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Speaker 2: You are now listening to True Murder The most Shocking
Speaker 2: Killers in True crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 2: written about them Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week,
Speaker 2: another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
Speaker 2: killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 2: journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 6: Maybe good evening. This is your host Dan Zupanski for
Speaker 6: the program True Murder, The most shocking killers in true
Speaker 6: crime history and the authors that have written about them.
Speaker 6: Murder in the Mountains. The Muriel Baldridge Story Real. It's
Speaker 6: the slaying of Muriel Baldridge, the seventeen year old high
Speaker 6: school cheerleader who was found beaten to death on the
Speaker 6: morning of June eighth, nineteen forty nine, in Prestonsburg, Kentucky,
Speaker 6: after a decade's long investigation. It featured an amazing array
Speaker 6: of twists and turns, including a sensational trial and a
Speaker 6: controversial verdict. The case remains unsolved to this day. Muriel's
Speaker 6: murder is considered the most bizarre and confusing case in
Speaker 6: the annals of Eastern Kentucky crime. The book that was
Speaker 6: featured this evening is Murder in the Mountains, The Muriel
Speaker 6: Baldridge Story with my special guest journalist and author Michael Crisp.
Speaker 6: Welcome to the program, and thank you for this interview.
Speaker 6: Michael Crisp.
Speaker 5: Great, Thank you, Dan. I appreciate you having me on tonight.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much for coming on. Let's start off
Speaker 6: without giving any of the story away, if you can
Speaker 6: possibly do that. Why was this a story that you
Speaker 6: were either picked for or you chose to do. Why
Speaker 6: was this story? Give us the audience a little bit
Speaker 6: of the background, why you would want to do this book,
Speaker 6: or why someone picked you specifically to do this. How
Speaker 6: did you become involved with this and why? Without giving
Speaker 6: us too much of the story, but tell us about
Speaker 6: that please.
Speaker 5: Certainly it is a great story. I live in Kentucky
Speaker 5: and over the last few years I've been known pretty
Speaker 5: much as a documentary filmmaker, and about three or four
Speaker 5: years ago I had the opportunity to do a documentary
Speaker 5: film about a really bad school bus wreck that happened
Speaker 5: in nineteen fifty eight in the town of Prestonsburg, Kentucky.
Speaker 5: And to this day. That school bus wreck, which claimed
Speaker 5: the lives of twenty seven young people, is still tied
Speaker 5: with It's still the number one traffic fatality in the
Speaker 5: United States regarding a school bus. And while I was
Speaker 5: making film, Throughout the course of the interviews, I had
Speaker 5: several people that I interviewed tell me that although their
Speaker 5: town was known for this horrific accident in nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 5: the town was also known for a very bizarre, unusual,
Speaker 5: strange murder and subsequent investigation that happened just nine years
Speaker 5: before in the same town there in nineteen forty nine.
Speaker 5: So the case really fascinated me quite a bit as
Speaker 5: I was making the school bus wreck film, and then
Speaker 5: about a year ago, I decided to start making a
Speaker 5: documentary film about this nineteen forty nine slaying, and a
Speaker 5: few days into the process, the family of the murder
Speaker 5: victim contacted me and said, we fully support your project. However,
Speaker 5: we feel it would be a little bit more tasteful
Speaker 5: if you wrote a book about it as opposed to
Speaker 5: doing a documentary film. The reason being was the documentary
Speaker 5: film film that I did about the best wreck, it
Speaker 5: won some awards, It did really well, It was extremely
Speaker 5: popular it played theatrically, and there was probably a period
Speaker 5: of a year where you really couldn't go through Appalachia
Speaker 5: or go through Kentucky without seeing the film in some
Speaker 5: sort of theater. So they thought it would be a
Speaker 5: little bit more tasteful to the murder victim's memory and
Speaker 5: to the family, especially that still survives, if we.
Speaker 3: Did a book.
Speaker 5: And so that's how I decided to go ahead and
Speaker 5: approach this as a book.
Speaker 6: Right, And with that cooperation, you knew then you would
Speaker 6: have something because you have to have access, especially with
Speaker 6: a crime a little bit older. But regardless, it's interesting
Speaker 6: for the reader to have that access, and it's pretty
Speaker 6: well essential for the journalists to need something, something other
Speaker 6: than the reports, the official reports in the courts transcripts
Speaker 6: not right, Oh.
Speaker 5: Yes, exactly. And from the get go, I was very
Speaker 5: privileged to have met and known a couple relatives of Merle.
Speaker 5: I got to talk a few, I got to talk
Speaker 5: to the feud during the course of the of writing
Speaker 5: the book. That the lady that writes the opening uh
Speaker 5: paragraph or the opening I guess prologue to the to
Speaker 5: the book. Her name is Lynn Preston and she is
Speaker 5: a niece by marriage of the murder victim, and she
Speaker 5: gave me so much information and was extremely helpful. She
Speaker 5: opened up a lot of doors to be to be
Speaker 5: able to have this book become a reality. So we're
Speaker 5: very thankful for her support.
Speaker 6: Right now, you made the correction to her her She
Speaker 6: really her name was really pronounced despite Muriel the way
Speaker 6: I mispronounced it. It really she was really known as
Speaker 6: Muriel uh. And so thanks for that correction. So I
Speaker 6: don't keep making a mistake during the entire interview. Now
Speaker 6: take us. You say you're from Kentucky, but tell us
Speaker 6: what Prestenburgh is really like. It's give us, maybe even
Speaker 6: leave in a brief history, but give us what Prestenburg
Speaker 6: in nineteen forty nine Prestinsburg was really like before we
Speaker 6: introduced the main character of this incredible tale.
Speaker 5: Oh, certainly, it was just a small town in eastern Kentucky,
Speaker 5: comprised of really just a couple thousand people. And during
Speaker 5: that time, the railroad was a pretty big industry in town.
Speaker 5: Coal mining was pretty big. But the people were very
Speaker 5: tight knit, much as they are today. Lots of families
Speaker 5: were related to each other, people lived fairly close to
Speaker 5: each other, so you knew almost everybody in town, and
Speaker 5: the people of that particular area, as well as throughout
Speaker 5: Appalachia in general, mainly have Irish ancestry. They're very smart,
Speaker 5: they're very hard working, and they're very tight knit. And
Speaker 5: so in that particular time period, you had a very
Speaker 5: small community that everybody pretty much knew each other. But
Speaker 5: the time period was also interesting as well because World
Speaker 5: War Two had just wrapped up four years prior. There
Speaker 5: was a sense of relief and a restoration of innocence
Speaker 5: in that community, and people were just happy and they
Speaker 5: were looking forward to the future ahead, and little did
Speaker 5: they know that such a traumatic event would change their
Speaker 5: lives forever.
Speaker 6: Right now, What was the sort of the industry and
Speaker 6: what was how was the town really? Basically does this
Speaker 6: little town thrive? What was it known for? What was it?
Speaker 6: A little bit of its history and background.
Speaker 5: Yeah, in many ways, it was like the small towns
Speaker 5: of today. The main street area was pretty popular. You
Speaker 5: had florists and restaurants and different things that you would
Speaker 5: see in pretty much most small towns today. But one
Speaker 5: of the largest industries and the biggest industry in town
Speaker 5: was the Cno railroad, and there was a depost station
Speaker 5: that saw lots of activity. Passenger trains would come through
Speaker 5: on the railroad, they would stop off at the depost station.
Speaker 5: There was a restaurant nearby, a bath house nearby. Hundreds
Speaker 5: of people would come in and out of town each day,
Speaker 5: and coal was a big industry there too, and so
Speaker 5: the coal would come in and out on these railway cars.
Speaker 5: And that's the railway plays a big role in the
Speaker 5: story because, first off, a lot of the people that
Speaker 5: are connected in the story, a lot of the main
Speaker 5: people were there because of the railroad, and if they
Speaker 5: didn't work for the railroad, they had some sort of
Speaker 5: indirect connection to it as well. And then the very
Speaker 5: famous bridge which still stands today that Merle was killed underneath.
Speaker 5: That bridge was constructed basically by the railroad because at
Speaker 5: that time the railroad was a private company. It was
Speaker 5: very big, it was making quite a bit of money,
Speaker 5: and they needed a bridge to connect the two different
Speaker 5: sides of the town across the river. So the railroad
Speaker 5: was huge during that time.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so it ends up being a major landmark and
Speaker 6: grim reminder for the city, for the town itself. So yes,
Speaker 6: now tell us about Meryl Baldridge. Tell us a little
Speaker 6: bit about her parents, about her background, what was her
Speaker 6: life like in this Prestonsburg, What was she like? She
Speaker 6: was as the photos, I will tell the audience that
Speaker 6: she was a very striking woman. Very beautiful woman, but
Speaker 6: very striking woman too. So tell us about Meryl Balldridge,
Speaker 6: her siblings, her parents were they like, what was her
Speaker 6: background like? What was her life really like?
Speaker 5: Yeah, she was the youngest of seven children. She had
Speaker 5: three brothers and three sisters, and at the time of
Speaker 5: her murder, she was seventeen years old. She was a
Speaker 5: cheerleader for the Prestonsburg High School and she was just
Speaker 5: she was somebody that we've used this phrase before, but
Speaker 5: everybody that's ever been in high school has always had
Speaker 5: a classmate or a friend like Merle Balbridge, who happens
Speaker 5: to be considered the prettiest girl in school, the most vivacious,
Speaker 5: somebody who's not only smart and funny and has a
Speaker 5: good sense of humor, but somebody that's popular with pretty
Speaker 5: much everybody in high school. And that's who Merle was.
Speaker 5: And her family was wonderful. Her brothers and sisters were
Speaker 5: very supportive of her and looked over her quite a bit.
Speaker 5: Especially her sisters. Her mom, I believe, was pretty much
Speaker 5: a stay at home mom, as most of the women
Speaker 5: were at the time. And her dad, his name was
Speaker 5: George Baldridge, and George worked for the CNO Railroad, And
Speaker 5: in this particular spot of geography in Prestonsburg, the CNO
Speaker 5: Railroad depot station was just across the street from where
Speaker 5: Merle lived, just probably maybe fifty yards away. And then
Speaker 5: the infamous bridge where underneath that that the murder took place,
Speaker 5: was just perhaps one hundred and fifty to two hundred
Speaker 5: yards away. And all of this was in an area
Speaker 5: called West Prestonsburg, which was essentially Prestonsburg, and that really
Speaker 5: sets the tone and the setting for where all of
Speaker 5: this occurred. But she was a wonderful young lady, and
Speaker 5: it's a shame that her life cut short so soon.
Speaker 6: One thing that we know when we do, when you
Speaker 6: do stuff that you can really call this historical crime
Speaker 6: true crime, because especially what's prominent in this story is
Speaker 6: that in nineteen forty nine, for those listeners that are
Speaker 6: twenty years old or younger, or even thirty years old,
Speaker 6: nineteen forty nine, not that I witnessed it myself, and
Speaker 6: nineteen forty nine was an innocent time in terms of
Speaker 6: not locking the doors and the windows, but an innocent
Speaker 6: time in terms of serial killers and psychopathic killers and
Speaker 6: the knowledge of what some people were capable of, and
Speaker 6: so people weren't as afraid and we're more trusting. Because
Speaker 6: I think this is important because when this happens in
Speaker 6: this day and age we were, with our cell phones
Speaker 6: and how connected we are, this might not have happened
Speaker 6: the same way. So we have to account for that
Speaker 6: for our audience that it's nineteen forty nine, and so
Speaker 6: the response to things that we would sing think might
Speaker 6: be susues or rais suspicions didn't do so in nineteen
Speaker 6: forty nine.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, you're exactly right, Dan. And to also paint
Speaker 5: a picture of the community in that time period, so
Speaker 5: many people that I talked to kept referencing the television
Speaker 5: show Happy Days, which took place primarily in the fifties,
Speaker 5: and even though this was a small eastern Kentucky town,
Speaker 5: they were all very privy to all the music and
Speaker 5: movies and television and everything that the rest of the
Speaker 5: country had. And when you picture the TV show Happy Days,
Speaker 5: and regarding how innocent it seems and how you know,
Speaker 5: you just couldn't imagine anything this monstrous occurring. That makes
Speaker 5: it even that much more surreal. But something like this
Speaker 5: could have happened in such a small community during that
Speaker 5: time period.
Speaker 6: Now to set the stage two, we have to fast
Speaker 6: forward because we have such a like, so many twists
Speaker 6: and turns in this case, it's incredible. Now, tell us
Speaker 6: about mural Baldridge's life. Was she dating? Was she seriously
Speaker 6: in a relationship with anyone? She's seventeen years old. You
Speaker 6: said she's a cheerleader, she's very popular. Her family life
Speaker 6: is good. Relationship with her siblings is fine. Tell us
Speaker 6: what's happening just she gets out of school. What is
Speaker 6: happening in her life in June of nineteen forty nine.
Speaker 5: Yes, she's a junior who's going to become a senior
Speaker 5: in high school, so she's going into her senior year.
Speaker 5: She is running around with a group of girls that
Speaker 5: like her, are very fun but also very respectful and
Speaker 5: very nice. She's dating quite a bit, but she does
Speaker 5: have one boy from another town that she's dating much
Speaker 5: more seriously, and they also over the last few weeks
Speaker 5: leading up to the murder, had also become secretly engaged,
Speaker 5: and so she was really living just a great life
Speaker 5: for what an American teenager would be living at the time.
Speaker 5: And on the evening of the murder, I believe it
Speaker 5: was a Monday night in June of nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 5: she and her girlfriends decided to go out and do
Speaker 5: a handful of activities before she would return home that evening,
Speaker 5: and of those activities, one of them included going to
Speaker 5: see a movie at the local theater there on Main Street.
Speaker 5: She also with her girlfriends, went to see a softball
Speaker 5: game that was being played down sort of near their school.
Speaker 5: But the most infamous thing that they did, and no
Speaker 5: one thought it would be infamous at the time, was
Speaker 5: that she and her girlfriends attended a carnival that was
Speaker 5: traveling through town. So during the carnival, they've spent probably
Speaker 5: about an hour or an hour and a half down there,
Speaker 5: and they didn't really have any unusual or strange encounters
Speaker 5: while they're.
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Speaker 3: Comilbrig necessary day. I lost the terms conditions eating plus the.
Speaker 5: Carnival, but that was the last place that they went
Speaker 5: to before she decided that she needed to go home.
Speaker 5: So she was walking back home with three of her
Speaker 5: girlfriends and Merle lived across the water on this on
Speaker 5: the Big Sandy River, and spanning that river was the
Speaker 5: West Prestonsburg Bridge, the Infanmous Bridge where this all occurred.
Speaker 5: So the four girls are walking down one of the
Speaker 5: main streets they're in Prestonsburg and it's time for her
Speaker 5: to cross the bridge in the darkness. It's now about
Speaker 5: ten fifteen pm and it's time for her to cross
Speaker 5: and go back home to her house. Some of the
Speaker 5: girlfriends offer and say would you like us to walk
Speaker 5: across the bridge with you, and she tells them no, thanks,
Speaker 5: I've done this a thousand times, you don't have to
Speaker 5: come with me. I'm okay. So they keep walking. They
Speaker 5: let her cross by herself, and that's the last she's
Speaker 5: ever seen alive again. A few minutes later, some of
Speaker 5: the neighbors in that particular neighborhood, here's some screams, but
Speaker 5: they don't think anything of it. There's a hospital that's nearby,
Speaker 5: and at that time, it was kind of routine as
Speaker 5: patients were being brought into the hospital that they might
Speaker 5: be moaning or they might be screaming. There's also some
Speaker 5: dogs in the neighborhood, so some of the neighbors passed
Speaker 5: off those screams as perhaps a neighborhood dog. And then
Speaker 5: night comes and go, and then in the morning, on
Speaker 5: the river bank, around six am, a truck driver driving
Speaker 5: across the bridge looks down and spots a clump of
Speaker 5: clothing that looks suspicious to him. He parks his vehicle,
Speaker 5: goes down to the river bank and turns out it's
Speaker 5: her body. And then that sets off a chain of
Speaker 5: events that is just so incredible, it's just hard to
Speaker 5: even describe.
Speaker 6: Now, why did she not coming home set off some
Speaker 6: alarms for her parents?
Speaker 5: Well, that's an excellent question, and it's one that we
Speaker 5: don't even really get into much in the book, but
Speaker 5: I believe that at the time, it was not uncommon
Speaker 5: to where if a girl was supposed to come home
Speaker 5: and if it got late and the parents were already
Speaker 5: turning in as long as they were with another girlfriend,
Speaker 5: it would be sort of assumed that that girl might
Speaker 5: be having sort of a last minute sleep over at
Speaker 5: another girlfriend's house. And these were the parents knew that
Speaker 5: she was that evening spending time with a handful of
Speaker 5: other very respectable young women, and if something had occurred
Speaker 5: to where she could have stayed over with one of
Speaker 5: them for whatever reason, that that would have been accepted.
Speaker 5: So I believe that's what happened in that case.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's why I wanted to make that other point,
Speaker 6: because it just I know that that there's a little
Speaker 6: bit of not really an explanation, because you can't get one,
Speaker 6: but the only real explanation is that that's how small
Speaker 6: that community is. And I know of communities not in
Speaker 6: the nineteen forty nine that were trusting like that as well,
Speaker 6: because everybody does really believe that they know everyone else literally,
Speaker 6: so very trusting. Now, what happened after the discovery to
Speaker 6: take us. Sorry for the interruptions, but what happens after
Speaker 6: the discovery by this person.
Speaker 5: Well, what happens from there is a crowd of onlookers
Speaker 5: decide to descend on the area once word has spread
Speaker 5: that a body has been found there on the river bank,
Speaker 5: and then from there law enforcement starts to begin to arrive.
Speaker 5: The crime scene is really sort of We could just
Speaker 5: say that in today's society, with today's law enforcement techniques,
Speaker 5: the crime scene would have been secured and there would
Speaker 5: have probably been a much better chance of being able
Speaker 5: to find the killer. But at this time, we had
Speaker 5: a whole lot of onlookers arriving first before any law
Speaker 5: enforcement arrived. It had rained a little bit the night before,
Speaker 5: so the area was already kind of muddy, and so
Speaker 5: now you have all these townsfolk coming down to see
Speaker 5: what's going on as the law enforcement are arriving. But
Speaker 5: some of the initial clues that the law enforcement find
Speaker 5: and one of the first people on the scene from
Speaker 5: the law enforcement side of things is the county coroner
Speaker 5: and his name is Brady Shepherd, and mister Shepherd finds
Speaker 5: a handful of things that are definitely of interest. There
Speaker 5: is a fifteen inch lead type that's a few feet
Speaker 5: away from her body, and so that's immediately believed to
Speaker 5: be the murder weapon. There is an uprooted peach tree
Speaker 5: that is there on the river bank. There are signs
Speaker 5: of struggle where the peach tree is. It looks as
Speaker 5: if Merle was involved in an altercation with her attacker
Speaker 5: and uprooted the peach tree by hand as he was
Speaker 5: trying to throw her body into the river. So apparently
Speaker 5: he killed her there on the river bank and then
Speaker 5: tried to get her out into the river, but was
Speaker 5: probably scared off by porch lights being turned on in
Speaker 5: the area and maybe some area when she screamed that
Speaker 5: might have scared some people as well. And a few
Speaker 5: feet away also was a empty whiskey bottle, and that
Speaker 5: also would lead to a, you know, an interesting direction
Speaker 5: that the case went to after as well. There was
Speaker 5: a strand of pearls also on the peach tree that
Speaker 5: was beginning that was believed to belong to her too,
Speaker 5: And so that was pretty much how the crime scene
Speaker 5: worked that morning, and and and from there things even
Speaker 5: got stranger.
Speaker 6: Now you talk about the pearls, and the pearls were
Speaker 6: given to her by her aunt, I believe, or some
Speaker 6: relative anyway, just the evening before, because they thought it
Speaker 6: went well with the dress that she was wearing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's correct. The pearls were a gift from an
Speaker 5: aunt that was visiting from out of state. And at
Speaker 5: the time, Merle had three brothers and three sisters, but
Speaker 5: all of her siblings had already moved out of the house,
Speaker 5: most were married and living fairly nearby, and so during
Speaker 5: the time over the summer when she was killed, she
Speaker 5: was living with her mother and her father, and they
Speaker 5: had also had a couple other younger relatives come in
Speaker 5: to stay because one of their parents was going through
Speaker 5: a divorce, and I believe one of their parents was
Speaker 5: one of Merle's sisters. So it was a pretty small
Speaker 5: household at the time. But this visiting aunt came in
Speaker 5: and when Merle put on a dress for going out
Speaker 5: that evening, brought out a strand of pearls and said,
Speaker 5: this would just be perfect for the dress, and rather
Speaker 5: than me have them tonight, I'd like to give them
Speaker 5: as a gift to you and have her put them on.
Speaker 5: And so she did, and ironically, those were the pearls
Speaker 5: that were found in the uprooted peach tree that night.
Speaker 6: Now, the early analysis from the police, Now we have
Speaker 6: to also explain to the audience that's you know, we've
Speaker 6: all had a steady diet a CSI and forensic evidence
Speaker 6: and DNA type evidence. This is nineteen forty nine. Like
Speaker 6: you say, what we would call it now is that
Speaker 6: the crime scene was definitely compromised or contaminated. What did
Speaker 6: the police have other than the pipe which may or
Speaker 6: may not have had blood according to your book that
Speaker 6: they weren't quite sure, but it looked like that might
Speaker 6: be the thing that the murder weapon. They had the
Speaker 6: pearls that were laying on a twig or tree or
Speaker 6: something right there. So what really wasn't robbery? What was
Speaker 6: there summation from and what kind of evidence given its
Speaker 6: nineteen forty nine and there's no real no technology. What
Speaker 6: did they have and what was their first summation conclusion,
Speaker 6: if there was any at all from that initial crime
Speaker 6: scene investigation?
Speaker 5: Yes, well, one of the first things that everybody thought
Speaker 5: of was the motive for the murder definitely, just like
Speaker 5: you stated, could not have been robbery. She was a
Speaker 5: very beautiful seventeen year old young woman. And the attack
Speaker 5: was probably believed to be by a man who had
Speaker 5: bad intentions sexually with her, So a lot of that
Speaker 5: immediately first started as they were looking at the evidence.
Speaker 5: There wasn't really a direct correlation between most of the
Speaker 5: evidence and who that they would go after as far
Speaker 5: as initial suspects, but one of the first suspects right
Speaker 5: from the get go, just a few weeks into the investigation,
Speaker 5: was a male friend of hers that His name was
Speaker 5: Donald Horn, and most people in town knew him by
Speaker 5: the nickname Dutney, and he, on the afternoon of her murder,
Speaker 5: took a bus to Texas, and after learning that she
Speaker 5: had been murdered, just about a day or two later,
Speaker 5: he told the local authorities in Texas that he was
Speaker 5: wanted in connection for questioning with her murder. So in
Speaker 5: Kentucky there was a big fervor, especially there in Prestonsburg,
Speaker 5: that he was perhaps the perpetrator and that he was confessing,
Speaker 5: And so the governor at the time extradited him from
Speaker 5: Texas and brought him back up here, and so for
Speaker 5: a while it looked like that we had the murderer
Speaker 5: and everything would be fine, But once he got up here,
Speaker 5: it turns out he saved his bus ticket bust for
Speaker 5: the ticket down there to Texas, and it exonerated him,
Speaker 5: and so a lot of people in town were pretty upset,
Speaker 5: especially because he had kind of used the murder to
Speaker 5: parlay a free ride home back to Kentucky. He didn't
Speaker 5: truly confess to it, but he sort of left it
Speaker 5: open ended to where he could get a ride back.
Speaker 5: So after that, then began on the carnival workers, because
Speaker 5: at the time in Prestonsburg in nineteen forty nine, it
Speaker 5: was so tight knit. Many people were thinking, there is
Speaker 5: no way a member of our community could have committed
Speaker 5: this crime. It has to be a stranger, and the
Speaker 5: strangers in town are from the carnival. So the focus
Speaker 5: went immediately to the carnival workers, and then for a
Speaker 5: while it looked like that was going to be a
Speaker 5: pretty hot lead. A lot of activity, a lot of
Speaker 5: interesting things occurred with the carnival workers during the summer
Speaker 5: of forty nine that were the target of the investigation.
Speaker 6: Now they went through obviously they probably went and checked
Speaker 6: the backgrounds. Were they able to check the backgrounds In
Speaker 6: nineteen forty nine, of the people that did work at
Speaker 6: the carnival, and then did they target those individuals, How
Speaker 6: did it work out that they had some suspects if
Speaker 6: we can call that from the carnival initially? Tell us
Speaker 6: how that turn events happened. What was there were they
Speaker 6: able to initially to check with backgrounds and go from
Speaker 6: there or what was their strategy?
Speaker 5: Yeah, even back then, they didn't have a really good
Speaker 5: background search or any kind of database for being able
Speaker 5: to find out readily which members, if any of the
Speaker 5: traveling carnival had extensive criminal backgrounds. Really, what they could
Speaker 5: do at that time was if they received some testimony
Speaker 5: that implicated someone at that time, then they could focus
Speaker 5: in on that person and then pull their background record.
Speaker 5: But they didn't have that kind of widespread capability like
Speaker 5: they do nowadays. So out of the carnival workers, there
Speaker 5: were two people that were very interesting to police at
Speaker 5: the time. There was a man who was twenty four
Speaker 5: years old named Bill Gamble and his young friend who
Speaker 5: was fifteen years old named Olan Collins. And turns out
Speaker 5: Olan Collins, the fifteen year old, after a few days
Speaker 5: of the investigation, decided to tell the authorities that he
Speaker 5: witnessed twenty four year old Bill Gamble kill Merle Baldridge
Speaker 5: while they were I believe, driving across the bridge and
Speaker 5: he witnessed her being drugged down to the river bank
Speaker 5: and that he saw Bill Gamble do this. So within
Speaker 5: a day or two, the town is in an uproar.
Speaker 5: They believe they have their guy. Bill Gamble is brought
Speaker 5: up to Cincinnati for questioning and even signs a confession.
Speaker 5: And now it's official. Here. It's just a couple months
Speaker 5: into the investigation, and it looks like we've got our guy,
Speaker 5: and everything is all set, and then some really strange
Speaker 5: things happen. Bill Gamble a day or two later says
Speaker 5: his confession that he signed in Cincinnati was coerced by
Speaker 5: threatening police officers, so he decided to recant the confession.
Speaker 5: And then a day or two after that, young Owen
Speaker 5: Collins says, I made all of that up, and I
Speaker 5: was just you know, just you know, expounding on the
Speaker 5: story and just wanted to make all of this up.
Speaker 5: So it was really suspicious. During the investigation, turns out
Speaker 5: the older gentleman Bill Gamble was in he was working
Speaker 5: for the carnival, just like Owen Collins, but he was
Speaker 5: under suspicion for kidnapping a husband and wife fairly recently,
Speaker 5: just a few weeks prior to this crime that I
Speaker 5: believe was in Virginia, and the car that Bill Gamble
Speaker 5: had was tied to that couple. It looked as if
Speaker 5: that couple owned it. The couple still had not turned up,
Speaker 5: they were still missing. And Bill Gamble was a big,
Speaker 5: tough guy that had quite a bit of a criminal record.
Speaker 5: He initially sounds like the type of person that would
Speaker 5: do something this bad. Two a young girl, and he's
Speaker 5: also somewhat in her age reign, with her being seventeen
Speaker 5: and being twenty four, and so it looked as if
Speaker 5: everyone had their guy. But then when the confessions and
Speaker 5: the testimony were recanted, the grand jury at the end
Speaker 5: of the summer decided not to seek any type of
Speaker 5: indictments or formal charges against either gentlemen. So by the
Speaker 5: end of the summer, three to four months after the
Speaker 5: crime had been committed, it was completely cold again.
Speaker 6: Tell us how the grand jury they took it to
Speaker 6: the grand jury and there wasn't enough for the grand
Speaker 6: jury to indict or set it to trial. Tell us
Speaker 6: a little bit more about that process, how they could
Speaker 6: possibly not be able to get this to trial.
Speaker 5: Certainly the grand jury was having to hear lots of
Speaker 5: different cases. I believe there was also another less glorified
Speaker 5: murder investigation going on involving some strangers, a total separate
Speaker 5: investigation that at the time was taking it quite a
Speaker 5: bit of a grand jury's time as well, and they
Speaker 5: wanted to make sure that they got that indictment right
Speaker 5: as well as the Merle Baldridge indictment. But aside from that,
Speaker 5: they had a lot of other different cases from things
Speaker 5: as Hello.
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Speaker 5: Eighteen pluss, even including the ancient art of bootlegging, which
Speaker 5: happened quite a bit in the time, and they had
Speaker 5: lots of things they had to deal with. One of
Speaker 5: the things that probably confused the grand jury most was
Speaker 5: in Olan Collins's story about seeing Bill Gamble commit the murder.
Speaker 5: He insisted that the murder was that the murder weapon
Speaker 5: was a hammer that was kept in the car underneath
Speaker 5: Bill Gamble's feat And I think such a focus on
Speaker 5: finding the hammer sort of discounted the lead pipe as
Speaker 5: official evidence and sort of made a lot of people
Speaker 5: wonder how much doubt and credibility these two witnesses were providing.
Speaker 5: And at the time, there wasn't much credence or strength
Speaker 5: being given to a lot of the physical evidence during
Speaker 5: the grand jury hearings, and they were really focusing more
Speaker 5: on the witness testimony by Gamble and Collins, and that
Speaker 5: turned out to just not be credible enough to get
Speaker 5: an actual indictment. And in many instances, even today, witness
Speaker 5: testimony without any really good concrete physical evidence just sometimes
Speaker 5: just isn't that strong when it comes to trying cases, right, well, I'll.
Speaker 6: Ask you a little bit later why, because I think
Speaker 6: that they're the most perplexing for sure, of these two guys.
Speaker 6: And now, so what happens after this? Now the two
Speaker 6: months they think they have their men, they have confessions
Speaker 6: from both that must have been very encouraging. Now they
Speaker 6: have this recanning, the grand jury won't indict. So what's
Speaker 6: their next move? What do they do next? What do
Speaker 6: police do next?
Speaker 5: Yeah, things go quiet for several weeks with the police.
Speaker 5: And as things are getting quiet with them, the town
Speaker 5: is still in an uproar. There are reward funds being
Speaker 5: put together at the bank, Private investigators are being brought in,
Speaker 5: the Pinkertons are being brought in to investigate, and such
Speaker 5: an overwhelming feeling of fear has engulfed the town. Teenagers
Speaker 5: now no longer have the freedom to go outside, even
Speaker 5: if they want to and walk the streets because the
Speaker 5: perpetrator has not been caught. So there's a lot of
Speaker 5: and as you mentioned earlier, car doors are now being locked,
Speaker 5: houses are being locked. More lights are staying on at
Speaker 5: night because they feel a murderer is in their midst.
Speaker 5: There's no guarantee this guy isn't a serial killer. Maybe
Speaker 5: he's lurking around and it's scaring everyone. So January rolls around,
Speaker 5: and then, to everyone's surprise, after the case seems dormant
Speaker 5: for weeks and months, a couple of arrests are made,
Speaker 5: and they're made with a couple of gentlemen who are
Speaker 5: older than the typical suspect that you might expect in
Speaker 5: this type of case. And the two men that are
Speaker 5: charged include a sixty year old gentleman, Lawn Mowles, and
Speaker 5: Lawn is a prominent school board member and at the time,
Speaker 5: if you were a school board member in eastern Kentucky,
Speaker 5: it was just like being on the city council. It
Speaker 5: was a very powerful position. You had a lot of
Speaker 5: weight in town. It was a really good position to have.
Speaker 5: And Lawn also coincidentally worked at the depost station across
Speaker 5: from Merle's house, and he was George Baldridge's boss, Merle's dad,
Speaker 5: so he knew the family really well and worked across
Speaker 5: from the house there at the depost station at the
Speaker 5: Cno railroad. And one of Lyn's best friends was a
Speaker 5: gentleman named E. K. Dotson who had a house close
Speaker 5: to the railroad, and he was also indicted because they
Speaker 5: believed that he had something to do with the murder
Speaker 5: as well. So then that set off an interesting chain
Speaker 5: of events involving just more bizarre investigation situations and other
Speaker 5: different things leading up to a sensational trial that spring.
Speaker 5: And there were probably two main reasons why Line was
Speaker 5: thought to be such a strong suspect in the case.
Speaker 5: Lawn was quite the drinker, and he was one of
Speaker 5: the few people in town that drank a particular brand
Speaker 5: of whiskey called Four Roses. And the bottle of whiskey
Speaker 5: that was found near Merle's body, and granted it was
Speaker 5: maybe thirty to fifty feet away from her body at
Speaker 5: the time she was found, was an empty bottle of
Speaker 5: Four Roses, so a lot of people thought, hey, this
Speaker 5: Lawn Moles may have something to do with it. Even
Speaker 5: though it did kind of appear where the bottle was
Speaker 5: that it could have easily been just thrown off the
Speaker 5: bridge a few days before or something like that, but
Speaker 5: it was still relatively close to her body. The second
Speaker 5: thing was was, even though he was sixty and respected
Speaker 5: member of the community but still a little bit of
Speaker 5: a drinker, he had a reputation of someone that would
Speaker 5: leer at young ladies and be very fascinated with young girls,
Speaker 5: especially pretty young girls, and he had a bit of
Speaker 5: a reputation in town, especially there also at the railroad station,
Speaker 5: that he had kinds of crush on Merle, even though
Speaker 5: she was so young. It was rumored that he had
Speaker 5: frequently looked forward to times when her and her girlfriends
Speaker 5: would come home from school or leave from school. He
Speaker 5: had a clear view through his window at the office
Speaker 5: at the depostation of seeing them, and many times she
Speaker 5: would come over to use the telephone there at the
Speaker 5: depost station, and she knew Lan through her dad, and
Speaker 5: she would sometimes get up on his desk and maybe
Speaker 5: flirt with him just a little bit in a very
Speaker 5: innocent way that girls at that age will sometimes do,
Speaker 5: or at least he turned interpreted it as flirting, and
Speaker 5: she would use the telephone on occasion, and that was
Speaker 5: a moment that apparently he really looked forward to whenever
Speaker 5: he could be that near to her. So those were
Speaker 5: a couple bits of I guess circumstantial evidence that helped
Speaker 5: lead a lot of people, especially Merle's family, into believing
Speaker 5: that he was one of the main perpetrators in the case.
Speaker 6: Now this I K. Dohnson, it's his Lom Wolf's friend.
Speaker 6: Then one of the other reasons is that police, if
Speaker 6: I'm not correct, police interpreted that the crime scene because
Speaker 6: they had dragged this the mural down the embankment towards
Speaker 6: this river, that this was not the work of somebody
Speaker 6: that was not familiar with this area, like say the
Speaker 6: carnival workers. So tell us a little bit more about
Speaker 6: I K. Dohnson, this is a friend of lom Wolves.
Speaker 6: Tell us a little bit more about what police thought
Speaker 6: his connection was. As I was mentioning, sure got.
Speaker 5: E K happened to own he was a neighbor of
Speaker 5: Merle Baldridge's family. He also lived very close His backyard
Speaker 5: was on the river bank, and he lived very close
Speaker 5: to the depost station as well. And one of the
Speaker 5: main physical things that seemed to probably tie ek to
Speaker 5: this crime more than anything was, as you said, it
Speaker 5: appeared that these that the perpetrator or perpetrators knew the
Speaker 5: area extremely well because it was dark. I don't recall
Speaker 5: if there was a full moon that night, but whether
Speaker 5: there was or not, it was dark and on this
Speaker 5: river bank there were a lot of twists and turns
Speaker 5: and alleys and areas on the hillside to where you
Speaker 5: really had to know the area to be able to
Speaker 5: efficiently escape or even bring someone down there to try
Speaker 5: and do harm to. In his backyard is where some
Speaker 5: footprints that led from the crime scene went up between
Speaker 5: his house and his backyard and one of the other
Speaker 5: neighbor houses. So it looked like that if he had
Speaker 5: committed the crime, he decided to flee in the general
Speaker 5: direction by his house, which you would sort of make sense.
Speaker 5: That would sort of make sense if you get into
Speaker 5: a killer's mind, where would they be wanting to go initially,
Speaker 5: maybe try and go home if they're thinking clearly, and
Speaker 5: he lives so close to that area. But there was
Speaker 5: so much more circumstantial evidence against Lawn Moles, more so
Speaker 5: than E. K. Dotson, that even though they were thought
Speaker 5: of as being in cahoots and could have done this together,
Speaker 5: more focus was shifted on Moles. And that's the situation
Speaker 5: that was going on during that spring of nineteen fifty.
Speaker 6: Now, in this as well, when you talk about the
Speaker 6: four Roses, whiskey tell us about what police are able
Speaker 6: to uncover in terms of that whiskey and some real
Speaker 6: damaging evidence at least you would think.
Speaker 5: Yeah, one of the really big pieces of damning evidence
Speaker 5: with some testimony by a husband and wife that did
Speaker 5: some bootlegging there in town, and the bootleggers the last
Speaker 5: name was Gotzy, and you had Clyde Gotzy and his
Speaker 5: wife Julia Gotzy. And turns out that a few days
Speaker 5: after Lawn and Ek are arrested, mister and Missus Godsey
Speaker 5: come forward and they decide to tell the tale of
Speaker 5: what they remember that evening, and one of the things
Speaker 5: that they remember was that lawn Moles, along with E. K. Dotson,
Speaker 5: made at least three and possibly four trips to their
Speaker 5: place of business to purchase alcohol, and on most of
Speaker 5: the trips they were purchased thing four Roses whiskey. So
Speaker 5: on the first trip or two I believe one of
Speaker 5: the first trips occurred around ten PM, and they did
Speaker 5: purchase some of that brand of whiskey. And then later
Speaker 5: on that evening I believe, around two or two thirty am,
Speaker 5: turns out that Missus Godsey remembers that he had changed
Speaker 5: clothes for some strange reason. So that was kind of
Speaker 5: unusual why lawn Moles would have changed clothes in that
Speaker 5: particular timeframe. And then finally they made another trip later
Speaker 5: on in the morning, and during that trip they decided
Speaker 5: not to buy any whiskey, but lawn Moles was there
Speaker 5: just asking the bootleggers, has anyone else here tonight bought
Speaker 5: any of this particular brand of whiskey, which raised their
Speaker 5: suspicion that once the authorities were coming by and looking
Speaker 5: at somebody who might be tied to this four Roses whiskey,
Speaker 5: that's kind of unusual that they would come in just
Speaker 5: to ask that question. So it raised quite a bit
Speaker 5: of suspicion at the time.
Speaker 6: And the thing was it wasn't the most popular whiskey.
Speaker 6: You have to have a little bit more money to
Speaker 6: be able to, wasn't. And it was a little bit
Speaker 6: more of a special whiskey, wasn't it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it sure was. It was a little bit more
Speaker 5: expensive at the time than the others. And because it
Speaker 5: was so unusual, that definitely raised a lot of eyebrows
Speaker 5: in the town on why that empty bottle would be nearby.
Speaker 5: And when you think of it in modern day times,
Speaker 5: if there's a particular brand of cigarette or alcohol or
Speaker 5: something that's very unique to you, and then if that
Speaker 5: particular thing is found at a crime scene, then sure,
Speaker 5: if you're guilty, that's something that's going to really help
Speaker 5: probably investigators lead some folks to you. But if you're innocent,
Speaker 5: it's an extremely rough situation should you have to try
Speaker 5: and explain yourself out of that. Any Ways, it's kind
Speaker 5: of pays to be popular in situations with the brands
Speaker 5: that you a choose in situations like this.
Speaker 6: Now, tell us about what other witnesses that they found
Speaker 6: they could attest to evidence that was again damaging the
Speaker 6: Moles at trial, like any kind of any did anyone
Speaker 6: witness seeing blood on the clothing? Tell us about that
Speaker 6: and any other witness that came forward and what evidence
Speaker 6: they provided.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the Julia Godsei, the female bootwagger, during the first trip,
Speaker 5: recalled seeing some mud or blood on Laine Moles's clothing,
Speaker 5: But on the second trip when he showed up to
Speaker 5: purchase more whiskey, he had changed clothes and she thought
Speaker 5: that was kind of suspicious. But there was also another
Speaker 5: witness that came forward that claimed just perhaps maybe two
Speaker 5: or three days after the murder, that Lawn Moles came
Speaker 5: to him to have him change the seat covers in
Speaker 5: his vehicle, and so the guy did the work on
Speaker 5: Lon's car change the seat covers remembers an unusual stain
Speaker 5: in the headrest of one of the in one of
Speaker 5: the seats. I believe it was a back seat, and
Speaker 5: in retrospect he wondered if that could have been blood,
Speaker 5: but it was a really unusual stain, and so Lon
Speaker 5: had him changed the seed covers. Well. A few days afterward,
Speaker 5: investigators taught to the gentleman. He starts mentioning the story,
Speaker 5: and then word gets back to Lawn Moles that this
Speaker 5: guy is talking about that, and so then LN goes
Speaker 5: to that guy directly at least once or twice and says,
Speaker 5: you know that did happen, but I believe you're mistaken
Speaker 5: about the date you change those seat covers. For me,
Speaker 5: about two or three days before the day of the murder.
Speaker 5: And that guy is saying, no, Laan, it was two
Speaker 5: days after I remember vividly. So Lawn again is being
Speaker 5: pretty suspicious about trying to alter a witness testimony and
Speaker 5: find out quite a bit about the murder from some
Speaker 5: of the other witnesses and from some of the other investigators.
Speaker 6: Now, the thing that we most people know about is
Speaker 6: the alibi? What is Lon Wull's alibi?
Speaker 3: Was E. K.
Speaker 6: Dotson's alibi or what is their counter? What does the
Speaker 6: defense to this murder charge?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, Lawn has lives with his wife at the time,
Speaker 5: and her name is Elizabeth, and she's essentially an invalid
Speaker 5: and is pretty much bedridden almost all the time. LN
Speaker 5: says that that evening he attended, I believe a football
Speaker 5: game that was taking place near the school by that
Speaker 5: softball game, and then he claims that he came home
Speaker 5: at about nine or nine thirty PM, tuned in a
Speaker 5: radio station for his wife at about nine thirty PM,
Speaker 5: and that he retired along with her right after he
Speaker 5: tuned in the radio station, and she verified it. And
Speaker 5: not only did she say that he was home at
Speaker 5: nine thirty and basically never left and the murder was
Speaker 5: committed at about ten fifteen, so Long said that he
Speaker 5: was in best sleep when that was going on. She
Speaker 5: also had one of her sisters and another neighbor over
Speaker 5: there right around that time, right around nine thirty, and
Speaker 5: those neighbors verified that they didn't see his car out
Speaker 5: after that after nine thirty PM, and they even one,
Speaker 5: if not both of them interacted and spoke with him
Speaker 5: in that nine to nine thirty period when he was home.
Speaker 5: So if he had been able to commit the murder,
Speaker 5: he would have probably had to sneak out of bed
Speaker 5: while she was sleeping and go back out at about
Speaker 5: ten o'clock, which is conceivable he could have done that.
Speaker 5: But one of the things that really assisted him was
Speaker 5: his wife and sister in law during the trial came
Speaker 5: forward and said that he was definitively there at home,
Speaker 5: and there's wasn't a way he could have done that.
Speaker 6: Now you offer and because there was the question, why
Speaker 6: would these prominent people lie for their murderous husband uh
Speaker 6: and in law? And why would these people lie? Because
Speaker 6: you really have these two seemingly credible witnesses set of witnesses.
Speaker 6: You have witnesses on one side, witness on the other side,
Speaker 6: with both reasonable credible stories. You would think, based on
Speaker 6: the all of the evidence, what did you offer or
Speaker 6: what did you find? What was the what was the
Speaker 6: assumption that may have happened? Why would these people lie
Speaker 6: if they did indeed lie.
Speaker 5: Yeah, one of the biggest assumptions and one of the
Speaker 5: things that we started to figure out from the get
Speaker 5: go was Lawn's wife, and Elizabeth was even though she
Speaker 5: was an invalid and didn't get out much, she was
Speaker 5: also prominent in the community too, and a lot of
Speaker 5: people believe that she probably would have considered lying in
Speaker 5: order to save her reputation and her husband's reputation, but
Speaker 5: also to protect her income, because if he had gone
Speaker 5: to the jail for the crime, then that might have
Speaker 5: affected his pension and her ability to live the life
Speaker 5: that she was accustomed to as well. So that was
Speaker 5: pretty much the main motivation. We thought, if he had
Speaker 5: indeed done this, or if she wasn't sure about what
Speaker 5: she was testifying about, that that's probably what happened.
Speaker 6: Now, it lends less credibility when you add a couple
Speaker 6: more people that with less of a vested interest in
Speaker 6: this Elizabeth vested interest. So are are you still confident
Speaker 6: that the other two co conspirators have that kind of
Speaker 6: interest so that solid of family and can't be shaken
Speaker 6: from the truth. You think that's reasonable.
Speaker 5: I definitely think it is reasonable, considering that one of
Speaker 5: the other witnesses was her sister and his sister in law,
Speaker 5: so if he did have had a hand in this,
Speaker 5: it wouldn't be that surprising to have family members, even
Speaker 5: in today's day and age, stepped forward in order to
Speaker 5: attempt to try and save somebody by offering some false,
Speaker 5: false testimony if they were related to that person and
Speaker 5: could help preserve their reputation. So the fact that his
Speaker 5: sister in law and who was her sister, came forward
Speaker 5: with that information in many ways raised some suspicion because
Speaker 5: a lot of people felt that those were false testimonies
Speaker 5: brought about by people that just wanted to keep law
Speaker 5: safe and had his reputation intact.
Speaker 6: Now was the fact that you mentioned earlier that he
Speaker 6: was considered a prominent person based on his stature in society,
Speaker 6: very much like a city councilman would be afforded that
Speaker 6: kind of privilege. Now with the family, with his wife
Speaker 6: having some prominence in the community as well, and her
Speaker 6: reputation bolstered by her sister and the in law sister
Speaker 6: in law, do you think that the police didn't tread
Speaker 6: or treaded quite softly towards that investigation or that possibility
Speaker 6: that they might be lying. They weren't. They weren't really
Speaker 6: dealing with these people very harshly, given the prominence that
Speaker 6: they had in the community.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right. And she was a member of something
Speaker 5: called the Daughters of the American Revolution, which are still
Speaker 5: around today, but at the time that was a group
Speaker 5: comprised possibly as it is today, of society women that
Speaker 5: are women of means, that come from good families, and
Speaker 5: she was very, very active in that group. And to her,
Speaker 5: we had many people tell us that she was the
Speaker 5: type of person that reputation meant everything her place in
Speaker 5: society and the way she and her husband looked in
Speaker 5: other people's eyes. She was definitely a woman that really
Speaker 5: cared about public perception of her and her family, and
Speaker 5: so that even kind of leads more people to believe okay,
Speaker 5: that gives her another very reasonable reason to go ahead
Speaker 5: and say something like that in order to protect him.
Speaker 5: But the police at the time, they really didn't delve
Speaker 5: in much to her story. They weren't able to really
Speaker 5: attack it or investigate it that well, because also it
Speaker 5: was a good story with regard to there wasn't a
Speaker 5: whole lot of holes in it, and there weren't a
Speaker 5: lot of other witnesses that could counter react at she
Speaker 5: with her being an invalid, and with her there at
Speaker 5: the house and not getting around much. A lot of
Speaker 5: people knew that she was at the house. That was
Speaker 5: a given on the night of the murder, and it
Speaker 5: was basically her word against other people's words. And with
Speaker 5: regard to that, they would give a whole lot of
Speaker 5: credence to that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, as opposed as the two ne'er dwell bootleggers.
Speaker 5: That's exactly right. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Now the thing is is that what's the jury's verdict
Speaker 6: with this? If we if the audience doesn't figure this out,
Speaker 6: but tell us quickly, what's the verdict? And then what
Speaker 6: do police decide to do after this?
Speaker 5: Yeah, the case is so hot that it has to
Speaker 5: be moved out of Prestonsburg, and it's moved over. Prestonsburg
Speaker 5: is in a county called Floyd, and they move it
Speaker 5: over to a neighboring county called Pike County, and they're
Speaker 5: in Pikeville, the county seat of Pike County. They have
Speaker 5: the trial in May of nineteen fifty. The trial lasts
Speaker 5: about a week and the authorities decide to try the
Speaker 5: two men separately, and because they believe they have a
Speaker 5: lot more evidence against lawn Moles, they try him first,
Speaker 5: and after about a week the case goes to the
Speaker 5: jury and less I believe the figure in the book
Speaker 5: says fifty three minutes. Within fifty three minutes, a verdict
Speaker 5: is return So everybody is holding their breath, wondering what's
Speaker 5: going to happen, And sure enough, the verdict is innocent.
Speaker 5: The family is heartbroken. A lot of people in Prestonsburg
Speaker 5: and Floyd County, just the county over where the crime committed,
Speaker 5: they were heartbroken and upset. They really felt that they
Speaker 5: needed the closure of a conviction, and it appeared lawn
Speaker 5: Moles really did have something to do with this crime.
Speaker 5: So they were flabberdasted. But just almost immediately after the
Speaker 5: verdict is returned, come a couple interesting things that occur.
Speaker 5: The authorities and what not decide not to pursue a
Speaker 5: trial against k Dotson because they feel that they had
Speaker 5: their best case against lawn Moles and with him being
Speaker 5: found innocent, there's no way they're going to get a
Speaker 5: guilty verdict with ek Dotson. So both men are released.
Speaker 5: And oddly enough, at this time, and you would never
Speaker 5: see this in today's day and age with DNA technology,
Speaker 5: of all of the evidence that was brought into the court,
Speaker 5: there was some clothing that belonged to lawn Moles and
Speaker 5: possibly ek Dotson, but definitely lawn Moles. They returned the
Speaker 5: clothing to him, and then the clothing and physical evidence
Speaker 5: that belonged to the murder victim, Merle Baldridge, they returned
Speaker 5: that to her family, and within about a day or two,
Speaker 5: both parties decide to burn all of the things they
Speaker 5: that were given back to them by the authorities. Now
Speaker 5: that's rather suspicious considering if lawn Moles was innocent, why
Speaker 5: would he and ek Dotson get together one night and
Speaker 5: burn the clothes that had been given back to them
Speaker 5: at the end of the trial. But also the most
Speaker 5: heartbreaking thing here is that because the Baldridge family was
Speaker 5: just so heartbroken by the verdict and by the fact
Speaker 5: that they just were not getting closure with their daughter's murder,
Speaker 5: the fact that they destroyed all of the evidence and
Speaker 5: the torn dress that I believe also had bloodstains on
Speaker 5: it that belonged to Merle, and this meant there would
Speaker 5: now be no way to ever have any kind of
Speaker 5: physical evidence examined that was very important to the case,
Speaker 5: regarding victim's clothing and things that years later would be
Speaker 5: important as the advent of DNA technology became present, so
Speaker 5: that pretty much ended most anyone's hope of ever really
Speaker 5: truly solving the case unless people would have to rely
Speaker 5: on witness testimony or other means.
Speaker 6: Yes, it's an incredible story. I thought, it's amazing, and
Speaker 6: it's still our time is almost up, and then there's
Speaker 6: still some more twists and turns for an audience that's
Speaker 6: prepared for this book. That's very very interesting book, Michael,
Speaker 6: and you've done a great job, and I want to
Speaker 6: thank you very much for coming on the program and
Speaker 6: talking about this. Now, so the case based just remains unsolved.
Speaker 6: We will leave a little bit more for the audience
Speaker 6: it's willing to go and purchase the book and delve
Speaker 6: more into this case. But it just does remain unsolved
Speaker 6: to this day, doesn't it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it does. It's sixty three years later now and
Speaker 5: the case it's still unsolved. And what I've found is
Speaker 5: a lot of people the book has sold incredibly well.
Speaker 5: It's sold over one thousand copies over the last few months,
Speaker 5: and a lot of people that purchase the book, i'd
Speaker 5: say fall into two camps. Either they're from eastern Kentucky
Speaker 5: or Kentucky and they've heard of the case and they're
Speaker 5: fascinated by it. Or it's other people just across the
Speaker 5: nation that feel that by reading the book they can
Speaker 5: learn a little bit more about the forties and the
Speaker 5: fifties and those type of crime investigation techniques, what to do,
Speaker 5: but more importantly, not what to do in a murder investigation.
Speaker 5: It's a fascinating story. And I've had a handful of
Speaker 5: people tell me when they've purchased the book that they're
Speaker 5: purchasing it because they want to read all of the
Speaker 5: details and all of the facts, no matter how minuscule,
Speaker 5: because they themselves want to take a crack at formulating
Speaker 5: a theory on who actually might have done this. And
Speaker 5: as much as we've talked about it tonight, there are
Speaker 5: so many, as you pointed out, small interesting side stories
Speaker 5: and other suspects, other confessions, other strange things that have
Speaker 5: happened in this case throughout the last sixty three years
Speaker 5: that readers that do purchase the book will have a
Speaker 5: chance to formulate their own opinion and who knows, maybe
Speaker 5: even solve this case.
Speaker 6: Yes, it's very very interesting. Just when you think you
Speaker 6: have the suspect that really looks like that the appropriate
Speaker 6: person for this. Then the case turns sideways and we
Speaker 6: have another direction, and just when we think we've got
Speaker 6: Lawn Moule's and then, like I say, that's why I
Speaker 6: asked you about the relatives and the life. It just
Speaker 6: seems that you know, you could see that getting that
Speaker 6: same kind of verdict today as you did in nineteen
Speaker 6: forty nine. It's it's sort of interesting to think that
Speaker 6: the juries were that sophisticated. I don't know what I
Speaker 6: thought of before this book, but that they were just
Speaker 6: as sophisticated and come to the same kind of conclusion
Speaker 6: that most people would come to today.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's correct. Even today, if the trial had played
Speaker 5: out of Lawnmowls exactly how it played out sixty three
Speaker 5: years ago, chances are it still would have been an
Speaker 5: innocent verdict. And a lot of the reason by that
Speaker 5: is when you try people and you're you know, you're
Speaker 5: very familiar with this, with the type of stories that
Speaker 5: you cover and that you're an expert in, and in
Speaker 5: many ways, when you rely so much, you know ninety
Speaker 5: five percent or more of your case is testimony, you're
Speaker 5: already going to have a little bit of trouble and
Speaker 5: then and some of the people that testify are bootleggers
Speaker 5: and people like that. Even though those are fine, wonderful
Speaker 5: people that are surviving and doing exactly what they feel
Speaker 5: they need to do, they're just at that time looked
Speaker 5: a little bit down upon and juries just didn't really
Speaker 5: want to believe them. So when you get into those
Speaker 5: he said, she said situations, that's why even today, if
Speaker 5: anything had changed, they might not have even brought Moles
Speaker 5: to trial because the local attorneys may have felt that
Speaker 5: they didn't have enough to spend tax payer money and
Speaker 5: do a trial. But at the time then they're in
Speaker 5: eastern Kentucky, it had been a year since her murder,
Speaker 5: and they had to do something, and they really did
Speaker 5: genuinely feel they had their man in Boles. And so yeah,
Speaker 5: that's a couple of interesting correlations between the cases of
Speaker 5: today and the cases of yesteryear.
Speaker 6: And really, like you said, one of the sad stories
Speaker 6: behind this is everyone and suspicious too that everyone burnt
Speaker 6: the evidence and so there is no chance of going
Speaker 6: back because we know, as the audience knows, you can
Speaker 6: go back, take a little scrap of clothing or hair
Speaker 6: or something and get DNA and start solving things sixty
Speaker 6: three or more years ago. So another sad aspect of
Speaker 6: this story, but a very fascinating story. Michael, and I
Speaker 6: want to thank you very much. The audience has been
Speaker 6: listening to Murder in the Mountains with Michael Crisp. If
Speaker 6: you have a website, Michael or Facebook page that people
Speaker 6: might be able to contact you and maybe listen to
Speaker 6: the program or at least find out about it, or
Speaker 6: find out more about the book and any upcoming projects
Speaker 6: for yourself.
Speaker 5: Yeah, definitely. If you go to www dot Kentuckycoldcases dot com,
Speaker 5: you'll find out information about the book, a brief description
Speaker 5: of the story, and you can also purchase the book there.
Speaker 5: At that side. You can also purchase it on Amazon
Speaker 5: dot Com just by searching for the title, which again
Speaker 5: is Murder in the Mountains the Merle Baldridge story with
Speaker 5: Merle being spelled like Muriel m U R I E L.
Speaker 5: And so, yeah, we definitely appreciate the support of your
Speaker 5: listeners with regard to the story. We're getting ready to
Speaker 5: do a second edition with some updates in the story,
Speaker 5: so there'll be more information about that on the website
Speaker 5: in the weeks to come.
Speaker 6: Great, great, well, thank you very much, Michael, and the
Speaker 6: best of luck with this and talk to you again
Speaker 6: in the near future. Thank you.
Speaker 5: Okay, great, thanks by Dan.
Speaker 6: Good night, Okay, good back.