# Cold Cases So Chilling… They Still Haunt Investigators | 262

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 23 Jun 2026, 38 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO5695387125.mp3

Join me for some of the most chilling cold cases imaginable, one of which is allegedly solved, one that remains unsolved, and one that's in a grey zone. Episode 262 of the true crime podcast btw. Also don't forget to follow, rate and share if you enjoy my content. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: 🛍️ Merch: https://lazy-chill-zone-shop.fourthwall.com ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw 🍏 True Crime Podcast on Apple 🍎: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lazy-chill-true-crime/id1815534472 unsolved mysteries, true crime, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, missing persons, murder investigation, forensic evidence, serial killers, crime scene analysis, dark history, criminal psychology, real life horror, police investigations, DNA breakthroughs, forensic genealogy, crime documentaries, criminal profiling, mysterious disappearances, solved cases, justice system, law enforcement stories, cold case files, creepy mysteries, true crime storytelling, crime reconstruction, chilling cases, investigative reporting, modern forensics, victim advocacy, unidentified remains, crime scene forensics, disturbing cases, true crime analysis, hidden clues, infamous crimes, real crime stories, forensic evidence, serial killers, heists, great train robbery, jfk assassination, jfk theories, john f kennedy

## Transcript

[0:00] 20 minutes of Hwy. was all that stood between Anne Harmeyer and
[0:03] the campus where the rest of her life was waiting.
[0:07] Her car never finished the trip and somewhere on a stretch of
[0:11] Rd. she knew well, she got into a vehicle that wasn't hers and
[0:15] disappeared. 5 weeks later, a farmer picking corn found what
[0:20] remained of her body dumped out in his field.
[0:23] Nearly half a century since, no one has ever been charged, and
[0:28] whoever did this may still be out there running out the clock
[0:31] before justice catches up with him.
[0:35] Anne grew up in Cambridge City, a small town in eastern Indiana
[0:39] close to the Ohio line. She was an only child, and her
[0:43] father, a local attorney, passed away when Anne was just four
[0:47] years old. This left her to be raised by
[0:50] her mother, Marjorie, a music teacher who taught in the local
[0:55] schools and gave piano and voice lessons on the side.
[1:00] By the autumn of 1977, Anne was 20 and heading into her junior
[1:05] year at Indiana University in Bloomington.
[1:09] Both of her parents had studied there, so she'd grown up coming
[1:13] down for games and walking those quads long before she ever
[1:16] enrolled. She'd chosen theater, and by
[1:19] every account, she'd flourished in it.
[1:22] That September, Anne had come back to Cambridge City for the
[1:24] weekend to visit a friend who was in the hospital.
[1:28] She'd meant to drive back to Bloomington on Sunday night, but
[1:31] Marjorie didn't like the idea of her daughter on the highway
[1:34] after dark. She talked Anne into waiting
[1:38] until Monday morning instead, figuring the daylight would be
[1:41] safer. So on the morning of Monday,
[1:44] September 12th, 1977, Anne set out in her rust colored 1971
[1:50] Pontiac Le Mans, A muscular 2 door she was fond of.
[1:55] Bloomington was roughly A2 hour drive, and she had a 10/30 class
[2:00] she didn't intend to miss. But she never got there.
[2:04] Her route took her onto State Road 37, the highway linking
[2:08] Indianapolis and Bloomington, a road she knew well.
[2:13] The car, though, was struggling, and she stopped at more than one
[2:16] gas station along the way to have someone look it over.
[2:20] The last of those stops came only about 10 miles from where
[2:23] the vehicle finally gave out. Investigators would later track
[2:27] down the people who'd seen her that morning, and every one of
[2:31] them checked out. The Pontiac came to rest on the
[2:35] shoulder of State Road 37, about two miles north of Martinsville
[2:40] and only 20 minutes shy of campus.
[2:43] When it was found, the doors were locked, the hazard lights
[2:46] were blinking, and the car was pointed S toward Bloomington.
[2:51] The radiator had run dry and the engine had overheated, the
[2:54] result of a faulty thermostat. Anne's laundry, her books, and
[2:59] most of her belongings were still sitting inside.
[3:02] Despite this being the 1970's, the alarm went up quickly
[3:07] because Anne simply wasn't the type to vanish.
[3:10] She was diligent to a fault and rarely missed a class, so when
[3:15] her 1030 seat sat empty, people noticed right away.
[3:20] She also hadn't called her mother to say she'd arrived the
[3:23] way she'd promised, which was completely out of character for
[3:26] her. Later that day, she failed to
[3:30] turn up for a theater rehearsal, and her castmates found that
[3:33] strange as well, though nobody reported her missing at the
[3:37] time. Marjorie, meanwhile, had been
[3:40] phoning her daughter's off campus apartment over and over
[3:43] with no answer. Near midnight, she and a friend
[3:46] got in a car and retraced the route to Bloomington themselves.
[3:50] That's how they came across the locked, abandoned Pontiac on the
[3:53] side of the highway. They drove to the nearest police
[3:56] station and reported that something had gone badly wrong.
[4:01] What followed was one of the largest searches the area had
[4:04] ever seen, and the cops used an innovative strategy to try to
[4:08] drum up eyewitness accounts. The Indiana State Police and the
[4:12] Morgan County Sheriff's Department threw real weight
[4:15] behind it, with as many as seven officers working the case full
[4:19] time at its peak. At one point, they hauled Anne's
[4:23] car back out to the highway where it was found and ran a
[4:26] Rolling Rd. check. They flagged down drivers to ask
[4:30] whether they'd pass that vehicle a week earlier or seen anyone
[4:34] near it. Unfortunately, despite this
[4:37] effort, no new tips or evidence came from this attempt.
[4:42] Back in Cambridge City, the town organized itself holding regular
[4:47] meetings to figure out how to keep Anne's name in front of
[4:50] people. At the time, without our current
[4:53] technology, that meant Flyers printed and posted up and down
[4:58] State Road 37 and across Central.
[5:00] IN this effort led to the story climbing all the way to the
[5:04] national news. Marjorie made a public appeal
[5:08] that few who saw it ever forgot, begging whoever knew anything to
[5:12] tell her where her daughter was, alive or otherwise.
[5:16] The answer, when it came, was the one no parent wants.
[5:20] On October 18th, 1977, thirty six days after Anne went
[5:25] missing, a farmer was picking corn in a field roughly 7 miles
[5:30] northeast of Martinsville when he found her body.
[5:34] The spot was about 200 yards off a County Rd. hidden in corn that
[5:40] stood more than 7 feet tall. The cornfield lay only a few
[5:44] miles from where her car had failed, so wherever she'd been
[5:47] taken, she hadn't been carried Far from the beginning.
[5:52] There was little doubt it was Anne in that field.
[5:55] She was still wearing an Indiana University T-shirt, and she was
[5:59] identified through her clothing, her dental records, and a purse
[6:03] found nearby. The scene told an ugly story,
[6:06] and one of her own shoelaces had been used to bind her hands
[6:10] behind her back, and the other had been used as a ligature.
[6:14] Despite finding her body, this didn't lead to any new breaks in
[6:18] the case, and the case ended up sitting on the shelf cold for a
[6:24] long time. Anne's own family believed the
[6:27] case had actually effectively been solved.
[6:30] The understanding that filtered down to relatives was that the
[6:33] man responsible had been caught and fried, and the name attached
[6:37] to that belief was Stephen Judy. Stephen Judy was put to death in
[6:42] Indiana's electric chair in March 1981 for the 1979
[6:47] annihilation of an entire four person family.
[6:52] Before his execution, Judy spoke openly about other crimes and
[6:55] confessed to several more, some in other states.
[6:59] When he was asked about Anne, though, he said flatly that he'd
[7:03] had nothing to do with her and didn't even know who she was.
[7:07] Police at the time didn't buy it, but as it turns out, the
[7:12] denial seems to hold up and this sick puppy may actually have
[7:16] been telling the truth. A later review by the cold case
[7:20] detectives on file placed Stephen Judy Likely in the
[7:23] Marion County Jail on September 12th, 1977, the very day and
[7:29] disappeared. Unfortunately, the specific jail
[7:34] records have since been lost or thrown out, which complicates
[7:37] things. However, by putting together the
[7:41] court records, they were able to determine that he was likely in
[7:45] lock up since that spring. Given that the jail records are
[7:49] gone, not everyone is entirely satisfied Stephen Judy didn't do
[7:54] it. However, this was a man who
[7:57] clearly wanted to take credit for as much suffering as
[8:00] possible, and Despite that, he didn't admit to doing it.
[8:04] Personally, I believe that he's not responsible for the crimes
[8:08] against Anne based on both his denial and the evidentiary
[8:12] record. That said, I do admit that
[8:15] there's always a possibility that he figured he could inflict
[8:18] more suffering on the family by maintaining A denial when he
[8:21] actually did it. Decades on, it was a news story
[8:26] that pulled Anne's case out of the back of a filing cabinet
[8:30] when her cousin approached investigators with a new
[8:32] technique that could solve the case.
[8:35] In 2018, the arrest of the Golden State Killer in
[8:38] California, cracked open by genetic genealogy, made him
[8:43] wonder why his cousin's case couldn't be next.
[8:47] He filed a Freedom of Information request for Anne's
[8:50] cold case file, but was turned down.
[8:53] Since the investigation is still ongoing and active, the police
[8:57] have been tight lipped about what they have, but there is at
[9:01] least genetic evidence that was recovered from the scene.
[9:05] It's been tested more than once, but as of yet, this evidence
[9:09] doesn't yet appear to have been sent for genetic genealogy
[9:11] testing. Personally, I think we've really
[9:15] got to get on funding genetic genealogy tests for all cases
[9:18] such as this. At the end of the day, every
[9:22] year that passes makes it more unlikely that the perpetrator
[9:25] will ever face justice for his crimes. 45 minutes after the
[9:33] president of the United States was shot in front of hundreds of
[9:36] witnesses, a patrol officer in a quiet corner of Dallas slowed
[9:40] his cruiser. He was pulling up beside a lone
[9:43] man walking along a residential St. and nobody can say for
[9:47] certain what made him stop. Nobody knows exactly what passed
[9:51] between them through the open window of that police car.
[9:54] What we do know is that within a minute, the officer was lying in
[9:58] the road with four bullets in him, and the attacker was
[10:02] already walking away. The officer's name was JD
[10:06] Tippett, and for more than 60 years he's been remembered, when
[10:11] he's remembered at all, as a footnote to a far larger crime.
[10:17] Tippett was born in September 1924 near Annona in Red River
[10:21] County, the eldest of seven children in a farming family of
[10:25] modest means. In an odd footnote, he was
[10:29] simply just named JD, and the initials didn't actually stand
[10:33] for anything at all. He grew up on the land, was
[10:37] raised in the Baptist Church, and left public school after the
[10:41] 10th grade, a fairly unremarkable upbringing at the
[10:44] time. When he was 15, the family moved
[10:48] to a stretch of Dirt Rd. southwest of Clarksville, and
[10:51] that part of the world stayed in him for the rest of his life.
[10:55] He entered the Army in the summer of 1944 and volunteered
[10:59] to be a paratrooper, which indicates an incredible amount
[11:03] of bravery and a strong martial spirit.
[11:07] By early 1945, he was in Europe attached to a parachute infantry
[11:12] regiment in the 17th Airborne Division, a unit that had seen
[11:16] heavy action in the Battle of the Bulge.
[11:19] He jumped into combat during the airborne crossing of the Rhine
[11:22] that March 1 of the largest operations of its kind ever
[11:26] attempted, and he came home with a Bronze Star.
[11:30] He stayed in uniform until the middle of 1946 before being
[11:34] honorably discharged back in Texas.
[11:38] He married Marie Francis Gassaway just after Christmas
[11:41] that year, and the two of them went on to raise three children.
[11:46] For a while he tried his hand at cotton farming, but it didn't
[11:49] pay, and in 1952 he traded the fields for a badge and joined
[11:55] the Dallas Police Department. He spent the next 11 years
[12:00] patrolling Oak Cliff, a working class residential district South
[12:04] of the river. The pay wasn't much, so he
[12:07] picked up part time work on the side, cooking at a BBQ
[12:10] restaurant on weekend nights and helping out at a neighborhood
[12:14] theater on Sundays. By the autumn of 1963, he was 39
[12:19] years old, a dependable beat cop with a family and two extra
[12:23] jobs. Nobody outside his neighborhood
[12:26] had any reason to know him. That is, until his whole life
[12:30] would intersect with the forces of history.
[12:34] At 12:30 on the 22nd of November 1963, three shots rang out
[12:39] across Dealey Plaza and President Kennedy slumped in the
[12:43] back of his open limousine. Within minutes, the Dallas
[12:46] Police radio became a wall of noise, every available unit
[12:50] being pulled toward the center of the city to seal it off.
[12:54] Tippett was working his usual beat that day in South Oak
[12:57] Cliff, several miles from the chaos that was rapidly
[13:01] unfolding. He knew the district about as
[13:04] well as a man can know a place after 11 years of driving its
[13:07] streets. At about 12:45, the dispatcher
[13:11] ordered him to move into the central part of the area as the
[13:14] department tried to throw a net around downtown.
[13:18] He acknowledged the order and a few minutes later radioed in to
[13:22] confirm he'd repositioned as instructed.
[13:25] By then, a description of the suspect had started going out
[13:28] over the air. It was vague, the kind of thing
[13:32] that could fit thousands of men in the area.
[13:35] A slender white male in his early 30s, somewhere around 5
[13:39] foot 10, weighing about 165 lbs. The man who'd soon crossed his
[13:46] path was younger, shorter and lighter than that.
[13:49] But in the rush of a city and panic, the description may have
[13:53] been close enough to put a careful officer on edge.
[13:57] Tippett never radioed in to report that he was approaching
[13:59] the unknown man, so his intent in the approach remains unknown.
[14:04] About 1:30, Tippett was rolling slowly eastward along E 10th St.
[14:09] about 100 feet past its intersection with Patton Ave.
[14:14] This was a residential stretch lined with fairly modest houses
[14:17] and parked cars. Along the street, a man was
[14:21] walking on the sidewalk, and something about him evidently
[14:24] caught the officer's attention. Tippett pulled the cruiser over
[14:28] alongside him. Why he singled out that
[14:32] particular man on that particular block remains an
[14:36] unsolved mystery. The man walked over to the
[14:39] passenger side of the car and leaned toward the open vent
[14:43] window, and the two of them exchanged a few words.
[14:47] Whatever was said, it was brief. Tippett opened his door and
[14:52] stepped out, and he began to walk around toward the front of
[14:55] the patrol car. He never made it.
[14:58] The man drew a revolver and started wildly blasting, firing
[15:02] off numerous shots in quick succession. 3 rounds landed
[15:06] square in Tippett's chest, and as he went down, a final shot
[15:11] caught him in the right side of the head.
[15:14] An ambulance carried his body the short distance to Methodist
[15:17] Hospital, where a physician formerly pronounced him deceased
[15:21] at around 1:15. There were a remarkable number
[15:25] of people nearby, and roughly a dozen of them ended up named in
[15:29] the official record. The closest was a man in a
[15:32] pickup truck driving the other way.
[15:35] He saw the officer standing by his car, and the second man on
[15:38] the far side heard the shots and watched Tippett drop.
[15:44] He stayed low in his truck until the attacker had gone, then a
[15:47] little longer before he worked up the nerve to climb out.
[15:51] In the era before cell phones, or even universally available
[15:55] home phones, he tried to call it in on the cruisers radio and
[15:59] couldn't make it work. Another passerby managed to get
[16:03] through to the dispatcher and the first word of the shooting
[16:06] reached headquarters only a few minutes after it happened.
[16:10] A used car salesman and former Marine who worked nearby saw the
[16:15] attacker moving off with the revolver still raised and
[16:18] shouted at him, getting only a muttered, unintelligible reply.
[16:23] A woman who'd been standing across the street watched the
[16:26] whole thing and picked the suspect out of a police line up
[16:29] that very evening. Her account would later be
[16:32] picked apart by critics who found her an unreliable witness
[16:35] who couldn't keep her own narrative straight.
[16:38] However, with so many other witnesses, this was less of an
[16:42] impediment to the investigation than it may usually have been.
[16:48] Two women who were sisters in law, known to history as the
[16:51] Davises, inside a house at the corner, heard the shots and saw
[16:56] the man cut across their lawn. The shooter had flipped open the
[17:00] cylinder of his revolver and dumped the spent casings as he
[17:03] moved. They later found two of the
[17:06] casings in the grass and handed them to police, creating a minor
[17:09] chain of custody issue on this evidence.
[17:12] A cab driver parked close by watched the man pass within a
[17:16] few feet of him, weapon in hand, grumbling something under his
[17:20] breath. By the end of that night, 5
[17:24] separate witnesses had identified the same man in
[17:27] police line UPS. One more did so the following
[17:31] day, three others later picked him out from a photograph, and
[17:35] two said only that he resembled the man they'd seen.
[17:39] The shells in the Davises yard and two more recovered at the
[17:42] scene would become the most important physical evidence in
[17:46] the case against the man who'd fired them.
[17:49] The attacker didn't get far, and a few blocks away, the manager
[17:53] of a shoe shop noticed a man behaving oddly in his doorway,
[17:57] ducking out of sight as patrol cars went screaming past.
[18:01] The man then slipped into the nearby Texas theater without
[18:04] bothering to buy a ticket, apparently attempting to hide
[18:08] among the patrons or turn it into a siege situation.
[18:13] The shoe shop manager pointed it out, the theater's cashier
[18:16] flagged the cops, and within minutes officers were converging
[18:20] on the theater and turning up the house lights.
[18:24] It was about 10 minutes to 2 when they moved in and prepared
[18:27] to apprehend the man who had gunned down Tippett.
[18:31] There was a brief scuffle among the seats and the man tried to
[18:35] get some shots off, but the suspect was wrestled into
[18:38] custody and hauled out to a waiting car as a small crowd
[18:42] jeered. The man was Lee Harvey Oswald,
[18:47] and by that point he was wanted for far more than a traffic stop
[18:50] gone horribly wrong. Late that evening he was
[18:54] formally charged with the killing of Officer Tippett, and
[18:57] in the early hours of the following morning he was charged
[19:00] with assassinating the President as well.
[19:04] He denied both to the end, insisting he was a Patsy, that
[19:08] someone else had done it all, and that despite how things
[19:11] looked, he was innocent. The case against Oswald for the
[19:15] officer's death rested heavily on what was found in the street
[19:19] and what was found on his person when he was clapped in cuffs.
[19:23] The weapon was a snub nosed Smith and Wesson revolver taken
[19:28] from him during the struggle in the theater.
[19:31] He'd bought it months earlier by mail order under a false name,
[19:34] the same alias he'd used to buy the rifle that would be tied to
[19:37] the president's death. At the scene And in the Davis's
[19:42] yard, 4 spent cartridge cases were recovered.
[19:46] When the firearms experts examine them, they were
[19:49] unanimous on one point. Those four cases had been fired
[19:53] in Oswald's revolver and in no other weapon on earth.
[19:58] The bullets pulled from Tippett's body were a murkier
[20:00] matter. Since Oswald had modified the
[20:03] weapon, it had been altered to chamber a slightly different
[20:07] cartridge than its barrel was built for.
[20:09] So the bullets pass through undersized and erratic, picking
[20:13] up inconsistent markings each time.
[20:17] Some have claimed that the issue with the bullets indicates that
[20:20] there may have been a second shooter, or that Oswald wasn't
[20:23] involved at all. Some theorists have even claimed
[20:27] that there were witnesses that claimed to have seen two men
[20:31] running from the scene, but that the police disregarded these
[20:35] witness statements. In the end though, the evidence
[20:39] generally does point to Oswald being the one who attacked
[20:42] Officer Tippett. For me, the real unsolved
[20:47] mystery here isn't who shot Tippett, or even why, but rather
[20:52] why Tippett decided to investigate Oswald at all.
[20:56] Maybe the loose description was enough to make him a suspect,
[21:00] but the description really didn't fit Oswald all that well.
[21:04] Oswald had just turned 24 and was substantially lighter than
[21:09] the description that was sent out.
[21:11] It's possible that Tippett hadn't been seeking to apprehend
[21:14] Oswald at all, but that Oswald simply misunderstood what was
[21:19] going on during a routine stop. It's entirely possible that
[21:23] Tippett had just intended to ask Oswald if he had seen anyone who
[21:27] fit the description of the shooter.
[21:29] Personally, I like this idea because I find it hard to
[21:33] believe that Tippett wouldn't have immediately radioed in if
[21:37] he believed he had JF KS assassin in his sights.
[21:41] In the end, we'll never have a firm answer to Tippett's
[21:44] thoughts in those moments because of course Tippett didn't
[21:48] make it. And what happened to Oswald next
[21:51] would change everything. Oswald, as you're probably
[21:55] aware, never stood trial for any of it.
[21:58] Not for Tippett and not for President Kennedy.
[22:02] Two days after the shooting, while being moved from one jail
[22:05] to another in the basement of police headquarters, he was
[22:09] gunned down on live television. The man that did it was a local
[22:13] nightclub owner named Jack Ruby, and the attack was broadcast in
[22:18] front of a national audience. Whatever Oswald knew about his
[22:21] interactions with Officer Tippett that fateful day went
[22:25] into the grave with him. The investigation fell instead
[22:29] to a federal Commission, which spent the better part of a year
[22:33] on it before concluding in the autumn of 1964 that Oswald had
[22:37] acted alone in both deaths. A later congressional inquiry in
[22:42] the 1970s reached the same verdict on the officer
[22:45] specifically citing the gun in his hands and the wall of
[22:49] witnesses who'd put him at the scene.
[22:53] For the family, the grief was swallowed up by the enormity of
[22:56] what had happened that weekend. He'd left behind Marie and the
[23:00] three children they'd raised together.
[23:03] Both RFK and the new president telephoned the officer's widow
[23:07] to offer their condolences, and the former first lady wrote her
[23:11] a letter about the bond they now shared.
[23:14] Money poured in from across the country, hundreds of thousands
[23:18] of dollars from ordinary people who'd read about her in the
[23:21] papers. In the end, we will never know
[23:25] why Tippett decided to approach Oswald, or why Oswald chose
[23:29] additional senseless violence on one of the most tragic days in
[23:32] American history. Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here
[23:39] with my somewhat annoying reminder to hit the subscription
[23:42] button and notification bell and turn on all those notifications.
[23:47] Also, don't forget to check out the membership or the Patreon if
[23:50] you want to take your support for my channel to the next
[23:52] level. Somewhere in England, a man with
[23:58] access to the Royal Mail's most sensitive paperwork worked out a
[24:02] single valuable fact which night a particular train would be
[24:07] hauling more cash than any train in British history.
[24:12] He passed that fact to a gang of thieves, took his cut, and then
[24:16] disappeared so effectively that more than 60 years later, nobody
[24:20] can prove who he was. The robbery he set in motion
[24:25] became the most famous heist the country has ever seen, and he
[24:28] never spent a day behind bars for it.
[24:31] The gang knew him only as the Ulsterman, and he's the first
[24:35] mystery in this case, and far from the last.
[24:40] The train at the center of it was a traveling post office, a
[24:43] rolling sorting room railway men called the UP special at 6:50 on
[24:47] the evening of the 7th of August 1963.
[24:51] It pulled out of Glasgow Central, bound for Houston and
[24:54] London, due to arrive just after 4 the next morning. 12 carriages
[24:59] hauled by a diesel locomotive carried 72 post office staff who
[25:04] sorted mail through the night as the country slept around them.
[25:08] The second carriage behind the engine was the one that mattered
[25:12] since it had the high value bundles of banknotes moving S
[25:15] between bank branches. On an ordinary night it might
[25:19] hold around 300,000 lbs, still a staggering sum at the time.
[25:25] But this wasn't an ordinary night and the August bank
[25:28] holiday had just passed. Scottish banks were flushing
[25:32] days of accumulated cash down to London, so the coach was loaded
[25:37] with somewhere between 2 1/2 and £3,000,000.
[25:41] The Post Office owned high value coaches fitted with alarms,
[25:45] barred windows and reinforced locks built so a night like this
[25:49] couldn't happen. But those coaches were out of
[25:52] service. In their place ran an ordinary
[25:55] reserve carriage with no alarm and no bars on the windows.
[25:59] The richest train in the country was that night, also one of the
[26:03] softest. The mastermind was Bruce
[26:07] Reynolds, a Londoner who drifted from petty break insurance into
[26:11] serious robbery and fancied himself built for adventure.
[26:15] Around him stood the core of what's sometimes called the
[26:19] Southwest Gang, Reynolds himself, Gordon Goody, Buster
[26:24] Edwards and Charlie Wilson. They were accomplished thieves,
[26:30] but they'd never stopped a train in their lives and they knew it,
[26:34] so they brought in specialist to assist them in their efforts.
[26:38] A second outfit, the South Coast Raiders, had real experience
[26:42] robbing trains and from them came Tommy Wisby, Bob Welch and
[26:47] Jim Hussey, along with Roger Corddry.
[26:51] This last man could rig a railway signal to stop a train
[26:54] wherever he liked, so he was an invaluable asset to this train
[26:58] heist. The final crew ran to roughly 16
[27:02] men on the ground directly involved in the Great Train
[27:05] Robbery 1 was a South London Carpenter named Ronnie Biggs,
[27:10] whose name the world would remember above all the others.
[27:13] Even though his job was almost trivial, Biggs was supposed to
[27:17] supply one thing a retired driver who could move the
[27:21] locomotive once it was seized. And let's just say he failed
[27:25] miserably. But more on that in a moment.
[27:28] And then there was the inside man who played perhaps the most
[27:32] important role of all. The whole scheme rested on
[27:36] knowing how much money the train carried and when, and that came
[27:40] from someone deep inside the postal system.
[27:43] The gang never learned his real name, but because of his accent
[27:47] or perhaps something else, they called him the Ulsterman,
[27:51] meaning he was from Northern Ireland.
[27:55] Just after three in the morning on the 8th of August, the train
[27:58] rolled toward a quiet spot called Sears Crossing.
[28:01] This location was in Buckinghamshire, between
[28:04] Leighton Buzzard and Chettington, and Corddry had
[28:07] done his work. He'd covered the green signal
[28:10] with a glove and wired a battery to light the red lamp so the
[28:14] driver saw a red stop signal the railway had never set.
[28:18] The driver was Jack Mills, 58 years old, a man with decades on
[28:24] the rails who probably thought he had seen everything the job
[28:28] had to offer. He brought the train to a halt
[28:32] exactly as the false signal told him to, and his second man, 26
[28:37] year old David Whitby, climbed out of the train to investigate.
[28:42] Before he could make sense of what he was seeing, Whitby was
[28:45] overwhelmed and restrained by a couple of goons.
[28:48] Hooded men were already swarming up into the cab from both sides
[28:52] of the train. Mills grappled with one of them
[28:55] and was struck from behind by another, a blow to the head that
[28:58] left him bleeding and barely conscious.
[29:01] Then the plan nearly fell apart. The retired driver Biggs had
[29:05] brought along couldn't operate this newer locomotive.
[29:09] His experience was with older engines and the controls in
[29:12] front of him might as well have come from another machine.
[29:16] There was no time to argue and the gang dragged the injured
[29:19] Mills back to his controls and made him drive the train half a
[29:23] mile down the line to Bridego Bridge.
[29:26] There the plotters had placed a white sheet stretched between
[29:29] two poles to mark the spot to stop at the bridge.
[29:34] The gang had already uncoupled the engine and the high value
[29:37] coach from the rest of the train, leaving the sorters
[29:40] further back with no idea what was happening up front.
[29:44] The handful of postal staff inside, led by a man named Frank
[29:48] Dewhurst, tried briefly to hold the door but was overwhelmed.
[29:54] After that there was nothing they could do.
[29:57] They were ordered to lie face down in the corner and Mills and
[30:01] Whitby were handcuffed together and laid down beside them.
[30:05] What followed was almost industrial.
[30:08] The robbers formed a human chain and passed the mailbags out of
[30:12] the coach and down the embankment to a waiting truck.
[30:16] They cleared 120 of the 128 sacks in 15 to 20 minutes,
[30:22] leaving the rest only because time had run out.
[30:26] The haul of cash weighed around 2 1/2 tons.
[30:30] Within about 30 minutes of the train stopping, the entire
[30:33] convoy was gone. And to fool any witness who saw
[30:36] them, two of their getaway trucks carried the very same
[30:40] number plate. As they ran the back roads with
[30:43] a radio tune to the police frequency, they heard the first
[30:46] stunned report that the train itself had been robbed. 27 miles
[30:52] from the bridge sat Leather Slade Farm, a rundown place the
[30:55] plotters had purchased two months previous.
[30:58] It was almost the perfect location but for the fact that
[31:02] there were other rural folk around who may notice unusual
[31:05] activity at the farm. Inside, they tipped out the
[31:09] sacks and counted their I'll gotten gains.
[31:12] They had stolen around £2.5 million in just 30 minutes.
[31:17] Divided between the men and their informants, it came to
[31:20] roughly £150,000 a share, a colossal fortune in 1963.
[31:27] To pass the time while the heat died down, they played Monopoly,
[31:31] and they used real notes from the heist to do it, perhaps to
[31:35] raise the stakes of the game. In a somewhat bizarre twist,
[31:40] that game of Monopoly would help send most of them to prison for
[31:43] years. Their immediate undoing, though,
[31:46] was a single, careless sentence spoken by one of the robbers.
[31:51] He told the postal workers not to move for half an hour to give
[31:55] the crew time to escape. Investigators turned that
[31:59] inadvertent clue into a circle on the map, a 30 mile radius,
[32:03] 1/2 hour drive in a fast car. And Leather Slade Farm sat
[32:07] inside that circle. The cops, of course, had no
[32:11] reason to suspect the farm itself yet, but the men weren't
[32:14] about to take any additional chances.
[32:18] Listening to the radio, the gang realized the police would be
[32:21] combing this exact patch of countryside, so they moved up
[32:25] their departure and scattered. A man hired to come back and
[32:29] burn the farm clean of all evidence lost his nerve and ran,
[32:33] and the farmhouse and everything inside it was left standing.
[32:39] The break came from a herdsman in a neighboring field who
[32:42] thought the activity at the supposedly empty farm was worth
[32:45] a phone call. On the 13th of August, 5 days
[32:49] after the robbery, two officers walked up to Leather Slade and
[32:53] found a thieves paradise of evidence.
[32:56] They found trucks, sleeping bags, food sacks stamped by the
[33:01] post office, banknote wrappers and a Monopoly board.
[33:05] The gang had wiped the place down, but they'd missed things
[33:10] and surviving fingerprints turned up on that Monopoly set,
[33:13] which they hadn't bothered to clean in their haste.
[33:17] The farm wasn't the only gift the gang handed the police.
[33:21] Days later, hikers nearby found briefcases stuffed with crisp
[33:25] banknotes, more than 100,000 lbs dumped among the trees.
[33:30] Tucked in with the cash was a German hotel receipt made out to
[33:34] Brian Field, one of the conspirators, and his wife.
[33:40] He was a clerk for a lawyer, and it was the thread that tied the
[33:43] apparently respectable man to the men who'd taken the train.
[33:47] By now, Scotland Yard had taken over the London end of the case
[33:51] under Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler, a
[33:55] relentless, secretive man nicknamed the Gray Fox.
[34:00] He lived for the job and trusted no one with the full picture,
[34:03] not even his own squad. With fingerprints from the farm
[34:07] and a steady drip of inside information from informants, the
[34:11] names came together and through the fall the gang were arrested
[34:15] one after another. The trial opened in Aylesbury on
[34:20] the 20th of January 1964 and ran for 51 days with hundreds of
[34:25] exhibits and witnesses in a courtroom modified to hold them
[34:28] all. Not every charge stuck and one
[34:32] of the men walked free part way through the proceedings.
[34:35] His only link to the crime was his Prince on that Monopoly set,
[34:39] and his counsel argued he'd played the game with his
[34:42] brother-in-law, who was involved well before the robbery.
[34:46] For the rest, the reckoning was severe, and in April the judge
[34:51] condemned the robbery as an act of cold greed and violence.
[34:55] Seven of the men were handed 30 years of peace sentences, longer
[35:00] than many got for taking a life. That sentence makes more sense
[35:04] when you realize that Jack Mills, the lead train conductor,
[35:08] spent the rest of his life partially disabled due to the
[35:12] blow to his head. I have to imagine that without
[35:16] that senseless act of violence, the sentences may not have been
[35:19] so severe. There's also the fact that the
[35:22] majority of the money wasn't returned, and as such, these
[35:26] long sentences really enforced that this wasn't a paid holiday
[35:29] for criminals. For some of the men, 30 years
[35:33] was simply not a sentence they intended to serve.
[35:37] In August 1964, one of the men, Charlie Wilson, was broken out
[35:42] of Winston Green prison in Birmingham by a three man team
[35:46] who got in and out in under 3 minutes. 11 months later Ronnie
[35:51] Biggs, the one who almost screwed up the entire operation
[35:55] by failing to get a qualified train conductor, also escaped.
[35:59] He went over the wall of Wandsworth prison with a rope
[36:02] ladder and into a van that was waiting for him.
[36:06] He then had plastic surgery in Paris, then ran to Australia,
[36:11] then Rio de Janeiro, where the British authorities couldn't
[36:15] touch him. Biggs lived in the Open in
[36:18] Brazil for decades and only came home old and I'll in 2001.
[36:25] Charlie Wilson, for his part, surfaced in Canada under a
[36:29] borrowed name, living a comfortable suburban life
[36:32] outside Montreal, joining a Golf Club and blending in.
[36:36] He stayed free until a careless invitation to a relative back
[36:39] home LED Scotland Yard to his door and he was recaptured in
[36:43] 1968. He served the rest of his
[36:46] sentence and was released, after which he moved to Spain, where
[36:50] he was gunned down in 1990. Years later, in 2014, one of the
[36:57] participants, a man named Gordon Goody, finally offered a name
[37:01] for the Ulsterman, who was never caught.
[37:04] He claimed this mysterious figure had been a postal worker
[37:07] called Patrick McKenna, then 43 years old.
[37:11] He was a quiet family man from Salford who'd been born in
[37:15] Belfast, and Goody only ever learned it by catching sight of
[37:19] his name written inside a glasses case.
[37:22] By the time anyone went looking, McKenna was long dead, and he
[37:26] died with no criminal record and very little money to his name.
[37:31] Plenty of people doubt that McKenna was involved at all, and
[37:35] instead point to an alternative figure named Sammy Osterman.
[37:40] Not much is known about him beyond the fact that he was on
[37:43] the periphery of the heist crew and was never charged.
[37:47] Some believe that the nickname The Ulsterman was actually based
[37:52] on a mishearing of the name Osterman, though this remains
[37:56] unknown. And honestly, I think that
[37:58] sounds like a fairly realistic interpretation given how similar
[38:02] the 2 words sound. After all, I suspect that in
[38:07] England, you're more likely to hear that someone is an Osterman
[38:11] than someone has the last name Osterman.
[38:15] There is, of course, 1 remaining mystery from this heist.
[38:19] The bulk of that two and a half million pounds was never
[38:22] recovered. The ultimate whereabouts of the
[38:25] majority of the money will likely never be known.

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