Welcome back to the Path Went Chile for part two of our coverage on the
murder of Ruth Marie Terry, and now I'm going to be sharing more details
about the case. It does sound like Ruth did have a good relationship with
her family, like they did stay in touch and she didn't really have any
issues with them. But I think she figured, I need to go out
and explore the world. I cannot stay here because getting married at thirteen years
old, no matter what the circumstances, is very creepy. It's super creepy.
And then what you get divorced a couple of years later and then decide
to remarry this person. But it's like you're not even of the age to
consent yet, but you're already deciding you want to get divorced and remarried.
And it's just like, this is a child. So to think that she
went through that at the age of thirteen to be married to a man.
And do we know how old the guy was. I'm actually going to look
that up because I think they have his name on find a Grave. So
yeah, he was born in nineteen thirty one, so he technically would have
been nineteen at the time. She was married, which is creepy. A
nineteen year old marrying a thirteen year old, it's super creepy. So Ruth
got a fresh start in Lavonia, Michigan. She got a job working at
an automotive plant, but she wound up becoming pregnant and giving birth to a
son. And to this day, the identity of this child's biological father is
still a mystery. It just might have been someone she could have had like
a brief sexual relationship with before he took off, But at the time,
she was still in her early twenties and she knows she knew she could not
provide for her son as a single mother, so she made an arrangement with
this couple, this married couple that she was close to. This man,
Richard Hanschett Senior, was I think the supervisor at the automotive plant where she
worked, and Richard's wife was also an employee there. So they pretty much
said that we will pay your living expenses, Ruth will we will give you
a place to live while you were pregnant and give birth to the child,
and in exchange, once you have this boy, you will give him over
to us, sign over the custody and we will legally adopt him. And
of course this is what happened, and the boy was raised under the name
Richard Hanschett Junior. After Richard's adoptive parents died, he became interested in tracking
down his birth mother and submitted his DNA to the website ancestry dot com and
wound up making a genetic link to Ruth's nice in twenty eighteen. At that
point, Ruth had still not been identified as the Lady of the Dunes,
but Richard got in touch with ruth surviving relatives, who said that yet we
have not seen her since nineteen seventy four. We have no idea what happened
to her, which was already a big shock for Richard, but it became
an even bigger shock in twenty twenty two when he was informed that your mother
is an infamous murder victim who was once known as the Lady of the Dunes,
and that she was murdered a short time after she disappeared. Yeah,
that's a lot to take in. I can imagine it's difficult when both of
your parents have died and they're your adoptive parents, and you feel this freedom
to be able to now look into your lineage, and then to find out
that your mother is this famous murder victim. That had to be really heartbreaking,
because I mean, it's like trauma on top of trauma. For one,
she's deceased, you're never going to be able to meet her. And
number two, she died in an extremely violent way, exactly, and Richard
was also regretful about another thing. Apparently, Ruth moved to California, and
sometime during the early nineteen seventy she decided to reach out and reconnect with her
son. But Richard had a kind of a tumultuous teenage years, and he
actually suffered a drug overdose sometime during the seventies and was in a coma for
eighteen days when Ruth tried to reach out and speak to him. Thankfully,
Richard made a full recovery and found out that his mother was looking for him,
But because he was trying to get himself clean and deal with some other
problems, he felt, this is not the right time. I'm not going
to reach out to my mother until I feel ready. And now, of
course he regrets it, thinking that Ruth was likely murdered only a short time
after she tried to get in touch with me, and he was thinking to
himself, if I had reached out to her at that time, then maybe
I could have met her before she was killed. So now we've got to
tack on survivor's guilt. That's just so sad, because of course you're going
to play those scenarios in your head. What if she actually was successful and
getting a hold of him, things could have turned out differently, because we
just truly don't know how things would have turned out, and like what hidden
variables would have made a difference in the trajectory of the life of somebody.
Could she have lived if that was the case, We just don't know,
And to kind of ascribe any type of blame to oneself in that situation is
something that we see family members of victims do all the time, exactly.
And even though Richard had a tough teenage years, it's good to know that
he turned his life around and he's still alive today in his sixties, and
he recently made a trip to Provincetown for the first time to visit the site
where his mother had been murdered. And even though her remains, part of
them are still buried in the original grave in Provincetown. He has been given
some of her remains and some ashes that he's kept in his possession, So
it sounds like he's at peace with the whole situation. Well that is at
least a little bit of catharsis to be able to have some of your mother
return to you and to know that she's with you. So my heart really
goes out to Richard because I can't imagine what it would be like to find
out that information and then to just to never get to know your mother and
to know that she did everything that she could in order for him to have
the best life possible. And he saw and she saw that with you know,
her boss, Richard Senior, and Richard Hensch senior and his wife what
was his wife's name, Her name was Thelma, Thelma Handget. Yeah.
So this idea that Ruth decided to give Richard Junior a better life by providing
him a family with Richard Henshey Senior and his wife Thelma. And obviously he
had some tumultuous years in his you know, his teenage years were a bit
tumultuous. But I think that can often be the case with children who are
adopted and don't get a chance to meet their families, because there's often a
sense just from what I've seen, obviously I can't speak from personal experience.
My mom was adopted, like she didn't know who her father was. So
I know that my grandma kept a lot of secrets, and she found out
through genetic I guess through genealogy right through like ancestry dot Com. She basically
ended up being able to trace back who her father was. But my grandma
held a lot of secrets during her life and she never knew that. And
I know that she always felt that sense of like not really knowing where she
came from because there was just it was so shrouded in secrecy. And so
I can imagine that Richard felt the same way, because there's just this huge
part of his life that he was just completely unaware about. I mean,
he did know who his mother was because Richard and Thelma could Richard Senior and
Thema could tell him about her because she worked for them. But actually being
able to meet her himself and being able to know her is a completely different
thing exactly. And we saw so many examples of this on the original Unsolved
Mysteries where they had to have lost's love segments where people would meet up with
long lost relatives, and more often than not, she would be have this
happy reunion in front of the camera where they finally met each other for the
first time. And I'm sure Richard was hoping that this would happen with his
mother, but it turned out to be exactly not what he expected. So
now this is when the story gets really crazy. It turned out that in
nineteen seventy four, while Ruth was living in California, she got married to
a man named Guy Maldovin, and marriage records showed that they officially got married
in Reno, Nevada on February sixteenth, nineteen seventy four, though for some
reason, Ruth used a fake name on the marriage certificate. She was listed
under the name Terry Marie Vizna. We're not entirely sure why, but as
we're going to talk about, there are a number of red flags in this
marriage. Shortly thereafter, Ruth and her new husband, Guy decided to visit
relatives in Tennessee, and it said that Guy was like it antiques art dealer
and that they were now traveling through the United States searching for old antiques.
But a lot of her relatives said that Ruth didn't appear to be herself whenever
she was a round guy, that he gave off the impression of being very
controlling and possessive. But nonetheless, they were going to continue on with their
trip around the United States. They were going to go on a honeymoon.
And I guess which state Guy said that they were planning to travel to sometime
in the near future. Rhode Island, Massachusetts. Oh, Massachusetts. Yeah,
that's what I'm just saying to keep hearing Provincetown and I think Rhode Island.
No, it's Massachusetts. But surprise, surprise, this turned out to
be the last time they ever heard from Ruth, and sometime during the summer
of nineteen seventy four, Guy returned to California. He also got in touch
with Ruth's family and said that shortly after they got back, they got into
a fight and then Ruth just decided to take off on him and run away,
and she and he had no idea what happened to her, And of
course this made Ruth's family very suspicious. They hired a private investigator to travel
to California and look into the matter and discovered that Guy had stold pretty much
all of Ruth's belongings, but he couldn't find any evidence about what happened to
her. But I'm sure at this point alarm bells are going off in your
head like crazy. Oh my gosh, I can't even imagine what it was
like investigating crimes before law enforcements were able to talk to each other, you
know, through different programs and whatnot, and be able to share information.
And then when you have missing persons cases not being taken as seriously as they
are today, it's a completely different ballgame. So the idea for families having
to hire your own private investigator so at great expense, and then at the
end of the day not being able to come up with really any information because
you don't have anybody looking into it right away. He's had guys had all
of this time to be able to dispose of any potential evidence exactly. And
of course Guy never filed an official missing person's report with the police. I
know Ruth's family tried, but there were all sorts of jurisdictional issues. Because
they had been traveling through the US, they suspected she might have gone missing
from Massachusetts. But Guy is telling people that after they got back to California,
that's when she ran away, and there was no direct evidence of foul
play, so of course there was no missing persons report on file for Ruth,
so that when investigators discovered the Lady of the Dunes that same year and
were combing through reports, they never found anything about Ruth, so they wouldn't
have had the opportunity to put two and two together. Well that makes total
sense. If guys the one that committed the murder, you want to be
able to go, oh, yeah, she ran away from California, don't
look over there in Massachusetts exactly. Yeah. So I'm not surprised at all
that this case she remained unidentified for a total of forty eight years. But
this is when the story goes in all sorts of crazy directions, because guy
Maldavin is quite a piece of work, and after Ruth was identified in twenty
twenty two, they started looking into his background and discovered that he may have
been responsible for many other crimes, and it actually turned out that he was
part of a very infamous crime from Seattle, Washington, which was chronicled in
the book written by noted true crime author and rule titled Smoke, Mirrors and
Murder. What Ann Ruel would do is she would release all these true crime
anthologies which had a number of different stories in them. And this particular book
was published in two thousand and seven. But because it took place while Guy
Muldavin was living under a completely different identity, no one put two and two
together and figured that he might be connected to the lady of the Dunes case.
Well, that's interesting. What was the infamous crime, like, what
was the nature of it? Well, I'm going to go into a lot
of detail about it because it's pretty complicated. It turns out that Guy mal
David it is his legitimate birth name. He was originally born in New York
in nineteen twenty three. Apparently he was adopted. I don't think anyone was
able to figure out who his biological parents were. But at some point in
his life, maybe the nineteen forties or sometime in the early nineteen fifties,
he decided to change his name to Raoul Guy Rockwell, and he went by
the nickname Rocky. So that's how I'm going to refer to him from here
on out. But in the nineteen fifties, he was living in Seattle,
Washington with his wife named Joe Ellen. They were running an antiques shop together,
but sometime in the mid to late nineteen fifties, a woman named Manzanita
Merns, who went by the nickname Mansie, started frequenting the store a lot,
and Rocky started an extramarital affair with her, even though Mansie was married
and had children of her own. And to show you what a great guy
Rocky slash Guy is, he wound up dumping Joe Ellen and telling her that
he wanted a divorce right in their antique shop in front of customers, and
then he kicked her out, and then he later divorced her and went on
to Mary Mansey, whoa, this guy's a real piece of work. That
is some balls on him to do that to your wife in front of other
people at your place of employment. Talk about missing a sensitivity chip. The
lack of compassion and the lack of empathy is astounding, exactly. And can
you imagine how awkward it be to be a customer in the store where you're
just shopping for antiques and then you see a man dumping his wife and saying
he wants a divorce right in front of you. I'd be like slowly edging
my way out the door saying I'm not going to do any business here.
I mean, I would be, but I would also be listening, because,
oh my god, that would be good dinner table conversation later when you're
hearing about how this guy did this to this woman and you don't know who
they are, right, you're just in this antique shop. It would provide
it an interesting story. But at the end of the day, it's like
when you're watching reality TV or something like that and you're talking about how this
guy is behaving in this horrific manner towards this woman and you're so shocked,
but like, this is actual, real people in front of your eyes,
I guess, before the advent of reality TV. So it had to have
been equal parts entertaining and just really upsetting for anybody that had to witness that
exactly. So you have to feel bad for the poor woman to because I
have no idea at that point if she even suspected that her husband was having
an affair, So for all we know, this could have happened completely out
of the blue that day and like way to victimize her by having the affair.
But then to dump her publicly. It's like, did you just not
want her to react in a way that was like above and beyond that had,
you know, emotions attached, and you didn't want to actually have to
be sorry for what you've done, so you just do this publicly and kick
her out, Like I can't even believe this guy. He's horrible. Oh,
yes, he definitely is. And it gets a lot worse, believe
it or not. So Mansi wound up divorcing her own husband, and by
nineteen sixty she was living with Rocky, and she also was living with her
eighteen year old daughter, Dolores, from her previous marriage. But sometime in
April of nineteen sixty, Mansie and Dolores were officially reported missing because Mansie's ex
husband had not heard from them in a while and he was wanting to get
in touch with his daughter. But not only had Mansie and Dolores gone missing,
but Rocky was gone as well. They couldn't find him anywhere and it
looked like they had just abandoned their house, and it was not until a
few months later that they finally decided to perform a full search of the house
and check inside a septic tank, and they wound up finding some skeletal remains.
Now keep in mind, everyone at the time figured that these remains belonged
to Mansie and Dolores, but this is nineteen sixty before DNA testing, and
it does not sound like they had any distinctive things like teeth or a skull
to make a positive identification. So officially they were not inclusively identified as belonging
to Nansi or Dolores. But I'm pretty sure they were because one of the
odds that the remains of a completely different people would be found inside this septic
tank. Wow, this just took a real dark turn. I thought,
what a horrible guy. I mean, obviously, this is behavior that clearly
sounds like almost sociopathic, the way to break up with somebody like that,
just completely lacking compassion. And then we see he takes up with the woman
he's having the extra marital affair with and her eighteen year old daughter, Dolores,
and then they all go missing, the houses quote unquote abandoned, and
then skeletal remains are found in the septic tank. Obviously, Rocky Slash guy
is responsible. He's even worse than he sounded initially. Oh yeah, exactly
and wait until you hear the circumstances of what he did during this time period.
When he disappeared, he was carrying on an affair with another woman,
and this particular woman was named Evelyn Emerson. I don't think that she had
any idea that Rocky was already married and had an eighteen year old stepdaughter living
with him. I think she just figured that he had lived in Seattle but
now was planning to relocate. But Rocky became friendly with Evelyn's mother, and
I think he was like a very fast talking con artist, so he convinced
the mother to invest thousands of dollars with them so that he could take a
trip to a British Columbia and purchase I think thousands of dollars in Native American
artifacts because she was interested in collecting them. But it turned out that he
never actually went there. He just ran off with his mother in law's money.
So she decided to file grand larceny charges against him, and he would
become a wanted fugitive for several months. And it would later turn out that
Rocky used this money that he got from his mother in law to purchase a
sports car so that he could pretty much travel around the country, and interestingly
enough, at one point he stayed in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is where
his wealthy father owns some property, and as you well know, Province down
is where Ruth would be discovered fourteen years later. That is pretty intense to
think that you'd feel so awful being broken up with in an antique shop when
he ends your marriage. But to know was his wife's name was Joellen,
right, his first wife was Joellen and his third wife was Evelyn. Yeah.
Yeah, So to know that, like Joellen got off really lucky,
because he seems to have this pattern of just starting this new affair with another
woman and then just leaves either heartbreak or bodies in his wake. I'm shocked,
but like not shocked at this point because we just see this pattern of
this guy who seems to be a pervasive con artist who behaves in an incredibly
sociopathic manner with just callous disregard for the emotions, the well being just any
other human being that is in his wake. They are expendable. He will
take their money or end their lives. He's he's insidious, oh exactly.
And that's what's crazy about this is that if people had known about Ruth's marriage
to Guy back in nineteen seventy four and that she had gone missing, then
he would have seemed like the obvious suspect. It probably would not have taken
nearly fifty years for the Lady of the Dunes to be identified, especially when
you look at his pattern of behavior. But of course, since he was
living under a completely different name, Raoul Guy Rockwell, nobody put these two
cases together. But he was eventually found in New York City in December of
nineteen sixty, several months after he fled Seattle, and he was extradited back
there, but prosecutors determined that there was not enough evidence to file murder charges
against him for the murders of Mansie and Dolores, because even though they found
remains in his septic tank, they weren't one hundred percent certain that the remains
belonged to them, and they could prove that he killed them and put them
in there, because for all, he could just say that, well,
I already left Seattle before I need this happen, so they were probably killed
by someone else. But he did get a charge for a grand larceny for
ripping off the money from his mother in law and was found guilty and received
a fifteen year prison sence. However, we only had to serve thirteen months
because the judge decided to suspend a sentence on the condition that he repaid all
the money he stole to his former mother in law. And this revelation has
pretty much pissed off Ruth's family because if he had served the fall fifteen year
prison sentence, he would not have gotten out until nineteen seventy five, so
he never would have met Ruth. He likely never would have murdered her,
So they pretty much have said that this decision to let him out early,
even though he was a suspect and a double murder, in the long run
wound up costing Ruth her life. But the information that he was a suspect
and a double murder might not have been released during the court case because that
would be deemed highly prejudicial, would it not. He was already convicted of
grand larceny and people were well aware that he was already like a suspect and
a double murder, but the judge still said that, well, he was
only technically convicted of grand larceny, so we'll have like a well, we'll
suspend a sense and let him out early as long as he repays the victims.
But I'm pretty sure the judge did know that he was a suspect and
another murder and probably thought maybe we should let him serve his full sentence because
this guy could be dangerous. Yeah, I mean, if the judge knew,
that was a poor choice, clearly, because Ruth would still be alive
if he'd served the full length of his sentence, But it gave him the
opportunity to be out there committing more crimes, exactly, And that's exactly what
he did, apparently several years down the line, because at some point,
I guess because of all the notoriety surrounding this case, because I know that
it got a lot of publicity in the Seattle area at least in nineteen sixty
though when he was released from prison, I think it pretty much dropped off
the radars. So he just decided to change his name back to his birth
name, Guy Maldovin. And I think no one had any idea that he
was a suspect in a double murder when he met Ruth and married her over
a decade later. But believe it or not, There's even more to this
story because when Ruth was identified in twenty twenty two, they started doing more
research into Guy Maldovn's background and they found out that while he was still living
under the name Raoul Guy Rockwell, he was wanted for questioning in a double
murder which took place in Eureka, California, in nineteen fifty. On June
eighteenth of that year, a twenty two year old bread truck driver named Henry
Baird was found murdered after he was found shot in the back of the head
on a beach near Eureka. When his body was found, he was clad
only in his shoes in his socks, and his clothing was neatly piled nearby.
And Henry had last been seen with a seventeen year old waitress named Barbara
Kelly, and her clothing was found neatly piled at the murder scene. But
they never did find Barbara's body, so whoever committed this murder presumably disposed of
her body at another location. So at the time, Raoul Guy Rockwell was
living in the nearby town of Fortuna with his first wife, Joe Ellen.
Joe Allen's parents owned one of the two restaurants in the town, and Rocky
just happened to work there as a short order cook. The main reason there's
a connection to him is because Henry Baird often visited this restaurant since it was
on his route as a bread truck driver, and Barbara Kelly just happened to
work as a waitress in the town's of the restaurant. The crime was ever
solved, and there really isn't anything to conclusively tie Guy Rockwell slash Guy Maldov
into this crime. But one reason that they find it interesting is the detail
about the victim's clothing being neatly folded at the crime scene, because, as
you recall, Roof's clothing was found neatly folded under her head when she was
found murdered twenty four years later. So there's been speculation that perhaps got I
committed his first murder all the way back in nineteen fifty and that he could
be a serial killer responsible for the murders of at least five victims. It's
an odd dichotomy or juxtaposition, this idea of this chaos scene with murder,
but then to fold the clothes. It's like his attempt to try to find
this order in chaos, and it is a strange parallel to have this other
case in the same town where he was, where he obviously knew Baird because
Baird is delivering the bread, and he probably knew his girlfriend as well because
she worked at the other restaurant in this town. It doesn't sound like it
was that big. It sounds like people knew each other there. So I
mean, he's a good suspect because we know that he seems to just commit
murder whenever things don't go his way or when he wants something. So the
idea that maybe he wanted to sexually assault her, maybe he wanted to rob
them, I don't know. He just seems like the type of guy that
we can't really discount the possibility that he could be capable of pretty much doing
anything exactly, because at the time, I don't think anyone thought he was
a serious suspect. They just wanted to question him, but he had not
been not yet been linked to any other murders back in nineteen fifty. And
I think it's only in retrospect now that people are looking through the newspaper archives
again and seeing his name and they realize, well, was he probably killed
Ruth. He probably killed Mansy and Dolores in nineteen sixty, so who's to
say he couldn't have committed another double murder ten years earlier. So what's also
crazy is that when all this stuff about Guy Maldovin became public after Rue's identification
in twenty twenty two, people started doing searches for the newspaper archives trying to
find out like all the information they could about him, and they wound up
finding a full article about him in the June fifth, nineteen eighty five edition
of The Californian, a newspaper based out of the town of Salinas, where
he was living at the time. And what's crazy is that it's a whole
profile on Guy because he had become a disc jockey and was the host of
this very popular late night talk radio show. And they show like these photographs
of him like hamming it up in front of the camera, screaming into the
mic, and they interview him and say that, yeah, I was a
guy who worked as like a salesman, but by the time I reached my
fifties, I decided I wanted to go into a more artistic feel to get
a change in my life, so I became the host of this late night
radio show. It's pretty much a fluff piece, but it's just so creepy
to read because guy Maldovan seems like this ordinary, likable guy in the article,
and no one has any inkling that he may have killed as many as
five people at that point. This is giving me major Rodney Alcala vibes,
like the dating game killer. Oh yeah, yeah right, Like this guy
goes out there, everyone thinks he's this charismatic guy. I mean, I
guess with Rodney al Kala, the woman that ended up being matched with him,
or she picked him, she didn't go on a date with him.
She thought he was creepy, so at least she was able to accurately read
him. But it's just so gross and weird to think that he was beloved
in any capacity exactly like he must have been a chameleon, Like he must
have had a very charming side to his personality to make people think he was
a likable guy, but then showed his darker side when he was alone with
women with spouses that he wanted to take advantage of. And that's the thing
is that even though the raul guy Rockwell case from Seattle had gotten a lot
of publicity. He was now living under a new name in nineteen eighty five,
so people reading that article are going to have no idea that this guy
was a suspect in a double murder twenty five years earlier. It's just wild
how you could go from state to state and just you know, change your
name when you felt like it, take up new identity, just be whoever
you wanted whenever you got to this new place. And that's exactly what he
did. He became the popular DJ. It's so weird. As an aside,
you've probably heard of Rex Huerman, who was recent arrested for the Long
Island serial killings, and after his arrest, people did a Google search and
found out he had been interviewed on a YouTube series several years ago about people
who ran successful businesses in Manhattan, and you look at the interview, he
just seems like an ordinary guy and you would never guess that he has probably
murdered about like ten twelve people at that point. So it's always shocking when
suspects are arrested for murdering. You look at their personal history and you find
like interviews or YouTube videos or articles in which they just come across as normal
people. Speaking of DJs too, with regards to Rex Hugerman, Howard Stern
when they were talking about the case like years ago, said, Oh,
he's probably an architect. Oh really, I didn't know that. Yeah,
that's crazy. Isn't that weird? Yeah? But I know. This was
kind of a small YouTube channel, and the guy who runs it said that
after Rex was arrested, the views on this particular video just skyrocketed because people
would just google his name and then find it. Well, yeah, you
want to have any instance where you can see this person talking, where you
can kind of get a feel for who they are, what's their cadence,
Are they hiding something? You know, these types of things that we try
to kind of intimate these details from these little sound bites or from these little
videos or audio whenever we have it of killers, because we feel like we
can get some kind of insight into who they are and why they do what
they do exactly. And another example, look back at Steve Panky's campaign videos
when he ran for governor of Idaho, and he's doing, like god,
a pro life, pro Second Amendment platform, even though he had already abducted
and murdered a twelve year old girl, which is pretty creepy. It was
wild, Yeah, he was. He was something else, so Guy Maldovin.
Other than the larceny charge, he was never officially charged or convicted of
any major crimes. He was never conclusively linked to any murders, and he
pretty much lived his whole light most of his life as a free man before
he died of natural causes in March of two thousand and two at the age
of seventy eight. And what's crazy to me is that Guy had gotten remarried
for the fourth I think it was the fifth time, to a woman named
Phyllis in October of nineteen seventy five. And even though he ran through so
many wives during his early days, Guy actually stayed married to Phyllis for twenty
seven years until he passed away. And I found an obituary for Phyllis.
She did not pass away until twenty twenty one before any of these revelations came
out about Guy maul Davin. So I really would love to speak to her.
I'd love to know if there were any warning signs during the marriage that
there was something off about him, because it just seems crazy to me that
after going through so many women and using them, that he would be willing
to stay married to the same woman for twenty seven years and settled down before
he passed away. Well, we're assuming he settled down. Maybe she was
just one of those like, you know, kind of don't ask, don't
tow type of people with regards to an affair. You know how sometimes in
situations it's like, well, do aishure do, but don't embarrass me type
of a thing. And maybe that was her attitude or her outlook, and
it didn't give him a situation where he had to do anything extreme because she
wasn't putting pressure on him to stop his gallivanting around town with you know,
all these different women. Or maybe he really did just love her and decided
to settle down. But I think it's more likely the former than the latter,
because he just doesn't really sound like somebody who's capable of any kind of
depth of feeling exactly, or like we never know. He could have killed
other people between nineteen seventy four and two thousand and two, but he was
getting up there in age, and I know that's the main reason that Joseph
DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer stopped because he was just getting too old to
break into people's houses and murder them. So maybe guy just decided I'm too
old for this and just lived a normal life working as this disc jockey,
this talk radio show host, and then just lived a quiet life until he
passed away. Yeah, and we saw that with BTK as well. Right.
I think he just got older and then he started to feel like he
was fading into obscurity, and so he decided to talk law enforcement and it
got him caught exactly. He likely wouldn't have been caught, or maybe not
for many years after he actually was, if he didn't decide to get this
big ego and want to remain relevant exactly. Yes, So that might be
why by Guy mal David was able to stop killing. Like maybe he thought,
I'm already a semi famous radio host, so my ego is being placated,
I'm getting attention, so this maybe this is my substitute for being a
killer. Oh, good call. That sounds like that would be accurate for
sure. That would be like a good surrogate situation where his ego is getting
stroked. He doesn't need the papers to write about him. He doesn't need
to have his crimes be plastered everywhere because he's this beloved you know, talk
radio host or DJ. Yeah. Pretty crazy. So as an aside,
I mentioned that Ann Rulebook which was published in two thousand and seven, and
wrote like a chapter about the uh murders which took place in Seattle in nineteen
sixty And I looked at the chapter and it just has this thing at the
end as saying that Raoul Guy Rockwell changed his name to Guy mal Davin and
public's records show that he got married to a woman named Terry and Nevada in
February of nineteen seventy four, but we don't know what happened to him afterwards.
And of course I mentioned that for some reason, when Ruth got married,
she used this fake name Terry Marie Vizna on the marriage certificate. But
when Amrul wrote that chapter, I'm sure she had no inkling that Terry would
later turn out to be the Lady of the Dunes. Oh my god,
No, I'm sure she had no clue. This case just has so many
twists and turns. Yeah, it's just so crazy. It's just gone in
so many unexpected directions. Which is why I felt we had to do an
entire podcast episode about this. So obviously, after Ruth was identified in twenty
twenty two and all this information was coming out against her former husband, everyone
was thinking to themselves, yet, it's obvious he did this, but how
are they going to conclusively prove this? After all this time, they kept
sending out public pleas for information, saying that if you cross pass with Guy
Maldovin or Ruth Marie Terry in nineteen seventy four, please come forward with information
anything that'll help the investigation. Of course, we've seen in recent years that
a whole bunch of cold cases have been solved when people have used genetic genealogy
in order to link DNA to the perpetrator, so you can officially name it
as the killer, even if they're already deceased. But the problem is that
there was no DNA evidence in this case which belonged to roost killer. Because
it turned out that when a lot of the items found at the murder scene,
like the towel and the clothing, were sent to the Massachusetts State Police
in the nineteen eighties, they just got rid of it. They apparently needed
more space and their evidence lockers, so they just decided to throw all this
evidence out, never realizing that it could be tested for DNA at some point
in the future. So when they went to look for and try to see
if it might have Guy's DNA, I found out it was missing, so
very very frustrating. Oh that is so frustrating. But we see it in
so many cases because they just didn't know to preserve things like they do today
exactly, So it happens in a lot of these older cases. But in
August of twenty twenty three, after performing extensive investigation the Cape and Islands District
Attorney's Office, who had jurisdiction in Provincetown, they announced that this case was
officially closed and they were comfortable naming Guy Maldovin as Ruth Marie Terry's killer.
It was base. They didn't have anything conclusive like DNA or physical evidence or
eyewitnesses, but they did learn some new information that made it obvious that Guy
was the killer. I previously mentioned how Guy had spoken to Ruth's family and
claimed that when they went to Massachusetts for their honeymoon and returned home to California,
they got into a fight and Ruth just decided to run away and he
didn't know what happened to well. Investigators would speak to other witnesses who had
interacted with Guy back in nineteen seventy four, and he claimed that when Guy
returned home from California, he was alone and he was driving Ruth's carr There
was no evidence that Ruth was in California at all during the summer of nineteen
seventy four, which just seemed to poke holes in this story. He provided
that they had gotten into a fight there and she had run away. And
not only that, is that even though Guy had told Ruth's family that she
was missing, he flat out told some of the other people living in California
that Ruth had died during their trip. So investigators were looking at this and
pretty much just said that, Yeah, there's no way that this guy could
be innocent. It's just too much a coincidence that they would go on a
hodimoon and the same period where Ruth was murdered, and that he would come
back without hers. So they just said, I'm confident that he's the killer
and we can finally close the investigation. Yeah, I think just his tie
to all of these different crimes the fact that he's giving different degrees. Well,
he's giving varying stories, one that she died during the trip, one
that she ran away in California. He can't keep his story straight, which
obviously alludes to the fact that he's lying and he is the one who is
responsible for murdering Ruth. Exactly. Yeah, And there's one more piece of
evidence I wanted to discuss that was uncovered the last year, which is even
creepier. It turned out in nineteen seventy six that guy had published a cookbook
about these weird like Northeast recipes titled Cooking with Rump Oil, and there was
one section which had a recipe titled cape Cod Shid, which showed this weird
drawing of a creature which had this long, flowing hair. But since they
looked at it recently, they're realizing this is disturbingly similar to Ruth's hair at
the time she was killed. And next to the drawing was this message,
I'm going to read it word for word quote. Out of the water and
into the pan. The only way to cook the shit after the shit is
caught, anything over five minutes ends it. The sweet turpentine will turn that
of a burnt glove, and the tender look will become one of despair.
Remember, just five minutes. Don't cook the shit out of it. End
quote. So this passage was given to an FBI profile or retired one named
Julia Cowley, and she looked at this and was just so creeped out about
it, thinking that guy is covertly using this recipe to describe his own wife's
murder, That he has a drawing of a creature who has similar hair,
and this whole thing about how it only takes five minutes to kill her and
they will have a look of despair. He think that she thinks that this
is him covertly describing how he killed Ruth, that maybe it took five minutes
she had a look of despair and then after five minutes he ended it and
she was murdered. And this is just all sorts of creepy. I just
have no idea where to begin trying to describe this. I'm really disgusted because
all elements of that are really gross, especially to think that he drew her
and then describe murdering her. Don't cook the shit out of it, Like,
what does that even mean? In reference to the murder yeah, I
try looking up shit. I guess it's kind of a like a sea creature
or something like that, and he's trying to say that you grab this creature
and cook it somewhere in Cape cod But it's like we talked about how killers
will sometimes have their own avenues where if they've gotten away with a crime and
they can't tell anyone about it, it will drive them crazy. And this
is the first example I found about someone publishing a recipe book. It's pretty
much the cookbook version of OJ Simpson's If I Did It, where he's almost
covertly describing him murdering his wife in the passage of describing a recipe. It's
the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. Is Julia Colly, the lead person
on that show, The Consult Uh good question. I know she is a
prominent figure, so I'm just going to look that up. I really love
that podcast. They just did a three part on Jody Who's in truet Oh
okay, cool? It was. It was really good hearing different retired FBI
profilers takes on who did it? And you know, the guy who'd been
the main suspect basically saying that the strong likelihood that he isn't responsible. Yes,
Julia Cally was the host of the consult and I would really love to
see her do an episode about this case because I think she just looked at
the recipe book and said, yeah, this guy is the killer. We
can just close this case. There's nothing else to solve here. Yeah,
you should definitely. Have you listened to the podcast. I haven't. No,
you should listen to it. It's really good. It's just so unique
getting to hear profilers takes on different cases. They don't put out episodes all
that often, Like over the last couple of years, I think they've only
put out a handful of episodes. But it's incredibly good. And I really
like Julia Cally. That's good, so I definitely would take her word for
it with her analysis of the recipe. Here's a quote she said, what
I do wonder, especially the last line, the tender look will become one
of despair. You have to think that perhaps that was the moment he watched
life go out of her eyes and when she realized he's going to kill me.
It's really horrifying. End quote. And then you just look at the
circumstances where investigators suspected that she was just son bathing, that it could have
been an ordinary routine day where she's son bathing with her husband, but then
something happens which makes him realize that my husband is going to murder me in
the most brutal, fashioned, imaginable And it's just so horrifying to think about
when you read that passage and think about how the major overkill, the fact
that she was killed by her own husband, and for all we know,
could have come completely out of left field. She may not have been expecting
it. Yeah, and you have to think that she's absolutely correct in her
assessment that he's talking about the murder, because that lies specifically. The tender
look goes to that of despair. You'd never talk about a fish ever having
a tender look like looking at you in any tender capacity. Fish aren't capable
of tenderness. You know, maybe they are with their little fish babies,
but not with us humans. So to say that the tender look goes to
that of despair, I don't think you see a lot of change on the
face of a fish when they realize that they're going to die. I mean,
I've done a lot of fishing. My dad was a fisheries biologist,
so I spent a lot of time with the fish, and I've never seen
a tender look. And I've also never really seen a look of despair.
Maybe I'm just not that keenly aware or like acutely tuned into fish expressions,
but I think that he's absolutely talking about Ruth's look on her face, and
that is bone chilling exactly. Yeah, And since Maldovin is now deceased,
will probably never know the full story about why he killed her. I mean
when he married her, was he originally planning to kill her sometime down the
line, or did he just get tired of her or did they have a
major fight or something and that just led to things escalating out of control.
We'll probably never know the full truth because we know that some of his other
relationships he would get involved with women and then use them and then kill them
when he was finished with them, So it could have been the same thing
with Ruth because they'd only been married I think something like five months at that
point when the murder likely happened. So it's just a very bizarre situation and
it's crazy to think that he maybe one of those serial killers who flew under
the radar where he managed to kill multiple people throughout the course of his lifetime
without ever getting charged with any crimes, and he went to his grave completely
getting away with it. He sounds like he came from, like you said,
an affluent family that had some kind of money, but he was a
bit of a grifter or you know, a wheeler dealer, and that he
was just really opportunistic and he would kind of make and take money wherever he
could. So I wonder if in the beginning when he met Ruth that he
was like love bombing her type of a thing, and maybe he had money
at that time, because it could be if you're that type of person,
could be very feast or famine, so you could have a lot of money
one time and then be completely broken another. So maybe he is responsible for
paying for all of her expensive dental work, and that's why he ended up,
you know, taking the time to remove as many teeth as he possibly
could, because he thought maybe the dental work could be tied back to him
specifically. Yeah, exactly. It still has never been conclusively determined when she
got the dental work, but it would make sense that it happened after they
got married because she may not have had enough money for that, but guy
seemed to have a decent amount of money, so he probably paid for it,
and maybe that was one of the reasons she decided to marry him.
But he figured, well, it'll be easily traced back to her, so
that's why he went to the trouble of removing some of her teeth and also
her hands. And I think the theory was correct that this was not a
first time killer. This was someone who had a lot of experience and knew
the methods of identification and why they wanted to go to the trouble of removing
this because obviously, if she was identified as Ruth back in nineteen seventy four,
he automatically would have become the prime suspect. But because she could not
be identified, he was able to just go on living his life under the
radar without anyone knowing better, and he probably would have gotten away with it
indefinitely. But back in nineteen seventy four, he did not know about an
invention like d in April filing, which led to the resolution and her identification.
Yeah, I think you could very easily say that this is not a
first timer there's a level of forensic sophistication with regards to countermeasures. For nineteen
seventy four. You wouldn't think that most killers would be adept enough to be
thinking about removing hands and removing teeth. But yet this is something that just
seems to come naturally, that this person is in this remote spot at this
beach and has the tools to do something like this, And also just the
you know, almost like reptilian nature to be able to turn on somebody that
you love in such a way. It's disgusting, but it also speaks to
somebody that has some kind of experience with killing for sure, oh exactly.
And that's a good point about the tools, because we were discussing that we
don't know what was used to remove her hands and remove her teeth. But
the idea that he's going on a honeymoon to this nice beach area and just
happens to have pliers or a hacksaw in his vehicle to do this really does
point to this being premeditated and that he knew what he was doing. Yeah,
and from like what we didn't really know in the beginning when I said
I wonder if this person it wasn't random and that they decided to take the
teeth and take the hands because it could be tied back to him because there
was a connection. And that ended up being true because maybe he paid for
the dental work and she was his wife, so she could absolutely be tied
back to him. So that is really interesting. Yeah, the case has
been such a wild ride because when I covered it in twenty sixteen, we
had all these theories about Rory Jean Kessinger and the serial killer had In Clark
and Whitey Bulger, and also the possibility that she was an extra in the
movie Jaws. But it turns out these were all red herrings and it's just
a much simpler solution. She was just a woman who was in a bad
marriage who was killed by an abusive partner. But because this was nineteen seventy
four and things just didn't get communicated as much and it was much harder to
report someone missing, nobody put two and two together for nearly fifty years,
and that's why the case was unsolved for so long. It's incredible when all
the pieces come together and you're able to get a resolution, But there as
few cases that are as wild a ride as this one. All these crazy
details, like I can't even I can't even process all of them. It's
just been a lot. It's true, like I mentioned that in the intro
that in so many of these cases involving unident identified decedents, there are all
these wild theories about who they were, what their backstory was. But when
they finally do get identified, it turns out to be very mundane that they
were just a right person who maybe was suicidal or just cross passed with the
wrong person. But here we have a bunch of wild theories and the real
truth turns out to be even wilder than anyone imagined. I mean, if
it was just a simple marriage gone wrong, that would be one thing,
but the fact that it involved a guy who was linked to other murders in
his past and had lived under different identities just makes this one piece of a
very large and crazy puzzle. I guess this will conclude our episode. But
even though it was a pretty sad story, I am just so glad that
Ruth has her name back and that her surviving relatives know what happened to her,
and that her son, Richard finally has answers about his biological mother.
So it's great to say that in this particular case, the trail is no
longer cold and the path is no longer chilly. Thank you so much for
sharing this case with me. I am so pleased to that Ruth got her
identity back and that her son, Richard Junior, has a piece of his
mother. Although to know that she was murdered is a horrific conclusion, at
least he has some kind of resolution, and especially in knowing who is responsible
and what happened to her exactly, Like, it's very hard to close murder
cases after the perpetrator has already deceased, but here it just seems obvious.
There is no mystery and everyone is at peace with what happened. And it
was fun sharing all the details of this case with you, because a lot
of the time I will give all these shocking stories and see your reaction where
you're like, I can't believe this happened, and I'm sure this happened multiple
times on this particular episode. Oh yeah, with every little tidbit of information
that you were sharing, it's like, how is this even possible? And
then you consider the time period and you consider how easy it was for people
to move around and change their identities, and that just seems to be what
happened here. But like you'd pegs, he was just a real chameleon.
I think he was able to move through the world what Rocky or Guy whoever
you want to call him, He was able to move through the world,
and he was able to be what people needed him to be at that moment.
But he wasn't able to really follow through with the emotion and the complexity
and nuance of being an actual human being in relationships. So he ended up
just leaving this carnage in his wake, exactly. And it will not surprise
me one day somebody releases a long form podcast on the story in the entire
life of Guy Maldovin in general, because I would like to see if they
can link him to any other unsolved murders. Oh, I'm sure it's completely
plausible that he killed other people, Like there's got to be. He just
seems like the type of person that just so easily disposes of human beings.
And to think that anytime somebody is standing in his way of whatever he wants,
whatever is his set objective, that he will resort to murder exactly.
So it's a good thing he's no longer with us, So on that note,
thank you everyone for joining us, and have yourselves a happy holiday and
a happy New Year. And Ashley will be back now that the holidays are
over on our next series of episodes, so join us then. So until
then, have a good few weeks, Robin. Do you want to tell
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