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Speaker 7: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
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Speaker 7: written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK Every
Speaker 7: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 7: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 7: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski. Good Evening. Ever wondered
Speaker 7: who murdered John Bennet Ramsey, or who terrorized San Francisco
Speaker 7: as the Zodiac Killer, puzzled over the notorious Black Valia
Speaker 7: murder or the mysterious Long Island serial killer case. This
Speaker 7: true crime book makes you the detective investigating some of
Speaker 7: the most infamous unsolved cases of the twentieth and twenty
Speaker 7: first centuries. Crime scenes, crucial evidence, witnesses, and persons of
Speaker 7: interest are clearly and concisely presented, along with essential details
Speaker 7: and clues, so you can judge for yourself who could
Speaker 7: have done it. Unsolved Murders also profiles the psychology of
Speaker 7: the killer, discusses the background and life of the unfortunate
Speaker 7: victim or victims, and explores how these horrific crimes impacted
Speaker 7: the victim's family and friends. From domestic tragedies to serial killers.
Speaker 7: With a love for the macabre, this book will have
Speaker 7: you returning to the cases again and again. Can you
Speaker 7: unlock the secrets of these unsolved crimes where others have failed?
Speaker 7: The book that we're featuring the seating is Unsolved Murders,
Speaker 7: True Crime Cases Uncovered with my special guest, journalist and
Speaker 7: author Amber Hunt. Welcome back to the program. Thank you
Speaker 7: very much for Greens's interview. Amber Hunt.
Speaker 5: Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 7: Thank you very much for joining me. For joining us
Speaker 7: once again. Tell us a little bit about the genesis
Speaker 7: of this project. This is a book co written with
Speaker 7: Emily Thompson. Tell us a little bit about the book
Speaker 7: itself and how it came to be.
Speaker 5: You know, it's funny. I'm a journalist by trade. I
Speaker 5: work for the Cincinnati Inquirer, and sometimes you get a
Speaker 5: story assignment. Sometimes you come up with the idea yourself.
Speaker 5: This one was more the former. The publishing company reached out,
Speaker 5: said they had an idea and asked if I wanted
Speaker 5: to be part of it, and I thought it sounded
Speaker 5: really interesting and said sure. And my co author is
Speaker 5: Emily G. Thompson. She's Irish, so we've never met. She's
Speaker 5: on the other side of the pond. And what impressed
Speaker 5: me the most. First off, it's been fun to get
Speaker 5: to know her through you know, the project, because she
Speaker 5: and I are very we're kind of similar souls. But
Speaker 5: what's amazing to me is that when you read the book,
Speaker 5: I don't think you'd be able to tell who wrote what.
Speaker 5: Our writing styles really mesh.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, yes, very similar. I couldn't tell, certainly.
Speaker 5: Sorry. What intrigued me about it was just this idea
Speaker 5: that you would have, you know, all of these cases
Speaker 5: in one place, and and while there are short sections
Speaker 5: on each, we really researched the hell out of it.
Speaker 5: I mean, they're they're very detailed, so you get a
Speaker 5: lot of information in some of the cases I knew
Speaker 5: nothing about, and you know I cover crimes for a living.
Speaker 7: Right, Absolutely, Yes, there's an incredible amount of detail, just
Speaker 7: compressed in fewer pages than if you explored them fully completely.
Speaker 7: That would be a volume of work. Absolutely, tell us
Speaker 7: some of the cases as you do, what are the
Speaker 7: famous cases, infamous cases that people might know of, but
Speaker 7: tell us the overview of the cases that are covered
Speaker 7: and the stories that are covered in this book. I'm
Speaker 7: solve murders.
Speaker 5: There's a huge array of them. One that I learned
Speaker 5: a lot about that I knew nothing about, with the
Speaker 5: Voliska Axe murders. This is in the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 5: nineteen twelve, and it's in Iowa, which is where I
Speaker 5: graduated high school. So I was a little surprised. I
Speaker 5: had never heard of it. But this was basically a
Speaker 5: farm family slain in their house. There was a high
Speaker 5: profile Hollywood murder, William Desmond Taylor. I had heard the name,
Speaker 5: but didn't know the details of the case. And then
Speaker 5: of course there's a black Dahlia. There's Zodiac that I
Speaker 5: added to the list myself with the Oakland County child
Speaker 5: killings because I used to I covered crime in Detroit
Speaker 5: for nearly eight years and that case always bothered and
Speaker 5: resonated with me. So that was one that I added.
Speaker 5: But there's a huge array, and some of them are,
Speaker 5: you know, over on the other side of the pond too.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, it is a very very interesting collection from all
Speaker 7: over the world. Let's get to one of the most
Speaker 7: famous cases, and that's the back Dalia case in nineteen
Speaker 7: forty seven. You call it death of a dreamer. Tell
Speaker 7: us a little bit about you've talked open this at
Speaker 7: January fifteenth, nineteen forty seven, and la housewife Betty Berzinger
Speaker 7: is out for a shoe repair with a three year
Speaker 7: old daughter. An tell us what happens on that walk
Speaker 7: to go to the shoe repair that day.
Speaker 5: Well, Betty notice something in this vacant lot, because they're
Speaker 5: walking along these like you know, brushy vacant areas, and
Speaker 5: she spot something white and she kind of squints and
Speaker 5: looks at it and realizes that it's in the form
Speaker 5: of a person. But she thinks that the mannequin and
Speaker 5: one that's just been discarded because it's been two pieces,
Speaker 5: And then she suddenly realizes with horror that it is
Speaker 5: a human, and so she runs to the nearest house
Speaker 5: with a phone and calls police. And that is how
Speaker 5: that's how the body was discovered.
Speaker 7: Along with some of the other things that we're going
Speaker 7: to cover in terms of uniqueness. What is the uniqueness
Speaker 7: in terms of the state of the body found at
Speaker 7: that crime scene by that woman. But later, of course
Speaker 7: she runs away, But what the police find.
Speaker 3: This was.
Speaker 5: This made all the headlines because in part Elizabeth Shore.
Speaker 5: The black value was gorgeous, but also because the death
Speaker 5: was particularly gruesome. I mean, she was cut in half,
Speaker 5: her face was disfigured, as in the sides of her
Speaker 5: mouth were split in this gruesome, exaggerated smile.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 5: It was just incredibly violent.
Speaker 7: Was there any indication that this was possibly surgically done?
Speaker 7: How precise was this or was this was, like I say,
Speaker 7: a butcher job.
Speaker 5: There was always some suspicion that whoever did this had
Speaker 5: some kind of medical training because of where the the
Speaker 5: bisection occurred. So it didn't I mean it was a
Speaker 5: butcher job and that it's a human being who's in half,
Speaker 5: but they did think that there was some skill behind it.
Speaker 7: You also include that she was again very unique is
Speaker 7: drained of her blood and then as you mentioned, but
Speaker 7: posing a very bizarre spread eagle display and rope marks
Speaker 7: on her ankles, wrists, and throat. And you say that
Speaker 7: police had determined or believed that she was hung upside
Speaker 7: down by her feet and tortured for hours before her death.
Speaker 5: Yes, it seems, and it's it's hard to fathom what
Speaker 5: on earth anyone could do to warrant somebody treating you
Speaker 5: that way, but certainly not. You know, some young beautiful
Speaker 5: want to be actress. You know, it's they never did
Speaker 5: find anything in her path. I quite pointed to that
Speaker 5: kind of death being warranted or yes, so she was
Speaker 5: hung upside down, she was, she was strained of blood.
Speaker 5: They're thinking, is that you know, she was tortured for
Speaker 5: a very long time before she it was finally killed.
Speaker 5: It was. It was just as brutal as I've seen.
Speaker 5: And it's for me. One of the really interesting things
Speaker 5: about not just this case, but a couple of the
Speaker 5: others too, is how much the police had to fight
Speaker 5: rumors because you know, people complain about the media today,
Speaker 5: but back then rumors made it into print a lot
Speaker 5: more than they do now. And also false confessions. It
Speaker 5: is amazing the number of people who step forward to
Speaker 5: take claim when something horrific like this happened.
Speaker 7: That was absolutely shocking. The stats and we'll go over
Speaker 7: those stats, but it was that was very, very shocking.
Speaker 7: Tell us tell our audience how she this Elizabeth Short
Speaker 7: gets the nickname the Black Dallian. What is this? And
Speaker 7: what is this? Reference too?
Speaker 5: There was a movie called The Blue Dahlia so which
Speaker 5: was popular at the time so it was kind of
Speaker 5: pulled from that, and it was changed to black because
Speaker 5: she had, you know, this raven dark hair and she
Speaker 5: liked to wear black clothing. So really it was sort
Speaker 5: of a pulled from the headlines kind of moniker.
Speaker 7: We talked about Elizabeth Short, this beautiful wanna be actress.
Speaker 7: She had done some film extra work and auditioned for jobs.
Speaker 7: She was again actively trying to be an actress. But
Speaker 7: tell us what the media did after this murder and
Speaker 7: team in terms of its importance. How did they present
Speaker 7: this case and how much of an impact did it
Speaker 7: have with the media and then with the public.
Speaker 5: It's funny. I just did an interview yesterday where somebody
Speaker 5: was talking to me about the They're asking about the
Speaker 5: increase in interest in true crime. You know, it's really
Speaker 5: it's not an increase because there's always been a strange
Speaker 5: fascination with true crime. And in this era where that
Speaker 5: came out was largely in the newspaper. So there were
Speaker 5: all of these stories. I mean, every single quarter turn
Speaker 5: that you could report on this case was front page news.
Speaker 5: So for an example, a friend of Elizabeth said that
Speaker 5: Elizabeth had bragged about being friends with an actress who
Speaker 5: was famous at the time named and Todd and so UPI,
Speaker 5: which is a wire service. They announced that the police
Speaker 5: would question this and Todd, who was a who is British.
Speaker 5: So Todd then tells them that she'd never met her.
Speaker 5: But this was all instead of reporting it out first
Speaker 5: and it being debunked and therefore not worthy of a story.
Speaker 5: The whole thing, like every turn of it, was front
Speaker 5: page news. And there were a lot of potential suspects.
Speaker 5: I have to say, you know, for this being an
Speaker 5: unsolved case, it does look like police were pretty thorough.
Speaker 5: They interviewed more than one hundred and fifty suspects, But
Speaker 5: every time a name was leaked, it was that person
Speaker 5: was guilty at least for a day, and it was just,
Speaker 5: you know, the headlines were absolutely merciless.
Speaker 7: You talk about all kinds of suspects one after another
Speaker 7: being arrested and getting a guilty man's treatment for one day.
Speaker 7: And they had other suspects that maybe they were investigating
Speaker 7: for a week or so before they could clear them.
Speaker 7: And again, like you say, the papers would run with
Speaker 7: any kind of rumor that was leaked to them. What
Speaker 7: was the idea that police did have or did they
Speaker 7: have anything concrete in terms of whether it was a man,
Speaker 7: whether it was a woman, and what was their theory
Speaker 7: on terms of what had happened.
Speaker 5: They did contemplate whether it could have been a woman,
Speaker 5: but there was also I mean, it would have been difficult.
Speaker 5: While Elizabeth was petite, it's still physically tough to imagine
Speaker 5: another woman lifting her up, getting her upside down and
Speaker 5: doing all of that by herself at least, So they
Speaker 5: always were leaning toward mail and then you know, it
Speaker 5: turns out we have the benefit of hindsight, and it
Speaker 5: turns out that they had some pretty strong front runners,
Speaker 5: but they never could quite make the case. And one
Speaker 5: of them was a doctor who is still largely on
Speaker 5: you know, most Officionado's you know list of favorites.
Speaker 7: And why is that you talk about that person's effort,
Speaker 7: Stephen Hodell. Talk about Stephen Hodell and how it becomes
Speaker 7: his book. But as you write, his father, this doctor
Speaker 7: was a suspect at that time, right.
Speaker 5: Steve Hodell wrote a book about his dad, and I
Speaker 5: found it one of the fun things researching the book.
Speaker 5: I'm really big on going through newspaper archives. I found
Speaker 5: all these stories written at the time but Steve Hodell
Speaker 5: were he was interviewed in two thousand and three by
Speaker 5: the AP and he had said that he saw some
Speaker 5: photos in his doctor father, George Hodell's wallet. That man
Speaker 5: looked to him an awful lot like tough to tell.
Speaker 5: There are some people who've done, you know, analyzes of
Speaker 5: the photos and they're not convinced. But bolstering that is
Speaker 5: that Hodell was actually a suspect in her murder. And
Speaker 5: we know that because some of the case files were
Speaker 5: released fifty years after she was killed, and he's lifted
Speaker 5: in there, and in fact, there were this George Hodell
Speaker 5: had been tried for committing incest with his daughter. He
Speaker 5: was acquitted, but when they were investigating that, when officials
Speaker 5: were investigating him, they were taping his conversations and some
Speaker 5: of them included Hodels saying things like suppose and I
Speaker 5: did kill her. They couldn't prove it now, so those
Speaker 5: are kind of a suspicious comments for an innocent person
Speaker 5: to make. So Steve Rodell ended up being absolutely convinced
Speaker 5: that his father was the killer. And lending credence to
Speaker 5: Odell is that he's he worked for the Los Angeles
Speaker 5: Police Department for quite a while. It's not like he
Speaker 5: was just somebody off the street with no law enforcement instincts.
Speaker 7: Black Dalua too is the case of one of those
Speaker 7: cases that seems eerily like what could happen today with
Speaker 7: the letter created from words and letters cut from magazines
Speaker 7: and papers and sent to police or the media. And
Speaker 7: what do experts today think about that letter and who
Speaker 7: might have sent that? What was the investigation at that
Speaker 7: time surrounding that.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, pretty soon after Abe died there were there
Speaker 5: was this letter made out of these strange like clippings,
Speaker 5: and it was sent to the examiner and it said
Speaker 5: something like, uh, I will give up uh in Dalia
Speaker 5: killing if I get ten years. But it's so they
Speaker 5: were basically like trying to say hint at that whoever
Speaker 5: the killer was was interested in giving himself up, But
Speaker 5: then he I believe he's sent a follow up saying
Speaker 5: basically never mind. There has always been some skepticism whether
Speaker 5: that was one of the crazy red herring, you know
Speaker 5: type situations where somebody's trying to insert themselves into the case,
Speaker 5: or whether it's real now now one of them. A
Speaker 5: letter came out that included Elizabeth this birth certificate, her
Speaker 5: address book, some of her personal papers, and then and
Speaker 5: that one. Obviously they were pretty comfortable with being legitimate.
Speaker 7: There were other theories as well, and people endeavored to
Speaker 7: write books up based on those theories. You talk about
Speaker 7: British author pu eat Well, what was the theory that
Speaker 7: he put forward regarding this Black Value murder?
Speaker 5: You know what, I have to remind myself which one
Speaker 5: that was, because there are so many freaking.
Speaker 7: He thought that that the Black Value murder was with
Speaker 7: his friend Connors and Mark Hanson, a local nightclub and
Speaker 7: movie theater owner.
Speaker 5: Thank you, go ahead, I'm sorry.
Speaker 7: No, I'm just I'm saying, I'm just reminding you of.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you, So yeah there. So Eatwell was a
Speaker 5: British author and his theory centered around Leslie Dylan, who
Speaker 5: was a bell hop. So the bell hop had in
Speaker 5: nineteen forty nine reached out to a doctor a saying
Speaker 5: he wanted to talk about the book for or the
Speaker 5: murder for a book he wanted to write, and the
Speaker 5: doctor got suspicious. And the bell hop had previously worked
Speaker 5: for mortician, and so that notion that her blood had
Speaker 5: been drained stood out because that is something that a
Speaker 5: person working to assist a mortician would know how to do.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 5: The Eatwell book proposed that Dylan had orchestrated the murder
Speaker 5: and he had worked with a friend of his named
Speaker 5: j Justic Connors, who had also been interviewed but released
Speaker 5: and then and Connors had also worked with Mark Hanson,
Speaker 5: a local nightclub a movie theater owner, and that's sort
Speaker 5: of where the Elizabeth connection comes in. Hanson was known
Speaker 5: to seduce women like Elizabeth. So the thought was that
Speaker 5: that the three of them actually were able to work
Speaker 5: together and because there was this trio, that they were
Speaker 5: able to get away with it. It is difficult, though,
Speaker 5: because each of these these theories, uh, there are pros
Speaker 5: and cons and some people are fervently you know, in
Speaker 5: the column of one theory or another. But for me,
Speaker 5: there there's nothing that is wrapped up in a bow.
Speaker 5: I mean, for me, the the the strongest one I
Speaker 5: think is is the Hodel theory. But it's a little
Speaker 5: I mean, they didn't have enough evidence, so.
Speaker 7: Who knows, right, right, And as you're right too, they
Speaker 7: put him under surveillance for three weeks in nineteen fifty,
Speaker 7: you're right, so they you would imagine that they did
Speaker 7: do some kind of thorough, thorough look at this person
Speaker 7: as a suspect, right, But then.
Speaker 5: You know, there's probably a three week span you could
Speaker 5: have watched Ted Bundy and not been tipped off to
Speaker 5: anything too.
Speaker 7: So sure, certainly it is.
Speaker 5: Hard to know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, certainly. Let's talk about another case. And like
Speaker 7: you say that when you worked in Detroit for eight years,
Speaker 7: this was a case that really impacted you. The Oakland
Speaker 7: County child killings. You call it stranger danger. This chapter
Speaker 7: four terrifying kidnappings and murders, two male victims and two females.
Speaker 7: Tell us, right, as you do write in the book,
Speaker 7: what is the interesting or unusual aspect a both the
Speaker 7: victims and sexual assault?
Speaker 8: With these four victims, what's interesting for the time is
Speaker 8: that they were very thoroughly cleaned, which kind of.
Speaker 5: Means the killer was a bit ahead of his time
Speaker 5: because in nineteen seventy six there was no DNA yet.
Speaker 5: Two of the victims, the two boys, investigators thought they
Speaker 5: looked like they had been sexually assaulted, but the girls
Speaker 5: had not. This one did resonate a lot with me,
Speaker 5: first off, because it still haunts the area. So if
Speaker 5: you've lived in Michigan for any amount of time in
Speaker 5: the Metro Detroit area, you've at least heard of this case.
Speaker 5: But it also resonates because I'm a mom and there's
Speaker 5: a story of one of the kids. In particular, his
Speaker 5: parents had even once the murder started, His parents had
Speaker 5: said to him, you know, okay, so what do you do?
Speaker 7: You?
Speaker 5: You know, somebody ask you to get in their car,
Speaker 5: and the kid knows the answer is to run away,
Speaker 5: but he ends up in a car. And what's haunted
Speaker 5: the dad is that you know that because they had
Speaker 5: gone over this at some point, surely it had to
Speaker 5: flash through the kid's mind. He had to know what
Speaker 5: was going to happen because he had been warned specifically.
Speaker 5: So that's always stuck with me.
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Speaker 7: Absolutely. There was confusion in terms of tying all these
Speaker 7: victims together because one of the victims had died of
Speaker 7: a shotgun blast of the head.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's always tricky too. The three of them
Speaker 5: were stopped, one was shot, so at first it didn't
Speaker 5: look as though that that fourth one the shooting was connected,
Speaker 5: but they ended up being pretty comfortable that it was
Speaker 5: all It was all done, not necessarily by the same person,
Speaker 5: because they're not convinced that it was a single perpetrator,
Speaker 5: but by the same group of people at least.
Speaker 7: Very interesting. You talk about the first victim, twelve year
Speaker 7: old Mark Stebbens, and he was hanging out with his
Speaker 7: older brother Mike at Allegiant Hall about a mile away
Speaker 7: from their home in Ferndale, Michigan, February nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 7: And so they went to play pool and after a while,
Speaker 7: Mark city wanted to walk home, walked to watch TV,
Speaker 7: went down the normal path he would take, and then
Speaker 7: he didn't make it home. What was the well, how
Speaker 7: was the media attention to this and what did the well?
Speaker 7: First off, what did the mother do when he didn't
Speaker 7: come home? Tell us what unfolded there? Because this is
Speaker 7: the first victim. They have no idea of these other
Speaker 7: three victims. What happens after this? Tell us as you do,
Speaker 7: as you're write in a book.
Speaker 5: Well, back then, you know, when when somebody called and
Speaker 5: reported disappearance, they really didn't take it seriously right away.
Speaker 5: And you know, Mark walked this path home that he
Speaker 5: had walked home. You know, countless times before I happened
Speaker 5: to know that area. I mean nine mile in Woodward
Speaker 5: is it's a it's a busy area. It's not someplace
Speaker 5: where I've walked it alone at night many times, and
Speaker 5: I never would have looked over my shoulder and a child.
Speaker 5: I wouldn't have looked twice at a child walking by
Speaker 5: himself either. So but so when he didn't come home,
Speaker 5: his mom called police. But and the people who knew
Speaker 5: him got worried because this was unlike him. But media
Speaker 5: didn't really jump on it. It's, you know, it's at
Speaker 5: first looking like another case where the kid's likely going
Speaker 5: to turn up within you know, a day or so,
Speaker 5: because that's typically what does happen with kids who are
Speaker 5: are gone quickly. But then four days later it's an
Speaker 5: officer spotted the body abandoned in a parking lot. Then
Speaker 5: the media attention came. So it's hard to know what
Speaker 5: kind of what kind of if there would have been
Speaker 5: any difference in the police's ability to nail this down
Speaker 5: if media attention had been what it is today with
Speaker 5: amber alerts and such. But at the time, they just
Speaker 5: didn't take it very seriously. In those early days and those.
Speaker 7: Too, it was still a more innocent time mark. The
Speaker 7: Steppens was found with rope burns on his wrist. He
Speaker 7: wasn't bound, but he had been strangled or suffocated, and
Speaker 7: they determined it. It was at least a day earlier. And
Speaker 7: you talk about Ferndale Police Chief Donald Geary, he had said, again,
Speaker 7: this is very unusual, say much like you say, way
Speaker 7: ahead of his time. Not only was the body scrubs,
Speaker 7: but the boy's fingernails had been scraped even you're.
Speaker 5: Right, right, yeah, that's that to me. I mean, my
Speaker 5: first thought is, jeez, I wonder if this person knows
Speaker 5: law enforcement. But even at the time, the scraping of
Speaker 5: the fingernails, the best you could do at the time
Speaker 5: is maybe you could get enough for blood type you know, DNA.
Speaker 5: The first trial with DNA evidence was nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 5: so this is ten years earlier than that. This killer
Speaker 5: where the killers were amazingly ahead of their time.
Speaker 7: And we'll talk about that too. I want to discuss
Speaker 7: something with you about that in terms of what really
Speaker 7: hit me when I noticed a couple of things with
Speaker 7: all these victims and what they had in common. You
Speaker 7: fast forward to December twenty sixth day after Christmas nineteen
Speaker 7: seventy six, a motorist finds a body of Jill Robinson,
Speaker 7: who's again twelve years old, in Troy, Michigan. She had
Speaker 7: left home four days earlier after an argument with her mother.
Speaker 7: What is the state of her body as opposed to
Speaker 7: twelve year old boy just before that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, this was Jill with someone who had been shot
Speaker 5: with a shotgun, which, of course, I mean that is
Speaker 5: immediately different and you would have trouble connecting those killings
Speaker 5: straight away. But investigators did notice. I mean, first off,
Speaker 5: just two kids killed in such within a year, I
Speaker 5: mean that's unnerving. So they're going to look at them
Speaker 5: and see what similarities they have, and they're were them.
Speaker 5: Jill's parents had been divorced, which was the same as
Speaker 5: Mark seven. Their personalities were similar. They both were described
Speaker 5: as like hanging out by themselves a lot, being loner prone.
Speaker 5: And then the big kicker was that it also appeared
Speaker 5: she had been kidnapped and held for several days, the
Speaker 5: same as Mark. She'd been fed in that time, which
Speaker 5: was the case with Mark, and as with Mark, her
Speaker 5: body was dumped on a day that it had snowed,
Speaker 5: which was a hindrance for police gathering at evidence. So
Speaker 5: again it seemed like whoever was doing this was thinking ahead.
Speaker 7: Now you're right, just now. Just a week later, January two,
Speaker 7: nineteen seventy seven, Christine Milovich Mahelich left the party store
Speaker 7: about four blocks from her house in nearby Berkeley, Michigan,
Speaker 7: and then she vanished. What was the what was her
Speaker 7: disappearance now, after Mark and after Jill was How was
Speaker 7: her disappearance treated by police?
Speaker 5: It definitely got faster attention at this point, especially because
Speaker 5: it was so soon after Jill's body was discovered. It
Speaker 5: seemed as though the killer was speeding things up, which
Speaker 5: is you know, I mean, profiling wasn't widespread at this
Speaker 5: point either, but there was still an understanding amongst the
Speaker 5: law enforcement community that when somebody gets comfortable, when a
Speaker 5: killer gets comfortable, they might start up being the pace.
Speaker 5: And that is definitely what it seemed like here. So
Speaker 5: with with Christine, sorry, she had just been buying a magazine.
Speaker 5: All of these you know, we talk about it being
Speaker 5: like a simpler time. It's safer today than it was
Speaker 5: back then. But it's all because these cases, these in
Speaker 5: the Atlanta disappearance cases, they were the ones that woke
Speaker 5: a lot of parents. So that's like, oh, maybe my
Speaker 5: kids shouldn't be walking alone anymore, you know. So a
Speaker 5: week after Christine vanished, police were certain that these were connected.
Speaker 5: And they were particularly unnerved by this because in Christine's case,
Speaker 5: it was three o'clock in the afternoon and it was
Speaker 5: a busy street. And there's a quote from one of
Speaker 5: the sergeants that I found in a newspaper at the time.
Speaker 5: If someone can be snatched off a busy street at
Speaker 5: three pm on a Sunday afternoon, how can you protect anyone?
Speaker 5: So things were definitely starting to feel tense in all
Speaker 5: of Oakland County. And I should mention too that these
Speaker 5: are all you know, when you're talking about Metro Detroit,
Speaker 5: it's hard to know about the you know, which areas
Speaker 5: are affluent and which are struggling. More. Oakland County is
Speaker 5: pretty affluent. Berkeley is a high you know, upper middle
Speaker 5: class for the most part. Ferndale, that area was maybe
Speaker 5: a little uh less affluent, but not much. So all
Speaker 5: of this was really shocking for that place.
Speaker 7: Yes, again disturbing being held in captivity nineteen days after
Speaker 7: Korean's Christrian's Christine's disappearance, a mail carrier, Jerry Wosney, discovers
Speaker 7: her body in a ditch in Franklin, Michigan. Not in
Speaker 7: Oakland County, No, that is Oakland County, Yes, Franklin.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a bit of a drive. And it also
Speaker 5: speaks to this, I mean, where are these kids being held?
Speaker 5: How could this be going unnoticed? The whole county is
Speaker 5: on high alert, that the whole region is. So how
Speaker 5: can somebody manage to pick a human being up off
Speaker 5: the street, hold them captive and nobody notices? But this
Speaker 5: mail carrier ends up. He saw the hand first, and
Speaker 5: then he saw the rest of the body, and same
Speaker 5: with the other two. Christine had been dropped during a
Speaker 5: snow a snowfall, and it looked to him as though
Speaker 5: whoever dropped her a like sort of done this half
Speaker 5: asked attempt to cover her with snow.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we talk about you mentioned the conversation that mister
Speaker 7: King had with his son, eleven year old son Tim
Speaker 7: after Christine was found, and of course this case that
Speaker 7: captivated everyone's imagination and probably obviously all these parents as well.
Speaker 7: So this is less than two months later, mister King
Speaker 7: has had this conversation with Tim warning him if you
Speaker 7: ever have anybody come up to you, just run, scream
Speaker 7: and run. This is March sixteenth, nineteen seventy seven, less
Speaker 7: than two months later. What happens with Tim King, Well.
Speaker 5: He skateboards to a local store, a drug store, to
Speaker 5: pick up some candy, and it's literally three blocks from
Speaker 5: his house. And he got to the store. The clerk
Speaker 5: said that he bought his candy and he left and
Speaker 5: he never got home. So that one, you know, again,
Speaker 5: when his body was found, it was totally cleaned. And
Speaker 5: then this extra like disturbing detail that always stayed with
Speaker 5: me was that his body was tossed like it was nothing,
Speaker 5: and then his skateboard was just tossed alongside it. It's
Speaker 5: just like, you know, this kid was picked up, used
Speaker 5: for whatever he was going to be used for, and
Speaker 5: then just tossed like trash.
Speaker 7: Let's talk about another more horrifying aspect of this. His
Speaker 7: favorite meal was fried chicken in particular KFC. And so
Speaker 7: after he was missing, there was some outreach through the media,
Speaker 7: talked about if you come home, we got your KFC.
Speaker 7: Now he's missing, and of course the police know that
Speaker 7: they have this psychopath on the loose child killer. Everyone's alerted,
Speaker 7: tell us about when he's found, and then with this
Speaker 7: fried chicken in mind, what they find in terms of
Speaker 7: from the autopsy regarding chicken.
Speaker 5: Well, he was missing for a week. His body was
Speaker 5: then found, so like the other ones, though he clearly
Speaker 5: hadn't been killed immediately, he'd been kept alive for most
Speaker 5: of the time he'd been missing. And in fact, police
Speaker 5: believes that when they found the body, Kim had been
Speaker 5: suffocated within the hour, and when they did the autopsy
Speaker 5: they found that him had eaten just before he was killed.
Speaker 5: Fried chicken.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was a last meal offered or something.
Speaker 7: What I want to ask you was I've alluded to
Speaker 7: this before, was that when we said that this killer
Speaker 7: was way ahead in potential DNA intelligence, well that couldn't
Speaker 7: be that he couldn't have that foresight to know of
Speaker 7: a DNA innovation years and years later. However, it also
Speaker 7: was a time of developing profiles on killers, and there
Speaker 7: weren't too many child killers in which to get examples from.
Speaker 7: What I thought was particularly interesting was the detail that
Speaker 7: you wrote about how they were washed and then carefully dressed.
Speaker 7: The fingernails were scraped, but this fried chicken thing that
Speaker 7: maybe the killer saw the plea by the parents or
Speaker 7: and or the kid said this is my favorite meal.
Speaker 7: It seems eerily coincidental that he would pay this much attention.
Speaker 7: And I just think that he's ahead in terms of
Speaker 7: the insane psychopathic killer that pays attention to the details
Speaker 7: of the kids, like he loves them and cherishes them
Speaker 7: and treats them good and then of course has to
Speaker 7: kill them.
Speaker 5: Right right, Yeah, Well, it paints an incredibly disturbing picture.
Speaker 5: It's one thing when you are thinking about I mean,
Speaker 5: none of it is pleasant, but it's one thing when
Speaker 5: you're thinking about somebody who is evil and he is
Speaker 5: out to hurt. It is another thing when you are
Speaker 5: thinking of the culprit is thinking of himself as benevolent
Speaker 5: and that maybe you know, he's doing something kind for
Speaker 5: these children. That's a special kind of crazy.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, yeah, the bone chilling stuff.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, it really is. Now you're right, there's enough witnesses
Speaker 7: come forward so that a sketch artist at the time
Speaker 7: creates a sketch white man, dark hair, prominent nose, thick lips,
Speaker 7: mutton chop, sideburns, and then even a psychological profile was
Speaker 7: created at that time. What is the result of all
Speaker 7: of that sketches and witness eyewitness reports.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean they so from the psychological profile, they
Speaker 5: what they told people they were looking for is somebody
Speaker 5: twenty to thirty five years old, somebody who's well educated, white,
Speaker 5: colored job and obviously like must either live.
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Speaker 5: Alone, or live with enough freedom that he can pull
Speaker 5: this off, because this is pretty time intensive. So the
Speaker 5: police chief at the time urged people in the medical
Speaker 5: and legal professions to come forward because they he thought
Speaker 5: that maybe the killer might be seeing a psychiatrist. And
Speaker 5: then they also started to try to appeal to people
Speaker 5: who might know something, but we're covering for this person,
Speaker 5: you know, a mom or a buddy or something like that.
Speaker 5: So one of the things that happened now was that
Speaker 5: family members of the victims ended up being left out
Speaker 5: of the loop. So they wanted information from investigators, and
Speaker 5: investigators were so concerned about trying to keep this close
Speaker 5: to the vest I mean, they did, of course legitimately
Speaker 5: want to solve these murders, but it was it was
Speaker 5: upsetting to the family that they were not given enough information,
Speaker 5: and so they they ended up kind of at odds
Speaker 5: with the cops in the case, which is pretty I mean,
Speaker 5: it's pretty unusual for that time period, and actually the family,
Speaker 5: I'm not sure if this is something that you were
Speaker 5: wanting to get into, but that the family. For me,
Speaker 5: one of the more interesting parts of the case in
Speaker 5: terms of legal aspects that have developed, is that the
Speaker 5: family has had to fight for investigating material to be released.
Speaker 5: So these murders were in seventy six, seventy seven, and
Speaker 5: it was just twenty twelve. It was actually right after
Speaker 5: I left the Detroit Free Press when I was working there,
Speaker 5: they finally released about six thousand pages. And so, you know,
Speaker 5: typically a police department doesn't have to release information that
Speaker 5: is part of an ongoing investigation, but if you haven't
Speaker 5: solved it in decades, maybe it's time you release it
Speaker 5: so somebody else can have a chance at looking at
Speaker 5: it before the killers or killers have died, make some
Speaker 5: progress on it. But they really had to fight for that.
Speaker 7: Now, from those six thousand pages of case documents, there
Speaker 7: is suspect speculation. You talk about a mysterious man named John.
Speaker 7: Maybe it was a priest or someone posing as a
Speaker 7: police officer. But you say few actual names were publicly
Speaker 7: tied to the case, except there was a name, David Norberg,
Speaker 7: an auto worker who drove a car similar to the
Speaker 7: one who was described nar Kim's King's abduction. Tell us
Speaker 7: about why he was a suspect.
Speaker 5: He stood out because he did have a violent pass.
Speaker 5: So he had been suspected of killing two little girls
Speaker 5: in the late nineteen seventies, so you know, obviously he
Speaker 5: wasn't he didn't jump out in seventy six because he
Speaker 5: wasn't on anybody's radar yet, but pretty soon he was,
Speaker 5: and he wasn't evicted, and then he died in a
Speaker 5: car crash soon after these. So it was nineteen eighty
Speaker 5: one and his wife found in his belongings this silver
Speaker 5: cross and it was inscribed with the name Christine and
Speaker 5: it was even spelled the same way Christine the ka,
Speaker 5: so she remembered. The wife remembered that that Christine had
Speaker 5: been the name of the Oakland County child killer's third victim.
Speaker 5: So she reached out to Christine's aunt and the aunt said, oh,
Speaker 5: that's identical to a cross that Christine had worn soon
Speaker 5: before her death. So police, yeah, so they had long
Speaker 5: been looking at her, but then they finally did exume
Speaker 5: his or him, I'm sorry, but they finally did exhume
Speaker 5: his body in ninety nine because as careful as this
Speaker 5: killer was, they did manage to pull a little DNA
Speaker 5: and they stored it. But Norberg DNA did not match
Speaker 5: what they had retrieved from one of the bodies. Of course,
Speaker 5: it could be that that was, you know, DNA from
Speaker 5: something else. Entirely, you never entirely know how this stuff
Speaker 5: plays out, but they had nothing conclusive to tie him
Speaker 5: to it, as suspicious as he seemed.
Speaker 7: Now there's another suspect, was convicted pedophile Christopher Bush, and
Speaker 7: he was just on a short list of suspects. Why
Speaker 7: is he a suspect and what happens at looking at
Speaker 7: him as a suspect.
Speaker 5: Well, the pedophile part helped. I mean, they were definitely
Speaker 5: investigators were absolutely zeroing in on people who they knew
Speaker 5: to have those kinds of proclivities. But he also drove
Speaker 5: a car that looked like the one spotted I believe
Speaker 5: in Tim's abduction, so investigator. So he ended up being
Speaker 5: questioned and he straight up like knowledged that he's a pedophile.
Speaker 5: So I guess that's useful for investigators. He this It
Speaker 5: gets a little complicated because there are politics involved, but basically,
Speaker 5: investigators wanted to keep him in jail. They liked him
Speaker 5: for this, and they wanted to learn more from him.
Speaker 5: But the head prosecutor, who's still a big player in
Speaker 5: Oakland County today, released him as part of a plea deal,
Speaker 5: and then in seventy eight he killed himself.
Speaker 7: Now, what about the allegation or mention that you have
Speaker 7: about a drawing of a screaming boy that resembled Mark
Speaker 7: Stebbens reportedly pinned to the wall when they found.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, yeah, and that's one of those you know,
Speaker 5: the cross with Norburg. It seems like a and obvious, like, oh, okay,
Speaker 5: so he must have done it. But then the screaming drawing,
Speaker 5: it's the piece that people point to a lot for
Speaker 5: Christopher Bush. So this drawing was pinned to the wall
Speaker 5: and it was this screaming child and young boy, and
Speaker 5: people who saw it felt like it resembled the first victim.
Speaker 7: Mark. Incredible. Now, yet another suspect did you write about?
Speaker 7: Is this James Gunnell's fifty six year old person and
Speaker 7: you say he's connected to Kristen's murder through DNA?
Speaker 5: Yes, tell us the strongest connection that we've got. Yeah,
Speaker 5: And that wasn't until twenty twelve that investigators said they
Speaker 5: let people know that a strand of hair had been
Speaker 5: found on Christine and then they tested it against this
Speaker 5: fifty six year old man, James Gunnals, and found they
Speaker 5: had to use mitochondrial DNA. It's a little less precise,
Speaker 5: but it's awfully good. So they found that it was
Speaker 5: a match for Gunnals, or at least they couldn't exclude
Speaker 5: him based on it. The interesting part with him is
Speaker 5: he would have only been sixteen and he had been
Speaker 5: one of Christopher Bush's victims. So that does make you
Speaker 5: wonder if he had been victimized and maybe one of
Speaker 5: his hairs landed on Christine through some kind of transfer
Speaker 5: or if he had been recruited to you know, assault
Speaker 5: other people who were picked up by somebody like Bush.
Speaker 7: You talk about the test producing another suspect, Art Sloan.
Speaker 7: Tell us about Arch Sloan. Why he's a suspect.
Speaker 5: He's another one who's serving a life sentence for the
Speaker 5: rape of a ten year old boy, so known pedophile,
Speaker 5: and a hair found in his car matched hair at
Speaker 5: both Mark and Tim's crime scenes. So now the hair
Speaker 5: wasn't Sloane, but there's a hair in his car and
Speaker 5: separate hairs on these two boys and they all match.
Speaker 5: So investigators are thinking, okay, well maybe it belongs to
Speaker 5: an acquaintance of Sloans. And this is this all feeds
Speaker 5: into one of the most prevalent theories that I heard
Speaker 5: while working in Detroit, which was that it was some
Speaker 5: kind of pedophile ring, so that there might have been
Speaker 5: more people involved, and that certainly, you know, would explain
Speaker 5: how it could how somebody could be kept in captivity
Speaker 5: for an amount of time and nobody report it.
Speaker 7: Now this story getting stranger. Now you talk about Mark
Speaker 7: Stebbens's family through this whole thing, is trying to fight
Speaker 7: for information from the police to release the files. But
Speaker 7: they also file a wrongful death suit in two thousand
Speaker 7: and seven against a man named Theodore Lamborghine, a man
Speaker 7: also in prison for life on assault convictions. Why does
Speaker 7: Stebens do this? And as a result of their efforts,
Speaker 7: what happens.
Speaker 5: They did this not so much because they fought for
Speaker 5: sure they would get a conviction. They did it because
Speaker 5: they wanted more information. And when you file a lawsuit,
Speaker 5: there's a called discovery, and sometimes it's a clever backdoor
Speaker 5: way to get more information released from an investigation than
Speaker 5: you might otherwise get. So Steven's lawyer was one of
Speaker 5: the people who didn't think that any one, single person
Speaker 5: did this. He he thought that one what's the word
Speaker 5: I'm looking for? He thought that one angle that should
Speaker 5: be pursued was that Lamborghine refused to take a polygraph
Speaker 5: even though he was offered a plea deal. So even
Speaker 5: when they told him, hey, you'll serve much less time
Speaker 5: if you do this, he said no. And so the
Speaker 5: lawyer's like, well, if you're not the Oakland County child killer,
Speaker 5: wouldn't you say so, wouldn't you try to prove that
Speaker 5: the fact that he refused was very suspicious to him.
Speaker 5: But the suit ended up being dismissed in two thousand
Speaker 5: and eight, then a year after it was filed, because
Speaker 5: because they didn't they didn't feel there was enough evidence,
Speaker 5: but the judge did leave room for it to be
Speaker 5: refiled if they did find more evidence that pointed directly
Speaker 5: at Lamborghine.
Speaker 7: What was the end result in terms of any more
Speaker 7: suspects that they seriously investigated after that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, they I don't think that they have They're not
Speaker 5: short on suspects, and they do have some DNA evidence,
Speaker 5: but unfortunately it's really limited. They have basically a few
Speaker 5: strands of hair. And there is something a little strange
Speaker 5: to me, just personally, as you know, a reporter who's
Speaker 5: done some cold case investigating. It's a little strange to
Speaker 5: me that they still hold on to the evidence so tightly,
Speaker 5: because come on, it's not like it's not like anybody
Speaker 5: can script the investigation at this point, you know, I mean,
Speaker 5: this case happened before I was born, So I think, though,
Speaker 5: my gut is that if more were released, we'd have
Speaker 5: a better sense at least of why some of these
Speaker 5: people were not arrested when it looked pretty strong, you know,
Speaker 5: or I'd love to know how much more they did
Speaker 5: on say, Gunnals and Sloan, the ones where they did
Speaker 5: have DNA ties. You really can't tell how far they
Speaker 5: went because you don't have the files.
Speaker 7: You write. Then, in twenty twelve, an identified unidentified investigator
Speaker 7: named Bob claimed there were eleven to sixteen victims and
Speaker 7: killings connected to Satanic rituals, and of course those claims
Speaker 7: were dismissed due to lack of evidence. But I always
Speaker 7: find it odd that there is never ever And according
Speaker 7: to the FBI, there's pretty strict criteria what a Satanic
Speaker 7: ritual is classified as. But I find it odd that
Speaker 7: there's never any connection to Satanic rituals. Ever. What do
Speaker 7: you think about what this investigator said about Satanic rituals
Speaker 7: any credibility.
Speaker 5: I am always suspicious of somebody who's not willing to
Speaker 5: put their full name out there. That's just the cynical
Speaker 5: journalist in me. But that doesn't mean the eleven to
Speaker 5: sixteen victims. I buy that pretty quickly. I don't know
Speaker 5: about Satanic rituals. To me, it feels like a I mean,
Speaker 5: we haven't seen any evidence of that, but what we
Speaker 5: have seen is clear evidence of some kind of maybe pedophilia,
Speaker 5: possibly ring. That's where my suspicion leans one thing. That
Speaker 5: But when you have a case, so when you have
Speaker 5: a case that happened and the political players remain in
Speaker 5: positions of power, it can get really frustrating because those
Speaker 5: people have decided they either know what happened or they
Speaker 5: know what they can't find out, so they're not going
Speaker 5: to release this information. Basically, what I would love to
Speaker 5: see is all of this stuff come to light, but
Speaker 5: it's probably not going to happen until after after the
Speaker 5: then prosecutor retires from county politics altogether.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Yeah, it's a fascinating case. It certainly has no answers,
Speaker 7: but again, like not short on suspects, no, And.
Speaker 5: That was one of the interesting things about researching all
Speaker 5: of these cases. They all seem to have an interesting
Speaker 5: array of suspects. Some were clearly people raising their hand
Speaker 5: when they had nothing to do with it and were
Speaker 5: just mentally unstable enough to want that kind of attention,
Speaker 5: but a lot of them are really strong possible suspects.
Speaker 5: And you can see how frustrating it must be for
Speaker 5: the family for all of these families to be like,
Speaker 5: you know, how can we know this much but not
Speaker 5: be able to get any one of these people in court?
Speaker 5: How can we not reach that finish line? You know?
Speaker 7: Absolutely we have time to talk about one more case
Speaker 7: in this Unsolved Murders. Can we talk about the Town
Speaker 7: Law murders of nineteen eighty two, because this is again
Speaker 7: a fascinating case that you've covered. Mary Kellerman September eighty
Speaker 7: two in Chicago is under the weather and takes a
Speaker 7: couple extra strength towle noow from our parents' bathroom. Tell
Speaker 7: us about this case and why you decided to cover
Speaker 7: this in particular, and some of the more fascinating aspects
Speaker 7: of this that we might not have known about.
Speaker 5: I thought this one was especially interesting because when we
Speaker 5: think of unsolved murders, we don't automatically think of something
Speaker 5: like this. So what happened was you had the opening
Speaker 5: of the chapter is you could see it cinematically because
Speaker 5: in one part of town, you've got Mary who goes
Speaker 5: and pops a couple of tailanol and then her dad
Speaker 5: hears this thump and he runs in and he finds her,
Speaker 5: and you know, she's twelve years old, and she's pronounced
Speaker 5: dead by ten am. And then across town. Somebody completely unrelated,
Speaker 5: twenty seven years old. He's a postal worker. He wakes
Speaker 5: up and he calls in sick to work because he's
Speaker 5: not feeling great. He picks up his kids from preschool,
Speaker 5: he goes to the pharmacy to get some medicine, and
Speaker 5: then he decided he should take some chilanol in an
Speaker 5: app and then within minutes he drops in the kitchen.
Speaker 5: So this is happening across town. This is a Chicago area.
Speaker 5: All of these these people just suddenly fall ill and
Speaker 5: they are They're mostly dead within minutes. It's frightening. And
Speaker 5: then they the investigators pretty like impressively quickly. I mean
Speaker 5: it's especially considering the time pieced together that all, you know,
Speaker 5: the connection between them is that they had taken tail
Speaker 5: and all. And then they they start to realize that
Speaker 5: somebody's tampered with them. And this is one of those
Speaker 5: cases that for me, I had heard of, but it
Speaker 5: sounded more like urban legend. Then I didn't really fully
Speaker 5: grasp how many victims there were and exactly what had happened.
Speaker 5: But this is the case that caused, you know, standards
Speaker 5: to change, and now we have feels on top of
Speaker 5: our medicine that we buy at the stores. It's because
Speaker 5: somebody had gone in and put in these tainted pills
Speaker 5: into these bottles and then slipped them right back on
Speaker 5: the shelves and straight up killed people.
Speaker 7: What you write is so moviesque though in terms of
Speaker 7: the facts, is that the second victim, Adam, takes the
Speaker 7: towel Nolls and then his brother Stanley, after they rush
Speaker 7: him to the emerged, he takes the paying killer for
Speaker 7: the stress, and his wife has a headache, so they
Speaker 7: both take him. And now, luckily the doctor that was
Speaker 7: on duty, this doctor Kim, who had treated I just
Speaker 7: seen Stanley in fine shape, now gets this call that
Speaker 7: other people from Adam's family are coming in, so he
Speaker 7: realizes quickly. Like you say, they miraculously figured this out quickly,
Speaker 7: especially for the time, and that was partly just timing,
Speaker 7: is that he had met Stanley and then figured, well,
Speaker 7: Jesus must be much more than just a heart at attack.
Speaker 5: Here, right. I mean, nobody had seen I mean, aside
Speaker 5: from the family members. Obviously nobody knew what condition Mary
Speaker 5: the twelve year old had been before she took her tail,
Speaker 5: and al same thing with Adam. But a doctor had
Speaker 5: just chatted with Stanley, telling him about his brother's situation,
Speaker 5: and he saw somebody healthy, and so when he comes
Speaker 5: in and his wife comes in, it triggered something quickly
Speaker 5: in him. So that probably kept more people from being killed.
Speaker 7: Well, you also write about two suburban firefighters who had
Speaker 7: been monitoring chatter on their fire radios, radios that they
Speaker 7: kept at home, and they were comparing notes, and they
Speaker 7: were the person's people that contacted doctor Kim and realized
Speaker 7: that that was the shared menality between all these people,
Speaker 7: was the inconspicuous talentol exactly.
Speaker 5: Yeah, these two and you know, they they weren't doctors,
Speaker 5: but they had this hunch. They you know, when somebody collapses, uh, firefighters,
Speaker 5: they're paying attention to the chat around the radios, and
Speaker 5: and they knew that the uh, the brother and his
Speaker 5: wife had both taken tylanol. So they they placed a
Speaker 5: phone call and said, you know, stab in the dark here,
Speaker 5: but could it be the tilnyl. So that gave that
Speaker 5: doctor the you know, it's one thing to know that,
Speaker 5: oh goodness, they seem to be related. It's another thing
Speaker 5: to be given sort of a shortcut into figuring out okay,
Speaker 5: this is what I need to test to see if
Speaker 5: this is the culprit, and that's what he was able
Speaker 5: to do. So inside of those bottles, like basically they
Speaker 5: had they had capsules with those little pellets. I'm not
Speaker 5: sure what you call them, but the little tiny pellets
Speaker 5: and the capsules have been emptied and refilled with cyanide.
Speaker 5: So between five and seven micrograms is fatal, and these
Speaker 5: capsules had up to sixty five miligrams, so they were micrograms,
Speaker 5: so they were in several thousand times more than a
Speaker 5: fatal dose. And so that's why the people who took them,
Speaker 5: because you can have cyanide poison that last for months
Speaker 5: and they check in your hair and all that stuff.
Speaker 5: But the floored them in minutes and there was no recourse.
Speaker 7: You write of the incredible panic in Chicago, And what
Speaker 7: I found interesting in your book is that you write
Speaker 7: about national report sorts of other victims falling ill from
Speaker 7: various poisons like rat poison and hydrochloric acid. So was
Speaker 7: investigation found opportunistic copycats? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, And in fact, I think one of the reasons
Speaker 5: I had heard of this sort it was kind of
Speaker 5: niggling in the back of my mind. I believe there's
Speaker 5: a forensic file where they figured out that one of
Speaker 5: the copycats had tried to kill her husband. You know,
Speaker 5: So it was pretty It became a in intriguing potentiality
Speaker 5: for people who were upset with others in their lives
Speaker 5: because it was so random, and you know, all you
Speaker 5: had to do was tamper one of those pills and say, well,
Speaker 5: I bought it this way. Of course, there are some
Speaker 5: more scientific tells that people maybe weren't thinking of, like,
Speaker 5: you know, they knew that, they knew the way that
Speaker 5: the originals had been pulled apart and put back together
Speaker 5: and all that. But yeah, there were there were not
Speaker 5: just copycats, but then also this this panic that just
Speaker 5: swept the area and not just Chicago, I mean it
Speaker 5: swept the country.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Now we talk about suspects in this case, and an
Speaker 7: early suspect was somebody named Roger Arnold who had worked
Speaker 7: alongside one of the victims in a food warehouse. He's
Speaker 7: forty eight years old, and he was arrested after a
Speaker 7: tip off that he had cyanide in his house, and
Speaker 7: he was interrogated for three days. What happened in terms
Speaker 7: of that, you know, that looked for cyanide in his home,
Speaker 7: and what about the interrogation for three days and tell
Speaker 7: us about the unofficial I guess, as you write, the
Speaker 7: eighth victim, because there were seven victims of the town,
Speaker 7: now murderer the eighth victim as a result of Roger
Speaker 7: Arnold and his actions.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this was I always talk about crime, as you know,
Speaker 5: being this never ending disaster. You know, the ripple effects
Speaker 5: never end, and this is very clearly indicative of that.
Speaker 5: So the situation was that we don't know who which
Speaker 5: coworker reported Arnold as having cyanide in his home, But
Speaker 5: what we do know is that Arnold was heavily interrogated
Speaker 5: for three days, and then it was sort of I
Speaker 5: think that the most recent scenario I can relate it
Speaker 5: to is Richard Jewel from the ninety sixth Olympic bombing,
Speaker 5: where you know, the name splashed all over the place.
Speaker 5: He's looking guilty because that's how it's presented. And then
Speaker 5: three days later, please say, you know, we can't find
Speaker 5: a link. So he's released, but he feels like his
Speaker 5: whole life is ruined, and you know, it kind of
Speaker 5: probably is. So he started to believe that a coworker
Speaker 5: named John. I'm not sure if it's the niche or spanisha,
Speaker 5: but John was the one who tipped police off. He
Speaker 5: was this forty six year old computer consultant and he
Speaker 5: had kids. He was the father of three. So he
Speaker 5: decides that John is the one who ruined his life.
Speaker 5: So he shoots him and kills him, and then learns
Speaker 5: after that that police say, no, he wasn't our informant,
Speaker 5: and so Arnold said years later, I killed a man,
Speaker 5: perfectly innocent person. So he's considered the unofficial eighth victim
Speaker 5: of this wave of killings.
Speaker 7: You talk about. The most likely break in the case
Speaker 7: was two weeks after and the manufacturer of the product,
Speaker 7: Johnson and Johnson, received a letter promising to stop the
Speaker 7: killings for one million dollars. You talk about that letter
Speaker 7: was given to the FBI and was traced. Who was
Speaker 7: it traced to and what happens as a result of
Speaker 7: this turn in the investigation.
Speaker 5: His name was James W. Lewis. There are a lot
Speaker 5: of James Lewis's in New York City, so made appoint
Speaker 5: to include the w At first it was dismissed. You
Speaker 5: know that he was being opportunistic. But when you talk
Speaker 5: to people who know this case inside and out, he's
Speaker 5: still on the top of their suspect list. But that's
Speaker 5: partly because nobody else has you know, Arisen as a
Speaker 5: more likely suspect. So, but there are there are some
Speaker 5: things that are interesting about him. So sure, he and
Speaker 5: his wife had pillmaking machines. They had imported some from
Speaker 5: India when they first moved to Chicago. They had lived
Speaker 5: under false names. That's not usually what people do, so
Speaker 5: why would you do that. That's a little suspicious. He
Speaker 5: also had some violence in his past. He had been
Speaker 5: charged with beating and dismembering a man. The charges were dismissed,
Speaker 5: but it still is something that investigators look at when
Speaker 5: they're trying to figure out somebody's character and then but
Speaker 5: they've never found anything concrete that connected him. I mean,
Speaker 5: he was convicted of trying to extort, so he's the
Speaker 5: only one who's been charged in connection at all with
Speaker 5: this crime. But they've never found anything definitive connecting him
Speaker 5: to the actual poisonings. But I did find that as
Speaker 5: recently as two thousand and nine, federal investigators had searched
Speaker 5: his home. Nothing was found, but they're still you know,
Speaker 5: as recently as a decade ago, they were still trying
Speaker 5: to figure out if they could, if they could nail
Speaker 5: him for it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you write an interesting stating.
Speaker 5: Oh, I'm sorry, But the next year he actually wrote
Speaker 5: a novel called poison The Doctor's Dilemma, and it's about
Speaker 5: people who were annoyingly poisoned.
Speaker 7: Incredible you write about the FDA with reports that more
Speaker 7: than two hundred and seventy different incidents of copycat tampering afterwards.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was an insane wave of opportunism and Jeeves,
Speaker 5: if you ever want to feel terrible about your fellow man,
Speaker 5: just think of that.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, we didn't talk about all the stories that are
Speaker 7: in this book itself, but when we talked about the
Speaker 7: Vasilia Basilica axe murders also in this book, we didn't
Speaker 7: get to William Desmond Taylor Hollywood, who done it? The
Speaker 7: Bodies in the Barn, the hinter KFK murders of nineteen
Speaker 7: twenty two, The Impossible Murder, very very interesting, the William
Speaker 7: Walla Wallace case of nineteen thirty one, the Deep Waters,
Speaker 7: which is a shark arm case in nineteen thirty five,
Speaker 7: the Cleveland Torso killer scandal in Shangri La. You have
Speaker 7: the Zodiac Killer which is covered, the murder of Marilyn Shepherd,
Speaker 7: did Sam Shepherd do it? And who put Bella in
Speaker 7: the witch Elm The Skelton in the Wood you have
Speaker 7: we just talked about, and the murder of John Benney
Speaker 7: Ramsay is also included in this book too, and the
Speaker 7: Lake Bodham murders of nineteen sixty and story about the
Speaker 7: Long Island serial killer which you call the Bodies in
Speaker 7: the Marshland. Also you cover Staircase of Death, the murder
Speaker 7: of Kathleen Peterson from two thousand and one, the murder
Speaker 7: of Jill Dando, and the drive by shootings of Tupac
Speaker 7: Shakur and Biggie Small's. I want to thank you very
Speaker 7: much for coming on and talking about this book. For
Speaker 7: those that might want to look at other work. Do
Speaker 7: you have a website Facebook page? How might they take
Speaker 7: a look at that?
Speaker 5: I do. I'm at reporter Amber dot com. Twitter is
Speaker 5: the same Reporter Amber, and I think I'm Facebook. I'm
Speaker 5: author Amber Hunt. You can find me there.
Speaker 7: Absolutely. Thank you very much. Amber. Unsolved Murders, True Crime
Speaker 7: Cases Uncovered. It's been a fascinating interview. Thank you very much,
Speaker 7: you have a great evening
Speaker 8: You two, thanks so much, thank you, good night, good night.