerque detectives picked up the suspect
[5:27] within days. His name was Joel Courtney and
[5:31] he was 38, married, a father of three, and had grown up in
[5:35] Beaverton, OR. He had previously pled guilty to
[5:39] a variety of disgusting charges in Oregon's Washington County
[5:43] back in 1985 when he was 19. He had served prison time for it
[5:49] and also served more time after subsequent probation violations.
[5:54] After his release in the mid 1990s, he'd cycled through
[5:57] manual labor jobs across multiple states, with his new
[6:01] family following along. By the spring of 2004, he was
[6:06] working as a supervisor for a Portland area construction
[6:09] cleaning company. A routine background check by an
[6:13] Albuquerque investigator turned up something that couldn't be
[6:16] ignored. Courtney had been bouncing
[6:18] between Oregon and the Southwest for months, and his name had
[6:22] never come up in the Will Burger file.
[6:25] The detective in New Mexico picked up a phone and called
[6:28] Corvallis, OR. Investigators pulled Courtney's
[6:32] employment records, fuel receipts, vehicle assignments,
[6:36] and route logs. On May 24th, 2004, the day
[6:43] Brooke was taken, Joel Courtney had been driving a company
[6:46] vehicle. It was a green 1997 Dodge
[6:50] Caravan, and he had taken it from Portland to the Oregon
[6:53] Coast on a service run for his employer.
[6:57] His route ran straight through Corvallis, and his timing put
[7:00] him in the area at the exact window in which Brooke
[7:03] disappeared. The 911 call from the man who'd
[7:07] called himself Brian, dismissed at the time as a routine
[7:11] reckless driving call, suddenly looked very different.
[7:16] Unfortunately, Brian couldn't be located, but his emergency call,
[7:20] along with all the other evidence, was enough to get cops
[7:23] to make a move. Oregon charged Courtney with the
[7:26] abduction and aggravated slaying of Brooke Wilberger in 2005.
[7:31] New Mexico had him first and prosecuted him there for the
[7:34] Albuquerque attack, which led to significant delays in Brooke's
[7:38] case. In 2007, Courtney was convicted
[7:42] of kidnapping and other vile offenses in New Mexico and
[7:45] sentenced to 18 years. Then he was extradited to Oregon
[7:49] to face the Wilburger charges, and from there, the evidence
[7:53] kept accumulating. Forensic technicians went over
[7:57] the green caravan, which was still in the possession of his
[8:00] employer. Witnesses came forward who'd
[8:03] seen a green minivan in or near the Oak Park lot that morning.
[8:08] Investigators reconstructed Courtney's route on May 24th,
[8:12] mile by mile, and tied his presence to the complex.
[8:16] They had no body, no eyewitness to the abduction itself, and no
[8:21] confession. What they had was the kind of
[8:25] circumstantial mosaic that's almost airtight when you step
[8:28] back and look at the whole picture.
[8:31] But circumstantial cases like this can be picked apart by
[8:34] defense attorneys who can target elements of the circumstantial
[8:38] mosaic. If even one single tile of the
[8:41] mosaic comes off, then the entire picture can look
[8:44] completely different. This is especially true given
[8:48] that the prosecution needs to prove the case beyond a
[8:51] reasonable doubt. To make matters more complex,
[8:55] prosecutors signaled they'd be seeking the death penalty
[8:58] despite the fact no body had been located.
[9:03] Courtney's defense team filed motion after motion, challenging
[9:07] searches, challenging the venue, challenging every line of the
[9:11] indictment they could plausibly question.
[9:14] Years went by, and the Will Burgers attended hearings in
[9:17] Corvallis and watched the calendar turn.
[9:21] By the summer of 2009, the case had technically been moving
[9:25] through Oregon courts for nearly half a decade.
[9:28] Brooke had been gone for five years, and her parents had still
[9:32] never been allowed to bury her because no one outside of Joel
[9:36] Courtney knew where she was. The Oregon attorneys understood
[9:40] the trap they were in and understood that they had not
[9:43] only a duty to public safety, but to Brooke's family as well.
[9:48] They had enough evidence to convict, almost certainly, but a
[9:52] verdict without remains would mean Brooke would stay missing
[9:55] forever. The families wish to bring their
[9:59] daughter home pulled the prosecutors in a direction they
[10:02] would not otherwise have gone. In September 2009, attorneys for
[10:08] both sides reached an arrangement.
[10:11] If Courtney would lead investigators to Brooke's
[10:13] remains and plead guilty, the state would take the death
[10:16] penalty off the table and accept a life sentence without parole.
[10:22] The Will Burgers signed off on this arrangement, though
[10:25] technically that wasn't a requirement.
[10:28] On September 19th, Courtney was taken from custody and driven W
[10:33] out of Corvallis into the Oregon Coast Range.
[10:37] The route ran roughly 12 miles into Benton County, then off the
[10:40] main highway. Then they went on to an
[10:43] abandoned logging Rd., climbing through second growth timber on
[10:46] private land West of town. The terrain was rough, steep and
[10:51] densely overgrown, the sort of place you'd never find anyone as
[10:55] long as you searched. Courtney directed the search
[10:59] team to a shallow grave on a hillside, and the remains were
[11:03] there, exactly where he said they'd be.
[11:06] An autopsy later confirmed that Brooke had been struck
[11:08] repeatedly in the head with a blunt object, which was
[11:12] consistent with the manner of death he admitted to in the plea
[11:15] filings. Two days later, on September
[11:19] 21st, 2009, Courtney stood up in a Corvallis courtroom and
[11:25] entered his guilty plea. He admitted to driving his green
[11:29] caravan into the Oak Park lot that May morning.
[11:33] He admitted to positioning the vehicle so that Brooke was
[11:36] screened from the line of sight of the apartment windows.
[11:39] He admitted he'd taken her at knifepoint, bound her with duct
[11:43] tape, and driven her up into the Coast Range.
[11:46] I'll skip the rest of the details since it's gratuitous,
[11:49] but it's safe to say that Brooke met a fate that absolutely no
[11:53] one deserved. The judge imposed life
[11:56] imprisonment without the possibility of parole, to be
[11:59] served consecutively with the New Mexico sentence.
[12:03] Courtney was processed back into the Oregon Department of
[12:06] Corrections, where he had already served time once before,
[12:10] and he's been rotting there ever since.
[12:12] This time forever. There's a detail about this case
[12:16] that's easy to skip past, and it's the one that bothers me the
[12:20] most. When Joel Courtney attacked the
[12:23] woman in Albuquerque six months after taking Brooke, he was
[12:27] driving a different vehicle. He was operating in a different
[12:30] state and using a somewhat different method.
[12:33] By every traditional measure of how investigators connect cases,
[12:37] he was a stranger to the Wilberger file.
[12:41] The reason his name finally surfaced in Oregon wasn't
[12:43] brilliant inferential work in Corvallis or some high tech
[12:47] forensic breakthrough. It was that one Albuquerque
[12:51] detective who ran a background check, saw an old Oregon
[12:55] conviction, picked up the phone, and asked a question.
[13:00] That one phone call collapsed what would have almost certainly
[13:03] been an unsolved cold case investigation into a charge
[13:07] sheet within weeks. But that brings me back to my
[13:11] point. Courtney had been operating as a
[13:14] working supervisor in a job that took him in and out of small
[13:17] towns at all hours. In the years since the plea, the
[13:20] FBI has flagged Courtney as a possible suspect in other
[13:25] unsolved attacks across the states where his work and family
[13:28] had moved him through. None of those cases have been
[13:32] closed against him, and he hasn't faced any additional
[13:35] charges at this point. He's never volunteered anything
[13:39] beyond what the Will Burger plea required, and he's offered no
[13:43] further admissions in the years since.
[13:46] Personally, I think there's more to Courtney's story, since
[13:49] everything about him indicates that he was a serial predator.
[13:57] Sometime in the early hours of April 12th, 2019, a car sat
[14:01] abandoned on one of the busiest bridges in Texas, and the
[14:05] driver's belongings were still inside.
[14:07] Her phone, her purse, all the small things a person carries
[14:12] through an ordinary day were there.
[14:15] The Fred Hartman Bridge stretches almost a mile and a
[14:18] half over the Houston Ship Channel, rising nearly 180 feet
[14:22] above the water. And on this particular night,
[14:25] surveillance cameras caught something strange happening on
[14:29] its deck. A figure stepped out of that
[14:31] car. The figure didn't climb the
[14:34] railing or pause at the edge of the deck.
[14:37] It just walked off the frame and disappeared into the dark.
[14:41] And to this day, nobody has been able to confirm who it actually
[14:44] was. The car belonged to a 23 year
[14:47] old woman named Nicole Markham, and she's never been seen since.
[14:52] Nicole had grown up in and around Baytown, a refinery town
[14:56] squeezed between Houston and Galveston Bay.
[14:59] In the weeks before her car ended up on that bridge, Nicole
[15:03] had been telling people she was scared.
[15:06] She told several different people this, and she took a step
[15:09] that most 23 year olds don't take casually.
[15:12] She went out and bought herself a weapon because she wanted
[15:15] something close at hand if the people she feared ever showed
[15:18] up. She'd also stopped living at the
[15:21] address most people associated with her.
[15:24] A former roommate would later say Nicole hadn't really been
[15:27] around the place in months. Where she was actually sleeping
[15:30] during that stretch is one of the murkier corners of this
[15:33] story, but the picture is of a young woman moving around and
[15:37] trying to stay below somebody's line of sight.
[15:41] Whatever she was running from in those final weeks, she clearly
[15:45] believed it was real, and she clearly believed it was closing
[15:48] in fast. Then in the early hours of April
[15:52] 12th, all of that fell into the background of something
[15:55] stranger. The Fred Hartman Bridge is A4
[15:59] Tower cable stayed span carrying State Highway 146 across the
[16:04] Houston Ship Channel. It's one of the largest bridges
[16:07] of its kind in the country, and it's also patrolled, lit and
[16:12] watched by cameras around the clock.
[16:14] The channel underneath it is one of the busiest shipping
[16:17] corridors on the planet. And if you leave a car on this
[16:20] bridge, it's going to be noticed and it's going to be on camera.
[16:25] When investigators sat down to review the surveillance footage
[16:28] from the bridge, they didn't find what you would expect to
[16:31] find at a suspected jumping. There was no figure climbing the
[16:35] railing or hesitating at the edge of the deck, and nothing on
[16:39] the tape looked anything like a person going over the side.
[16:43] What they found, instead, was a single individual stepping out
[16:47] of the driver's side of Nicole's vehicle and walking away from it
[16:51] on foot. Here's where the story takes a
[16:54] turn that's frustrated her family and supporters for years
[16:58] now. The official response, at least
[17:01] at the outset, treated Nicole's disappearance as if she'd most
[17:04] likely pulled the curtains on herself.
[17:08] The scene on the bridge fit the surface pattern of a young
[17:11] woman, anxious with a recent history of fear and stress,
[17:16] ending up alone on a structure with a long history of jumpers.
[17:21] But there's a problem with that reading, and it's the same
[17:24] problem that's dogged the case from the start.
[17:27] The footage doesn't show her going over the side, and it
[17:30] shows somebody, potentially not her, walking off the frame on
[17:34] foot. Unfortunately, this surveillance
[17:38] evidence hasn't been released to the public, at least as far as I
[17:41] can tell. I suspect this may be due to the
[17:45] nature of the bridge and national security concerns
[17:48] surrounding this key piece of infrastructure.
[17:52] The official response by the accounts of the people who
[17:55] pushed hardest for more never matched the urgency the
[17:59] situation seemed to demand. Critics have pointed out that
[18:03] the kind of intensive water search a presumed jumping would
[18:06] usually trigger didn't seem to happen in this case.
[18:10] There were no divers methodically working the area
[18:12] beneath the deck of the bridge or sonar sweeps of the shipping
[18:15] lane below. In the years since a public
[18:19] petition has circulated asking Harris County to take a fresh
[18:22] look. Her friends and family have
[18:25] argued persistently and out loud that the available evidence
[18:29] simply doesn't add up. They point to her fears in the
[18:33] months prior to the firearm she bought because she didn't feel
[18:37] safe, to the unidentified figure in the bridge footage, and to
[18:42] the basic logic that a young woman who's just taken active
[18:45] steps to protect her own life doesn't usually choose to end it
[18:49] a few weeks later. Hey everyone, it's Jimmy.
[18:55] Just dropping a quick reminder to hit the subscribe button and
[18:58] the notification bell and turn on all notifications.
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[19:05] take your support for my channel to the next level.
[19:11] A 19 year old missionary disappeared from her family's
[19:14] Bronx home one Wednesday morning in the summer of 19.
[19:17] O 9A short telegram arrived from Washington a few days later,
[19:22] signed in her initials telling her parents not to worry and
[19:27] that she'll be home soon. Nine days after she vanished in
[19:31] a locked tenement room above a Chinese restaurant on 8th Ave.
[19:36] two men Cut the Rope binding a heavy steamer trunk and lifted
[19:39] the lid. The man whose apartment it was
[19:42] had already slipped out of New York City and into one of the
[19:46] largest manhunts the country had ever seen.
[19:50] Elsie Siegel was born in 1889 into one of New York's more
[19:53] visible families. Her grandfather was Franz
[19:56] Siegel, the German born Union general who didn't have the
[19:59] greatest battlefield record but could recruit German Americans
[20:03] in droves. Her father, Paul, lived
[20:06] comfortably, and her mother, Anne, taught Sunday school for
[20:09] years at Saint Andrew's Episcopal Church on 5th Ave.
[20:13] That class was aimed specifically at young Chinese
[20:16] men trying to learn English and find their footing in New York.
[20:20] Anne started bringing Elsie along when her daughter was
[20:23] still a teenager, and by nineteen O 9, the girl was doing
[20:26] missionary outreach in Chinatown on her own.
[20:30] On June 9th, 19 O 9, Elsie left the family's Wadsworth Ave.
[20:35] apartment and didn't come back. Her parents weren't immediately
[20:40] panicked, as she'd recently been spending time with her
[20:42] grandmother in Washington, and trips like that weren't unusual.
[20:47] A few days into her absence, A telegram arrived from the
[20:50] capital. The message was brief and
[20:53] reassuring. She'd be home by the end of the
[20:55] week. No need to Worry signed with her
[20:58] initials and to Paul and Anne that closed the matter.
[21:02] The trouble was that Elsie hadn't sent it, and by the time
[21:05] the Wire reached Wadsworth Ave. she'd been dead almost a week.
[21:11] A few blocks South of Central Park at 782 8th Ave. a man named
[21:16] Sun Lung ran a Chinese food place on the third floor of a
[21:20] four story walk up. Upstairs lived his cousin, a
[21:24] Chinese immigrant who went by several names, but most commonly
[21:29] William. Leon.
[21:31] Son hadn't seen him in close to a week on June 18th.
[21:36] Worried, he climbed the stairs to bang on his cousin's door,
[21:40] but no one answered. There was something else,
[21:43] though. A smell was coming through the
[21:45] door that he couldn't quite talk himself out of.
[21:50] He walked to the W 47th Street police station and asked an
[21:53] officer to come back with him. Patrolman John Reardon pried the
[21:57] door open and the room was almost empty, just a bed and a
[22:01] heavy trunk lashed shut with a rope.
[22:04] When Reardon Cut the Rope and tried the lid, what was inside
[22:08] pushed it open the rest of the way.
[22:10] Bent double and wrapped in a sheet was a young woman who had
[22:14] clearly been there for many days.
[22:17] She was wearing some jewelry, including a thin gold chain with
[22:21] an initial pendant and a bracelet engraved with the
[22:24] letters Els. A cousin of Leon's name.
[22:30] Joe was tracked down quickly and told detectives Leon Sweetheart
[22:34] had been the granddaughter of General Siegel.
[22:36] He'd seen the pair of them out at the theater together, and a
[22:40] detective rode up town to the Seagull home.
[22:43] The family's first answer was that Elsie wasn't missing, she
[22:47] was just away visiting the Capitol.
[22:50] Pressed, they admitted they hadn't actually heard from her
[22:53] in over a week, and Paul was taken to view the body.
[22:57] According to the police account, he looked at the remains and at
[23:01] the jewelry and refused to identify either.
[23:05] Anne was brought in afterward, and she was able to identify
[23:09] both immediately. There was more behind Paul's
[23:12] hesitation than just grief. There was also the matter of his
[23:16] familial reputation on the line. The investigators going through
[23:21] Leon's apartment had already found roughly 35 love letters in
[23:24] Elsie's handwriting, scattered across the floor.
[23:28] They weren't shy letters, and they referred to sacrifices made
[23:32] for him. Family she'd risked, devotion
[23:36] she promised wouldn't quit. There were other women's letters
[23:39] mixed in as well. And Leon, as the press would
[23:43] soon notice, didn't lack for correspondence from women.
[23:47] But it was Elsie's that stacked the highest.
[23:51] A few blocks E on Mott St. a man named Chew Gain managed the Port
[23:55] Arthur restaurant 1 of Chinatown's nicer rooms.
[24:00] When detectives brought him in for questioning, Chew Gain made
[24:03] a few admissions of his own. He'd also been seeing Elsie, and
[24:07] he had recent letters from her in which she called him her one
[24:11] true love and asked him not to mind that Leon was hanging
[24:15] around. Chu told police he'd been
[24:17] getting anonymous notes threatening both his life and
[24:20] Elsie's if he didn't break off the affair, and he believed Leon
[24:25] had written them. The picture investigators put
[24:28] together looked roughly like this.
[24:31] Elsie had met Leon four years earlier.
[24:34] He was running a small Chinese food restaurant called A Chop
[24:38] Suey Place, using the lingo of the time, on Amsterdam Ave., not
[24:43] far from the Siegel home. Anne Siegel had taken her
[24:47] daughter into Chinese restaurants on missionary
[24:49] rounds, and Leon had become a familiar face.
[24:53] He started sitting with the seagulls at church, visited
[24:56] their home, took mother and daughter on tours of Chinatown.
[25:00] At some point, the friendship became something else, and Leon
[25:04] had even lived briefly under the seagull roof, though the true
[25:08] nature of the relationship was unknown to her parents.
[25:12] Just over a week before Elsie disappeared, he'd shown up at a
[25:16] police station asking for an officer to accompany him to the
[25:20] family's house. He claimed Anne owed him $300
[25:25] and he wanted to retrieve his clothes without trouble.
[25:28] By the spring of 19 O 9, Elsie had also taken up with Chew.
[25:32] Gain and Leon eventually figured it out.
[25:36] Witnesses said he showed up drunk to a party at the Siegel
[25:39] home on the evening of June 8th and pulled Elsie aside to warn
[25:42] her that if she kept seeing Chew, he'd cut them both down.
[25:47] The next morning, June 9th, Elsie left home and instead of
[25:51] going to her grandmother's, she went to 782 8th Ave.
[25:57] Leon hadn't lived in that apartment alone, and his
[25:59] roommate, a Chinese man named Chong Singh, also vanished.
[26:03] On June 9th, a few days after the trunk was found, a man named
[26:08] Harvey Kennedy hired a new Chinese cook from an employment
[26:11] agency on West 29th St. The next morning, he opened the
[26:16] paper and recognized his new cook.
[26:18] In the manhunt photograph, Police picked Chong Singh up.
[26:24] His statements changed repeatedly over the early days
[26:27] of the investigation. The version he eventually
[26:30] settled on was that Elsie had come to the apartment that
[26:33] morning to confront Leon to tell him to stop visiting the family.
[26:38] Chong Singh said he was downstairs when she arrived,
[26:42] then went up and heard a struggle from the next room
[26:45] through a partly open door. He claimed to have seen Leon
[26:48] throw Elsie onto the bed and end her life, a fact that struck
[26:52] detectives as odd. Chong Singh, for his part, was a
[26:57] strapping, physically imposing young man, and the idea that he
[27:01] didn't attempt to stop the attack was suspicious at best.
[27:06] He said he walked in afterward, touched her hand, and was told
[27:10] she was already deceased. Then, by his telling, he handed
[27:15] Leon 200 of his own dollars, apparently so that William Leon
[27:19] could escape, and then Chong Singh walked over to the Port
[27:23] Arthur restaurant. Singh convinced Chu Gain that
[27:26] William would leave town for good if he was bankrolled, and
[27:29] Chu emptied the till for $260.00 For Chu Gain, his motivation for
[27:35] doing this was apparent. He wanted to clear out a
[27:38] romantic rival. Chong Singh brought it back to
[27:42] the apartment and watched Leon put Elsie's body in the trunk.
[27:47] Parts of that story matched what police could verify on their
[27:50] own, but other parts remained mysterious.
[27:53] For instance, the transaction between Chong Singh and Chu Gain
[27:58] could be verified as having actually happened.
[28:02] But what happened next is a bit more bizarre.
[28:05] Within an hour or two of the time Chong Singh claimed the
[28:08] slaying happened, Leon had walked into the Constitution
[28:12] Express Company on 8th Ave. Leon paid a driver named Arthur
[28:16] Logan to move the trunk Uptown to a laundry service, though the
[28:20] reasoning for this move was unclear.
[28:23] Then, that night, he hired A chauffeur to take him and the
[28:29] trunk over to a Chinese restaurant in Newark, where he
[28:32] tried to leave it indefinitely. The Newark man refused and the
[28:38] trunk made its way back to 782 8th Ave. the following
[28:42] afternoon, and there it sat in a locked room.
[28:47] It would sit there until Reardon forced the door 8 days later in
[28:50] the presence of Sun Leung. When the coroner's jury met on
[28:54] September 24th, 19 O 9, it named William Leon as the man
[29:01] responsible for Elsie's death by asphyxiation.
[29:05] Chong Singh, who had been held as a potential collaborator on a
[29:08] $10,000 bond, was released for lack of evidence to charge him.
[29:13] Personally, I find this part a little bit bizarre since
[29:17] everything indicates that Chong Singh was at the very least an
[29:22] accessory after the fact. Anyway, I looked into this
[29:26] offense a bit more and it existed as a common law offense
[29:30] at the time of the crime, but it wouldn't be codified until 1965
[29:35] in New York. I suspect the reason he was
[29:39] never charged is that proving the offense beyond a reasonable
[29:42] doubt would be problematic without William Leon's
[29:46] testimony. By then, Leon's face had been on
[29:50] the front page of nearly every major newspaper in North America
[29:53] for three months. Police rounded up Chinese men
[29:57] with even a vague resemblance to him.
[29:59] From California to the Canadian Maritimes.
[30:02] Steamships bound for Asia were searched cabin by cabin.
[30:07] Reported sightings poured in from Cuba, Texas, the Midwest,
[30:12] the West Coast, even the Far East itself.
[30:16] The telegram from Washington, the one signed with Elsie's
[30:19] initials, was traced to a Chinese man matching Leon's
[30:23] description who'd handed it in at the Wire office on June 11th.
[30:28] However, that said, it remains unclear if this individual was
[30:32] actually Leon or someone else. But as you'll see, detectives of
[30:37] the time didn't consider other possibilities.
[30:41] That was two days after Elsie had already been put in the
[30:44] trunk, and investigators came to believe Leon himself had sent
[30:48] the message. They believed that this was
[30:50] partly to buy time and partly to set up a trail leading anywhere
[30:54] but 8th Ave. The case dominated American
[30:58] newspapers through the summer and into the fall, and a touring
[31:01] show based on the case played theaters across the country.
[31:05] Anne Siegel, by some accounts, suffered a breakdown and
[31:09] underwent experimental psychiatric treatment after
[31:13] coming to believe her own missionary work had LED her
[31:16] daughter to that fate. William Leon was never found,
[31:21] and theories rushed in to fill the space he'd left almost
[31:24] immediately. One version had him on a
[31:27] steamship for China under another name, where he lived out
[31:30] his life, never to return to the United States.
[31:35] Another theory said members of a Chinese organized crime group in
[31:38] New York City tracked him down and eliminated him.
[31:43] Under this theory, William Leon had brought an immense amount of
[31:46] police intrusion into Chinatown, and these figures wanted him
[31:50] gone. 1/3 theory. Perhaps the most bizarre of all
[31:55] claimed he'd taken Elsie alive with him and the body in the
[31:59] trunk belong to some other woman entirely.
[32:03] Under this theory, he eliminated another woman and put Elsie's
[32:07] jewelry on her while letting the decomposition make her largely
[32:11] unrecognizable. Notably, while this theory was
[32:15] popular at the time, it was popular because it was lurid and
[32:20] it moved papers. There was never any evidence to
[32:23] support this, despite numerous questionable press outlets
[32:27] reporting sightings as a front page news story for the next
[32:31] decade or so. Still another theory claims that
[32:34] William Leon was himself a victim and that Chong Singh may
[32:38] have been the man who eliminated him.
[32:41] Under this theory, Chu Gain gave the money to Chong Singh not to
[32:45] ensure that William Leon left New York City, but fulfill a hit
[32:49] on the man, eliminating a romantic rival.
[32:53] However, this theory doesn't meaningfully explain why Elsie
[32:57] also perished, since this would run contrary to what Chu Gain
[33:01] wanted anyway. All I can say for sure is that I
[33:06] believe that Chong Singh was likely much more involved than
[33:09] he made himself out to be. On a cool October evening in
[33:15] 1983, nineteen year old Patty Osbourne stepped out of a
[33:19] Seattle motel and into the neon glow of Aurora Ave.
[33:24] She told her quote UN quote boyfriend she was heading to
[33:28] meet a man at a nearby restaurant, a quote UN quote
[33:32] date arranged by phone. She never made it to that
[33:36] meeting, and Patty vanished without a trace into the night.
[33:40] In a city already on edge from a string of grisly attacks
[33:43] targeting young women, Patty's disappearance would soon become
[33:47] part of one of the most notorious cases in American
[33:50] history. Patty Osbourne's life hadn't
[33:55] been easy, to say the least, and she grew up in a very rough
[33:58] household. Born in 1964, she grew up in
[34:02] Washington state and by her teenage years struggled with
[34:06] substance use and frequent trouble with the law.
[34:10] At just 17, Patty left her family home for good and drifted
[34:14] into life on the streets of Seattle, where she became
[34:18] involved in illicit work to survive.
[34:21] Despite the hardships and risky lifestyle, Patty remained in
[34:25] contact with her mother, Patricia Muse.
[34:29] She never let a holiday or birthday pass without a phone
[34:32] call home, a reassurance that she was still alive and thinking
[34:36] of her family. Concerned and unable to reach
[34:40] her daughter, Patty's family feared the worst as the fall of
[34:44] 1983 dragged on. On October 28th, 1983, Patty was
[34:52] last seen along Seattle's North Aurora Ave. an area dotted with
[34:57] motels and known strolls. For this sort of paid work, she
[35:01] had been staying with a man described as her boyfriend at a
[35:05] motel on N 115th St. in Aurora. That evening, Patty left the
[35:11] motel room to meet a client at a nearby restaurant.
[35:15] The plan was routine for Patty's line of work, but something went
[35:18] terribly wrong when her boyfriend realized she hadn't
[35:22] come back. And with no word from Patty in
[35:25] the days that followed, it became clear she had
[35:28] mysteriously disappeared. Patty's disappearance didn't
[35:34] happen in isolation, and Seattle was in the grip of fear during
[35:38] late 1983 as dozens of young women were going missing or
[35:42] turning up deceased. Just the previous year, in 1982,
[35:48] police had discovered the bodies of five women in or near the
[35:52] Green River in King County, sparking a massive
[35:55] investigation. Throughout 1983, more women
[36:00] connected to the case went missing and several bodies were
[36:04] found dumped in wooded areas around Seattle's suburbs.
[36:08] Many of the victims, like Patty, were living on the outskirts of
[36:12] life and were in this illicit line of work or were young
[36:16] runaways. It was against this backdrop
[36:20] that Patty Osbourne vanished, and investigators quickly
[36:23] suspected her case was not a simple missing person, but
[36:27] something far more sinister. Within months of Patty's
[36:33] disappearance, law enforcement added her name to the growing
[36:36] list of women believed to have been slain by the then still
[36:40] unidentified Gary Ridgway. This is a name, of course,
[36:44] that's well known to anyone with even a passing familiarity with
[36:48] crime. The Green River investigation
[36:51] stretched on for years without an arrest.
[36:54] It would go on to become one of the largest and longest running
[36:57] serial predator cases in American history.
[37:01] Finally, in November 2001, a major breakthrough came when DNA
[37:06] technology linked a long time suspect, Gary Ridgway, to
[37:11] several of the attacks. Ridgway was arrested and
[37:15] eventually struck A plea bargain to avoid the DP, and he agreed
[37:19] to confess to everything so the authorities could bring closure
[37:22] to the families of the victims. In 2003, Gary Ridgway pleaded
[37:28] guilty to 48 counts, making him one of the most prolific
[37:32] confirmed serial predators in history.
[37:38] As part of his cooperation with authorities, Ridgway provided
[37:41] information on many of his victims, including details that
[37:45] helped recover remains of women long missing.
[37:48] In the course of these interviews, Ridgway also
[37:51] admitted to slaying Patty Osbourne.
[37:54] However, unlike most of his other confessions, his admission
[37:59] lacking detail and physical evidence wasn't enough for
[38:03] prosecutors to bring a formal charge in Patty's case.
[38:07] With no body and no forensic proof, authorities had to leave
[38:11] Patty Osbourne's case officially unsolved, even as Ridgway went
[38:15] to prison for life for the numerous other cases.
[38:19] In the final plea agreement, King County Sheriff officials
[38:22] removed Patty's name from the list of victims Ridgway was
[38:25] charged with, citing the lack of evidence.
[38:29] This, of course, was an awful feeling for Patty's family, who
[38:33] thought that there would be some form of justice for Patty now
[38:36] that Ridgway was clapped in cuffs.
[38:41] At present, most believe that Gary Ridgway was indeed
[38:44] responsible for the slaying of Patty Osbourne in 1983.
[38:48] However, there are lingering doubts because aside from her
[38:52] and two other women, he was able to provide great detail on all
[38:55] his crimes and reveal the locations of his victims bodies.
[39:00] Unfortunately, Patty's body has never been recovered, and the
[39:04] authorities have hoped that Gary Ridgway, who is still alive, may
[39:09] one day sing like a Canary. Personally, I believe that he
[39:14] may have simply forgotten the location of her body, since he
[39:18] didn't deny committing this horrible act against her.
[39:21] Notably, he did explicitly deny being connected to a few other
[39:25] victims who the task force had thought he had slain.
[39:29] So I suspect he wouldn't lie about Patty's case.
[39:32] And actually, as I read that out, that kind of sounds
[39:35] ridiculous. This guy is one of the most
[39:37] prolific predators of all time, so obviously his word isn't
[39:41] worth a thing. Just past one in the morning on
[39:44] January 16th, 1997, a young man knelt beside a dark green
[39:49] Mercedes convertible on the shoulder of Interstate 4 O Five
[39:53] in the Sepulveda Pass. He was wrestling with a flat
[39:56] tire, and he'd already used his car phone to ask a friend to
[40:00] come keep him company while he changed it.
[40:03] Within a few minutes, a stranger approached him out of the
[40:06] darkness, demanded his money, and fired a single round into
[40:11] the side of his head. The 27 year old who died there
[40:15] at the edge of the off ramp was the only son of one of the most
[40:19] recognized entertainers in the United States.
[40:22] His death would set off one of the most heavily covered
[40:25] investigations in Los Angeles in a generation.
[40:29] Ennis William Cosby was born in April of 1969 in Los Angeles,
[40:34] the third of five children born to Bill and Camille Cosby and
[40:38] the family's only boy. He grew up between Massachusetts
[40:42] and California, attending Morehouse College in Atlanta and
[40:46] graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1992.
[40:51] After finishing up his bachelor's, he enrolled at
[40:54] Columbia University's Teachers College in New York.
[40:58] By the mid 1990s, he was deep into a master's program in
[41:02] special education there, and he'd recently begun working
[41:05] toward a doctorate. His research focused on learning
[41:09] disabilities, an interest that came from his own life.
[41:13] While he was at Morehouse College, he had been diagnosed
[41:16] with dyslexia, and this instilled in him a deep desire
[41:19] to help others with similar learning disabilities.
[41:23] By the time he died, Ennis had spent years working in the
[41:27] field, including teaching at an elementary school in New York
[41:32] and a summer at Landmark College in Vermont.
[41:35] He had a quiet, almost shy demeanour, and people often
[41:39] described him as the most grounded member of a family
[41:42] whose name lived on billboards. He drove a flashy convertible,
[41:46] sure, but his ambitions were relatively modest by the
[41:50] standards of his last name. He wanted to open a school for
[41:53] kids with dyslexia. In January of 1997, he had flown
[41:59] out to spend time with his family, do work on his
[42:01] dissertation, and visit longtime friends.
[42:06] A friend named Stephanie Crane lived off Mulholland Drive in
[42:09] the hills above the Sepulveda Pass.
[42:12] She and Ennis had agreed to meet that night at her place.
[42:16] He'd been driving his mother's dark green Mercedes-Benz
[42:19] convertible, and he set out from a friend's home in the city
[42:22] shortly before 1:00 in the morning.
[42:25] He never made it. On the southbound shoulder of
[42:28] the Four O 5, just north of the Skirball Center Drive exit, the
[42:33] Mercedes blew a tire. Ennis pulled off as far as he
[42:37] could, parked beneath the freeway lights, and called
[42:40] Stephanie on his phone to let her know what had happened.
[42:44] He asked if she could drive down, position her car so it's
[42:47] headlights faced his, and stand by while he changed the tire.
[42:53] She agreed, grabbed her keys, and got into her own car to meet
[42:57] him. When Stephanie arrived a short
[43:00] time later, she pulled in behind the Mercedes and waited for
[43:03] Ennis to walk over. Instead, a man she didn't
[43:07] recognize appeared at her driver's side window and he
[43:11] spoke through the glass, telling her in a low voice to open the
[43:15] door or he'd hurt her. She didn't open it, put the car
[43:20] in gear and drove forward, maybe 50 feet away from the man, and
[43:24] stopped again. A moment later, she heard what
[43:28] she believed was a loud shot. When she turned around and drove
[43:32] back, the man was gone and Ennis was on the ground beside the
[43:36] open driver's side door of his Mercedes.
[43:39] A single bullet had entered his head at close range.
[43:42] He still had cash in his pocket and an expensive watch on his
[43:46] wrist. These two details complicated
[43:50] the prevailing theory that this had been a straightforward
[43:52] robbery gone wrong. After all, these were things
[43:56] that the attacker could have grabbed within seconds.
[43:59] Though some believe that the presence of Stephanie made the
[44:02] robbery impossible. And trust me when I say it, the
[44:06] actual reason the attack happened was so much more
[44:09] disturbing than a robbery. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
[44:13] Stephanie placed an emergency call, and paramedics from the
[44:17] Los Angeles Fire Department arrived within minutes.
[44:21] There was nothing they could do, and he was pronounced dead at
[44:23] the scene a short time afterward.
[44:26] The Los Angeles Police Department's West Bureau unit
[44:29] took over within hours, and what they found was a crime scene
[44:33] that was unusually clean. They had no clear fingerprints
[44:37] from the assailant, no shell casing they could match to a
[44:40] known weapon, and at first only Stephanie's description of the
[44:44] man at her window. He was a slender white male in
[44:48] his late 20s or early 30s, wearing a knit cap.
[44:52] What they did have recovered from the brush near the off ramp
[44:56] was a black knit wool cap that the attacker seemed to have
[45:00] discarded. It was the kind of detail that
[45:03] easily could have been overlooked, but forensic
[45:06] technicians lifted enough material from inside the cap to
[45:11] begin building a genetic profile.
[45:14] In the meantime, the story was everywhere, and while the name
[45:18] Bill Cosby carries certain darker connotations now, this
[45:22] wasn't the case at the time. Bill Cosby was, at that moment,
[45:28] one of the most beloved entertainers in the country,
[45:31] someone who was affectionately known as America's dad due to
[45:35] his role on The Cosby Show. The slaying of his only son hit
[45:39] the news cycle with the kind of force that left investigators
[45:43] wading through hundreds of tips a day.
[45:46] Most of them were useless and some pointed to a professional
[45:49] hit since Bill Cosby had been the target of a long running
[45:53] extortion campaign, which police were well aware of.
[45:57] Someone claiming to be his biological daughter was asking
[46:00] Cosby for 10s of millions of dollars or they'd take the story
[46:04] to the press. The ringleader of the extortion
[46:08] scam was at that point being prosecuted by the feds.
[46:12] Some investigators believe that this attack was done to silence
[46:16] Bill Cosby and stop him from testifying.
[46:18] In that case, while this wouldn't be the reason why this
[46:22] happened, this is somehow less disturbing than the actual
[46:26] reason for the attack. By early March of 1997, with no
[46:31] arrest insight, the National Enquirer announced a $100,000
[46:36] reward for information leading to the gunman's capture and
[46:40] conviction. The tabloid Globe added a
[46:43] separate offer of its own, and the reward changed the dynamic
[46:47] of the case almost overnight. It made the difference between
[46:51] someone keeping a friend's secret and someone picking up
[46:55] the phone. Within weeks, a young man from
[46:59] the Los Angeles area contacted The Enquirer and said he knew
[47:03] who'd done it. The caller was a man named
[47:07] Christopher so, a young acquaintance of an 18 year old
[47:11] Ukrainian born immigrant named Mikhail Marcassev.
[47:15] According to so, Markosev had bragged in the days after the
[47:18] shooting about confronting A wealthy man on the side of a
[47:21] freeway. According to So's account, he
[47:24] asked for money and then blasted him when the man hadn't handed
[47:28] it over fast enough. That was literally it.
[47:32] He picked a random guy to rob and thought it was hilarious
[47:35] that he ended his life when Ennis didn't move fast enough to
[47:38] hand over the cash. SO also told investigators where
[47:43] Markosev had reportedly hidden the weapon in a wooded area not
[47:47] far from the shooting scene. Detectives from West Bureau
[47:52] moved on the lead almost immediately since SO seemed to
[47:55] have information that wasn't publicly available at the time.
[47:59] They obtained search warrants and with SO guiding them,
[48:03] located a revolver hidden in the brush.
[48:06] Ballistics tied the weapon to the round from the scene and the
[48:09] genetic profile pulled from the wool cap matched a sample taken
[48:13] from Markosev. By March of 1997, just under two
[48:19] months after the shooting, the 18 year old was in custody,
[48:23] charged with the slaying of Ennis Cosby and the attempted
[48:26] robbery that preceded it. The arrest itself was relatively
[48:31] quiet, and officers picked Markosev up without incident.
[48:35] He didn't run, he didn't resist, and by all accounts he didn't
[48:39] even seem particularly surprised.
[48:42] He just asked for a lawyer and largely stopped talking after
[48:45] that. The reward money, after some
[48:49] back and forth about how it would be distributed, eventually
[48:53] went to Christopher. So the Markusev who began
[48:56] appearing in court was a slightly built young man with a
[48:59] hard stare, someone who really didn't seem all there.
[49:03] He'd come to the United States from Levive as a child, had
[49:07] drifted in and out of trouble through his teens, and had
[49:10] already been arrested once for an earlier incident involving a
[49:14] weapon. The night of the shooting, by
[49:17] his companions accounts and grand jury testimony, had been a
[49:21] restless Dr. looking for someone to rob.
[49:24] They hadn't been targeting anyone in particular, and they
[49:27] hadn't known whose car they were pulling up behind.
[49:31] The randomness was part of what made the case so disorienting
[49:34] when the facts came out. And I think random crimes like
[49:38] this fill us with an extreme sense of discomfort.
[49:42] I think we want to believe that things happen for reasons, good
[49:45] things and bad things, not that horrific things can happen
[49:49] entirely randomly. The trial began in the summer of
[49:54] 1998 in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom.
[49:58] His defense team argued that the prosecution's witnesses were
[50:01] unreliable, that the DNA evidence was overstated and that
[50:05] the weapon could have been planted to claim the reward.
[50:09] The defense also tried, with no success, to suggest that another
[50:14] young man named Eli Zakaria, who'd been with Mark Hassev on
[50:18] the night in question, was the actual shooter.
[50:22] The prosecution walked the jury through the timeline carefully.
[50:26] Markosev and his friends had been driving around the West
[50:29] side of Los Angeles that night, looking, by their own later
[50:32] account, for someone to rob. They'd taken the four O 5 N,
[50:37] exited near the scurball and stopped when they saw the
[50:40] Mercedes pulled over. Markosev, by every account
[50:44] except his own, had stepped out of the car and approached Ennis
[50:48] on foot while the others waited a short distance away.
[50:53] Bill Cosby himself testified during the trial.
[50:57] His appearance on the stand was a national news event, and his
[51:00] composure was widely remarked upon.
[51:04] He spoke quietly about identifying his son's body,
[51:07] about the kind of person Ennis had been, and about the call he
[51:11] received in the early morning hours informing him of what had
[51:15] happened. The defense didn't cross examine
[51:19] him at length and by most accounts the jurors looked
[51:22] stricken during his testimony. The jury deliberated for less
[51:26] than a day and on July 7th, 1998, they returned a verdict of
[51:31] guilty on all charges. Mark Hassev was sentenced to
[51:35] life in prison without the possibility of parole, but
[51:39] despite this he showed little reaction in the courtroom.
[51:44] The verdict made the front page of every major paper.
[51:47] The following morning. The case, for the moment at
[51:50] least, was finally closed. For three years after the
[51:55] conviction, Markosev maintained that the verdict was a
[51:58] miscarriage of justice, and his attorneys filed appeals.
[52:02] His mother gave occasional interviews, insisting on his
[52:05] innocence that her boy couldn't have done what the jury said
[52:08] that he did. And then, in early 2001,
[52:13] Markosev wrote a letter from prison, addressed to the deputy
[52:16] attorney general handling his appeal, asking that all of his
[52:20] pending appeals be withdrawn. In the letter, he admitted that
[52:24] he had been the shooter and that the jury was absolutely correct
[52:28] in the conclusion it drew. He said he wanted to take
[52:32] responsibility for what he'd done, that continuing to fight
[52:35] the conviction was an act of dishonesty he could no longer
[52:39] maintain. He said that he'd become a
[52:42] Christian during his time in prison and wanted to make peace
[52:45] with what he had done. The letter was, in many ways,
[52:50] the final piece of the puzzle that the trial had largely
[52:53] settled. It removed any doubt about
[52:56] whether the right person had been convicted, and it also
[52:59] removed the lingering suspicion that he hadn't acted alone.
[53:04] In the years after his death, the Cosby family established a
[53:07] foundation in his name, the Hello Friend Ennis William Cosby
[53:12] Foundation. This foundation is dedicated to
[53:16] supporting research and educational programming for
[53:19] individuals with dyslexia and other learning disabilities.
[53:23] The rather unusual name for the foundation came from one of
[53:26] Venice's own habits. He had a way of greeting
[53:29] strangers and old friends alike with the same opening line.
[53:33] Hello friend. Mark Kassev, for his part,
[53:37] remains incarcerated in the California State prison system
[53:41] more than 1/4 century after his sentencing.
[53:44] His 2001 letter has been the last major statement to come out
[53:48] of the case from the man responsible for it.
[53:51] He has given no interviews, granted no documentary access,
[53:56] and made no further public attempt to explain what he did
[53:59] or why. I've covered literally thousands
[54:02] of cases at this point, and I'm somewhat fascinated by the way
[54:05] Markosev ultimately took responsibility for the sick
[54:08] action that took the life of an innocent man.
[54:12] He appears to have fully and completely accepted his fate and
[54:15] his punishment for what he did in a way that's very rarely
[54:19] seen, completely giving up all of his appeals.
[54:24] Whether this is a sign of true remorse or perhaps something
[54:27] more cynical, I'll leave that up to you to decide.
[54:34] By the time the 1st 911 caller had her phone in her hand, the
[54:38] white pickup was already past her, doing well over 70, and the
[54:43] passenger door was hanging open. The young woman who'd been in
[54:47] the cab a few seconds earlier was on the bridge deck behind
[54:50] it, and the man who'd put her there had no plans to stop.
[54:56] He was going to drive South, off the bridge, off the Interstate
[55:00] and completely off police radar. And for almost 5 1/2 years,
[55:05] that's exactly what he did. Carson Prince was 19 years old
[55:10] and the oldest of three children born to Tom and Suzanne Prince.
[55:15] Her father had served a term as the mayor of Little Rock in the
[55:18] mid 1980s, and her mother was a deputy prosecutor in the same
[55:23] city. By the spring of 1999, she'd
[55:27] stepped away from college for a semester and was living back
[55:30] home in Momel, a community on the north Bank of the Arkansas
[55:34] River. She wanted to re enroll for the
[55:37] fall term, and her family later said she'd been looking forward
[55:41] to it. On the morning of Wednesday,
[55:44] April 28th, 1999, she told her father that she was driving into
[55:49] Little Rock to pick up registration paperwork.
[55:53] The family's housekeeper saw her leave a little before noon, and
[55:57] Carson was in her own car alone. Unfortunately, Carson's car ran
[56:03] out of gas on Interstate 430, and that one small mechanical
[56:07] failure is what the rest of the story hangs on.
[56:11] She pulled to the shoulder, got out and started walking back
[56:15] toward the nearest service station.
[56:18] It was Wednesday, just after lunchtime on the busiest stretch
[56:21] of north-south Freeway in Central Arkansas, and nothing
[56:25] about the situation was menacing.
[56:27] Yet at the exact same time, Stephen Talley was driving past
[56:32] in a white Ford pickup. He was 33 years old, from the
[56:36] small town of Perryville, out in the wooded Hill Country West of
[56:40] Little Rock. By his own much later admission,
[56:45] he was on the hunt that morning, driving around looking for a
[56:48] woman to attack Carson, walking the shoulder of a freeway in the
[56:53] middle of a sunny weekday fit whatever twisted parameter he
[56:57] was using, and he pulled over and offered her a ride.
[57:01] She took the ride, and the social calculus around stranded
[57:05] motorists in 1999 hadn't yet hardened into the kind of
[57:10] stranger danger reflex we now have.
[57:13] In any case, she was only in his cab a few minutes before she
[57:17] realized something was very wrong.
[57:20] By Tally's later account, she figured it out almost
[57:23] immediately that he was no ordinary Good Samaritan trying
[57:27] to help out. She started talking fast, and
[57:31] she told him who her father was. She told him that if anything
[57:36] happened to her, her dad wouldn't let it go for the rest
[57:39] of his life. That promise, coming from the
[57:42] daughter of a former mayor and a sitting deputy prosecutor, seems
[57:46] to have unsettled Tally. Disturbingly, though, it also
[57:50] seems to have made him decide that whatever happened next, he
[57:54] couldn't let her walk away to tell what happened.
[57:58] Tally reached for a Crescent wrench inside the cab and swung
[58:01] it at her head, but according to his account, she successfully
[58:05] fought back, taking advantage of the close quarters environment.
[58:09] He had a nine mil on him too, and in the next few seconds he
[58:12] reached for that as well. Carson, seeing what he was
[58:15] doing, lunged for the passenger door, but the truck was already
[58:18] on the bridge over the Arkansas River, accelerating rapidly.
[58:22] He braked hard, the door swung wide, and she came out of the
[58:26] cab at highway speed. The witnesses who called 911
[58:30] didn't see most of what was going on.
[58:33] What they saw was a pickup weaving across lanes at well
[58:36] over 70 miles an hour, a struggle through the windshield,
[58:40] and then a body coming out the side.
[58:43] She hit the concrete guardrail of the bridge at full speed, and
[58:47] the pickup didn't slow down. Tally kept S off the bridge, off
[58:53] the Interstate and gone. State troopers and Little Rock
[58:57] police were on the scene within minutes.
[59:00] Paramedics rushed Carson to a Little Rock hospital, but the
[59:04] head injury from the guardrail and the speed had already
[59:06] ensured she wouldn't make it. A few drivers tried to keep
[59:10] their eyes on the truck as it continued S, but they eventually
[59:14] lost the vehicle. Witnesses gave investigators a
[59:17] rough description of the driver, a roughly 30 something white man
[59:21] at the wheel of an older white Ford pickup.
[59:25] That profile would fit thousands of other drivers across Central
[59:29] Arkansas at any given hour of the day.
[59:33] The Prince family found themselves in the small, loud
[59:36] center of a public tragedy, with local media widely covering the
[59:40] case. Investigators circulated the
[59:43] truck and driver description almost immediately, asking
[59:46] anyone who'd been on that stretch of Hwy. to call in what
[59:49] they remembered. Tip lines opened and a few
[59:52] drivers came forward with extra detail.
[59:55] A glimpse of the man, a sense of his rough age and build.
[59:59] But none of it was enough for a few weeks.
[1:00:03] The Arkansas State Police were optimistic that they could crack
[1:00:06] the case quickly, since they had a vehicle description
[1:00:09] circulating on every news broadcast in the state.
[1:00:13] They also had a victim whose father knew exactly which phone
[1:00:16] calls to make to keep the pressure up.
[1:00:19] But despite all this, the truck didn't surface, the driver
[1:00:22] didn't slip, and nobody who knew Tally walked into a Sheriff's
[1:00:26] Office to say his name. By summer, the file was thick
[1:00:30] and going nowhere, and by the fall it was a cold case.
[1:00:34] The Prince case became a recurring feature on National
[1:00:36] Crime television. America's Most Wanted ran it,
[1:00:40] and then in August 2002, the long running series Unsolved
[1:00:45] Mysteries put together its own segment.
[1:00:49] Tip lines lit up after every broadcast, the way they always
[1:00:52] do when a story like this hits millions of households and
[1:00:56] Arkansas detectives chased every plausible lead, but nothing
[1:01:00] held. In October 2004, more than five
[1:01:05] years after the slaying, Stephen Talley got into his truck around
[1:01:09] midnight on a Tuesday night and drove himself to the Perry
[1:01:13] County Sheriff's Department. He was 38 by then, and he'd been
[1:01:17] living quietly back home in Perryville the whole time, on
[1:01:21] the western edge of the search radius and just inside the next
[1:01:24] county line. Tally had decided that he now
[1:01:28] wanted to tell a deputy exactly what he'd done.
[1:01:31] He told them that he was responsible for the death of the
[1:01:34] young woman on the Interstate bridge in the spring of 1999.
[1:01:38] He admitted on his own initiative that the reason he'd
[1:01:41] pulled over for her in the first place was that he'd been driving
[1:01:45] around looking for a victim, and she'd been the one who fit.
[1:01:50] This was a shocking admission, but there was more, and it
[1:01:54] turned out Carson hadn't been his only victim.
[1:01:58] On the morning of June 21st, 1999, less than two months after
[1:02:03] Carson's death, he'd crossed paths with a young couple from
[1:02:07] Perryville, Barbara Leggett and Christopher Barnes.
[1:02:12] By his account, he'd shot Barnes first specifically so he could
[1:02:16] assault Leggett, and then strangled her with a length of
[1:02:19] twine and hidden her body. The couple had been on the books
[1:02:23] is missing for over 5 years, and no remains had ever been
[1:02:26] recovered. Tally said he could lead
[1:02:29] investigators to wear Leggett was buried, and the next morning
[1:02:33] he did exactly that, walking deputies to a location in the
[1:02:37] woods only he could have known. Three capital charges came down
[1:02:43] inside a week, and bizarrely, Tally first entered a not guilty
[1:02:46] plea. While he sat in the Perry County
[1:02:49] Jail awaiting whatever came next, another inmate who
[1:02:54] reportedly knew one of the victims severely beat him.
[1:02:58] He eventually changed his plea, and in June 2005 he was formally
[1:03:04] received into the Arkansas Department of Correction with a
[1:03:07] sentence of life without the possibility of parole.
[1:03:11] What never quite got explained then or after, was why a man who
[1:03:15] had managed to stay invisible for more than half a decade
[1:03:19] decided to confess. 1 evening. Nobody had gotten any closer to
[1:03:23] him in five years, and there was no new witness and no genetic
[1:03:28] hit. By every measure available to
[1:03:31] the public record, Stephen Talley was going to get away
[1:03:34] with all three crimes. Yet despite this, on a random
[1:03:39] Tuesday around midnight, he stopped getting away with them
[1:03:43] by his own choice. I personally like to believe
[1:03:46] that he had some sort of remorse for his sick actions, but that
[1:03:50] doesn't explain why he initially entered a not guilty plea.
[1:03:55] Anyway, let me know in the comments about your own theories
[1:03:58] about why Tally may have come forward.
[1:04:04] A sheriff's deputy on a slow morning patrol through a
[1:04:07] Virginia park kicked at a steamer trunk left like trash
[1:04:10] beside an overlook. It refused to budget an inch,
[1:04:14] and when he forced the lid open and dug through the duffel bag
[1:04:17] stuffed inside and I stared back at him, the man in the trunk was
[1:04:23] emaciated, half undressed and recently deceased.
[1:04:27] For nearly seven years after that, nobody on earth would know
[1:04:31] who he was. And during all of that time,
[1:04:34] somebody else was still quietly cashing his Social Security
[1:04:37] checks. It was the early morning of May
[1:04:41] 14th, 1996, when a deputy with the Loudown County Sheriff's
[1:04:46] Office pulled into an overlook at Harpers Ferry National
[1:04:49] Historical Park. The trunk wasn't hidden.
[1:04:53] It sat where someone had wanted it to look like dumped furniture
[1:04:57] near a small heap of trash. The man inside hadn't been
[1:05:01] deceased for very long, maybe a day, maybe 2 at most.
[1:05:06] What the autopsy found was ugly. There were fresh cuts and
[1:05:10] abrasions on his skin, blunt force trauma to the back of his
[1:05:14] head, and toxic levels of a sedative in his bloodstream.
[1:05:19] The official cause was asphyxia, the kind that comes from a hand
[1:05:24] squeezing a throat or something pressed over a face, or possibly
[1:05:29] both at once. There was no identification
[1:05:32] anywhere on him or in the trunk. As was to be expected, his
[1:05:38] fingerprints went to the FBI and turned up nothing in any of the
[1:05:41] limited databases that existed at the time.
[1:05:44] DNA testing in 1996 wasn't what it would later become, and he
[1:05:50] didn't match any missing persons report investigators could find.
[1:05:55] The only physical oddity on the trunk itself was a smear of nail
[1:05:59] Polish on the outside, the kind of stray detail that means
[1:06:03] nothing until years later. It means everything.
[1:06:08] Loudown County deputies passed a composite image of his face to
[1:06:11] media outlets, and he was featured on Unsolved Mysteries.
[1:06:16] But no one recognized him. And from there the case went
[1:06:20] cold, and for years it looked like nobody would ever know who
[1:06:25] this John Doe was. And for many years, that would
[1:06:29] remain the case. In time, it turned out that he
[1:06:33] was Jasper Frederick Watkins Junior, though everyone called
[1:06:37] him Jack. Born in Richmond in March 1920,
[1:06:41] he'd grown up in a part of Virginia that still remembered
[1:06:45] the antebellum South in living memory.
[1:06:48] In 1941, just a couple of weeks before the bombs fell on Pearl
[1:06:52] Harbor, he enlisted in the United States Army.
[1:06:57] He came home after, took a steady job at an auto parts
[1:07:00] store, and settled into the kind of quiet, unremarkable adulthood
[1:07:06] that men of his generation tended to build one day at a
[1:07:09] time. In 1964, when he was 44, he
[1:07:14] married a 40 year old divorcee named Mary Triplett.
[1:07:19] She brought three grown daughters into the marriage, and
[1:07:22] by all accounts, they took to Jack like a real father rather
[1:07:25] than a stand in. He and Mary stayed together for
[1:07:28] 1/4 of a century, but she passed away in 1989 and Jack was alone
[1:07:33] again. By the mid 90s he was retired
[1:07:37] and living on a fixed income of $1200 a month in a small house
[1:07:42] in Reisterstown, just outside Baltimore.
[1:07:46] Then 1 autumn day, a sinister woman came to his door selling
[1:07:50] cemetery plots, and his life would change in a very big way.
[1:07:56] Her name was Nancy Siegel, though she'd been born Nancy
[1:07:59] Switzer in Baltimore in 1948. Her mother walked out when she
[1:08:04] was small, and her father raised her until he was cut down
[1:08:07] outside a bar in 1964, leaving her effectively on her own at
[1:08:12] 16. She married her high school
[1:08:14] sweetheart in 1968 and had two daughters with him.
[1:08:19] But the marriage curdled in the 80s when she developed a serious
[1:08:22] gambling habit. She started opening loans and
[1:08:25] credit cards in her husband's name without telling him, and by
[1:08:29] the time they divorced in 1985, he was over $100,000 in debt.
[1:08:35] She married a second man soon after, used his identity for
[1:08:39] more loans, and even altered his mortgage checks so the money
[1:08:43] landed in her account instead of the banks.
[1:08:47] Unsurprisingly, that marriage, to the extent that it was ever
[1:08:51] legitimate to begin with, ended in 1993.
[1:08:56] Then came November 21st, 1994 and Nancy was now working as a
[1:09:01] door to door burial plot salesperson.
[1:09:05] Personally, I wasn't aware that this was even a thing, and I
[1:09:09] really have to question why anyone would buy this sort of
[1:09:12] thing from a random person at your door.
[1:09:15] Nancy showed up at Jack Watkins door to talk about some grave
[1:09:19] upgrades, almost certainly one for Mary, his former wife.
[1:09:24] According to one source, she was trying to upsell Jack from his
[1:09:28] wife's current grave to a fancy little mausoleum.
[1:09:31] Jack, for his part, had been widowed for five years and he
[1:09:35] was lonely and ready to trust anyone kind.
[1:09:39] Within weeks, she was running his credit accounts.
[1:09:43] What happened to Jack Watkins from late 1994 to early 1996
[1:09:49] reads like a slow motion robbery dressed up as a romance.
[1:09:53] Within a month of meeting him, Nancy was using his existing
[1:09:56] credit cards for clothes, jewelry and bigger purchases.
[1:10:02] She'd quietly rerouted his account statements to her own
[1:10:05] mailing address so he'd never see the bills.
[1:10:08] She opened new credit lines in his name, and by the summer of
[1:10:12] 1995 there were 10s of thousands in fresh credit card debt and a
[1:10:17] $40,000 car loan for a fancy German car.
[1:10:22] She told friends and neighbors she and Jack were engaged and he
[1:10:25] believed it. In August 1995, she convinced
[1:10:30] him to take a $44,000 mortgage out on his home, then use the
[1:10:34] cash to pay off 13 credit cards she'd run up in his name.
[1:10:39] A few months later there was a second mortgage and another
[1:10:42] $20,000 handed over so she could supposedly buy a condo for the
[1:10:47] two of them. But there was never any condo.
[1:10:51] By then, Nancy was already seeing the man who'd eventually
[1:10:54] become her third husband, a wealthy loan broker.
[1:10:58] In April of 1996, she finally sold Jack's house, and records
[1:11:03] show it went for $90,000. But Jack walked away with less
[1:11:08] than 4000. The rest vanished into Nancy's
[1:11:12] debts, and he had almost nothing left to take.
[1:11:15] Now, this is the point where a typical con artist usually moves
[1:11:19] on, but Nancy Siegel didn't. Jack was a witness who could, in
[1:11:23] theory, walk into a police station and tell them everything
[1:11:26] she'd done. Worse, he was about to lose the
[1:11:30] last few things that had kept him compliant, his home and his
[1:11:35] independence. So she started building a
[1:11:38] different ending. By the spring of 1996, she was
[1:11:42] trying to have him committed to psychiatric care, claiming that
[1:11:47] he suffered from dementia. She also began selling off his
[1:11:51] remaining personal belongings to the extent that he had anything
[1:11:55] left. Worse yet, she moved him into
[1:11:58] her own house, where she controlled what he ate, who he
[1:12:02] spoke to, and of course, what was in his bloodstream.
[1:12:07] The autopsy's toxic sedative levels weren't from a one time
[1:12:10] dose, and she'd been drugging him and starving him for some
[1:12:14] time before the end. Sometime in the 48 hours before
[1:12:19] that trunk turned up beside the Appalachian Trail, she ended his
[1:12:23] life. She then packed his half
[1:12:25] stripped body into a duffel bag, wedged it inside the trunk, and
[1:12:30] drove from Maryland across the state line into Virginia.
[1:12:34] There she dropped him beside a pile of trash at a quiet
[1:12:37] overlook, believing that she had gotten away with everything.
[1:12:41] Then she went home, kept right on cashing his Social Security
[1:12:45] checks and acted as if nothing had happened.
[1:12:49] For the better part of a decade after Jack's death, Nancy Siegel
[1:12:53] kept the lights on by impersonating him.
[1:12:56] Social Security payments and a retirement annuity continued to
[1:13:00] flow to a post office box in Ellicott City, MD.
[1:13:03] She used his identity to open more credit.
[1:13:06] She married her third husband in December 1998 and quickly began
[1:13:11] bleeding him too, eventually defrauding him of around
[1:13:15] $300,000. Rather than turn her in when he
[1:13:19] caught on, he just paid off her debts and kept his mouth shut,
[1:13:24] apparently out of shame over the situation.
[1:13:27] The break came in January 2003, when the Department of Defense
[1:13:32] finally opened its internal fingerprint database to the FBI.
[1:13:37] The match was almost instant, and the man in the trunk was a
[1:13:40] veteran from Richmond, VA, last known to be living in Maryland.
[1:13:46] Once they had his name, the rest unravelled fast.
[1:13:50] Investigators traced the dead man's still active Social
[1:13:53] Security checks to that post office box in Ellicott City and
[1:13:57] set up a sting in February 2003. Nancy Siegel walked up to the
[1:14:03] window and asked for her mail, and a postal inspector was
[1:14:06] waiting for her. She told them with a straight
[1:14:10] face that Jack was alive and well and living in Pennsylvania
[1:14:15] with a woman named Ruth. Then they watched her walk out,
[1:14:19] drive to a nearby bank and deposit one of his Social
[1:14:23] Security checks. A database search showed an
[1:14:26] arrest history sprawling across enough jurisdictions that no
[1:14:30] single agency had ever stitched the pattern together.
[1:14:34] When they showed her a photograph of the trunk, she
[1:14:37] cried and called Jack, a father figure she'd nurse through
[1:14:40] dementia. His medical records said he'd
[1:14:43] never been diagnosed with anything of the kind, and
[1:14:46] instead they revealed that she had been trying to get him
[1:14:49] diagnosed. She later tried to claim he did
[1:14:52] it to himself, saying that she walked in and found him hanging
[1:14:56] from a light fixture. Her own daughters cooperated
[1:14:59] with investigators, and one of them recognized the trunk in the
[1:15:03] crime scene photo on site. It had been hers, and she knew
[1:15:08] it by the nail Polish stains on the lid.
[1:15:11] The federal grand jury indicted Nancy Siegel in January 2004 on
[1:15:16] charges that stacked her financial crimes against Jack
[1:15:19] alongside her decision to silence him.
[1:15:22] What followed was five years of pretrial wrangling over what
[1:15:26] evidence would be admissible and what wouldn't be.
[1:15:30] The prosecution wanted everything from the bankrupted
[1:15:33] husbands to the credit cards run up in other people's names
[1:15:36] admitted to evidence. The defense, for their part,
[1:15:40] said that this would be too prejudicial to their client, and
[1:15:44] the judge initially sided with the defense.
[1:15:48] However, at the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, after a long
[1:15:51] process, they disagreed and held that the evidence was almost all
[1:15:56] admissible. Simply put, they found that the
[1:15:59] probative value of the pattern as a whole outweighed the
[1:16:03] prejudicial effect upon the jury.
[1:16:06] After years of delay, the trial began in early March 2009 in
[1:16:11] Judge Andre Davis's downtown Baltimore courtroom.
[1:16:16] The case was handled by a team of Assistant United States
[1:16:18] Attorneys from the District of Maryland under US Attorney Rod
[1:16:22] Rosenstein. If that name sounds familiar to
[1:16:26] you, that's because he was the Deputy Attorney General from
[1:16:30] 2017 to 2019. The defense, for its part, was
[1:16:35] led by court appointed attorney Jane Flanagan.
[1:16:40] The government's narrative was simple and devastating, and it's
[1:16:43] hard for me to imagine why this went to trial at all.
[1:16:47] The prosecution said Siegel had built her adult life on a
[1:16:50] rotating cast of victims, each one chosen, charmed and drained
[1:16:55] until the next one came along. Jack Watkins was 1 mark in a
[1:16:59] longer chain. The difference was that Jack was
[1:17:02] about to lose his home, his savings and his usefulness.
[1:17:07] And Jack could talk. The other men she had been
[1:17:10] involved with had, in essence, been controlled by their shame
[1:17:15] over the situation. But Jack had nothing to lose.
[1:17:20] Prosecutors walked the jury through the slow physical
[1:17:23] destruction of him at her Ellicott City apartment.
[1:17:27] They showed where she'd isolated him from friends and family,
[1:17:31] drugged him with a sedative the autopsy would later detect at
[1:17:34] toxic levels, and starved him. The medical examiner described
[1:17:39] the cause of death as neck compression, consistent with the
[1:17:43] prosecution's theory that Siegel had stood on Jack's throat until
[1:17:47] he stopped breathing. Now, usually I don't get into
[1:17:50] those kind of details, but honestly, I think it's necessary
[1:17:55] to state to fully show the depths of Siegel's evil acts.
[1:18:00] The evidence came in from every angle, and bank records showed
[1:18:04] her depositing Jack's Social Security checks for the better
[1:18:07] part of a decade. The steamer trunk itself was
[1:18:10] identified on site by one of her own daughters, who recognized it
[1:18:14] by the nail Polish stains on the lid.
[1:18:17] Her own statements to investigators were played back
[1:18:20] to the jury, including the laughable claim that Jack was
[1:18:24] alive and living in Pennsylvania with a woman named Ruth.
[1:18:29] Thanks to the 4th Circuit's ruling.
[1:18:31] The panel also heard about the husbands left in five and six
[1:18:34] figures of debt, as well as her other nefarious activities.
[1:18:40] Across roughly 2 weeks of testimony, the defense did
[1:18:43] something few defendants do in a federal case of this size.
[1:18:47] They called no witnesses at all. Siegel herself didn't take the
[1:18:52] stand herself, though that shouldn't come as any surprise
[1:18:56] because she would have been absolutely destroyed on cross
[1:18:59] examination. Flanagan's strategy seems to
[1:19:03] have been to attack the chain of evidence from the cross
[1:19:05] examination chair. She picked at the gaps in the
[1:19:08] government's circumstantial case for the slaying and hoped the
[1:19:12] jury would balk at returning a guilty verdict in the industry.
[1:19:16] That's what we like to call a Hail Mary pass.
[1:19:18] And the jurors only needed seven hours to find her guilty.
[1:19:23] A month later, on April 23rd, 2009, Siegel returned for
[1:19:27] sentencing and by that time, she was 61 years old.
[1:19:31] The judge handed down 400 months in federal prison, the
[1:19:35] equivalent of just over 33 years, followed by five years of
[1:19:39] supervised release and an order of full restitution.
[1:19:44] Nancy Siegel remains in prison today.
[1:19:47] And interestingly, after serving 18 years, she sought a release
[1:19:51] on quote UN quote compassionate grounds.
[1:19:56] Unsurprisingly, given the gravity of her lifetime of
[1:19:59] offenses, and in particular the disgusting way she treated Jack,
[1:20:04] this was denied. Around 11:00 on a Sunday morning
[1:20:11] in late January, Jill Lynn Udo picked up the phone in her 6th
[1:20:16] floor apartment, called her mother's house a few miles away
[1:20:19] and asked to talk. Little did her family know this
[1:20:24] would be the last time they would ever hear her voice, and
[1:20:28] the mystery of what happened next continues to haunt
[1:20:31] investigators till this day. Jill Lynn was 18 years old in
[1:20:36] the winter of 2001, and from the way her family describes her,
[1:20:40] fiercely independent was barely a strong enough phrase.
[1:20:45] She'd been born in Syracuse, but the family bounced around for
[1:20:49] most of the 1990s, living in Colorado Springs before circling
[1:20:53] back to New York in 1997. Her father wasn't really part of
[1:20:58] her life, but her mother, Joanne Browning, definitely was.
[1:21:02] Jill had dropped out in the ninth grade because school
[1:21:05] wasn't moving fast enough for what she actually wanted to do,
[1:21:09] which was work. She earned her GED almost
[1:21:13] immediately and started clocking in shifts.
[1:21:17] By the start of 2001, she was selling clothes at a store
[1:21:21] inside Shopping Town Mall. It may not have been the
[1:21:25] recommended path for a young person by any means, but it
[1:21:29] seemed to be working for her, and she was also studying to be
[1:21:32] a paramedic. While she worked, she'd also
[1:21:35] just moved into her own place, a 6th floor studio at 600 James
[1:21:40] St. in the Near Northeast neighborhood of Syracuse.
[1:21:44] It was, by every account, the proudest thing in her young
[1:21:48] life. Her first real apartment, and
[1:21:51] she could afford it herself. January 28th, 2001 was Super
[1:21:56] Bowl Sunday. The Baltimore Ravens were about
[1:21:59] to demolish the New York Giants 34 to 7.
[1:22:03] The Udos were Denver Broncos people and weren't fans of any
[1:22:07] New York team, so they were quietly rooting against the
[1:22:10] Giants. The plan was simple.
[1:22:13] Jill would come over, they'd make tacos her favorite, and
[1:22:17] they'd watch the game. Around 11 that morning, Jill
[1:22:22] called the house and Jenna answered.
[1:22:24] Jill wanted to talk to their mom, but Joanne was already
[1:22:28] heading out the door for groceries, so Jenna told her
[1:22:31] sister they'd call her right back.
[1:22:34] It was a tiny, ordinary deflection, the kind a sister
[1:22:38] does 100 times without thinking, but this time Jenna would replay
[1:22:42] it in her mind for the rest of her life.
[1:22:45] The family came back from the store around noon.
[1:22:49] Jenna started calling her sister to coordinate the pick up, but
[1:22:52] there was no answer. She kept trying, getting more
[1:22:56] annoyed each time, eventually leaving sharp voicemails
[1:23:00] chastising Jill for being rather rude and no showing on her own
[1:23:04] family. The family ate the tacos.
[1:23:08] They watched the halftime show. The New York team got bodied,
[1:23:12] which Jill would have loved. Joanne stayed calm and figured
[1:23:16] her daughter had simply changed plans and they'd sorted out in
[1:23:20] the morning. Joanne and Jenna were more than
[1:23:23] a little bit upset, but in a week or two, all would be
[1:23:26] forgotten. Or at least that's what they
[1:23:29] thought. Monday morning came and Joanne
[1:23:33] went to work. By around 9:30 she was making
[1:23:37] calls to her daughter's apartment, but there was still
[1:23:40] no answer. She called her daughter's
[1:23:42] workplace at Shopping Town Mall to see if Jill had clocked in,
[1:23:45] but she hadn't. And this is when the alarm bells
[1:23:48] started ringing in Joanne's head.
[1:23:52] Joanne came home, picked up Jenna, and the two of them drove
[1:23:55] to James St. to figure out what was going on.
[1:23:59] They climbed up to the 6th floor and knocked.
[1:24:02] Nothing. Joanne went inside first.
[1:24:06] What came out of her, according to her surviving daughter,
[1:24:10] wasn't a word so much as a sound, a noise Jenna says she
[1:24:14] still can't really explain. Joanne did the one thing a
[1:24:18] mother in that exact moment can still do, which is throw her
[1:24:22] body across the threshold so her 17 year old wouldn't see the
[1:24:25] scene. Inside the studio.
[1:24:29] Jill Lynn Utah was lying in the main living area.
[1:24:33] She'd been stabbed multiple times in the neck, in the chest,
[1:24:37] and in the back. The weapon was lying right there
[1:24:41] at the scene, and it turned out that it was one of her own
[1:24:44] kitchen knives. When the Chief Medical Examiner
[1:24:48] of Onondaga County arrived, he was reading the scene the way
[1:24:51] medical examiner's do, looking at what was missing as much as
[1:24:55] what was there. 2 Details did most of the talking, and they're
[1:25:00] still talking 25 years later. 1st, the door hadn't been
[1:25:04] broken. There was no sign anyone had
[1:25:07] forced their way in. Whoever did this either had a
[1:25:11] way through the lock or far more likely, walked in because Jill
[1:25:16] let them in. Second was the weapon.
[1:25:20] A person who shows up planning to do harm tends to bring
[1:25:23] something with them, but this one didn't.
[1:25:26] They used something from Jill's kitchen, which means at some
[1:25:30] point during the encounter, they crossed her apartment, opened a
[1:25:33] drawer, and grabbed a blade. That isn't the usual behavior of
[1:25:37] a stranger who burst in with a plan in mind.
[1:25:41] That's likely the behavior of someone comfortable enough in
[1:25:44] the space to know where the knives were, or comfortable
[1:25:47] enough to walk over and grab one without panicking.
[1:25:51] It's also the sort of thing that suggests that the individual
[1:25:54] didn't believe that violence would be the inevitable outcome
[1:25:57] of the encounter. And then there's the wound
[1:26:01] pattern. Multiple stabs to the neck,
[1:26:04] chest and back is, in the language investigators use,
[1:26:09] personal It's not the clean efficiency of a robbery gone
[1:26:13] sideways, but rather it shows some serious rage generally
[1:26:17] directed toward that person in particular.
[1:26:21] The medical examiner's read at the time and the lead detectives
[1:26:25] read ever since is that whoever did this knew Jill, and that
[1:26:29] Jill knew them. Beyond those two tells, the
[1:26:33] scene was reportedly almost frustratingly clean, though
[1:26:37] whether this happened by accident or as the result of a
[1:26:40] cleanup wasn't entirely clear. The working theory inside the
[1:26:45] Syracuse Police Department has effectively never moved.
[1:26:49] Investigators have said for years that the person who did
[1:26:51] this was someone Jill recognized and even invited up.
[1:26:56] Her sister Jenna has agreed with this and has said more than once
[1:26:59] she believes Jill knew the perpetrator well.
[1:27:02] That points away from a random late night break in and towards
[1:27:06] something more deliberate, someone targeting her
[1:27:08] specifically. The building had a buzzer at the
[1:27:12] door and a 6th floor walk up isn't the kind of place a
[1:27:16] stranger wanders into by accident.
[1:27:19] Whoever came up there knew the address, and they knew Jill
[1:27:22] would open up the door. There's also the question of
[1:27:26] what didn't occur. This wasn't a robbery dressed up
[1:27:29] as something worse, and the public record doesn't suggest it
[1:27:33] was an act of indecent violence either.
[1:27:36] The simplest reading is that the visit had a single purpose, and
[1:27:40] that purpose was eliminating Jill herself.
[1:27:43] Perhaps if she didn't agree to something.
[1:27:46] The theory that I've seen tossed around that I personally prefer
[1:27:50] is that the perpetrator may have been a man from the mall she
[1:27:53] worked at or from her paramedic program.
[1:27:57] Under this theory, he had been passing himself off as her
[1:28:00] friend, but in actuality he had functionally been behaving as a
[1:28:05] stalker when he went over. Jill may have assumed this was a
[1:28:09] friendly visit and let him in, simply believing he was a
[1:28:13] friend. Joanne Browning never recovered.
[1:28:18] She stopped working, went on stress related disability, and
[1:28:22] turned the rest of her life into a quest for justice.
[1:28:25] She put up Flyers and billboards, set up a reward
[1:28:29] fund, and talked to anyone with a microphone, including Unsolved
[1:28:34] Mysteries and America's Most Wanted.
[1:28:38] In October 2007, Joanne took on a landscaping job to pull in a
[1:28:43] little extra money. During a shift, she fell from a
[1:28:47] flat roof and landed on the back of her head.
[1:28:50] The doctors told the family she was gone instantly, and Jenna
[1:28:54] has been carrying the weight of the case since.
[1:28:57] Now, if there's one potential silver lining to this extremely
[1:29:00] dark, cold case, it came in 2016.
[1:29:04] In January of that year, the police indicated that they were
[1:29:07] able to recover a genetic sample from evidence collected in 2001.
[1:29:12] It's not clear what the nature of this sample is or whether it
[1:29:15] definitely belongs to the perpetrator, and unfortunately
[1:29:18] in 2016 it didn't match to any national database.
[1:29:23] However, in the meantime, genetic genealogy has developed
[1:29:27] into a powerful forensic tool to locate unknown suspects.
[1:29:31] If this DNA belongs to the attacker, I'm confident that
[1:29:35] Jenna will be able to see at least some form of justice
[1:29:38] delivered for her sister within the coming years.
[1:29:45] When sheriff's investigators finally reached the spot just
[1:29:48] off State Highway 43 in mid January of 1982, there wasn't
[1:29:53] much left of him. There was just bones, scraps of
[1:29:57] clothing, and a likely narrative about how he'd ended up there.
[1:30:01] He'd been shot in the head multiple times and left out in
[1:30:05] the open dirt of rural Kings County for months.
[1:30:09] By the time anyone noticed the remains, the body had been
[1:30:12] sitting in that stretch of San Joaquin Valley farmland north of
[1:30:16] Corcoran, CA for somewhere between two and six months.
[1:30:21] He was young, somewhere in his late teens, and he was carrying
[1:30:25] nothing that could give investigators his name. 40 plus
[1:30:29] years later, that's still where things stand.
[1:30:33] And whoever he was, no one has come forward to claim him and
[1:30:37] give this John Doe his name back.
[1:30:41] Corcoran sits deep in the southern San Joaquin Valley,
[1:30:45] surrounded by cotton fields, dairy farms and flat irrigated
[1:30:49] countryside that runs out to the horizon in every direction.
[1:30:53] Hwy. 43 cuts ANS line through that landscape, threading past
[1:30:58] small farming towns like Wasco, Shafter and Hanford on its way N
[1:31:03] toward Selma in the Fresno area. It's the sort of Rd. where you
[1:31:07] can drive for long stretches without seeing another car after
[1:31:11] dark, and the shoulders aren't really shoulders so much as the
[1:31:14] edges of irrigation ditches. Somebody in the second-half of
[1:31:19] 1981 took advantage of that anonymity to dispose of a young
[1:31:24] man whose name nobody has ever been able to recover.
[1:31:29] The condition of the body sharply limited what
[1:31:31] investigators could establish, since by the time deputies in
[1:31:36] the coroner reached the scene, the remains were almost entirely
[1:31:40] skeletonized. Still, the basics came through,
[1:31:45] and he stood somewhere between 5 feet and five foot four and had
[1:31:49] brown hair. He was wearing a blue and black
[1:31:52] wool shirt, a white T-shirt underneath and a pair of blue
[1:31:56] Levi's jeans, utterly ordinary clothing for a teenager moving
[1:32:00] through California in 1981. Forensic examiners classed him
[1:32:05] as either white or Hispanic, with the consensus that he was
[1:32:09] likely the latter. The wounds to the head, for
[1:32:13] their part, pointed at a deliberate, close range
[1:32:16] execution. Whoever ended his life knew what
[1:32:19] they were doing, and they made sure he wouldn't be in any
[1:32:22] position to identify them later. Local coverage of the discovery
[1:32:27] ran in newspapers through February and into early March of
[1:32:30] 1982, with follow up pieces appearing as late as that May.
[1:32:36] Despite this effort, none of it produced a usable
[1:32:38] identification, and missing persons files were combed
[1:32:42] through and dental records pulled with sketches circulated
[1:32:45] to neighboring counties. Unfortunately, it remains
[1:32:49] unclear what happened to this John Doe's body or if any
[1:32:53] genetic evidence has been preserved.
[1:32:56] If it has, genetic genealogy would be the obvious next step
[1:33:00] to giving him his name back, and from there, investigators may be
[1:33:05] able to reconstruct the last weeks and days of his life.
[1:33:12] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here with my usual reminder to hit
[1:33:15] the subscribe button and tap the notification bell.
[1:33:18] Also, don't forget to check out the Patreon or the membership to
[1:33:21] take your support for my channel to the next level.
[1:33:28] A wrecked sedan sat off a pitch black gravel Rd. outside Luling,
[1:33:32] TX. The headlights were still
[1:33:35] burning, the keys were still in the ignition, and the front
[1:33:38] passenger door was locked from the inside.
[1:33:41] The driver's clothing was laid out down the road behind the car
[1:33:44] in a long scattered trail. His shirt, his shorts, his
[1:33:48] sandals, even his wristwatch. A backpack with his laptop sat
[1:33:53] 900 feet from the wreck. The driver himself was gone.
[1:33:58] And more than five years later, nobody can tell you where Jason
[1:34:02] Landry went or whether anyone else was on that road with him
[1:34:06] that night. Jason was 21, a student at Texas
[1:34:11] State University in San Marcos, and he just wrapped his first
[1:34:15] semester working toward a slot in the school's sound recording
[1:34:18] technology program. His father was a former defense
[1:34:22] attorney who'd become a pastor in Missouri City, a suburb South
[1:34:26] of Houston, about 2 1/2 hours down Interstate 10.
[1:34:31] By all accounts, Jason was thoughtful and curious, the kind
[1:34:34] of student who'd debate philosophy with friends and
[1:34:37] crack jokes at his own expense. His finances had been rough that
[1:34:41] semester and he was packing up his apartment for winter break
[1:34:45] on the evening of December 13th, 2020.
[1:34:49] He loaded his silver Nissan Altima with clothes, school
[1:34:52] books and gaming gear and pointed it S but he never made
[1:34:56] it home. The drive from San Marcos to
[1:35:00] Missouri City is a straight shot down I-10, an unremarkable 2 1/2
[1:35:05] hours of highway, and Jason almost made it.
[1:35:08] He left his apartment around 10:55 that night and turned on
[1:35:12] ways for the route. His path took him east along
[1:35:16] smaller roads before he reached the small oil field town of
[1:35:20] Luling, where he was supposed to turn right onto Magnolia Ave.
[1:35:25] and link up with the Interstate. Instead, at roughly 11/24, his
[1:35:30] Waze session went dead. Whatever happened next, the
[1:35:34] navigation app wasn't recording it.
[1:35:37] Cell tower data placed his phone moving S through Luling and then
[1:35:41] bending left as the road curved away from his destination.
[1:35:45] This turned into a dark, narrow gravel lane known as Salt Flat
[1:35:50] Rd. The road runs through old
[1:35:54] oilfield country, the kind of stretch where there are no
[1:35:57] streetlights, no houses for long gaps and, most importantly, no
[1:36:02] cameras. Around midnight, a volunteer
[1:36:06] firefighter heading home spotted Jason's Ultima off the shoulder.
[1:36:11] The car had spun across the gravel and clipped a tree with
[1:36:14] its rear end. The headlights were still on,
[1:36:17] the front passenger door was locked, and the driver was
[1:36:21] nowhere to be seen. When deputies and Jason's family
[1:36:25] began retracing the route the following day, they found
[1:36:28] something none of them was prepared for.
[1:36:31] Starting roughly 1/4 mile from the wrecked Ultima, a trail of
[1:36:35] Jason's belongings stretched along the asphalt.
[1:36:39] His backpack had been dumped about 900 feet from the car,
[1:36:42] packed with his laptop, his gaming equipment and his
[1:36:45] toiletries. Past that, his clothing began to
[1:36:49] appear in pieces. Shirt, shorts, socks, sandals,
[1:36:55] underwear, even his wristwatch. Each item had been dropped or
[1:37:00] laid out at intervals, sometimes neatly, sometimes torn.
[1:37:05] By the time the trail ended, Jason had nothing left on him.
[1:37:10] His phone, his wallet and his keys had all been left back at
[1:37:13] the crash site. Search team swept the
[1:37:16] surrounding brush and pasture land for weeks, with sniffer
[1:37:20] dogs occasionally picking up faint scents, but nothing that
[1:37:23] led anywhere. The case has refused to fit
[1:37:27] neatly into any of the boxes investigators normally use.
[1:37:31] The crash itself was minor, the kind of young driver would
[1:37:35] usually walk away from with a sore neck, though I'll come back
[1:37:38] to this point in a moment. There was no blood inside the
[1:37:42] cabin and no obvious sign of injury.
[1:37:45] Jason's phone was right there in the car, fully charged and
[1:37:49] capable of calling for help. The temperature that night
[1:37:53] dipped into the low 40s, cold but not lethal, especially for a
[1:37:58] healthy adult who was already dressed.
[1:38:01] Investigators later learned that Jason used magic mushrooms in
[1:38:04] the weeks before his disappearance, a detail his
[1:38:07] family openly acknowledged. Even so, no one who saw him in
[1:38:12] the hours before he left San Marcos described him as impaired
[1:38:17] or in any kind of crisis. The crash scene yielded no
[1:38:21] second set of tire tracks and no skid marks suggesting another
[1:38:25] vehicle had run him off the road.
[1:38:27] Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were no surveillance cameras
[1:38:31] along that lonely strip of oil field country either.
[1:38:35] The simplest explanation appears to be that Jason was
[1:38:38] experiencing a head injury and the associated symptoms as a
[1:38:42] result of the seemingly minor accident.
[1:38:45] While the accident didn't appear to be particularly severe,
[1:38:49] there's always the possibility that he struck his head in just
[1:38:52] the wrong way that he suffered A concussion.
[1:38:55] A head injury can plausibly explain both the wandering and
[1:38:59] especially the shedding of clothing, especially in
[1:39:02] combination with hypothermia. Hypothermia sometimes triggers A
[1:39:07] phenomenon called paradoxical undressing, where victims RIP
[1:39:12] off layers in the false belief that they're overheating.
[1:39:17] Under this scenario, Jason crashed, became disoriented,
[1:39:22] fled into the dark on foot, removed his clothes as he ran,
[1:39:26] and eventually fell somewhere deep in the brush.
[1:39:30] It's the reading of the case that Caldwell County
[1:39:33] investigators have leaned toward most consistently, but it leaves
[1:39:37] a great deal unexplained, including why no remains have
[1:39:41] ever surfaced in a landscape combed for years by
[1:39:44] professionals and volunteers alike.
[1:39:47] Another element that remains unexplained by this theory is
[1:39:51] why he went off course to begin with.
[1:39:54] But that brings us to the darker possibility that's been raised
[1:39:57] by some people close to the case but who are outside the official
[1:40:01] investigation. A retired FBI agent, Able Pina,
[1:40:06] a veteran investigator with roughly 3 decades of casework,
[1:40:10] examine the scene and came to a strikingly different conclusion
[1:40:14] than local authorities. He identified what they describe
[1:40:17] as multiple red flags that point toward foul play.
[1:40:21] This investigator has argued publicly that the trail of
[1:40:24] clothing may have been staged, deliberately laid out to make
[1:40:28] the disappearance look like a panicked run from the vehicle.
[1:40:32] He suggested Jason may have encountered someone at the
[1:40:35] intersection in Luling where he made his fateful wrong turn.
[1:40:40] Under this theory, someone either lured him onto that back
[1:40:43] Rd. or followed him there. Once on the dark stretch of Salt
[1:40:48] Flat Rd. the encounter could have escalated quickly.
[1:40:53] The absence of a body despite years of searching and the
[1:40:56] bizarre detour off Jason's normal route are exactly the
[1:41:00] kinds of details that have kept the foul play hypothesis alive.
[1:41:08] Her front door stood wide open, her purse sat on the floor just
[1:41:12] inside, cash and credit cards untouched.
[1:41:16] Her beloved dogs were still in the house, 1 deceased and two
[1:41:20] clinging to life. And out in the driveway her car
[1:41:23] was parked with the driver's side window rolled halfway down.
[1:41:27] Nothing about the scene suggested a struggle.
[1:41:30] And yet, Barbara Knave, an 80 year old retired teacher, had
[1:41:35] vanished from her own 20 acre property in South Carolina. the
[1:41:40] Super Bowl had just wrapped up that weekend and Barbara had
[1:41:43] returned from celebrating her 80th birthday with her son Paul,
[1:41:47] who lived a few hours South in Georgia.
[1:41:50] He'd last seen her in person on the 4th of February. 5 days
[1:41:55] later, on February 9th, 2017, she was still very much active.
[1:42:03] She emailed a friend, spoke with a contractor about ongoing work
[1:42:07] at the house, and a construction crew actually saw her that day.
[1:42:11] So did a neighbor, and both witnesses later told
[1:42:14] investigators the same thing. Barbara had walked off into the
[1:42:18] woods behind her house, calling out, apparently looking for one
[1:42:22] of her dogs that had wandered off.
[1:42:25] That image of an elderly woman heading into the trees,
[1:42:28] allegedly chasing after a runaway pet is the last fixed
[1:42:32] point anyone has of her. When her friends couldn't reach
[1:42:36] her, one of them drove out to the property to check in.
[1:42:41] What she found is the part of this case that's bothered
[1:42:43] everyone involved. Ever since the front door was
[1:42:47] open and Barbara's purse was on the floor just inside, with her
[1:42:51] money and credit card still tucked inside.
[1:42:54] Her keys were there and her vehicle sat in the driveway
[1:42:57] untouched, despite having last been seen calling out for her
[1:43:01] dog. All the pets were accounted for
[1:43:04] inside. Disturbingly, 2 of her prized
[1:43:08] Lhasa Apsos were severely dehydrated, while the third one
[1:43:12] that had been sick had perished in the meantime.
[1:43:15] It looked oddly like the home of someone who'd stepped outside to
[1:43:19] grab the mail and meant to come right back inside.
[1:43:22] At least aside from the dog situation, the Sumter County
[1:43:27] Sheriff's Office took the case seriously from the start.
[1:43:30] Within days, deputies were combing the property with
[1:43:33] sniffer dogs while helicopters and drones worked the air above
[1:43:37] the pine canopy. A team of divers went into the
[1:43:41] swamp that ran alongside Barbara's land after the dogs
[1:43:45] alerted on a stretch of dark water near her home.
[1:43:49] Investigators drained portions of it, hoping for an answer of
[1:43:52] any kind. But what they pulled out was a
[1:43:55] deer carcass. Volunteer search organizations
[1:43:59] soon brought horses and all terrain vehicles sweeping the
[1:44:02] full 20 acre parcel and the woods beyond it.
[1:44:06] People walked grid patterns through Palmetto and pine for
[1:44:09] days. They turned up no clothing, no
[1:44:12] jewelry, no remains, no broken branches.
[1:44:16] That mattered. For a woman in her 80s, that
[1:44:19] kind of nothing is genuinely strange.
[1:44:22] She shouldn't have been able to get far in rough terrain on her
[1:44:25] own, and yet trained handlers with dogs couldn't follow her
[1:44:29] trail past the edge of the yard. After more than a week of
[1:44:33] intensive work, the formal search was scaled back because
[1:44:37] there was nothing left to look at.
[1:44:40] Detectives leaned hard on the people closest to her.
[1:44:44] Barbara's family agreed to polygraph examinations, and
[1:44:47] according to the Sheriff's Office, every relative came back
[1:44:51] clean. There's no public indication
[1:44:54] that the contractor working on the House was treated as
[1:44:56] anything other than a witness, and the same goes for the
[1:45:00] neighbor who saw her walking toward the trees.
[1:45:03] Investigator Charles Bonner of the Sumter County Sheriff's
[1:45:06] Office, who handled the case for years, said publicly that there
[1:45:11] was no evidence of foul play in the traditional sense.
[1:45:15] A real suspect never emerged, and physical evidence stayed
[1:45:19] stubbornly absent. There's also no record of her
[1:45:22] accessing money, using a phone, or contacting anyone after the
[1:45:27] morning of February 9th. There are a number of theories
[1:45:32] floating around about what happened to Barbara, but none of
[1:45:35] them really fit the evidence. The 1st is that Barbara stepped
[1:45:39] into the woods going after her dog, lost her footing somewhere
[1:45:42] on the rough ground, and ended up in trouble.
[1:45:45] She couldn't get out of swamp, swallow things and predators
[1:45:49] move through, but after years of searching by trained teams,
[1:45:53] dogs, divers, and a small army of friends, that explanation has
[1:45:59] a problem of scale. If she'd fallen, something
[1:46:03] should have turned up by now, especially since she can't have
[1:46:06] gone all that far given her advanced age in the terrain.
[1:46:11] There's also the major problem that the dogs were all found at
[1:46:14] home, which begs the question why she was pursuing a pet into
[1:46:19] the woods to begin with. The second theory is that
[1:46:22] someone she knew was waiting for her or arrived not long after
[1:46:26] she walked into the trees. Maybe a brief encounter, a quick
[1:46:31] ride, an interaction that didn't leave a trace in the house
[1:46:35] because it never happened inside the house.
[1:46:38] No vehicle was reported coming or going at the right moment.
[1:46:42] But a rural driveway in February isn't a heavily watched place,
[1:46:46] and a few minutes is really all it would have taken anyway.
[1:46:50] To me, this case feels like 1 where foul play is involved.
[1:46:54] But with the limited amount of evidence available and no body,
[1:46:58] it's really difficult to actually form a coherent theory
[1:47:01] of the case. A young actor walks onto a sound
[1:47:08] stage in Wilmington, NC, on a humid spring night in 1993.
[1:47:13] He's two weeks out from his wedding.
[1:47:15] He's 28, and Hollywood has finally decided he's the next
[1:47:19] big thing. The scene he's about to shoot is
[1:47:22] straightforward. Walk through a door, take a hit,
[1:47:27] fall to the floor. The weapon pointed at his chest
[1:47:31] is supposed to be loaded with a blank. 12 hours later, he'll be
[1:47:35] gone and immediate talk will begin of a family curse or
[1:47:39] something even more sinister. Brandon Bruce Lee was born on
[1:47:44] February 1st, 1965 in Oakland, CA, the first child of Bruce Lee
[1:47:50] and Linda Emery. By the time he could walk, his
[1:47:54] father was on the verge of becoming the most recognizable
[1:47:57] martial artist on the planet. By the time Brandon turned 8,
[1:48:02] Bruce was gone, felled in Hong Kong by a cerebral edema during
[1:48:07] the production of an unfinished film called Game of Death.
[1:48:12] It's a detail that matters more than it should, and we'll come
[1:48:15] back to it in a little bit, so keep that in mind.
[1:48:19] After his father passed, Brandon's mother moved the
[1:48:22] family to suburban Seattle, where Brandon spent his
[1:48:25] adolescence trying to be an ordinary kid.
[1:48:29] He got expelled from one school for misbehavior, drifted through
[1:48:33] a couple of others, and eventually wound up at Emerson
[1:48:36] College in Boston. He studied acting there before
[1:48:39] transferring to the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film
[1:48:41] Institute in New York. He spoke Cantonese, trained in
[1:48:46] Jeet Kundo under his father's surviving students, and grew
[1:48:49] into a tall, lean, sharp featured young man eager to
[1:48:53] expand upon his father's legacy. His early acting career was
[1:48:57] respectable, if somewhat unremarkable.
[1:49:00] He was in a run of low to mid budget action features through
[1:49:04] the late 80s and early 90s. Showdown in Little Tokyo paired
[1:49:08] him with Dolph Lundgren and Rapid Fire gave him his first
[1:49:12] proper leading role. But it was an adaptation of an
[1:49:16] indie comic book by James O Barr that promised to finally let him
[1:49:20] out from under his father's name.
[1:49:23] Unfortunately, while this role would turn him into a legendary
[1:49:26] figure, it would also cost him his life.
[1:49:30] The Crow was a strange project from the start, and the source
[1:49:33] material was extremely bleak. A young rock musician named Eric
[1:49:38] Draven is slain alongside his fiance and a year later returns
[1:49:43] from the dead, guided by a supernatural crow to take
[1:49:47] revenge on the men responsible. James O Bar had written the
[1:49:51] comic after losing his own fiance to a drunk driver and the
[1:49:55] script that landed on Brandon's desk preserved that grief
[1:49:58] stricken intensity. He took the role in 1992, signed
[1:50:04] a multi picture deal and arrived in Wilmington, NC in February of
[1:50:09] 1993 for principal photography at Karolco Studios.
[1:50:14] The shoot was difficult from the opening day.
[1:50:17] North Carolina had drawn film production S with tax
[1:50:21] incentives, but Karolco was a chaotic environment.
[1:50:25] The schedule was punishing, and the production was reportedly
[1:50:29] cutting corners by the time the cast and crew reached the back
[1:50:32] half of the calendar. There were minor injuries, set
[1:50:36] fires, electrical accidents and at least one Carpenter who was
[1:50:41] badly hurt before Brandon ever stepped in front of a camera.
[1:50:45] The mood on set, according to people who were there,
[1:50:48] oscillated between focused and frayed, though morale largely
[1:50:53] stayed afloat due to belief in the project.
[1:50:57] The sequence being filmed in the early hours of March 31st, 1993,
[1:51:01] was a flashback. Brandon's character walks
[1:51:04] through the front door of his apartment, carrying a bag of
[1:51:07] groceries. Inside, his fiance is being
[1:51:11] attacked by a group of intruders.
[1:51:13] A character called Fun Boy, played by Michael Massey, turns
[1:51:18] and fires a revolver at Draven's chest.
[1:51:21] The cartridge in Massey's revolver was supposed to be a
[1:51:24] blank. That means a primed casing with
[1:51:27] gunpowder but no projectile. It's designed to produce a loud
[1:51:31] bang and a flash of muzzle smoke for the camera.
[1:51:34] The propellant in a blank can still cause injury at close
[1:51:37] range, but at the distance and angle the scene called for, it
[1:51:41] should have been entirely safe. Brandon was wearing a small
[1:51:45] squib pack under his shirt, rigged to detonate on cue and
[1:51:49] simulate a chest wound. When the shot was fired, Brandon
[1:51:53] collapsed exactly as scripted, but the squib never went off and
[1:51:58] within seconds the crew realized that something had gone
[1:52:00] seriously wrong. Paramedics arrived shortly after
[1:52:05] and Brandon was rushed to New Hanover Regional Medical Center
[1:52:08] where surgeons worked on him for more than five hours.
[1:52:12] Brandon Lee was pronounced deceased at One O 4 in the
[1:52:15] afternoon on March 31st, 1993. His fiance, Eliza Hutton, was
[1:52:22] waiting for him in Los Angeles, with their wedding scheduled for
[1:52:26] April 17th. The investigation pieced
[1:52:30] together one of the most damning chains of negligence ever
[1:52:33] documented on an American film set, and I'm going to have to
[1:52:37] get a bit technical here for a moment.
[1:52:40] Several days before the fatal take, the production had needed
[1:52:43] close up insert shots of a loaded revolver, the kind of
[1:52:47] tight shot where the audience can see the actual cartridges
[1:52:50] inside the cylinder. For those inserts, the prop
[1:52:54] department had improvised what are known in the industry as
[1:52:57] dummy rounds. A proper dummy is a cartridge
[1:53:01] that has been deliberately and verifiably inerted, often with
[1:53:05] the powder removed, the primer struck flat and a hole drilled
[1:53:10] in the casing as a visual marker.
[1:53:13] What the crew on the Crow apparently used were look alike
[1:53:16] cartridges they had created themselves by pulling the
[1:53:20] bullets out of real 44 magnum rounds.
[1:53:24] They dumped out the powder and reseeded the bullets in the
[1:53:26] casings, but the primers, the small explosive caps at the base
[1:53:31] of each cartridge, were left intact.
[1:53:34] That alone is a recipe for disaster, because a live primer
[1:53:39] with no powder behind it can still generate enough force to
[1:53:42] dislodge a bullet from a casing and push it part way down the
[1:53:46] barrel during the insert shoot. When the trigger was pulled on
[1:53:51] one of these improvised dummies, the primer fired.
[1:53:55] The bullet then separated from the casing, and it traveled just
[1:53:59] far enough up the barrel of the revolver to lodge there unseen.
[1:54:04] The weapon was then handed off, set aside, and eventually loaded
[1:54:08] with full power blanks for the scene.
[1:54:10] On March 31st. When the blank was fired behind
[1:54:14] that lodge projectile, the gunpowder did what gunpowder
[1:54:18] does. It propelled the obstruction
[1:54:20] down the barrel and out the muzzle with very nearly the
[1:54:23] velocity of a live round. There was no certified armorer
[1:54:27] on set that night, and the prop master had reportedly left the
[1:54:30] production earlier in the schedule.
[1:54:33] The responsibility had drifted down the chain to people who
[1:54:36] weren't qualified to make the call.
[1:54:39] North Carolina authorities conducted an investigation, and
[1:54:43] no criminal charges were filed. But I'll come back to that in a
[1:54:47] moment. Massey, who'd pulled the trigger
[1:54:50] in what should have been a routine movie stunt, was
[1:54:53] devastated and reportedly never fully recovered.
[1:54:58] That's the version the official record tells, and on its surface
[1:55:01] it's a complete account. Gross negligence, a chain of
[1:55:06] mistakes that no single person owned, and a death that could
[1:55:09] have been prevented at a dozen different points along the way.
[1:55:13] But almost from the moment Brandon was gone, a parallel set
[1:55:17] of theories began circulating, and more than three decades
[1:55:21] later, they haven't entirely faded.
[1:55:24] The 1st and most persistent theory ties Brandon's death
[1:55:27] directly to his father's. Bruce Lee had passed in 1973
[1:55:33] under circumstances that some still find suspicious, and at
[1:55:37] the time of his passing he was working on a film called Game of
[1:55:41] Death. The film was completed after his
[1:55:44] passing and released in 1978, though the movie was almost
[1:55:49] entirely different from what had originally been conceived.
[1:55:53] In the 1978 version of the film, there's a scene that depicts a
[1:55:58] Hong Kong martial arts film actor being targeted by an
[1:56:01] organized crime group. Since he wouldn't follow their
[1:56:04] rules, the organized crime group sneaks a fake stuntman onto the
[1:56:09] set, and the imposter shoots the martial artist on the film set
[1:56:13] with a weapon that was supposed to be loaded with blanks.
[1:56:17] This coincidence seemed extremely eerie in retrospect,
[1:56:21] especially since the martial artist character is supposed to
[1:56:24] be a fictionalized version of Bruce Lee.
[1:56:28] A second, related theory points at the powerful Hong Kong
[1:56:31] triads, who reportedly had a vendetta against Bruce Lee and,
[1:56:35] by extension, his family. Bruce Lee had reportedly refused
[1:56:39] to pay protection money to organized crime figures during
[1:56:42] his rise, and rumors of a Triad contract on him circulated for
[1:56:47] years after he was gone. There are also rumors that many
[1:56:51] powerful triads were upset about his willingness to teach
[1:56:54] traditional Chinese martial arts outside of Chinese circles.
[1:56:59] The argument in its strongest form is that the same organized
[1:57:04] crime network arranged for tampering with the cartridges
[1:57:07] used on the crow as a delayed form of reprisal.
[1:57:11] According to the theory, this criminal element caught wind of
[1:57:15] the production's known sloppiness and used it as
[1:57:18] convenient cover. Most versions of this theory tie
[1:57:22] this back to the 1978 version of Game of Death.
[1:57:26] Theorists claim that the scene showing the spiritual successor
[1:57:29] to Bruce Lee being shot was intended to be a direct threat
[1:57:33] to Brandon Lee should he embark on the same career.
[1:57:38] The evidence is essentially circumstantial, though I'm using
[1:57:42] that term fairly loosely here given so much related to this
[1:57:45] theory is highly speculative. Another variant of this theory
[1:57:50] proposes, in essence, A triad curse, but of course there's no
[1:57:55] evidence to support this. And even if there was a curse in
[1:58:00] general, as far as I'm aware, organized crime groups don't
[1:58:04] generally publish evidence of the curses they're placing on
[1:58:08] people. Personally, I'd put this literal
[1:58:10] curse theory firmly in the class of folklore and legend that has
[1:58:14] grown around both Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee. 1/3 theory is
[1:58:19] closer to home and focuses on the production itself, and for
[1:58:23] reasons that I'll explain, there's no way this theory holds
[1:58:27] any water whatsoever. It goes like this.
[1:58:31] The Crow was an insured project, and Brandon's death generated
[1:58:34] enormous publicity that the finished film ultimately road to
[1:58:38] commercial success. Some have asked whether the
[1:58:42] chaos on set was less negligent than convenient, and whether a
[1:58:46] guiding hand might have nudged the chain of failures along to a
[1:58:49] known end point. In essence, the theory is that
[1:58:54] someone with a financial interest in the production
[1:58:57] sought to eliminate Brandon Lee to make more money off the film.
[1:59:02] Under this theory, the dark nature of The Crow would amplify
[1:59:06] the interest as well. Now, as I indicated, I don't put
[1:59:12] any weight in this theory at all.
[1:59:14] And the first reason is that there's no evidence whatsoever
[1:59:18] that this is the case. The second reason is practical,
[1:59:22] because the theory makes almost no financial sense once you
[1:59:25] think about what Brandon Lee actually meant to the
[1:59:28] production. He wasn't a disposable
[1:59:31] supporting player whose absence could be quietly absorbed by the
[1:59:34] movie. He was the movie's face, its
[1:59:37] physical engine, its emotional center, and the main reason the
[1:59:42] project had any chance of breaking through.
[1:59:44] Beyond the cult audience that already knew the comic, his
[1:59:49] death didn't create some neat promotional advantage, even if
[1:59:53] the tragedy did ultimately raise awareness of the film.
[1:59:57] It also torpedoed the ability to produce any subsequent films and
[2:00:01] develop it into a film franchise led by one of the most promising
[2:00:05] young actors in Hollywood. It created an immediate
[2:00:09] disaster. Shutting down production,
[2:00:12] inviting police scrutiny, and creating legal and insurance
[2:00:16] exposure. It also raised the very real
[2:00:19] possibility that the film would never be completed or released
[2:00:23] at all. For instance, the film Rust had
[2:00:26] a shooting accident on set, which resulted not just in a
[2:00:30] catastrophic personal tragedy, but a complete commercial
[2:00:34] breakdown of the film. The third problem is the
[2:00:38] supposed method, which is so convoluted that it collapses
[2:00:42] under its own weight. For this theory to work, someone
[2:00:46] would have needed to engineer a botched dummy round, leave a
[2:00:49] projectile lodged invisibly in the barrel, and ensure the
[2:00:53] weapon wasn't properly inspected.
[2:00:56] Personally, I think the theory that the entire thing was an
[2:00:59] accident brought on by the negligence surrounding the
[2:01:02] production is correct. North Carolina prosecutors
[2:01:05] considered bringing charges in the case but opted not to do so.
[2:01:10] And to understand why, I'm going to have to get into a legal
[2:01:14] distinction for a second here. Brandon Lee's family sued the
[2:01:18] film makers, and that was settled out of court under
[2:01:21] undisclosed terms almost immediately.
[2:01:24] For civil negligence, such as bringing a lawsuit, you really
[2:01:29] only have to prove on a balance of probabilities that someone
[2:01:33] failed to follow proper safety procedures which caused the
[2:01:37] harm. Under that framework, it's
[2:01:40] fairly obvious why the civil lawsuit was settled almost
[2:01:43] immediately, given the circumstances on the set.
[2:01:47] For criminal negligence, the conduct needs to be so reckless
[2:01:51] or extreme that there's a foreseeable risk of death or
[2:01:54] grievous bodily harm. Further, unlike in the civil
[2:01:58] case, that higher standard needs to be proven beyond a reasonable
[2:02:02] doubt. As you can see, this is an
[2:02:05] exceedingly high standard, and it goes well beyond just mere
[2:02:09] sloppiness with respect to safety on set.
[2:02:13] There's also the matter of who would be held criminally
[2:02:15] responsible, which becomes very hard in a situation of diffuse
[2:02:20] decision making. Anyway, I don't usually ask but
[2:02:24] I'm genuinely curious if you think there was sufficient
[2:02:26] evidence here to lay criminal charges, so let me know in the
[2:02:30] comments.

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