You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together
with Kristin Dilley. My name is Kristin Dilley. I'm a writer, a
researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social
media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to mind Over Murder. I'm Kristin Dilley
and I'm Bill Thomas. We're continuing our discussion today about the HBO Max series
Burden of Proof, which dropped on the sixth of June. We hope you've
had a chance to watch it by now, but if not, please pause
this recording go watch join us again a little bit later. It's a terrific
series about the February nineteen eighty seven disappearance of Jennifer Pandos. This conversation today
will make a lot more sense if you listen to the first part of this
conversation in our last episode of Mind Over Murder. So we're shifting into the
back half of the four episodes in Burden of Proof, which are extremely well
done, but we also want to encourage you to jump into this conversation if
you like. Yeah, absolutely, of course. We love it when you
all engage with us on social media, and we do our best to respond
to everybody. So if you have thoughts, observations, raves, questions,
anything else with relation to Burden of Proof, please do put all of that
on our social media page. We're happy to engage with you, and we
will address listener questions as needed or warranted. We're trying not to give everything
away because we're trying to respect the fact that Cynthia Hill and the team that
put this together as a four part series, they would like you to watch
all four episodes. Part of the thing that's key, I think to Burden
of Proof is that this is a series that was shot over a seven year
period from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty three. A good portion of what you're
seeing, and this is probably from hundreds of hours of footage. Is Steven
Pandos, the brother of Jennifer Pandos, and his personal journey moving from a
situation where in twenty sixteen and for several years forward he strongly suspects that his
father, Ron Pandos, and his mother Margie may be involved, the father
specifically, and then the mother perhaps involved in a potential cover up. And
then, of course, as Steven learns more about his sister's disappearance and the
circumstances around that time frame from investigators, forensics experts, the Commonwealth attorney,
and others, he realizes his original view of the case is probably wrong,
and he even says the things he was led to believe for the first twenty
two years of his understanding of his sister's disappearance are completely wrong. Then the
conclusions that he at least is tentatively committed to in the first two episodes began
to shift in episodes three and four, and it was interesting to me too
when they shifted to talking to the investigators on the case. I don't think
we're spoiling too much here if we'd do. You mentioned that there was a
lost case file is do you think that it's okay? Can we mention the
lost case file? I certainly have no problem with it, And of course,
the idea that there were misfiled papers. We haven't had that happen in
the Colonial Parkway murders, but we've had discarded evidence and missed opportunities. We've
had leaks of crime scene photos. So I groaned out loud when we first
learned about this. As you move forward, this missing case file becomes increasingly
important because there's so little for law enforcement to work with in this case.
When one of the current investigators reaches out to Stephen and says, hey,
we found the original case file. It was at the bottom of a box
in one of the filing rooms, they reveal once we had the original case
file, we realized that we needed to shift our investigation into an entirely different
direction. And that was a moment where I was like, Oh, my
goodness, do tell where are we looking now? And that is what you
learn in episodes three and four. This is where the investigation has shifted,
and it has shifted away from the parents Bill, even after you've learned along
with the rest of us, that hey, they're shifting the focus away from
the parents. Did you still feel suspicious of the parents at all or did
you understand why they shifted. I think that Ron and Margie's very odd responses
to Jennifer's disappearance, I think actually unintentionally created suspicion. Just some of the
things they did were so profoundly odd, And even in episodes three and four,
when the investigation shifts from the parents to other potential and strongly suspicious suspects,
I wasn't dismissing the fact that Ron Pandost could have been involved in the
disappearance of his daughter, but they were definitely moving down the list. Of
course, I had some of the lessons learned from the Colonial Parkway murders in
my head, like one of our FBI investigators saying to me years ago,
no one's ever cleared in an unsolved homicide until the homicide itself is cleared.
Until you actually know what happened, you can't say, oh, no longer
suspect in the Jennifer Pando's disappearance, for example, that was always in the
back of my mind. But it's shocking to find out that there are some
other people who really belong at the top of the list, and this is
not like the Colonial Parkway murders, where we have one hundred and fifty persons
of interest. Is a much smaller group of people. The players begin to
shift around, and you begin to realize we should be looking at people that
probably had a role here in her disappearance, and the parents are moving down
the list of likely suspects into perhaps not beyond suspicion, but definitely not the
most likely. One of my other crime minded friends who watched this documentary after
my recommendation, and he said, he said, do you want to know
when I figured out that mom and dad probably had nothing to do with it?
I said, no, when did you figure that out? And he
said, came a little later in the documentary than it should have. He
said, but the minute that mom allowed herself to be hypnotized, I knew
that they had nothing to do with it, because you can't hide anything under
hypnosis, he said. If she was going to allow herself to fall under
that sort of of that sort of procedure, he said, I knew she
didn't have anything to do with it. And I thought that's very interesting.
Yeah, Yeah, he's such a smart dude that I was like, Hey,
I wouldn't have thought of it that way, but now that he mentioned
it, I can see it someone had something to hide. You'd think that
they would not be willing to see that level of control never been hypnotized.
It's a very interesting field. Yeah, but as I understand it from what
I've read and heard, people under hypnosis will say things, admit things that
they wouldn't necessarily admit while fully conscious. I know one of the efforts in
the true crime space is trying to get people to remember more detail, but
that could be incriminating if you're trying to hide the fact that, let's say
you're involved in Jennifer's disappearance. I think the last thing someone would do would
be to say, oh, sure, go ahead hypnotize me. Yeah,
but someone needed nothing to hide, they'd probably say, okay, sure,
if it helps. And I really felt for all that. I think we
can all agree Ron and Margie's responses were definitely a little odd, ranging up
the scale to bizarre, but I felt really awful every time that I watched
Margie have confrontations both with Stephen and with the investigators, because she's so very
clearly is frustrated and hurt and angry and indignant that her son would believe that
she had anything to do with it, when she has staunchly continued to say
I had nothing to do with this. I would never And by the time
we get to the end of the series and we learn who they're focusing on
as opposed to the parents, I did feel like, pardon me, felt
bad for doubting her. I know that you're going on the journey the filmmakers
are taking you on, and so for the first two episodes they clearly wanted
you to look at mom and dad with some suspicion. But I felt bad
by the time we reached the end of it that I had thought that of
Margie, because she is just so clearly. I felt awful for her.
She has suffered not just of course, the loss of one child, but
it very clearly upset her relationship with Stephen, and she's had to deal with
essentially like losing both her kids. I really felt awful about that. And
I know I keep saying that this really tugged at my heart strings in a
way that I did not expect, Like I didn't expect to be emotionally invested
in this. I am I share your perspective, but let me offer two
quick thoughts. One is that I think one of the reasons why we're so
sympathetic to Margie Pandos the mother, is that she's clearly damaged her ex husband,
Ron Pandos, who has spent time in jail and been involved in some
pretty sketchy activities over the years. He's also been married two times after their
divorce, so he's on his third wife. He's not a very nice man.
He's cruel, and he's crude and he's hard edged. I feel like
his wife, his ex wife, is damaged. Goods because Stephen made it
very clear that his father was very abusive to himtically abusive, mentally abusive,
emotionally abusive, and that he felt very strongly. He didn't say that his
father beat his mother or anything like that, but he did say that he
was extremely emotionally abusive towards his mother on a lot of levels. Margie's so
damaged by her life experience an abusive ex husband. I don't think there's much
way around that. Losing a daughter at age fifteen and then this horrible strain
between Stephen and his mother, and of course, yes, I agree that
Cynthia Hill and the filmmaking team are positioning things in a certain way in episodes
one and two. But remember Stephen Pandos as the brother. It's his journey.
He really believes that his father is involved in his sister's disappearance in nineteen
eighty seven, and that he believes that essentially his father's gotten away with murder
and that his mother may have facilitated her daughter's disappearance, and that is something
that is unacceptable to Stephen emotionally. There are oftentimes where I thought he seems
very shut down, but his sense of righteousness and fairness and what's right and
what should be made right in his world just burns throughout the four episodes.
This guy really feels that his sister has been done wrong and that he wants
to do everything he can to make it right, even if that means accusing
his father, whom he's very estranged from, of murder and his mother of
facilitating a cover up, because he really believes that. I mean, he
clearly explored suing his parents in a civil suit, taking legal action against them.
He actually had his sister declared legally dead. That's actually quite a bone
of contention between himself and his parents. They're asking him, basically, where
do you get off having your sister declared legally dead when her parents are still
alive? But he said, yeah, I'm her brother, and I believe
that she is no longer with us, and so I have had her declared
dad. This clearly bothers his parents tremendously, and his father, like I
said, is not a nice guy. I really disliked this guy intensely.
Yeah. Yeah. And then there's some very strange interview footage where his third
wife, who clearly wasn't around back in nineteen eighty seven, Yeah, is
acting as his spokesperson. Almost. Yeah, that was interesting arguing points with
Stephen, and part of me just wanted to say, lady, but out,
this isn't your kid. You weren't married to my father back then.
It's unbelievable. There is so much now I realize, of course, we're
just going to do True Confessions with Bill Thomas for a couple of minutes.
Here do we have to why didn't I ask the question? And then you
decide if you want to answer it. The dynamics at play between your parents
and you are vastly different among those between Stephen and his parents. But I'm
curious when you were watching this, did you have moments We know that there
are moments in which you similarities between Jennifer's investigation in Kathy's. Did you ever
feel like there were moments of kinship between you and Stephen where you could see
what was going on with him and go, yeah, I got you,
I get it, Yes, very much. And you and I've talked about
this before. I had a chance to meet John Walsh from America's Most Wanted
a number of years ago, and he was a super nice man. I
remember him saying to me, boy, the more I had learned about Cathy's
case, the Colonial Parkway murders, the more it reminds me of Adam's case,
his son's case. And there were a lot of problems in Adam's case,
missed opportunities in friction with the FBI, and a lot of stuff we've
talked about here. And at the same time, I remember mister Walsh used
to use this expression about you've been asked to join this club that no one
wants to be asked to join. That is the families of murder victims I
have found over the years since we've been doing podcast, and of course since
I've been much more heavily involved in the Colonial Parkway murders. When I meet
the loved one of murder victim, I feel an almost immediate affinity for them,
and especially these days, when I meet the siblings of murder victims.
It's very easy to develop that kind of shorthand that you would have with someone
because you share something that's so incredibly unusual and there's a bond there. Now.
I'm not saying I'm going to be best friends with everyone who's ever lost
a brother or a sister to this kind of terrible crime, but it's very
easy, and particularly now watching Stephen's story unfold, and this is really his
story. It's all about Jennifer and his search for answers. So much of
it felt so familiar, And as I said, even Pamela, my partner,
was saying, Wow, where have we heard that before? Or that
sounds familiar, or she said out loud, that's exactly what happened to you.
So much of his journey feels so similar. Yeah, it's a pretty
easy place to put yourself. It's just got to be so tough to take
what you yourself have been experiencing for quite a while now thirty seven years and
see it reflected rate on TV and see another person going along with it,
experiencing the same thing. Did you gain any insights about yourself and your own
journey watching Stephen go through his true confessions? Remember, I guess I'd have
to think about that one. I don't know that. I don't know if
I honestly have a great answer for that at this moment. I'll have to
think about that. It's a good question. I don't have an answer at
this moment. Well, we'll come back to it again. One of the
things that's very clear as we move into episodes three and four is that this
mysterious father figure who may be the man that Jennifer Pando's babysat four, Carrie
Hendrix, Harry Hendrix, and her boyfriend on again off again boyfriend Tony Tobler,
definitely deserve a significant look and that all of this talk about Jennifer's parents
may actually have created a focus that's aimed in the wrong direction. That Kerrie
Hendrix or Tony Tobler could easily be involved in Jennifer's disappearance. And there's a
third figure, a man named May who shows up in episodes three and four,
and mister May appears to have additional information which might steer the investigation towards
Kerrie Hendrix or Tony Tobler and perhaps others. The one thing that I noticed,
and I'm not saying that this wasn't taken into account by James City County.
It's entirely possible that it was and they just didn't share it with the
filmmakers. But when you see something in a note that references a father figure,
you either look at the parents, which they did the boyfriend, you
look at other figures in their life. But they seem to have missed one
particular arena that they could have looked in where you would definitely find a father
figure for a fifteen year old girl, and that is school. I'm wondering
if they ever looked in the direction of any of the teachers at Lafayette High
School. And I'm not saying because I went to Lafayette and I had most
of the same teachers she did. I'm not saying there's any teacher at Lafayette
who is capable of that kind of violence. I really don't think that there
is, But I am curious if at any point during the investigation, they
looked at and it could be like a coach. I don't know. They
didn't talk about whether or not she did sports. They didn't talk about coaches
or anything else like that. I'm just curious if they win immediately to parents'
boyfriend father figure, but skipped school. As a teacher, when I think
of father figures and I think of teenagers, I immediately go to school.
So I'm curious if they ever went down that investigative route. You're listening to
Mind Over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors.
We're back here at Mind Over Murder. In the latter part of the investigation,
as the years unfold, the case is taken over by a James City
County Police detective named Jake Rice, whose specialty is forensics. Although Jake Rice
has now retired from the James City County Police Department, he's still involved in
the case and he has a very high level of trust with Stephen Pandos.
They appear to have a good relationship on and off camera, and all these
people are willing to appear on camera, which I was actually very impressed by.
Yeah, me too. We certainly didn't see that in the Colonial Parkway
murders, none of the FBI or Virginia State Police investigators would appear on camera.
I found it interesting and to the credit of the James City County Police
Department and others that they were willing to appear on camera. The first investigator,
Wendy Reid, appears on camera and spoke at some length, and then
Jake Rice also spoke at some length on camera. Their backfill on what happened
in the investigation, including the moments that were less than stellar, the misfiling
of the case file for what appeared to be a period of years, and
then its rediscovery and being brought forward, which helped inform people like Jake Rice
on how to move the investigation for it. Again, remember they weren't there
back in nineteen eighty seven. Yeah, some of these people, including Jake
Rice, had actually gone to school with some of the people involved in this
case, including Jennifer Pandos herself, so that they were high school kids back
then, and of course now they're adults in mid career. Their candor allowed
us inside that investigation to a certain extent, and I found that very helpful.
I also immediately noticed, hey, wow, they have law enforcement people
willing to talk on camera, because we never ever had that. If I'm
remembering correctly, we had a former Virginia State Police investigator on to talk about
the case, but certainly we did not have anybody currently working on Colonial Parkway,
and I don't think we had any of the former case stations from the
FBI, no, unfortunately. I was also very interested in the fact that
they included some I don't know that interrogations the right word, I guess interview
footage from the Times that investigator Read was speaking to missus Pandos. I was
surprised but also pleased that they had footage of that that they were willing to
share. Yeah, they shared some of the footage from Margie's hypnosis session.
There was a lot more like archival here, we're putting you in the investigation
room footage involved in the documentary. I was very glad to see it,
because we certainly didn't have it with ours. I was very struck by the
fact that the decision by James City County Police to release that footage probably much
more clearly indicated that they did not suspect the mother of involvement. The interrogation
footage, and some of that got very heated, and oh my God went
after her, trying to push her off her story. They offered her immunity
in exchange for information, and of course she turned them down because she says
she doesn't know anything about Jennifer's disappear parents and the hypnosis footage, which we
discussed earlier, is very striking. What, of course, isn't made available
to the filmmakers are the interrogations or interviews that may have taken place of people
that I think are now regarded as much more likely suspects. Yeah, the
focus shifts in the third and fourth episodes to people that probably deserve a much
closer look in terms of do these people know anything about the disappearance of Jennifer
Pandos. My guess is there's very interesting footage of those interrogations and discussions unless
they've lawyered up and refused to move forward with any kind of discussion with law
enforcement. I am interested in the fact that there was no interview footage of
Ron Pandos of law enforcement talking to Ron Pandos. Certainly the filmmakers were able
to get him in his own house discussing things like that. Sometimes with the
third wife, sometimes without. But for all that we watched Margie go up
against investigators a number of different times, we never saw that with Ron,
and I would be very interested to know what he was like, how he
would have responded when put under pressure from investigators. I really would have liked
to see that. That's a fly on the wall moment for me, and
we never did get to see it. And certainly in the early going of
Burden of Proof, Ron Pandos appears to be, at least from the perspective
of his son Stephen, suspect number one. My guess is that there is
footage of Ron Pandos, who's a difficult, kind of prickly personality. He's
not a nice man. As I've said, he doesn't come across as a
particularly caring individual. He's got a lot of rough edges and a lot of
attitude. At the same time, he's been accused of murder, not necessarily
formally as far as we know, but his I certainly believed for years,
if not decades, that he was responsible for the disappearance of his daughter,
which more than likely makes him a murderer. And he kept, as we
had mentioned in our previous episode, he kept making these really odd statements.
Hypothetically, I hit her, she hit her head and it killed her.
And he at one point even said, oh, let's get a plane,
I'll take you to the body who says that exactly? Who says that,
if you had nothing to do with your daughter's death, why do you say
that. I was so floored by both of those statements, the hypothetical and
maybe he's just being a jerk. But then let's get into an airplane and
I'll take you. And then of course he backs up and recants and says,
no, he can't do that. And I'm not sure how he got
himself to that place. If he's really not involved, How in the world
would you say something like that. I know sometimes that in other investigations with
serial killers and others, we've seen people who will string law enforcement investigators along.
Part of what they're looking for is just a way to get out of
that jail cell, even if it's just for a day or two, to
be put on a plane and taken to another location and march around in the
woods and fail to identify the right location where someone's remains might be found.
You can make a case that prisoner who's probably bored out of their mind,
is probably looking at this as a short term vacation. You get outside,
see some beautiful scenery and get marched around in the woods or something with a
bunch of law enforcement people, which I guess from their perspective beat sitting in
a jail cell. Now that I'm thinking about it, this is literally just
coming to me as we're sitting here talking. We know that Margie Pandas was
offered an immunity deal, and it was immunity for everything up to homicide.
They were like, well, forgive anything up until the point that you say
your kilter it and then it's off the table. Was Ron Pandos ever offered
an immunity deal. I never got that impression. I didn't think so.
But I'm really curious. It's like, why would you offer it to one
parent and not the other if you think that they're in cahoots. I believe
that a lot of situations in law enforcement, you're looking for the partner,
the facilitator of the second tier person, the one who's going to flip to
flip exactly on the principle who's responsible for that particular crime. And since law
enforcement often doesn't have another way of breaking a case and identifying a responsible person.
They will say to the partner the second the weak link, the weak
link, tell us what happened, and will give you immunity, or we'll
give you some sort of deal. I don't think they would have ever done
that with Ron Pandos, because I believe that not just Steven Pandos his son,
but law enforcement suspected that the father was involved in this disappearance and likely
homicide. Very interesting dynamics at play here as the series moves toward its inevitable
conclusion. And we're not going to spoil this for anybody, although anybody who's
been following the press on this probably knows who the suspect is going to end
up being. But I'm very interested in how this is going to resolve itself.
They had mentioned at the very end that there is still lab work being
done. There is still some DNA testing that they're trying to do. I
am very curious to see if this case can be resolved. Jake Rice,
the investigator, had said he thinks it's a solvable case. It does sound
like a solvable case. I think they're really going to need to do some
of the best DNA testing that they possibly can to see if they can get
something off of the note after all this time. All that being said,
this is a case with significant challenges though. There's a limited amount of forensic
evidence, and it isn't like they have dozens and dozens of choices in terms
of moving this case forward. They've done handwriting analysis, they've done language analysis,
they've done DNA testing. I certainly sympathized with Stephen Pandos making phone calls
to Jake Rice asking for updates, asking if the test results had come back
from the lab. They were doing testing at what sounded like the FBI lab
as well as at private labs, And the weeks go by, and he
keeps looking for answers. Boy, that sounded so familiar. There's a limited
amount of evidence remaining. They're going to have to get really lucky, and
they're going to have to create some of their own luck in order to move
this case forward. No one's ever been formally charged in this case, even
though it's very evident that they have strong suspects. They have a much clearer
idea of what happened the night that Jennifer disappeared. There's no slam dunks here.
They are going to have to work very hard and they're going to have
to be lucky in order to move this case forward. Now, I would
appeal to our local audience listening here in the area that goes especially for anybody
in the Williamsburg James City County area. If you know anything with relation to
the Jennifer Pando's case or any of the people involved in this case, please
do not hesitate to reach out to the James City County Police and offer what
you know as part of this investigation. I think we would love to see
Stephen finally have the answers that he is looking for in this case. One
of the key areas that's mentioned in the documentary is that there is a suspicion
that construction materials could have been stolen from construction sites. So if you know
anything about that, this would have been in the nineteen eighty seven time frame.
This would have involved theft of large barrels and the theft of acid.
And I don't think I want to get any more graphic than that, but
if you know anyone, if you were a four person on a construction site
in the Williamsburg area in nineteen eighty seven that suffered losses involving acid used for
cleaning brick. Obviously it can have nefarious uses as well, and the theft
of probably fifty five gallon drums which obviously would have been used to place the
acid in those drums. That would be something that the James City County Police
Department would be very interested in hearing about. At the same time, these
suspects that are mentioned in the latter part of the documentary, Kerrie Hendrix,
who was the man who had used Jennifer as a babysitter. Her former boyfriend
Tony Tobler is also mentioned as a strong suspect, and Charlie May who's actually
quite distinctive he only has one arm. He shows up very prominently in the
latter episodes and provides additional detail about what he suspects may have happened. If
more about any of these individuals from that nineteen eighty seven timeframe, there's a
possibility this could be helpful to the James City County Police Department. Will include
in the show notes how to contact the investigators. We believe anyone around the
world will enjoy watching Burden of Proof, but we know we have a lot
of listeners in the Williamsburg and Virginia area. If you know anything about the
disappearance of Jennifer Pandos, now is the time to come forward. Absolutely.
We hope you'll join us again next week as we continue our exploration of the
Burden of Proof, HBO documentary and the disappearance of Jennifer Pandos. In our
next episode, we'll be featuring an in depth conversation with retired investigator Wendy Reid,
who was the lead in the Jennifer Pando's disappearance for several years. The
following episode will have an exclusive conversation with Stephen Pandos, brother of Jennifer,
and filmmaker Cynthia Hill, who directed and produced HBO's Burden of Proof. Please
let us know what you think on our social media feeds. You can find
Mindover Murder on Facebook, as well as our ongoing conversation regarding the Colonial Parkway
murders. That is going to do it for this episode of Mind Over Murder.
Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Mind
Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our executive
producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley. Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Our theme music is by Kevin McLeod. Mind Over Murder is distributed in
partnership with Coral Space Media. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter,
or Instagram. You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway Murders on
Facebook, and finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at Bill Thomas.
Five six. Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder my