# 2.5 Hours of Chilling Unsolved Mysteries Detectives Can't Crack | True Crime Compilation | 287

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 4 Aug 2026, 2 h 36 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO7319744480.mp3

Join me for 2.5 hours of horrifying unsolved cold case mysteries. Episode 287 of the true crime podcast btw. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw 🍏 True Crime Podcast on Apple 🍎: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lazy-chill-true-crime/id1815534472 unsolved mysteries, true crime, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, missing persons, murder investigation, forensic evidence, serial killers, crime scene analysis, dark history, criminal psychology, real life horror, police investigations, DNA breakthroughs, forensic genealogy, crime documentaries, criminal profiling, mysterious disappearances, solved cases, justice system, law enforcement stories, cold case files, creepy mysteries, true crime storytelling, crime reconstruction, chilling cases, investigative reporting, modern forensics, victim advocacy, unidentified remains, crime scene forensics, cold cases, true crime, true crime solved, 5 true crime cases, cold case compilation, true crime compilation, fall asleep, sleep compilation, sleep video, 3 hour podcast, 2 hour podcast, long podcast, sleep pod

## Transcript

[0:00] There's a particular kind of dread that creeps in when
[0:02] someone you love misses a phone call they always make.
[0:06] Not a meeting, not an appointment, just the routine
[0:09] check in that's so reliable you've stopped thinking about
[0:12] it. That's the dread Elaine Sobeck
[0:15] felt on the evening of November 16th, 1995 when her 27 year old
[0:21] daughter Linda didn't ring her back.
[0:24] Linda had called that morning to say she was running late for a
[0:27] quick photo shoot, but promised she'd phone again that night to
[0:31] nail down plans for a family BBQ the following weekend.
[0:36] She never did, and within 48 hours, a maintenance crew
[0:40] working the Angeles National Forest would find pictures of a
[0:44] smiling young woman tossed into a roadside trash bin.
[0:48] Soon, a freelance photographer would be telling a story to
[0:51] police that didn't quite add up. And the truth, when it came out,
[0:56] was far worse than anyone could have guessed.
[1:00] Linda Sobek had been chasing the same dream as half of Los
[1:03] Angeles County, and by the autumn of 1995, she was closer
[1:07] to catching it than most. Born in July of 1968 and raised
[1:12] in Lakewood, she'd spent roughly five years on the sidelines of
[1:16] the Coliseum as a Raiderette, the Los Angeles Raiders cheer
[1:20] dance squad. She was named Raiderette of the
[1:23] Year during her third season. At 5 foot 4, she was too short
[1:27] for runway work, but her looks made her a fixture and other
[1:31] forms of modeling, swimwear layouts, calendar shoots, car
[1:36] magazine spreads and more. She'd picked up bit parts on
[1:40] screen too, small rolls that paid the rent while she waited
[1:44] for the call that might actually change things.
[1:47] That phone call had come only days before she vanished, and
[1:50] she'd booked a recurring guest spot on Married With Children,
[1:54] the kind of credit that opens doors in Hollywood.
[1:58] A costume fitting for the show was on her calendar for the
[2:00] afternoon of November 16th, and she'd already told the producers
[2:05] she'd be a little late getting in because of the photo shoot.
[2:09] By that fall, Linda was sharing a four bedroom house in Hermosa
[2:13] Beach with three other women working in or around the
[2:16] entertainment business. She kept careful records of her
[2:20] bookings in a day planner she carried everywhere.
[2:23] Friends would later describe her as a model who treated the work
[2:26] like a business rather than a fantasy.
[2:29] She was the sort of person who told people where she was going,
[2:33] when she'd be back, and who she'd be with.
[2:36] Which is exactly what makes what happened next so chilling.
[2:43] The job had come together fast. Only a day earlier, Linda had
[2:47] taken a call from a photographer she'd worked with before.
[2:51] He was a tall, heavyset man named Charles Rathbun, then 38,
[2:55] who specialized in automotive shoots and had a small but
[2:59] legitimate looking portfolio with several car publications.
[3:04] Rathbun said he had a same day assignment to photograph a
[3:07] prototype Lexus sport utility vehicle, and that he needed a
[3:11] model on the call sheet. He reportedly told her the
[3:15] assignment was for Auto Week magazine, which had a
[3:18] circulation of about 300,000 magazines per week at the time.
[3:23] This was, at least the way Rathbun sold it, a pretty big
[3:27] job for an up and coming model like Linda.
[3:31] The publisher of that magazine would later flatly contradict
[3:34] the claim, telling reporters that Auto Week didn't use models
[3:38] in its product shoots. It would later be confirmed that
[3:41] the assignment Rathbun had taken on with the manufacturer never
[3:45] involved any model at all. But here's the thing.
[3:49] He was an established photographer with a legitimate
[3:53] prototype Lexus, and a real assignment to take pictures of
[3:57] it. The job on his end was real,
[3:59] which presumably made the ruse all the more realistic.
[4:03] But he used that prototype to target Linda.
[4:07] Linda, of course, had no way of knowing any of that, and they
[4:10] agreed to meet for breakfast the next morning at a Denny's
[4:13] restaurant in Torrance. She woke up early on November
[4:18] 16th and made two calls. The first was to her mother.
[4:22] The second was to her Booker. Confirming the day's schedule.
[4:27] She told both women the same thing.
[4:29] A quick shoot in the desert, back in time for the costume
[4:33] fitting. She walked out the door, met
[4:36] Rathbun at the Denny's and climbed into a black pre
[4:39] production Lexus Suva vehicle so new IT hadn't yet been released
[4:44] to dealerships. The plan, according to Rathbun,
[4:48] was to drive out to the El Mirage dry lake bed in the
[4:51] western Mojave, run a few hours of action shots and head home.
[4:57] The dry lake bed sits roughly 2 hours from the South Bay, a flat
[5:01] white expanse where automotive photographers love to shoot.
[5:05] Because there's nothing in the frame except sky and dust.
[5:09] Whatever happened that day didn't happen there.
[5:12] By the time Linda's mother started worrying, her daughter
[5:15] was already deep in the Angeles National Forest, north of Los
[5:19] Angeles. When Linda missed her costume
[5:23] fitting that afternoon, a close friend named Brooke Morales
[5:27] started calling around. Linda didn't ghost call sheets
[5:31] and she didn't miss bookings, so this was highly unusual to say
[5:35] the least. By the morning of November 17th,
[5:39] Elaine had filed a missing persons report with the Hermosa
[5:42] Beach Police Department. A small group of Linda's friends
[5:46] and former Raderet team mates had started running their own
[5:49] search, printing Flyers, working the phones and walking the
[5:54] neighborhoods near her house. The story got into the Los
[5:58] Angeles Times within 72 hours, and local television picked it
[6:03] up. A pretty former cheerleader
[6:06] vanished on her way to a photo shoot was the kind of story that
[6:10] didn't stay buried for long. Volunteers from the Montrose
[6:14] Search and Rescue Team were called out to comb the canyons
[6:18] north of the city, working off the theory that Linda had been
[6:22] driven somewhere remote. Nobody quite knew where to start
[6:26] looking, because nobody yet knew where she'd actually been.
[6:30] The break came not from the searchers, but from a county
[6:33] maintenance worker doing routine trash pickup along a forest Rd.
[6:36] north of the city. Sometime around November 18th,
[6:40] he came across an odd collection of items dumped into a roadside
[6:43] bin. There were photographs of a
[6:46] young woman posing professionally, a daily planner
[6:49] with the page for November 16th torn out, and a piece of paper
[6:54] that turned out to be a vehicle lease contract.
[6:58] The contract authorized A freelance photographer named
[7:01] Charles Rathbun to borrow a prototype Lexus for what the
[7:05] document described as an Auto Week assignment.
[7:09] The maintenance worker didn't think much of it at the time,
[7:12] but a few days later, watching the news, he saw the missing
[7:15] woman's face and recognized her instantly from the photos.
[7:20] He called the Sheriff's Department, and that call
[7:23] cracked the case open in roughly the time it took investigators
[7:26] to drive to Rathbun's apartment in Hollywood.
[7:29] He'd already returned the Lexus to the manufacturer on November
[7:33] 20th, but a forensic team got into it before it could be
[7:37] cleaned by the manufacturer. Despite obvious signs that the
[7:41] interior had been scrubbed carefully, technicians recovered
[7:45] traces of blood. They also recovered fibers and a
[7:49] pattern of soil consistent with the back roads of the Angeles
[7:53] National Forest. Rathburn, meanwhile, was at
[7:56] home, and he wasn't behaving like an innocent man.
[8:00] He told the first detectives who reached him that he'd met Linda
[8:03] for breakfast at the Denny's, decided she wasn't quite right
[8:07] for the shoot, and parted ways with her in the parking lot.
[8:11] Then, almost as an aside, he reportedly said something he had
[8:16] no business knowing. He told them he must have been
[8:19] the last person to see her alive.
[8:22] But here's the thing. Investigators hadn't even told
[8:26] her she was suspected to be deceased.
[8:29] Now, I probably don't have to tell you that this instantly
[8:32] made him the prime suspect in her disappearance.
[8:35] If he wasn't occupying that slot already, Charles Rathbun was a
[8:40] freelance photographer of the kind any modeling agent in Los
[8:43] Angeles would have called a known quantity.
[8:46] He'd shot for several legitimate publications, and he had both a
[8:50] portfolio and references. He was also, as it turned out, a
[8:55] man with a long shadow trailing behind him.
[8:59] Investigators digging into his background uncovered a 1979
[9:03] incident in Ohio in which a young Kroger Co worker reported
[9:07] being assaulted in his home. He had invited her in to look at
[9:11] his photography and discuss modeling opportunities, but it
[9:15] was all a ruse. Unfortunately, though, for
[9:19] reasons that aren't quite clear, he was never prosecuted for this
[9:23] crime. They found a pattern of
[9:26] accusations stretching across the Midwest, including a stint
[9:30] as a student at Ohio State University, that overlapped with
[9:34] the 1994 disappearance of an OSU freshman.
[9:38] He had an address in the Lansing area that overlapped with the
[9:41] 1993 disappearance of a young Michigan model named Rose
[9:45] Larner. Closer to home, Rathbun's name
[9:49] had come up at least once in connection with the 1992 case of
[9:53] Kimberly Pandelios. She was a young Southern
[9:57] California model whose body had been found in the same general
[10:01] region under broadly similar circumstances.
[10:05] He'd never been charged in any of those cases, and other
[10:08] suspects would eventually surface in some of them, but the
[10:12] resemblance to what had just happened to Linda was hard to
[10:15] ignore. In the Larner and Pandelios
[10:18] cases specifically, other people were eventually charged and
[10:22] convicted, but it's clear that the cops already had him pinned
[10:26] as a potential serial predator. While detectives were still
[10:31] working out how to approach him. Rathbun made the next move
[10:34] substantially easier. While under surveillance, he
[10:38] reportedly fired a weapon in his own driveway, a shot that
[10:42] ricocheted and grazed the arm of a female acquaintance who was
[10:45] with him at the time. That gave Los Angeles
[10:48] authorities grounds to enter the residence, conduct a search and
[10:52] detain him. I've said it once before and
[10:55] I'll say it again, we're very lucky that criminals tend not to
[10:59] be the brightest people around. Perhaps, though, it's not an
[11:03] intelligence issue but rather hubris, the belief that no
[11:07] matter what they do, they're untouchable.
[11:10] At any rate, I just can't imagine that he wouldn't have at
[11:13] least thought he might have been under police surveillance at the
[11:16] time. But I'm getting off track here.
[11:20] Inside, they found a massive cache of weaponry, ammunition,
[11:24] restraints, packing tape and bottles of alcohol bundled into
[11:29] what looked unsettlingly like a kit.
[11:32] They also found photographs of women they couldn't immediately
[11:35] identify. The theory developed that
[11:38] Charles Rathbun was keeping these pictures as some sort of
[11:42] trophy related to his previous victims.
[11:45] I'll get into this more in a moment, but somewhat
[11:48] surprisingly, this actually may not have been the case.
[11:52] Or I should say, it's never been proven that this is what these
[11:56] photos were. Once he was in custody,
[12:01] Rathbun's account of November 16th began evolving in real
[12:04] time, which generally isn't the behavior of a man with nothing
[12:08] to hide. The first version was the one
[12:11] he'd already given that they had parted ways at the Denny's.
[12:16] The second version was that he'd taken Linda out to the desert
[12:19] after all, and she'd been struck and fatally injured by the
[12:23] Lexus. He claimed that he leapt into
[12:26] the driver's seat to demonstrate a high speed turn and lost
[12:30] control of the vehicle while doing Donuts.
[12:33] He was, of course, getting slightly closer to the truth
[12:35] with this one, but he was trying to frame it all as an accident.
[12:40] Just a big mistake. The medical examiner who
[12:44] eventually examined the body would find no broken bones
[12:48] consistent with a vehicle strike.
[12:51] The third version was that the contact had been intimate and
[12:54] the asphyxiation had been accidental, the kind of thing
[12:57] that happens in consensual encounters that go wrong.
[13:01] The 4th version was that there had been an argument and a
[13:04] struggle, and that the asphyxiation had still somehow
[13:07] been accidental, just under different circumstances.
[13:12] Each version was offered as if it were the first, and each one
[13:15] steered detectives a little further from the only piece of
[13:18] evidence that mattered, the location of Linda's body.
[13:22] If they had her body, they could prove what actually happened to
[13:26] her, and detectives had a hunch that there was nothing
[13:29] accidental about Linda's fate. Then the lead detective, Raul
[13:34] Saldana, did something brilliant to get justice for Linda and her
[13:38] family. He implied that he agreed that
[13:41] it was all one big awful accident, but that Linda's
[13:45] family needed her body so that they could lay her to rest.
[13:49] Somehow, Rathbun bought this hook, line, and sinker, and this
[13:53] would be his unraveling. On November 24th, 8 days after
[13:59] she'd vanished, Rathbun finally agreed to lead detectives into
[14:03] the Angeles National Forest. He took them to a shallow grave
[14:08] on a wooded slope and watched as deputies dug.
[14:11] They found Linda, and the autopsy concluded that she'd
[14:15] been asphyxiated and that she had also sustained blunt force
[14:19] trauma to the head. She had been subjected to other
[14:23] forms of disturbing assault beyond what initially passed for
[14:27] the central crime. Her blood alcohol level was
[14:30] measured at almost twice the threshold for legal
[14:33] intoxication. The case went to trial in Los
[14:37] Angeles County in the autumn of 1996 and ran for roughly 5
[14:42] weeks. The prosecution didn't have an
[14:45] eyewitness, but it didn't need one.
[14:47] It had the photographs in the trash, the planner, the lease
[14:50] contract, the cleaned car that wouldn't quite come clean, the
[14:54] changing stories, and the comment about being the last
[14:58] person to see her. They also had the implements
[15:01] found in the apartment and the body Rathbun himself had LED
[15:05] detectives to. The jury returned guilty
[15:08] verdicts on all counts, and on December 16th, 1996, Charles
[15:13] Rathbun was sentenced to life in a California State prison
[15:17] without the possibility of parole.
[15:21] What's never been formally answered, and what remains an
[15:24] unsolved mystery, is whether Linda Sobek was the first young
[15:28] woman he did this to, or only the last.
[15:32] Investigators in Ohio, Michigan, and California spent years
[15:36] trying to clear or close the cases his movement seemed to
[15:40] brush up against. However, a handful of those
[15:43] cases have since resolved without his name attached.
[15:47] The Pandelios case in particular was eventually solved with a
[15:50] different suspect entirely, which complicates the easy
[15:54] serial predator narrative that built up around Rathbun.
[15:58] Personally, I don't think Linda was his first victim, but
[16:01] proving that seems incredibly difficult at this point.
[16:05] That said, it's possible that his other criminal activities
[16:09] were simply all leading up to this event, that he'd wanted to
[16:12] take a life, but for whatever reason hadn't done so until he
[16:16] met Linda. What isn't in dispute is that
[16:20] Linda Sobek, on the last morning of her life, did everything
[16:23] anyone could reasonably ask. She told her mother where she
[16:27] was going and confirmed the day's schedule with her Booker.
[16:31] She hadn't put her trust in someone who wasn't a known
[16:34] quantity. She was going on a professional
[16:37] shoot with a real photographer. Unfortunately, it still wasn't
[16:41] enough, because the man waiting for her at that Denny's had been
[16:45] quietly rehearsing for the moment for longer than anyone
[16:48] yet realized. Three friends are having drinks
[16:55] in a heated garage in rural Wisconsin, and two of them are
[16:59] listening to the third tell hunting stories.
[17:02] Then mid conversation, the third one calmly says he hopes they'll
[17:06] forgive him if he has to put them both down, and he's
[17:10] reaching for the weapon before the sentence is finished.
[17:13] The town of Germania sits West of Tigerton in Shawano County,
[17:17] Wisconsin. It's the kind of place where
[17:20] deer season is a real season on the calendar, and where folks
[17:24] down the road from each other tend to know one another's
[17:27] pickup trucks. Rick Roundy lived there, and the
[17:32] evening of November 12th, 2025 carried the same low key rhythm
[17:37] that defined a lot of his nights.
[17:40] Roundy had a detached garage on his property, and inside it he'd
[17:44] built a small bar. It wasn't fancy.
[17:48] There were a few stools and not much more.
[17:51] It was somewhere to land after a day in the woods.
[17:55] That night, his closest hunting partner was over.
[17:59] The man court documents would later refer to only as victim #2
[18:05] the two had planned on talking through stories from the deer
[18:08] season and unwinding. Just regular stuff, nothing
[18:12] special. The third man at the bar was
[18:15] Brent Hoffman. He was 74, lived just down the
[18:20] road, and had haunted with both of them for more than a decade.
[18:25] By victim #2's account, Hoffman had always been a bit of an
[18:28] oddball, A hermit, a bit weird, but never trouble.
[18:34] Not once in all those years on adjoining hunting land had there
[18:39] been a fight or a flare up or even a sharp word between them.
[18:45] Hoffman showed up that evening with a big iron on his hip, and
[18:48] the surviving hunter would later tell investigators that he
[18:51] seemed to be drinking heavily by the time he sat down.
[18:55] That wasn't unusual in itself, and Hoffman was often pretty
[18:58] heavy into the bottle by the time the men got together.
[19:03] The three of them poured drinks and settled in around the bar.
[19:07] They talked deer hunting the way men in northern Wisconsin do
[19:11] when the weather starts to turn. By every account given to the
[19:15] Shawano County Sheriff's Office, nothing about that conversation
[19:19] was tense, and nothing was off color or accusatory.
[19:23] There was no buried grudge surfacing and there were no
[19:27] disputes between any of them. It was just an ordinary night.
[19:32] Then, without warning, Hoffman said something that made the air
[19:35] go cold, according to the criminal complaint.
[19:39] He told the other two, quote, I hope you'll excuse me if I have
[19:43] to kill you guys. Victim #2 told deputies the
[19:47] comment came out of nowhere, that Hoffman had never said
[19:50] anything remotely like it before.
[19:54] Then after delivering his seemingly quote UN quote polite
[19:57] statement, Hoffman started blasting.
[20:00] The shots came without buildup or warning and they caught Ricky
[20:04] Roundy as he came around a corner of the garage.
[20:07] Roundy went down. The surviving victim watched it
[20:11] happen, then bolted into the main house and locked the door
[20:14] behind him. He grabbed A Ruger that he kept
[20:17] on the property, loaded it, and sat down on an Ottoman near a
[20:22] glass door, and from there he called the cops.
[20:26] The dispatcher could hear everything.
[20:29] Victim #2 told the operator that a man named Brent had shot his
[20:33] friend, that he didn't know if his friend was still alive.
[20:38] He told her that if Brent tried to come into the house, he'd
[20:41] shoot. The 911 call captured the next
[20:44] several seconds in real time. Glass shattered.
[20:48] The victim fired by the district attorney's later account.
[20:51] Twice he told the dispatcher he thought Brent had gone down.
[20:56] Police later determined that Hoffman had pursued victim #2
[21:00] from the garage to the main house and had tried to get
[21:03] inside. The surviving man had fired
[21:06] through the glass pane of the door, sending shards into
[21:09] Hoffman's face and head. By the time deputies pulled into
[21:13] the driveway, the man who'd opened fire in the garage ambush
[21:17] needed serious medical attention.
[21:20] And I have to say, the mugshot of Brent Hoffman is horrific and
[21:24] I've never really seen an injury like that before.
[21:27] It appears as though this was caused by glass shattering into
[21:30] his eyes, though it's not entirely clear from the
[21:34] reporting on it so far. When Shawano County deputies
[21:38] arrived, they found a man propped against the side of the
[21:41] house, bleeding from his face. He identified himself as Brent,
[21:47] and he denied having a weapon, but then admitted he had an
[21:50] empty holster on his hip. He asked the deputy why he'd
[21:54] been shot by the cops, and the deputy told him that police
[21:57] hadn't fired a single round, according to the report.
[22:01] Hoffman responded with thank you and I love you, the kind of
[22:07] phrase a person says when they're either deeply confused
[22:10] or trying to play a role. Inside the detached garage,
[22:14] deputies found Ricky Roundy. Sadly, he'd succumbed to
[22:18] multiple shots, according to the autopsy referenced in the
[22:22] complaint, and there was nothing the first responders could do
[22:25] for him at the Shawano County Jail.
[22:29] When officers told him he was being processed for slaying his
[22:32] friend, he reportedly responded that he'd never hurt anybody.
[22:37] Shawano County District Attorney Gregory Parker didn't dance
[22:41] around what the file showed. He told the court plainly that
[22:46] what had happened in that garage was a slaying in cold blood.
[22:50] Hoffman was charged with first degree intentional homicide as
[22:54] well as the same sort of charges for what he attempted to do to
[22:58] victim #2. At his 1st court appearance on
[23:02] November 18th, 2025, the State asked for $1,000,000 cash bond.
[23:08] Hoffman's attorney, Eric Mcalek, argued for 1/4 of that, telling
[23:14] the court that the facts of the case were perplexing and that
[23:17] his client didn't appear to be a flight risk.
[23:20] The judge sided with the prosecution and Hoffman was also
[23:24] ordered to have no contact with the victims families and no
[23:28] contact with the surviving hunter.
[23:31] He was also ordered to surrender all weapons forbidden from
[23:35] travel outside Wisconsin and to maintain absolute sobriety while
[23:40] the case moved forward. Those last terms wouldn't be
[23:43] necessary since, as it turned out, he wasn't going to post
[23:47] bail, and instead he sat rotting in the slammer through the
[23:50] winter and into the spring. On May 21st, 2026, Hoffman
[23:57] appeared in court again and entered a plea of not guilty to
[24:00] both counts. Roundy's family released a
[24:04] statement through a spokesperson in the days after his passing.
[24:08] They described him as a wonderful man whose untimely
[24:11] loss had devastated everyone close to him, thank the
[24:14] community for the outpouring of support, and asked plainly for
[24:19] privacy. The legal filing stacking up
[24:22] across Shawana were by then doing all the talking for them.
[24:28] For me, I think the most unsettling part of the file is
[24:31] the absence at the center of it. Since there's no motive in the
[24:34] criminal complaint and no precipitating argument, the
[24:38] surviving hunter sat across from investigators and told them
[24:42] plainly that he could not think of a single thing that could
[24:46] have turned the evening into a sudden act of violence.
[24:50] Hoffman himself, in his own words to deputies, denied that
[24:54] anything had happened at all. In most cases like this, even
[24:59] the ones that look senseless on a headline, you can usually
[25:02] trace the evening backward and find the snag the moment
[25:06] something tightened. This case doesn't appear to have
[25:09] one, at least not yet. Three men sat down to have a
[25:14] drink and talk about deer, and only two of them got to walk out
[25:18] of that garage. Personally, and this is just
[25:22] speculation on my part, I do have to wonder if there was some
[25:26] sort of conflict brewing underneath that hasn't come to
[25:29] the surface yet. I have to question whether
[25:32] Hoffman may have began acting bizarrely as some sort of cover
[25:36] for the true 'cause of the attack or as a potential, I'll
[25:40] thought out defense. Some people have this false idea
[25:44] that if you just act crazy or deranged enough, you'll somehow
[25:48] escape legal culpability for your actions.
[25:52] Or perhaps I'm just looking for some way to explain a truly
[25:54] random and disturbed act and somehow make it make sense.
[26:02] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy, with my usual reminder to hit that
[26:05] subscribe button and the notification bell if you're
[26:08] enjoying my content. Also, don't forget to share this
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[26:14] content, cold cases, and mysteries.
[26:21] On October 21st, 1996, a park Ranger pushing into one of the
[26:26] more remote canyons of Death Valley spotted something
[26:29] glinting in the wash. It was a green minivan, sunk to
[26:33] its axles, 3 tires flat. The doors were closed and the
[26:38] keys were gone. Inside, he found German language
[26:42] brochures and an American flag that seemed to be entirely out
[26:45] of place. The four people who'd driven the
[26:48] van into the Canyon were already long gone, and for the next 13
[26:53] years, nobody would know what had really happened to them.
[26:59] The family had touched down at Seatac Airport on July 8th,
[27:02] 1996, then connected to Los Angeles, where they collected
[27:07] the keys to a brand new Green Plymouth Voyager.
[27:11] There were four of them, all from Dresden in the former East
[27:14] Germany. Egbert Rimkus was 34, an
[27:18] architect with the love of the outdoors and at least one prior
[27:21] trip to the American Southwest behind him.
[27:25] His girlfriend, Cornelia Meyer was 27.
[27:29] Each had brought one child along, Egbert's 11 year old son
[27:33] George Weber and Cornelia's four year old son Max Meyer.
[27:38] They had a return flight booked from LAX on July 27th, giving
[27:43] them about 2 1/2 weeks to roam the western parks.
[27:47] On July 22nd, they pulled into Death Valley and stopped at the
[27:52] Furnace Creek Visitor Center, where they picked up a German
[27:55] language park guide. That night they camped near
[27:59] Telescope Peak in Hanaba Canyon, already well off the standard
[28:04] tourist track. The next morning they headed
[28:07] deeper into the Backcountry. They poked around an abandoned
[28:11] mining settlement called Warm Spring.
[28:13] Cornelia signed the dusty visitor log book on behalf of
[28:17] all four of them. Underneath the signatures she
[28:20] added a short note in German and the translation amounts to a
[28:23] casual line saying they were heading over the pass.
[28:27] The pass almost certainly was Mangle.
[28:31] Mangle Pass is one of the more punishing routes in a region
[28:34] that is famous for its inhospitable environment.
[28:37] It's a rugged 4 wheel drive track that climbs out of Butte
[28:40] Valley over a saddle of broken rock and drops into Goal or Wash
[28:44] on the far side. Locals who know the area will
[28:48] tell you that even modified off road vehicles get hung up on it.
[28:52] A rented suburban minivan was, to put it mildly, the wrong
[28:56] machine for the job. The family had been pushing
[29:00] their luck for hours by then. Before tackling the pass, they'd
[29:04] stopped at Butte Valley's geologists cabin, a tiny stone
[29:08] refuge built around 1930 by a prospector named ASA Russell.
[29:14] When investigators later got inside the abandoned van, they
[29:18] found a small American flag tucked among the family's
[29:21] belongings. That flag had been taken from
[29:24] the cabin where it usually flew as an informal marker for anyone
[29:28] who happened to find the place. What happened after they crested
[29:33] Mengele has to be inferred because no one saw them alive
[29:37] again. The likeliest scenario is that
[29:41] they descended the western side, realized the terrain was even
[29:45] worse than what they'd just come through, and decided to loop
[29:48] back rather than retrace their steps.
[29:52] Their German language map showed a tempting shortcut back into
[29:55] the main valley through a place called Anvil Spring Canyon.
[29:59] On paper, the Canyon Rd. appeared perfectly navigable,
[30:03] but on the ground, it absolutely wasn't.
[30:07] When the Ranger spotted the Plymouth Voyager that day, it
[30:10] was sitting in the wash of Anvil Canyon, about 2 1/2 miles below
[30:14] Willow Spring. The vehicle was lodged up to its
[30:18] axles in soft sand, and both rear tires were flat, as was the
[30:23] front left. Tracks in the wash showed the
[30:26] family had tried to keep driving for at least 200 feet after the
[30:30] rear tires failed, gouging the bare rims into the Canyon floor
[30:34] before the van gave up. Inside, the scene was almost
[30:38] domestic. There were clothes and toys, the
[30:42] German park guide, toiletries, food wrappers and that little
[30:48] American flag from the geologist cabin.
[30:51] The keys were gone, which meant whoever had walked away from the
[30:54] van had done so deliberately. They locked up the way a tourist
[30:59] locks up at a trailhead before heading off for a quick look
[31:02] around. Except the look around in this
[31:06] case was an attempt to walk out of one of the harshest
[31:09] landscapes in North America in the middle of July.
[31:14] The search was substantial, and helicopters crisscrossed the
[31:17] canyons for days. Ground teams swept the most
[31:20] obvious escape routes on foot, working their way back up toward
[31:24] Butte Valley and N toward Warm Spring.
[31:28] Those were the corridors any experienced desert hiker would
[31:31] have considered, but they turned up nothing.
[31:35] The official theory eventually hardened around the idea that
[31:38] the German family had walked one of those familiar routes and
[31:42] succumbed to the heat. They had later been buried under
[31:45] sand or debris by a flash flood, and with no remains and no
[31:49] leads, the case went cold. And that's where this case would
[31:54] have likely stayed forever but for the obsession of one man.
[31:58] But I'll get to that in a brief moment.
[32:02] Back in Germany, the families of Egbert and Cornelia were left in
[32:06] the worst kind of limbo. Bank balances stopped moving and
[32:09] the credit cards never registered another charge.
[32:13] The return flight from Los Angeles to Frankfurt on July
[32:16] 27th left without any of them aboard, and the rental company
[32:21] eventually reported the Green Voyager as overdue.
[32:25] There was no ransom demand and no bodies, just an empty van
[32:30] rusting in a Canyon 9000 kilometers from home.
[32:35] Tabloids in Europe floated theories that the family had
[32:38] faked their own disappearance or had been caught up in some crime
[32:42] ring, but none of it held together.
[32:45] The bleakest possibility was always the likeliest, though it
[32:49] perhaps doesn't move papers in the way a crime ring does.
[32:53] Four people had vanished into a desert that swallows people
[32:56] regularly, and the trail had gone stone cold because the
[32:59] environment swallowed them up. That's where things would have
[33:03] stayed if not for a retired aerospace engineer named Tom
[33:06] Mahood. He's a search and rescue
[33:08] volunteer in Southern California with a serious interest in cold
[33:12] cases. In 2009, after digging through
[33:17] the Inyo County sheriff's records and spending months
[33:20] going over topographic maps, the light bulb went off.
[33:24] Mahood came around to a conclusion the original
[33:27] searchers had ruled out as a waste of time.
[33:30] The official assumption was that the German family wouldn't have
[33:33] walked S further into the wilderness because no rational
[33:37] person familiar with the area ever would.
[33:41] Mahood thought that was exactly the assumption that had doomed
[33:44] the search. Since they weren't behaving
[33:47] rationally and they weren't familiar with the environment,
[33:51] they were exhausted, panicking foreign tourists with no sense
[33:54] of scale in a landscape unlike anything back home in Europe.
[33:58] The fact that they took a van on such an expedition should have
[34:02] perhaps been the first clue that all rationality should be
[34:06] tossed. Aside from the vans location,
[34:10] the topography offers a deceptive view, a wash that
[34:14] seems to lead somewhere, and mountains that look closer than
[34:17] they are. Add into this the fact that even
[34:21] rational and experienced hikers in these sorts of situations
[34:25] make what appear to be paradoxical decisions.
[34:28] If they'd seen the outline of the China Lake Naval Weapons
[34:31] Station marked off to the South on their map, they might have
[34:35] convinced themselves they could hike out that way.
[34:38] The reality is that the route is roughly 25 miles of brutal,
[34:42] waterless desert, an absolute wasteland.
[34:46] On November 12th, 2009, Mahood and a fellow hiker named Les
[34:52] Walker were working a search grid in that exact direction.
[34:56] When Walker called over, he had found bones.
[35:00] Scattered around them were items the searchers recognized from
[35:03] old case photos, a Sprite bottle, fragments of clothing,
[35:08] sandals, the spine of a German English Dictionary, and a wine
[35:13] bottle. Again, some of these items
[35:17] really give you clues that this family wasn't properly
[35:20] provisioned for what they were attempting to do.
[35:24] Meyer's passport was still legible after 13 years in the
[35:27] open, as was her bank card. The two adult skeletons were
[35:32] later identified through their belongings and through dental
[35:35] records sent over from Germany. Other remains were also
[35:39] recovered in the same area, but had been too long exposed to the
[35:43] desert sun for a positive identification.
[35:48] From the location of the remains and from a trail of discarded
[35:52] personal items scattered between the van and the final site, it's
[35:56] possible to roughly sketch the family's last hours on foot.
[36:00] They had walked roughly 6 miles cross country in extreme heat,
[36:04] away from any reliable water sources.
[36:07] They had carried what they could grab from the vehicle, and the
[36:10] four year old almost certainly had to be carried himself for
[36:13] long stretches by one of the adults.
[36:16] They appear to have stopped at one point, possibly to wait out
[36:20] the worst of the daytime heat in the shadow of a rock outcrop,
[36:24] before pushing on toward an empty horizon.
[36:27] The final site sits in a shallow wash with partial shade, but no
[36:32] real escape from temperatures that climb well past 120°F by
[36:38] mid afternoon. The straight line distance from
[36:41] that final resting site to the nearest paved Rd. today is still
[36:45] more than a dozen miles of open desert without a single reliable
[36:49] spring along the way. In the end, the disappearance of
[36:54] the Death Valley Germans was almost certainly not a crime,
[36:58] but a brutal lesson in how deceptive desert danger can be.
[37:02] From a map, the route may have looked survivable.
[37:05] From the van, the mountains may have looked close, the wash may
[37:10] have looked like a path, and the open horizon may have suggested
[37:15] rescue was only a hard walk away.
[37:18] But the valley doesn't reveal its scale.
[37:20] Honestly, distances stretch, heat destroys judgment, shade is
[37:26] rare, and a dry Canyon that looks passable can become a
[37:31] trap. The family had already driven
[37:34] deep into terrain their vehicle was never meant to handle, and
[37:37] once the van failed, every choice became worse than the
[37:41] last. Theories about escape, foul play
[37:45] or criminal involvement made for dramatic speculation, but the
[37:50] evidence points to something simpler and sadder.
[37:54] These were 4 tourists overwhelmed by an unforgiving
[37:57] landscape. But of course that undersells
[38:00] what happened to a certain degree.
[38:03] While two of these people ought to have known better, I can't
[38:06] help think of Max and George in those last moments, and how
[38:10] unfair and tragic the entire event was.
[38:14] But that's not really to blame the parents here either, at
[38:17] least not fully, since education about the danger of desert
[38:20] environments is remarkably poor. Deserts are some of the most
[38:25] inhospitable places on earth, and even well provisioned,
[38:29] experienced hikers perish fairly frequently in situations like
[38:33] this. I can't help but think that
[38:36] today such a tragedy could have been avoided by a simple quick
[38:39] Google search, but sadly information was harder to come
[38:43] by at the time. At 18 minutes past three on a
[38:48] summer afternoon, a man sat handcuffed on the warm asphalt
[38:52] of an eerie parking lot, begging the officers around him to
[38:56] hurry. Locked around his neck was a
[38:58] metal collar, and inside that collar a bomb was counting down.
[39:04] He'd already told them a story that sounded too strange to be
[39:07] true. Strangers had jumped him, he
[39:09] said, fasten the thing to his throat and ordered him to rob a
[39:13] bank. The officers kept their distance
[39:17] and waited for the bomb squad that could cut it off him.
[39:19] But that squad was still minutes away.
[39:22] And then, with a local news camera trained on him and the
[39:27] whole scene going out live, the timer reached 0.
[39:31] This case has become known as the Pizza Bomber Incident, and
[39:35] despite being solved, it contains more unsolved mysteries
[39:39] than most truly unresolved cases.
[39:43] Brian Wells was 46 years old and by almost every account he
[39:47] hadn't lived the most interesting life.
[39:49] Back in 1973, when he was a 16 year old sophomore, he dropped
[39:55] out of East High School to work as a mechanic.
[39:58] Unfortunately for him, this profession turned out to be too
[40:01] demanding for him and he never became a full-fledged mechanic.
[40:06] People who knew him described him as somewhat simple minded,
[40:10] which is something you're probably going to want to keep
[40:12] in mind as I explained this case, For roughly A decade he
[40:17] delivered pizzas for a little shop called Mamma Mia's
[40:19] Pizzeria. The morning of August 28th, 2003
[40:24] started like any other shift. Then just after 1:30, the phone
[40:30] at the pizzeria rang. The call came from a pay phone
[40:34] outside a gas station nearby, and whoever was on the line was
[40:38] hard to understand, so the owner handed the phone to Wells.
[40:42] The order was simple enough. 2 pizzas delivered to 8631 Peach
[40:47] Street, only a few miles away. That spot was the base of a
[40:52] television transmission tower sitting at the end of a dirt Rd.
[40:56] ringed by woods. What happened at the foot of
[41:00] that tower has never been fully nailed down and remains an
[41:04] unsolved mystery till this day. Law enforcement later concluded
[41:08] that Wells arrived expecting one thing and found another waiting
[41:12] for him. According to that version, he'd
[41:16] been told the plan involved a fake bomb, a harmless prop to
[41:20] make him look like a victim if he were ever caught at the
[41:24] tower. The story goes he learned the
[41:27] device was very real after he'd had it affixed to his neck.
[41:32] By then, of course, he was too deep in it to actually step away
[41:35] from the plot since, well, he had a real bomb strapped to his
[41:39] neck. I've never been in that
[41:42] situation, and I don't imagine you've been either, but your
[41:46] leverage tends to go out the window, I would imagine.
[41:50] His family has always rejected that account flatly, and in
[41:53] their telling, Brian was ambushed by strangers at the
[41:57] tower and forced into the whole nightmare against his will.
[42:02] What the evidence does suggest is that there was a struggle and
[42:05] that more than one person was there in those woods.
[42:08] A weapon was reportedly fired to force his compliance, and
[42:12] witnesses in the area did say they heard a shot.
[42:16] However, according to the police narrative, this was only done
[42:20] after Brian discovered he didn't get what he had bargained for.
[42:25] Whatever was said at the tower, what came off that desolate road
[42:29] and into the city was a piece of work.
[42:32] The bomb was built into a hinged metal collar that locked around
[42:35] the neck like an oversized handcuff, and four key holes sat
[42:39] under the chin. Behind them was a rectangular
[42:42] housing packed with two pipe bombs and a pair of kitchen
[42:45] timers, with a separate electronic timer dangling down
[42:49] over the chest. The thing was also studded with
[42:53] decoys, apparently in an attempt to throw off any bomb squad
[42:57] specialists encountering the device.
[43:00] There were wires that connected to nothing, a toy cell phone and
[43:04] warning stickers meant to confuse anyone who tried to read
[43:07] it. Bolted to that horror was a set
[43:10] of instructions, and inside Wells's car, investigators found
[43:15] 9 handwritten pages addressed chillingly to the bomb hostage.
[43:20] The pages laid out a scavenger hunt, robbed the bank first, the
[43:24] note said, then drive to a series of locations on a tight
[43:28] clock. Along the way, collect keys and
[43:32] codes that would supposedly buy time and eventually remove the
[43:36] collar after perfect compliance. He'd be watched the entire
[43:40] route, the pages warned, and any move toward the authorities
[43:44] would set the bomb off. Scrawled across the bottom was
[43:47] one last shove. He should act first and think
[43:50] later, the note warned, or he wouldn't survive, according to
[43:56] the official narrative. To sell the illusion that he was
[43:59] a victim, Wells was coached on what to tell the police.
[44:03] He was to claim that three men had forced the device onto him
[44:07] and we're holding him hostage. In case the caller wasn't
[44:11] menacing enough, he was handed a weapon for the robbery itself.
[44:16] It was an improvised weapon made to look like a cane, but in
[44:19] actuality, it had similar capacities to a shotgun.
[44:24] At around 2:30, Brian Wells walked into APNC Bank branch at
[44:29] the Summit Town Center, just off Peach Street.
[44:32] He got in line like any customer with somewhere to be, and when
[44:36] he reached the counter he slid a note across to the teller.
[44:41] The note demanded $250,000 and claimed the bomb on his neck
[44:45] would go off in 15 minutes. The teller simply couldn't move
[44:49] that kind of cash that fast. But what she could hand over was
[44:54] a bag holding 8702 dollars. Wells took it and walked out,
[45:01] and the footage and witness accounts from inside the bank
[45:04] are some of the strangest details in the whole affair.
[45:08] By the time he reached the counter, Wells was calmly
[45:11] sucking on a lollipop. One witness later said he
[45:15] strolled out swinging his cane in the bag of money, almost like
[45:18] Charlie Chaplin. At 38 minutes past two, someone
[45:23] inside the bank dialed 911 and reported a man leaving with what
[45:27] looked like a bomb wrapped around his neck.
[45:32] Wells got back in his car and started working the scavenger
[45:35] hunt, apparently to buy himself time.
[45:39] I say apparently here because ultimately we don't truly know
[45:43] to what extent he believed that was all necessary.
[45:47] Some have noted that his calm demeanor during the robbery
[45:50] seems inconsistent with someone who believed the bomb was
[45:53] actually real. He reportedly finished the first
[45:57] task and was moving toward the second when the police caught up
[46:00] with him. They found him standing outside
[46:02] his vehicle and took no chances. They cuffed him, walked him back
[46:06] from the car, and sat him down on the pavement.
[46:09] And there, on the ground, Brian Wells told them his story.
[46:14] Not the real story, the one he was instructed to present.
[46:19] This again is another piece of evidence to suggest that maybe
[46:23] he truly believed he was in on the whole plot rather than a
[46:27] tool of some sick minds. Three people had strapped the
[46:31] bomb to him, he said, given him the weapon, and promised he'd
[46:35] perish unless he robbed the bank and finished the tasks.
[46:41] The officers made the right call by the book, and they didn't try
[46:44] to pull the device off him because nobody there knew how.
[46:48] Instead, they cleared the area, pushed pedestrians back, and
[46:52] made sure he couldn't trigger it himself.
[46:56] The bomb squad got the call at 4 minutes past 3.
[46:59] That was roughly half an hour after the 1st 911 call from the
[47:03] bank and about 10 minutes after Wells had been handcuffed.
[47:08] Heavy traffic slowed the squad's drive across the city and at 18
[47:12] minutes past 33 minutes before they arrived, the timer ran out.
[47:18] The blast tore a fist sized hole in his chest and Brian Wells was
[47:22] gone within seconds. A local ABC affiliate had been
[47:27] broadcasting the standoff live, but a technical glitch meant
[47:31] viewers didn't see the actual detonation, which was a small
[47:35] mercy. The footage still leaked, and
[47:38] within weeks a copy had made its way to a radio shock jock in
[47:42] Washington who posted it online, and from there it spread to
[47:46] every corner of the early Internet.
[47:49] There's a grim footnote to the recovery.
[47:52] The caller survived the explosion intact, still locked
[47:55] around its victim. To preserve the device for
[47:58] analysis, investigators had no choice but to perform an
[48:02] operation of sorts to save the device.
[48:06] Forensic analysis would eventually conclude that even if
[48:09] the bomb squad had arrived, the device would likely have been
[48:12] too complex to safely remove in a reasonable amount of time.
[48:18] The collar had never really been made for removal at all, despite
[48:22] what the instructions said. There's one more cruelty buried
[48:26] in those nine pages, which contained the scavenger hunt to
[48:29] save his life long after the fact, investigators actually
[48:33] drove the scavenger hunt route themselves against the clock the
[48:37] notes had set. They couldn't finish it.
[48:40] The timing was impossible. Which means that whatever Brian
[48:44] Wells did that afternoon, whether he robbed the bank
[48:47] perfectly or not, he was never going to make it.
[48:51] He'd been a condemned man from the moment the collar closed,
[48:55] and the people behind it likely knew it.
[48:57] And as you'll see, this group didn't care for loose ends or
[49:01] half measures. For a while, the case looked
[49:05] unsolvable, and it wasn't even necessarily proven that there
[49:09] was anyone else involved in the crime.
[49:12] Then, less than a month later, the phone rang.
[49:16] And with that call, everything would change.
[49:21] On September 20th, 2003, a man named William Rothstein called
[49:27] the police with a confession that had nothing on its face to
[49:31] do with the bank. There was a body in his garage,
[49:35] he told them, specifically in a chest freezer.
[49:40] When investigators arrived at his house near that very
[49:43] television tower on Peach Rd. they found exactly that.
[49:48] The frozen remains turned out to belong to a man named James
[49:51] Roden. And let's just say he kept some
[49:53] very interesting company. Here's where the whole thing
[49:58] starts to fold in on itself. Roden had been the long time
[50:02] boyfriend of a woman named Marjorie Deal Armstrong.
[50:05] He'd been slain with a 12 gauge during a dispute over money, Or
[50:09] at least that's the story the cops were sold at the time.
[50:13] According to Rothstein, Deal Armstrong had done it, then
[50:17] called him in a panic to help her hide the evidence.
[50:20] He claimed she'd paid him $2000 to clean the scene and stash the
[50:25] body. After he made that call to
[50:27] police, Rothstein left behind a strange note suggesting that he
[50:31] had intended to end himself. He also insisted this action had
[50:36] nothing to do with the pizza delivery man and the bomb
[50:39] caller, which is an odd thing to write if you're truly not
[50:42] involved. Last I checked, when you declare
[50:46] that you definitely didn't commit a crime for no reason
[50:49] whatsoever, as a rule, you've generally been involved.
[50:54] To understand how an ordinary pizza driver ended up with a
[50:57] bomb on his neck, we have to understand the small, strange
[51:00] circle of people who built it. They were misfits who'd known
[51:04] each other, in some cases, for decades.
[51:07] And Marjorie Deal Armstrong was the center of gravity, the
[51:11] ringmaster of this weird circus. Years before, she'd been an
[51:16] exemplary student who earned a master's degree from a local
[51:19] college. Then, somewhere in her 20s, her
[51:23] mental health came apart, and unlike most people who
[51:26] eventually successfully get treatment, she didn't.
[51:31] She lived for years with serious illness, including bipolar
[51:34] disorder, and she left a long trail of partners who met some
[51:38] pretty grim fates. Back in 1984, she'd fired six
[51:42] shots into a sleeping boyfriend. She was acquitted of that one,
[51:46] having claimed self-defense, but it set a pattern that's hard to
[51:50] ignore. That said, looking into it just
[51:54] briefly, it very well may have been legitimate self-defense,
[51:59] despite the later turn her life would take.
[52:02] In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it probably was, but I
[52:06] can't imagine the situation didn't cause her further mental
[52:10] anguish, which perhaps explains a lot of what's to come.
[52:15] William Rothstein was an old flame of hers from decades
[52:18] earlier. A handyman and part time shop
[52:20] teacher with a brilliant, restless mind.
[52:23] He'd been mixed up in a serious crime once before, back in 1977,
[52:29] when he handed a weapon to a friend who used it to cut down a
[52:32] romantic rival. He was, by reputation, one of a
[52:36] loose group of people locals called the Fractured
[52:39] Intellectuals. Old Billy Rothstein had actually
[52:43] coined this term and spread it around eerie, portraying his
[52:46] group as smart, alienated misfits.
[52:49] Honestly, the whole thing sounds incredibly cringy and would be
[52:54] comical if they didn't commit such disturbing acts.
[52:57] Wait, scratch that. It's still comical regardless,
[53:01] and you'll see that the bar was pretty low to be considered a
[53:04] quote UN quote fractured intellectual.
[53:08] Bilbo Rothstein is the man investigators came to see as the
[53:11] builder of the collar bomb itself.
[53:15] Then there was Kenneth Barnes, a retired television repairman who
[53:18] dealt crack on the side and counted himself one of Deal
[53:21] Armstrong's fishing buddies. And there was Floyd Stockton, an
[53:26] ex convict and registered pervert who was then currently
[53:30] on the Lam, living under an assumed identity as a fugitive
[53:34] in Rothstein's house. Stockton would later tell
[53:38] investigators that he was the one who fastened the collar
[53:41] around Brian's neck at the tower.
[53:43] So yeah, with that said, we've got some real intellectual heavy
[53:47] hitters here. Clearly, I say, without a hint
[53:50] of sarcasm, The motive, once it surfaced, was completely
[53:55] bizarre. When it was discovered Marjorie
[53:58] Deal Armstrong wanted her father gone, and she believed her
[54:01] elderly father, Harold Deal, was burning through money, she
[54:05] considered her inheritance. So the group sat around and
[54:09] talked about how to fix that, the sort of thing high minded
[54:12] intellectuals do when they're not dealing crack.
[54:15] And the conversation turned to a price.
[54:18] Barnes reportedly told her he'd be willing to eliminate her
[54:21] father for $250,000, which is the exact sum the note demanded
[54:26] from the bank teller. The entire collar bomb
[54:29] spectacle, the scavenger hunt, the disguised weapon, all of it
[54:35] was a fundraising scheme for a quasi professional hit.
[54:39] As for why Brian Wells himself ended up wearing a live device
[54:43] instead of the prop he may have been promised, the working
[54:46] theory is bleak. The plotters wanted fewer mouths
[54:50] who could expose the plot, and a man who walks away from a scheme
[54:53] like this is a man who can talk. A man left in a parking lot with
[54:58] a real bomb wouldn't. And James Rhoden, the body in
[55:02] the freezer, fits the same logic.
[55:05] He'd been living with Deal Armstrong close enough to know
[55:08] things, and investigators believe he was cut down to keep
[55:12] him from breathing a word about the plan.
[55:16] The bodies in the timeline started pointing in One
[55:18] Direction. In January 2005, Deal Armstrong
[55:23] pleaded guilty for what happened to Roden, drawing a sentence of
[55:27] 7 to 20 years. A few months later, she made a
[55:30] fateful decision, and she told a state trooper she knew things
[55:34] about the Wells case. She offered to trade what she
[55:37] knew for a transfer to a softer prison, and across a string of
[55:41] interviews, she admitted she'd supplied the kitchen timers used
[55:45] in the bomb. She pointed at Rothstein as the
[55:48] mastermind, and tellingly, she insisted Wells himself had been
[55:52] in on the plan. Rothstein, the one person who
[55:57] could have answered the deepest questions, was already beyond
[56:00] reach. He'd been slowly consumed by
[56:03] cancer and passed away on July 30th, 2004, at the age of 60.
[56:09] Because he was gone, he was, of course, never charged, only
[56:13] named later as an unindicted party to the crime who didn't
[56:17] live to see a courtroom. Stockton, the fugitive, was
[56:21] eventually granted immunity for his cooperation, though his
[56:25] death from natural causes meant he was never actually called to
[56:29] the stand. The last domino was Barnes, and
[56:34] late in 2005, while he was sitting in jail on unrelated
[56:37] crack charges, he started talking to a visiting relative
[56:42] and the relative turned him in. I've got to say, it's a bit
[56:45] disturbing that such a great intellectual like Barnes
[56:48] couldn't see that yapping about his involvement in a high
[56:50] profile case wouldn't end well for him.
[56:55] In July 2007, a federal prosecutor stood up and
[56:59] announced charges against Deal, Armstrong and Barnes, naming her
[57:03] as the mastermind of the whole affair.
[57:07] This was, of course, different from her account of events,
[57:10] which placed the now deceased Rothstein as the puppet master
[57:13] behind the whole grim affair. The prosecution's position was
[57:18] stark and really does form the core of the unsolved mystery
[57:22] surrounding the case today. Wells had been involved from the
[57:26] beginning, they argued, but his own partners had fitted him with
[57:30] a bomb that was always going to detonate.
[57:33] He was both a perpetrator and a victim, depending on which
[57:36] minute of the day you looked at. According to them, he really
[57:40] truly believed that he was in on it, and may have even believed
[57:43] that up until the very end, though it remains a mystery.
[57:47] Personally, looking at the evidence, I see him more as a
[57:51] simple minded individual who was manipulated by people much more
[57:56] intelligent and nefarious than he was.
[57:59] While he may have had a good faith belief that he was an
[58:01] active participant, in my mind he was taken advantage of and
[58:06] was, in the end, more victim than anything else.
[58:11] The legal endings came one at a time and Barnes pleaded guilty
[58:14] in 2008 and was handed 45 years later.
[58:18] Cut to 22 1/2 after he testified against Dale Armstrong.
[58:22] She fought hers the whole way, though there were significant
[58:25] questions about whether she was even competent to stand trial
[58:29] given her severe and untreated mental health issues.
[58:33] In the end, though, it was determined that she was fit to
[58:36] stand trial and that she was of reasonably sound mind at the
[58:40] time the pizza bomber event occurred.
[58:43] Honestly I don't see how someone could orchestrate such an
[58:46] elaborate and well thought out plan and still be found not
[58:50] criminally responsible by reason of insanity.
[58:53] She had a clear logical framework for doing what she did
[58:57] and an end goal in mind, even if the entire thing was quite
[59:00] clearly disturbed. In November 2010, a jury
[59:05] convicted her on all counts, and the following February she was
[59:09] sentenced to life in prison, stacked on top of the time she
[59:13] was already serving for Roden. In April 2017, she died behind
[59:18] bars of breast cancer at 68. Barnes, for his part, outlived
[59:23] her by a couple of years and passed away in prison in 2019.
[59:28] There's a detail that surfaced years later that potentially
[59:31] reframes everything, though. This was tied to an individual
[59:35] who had some serious credibility issues, to put it mildly.
[59:39] A woman who'd known Wells, someone he trusted, eventually
[59:44] admitted that she was the one who D handed his name to the
[59:46] plotters. She'd given them his name and
[59:50] his delivery schedule in exchange for money and some
[59:52] dope. She described him in the end as
[59:55] a pushover, and she swore he'd had no idea what was coming.
[1:00:00] If that's true, then the man sucking a lollipop in line at
[1:00:03] the bank wasn't a willing player at all.
[1:00:06] He was a name on a list, picked because he was simple, easily
[1:00:10] manipulated, and unlikely to put up a fight.
[1:00:14] So the question that started this whole thing has never fully
[1:00:17] closed. Was Brian Wells a criminal who
[1:00:20] got tangled in a scheme far darker than he bargained for?
[1:00:25] Or was he simply the easiest man to trick into walking into a
[1:00:28] bank with a bomb locked around his throat?
[1:00:31] In the end, the people who could have answered it took their
[1:00:34] answers into the ground one after another.
[1:00:38] Personally, I think it's a little bit of both, that Brian
[1:00:41] Wells was both a passive victim and an active perpetrator in
[1:00:45] this awful event. At 10:44 on a Saturday morning
[1:00:50] in February 2008, a woman lying face down on the carpet of a
[1:00:54] clothing store in suburban Chicago managed to dial 911 from
[1:00:59] a Bluetooth earpiece. Her hands were taped behind her
[1:01:02] back. Five other women were in the
[1:01:05] room with her, and there was a more sinister presence there as
[1:01:08] well. Within minutes, five of those
[1:01:11] women would be gone. And in the 18 years since that
[1:01:15] morning, no one's been able to determine who the shooter was.
[1:01:20] Tinley Park sits about 30 miles South of downtown Chicago.
[1:01:24] The Brookside Marketplace, an outdoor shopping Plaza on West
[1:01:28] 191st St. was a few years old at the time.
[1:01:32] It had the usual lineup with a Target across the lot, a few sit
[1:01:37] down restaurants, and a handful of clothing stores.
[1:01:41] One of those stores was a Lane Bryant, a national chain that
[1:01:45] sells women's plus size clothing.
[1:01:48] On the morning of February 2nd, 2008, the Lane Bryant opened a
[1:01:53] little before 10. The manager that day was a 42
[1:01:58] year old woman from Joliet named Rhoda McFarland.
[1:02:02] She'd been with the company for years, the kind of employee Co
[1:02:06] workers described as warm and competent with her was one part
[1:02:11] time employee, a 33 year old nursing student who worked
[1:02:15] weekend shifts. She's never been publicly
[1:02:18] identified, and for reasons that'll become clear, that's a
[1:02:22] name still being protected. The store was quiet that
[1:02:26] morning. February in Chicagoland isn't
[1:02:29] peak retail season, and the parking lot wasn't full yet.
[1:02:33] Sometime not long after the doors opened, two customers came
[1:02:37] in to browse. They were Jennifer Bishop, 34,
[1:02:41] who'd driven up from South Bend, IN, and Carrie Hudak Chiuso, 33,
[1:02:46] of Frankfurt. Two women in a clothing store on
[1:02:49] a slow Saturday and nothing about it would have registered
[1:02:53] to anyone watching from the street.
[1:02:56] Just after 10 that morning, a man walked through the front
[1:02:59] door. He was tall, somewhere between 6
[1:03:02] feet and six, two with broad shoulders and a Husky build.
[1:03:07] He was African American, somewhere in his late 20s or
[1:03:10] early 30s. He had three to five thick corn
[1:03:14] rows pulled toward the back of his head, and one of those
[1:03:17] braids hung down past his right cheek with four light green
[1:03:21] beads on the end. He was wearing a dark waist
[1:03:25] length jacket, a charcoal ski cap and black jeans with what
[1:03:29] looked like a cursive G stitched into the back pockets.
[1:03:33] He told the employees he had a delivery problem, and he said
[1:03:36] something about paperwork that needed signing, something about
[1:03:40] needing the managers attention. Whatever the cover story was, it
[1:03:45] was good enough to keep the room calm for a few minutes.
[1:03:48] After all, there was nothing yet to suggest the horror to come.
[1:03:53] The women at the front of the store treated him the way anyone
[1:03:56] treats a delivery driver on a Saturday morning.
[1:03:59] But he was stalling and he was waiting for the room to fill
[1:04:02] out, or maybe waiting until he had everyone's positioning right
[1:04:06] in his head. According to the timeline police
[1:04:09] later assembled, 2 more customers came through the door
[1:04:13] while he was still standing there in his fake delivery guy
[1:04:16] role. Those customers were Sarah
[1:04:18] Safransky, just 22, from Oak Forest, and Connie Woolfolk, 37,
[1:04:26] of Flossmoor. Sarah was the youngest person in
[1:04:29] the building, and Connie, by every account, was a fighter.
[1:04:33] And you're going to want to keep that in mind because it'll be
[1:04:36] important. At some point, the man stopped
[1:04:39] pretending to be a delivery driver, and he pulled out a
[1:04:42] pistol and announced that this was a robbery.
[1:04:46] He told everyone to walk to the back of the store and everyone
[1:04:50] complied, believing that if they just did as he said, the
[1:04:53] nightmare would be over quickly. The stockroom of Elaine Bryant
[1:04:58] isn't a big space. It's the kind of place you'd
[1:05:01] walk past without noticing, full of bins and racks and folded
[1:05:05] inventory. He marched six women into it,
[1:05:09] the manager, Rhoda McFarland, the part time employee and the
[1:05:13] four customers, meaning Bishop, Chiuso, Safransky and Woolfolk.
[1:05:21] He had them lie face down on the floor, and then he used duct
[1:05:25] tape to bind them hands and feet.
[1:05:28] He moved methodically still, and he wasn't panicked, at least not
[1:05:33] yet. The survivor would later
[1:05:35] describe him as calm in those first few minutes, almost
[1:05:39] business like, the way someone might be while changing a tire.
[1:05:44] Whatever robbery he was supposedly running, the math of
[1:05:47] it stops making sense pretty quickly.
[1:05:50] There wasn't much to steal at a Lane Bryant on a Saturday
[1:05:53] morning, since the register hadn't been open long, there
[1:05:56] weren't safes full of cash sitting in the stockroom, and at
[1:06:00] any rate, a clothing store generally isn't the sort of
[1:06:02] business that robbers hit. But here's where the case takes
[1:06:06] its first hard turn. While he was distracted moving
[1:06:10] between victims and doing whatever it was he was doing,
[1:06:14] Rhoda MacFarlane did something extraordinary.
[1:06:17] She was wearing a Bluetooth earpiece that morning, and
[1:06:20] despite her hands being taped and her face on the floor, she
[1:06:23] could speak into the earpiece without lifting a finger.
[1:06:27] The 911 audio from that morning is publicly available on the
[1:06:31] Tinley Park Police Department's website, and it's one of the
[1:06:34] eeriest pieces of evidence in any unsolved case.
[1:06:39] McFarland whispers into the earpiece, and she gives the
[1:06:41] dispatcher the name of the store and the address.
[1:06:44] She tells them to hurry. She doesn't have time to explain
[1:06:48] what's happening, and she doesn't have to.
[1:06:51] In the background, you can hear him, and he's not whispering.
[1:06:54] He's working through some kind of escalating internal
[1:06:57] monologue, the voice of a man whose composure is slipping.
[1:07:02] At one point he can apparently be heard saying that he's losing
[1:07:05] his grip, though I personally find the audio too difficult to
[1:07:09] make out. McFarlane, naturally, never got
[1:07:13] the dispatcher into a full conversation, and the line
[1:07:16] stayed open even as she couldn't keep speaking.
[1:07:20] What follows on the tape is what police later confirmed, namely a
[1:07:24] man methodically shooting 5 women in the back of a clothing
[1:07:27] store. He shot each one in the head.
[1:07:31] Execution style is the term police have used publicly, and
[1:07:35] as ugly as that term is, it's the accurate 1/5 of the six
[1:07:40] women were eliminated where they lay.
[1:07:43] He emptied his weapon and walked out the back of the store.
[1:07:47] Here's the part of the story that haunts every detective who
[1:07:49] worked the case, and, to be honest, pretty much anyone who
[1:07:53] has dug into it even a bit. A patrol unit happened to be in
[1:07:56] the Target parking lot directly across the Plaza when the 911
[1:08:00] dispatch went out, and the officer responded immediately.
[1:08:05] From the moment that call hit the radio to the moment a cop
[1:08:08] was walking through the front door of the Lane Bryant, the
[1:08:11] elapsed time was about two minutes.
[1:08:14] But he still missed him. The perpetrator had walked out a
[1:08:18] back exit, and by the time officers entered the store and
[1:08:21] pushed toward the stockroom, the assailant was already gone.
[1:08:26] Whether he had a vehicle waiting, whether he ran on foot
[1:08:29] to a different part of the Plaza, or whether he simply
[1:08:32] walked away into the residential streets, none of that is
[1:08:36] settled. There were no witnesses outside
[1:08:40] and there were no security cameras with a usable angle on
[1:08:43] the back of the building, which seems odd for 2008, but those
[1:08:48] are the facts. Within minutes of the dispatch,
[1:08:53] every available unit in Tinley Park was responding, but by then
[1:08:57] the perp had a head start of at least two or three minutes.
[1:09:01] The first paramedics arrived seconds behind the first officer
[1:09:04] and they found the women in the backroom.
[1:09:07] Five of the six women in that room wouldn't survive their
[1:09:10] wounds. And then there was the 6th,
[1:09:13] alive but still pretending not to be the part time employee is
[1:09:18] the only reason police have a description of the attacker at
[1:09:21] all. As he moved through the line of
[1:09:24] women methodically shooting, she did the only thing she could
[1:09:27] think to do. She turned her head a fraction
[1:09:30] of an inch at the last moment, and the bullet grazed her neck
[1:09:33] instead of going through her skull.
[1:09:36] She bled, but didn't move or make a sound.
[1:09:39] And then she listened to him walk away.
[1:09:43] She was taken to a local hospital and treated for her
[1:09:45] wounds. And then, while still in the
[1:09:49] rawest possible state, she sat down with detectives and gave
[1:09:52] them everything she had. She gave them his build, his
[1:09:56] description, the four green beads on the right braid, the
[1:10:00] embroidered jeans, a description of his hat, and his tone of
[1:10:04] voice. The composite sketch police
[1:10:08] released on February 11th of 2008 was built entirely from her
[1:10:12] account. Thankfully, she's never been
[1:10:14] named in the press and her identity has been kept out of
[1:10:18] all court filings and public releases.
[1:10:21] Multiple investigators over the years have said publicly that
[1:10:24] protecting her remains a top priority of the case.
[1:10:28] Her testimony will one day hopefully be what lands this
[1:10:32] monster under lock and key for the rest of his days.
[1:10:36] The original 2008 sketch shows a man who looks, frankly, like he
[1:10:40] could be 5000 other men in the area, and that's part of the
[1:10:44] problem. The composite was specific in
[1:10:47] some places, like the cornrows, the beads and the build, and
[1:10:51] generic and others. Police circulated it widely and
[1:10:55] tips flooded in claiming they knew who the guy was.
[1:11:00] Unfortunately though, as I said, the sketch created at the time
[1:11:04] was sufficiently generic aside from a few defining features.
[1:11:09] Those defining features, though, weren't immutable
[1:11:11] characteristics, and he could easily change his hairstyle, for
[1:11:15] instance. Within weeks of the slayings,
[1:11:18] the case was featured on the long running National Crime show
[1:11:21] America's Most Wanted, which generated another wave of public
[1:11:25] leads. A slightly updated composite
[1:11:28] sketch was released later that year, though this one wasn't too
[1:11:31] much different from the original.
[1:11:34] Each milestone drew a fresh round of national attention and
[1:11:37] each 1 ended the same way. In 2018, the Tinley Park Police
[1:11:42] partnered with the Michigan State Police on a new 3D modeled
[1:11:47] composite. This used updated facial
[1:11:50] identification technology and the survivors original
[1:11:53] description to produce a more photo realistic image.
[1:11:56] It's the version most people have seen since and it hasn't
[1:11:59] cracked the case either. If this image is accurate then I
[1:12:02] think that this should have been enough to break the case.
[1:12:05] I have to think that during the extreme stress of the situation
[1:12:09] it's possible that the witness got some features wrong, which
[1:12:13] may explain why he hasn't yet been clapped in cuffs.
[1:12:17] There's also forensic evidence police haven't disclosed in
[1:12:20] full, and this may be what ultimately breaks the case.
[1:12:24] Investigators have confirmed the perpetrator wasn't wearing
[1:12:27] gloves, which means latent fingerprints likely existed
[1:12:31] somewhere in the back of that store.
[1:12:34] However, whether these were actually recovered or not
[1:12:38] remains unknown at this point. But as you'll see, that may be
[1:12:43] largely immaterial. Connie Woolfolk, the 37 year old
[1:12:48] customer from Flossmoor, fought back.
[1:12:51] During the attack, blood believed to belong to the killer
[1:12:55] was reportedly recovered from underneath her fingernails.
[1:12:58] That genetic information has been run against the standard
[1:13:01] criminal databases for nearly two decades, but it still hasn't
[1:13:06] matched anyone. That means that whoever the
[1:13:09] shooter was likely didn't have a criminal record and hasn't been
[1:13:13] booked for any serious offenses after.
[1:13:17] Personally, that leads me to believe there's a chance that
[1:13:20] he's no longer alive, since I don't think someone who commits
[1:13:23] such an act can just integrate back into normal society.
[1:13:28] That said, I'll admit that's entirely speculative on my part
[1:13:33] and he may have intentionally been keeping a low profile in
[1:13:36] the years after. This is also the point where I
[1:13:39] have to mention the potential for genetic genealogy to crack
[1:13:44] this case wide open, and honestly I'm a bit surprised
[1:13:49] this hasn't happened yet. Genetic genealogy has been used
[1:13:53] to crack numerous cases of much less severity than this one.
[1:13:57] I would have thought this case would have been top priority for
[1:13:59] this cutting edge forensic technique, though for whatever
[1:14:03] reason it apparently hasn't been.
[1:14:06] A reward for information leading to an arrest was announced in
[1:14:09] the days after the slayings, and it's been raised more than once
[1:14:13] over the years. The figure posted by Tinley Park
[1:14:16] police is $100,000, and family pledges have pushed the publicly
[1:14:22] cited total as high as $200,000. Tinley Park has assigned new
[1:14:28] detectives to the case at regular intervals.
[1:14:31] The most recent set brought in to look at the file and bring
[1:14:34] new forensic techniques to bear. And I'll say it again very
[1:14:38] directly, retain the best genetic genealogy lab in the
[1:14:43] country and get some justice for these victims and take this guy
[1:14:48] off the street. If he's still alive, someone
[1:14:51] like this could strike again at any time, even if he's been
[1:14:54] staying out of trouble. A documentary on the case called
[1:14:59] The Tinley Park 5 was released early in 2026, and police are
[1:15:03] openly hoping it'll shake a tip loose from somebody who's been
[1:15:06] sitting on something for years. So far it's too early to tell if
[1:15:11] this has panned out at all, but given that the documentary is
[1:15:15] fairly obscure, I wouldn't count on it.
[1:15:18] I think the motive for this attack is perhaps one of the
[1:15:21] biggest open questions in the case, aside from who the
[1:15:25] perpetrator actually was. No one in their right mind would
[1:15:29] have chosen to rob this store at this time of day in that season.
[1:15:34] It also makes no sense whatsoever why he appeared to
[1:15:37] wait for more people to enter the store if this was a simple
[1:15:40] robbery. Generally people in these
[1:15:43] situations want less witnesses and less factors at play rather
[1:15:47] than more. Personally, I think while he
[1:15:50] announced it as a robbery, this was just his way to ensure
[1:15:54] compliance from the staff and the customers.
[1:15:58] The general logic is that anyone who's sticking up a store just
[1:16:01] wants the money, not life in prison, so the natural response
[1:16:05] is simply to comply. I think he exploited that
[1:16:09] natural response in an effort to lull the victims into compliance
[1:16:12] before he did what he came there to do.
[1:16:15] Why anyone would try to eliminate 6 innocent people like
[1:16:19] this is entirely beyond my reasoning though.
[1:16:23] In the end, some people are just really sick individuals.
[1:16:29] As I was recording this, I just thought of something else as
[1:16:32] well and I'm just going to toss this in at the end rather than
[1:16:35] trying to fit it in. I think the perpetrator was
[1:16:39] likely not from the Chicago area that he may have traveled there
[1:16:43] to commit the crime. This could explain why, even
[1:16:48] with the updated composite image, that no one has put two
[1:16:51] and two together on who this guy is.
[1:16:55] That said, this is just purely speculation on my part and I
[1:16:59] have no real evidence to back up this theory.
[1:17:04] The man slipped in through an unlocked door and walked past
[1:17:07] six dogs that should have torn him apart.
[1:17:10] He then climbed the staircase of a log home tucked into the trees
[1:17:14] outside one of Colorado's most picture perfect resort towns.
[1:17:19] Upstairs, a 44 year old Norwegian woman lay sleeping a
[1:17:23] few feet from her two young kids.
[1:17:26] He fired one round into her back, walked back out into the
[1:17:30] dark, drove S for hours and tossed most of his clothes out
[1:17:35] the car window as he crossed into New Mexico.
[1:17:38] For more than three years, nobody knew his name.
[1:17:43] The dead woman's father-in-law, meanwhile, was on national
[1:17:46] television making some very unusual allegations.
[1:17:51] Eva Berg Schoen had built the kind of life that from the
[1:17:55] outside, looked like a dream. She'd been born in Norway in
[1:17:59] 1946, met an American somewhere along the way, and ended up
[1:18:04] married to Sam Schoen. He was the oldest son of one of
[1:18:09] the most famous self-made men in America.
[1:18:13] Sam's father, Leonard Schoen, had launched U-Haul in 1945 with
[1:18:19] a single trailer and a concept so obvious in hindsight it's
[1:18:24] hard to believe nobody had cornered it yet.
[1:18:27] He had the idea to rent the moving truck to the people doing
[1:18:30] the moving. By the late 1980s, U-Haul was a
[1:18:34] billion dollar empire and the Schoen's were one of the
[1:18:37] wealthiest families in Arizona. But they were also behind closed
[1:18:42] doors, openly in conflict with themselves, and things were
[1:18:46] getting extremely acrimonious. Sam and Ava wanted no part of
[1:18:50] any of it, and in 1987, Sam resigned from the company,
[1:18:56] allegedly in protest, after a faction of his own brothers
[1:19:01] allegedly forced their father out of the boardroom.
[1:19:04] He packed up Eva, their two young daughters, and bought a
[1:19:07] $400,000 log house on a private road called Skunk Creek Drive.
[1:19:13] This somewhat unattractively named address was about four
[1:19:16] miles outside the town of Telluride, and despite the name,
[1:19:20] it was beautiful. The houses there had no St.
[1:19:23] numbers and no streetlights. There were aspens, spruce trees,
[1:19:28] six dogs running the property, and a few horses Eva kept in a
[1:19:31] paddock behind the house. She trained dogs and she skied
[1:19:36] doing the kinds of normal things Telluride newcomers do.
[1:19:40] To understand why anyone would assume this was something other
[1:19:43] than a botched break in, we need to look at where the Schoen
[1:19:47] family was leading up to that August.
[1:19:50] Leonard Schoen had fathered 12 children across 3 marriages and
[1:19:54] gradually transferred U-Haul stock to those children as part
[1:19:58] of a long term succession plan in November 1986.
[1:20:03] A coalition of his sons, led by Joe and Mark Schoen, launched a
[1:20:07] takeover of the business, correctly believing they had the
[1:20:10] secret sauce to expand the company.
[1:20:13] Leonard wasn't the CEO of the company he'd founded anymore,
[1:20:17] and he wasn't the president either, a fact that apparently
[1:20:21] made him quite bitter. Sam, the eldest, sided with his
[1:20:25] father, and he quit U-Haul in 1987 in solidarity with him.
[1:20:31] He kept fighting through shareholder lawsuits against Joe
[1:20:34] and Mark, and by the time Eva moved to Telluride, the family
[1:20:38] had effectively split into two camps.
[1:20:41] There were sworn depositions, private investigators on
[1:20:44] retainer for both sides, and this bitterness ran incredibly
[1:20:48] deep. In one court decision from 1993,
[1:20:53] the judge characterized it as a bitter family feud pitting the
[1:20:57] patriarch versus Mark and Joe Shown it wasn't the kind of feud
[1:21:03] that gets resolved over a Turkey and some stuffing at
[1:21:06] Thanksgiving. It was the kind that ends up in
[1:21:09] court for years. When Eva was found dead in
[1:21:13] August 1990, it shaped many people's first instinct about
[1:21:17] what had happened. A wealthy woman shot in the back
[1:21:21] inside a remote log home on a private road with no obvious
[1:21:25] signs of robbery and no obvious motive at the scene, looked
[1:21:29] unusual to the local sheriff, to the press, and eventually to
[1:21:34] Leonard, shown himself. It looked like something else
[1:21:37] more sinister entirely. Of course, that instinct would
[1:21:41] be entirely incorrect and Leonard would make some serious,
[1:21:45] unfounded allegations that are quite disturbing.
[1:21:50] Sam was in Phoenix on business that week, and Ava was alone in
[1:21:53] the house with their two kids and the dogs.
[1:21:57] Sometime in the early hours of August 6th, an intruder slipped
[1:22:01] inside. The Shone's had six dogs on the
[1:22:04] property, and none of them barked loud enough or long
[1:22:07] enough to wake the house. The intruder made it up the
[1:22:11] staircase to the second floor, where Ava was in bed.
[1:22:15] A single round was fired into her back from a small caliber
[1:22:18] weapon, which investigators later concluded had probably
[1:22:22] been fitted with a silencer. That detail, more than any
[1:22:26] other, shaped what some people incorrectly believed about the
[1:22:29] case. For years afterward, Ava somehow
[1:22:32] managed to get up after being shot.
[1:22:35] She made it as far as the top of the staircase before she
[1:22:38] collapsed, and that's where her older daughter found her in the
[1:22:42] morning. The dogs were still alive and
[1:22:45] everyone else was physically unharmed, but whoever had been
[1:22:49] inside the house was long gone. The local sheriff, Bill Masters,
[1:22:55] irresponsibly called it a quasi professional hit when he first
[1:22:59] addressed reporters, and that phrase would echo through
[1:23:02] coverage for years. He didn't have a suspect or a
[1:23:06] weapon, and within a few days he didn't really have a working
[1:23:09] theory either. What he had was a body and an
[1:23:13] angry, terrified family hundreds of miles away in Phoenix,
[1:23:17] already starting to ask hard questions of one another.
[1:23:21] Telluride in 1990 wasn't the celebrity playground it has
[1:23:25] since become, but it wasn't a stranger to money, either.
[1:23:29] The Ski Ranches subdivision where the Shone's lived was the
[1:23:33] kind of place where people moved precisely so they wouldn't have
[1:23:36] to lock their doors at night. The Sheriff's Office didn't have
[1:23:40] a deep bench of detectives, and the county didn't have its own
[1:23:44] crime lab. Within days of the slaying,
[1:23:47] investigators were leaning heavily on outside agencies,
[1:23:51] including the feds. They worked through the obvious
[1:23:55] questions first, There had been no forced entry and no
[1:24:00] ransacking on the scale you'd expect from a burglar.
[1:24:03] There had been no indecent assault, and numerous valuable
[1:24:07] items in Plainview were apparently untouched.
[1:24:11] Some in law enforcement floated the idea that whoever had come
[1:24:14] into that house seemed to have come in for one purpose
[1:24:17] specifically, and to have left as soon as the job was done.
[1:24:22] Leonard, shown by then in his mid 70s, went on national
[1:24:26] television and falsely accused 2 of his own sons of being
[1:24:31] involved in his daughter in And you're never going to guess
[1:24:46] what they did next. Facing these wild, unfounded
[1:24:50] allegations, his sons sued their father for defamation in 1990
[1:24:55] and 1991, respectively, over these statements.
[1:24:59] And given the eventual resolution of the case, you'll
[1:25:02] see why. Investigators, for their part,
[1:25:06] never found any evidence linking the slaying to the family
[1:25:09] dispute in any way whatsoever. They found that they were a
[1:25:13] family who was in deep conflict, but that they were solving their
[1:25:16] disputes through legal means only.
[1:25:19] Unfortunately, investigators would burn through valuable
[1:25:23] resources investigating since the sheriff seemed to have it in
[1:25:27] his mind that this was a professional job.
[1:25:31] And as it turns out, it was actually the furthest thing from
[1:25:34] it. In December 1992, the case got
[1:25:38] picked up by Unsolved Mysteries and the first broadcast
[1:25:42] generated leads, but nothing that stuck.
[1:25:45] This segment is actually pretty hard to find now because there
[1:25:48] are a lot of allegations that were made that turned out to be
[1:25:51] completely false. When the segment was rerun the
[1:25:54] following year, a viewer in New Mexico picked up the phone.
[1:25:59] His name was Kelly Lemons and he'd been sitting on something
[1:26:02] for nearly three years. His brother-in-law, he told the
[1:26:06] producers, had been bragging since 1990 about shooting a
[1:26:10] woman in Telluride during a break in that had gone sideways.
[1:26:15] The brother-in-law was a 38 year old auto repairman from Santa Fe
[1:26:19] named Frank Marquis. He had a long record of
[1:26:22] burglaries and other serious offenses from the 1980s, and he
[1:26:26] was on parole at the time of the August 1990 slaying.
[1:26:31] He'd been moving through Colorado that summer, breaking
[1:26:34] into vacation homes along the Western Slope when the owners
[1:26:37] were out. He knew how to read a property
[1:26:40] from the road and tell whether anyone was inside.
[1:26:43] He worked alone, and by all accounts he was generally good
[1:26:46] at picking vacation houses that weren't occupied.
[1:26:50] The shown house had been on his list, and he hadn't expected
[1:26:53] anyone to be home that night. Eva had heard him moving around
[1:26:58] downstairs, gotten up, and started for the stairs to see
[1:27:02] what was happening. He'd panicked, fired one shot,
[1:27:06] and run without taking anything. On July 20th, 1993,
[1:27:11] investigators in Santa Fe arrested him, and he denied
[1:27:14] everything for more than a year while the evidence built against
[1:27:17] him. What broke him in the end was a
[1:27:21] single strand of hair found in one of the most unlikely ways
[1:27:24] possible. After firing the shot, Marquis
[1:27:28] had driven back to New Mexico and tossed pieces of his
[1:27:31] clothing out the car window along the way.
[1:27:34] In A twist that sounds unbelievable, investigators
[1:27:38] working backward from his root eventually recovered some of the
[1:27:41] discarded clothes. A Forensic Trace expert analyzed
[1:27:46] a hair found on one of the shirts and concluded it was
[1:27:49] consistent with Eva's. When detectives put that finding
[1:27:53] in front of Marquis in October 1994, he finally admitted what
[1:27:58] he'd done. He had no idea who the Shone
[1:28:01] family was, and he'd simply been working through a list of empty
[1:28:04] looking mountain homes that summer.
[1:28:07] In November 1994, Marquis pleaded guilty to manslaughter
[1:28:11] and 2nd degree burglary as part of a deal that took the first
[1:28:15] degree charge off the table. The judge handed him 24 years
[1:28:20] and he served roughly 17 of them inside the New Mexico prison
[1:28:23] system and was released on parole in November 2011.
[1:28:31] On a warm afternoon in late August 2010, police forced their
[1:28:36] way into a top floor apartment on one of London's quietest and
[1:28:39] most expensive streets. In the en suite bathroom,
[1:28:43] sitting in the bath was a large red duffel bag, zipped shut and
[1:28:48] padlocked from the outside. Folded inside it, in a space
[1:28:53] barely big enough to contain him, was the naked body of one
[1:28:57] of Britain's most gifted intelligence officers.
[1:29:00] The only key to the padlock was inside the sealed bag lying
[1:29:04] beneath him. Two official investigations
[1:29:07] would go on to examine the very same evidence and reach
[1:29:11] completely opposite answers about how he got there.
[1:29:15] Gareth Williams was born on the 26th of September 1978 in
[1:29:19] Valley, a village on the island of Anglesey off the northwest
[1:29:23] coast of Wales. Welsh was his first language and
[1:29:27] from an early age it was clear he wasn't an ordinary child.
[1:29:31] While still at his secondary school, he was already studying
[1:29:34] mathematics part time at Bangor University and he came away with
[1:29:39] a first class degree at the age of 17.
[1:29:42] My understanding is that this is in essence the equivalent of
[1:29:46] graduating with an undergrad degree with highest honors.
[1:29:50] A doctorate at the University of Manchester followed, and then a
[1:29:54] place on a postgraduate course at Cambridge, which he left
[1:29:57] after stumbling on an exam. In 2001, he joined the
[1:30:01] Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the
[1:30:06] government signals intelligence agency in Cheltenham and the
[1:30:10] rough equivalent of the NSA. He'd stay tied to that town for
[1:30:15] nearly a decade, renting the same modest room in the nearby
[1:30:19] village of Prestbury and keeping very much to himself.
[1:30:24] Colleagues and neighbors tended to describe the same man.
[1:30:27] Quiet, almost painfully private, brilliant with numbers and
[1:30:32] happiest on a bicycle, He cycled for miles, walked the hills and
[1:30:38] had little patience for the social churn of office life.
[1:30:41] Which is perhaps the one relatable thing about Gareth, at
[1:30:45] least for me. In the spring of 2009 his
[1:30:48] talents carried him to London and a secondment to the Secret
[1:30:52] Intelligence Service, better known as MI 6.
[1:30:56] He spent his first stretch there on training courses before
[1:30:59] moving on to active operational work.
[1:31:02] By 2010 he'd qualified for the kind of deployment that takes an
[1:31:06] analyst out from behind a desk. It was a different world from
[1:31:09] the code breaking labs of Cheltenham and by most accounts
[1:31:13] he didn't much enjoy it. Some of his work is understood
[1:31:17] to have touched on Russia and he'd reportedly helped American
[1:31:20] counterparts trace the money laundering routes used by
[1:31:23] organized crime. That summer he'd flown to Las
[1:31:27] Vegas for Black Hat and DEFCON, two of the biggest hacking
[1:31:31] conferences in the world. Yet despite all of it, he'd
[1:31:35] asked to go back to GCHQ and the countryside he loved, and he was
[1:31:39] due to return on the 3rd of September.
[1:31:42] Unfortunately for Gareth, things would go very wrong before then
[1:31:47] and he would never return to his quiet life.
[1:31:50] The Pimlico apartment in London at 36 Alderney St. wasn't really
[1:31:55] his home. It was service accommodation,
[1:31:59] one of several addresses kept for intelligence staff.
[1:32:02] Williams had only been living in London for about a year.
[1:32:06] He was last captured on CCTV around the middle of August,
[1:32:10] going about ordinary errands in the city.
[1:32:14] In the early hours of the 16th, his laptop was logged onto a
[1:32:17] cycling website. After that, he simply went dark,
[1:32:22] with no calls and no sign of him anywhere.
[1:32:25] Williams worked for the most secretive organization in the
[1:32:29] country in a job where dropping out of contact should have set
[1:32:33] off alarms straight away. Yet a full week went by before
[1:32:37] anyone went to check on him, which has struck many as
[1:32:41] unusual, to say the least. It wasn't until the afternoon of
[1:32:45] Monday the 23rd of August that colleagues finally raised
[1:32:48] concerns and officers were sent round for what was meant to be a
[1:32:53] routine welfare check. They let themselves in around
[1:32:57] 4:45 on that very same day. He'd been on a vacation leave,
[1:33:02] which may be part of why nobody chased him sooner, though a week
[1:33:06] of silence from an MI Six officer is still a startling
[1:33:10] thing to slip past unnoticed. Inside, there was no sign of a
[1:33:15] break in, and nothing obviously disturbed until they reached the
[1:33:19] main bedroom and its en suite bathroom.
[1:33:22] There, in the bath, sat the padlocked red duffel bag.
[1:33:27] When they opened it, they found Williams's remains curled
[1:33:30] inside, by now badly decomposed. The premises were locked down at
[1:33:36] once and treated as a crime scene.
[1:33:39] The scene made no sense, and the closer investigators looked, the
[1:33:44] less sense it made. The bag was padlocked shut from
[1:33:48] the outside, and the single small key wasn't hidden across
[1:33:52] the room or pocketed by an intruder.
[1:33:55] It was inside the bag, tucked underneath his body.
[1:34:00] To add to the confusion, he wasn't wearing a single thing,
[1:34:04] and his clothes were folded neatly nearby.
[1:34:07] The heating had been left running through a London summer,
[1:34:10] which would have speed up the decomposition of his body and
[1:34:13] erased evidence with every passing day.
[1:34:17] By the time he was found, the decay was so far gone that
[1:34:21] pinning down a precise cause of death became almost impossible.
[1:34:25] Then there was what investigators couldn't find.
[1:34:28] There were no fingerprints belonging to Williams on the rim
[1:34:31] of the bath, on the bag, or on the padlock.
[1:34:36] There were no palm prints where you'd expect a man to brace
[1:34:38] himself while climbing in, and no gloves inside the bag.
[1:34:44] His body showed no injuries and no sign of a struggle, and there
[1:34:48] was no alcohol or any common recreational drug in his system.
[1:34:54] The apartment was almost unnervingly clean of biological
[1:34:57] traces, with only a few inconclusive fragments of
[1:35:01] genetic material from other people on the bag.
[1:35:05] One biological trace recovered from his hand briefly seemed to
[1:35:09] point to a suspect and even LED police to release images of two
[1:35:13] people seen near the building. That lead later collapsed into
[1:35:17] embarrassment when the DNA turned out to belong to forensic
[1:35:20] scientists who'd handled the evidence, the result of a simple
[1:35:23] data entry slip at the lab. In the months that followed,
[1:35:28] certain details about his private life leaked into the
[1:35:31] press, and they seemed designed to color how the public saw him.
[1:35:36] His wardrobe, it emerged, held 10s of thousands of pounds worth
[1:35:41] of high end women's clothing. He'd occasionally spent time on
[1:35:45] some very spicy websites, though there was no sign it was
[1:35:48] anything illegal whatsoever. Then it came out that years
[1:35:52] earlier, a couple who'd rented to him in Cheltenham had once
[1:35:56] found him tied to his own bed, asking to be cut loose.
[1:36:01] Each of these threads invited an easy and convenient explanation
[1:36:06] that this was some private ritual gone wrong, a man who'd
[1:36:09] sealed himself away and simply couldn't get back out.
[1:36:14] But the forensic evidence kept refusing to cooperate with that
[1:36:17] story. Even if the cops wanted to close
[1:36:20] it out quickly with this hogwash, the central question
[1:36:25] was almost stupidly simple to ask and madding to answer.
[1:36:29] Could Gareth Williams have conceivably locked himself
[1:36:32] inside that bag? To find out, investigators
[1:36:35] brought in specialists and confined spaces and escapology.
[1:36:40] Working with a bag of the same model in the same bath, they
[1:36:44] tried again and again to climb inside and fasten the padlock
[1:36:47] from within. Even getting into the bag was a
[1:36:51] struggle. And mind you, this was with
[1:36:54] trained experts. The grown man had to fold
[1:36:57] himself almost double to fit, and once curled in, there was
[1:37:00] nowhere to brace a hand and no leverage to thread the padlock
[1:37:04] through the zip and snap it shut.
[1:37:07] They tried hundreds of times, and by the end the attempts
[1:37:10] numbered somewhere around 400, and not a single one worked.
[1:37:15] One specialist allowed that there was a vanishingly small
[1:37:18] chance Williams could have managed it, but the overwhelming
[1:37:21] verdict was that it simply couldn't be done.
[1:37:25] The medical evidence pointed the same way that this couldn't have
[1:37:28] been the work of Williams. One of the pathologists
[1:37:31] concluded it was more likely than not that Williams had been
[1:37:35] alive when he got into the bag. Apparently, folding A lifeless
[1:37:39] body into that cramped posture would have been extraordinarily
[1:37:43] hard. Another calculated that once the
[1:37:47] bag was sealed, the rising carbon dioxide would have
[1:37:50] overwhelmed him in two or three minutes.
[1:37:53] When the inquest opened in the spring of 2012, it had to work
[1:37:58] under unusual constraints. Williams Job was so sensitive
[1:38:02] that the heads of MI 6 and the police had met privately within
[1:38:06] hours of the discovery to settle how the investigation should
[1:38:09] even proceed. The Americans asked that nothing
[1:38:13] about his work be aired in public, and the Foreign
[1:38:16] Secretary signed a certificate keeping the details of his
[1:38:19] duties out of the proceedings. That, of course, made it highly
[1:38:23] difficult to actually investigate what happened to
[1:38:26] him. Even hemmed in like that, the
[1:38:29] coroner, Dr. Fiona Wilcox, reached a striking conclusion.
[1:38:36] She found that Williams's death was unnatural and very likely
[1:38:40] the result of a criminal act, and that on the balance of
[1:38:43] probabilities, he'd been killed. In her judgment, another person
[1:38:49] had almost certainly placed the bag in the bath and locked it,
[1:38:52] and Williams had probably been alive when he was put inside.
[1:38:57] He perished soon afterwards, either from a build up of carbon
[1:39:00] dioxide or from a fast acting poison that left no trace.
[1:39:04] She didn't stop there. She firmly rejected the idea
[1:39:08] that this was an accident. Dismissing the talk of
[1:39:11] autoerotic misadventure, she pointed out that his website
[1:39:16] visits had been far too infrequent to suggest any real
[1:39:19] fixation. She went further and condemned
[1:39:22] the leaks about his private life as a possible attempt to steer
[1:39:26] the story in the press. Her criticism of the authorities
[1:39:30] was blistering, and she rebuked the intelligence service for
[1:39:33] failing to raise the alarm for a week after Williams went silent.
[1:39:38] She said that this was a delay that both deepened his family's
[1:39:42] anguish and let crucial forensic evidence slip away.
[1:39:46] She also said that the possible involvement of his own service
[1:39:50] was a legitimate line of inquiry that had never been properly
[1:39:53] pursued. Now, of course, that wasn't an
[1:39:56] accusation by any means, It just meant that there had been
[1:39:58] absolutely no investigation into anyone in the intelligence
[1:40:02] community whatsoever. Of course, with any standard
[1:40:05] investigation, it would be normal to at least perform some
[1:40:09] sort of cursory interviews with someone's employer and
[1:40:12] colleagues. However, due to the extremely
[1:40:16] sensitive nature of his work, that couldn't be done here and
[1:40:19] the coroner was concerned about it.
[1:40:22] At any rate, that perhaps should have been the final word, but it
[1:40:25] wasn't. And then things got truly
[1:40:28] bizarre. The coroner's verdict prompted a
[1:40:31] fresh investigation by the Metropolitan Police, one that
[1:40:34] officers said had been granted unprecedented access to the
[1:40:38] Secret Intelligence Service. This was in the wake of the
[1:40:42] inquest criticism, though how much actual access they actually
[1:40:46] received isn't known due to the sensitive nature of the
[1:40:49] investigation. For roughly a year they re
[1:40:53] examined the evidence and chased new leads and again we know less
[1:40:58] than we usually would because of national security issues.
[1:41:02] Then in November 2013 they announced A conclusion that
[1:41:06] landed like a slap in the face of everything that had come
[1:41:09] before. The most probable explanation,
[1:41:12] they now said, was that Gareth Williams had died alone, having
[1:41:17] somehow managed to lock himself inside the bag by accident.
[1:41:21] A senior officer suggested it was at least theoretically
[1:41:24] possible to lower yourself into the bag without touching the rim
[1:41:28] of the bath, which might account for the missing Prince.
[1:41:32] Much of the earlier suspicion, the police argued, came down to
[1:41:36] the evidence lost during that week of delay around the edges
[1:41:41] of the case. A darker theory has never quite
[1:41:44] gone away. In 2015, a former KGB officer
[1:41:50] who defected and settled in Britain claimed that his own
[1:41:53] sources pointed squarely at Russian intelligence.
[1:41:57] As he told it, the Russian intelligence had tried to
[1:42:00] pressure Williams into becoming a double agent.
[1:42:03] When he refused and threatened to expose a Russian mole, they
[1:42:07] decided he was too dangerous to leave alive.
[1:42:11] The method he claimed was an untraceable poison slipped into
[1:42:14] his ear, but there's no hard proof for any of it and it rests
[1:42:19] entirely on second hand assertions.
[1:42:22] However, it's slotted neatly into a wider pattern that
[1:42:25] journalists would later layout, counting Williams among more
[1:42:29] than a dozen suspicious deaths on British soil with links to
[1:42:32] Russia. His work tracing Russian dirty
[1:42:35] money, after all, was exactly the sort of thing that earns a
[1:42:39] person dangerous enemies. There's one more detail that
[1:42:44] many who have looked at this case have never been able to let
[1:42:46] go of. And to be honest, I have no idea
[1:42:50] what to make of it. The apartment at 36 Alderney
[1:42:53] Street where he died was owned through layers of corporate
[1:42:57] paperwork by a company called Novaya Rodina.
[1:43:01] In Russian, Novaya Rodina means new motherland, which, if it is
[1:43:06] a coincidence, is a strange one indeed.
[1:43:10] More than 15 years on, the fundamental questions sit
[1:43:13] exactly where the coroner left them.
[1:43:16] How a fit, careful man in his early 30s ended up sealed inside
[1:43:20] a bag in his own bath, with the key beneath his body and no
[1:43:24] clear cause of death is something no one has ever truly
[1:43:27] explained. One official inquiry says he was
[1:43:31] eliminated by a hand that's never been named, but that could
[1:43:34] apparently leave no traces whatsoever behind.
[1:43:38] The other says he did it to himself by accident, in a way
[1:43:41] that hundreds of expert attempts couldn't reproduce.
[1:43:45] Both can't be right, and the only people who definitely know
[1:43:48] the answer for certain were zipped inside or doing the
[1:43:52] zipping. When searchers reached the body,
[1:43:59] his fingertips were already gone, rotted off in the heat and
[1:44:02] scattered into the dirt beside his hands.
[1:44:05] That should have been the strangest thing about the scene,
[1:44:09] but it wasn't, and it wasn't even close.
[1:44:13] The strangest thing was folded into the pockets of his jeans,
[1:44:16] and more than 25 years later, no one has managed to read it.
[1:44:21] Not the FB is cryptographic analysts and not the dead man's
[1:44:25] own family. Whoever left him in that field
[1:44:29] almost certainly knew what those 2 pages of writing were trying
[1:44:32] to say. Ricky McCormick was born in June
[1:44:35] of 1958, and by most accounts he never quite found his footing.
[1:44:41] As a boy, he stood off by himself at recess, told stories
[1:44:45] that didn't add up, and worried the adults around him.
[1:44:50] His mother came to believe something was wrong with him,
[1:44:52] and she sought professional help.
[1:44:55] A psychiatrist reportedly told the family that Ricky had built
[1:44:58] a wall inside his own mind and refused to climb over it.
[1:45:03] A cousin said he talked like he lived in a different world and
[1:45:07] wondered whether he'd been mentally ill.
[1:45:10] Whatever the cause, the practical result was the same.
[1:45:14] Ricky moved from one grade to the next without ever really
[1:45:18] learning to read or write. Relatives said he could barely
[1:45:22] spell, and one of them claimed he struggled even with his own
[1:45:25] name, which is a fact that's going to matter for this
[1:45:28] unsolved mystery. By the time he dropped out of
[1:45:32] high school, the gap between him and everyone else was both
[1:45:35] massive and permanent. He drifted through whatever jobs
[1:45:39] he could get, usually working nights, and at certain points in
[1:45:43] his life he subsisted on meager disability payments that really
[1:45:47] aren't enough to survive on. But before you think I'm
[1:45:51] presenting him as some sort of sympathetic figure, he had an
[1:45:54] extremely disgusting criminal record, which I'll get to in a
[1:45:58] brief second. He was exactly the kind of
[1:46:01] person living on the outskirts of life whose disappearance
[1:46:05] tends to go unremarked. And for a while, that's what
[1:46:08] happened. In 1992, when he was 34, Ricky's
[1:46:14] life took a much darker turn. And for me personally, this is
[1:46:18] where all sympathy for him runs dry, regardless of what
[1:46:22] happened. He was charged in connection
[1:46:25] with two children he'd fathered with a girl who was barely a
[1:46:28] teenager. His public defender suspected he
[1:46:31] was suffering from some mental illness or severe learning
[1:46:34] disability, but he was ruled fit for trial all the same.
[1:46:39] He was, after all, capable of knowing what he did was both a
[1:46:43] profoundly immoral and a profoundly illegal act.
[1:46:47] He pleaded guilty and spent a little over a year at a minimum
[1:46:51] security Missouri Correctional Center before his release.
[1:46:55] Personally, I think that should have been the end of the line
[1:46:58] for him in terms of his freedom. But the soft on crimes against
[1:47:02] women and girls justice system said one year was enough.
[1:47:06] After prison, Ricky landed a graveyard shift job at an Immoko
[1:47:10] station in downtown Saint Louis. This thing somehow started going
[1:47:14] even worse for him. The station was run by two
[1:47:18] brothers who, by reputation, weren't people you wanted to
[1:47:22] cross. While Ricky worked for them, he
[1:47:25] reportedly began making trips down to Florida, and his
[1:47:29] girlfriend later told investigators what she believed
[1:47:32] those trips were about. She thought that Ricky was
[1:47:36] running weed for the brothers, an allegation which was never
[1:47:40] proven to be true in a court of law, and in the weeks before he
[1:47:44] vanished, he'd grown frightened. Roughly 2 weeks before the end,
[1:47:49] Ricky bought a one way. Bus ticket to.
[1:47:51] Orlando. It was at least the second time
[1:47:54] that year he'd travelled down the coast, and investigators
[1:47:57] never pinned down who he was going to meet or why some
[1:48:01] assumed a drug connection. But the honest answer is nobody
[1:48:04] knows. And the man who could tell us
[1:48:07] was about to disappear for good. The record of Ricky's final week
[1:48:12] is patchy. And the accounts that survived.
[1:48:14] Don't all line up. What's clear is that his health
[1:48:18] was failing fast. In the last days of June 1999,
[1:48:23] he turned up at Saint Louis emergency rooms more than once
[1:48:26] with chest pains and shortness of breath, admitted once and
[1:48:30] turned away another time. The last confirmed sightings put
[1:48:34] him at a hospital and at the Immoko station somewhere in the
[1:48:39] final week of the month. Then Ricky McCormick simply
[1:48:43] stopped existing as far as the. World was concerned.
[1:48:46] And no one reported him missing or raised an alarm for a man
[1:48:50] with a habit of dropping out of contact and a disturbing.
[1:48:53] Criminal record. A few days of silence didn't
[1:48:56] register at all on the 30th of June 1999.
[1:49:01] A woman was driving along a. Field Rd. near Hwy. 367 out by
[1:49:06] West Alton, MO When something in one of the cornfields caught her
[1:49:10] eye, she pulled over to look and found the badly decomposed body
[1:49:15] of a man lying among the stalks. He was wearing dirty Lee jeans
[1:49:20] and a stained white T-shirt. The decomposition was severe
[1:49:24] enough that his fingertips had come away from his hands
[1:49:26] entirely, which made identifying him by fingerprint its own small
[1:49:31] irony. The man in the cornfield was
[1:49:35] Ricky McCormick. And the location made.
[1:49:38] No sense. Ricky lived roughly 15 to 20
[1:49:41] miles away and he couldn't drive, so there was no way he
[1:49:45] reached that field under his own power, which meant somebody had
[1:49:49] taken him there. The spot had history too, and a
[1:49:53] few years earlier another body had been dumped along the same
[1:49:57] stretch of road. To the investigators in that
[1:50:00] cornfield, it had the look of a place some real bad dudes might
[1:50:04] be using as a dump site. There were hints of violence,
[1:50:08] though nothing certain. Some accounts suggest Ricky may
[1:50:11] have suffered a head injury, but his body had broken down too far
[1:50:15] for anyone to say. So with confidence, the man
[1:50:18] leading the investigation put it simply.
[1:50:21] His gut said foul play, even if the evidence wouldn't yet prove
[1:50:25] it. Here's where the case takes its
[1:50:29] first strange turn. Despite the suspicious location,
[1:50:33] despite a man who couldn't drive ending up 20 miles from home,
[1:50:37] the medical examiner couldn't establish A cause of death.
[1:50:41] There were no obvious gunshot or knife wounds, and Ricky's heart
[1:50:45] and lungs were bad enough that he might simply have given out.
[1:50:49] And so within a few days, the authorities did something that
[1:50:53] would baffle people for years. They effectively closed the
[1:50:57] book, attributing his death to natural causes.
[1:51:02] For more than a decade. That was that, Ricky.
[1:51:05] Was a sick man who. Died in a field and the world
[1:51:09] moved on. The notes in his pockets were
[1:51:12] filed away and forgotten, with his family not even being told
[1:51:16] about them. The case came roaring back in
[1:51:20] March of two. 1011 from an. Unexpected direction.
[1:51:24] The FBI, apparently out of nowhere, announced to the public
[1:51:28] that Ricky McCormick hadn't died naturally at all.
[1:51:32] He'd been cut down elsewhere, the Bureau said flatly, and
[1:51:36] dumped in that field at some later point.
[1:51:39] The only physical clues to the attack were the two encrypted
[1:51:42] notes that had been riding in his pants pockets the whole
[1:51:46] time. The notes themselves are bizarre
[1:51:49] to look at, and if you're one of those people who just listen,
[1:51:53] you may want to take a look at the screen now.
[1:51:56] Across the 2 pages run more than 30 lines of dense code, a
[1:52:00] thicket of letters, numbers, dashes, and parentheses with no
[1:52:05] obvious spaces or structure. The Bureau's cryptanalysis and
[1:52:10] racketeering records. Unit the same.
[1:52:13] Specialists who break the ciphers of spies and organized
[1:52:16] crime had been chewing on these pages for years.
[1:52:19] So had the American Cryptogram Association, the country's
[1:52:23] leading Society of puzzle solvers.
[1:52:27] Both had failed and the notes earned a place.
[1:52:30] Among the unit's most. Stubborn unsolved cases.
[1:52:34] The chief of that unit explained the problem in plain terms.
[1:52:38] Cracking a code, he said, comes down to four steps, working out
[1:52:43] the language, then the system, then the key, then the message
[1:52:47] itself. With Ricky's notes, the experts
[1:52:51] could barely get past the. Second step.
[1:52:53] But he was careful to stress that this wasn't gibberish.
[1:52:57] The characters weren't random. There were patterns, repeated
[1:53:01] letters that looked like they might mark the breaks between
[1:53:03] words, all the signatures of real structure.
[1:53:07] The madding part was that everything said they should be
[1:53:10] solvable, and yet they weren't. So the Bureau made an unusual
[1:53:15] move. It put the pages online and
[1:53:18] asked the public, anyone at all, to take a crack at them.
[1:53:22] The response was immediate, large enough that they set up a
[1:53:26] separate page to collect theories.
[1:53:29] The bureau's cryptography chief captured why the case mattered
[1:53:33] to him. And it actually potentially has
[1:53:35] nothing to do with any crime. Even if the notes turned out to
[1:53:39] be a grocery list or a mundane letter, he wanted to know how
[1:53:43] the thing was built because it was a coding system the feds had
[1:53:46] never seen before. Then, in 2012, the story turned.
[1:53:51] Again and this. Time.
[1:53:53] The twist came from the people who'd known Ricky Best when the
[1:53:57] FBI first publicized the case. Investigators had.
[1:54:01] Framed the notes as something Ricky had done his whole life, a
[1:54:06] private code he'd been scribbling since childhood.
[1:54:10] Family members had supposedly confirmed it.
[1:54:13] At least according to the. Initial reports, But his
[1:54:16] relatives pushed back relatively hard.
[1:54:20] They said they'd never told anyone, Ricky wrote in code.
[1:54:23] And that the whole. Thing was, in essence, one giant
[1:54:27] misunderstanding. What they'd actually said was
[1:54:31] that he sometimes jotted down meaningless scribbles he called
[1:54:34] writing, which isn't the same thing at all.
[1:54:39] That said, they weren't able to confirm if the.
[1:54:42] Bizarre writings. Were actually his quote UN quote
[1:54:45] meaningless scribbles or not. This was a man, they pointed
[1:54:51] out, who couldn't reliably spell his own name and could barely
[1:54:55] read an entire simple sentence. The idea that he'd authored an
[1:54:59] encryption scheme capable of stumping federal cryptographers
[1:55:03] for over a decade struck them as absurd.
[1:55:06] And that's the question that won't go away.
[1:55:09] If Ricky didn't write those notes, then who did?
[1:55:14] The Unit chief stood by the Bureau's reading.
[1:55:17] Noting that the pages. Looked like something written
[1:55:19] for himself. The chief even pointed to
[1:55:22] circled sections that resemble the.
[1:55:24] To Do List. Items checked off as they were
[1:55:27] finished. However, the feds do admit that
[1:55:30] they can't be certain that he was actually the author of the
[1:55:33] code, which is something I'll come back to shortly.
[1:55:37] Whether they had additional information to suggest that he
[1:55:39] authored this himself wasn't released to the public.
[1:55:44] Investigators never lacked for people to look at.
[1:55:47] And Ricky's old bosses. At the gas station, with their
[1:55:50] fearsome reputation drew attention.
[1:55:53] So did a local underworld figure who was reputedly known as a
[1:55:57] real professional when it came to taking care of problematic
[1:56:00] people or those who had outlived their usefulness.
[1:56:05] All the men were watched, but none could be tied.
[1:56:08] To what happened to? Ricky.
[1:56:10] And no one was ever charged. So the case sits where it has
[1:56:14] sat for years, with the notes still posted on the bureau's
[1:56:18] website, where thousands of strangers have tried and failed
[1:56:22] to make sense of them. People have guessed at
[1:56:25] everything. Vehicle numbers.
[1:56:27] Drug Ledger. 'S gambling records, location
[1:56:31] coordinates, reminders to take medication, even a single name
[1:56:36] buried in the characters. One Redditor recently claimed to
[1:56:39] have solved the entire thing, and his approach was novel.
[1:56:44] The Redditor claimed Ricky Mccormick's notes aren't a
[1:56:47] cipher, but a personal shorthand system shaped by limited
[1:56:51] literacy, autism like patterning, pop culture, transit
[1:56:56] routes and phonetics. The poster argued the notes
[1:57:00] documented drug operation, named specific suspects and explained
[1:57:05] Mccormick's final movements. In essence, the poster argued
[1:57:10] that the whole thing was perhaps an insurance policy or a witness
[1:57:14] statement written in a context that only he could understand.
[1:57:20] While the Reddit post recently gained a lot of traction online.
[1:57:23] As a potential. Solve for the problem.
[1:57:25] I take issue with it. I don't think this approach
[1:57:29] works because it starts with a desired meaning and then builds
[1:57:33] A decoding system around it. Once you decide the notes are
[1:57:37] really about a hidden crime narrative, almost any fragment
[1:57:41] can be made to fit. Random letters become initials,
[1:57:46] numbers become dates or roots, repeated endings become grammar
[1:57:51] and vague similarities become proof.
[1:57:54] The problem is that the so-called method is too
[1:57:57] flexible. A real decipherment should
[1:58:00] produce consistent rules that can be applied before you know
[1:58:03] the answer, not after. It should also explain the whole
[1:58:08] text, not just the parts that support the theory.
[1:58:12] This kind of reading feels persuasive because it connects
[1:58:15] real people, real places, and real events.
[1:58:19] But those connections don't prove the notes say those
[1:58:22] things. Without independent validation,
[1:58:25] repeatable rules, or predictive power.
[1:58:28] It's more of an interpretation than anything else.
[1:58:32] Notably, the Reddit post also works on the assumption that it
[1:58:36] isn't actually a cipher, which runs contrary to the belief of
[1:58:39] the experts that have worked on it.
[1:58:42] Personally I think they could be single use ciphers because they
[1:58:45] don't seem to provide enough repeatable structure to test a
[1:58:48] reliable solution. A normal cipher should leave
[1:58:51] some pattern, repeated words, grammar, symbol frequency, or
[1:58:57] enough text to compare against known language.
[1:59:01] But if someone invents a private system for one message, the key
[1:59:05] might exist only in their head. That makes the notes less like a
[1:59:10] puzzle with a hidden answer and more like a personal shorthand
[1:59:13] that may be impossible to verify.
[1:59:16] Any solution might sound plausible, like the Reddit post,
[1:59:20] but without an outside check it's hard to know whether it's
[1:59:23] real. Hey everyone.
[1:59:27] It's Jimmy, as usual, jumping in with a quick reminder to hit the
[1:59:30] subscribe. Button and the notification bell
[1:59:33] for more content. Also don't forget to check out
[1:59:36] the Patreon if you want to take your support for my channel to
[1:59:39] the next level. A worried.
[1:59:45] Father arrived at his daughter's apartment in Minot, ND 1.
[1:59:48] June afternoon in 2007, concerned after days of
[1:59:52] unanswered calls, finding 18 year old Anita Knutson's car
[1:59:57] outside but no response at the door, he enlisted the building
[2:00:01] managers help to get inside. Through Anita's bedroom window,
[2:00:06] her father saw a. Horrifying.
[2:00:08] Scene Anita lay lifeless on her bed.
[2:00:12] He immediately called 911, summoning police to the gruesome
[2:00:16] scene. In that moment, a family's world
[2:00:20] shattered, and in time, a horrific and shocking secret
[2:00:24] would crack this case wide open. Or at least that's what
[2:00:28] investigators wanted to believe. Anita was a bright and hard.
[2:00:34] Working college freshman at Minot State University.
[2:00:37] Pursuing a degree in elementary education, Anita had been
[2:00:41] adopted as an infant by Gordon and Sharon Knutson and grew up
[2:00:45] in a loving family. She graduated from Velva High
[2:00:49] School in 2006 and was known for her kindness and strong work
[2:00:54] ethic, juggling her studies with part time jobs at a clothing
[2:00:58] store and a hotel. Friends and family described
[2:01:01] Anita as joyful, caring, and always ready to help others.
[2:01:08] On June 4th, 2007. After Anita failed to answer
[2:01:12] her. Phone for two days and even
[2:01:14] missed a work shift which was unlike her.
[2:01:17] Her father drove to her off campus apartment to check on
[2:01:20] her. He found the front door locked
[2:01:22] and no sign of movement inside. A maintenance worker then
[2:01:26] pointed out that the screen from Anita's bedroom window was lying
[2:01:29] on the ground with a slit cut through it.
[2:01:32] Looking through the window, Anita's father saw a nightmare.
[2:01:37] His daughter was lying face down on her bed in a pool of blood.
[2:01:43] Police rushed to the scene and soon confirmed that Anita.
[2:01:46] Had been stabbed to. Death, later determined to be
[2:01:49] two fatal knife wounds to her chest.
[2:01:54] A robe had been draped over her. Body and while the bedroom was
[2:01:58] bloody. Nothing seemed to be stolen or
[2:02:00] ransacked in the apartment. Investigators suspected the
[2:02:04] sliced window screen was a ploy to mislead them since the
[2:02:07] apartment door was still locked and the evidence didn't line up
[2:02:11] with a typical break in. The brutal slaying of a well
[2:02:15] liked young woman in a small city like Minot left family and
[2:02:19] friends in utter shock. Investigators later estimated
[2:02:23] that Anita had been killed over the weekend, likely late on June
[2:02:27] 2nd or early June 3rd, 2007, despite A thorough
[2:02:33] investigation. Police initially had few leads
[2:02:36] to. Go on.
[2:02:37] They interviewed Anita's friends, Co workers and
[2:02:40] neighbors trying to piece together her final days.
[2:02:46] Naturally, attention turned to Anita's.
[2:02:48] Roommate at the time, Nicole. Thomas, now known as Nicole
[2:02:52] Rice, but Nicole told investigators she had been out
[2:02:56] of town visiting family. According to investigators, her
[2:03:00] alibi had some inconsistencies. Yet in 2007, there wasn't enough
[2:03:06] evidence to tie her or anyone else to the crime further.
[2:03:10] Yet. She was a quiet female roommate,
[2:03:13] not the usual sort of person who commits this sort of act against
[2:03:16] a young woman who is ostensibly home alone.
[2:03:21] Detectives also explored other possibilities.
[2:03:25] For example, a maintenance. Man who worked at the apartment
[2:03:27] complex, and even a report of an unknown man seen running near
[2:03:31] the building. But none of these leads panned
[2:03:34] out. Forensic evidence didn't clinch
[2:03:37] the case either. The knife found at the scene
[2:03:40] contained DNA from multiple people, which meant no
[2:03:43] definitive match to a suspect could be made.
[2:03:47] With no arrests and no prime suspect, the investigation
[2:03:50] stalled. As months turned into years,
[2:03:54] Anita's case went cold. The notion that a predator was
[2:03:59] still roaming. Free haunted the community.
[2:04:02] Leaving residents fearful while the family's pleas for justice
[2:04:06] continued unabated. Still, Anita's loved ones
[2:04:10] refused to let her memory fade. They pressed authorities for
[2:04:14] answers and kept the case in the public eye, hoping that someday
[2:04:18] there would be a breakthrough. Pink ribbons were tied around
[2:04:21] trees and mine it and a billboard with Anita's photo
[2:04:25] went up, somber reminders of the young woman whose killer
[2:04:28] remained at large in 2022. Nearly. 15 years after Anita's
[2:04:35] death. An unexpected break finally came
[2:04:39] on March 16th, 2022. Minot Police stunned the
[2:04:43] community by announcing the arrest of 34 year old Nicole
[2:04:46] Rice, Anita's former roommate, for the brutal attack.
[2:04:52] She was taken into custody at her job on the Minot Air Force
[2:04:54] Base. At a press conference that day,
[2:04:58] Minot's police chief confidently announced that they finally had
[2:05:02] the person responsible for Anita's slaying in custody.
[2:05:06] Authorities credited a collaboration with the Oxygen
[2:05:09] Network's Cold Justice true crime TV series for helping
[2:05:13] crack the long cold case in 2019.
[2:05:19] The Minot police had assigned new detectives.
[2:05:21] To re examine the evidence and with fresh eyes, they enlisted
[2:05:25] Cold Justice to spread word of the case.
[2:05:28] New investigators had re examined every detail of the
[2:05:31] case and with this renewed effort, they found reasons to
[2:05:35] focus on Nicole. They noted alleged significant
[2:05:39] inconsistencies in Nicole's alibi and uncovered witnesses
[2:05:43] who reported that Nicole had made suspicious comments about
[2:05:46] the event in the past after the cold justice episodes about
[2:05:52] Anita's. Case aired in late 20. 22 new
[2:05:55] tips, including those alleged confessions, flowed into
[2:06:00] investigators, bolstering the case against Nicole.
[2:06:04] These developments gave police probable cause to charge Nicole.
[2:06:07] At last. In the face of the accusations,
[2:06:11] Nicole maintained her innocence and pleaded not guilty to the
[2:06:15] charges in March 2020. 5 Nicole Rice finally went on.
[2:06:22] Trial for the slaying of Anita Knutson, a case that had haunted
[2:06:26] the community for nearly 18 years at that point.
[2:06:30] The trial took place in Grand Forks to help try to ensure an
[2:06:34] impartial jury. Over 7 days in court, more than
[2:06:38] 20 witnesses testified as prosecutors and defense
[2:06:41] attorneys presented very different narratives of what
[2:06:44] happened prosecutors laid out. A theory that the crime stemmed
[2:06:51] from a toxic roommate. Relationship that spiraled out
[2:06:53] of control. They argued that Nicole and
[2:06:56] Anita had a history of petty conflicts, including
[2:06:59] disagreements over things like alarm clocks, Internet usage,
[2:07:03] and household chores. They claimed that on the night
[2:07:06] of the slaying, A heated argument between them turned
[2:07:09] violent. According to the prosecution,
[2:07:12] Nicole stabbed Anita in a fit of rage and then tried to cover her
[2:07:17] tracks by staging the scene to look like an intruder was
[2:07:20] responsible. Investigators pointed out how
[2:07:23] nothing was actually stolen from the apartment and forensic tests
[2:07:27] showed the blood on the fallen window screen came from Anita
[2:07:30] herself. This was a sign that the screen
[2:07:33] was cut after she was attacked, rather than by an outside
[2:07:36] intruder. Supporting the theory that the
[2:07:38] break in was staged, one officer testified that when Nicole.
[2:07:44] Was first contacted about Anita's.
[2:07:46] Death. She oddly mentioned that her
[2:07:48] iPod was missing. He found this extremely odd that
[2:07:52] she was so concerned about a missing iPod when someone had
[2:07:55] allegedly just broken into her home and slain her roommate.
[2:08:00] This cop later reflected that it seemed like an attempt to
[2:08:02] support the burglary story and deflect suspicion.
[2:08:07] And this is really a damned if you do, damned if you don't
[2:08:09] situation. If you don't report what
[2:08:12] happened, you're withholding potentially material evidence.
[2:08:15] And if you do report it, that's apparently suspicious.
[2:08:21] The prosecution's most startling?
[2:08:23] Evidence came from two people who said that Nicole.
[2:08:25] Had effectively confessed Years earlier, a former friend of
[2:08:29] Nicole's testified that at a party in 2008, Nicole got drunk
[2:08:34] and tearfully blurted out that she had argued with Anita and
[2:08:37] that she then quote did it. Similarly, an ex-boyfriend of
[2:08:42] Nicole's recounted another. Occasion where a.
[2:08:45] Heavily intoxicated, Nicole allegedly said she had
[2:08:48] eliminated Anna. Both witnesses claimed they
[2:08:53] thought they. Had told police about these
[2:08:55] admissions back. In 2008, though, no official
[2:08:58] record of those reports was found.
[2:09:01] These alleged drunken confessions, combined with the
[2:09:04] circumstantial evidence of motive and a staged crime scene,
[2:09:08] form the crux of the case against Nicole Rice.
[2:09:13] And that's the broad overview of the evidence.
[2:09:15] As it was presented to the jury. By way of reminder, the
[2:09:19] prosecution has to prove the accused to be guilty beyond a
[2:09:23] reasonable doubt. The defense, however, contended
[2:09:28] that the. State's case was built on
[2:09:29] speculation. And unreliable memories.
[2:09:33] Nicole's attorney pointed out that there was no physical
[2:09:36] evidence linking her to the attack.
[2:09:39] Investigators had not produced any DNA, fingerprints or
[2:09:43] forensic proof placing Nicole in Anita's bedroom at the time of
[2:09:47] the crime. The entire accusation, the
[2:09:50] defense argued, rested on circumstantial details and
[2:09:54] hearsay. They cast doubt on the
[2:09:57] confession stories, noting that they emerged only after ATV Show
[2:10:01] reignited interest in the case. Notably, they said that it was
[2:10:06] suspicious that both witnesses, quote UN quote, remembered these
[2:10:09] confessions so many years later. Defense lawyers suggested that
[2:10:15] the. Cold justice television show
[2:10:17] had. Inadvertently created a frenzy
[2:10:20] around the case. They suggested that this caused
[2:10:23] the confessions to be remembered, perhaps falsely,
[2:10:27] possibly causing them to 0 in on Nicole without considering other
[2:10:31] suspects. They reminded jurors that early
[2:10:35] in the investigation, others had been persons of interest, yet
[2:10:39] those leads were never fully resolved or even completely
[2:10:42] investigated. In fact, the defense called a
[2:10:45] retired FBI agent as an expert witness to walk the jury through
[2:10:49] numerous unresolved clues and potential suspects that police
[2:10:53] had overlooked. This reinforced the idea that
[2:10:56] someone else could have been the perpetrator.
[2:10:59] With no direct proof against Nicole and so many unanswered
[2:11:02] questions, the defense urged the jury to find her not guilty
[2:11:09] after about a week of testimony. The jury deliberated for roughly
[2:11:12] 5. And 1/2 hours before reaching a
[2:11:14] decision on March 26th, 2025, the verdict was announced.
[2:11:22] Nicole Rice was found not guilty of the slaying of Anita Knutson.
[2:11:27] Upon hearing the jury's decision, Nicole broke down in
[2:11:30] tears covering her face as her lawyers and family embraced her
[2:11:35] in relief and joy. On the other side of the
[2:11:38] courtroom, Anita's family sat. In stunned.
[2:11:41] Silence. They had waited nearly 18 years
[2:11:44] for this moment, but the outcome was not what they'd hoped.
[2:11:49] Anita's sister later remarked that a not guilty verdict is not
[2:11:53] the same as innocence. While this is technically a true
[2:11:57] statement, Nicole Rice's name is, for all intents and
[2:12:00] purposes, completely cleared. At any rate, the Knutson family
[2:12:06] left the courthouse heartbroken, feeling that justice had not
[2:12:10] been served for law enforcement the trials.
[2:12:15] Outcome meant that the question of who ended.
[2:12:17] The life of Anita Knutson remained unresolved, with Rice
[2:12:23] acquitted and unable to be tried.
[2:12:25] Again due to double. Jeopardy protections The case
[2:12:29] has essentially returned to square one.
[2:12:32] No other suspects have been charged, and authorities didn't
[2:12:36] immediately indicate any plans to continue investigating the
[2:12:39] case in the wake of Nicole's acquittal, unfortunately, given
[2:12:46] the passage. Of time and the intensive focus
[2:12:48] on the wrong. Person it seems unlikely this
[2:12:51] tragic slaying will ever be solved.
[2:12:53] That said, I hope the Knutson family is able to continue to
[2:12:57] pressure investigators to solve this case and get justice for
[2:13:01] Anita once and for all. A 20 year old walks out his
[2:13:06] back. Door on a spring afternoon to
[2:13:08] put a pair of. Jumper cables away in a shed
[2:13:10] just outside the house. Two men are in the driveway with
[2:13:14] their heads under the hood of a car.
[2:13:16] A friend is inside cleaning. It's broad daylight in a highly
[2:13:21] sinister little town of a few 100 people, the sort of place
[2:13:24] where 40 people witness a man being cut down in the street and
[2:13:28] nobody talks to the cops. He never comes back.
[2:13:32] And when police finally searched that shed, the jumper cables
[2:13:36] aren't even there. At least not until a couple
[2:13:39] weeks later. Branson Perry was born on the
[2:13:43] 24th of February. 1981. And grew up in Skidmore, a
[2:13:48] farming town in the northwest corner of Missouri.
[2:13:51] He graduated from Notaway Holt High School in 1999 and drifted
[2:13:56] through the kind of work a young man finds in a small place.
[2:13:59] He did a stint with a roofing crew and took a job helping look
[2:14:03] after the animals in a traveling petting zoo.
[2:14:06] By the spring of 2001, he was between jobs, he lifted weights,
[2:14:11] he'd earned a black belt in Hapkido and he liked being
[2:14:14] outdoors. People in Skidmore describe him
[2:14:17] as easygoing and well liked, with no enemies, though as
[2:14:22] you'll see, this town is incredibly dark, so take that
[2:14:26] under advisement. Friends and relatives said
[2:14:30] vanishing without a word was completely out of character
[2:14:33] because he stayed in close touch with the people he loved.
[2:14:37] He had a heart condition that made his pulse race though.
[2:14:40] Nothing that kept him. From a normal life, he stood 5
[2:14:44] foot 9, blonde and blue eyed, and clocked in at around 155
[2:14:50] lbs. Keep that hair color in general
[2:14:53] appearance in mind because trust me, it'll be coming up again.
[2:14:58] He liked to wear necklaces strung with leather and
[2:15:01] arrowheads, a detail that would matter more than anyone guessed.
[2:15:06] He lived with his father, Bob, on West Oak.
[2:15:09] Street at the time. That he disappeared, his parents
[2:15:12] had recently divorced and his mother Rebecca had moved into a
[2:15:16] new chapter of her own on the 11th of April 2001.
[2:15:22] Bob Perry was laid up in. The hospital and due home soon.
[2:15:26] Branson wanted the house clean before his father got back, so
[2:15:30] he'd asked a friend over to help him tidy up outside.
[2:15:34] Two other men were bent over Bob's car, which needed a new
[2:15:38] alternator. Sometime around 3:00 in the
[2:15:40] afternoon, Branson told his friend he was going to run a set
[2:15:44] of jumper cables out to the shed beside the house.
[2:15:47] That was the last time anyone admits to seeing him, and he
[2:15:51] didn't take his vehicle. And he didn't pack a bag.
[2:15:55] His money, his clothes, everything he owned stayed
[2:15:59] exactly where it's at. A young man with a heart
[2:16:03] condition and no working car simply evaporated from his own
[2:16:07] backyard in the middle of the day with people standing close
[2:16:11] enough to hear him call out. The first person to sense
[2:16:14] something was wrong was his grandmother.
[2:16:16] Joanne. Who the next day stopped by and
[2:16:19] found the house unlocked and empty.
[2:16:22] That wasn't like Branson, so she kept calling over the following
[2:16:26] days and never got an answer. When she finally reached his
[2:16:29] mother, she learned that Rebecca hadn't heard from him either.
[2:16:34] Bob was discharged later than expected, and only after he came
[2:16:38] home did the family file a missing person report.
[2:16:42] By then it was the 17th of April, 6, full days after
[2:16:46] Branson had stepped out the door, and whatever trail there
[2:16:50] might have been had gone cold before anyone really started
[2:16:53] looking once the search began. Notaway.
[2:16:58] County authorities organized ground.
[2:17:00] Parties that combed the countryside for roughly 15 miles
[2:17:04] in every direction. They worked through fields,
[2:17:07] farms and abandoned buildings in the area, but they found
[2:17:10] nothing. At first, there was hope.
[2:17:13] He'd just taken off to clear his head, but his wallet and clothes
[2:17:17] sat untouched, and it got harder by the day to believe he'd left
[2:17:21] on his own. And then there's the detail
[2:17:24] nobody has ever been able to square.
[2:17:26] When investigators first looked inside that shed, the jumper
[2:17:30] cables Branson had supposedly carried out were nowhere to be
[2:17:33] found. Two weeks later, they turned up,
[2:17:36] sitting just inside the door, as though someone had set them
[2:17:40] there after the fact. How they got back has never been
[2:17:44] explained and no one has ever admitted to putting them there.
[2:17:49] In the weeks after the disappearance, more than 100
[2:17:51] people were. Interviewed.
[2:17:53] And a murkier picture of Branson's last days and his
[2:17:56] lifestyle began to surface. The friend who'd been helping
[2:18:00] him clean admitted that the two of them had recently been using
[2:18:04] serious quantities of dope, including weed and meth.
[2:18:08] A relative reported that Branson had a bottle of Valium on him
[2:18:11] the day he vanished. And there were rumors, never
[2:18:15] quite pinned down, that he owed money to the kind of people you
[2:18:19] don't want to owe. Investigators followed those
[2:18:23] threads S to Saint Joseph, where they questioned people Branson
[2:18:27] knew through the local drug scene.
[2:18:29] Each of them claimed they hadn't seen him, and reportedly each
[2:18:33] one passed a polygraph, though as you probably know, those
[2:18:37] aren't exactly reliable. Then came a tip that after
[2:18:41] leaving home that afternoon, Branson had been spotted at a
[2:18:45] house about a mile outside Quitman.
[2:18:48] This was a place locally understood to be somewhere you
[2:18:50] could score basically any substance.
[2:18:53] You were in the market for a trap house, to put it bluntly.
[2:18:57] Less than a week after he disappeared, and before he'd
[2:19:00] even been reported missing, that house burned to the ground, and
[2:19:04] nobody ever established who lit the match.
[2:19:09] In April of 2003, the case took its.
[2:19:11] Strangest and most disturbing. Turn police in Central Missouri
[2:19:16] arrested a 59 year old Presbyterian minister and former
[2:19:20] Boy Scout leader named Jack Wayne Rogers.
[2:19:23] He'd performed A crude, unlicensed operation on a woman
[2:19:27] in a hotel room in Columbia and was booked on 1st degree assault
[2:19:32] and practicing medicine without a license.
[2:19:35] When investigators examined his computer, things got far worse.
[2:19:40] And honestly, I can't even fully describe the extent of it, nor
[2:19:44] do I want to. They found the most disturbing
[2:19:47] material imaginable. And posts he'd written.
[2:19:50] On online message boards, under a handful of usernames, he
[2:19:54] described in graphic detail the things he wished to do to Young.
[2:19:57] Blonde men. Against their will.
[2:20:00] In one of them, Rogers described picking up a young blonde male
[2:20:03] hitchhiker and ending the life of that young man before burying
[2:20:08] the body in a remote stretch of the Ozarks.
[2:20:11] The description fit Branson right down to the hair color.
[2:20:16] The other stories he posted were even more disgusting.
[2:20:19] Indicating just what? Sort of deeply sick individual
[2:20:22] the cops had bagged. When police searched Rodgers
[2:20:25] vehicles, they turned up a turtle claw necklace that
[2:20:28] resembled one Branson used to wear.
[2:20:31] For a while, it looked like that story may have been a veiled
[2:20:34] confession that might finally account for a blonde young man
[2:20:38] who'd vanished 2 years earlier. Rodgers insisted he'd never met
[2:20:43] Branson and that the post was nothing more than a sick
[2:20:46] fantasy. But law enforcement wasn't so
[2:20:49] sure. In 2004, he was convicted and
[2:20:53] handed a 30 year sentence for his crimes, though he wasn't
[2:20:57] charged with anything related to Branson.
[2:21:00] At his sentencing, Branson's mother stood before.
[2:21:03] Him and begged him to say. What he'd done with her son, he
[2:21:07] gave her nothing, leaving her heart broken and assuming that
[2:21:11] she would never be able to get justice for her son.
[2:21:15] And yet, within months, Rebecca herself came to doubt he was
[2:21:19] involved. The necklace in the matching
[2:21:22] description were suggestive, but suggestive isn't proof, and
[2:21:26] investigators eventually swung their attention back towards
[2:21:29] Skidmore more broadly. It's impossible to talk about
[2:21:33] Branson Perry without talking about.
[2:21:35] Where he vanished. From Because Skidmore is a town
[2:21:38] that seems almost cursed. Two decades earlier, the local
[2:21:42] bully, Kenneth Rex McElroy, was Swiss cheesed up in the middle
[2:21:46] of the street in front of dozens of townspeople on a summer
[2:21:50] morning in 1981. He'd been terrorizing the town
[2:21:54] for years, and not one of them would say who'd pulled the
[2:21:57] trigger. I've actually covered this case
[2:22:00] before a number of years back, and he's perhaps one of the
[2:22:03] worst people I've ever covered. I have to revisit that case
[2:22:07] since back then I was new to content creation and my scripts
[2:22:10] were short and amateurish at best.
[2:22:14] Neither a grand jury nor federal investigators.
[2:22:17] Could crack the wall of. Silence.
[2:22:18] The town built around it, and no one was ever charged.
[2:22:23] That instinct, the reflex to look away and keep quiet, is the
[2:22:29] backdrop Branson's case has always been read against.
[2:22:33] A few years after he disappeared, his own cousin,
[2:22:37] Bobby Jo Stinnett, 8 months pregnant, was slain in her
[2:22:41] Skidmore home. That case drew national
[2:22:45] headlines and tied the Perry name.
[2:22:46] To two of the most. Notorious crimes the state has
[2:22:49] ever produced. And just to put this in context
[2:22:53] as to why I'm saying the town seems cursed.
[2:22:56] This place has less than 300 people living in it.
[2:23:00] The per capita crime rate of Skidmore is something that I'm
[2:23:03] sure sociologists and criminologists have studied by
[2:23:06] this point, but I'm getting off topic.
[2:23:10] The drug angle never fully went away, and it ran.
[2:23:13] Into the same wall as the. McElroy case People who might
[2:23:17] know something were afraid to say it.
[2:23:19] Before she passed, Rebecca said, she was convinced that somebody
[2:23:23] in or around Skidmore knew exactly what had become of her
[2:23:26] son and had chosen to keep it to themselves.
[2:23:30] In 2009, acting on a credible tip, investigators excavated a
[2:23:35] site near Quitman, digging a hole more than 20 feet deep and
[2:23:40] dozens of feet across. But they came up with nothing.
[2:23:45] The family searched oil wells and old outhouses, every dark
[2:23:49] place a body might be hidden. The case has never been closed.
[2:23:54] And in 2022, the Notaway County Sheriff announced that a suspect
[2:23:58] had finally been identified. However, despite this
[2:24:03] announcement, there was a major catch.
[2:24:05] There still wasn't enough evidence to make an arrest.
[2:24:09] Two years later, the feds joined, drawn by a.
[2:24:12] Fresh tip about a well. In the countryside near Quitman,
[2:24:16] around the same time, two people independently pointed
[2:24:19] investigators to a patch of ground nearby, swearing Branson
[2:24:23] was buried there. When it was dug up, the soil
[2:24:27] looked disturbed, as if something had been put in and
[2:24:31] later taken out. But there was no trace of
[2:24:34] Branson himself. Somebody out in that quiet
[2:24:38] stretch of Missouri knows what. Happened in the few steps.
[2:24:41] Between a back door and a shed. But whatever sinister force
[2:24:45] clouds this town has kept them from talking anyway.
[2:24:49] I'm kind of fascinated by the town of Skidmore, given the fact
[2:24:53] that it's clearly punching above its weight in the true crime
[2:24:55] world. If you're from Skidmore or if
[2:24:58] you're familiar with the area, take a moment to comment since
[2:25:02] I'm interested in getting a read on the town from a local in
[2:25:08] March of. 1993 two hikers picking their way through the.
[2:25:12] Brush of the Angeles National Forest came across a human skull
[2:25:17] lying in the dirt. When investigators recovered the
[2:25:20] rest of the partial skeleton scattered nearby, dental records
[2:25:24] gave the remains a name. That name reopened A wound that
[2:25:29] had been festering in a San Fernando Valley household for
[2:25:32] more than a year. The skull belonged to a 20 year
[2:25:35] old wife and mother named Kimberly Pandelios, who'd walked
[2:25:39] out her own front door for a modeling job and simply never
[2:25:43] come back. The job, it turned out, had
[2:25:46] never existed, and the man who'd invented it would manage to stay
[2:25:50] free for another 11 years. The mystery here isn't that the
[2:25:54] case is unsolved. It's the rather curious reason
[2:25:58] why it stayed a cold case for as long as it did.
[2:26:01] And let's just say I have some questions.
[2:26:05] Kimberly Pandelios was 20 years old in the.
[2:26:08] Winter of 1990. Two, she lived in Northridge, CA
[2:26:13] with her husband Peter, and the couple's 13 month old son.
[2:26:18] She was the kind of young woman who was trying to build
[2:26:20] something for herself. She'd enrolled in business
[2:26:23] courses, she picked up part time modeling work, and she was
[2:26:27] chasing the sort of break that the Los Angeles area dangles in
[2:26:31] front of everyone in that world. At that time, modeling gigs
[2:26:36] often came through classified ads in the local papers, and
[2:26:39] Kimberly, like a lot of aspiring models on a tight budget,
[2:26:43] answered them on February 27th, 1992.
[2:26:49] Kimberly told. Peter, she was heading out to
[2:26:51] that shoot. Investigators later pieced
[2:26:54] together that she'd been in contact with a man who called
[2:26:57] himself Paul. The babysitter watching her son
[2:27:00] remembered his calls clearly. Paul rang the house around 2:00
[2:27:04] in the afternoon to confirm the appointment, then again at 7:00
[2:27:08] that evening, by which point Kimberly was already gone.
[2:27:12] He mentioned, almost in passing, that she'd left her appointment
[2:27:16] book behind when the two of them had met earlier.
[2:27:20] An appointment book belonging to a woman who answered classified
[2:27:23] ads for a living was exactly the kind of object that could name
[2:27:27] the person she'd gone to meet. Kimberly never came home And the
[2:27:32] next day. February 28th.
[2:27:35] Her car was found burned out on a road near the Angeles forest.
[2:27:39] The fire had been set on the passenger side, and
[2:27:42] investigators believed Kimberly herself had driven the vehicle
[2:27:45] to that spot before whatever happened to her happened.
[2:27:50] Inside were the charred remains of a spiral notebook.
[2:27:54] Weeks later, a second notebook with her schedule turned up
[2:27:59] under a bridge a couple of miles away.
[2:28:02] The book was full of numbers, and for reasons which are
[2:28:05] unclear to me, the investigation into those numbers seems to have
[2:28:09] been quite limited at the time. Notably, this won't be the first
[2:28:13] time that the perpetrator remained free because detectives
[2:28:16] didn't follow up on a lead. But more on that in a moment.
[2:28:21] Aside from that, there was nothing else, and for a time the
[2:28:25] case went cold. Then came the skeleton in March
[2:28:29] 1993, lying about 50 yards from an old campsite.
[2:28:34] Now police had a body, but they were no closer to the man who'd
[2:28:38] left it there. For Kimberly's family.
[2:28:41] The discovery confirmed the worst.
[2:28:43] While answering almost nothing about who'd done it, one witness
[2:28:48] given the cover name Jeff, came forward to say he'd driven past
[2:28:52] a campsite around the time Kimberly vanished.
[2:28:56] He'd seen a young blonde woman sitting near a brown van guarded
[2:29:00] by several rough looking men who'd shouted at him to clear
[2:29:03] off when Kimberly's photo later aired on television.
[2:29:08] Jeff became. Convinced she was the woman he'd
[2:29:10] seen for years, the leading theory held that a group of men
[2:29:15] had taken her captive somewhere in the forest, done some
[2:29:19] horrible things, and then dumped her body.
[2:29:23] It was a vivid account, and it pointed investigators in
[2:29:26] entirely the wrong direction. Much later, authorities would
[2:29:31] conclude that Jeff had simply been mistaken and that the
[2:29:34] blonde woman at the campsite was never Kimberly at all.
[2:29:39] Suspicion later swung toward Charles Rathbun A.
[2:29:42] Photographer. Arrested for the slaying of
[2:29:44] another aspiring model named Linda Sobek.
[2:29:48] I covered her case very recently, which is how.
[2:29:52] I found out about. Kimberly's case both women were
[2:29:55] young, attractive and. Lured by the promise.
[2:29:59] Of a shoot and both were found within a few miles of each other
[2:30:03] in the same stretch of forest. A witness even claimed to have
[2:30:08] spotted Rathbun with Kimberly. At a Denny's.
[2:30:10] But the evidence didn't hold up, and he was eventually cleared.
[2:30:15] The truth, as it happened, revolved around a very different
[2:30:18] man entirely. David Raidmaker wasn't a
[2:30:21] photographer at all. He was something far more.
[2:30:24] Sinister. He was a convict who, around the
[2:30:28] time Kimberly disappeared, was reportedly running a variety of
[2:30:32] illicit operations, including an underground escort ring.
[2:30:37] He moved through the same shadowy world of personal ads
[2:30:40] and classifieds that Kimberly had been navigating in search of
[2:30:43] legitimate work. The authorities came to believe
[2:30:46] that he was the Paul who'd called the Pandelios home, and
[2:30:50] that he had been using an alias. He'd had her number on the day
[2:30:55] she vanished, and she'd. Had his.
[2:30:58] And yet the thread that finally led to him didn't come from
[2:31:01] forensics or anything more conventional.
[2:31:04] Raid maker, it emerged, had a habit of talking.
[2:31:08] Perhaps bragging? About crimes He told a
[2:31:11] girlfriend named Mania Senzaf about the slaying more than
[2:31:14] once. On one occasion, the two of them
[2:31:18] happened to be watching a television broadcast about the
[2:31:20] case. The one pushing the theory about
[2:31:23] a gang of men taking her raid maker scoffed that the whole
[2:31:28] story was wrong, and he told her he'd taken a young model into
[2:31:31] the forest, that she'd resisted his advances and that he dealt
[2:31:36] with her when she did. He said Kimberly had begged him
[2:31:39] to let her go, swearing she'd never go to the police, but he
[2:31:43] didn't believe her. He said he drowned her in a
[2:31:46] Creek, and he even claimed he'd gone back to the spot later and
[2:31:50] confirmed that her remains were still lying where he'd left
[2:31:53] them. Manya was terrified of him, and
[2:31:57] for years she said nothing to anyone carrying the dark secret
[2:32:01] with her. What finally cracked the case
[2:32:04] open had nothing to do with Kimberly at all.
[2:32:07] In the early 2000s, Raid Maker was arrested over his disturbing
[2:32:11] activities with an underage girl, which, knowing his
[2:32:15] history, was on brand for this sicko.
[2:32:18] When that arrest happened, the girl told police something
[2:32:21] startling. He'd bragged to her about ending
[2:32:24] a model's life years earlier. For reasons that were never
[2:32:28] fully explained, the lead wasn't chased down right away.
[2:32:33] Only after Raid Maker was released did the account get the
[2:32:36] attention it deserved. And around the same time, Mania
[2:32:40] finally came forward as well. Detectives went back to the old
[2:32:44] evidence and found something. They could actually put in.
[2:32:47] Front of a jury, that was the fact that raid maker's phone
[2:32:51] number was sitting in kimberly's records from the very day she
[2:32:54] vanished a fact that I find highly unsettling another
[2:32:59] girlfriend Cynthia recalled that raid maker had driven her out to
[2:33:03] kimberly's car on the night of February 28th and set it ablaze
[2:33:10] when investigators recorded her phone calls with him he.
[2:33:13] Admitted to torching the. Vehicle, though he flatly denied
[2:33:16] taking Kimberly's life in March 2412, years after a.
[2:33:22] Young mother left. Home for a modeling job that was
[2:33:24] never even real, David Raidmaker was finally arrested and
[2:33:29] charged. The trial began in January 2006,
[2:33:35] and the jury heard about the confessions he'd handed to the
[2:33:37] women in his life. They heard about the phone
[2:33:40] records that tied him to Kimberly's final day and his own
[2:33:44] admission about the burned car. They didn't believe his denials.
[2:33:50] And in February? 2006.
[2:33:52] They found him guilty with the special circumstance that he'd
[2:33:56] abducted her. That verdict made him eligible
[2:34:00] for the ultimate penalty, but on March 30th, 2006, a judge handed
[2:34:06] him life in prison without the possibility of parole. 14 years
[2:34:12] after Kimberly Pandelios answered an.
[2:34:14] Ad for a photo. Shoot, that didn't exist.
[2:34:17] The man who'd written it finally had a cell with his name on it.
[2:34:23] The thing that really disturbs me about this case is how.
[2:34:25] Long Raid Maker was able. To get away with it.
[2:34:28] While I can understand why Manya didn't go to the cops out of
[2:34:32] extreme fear, the rest of it remains a mystery to me.
[2:34:36] Detectives had his number within a week of the slaying and just
[2:34:40] apparently never fully investigated all the numbers in
[2:34:43] her appointment book. If this was a much more minor
[2:34:46] offense, I could see why the resources may not have been
[2:34:50] dedicated, but given the crime, this makes no sense.
[2:34:55] To make matters even worse for detectives, this wasn't.
[2:34:58] Some number that. Was buried deep in the book.
[2:35:01] It was right on the latest date. The thing that really, truly
[2:35:05] makes no sense to me is the fact that he.
[2:35:07] Wasn't investigated. Further, after the girl he
[2:35:09] assaulted told them what Raid Maker had done.
[2:35:13] Now hear me out for a second on this one, because I have a
[2:35:16] theory and as usual when it's speculative, I'll admit that
[2:35:21] right off the bat, Raid Maker was operating some sort of
[2:35:24] underground escort network in Los Angeles, perhaps the sort of
[2:35:28] operation that rich and powerful people may have used.
[2:35:32] I have to question whether he may have had some compromising
[2:35:35] material on people in positions of power and authority that kept
[2:35:39] him protected. That said, maybe I'm
[2:35:42] overthinking it and maybe. It was all just pure.
[2:35:45] Incompetence all along. I feel like I'm asking for a lot
[2:35:49] of feedback from my audience for this video, but I'd like your
[2:35:52] thoughts on this theory as well.

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