Welcome back to the Path Went Chile for part two of our series about the
unexplained death of Crystal Spencer. Robin, do you want to catch everyone up
what we talked about in our previous episode? Well, Crystal Spencer was an
aspiring actress who had spent several years living in Burbank, California. She was
twenty eight at the time. She hadn't had much luck find the acting job,
so she was making her living as an exotic dancer at a club.
She got involved with an older man named Anton Klein, who was an aspiring
screenwriter, and for years she didn't want to tell him that she worked as
an exotic dancer, but he eventually accepted it and knew that it was a
way to pay the bills. Crystal had told Anton that she was being considered
for a job as a hostess at a club in Japan, and she seemed
excited about it, but the last time she spoke she sounded awfully sick,
and her sister would say the same thing as well. And then another week
went by and no one heard from Crystal, and when they finally checked her
apartment, they found her decomposing body in the corner and she was wrapped in
a telephone chord, but there was no obvious signs of forced entry or foul
play, and since the police could not figure out how she died, they
listed her cause of death to be undetermined, but it seemed obvious they believed
that there was no foul play and that she had succumbed to some sort of
mysterious illness. But there were a lot of weird discrepancies with the investigation,
and I know that a bunch of neighbors of Crystal said that they heard some
weird screaming from her apartment around the approximate time period she died. And there
was some suspicion about a guy named Horace McKenna, a corrupt apparently owned a
share of the club Crystal was dancing, and he was involved in a whole
bunch of shady stuff. And Anton would later find out that the FBI had
a file on Crystal to suggest she might have been working as an informant,
but a lot of the pages have been removed, so he had no idea
about what she was actually doing for them, and he began to suspect that
perhaps Horace McKenna had something to do with Crystal's death and killed her, but
he died a short time after Crystal did, so they never had any evidence
that they knew each other, let alone that he might have been connected in
her death. So after all these years, it still officially listed as undetermined
and no one has any idea how Crystal died. So you can definitely draw
some parallels between this story and a case we covered on this podcast last year,
and that's the nineteen sixty three death of Karen cups in it. In
both cases, the victim was a young woman who was attempting to launch an
acting career in Hollywood and seemed to be struggling with their own personal demons before
they were discovered dead inside their apartment, and no one could conclusively determine if
they were the victim of foul play. I guess the biggest difference is that,
unlike Karen Cupsonant, no one ever attempted to link Crystal Spencer's death to
John F. Kennedy's assassination, though her autopsy report was examined by someone who
worked on the post mortem for Robert F. Kennedy after he was assassinated.
So I guess everything did come full circle Crystal's case is a particularly difficult one
to get a handle on, since there is compelling evidence to suggest her death
being the result of natural causes and the possibility of foul play. However,
Crystal's biggest advocate is her boyfriend Anton Klein, and if you read online discussions
about this case, there are a number of people who think there's something off
about the guy. He does come across as a bit strange in his interviews
and seems rather snobbish when he describes himself as this cultured individual who took a
topless dancer under his wing and introduced her to the finer things in life.
There are also a few things about his story which raised some red flegs.
I think the one part I just can't get a grasp on is the fact
that Anton never even attempted to visit Crystal's apartment during the time period he couldn't
get a hold of her. As you recall, he attempted to call her
on Nyvy eighth and kept getting a busy signal and the operator told him that
her phone was off the hook. That seems like something that should raise some
major concerns, but according to Anton, Crystal was such a disorderly person that
she had a habit of inadvertently leaving her phone off the hook after she used
it. But then another five days passed before Crystal's body was discovered, and
Anton only learned about it after the police called him. He claims he tried
to reach her at the Wild Goose and was told by the dorman she had
left for Japan, which is why he never attempted to visit her apartment.
Even so, it's strange that Anton wouldn't have gone to her apartment first before
trying to find her at the club. I definitely think it's odd. When
we first described this case, Anton does seem to be a big advocate for
her. He is the one who's trying to give different suspects. He continues
to work with the police, he's trying to get attention on her case.
But then you have the other side where he doesn't go to her apartment to
check on her. But I do wonder how in depth was their relationship.
Remember, she supposedly didn't even tell him she left for Japan, and that
wasn't even crazy to him. He said, she'll just call me when she
gets there. So I wonder was it someone that you know? Were Anton
and Crystal the kind of couple that were together every evening and they talked all
the time. Or was it kind of like him, like you said,
being this more pretentious person who says, oh, I help her when I
can, and she's a nice companion to have, and it's kind of more
flippant and not as engaged as you would think of a partner would be.
That is a possibility because I never saw any indication that they were planning to
get serious, like get engaged or get married or anything in the future.
So it's possible that maybe Anton is over exaggerating how close relationship was, and
if you look at the situation. I know we talked about it extensively in
Part one, this Japan trip, and how little we know about it.
There is a possibility. And I'm not saying that Anton is responsible or that
he isn't, because obviously we have no idea, but we don't know.
Maybe he's the one, or it could have been even somebody who, like
say, we'd suggested in part one that if Crystal was sexually assaulted at say
that casino that Horace McKenna owned, and there was powerful people there, so
if somebody wanted to set her up and they wanted to buy themselves several months.
You could say, Hey, I've got a friend that's going to hook
you up with this job in Japan, and then they've got Crystal going around
telling everybody about this job opportunity in Japan. And then when she goes missing
or if she doesn't show up places, then they've got a few months before
people start really asking questions, because we know she was disorganized, and if
we're to go on what Anton's saying, the fact that she wouldn't call before
she left, that she would just like impulsively kind to leave without telling her
loved ones. If that is her mo and that's the way that she operates
in life, then that would be pretty advantageous for somebody close to her if
they were indeed trying to set her up because of a situation such as that,
or it could be something simpler. If it was Anton, it could
have been because she wanted to leave the relationship and if she wanted to leave
him, or if things weren't going well. There could have been any number
of reasons. You could see how somebody could come up with this Japan thing
and dangle it just like a carrot, and then hope that she bites and
tells everybody about it, and then they've got this time to one clean up
the crime scene. Number two basically just put some time between the act of
killing and maybe they thought they would dispose of the body but just weren't able
to didn't have a vehicle, it became too arduous to do so, so
they just left her body there and thought, Okay, well, now we've
at least just got several days, maybe a week before anyone ask questions,
because they all are likely going to think, what Anton is saying that she
just left for Japan. Yeah, that's a good point, because I think
most spouses if they heard someone say, oh, your girlfriend left for Japan
without telling anyone, they probably think that's a major red flag and be pretty
shocked by that. But everyone who described Crystal said that she was very disorganized,
she was very scattershot, She had a messy apartment, So maybe that
was kind of her personality, that she would be the type of person who
would just go off to another country and then not even tell her boyfriend until
after she arrived. It's also pretty baffling that, in spite of all these
suspicions about Crystal's death, her body wound up being cremated, But to be
fair, I get the impression that the decision to cremate Crystal was made by
her family and not Anton, and that it may have been Crystel's wish for
her ashes to be scattered beneath the Hollywood Sign after she died. Her family
maintained that even though they were not allowed to view Crystal's body, they had
been assured her death was a result of an illness and had no reason to
suspect foul play. It was not until after the ashes were scattered that Anton
received information which made him suspect that Crystal was murdered. He showed the autopsy
report to a number of medical experts, but of course, since exhuming Crystal
and allowing them to examine her body was no longer an option, there's no
way they could conclusively determine that foul play had taken place. I believe the
immediate next of kin is the one who can authorize the cremation of a body,
So even if Anton had his own suspicions at the outset, Crystal's family
likely would have made the final call about cremating her, and it might have
been out of Anton's hands overall. Even though I do think some of Anton's
actions are a bit strange, I just can't see him being involved in Crystel's
death. The burmank PD were content to write the whole thing off as some
sort of illness, and since Crystal's cremation essentially destroyed all potential evidence of foul
play, Anton would have been completely in the clear if he killed her.
Yet he's the one publicly insisting that Crystal was murdered, keeping the case in
the spotlight, taking your story to TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries, and filing
lawsuits in order to garner access to the police files. It just seems awfully
brazen for Anton to do this if he was responsible for what happened to play
Devil's advocate. If Anton had an ulterior motive for appearing on TV, it
might have been to help launch his own fledgling career as a screenwriter. Believe
it or not, Anton Klein actually has his own page on the Internet Movie
Database, which only has one credit. In nineteen eighty seven, a made
for TV movie was produced called Daniel in the Towers, which covers the story
of Simon Rodia the artist who constructed Los Angeles Watts Towers. You can actually
watch the film on YouTube and it stars Michael McKean and a young Sean Harrison,
who later found fame playing Wualdo Geraldo Faldo on Family Matters. And yeah,
that's probably the only time you'll ever hear a Family Matters story referenced on
this podcast. Anyway, Anton got a story by credit on the movie because
the script was based partly on his doctoral thesis at UCLA. Because of this,
Anton was hoping to become a full time screenwriter himself, but his career
never went anywhere. I suppose if Anton was hoping to get himself noticed and
potentially land some writing gigs, it would have been in his best interest to
keep his face out there by placing himself at the center of a bizarre murder
mystery. But regardless of Anton's intentions, I still don't believe he would have
gone to the trouble of generating so much publicity for Crystal if he murdered her.
I'm in the same boat. And when you go back to the idea
where you're talking about her being cremated, it would have definitely been the parent's
decision because Anton and her were not longtime domestic partners living together. Correct,
No, I don't think they had ever lived together at any point. They
just dated each other. Okay, So in less Crystal, which she's not
a very organized person, so she definitely did not appoint probably someone to handle
her burial. Legally, it is the spouse or a long term domestic partner,
and then it would fall to either like adult children or parents if you
didn't have a spouse or partner. So for the idea that she was cremated,
it is a little shocking because we have this death and of course there's
no sign of foul play according to the police, but it's a very bizarre
way her body was found. She was decomposed. She only was wearing her
T shirt if I can recall correctly, So she was nude from the waist
down, and she had that telephone cord wrapped around her. As a family,
I would want to say, hey, listen, I need more.
I need you to do more to see how she passed away. She's so
young, you don't see any big signs of trauma to her body. But
it's confusing to us. But they made the decision to cremate her and that
does take away any option, like you said, to have any kind of
analysis done down the road. When did the neighbors tell the police about the
screaming they heard? Was that before she was cremated. I'm not entirely sure,
but I know that we told on the last episode that when they told
the police, they didn't seem particularly interested in it. So it's possible that
even if they did tell the police, that Anton and Crystal's family never found
out about it until much later. See that's what frustrates me the police,
the way they treated Crystal's death from the get go is that she was simply
this dancer who was probably dabbling in drugs and things like that, and they
just discounted the value of her life. And so they said, case closed,
natural causes, let's be done. And so if the family didn't have
information, cremation is a much more affordable option. It does allow her remains
to be scattered in a place that's important to her and not in a graveyard.
And so I think I think you have to feel just a lot of
empathy for the family and say, did they even have the information they needed
to try to advocate for their own loved one and why would Anton continue to
push and push and push. Yes, he likes attention, Yes he seems
to be full of himself. But if you're the killer, at some point
you want to start to distance yourself. When they've told you there is no
murder, you go, thank you Lord, right, and you back up,
and you just let it go. I don't think he'd keep pushing for
years and years to get answers. So now let's discuss the possibility that there
was no murder at all and Crystal simply died as the result of a serious
illness. It seems that unsolved Mysteries wanted to portray Crystal in the best possible
light, as they never made any mention of her substance abuse issues. I'm
not entirely sure how serious these issues were at the time of Crystal's death,
but since there were only small traces of alcohol and marijuana found in your system,
it seems likely that you did not die of an overdose. But there's
been some debate about just how sick Crystel was the last time she was confirmed
to be alive. According to Anton, her case of the flu was nothing
more than a bad cold, and she was gradually getting better. The last
time he spoke with her. But then there's Cristel's final phone conversation with her
sister Julie on May the sixth, which has been the subject of some controversy.
Julie claims that when she refused to provide Christel with her mother's phone number,
Cristel told her that she was so sick that she could hardly make it
to the bathroom. Since Crystel's death is believed to have taken place during the
early morning hours of May the seventh, the police took this exchange as an
indication that she was suffering from a serious illness at that time, which soon
killed her. However, Julie insisted that her sister was a drama queen who
often liked to exaggerate things, and believed that Cristel only said she was incredibly
sick in order to garner sympathy and convinced Julie to hand over their mother's phone
number. So it seems like context is everything here, But another neighbor apparently
told police that they heard the sounds of someone who was violently ill on May
sixth, even though neither Anton or Julie thought that Crystal sounded that ill during
their phone conversations with her. However, the one thing which might discount the
idea of Crystal being sick is the possibility that she was working at the Wild
Goose that night. Obviously, if Crystal is out there doing topless dancing on
stage, her owness couldn't have been so bad that she could quote unquote hardly
make it to the bathroom. There seems to be a discrepancy about whether or
not Crystal worked on May to six, as the club's records do not support
this, but a waitress friend of hers and the security officer believe she was
there that night. Of course, their memories may simply be faulty, but
you could also infer that since a potential suspect in her murder owned the club,
this person might have fudged the records to make it look like she wasn't
working. But we'll get back to him in a little while. This one
is confusing because it seems like the people that knew her most said she was
exaggerating, right, it seemed like she was sick, and then she told
Anton she was feeling a lot better. Then when she's trying to talk to
her sister and get her mom's phone number. She says, Oh my gosh,
I'm so sick. You got to give me mom's phone number. I
can barely make it to the bathroom. I need mom's phone number. It
does seem to play into this idea that maybe she was using an illness to
try to get sympathy from Julie, because remember, Julie's being told by mom,
don't give out my phone number. Your sister just calls and talks and
talks and talks. I don't have time for that. Don't give her phone
number my phone number to her. So Julie's doing what her mom asked.
There's obviously a history of the girls going back and forth with her mom like
this. And so if she was at the club and she was so ill
that she was fighting something that would eventually kill her, I don't think she'd
be able to perform at that level. If she was desperate and she had
to go, you'd think that coworkers would note she was here, but something
was really off. She was really struggling, she had no energy, she
looked really pale. They didn't. They just said she was here and she
was dancing. And so I feel like you have to almost buy into the
idea that she was exaggerating the illness, which makes natural causes less likely.
Yeah, that's a good point, because I do not believe those witnesses of
the club, specifically Sanity, thing about her being ill or her acting strangely.
So just since they just said that it seemed like a standard night that
she was there dancing, that's what makes me believe that they're probably mistaken and
she was not actually there on me the sixth, Because if she was so
sick that it would precipitate like this sudden death from an illness, I think
her coworkers would definitely notice. So now let's talk about the loud screams Crystel's
neighbors heard coming from her apartment during the approximate time period she's believed to have
died. It goes without saying that Jet Taylor and Susan Aiken are probably two
of the least like people to ever be interviewed on Unsolved Mysteries. Jet Taylor,
well, given the circumstances, I have no qualms about poking fun of
his name. But Susan Aiken actually has an interesting backstory. So we mentioned
in our last episode that she won the Miss America pageant in nineteen eighty six,
and even as her own Wikipedia page. However, she also has a
familial connection to a very infamous crime. In nineteen sixty four, Susan's father
and grandfather were just two of the many people believed to have been involved in
the racially motivated murders of civil rights workers James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and
Michael Schwerner, which took place in Nashoba County, Mississippi. They became known
as the Mississippi Burning murders and were later the subject to the Academy Award nominated
movie named Mississippi Burning. Even though neither of the Achins were actually convicted for
their alleged roles in the murders, there were quite a few people who did
not think a woman from a family associated with such a notorious crime family should
have won the Miss America title, especially since Susan once gave an interview in
which she said she didn't believe in interracial marriages. You also might be curious
to know that, even though Susan and Jet did get married, they wound
up divorcing in nineteen ninety four, But that's beside the point. The issues
of the couple have taken a lot of heat over the fact that they heard
horrific screaming coming from Crystal's apartment and chose to do nothing about it. During
an interview, Susan was actually quoted as saying, we were already told in
California you just don't get involved in domestic disputes. But what exactly is she
talking about. Why are you specifically supposed to ignore domestic violence in California.
Of course, hindsight is twenty twenty, and they did later report these screams
to their landlord, who also refused to do anything, so the blame does
not just fall on them. However, it is strange that a couple who
did not want to get involved were willing to appear on camera on national television
to share their account. It is horrific to think that Crystal was part potentially
tortured and murdered inside her apartment while her neighbors were electing to ignore it.
And even if Crystal wasn't being violently attacked, what if she was suffering some
sort of medical problem and at that time her life could have potentially been saved
if someone had called for help. The scream seemed to be the one aspect
of this case which lends the most credence to the foul play theory, because
if Crystal succumb to some sort of illness, would it really cause her to
scream like that for an extended period of time. I think we talked about
this on episode one, but when I heard her that she was screaming for
an extended period of time and the neighbors heard this and did nothing, we
talked about the idea that if she was so sick and she was scared,
and she's screaming in agony to that extent, what would have stopped her from
calling the police in nine one one? What would have stopped her from crawling
on her hands and knees to the neighbor's apartment and knocking on the door and
saying, I'm terrified, I'm dying, Help me please. I just don't
see her sitting there forever in agony, slowly dying, like I feel like
you would have had enough energy and fight for your life to at least crawl
to the phone. If you have the ability to scream, that takes a
lot of effort, Like if you've cried in the middle of the night and
you've screamed. You're exhausted the next day because it takes a lot of physical
effort. So I feel like you could have at least pushed yourself towards a
phone or the door to get some help, lie out in the hallway and
scream, so if someone had to see you. But then you do.
You have these neighbors who say, like, well, we heard it for
a long time and it sounded like she's getting tortured. I will say,
back in the eighties and nineties, domestic violence was one of those things,
whatever happens behind closed doors, that's your issue. You deal with it,
including child abuse, spousal abuse, all of that. And thank god,
we've taken the front door of people's houses and pushed it open a little bit
and said, it's actually everyone's problem when someone's beating their spouse, or they're
hurting somebody inside of a home, or they're abusing their kids, all of
our problems and so. But it wasn't like that back then, and so
I do think there was a different mentality at the time, like that's their
problem, they're messed up. I'm not getting involved in it. But how
tragic, because like you said, what would it have taken to call the
police and say you've got to come here. It's a scary sound coming from
her apartment, and whether it was illness or violence, her life could have
been saved. Yeah, I know that Jet and Susan originally said that when
they heard it they wondered if it was some sort of S and M thing,
that maybe they were going through some sexual activities out there which involved Crystal
being tortured consensually, but that as they kept hearing it, they're thinking,
no, this sounds like something much worse. That someone is like being tortured
against their will, or they're being like beaten or something like that. But
then they just decided, no, we're not going to do anything about it.
But you brought up the point about why wouldn't she go for the phone.
Well, we know that Crystal was found tied up in the phone cord
as if she was going there to try to seek help or call for help,
but then died before she could dial in number. But like you said,
it just seems weird that she would have the energy to screen for a
long period of time if she was alone, but just not use that energy
to actually go to the phone. Much earlier it's just so weird that she's
not wearing any pants and she's completely unclothed in the bottom half of her body.
She was alone. I guess she could have been sleeping like that,
and if it was an illness, she could have just woken up and just
been in like a frenzy or something like that. But it's interesting too though,
if she was so sick, there was no vomit, there's no feces,
there's nothing around her that indicate like this horrible stomach bug or poisoning or
anything like that. It's she's just found. It might be difficult to tell
as well too, because we're not quite sure on the level of decomposition of
the body. And I think, isn't it pretty common when somebody dies that
their body will just kind of release, whether it be urine or feces.
And maybe even if there was vomit, would you necessarily be able to tell
if Shay she was foaming at the mouth and it wasn't vomit, Maybe it
wasn't like vomit as we would you know, typically define vomit, it was
just boem. Could that have dissipated? Did they even properly investigate for that
is really the question. Yeah, it's never been said in any of the
sources. If they found any vomit or feces, I mean, if it
was found near her body, they could have chalked it up to decomposition.
But if it had been found in other sections of the apartment, suggesting that
she had become violently ill, I'm sure we probably would have heard about it.
But as hod as the circumstances of Crystal's death may be, they can
still be explained away as some sort of undisclosed medical issue. Like we just
said, she was new from the waist down and wearing nothing but a T
shirt, but perhaps that's how she normally liked to sleep. Her body was
entangled in the telephone chord. But what if her medical issues were so bad
that she was attempting to call for help but collapsed and got tangled in the
cord before she could make the call. The fact of the matter is that
there were no signs of forced entry at the apartment, and even though the
place was a mess, Crystal was known for being a very messy person,
so that doesn't necessarily mean that a violent struggle took place. All that being
said, even though the coroner found nothing on Crystal's body to indicate she was
the victim of foul play. The autopsy report turned out to be such a
screw up that I'm not sure you can consider any of its conclusions to be
reliable. As you mentioned in her last episode, Crystal was five feet one
hundred and five pounds, while the report listed her as five foot seven,
one hundred and forty pounds, and that's a pretty big discrepancy. Now,
personally, I have no doubt that the body found inside the apartment did belong
to Crystal. Some people have pushed forward the idea that the decomposing body of
another unidentified young woman was planted there to fake Crystal's death, but I think
that's pure nonsense, Believe it or not. The security officer at the Wild
Goose openly theorized that Crystal was abducted and being held as a sex slave in
Japan, and that the body in her apartment was a decoy. Yeah,
I don't think so. I think those discrepancies are simple clerical errors and the
result of a medical examiner doing a very sloppy job. Crystal was positively identified
through her fingerprints, so I'm sure her body did go to the morgue.
But I have to wonder if the coroner mistakenly mixed up Crystal with another dead
body he examined and filled out the wrong information on Crystal's autopsy report. I
mean, they intended to come up with explanations for the wrong height and weight
being listed, but didn't account for why the report made no mention of the
metal pins and plates in Crystal's right ankle. So this begs the question,
if there were signs of foul play on Crystal's body, could the medical examiner
have either a overlooked it or b not mentioned it in the autopsy report because
he mixed up her body with someone else. For this reason, I am
willing to consider the idea that there might have been something about Crystal's death which
pointed to murder and just wasn't documented. But since her body was cremated,
we'll never know. And what's sad is that because she was so decomposed,
the family never got to see her correct. Yeah, like the I know
that Anton and her family requested it, but they pretty much just told her
that told them that no, that you do not want to see this.
She's in such bad shape. And that's what's sad because then they get the
autopsy report back and there's all these discrepancies, and there are those kind of
crazy thoughts that enter your mind, like did we even cremate and get back
the remains of the right girl? Because we didn't get to see her.
And so for families, that's one of those components of a case, when
they don't get an opportunity to touch and view the deceased body, there's those
fears of like what if they got it wrong, what if they missed something
and you just don't know. And unfortunately, like you said, cremations occurring
a few days after the death. But they're starting to get all this information
after all of this is happening, and they're getting different theories and stuff fed
to them after she's cremated. So you just got to feel heartbreak for them
where they're going what's true and what's not because in this case, it's really
hard to know your heads or tails of all the information they're getting. Yeah,
I know, on researching this, they made comments about how if you
knew how many clerical issues and mistakes are made in the coroner's office with dead
bodies, you would be horrified because they're a whole bunch we probably do not
even know about. And that's why it's easy to assume that these kind of
errors could have happened in Crystal's case, and that maybe some evidence which pointed
to foul play just didn't get just got overlooked or didn't get documented properly.
It's just so many errors on one body, like missing all of you know,
the metal plates or rods or whatever it was. And then I could
see like if it was just that, But then when you add the height
and weight too, and it's like, okay, so what she had pointed
toes and that might account for an extra few inches, but how do you
go from five feet to five seven? That seems absurd? And then also
okay, maybe the gurney thing, that one makes sense to me. But
then when you have all of them together, it just is either some giant
conspiracy, which likely it's not, but it's probably just a collection of clerical
errors and somebody who's just so sloppy. Did they even scan the body?
Is the question? Did you or did you just say that you did and
you found nothing? Like who knows how rush they were, how many bodies
they had to deal with, if it was chaos at the morgue at that
time. But it seems like somebody dropped the ball. Oh yeah. Like
we mentioned earlier, I made a comparison to the Karen Cups in a case
which we covered on the podcast last year, and that was the one where
they couldn't determine how the victim died and she had a broken hyoid bone on
her throat which could point to strangulation. But then it later turned out that
the particular medical examiner had a habit of breaking hyoid bones by accident during his
autopsies, so that's the reason it might have been created. So it is
pretty horrifying to learn, like the kind of mistakes that medical examiners are capable
of. Nothing quite egregious, is our friend Fammi Malik? No, no,
oh my god, nobody could be where? Said him? Oh his
head was chopped off. You must have died of an ulcer, yes,
amen, gunshot wounds? What that must be poisoning? Was it? The
dog ate the head? Yeah, the dog ate the head. That was
his explanation for it. Yeah, the hungriest dog ever of your seeing.
They eat the skull and everything. Yeah. So now let's examine the foul
play theory. The one suspect whom Anton Klein has pointed the finger at is
Horace McKenna, the deceased former California Highway Patrol officer who was apparently the secret
owner of the Wild Goose. But the connection between McKenna and Crystal is a
tenuous one at best, and I'm not even sure it was conclusively proven that
they knew each other. All we have is the account of a former waitress
friend of Crystal's who claimed that Crystal often frequented McKenna's illegal casino, But this
waitress preferred to remain anonymous, so we have no idea how credible she is.
Like Robin just stated, the proposed about Crystal being taken to Japan and
forced into sex slavery is absurd, and I think that her job opportunity in
Japan is not really an essential part of this story. There seems to be
a misconception that Crystal had been offered a new job in Japan and was planning
to go there. But the impression that I've always gotten is that she was
being considered for this job at the time of her death, but nothing had
been made official yet. That's why we found it odd that Anton believed why
he couldn't get a hold of Crystal was because she'd chosen to leave for Japan
without saying goodbye, even though there's no indication that she'd actually gotten the job
yet. But to be fair, Anton came to this conclusion because the doorman
of the Wild Goose told him that Crystal went to Japan, which opens up
more questions and makes me wonder if there were people from that club who knew
more than they were letting on. There's been confusion about whether Crystal was actually
working there on the evening of May sixth, but whatever the case, she
wasn't found dead until Life thirteen. Did Crystal not have any scheduled shifts there
that week which she didn't show up for? Did all the other employees just
assume that she'd quit without notice and left for Japan. If Crystal had gone
missing, then I can see why people from the club might have the incentive
to lie and claim that she'd travel to a foreign country. But there's really
no need to do that if her body is still inside her apartment and is
going to be discovered eventually. Remember, she's at a topless dance club,
and so a lot of times we know that there's a legal behavior happening behind
the scenes there. There's drug deals, there's sex trade deals, there's money
laundering, there's all kinds of things that happened there. And was Crystal aware
of something that started to make her a problem for the club? Remember she
kept writing in her journal, I'm going to get out of here. I'm
going to stop having to work at this club. And so if that's the
case, and that somehow has something to do with what that FBI file was
on her, right, they had a large file on Crystal, some little
dancer at a club. Was there a reason for the people there to need
her gone or to cover and lie about her. I think Anton was given
misinformation. I think he's an odd ball, and I think Crystal was a
project of his or this pet friend of his. I don't feel like he
was this deeply committed, loving man who was just totally concerned about her.
I think Cristel was fun and he was quote helping her and he got benefits
from doing that. So I just I don't see him being the killer here.
I don't think he's the killer either. I think you said he's really
strange and maybe behaves in a way that is odd. But he was the
one who was screaming from the rooftops. Something had happened, and he was
trying to keep attention on the case. And I think if you're responsible and
the authorities don't seem to care, just walk away. You wouldn't be screaming,
going there's something wrong here. You know, she was potentially murdered,
and maybe these are ways in which it could have happened, or people who
could be responsible. It just doesn't seem to compete who but that FBI file.
I really wish we knew more about it, And I guess it's on
brand for Crystal not to if she was an informant, say that she wouldn't
have shared anything with Anton, because we know that she has a history of
being deceptive with him about certain things that maybe he might not agree with or
might not be in line with, you know, what he believes she should
be doing, because she lied about working at the Wild Goose until one of
his friends had seen her on stage. So if she was informing for the
FBI, I think it would be reasonable to assume that she may have kept
up from him for a variety of reasons. So if Crystal and Horace McKenna
did know each other, I'd be really curious to know how well they were
acquainted. I know there were no signs of forced entry at Crystal's apartment,
but that doesn't mean she couldn't have invited someone inside who subsequently killed her.
Let's say Crystal really did work her shift at the Wild Goose on the evening
of May the sixth, If McKenna was there that night, perhaps she invited
him back to her place after her shift ended, before things went horribly wrong.
Now be advised you should take the next information I'm about to share with
you with a huge grain of salt. But if you visit the Unsolved Mysteries
message board at the sitcoms online for Him, you'll find a lengthy thread about
this case, featuring a post from two thousand and eight by someone under the
username Ozzie Rules, who claims to be Cristel's brother. His theory is that
a few years before her death, Crystal attended one of those parties that McKenna
allegedly held for his friends in law enforcement, and became disgusted when she saw
some of the men there sexually abusing underage children. To prevent her from talking,
McKenna arranged things so that Crystal has sold a bag of tainted cocaine laced
with boric acid, which caused her to suffer a slow, agonizing death by
poisoning. WHOA Okay, now, we don't have any proof that she even
knows McKenna. Yes, he's a bad dude. We know that we know
that he has this amazing mansion but can't even hold a legal job, and
that he holds these crazy parties with law enforcement agents being there as his guest.
I'm sure there's a lot of sexual things going on there. I'm sure
there's a lot of drug use going on there, but we don't have proved
that Crystal ever attended these parties. Again, though Crystal was secretive, if
she was going there to make extra money on the side, I could see
her not sharing that publicly, and who knows what was going on there.
But this does seem like a little bit of a stretch because I don't feel
like we have any information about McKenna ever being charged with a sexual abuse,
ring of kids or anything like that. And surely at some point he would
have gotten busted for something, right, I know, that he died like
less than a year later, So I guess it's possible that he could have
been killed before they found any evidence that he was abusing underage children. Yeah,
he was murdered, Yeah, in early nineteen eighty nine. That's right.
And don't you guys think that if they were at this party sexually abusing
young children that it would be a conspiracy of those who'd be involved. I
doubt that you would be doing it in front of dancers from the Wild Goose,
because then that makes them kind of complicit in the crime and loose lips
think ships. So if they're going to do it in front of Crystal,
then they're likely doing it in front of other people. The more people that
are going to know about the worst crimes that you could be committing, I
would think, the higher the chances that you're going to get caught for that,
the higher the probability that you will end up incarcerated for what you've done.
So, if you're going to do it, you think you would do
it secretively so that less people who aren't directly involved have information about what you're
doing. And let me say this, if you're a law enforcement agent who's
complicit in doing these illicit things like sex and drugs and wild parties. That
doesn't mean you're okay with child's sex abuse. Like that's a whole nother level.
These girls, like you said, jewels, these girls are going to
be witnessing babies being hurt. Like I might be down to do drugs with
you, I might be down to do some crazy sexual things with you,
But the moment you bring a baby into this, you want to have a
child in here where these girls are potentially wanting to be moms one day.
These are men who are fathers, a large group of fluctuating guests. I
don't see there being a child sex ring in there. I do think if
this was a small intimate group where it was the same folks every week,
and like you said, there was one dancer that was the big entertainer and
things like that, I could see there being an abuse of a child because
this is a small group of people all willing to look the other way or
engage in the act. But not the way they describe these parties. It's
like, oh, it's sometimes there'd be you know, all these different law
enforcement officers and things like that, and oh, sometimes you'd have girls like
it's always changing characters who are down to have a good time, not abuse
kids. It just it just sounds like not not the right circumstances for a
child's sex abuse ring. And it's worth mentioning that this was California during the
nineteen eighties when they had the daycare sexual abuse hysteria scandal, where a whole
bunch of innoc and daycare providers and teachers were accused of sexually molesting children and
having these satanic rituals and stuff like that where they would sell them off to
the cartel and they'd slaughter animals, and it just got so ridiculous. So
I can totally believe that someone thinking that this is a true story, because
this was the time period of like the whole sex abuse hysteria, that someone
would believe a story about Crystal being present for a party like this. Now,
we're certainly not going to take the word of an anonymous Internet comment or
as gospel, as we have no idea if this poster was actually Krystel's brother,
and even if he was, he could have been sharing unverified, third
hand rumors that he'd heard. Well, I'm not saying I necessarily believe this
story. The idea of Crystal somehow being poisoned is not that implausible, especially
if you believe the account from the neighbor who heard the sounds of her being
violently ill in the hours leading up to her death. If Crystal had ingusted
poison the symptoms could have conceivably gotten so bad Ristil eventually reached the point where
she was screaming in agony, which would explain the screams Jet and Susan heard
during the wee hours of the morning. Crystal soon succumbed to the poison and
died, but since there was no outward signs of violence, the police were
inclined to think she succumb to an illness and had no reason to suspect foul
play. I was inclined to disbelieve the idea that Crystal had been poisoned by
tainted cocaine, since you'd assume that that's the type of thing that would show
up on an autopsy. But given all the other mistakes made in Crystel's autopsy
report, I could see the evidence of poisoning being overlooked. However, the
main problem with pinning Cristel's death on McKenna is that all these accusations against him
seemed to start after he was already dead and no longer around her refeude anything.
If you look at McKenna's backstory, it doesn't seem like he was a
good guy, and he certainly did his fair share of illegal activity, but
as far as I can tell, he was never officially linked to any murders.
The one thing which does raise my eyebrows is that the FBI kept a
file on Crystal and withheld twenty one pages of documents from the file from Anton.
It was still unclear why she would have been involved with them. We
know the FBI was monitoring McKenna's activities at the time of his death, so
perhaps Crystal really was working as an informant, which is what Anton suspected.
I can't help but wonder if things might have turned out differently had a contract
killing not been performed on McKenna ten months after Crystal's death. I'm sure that
brought an abrupt end to the FBI's investigation into McKenna's activities, and once the
focus switched to solving his murder, Crystal might have become an afterthought. If
McKenna had actually lived longer, perhaps a more concrete connection would have eventually been
made between him and Crystal. The FBI file bothers me so deeply. Remember
Ann asked to get the file and then twenty one pages of it were kept.
And so when you think about the size of that file, Crystal was
doing something big. This isn't a local law enforcemtion. It's like, hey,
man, make this drug deal for me so I can catch the guy
around the corner. That's like normal informant stuff. You know, when you
have someone who might have a run in with getting caught with a little bit
of drugs on themselves or getting caught doing something illegal that's minor. The police
might say, if you flip on this person, I'll let you go on
that. But this is an FBI file built on this girl who seems to
be relatively harmless and kind of quote unimportant. Right. She dances at this
club, she hangs out with her friends and family, and that's about all
we know about Crystal. So the fact that the FBI had her doing something
that had twenty one pages worth of information that could not be shared with her
closest friend partner, it's very disturbing. And like you said, if there
was a drug deal they're exploring, or like a drug ring they're exploring with
McKenna and then he gets murdered. Do they really need to be chasing the
drug lead anymore? Or maybe not, Maybe all of that disbanded because their
leader's gone or the man who was running the show is dead, and now
we need to focus on the murder itself. But Crystal was doing something that
got her into trouble and someone I think found out. Now, again we
still don't have information in proof that she was murdered, but that autopsy where
the world renowned forensic scientist is saying, yeah, look it looks like she
was strangled. That in that FBI file they bother me deeply, And it
is frustrating that if Crystal was involved, this was something that the FBI couldn't
finally share the truth about it after all these years. Because if it was
something to do with Horace McKenna, he's now dead and the people who killed
him have been brought to justice and put in prison. So I wouldn't assume
that there's still some secret investigation that they have to keep confidential. So if
she was doing something, why not tell Anton? Why not tell her family?
Unless of course, it's a case where maybe they put her life in
danger and they don't want to admit that in order to provide potential liability.
That's what we theorized in Keith Warne's case, coming full circle to our first
episode, exactly, Yeah, if that's what I've always suspected that he might
have been involved in some as an informant for something dangerous going on, and
the police are so tight lipped because they fear they're going to get in trouble
if they show what they did to put Key's life in danger. However,
here's the big issue. If Horace McKenna was actually responsible for Crystal's death,
what more can really be done. Anton Klein was carrying on this very public
crusade to find answers and expressing his suspicions to McKenna even though he was already
dead. Yes, I suppose it's possible that others could have been involved,
particularly if someone really did sell Crystal a poisoned bag of cocaine. But if
McKenna was the sole perpetrator, it's not like you can prosecute a dead man.
But at the same time, I can understand why Anton would be so
determined to see the police files on this case, as the errors in the
autopsy report are a to make one suspicious. But ask yourselves this question,
what would be the point of intentionally listing the wrong height and weight for Crystal
in her autopsy Unless you believe the absurd theory that someone planted the decomposing body
of another woman in Crystal's apartment in order to fake her death. I just
don't see those discrepancies being anything more than a clerical error. That's not to
say that I completely dismiss the idea of foul play, as I do think
it's possible that Crystal may have been poisoned. The loud screams and strange manner
in which Crystal's body was found do lend credence to the idea that she was
suffering pretty badly prior to her death. I'm not sure how many standard illnesses
could generate that type of reaction, but if she had some sort of deadly
poison her system, that's a different story. But the problem is that any
possible motives for why someone would want to poison Crystal wind up venturing into conspiracy
theory territory, and there really is a very strong evidence pointing to murder.
The alleged prime suspect is aised guy who may have owned the place where Crystal
worked, but we can't be certainly even met. Since there is no hard
evidence that Crystal was poisoned, I am inclined to lean towards Oukham's razor and
attribute her death to some sort of fatal, undiagnosed illness. Of course,
the circumstances are so strange that there's no way I would one hundred percent attribute
her death to natural causes. But without stronger evidence pointing to a suspect,
I just think it's more logical to assume this is how things went down.
Sadly, the fact that Crystal's body was cremated may have ruined any chances of
proving that foul play had taken place, and short of someone making a full
confession to her murder, after all these years, I don't think there's any
way to conclusively determine the full truth about what happened. But if you do
happen to have any information on the unexplained death of Crystal Spencer, please contact
the appropriate authorities. Jules Ashley any final thoughts in this case. This is
one of those like I said, I feel so much pain for the family
who is in contact with her. Just the day before we know she's likely
has passed away. You have poor Julie who carries this guilt of saying,
you know she was asking to talk to her mom. I didn't give her
the phone number to my mom because my mom had asked me not to.
And I honestly don't know in hindsight if my sister was being dramatic or if
she was struggling. And now we have all this misinformation that I don't even
know what happened to her. She's been cremated. There's no way to get
answers. The more we learn, the more confusing it becomes. It's one
of those cases where you ask yourself, even if it was natural causes,
couldn't the police have done more to do a thorough investigation and to give enough
respect to a deceased body to say we want to guarantee we know what happened
in this case. And instead, I think they do what they do often,
and they learned who the victim was, They saw the kind of disarray
she lived in and the lifestyle she had, and they said, hmm,
looks like natural death. I don't see any cause of a concern here.
Let's move forward, and therefore, any concerns that were brought to them before
she was cremated, I don't think they passed to the family to allow them
to make decisions. And I think you have a friend of hers and a
partner of hers who's left questioning what happened. Her family's left what questioning what
happened and if it was foul play, and maybe that FBI informant role got
her in trouble. Why don't we know more about that? I think you
know they law enforcement doesn't want the family to know. They don't want to
have any responsibility in someone's death. But how tragic that putting her in that
position might have actually led to her death. And if nothing else, it
did lead to this idea that she's somebody who wasn't valuable enough to investigate.
And that is simply heartbreaking because she was a daughter, she was a sister,
she was a friend, and she was a partner to somebody, and
so my heart just goes out and I'm praying that there could be answers,
but unless someone came to confess, I really don't see how that's possible.
Yeah, I ca go either way on what happened here, Like I quite
honestly lean sixty percent towards foul play and forty percent towards an illness, just
all of these unknown variables. As she just mentioned the FBI report, Why
are you holding this back? Why aren't you giving this information to Anton or
to her family? I feel like Crystal's death was it was criminal, how
little they seemed to care and how many errors were made. I just don't
know, based on the investigation that they did and the type of autopsy report
that we have at this point that all of the answers are available to us.
And it's so unfortunate that Crystal was cremated so that there wasn't the possibility
to exhume her body later. And I really hope that her family found peace,
even just thinking about the impacts on somebody like Julie knowing that Crystal had
called her asked for the number for her mother and she didn't give it to
her. She gave the reasoning that her sister talks her ear off. But
I can imagine how many times Julie has gone over that in her head and
gone, well, maybe things would have been different had I given her that
number for our mother, And none of this is her fault, but it's
just the impact that these crimes are crimes, whether it or illness, these
types of things have on a family, and that's the part that really sticks
with me with this case. Yeah, I've always been split on this,
and I do agree that if the police had performed a more thorough investigation right
at the outset, then we maybe we might have some more conclusive answers,
and that they just did not treat the family very well. And even though
Anton Klein does seem to be a bit of an odd individual, I do
give him credit for keeping Cristel's memory alive, because if he hadn't pushed so
hard, we might never have heard about her story. For years, I've
always been inclined to believe she died of just some sort of unknown illness,
just simply because there is no real evidence pointing towards foul play, and that
all these stories about Horace mcay and her attending a party was child sexual abuse
and sex slavery. There's never been anything to substantiate that they're true. But
like you said, the big elephant in the room here is the FBI file,
which makes you wonder why would something like this even exist unless Crystal was
involved in something. I mean doesn't necessarily mean she was murdered, but it
just shows that there's probably a lot more to her story than what we've been
told. I do think if she was murdered, that there is some merit
maybe to the poisoning theory. Like I don't necessarily believe she was sold tated
cocaine, but given the lack of a struggle or forced entry or foul play
at the apartment, I do think possibly someone could have slipped her some poisoned
the day before she died, and that caused her to become more progressively ill,
until things reached the point where she got so bad that she started screaming
and had a violent reaction. And in a sense, that would be the
perfect murder because you don't actually have to be at the scene to kill your
victim, and there's nothing to link you to it. And who knows,
maybe if a better autopsy had been done, they would have been able to
confirm or deny this poisoning theory. But without any of that, we just
don't know for sure, so very sad case. I don't know if we'll
know the truth about what happened, but it's good we do these podcast episodes
in order to keep the memories of victims like Crystal alive. Robin, do
you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold? Patreon?
Yes, The Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three years now,
and we offer these standard bonus features like early ad free episodes, and I
also send out stickers and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up with
us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars tier tier two, we
also offer monthly bonus episodes in which I talk about cases which are not featured
on the Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon, and
if you join our highest tier tier three, the ten dollars tier. One
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Mysteries, where you can download an audio five and then boot up the original
Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or YouTube and play it with my audio commentary
playing in the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about the cases
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to download a commentary track in which I make more smart ass remarks about Jewel
Kaylor, then be sure to join Tier three. So I want to let
you know a little bit about the Jules and Nashty patreons. So there's early
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So until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold trails and chilly
pass call for warm clothing. Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy