Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: Welcome to mind Over Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm
Bill Thomas.
Speaker 5: We're joined today by Maureen Boyle, author of Shallow Graves,
The Hunt for the New Bedford Highway serial Killer.
Speaker 3: Maureen, thank you for joining us today, and thank you
very much for having me on the show. I greatly
appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Start by telling us a little bit about how you
got your start in journalism.
Speaker 3: I started in journalism actually in high school, working a
school paper, and I went to college for journalism. Throughout
my college career, I interned at the local newspaper, Deally
Newspaper in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where I'm originally from, and then
after graduation, I started working at different newspapers throughout New England.
I like to say, though I started my career in journalism,
actually started in the second grade when a nun was
teaching us how to do quotation marks, and I have
this distinct memory of looking up at her and thinking
in my head, I really need to know this. And
after that.
Speaker 6: Career was born, I noticed in the notes to your
book you're very clear on something, which is if something
is quoted directly, those, as you point out, are from
conversations you participated in directly, or court docs or other
things where you know, for certain so and so said
exactly these words.
Speaker 2: And then in other situations where you're talking about things
where you weren't in the room, which obviously is some
at the time, then it's no quotes. And you're very
clear about when you have precise quotations and when you
have other things that are probably paraphrased.
Speaker 3: Yes, And I think that's something that you really have
to be very accurate about for the reader, because you're
not there for all of it. I was very lucky
with the New Bedford Highway serial killing case because I
was a reporter for the New Bedford Standard Times in
Massachusetts at that time, and I was covering the case,
so I could draw on what was going on, what
I remembered, what I saw, and my own stories that
I wrote back then, so I preserved those quotes, so
that is what was said, So that served is some
of the notes for the book, as well as some
of the additional interviews that I did with people.
Speaker 5: Were you the only reporter who was covering that case
or was it something that just about everybody on staff
was covering at some point or another.
Speaker 3: Later on, obviously I could not cover every single angle
of it because the story really got too big. We
had the New York Times there, There was I believe
someone from the Washington Post may have been there, all
of the Boston stations, all of the Boston newspapers, the
Providence stations, the Providence newspaper, the Fall River Paper. So
it was a what someone might call a real cluster
at that point with all of the media there. As
the story progressed in the very beginning, though primarily it
was me and this son's very odd, but it also
tells you something about the staffing of local newspapers. At
one point early on, it was me and a photographer
from the Providence Journal, because the photographer for the Journal
lived in the New Bedford area, so when anything happened,
he's able to get there quickly, while the reporters were
in Rhode Island and at the Standard Times at that point,
our photographers were tied up on other assignments, and we
did have a running joke that between the two of
us we worked for two different papers, but were between
the two of us we had the story covered in
print and photo. But then as the months progressed, more
and more reporters came on the scene.
Speaker 2: My family is from Lowell, Massachusetts, and I remember when
this story was happening, which is nineteen eighty eight, how
much press there was, and there was a tremendous amount
of coverage. I was probably reading some of your stuff.
Would you get picked up then and carried in other
papers as well?
Speaker 3: It would have been the Associated Press would have picked
up the stories and carried them.
Speaker 2: Now, were you as always a crime reporter?
Speaker 3: When I started in New Bedford. I was working in
a town, then very quickly became their police reporter. Then
for a brief period of time, I was general assignment.
Actually when this case broke, I was general assignment covering
of all things politics, which I have to say is
pretty boring. It really is. But because I was still
a general assignment, I just moved right into this case.
Speaker 5: There are probably going to be some of our listeners
who have not heard of the New Bedford Highway serial killer.
Until Bill put your book on my radar, I had
not heard of it. Can you take a couple of minutes,
while we're still at the top of the conversation and
just give us a quick rundown for anybody who's not familiar.
What is the New Bedford Highway serial killing case all about?
Speaker 3: Well, it started in March April of nineteen eighty eight.
That was when some the women began and disappearing. Between
March and April and September of nineteen eighty eight, eleven
women went missing from New Bedford. Nine of them were
eventually found dead near or along local highways, the highways
that circled New Bedford. None of the women were found
inside New Bedford proper. Two of the eleven women are
still missing. People have a tendency even around here, thinking
that the killer was active for a much longer period
of time because the bodies weren't found until all of
the bodies weren't found until spring of eighty nine. Then
there was a lengthy investigation and a grand jury investigation
as the district attorney was trying to get some potential
witness testimony on the record before a grand jury. This
was a very tight killing spray. So you've got just
from roughly March April until September of eighty eight, and
two of the women are still missing. They are presumed dead.
So you had eleven missing, nine found. All of the women.
The link between all of the women, in addition to
most of them had somewhere height and weight where they
were all addicted to drugs. That was the link between
all of them. Some of them did have criminal records
for prostitution, but not all of them.
Speaker 2: Although the thread of sex work is one of the
through lines. In other words, not that all eleven women
were involved in sex work, but a fair number of
the victims were.
Speaker 3: Yes. But we have to keep in mind, especially in
New Bedford. Those that are working, the women that were
working in the street, they were there because of their addiction.
That is the only reason why there was nothing romantic
about it. There is this image when people used term
sex work. People have this image of women coming in
and out of hotels, wearing high heels and dressed nicely
and this sort of thing. The women that were on
the street in nineteen eighty Bedford were there only because
of their addiction. Once they got into recovery, they were
not there at all. Every penny that they made went
right to buying drugs.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there was one of the women that I was
reading about as I was going through and tracking all
of the different victims, and it said that she was
only doing this to feed her habit, that she was married,
that her husband didn't even realize that she was doing this,
and the only reason that she was doing it at
all was because the amount of money she could charge
for such sex work was related to the amount of
money it costs to get the drug that she wanted,
and that, for some reason or another, it did not
occur to me. I have the same stereotype I think
in my head that a lot of people do. That's
put there by Hollywood, Like you just said, high heels, hotels.
It didn't occur to me that might be a reason
someone might turn to sex work. So I really enjoyed
that you were able to put that out there, and
that you were able to like be very compassionate towards
these women, because it's really obvious that they didn't want
to be having to feed this habit that way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the women that did eventually wind up on
the street, the reason they head prior to that. Not
necessarily all of these women, but a lot of the
women who were who warmed up on the street, their
previous criminal records were things like bad checks, shoplifting, things
like that, and you could see a progression in their crimes,
most more like crimes against themselves, not against other people,
as their habits got worse.
Speaker 2: And then let's talk about New Bedford for a second.
For our listeners who are around the country and even
around the world who have never been to New Bedford, Massachusetts,
tell us a little bit about what New Bedford is
like or was in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 3: New Bedford is a lovely, lovely city. I cannot say
enough good things about it. It's a waterfront community, the
country's largest fishing pool, very close knit families, a close
knit community, a lot of first second, third generation immigrants, multicultural,
just a nice place. When I lived there, I absolutely
loved living there. Great restaurants, great people, good people. Yes,
it has crime, but all cities have crime. Compared to
other cities, I would say the crime is fairly low.
When you live in a city generally, and you're former city,
people have a tendency to be hypercritical of their own hometown.
But I have seen other cities that are very harsh
and New Bedford does not have that harshness to it.
In nineteen eighty eight, it was a bit isolated because
it's so far from Boston. One politician in I believe
it was nineteen eighty four had called New Bedford the
end of the universe, Southeastern Massachusetts the end of the universe,
a view from the politicians in Boston because it was
so far away. It was it's only like an hour
and a half because most of that is because of traffic,
maybe two hours. So the city was always a bit isolated,
and during that period of time, New Bedford was a
bit isolated. It was more aligned with Providence and the
Cape a very large number of people were employed in
the fishing industry. In the trades, there had at one
point been a very thriving textile industry, but that of
course faded very quickly in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 5: Is there any particular reason why the drug trade seemed
to be thriving so much in New Bedford? It sounds
the drugs and the addiction were really the biggest part
of the problem here.
Speaker 3: Why might that be.
Speaker 5: Did it have anything to do with drug running coming
in from fishing boats? What was contributing to this drug
epidemic in New Bedford?
Speaker 3: And that's what I had always wondered about, and had
asked some of the narcotics, older narcotics guys, and they
said that they noticed the heroin trade picking up in
the nineteen sixties nineteen seventies when they were seeing some
programs that had started in the city where people from
New York were coming into the city. For whatever reason,
someone decided that was the place to be. Because I
could never quite and we're talking about heroin, I could
not understand why you didn't have the same serious heroin
problem in Fall River, that is a city that's mostly
known for an axe murderer as Lizzie Morton, and it
seemed that the heroin when it was coming in by car,
they were driving right through Fall River and coming into
New Bedford, and that just seemed a bit odd, but
that's how it was. Someone had I did that was
the place for the heroin trade and then to move
out from there. Marijuana during the nineteen eighties was coming
in by boat through some of the fishing boats. Large
bales of the marijuana were coming in, But the main
problem drug during that period of time was heroin.
Speaker 5: What ultimately made you decide it's time to write a
book about this case, because as we all know, writing
a book is a massive undertaking. You're probably better equipped
for it than most people because you had done all
of this writing and reporting on the case. But what
finally tipped you over to I think it's time to
do the book of record on the case.
Speaker 3: If you will. You're never fully equipped to do a
book forever. I think it's going to be hard, and
then it is even harder than you ever thought. And
I'm glad I didn't know how hard it was going
to be. I had always wanted in a planned to
write a book on the case. But I kept on
waiting for it to be solved, right because everyone wants
everything story to be tied up in a neat package.
That's what readers want. I kept on waiting for it
and waiting for it and waiting for it because I
was convinced, of course, this case is going to be solved.
No one can get away with these many murders, especially
not in a place like New Bedford, where people cannot
keep secrets. They really can't. And because everyone's married to
someone's cousin, or they've gone to high school with someone,
or they're talking in bars, people would find out who
the killer was, and it never happened. So it was
year after year after year after year, and I was
having some conversations with people. I discovered that number of people,
even in the city, were misremembering what happened. Some people
thought the killer was found, some people thought that he
was convicted. They were forgetting who was the victims. And
that's one of the reasons why I decided to write
the book. Also, because it hasn't been solved. I wanted
to put a spotlight on the case so that more
people could come forward and say, this is who the
killer is. Because I am firmly convinced that there is
someone out there who knows who the killer is. That said,
what's awsome, very frightening is the number of people that
I've spoken to since the book came out who have said, Oh,
I know who the killer is, and it's their brother,
or their father, or their boyfriend or their ex boyfriend,
or their neighbor. And it really is an eye opener
that there is a potential of so much evil out
there that someone would think this person could be the
killer of eleven women. It was a challenge writing the
ending to the book because there was no ending, and
then I just took a step back and realized, sometimes
life isn't me, and life does go on even in
the wake of just such horror, so that you have
to how does a community heal? How does a family
go on? That's part of the story.
Speaker 2: How did people react now the book came out several
years ago in twenty seventeen. How did people react When
the book came out and people had a chance to
go back and revisit the whole case. But as a
result of Shallow Graves coming out.
Speaker 3: They reacted very well. Both the police, the attorney's office, families. Overall,
a very good reaction. Anyone who was tied to the
case had a very good reaction to it.
Speaker 5: You did a really wonderful job highlighting the dog in
pursuit of this killer from the law enforcement side. Every
single law enforcement agent that came up in the book.
I was like, boy, I would love to meet these
people and have a beer with them.
Speaker 3: They sound terrific. How much access did you have to them?
Speaker 5: Were they all like, absolutely, yes, I will share everything
with you, or was there any resistance on their part
to having the book written.
Speaker 3: And any resistance to having the book written? I will
say that Josie Gonzalz, who was one of the state
police investigators, he was very careful about what information that
he gave me when I interviewed him. He was already retired,
but he is still a state trooper right to the hinge,
and he would have his reports or copies of his
reports in front of him, and he'd be going through
with answering my questions. I said, can I look at
the reports? No?
Speaker 2: No, But.
Speaker 5: He was.
Speaker 3: But some other people were very good at also sharing
some of their old reports.
Speaker 2: Were there ever people that you wanted to talk to
that refused to speak to.
Speaker 3: You one of the suspects family members, and I think
that was it. Most of the people that I wanted
to talk to were very cooperative. Even the priest, who
was one of the last people to live seen one
of the suspects in the case. I did talk with
him and he was very hopeful.
Speaker 5: When you're talking to family members of the victims, it's
very painful and very difficult for them to relive what
is got to be one of the worst emotional shocks
of their life. Did it ultimately feel like a good
experience for you and for them to be able to
talk and work through here's this terrible thing that happened,
and here's how we have lived with.
Speaker 3: It since then.
Speaker 5: This is going to be so painful for them, especially
because it is still unsolved. Do you feel like working
with the victims' families was good for you and did
it bring you some sort of emotional closure with the
whole entire thing.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't say closure, what it was more of a
shared purpose. They knew what we were, what the book
was about. They knew that how I was portraying their
loved ones and the information that I was looking for
to present a whole person, not a caricature that was
trade in some of the media back in eighty eighty
nine and ninety even into ninety one. I was looking
for something deeper. These are families, and these are how
families had to deal with adyption, how they had to
overcome their frustration when they were trying to get their
loved one's help, and the grief that they felt when
it all came down to a killer taking away the
hope that they had for a better wife, for their mother, sister, daughter.
Speaker 2: Where we stand now in twenty twenty five, Maureene, do
you believe that the murder and the disappearance of eleven
women altogether? Do you think those cases are all related
and there's one single killer.
Speaker 3: If it isn't one, it would be two people working
in concert.
Speaker 2: In your mind, not much chance that these are overlapping
cases or anything like that. You're thinking, this is one
or two people who killed this cluster of eleven women
over a fairly short period of time. Time.
Speaker 3: Yes, some people have asked me in the past, could
be a copycat, and the answer to that would be no,
because there was no publicity when the women first went missing.
The first two victims that were found there were found
in July of nineteen eighty eight. It involved a woman
who went missing in the spring and a woman who
had gone missing in July. When those two bodies were
found in two different towns along the highways, it didn't
get a lot of press at the time. During that
period of time, other women were going missing or they
reported missing, but no alarms really went off until much
later in the fall of that year. There was only
two bodies that were found early on, so there wasn't
a copycat per se at that point.
Speaker 2: One of the things that you mentioned in the book
was that of the nine victims that were found, they
were all outside the city limits of New Bedford. Is
that really significant? Is someone really trying to drop these
bodies off in a place where the New Bedford Police
Department would not be the investigating agency, or is that
just a coincidence in your opinion.
Speaker 3: That's a very good question, and that is something that
a number of the investigators looked at. That is one
of the theories is it's someone who did not, for
whatever reason, did not want New Bedford to investigate the case.
They just wanted it away from the city. Another theory
is that the person wasn't familiar enough with New Bedford
and felt much more comfortable in the outlying areas. Would
be someone who might live in one of the smaller towns.
Even though New Bedford is a city, it's a small
and it's a small city. But if you're from a
much smaller town that may be overwhelmed by even a
city such as New Bedford. So that was one of
the theories of one of the issues that they looked at.
And then it goes to the question was it a cop?
And that is also one of the theories. Was this
say someone involved in law enforcement is responsible for the murders?
Was it a cop or is it someone else involved
in a law enforcement someone who is wearing a uniform,
someone who has a badge. And when you look at
the number of people who have badges who are not
technically cops, there's a lot of them. We've got people
from a sheriff's department as one of the main suspects
in the case early on, as an attorney who was
also a deputy sheriff in the Bristol County Sheriff's Department.
Speaker 2: You're listening to mindover Murder, We'll be right back after
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Speaker 5: There was a very interesting little I don't think it's
big enough to be a rabbit hole. We're just going
to call it a little side street, but you went
down at one point and it is a discussion of
snuff films. I do know that we're gonna have listeners
who aren't familiar with the term snuff film. Can you
explain what a snuff film is and how that rumor
of it came up and got involved in the case,
because I can't think of another case outside of like
CSI or something like that, where the term snuff film
even gets brought up.
Speaker 3: Can you tell us a little bit about that. A
snuff film is a film where someone is it's almost
like a porno film of sorts, but the person is murdered.
It is literally there's snuffed out. There were rumors throughout
the city around that time that someone is making porno films,
hardcore pornal films. That was one aspect of the investigation,
and then there was rumors that there were snuff films,
and so they're scrambling all all around. One of the
stay Troopers Josie Ganzelves, who is the have to say,
he is just a very devout Catholic. So they went
to an old video store this is when video was big,
and they went through all they took out a hawk
of their hardcore porn films to see if there was
any homemade snuff films, and poor Josie had to watch
all of them. Oh my, and he's watching them, not
of what's going on, to see if he recognizes any
of the faces that are in And nothing came out
of that. However, that rumor persisted, and there was one
woman who made some allegations that there was this videotape
was stolen from one of the suspects homes and they
planted it in a planter, a flower pot. Everyone was
running around in circles trying to find this mysterious videotape
and until a until another member of the state police
was listening to the woman to and realized that they
were not talking about snuff films. What they're really talking
about was smut films. Oh, so you're talking about and
this is where accents come into play. It's and that's
a rabbit hole. So this woman is talking about snuff films.
And then as they're circling back to who's talking to
who and talking to who, and it is smut rather
than snuff. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I got to this scene where he is sitting
there having to watch stacks of porno films after he's
had dinner with his kids and put his kids to bed.
Speaker 3: He's just sitting there like that.
Speaker 5: Oh gosh, the things that the agents assigned this case
we're going through. You really just did a wonderful job
painting like this is what it is like for an investigator.
It is not glamorous. It is not a job that
you get to do nine to five. You don't get
to do it all glamorously dressed up. As Bill always
jokes when we're talking about CSI, there's not one scene
where they're just getting a bag of snack food from
seven to eleven to hit the road and keep circulating
and talking to people. You really get the sense of
this is a very difficult job.
Speaker 3: And I used to run into both Josie and Mariandel
Josie Gonslfs of Mariandel with the two primary state police
investigators on the case, and at that time, the Standard
Times was an afternoon paper, so I would be in
at seven and my stories and then go out and report.
And I would often see them that night because I'd
be looking for some people on the street, particularly some
of the girls who are on the street. Just see
what they're hearing, what they're what they've seen. I'd always
swing by the DA's office, and the seven eleven was
downstairs from the DA's office, and I would see them
out there with their junk food coming out to get
back into their on mark cruiser. They were working long,
long hours at that time. Their dinner was not good.
Speaker 2: No, I can imagine it's not the healthiest lifestyle with
the long hours and eating junk food in your unmarked car.
Speaker 3: And everyone in the street knew the two of them
because both of them were very pleasant and very nice people.
So just when they would pull up, and I know
there's one scene in the book where they pulled up
and some of the girls who were out there run
off until they realized who it was and then they
oh come back to talk with them.
Speaker 2: There has to be a delicate dance here because if
the investigators are talking to people that are involved in
many examples with sex work and the sale and distribution
of drugs. So we're talking about people that are clearly
breaking the law. The investigators aren't there to bust people
for drugs or sex work. They're trying to solve a murder.
There has to be a real delicate dance there. How
do you convince people who work on their fringes of
society to talk to you when you're not there to
bust them for other behaviors. You're really trying to solve
a series of unsolved murder.
Speaker 3: And that comes down to trust. They trusted the individuals
who were working the case. Now, both Marion and Josie,
the two state troopers, they were the primary on the case,
but there were many other people that were also working
other aspects of the case. They approached it as we're
looking for who the killer is. We're not here to
arrest you for this right now, you're not in trouble.
Because they knew that to get to the heart of
what happened, they had to go into that world and
they had to earn the trust of the people that
were in that world, and that's what they did, and
unfortunately it still wasn't enough. The law enforcement side of things,
it really looks like they did everything they could conceivably do.
So why do you think the new Bedford murder remain unsolved?
As you said earlier, this person has heild nine women
presumably two more who are still missing, eleven total.
Speaker 5: How do you go that long uncaught? Why do you
think this is still unsolved to this day.
Speaker 3: I think part of it has to do with the
time when it happened. We're talking nineteen eighty eight, and
that was a period of time when we did not
have where everyone didn't have a mini computer in their pocket,
everyone did not have a cell phone, There wasn't social media.
The surveillance cameras were really poor quality, and they were
mostly at gas stations. And the reason they were at
gas stations is because people used to rob gas stations
and convenience stores, and they were at banks. Today there
are surveillance cameras everywhere. If it happened today, the women
most likely would have had a cell phone on them,
and they would have been able to track where they were,
who they last had contact with, and see who else
might have been in that area. One of the other
problems with the case was by the time the investigation started,
the killer had already stopped is believed that the killer
stopped in September of that year.
Speaker 2: Was there any sent among the investigators you talked to
as to why the murders appeared to stop.
Speaker 3: They had several different theories. One was the killer was dead.
Another was that he was a fisherman from down south
and a sword fisherman and had come up to New
Bedford for the summer spring summer and had gone back
left the area. That was another theory. Another theory was
that he was in prison. There was another theory that
he may have left the country or he had just
stopped for whatever reason. Many people seem to think that
serial killers just continue killing at a frenzy rate all
the time, but they do have cooling off periods, and
for whatever reason, a serial killer can stop for a
period of time that may have happened here. They don't
kill every single day.
Speaker 2: Something we mentioned to you off air was that we
had received a tip last year from a woman who
believed there was a connection between a waterman from Virginia
who she thought might be involved in the Colonial Parkway murders,
who interestingly moved to New Bedford continuing his work on
the water in nineteen eighty eight and would have been
there right at the time that the murders started. Now,
this guy has an extensive history of violence, and his
ex wife in this example, he was deceased by the
time she and I spoke last year, but very interesting
given how much she knew about him and their life together,
which doesn't sound very pleasant. And then he ends up
to New Bedford. Given his proclivities. It was very eye
opening for Kristen and me to hear from this woman.
If we were to pursue that tip, we then have
to go back to the cold case detectives from Massachusetts
State Police. They're handling the case now.
Speaker 3: Yes, their number would be five oh eight nine six
one nineteen fourteen, and that would be Sergeant Hollis Crowley
was in charge. The email would be Hollis dot Crowley
crow l e Y at pol dot state dot MA
dot us. People can also call this state police directly
on a line called massoff. It would be eight five
five six two seven sixty five eighty three. That'd be
eight five five MSLF.
Speaker 2: When we were talking about the bodies being found outside
New Bedford, New Bedford PD wasn't the lead agency. It
sounds like in most of this investigation. So how is
it that it's the Massachusetts State Police and not local
law enforcement.
Speaker 3: In Massachusetts has to do with the way they do
things in Massachusetts. Each of the District attorney's offices has
a State Police unit assigned to them, and the state
Police has jurisdiction for the most part of all of
the homicides in the state. With the exception of a
few cities like Boston, the state police do not have
the primary investigation and homicides in Boston. So the state
police are the primary investigators in the homicides, and they
work with the local police departments in the case they
pair up when they're covering these now in this case
to complicate the investigation. To go back to Kristen's question
about how things are different in some of the challenges.
The bodies were found in the town of Town, which
is a town north of New Bedford that was a
small town at the time, Dartmouth, which is to the west.
Three of the bodies were found in Dartmouth. That was
for the bodies for the bodies were found in Dartmouth,
which is to the west, the town west of New Bedford.
There was a body found in Westport, which is one
town over from Dartmouth, and then there was another body
that was found in Marion, which is in a completely
different county, a couple of towns over from New Bedford.
Most of the bodies were found right along the highway,
just inside the brush line, so that you wouldn't have
seen them if you're driving by. But if, let's say
someone pulled over, is what happened in at least two
of the cases, pulled over to the side of the
road to quote unquote use the facilities. That is how
the bodies could be discovered. In a couple of cases,
it was highway Queen Up cruise found bodies. Some other cases,
especially trained dogs that were brought in from the other bodies.
One of the bodies that was found in Westport, which
is unusual, it was found on a road in a
brush on a road that goes to a state beach
on Beautiful Beach cult Horseneck Beach, and to get there
you would take a road off of one ninety five,
which was the highway that most of the bodies were
found on. My theory is that the killer had planned
to dump that body on one ninety five, but for
whatever reason, he got spooked and kept on driving and
took that exit and wound up on this other secondary
highway and dumped Mary Rose Santos's body on Wreugh eighty
eight and Westport.
Speaker 2: How were these women kill?
Speaker 3: Do we know? At least two of them they were
they believed were strangled, and they believe all of them were.
The rest of them was quote unquote and inconclusive just
because of the deterior of the remains. But they believe
that two of them were strangled based on what they found.
There was clothing wrapped around their necks.
Speaker 5: So are you still keeping an ear to the ground
on the new Bedford case? Will you be one of
the first to know if it does get solved? Do
you still have people inside the law enforcement community who
would give you a heads up if there's something that
broke I hope so.
Speaker 3: I hope so. But obviously the first people to know
would be those that house have solved it, and that
would they would be the first, and I would hope
the second would be the families. And I am convinced
that once they identify who the killer is, and I
am convinced at some point they will identify the killer.
I don't know when I didn't think it would take
over thirty years, but they will look back in their
records and they will find the name of that person.
I really think that they have cross paths with the
killer at some point during the investigation. Reason why, here's
another reason why it was also so difficult to solve.
They didn't have PCs the way we have them today.
You didn't have a searchable databases like we have now.
People were typing.
Speaker 2: Reports and even handwriting reports. We found this in the
Colonial Parkway murders as well. There's there were five thousand
documents in Kathy, my sister Kathy and her girlfriend Rebecca's
part of the Colonial Parkway murders. Five thousand documents in
two thousand and ten, and it's probably many more since then.
So they said that cross referencing was incredibly difficult.
Speaker 3: And that's the same here. They were starting to computerize
the records. Rui Pachico, who was in charge of the
Drug Task Force at that point assigned to the DA's office.
He was starting to put the records onto a computer.
But it really and now there's I'm sure at this
point they've also scanned reports and things like that to
make it searchable. Maybe hopefully something will pop up. But
that was also another reason, or less you could. They
had to rely very much on people's experiences, investigators experiences,
and their memories.
Speaker 5: I know you said that writing a book is terribly difficult,
and we've both tried it, so we know if we
agree with you.
Speaker 3: Do you have another book that you're working on or
was one enough? Since then I wrote two other books.
One was called The Ghost the Murder of Police Chief
Craig Adams and the Hunt for His Killer. That was
about a Pennsylvania police chief who was killed by a
individual from a criminal from New Bedford who is in
the town of Saxonburg and Butler County in Pennsylvania, Western Pennsylvania,
who was scouting out some jewelry stores to rob. And
then this guy just disappeared for years, even though he
was on the FBI's most wanted list. And then my
book after that was Child Last Scene, which was about
the eight disappearance of a sixteen year old girl in
Pennsyl Western Pennsylvania. They had a suspect in that case
and it wasn't until someone came forward that they were
able to solve the case years and years later. And
finally locates a child, and right now I'm writing about another.
It wasn't quite a Cold Colds case, but it's about
a fifteen year old girl who was abducted by a
convicted serial killer and killed, and is the long quest
for justice in that case.
Speaker 5: Oh, that sounds fascinating. Do you have a publication date
for that yet? Or are you still working on it?
Speaker 3: I am still working on it. Marine.
Speaker 5: Tell us where everybody can find your book.
Speaker 3: The book can be found Barnes Noble. If they don't
have it in stock, they can order it on Amazon,
and any of your local bookstores can order it for
you a million. I believe can't forget book for a million.
Speaker 5: The book is Shallow Graves The Hunt for the near
Bedford Highway serial Killer. Marine, thank you for joining us.
We really appreciate you shedding some light on the case.
And thank you both for having me on the show.
I really appreciate it, and thank you so much for
sharing the story of all these women who were killed
and the two that are still missing. That is going
to do it for this episode of Mind Over Murder.
We will put a link to Marine's book into those
phone numbers. Four tips in our show notes. Thank you
so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Speaker 2: Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with Coral Space Media.
Speaker 2: Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Speaker 1: You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
Murders on Facebook.
Speaker 2: And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
Bill Thomas five six.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.
Speaker 5: Yeah,