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Speaker 4: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 4: written about them, Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 4: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 4: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 4: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski, an anthology of haunting
Speaker 4: murders written by acclaimed true crime writer Michael Benson and
Speaker 4: his boots on the ground private investigator Donald A.
Speaker 5: Tubman. Featured stories include the murders of Joanne Lynn, Pamela Moss,
Speaker 5: Sherry Smoyer and Jack King, Tammy Joe Alexander, Damitia Gibson,
Speaker 5: Victoria Jobson, Kelly Gaffield, Kathleen Krausnick, The Brighton Axe Murder,
Speaker 5: Brittany Drexel, Rejana May Armstrong, Loretta Joe Gates, and Terry
Speaker 5: Lynn Bills, plus many more, including updates on Rochester, New
Speaker 5: York's Double Initial murders and the Genesee Junction murders of
Speaker 5: Georgia and Formacola and Kathy Bernhardt. The book that we're
Speaker 5: featuring this evening, is Hunting Homicides with my special guest
Speaker 5: journalists and author Michael Benson. Welcome back to the program,
Speaker 5: and it's really good to have you back. Michael Benson.
Speaker 6: Thanks, Darren's pleasure to be here.
Speaker 5: It's always a pleasure. Your books are incredible, and you've
Speaker 5: been here right from the beginning, right back ten years ago.
Speaker 5: So let's let's get to again. It's worth repeating. We've
Speaker 5: spoken about this before when we talked about the Genesee
Speaker 5: Junction Devil at Genesee juhncs and tell us about what event,
Speaker 5: what event in your life was instrumental in your decision
Speaker 5: to become an author and now a best selling acclaim
Speaker 5: true crime author.
Speaker 6: All right, I was. I never volunteered to become a
Speaker 6: true crime writer. I was drafted. When I was nine
Speaker 6: years old. My babysitter and her friend from down the road,
Speaker 6: girls I knew went to school with, went swimming in
Speaker 6: a swimming hole behind my house and never came back.
Speaker 6: And a month later they were found horribly mutilated a
Speaker 6: mile to the west near some railroad tracks are a
Speaker 6: Lover's Lane. Happened on graduation night, June twenty fifth, nineteen
Speaker 6: sixty six, and that's the story that's in the Devil
Speaker 6: of Genessee Junction. And at that time I teamed up
Speaker 6: with private investigator Donald A. Tubman my boots on the ground,
Speaker 6: and we got some PaperWorks signed by the mom of
Speaker 6: one of the one of the victims and were made
Speaker 6: the family investigators got us an inn with law enforcement,
Speaker 6: and we had access to files we ordinarily wouldn't have found.
Speaker 6: And we did a great deal too, I think answer
Speaker 6: some of those questions now, Alis Bernhardt, the mom has
Speaker 6: since passed away, but I'd like to think that we
Speaker 6: gave her a little bit of closure. Makes me feel
Speaker 6: pretty good because you know, we gave her a name
Speaker 6: instead of a question mark.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, let's get to that case a little bit later
Speaker 5: in the episode. Sure, let's start off with juan Na Lynn. Yes,
Speaker 5: this is Septemps and she's in sixth grade, and tell
Speaker 5: us a little bit about Joanne in Na Lynn and
Speaker 5: her school this day.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the first case in the book, Haunting Homicides is
Speaker 6: the oldest one. It happened Monday, September nineteenth, nineteen forty nine.
Speaker 6: Victim was Joanne Lynn, an eleven year old from Hemlock,
Speaker 6: New York. That's near Hemlock Lake, one of the Finger Lakes,
Speaker 6: and her school bus had mechanical problems, so for the
Speaker 6: first few weeks of school, the kids would normally take
Speaker 6: the bus were forced to walk down the busy highway
Speaker 6: to school. She was abducted, police believed by a perverted
Speaker 6: motorist who lured her or dragged her into his car,
Speaker 6: and she was found shot with a nine millimeter gun
Speaker 6: and left dead beneath the thorn apple trees a few
Speaker 6: miles up the road. Now, she usually walked to school
Speaker 6: with her brothers and sisters and friends, but on this
Speaker 6: day she was alone. On this day, she took a
Speaker 6: brief detour southward, stopping at her friend Sue Carpenter's house,
Speaker 6: only to learned that Sue had already left, and by
Speaker 6: that time her brothers and their friends who usually walked
Speaker 6: with her, were already well up the road, so that
Speaker 6: left Joeyan alone for the walk to school. She was,
Speaker 6: by all accounts, in a great mood that morning. She
Speaker 6: had things to look forward to. The Hemlock Fair was
Speaker 6: that weekend, and she's been saving money out of her
Speaker 6: lunch money to ride all the rides that weekend, and
Speaker 6: that leads to one of our favorite suspects who was
Speaker 6: ferris wheel operator William Henry Redmond, a man who moved
Speaker 6: from town to town with the carnivals and fairs and
Speaker 6: who had twice during the nineteen thirties been arrested, convicted,
Speaker 6: and jailed for attacking girls when he was still a teenager.
Speaker 6: Then on April twenty sixth, nineteen fifty one, this couple
Speaker 6: of years after join Lynd's murder, Redmond took his attacks
Speaker 6: to the next level and murdered a little girl who
Speaker 6: wanted a free ride on his ferris wheel. Now she
Speaker 6: was found in a truck on the grounds of the
Speaker 6: penn Premiere Show, Carnival and Trainer Pennsylvania to eight years
Speaker 6: old Jane Marie Elfoff found lying on her back across
Speaker 6: the seat of a tractor trailer with her feet towards
Speaker 6: the driver's door. So Joanne Lynn in Hemlock was a
Speaker 6: little girl who couldn't wait to ride the ferris wheel.
Speaker 6: So the connection was made eventually between these two. That
Speaker 6: was major disappointment when it turned out that Redmond was
Speaker 6: not a DNA match with the semen that was found
Speaker 6: on Joan Lynn's slip. Now, Interestingly, even since the book
Speaker 6: has come out just a few weeks ago. Don Tubman
Speaker 6: and I have made progress on this case. It's fifty
Speaker 6: with a seventy year old case. Party's were doing the
Speaker 6: math in my head, but we put a couple of
Speaker 6: pieces of information together and I think came up with
Speaker 6: the lead that maybe no one's looked at before. Involves
Speaker 6: the bloodhounds that they used during the days when joe
Speaker 6: Anne was still missing, before her body had been found,
Speaker 6: and the bloodhounds stopped at a house farmhouse called Green Acres.
Speaker 6: It had formerly been a home for tourists spend the
Speaker 6: summer at the lake. The bloodhounds got to the house,
Speaker 6: stopped and then went behind the house, milled around behind
Speaker 6: the house a little bit, and then returned to the road.
Speaker 6: And police thought that was the end of the trail
Speaker 6: and this was the spot where the motorists had picked
Speaker 6: up the little girl. But if that was the case,
Speaker 6: why did the dogs take a right and go behind
Speaker 6: the house. What were they doing milling around behind the house,
Speaker 6: and why did they return to the road again before
Speaker 6: they stopped completely. And it occurred to us that joe
Speaker 6: Anne had gone behind that house for reasons on known
Speaker 6: so a don spent some time in a basement going
Speaker 6: through boxes of old police records and found a letter
Speaker 6: that had been written to the Rochester Police Chief in
Speaker 6: nineteen fifty saying that she had a friend and coworker
Speaker 6: who had a sixteen year old son who lived in
Speaker 6: the house Green Acres and was living with a couple
Speaker 6: a sixty year old sixty two year old man and
Speaker 6: his sister. Now why this little pseudo family is living
Speaker 6: together in Hemlock, we don't know. But the letter goes
Speaker 6: on to say that the sixty two year old man
Speaker 6: had been kicked out of his house by his wife
Speaker 6: for trying to fool around with her little step daughter. Right,
Speaker 6: so we have a pedophile and a sixteen year old
Speaker 6: boy living together in the house where Joanne Lyn sent
Speaker 6: a the bloodhounds stop. So that's pretty interesting. Now. The
Speaker 6: key now is to find these people, and it's because
Speaker 6: they were separated from their families. It's proving to be
Speaker 6: a little bit difficult. But if we can find out
Speaker 6: where their remains are, and we're assuming they've passed away,
Speaker 6: although the teenager would be eighty six now, very possibly
Speaker 6: still alive. But if this is a DNA case, there
Speaker 6: was seeming found on the slip of the victim, and
Speaker 6: if we could get a match that we could solve
Speaker 6: the case, which it was just pretty exciting for something
Speaker 6: that's seventy years old.
Speaker 5: Absolutely throughout this book, it's you pepper this book with
Speaker 5: whenever you're doing a book signing for devil Agendese Junction,
Speaker 5: whenever you're getting responses from that almost immediately online, and
Speaker 5: you make new contacts and again lead to new leads
Speaker 5: that you can provide to police, things that no one
Speaker 5: else had thought of, or people that were afraid to
Speaker 5: contact police or hesitant to contact police. That's this book
Speaker 5: is entirely full of those kinds of antidotes. What about
Speaker 5: the connection between Aldoff and Lynn's DNA, You write part
Speaker 5: of the mystery of this was there a match for that?
Speaker 6: Now there was no match. Redmond, the ferris wheel operator
Speaker 6: did not deposit his seamen on the body of Joan Lynn.
Speaker 6: That would have been a really nice way to sum
Speaker 6: up that case. But yeah, you're absolutely right. Well, before
Speaker 6: I talk about how I acquire new leads, kudos to
Speaker 6: the law enforcement in Livingston County, New York with this
Speaker 6: Joan Lynn case, because it is seventy years old, and
Speaker 6: they kept that semen sample for seventy years. When DNA
Speaker 6: technology came in, they had no problem again a profile
Speaker 6: off of it, and the case is solvable because of that.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's a long distance from what we got
Speaker 6: from Monroe County before the nineteen sixty six case, in
Speaker 6: which they complained that everything had degraded, and then eventually
Speaker 6: when we really got interested in it, they said they
Speaker 6: lost it. So Livingston County, whoever bagged that evidence, was
Speaker 6: way ahead of their time. A crime scene investigator from
Speaker 6: the future. But yeah, it's sad a lot because I
Speaker 6: do get a lot of phone calls and messages from
Speaker 6: people who have been abused and because their husband, their
Speaker 6: ex husband, or their father or whoever it was, was
Speaker 6: a monster, they're convinced that they must be the killer
Speaker 6: of this person or that person. One case, we found
Speaker 6: a he a woman who said that her father had
Speaker 6: abused her as as a child, and when double Jessey
Speaker 6: junction came out, he didn't want to talk about it,
Speaker 6: left the room in a hop at one point when
Speaker 6: somebody asked him a question about that, Hey, didn't you
Speaker 6: used to live in that neighborhood And subsequently this man,
Speaker 6: uh moved down to Florida where a little girl was
Speaker 6: murdered and the composite drawing of the suspect was a
Speaker 6: dead ringer for him. So I mean, and that's that's
Speaker 6: the way we get. We've been pulled into these cases
Speaker 6: in a lot, in a lot of instances, uh, where
Speaker 6: we were interviewing people for either Double Jessey Junction or
Speaker 6: Nightmare in Rochester, the double initial murders, and people said, well,
Speaker 6: you know, while you're looking at that, you should look
Speaker 6: at this one as well. I think if you go
Speaker 6: through the names that you read at the beginning of
Speaker 6: the show, you'll find a disproportionate number of them are
Speaker 6: women with the same first and last initial. And that's
Speaker 6: not to say that those cases are connected in any way,
Speaker 6: but those were the cases that were referred to us
Speaker 6: because if you look for double initial cases, here's one,
Speaker 6: and that's how we started. I'm sure Smoyer and Jack
Speaker 6: King and thegi in the book are really they're mostly female.
Speaker 6: There are a couple of males thrown in one because
Speaker 6: he was, you know, with a female apparently somebody was
Speaker 6: mad at But I think females make the most haunting victims.
Speaker 6: In true crime. The oldest case was the Joan In
Speaker 6: case from nineteen forty nine, but the most recent was
Speaker 6: twenty fifteen. They thought, the thing they have in common
Speaker 6: really is that they get under your skin. And these
Speaker 6: are cases that you'll be thinking about long after you're
Speaker 6: done reading what I wrote about them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you write very very eloquently about that. Cops know
Speaker 5: how it feels the heaviness of their cases on their souls,
Speaker 5: how these atrocities chip away at their notions of a civilization.
Speaker 5: The victims' families know buried in their necks in a
Speaker 5: nightmare that won't end. They understand the discomforing power of
Speaker 5: haunting homicides. It's so very appropriate name. Let's talk about
Speaker 5: Pamela Moss at fourteen from Penfield, New York, and she
Speaker 5: was in the ninth grade in nineteen sixty two. She
Speaker 5: was planned to go to the mall. And this is
Speaker 5: a good kid, active in Girl Scouts and volunteering. Tell
Speaker 5: us what happens on that day with plans to go
Speaker 5: to the mall Palas.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Pamela came home that day and had plans to
Speaker 6: go to the mall with her girlfriend who had to
Speaker 6: pick up a new pair of glasses, and when she
Speaker 6: got home, she called her girlfriend and girlfriend said, my
Speaker 6: glass isn't ready yet. My mom says I can't go.
Speaker 6: So Pamela, without telling anyone, decides she was going to
Speaker 6: go to the mall by herself. And she lived at
Speaker 6: the end of a dead end street in a recently
Speaker 6: built suburban housing area, and the way it was set
Speaker 6: up to follow the main roads to the mall was
Speaker 6: a mile further than if you just took the shortcut
Speaker 6: through the woods right, So she needed to get back
Speaker 6: in time for a babysitting job that she had that evening,
Speaker 6: so she decided to go through the woods, and her
Speaker 6: partially clad body was found in a water filled gravel
Speaker 6: pit two miles from the Moss home. Her head was
Speaker 6: in eighteen inches of muddy water and her feet were
Speaker 6: on the shoreline. Partially Covering the body was a water
Speaker 6: logged four foot wooden ladder that looked like it had
Speaker 6: been in the water for some time. Body wore a
Speaker 6: bron a pullover blouse. The underwear and shorts were found
Speaker 6: one hundred feet away on the side of a steep hill. Now,
Speaker 6: unlike many of the cases in this book, this one
Speaker 6: was solved. The hunt for Pamela Moss's killer developed into
Speaker 6: the largest manhunt in Monroe County history up until that time.
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Speaker 6: I lost the terms conditions eighteen plus. Unlike most of
Speaker 6: the murders that we deal with here, we have a name.
Speaker 6: We have a name to put with the with the
Speaker 6: horrible child molester and killer. He is James Robert Moore,
Speaker 6: and he was working as a landscaper next door to
Speaker 6: the Moss House. Moore's criminal record was enough to make
Speaker 6: your skin crawl. He'd been released from probation in June
Speaker 6: sixty two after a November nineteen sixty convention conviction in
Speaker 6: Erie County for molesting two young girls in Depew, That's
Speaker 6: a Buffer suburb. Moore was charged with third degree assault
Speaker 6: for the debut crime and given a sixty day suspended sentence.
Speaker 7: He was sent to.
Speaker 6: Meyer Memorial Hospital in Buffalo for observation, and his eventual
Speaker 6: probation terms required him to regularly see a psychiatrist, which
Speaker 6: he did after he moved from Cheektowaga to Webster, which
Speaker 6: is a town just east of Rochester. He arranged to
Speaker 6: see a psychiatrist at Strong Memorial Hospital. Rochester's number one hospital,
Speaker 6: and at that point he was allowed to take a
Speaker 6: job trimming hedges next door to the Mosses, where he
Speaker 6: could keep an eye on the comings and goings of Pamela,
Speaker 6: who was a pretty little girl. Now Moore is still alive.
Speaker 6: He is the senior resident of the New York State
Speaker 6: Penal System. He's now been behind bars for the killing
Speaker 6: of Pamela Moss for fifty six years.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 6: Now that was the last murder in Penfield. It's a
Speaker 6: very nice time until the two thousand and three murder
Speaker 6: of Tabitha Bryant by her husband and brother, a crime
Speaker 6: that became the subject of my first true crime book
Speaker 6: many years ago, called Betrayal and Blood. The Pamela Moss
Speaker 6: case was solved just in time for the Monroe County
Speaker 6: Sheriff's office new headline grabbing mystery, the murders of Shuri
Speaker 6: Smoyer and Jack King.
Speaker 5: Yes, what was the you include some of the things
Speaker 5: that how he confessed the police and what he told
Speaker 5: police very disturbing.
Speaker 6: What he aded to he stalked her, you know, he
Speaker 6: knew that she took the shortcut to go to the mall,
Speaker 6: even though the girls weren't supposed to, but they all
Speaker 6: did because it was such a time saver round trip.
Speaker 6: It would cut forty five minutes off of your walk.
Speaker 6: He jumped her in the middle of the woods. He
Speaker 6: raped her, he strangled her to death, and then he
Speaker 6: wrapped her up and put her in his pickup truck
Speaker 6: and drove her to the landfill where he dumped her
Speaker 6: body on the opposite side of the landfill from where
Speaker 6: men were usually working, which is why the body wasn't
Speaker 6: found more quickly.
Speaker 5: Right, you right too? That he has now's a parole
Speaker 5: hearing every two years, but he's been denied nineteen He
Speaker 5: was denied nineteen times. Last time was twenty eighteen.
Speaker 6: So well, the judge that sentenced him said that he
Speaker 6: was getting life in prison without the chance of parole
Speaker 6: in lieu of a death sentence. Right, so that even
Speaker 6: though the parole rules have changed since then, You know what,
Speaker 6: the new judge who's hearing the case always goes along
Speaker 6: with the original judge the discuss should never ever see
Speaker 6: the outside of a prison again for any reason. And
Speaker 6: he hasn't and I don't think.
Speaker 7: He will.
Speaker 5: Now, you say. Hours later, after this sentence was handed down,
Speaker 5: Jack King and Sherry Smoyer were killed. This is particularly
Speaker 5: interesting case because of your involvement and the contact that
Speaker 5: you had with King's niece. Tell us about Jack King
Speaker 5: and Sherry Smoyer.
Speaker 6: Sure, Jack King and Shree Smoyer were a young couple.
Speaker 6: On Saturday night, July thirteenth, nineteen sixty three, went to
Speaker 6: a drive in movie on a date to see the
Speaker 6: three plus hour film Mutiny in the Bounty with Marlon Branda.
Speaker 6: Because of the length of the movie, I'm sure he
Speaker 6: had to get a special curfew for that night. I
Speaker 6: think she got to be home by one am. But anyway,
Speaker 6: the kids never made it home and they were found
Speaker 6: shot to death the next morning on a really really
Speaker 6: hard to find Lover's Lane near Pittsford, New York. Now
Speaker 6: here's a fun fact, you know, fun with quotation marks
Speaker 6: around it. I grew up about a mile from that
Speaker 6: drive in, and I remember going with my mom and
Speaker 6: dad I was six to see Mutiny on the Bounty
Speaker 6: at the Starlight drive in. You know, I don't I
Speaker 6: don't know if the Bensons went the same night as
Speaker 6: Jack and Suie, but we might have. And the other
Speaker 6: interesting point about this case is that the cover of
Speaker 6: Haunting Homicides is based on the Marquis of the Starlight
Speaker 6: Drive In was adapted by my daughter as the title
Speaker 6: and byline for the book, which I think gives it
Speaker 6: a striking and different look. I don't know if any
Speaker 6: other book it quite looks like Haunting Homicides. It's kind
Speaker 6: of a spooky cover. By the way, we know that
Speaker 6: we know that Smoyer and king At actually went to
Speaker 6: the movies that night because there was a witness who
Speaker 6: saw Sherry at the concession stand at about nine to
Speaker 6: fifty pm. And the witness was a good one. She
Speaker 6: was a twenty year old Carol Beachy. She had been
Speaker 6: Smayer's former West High West High School classmate. She easily
Speaker 6: recognized Seri and vice versa. They waved at one another.
Speaker 6: Sherry seemed upbeat and there was no evidence of a problem.
Speaker 6: The movie ended at one five am, but for those
Speaker 6: who fell asleep there could have been confusion because immediately
Speaker 6: following the first showing, the first half of the movie
Speaker 6: was shown again for the benefit of latecomers, so the
Speaker 6: theater didn't go dark that morning until two forty am.
Speaker 6: No authorities would soon learn that there were two witnesses
Speaker 6: with a reason to recognize King's car, who he saw
Speaker 6: Smoyer and King at one fifty am speeding home from
Speaker 6: the drive in, already twenty minutes late for Smoyer's curfew
Speaker 6: will They never made it home. At seven am on Sunday,
Speaker 6: Smoyer's parents called the sheriff, and less than four hours later,
Speaker 6: a fisherman from Brighton discovered the bodies a mile and
Speaker 6: a half from Smoyer's home on a difficult access dirt
Speaker 6: road that led to the state owned hunting and fishing
Speaker 6: area off of Old Root ninety six, also known as
Speaker 6: the Pittsford Victor Road. The bodies were close together but
Speaker 6: oddly configured. They were lying on the ground near the
Speaker 6: front of King's car, positioned in the shape of a tee.
Speaker 6: She was clutching one of his trouser legs. He was
Speaker 6: lying on his left side. Neither his slacks nor his
Speaker 6: short sleeved sports shirt were in disarray. He was shoeless,
Speaker 6: but his loafers lay nearby. The girl was faced down
Speaker 6: wearing bermuda shorts, blouse and white sneakers. Her clothing was
Speaker 6: all so undisturbed no sex aspected and therefore no DNA.
Speaker 6: Police speculated that They'd been ordered to lie down before
Speaker 6: they were shot, and Smore apparently clutched King in fear
Speaker 6: just before they died. Or no powder burns on the bodies,
Speaker 6: suggesting that the shots were not fired from point blank range.
Speaker 6: Four shells from A forty five were found near the
Speaker 6: bodies and a fifth was found inside King's car, a
Speaker 6: quarter in a penny land on the dirt road, fifty
Speaker 6: dollars in King's pocket, milkshit containers found in King's car.
Speaker 6: Smore had a small amount of money in her purse,
Speaker 6: so robbery wasn't the motive. Jack King was not familiar
Speaker 6: with the area actual actually, neither of them were. Sherry's
Speaker 6: parents had only moved to their new house the year before,
Speaker 6: and she'd been away to college for most of that time.
Speaker 6: You know she knew if she knew about a lover's lane,
Speaker 6: would have been in Genesee Valley Park, which was near
Speaker 6: the high school that she went to. Throughout the suburbs. Now,
Speaker 6: neither of these kids know how to get to the
Speaker 6: place where their bodies are found, which I think a
Speaker 6: key point in figuring out who did it. To prove
Speaker 6: that he couldn't have found the lover's lane. He had
Speaker 6: a hastily sketched map in his pocket so that he
Speaker 6: could get to Shury's house right and so then the
Speaker 6: difference between the two victims was that Shari had been
Speaker 6: beaten in the back of the head, crushing her skull.
Speaker 6: The killer had a special anger for her, or for
Speaker 6: females in general. And yet there was no sign of
Speaker 6: sex in the crimea the clothes weren't even disheveled, And
Speaker 6: the timeline for the night of the murder turns out
Speaker 6: to be a real problem. The postmartar procedures determined that
Speaker 6: the teens were shot at about five in the morning,
Speaker 6: but sheriff's deputies had reported to the scene at three
Speaker 6: thirty am to investigate a report that two cars had
Speaker 6: been stuck in the sand about two hundred feet beyond
Speaker 6: the place where the shooting occurred. So at three thirty am,
Speaker 6: King and Smoyer aren't there. So where were they at
Speaker 6: three point thirty, already long past curfew? We don't know,
Speaker 6: And why and how they got to the lover's lane
Speaker 6: we don't know. Daily car there is Jack's father's car,
Speaker 6: and there's a scrape on the side of the car
Speaker 6: that wasn't there that morning.
Speaker 5: That interesting.
Speaker 6: One thing I know from experience, from first had experience,
Speaker 6: is when you went to the Rochester drive in and
Speaker 6: the movie ended, everybody tried to get out at the
Speaker 6: same time. There was one exit the right hand side
Speaker 6: you faced the screen out onto Brighton Henryetta Townline Road,
Speaker 6: and because they didn't want everybody emptying into the major
Speaker 6: intersection to the left, there was a guy standing there
Speaker 6: with a flare and he made everybody go to the left,
Speaker 6: and everybody tried to merge to get out this small
Speaker 6: exit and a lot of opportunities for fender benders. So
Speaker 6: it's possible that somebody scraped Jack's dad's car. Jack had
Speaker 6: a fit, and somehow the rest of the evening was revenge.
Speaker 6: Although I mean who knows. Profiles at the time said
Speaker 6: that there was a killer, that the killer was a
Speaker 6: religious zealot who was out to punish sinful teenagers for
Speaker 6: their lustful ways. This is I guess, under the assumption
Speaker 6: that the killer came upon them already on the lover's
Speaker 6: lane or preps kissing in the car at the movies. Well,
Speaker 6: it seemed a little bit wacky to me, But then
Speaker 6: a guy just liked that profile shows up. On April
Speaker 6: twenty fifth, nineteen sixty four, at about one o'clock in
Speaker 6: the afternoon, a thirty year old Rochester man named Vernon M.
Speaker 6: Hunter ran the Thruway toll booth in Victor at the
Speaker 6: New York State Thruway, entering the throughway without taking a ticket.
Speaker 6: The Throughway interchange at Victor called troopers and set a
Speaker 6: nineteen fifty six car it just passed without license plates,
Speaker 6: and the chase began on the Throughway. Suspect crossed the
Speaker 6: mall and returned back got on the route ninety six
Speaker 6: and at ninety miles an hour, with now twenty officers
Speaker 6: in pursuit. The chase lasted for close to an hour,
Speaker 6: and it finally came to an end when he drove
Speaker 6: across the lawn and cop cars boxed him in so
Speaker 6: once his car was uh oh. Then they rammed his
Speaker 6: car so that the fender was rubbing against his tire.
Speaker 6: With his car disabled, his adrenaline plummeted and he just
Speaker 6: sat there and awaited a rest. It was now two
Speaker 6: o'clock in the afternoon. Now when he was captured. It
Speaker 6: was near Panorama Plaza. It happens to be the same
Speaker 6: plaza that Pamela Moss was heading toward. He has an
Speaker 6: Army forty five loaded with six ball shells in his car,
Speaker 6: and that's taken away from him. In the high hopes
Speaker 6: that this will be a match for the Smaier King Ballistics,
Speaker 6: but it was not. The man was captured and explained
Speaker 6: that he'd been on his way to Auburn but didn't
Speaker 6: have toll money for the thruway, gave his address. He
Speaker 6: said he owned the car, but it was unregistered. He
Speaker 6: was a six foot Husky veteran, and police learned he'd
Speaker 6: been in the Army for two years, was stationed in Europe.
Speaker 6: It's honorably discharged. They took him to the Henrietta substation
Speaker 6: and charged him with carrying a loaded gun without a permit.
Speaker 6: And during his arraignment, Hunter seemed happy. He was smiling
Speaker 6: and joking, said he wanted to call his brother. Background
Speaker 6: check revealed that he had previous address for drunk driving
Speaker 6: and speeding tickets, but he'd never been charged with a felony.
Speaker 6: While authorities awaited word from Washington on his gun, he
Speaker 6: began acting weird in his jail cell. Now the newspaper
Speaker 6: reported that he poured water onto his mattress and put
Speaker 6: his shoes in the toilet. I'm guessing that's us. He
Speaker 6: urinated on his mattress and put his shoes in the toilet.
Speaker 6: And then they found that he had been a former
Speaker 6: resident of the Willard State Hospital, which was an ancient
Speaker 6: asylum for the chronic insane, and that he'd been diagnosed
Speaker 6: as a schizophrenic and discharge from that facility on February fifteenth,
Speaker 6: nineteen sixty two. As quote improved unquote, his behavior became
Speaker 6: increasingly erratic. He told cops he was the son of God,
Speaker 6: that teenagers under twenty five were bad and needed to
Speaker 6: be punished, So here he was. He was just what
Speaker 6: the profilers for the Smayer King murders were looking for,
Speaker 6: religious fanatic, well a grudge against young people. And it
Speaker 6: really looked very promising until the FBI ruined it and
Speaker 6: said the gun was no match. Now, my own profile,
Speaker 6: which developed in conjunction with Don Tubman and all the
Speaker 6: other smart people I've talked to over the years, is
Speaker 6: that our killer is a local. You have to be
Speaker 6: a local to find the crime scene. I mean, it's
Speaker 6: a dirt road, off a dirt road, down a slope
Speaker 6: by the next you had to have gone fishing there
Speaker 6: or parked there before to know where it was. So
Speaker 6: he's a local kid, and he's got a special grudge
Speaker 6: against Sherry Smoyer or women in general. Now, just like Hunter,
Speaker 6: just such a suspect is reported to me by a
Speaker 6: man we called Darryl. He said his brother, Edgar was
Speaker 6: the killer. Daryl said that Edgar had dated Sherry that
Speaker 6: summer and had run into her at the movies by accident.
Speaker 6: He became angry that she was with another guy and
Speaker 6: followed them afterwards, eventually forcing them to a location that
Speaker 6: he was very familiar with, and he killed them there. Now,
Speaker 6: my informant even said that he'd seen his brother throw
Speaker 6: the gun into the eerie canal and later admit to
Speaker 6: killing the couple. But there was a problem. Darryl, our
Speaker 6: informant was in their do well, a troubled guy with
Speaker 6: a sketchy passed mental issues, and his brother, the accused,
Speaker 6: had no record and was squeaky clean. So as a
Speaker 6: man of caine squealing on Abele and predictably police talk to.
Speaker 6: Both decided that it was a hoax of some sort
Speaker 6: and that was that. But you know, if Edgar isn't
Speaker 6: the guy by this investigation's way of thinking, it's someone
Speaker 6: just like him.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you talk of a the did you talk to
Speaker 5: Lynn King about Darryl's yet That was the interesting conversation
Speaker 5: what she thought along this whole way, because it was
Speaker 5: a progression. You spoke to him, and progressively it was
Speaker 5: revealed that it can't have problems with the story.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well that's right. Lynn King is Jack King's niece, right,
Speaker 6: and the King family is a huge family, and she's,
Speaker 6: you know, a beautiful and talented and intelligent woman. She's
Speaker 6: a lawyer. And she asked Donn and I to help
Speaker 6: with the case, which was fine with us because you know,
Speaker 6: we already had a pret decent final on it to
Speaker 6: begin with, and again we became family investigators.
Speaker 7: So when I.
Speaker 6: Had developed Darryl uh to the point where I thought
Speaker 6: I had him telling a coherent story because he had problems,
Speaker 6: he couldn't finished sentences on the same subject he started
Speaker 6: them on, and everything was Everything came off as sketchy,
Speaker 6: but I couldn't ignore him as nuts because he hit
Speaker 6: all the key points on my profile. He he established
Speaker 6: why the gun wasn't found, He established a motive, He
Speaker 6: established how the crime scene came to be the crime scene.
Speaker 6: All these things were difficult to explain that he did
Speaker 6: it very simply, but in his own, you know, kind
Speaker 6: of scattered way. Now, he said that, you know, Dad
Speaker 6: was a misogynist. Dad abused Mom, His brother Edgar was
Speaker 6: a misogynist, had gone through several wives, and you know,
Speaker 6: and he had to admit that even he too had
Speaker 6: troubles with women, largely because Mom was addicted to prescription
Speaker 6: drugs and didn't defend the kids when Dad was on
Speaker 6: a rampage. And I think a lot of misogynists developed
Speaker 6: that feeling in this way. So it's the anger towards
Speaker 6: Mom that's been expanded to include all women in the world.
Speaker 6: So and I didn't give that piece of information enough
Speaker 6: weight when I decided that maybe Lynn King, victim's niece,
Speaker 6: you know, lawyer trained questioner, should talk to Darryl and
Speaker 6: see what happened. Well, it didn't go well. He didn't
Speaker 6: like being accused of things by a woman. Eventually said
Speaker 6: some really really ugly things about both Lynn King and
Speaker 6: the King family, which apparently he was making up, you know,
Speaker 6: out of whole cloth. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the
Speaker 6: King family or Glynn King. Then he started in on me.
Speaker 6: He done research into me, he found out that nobody
Speaker 6: likes me, and blah blah blah. Anyway, he was having
Speaker 6: a worse witness as time went along. I think by
Speaker 6: the time the police took over and talked to him
Speaker 6: and his brother, they found a very very strong case
Speaker 6: of sane and insane, and the sane one was the
Speaker 6: one who was being accused.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but it was very very interesting though that this it.
Speaker 5: The sane part of them was certainly evident. In the beginning,
Speaker 5: it seemed to be very plausible. The story seemed like,
Speaker 5: you say, parts of it could be checked out and
Speaker 5: verified to a certain degree. And then at the end
Speaker 5: he really does sell sound bald face crazy, so which
Speaker 5: is pretty happy.
Speaker 6: And that has been a problem in most cases, when
Speaker 6: the witnesses deteriorate and lose their grip on the story
Speaker 6: they're telling, it's easy to just missed them because you really, well,
Speaker 6: they were just crazy all along, and the person are
Speaker 6: accusing as someone who's a personal enemy of theirs, but
Speaker 6: not necessarily a person involved in the crime we're investigating.
Speaker 6: But in this case, it wasn't so easy. That they
Speaker 6: did know the accused had proximity, had motive, and anyway,
Speaker 6: it's very frustrating that it's happened this way. We're still fascinating,
Speaker 6: we're still very hopeful and King Slayer, but we shall
Speaker 6: see what happens.
Speaker 5: Yes, let's talk about a case that made incredible national news,
Speaker 5: the case of Britney Drexel Bantages on a spring break.
Speaker 5: But of course we know the story that her mother
Speaker 5: was not aware that she was on spring break. It
Speaker 5: sounds like a familiar story. Tell us about two thousand
Speaker 5: and nine, a very attractive young girl on spring break,
Speaker 5: Britney Drexel.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well again, I think I have a little bit
Speaker 6: more of a personal attachment to this than than the
Speaker 6: rest of the nation because the headline said Chilai, New
Speaker 6: York girl missing. And of course the last time that happened,
Speaker 6: I was nineteen sixty six, and that's the Devil at
Speaker 6: Genesee Junction. So it's my hometown. Yeah, she wasn't just
Speaker 6: a beautiful seventeen year old girl. She grew up about
Speaker 6: a mile from where I did. Yeah, she wanted to
Speaker 6: go away for spring break with her friends. Her mom
Speaker 6: understandably said no, and Brittany, instead of doing what mom said,
Speaker 6: told a lie, said I'm spending the night with friends
Speaker 6: here locally, and split for South Carolina. The fact that
Speaker 6: her mother did not know until she was already missing.
Speaker 6: So it's April twenty fifth, two thousand and nine. Myrtle Beach,
Speaker 6: South Carolina a great place to go for spring break,
Speaker 6: as long as you don't wander around at night in
Speaker 6: your shorts. Brittany was staying at the Bar Harbor Motel.
Speaker 6: She went to visit a friend at the Blue Water
Speaker 6: Resort on Saturday night, which was down the road, and
Speaker 6: she left to return to her own motel and was
Speaker 6: never seen again. Now, according to her Blue Water Resort friends,
Speaker 6: who were adult men, she was having an argument with
Speaker 6: one of the girls she traveled with. She borrowed the
Speaker 6: girl's shorts and the girl wanted them back, so that
Speaker 6: meant an unscheduled walk back to her hotel to change. Now,
Speaker 6: the last evidence of Brittany on the Earth is on
Speaker 6: a surveillance video that shows her leaving the Blue Water
Speaker 6: Resort on Ocean Boulevard eight fifteen pm, wearing a white
Speaker 6: top and the controversial black shorts. She left by herself
Speaker 6: and was never seen again. Now, her mom last spoke
Speaker 6: to her at noon on the day she disappeared. Down
Speaker 6: The mom still had no clue where her daughter was.
Speaker 6: Brittany said she just spent the morning just hanging out.
Speaker 6: Britney's on again, off again boyfriend, John Greco. He was
Speaker 6: one of the first to realize that something was wrong.
Speaker 6: They'd met on a blind date and had been going
Speaker 6: together for years off and on, and when when he
Speaker 6: called her, he always got a call back right away,
Speaker 6: but this time there was nothing, no response, and five
Speaker 6: hours without a callback. John called Britney's parents and told
Speaker 6: them he thought something had happened to Britney, and that
Speaker 6: was how Dawn Drexel found out that her daughter had
Speaker 6: gone south. Now, the day after Britney disappeared, her phone
Speaker 6: gave a single ping in Mclellanville, Georgetown County, South Carolina,
Speaker 6: and then went forever silent. So skip ahead to twenty sixteen.
Speaker 6: Seven years later, an FBI investigation on new and incredibly
Speaker 6: nightmarish information human traffickers snatched Brittany. A series of jailhouse
Speaker 6: snitches read it out. An inmate named Timothy DeShawn Taylor
Speaker 6: as the same guy who was arrested six years earlier
Speaker 6: for attempting to kidnap a Myrtle Beach woman. The story
Speaker 6: went to Taylor picked Brittany up in Myrtle Beach and
Speaker 6: drove her to Mcclellanville, where he showed her off and
Speaker 6: introduced her to his friends. He then quote tricked her
Speaker 6: out unquote, as human traffickers are prone to do. One
Speaker 6: of the informants said he saw Brittany being abused tortured
Speaker 6: for days in a smelly stash house. One of the
Speaker 6: informants was named to Kwan Brown, and he said he
Speaker 6: was at the stash house to meet Taylor, who told
Speaker 6: him he needed to borrow some money, and he saw
Speaker 6: Brittany there. She'd been beaten. She was sporting a black eye,
Speaker 6: and he watched as she made a run for it.
Speaker 6: The stash house was in the country and there was
Speaker 6: a back door that faced a dirt road, but she
Speaker 6: ran too slow. She was grabbed, dragged back, and pistol
Speaker 6: whipped now Sean. Taylor then took her in back of
Speaker 6: the house. Two shots were fired, and Brown did not
Speaker 6: see her after that. He said he assumed they wrapped
Speaker 6: her up and took her away. That's not the end
Speaker 6: of the story. Unfortunately, the FBI spoke to other informants
Speaker 6: who carried the story from there, saying that Britney's body
Speaker 6: was taken to a gator pit and fed to the alligators. So,
Speaker 6: you know, haunting, to say the least, the ultimate nightmare
Speaker 6: for a mother.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's the story they told the mother. I mean,
Speaker 5: I couldn't I couldn't believe. There's so much of this,
Speaker 5: so many details were spared from some mothers. Again, one
Speaker 5: of the stories where she had to talk to you
Speaker 5: to find out details. Uh, I think Georgia.
Speaker 6: Uh, that's Kathy's mom, Alice, Sure, well.
Speaker 5: Kathy's momm Yeah.
Speaker 6: You know, I am all in favor of being truthful
Speaker 6: to moms. You are just not doing them any favor
Speaker 6: by sparing them details because their imaginations and their dread
Speaker 6: is so strong that, you know, please make them stop
Speaker 6: wondering what happened, Tell them what happened. Yeah. I don't
Speaker 6: know how others feel about that, but I just don't
Speaker 6: think that protecting the mom by keeping her in the
Speaker 6: dark is necessarily a good thing. Maybe if there's still
Speaker 6: a question as to what happened, you might want to
Speaker 6: save the mom from the grief. But once you know
Speaker 6: that that's what happened, tell her please, it's just torturing
Speaker 6: her by keeping it a secret.
Speaker 5: Well, I've seen in my own experienced people not informed
Speaker 5: about details how their loved one killed right thirty seven
Speaker 5: years later, So they didn't. They're finding out details now inadvertently,
Speaker 5: So I mean more horrible, I would believe. Let's talk
Speaker 5: about Kelly Gaffield. Sure, and August eighth, nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 5: She's supposed to be home by nine thirty. Again, this
Speaker 5: is a good kid here. Let's let's talk about what
Speaker 5: happens that night instead of coming home.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Kelly Kelly and Gaffield was sixteen years old. She
Speaker 6: lived in Webster, New York, again, town just east of Rochester.
Speaker 6: She told her mother that she loved her and will
Speaker 6: be home by nine thirty and never came back. Now,
Speaker 6: Webster's a working class suburban town. It's not ritzy like
Speaker 6: Brighton or Pittsford. And Kelly's mom, Christine Riley, called Webster
Speaker 6: police the following morning and said Kelly didn't come home
Speaker 6: last night and the search for Kelly at the homes
Speaker 6: of friends was fruitless, and she was presumed to have
Speaker 6: run away. During interviews, Christine was candid about her worries
Speaker 6: that Kelly was growing up too fast. She'd found letters
Speaker 6: in Kelly's room that were troubling. But here's the most
Speaker 6: haunting part. There were nine sightings of Kelly Gaffield in
Speaker 6: the Rochester area in August, September, and October of nineteen
Speaker 6: ninety five, reports that reinforced the notion that she was
Speaker 6: alive and well put off on her own you three
Speaker 6: young people who knew her told police that they'd run
Speaker 6: into Kelly on the street and had briefly spoken to her.
Speaker 6: The very first sighting came on August eighth, just minutes
Speaker 6: after she left her house. Her aunt saw her walking
Speaker 6: into the woods behind the Phillips Village off Krieger Road.
Speaker 6: That's the apartment complex where she lived. It was about
Speaker 6: seven to fifteen pm and it was a secluded area
Speaker 6: known as a teen hangout. And the last sighting in
Speaker 6: early October was by a male friend who said he
Speaker 6: ran into her in the parking lot of a top
Speaker 6: friendly supermarket on South Clinton Avenue in town of Brighton,
Speaker 6: and the young man said Kelly appeared agitated. So all
Speaker 6: of this is adding to this feeling that Kelly doesn't
Speaker 6: want to go home. Kelly's left home and she does
Speaker 6: not want to go home. But Kelly's mom knows Kelly
Speaker 6: is not a runaway. She never returned to pick up
Speaker 6: her belongings. She didn't even take her asthma medication. You know,
Speaker 6: her aunts and cousins said she was not a runaway candidate.
Speaker 6: She liked her family, she was willing to talk about
Speaker 6: her problems. Well. Kelly's missing person status changed at ten
Speaker 6: o'clock in the morning on October twenty second, three solid
Speaker 6: months after she's disappeared, when her decomposed body was discovered
Speaker 6: by a hunter in a wooded area east of Phillips
Speaker 6: Road near Ridge Road in Webster, fairly close to where
Speaker 6: her aunt saw her on the evening of her disappearance. Right,
Speaker 6: so not an easy to reach spot. There's no path
Speaker 6: to kind of have to hack you wate through the
Speaker 6: weeds to get there. And it almost seemed that the
Speaker 6: police were duped into believing Kelly was still alive, because
Speaker 6: you know, these woods would have been searched if their
Speaker 6: fall play had been suspected, but they weren't. You know,
Speaker 6: people keep running into Kelly now, every report of a
Speaker 6: Kelly sighting was followed up on with police interviews, and
Speaker 6: the family was now saying that the cops dropped the
Speaker 6: ball by treating the case as a runaway case. And
Speaker 6: police defended themselves. They said the sightings were so frequent
Speaker 6: that they had work on the theory that she was okay,
Speaker 6: but elsewhere there had never been any indications, for example,
Speaker 6: that she was being held against her will, and at
Speaker 6: age sixteen, she was being treated as an adult. Now,
Speaker 6: the frustrating thing in this case is that there's an
Speaker 6: unchanging list of suspects been common knowledge in Webster for
Speaker 6: many years, and I first heard about the case from
Speaker 6: an informant who gave me the names of the men
Speaker 6: on the list. And the story was that she'd been
Speaker 6: lured into the woods by a group of boys, that
Speaker 6: they had preps, given her alcohol and drugs, and were
Speaker 6: in the process of having sex with her when something
Speaker 6: went wrong, you know, made the stories she had an
Speaker 6: asthma attack and the boys, instead of getting her help,
Speaker 6: they abandoned her. The problem with that is she had
Speaker 6: a couple of broken ribs, so there's in the case
Speaker 6: if she had an asthma attack, it might because somebody
Speaker 6: was too rough with her. If she's tired to breathe
Speaker 6: when you have broken ribs sticking into your lungs. Now,
Speaker 6: none of the young men who aren't that young anymore
Speaker 6: have ever confessed to law enforcement, although two of them
Speaker 6: have committed suicide, which I think lends some credence to
Speaker 6: the validity of the list of names. I would urge,
Speaker 6: you know, any of those young men who might be
Speaker 6: listening to you know, tell Webster police. You know, at
Speaker 6: this point, I don't think you're gonna have to deal
Speaker 6: with a murder charge. It all happened when you were
Speaker 6: a kid. It was a bad incident that went from
Speaker 6: bad to worse. But I'm not sure that life wouldn't
Speaker 6: improve for these gentlemen if they fessed up, because obviously
Speaker 6: they have consciences.
Speaker 5: It's quite a plausible story, though, when you add that
Speaker 5: it was a relative of hers friends. They'd been used
Speaker 5: to sort of saying inappropriate things to her. Then they
Speaker 5: had this plan of getting her drunk and it worked,
Speaker 5: and then this. It seems a very plausible story compared
Speaker 5: to some unplausible stories given by accused in this book.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, oh, absolutely absolutely. I think that we kind
Speaker 6: of know what happened to Kelly Gaffield, but further to Diclosure,
Speaker 6: someone who's there is going to have to admit it
Speaker 6: to someone in a thought. So far, it's been discussed
Speaker 6: at a lot of parties and get togethers. And I
Speaker 6: know that there's one of the men on the list
Speaker 6: is ill and you know, may not have long to live,
Speaker 6: and very hopeful that you know, before you know, his
Speaker 6: life ends. He decides to set the record straight. And
Speaker 6: I guess they're they're they're protecting each other as much
Speaker 6: as they're protecting themselves, but it would be better for
Speaker 6: all of them if the truth was known.
Speaker 5: Tell us again how you got it you became involved
Speaker 5: in the George Anne form of Cola and Kathy Bernhardt,
Speaker 5: your former friends, How you came to write about their case.
Speaker 6: I always wanted to write about their case. I can
Speaker 6: remember writing about it in a little journal when I
Speaker 6: was twelve, which I kept, and some of that material
Speaker 6: ends up in the book, but forty some years later.
Speaker 6: But yeah, what happened was that Kathy's Kathy Bernhardt's mother, Alice,
Speaker 6: and my mom they both passed away. Since we're sitting
Speaker 6: in a backyard at a summer party and folding chairs,
Speaker 6: sipping beer, and my book Killer Twins had just come out,
Speaker 6: and my mom was bragging to Alice about her son,
Speaker 6: the crime writer, and Alice said, it's too bad that
Speaker 6: your Michael can't write a book about my Kathy, And
Speaker 6: my mom said, ask him. Well. Alice was too shy
Speaker 6: to asked me. But eventually I got around to approaching Alice,
Speaker 6: and we decided that we had a lot in common
Speaker 6: and we could be very good for one another because
Speaker 6: people who wouldn't talk to me in a million years
Speaker 6: were now going to tell me everything they knew because
Speaker 6: I'm working for Alice Bernhardt, who's a beloved men member
Speaker 6: of the community, true sweetheart, ninety year old woman who
Speaker 6: everybody loves. She's still the neighborhood's grandma. And for her,
Speaker 6: she's finally found someone who's going to treat her like
Speaker 6: a grown up and, like you said before, tell her
Speaker 6: the truth about what happened instead of letting her imagination
Speaker 6: continue to work. Right, And we did a really good
Speaker 6: good job. I have to say that we teamed up
Speaker 6: with Donald, a tubman who's been around ever since, and
Speaker 6: our best lead during the initial investigation led us to
Speaker 6: a set of brothers who are prone to violence against women,
Speaker 6: including sex attacks under threat of death. In the Devilo
Speaker 6: genesy junction, we refer to them as the Wilson brothers,
Speaker 6: but their names were actually Johnson, and they were from Dundee,
Speaker 6: New York, and one of them was married to George
Speaker 6: Anne's sister and another to her first cousin. The brothers
Speaker 6: had no scruples. You know that one of them quote
Speaker 6: beat up unquote their mom. The best way to explain
Speaker 6: the depravity of the family is this. Both our primary suspect,
Speaker 6: Clint and his father, Clint Sor, died soon after being
Speaker 6: caught raping their own granddaughters. So Junior was a chip
Speaker 6: off the old block in the sickest possible way. And
Speaker 6: if it's a coincidence that this guy lives next door
Speaker 6: to one of the victims and his brother in law
Speaker 6: of another, then I you know, I'll eat my hat.
Speaker 6: Georgianne's nephew said that quote the Johnson boys killed the girls,
Speaker 6: but that it was okay because they took care of
Speaker 6: it inside the family, which led us to investigate the
Speaker 6: deaths of the brothers, and many of which were caused
Speaker 6: by or occurred in the vicinity of their wives, so
Speaker 6: the women of the family took over and systematically disposed
Speaker 6: of these guys. And in haunting horamsites, we get a
Speaker 6: close up look at the investigation into the death of
Speaker 6: Georgie Anne's brother in law shot to death with a
Speaker 6: shotgun in the town of Henrietta by his wife's boyfriend
Speaker 6: while the wife, George Ane's sister was in the car screaming.
Speaker 6: We take a close up look at the investigation into
Speaker 6: that crime, as well as some haunting eyewitness accounts of
Speaker 6: the bizarre cauldron of human depravity that was allowed to
Speaker 6: fester in near Genese Junction during the summer in nineteen
Speaker 6: sixty six. The book also has an update on the
Speaker 6: double initial murders, which is the murder of Carmen Cologne,
Speaker 6: Wanda Walkowitz, and Michelle Maenza in nineteen seventy one and
Speaker 6: nineteen seventy three in Rochester. All of them were picked
Speaker 6: up while walking alone on the street in an urban
Speaker 6: setting and their bodies were found raped beside a country
Speaker 6: road in a very rural setting, and that was the
Speaker 6: thing that they tied them together. They're all ten or
Speaker 6: eleven years old, and we give some updates, and that
Speaker 6: we follow the the odd patterns set by Kenneth Bianchi
Speaker 6: and Joseph Naso, which is now joined by a new
Speaker 6: guy named Paul Frediani. And these are all young men
Speaker 6: who were in high school in the Rochester area at
Speaker 6: the time of the double initial murders, and all of
Speaker 6: them moved to California and became convicted killers. Wow, so yeah,
Speaker 6: it's weird. Us, of course, is the most unusual of
Speaker 6: the bunch because his victims all had the same first
Speaker 6: and last night not all, but most of them had
Speaker 6: the same first and last initial. And he killed a
Speaker 6: woman in California whose name was also Carmen Cologne, same
Speaker 6: name as the first double initial victim in the Rochester area.
Speaker 6: Now that's a DNA case, the limited DNA case. We
Speaker 6: have DNA from the middle victim, but not from the
Speaker 6: other two. And obviously so far there's never been a
Speaker 6: DNA match with any of these suspects.
Speaker 5: What is the most profound thing that you discovered in
Speaker 5: Haunting Homicides Of all the profound things that you discovered
Speaker 5: in all the investigations that you undertook with these cases,
Speaker 5: and all the contacts and leads that you followed up
Speaker 5: on was the most profound thing about this book.
Speaker 6: Well, I think what we have here is.
Speaker 7: Symptoms of a disease that, in some cases police didn't
Speaker 7: yet know existed, the idea that human monsters went out
Speaker 7: and hunted people, that the victims were usually non threatening
Speaker 7: types such as children and diminutive women, and that the
Speaker 7: crimes were done for sexual gratification. Law enforcement up until
Speaker 7: the end of.
Speaker 6: World War two, very very good at solving murders that
Speaker 6: accompanied robberies and murders that were involved involved domestic disputes.
Speaker 6: You know, if the wife died, the husband always did it.
Speaker 6: You know, if the gas station guy was shot, it
Speaker 6: was the same guy who emptied the cashal resister drawer.
Speaker 6: But this we found in a lite year old girl
Speaker 6: partially clad in the weeds. That stuff was kind of befuddling,
Speaker 6: you know. The whole idea of serial murder wasn't thought
Speaker 6: of that much. The Boston Strangler was one that was
Speaker 6: known but until the mid sixties, when Pandora's Box was
Speaker 6: opened pretty much during the summer in nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 6: same time as the child I murders, you know, with it.
Speaker 6: By the end of the sixties, we knew that that
Speaker 6: serial killing was a thing, that evil was out there,
Speaker 6: and that there were human predators. But to watch the
Speaker 6: light bulb go on slowly is very profound for me
Speaker 6: that we're so much smarter now and to the point
Speaker 6: where that the nature of mind bogglingly horrible crime has changed.
Speaker 6: We don't see the serial killer who allowed it was
Speaker 6: the pressure cooker to build up in between crimes, the
Speaker 6: one who taunts police but stays a shadow. Today we
Speaker 6: see spree killers, guys who harm themselves in one way
Speaker 6: or another and then go to a crowded place and
Speaker 6: try to kill as many as they can, and usually
Speaker 6: it turns out to be a particularly violent and horrible
Speaker 6: form of suicide because they end up dead, either shot
Speaker 6: by a police officer or at their own gun. So
Speaker 6: there's this period at the end of the twentieth century
Speaker 6: where there's this phenomenon of serial killing, and I don't
Speaker 6: think it'll ever cease to fascinate me because it was
Speaker 6: the thing that terrorized me to the point of trauma
Speaker 6: when I was a kid. You know, I'm glad I
Speaker 6: gave Alice Bernhardt some closure. I'm not sure that I'll
Speaker 6: ever give myself closure, and luck luckily for the crime readers,
Speaker 6: I think I will always be searching for answers involving
Speaker 6: these sorts of crimes.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, it is also fascinating to see for the younger
Speaker 5: reader they must be astonished at the sense of trust
Speaker 5: of people that they weren't. They wouldn't report their children
Speaker 5: missing for hours later, I guess after they.
Speaker 6: Exhausted all of the.
Speaker 5: The obvious ideas where they thought their kid might have
Speaker 5: gone to the Uh. The constant phone contact that we
Speaker 5: have now would enable us to know about things that
Speaker 5: or at least believe that something had gone awry much
Speaker 5: much earlier than afterwards. Now, when when you read this
Speaker 5: stuff now, you can't believe the differences that these kinds
Speaker 5: of crimes and these kinds of criminals have made with
Speaker 5: everyone's life in society today.
Speaker 6: Yeah, when Joe Anne Lynn is a ducted at about
Speaker 6: eight o'clock in the morning, uh, the school knows she's absent,
Speaker 6: but her parents don't know she's absent until she doesn't
Speaker 6: come home from school. And even then, you know, the
Speaker 6: thinking is that maybe she stopped at the store. All
Speaker 6: in all, eleven hours passed before police are informed that
Speaker 6: this little girl didn't show up at school that morning.
Speaker 5: Those rules changing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 5: Even the brother doesn't know, he sees he doesn't see
Speaker 5: his sister there, but doesn't think the call again, we
Speaker 5: would do that today, doesn't think to call home, just thinks, well,
Speaker 5: I guess she just stayed back. Yeah, incredible.
Speaker 6: And I you know, I certainly remember the days before
Speaker 6: cell phones. You know, you you needed you need to
Speaker 6: find somebody with a phone or her a payphone in
Speaker 6: order to call, and you wanted to make really sure
Speaker 6: that not thing that there was an actual emergency, because
Speaker 6: if you called and upset your mother and it turned
Speaker 6: out to be nothing, you know, you might get yelled at.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean just the whole idea that there might
Speaker 6: be a crime occurring didn't occur to people.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Incredible.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I want to thank you very much for coming on
Speaker 5: and talking about haunting homicide. It's been a real pleasure
Speaker 5: for those that might want to look at your other work.
Speaker 5: You're twenty five years of true crime writing. Is there
Speaker 5: a Facebook page for this and a website they might
Speaker 5: refer to.
Speaker 6: Well, you can go to Amazon dot com. I have
Speaker 6: my own page there. Don't confuse me with the Michael Benson,
Speaker 6: who writes about outer space, the one with the White Beard,
Speaker 6: the one thing in the book at the end of
Speaker 6: each chapter. For the open cases, I've given a phone
Speaker 6: number for the appropriate law enforcement And if, as so
Speaker 6: often happens, you know something and you never want to
Speaker 6: talk to a police officer ever, ever, ever, you can
Speaker 6: get in touch with me. You know, I'm at author
Speaker 6: Michael Benson. If I can give a quick plug for
Speaker 6: stuff coming up, sure not. Still on sale at a
Speaker 6: bookstore near you is Carmine the Snake, biography of mafia
Speaker 6: legend Carmine Persco that I wrote with Frank Demadio on
Speaker 6: sale next month. Brooklyn the bag Dad, Christopher Strom's memoir
Speaker 6: written with Jerome Pricelin, myself by a New York Police
Speaker 6: Department interrogation expert who after retirement, goes to Iraq to
Speaker 6: fight terrorism. And next year my next mob opus written
Speaker 6: with Frank Domadio, called Lord High Executioner. It's the story
Speaker 6: of the man who ran murdering albert Anastasia. Wow.
Speaker 5: Fascinating. Well, thank you very much, and thank you Michael
Speaker 5: for your work with Donald Tubman on hunting homicides. It's
Speaker 5: been that an thank you very much, Michael, have a
Speaker 5: great day.
Speaker 6: I appreciate it. Dan.
Speaker 5: Always a pleasure, always a pleasure. Thank you, good night,
Speaker 5: take care.