Welcome back to the Path wind Chili for this month's bonus Patreon minisoke, I'm
Robin, I'm Jules, and I'm Ashley. Let's dive right into this week's
case. February fourteenth, two thousand and six, horum Nevada, forty one
year old Marine Fields arrives her work at her bank and expresses concern that something
is going to happen to her. The following day, Marine fails to show
up for work, and her husband, Paul Fields, claims that he last
saw her when she left the house that morning. Maureene's abandoned car is discovered
in the desert, along with many of her personal items, which she is
nowhere to be found, and suspicion is directed towards her husband. Years later,
DNA evidence from the scene is matched to a convicted sex offender named Keith
Wayne Holmes, but because he's suffering from dementia, he's unable to provide concrete
answers about what happened and soon passes away. After that, the Path went
chilly, So today we're going to be exploring a case which took place on
Valentine's Day. The two thousand and six Disappearance of Marine Fields. This is
the story of a Nevada woman whose abandoned car was discovered in a remote desert
area of California, but a search of the area failed to turn up any
trace of her body on the surface. This appeared to be one of those
missing persons cases where it seemed obvious that the spouse was responsible, as Marine's
marriage to her husband, Paul Fields, was in a very troubled place,
and prior to her disappearance, Marine had expressed concern that her life might be
in danger. But to everyone's surprise, when DNA testing was performed on a
pair of pantyhose found in Marine's car, it wound up matching an elderly convicted
sex offender named Keith Wayne Holmes, who was serving time in a California prison
at that point for an unrelated crime. When questioned, Holmes originally stated that
he knew Paul Fields, which implied that Paul may have hired him to murder
Marine. But the problem is that Holmes was suffering from dementia, so he
kept changing his story and was unable to provide a consistent answer about why his
DNA was found on Marine's pantyhose. Holmes eventually passed away, so investigators have
been unable to figure out how he fits into this case or what actually happened
to Marine. So we're definitely going to have a lot to talk about on
today's episode. Well, here's what I was thinking as you're starting to describe
this case. I thought, Oh my gosh, her poor husband. Of
course becomes the number one suspect and the person that is going to be tied
to this murder because or disappearance, because that's what happens in these cases.
We all know the husband is going to be number one suspect. And then
you have the idea that the DNA actually matches Holmes, who's suffering from dementia.
But Holmes does throw out that it's possible Paul Fields hired him to kill
his wife, and then we learned that there's a trouble marriage, so I
have to know more. I wanted to have complete empathy and sympathy for the
husband, and now I just need answers. Well, I'll tell you that,
regardless of whether or not the husband did it, it does sound like
he was a major jerk, So I don't think you can have much sympathy
for him. By the way, Our story begins in two thousand and six
in Perumph, Nevada, an unincorporated desert town located in Nye County, over
sixty miles west of Las Vegas near the California state line. Our central figure
is forty one year old Marine Fields, who lives with air fifty six year
old husband, Paul Fields. The couple have been married for nearly fifteen years
and originally hail from New Jersey. They've lived in Perump for ten months,
and Marine now works as a bank teller at the local Wells Fargo branch.
On Valentine's Day, Marine showed up for work at the bank, but both
her co workers and customers noticed that she seemed very perturbed. At various points
throughout the day, Maureene broke out into tears, but would not go into
any specifics about what was bothering her, only stating quote, Something's going to
happen. When one of her colleagues asked if she was going to have a
good Valentine's Day, Marine replied no. Marine never did share what was wrong,
and when she left the bank at the end of her shift that day,
he would turn out to be the last time she was confirmed to be
alive. The following morning, Maureene was supposed to show up for work at
eight thirty a m. But never arrived. After twenty minutes passed, her
co worker decided to phone Marine's husband, Paul at home. Paul claimed that
Marine had left the house at eight am to drive to work and he didn't
have any idea where she was. However, he said that he was going
to go to the police station and file a missing person's report for her.
Well. Paul went to the police that morning, but the only thing he
did was inquire about whether or not there had been any reported accidents involving a
green two thousand and four Hyundai, which was the vehicle Marine drove. When
the police told him no, Paul left the station. He would later claim
that he attempted to report Maureene missing but was informed that he'd have to wait
at least twenty four hours. However, the deputy on duty said that when
Paul inquired about the accidents, he never actually mentioned anything about his wife at
all. Okay, Robin, you're right, Paul seems like he already is
a suspicious character, because the I thanks calling him around eight point fifty in
the morning, saying hey, Marine never showed up for work, and he's
like, I'm on it. I'm going to file a missing person's report.
It's like, okay, I don't think that would be your first reaction.
I think you'd be in a little bit of a panic, like, Okay,
let me retrace her steps, let me call me if you hear something,
and then you might start going I need to go have the police help
me look for her. But the first thing you do when you walk through
those doors is say, my wife hasn't shown up for work. I need
help. Can you please help me look for her. I need to file
a missing person's report. I'm horrified of what could have happened to her.
He's basically just saying have you had a car accident reported? Or Okay,
then have a great day, and he walks off. He's lying to the
people at the bank. He's misrepresenting what he did at the police department.
Why would you do that? I know grief makes you do very bizarre things,
but why those actions when you think he would have a totally different,
more calculated approach to trying to help find Marine. I'm going to venture a
guess, and this is just allegedly, but grief does not make you behave
like this. This is a bit of a reach for me. The fact
that he goes into the police station and we see people sometimes when it's like
the quote unquote the husband did it, and they're doing the most in order
to kind of avert any eyes or suspicion away from them. But in this
case, it feels like he's doing the very bare minimum so he can say,
oh, yeah, I was there, I did this, but he
actually doesn't want to alert law enforcement for any number of reasons. Maybe he
wants to make sure that whoever he collaborated with, if he was indeed involved,
he has had time to get rid of any evidence, or he himself
needs to come up with a proper story or alibi. It just is very,
very concerning because that doesn't seem to be the reaction of a loving husband.
I know grief makes people do crazy things, but it just doesn't seem
like if you're grieving that you wouldn't care where your wife was. Because these
seem to be the actions of somebody who doesn't really and truly want to find
his wife, because he hasn't even articulated that she's missing, And would you
go straight to a missing person's like finding a missing person's report fifty minutes after
she was supposed to be at work. Like my first reaction would be like,
oh my god, Okay, something's happened. I'm going to call these
people. Can you guys call these people. I'm gonna drive her route to
work. I'll meet you at the bank, And like there would just be
a different reaction of like, Okay, she's an hour late to work.
That's weird, but let me do let me do these things, let me
get up there and let's see what we can do. Like I don't know
that I'd be heading to the police department five zero minutes later, fifteen minutes
later, and you'd call a hospital, you'd call her good friends, you'd
call her mother, anybody who's related. You'd start like a phone chain and
be like, has anybody seeing Maureen? This is completely uncharacteristic. I agree
with you. I think fifty minutes seems like a very narrow timeframe to go
straight to the police, and then the way that he approached it seems extremely
odd. So there's some incongruities here for sure. And technically it's not even
fifty minutes because she was supposed to arrive at eight thirty, and they called
him twenty minutes later, so technically, she's only twenty minutes late, like
she could have gotten caught in traffic or something. And his first response was,
Oh, I'm going to go straight to the police and foul a missing
person's report, Like even the most loving spouses are not going to be that
concerned that fast. Oh my gosh, I thought you I thought work was
at eight. It is. She left the house supposedly at eight, Robin,
You're so right, So twenty minutes late, he's going missing person's report,
time to turn her in. Red flag, red flag. Yeah,
Like he was just trying to put on a show to make himself look like
the concerned husband. Like what if she just lost track of time and stopped
at a Starbucks or got a flat tire. Any number of things can happen
in twenty minutes. I could understand if she was like six hours late and
you haven't heard from anybody, and you're going, okay, at this time,
we really got to do something, glad to go to the police.
But twenty minutes, I mean, my husband's been late twenty minutes for plenty
of things. And the last thing I was thinking, is I better alert
the authorities. So the day after Marine disappeared, her green Hyundai was discovered
abandoned across the state line in the Mojave Desert in Inyo County, California.
It was parked nearly one hundred and twenty feet from the highway at a location
which was over twenty miles away from Perump and in close proximity to Death Valley.
The keys were still in the vehicle's ignition, the driver's seat was fully
reclined, and Marine's purse, which still contained her wallet and credit cards,
had been left behind. There were numerous items inside the vehicle, including a
pair of knotted pantyhose, some religious pamphlets, and Marine's eyeglasses and slippers,
which were underneath the gas pedal. There was also a twenty two caliber rifle
in the back seat, along with multiple bottles of prescription painkillers, including one
bottle of Xanax which appeared to be empty. On the ground outside the vehicle,
there was a blanket with very small traces of blood and vomit on it.
However, an extensive search of the surrounding desert turned up no trace of
Marine. Initially, there was speculation that Marine might have wandered off into the
desert and completed suicide by overdosing on the pills from the empty Xanax bottle,
but this theory was shot down once it was discovered that the bottle had been
completely wipe clean of fingerprints. In addition, there was unidentified male DNA on
the knotted pantyhose, so fear began to set in that Marine had been the
victim of foul play. There's a lot of concerning things here. You have
the twenty two caliber rifle in the back seat, but you also have that
front seat that's tilted backwards, it's reclined. We see this so often in
criminal cases where when you arrive at the car and that front seat is out
of the traditional position of like what that victim would be driving, So location
of the steerum wheel, the way that the back would be set, all
of those things, it shows that something else happened that front seat beyond driving
to that location and leaving, almost like a sexual assault happened in the front
seat where the attacker pushes the seat back to provide that room to attack the
victim. And so for me, that's always one of those things I look
for in a case is I say, what was the position of the front
seat. Was it the same spacing and the same upright position that she'd be
driving in And in this case no, So that to me, an addition
to the DNA you find on the panty hose, shows that something else happened
here. She didn't drive there to complete suicide. And one clarification is that
I don't know if they've ever done DNA testing on the blood in the vombit
to confirm that it belonged to marine. I'm kind of guessing it did,
because if it matched anyone else, I'm sure we would have heard about it.
But the blood isn't unusual if she was murdered, but the bombit is.
So it almost makes me wonder maybe she was forced to follow swallow some
pills against her will. Either that or with trauma, end up being upset
of being let's say, sexually assaulted or something of that. Instead being so
scared, she could have also vomited. You could have had a killer that
may have felt remorse or discussed with what they did, and they also could
have vomited. Well. Suspicion immediately turned towards Paul Fields, who still claimed
he last saw Marine when she left for work on the morning of February fifteenth.
He said they'd gotten into an argument before she left, and the last
words she said to him more quote, I might as well do it now.
Why wait? According to Paul, the argument had stemmed from him turning
down sex with her the night before, but no one could be certain if
Paul's story was true, as the last independent eyewitnessed who could confirm having seen
Maureen were her coworkers, who saw her leave the bank on Valentine's Day.
According to Marine's family and friends, her marriage to Paul was not in good
shape at that point and she was looking for a divorce. He was known
for being a jealous, domineering husband, and even though Marine claimed Paul had
never crossed the line into physical abuse, she appeared to be afraid of him
and had even said quote, if I ever disappear, tell police. Paul
did it. Before he met Marine, Paul already had a previous divorce under
his belt and was estranged from his two daughters. According to Paul's ex wife,
he would miss his child support payments, and whenever she denied him visitation
with his daughters, she would soon find her windshields smashed or tires slashed well.
Paul denied harming Marine and seemed certain that she had abandoned her car in
the desert and orchestrated her own disappearance. He claimed the Marine had been draining
money from their joint bank accounts because of a gambling problem, and had withdrawn
two thousand and taken seven thousand in cash advances off their credit cards before she
went missing. When police checked the couple's financial records, they discovered the Marine
had taken a four thousand dollars advance off of one of her credit cards,
but used the money to pay off the balance on another card. The one
detail which made Marine's family and friends skeptical about her disappearing voluntarily was the fact
that she left behind her pet pitbull dog, Wolfy, whom she absolutely adored,
and no one believed that she would have ever taken off without WOLFI okay
for me, I almost feel like this is a reverse of what actually happened
that day. So you have Paul who says, oh, Marine's mad because
I denied her sex and she took all this money and was gambling it away.
And I wonder if it's really Paul who's gambling their money away. Maureene
cans him. Maureene's the one who denies him sex because she's so mad at
him, and then he stages this idea that he's gonna hurt her. But
it seems to me like he would be the one who is sitting there saying,
okay, let me take my actions and reverse them on themselves. Like
Maureen was mad at me about all of these things. I attacked and killed
her, maybe even accidentally, but just of a rage. So I'm going
to stage it and tell the police she did all of these troubling behaviors which
would set her up for that suicide or running away. And instead he's really
covering for his own actions, like she's so upset that she was denied sex
from the man that she wants to divorce from, that she's going to decide
to end her own life. Like okay, Paul, I agree. It's
like classic projection exactly, and just the whole line, like I might as
well do it now. Why wait? It sounds like something you'd hear a
character say on a soap opera, Like you're rarely going to see someone say
that if they're being suicidal, say this very dramatic line, and then conveniently,
when they find her car, it's like an empty Xanax bottle. So
there it sounds like he's trying to plant the seats that she went off on
her own and completed suicide. But of course, since there were no fingerprints
found on the pill bottle, the police did not buy that at all.
So it definitely seems like major projection, and he's accusing Marine of doing a
lot of the stuff that he himself had done. So Paul's alibi for Valentine's
Day was that he went out to dinner with a friend, brought home food
for Marine, and then spent the rest of the evening watching television without leaving
his mobile home. However, police checked Paul's cell phone records from that night
and saw that he made a call to an acquaintance which pinged off a cell
phone tower. The location of this tower seemed to suggest that Paul would have
had to be on the other side of town in order to make this call.
When questioned by police, there were numerous details about Paul's story which would
change. As you recall, a twenty two caliber rifle had been found in
the back of Marine's hunday, and when asked by police if any weapons were
missing from his home, Paul checked his closet and expressed surprise that a twenty
two caliber rifle was missing. However, in an interview years later, Paul
claimed that he had given the rifle to Marine to take to a gun shop
in order to get an estimate on how much it would cost repair, which
seemed to go against his story about giving off a surprised reaction when he discovered
the rifle was not in his closet anyway. After the mandatory ninety day waiting
period following Marine's disappearance, Paul immediately went to court to try to get her
name taken off their joyly owned property, and was met with resistance from Marine's
family. Paul was able to have Marine declared legally dead in two thousand and
nine and became executor of her estate, though it was generally standard practice for
a person to be missing at least seven years before they're declared dead in absentia,
the police openly considered Paul to be the prime suspect and attempted to file
charges against him for Marine's disappearance, but the local district attorney's office felt that
the evidence was insufficient. Paul continued to maintain his innocence, and the investigation
would eventually turn in a very surprising direction. Okay, so the gun is
really an interesting tibet. But let's back up. Even before that, him
Valentine's Day, he's out to dinner with his friend, very weird, and
then he's going to bring dinner home to Marine. It seems like when he
talks about, oh, I just had this amazing night with my friend,
I brought up home dinner for my wife. We just hung out, you
know, and I watched TV because supposedly she was there and left at eight
am the next morning. So it's interesting that Maureene was having such a bad
day at work and she said she's going to have a terrible Valentine's Day.
And his story is that he was out with friends, he came home and
brought her dinner. It was just a very calm and relaxing night. I
just don't think that is what happened. I think the day had started off
horrific and she knew she was coming home to a hailstorm of abuse, and
something happened that evening. It could be that Paul even had that dinner with
friends and was across town on purpose to show police. You know, I
was not even near Maureene at the time. And then you get to this
gun where he says, oh, my goodness, a gun is missing from
my closet and it happens to be a twenty two caliber weapon. Oh wait,
there was a twenty two found in our car. Okay, well,
I had actually given that to her to go see if you can get fixed.
Those are massive errors in your story. One that would be a shock
and it's missing. Did Maureene take it to hurt herself? And the other
one's like, oh, I can explain that away because maybe his fingerprints were
on it or whatever else he was trying to cover. With the second story,
he tells, Paul's a mess. I've got a question for you both.
Who casually goes out for Valentine's Day dinner with friends but doesn't take their
wife Because typically most restaurants have set menus. You're going to pay like double
the price, and you're gonna be sitting around all of these couples and sometimes
like awkward first dates. It can be such a hallmark holiday type of a
situation and it just feels really bizarre that he's gonna be out like, oh,
just super casual out with friends on Valentine's date and going to bring my
wife who's sitting at home dinner. Doesn't that feel weird? That's the part
that seems weird to me is if you're gonna go out with your friends because
you're pissed at your wife, go out with your friends and stay out all
night, but don't say you went out with friends, waited hours to get
seated at a table, and then brought her home dinner and had this relaxing
night. You were either going to spend it with your friends or you were
going to spend it with your wife, like which one isn't Because as we're
going to talk about, we're going to explore a theory that Paul hired someone
to kill his wife. So I see no indication that this story about going
out to dinner with a friend isn't true. So that could have been his
way of making an alibi for himself and placing himself in public if someone else
was killing his wife. But of course it just doesn't fit the facts because
he's the one saying that, oh, when I got home, I was
the one who denied sex to my wife, And I'm thinking, if you
spent dinner with friends, I think she would be the one denying sex for
you. So nothing about this story holds up. In twenty twelve, there
was finally a match on the unidentified male DNA found on the knotted pante hoose
inside Marine's car. It was linked to an eighty one year old registered sex
offender named Keith Wayne Holmes, who was incarcerated for trying to lure a twelve
year old girl into his car in Pere Blossom, California. When Holmes was
arrested for the incident in June twenty eleven, a newspaper clipping of an anniversary
article about Marine's disappearance was found under a mattress in his nineteen sixty five Ford
Camper. At that time, Holmes already had numerous sexual offenses on his record,
and he also apparently had a history of picking up sex workers, beating
them, and abandoning them by the side of the road. While Pear Blossom
was over two hundred miles away from Perump, investigators did uncover evidence that Holmes
was in the parumpt area in two thousand and six, witnesses remembered homes frequenting
local campgrounds during this time period in his forward camper, and he was known
for singing church music around the campfire. When investigators questioned Holmes, he admitted
to knowing Marine and explained the presence of his DNA by claiming that they had
considered and jewel sex together, but he denied harming Marine and said that he
left her alive in Death Valley before they went their separate ways. When asked
about Paul Fields, Holmes claimed he did know him, but he wouldn't provide
any further details. That's a really disturbing part that he does say that he
one did have sexual contact with her and two knew who Paul Fields was.
Again, he has dementias, so we can't necessarily say with certainty that he's
confident in what he's saying or that he's not falsifying information to get attention.
But he does have these sex crimes on his record. You do see that
front seat leaned back and the DNA is located on the panty hose, indicating
a sexual encounter of some nature. But I feel like if you were having
an affair and you were at your wits in with your husband, and you're
telling people that you know, if I go missing, it's my husband.
I feel like there might have been one or two friends, your mom,
somebody that knew like, hey, I'm like getting attention from somebody else.
It's amazing. I'm going to pursue that I want away from my husband.
There was no part of Marine. I don't think of as having an affair
on the side with a convicted sex offender and then just accidentally goes missing or
is killed after their casual sexual encounter. That just does not seem to fit
the bill here at all. Well, Marine was forty one years old at
the time and Holmes was in his seventies, and if you look up photographs
of him, he's a creepy looking dude. And I find it very unlikely
that someone like Marine is going to be having consensual sex with him, even
if she was angry with her husband. And of course this thing about oh
I left her alive and Death Valley we went our separate ways, and it's
like Death Valley is a desert area in the middle of nowhere which can get
very hot and you can die if you're left alone there. So it seems
pretty weird that they would just go and have sex out there in the desert
and then just leave her there and stuff. It just doesn't hold up.
And I don't know if he was making up the story to cover him himself
or because of his dementia, he had no idea what was really going on,
and it just had these elaborate fantasies, but nobody bought it. It
sounds pretty calculated though. It sounds like you're trying to explain away if they
ever find the body and you can actually connect the physical evidence that he's like,
well, obviously it's there. I said that we had consensual sex.
It seems like maybe he just made up the story. But it's one of
those things we see perpetrators do where they lie and they're like, oh,
yeah, like I had consensual sex with the victims. So if you find
my fingerprints or my DNA, then that's why it's not because I murdered them.
I left them alive. Somebody else must have done that. Well.
Needless to say, no one believed Holmes's story about consensual sex with Marine,
but there were already major issues with questioning him. By this point, Holmes
was suffering from dementia. And while police continued to interview him on multiple occasions,
he became less and less lucid. It eventually reached the point where Holmes
would confess such crimes as the murders of his mother and his wife, and
he even started believing that one of the detectives was his son. The final
time Holmes was questioned, he was in a prison hospice bed, and when
asked if he knew Paul Fields, he answered quote, I think so.
But when asked if he remembered how he knew Paul, Holmes simply replied no.
In the end, Holmes could not provide any conclusive answers about what happened
to Marine, and he died in April of twenty fourteen. For his part,
Paul denied knowing Holmes, and obviously the statements of a suspect with dementia
could hardly be considered concrete evidence against him. However, in spite of the
DNA match to Holmes, investigators made it clear that they have not eliminated Paul
as a suspect. But unfortunately, there's still no answers about what actually happened
to Marine, and her body has never been found, So I guess you
could say the path went Chile. That's pretty powerful when you have a DNA
mounted to a convicted sex offender and you're pretty confident that we did not survive
this attack, and you say, okay, yes, so we have this
match to Holmes. Yes, he says he had an encounter with Maureen,
even though he's lying about the nature of that encounter. But just so you
know, Paul is not off of our radar whatsoever. That's pretty damning,
exactly like I've seen a lot of cases like this where the husband is a
suspect and then they do have a DNA match to someone else, and then
the husband is exonerated. But this is a rare case where that has not
happened, where they think that maybe Holmes was the one who killed her,
But we haven't eliminated the possibility that Paul orchestrated the whole thing, and that
he might this might have been some sort of murder for hire. So on
the surface, this seemed like yet another one of those tragic spousal disappearances where
the only possible resolution could be the husband did it. I've seen far too
many stories like this where a husband will claim that he and his wife got
into an argument, she decided to storm off on him and then mysteriously vanish
without a trace. And this particular story seems even less believable than usual because
Marine's disappearance would have had to take place during a very narrow time frame.
The story goes that Marine left her house at aam, did not show up
for work as planned at eight thirty, and her coworker's phone Paul to mention
this at around eight fifty or so. So if Paul is telling the truth,
something had to happen to Marine between eight and eight thirty. But of
course, Paul instantly aroused suspicion by lying about his attempt to file a missing
person's report when all he did was ask police if any accidents had taken place
involving Marine's vehicle. What was most bizarre to be is that if Paul had
no involvement in Marine's disappearance, why would he even visit the police station to
begin with. I mean, I'm not saying there isn't a reason for him
to be concerned about Marine not showing up for work, But most people aren't
instantly going to run to the police because their spouse is twenty minutes late.
If he only wanted to acquire about accidents. That would be one thing,
But why make the false claim that he attempted to file a missing person's report.
It almost looks like Paul was just putting on a show to make himself
look like a concerned husband. I mean, there are just so many red
legs to suggest he was responsible. Maureen openly expressing fear about her husband,
Paul trying hard to push forward the theory that marine ran away voluntarily, Paul
sharing an inconsistent, constantly changing story about the last time he saw and there's
also the fact that he tried to get his wife's name off their property and
have her declared dead as soon as possible, and all the interviews I've seen
with Paul, he comes off as an unlikable jerk, and law enforcement has
always considered him to be the prime suspect from day one, as they've openly
said that they would charge him with a crime and a heartbeat if stronger evidence
against him surface. Very easy to see where police are coming from. Like
we said earlier in the episode, I mean, you're right, Robin,
it's twenty minutes late, and the first reaction is like, what, my
wife's not at work. She's twenty minutes late. I'm off to file a
missing person's report. I knew this was going to happen. I knew she
was gonna go kill herself. I would have thought broken down. I would
have thought lost track of time. I would have thought met up with a
friend, or is doing something else, And then I would have started to
get really worried. I might have made some phone calls immediately, but I
wouldn't lie in Concock's stories to draw attention to her. I also wouldn't be
trying to put on a show for people, which it feels so disingenuine.
His actions right then, and how quickly he tells everybody the awful things Maureen
has done and how she's really the one that fault for all these things in
their marriage, it's, oh, it's just it's just bad. It's a
bad look on him. And when you have the DNA link to a man
who says he knew Paul, it makes him even more suspicious. Paul is
just like the most performative person. It's like he's looked up how you should
act, what type of script you should write. The things that he says
that Maureen had said, like I might as well and do it now.
After she'd been quote like denied sex from him and then coming up with the
gambling stuff. It's like, you've got nothing to substantiate this. And we
know that from her friends and family that she had a troubled marriage that she
wanted out of. So I really don't think that she's going to be barking
up your tree for sex and then so distraught about it that she wants to
then just go and end her life. I think she just wanted to get
away from him, and he feels like he's just he's like written this like
Telenavella about how a husband should act in the wake of his wife's disappearance,
and he's just hitting the gas a little bit hard with this twenty minute timeline
and then straight to the police. I also think you have to pay attention
to what she's saying throughout all of this. You have her showing up to
work on Valentine's Day and people can tell she's really agitated. People can tell
that she's anxious and kind of on edge, and when they are you going
to have a good Valentine's Day? She says no, And when they are
listening to her she says something to the extent of something bad is going to
happen, and she's gone so far as to tell her family, if something
happens to me, it's Paul. If I go and I disappear, it's
Paul. So that is wild. Like every couple fusses. I know that
when you're contemplating divorce and things like that, you still share information. But
to say I'm scared and I think if something were to happen to me,
you need a point to him that goes beyond a typical divorce of a husband
and wife that is class A domestic violence fear and proof that I've seen him
act in certain ways before that scare me to where I don't think him escalating.
It would be that big of a stretch. However, when the DNA
evidence from Marine's panteos matched up to this sex offender, Keith Wayne Holmes,
it's through the entire case for a loop. Now. Just because the DNA
was linked to another SUSPEC effect does not mean investigators believe Paul is innocent.
But this definitely opens up a lot of questions about Keith Wayne Holmes's role here.
It's entirely possible that Paul hired Holmes to murder his wife, or that
they both committed the crime together. The problem is that there's just no evidence
to connect the two of them, except some vague statements Homes made about them
knowing each other while he was a dementia patient in hospice care, which can
hardly be considered reliable. Since it was established that Holmes was camping in Perump
around the time period Marine went missing, it seems very likely he was involved.
The fact that his DNA was found on a pair of knotted pantehose suggests
that he might have used it to time Marine's hands together, but the question
is did he act alone. Well, if Paul's account of what happened is
true and he last saw Marine leaving their home to go to work, then
that means Marine would have had to have cross paths with Homes some time between
eight and eight thirty am during her drive to the bank. But how would
this have happened? I guess it's possible that if Holmes attempted to flag down
a ride that morning, he could have tricked Marine into pulling over and then
forced her to drive out to the area. Once he entered her vehicle,
or he forcibly entered Marine's car after she pulled over to park at the bank.
He then forces Marine to drive out to a remote area in the Mohave
Desert before he sexually assaults and murders her before disposing of her body. Now
we know Holmes was a sex offender who apparently had a habit of picking up
sex workers, beating them, and then abandoning them by the road. So
this could have been a case of things escalating to the point where he wound
up killing Marine. But there's a big problem with the scenario, namely the
fact that Marine's Handai was abandoned in the middle of nowhere. It was parked
nearly one hundred and twenty feet from the highway, in the middle of a
barren desert, at least twenty miles outside of Parum. So if Holmes forced
Marine to drive there and abandon her vehicle, how did he leave the area?
I also want to know if we go back a little bit and we
look at this timeframe that Paul's talking about. He says that they had this
normal Valentine's night, very typical Valentines. He goes out with friends to have
dinner. He brings his wife dinner home, and he has an easy evening
watching television before she leaves the next morning for work as usual. I don't
think that ever happened. I think either he had arranged for her to be
killed that evening while he was out of dinner with friends, or they got
into a fuss and something happened later that evening. But I feel like it
had to have been planned. If you allowed and you connected homes to marine,
I feel like he had to have some kind of knowledge because those two
things, killing her or starting to get into a fuss, you wouldn't have
really included homes in that. But if you had said, I'm going to
let him kidnap her and take her when she gets home from work tonight,
or maybe he even drove her out somewhere and left the car and Holmes met
them there and he just said, do what you want. That seems way
more probable than an eight to eight thirty am attack on her. Oh yeah,
exactly, because there are no other independent eyewitnesses besides Paul who could confirm
having seen her since she left the bank the previous day at around four thirty
and five pm, So this easily could have happened. During this timeframe of
about fifteen hours, and that there's no one else who can confirm that she
left at eight am the following morning to drive to the bank. And like
we were talking about, if this was a planned murder for higher plots,
he could have arranged things so that Holmes would kill his wife and dispose of
her body while he was out having dinner with a friend, establishing an alibi
for himself. I think Paul is about as reliable as Scott Peterson. Yeah,
exactly. Now we know that Holmes owned a Ford camper, but it's
not like he could have driven two vehicles out into the desert at the same
time. Sure, I guess Holmes could have made it back to the highway
at hitchhiked, but this location was in close proximity to Death Valley, which
is one of the highest places on Earth during the daytime. When you couple
in the fact that Holmes would need to perform a lot of physical labor in
order to hide Marine's body, there's a huge risk that he's not going to
get out of the area alive if he doesn't have transportation. Not to mention
that the scene at Marine's vehicle looked staged in order to give off the impression
that she might have wandered off and completed suicide. In fact, the authorities
actually considered this possibility at first, until they discovered that Marine's empty pill bottle
had been wiped clean of fingerprints. Holmes does not strike me as a particularly
sophisticated criminal, and if this was just a random stranger abduction, I see
no reason for him to go to the trouble of staging the scene like that.
No, it seems likely that two people had to be involved, one
who could drive Marines hyun date to that remote spot in Inyo County, and
another who could provide transportation out of the area. So the most logical explanation
is that Paul and Holmes work to stage the scene together. Okay, so
I'm wondering when his phone is identified as being used, he's nowhere near this
area, Well, he's nowhere near his home, Like it's showed pinging off
a cell tower on the other side of prompt And I don't know if there
were any cell towers out there in the remote desert, so I don't know
if there were any towers to be pinged off it. But of course this
ping that on the other end of the town goes against Paul's story that it
was alone he was home all night, because otherwise his cell phone wouldn't have
pinged in that area. Yeah, something's going on. I almost wonder if
Holmes is the quote friend he went to dinner with. That is possible because
I haven't seen any information about this friend speaking to police or corroborating his alibi.
So maybe it was with Holmes in this dinner was just a cover story.
However, I'd be really curious to know how Paul would have cross paths
with homes in the first place. Given the Holmes was a frail old man
who was in his mid seventies at that point, he seems like an odd
person to enlist as an accomplice to murder. But then again, Perump is
an unincorporated town in the middle of nowhere, and Paul hadn't lived there that
long, so maybe he just had slim pickens to choose from. Since Holmes
drove afored camper, Pole might have thought it would be an ideal vehicle to
transport a body. Even though Paul claimed that he spent the entire evening at
home on Valentine's Day, cell phone pings seemed to place him on the other
side of town. This strongly indicates that Paul is lying, though I wouldn't
say it's strong enough evidence to bring criminal charges against him. But if those
pings are accurate, then Paul could have been out there disposing of his wife's
body. If Holmes bound Marine's hands together with her pantyhose, this would explain
how his DNA got there. He could have used his camper to drive Marine
out to the desert while Paul drove his wife's Hondai. Una is abandoned over
one hundred and twenty feet from the highway because Paul wants to ensure that no
one will find it until after Marine fails to show up for work on the
morning of February fifteenth. Paul then stages the scene to make it look like
Marine wandered off, and then hitches a ride back to Perump in Holmes camper
before they go their separate ways. It's worth noting that investigators did find a
second set of vehicle tracks near the Hyundai, but since the scene was not
properly secured at first, no one is certain if the tracks were already there
when the Hyundai was originally found. That is awful because the reality is if
we could know, or if we had anyone who spotted vehicles in that area
at a given time, if they had preserved the scene and we were able
to link the two sets of tire tracks to one another, we wouldn't be
talking about the same case the way that we are. You would have had
a link, possibly to one of Paul's vehicles and been able to place him
at the scene with home. It is tragic that Holmes had dementia at the
time, and therefore even his saying I knew Paul is called into question right
and the extent to get details is to how you knew Paul? Those were
never provided before his death. So it's one of those things where it's like,
did Paul get away with murder and staging a way to get rid of
his wife? Where then he benefits because they declare her dead and he's able
to be the head of her estate and get all of her belongings and money
because of this man's illness and death. I mean, is that really what
it came down to is that because Holmes passes away and has this decline in
mental stability, that we've lost our chance to figure out what happened. That's
certainly possible, and maybe that was Paul's plan all along. He's figuring,
well, I mean, en list this guy to help me commit a murder,
but he looks old, so he's not going to be around for too
long and that lessens the chance of him ever speaking with the police and giving
me up and implicating me in this crime. O of detail we haven't even
talked about is when Holmes was arrested for trying to lure that twelve year old
girl into his vehicle in twenty eleven, they found a newspaper clipping about Marine's
disappearance inside his camper, and at that point they didn't really see any significance
for it. But then you're wondering, why is he having this random newspaper
clipping about a crime that took place in another state five years earlier, involving
a woman he shouldn't have even known. So that was the instant red flag
there that he did have some sort of connection to this case. Now we
know police performed in extensive search of the area where the Hyundai was abandoned and
found no trace of Marine's body, But I have to wonder if she might
not have even been buried at that location. Remember, the route from perumpt
to Inyo County is nothing but desert, so theoretically Paul could have stopped somewhere
else to bury her body and abandon her vehicle at a different spot in order
to throw everybody off the track. I'm not sure if any of Paul's DNA
was found at the scene, but the problem is that the Hyundai belonged to
his wife and he would have been inside the vehicle on multiple occasions, so
even if his DNA is there, that's hardly incriminating. So it's difficult to
pin anything on Paul. But when you break everything down, the most logical
explanation is that he and Holmes committed this crime together, and the discovery of
holmes DNA at the scene does not exonerate Paul in any way. If this
is what actually happened, then Paul got really lucky that the DNA match did
not occur until after Holmes was suffering from dementia, so any incriminating statements he
may have made about Paul are not admissible as evidence. So while it might
seem unusual that Paul enlisted the help of an elderly man in order to murder
his wife. The strategy technically did pay off, since Holmes passed away before
he ever had a chance to testify against him. Sadly, until Marine's body
can be found or other evidence surfaces against Paul, it would be difficult to
charge him with anything. At the moment, there is no evidence that Paul
and Holmes knew each other, so the press and stuff another suspect's DNA would
be more than enough to generate reasonable doubt if Paul ever went to trial.
So if you happen to have any information on the unsolved disappearance of Marine Fields,
please contact the Nye County Sheriff's Office at seven seven five seven five one
seven zero zero zero at seven seven five seven five one seven zero zero zero,
Jules Ashley any final thoughts on the case. This is one of those
that goes to meet at the heart of domestic violence and where you hear Marine
telling friends and family it's bad, like it's gotten really bad. I have
to get away from him if I disappear. Please it's him. It's Paul,
and she's even at work. Like usually a victim of domestic violence,
they're really protecting their abuser, especially out at work or with acquaintances around town.
You're like, oh, it's wonderful. Oh yes, I can't wait
to get home for Valentine's Day. Here she's at her wits end. You
can tell where she's saying it's bad, like something might have happened the evening
before, he might have made threats that morning, and she's saying something bad
is going to happen. No, I'm not excited that it's Valentine's Day.
This is to not her friends, this is to colleagues. So you know
that it's gotten pretty intense. And then Maureene never shows up the next day.
I am so sad because she wasn't ever recovered. Her body was never
found. It's very clear something bad happened to marine. She had a family
that was supportive of her, She had that dog that she loved. She
did not leave voluntarily. She was being responsible, trying to pay bills off,
so there was no reason for her to end her life while she's also
trying to manage and be responsible. It's just pitiful because her family never got
to even give her a burial where they could have some kind of physical ability
to say goodbye to her. It's just questions, and it's rage about someone
that was supposed to love and protect her could be involved in that. That's
the ultimate betrayal of this feeling of human safety. So so so so sad.
I would be elated if someone had information who knows maybe Paul says the
wrong thing to the wrong person and there is a change in that relationship or
dynamic and that person has the courage to come forward and say something. Just
a question before I give my final thoughts, Robin, So, Paul and
Marine lived in a mobile home? Correct? Yes? Yeah? So did
they live in a mobile home park? I'm not entirely sure. I mean,
I know we talked about homes living at a campground in a camper,
So I don't know if homes ever frequented like a park nearby where Paul and
Marine lived, But that is a possibility for how they could have crossed paths,
because I was just thinking if it was a mobile home park or something
to that effect, they might have mixed in somewhat similar circles. Because although
Marine was quite far off in age from homes, Paul was closer in age
like what like maybe like ten years apart, fifteen years apart, something like
that. Yeah, Paul was fifty six, so he would have been closed
her eyes. Yeah, yeah, So it's possible that they might have known
or had, you know, similar friends in common or people in common where
he might have been griping about Marine and somebody might have been like, well,
you know, I know this guy who's a sex offender and or whatever.
I don't know the type of people that he mixed with. Just based
on Paul's behavior, he sounds like a pretty abhorrent person, and it sounds
like Marine was really stuck in a situation where it was pretty clear domestic violence.
It meets the criteria even if he didn't physically put his hands on her.
But I don't think that we can count that out either. Even though
she said that it hadn't crossed the line, a lot of women say that
it has to cross the line when it very clearly has. We don't know
exactly what Mariene was dealing with, only that she was really scared and that
she said, if I go missing, Paul did it, and that to
me is everything. I think we should trust her words, and we should
trust that when a victim says something like that, that they are actually in
danger and it is such a travesty that this poor family doesn't have a grave
to go to, they don't have a body that they they don't get a
resolution in this case. I don't know how the two of them met,
but I think that in my mind, it seems to be the most logical
explanation that they collaborated together, because I don't think anybody walked twenty miles in
the desert like back to Perump. It just doesn't seem likely, and it
seems also dangerous. So it feels like two people had to be there,
and these two are the best suspects. So I just my heart breaks for
the family, and I really hope that if anybody knows anything, that they
would come forward with information at this point in time, Yes, I remember
when I researched this one on the Trail Went coldy years ago, and I
was looking through the earliest media coverage from like two thousand and six to twenty
twelve. Then this just seemed like an afe case of the husband. Did
it that we have a woman trapped in a very unhappy marriage, filled with
abuse, and a husband acting very suspiciously, And you just had this feeling
that the only reason the authorities haven't arrested him yet is because they don't have
a body or any incriminating physical evidence. And of course I remember reading the
media coverage in twenty twelve when the DNA matched Keith Wayne Holmes, and everyone's
thinking, WHOA were we wrong about this all along? Could the husband have
been innocent this whole time? Did she just cross paths with like a random
predator, a sex offender who decided to kill her? But when you look
at the facts of this case, that just doesn't seem likely. It doesn't
seem possible that Holmes could have done this on his own and then disposed of
Marine's body. And there's very, very unlikely that a complete stranger who didn't
even know Marine would go to the trouble of staging the scene and emptying out
her pill bottle and then wiping the fingerprints from the bottle to make it look
like she wandered off and completed suicide. No, the only person who would
do go to the trouble of doing something like that someone who knew her personally,
And the only suspect in that case is Paul, So it just seems
likely that he crossed passed with this sex offender and enlisted him to help him
murder his wife and dispose of her body. And unfortunately, even though in
most circumstances, the DNA match could have led to this case being resolved,
that if Holmes was a free man at that point, he may have decided
to talk and get himself a good plea deal, But unfortunately for investigators,
he was already in prison. He was suffering from dementia, so he just
could not provide a consistent story before he passed away. So Paul just got
incredibly lucky. And it is sad to think that he's still getting away with
it to this day. But I do know that if new evidence surfaced that
the authorities would probably rest Paul in charge him in a heartbeat. So,
like we said, if you have any information about what happened to Marine that
could be beneficial to the investigation, please come forward. So that about brings
an end to this month's bonus Patreon miniso. Thank you so much for your
support, and we'll return again next month for an other bonus minisodes. So
until then, everyone have yourself a great month.