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Speaker 4: If it's eighty plus, you are now listening to True Murder.
Speaker 4: The most shocking killers in true crime history and the
Speaker 4: authors that have written about them. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The
Speaker 4: Nightstalker BTK every week another fascinating author talking about the
Speaker 4: most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True
Speaker 4: Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski, The.
Speaker 6: Pulse pounding account of the first time in history that
Speaker 6: the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit created a psychological profile to
Speaker 6: catch a serial killer. On June twenty fifth, nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 6: a seven year old girl went missing from the Montana
Speaker 6: campground where her family was vacation. Somebody had slit open
Speaker 6: the back of their tent and snatched her from under
Speaker 6: their noses. None of them saw or heard anything. Susie
Speaker 6: Yeger had finished into thin air, plucked by a shadow.
Speaker 6: The largest manhunt in Montana's history ensued, led by the FBI.
Speaker 6: As days stretched into weeks and weeks into months. Special
Speaker 6: Agent Pete Dunbar attended a workshop at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia,
Speaker 6: led by two agents who had hatched a radical new idea,
Speaker 6: what if criminals left the psychological trail that would lead
Speaker 6: us to them. Patrick mulaney, a trained psychologist, and Howard Tetton,
Speaker 6: a veteran criminologist, had created the Behavioral Science unit to
Speaker 6: explore this new voodoo they called Criminal Profiling. At Dunbar's request,
Speaker 6: Milani and tent and built the FBI's first profile of
Speaker 6: an unknown subject who had snatched Susie Jaeger and a
Speaker 6: few months later, a nineteen year old waitress. When a
Speaker 6: suspect was finally arrested, the profile fit him to a t.
Speaker 6: The book that we're featuring this evening is shadow Man,
Speaker 6: an Elusive Psycho Killer and the Birth of FBI Profiling,
Speaker 6: with my special guest journalist and author Ron Francell. Welcome
Speaker 6: back to the program, and thank you so much for
Speaker 6: this interview. Ron Francell.
Speaker 3: You bet Dan, I'm glad to be back. Over the years,
Speaker 3: I've been with you on a few books and it's
Speaker 3: always been a marvelous interview and it's I think it's
Speaker 3: you know, always found something that I hadn't thought about,
Speaker 3: So hats off to you.
Speaker 6: Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Ron.
Speaker 6: You've been on the program right from the very beginning,
Speaker 6: right from all of your books we've covered. I think
Speaker 6: I believe. So congratulations on this book.
Speaker 3: You thank you. I'm excited about it. I think it's
Speaker 3: a great story.
Speaker 6: Absolutely. Why don't we just start talking about this story
Speaker 6: and introduce Manhattan, Montana. You say, population nine hundred and
Speaker 6: two thousand miles and many many light years away from
Speaker 6: the other Manhattan.
Speaker 3: Certainly is yeah.
Speaker 6: Talk about in you talk about in nineteen sixty four
Speaker 6: and nineteen sixty five, just to start to beginning story
Speaker 6: that someone had been mailing stray cats and puppies alive,
Speaker 6: the power poles and trees.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, here was this little dinky town in
Speaker 3: the middle of rural Montana, and nothing ever happened there.
Speaker 3: I mean that was the view of the people who
Speaker 3: lived in Manhattan, that this was a small town where
Speaker 3: the people were good, everybody knew everybody else, and nothing
Speaker 3: of importance ever happened. As we later figure out it
Speaker 3: might it might have indicated that there was something more,
Speaker 3: something scarier. Afoot.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about nineteen sixty seven March and a Bernie Pullman,
Speaker 6: a young man is on top of a bridge doing
Speaker 6: cannonballs into the Gallatin river below.
Speaker 3: Tell us about this. It was a typical steel bridge
Speaker 3: that you'd see and a lot of places still do actually.
Speaker 3: And then kids did what kids will do. And at
Speaker 3: the time, Bernie Pullman and his friend had gone out
Speaker 3: to the bridge and they'd climb up the girders and
Speaker 3: jump into the river and over and over and overgive
Speaker 3: it's just a typical little boy thing. While they're doing it,
Speaker 3: Bernie is up on top of the bridge and his
Speaker 3: friend notices a little Bernie cries out. He says, I've
Speaker 3: been shot, and he falls off the top of the
Speaker 3: bridge into the water and drifts away. The friend runs
Speaker 3: to the nearest farmhouse, which is I think more than
Speaker 3: a mile away, and by the time the sheriff's deputies arrived,
Speaker 3: nobody can find Bernie's body. It's been swept down the river.
Speaker 3: I think of several weeks that searchers went and looked
Speaker 3: for him. They couldn't. Even kids from the high school
Speaker 3: turned out in occasionally during that time and helped search.
Speaker 3: But it was about three weeks before they actually found
Speaker 3: him far down the river, and indeed he had been shot.
Speaker 6: What did the police They couldn't find who might have
Speaker 6: done this, but based on their assumptions, what did they
Speaker 6: deduce had happened that day?
Speaker 3: Well, remember, nothing ever happens in Manhattan, right, nobody been
Speaker 3: decades since the last murder had happened there, so it
Speaker 3: couldn't be a murder. The presumption by the deputies who
Speaker 3: investigated was that Bernie had just been hit by a
Speaker 3: stray shot, that somebody out there had been shooting at
Speaker 3: a rabbit or target practicing in one of those straight
Speaker 3: It's just happened to hit Bernie Pullman as he sat
Speaker 3: on that bridge. And ultimately the case was closed with
Speaker 3: that explanation that it had just been a stray shot,
Speaker 3: because nothing ever happens in Manhattan, you know, certainly not murders.
Speaker 6: Now you go to early nineteen sixty eight May and Bozeman,
Speaker 6: which is a nearby town. Sixth grader Michael Rainey on
Speaker 6: two hundred boy scouts are at a caparee in Missouri
Speaker 6: Headwaters State Park. They're thirty feet away from their adult supervisors.
Speaker 6: What happens to these two boys.
Speaker 3: Well, and not only that, but this park, it's actually
Speaker 3: farther out than Manhattan is in a rural area on
Speaker 3: the grass in this park, which is only a couple
Speaker 3: of akers. There were three more than three hundred young
Speaker 3: boy scouts in this camparee, and then all of their
Speaker 3: supervisors and troop leaders and that sort of thing, scout masters,
Speaker 3: And it was a weekend thing. The kids were gathering
Speaker 3: for some you know, to learn some skills that boy
Speaker 3: scouts do, but a great amount of their time was spent,
Speaker 3: you know, again, being little boys and screwing around and
Speaker 3: tussling and hiding and all the things.
Speaker 7: It's one night in there that these two boys, Michael
Speaker 7: Rainey and his tent mate go go to sleep in
Speaker 7: a pup tent among all these hundreds of other scouts
Speaker 7: literally five six feet from the nearest tents on either
Speaker 7: side and in front and in back. You have to
Speaker 7: imagine that they were all crammed into this park area, right,
Speaker 7: and it was just a lot of people. And the
Speaker 7: next morning, Michael Rainey's tent mat awakes and he's bleeding.
Speaker 7: At first, he thinks it's a bloody nose or something,
Speaker 7: but he then sees that it's far worse and that
Speaker 7: Michael is barely conscious. So he arouses their camp leader
Speaker 7: and many people in the camp who find Michael. He
Speaker 7: has apparently been stabbed, They get the local sheriff. He
Speaker 7: gets to the hospital where he lingers a while a
Speaker 7: couple of days and ultimately dies, and it's determined that
Speaker 7: he actually dies from a head injury. It all gets
Speaker 7: chalked up by these sheriff's investigators to a couple of
Speaker 7: boys you know, rough housing, and that he must have
Speaker 7: fallen and hit his head hadn't been reported because they
Speaker 7: were jacking around and didn't want to get in trouble,
Speaker 7: and that he ultimately died from it, so again an
Speaker 7: accidental death. For a time, his tentmate is the suspect,
Speaker 7: but ultimately the sheriff's investigators don't really believe that pursuing
Speaker 7: him in any.
Speaker 3: Way, you know, made sense, so it was all dropped again,
Speaker 3: closed as an accident, an accidental death, and the locals
Speaker 3: in the area were a little uncomfortable with that, only
Speaker 3: because they felt that the sheriff's department didn't do a
Speaker 3: great investigation because it ended unsatisfactorily. They kind of wanted
Speaker 3: to know who did it, but that was never determined,
Speaker 3: and it had the effect of the sheriff coming under
Speaker 3: some fire from locals for not doing a great job
Speaker 3: and to a sheriff in Montana who was generally elected.
Speaker 3: It became a political it became a hampered him politically.
Speaker 3: He didn't he didn't really get over that. He felt
Speaker 3: that it was unfair and he, at least to himself,
Speaker 3: determined to not be in that position again.
Speaker 6: Now you go, you take us, the reader, the listener
Speaker 6: to Headwaters State Park in Montana. Again. This is June
Speaker 6: twenty fifth, nineteen seventy three. Now, now, this family had
Speaker 6: come from Farmington and they were on a vacation. So
Speaker 6: this was a summer vacation with five kids. They left
Speaker 6: Michigan in a van and they'd come to this place.
Speaker 6: And Heidi, Susie Yeager's sister, and her shared a tent.
Speaker 6: Tell us about this vacation and what happens with Heidi
Speaker 6: and Susie.
Speaker 3: Sure, it was one of those idyllic family vacations where
Speaker 3: mom and dad, five kids pile into a couple of
Speaker 3: vehicles and head west and they're stopping all the all
Speaker 3: the sites and and taking care of, you know, taking
Speaker 3: taking in all the roadside attractions along the way. In fact,
Speaker 3: they're meeting up with grandparents there in Headwaters State Park
Speaker 3: in Montana, where they're all going to camp, and it's
Speaker 3: it's the summer and there are campers all around. It
Speaker 3: just happens to be the same part where Michael Rainey
Speaker 3: had been fatally injured five years before. They are in
Speaker 3: the park, they are camping. They mom and dad are
Speaker 3: sleeping in a van, Grandpa and grandma are sleeping in
Speaker 3: a trailer, and four of the five kids are in
Speaker 3: the tent and they're kind of packed in there as
Speaker 3: you can edge and in their sleeping bags, and but
Speaker 3: they're having fun. It's it's this grand adventure to them.
Speaker 3: Heidi awakes the next morning and feels a breeze and
Speaker 3: they are in a tent, and she thinks, well, that's
Speaker 3: that's odd. But maybe somebody got up in the middle
Speaker 3: of the night to go to the restroom and left
Speaker 3: left the door to the tent on the zip. So
Speaker 3: she got up to you know, see where the wind
Speaker 3: was coming from, and noticed that Susie, her little seven
Speaker 3: year old sister, was gone. At first, she thinks, well,
Speaker 3: maybe she has, you know, left for some reason, gone
Speaker 3: to the trailer or to the restroom or something. But
Speaker 3: then she sees a half moon shaped hole that's been
Speaker 3: cut in the back of the tent, she sees one
Speaker 3: of her little sister's stuffed animals outside, and suddenly she's
Speaker 3: she's aware that this isn't as innocent as maybe she
Speaker 3: first thought it was. She raises an alarm. Mom and
Speaker 3: Dad come out. They come to the same conclusion. Susie
Speaker 3: is missing. They see her nowhere around there. They call
Speaker 3: for her. Some of the people in the campground even help.
Speaker 3: The sheriff is called and the first deputy on the
Speaker 3: scene sees a trail of footprints leading away from the
Speaker 3: tent to cross the lawn to a park area, and
Speaker 3: these these footprints, this path is in the dew on
Speaker 3: the grass. But that is the only evidence they have
Speaker 3: at that time that Susie's been abducted, and the abductor
Speaker 3: left no other evidence that his deputy could see. And
Speaker 3: pretty soon the whole, the whole Sheriff's department is mobilized
Speaker 3: out there and they begin their investigation.
Speaker 6: You introduced two FBI guys in Bozeman, special agents, Pete
Speaker 6: Dunbar and Bill Terry, and also the involvement of Sheriff Anderson,
Speaker 6: which you say was still spooked by the unsolved murder
Speaker 6: of Michael Rainey.
Speaker 3: Exactly he it haunted him, and he knew that he
Speaker 3: could come under some of that same political pressure as
Speaker 3: he'd face before if he couldn't close this case satisfactorily.
Speaker 3: So yeah, he came on the scene, and of course
Speaker 3: he's a law man and he wants to solve the crime,
Speaker 3: but he also wants to avoid any of the political
Speaker 3: backlash that could come as it had before if he
Speaker 3: couldn't close this case.
Speaker 6: So enter Pete Dunbar from the FBI and talk about
Speaker 6: the early involvement and the investigation at that point.
Speaker 3: Well, it's important to note that the FBI was only
Speaker 3: involved because of the what's known in the United States
Speaker 3: it's the Little Lindbergh Law, and it's a law that
Speaker 3: was enacted after the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's child. Of course,
Speaker 3: we know how that turned out, and it was tragic.
Speaker 3: The action in Congress is the local law enforcement and
Speaker 3: jurisdictions and that sort of thing all played a role
Speaker 3: in the tragic outcome. So they required that the FBI
Speaker 3: get involved in many abduction type cases very quickly to
Speaker 3: avoid some of those tragedies. And that's what happened. It
Speaker 3: seemed clear at the time that they were dealing with
Speaker 3: a crime, not just Susie wandering way. So the FBI
Speaker 3: was called in. Pete Dunbar, who was the lead agent,
Speaker 3: was actually a Montana guy. He worked with the FBI
Speaker 3: in other places including Washington, DC, but he wanted at
Speaker 3: some point to come home to Montana because he had
Speaker 3: ill parents and he wanted to be He placed in
Speaker 3: a field office out there, but he was from that area.
Speaker 3: In fact, his family is I believe great grandfather had
Speaker 3: homesteaded that area and donated the land that the Headwaters
Speaker 3: State Park actually sat on. So he had this connection
Speaker 3: that was actually significant to the place. But he understood
Speaker 3: the people, he understood the landscape, and it made him invaluable.
Speaker 3: But here they are. They're launching this investigation literally the
Speaker 3: days as he disappears, and pretty soon they've mobilized National Guard.
Speaker 3: There's a convention of trailer in enthusiasts going on in
Speaker 3: the same county at the time. They get in law
Speaker 3: and it becomes the largest manhunt in Montana history. And
Speaker 3: there are literally hundreds, maybe more than a thousand people
Speaker 3: out there combing the area for miles and miles for
Speaker 3: looking for this little girl. But they find nothing. So
Speaker 3: the first few days close with nothing more than they
Speaker 3: had in the beginning, which was a little path of
Speaker 3: footprints in the dewy grass leading off to a parking area,
Speaker 3: and that was it. There was nothing else. So when
Speaker 3: they turned to the public for information, the public has
Speaker 3: a lot of information, or it thinks it does. They
Speaker 3: come for with sightings of hippies, you know, traveling across
Speaker 3: the county and strangers. And because the rural nature, the
Speaker 3: small town nature, couldn't believe there could be one of them,
Speaker 3: of course, so it had to be an outsider. You're
Speaker 3: also talking about a period of sort of great paranoia.
Speaker 3: The Manson trials had wrapped up only less than two
Speaker 3: years before Watergate was going on. The whole counterculture was happening,
Speaker 3: plus the protests against the Vietnam War. The world in
Speaker 3: the view of these rural Montanans, these small town farmers
Speaker 3: and ranchers and shopkeepers, was that the world was falling apart,
Speaker 3: and that made this all the worse that somebody would
Speaker 3: come into their county, uh snatch a little girl and
Speaker 3: disappear into the shadows. And so when when the FBI
Speaker 3: opens up the investigation to the public for for kids.
Speaker 3: There deluged with reports of these hippies that were seen
Speaker 3: at the gas station or the market. H There were
Speaker 3: more reports of Volkswagon vehicles of all sizes and kinds
Speaker 3: and colors than there were people with names, literally hundreds
Speaker 3: of reports, sometimes as little as I saw a long
Speaker 3: haired guy with a little girl who stopped and got
Speaker 3: gas in three Forks, Montana. So there was never enough
Speaker 3: to be able to identify anybody. State police were stopping
Speaker 3: people hundreds of miles away in little volkswagons with little girls,
Speaker 3: but coming up with nothing, and it soon became a
Speaker 3: very frustrating pursuit for Dunbar, for Bill Terry, for Sheriff Anderson,
Speaker 3: for everybody who worked.
Speaker 6: On You say, though, there was a tantalizing clue that
Speaker 6: came up about a week in to the search. Bozyman
Speaker 6: cop stumbled across an old Mica mine and there was
Speaker 6: a shack. What was found in the shack that was,
Speaker 6: as you write, a tantalizing clue.
Speaker 3: Well, there were a variety of items, but among them
Speaker 3: I believe was some drawings, Yes, some ribbons, crahunts, things
Speaker 3: like that, and it sort of screamed to be a
Speaker 3: place where a child had been kept, and it drew
Speaker 3: the attention to say the leads of Dunbar and Terry
Speaker 3: and the rest. But in time it was ultimately dismissed
Speaker 3: as a terrible coincidence, but that there was an innocent
Speaker 3: explanation for what they found at that mine. And then
Speaker 3: they're back to the square one. They're back to having
Speaker 3: no good leads, no witnesses, and of course no suspects,
Speaker 3: and things begin to get more frustrating by the day
Speaker 3: because of that, and it weighs heavily leap on Dunbar.
Speaker 6: Tell us about the call to Sheriff Brown about five
Speaker 6: months after from three Forks and what does the caller
Speaker 6: have to say and demand?
Speaker 3: The caller calls Deputy Brown's house while Deputy Brown is
Speaker 3: actually out trying to find the killer, so his wife
Speaker 3: answers the phone, and on the other end is a
Speaker 3: man who claims that he was the abductor of Susieger
Speaker 3: and he makes some demands about a ransom. I believe
Speaker 3: it was fifty thousand dollars. They wanted them to drop
Speaker 3: off the cash in a bathroom at Denver's train station,
Speaker 3: and that was it. So it was ultimately judged to
Speaker 3: maybe be a hoax, But he calls back and he
Speaker 3: eventually he's kind of angry that he's been blown off,
Speaker 3: and now somebody is starting to take it a little
Speaker 3: more seriously. But they really still have no, no clues
Speaker 3: to go on beyond that, no ransom is paid, No,
Speaker 3: the whole situation just falls apart. So they're again for
Speaker 3: a second time, or maybe a third time, back to
Speaker 3: square one. They don't They don't know almost everything. They
Speaker 3: do know almost nothing now.
Speaker 6: Just to talk about the FBI. Fifty years ago, the
Speaker 6: FBI advises the family to do what and to buy what.
Speaker 3: Well, the FBI is the FBI. They were kind of
Speaker 3: relying on their tried and true techniques. They are still
Speaker 3: the best investigative body in the world, certainly in the
Speaker 3: United States, and they proceed as the FBI did at
Speaker 3: the time and still do as a matter of fact,
Speaker 3: in many ways. Today they have more tools, high tech tools,
Speaker 3: everything from computer databases to DNA. Back then, forensics consisted
Speaker 3: of sort of primitive blood typing and fingerprints. They believed though,
Speaker 3: that the way to conduct an investigation was a lot
Speaker 3: of wandering around, talking to people and deducing certain things.
Speaker 3: But it was a gut level kind of approach. What
Speaker 3: they did tell su Dieger's family was to buy a
Speaker 3: simple tape recorder down at the radio shack and connected
Speaker 3: to the phone and see if this fellow who had
Speaker 3: called that had called a deputy in Montana, Mike called
Speaker 3: them in Michigan. It was it was a long shot,
Speaker 3: but they thought, let's do it. If nothing happens, no
Speaker 3: big deal. And so the family did. The family bought
Speaker 3: a little tape recorder and connected it to the phone,
Speaker 3: and you know, got a lot of it, captured a
Speaker 3: lot of calls that were you know, friends and neighbors,
Speaker 3: but they it was there. They connected it.
Speaker 6: You're right about September twenty fourth and Marietta, Susie's mother
Speaker 6: is out doing some errand to pick up her other son, Joey,
Speaker 6: and Danny was in charge. Sixteen year old Danny was
Speaker 6: in charge. A call came in. You write and describe
Speaker 6: this call. Tell us what is said in this call.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't have the exact words right now. Like
Speaker 3: a lot of the conversations that you'll read in the book,
Speaker 3: they come from actual transcripts in the FBI's case file,
Speaker 3: which I had access to at least to a great
Speaker 3: deal of it. He picks up the phone and there's
Speaker 3: a man on the other end, and the man has
Speaker 3: information that sounds like it's about Susie, and the son
Speaker 3: tries to keep him on the line, but he can't
Speaker 3: record it. He's in a different place. And mom comes
Speaker 3: home sort of as the phone call is ending. And
Speaker 3: now they believe that they might have talked to Susan's abductor,
Speaker 3: but again he had eluded them, but there was a
Speaker 3: feeling he might call back. It was just if it
Speaker 3: were him, and he had called a sheriff's deputy, you know,
Speaker 3: months before, and now was calling their house. They had
Speaker 3: a sense that he might call again, and so they
Speaker 3: waited on pins and needles for a good time, hoping
Speaker 3: that he would, and eventually that happened.
Speaker 6: You also write about February fifth, nineteen seventy four and
Speaker 6: Chevron McGinnis, five year old. After school, she's at her
Speaker 6: friend SEUs. Her mom calls and says suppers on, and
Speaker 6: so she heads home, pumps into a school friend, but
Speaker 6: in the end doesn't make it home at all.
Speaker 3: And she's a little girl. She's an outgoing little girl.
Speaker 3: She's full of energy, everybody knows her in the neighborhood.
Speaker 3: And this is after school, it's in daylight, it's winter time.
Speaker 3: But she's kind of wandering around the neighborhoods seeing all
Speaker 3: of her friends and finally needs to go home for dinner,
Speaker 3: and so she heads home. But that's the last time
Speaker 3: we see her. And this is all in Missoula, Montana,
Speaker 3: which it's a bigger city than Manhattan or Bozeman, Montana,
Speaker 3: but still has that small town feel to it, and
Speaker 3: you know they're only slightly less innocent about what could
Speaker 3: happen there, and the people some of those same feelings
Speaker 3: as in the smaller towns. But Chavon goes missing, and
Speaker 3: it's oh, I think later. Within twenty four hours, she's
Speaker 3: found dead on the highway, hidden in a culvert on
Speaker 3: the highway out away from Missoula, and she had been
Speaker 3: stabbed but not killed immediately. She'd been stabbed and stuffed
Speaker 3: in this culvert. She revived and tried to crawl out
Speaker 3: of the culvert, but there's nothing around there. There would
Speaker 3: have been no way for her to call or be
Speaker 3: seen by anybody, so she on her way back, crawling
Speaker 3: to the culvert for shelter. She dies of exposure in
Speaker 3: the snow, and that's the way they find her.
Speaker 6: You say, there's no evidence of rape necessarily, but there
Speaker 6: is evidence of some sort of sexual assault.
Speaker 3: There is, and police collect the evidence that's there. They
Speaker 3: find kind a strange wound on her. The knife would
Speaker 3: have had a kind of hilt that they didn't recognize.
Speaker 3: But they collected the evidence. They took her clothing ultimately
Speaker 3: and bagged it and preserved it. But suffice it to say,
Speaker 3: they had their own mystery, similar to Dunbar. They had
Speaker 3: no tips, they had no physical evidence. They had a
Speaker 3: dead little girl. Some of her clothing they had in
Speaker 3: the evidence locker. But again that meant nothing. It was
Speaker 3: just her clothing. It might well have been given back
Speaker 3: to the family. It just wasn't it was. You know,
Speaker 3: they bagged it and put it in the evidence locker,
Speaker 3: and that's you know, where it sat for decades.
Speaker 6: Five days later you write that February ninth, nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 6: Now we're back in Manhattan at a basketball game, and
Speaker 6: so basically almost everyone is there, and you introduce Sandy
Speaker 6: Small again, tell us who she is and about this game,
Speaker 6: and who else is in the stands tell us about
Speaker 6: this game.
Speaker 3: Well, Sandy is a local girl. She's very popular. She's
Speaker 3: a waitress at the local cafe. She's outgoing. She's really
Speaker 3: just out of high school. She had been married, but
Speaker 3: she was divorcing from that husband. They just started too young,
Speaker 3: and things happened the way they often do with young
Speaker 3: marrieds that you know, right out of high school. They
Speaker 3: were more eager to be married than to stay married. Really,
Speaker 3: this particular night was kind of the end of the
Speaker 3: basketball season. Then they had a good team that year,
Speaker 3: Manhattan did. They were playing this other team in a
Speaker 3: nearby little town, and really most of Manhattan probably turned
Speaker 3: out for the basketball game, including Sandy, including her parents.
Speaker 3: She had a boyfriend at that time. He was there,
Speaker 3: but he wasn't with her. He was with some other people,
Speaker 3: some other girls in the stands, and she had some
Speaker 3: words with him. There's no indication they were angry words,
Speaker 3: just she had talked to him, let him know she'd
Speaker 3: seen him. And then the game was over and everybody
Speaker 3: headed home, including Sandy. She went to her apartment there
Speaker 3: in Manhattan, which was over an implement store, and she
Speaker 3: changed her clothes and she walked across the street. You
Speaker 3: know literally, you know, one hundred paces maybe from her
Speaker 3: apartment to the American Legion, where people were in the
Speaker 3: bar having a good time as they often did on
Speaker 3: the weekends. And anyway, she went over there, she saw
Speaker 3: some people, she did some dancing, and then she left,
Speaker 3: and some friends recall partying with her on the sidewalk there,
Speaker 3: and that was the last time anybody ever saw her alive.
Speaker 6: Let's use this as an opportunity Ron to stop for
Speaker 6: a second for these messages from the Generation Why podcast.
Speaker 6: For fans of true crime podcasts required essential listening is
Speaker 6: the Generation Why podcast hosts Aaron and Justin cover cases
Speaker 6: from different perspectives, examining theories and delving deep into the
Speaker 6: forensic evidence to discuss the most perplexing of all cases.
Speaker 6: In a recent episode, Aaron and Justin feature the case
Speaker 6: of Charles Cohen, who in nineteen eighty eight murdered his
Speaker 6: parents at their home in Hakkison, Delaware. Many speculated that
Speaker 6: the murders were a crime of passion or committed in
Speaker 6: a fit of rage. However, when arrested, Cohen made it
Speaker 6: clear that the murders were premeditated and had a far
Speaker 6: more sinister motive. Than ever imagined. I love that the
Speaker 6: Generation Why podcast features such compelling cases, ones that I
Speaker 6: wasn't necessarily familiar with before conveying the story so interestingly
Speaker 6: exploring the evidence, the characters involved, and the crimes. Don't
Speaker 6: miss hearing Aaron and Justin every week. Listen to the
Speaker 6: Generation Why podcast on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or you
Speaker 6: can listen ad free by joining Wondery Plus in the
Speaker 6: Wondery app Now, Ron, we were talking about the disappearance
Speaker 6: of Sandra small Again and obviously a an investigation begins.
Speaker 6: What we hadn't mentioned that there was many suitors. You
Speaker 6: mentioned a boyfriend in the bar that night, Bob Harrison.
Speaker 6: Also in the bar that night was Jack small Again,
Speaker 6: her former husband that she was still friends with, good
Speaker 6: friends with, But we hadn't mentioned that there was a
Speaker 6: person that was interested in her and had before Christmas
Speaker 6: a date with Sandra. Tell us about this suitor and
Speaker 6: the date and what Sandra's reaction was to this person.
Speaker 3: Well, and Sandy was a popular girl, and once it
Speaker 3: was known in the small town that she was sort
Speaker 3: of single again, she had a lot of interested guys
Speaker 3: floating around, you know, as you named a couple her
Speaker 3: husband and well, he of course wasn't floating around anymore,
Speaker 3: but but they were friendly. She had the boyfriend she
Speaker 3: saw at the basketball game. She had a lot of
Speaker 3: guys asking her for dates and hoping that they'd be
Speaker 3: their boy her boyfriend. One of them was a young
Speaker 3: man named David Meyerhoffer. His father owned the implement store
Speaker 3: that Sandy where Sandy's apartment was. David was known as
Speaker 3: a kind of introverted kid who was a little He
Speaker 3: was one of those guys was kind of half a
Speaker 3: bubble loft to most of the people there. They were
Speaker 3: just quiet and strange, and they described him as odd.
Speaker 3: He had asked her out before Christmas. They went out.
Speaker 3: He was smitten, she wasn't. She didn't really have a
Speaker 3: good time. He would send flowers or chocolates, but she
Speaker 3: was kind and would thank him. But he would ask
Speaker 3: her out a few more times and she would politely refuse.
Speaker 3: So she was at the time of that night of
Speaker 3: the basketball game, for all intents and purposes, single. Her
Speaker 3: marriage was, her divorce was still in the process, but
Speaker 3: she had a lot of suitors, obviously, and so when
Speaker 3: she disappears that night, the fbis and the Sheriff's Department's
Speaker 3: interests fall on a lot of these guys, and they
Speaker 3: investigate all of them and ultimately dismiss all of them. Harrison,
Speaker 3: Jack Smulligan, who might have been jealous or angry about
Speaker 3: her her dating Meyerhoffer, several others, and all of them
Speaker 3: were dismissed because they all impressed the investigators as having
Speaker 3: no idea how Sandy would have disappeared or where she
Speaker 3: might have gone. In fact, a lot of times they
Speaker 3: were pointing fingers at each other, but she was gone. Nonetheless,
Speaker 3: she and her card were missing.
Speaker 6: You're right about the search, and it included a ranch
Speaker 6: called Lockhart Ranch. So there is a cursory search of
Speaker 6: this building, all the buildings that exist at this ranch. Yeah,
Speaker 6: tell us about the search and what if anything they discovered.
Speaker 3: Well, it's an abandoned ranch. The people who owned it
Speaker 3: once upon a time were elderly and passed, and the
Speaker 3: ranch just sat there and sort of slowly sunk into
Speaker 3: the earth. There was nothing there. Some old dilapidated buildings,
Speaker 3: you know, an outhouse, it was a barn. There was
Speaker 3: nothing there useful. Some deputies went out there during the search,
Speaker 3: and this ever widening search that was going on centered
Speaker 3: in Manhattan, but going out in the successive circles. They
Speaker 3: got out far enough into this you're talking about a
Speaker 3: town that's in a remote place. Then this search reaching
Speaker 3: out into the real wilds, into the real outback of
Speaker 3: that area, this unsettled outback. They finally come to this
Speaker 3: ranch among many. As they searched look around, they find nothing.
Speaker 3: These shacks are decaying. One looks like maybe a cowboy
Speaker 3: has stopped and had his lunch there or something. They
Speaker 3: really find nothing, you know, in their cursory search that
Speaker 3: screams foul play, So they are They go to the
Speaker 3: barn and it's kind of nailed shut. So they're about
Speaker 3: to leave when they find a piece of clothing there
Speaker 3: that's out of place. So they decide to take another
Speaker 3: look at the barn, and long story short, they find
Speaker 3: Sandy Smulligan's car inside the barn, kind of camouflaged with
Speaker 3: hay and tarps and fifty five gallon drums and that
Speaker 3: sort of thing. Suddenly, now this is a crime scene.
Speaker 3: They mobilize the rest of the sheriff's apartment. Pretty soon
Speaker 3: everybody's out there and they're collecting evidence and searching the car.
Speaker 3: And not getting evidence about who the perpetrator might have been,
Speaker 3: but a lot of evidence about Sandy and what she
Speaker 3: how this might not be something that she wanted to happen,
Speaker 3: there was foul play involved in Because it was now
Speaker 3: a crime scene, everybody spread out to look, and in
Speaker 3: time they find some physical evidence that intrigues them. And
Speaker 3: as they begin to look closer, they start to find
Speaker 3: these little tiny shards of bone all around the place,
Speaker 3: as if they'd been scattered by the wind or thrown
Speaker 3: out there. So they as they concentrate on that, they're
Speaker 3: collecting more and more and more. They find some bigger remains,
Speaker 3: some just bone remains, and now they're pretty sure that
Speaker 3: they know what might have happened to Sandy Smalligan. And
Speaker 3: they send all this material off both to a Montana
Speaker 3: pathologists and to the Smithsonian Institute or the institution, and
Speaker 3: where they're they're examined and it's determined that indeed they
Speaker 3: are the remains of female about the age of Sandy Smalligan.
Speaker 3: But there's one more thing. The remains also include bones
Speaker 3: or pieces of bones that belonged to a much younger
Speaker 3: girl between six and eight years old, impossibly Sandy Smulligan's
Speaker 3: it had to be a second. Suddenly, Pete dunbar feared
Speaker 3: the worst, he might have the related killings of both
Speaker 3: Sandy Smulligan and Susie Yeger, and that in fact, they
Speaker 3: might have the same killer.
Speaker 6: You talk about the tools that police employed at that time,
Speaker 6: and one of those tools that they employed regularly and
Speaker 6: trusted it and if its efficacy was the lie detector.
Speaker 6: So they had about seven suspects, you right, and one
Speaker 6: of them was David Meierhoffer, but they passed easily the
Speaker 6: lie detector test. In April nineteen seventy four, though the
Speaker 6: new FBI training Academy in Quantico and was being set up,
Speaker 6: and there was two teachers, Patrick Mullany and Howard Teton
Speaker 6: tell us about the how dunbar Is introduced to Milani
Speaker 6: and Tetan.
Speaker 3: Dunbar is in Quantico for some regular training, just this
Speaker 3: scheduled ProForma training that he had to do, and he
Speaker 3: happens to attend a workshop and in this workshop, two
Speaker 3: fellow agents are presenting the idea that maybe maybe the
Speaker 3: crime scene evidence could tell more about the psychology and
Speaker 3: the behavior of the perpetrator than they believed before that
Speaker 3: It wasn't done under the radar, but it was. It
Speaker 3: wasn't fully believed that this would do. This was true science.
Speaker 3: Jay Edgar Hoover himself thought it was hokum, but he
Speaker 3: had died just before this, and his replacement, Clarence Kelly,
Speaker 3: was a little more progressive about about law enforcement, and
Speaker 3: he gave, you know, mild tacit approval to these guys
Speaker 3: to kind of continue with what they had been pursuing,
Speaker 3: and they began to put on these workshops. Well, Unbarred
Speaker 3: attends one. He believes suddenly as he listens to them
Speaker 3: talking about all this, all this science and investigation all
Speaker 3: mixed up, that maybe they can help him, and he
Speaker 3: follows them after the workshop down to their offices and
Speaker 3: he tells them the basic story about the vanishing of
Speaker 3: both Susiegger and Sandy Smalligan. They think that this might
Speaker 3: be a case for them to get involved with kind
Speaker 3: of test the theory. They saw it as neither that complicated.
Speaker 3: They didn't think it had particularly high stakes, so it
Speaker 3: was kind of safe to test their theory, and they
Speaker 3: asked Dunbar to give him the evidence. He shipped it
Speaker 3: to them, and pretty soon they put together a collection
Speaker 3: of elements that they believed pointed the direction at this
Speaker 3: unknown subject or unsubbed and help would help. They hoped
Speaker 3: Dunbar to narrow the pool of people he was looking for.
Speaker 3: If they could say, well, this is definitely not a female,
Speaker 3: will he cuts the pool in half? Correct? I mean
Speaker 3: that's they didn't say that that wasn't one. But by
Speaker 3: giving him all of these elements, there were between fifteen
Speaker 3: and twenty elements, he could progressively narrow his pool of suspects,
Speaker 3: which should focus his investigation a little bit better. Instead
Speaker 3: of having the whole county to be a suspect, he
Speaker 3: could narrow that down to a group of people where
Speaker 3: his investigation could be focused. And they so they did.
Speaker 3: They created what was the first ever FBI criminal profile.
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Speaker 6: Now putting together this profile, they also, as they do
Speaker 6: believe in criminal profiling itself, utilize all of the evidence
Speaker 6: they had, and some of the remarkable evidence they had
Speaker 6: was the tape recordings. So what do they do with
Speaker 6: the tape recordings and talk about this incredible voice lineup.
Speaker 3: Well, that came after their basic profile. They had shipped
Speaker 3: off these tape recordings. They had got better and installed
Speaker 3: better equipment once those phone calls started to happen. Their
Speaker 3: profile came before that. They had shipped off that voice
Speaker 3: evidence to a voice analyst. But voice evidence at that
Speaker 3: time and to a certain degree to this day, is
Speaker 3: not considered that conclusive. Definitely less then than it is today.
Speaker 3: But they had to develop some other things. So they
Speaker 3: went back to that profile, as I say, about fifteen
Speaker 3: to twenty items, And when you look at it, you
Speaker 3: can see that some of that was kind of old
Speaker 3: cops experience and logic. A little bit of it is guesswork.
Speaker 3: But you got to remember that Howard Teaton and Pat
Speaker 3: mulaney had no rule book, They had no system, They
Speaker 3: had no idea. They were experts in psychology and in
Speaker 3: crime scenes, but they had no model about how those
Speaker 3: things would work together. So a lot of it was
Speaker 3: based on what they knew, and some of it was
Speaker 3: low hanging through. You know, an example, we all know
Speaker 3: from TV, or at least we think we know that
Speaker 3: the typical serial killer tends to be a white male
Speaker 3: in his twenties. Sure, that's because we have fifty years
Speaker 3: of data. You know, profilers have gone out and collected
Speaker 3: a database of thousands of intensive expert interviews with killers.
Speaker 3: Teton and Mulaney had visited with a couple a few
Speaker 3: and they had no database. They just deduced that the
Speaker 3: killer was a white male in his twenties. Because these
Speaker 3: crimes required and now an astounding degree of stealth and strength.
Speaker 3: They believed that probably suggested there was military experience, which
Speaker 3: of course was largely male during Vietnam. They believed he
Speaker 3: had knowledge of his surroundings and the local law enforcement,
Speaker 3: which means he was probably local. And if he's local,
Speaker 3: there was a ninety nine percent chance that he was white,
Speaker 3: because this county was mainly white. Another deduction they had
Speaker 3: was that he'd thrive in solitary jobs because he didn't
Speaker 3: want to be around other people. And that's because they
Speaker 3: knew that deeply disturbed criminals worked very hard to protect
Speaker 3: their secret lives. So they believed their suspect, or the
Speaker 3: perpetrate that they didn't know they're unsubbed, would be he
Speaker 3: live in fear that his co workers and bosses were
Speaker 3: always watching him and would know his deepest, darkest secrets,
Speaker 3: so he'd avoid that by working alone. At the time,
Speaker 3: they believed that psychopaths problems their men, that their mental state,
Speaker 3: their emotional state, was based on conflicts or even flawed
Speaker 3: views about sexuality. But that was an educated guest too,
Speaker 3: based on interviews that they'd done with a serial killer
Speaker 3: named Ed Kemper. So now that we know who the
Speaker 3: killer was, we also know that there was only one
Speaker 3: questionable element out of these fifty. They got it on
Speaker 3: all but one of the elements, and even that one
Speaker 3: element is up in the air because we don't have
Speaker 3: enough information, and we'll talk about why we don't have
Speaker 3: enough information. But that first profile was astoundingly accurate. And
Speaker 3: you've got to remember that these guys had no plan,
Speaker 3: they had no system. This was primarily just them thinking
Speaker 3: it through and trying to piece this puzzle together using
Speaker 3: their experience.
Speaker 6: You have this incredible, very vivid scenes in this book
Speaker 6: where Susie's mother, Susieyeger's mother, Marietta, is basically employed to
Speaker 6: talk to this person that took her daughter, and so
Speaker 6: the exchange is extraordinary, which he tries to get this
Speaker 6: guy to give She's begging for him to give back
Speaker 6: her child. Why can't we have our child back? Why
Speaker 6: can't we have Susie back? And all kinds of rationalization
Speaker 6: on his part for why he can't do that, the
Speaker 6: back and forth. But also they get investigators get a
Speaker 6: break when there is a West Montana rancher, Ralph Greene,
Speaker 6: and he complains about his long distance bill. So tell
Speaker 6: us a little bit about this dramatic exchange that was
Speaker 6: recorded and this lucky break and this rancher with a
Speaker 6: long distance bill.
Speaker 3: One of the things these original profilers deduced was that
Speaker 3: the unsubs psychological behavior would compel him to reach out
Speaker 3: to the family on an anniversary because this was important
Speaker 3: and it was personal to him. It was an intimate
Speaker 3: event in his life, so they believed that he would
Speaker 3: reach out on an anniversary. In the anniversary coming up
Speaker 3: was of Susie's disappearance. So, as they predicted the unsubb
Speaker 3: who they I should say, a man called and talked
Speaker 3: to Susie's mother. In the process, he gave away a
Speaker 3: small bid of evidence that proved what only the kidnapper
Speaker 3: would know. And suddenly they believed they had the right
Speaker 3: guy on the phone, they just didn't know who it was.
Speaker 3: And of course his phone call was to their home
Speaker 3: in Michigan, in the town Detroit suburb called Farmington Hills.
Speaker 3: Some weeks later, a rancher in Montana calls the local
Speaker 3: phone company complained that there was he had been built
Speaker 3: for a telephone call that he and his wife hadn't
Speaker 3: made to a place called Farmington Hills. Immediately, the phone
Speaker 3: company recognized the number because they'd been put on alert
Speaker 3: by the FBI, and they called the FBI and said,
Speaker 3: this number popped up, and it popped up related to
Speaker 3: this rancher's phone line. So they went out there and
Speaker 3: they dunbar investigated, and one of the things they found
Speaker 3: was that there was this sort of homemade telephone wire
Speaker 3: that they had strung from the poll to their house,
Speaker 3: and it kind of kind of hung low in a
Speaker 3: little wash, and they found some tire tracks going in
Speaker 3: there underneath the line. The rancher recognizes the tire tracks
Speaker 3: as belonging to a ranch hand that he had employed,
Speaker 3: because they were the same kind of truck tires that
Speaker 3: he had on his own truck, and he had made
Speaker 3: the recommendation. So the attention turns to this guy, and
Speaker 3: indeed they find that his truck has those tires, but
Speaker 3: he explains, he gives a reason for that, and Dunbar,
Speaker 3: throughout these investigations looks at at this particular guy two
Speaker 3: or three times, but two or three times the guy
Speaker 3: is on the radar and then off the radar because
Speaker 3: he doesn't fit. Dunbar's gut tells him this isn't the guy,
Speaker 3: but he goes through and and gives another test in
Speaker 3: this guy's case, a third truth test to two light detectors,
Speaker 3: tests that it happened. Now he's giving him a truth
Speaker 3: serum test. Suffice it to say this, this guy passes
Speaker 3: all three of them. Uh, and so once again he's
Speaker 3: off of Dunbar's radar. Dunbar, by this time is just
Speaker 3: totally frustrated, but these the profilers believe that he's actually
Speaker 3: zeroing in on their guy. So that it's believed that
Speaker 3: the phone call to Susieyeger's mother was made from that
Speaker 3: low slung wire, and it would have taken somebody with
Speaker 3: some knowledge of how to connect to that wire and
Speaker 3: to make a telephone call, and that told them something
Speaker 3: that suddenly they had some information that they could act on.
Speaker 6: You talk about that. They ask for another search warrant
Speaker 6: for David's property and grade and vehicles, And remarkably, he
Speaker 6: now has a lawyer that he just hired so that
Speaker 6: they could end the frustration that he felt from the
Speaker 6: police under this twenty four to seven surveillance that they
Speaker 6: told him he was under. So this attorney agrees to
Speaker 6: the conditions of this search. What do they find in
Speaker 6: this search this time.
Speaker 3: In this particular search, they find little bits of cantalyzing
Speaker 3: information like newspaper clip beings about some of the crime.
Speaker 3: Also some newspaper clippings about gatherings of girl scouts and
Speaker 3: that sort of thing that intrigued them, that align with
Speaker 3: some things that they know already. And so now they
Speaker 3: think they've narrowed down their search to pretty much the
Speaker 3: right guy, and they do put him under twenty four
Speaker 3: to seven surveillance at that time, but it's very open
Speaker 3: and they want him to know he's under surveillance. There's
Speaker 3: one point he actually goes over to the deputy and
Speaker 3: asks for a ride to the next town, since they
Speaker 3: were both going to be going that way anyway, and
Speaker 3: he knew that he knew the deputy. He was a
Speaker 3: local guy, right. So there was a lot of circumstantial
Speaker 3: evidence that they found there. It was pretty strong, but
Speaker 3: no smoking gun. But they kept up there, they kept
Speaker 3: up their surveillance.
Speaker 6: They also have the idea the profilers that they should
Speaker 6: check out this locker ranch one more time. Tell us
Speaker 6: what happens with this search warrant and what do they find.
Speaker 3: I think the timeline is a little off because ultimately
Speaker 3: it comes after his arrest and they find more and
Speaker 3: more ghastly evidence out there after he's arrested, and so
Speaker 3: it's the timeline is a little confused here, but it's
Speaker 3: during it's within a couple of hours after his arrest.
Speaker 3: They go back to his little converted garage where he
Speaker 3: lived and search it more closely than they had before,
Speaker 3: and there they find human remains let's say that he
Speaker 3: had kept as souvenirs and suddenly confronted with literally a
Speaker 3: frozen human hand that proves to be one of his victims.
Speaker 3: It's clear that he is going to have a tough
Speaker 3: time not being hanged as a murderer, and his lawyer,
Speaker 3: who had believed in him all this time, confronts him
Speaker 3: and literally screams at him about this. Our killers reaction
Speaker 3: is could I avoid the death penalty by confessing to
Speaker 3: other killings. Suddenly that lawyer is listening and goes to
Speaker 3: the prosecutor and says, if you will take the death
Speaker 3: penalty off the table, we'll confess to two more killings.
Speaker 3: In other words, we will give you four. We will
Speaker 3: confess to four.
Speaker 7: Murders instead of just these two.
Speaker 3: You just have to take the death penalty off the table.
Speaker 3: The prosecutor, after talking to the families of Susiejeger and
Speaker 3: Sandy Smalligan, agrees so late on Meyerhoffer's arrested on a Friday.
Speaker 3: Late on Saturday, they take him in for a lengthy
Speaker 3: interrogation that's designed to have him confess to these four crimes,
Speaker 3: which he does, and the upshot of it is he
Speaker 3: was responsible for the death of Bernie Pullman and Michael Rainey,
Speaker 3: both of whom we talked right at the beginning of
Speaker 3: this interview. And they presumed, in these wee hours of
Speaker 3: this investigation or this interrogation, that they were going to
Speaker 3: come back later that day to ask about other killings,
Speaker 3: about methods he in he had employed, about why he
Speaker 3: would have done these things. They're awful, awful things and
Speaker 3: ghastly things, but they were all tired. They'd all been up,
Speaker 3: the defense lawyer, the prosecutor, Dunbar, and Meyerhoffer himself had
Speaker 3: been up for two days essentially, and they were all tired.
Speaker 3: And at around four o'clock in the morning, they take
Speaker 3: him back to his cell and they themselves go home
Speaker 3: to catch a few hours of sleep and then come
Speaker 3: back to continue the.
Speaker 6: Entire Let's use this as an opportunity to stop for
Speaker 6: these messages now they want. There's police and other jurisdictions,
Speaker 6: and plus they're lining up as well in terms of
Speaker 6: the Marines would like to ask them some questions. So there's,
Speaker 6: as you say, there's quite a few cases that they
Speaker 6: would like to ask him questions about.
Speaker 3: Well, yes, he had he was a marine himself, that
Speaker 3: there were slowly being realized that he might have been
Speaker 3: involved in other things, and the FBI was doing its investigation,
Speaker 3: and so there were other jurisdictions interested. But remember we
Speaker 3: have the difference of thirty six hours here, that's what
Speaker 3: they had from his arrest to this moment. So things
Speaker 3: are in the very early stages It's important to understand too,
Speaker 3: that the term serial killer hadn't even been coined at
Speaker 3: that point. They didn't see him as a serial killer,
Speaker 3: and there was no real indication hadn't really been defined
Speaker 3: about what we now know about these psychos like Ed
Speaker 3: Kemper or One Corona or even later Ted Bundy, John
Speaker 3: Wayne Gacy and so forth. They had an idea that
Speaker 3: these were freakish kinds of people, but that fascination with
Speaker 3: serial killers actually comes later, So they weren't necessarily putting
Speaker 3: together in their minds that he had a psychological flaw
Speaker 3: that made him kill people. They just knew that he
Speaker 3: had been in other places, and there were indications from
Speaker 3: their search is that maybe he'd been doing some things
Speaker 3: that they didn't want to think about in other places.
Speaker 3: So yeah, some other law enforcement agencies, the Marines had
Speaker 3: sort of started to line up for their chance to talk.
Speaker 5: To him, and that's where they were at four am
Speaker 5: on that Saturday morning or Sunday morning.
Speaker 6: You talk about this death penalty, and that there was
Speaker 6: the deal that the death penalty would be taken off
Speaker 6: the table because he would confess to these other two murders,
Speaker 6: Paulman and Rainey but that didn't guarantee that he couldn't
Speaker 6: be tried and have the death penalty applied in any
Speaker 6: other case outside of the state, and in fact not
Speaker 6: even in other cases that he didn't include in this
Speaker 6: full confession. Just as a part of the story as well,
Speaker 6: is that Marietta who had the horror of listening to
Speaker 6: this killer talk on the phone and these incredible exchanges
Speaker 6: where she said, I know who you are and called
Speaker 6: him by name and he denied it. At one point
Speaker 6: in this incredible book, you have the transcript of him
Speaker 6: putting on a girl on the phone to talk to Marietta.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's one of the three big phone calls between them,
Speaker 3: and he calls her and he's as he tended to do.
Speaker 3: He's taunting. He wants her to know he's in control.
Speaker 3: What he doesn't know is that Marietta Jaeger is an
Speaker 3: incredibly strong woman, and she stands in there and talks
Speaker 3: to him, and she's calm, she's not crying, she's not accusatory.
Speaker 3: Confronted with a wrong woman, he starts to break down himself,
Speaker 3: and in this last phone call, he sort of in
Speaker 3: a sadistic way, claims he has this little girl and
Speaker 3: her little girl and puts her on the line. Marietta
Speaker 3: doesn't think it's her little girl. The FBI suddenly thinks though,
Speaker 3: that maybe he has another little girl, and that's when
Speaker 3: they swoop in for the arrest. They now believe that
Speaker 3: they don't want to just keep watching him because he
Speaker 3: might be actually still active with taking little girls, and
Speaker 3: that's what causes them to swoop in to make that
Speaker 3: final arrest. But Marietta is really one of the heroes
Speaker 3: of this book. Without her, without her conversations with David,
Speaker 3: they probably would never have caught him.
Speaker 6: These profilers learned so much from this case, the first
Speaker 6: case that they were employed to create this profile, this
Speaker 6: fledging art science combination of criminal profiling. They learned so
Speaker 6: much from this case, and there's so much that we
Speaker 6: didn't talk about that again would inform them of the
Speaker 6: serial killers and the aberrant behavior that was exhibited shortly
Speaker 6: after this, this golden age as it is referred, of
Speaker 6: serial killing and some of the most infamous and notorious
Speaker 6: serial killers of all time. With this, Marietta did not want.
Speaker 6: She had been counseled by her pastor, but she was
Speaker 6: specific when the cuter Olsen asked if she was okay
Speaker 6: with the death penalty. She was not okay with the
Speaker 6: death penalty, and the death penalty would have been hanging
Speaker 6: in Montana. What was the ultimate justice in this case?
Speaker 3: Well, I would say that at the time that the
Speaker 3: prosecutor asked her, Marietta was ambivalent about it. It still
Speaker 3: hadn't formed in her head. But the more she thought
Speaker 3: about it, the more she thought about Susie, and she
Speaker 3: thought about how this outgoing, marvelous little girl would feel
Speaker 3: about this. At the same time, she's she's hearing a
Speaker 3: lot of her own faith bubbling around, and she's coming
Speaker 3: to conclusion about the death penalty ultimately that she opposes.
Speaker 3: And of course, by that time, the ultimate justice that
Speaker 3: you refer to has already happened. But she comes to
Speaker 3: the conclusion that the death penalty is not the best
Speaker 3: thing for religious reasons more than anything. But as I say,
Speaker 3: the justice that you referred to has already happened at
Speaker 3: that point. It involves death, but it's not carried out
Speaker 3: by the state.
Speaker 6: Yes, you talk about this case being the first case
Speaker 6: where the FBI was brought in for this criminal profiling,
Speaker 6: this new art slash science what as you write, what
Speaker 6: is the history afterwards? We know so much has happened.
Speaker 6: We're watching criminal minds and profiling has become such an
Speaker 6: exciting and captivating subject for so many people, true crime
Speaker 6: and even in the fictional world. As you write what
Speaker 6: was the path forward for Tetan and for Milani and
Speaker 6: there they mentioned an assistant at that time, Robert k Rustler.
Speaker 6: As you write what happened with this fledging criminal profiling and.
Speaker 3: A well, of course, now it has succeeded, or at
Speaker 3: least helped, and now there's more belief, at least in
Speaker 3: the FBI's superstructure that maybe there's something there and maybe
Speaker 3: they can develop this as a tool. But it's just
Speaker 3: a tool. And the fact is, even as they were
Speaker 3: conceiving this first one, the boots on the ground cops
Speaker 3: were suspicious of it because this wasn't the way investigations went.
Speaker 3: They didn't use this voodoo hookum. They used that boots
Speaker 3: on the ground investigation. So the FBI was at least
Speaker 3: open now to developing this a little bit more. They
Speaker 3: believed Teton and Mullaney were maybe on the right track,
Speaker 3: so there was more latitude given they created the Behavioral
Speaker 3: Sciences Unit, and they did hire some people. But of
Speaker 3: course today there's hardly a prime time TV crime drama
Speaker 3: or movie mystery, or a crime thriller book that doesn't
Speaker 3: feature profiling in some form. You know, it's easy to
Speaker 3: think that cops have just always been intuitive about bad guys,
Speaker 3: but in fact, it was Keeton and Mullaney less than
Speaker 3: fifty years ago that formulated this thing. And so that's
Speaker 3: what this book is about, the fact the criminal mind
Speaker 3: has always fascinated us. Yes, you know, when an especially
Speaker 3: debian crime happens, our rational brains want to put things
Speaker 3: back in order to make sense out of something that
Speaker 3: is senseless. That's certainly the case in this crime. And
Speaker 3: it's not surprising that that we would think that way.
Speaker 3: Since the beginning of mankind, we've wanted to understand the
Speaker 3: threats of it are out there that we want to
Speaker 3: feel safe, we want to avoid unnecessary death. So, you know,
Speaker 3: I don't think that sort of primitive fascination has changed
Speaker 3: right now. Our media has changed and we're seeing more
Speaker 3: of it, we're feeling more of it. Where do we
Speaker 3: think we're understanding more of it? There's a question about that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but these profilers play a role in that that. You know,
Speaker 3: we kind of see them as the nights going out
Speaker 3: fighting the dragons, and whether that's true or not is irrelevant.
Speaker 3: It's kind of just the media's portrayal of that. But
Speaker 3: it all starts here. This is the origin story of profiling,
Speaker 3: something we're all familiar with right now. This is how
Speaker 3: it began. Everything we see right now is built on
Speaker 3: that reality, that real thing that happened.
Speaker 6: Yes, and this incredible case that touched it all off.
Speaker 6: I want to thank you very much Ron Francel for
Speaker 6: coming on and talking about your latest It's Dynamite shadow Man,
Speaker 6: an Elusive Psycho Killer and the birth of FBI profiling.
Speaker 6: But those of might want to take a look at
Speaker 6: as an Amazon page or a Facebook or a website,
Speaker 6: they might take a look at.
Speaker 3: Certainly the book is available at bookstores everywhere. You can
Speaker 3: do that Amazon, certainly. If they want to see a
Speaker 3: little bit more than and go to my website which
Speaker 3: is Wwwernfrancel dot com. And there's there's a lot of
Speaker 3: stuff there about the book and it might give you
Speaker 3: a sense of the story here, which is the collision,
Speaker 3: ultimately the collision of some ghastly crimes with this science
Speaker 3: that that that is is fascinating to us today.
Speaker 6: I wanna thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Ron.
Speaker 6: We just touched on some of the horror that we
Speaker 6: didn't touch on in this book. Thank you so much
Speaker 6: for this interview, shadow Man, an elusive psycho killer, and
Speaker 6: the birth of FBI profiling. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me Dan, I appreciate it.
Speaker 6: Thank you, good night.