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Speaker 2: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 2: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 2: written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 2: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 2: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 2: journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 6: Good evening on a fall evening in Corvallis, Oregon. In
Speaker 6: nineteen sixty seven, seventeen year old Dick Kitchell, a senior
Speaker 6: at the high school, disappeared after attending a party. Ten
Speaker 6: days later, his body was spotted by two children as
Speaker 6: it floated down the Willamette River. He had been beaten
Speaker 6: and strangled. The investigation into his murder played out during
Speaker 6: one of the most dramatic years in America. Life in Corvallis,
Speaker 6: a college town, had offered a protective, idyllic life to many,
Speaker 6: but in nineteen sixty seven nineteen sixty eight Vietnam a
Speaker 6: presidential campaign, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Junior and
Speaker 6: Robert Kennedy and the murder of Dick Kitchell changed and
Speaker 6: all that his friends thought his death was ignored because
Speaker 6: Dick was from the wrong side of the tracks. Police
Speaker 6: in the district attorney thought they knew who had murdered
Speaker 6: the boy, but never made an arrest. Decades later, a
Speaker 6: cold case detective believed he too, had solved the case. However,
Speaker 6: once again justice was elusive. Now, nearly fifty years later,
Speaker 6: a classmate, New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Morris, returns
Speaker 6: to her home town to write about how the murder
Speaker 6: changed the town and the lives of Dick Kitchell's friends.
Speaker 6: Rebecca Morris is the New York Times Best knowing author
Speaker 6: If I Can't Have You, Susan Powell, her mysterious disappearance
Speaker 6: and the murder of her children, Killing an Amish Country,
Speaker 6: Ted and Ann, and other books. The book that we're
Speaker 6: featuring this evening is A Murder in My Hometown, was
Speaker 6: my special guest journalist and author Rebecca Morris. Welcome to
Speaker 6: the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to
Speaker 6: this interview. Rebecca Morris, I think, hi.
Speaker 5: Dan, thanks so much for having me inviting me on.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much. Like I had mentioned. This is
Speaker 6: a very very personal story for you, and let's get
Speaker 6: right to this. Tell us a little bit about Corvallis,
Speaker 6: Oregon to let people know the size, and you talk
Speaker 6: about the racial mix in the city, in the small town,
Speaker 6: I should say, but tell us about the size and
Speaker 6: where it is, and a little bit more about Cravallis,
Speaker 6: Oregon to introduce this story.
Speaker 5: Well, Cravallis is, Uh, I mean, Oregon is almost all
Speaker 5: small towns except for except for Portland. And it's one
Speaker 5: of the towns in the in the Willamette Valley that
Speaker 5: you know, the pioneers came on the Oregon Trail and
Speaker 5: settled along the Willamette River and in Oregon because of
Speaker 5: the what would be rich farmland. Uh. It's it's been
Speaker 5: a college town since I think the eighteen seventies and uh,
Speaker 5: growing from what was basically an agricultural college uh into
Speaker 5: Oregon State University. The our rival school is University of Oregon,
Speaker 5: which is in Eugene, just forty miles south. So the
Speaker 5: two main universities are are pretty close geographically. But Cravallis,
Speaker 5: I mean, one of the things I learned doing during
Speaker 5: this book, uh Dan, is that I I had no idea.
Speaker 5: You know, you're when we're in grade school, we're taught
Speaker 5: Oregon history. But I had no idea that there were
Speaker 5: slaves that came on the wagon trains to Oregon, and that,
Speaker 5: as a couple of historians describe it, Oregon's always had
Speaker 5: a schizophrenic relationship with race and UH. In fact, Southern
Speaker 5: Southerners were most of the group that came west, and
Speaker 5: what they wanted to do was create another Southern state
Speaker 5: with slavery and other uh southern uh ways of life.
Speaker 5: And so that when when Oregon gained statehood in eighteen
Speaker 5: fifty nine, there was a law that slavery was outlawed,
Speaker 5: but African Americans couldn't live in the state, and it's remained.
Speaker 5: Portland even now is considered the widest city in the country.
Speaker 5: And UH, there was one, you know, one black student
Speaker 5: in my high school class, and I think, I think
Speaker 5: it's one of the contributors to, uh, the kind of
Speaker 5: elitism and the town and gown feel of the college,
Speaker 5: which became a n an issue in this murder investigation
Speaker 5: because you know, we were all white, but there was
Speaker 5: a a class, a class difference that really kicked in.
Speaker 6: You talk about October you right about October twenty first,
Speaker 6: in nineteen sixty seven, specifically, there was a couple Dan Eccles,
Speaker 6: a young guy thirteen and fourteen year old friend Jim Crawford.
Speaker 6: We talked about the Molt River. Yeah, and they spotted
Speaker 6: a body. So tell us what they what they were
Speaker 6: doing and what they spotted. Yeah, and then the police
Speaker 6: response reintroduced, uh, Sergeant Montgomery.
Speaker 5: Well, Dan Echos was uh thirteen or fourteen, as you said,
Speaker 5: and he and his cousin were fishing off the dock.
Speaker 5: Dan's father had been a sheriff in Los Angeles, a
Speaker 5: w sheriff in Los Angeles, and had moved the family
Speaker 5: up to Oregon and bought this marina. So the boys
Speaker 5: were fishing in those days. The Malamat River was one
Speaker 5: of the most polluted in in America. It's also I
Speaker 5: think one of just two rivers that actually run up
Speaker 5: hill that runs south to north. So Uh, anyway, they
Speaker 5: cleaned up the river later, but in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 5: I know, it was really filthy and and uh therefore
Speaker 5: the fish that the boys caught, uh, well, the one
Speaker 5: time they they tried eating, you know, frying it up
Speaker 5: and eating made them, made the family sick, so they
Speaker 5: just fished for fun. So Dan was, you know, fishing
Speaker 5: off the dock and here came this body floating and
Speaker 5: he started to reach for it. It was faced in
Speaker 5: and he had this kind of irrational fear that, well,
Speaker 5: what if the arm came off if he grabbed it,
Speaker 5: So he let it float by, but he ran for
Speaker 5: his father, who of course knew how to contact the
Speaker 5: sheriff's office and the city police, and they brought the
Speaker 5: body ashore and it was the body of Dick Kitchell,
Speaker 5: a seventeen year old high school student who had been
Speaker 5: missing for ten days.
Speaker 6: Now, autopsies were done right away basically, and another captain
Speaker 6: if I get this pronunciation wrong, Hakima and also Hakama okay,
Speaker 6: and also right away the district attorney, Frank Knight. There's
Speaker 6: a corner doctor Rosendahller involved. What you say the autopsies
Speaker 6: were conducted at the funeral homes. What did they find
Speaker 6: in those autopsies? Immediately?
Speaker 5: Yeah, in those days, I thought that was really interesting
Speaker 5: that autopsies were uh, and you know, later bodies became
Speaker 5: you know, they were sent to Portland, but it was
Speaker 5: uh uh what they found uh And Dick's father and
Speaker 5: stepmother uh came in and identified him and then left.
Speaker 5: But he was he was a little guy, and uh,
Speaker 5: he was just five foot two and one hundred and
Speaker 5: twenty five pounds. And you know, I I've never unearthed
Speaker 5: any information that he was bullied or teased or anything.
Speaker 5: But he was actually well liked across across the different
Speaker 5: clicks that that had formed in high school. But he
Speaker 5: had been beaten up pretty badly. Both his eyes were bruised,
Speaker 5: his hands were bruised, you know, there were defensive uh
Speaker 5: bruising on his body. And he'd been strangled. And they
Speaker 5: concluded that, uh, he'd been strangled not so much with
Speaker 5: hands as with an arm or a piece of cloth.
Speaker 5: And then he'd been put into the river, probably in
Speaker 5: the spot uh off off the main road and Crabalos
Speaker 5: off the drain. Main road means only a block or two, uh,
Speaker 5: but uh where two rivers meet the Marys River and
Speaker 5: in the Willamert River. And then he'd he'd I don't
Speaker 5: think he'd surfaced for a few days, but eventually he'd
Speaker 5: surfaced and and floated probably probably just about a mile
Speaker 5: from where he was putting the river to the Marina.
Speaker 5: So he'd put up a s you know, he'd put
Speaker 5: up a struggle and you know, uh, he'd he'd been
Speaker 5: at a party uh that night, Uh at a home
Speaker 5: of some older, you know, kids in the early twenties
Speaker 5: who sort of provided a place and and alcohol for
Speaker 5: teenagers that wanted to go there, and the teenagers would
Speaker 5: chip in a little bit for you know, beer or liquor.
Speaker 5: But he'd been in a scuffle that night. He was
Speaker 5: known the last couple of years of his life for
Speaker 5: getting into fights. He especially he had you know, brutal
Speaker 5: fist fights with his father, and in fact, the very
Speaker 5: first police officer who arrived at the scene at the
Speaker 5: river when they were bringing the body ashore, had been
Speaker 5: an officer who'd been called to the kitchen home more
Speaker 5: than once to break up fights between Dick and his father.
Speaker 6: Now you talk about his father, Ralph and his stepmother
Speaker 6: Sylvia his real mother's names Joan. But at this time
Speaker 6: you say that he was discovered on October twenty first,
Speaker 6: nineteen sixty seven. However, when was he reported missing? And
Speaker 6: by who tell us about this?
Speaker 5: Okay, Well, the party he had been at was ten
Speaker 5: days before, basically the night of October tenth and early
Speaker 5: the morning of October eleventh, and he was missing for
Speaker 5: five or six days before his father and stepmother went
Speaker 5: to the police. And this is just one of many
Speaker 5: things that I found, uh, really shocking and actually quite
Speaker 5: different than probably how something would be done today. But
Speaker 5: they waited, and I just shrugged off his disappearance and
Speaker 5: thought maybe he'd gone to the coast with friends, and
Speaker 5: you know, sometimes they'd go he and friends would disappear
Speaker 5: for a few days. But finally, when he didn't show
Speaker 5: up on a school day on a Monday, then they
Speaker 5: they went to the police.
Speaker 6: Now, once police speak with Ralph and Sylvia, they compile
Speaker 6: a list through these the parents, a list of Dick's friends,
Speaker 6: and then they do find out about this party and
Speaker 6: more about the behavior of Dick and his reputation and
Speaker 6: how this might have happened. So before we talk about Montgomery,
Speaker 6: the Texas Montgomery and Hakinema going into this party and
Speaker 6: speaking to the people that hosted that party, let's talk
Speaker 6: a little bit about who Dick was. You've mentioned the
Speaker 6: rocky relationship he had with his father, but tell us
Speaker 6: a little bit more about Dick and this idea that
Speaker 6: he had friends on the other side of the tracks.
Speaker 6: You said he was well liked. Tell us a little
Speaker 6: bit more about Dick and his life with Ralph and Sylvia.
Speaker 5: Yes, well, I knew Dick a little bit. We went
Speaker 5: to the same junior high school in those days of
Speaker 5: junior high school. And he signed two of my yearbooks.
Speaker 5: And there's at least one photograph in one of the
Speaker 5: yearbooks that shows he's in my I guess my social
Speaker 5: studies class. And he did sign my yearbook and and
Speaker 5: I write that. You know, I don't know if it's
Speaker 5: because of his uh very chaotic childhood or in spite
Speaker 5: of it, but he was the only boy and or
Speaker 5: one of the only boys in junior high school to
Speaker 5: show up a picture day, you know, in a shirt
Speaker 5: and tie. And he'd been a he was a really
Speaker 5: he'd been a sweet kid.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 5: I interviewed a lot of his you know, uh close
Speaker 5: friends for the book, and they still call him, you know,
Speaker 5: fifty years after he's been murdered, they still call him Dickie,
Speaker 5: which was his childhood name and his his closest friends
Speaker 5: he made in uh grade school, Uh from uh you know,
Speaker 5: he went to Harding School, and he also went to
Speaker 5: a couple other grade schools in craballs but they were
Speaker 5: on uh you know, uh summer baseball teams, and he
Speaker 5: was on one called the Crocodile's and you know they
Speaker 5: the way they spent their days outside of school was
Speaker 5: you know, writing byic goals and playing baseball and and
Speaker 5: the the main uh issue for for Dick in his
Speaker 5: life was that his parents had divorced. His mother moved
Speaker 5: back to Washington State where she was from. On on
Speaker 5: occasion he would live in Washington State with her, and
Speaker 5: then he, I don't know would be sent back to Craballis.
Speaker 5: And when Dick by by our senior year, he was
Speaker 5: his second step mother was living with him. So that
Speaker 5: was his father's third marriage. And his father was a
Speaker 5: small business owner. He owned a a shoe repair shop
Speaker 5: in Craballis and they did live south of town where
Speaker 5: you know, geography is kind of important in Craballis. It
Speaker 5: says a lot about what kind of social class you
Speaker 5: fall into. And south of town is is you know, uh,
Speaker 5: just less fancy and and simpler and moller you know,
Speaker 5: modest home and no uh, no shame in that. But
Speaker 5: and his parents, he was an only child, but he had,
Speaker 5: you know, a couple of step brothers that sometimes lived
Speaker 5: with Ralph and Sylvia and him, and sometimes they didn't.
Speaker 5: And uh, Dick was he just became kind of you
Speaker 5: know lost when he reached his teenage years, and you know,
Speaker 5: because there wasn't well there was summer baseball, but he
Speaker 5: had friends who you know, would take up snow skiing
Speaker 5: in the winter. Well, Dick couldn't afford anything like that,
Speaker 5: and he began to drink. His his parents were drinkers
Speaker 5: and spent a lot of time, you know, bowling or
Speaker 5: at the Moose Club or the Elks Club in Cravalis,
Speaker 5: and that was kind of their their social life. And
Speaker 5: Dick had a car that meant the world to him,
Speaker 5: this baby Blue Ford, and he had a a jacket
Speaker 5: and those were the most important things. A uh uh
Speaker 5: kind of swayed, you know, uh, jacket and those were
Speaker 5: his two belongings that were so important to him. And
Speaker 5: on Labor Day weekend, nineteen sixty seven, so just before
Speaker 5: the party he went to in the last night of
Speaker 5: his life, he'd cracked up his car and been arrested
Speaker 5: for drug driving and resisting arrest. And you know, it
Speaker 5: was kind of a rather spectacular accident, kind of right
Speaker 5: in the middle of town, and one of his girlfriends
Speaker 5: was with him in the car, and so, uh, his
Speaker 5: first mention and the local newspaper was as this miner
Speaker 5: who'd been in the spectacular car rack and because he
Speaker 5: was a minor, his name wasn't mentioned. But of course
Speaker 5: a few weeks later he'd be murdered, and and then
Speaker 5: you know, his life was kind of a fair game.
Speaker 5: And one of the things I think so interesting is
Speaker 5: how how our hometown newspaper, you know, wrote about this
Speaker 5: or or didn't write about this. I think the town
Speaker 5: was embarrassed by the murder.
Speaker 6: You taught. You write about that to explain to our
Speaker 6: audience that you say, he's a very small guy five
Speaker 6: foot two hundred and twenty five pounds, but despite that,
Speaker 6: his I guess his family life and again you'd say,
Speaker 6: turn different when he was a teen, became much more angry.
Speaker 6: You write about that fighting was not foreign to him whatsoever.
Speaker 6: Maybe explain that, Yeah, well, I I now I know,
Speaker 6: and I think I knew at the time how naive
Speaker 6: I was.
Speaker 5: I mean, when I when I was researching the case
Speaker 5: and found out that these parties and even the night
Speaker 5: Dick disappeared was it was a week, was a school night,
Speaker 5: you know school nights. You know, I know where I was.
Speaker 5: I was at home, but he had he was He
Speaker 5: was gone a lot because he wanted to get out
Speaker 5: of the house. And that's what he and his friends
Speaker 5: uh had in common. Uh some of his friends is
Speaker 5: they wanted to get out of the house and they
Speaker 5: wanted to get uh out of care balance and uh.
Speaker 5: But but Dick was you know, Dick was really uh
Speaker 5: he had friends in in all all all areas of life.
Speaker 5: It began to split bit a bit more in in
Speaker 5: his teenage years in high school, as you know, as
Speaker 5: some of the kids he grew up with in grade
Speaker 5: school became, you know s more serious students, and you know,
Speaker 5: they were trying to get into good colleges and they
Speaker 5: were in and we were in you know I I
Speaker 5: uh college placement advanced placement classes. And Dick, who w
Speaker 5: you know, was just an average or a little bit
Speaker 5: below average student, was taking you know a shop and
Speaker 5: and uh car mechanics and and things like that. So
Speaker 5: his friends were I think more aware. They stayed friends
Speaker 5: with him, but they were busy with different things. They
Speaker 5: had less in common in in their teenage years than
Speaker 5: they'd had in common when when they were young, and uh,
Speaker 5: I think Dick was lonely. He'd he certainly there was
Speaker 5: alcohol around the house. But he became known, as you know,
Speaker 5: as a partier. And there were a number of places
Speaker 5: in town where uh, it was im you know, you'd
Speaker 5: go to BC for fee or to be seen. One
Speaker 5: of them was Seatants drive in, which didn't have indoor seating.
Speaker 5: It was, uh, you stayed in your car to eat,
Speaker 5: and so kids moved between the cars a lot to
Speaker 5: talk and socialize. And he was called the Mayor of
Speaker 5: Seatans because you know, he was there all the time
Speaker 5: and uh had this huge network of people. But he'd
Speaker 5: begun to fight a lot. And one of the other
Speaker 5: things I was naive about is that at least an
Speaker 5: maybe this is true. I've never I've never been a
Speaker 5: teenage boy. But in in his uh you know, his
Speaker 5: his group, there were these fights and he would he
Speaker 5: would try to pick a fight with somebody, or he'd
Speaker 5: try to have a friend of his fight this kid
Speaker 5: for him. And I don't know how often there actually
Speaker 5: were fights, but that he talked about it a lot,
Speaker 5: and and all through the police report. Uh, when the
Speaker 5: the dis two detectives interviewed Dick's friends. This is a
Speaker 5: it's a theme that keeps coming up that Dick asked
Speaker 5: so and so if they would fight so and so
Speaker 5: for him, And and I I just, you know, myself,
Speaker 5: didn't really know that that was one of the things
Speaker 5: that occupied at least, you know, some teenage boys days
Speaker 5: and nights. It was thinking about fights. But I assume
Speaker 5: there's some you know, some psychological connection to his relationship
Speaker 5: with his father in all of that is that, you know,
Speaker 5: he he was angry, and he was the night he
Speaker 5: showed up for that party, he was uh, you know,
Speaker 5: looking forward to some kind of altercation. He was also drunk,
Speaker 5: and and there was an argument at the at the party,
Speaker 5: and and you know it, I always thought, well, that
Speaker 5: must have led to his disappearance, But it was actually
Speaker 5: something quite different.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about you talking with Detective Montgomery and h.
Speaker 6: Hakama and assistant Chief Akama assistant yeah, and and Chief Burright.
Speaker 6: And they went to Paul and Judy Everett's home. Yes, now,
Speaker 6: who who were who were there? And it's it's really
Speaker 6: interesting what they were doing when the detectives and the
Speaker 6: chief went there. What were they doing? Who were they
Speaker 6: were on the list given by Ralph and Sylvia to
Speaker 6: the detectives. So who was on that list that was
Speaker 6: at this home the day after this event apparently happened.
Speaker 5: Well, I think you're talking about after the day his
Speaker 5: body is found, which is ten days after he disappeared.
Speaker 5: The day the body is brought out of the river.
Speaker 5: Late that night, the DA and the assistant police chief
Speaker 5: and the two detectives go to the home where they
Speaker 5: know Dick had been to this party the last night
Speaker 5: of his life. And what they find this is pretty
Speaker 5: much the makeup of the people who'd been there the
Speaker 5: same uh night as Dick's last night. There's uh Paul
Speaker 5: and Judy Efforts, who are the runners of the house
Speaker 5: and who are also grad you know from our high school,
Speaker 5: but are a little bit older twenty two, twenty three
Speaker 5: years old. There are a couple of other seventeen year
Speaker 5: old boys, and uh mel Plemons and Marty Tucker. And
Speaker 5: there is this twenty three year old Doug Hamblin who
Speaker 5: has kind of has a reputation around town as a
Speaker 5: trouble maker. And they turns out to be the exact
Speaker 5: makeup of the people who'd been there the night Dick
Speaker 5: was there, and they were playing the same game that
Speaker 5: they'd played ten days before, which is called uh what
Speaker 5: was it called pass out? Just drink, drink until you
Speaker 5: pass out. And now on the night that Dick was there,
Speaker 5: on the tenth, there'd been you know, probably a dozen
Speaker 5: teenage sh other teenage kids come in and out, you know,
Speaker 5: buy buy some alcohol and leave. On this night ten
Speaker 5: days later, Uh, it's just the key, you know, the
Speaker 5: key five people and they're uh, they're playing the same
Speaker 5: drinking game. But the thing I thought was really interesting is,
Speaker 5: you know, the the detectives tell them, you know, your
Speaker 5: friend Dick, who you're the last people who see him alive,
Speaker 5: probably you know, he was found deadity murdered, and nobody flinched.
Speaker 5: And maybe they'd already heard it because it was twelve
Speaker 5: hours after the body'd been found, and word kind of
Speaker 5: travels fast and cabalas or a small town, but or
Speaker 5: maybe they had firsthand knowledge and and weren't surprised. But uh,
Speaker 5: nobody seemed uh, very surprised. And their names were on
Speaker 5: the list that some of their names were on the
Speaker 5: list that Dick's parents came up with, but there were
Speaker 5: also other lot of other names from the list, including
Speaker 5: the two girls you know he'd been dating, and you know,
Speaker 5: some boyhood friends and a boy in Dick's neighborhood who
Speaker 5: you know. Because Dick didn't have his car because he'd
Speaker 5: smashed up, he needed to ride to the party October tenth,
Speaker 5: and a neighbor boy had given him a ride, and
Speaker 5: so they had a long list of people to talk to.
Speaker 5: But I think they knew very early on that there
Speaker 5: was something about the people at that at that party house.
Speaker 6: Now, how do they find out about exactly about the
Speaker 6: car ride and the drop off? And at the same
Speaker 6: time you write that they're they're hearing rumors as well.
Speaker 6: At the same time as they begin their investigation, who
Speaker 6: gives them information that that sort of directs them towards Doug.
Speaker 5: Yes, Well, people they had, you know, they had talked
Speaker 5: to begin talking to people as soon as you know,
Speaker 5: they found Dick's body, and they knew, I believe they
Speaker 5: knew before they got to the house on the twenty first,
Speaker 5: that uh Doug Hamblin had given uh Dick a ride
Speaker 5: and you know, and he had to admit that because
Speaker 5: e everybody knew it, and the for ten days, the
Speaker 5: among Dick's group, you know, they didn't know he'd been murdered.
Speaker 5: They didn't know what had happened to him, but they
Speaker 5: knew that Doug Hamblin had given him a ride after
Speaker 5: the party. Everybody knew that Doug had off. Doug had
Speaker 5: taken three boys home who needed rides after at at
Speaker 5: midnight on that night, and two of them were like
Speaker 5: north of the city and Dug uh Dick was the
Speaker 5: last person in Doug's car, and so Doug people year
Speaker 5: that Doug had given Dick a ride. So he what
Speaker 5: he told the police is that Dick wouldn't tell him
Speaker 5: where he lived, and so Doug said he just dropped
Speaker 5: him off on a downtown street that was, you know, incidentally,
Speaker 5: you know, a block and a half from the river.
Speaker 5: And so they knew fairly early on that this that
Speaker 5: Doug Hamblin, who was twenty three, had was probably the
Speaker 5: last person to see Uh Dick. The rumors that were
Speaker 5: circulating early on were about you know gangs. I mean,
Speaker 5: I don't We're not talking you know, inner city gangs,
Speaker 5: but groups of kids from maybe you know, the smaller
Speaker 5: towns uh east of Cravallo's or south of Crevallos had come,
Speaker 5: you know, cruising through town and seen him or picked
Speaker 5: him up or something, or that that something went wrong
Speaker 5: like that. The the theory that, in fact, my classmates
Speaker 5: for fifty years, I mean, we'd we assumed his father
Speaker 5: had killed him, that Dick had gotten home, he'd had
Speaker 5: one last fight with his father, and his father had
Speaker 5: uh maybe even accidentally killed him, and then he'd gotten
Speaker 5: rid of his body. Uh, I mean we I thought
Speaker 5: that until last year. Uh uh, we never had any idea,
Speaker 5: uh that that the focus was on Doug Hamblin. Uh.
Speaker 5: It just it wasn't made public at the time it
Speaker 5: was made public that he was among Dick's friends who
Speaker 5: who had polygraphs. The DA never told so it wasn't
Speaker 5: it wasn't of course in the gazat times that uh
Speaker 5: Doug had failed three polygraphs. But now we know he did.
Speaker 5: And so really for fifty years, we thought, you know,
Speaker 5: his father had had killed him and maybe in an accident,
Speaker 5: and so he was somebody that the police needed to eliminate.
Speaker 5: And you know, Dick's father and stepmother balk to taking polygraphs.
Speaker 5: But they finally did, and so they began to you know,
Speaker 5: they gave polygraphs to a lot of a lot of
Speaker 5: the teenagers and began to kind of Winnow the list
Speaker 5: of suspects.
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Speaker 6: Some suspects, when asked for a lie detector test, to act,
Speaker 6: at least, according to the police, in a suspicious manner.
Speaker 6: When he was asked for a lie detector test, what
Speaker 6: was his response.
Speaker 5: Uh, Dick's father.
Speaker 6: Well, no, no, Doug, Oh dog no Doug.
Speaker 5: Well, Douck agreed, And it's interesting he you know, they
Speaker 5: told them that night that they showed up at the
Speaker 5: house that they wanted to do polygraphs, and uh, he agreed,
Speaker 5: And within two days the detectives were driving them to
Speaker 5: Eugene where the police or sheriff's office had a UH
Speaker 5: polygraph examiner. And even from after the first test, Uh,
Speaker 5: the the examiner said that Doug's test was inconclusive. Uh.
Speaker 5: The n newspaper story, UH, the next newspaper story about
Speaker 5: the case, after the first big story that Dick had
Speaker 5: been found murdered, UH, was about the detectives taking this
Speaker 5: group of kids to uh have polygraphs, and it named them.
Speaker 5: Even the seventeen year olds and it named Doug, but
Speaker 5: it did it just said, you know, the headline was
Speaker 5: they seem seemed to pass. So the DA knew there
Speaker 5: was problems with Doug's polygraph, but they weren't going to
Speaker 5: you know, admit it in the in the newspaper at
Speaker 5: that point, and they never did. They just wanted to,
Speaker 5: you know, they were going to put some pressure on him,
Speaker 5: and so, and he consented to second polygraph and then
Speaker 5: finally they did a third one at the State Police
Speaker 5: headquarters in Salem, and that's when the examiners said, you know,
Speaker 5: most likely this is your killer.
Speaker 6: You talk about the difference at that.
Speaker 5: Point, you finally hired an attorney and the attorney said,
Speaker 5: you know, you either charge him or you back off,
Speaker 5: and they couldn't. They didn't think they had enough to
Speaker 5: charge him.
Speaker 6: You talk about the difference in forensics and police procedure
Speaker 6: back then in the seventies, way back then, in late sixties,
Speaker 6: even pardon me, late sixties, and so you talk about
Speaker 6: how the police handled this case in terms of the
Speaker 6: difference on where the crime scene was or the supposed
Speaker 6: crime scene, or what was his termined as a crime
Speaker 6: scene on fourth and B Street, where supposedly he dropped
Speaker 6: them off, considering there was ten days later for things
Speaker 6: to happen like nature and rain and things like that,
Speaker 6: but also that there was other things like a code
Speaker 6: in the car. So tell us about this code in
Speaker 6: the car, and then the idea of again normally what
Speaker 6: they would do with processing a car, that would be
Speaker 6: that they would want to search and process. Tell us
Speaker 6: about what the police did at that time, and again
Speaker 6: what they would have done today, yes.
Speaker 5: Or even what they might have done then and didn't do.
Speaker 5: So the first thing, Dick's father, you know, always identifying
Speaker 5: the body, he says, where's Dick's coach? Because Dick was
Speaker 5: in his you know, cowboy bullets and jeans and shirt,
Speaker 5: and you know, the the the police, the funeral homes
Speaker 5: say well we we didn't see a coat. There was
Speaker 5: no coat. So words spread really quickly, you know, where
Speaker 5: was Dick's code? And so when the police visit the
Speaker 5: uh Everetts home ten days later, they ask, you know,
Speaker 5: what about Dick's coat, and Doug hamblin actually, you know, volunteers,
Speaker 5: and I just think he did because it would have
Speaker 5: been worse if he'd caught lying. He said, he found
Speaker 5: a coat in his car, uh you know, that week,
Speaker 5: and he'd thought it was a child's code, and so
Speaker 5: he'd given it to a nine year old neighbor boy
Speaker 5: and he did he got it back from you know,
Speaker 5: the police didn't go get it, which you'd think they
Speaker 5: would do. They they uh the next time they saw Doug,
Speaker 5: Doug had brought it. I brought it to them. So,
Speaker 5: I mean, one of my theories is that when Dick
Speaker 5: realized he was gonna be fighting with Doug, that he
Speaker 5: took off his coat and put in the car because
Speaker 5: that was you know, a cherish belonging to him. Of course,
Speaker 5: six nineteen sixty seven, sixty eight. It's it's before DNA testing.
Speaker 5: It's before an awful lot of uh things could be
Speaker 5: done that that are dan done now routinely. I was
Speaker 5: surprised that they didn't seize Doug Doug's car once they
Speaker 5: knew he was a suspect. They went and looked at it,
Speaker 5: walked around it, looked inside, didn't see anything. I think.
Speaker 5: I mean, I know today the car would be seized
Speaker 5: and there'd be some kind of more detail, uh examination
Speaker 5: of it. The ninth that they showed up at the
Speaker 5: Everts House. Ten days after the murder. They looked at
Speaker 5: Doug's hands and but he worked at a at a
Speaker 5: metal foundry, and you know, his hands were greasy, dirty,
Speaker 5: well worn. Anyway, they didn't see anything. He didn't appear
Speaker 5: to have been you know, hit in the face, and
Speaker 5: they they just couldn't tell by really looking at him
Speaker 5: ten days later. But what really uh stymied them is
Speaker 5: that there was uh, there was no they didn't have
Speaker 5: a crime scene. I mean, we don't really know if
Speaker 5: he let Dick off at Fourth and B Streets downtown.
Speaker 5: They went and looked around there. Uh it's a it's
Speaker 5: it'd be a quiet area at night. It's uh, there's
Speaker 5: kind of a main street through there, but not a
Speaker 5: lot of traffic at night. The State Employment office is
Speaker 5: on one corner. There's some apartment buildings, a couple other
Speaker 5: small businesses. There was You're right, the ten days had
Speaker 5: passed and probably had rained. But they they didn't find
Speaker 5: anything there. Uh, So they don't know where the crime
Speaker 5: was committed. They had no you know, forensics, they had
Speaker 5: no confession. They uh, I just really didn't have uh
Speaker 5: much to go on besides the polygraphs, which of course
Speaker 5: are inadmissible. Uh in court they s in a murder.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 5: Evidence is supposed to be kept uh indefinitely. And there
Speaker 5: were some things and uh, I'm not sure, maybe I
Speaker 5: should wait to go into that. But but when a
Speaker 5: cold case detective looked at this, you know, forty years later,
Speaker 5: there were a lot of things lost or missing, and
Speaker 5: that happens when decades passed. But it would have been
Speaker 5: nice if things had been kind of better organized. I
Speaker 5: I guess.
Speaker 6: Now you have the two detectives of central figures in this,
Speaker 6: Jim Montgomery and Dick UHAMI and Jim Montgomery, Yeah, right,
Speaker 6: And and they have to not focus on on Doug
Speaker 6: necessarily they've got and then they come to the realization
Speaker 6: that there's more to Doug as a suspect, and that
Speaker 6: hence the inconclusive polygraph, and then up to the third
Speaker 6: one where they get a conclusive at least from the
Speaker 6: examiner response to say this guy is likely responsible for
Speaker 6: the murder. But these two detectives have to go through
Speaker 6: every other lead and and talk to everybody involved, not
Speaker 6: only at that party but ex wives and the babysitter, Pt. Hawcket.
Speaker 6: So what do they how do they proceed with this,
Speaker 6: and how it's interesting how much they relied on in
Speaker 6: those days this inadmissible polygraph test to be able to
Speaker 6: go further with this. So given that they rely on
Speaker 6: those polygraph tests, once everybody has been given the goal
Speaker 6: ahead and cleared, how do they proceed with and who
Speaker 6: do they look at as potential other suspects in this?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Well, you know, I've been I was a reporter
Speaker 5: from you know, many years and then I've been writing
Speaker 5: true crime books for just eight or ten years. But
Speaker 5: I continue to learn how important it is that police
Speaker 5: don't have tunnel vision and focus on the one suspect.
Speaker 5: It it turns out, I mean that that is that's
Speaker 5: really important because they if they miss their opportunity with
Speaker 5: other people and with other you know, paths of the investigation,
Speaker 5: it may be too late to go back. So they
Speaker 5: were you know, pretty open minded about it. And I
Speaker 5: should explain it was a pretty short investigation by early
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty eight, so the murder was in October. This
Speaker 5: this had a pretty short life because there was nowhere
Speaker 5: much for them to go with it. And once you've
Speaker 5: talked to you know, the thirty or forty people who
Speaker 5: knew these people. It it just there there were no leads.
Speaker 5: And I think the thing that that Doug Hamblin was
Speaker 5: lucky about was that, you know, he wasn't nobody. Nobody
Speaker 5: drove along, nobody saw anything. You know, they were trying
Speaker 5: to find witnesses or or look at different scenarios. Had
Speaker 5: Dick been hitch hiking and picked up or you know,
Speaker 5: was he was he seen uh after leaving Doug's car,
Speaker 5: and he never was. And then in nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 5: you know, the detectives were pulled off on to other cases.
Speaker 5: Just to back up for a second. The other thing
Speaker 5: about the UH investigation procedures at the time that of
Speaker 5: course it's you know, pre cell phones and the fact
Speaker 5: that UH today you know, people have we leave an
Speaker 5: electronic footprint. You know, there's nothing right we do that
Speaker 5: can't be traced. And it it just was so interesting
Speaker 5: to remember that in nineteen sixty seven, sixty eight that
Speaker 5: that was not the case or what UH A detective
Speaker 5: I talked to recently about another case tall called life patterns.
Speaker 5: You and maybe everybody knows that term, but I I
Speaker 5: didn't know it as far as the police investigation that
Speaker 5: you look at somebody's life patterns, and in this case,
Speaker 5: they would've looked at decks and they would've looked at
Speaker 5: at Doug Hambling's and the other parties involved to see, well,
Speaker 5: what did they do? What did they do differently? Were
Speaker 5: they ever seen after this moment in time? You know,
Speaker 5: when was the next moment in time? What what would
Speaker 5: they you know, what would Doug usually be doing the
Speaker 5: next day? And could they look to see if he
Speaker 5: you know, showed up at work for instance, and uh,
Speaker 5: if he changed his life patterns. So they they proceeded
Speaker 5: by really talking to everybody. The the girl who was
Speaker 5: the living babysitter for Paul and Judy Everts, who'd c
Speaker 5: kind hadn't been there the night of the party, or
Speaker 5: she'd been there and then left for a while. Uh,
Speaker 5: they went to California to find her. And you know,
Speaker 5: there were some people that that the rumor was they
Speaker 5: moved away very quickly, and you know, it just seemed
Speaker 5: to be kind of coincidence. But they checked, they checked
Speaker 5: all that out. But uh so Ray, really they were
Speaker 5: left where their their main suspects were were. He here's
Speaker 5: the fellow who flunks three polygraphs and and then there's
Speaker 5: Dick's father, who was, you know, very surly to the police.
Speaker 5: The other thing I found most shocking is that never
Speaker 5: once did Dick's father call or show up at the
Speaker 5: police department and nag them and say, what's going on
Speaker 5: with the investigation and my son's murder. Never once. Now,
Speaker 5: they dropped in on him at the shoe store, and
Speaker 5: he and Sylvia didn't like that much. And you know, uh,
Speaker 5: thank goodness Jim Montgomery took all these detailed notes for
Speaker 5: the police file, because there's absolutely perfect lines of dialogue
Speaker 5: of them saying, we know our rights. You know, we
Speaker 5: know our rights. You can't you can't hound dislike this.
Speaker 5: And they were not very sympathetic parents or people in
Speaker 5: this case. And it appears, you know, Dick's father didn't
Speaker 5: kill him, but but it was. It's hard to find
Speaker 5: sympathy for them.
Speaker 6: You write about his them visiting Martha Taylor. So the
Speaker 6: detectives talked to Martha Taylor and they ask and she
Speaker 6: says why he left, but also that he was attending church.
Speaker 6: Now why is this important? And what did the detectives? Yeah, well,
Speaker 6: what do they conclude or determine from this bit of information?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, Martha Taylor was the third of Doug Hamblin's wives,
Speaker 5: and she, you know, has been very open about about
Speaker 5: things with me. She married Doug when in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 5: and she had two daughters from another marriage. And so
Speaker 5: this is the later the cold case detective in two
Speaker 5: thousand eight, UH goes to talk to her and I
Speaker 5: don't well, they didn't. Of course, she wasn't on the
Speaker 5: on the scene. I mean, she didn't know Doug in
Speaker 5: the sixties, so she she didn't know about then, but
Speaker 5: she told them that. And they had heard at the
Speaker 5: time that Doug suddenly Doug Hamblin was suddenly attending a
Speaker 5: church in Crabalis UH after the murder, and UH appeared
Speaker 5: to be possibly confiding in a minister at the church,
Speaker 5: and that minister accompanied Doug to the third polygraph exam
Speaker 5: in Salem, and at some point the detectives went to
Speaker 5: see the minister and the minister told them, if you're
Speaker 5: looking at Doug Hamblin, you're looking in the right direction.
Speaker 5: So that was a pretty uh big thing to hear
Speaker 5: from somebody that Doug was confiding in. And UH, so
Speaker 5: you know, it's it's a little sticky with what kind
Speaker 5: of It's kind of like you know, privacy rights around
Speaker 5: uh clients of of attorneys, you know, what kind of
Speaker 5: att attorney share and what can and a minister's share.
Speaker 5: But the minister shared that with the detectives in nineteen
Speaker 5: sixty seven or nineteen sixty eight. So Martha knew that, uh,
Speaker 5: Doug had you know. Basically what she knew as his
Speaker 5: third wife was that this incident that happened and Doug said,
Speaker 5: you know, he didn't do it. She went to a
Speaker 5: an attorney uh one year to deal with a a
Speaker 5: custody issue from her her former marriage, and the attorneys said, oh,
Speaker 5: you're married to Doug Hamblin. Uh, the only man to
Speaker 5: get away with c with murder and cabalence. And uh
Speaker 5: so she thinks he was very much capable of it.
Speaker 5: You know, he was. He was a brute, He drank
Speaker 5: a lot, He got angry, and he had problems with rage,
Speaker 5: and he never admitted it to her, but she thought
Speaker 5: he was capable of it.
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Speaker 6: a better way to cook. Now, Rebecca, we were talking
Speaker 6: about all of the information that detective Montgomery had and
Speaker 6: his partner Akama, but they went to the DA Frank Knight,
Speaker 6: and what was his response to all the evidence gathering
Speaker 6: that they had and their idea that they should take
Speaker 6: this to the grand jury. What did Frank Knight continually
Speaker 6: have to say to these two detectives regarding the chances
Speaker 6: of doing that.
Speaker 5: Well, he said then and he says today that they're
Speaker 5: just you know, there wasn't any conclusive evidence. And of
Speaker 5: course he was afraid that if they tried dug on
Speaker 5: manslaughter murder charges and he was acquitted, that was it.
Speaker 5: That was their one shot. And because you can't be
Speaker 5: retried and he was, you know, they tried putting some
Speaker 5: pressure on Doug not not in a physical kind of way,
Speaker 5: but you know, they they would meet with him alone
Speaker 5: and hoped to kind of intimidate him, and uh, and
Speaker 5: the detectives you know, went home every night just uh
Speaker 5: really frustrated. One of the the themes that came through
Speaker 5: when I began talking to my classmates about this murder
Speaker 5: was there was an overwhelming sense that if Dick's father
Speaker 5: had been prominent in the town, that this would have
Speaker 5: been solved, that somebody would have been arrested and convicted.
Speaker 5: And when I began to look into this three years ago,
Speaker 5: I mean I was really stunned, uh how widespread that
Speaker 5: feeling was, that this was actually about uh class in
Speaker 5: in our college town and kind of the haves and
Speaker 5: have nots. And I asked, you know, that there wouldn't
Speaker 5: have been a book without these two detectives in the
Speaker 5: DA who are all now, you know, in their eighties
Speaker 5: and still you know, have very sharp memories. And I
Speaker 5: asked them about that that you know, would've made a
Speaker 5: difference if if Dick's father was you know, a university
Speaker 5: person like like my dad was. And uh, they said,
Speaker 5: you know, of course, they said, no, not at all.
Speaker 5: They they were, you know, in a lot of uh
Speaker 5: agony over not being able to bring they'd never had
Speaker 5: they'd never had a case, they hadn't closed, they never
Speaker 5: had a murder they hadn't closed, and so they you know,
Speaker 5: took this personally. They were all every one of them
Speaker 5: had young children themselves, and I you know, it just
Speaker 5: it it really became personal for them to to try
Speaker 5: to to try to close this and try to find
Speaker 5: some justice for for Gick. And you know, uh, the
Speaker 5: DA just said there wasn't enough there. And you know,
Speaker 5: a cold case detective later on that I'm sure we'll
Speaker 5: talk about, had a different opinion. But you know, it's
Speaker 5: not enough to be the person who gave somebody a
Speaker 5: ride on the last last night of their lives. You know,
Speaker 5: they didn't know who had killed him. M M.
Speaker 6: You talk about in two thousand eight, right about in
Speaker 6: two thousand and eight that that enters into this story.
Speaker 6: As the detective Tyson Poole Cravali's police department, he inherited
Speaker 6: a cold case and that was a nineteen sixty seven
Speaker 6: murder of Dick Kitchell. He was assigned take a look
Speaker 6: at this is the first and for its forty years later.
Speaker 6: So yes, how do he approached this differently? And then
Speaker 6: when he with his different approach what did he find.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, of course he he was he was a
Speaker 5: young detective. He'd been trained differently than you know, than
Speaker 5: Hakama and Montgomery had been. He had had even uh
Speaker 5: uh specialized forensic training. So he comes to it, of course,
Speaker 5: and you know, decades after we know about DNA and everything.
Speaker 5: So he he felt like the case had just kind
Speaker 5: of been forgotten. And what he did is he was
Speaker 5: a great believer in organization, and he was uh he
Speaker 5: has a very methodical way of dealing with the cold case,
Speaker 5: which is which pays off for him, uh usually, and
Speaker 5: it seems very simple, but just to you know, begin
Speaker 5: at the beginning and get everything uh organized. For one thing, Well,
Speaker 5: what he found is that the original police report and
Speaker 5: the notes they'd never been they'd never been typed up,
Speaker 5: they'd never been you know, f kept in the formal
Speaker 5: uh record keeping of of any kind. The audio tapes
Speaker 5: that had been made with Doug Hamblin when they met
Speaker 5: with him alone one on one, uh, not only were lost,
Speaker 5: they'd never been transcribed. Uh. Dick's clothing was missing, photos
Speaker 5: that were taken at the river when the body was
Speaker 5: first discovered had never been developed, and the negatives were
Speaker 5: missing now that I found Actually isn't unusual. Usually photos
Speaker 5: aren't developed until you know, the DA or somebody asks
Speaker 5: for them. But but in the m anyway, the negatives
Speaker 5: were missing, the photos have never been developed, the audio
Speaker 5: tapes were gone. But uh Tyson Poole continued to think
Speaker 5: that that Doug could have been charged. And so over
Speaker 5: a couple of years, UH, the cold case detective was
Speaker 5: pulled off to work on other things. He came back
Speaker 5: to it. He went to talk with Martha Taylor and
Speaker 5: also talked with UH a man who had been a
Speaker 5: neighbor of Doug's first wife and who who said that
Speaker 5: Doug had confessed the murder to that to his first wife,
Speaker 5: who is deceased now. And uh Tyson Poole was ready
Speaker 5: to to talk to the DA in two thousand eleven
Speaker 5: about about bringing charges, and Doug Hamlin had just died
Speaker 5: and so that was you know, he was too late. Yeah,
Speaker 5: So the case is considered closed. It's called uh closed conditionally,
Speaker 5: uh I'm sorry. Closed exceptionally is the term meaning it's
Speaker 5: closed because prosecutors either declined to proceed or because of
Speaker 5: the death of the suspect. So in this case, that's
Speaker 5: that's probably uh, both of them. One of the things
Speaker 5: I thought was uh so interesting, having spent my life
Speaker 5: in in broadcasting my first few decades, is is what
Speaker 5: news coverage was like at the time that there was
Speaker 5: never ever a story in the paper about you know,
Speaker 5: who who Doug wa I'm I'm sorry who Dick was.
Speaker 5: And today, you know, we'd see TV cameras at the school,
Speaker 5: or there'd be stories, you know, quoting Dick's coach or
Speaker 5: a teacher, or his shop teacher, or his friends or
Speaker 5: his friends who played baseball with him. I mean, you
Speaker 5: know what I mean, Dan, we'd we'd right get a
Speaker 5: glimpse of who was this young person, and there was
Speaker 5: nothing like that, And I I just don't think, you know,
Speaker 5: the media worked like that then, So you know, people
Speaker 5: reading about it in the paper never really knew who
Speaker 5: he was or what happened to him. And incredibly sad
Speaker 5: thing is that, you know, adults and friends of his
Speaker 5: parents were were overheard saying, you know, good riddance, you know,
Speaker 5: good riddance. It couldn't happen, you know, to a better kid,
Speaker 5: and just yeah, writing this off because he'd been in some.
Speaker 6: Trouble, he had some minor stuff. Really consider it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I mean he he didn't hurt anybody when
Speaker 5: he drove his car into the mailbox, and and and
Speaker 5: it was pretty minor stuff. And and there were never
Speaker 5: any there was no drugs. There probably was, you know,
Speaker 5: pot around Carballis in the late sixties, but uh uh,
Speaker 5: I think the DA told me the very first arrest
Speaker 5: for any drug related thing in Travalis was up on
Speaker 5: the college campus in the early seventies, when you know,
Speaker 5: at a a guard at a at a entrance to
Speaker 5: the university smelled, you know, smelled pot from a car,
Speaker 5: and that was the very first drug arrest and from
Speaker 5: Alas it was rather tame.
Speaker 6: M M. It's interesting you write that uh Tyson Poole
Speaker 6: met with John Lee, the man who had contacted police
Speaker 6: in the seventies saying he had information about Dick's murder,
Speaker 6: and you say that a note with his name was
Speaker 6: stuck on the back of the original case file. But
Speaker 6: it was a Pool that met with that Pool met
Speaker 6: with him and and and like as you mentioned that
Speaker 6: he had said that he lived across the street from
Speaker 6: Doug's first wife, Teresa, and he said that Teresa told
Speaker 6: him many times that Doug d they committed murder, and
Speaker 6: he had tried to convince him or her to go
Speaker 6: to authorities. But you said she was afraid.
Speaker 5: So yes, Well, she'd been married to Doug twice. Uh,
Speaker 5: they had divorced and then remarried. They had a small child,
Speaker 5: and and and Doug's mother actually was married eight times
Speaker 5: to six men, so that kind of ran in the family.
Speaker 5: But Teresa was was afraid to go to the police.
Speaker 5: And and I think you know, and Doug also has
Speaker 5: a brother who wouldn't communicate with me for the book,
Speaker 5: which is absolutely his right.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 5: I think they might be the only people who uh,
Speaker 5: you know, who ever knew exactly what had happened. But
Speaker 5: you know, the police did conclude that it probably it
Speaker 5: probably was an accident. It probably would have been a
Speaker 5: manslaughter charge that they Dug and Dick got into a
Speaker 5: a fight. Uh. They'd probably argued in the car before
Speaker 5: you know, he s he pulled over, uh somewhere. Uh.
Speaker 5: I don't think he ever stopped a fourth and B Street.
Speaker 5: I think he went over where it was dark, near
Speaker 5: the river, and the passenger side door of Doug's car
Speaker 5: was broken so that you had to flied across you know,
Speaker 5: the bench seat to leave the car, and he told
Speaker 5: the lice he had to drag Dick out of the car.
Speaker 5: And I think he'd dragged Dick out and they began
Speaker 5: to fight. Dick stopped to take off his jacket, and
Speaker 5: then you know, uh Dick was beaten and strangled, maybe
Speaker 5: with Dug's arm, and I think you know, Doug panicked
Speaker 5: and took Dick's body, uh to a place with uh
Speaker 5: hidden access to the river nearby, and he he'd been
Speaker 5: in trouble, you know a lot of his life, and
Speaker 5: the Camberlin went a head and as an adult was
Speaker 5: in was in some trouble, uh off and on and
Speaker 5: uh you know if he if he kept them to
Speaker 5: himself for all those years, I can't imagine it was
Speaker 5: you know pleasant.
Speaker 6: I don't wanna disagree with you, but what I found
Speaker 6: weird and you didn't address it was the story that
Speaker 6: that Dick wouldn't tell him where he lived in this
Speaker 6: small town and uh th I to me, it seems
Speaker 6: there was no good reason why Dick would be that belligerent,
Speaker 6: regardless to say, your humman's given you a ride, but
Speaker 6: you're not gonna tell him where you lived, so I
Speaker 6: thought that this idea of the accidental death. Certainly, I
Speaker 6: don't think he planned the murder. I I there's no
Speaker 6: evidence of or even I can't see an inkling of
Speaker 6: why you would do that. But you stayed a pretty
Speaker 6: good case that he had a violent propensity, and that
Speaker 6: certainly Dick was considered sort of a pain in the
Speaker 6: ass and and it acted up at this party as
Speaker 6: well and been disrespectful to the hosts.
Speaker 5: I actually agree with you on all of that. And
Speaker 5: in fact, Doug was not the person Dick had the
Speaker 5: confrontation with at the party. No, you know, he'd had
Speaker 5: a confrontation with Paul Everts, the host, and various kids
Speaker 5: at the party had various, you know, recollections of this.
Speaker 5: But Doug wasn't that person at all. And Doug, you know,
Speaker 5: Doug at his own problems and he and yeah, I
Speaker 5: think I don't think he intended to hurt or fight
Speaker 5: fight Dick at all, but he found himself with Yeah,
Speaker 5: Dick was being a pain in the ass, and so uh,
Speaker 5: Doug you know, pulled over somewhere to to let him
Speaker 5: out of the car. I suppose he's dreamt up the
Speaker 5: you know, you wouldn't tell me where he lived because
Speaker 5: we couldn't think of another reason that he'd pulled over
Speaker 5: his car and Dick had gotten out. I mean, everybody
Speaker 5: knew Dick had been, you know, the last person to
Speaker 5: be dropped off in the car. And why didn't Dick
Speaker 5: get home? Well, because something had prompted Doug to pull
Speaker 5: over the car. But they were, you know, both pretty
Speaker 5: unhappy people, and then they've been drinking, and I think
Speaker 5: it just got out of hand.
Speaker 6: Well, what do you think about regardless of whether these
Speaker 6: people passed their light detector tests? And what was interesting
Speaker 6: you right, that Judy, which was there at that day,
Speaker 6: was not considered a suspect at all, not whatsoever, was
Speaker 6: not given the light detector test, even though her husband
Speaker 6: was and other people were. And then the reaction that
Speaker 6: you have, which I think is just very very striking,
Speaker 6: that when they came again ten days after they discovered
Speaker 6: the body, that these people were playing a drinking game,
Speaker 6: which seems gonna be convenient again if you really wanted
Speaker 6: to kind of bolster your nerves or get up the
Speaker 6: nerve to be able to answer questions. And yet how
Speaker 6: on earth could those people not know if the town
Speaker 6: believed at some point that Doug was the guy. Why
Speaker 6: wouldn't those people at that party, given all the circumstances,
Speaker 6: believe Doug had done it as well?
Speaker 5: Well, I think they probably did. Now Judy Everts has
Speaker 5: passed away. I did talk to Paul couple of times,
Speaker 5: and he, you know, uh didn't seem to remember a
Speaker 5: lot of details. And you know, uh, my way is
Speaker 5: not to to hound somebody, but uh, he he people,
Speaker 5: And I suppose if he's reading the book, he knows
Speaker 5: this now that people at the party describe what happened
Speaker 5: to the party differently than he did to me. You know,
Speaker 5: he says that got into a scuffle with somebody. Well,
Speaker 5: numerous people at the party told police that Di dick
Speaker 5: had got into a scuffle with Paul because Dickett said
Speaker 5: something rude to Judy, and Paul took him outside and
Speaker 5: grabbed him by the neck and put him up against
Speaker 5: the pillar and gave him a talking to. You know,
Speaker 5: That's what numerous people at the party say happened. So
Speaker 5: I I thought myself that, well, maybe Paul Everts was
Speaker 5: you know, going to be uh a suspect, but uh,
Speaker 5: but he wasn't. But I I the other thing that,
Speaker 5: as far as I know, they the ten days later,
Speaker 5: when the detective showed up at the house and found
Speaker 5: the same small group of people, they never asked Doug,
Speaker 5: as far as I know, well, why did it take
Speaker 5: you ninety minutes to drive I don't know, four miles,
Speaker 5: drop off these kids and and come back Doug? It returned?
Speaker 5: I don't think I said that yet. Dugot returned to
Speaker 5: the house the night of the murder. Yeah, And I'm
Speaker 5: I'm just so curious, Well, did he stop at his place,
Speaker 5: which was an apartment downtown and cleaning self up? Did
Speaker 5: he need to do that? Or when he got back
Speaker 5: to Paul and Judy's this is this is within you know,
Speaker 5: minutes of the murders. Did he did he ask for
Speaker 5: band aid? Did he wash himself from you know, clean
Speaker 5: up in their bathroom or And they were never asked, well,
Speaker 5: what was Doug's you know demeanor when he returned to
Speaker 5: the party on October tenth, eleventh? And why did it
Speaker 5: Why would it take him ninety minutes really to drive
Speaker 5: three kids a couple of miles And there's no there's
Speaker 5: no indication that that they looked in the you know
Speaker 5: what was happening. Well, I guess it was part of
Speaker 5: that missing time was when he you know, he was
Speaker 5: fighting Dick and deciding what to do the body.
Speaker 6: One of the most fascinating optimistic things in this as
Speaker 6: we're as a mystery unfolds in this are they going
Speaker 6: to be able to get Doug for this murder? Is
Speaker 6: that in two thousand and eight, when Tyson Poole came
Speaker 6: on the scene, he went and got advice as to
Speaker 6: whether that minister could be that they could question that
Speaker 6: minister after all those years.
Speaker 5: And he did. He talked to the DA about could
Speaker 5: we compel the minister to say what he'd been told?
Speaker 5: And the DA in two thousand and eight said yes,
Speaker 5: Now that wasn't the case in nineteen sixty seven, sixty eight,
Speaker 5: I don't even I don't know that they considered could
Speaker 5: they compel the minister to reveal that. I mean, they
Speaker 5: knew it he told the detectives, and the detectives you know,
Speaker 5: had told the DA. But I'm not aware that they
Speaker 5: had a conversation about is that is that evidence to
Speaker 5: take to the grand jury. But in two thousand and
Speaker 5: eight the DA thought they could.
Speaker 6: It's interesting because he had voluntarily made that statement, which
Speaker 6: would allude to so with that alone, I think they
Speaker 6: would have made at least some progress with him in
Speaker 6: terms of saying, you're going to have to admit to that,
Speaker 6: least this statement if he said no, I'm going to
Speaker 6: stick it the confidentially.
Speaker 5: We know you've confessed to somebody. And I'm not aware
Speaker 5: that they ever went back to Doug and said, you know,
Speaker 5: I don't think they ever said your minister has rated
Speaker 5: on you, or we know this, or we know that
Speaker 5: there you've confessed to somebody. And if I see them
Speaker 5: next week when I'm in Cabalis, I will ask them that. Uh.
Speaker 5: I'm not aware that they ever confronted him with with that,
Speaker 5: and I assume the minister wanted it kept private. But
Speaker 5: hm uh. And going back to Judy for a second,
Speaker 5: I think the reason she was that polygraphed is is
Speaker 5: just kind of you know, uh u a janitor h
Speaker 5: J janitor, a gender uh, you know, conclusions at the
Speaker 5: time that you know, she was they had a baby there,
Speaker 5: had a year and a half year old child. She
Speaker 5: was a young woman, she was I think she was
Speaker 5: twenty one at the time, and you know, they so
Speaker 5: she wrote along with them the Eugene, but was not polygraphed.
Speaker 5: And I I think probably uh today that that she
Speaker 5: would be m but you know, she got a pass
Speaker 5: uh back then.
Speaker 6: It was interesting because you're right that they wanted to
Speaker 6: ask her questions, so they asked her questions off the record,
Speaker 6: but again no record of what she said and h
Speaker 6: and assuming that.
Speaker 5: She had and and talked to her and you know
Speaker 5: that makes sense because to get away from her husband
Speaker 5: and the other guys and everything, and she you know,
Speaker 5: admitted that she'd had a a relationship with Doug and
Speaker 5: so you know, just not We're not sure how much
Speaker 5: you know, her husband knew about about that, or if
Speaker 5: it was in the past or the distant past or
Speaker 5: the not so distant past.
Speaker 6: But but that would be that would be quite important
Speaker 6: in terms of a motive. Again, if she were to
Speaker 6: be polygraphed, and if they were to have an inconclusiveness,
Speaker 6: if they were to be able to imagine that she
Speaker 6: could be a potential that she potentially knew something and
Speaker 6: she was disrespected at this party and Doug drove the
Speaker 6: the person that disrespected her. Again, Yeah, it does show up.
Speaker 5: You've got a good point You've got a gr really
Speaker 5: good point. And especially because you know, most the the
Speaker 5: people that I've talked to who've uh, you know, taken
Speaker 5: polygraph uh tests, I don't think I've ever talked to
Speaker 5: an exactual examiner. I've I've read the reports, and these reports,
Speaker 5: uh when I found them, you know, were quite thorough
Speaker 5: as far as what exactly was asked and the it's asked.
Speaker 5: And I've talked t talk to people recently who have
Speaker 5: taken polygraph and a lot of times it's not you know,
Speaker 5: it's not did you called did you kill the Kitchell?
Speaker 5: It would be uh, did you did you see the
Speaker 5: Kitchell after twelve midnight d on this date? Or do
Speaker 5: you know what happened? Or and and maybe they do
Speaker 5: to some people ask more appointed questions, but I've I've
Speaker 5: been interested in how kind of round about they can be.
Speaker 5: And I don't know if that's uh the way of
Speaker 5: sort of more subtle testing or more subtle test results.
Speaker 5: Do you know Dan? It just seems like a lot
Speaker 5: of questions are kind of round about do you know
Speaker 5: about or do you know what happened? Or or you know,
Speaker 5: did you see him put in the river?
Speaker 6: I think it's a way. I think it's a way
Speaker 6: to measure compared to the control where inocuous questions or
Speaker 6: innocent questions are given and then they up that with
Speaker 6: questions that will round about confirm things without a confrontational
Speaker 6: question per se. But I don't know. I mean, this
Speaker 6: book at least sheds quite a bit of light on
Speaker 6: exactly what kind of questions. So I know that, especially
Speaker 6: in the last year or so, that so many books
Speaker 6: that I've covered on the program refer to how much
Speaker 6: the police relied on those polygraph tests despite them being inadmissible.
Speaker 6: They really did use them and rely on them and
Speaker 6: believe in the results. And as you show in this book,
Speaker 6: just with a different with the police saying we want
Speaker 6: somebody else to examine, or they didn't go with the
Speaker 6: same examiner, they went with another examiner, and hence that
Speaker 6: other exam eminer came up with a different opinion. And
Speaker 6: as we know from all the cases and documentaries that
Speaker 6: have come up lately, that sometimes there's a bias going
Speaker 6: into that room. Oh yeah, and to say, you know, so,
Speaker 6: it's a bias that can't be controlled. And I think
Speaker 6: that's what I'm hearing in a lot of yes, in
Speaker 6: the last year.
Speaker 5: That yeah, and I think as time passed and they
Speaker 5: gave Hamplin more polygraph tests that there was probably a
Speaker 5: biased building. But I really hadn't known much about polygraph tests,
Speaker 5: and I didn't know that, you know, like the detectives
Speaker 5: would go down early enough that they could talk to
Speaker 5: the polygraph examiner and go over what questions to ask
Speaker 5: and suggest questions, and that that could evolve over time.
Speaker 5: And also they'd checking with for instance, if if if
Speaker 5: Doug Hamlin had told him one thing in an interview,
Speaker 5: then would he say the same thing during a polygraph
Speaker 5: exam or not. I mean it it sounds very simple
Speaker 5: and basic, but but I I didn't really know that
Speaker 5: well the detectives could suggest questions because of course, how
Speaker 5: would this polygraph examiner know, you know, what the what
Speaker 5: they were trying to find out. He had to be
Speaker 5: he'd have to be told. And and then it was
Speaker 5: very different questions that they asked. You know, Dick's step
Speaker 5: brother who uh, you know, they they fought a lot
Speaker 5: and and Dick actually picked on him, although the step
Speaker 5: brother was a little older, so he was kind of
Speaker 5: a suspect first for a day or two and uh,
Speaker 5: and the kinds of questions they asked him were were
Speaker 5: It's quite different about maybe maybe framing it as if
Speaker 5: he'd been an observer to the murder, you know, and
Speaker 5: that might have well been if Dick's father, you know,
Speaker 5: maybe this the step brother had been along uh with it.
Speaker 5: Uh Yeah, it's uh incidentally, the so that when I
Speaker 5: started looking into this three years ago, there was nothing
Speaker 5: at the police department to be found. There was no
Speaker 5: no case file, was just nothing. And I knew that
Speaker 5: in two thousand and eight that uh, the cold case
Speaker 5: detective had met with friand Ny the DA and the
Speaker 5: two detectives and a couple other detectives to talk about
Speaker 5: the case. So that's another thing where the cold case
Speaker 5: started with. Uh, the detectives started with talk to the
Speaker 5: people who were there, and thank goodness, you know, they
Speaker 5: were still around. And so I knew, uh that he'd
Speaker 5: held this case file in his hand, the cold case guy.
Speaker 5: So when I was, you know, urging the police department,
Speaker 5: you know, they went through the basement, they went through
Speaker 5: their boxes. They thought I'd been lost or tossed, and
Speaker 5: finally I said, you know, in two thousand eight, Tyson
Speaker 5: Toole sat at at this desk and then he left
Speaker 5: in these on the forest and Ben door again, would
Speaker 5: you just look in his desk because I knew he'd
Speaker 5: had it in his hand in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 5: and they looked and they found it.
Speaker 6: Wow, you're pretty good detective. A pardon, yeah, I said,
Speaker 6: you're a pretty good detective yourself. In this case.
Speaker 5: Well, you just have to keep, you know, looking, And
Speaker 5: and I don't think police departments are ever happy, ever
Speaker 5: about somebody looking, you know, at a closed case, an
Speaker 5: open case, a cold case. You know, Uh I I uh,
Speaker 5: I think it's a I think it's a but anyway,
Speaker 5: we found it and and uh so, and I I
Speaker 5: think it's a matter. I think it's actually a law
Speaker 5: of that, you know, I mean it is it is
Speaker 5: in the public domain, if it's if there's a police case,
Speaker 5: and I've had to pay sometimes hundreds and hundreds of
Speaker 5: dollars to to get a copy. But you know, and
Speaker 5: I've had other stories where you know, there it's completely lost.
Speaker 5: There's another story I'm interested in in Oregon in a book,
Speaker 5: and and that that just doesn't seem to exist anywhere,
Speaker 5: including you know, state archives or uh anything. It was
Speaker 5: a really important case. Uh, in nineteen sixty one and
Speaker 5: the first woman sentenced to death in Oregon, and uh,
Speaker 5: there's just there are no records at all. So you
Speaker 5: almost need there is a trial transcript that we paid
Speaker 5: one thousand dollars for sure, so because you have to
Speaker 5: have felt some kind of record.
Speaker 6: Now, a huge part of this is that this is
Speaker 6: a murder that occurred in your hometown, hence the title
Speaker 6: of murder in my hometown. And we've skipped over basically
Speaker 6: what you and your classmates. You mentioned that five hundred
Speaker 6: and twenty five people graduated in nineteen sixty eight, I believe,
Speaker 6: and everybody was affected differently, but you say everybody in
Speaker 6: corvalis all those students that were there, they were affected.
Speaker 6: Then tell us when this happened again, your interest in
Speaker 6: true crime and journalism and writing, and how this affected
Speaker 6: you and to the point where you became involved in
Speaker 6: this and to write this book and involved in this case,
Speaker 6: interviewed these people that were involved, these detectives in da
Speaker 6: tell us go back as you do and write in
Speaker 6: a book, tell us how it started.
Speaker 5: Well, just over three years ago, I put something on
Speaker 5: our class Facebook page, our high school class Facebook page,
Speaker 5: that and I don't. I wish I could tell you
Speaker 5: why I'd started thinking about Dick, and maybe cause I
Speaker 5: was between books for something. And I put something on
Speaker 5: our Facebook page saying, you know, I'm a true crime
Speaker 5: author and I've just been thinking about uh, Dick Kitchell's
Speaker 5: unsolved murder. And I heard from dozens, literally dozens of
Speaker 5: classmates who said they had never forgotten it, never forgotten
Speaker 5: that it had never been solved, never forgotten that he'd
Speaker 5: just been forgotten, and that there'd never been an arrest.
Speaker 5: So I went down, UH three years ago. And of
Speaker 5: course I'd been back to my hometown many many times
Speaker 5: over the years, but I started going down every couple
Speaker 5: of months, and the first time I met with a
Speaker 5: group of about a dozen classmates and just to talk about,
Speaker 5: you know, their memories of Dick, of the murder, and
Speaker 5: to talk about, you know, growing up in Crabalis. And
Speaker 5: then I found that the DA and the two detectives
Speaker 5: were still around, and I started talking to people because
Speaker 5: you can't do a book like this, but Dick's family,
Speaker 5: you know, his parents were deceased, and the step brother
Speaker 5: and a uh didn't wanna wanna speak with me, And
Speaker 5: so there's no family to talk to. And but in fact,
Speaker 5: Dick's friends were his family. And I was asked the
Speaker 5: other day why the book is dedicated to our our
Speaker 5: high school class of nineteen sixty eight. It's because that
Speaker 5: was Dick's family. Literally. Uh So, I one of the
Speaker 5: first themes that that that came up in the Facebook
Speaker 5: pos and then when I started going down there and
Speaker 5: meeting with classmates, is that this idea about you know,
Speaker 5: if his family, if his father had been prominent, that
Speaker 5: it would have been different. And I'd always wanted to
Speaker 5: write something about uh crevalis and and I will say
Speaker 5: it's it's rather frightening to do a memoir. And I
Speaker 5: do call this, you know, part true crime, part part memoir.
Speaker 5: And I said a lot more personal things than I
Speaker 5: thought I would in the book but became But I
Speaker 5: think Cravallous became a character in the book. And to
Speaker 5: write about Cravelli's character and to write about, you know,
Speaker 5: its history and and and then what I did was
Speaker 5: follow the lives of several UH classmates through that through
Speaker 5: our senior year, and ones that knew Dick Will and
Speaker 5: ones that didn't know Dick Will, but also seemed to
Speaker 5: represent things that were going on with our j generation
Speaker 5: and we were uh really you know, isolated town and
Speaker 5: there weren't a lot of political demonstrations there. You know,
Speaker 5: it wasn't really uh diversity, you know, social class was
Speaker 5: was important. And we were very very highly educated group
Speaker 5: because uh we had teachers with lots and lots of
Speaker 5: graduate degrees and and I'm sure it's the school district.
Speaker 5: It was always known for t you know, having the
Speaker 5: the best and the brightest. But we also had, you know,
Speaker 5: other kids who who didn't do as well. But uh
Speaker 5: so I I tried to tell the story of nineteen
Speaker 5: sixty eight, which is a pretty pivotal year in America.
Speaker 5: And how you know, my classmates, we we attended, we
Speaker 5: marched when Martin Luther King was assassinated. That you know,
Speaker 5: the Oregon presidential primary used to be a lot more
Speaker 5: important than is now now that Iowa New Hampshire have
Speaker 5: kind of taken over. But you know, Richard Nixon was
Speaker 5: campaigning and or in for Ballus, Robert Kennedy was killing
Speaker 5: intervallus and literally the word spread our our graduation evening
Speaker 5: party was stopped the announcement that Kennedy just been shot
Speaker 5: in Los Angeles. So the the the the bigger world
Speaker 5: was beginning to come into Crevalus and and along with knowing,
Speaker 5: you know, Dick's murder went unsolved, you know, that was
Speaker 5: that was the year we were growing up.
Speaker 6: You also talk about, which very sound might be surprising
Speaker 6: to some people, but you talk about your interest in
Speaker 6: true crime as well, and aw that came.
Speaker 5: To be and I can't I I realized as I
Speaker 5: was writing this that while my mother grocery shopped, I'd
Speaker 5: be over in a sec of the safeway reading true
Speaker 5: detective magazines at a pretty young age, and that I
Speaker 5: was just kind of fascinated with I, you know, and
Speaker 5: especially how the women were portrayed that you know either
Speaker 5: well they were always a dictum, and uh, I just
Speaker 5: got interested in it. And then I didn't know I
Speaker 5: was interested in crime or true crime. For m many
Speaker 5: years I worked in radio and TV news in in
Speaker 5: New York City and in Seattle and in Portland, Oregon,
Speaker 5: and also was writing for magazines and newspapers. And and
Speaker 5: then UH my very first book about UH, a girl
Speaker 5: missing from Tacoma, Washington since nineteen sixty one and her
Speaker 5: neighbor Ted Bundy as a teenager Uh. Grew out of
Speaker 5: an article for the Seattle Times that I was writing
Speaker 5: for and at and there had never been a book
Speaker 5: about that case. And I got to know the girl's
Speaker 5: mother and basically spent the last year of this woman's
Speaker 5: life with her. Uh interview here and uh and found
Speaker 5: whoever else was still around that had known dead I'm sorry,
Speaker 5: known Ted Bundy and known him as a as a
Speaker 5: young person. And uh. So that was my first book.
Speaker 5: And and then I'm the opportunities kind of you know, Uh,
Speaker 5: the door opened to writing more about true crime. And
Speaker 5: I I couldn't have told you I was going into
Speaker 5: doing this, but it's it's pretty interesting. And I I
Speaker 5: think back to when I was reading you know, True
Speaker 5: Detective as a twelve year old, and uh, you know,
Speaker 5: I always say this is not original with me. But
Speaker 5: the crime is the end of the story. I mean,
Speaker 5: I'm really interested in what leads up to it and
Speaker 5: who the people are, you know, both the perpetrators and
Speaker 5: the and the victims and the community in which a
Speaker 5: crime takes place. But it's always, you know, sort of
Speaker 5: my favorite part of painting the story of a crime.
Speaker 6: It's very interesting how you portray the event October eleventh,
Speaker 6: nineteen sixty seven, and then the response in school over
Speaker 6: the public the PA system that was announced that ye
Speaker 6: had been was missing, and then later how the information
Speaker 6: came out and how the kids talked among themselves. But
Speaker 6: the parents didn't talk to the kids. Unlike today, there
Speaker 6: would have been, like you say, trauma counselors, there would
Speaker 6: have been more discussion and what this meant to the students,
Speaker 6: And yet the students among themselves.
Speaker 5: And I think it's a really interesting example of how,
Speaker 5: you know, how we've changed as a culture. And you know,
Speaker 5: as my brother and I always say, you know, we
Speaker 5: we were loved and we had great parents, but we
Speaker 5: weren't going on And that literally was the time when
Speaker 5: you know, you could go out and play and disappear
Speaker 5: for the day and and you know, ride your bikes
Speaker 5: and and we just weren't policed, you know, as parents
Speaker 5: do today. But no, parents didn't talk to their kids.
Speaker 5: And even even the two uh women I spoke to
Speaker 5: who were his girlfriends at the time, their parents didn't
Speaker 5: sit down and talk with them about what this. You know,
Speaker 5: how they felt about this kid who they dated and
Speaker 5: murdered and you know, uh, one of his friends told
Speaker 5: me that you know, he he heard, uh, he heard
Speaker 5: somebody say, you know, good riddance and everything, and he
Speaker 5: just went home to his bedroom and cried. And I
Speaker 5: think I think there were his friends who really felt
Speaker 5: it like that and you know, and went to the funeral.
Speaker 5: And then there were his acquaintances or the people he
Speaker 5: drank with who you know, they talked more, but on
Speaker 5: a more of a gossip level among themselves about it. Uh.
Speaker 5: But it didn't seem to be something that families talked
Speaker 5: about then, you know, and including my own, and my
Speaker 5: parents may not have known that I knew him or
Speaker 5: just thought I went to school with him and that
Speaker 5: that's true. But you know, today we well, I don't know,
Speaker 5: you know, helicopter parents and all that we'd be we'd
Speaker 5: be taking the temperature, wouldn't we of of how this
Speaker 5: affects our kids.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, I wanna thank you very much, Rebecca Morris for
Speaker 6: coming on and talking about a murder in my hometown
Speaker 6: was a factist break and your incredible personal involvement in
Speaker 6: this story. Congratulations. Oh those that might want to take
Speaker 6: a look at other work of yours.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 6: I know this is a wild blue press release, but Uh,
Speaker 6: where might they look?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 6: Do you have a web page or Facebook?
Speaker 5: Uh? I do have a website. It's Rebecca Tmarris dot com.
Speaker 5: And very proud of uh number of books I've done,
Speaker 5: including Ted and Anne, which I talked about, and and
Speaker 5: the book about Susan Powell who's still missing in Utah
Speaker 5: and her husband who killed himself and their children. The
Speaker 5: book is If I Can't Have You, And that was
Speaker 5: fascinating because I uh stepped into the her her life
Speaker 5: as a you know, young Mormon in Utah and to
Speaker 5: learn as much as I could uh about her her life.
Speaker 5: And then Greg Oldson and I did a Killing an
Speaker 5: Amish Country together about a very rare murder among the
Speaker 5: Amish in two thousand nine, and so again learning about
Speaker 5: the Amish and winning their trust uh when they're don't
Speaker 5: you give interviews was really really important to you know,
Speaker 5: usually winning the trust of people is pretty important to
Speaker 5: these books, and I always I don't take that for granted.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Absolutely, it's incredible access that you do have. I
Speaker 6: want to thank you very much and hope to talk
Speaker 6: to you again soon. Thank you, Rebecca, you have a
Speaker 6: great Thank you.
Speaker 5: Good night,