Speaker 1: I walk straight line.
Speaker 2: Shackle change. Oh weesome, Girdie, it's calling my name. There
is no mercy and it's been a tentery juice as
the huge stream game Rango three.
Speaker 3: Come here by me to die.
Speaker 2: Inside these walls, inside the wild.
Speaker 1: And went no girl as I.
Speaker 3: Hey everyone, and welcome back to Bloody Andngola, a podcast
one hundred and forty two years in the making, the
complete story of America's bloodiest present. I'm your host, Jim Chapman.
I'm dropping this episode on Thanksgiving Eve, and hopefully you're
out there with family and friends you're cooking it up
and maybe even listening to Bloody Andngla. I'm absolutely thankful
for every single one of you who, like me, share
a unique interest in history, prisons, the criminal mind, and
all that encompasses that. So from me to all of you,
thank you so much for hanging in there and staying
with me.
Speaker 1: Now today I'm continuing.
Speaker 3: With the story of Felix Veil. In the last time
that I left you, Felix Veil had finally been arrested
for the murder of his wife Mary, which occurred some
fifty years prior to his arrest. On May eighteenth, of
twenty thirteen, and Felix was seventy three y'all at the
time of his arrest. Now, Veil was arrested in Kenyon Lake, Texas.
Undercover cops actually waited for him outside of his home.
They were doing kind of a stakeout, but when he
didn't arrive there, they put out an APB and he
was actually arrested at a local post office. And his
statement upon his arrest was, I don't know why this
is happening, that's all he said. He actually waived extradition
to Calcashu Parish, Louisiana, and they drove him straight there
from his arrest. And that arrest was significant. This was
to be the oldest prosecution of a serial killer in
a cold case in the entire history of the United States. Now,
what prompted his arrest is an interesting story in and
of itself. An investigative reporter for a Jackson, Mississippi newspaper
called The Clarion Ledger. His name was Jerry Mitchell, and
he started investigating this case again kind of on his
own in twenty twelve. That investigation led him to publish
a special report titled Gone in that local paper, and
that in turn prompted authorities to open a case up
of their own. So I cannot overemphasize how big of
a role that Jerry Mitchell played in this case. As
a matter of fact, were it not for Jerry Mitchell
and that report, Felix Veil would have never been arrested
or convicted in his wife Mary's death. And another large
bit of credit goes to a nets mother, Rose, who
never gave up on her own pursuit of justice after
her teenage daughter had went missing while being married to Veil.
So what was Veil up to between the years of
nineteen eighty five where I last left you in episode
one and twenty thirteen when he was finally arrested. Well,
I'm going to give you the rest of the story
through the eyes of the guy who really deserves all
of the credit, and that is Jerry Mitchell in his
account of the details. And I'm going to pick up
in nineteen eighty seven in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Now, Rose at
this point is fed up with the lack of of
progress in her daughter's death. She had spent thousands of
dollars by this time on private investigators, and she was
trying to start a new life. She had just started
a new job at a bakery. She fired all these
private investigators that seemed to lead nowhere, and she decided
to look for Veil herself. So she put some information
out there, she's looking for this guy, and she actually
got tipped off. Someone told her he was staying at
a house, and she got her friend and they go
to that house and they actually see him sitting outside.
Imagine that, after all these years of looking for this guy,
there he is sitting outside on the front porch of
a house. So she walks up to him and she says,
where did that go? And he said Mexico? And she
said where in Mexico? And Seveil told her that he
and a Nette had made a pact that they would
contact each other after five years. He never looked up
at her, he never stood up, He never looked her
mother in the eye, and shocks. She just walked away,
shaking her head in disbelief. She didn't believe a word
of what he had said. Now they'll became fast friends
with a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, by the name of
Scott Porter, and he was an expert in martial arts.
Had like a ton of black belts, and they'll believed
he was a martial arts expert too. After practicing flying
kicks into a mattress. Each morning, he and Porter they
would work out. They would left weights together before hitting
a Chinese buffet over lunch. VLL had shared with this
guy that he had never felt he was bound by
society rules. As a matter of fact, Porter recalled, he
dropped his silverware and began eating with his hands like
a caveman. And at nights the pair would play pool,
they would drink beer, and they would sometimes visit strip
clubs in Tulsa. Porter was quoted as saying, Tulsa has
more churches than gas stations, but also more strip clubs
than anywhere else I've lived. The two men reminisced about
the women missing from their lives. Veil at forty five,
had been married to a Net just eighteen, if you'll remember,
and Porter, at twenty eight, had dated.
Speaker 1: Rose, who was thirty six.
Speaker 3: That's right, they dated mom and daughter at one point
in their lives. Porter had driven Rose to California before
returning home alone, and he said, my heart was absolutely broken.
She needed to move on, and I didn't now. Not
long after, a Net had vanished. Rose telephoned Porter and
shared some of her suspicions that Veil had something to
do with their daughter's disappearance. Porter began examining each word
his friend spoke while he discovers his hopes of reuniting
with Rose. He noticed Veil never mentioned the possibility of
reuniting with a net One night, Val seemed more open.
He was crying like a baby, Porter recalled, angry it
didn't work out differently, They'll explained that Annette wanted to
recreate herself and that she didn't want any contact with
any portion of her past life. She wanted to totally
break with herself now. While Veill talked of breaking with
the past, Porter he was busy searching for his He
had been adopted and decided to move to Minnesota to
reconnect with his birth parents, and while there he met
his future wife, Jenny. Returning to Oklahoma with a small
son and another on the way, he renewed his friendship
with Veil, who was so kind. He later watched the
boys while the couple went out on dates. Once, during
a discussion of fidelity, Porter said, Veil shared that he
felt nobody could ever be fake to one person. Months later,
Val started hitting on my wife, Porter said. Upset about this,
he took Veil on a walk and confronted him, and
of course Val denied it all. Porter recalled, He said, no, no,
she was hitting on me. As they crossed the Arkansas
River bridge, of fleeting thought ran through his head. I
wanted to throw Felix off that bridge and was wondering
if I'd get away with it now. After these incidents,
Val began dating someone by the name of Beth Field.
She was attracted to its intelligence, and the pair grew close.
Then during a December nineteen eighty seven argument, he became
so violent he ruptured her ear drum. She told Val
there was no justification for physical violence, and she said
He replied, if you quit behaving like a whore, I'll
quit hitting you. She recalled. Discussing this with a therapist,
I finally told this woman, it's all very nice, but
one of us is going to be dead before this works.
Field eventually took the advice of a close friend and
attended an intensive ten day mediation course in August of
nineteen eighty eight on Colorado's Western Slope. To her surprise,
Veil came to after the course, she received a telephone
call from Rose sharing details about the disappearance of her
daughter Annette. From that point forward, Field said she began
to examine Vale's words more closely, realizing the probability that
he had taken Annette's life.
Speaker 1: He told Field he.
Speaker 3: And a Nette had gone camping and that she wanted
to get away from her mother, and that he had
helped her set up an opportunity for her to change her.
Speaker 1: Name and move on.
Speaker 3: Veil denied to her any involvement in Annette's disappearance. Then
one time she recalled, he said, what if I said yes.
Four months after the mediation course, he entered her home unannounced,
Already drunk, he accused her of imagined promiscuity. According to
the court order, he slapped her, he struck her, and
he threw across the bedroom. She asked if he was
going to kill her, and he said, it depends on
what you tell me. So the judge here in all
this information. He gave her a protective order and he
required Veil to keep his distance. Two weeks later, the
sheriff reported that Veil was nowhere to be found. Field
said she was caught in a sick, addictive relationship, and
it took quite some time to fully unrival. Over time
her attachment to him it began to fade, and while
Field was visiting a mediation center again in Texas, this
was in nineteen ninety, Vail arrived and chastised her. She
felt the same anger and defensiveness rising up as before,
she said. She walked away to compose herself, and when
she returned, she sat down next to him. I told
him there is a part of you that goes off,
and it's sick and it's dangerous, she said. He looked
at her and said, really, yes, Really, this time the
message seemed to sink in. Vail left the next day,
and with a single exception of about five years later,
she never saw him again. Now Mary Rose, she moved
to Ashland, Oregon. This was in nineteen eighty nine, and
she was working as an administrator for a private school.
She was hoping for a quieter life, obviously than the
one she had in California. More than a year later,
she goes and she visits a psychic and she asked
if she could talk to her daughter a net. The
psychic put her hands over her forehead and spoke, oh
my gosh, this is not something I usually talk about
when I see images like this. She never shared what
she saw, but Rose knew her daughter was dead and
that she needs to get to the bottom of it.
So in the summer of nineteen ninety one, she removed
the back seats from her Toyetta vann and put in
a makeshift bed for sleeping. She actually made curtains to
hang over the windows. She had previously taught by phone
with Felix Veil's sister, Sue Jordan, who now lived in
Canyon Lake, Texas, so Rose decided to drive more than
two thousand miles there, hoping she might find out more
in person. So Jordan answered the door, She invited her in,
and the two women they sit in the living room
and Jordan recalled the last time she saw a Net.
That was in October of nineteen eighty four, when the
family attended a fair in Sulfur, Louisiana. She said Veil
was there and a nut, and she told Annette's mom
that Felix was giving a Net a hard time. He
criticized the way she was dressed. He was just very
rude to her. Days after the fair, the couple left
again in a few days after that, Vale returned alone.
He looked extremely distressed and he was drinking a lot.
Jordan also said that Val told her and Nette had
wanted to leave, and that he took her to a
bus station and that she left with some Mexican men
heading to Mexico. Jordan also mentioned that VAL's first wife
had drowned, which Rose by this point did not know,
and before she left, Jordan said, oh, you know, there
was another woman that disappeared. I remember her mother calling
my mother for years, checking to see if they had
heard from her. I think her name was Sharon. Now,
after this conversation, Rose sits down at a typewriter and
she basically logged every word she could remember from that conversation,
knowing she may need it later. She also called a
public library in Lake Charles. That librarian remembered the nineteen
sixty two drowning of Vale's first wife, Ma, and that
library recalled that he had taken out life insurance policies
on his wife prior to her drowning. She also said
the insurance companies were suspicious and didn't pay the full value.
The library made some copies of the newspaper articles and
actually mailed them to Annet's mother. After reading them, Rose
reached out to Mary's family in Louisiana and she spoke
to Will Horton, which was Mary's brother. He shared the
suspicions he had about Vail, and also a copy of
a nineteen seventy one National Inquirer article. When she read it,
she knew that Sharon's last name was Hensley, so that
solved one problem, but created another. Where was Sharon Hensley from?
She didn't have any idea, she had never heard of her.
In nineteen ninety four, she read in the newspaper about
Delores Strullo's disappearance from Medford, Oregon, seven years earlier. Police
had just arrested her husband thanks to the work of
a detective by the name of Terry Nele. So she
got an idea. She figured, if this guy could do that,
maybe he can help me. She contact Noll and he
was able to help her find the family of Sharon Hensley.
So when Rose dialed Hensley's family, Sharon's mother, Peggy answered
the first question. Rose asked, do you happen to know
who Felix Vale is?
Speaker 1: You bet? I do?
Speaker 3: Sharon Heinsley's mother said back, and Rose replied, we need
to talk now. At this time, Vale was living with
his mother and father in their home in my Pelier, Mississippi.
During the day he will work some on the family farm,
and he also tinred with his Fiat which is a
car for you young people out there, and used his
gravity boots to hang upside down in the barn. One day,
he actually chased off a three legged hound dog. He
wrote in his journal, Remember I told you he liked
the journal. The next day he wrote, I shot the
three legged dog and cleaned up the garbage. He detailed
in his journal about winning pool games and screwing women,
sometimes having sex in a grain bend, an old bus,
or their homes while their husbands were away. This was
in nineteen ninety two. Also in nineteen ninety two, Robinsinclair,
she telephoned a Mississippi newspaper wanting to buy an advertisement
to remind Veil that he had a daughter he had
never met. The newspaper put her in touch with Vel,
and the two began writing letters back and forth and
talking on the telephone. In one note, Vel stated he
had never gotten over me.
Speaker 1: She recalled.
Speaker 3: She felt confused by his words, she said, because she
said she was already living with a man who made
her happy and who would be her future husband. When
Vail arrived a few months later, she said, the same
magic she had felt with him more than twenty years
earlier had vanished. I realized that he was a fraud,
of bomb and kind of a joke. So during this time,
Mary Rose she had contacted everyone she could think of,
even the FBI and the detective who had helped her before,
Terry Noll. He contacted Jim Bell, a national expert in
serial killings who actually worked for the FBI, and when
Rose talked with Bell, she felt like she had hit
the jackpot. He was interested in working on Vale's case
if he could swing the time he was busy. Serial
killers seemed to be active during that time in history.
Now Vail's son Bill, he told Rose that he was
willing to testify as long as authorities provided protection to
his family. Both the Tulsa Police and the District Attorney's
office in Lake Charles they revived their investigations into Vail,
now considered a suspected serial killer, and Bell suggested the
victim's families gather with authorities at the FBI Academy in
Virginia to share that information on Veil. He was unable
to work on the case and left the FBI in
nineteen ninety five. The meeting in Quantico never materialized in
the case involving Veil grew cold yet again. So obviously
Roses devastated. She had worked so hard to make something
happen and nothing had happened. She knew that other families
felt devastated too.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: In the men nineteen nineties, Veil began dating a woman
in Mississippi. At the time, he was fifty five and
she was forty four. In ten years, I never saw
a temper, the woman said. She recalled Veil taking care
of his parents before their deaths, and she described him
as very attentive. She said he was just a kind man,
although he never worked a job. She said he was
the most frugal person she had ever met. He could
probably live off three hundred dollars a month. He got
rental money from a house in Tulsa, and all that
is a nets house that he fucking stole from her.
One day, she tried to step across the swollen creek
in front of her house, knocked off her feet. She
got dragged downstream, and she said, if I had died
in the creek, I would have been added to the
list of people that Felix supposedly killed. And she actually
brings up a good point. There would have been another
strange death, and she's using that as a example of
how that shit can happen.
Speaker 1: I don't buy it.
Speaker 3: She knew of the allegations that Veil had something to
do with the net Veil's disappearance, but she was unaware
of Sharon Hinsley's disappearance or the suspicion surrounding Mary Horton.
That man, she insisted, was not the man I know.
So let's get into after that article I told you
about gone was written by Jerry Mitchell, and I'm gonna
pick up with his account of that. He starts trying
to find Veil hisself in twenty twelve, and he finds
out that where Veil was living, he had sold all
his acreage he had like seventeen acres from his parents
and he shut up there and there was just a
storm damage trailer, etc. But no contents whatsoever in that trailer.
So he calls Veil's brother, Ronnie, and Vale's brother Ronnie said,
I don't.
Speaker 1: Know where he went.
Speaker 3: He probably doesn't want anyone to know where he is. Ronnie,
who had work for the US Army Corps of Engineers
for twenty two years, told him that when he had
heard the allegations of the disappearances of these women, he
was as shocked as anybody else. So the reporter asked him,
did the FBI ever interview know? And I'm surprised they haven't,
he said, And then he picks up. After my story
on Felix veil Gone appeared in The Clearing Life on
November eleventh, twenty twelve, I traveled to my failure to
meet a man who had telephoned me. Wesley Turnage grew
up with Val and recalled a conversation he had in
the month following his nineteen sixty three graduation from high school.
He said he had car trouble one day, and Val
gave him a ride to the Nickenbacker Manufacturing Company in
nearby West Point, where they both worked. During that drive,
he said, Val talked first of his son Bill and
then of his deceased wife, Mary, calling her his ex wife,
a word that kind of stuck with Turnage as strange,
since the two were not divorced at the time of
her death. He said, the longer Veil spoke, the angrier
he got. You could see the rage in his eyes.
Val referred to Mary as a bitch, saying that she
thought another child would help solve her marriage problems. Turner's recalled.
He quoted Val as saying she wanted to have another kid.
I didn't want the one I got. I told her
I fixed that. Sorry, bitch, she'll never have another one.
Time marched on, but he said he never forgot what
Veil told him. It's like nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: He said.
Speaker 3: Some things just stick in your mind. So the reporter
returned to Lake Charles, puzzled by how Veil dided an
indictment in that nineteen sixty two death of his wife.
Her brother Will Horton joined me in the Calkashu Clerk's
office as I poured through stacks of records trying to
find out more information about the grand jury that met
on the case. Flipping through the pages, I noticed a
lot of criminal cases had been dismissed in nineteen sixty two.
When I added them up, I realized the district attorney
had the judge dismissed eight hundred and eighty two cases,
which were more than three cases for each working day.
Mary's brother told me the original detectives in the case
told him that the judge would not allow them to
present evidence that they had collected against Vail that match
the stories I had heard from the grand Jerry's families.
Mary's brother left while I continued to dig. A half
hour later, he called me to let me know he
was talking with District Attorney John Derozer. He's from Unice,
just like me, Horton said. I walked over and met Deroza,
a Vietnam veteran. He viewed himself as the guy wearing
the white hat and battling the bad guys. He even
kept a life size cutout of John Wayne in his office.
He said he would be willing to reopen the case
if there was enough evidence. Afterwards, I telephoned a retired
lawyer who had known Frank Salter Junior, who was the
then district attorney in nineteen sixty three. The cheerful, white
haired man who built boats and model airplanes greeted Horton
and me at the door and invited us to join
him at the kitchen table. A talented attorney in both
civil and criminal courts. Russell Tritticko, Senior, had won a
nineteen eighty civil judgment forcing chainsaw manufacturers to put chain
brakes on their products. The eighty four year old retired
lawyer recalled the corruption of those days. He worked back
then under his uncle Joe, who represented the then sheriff
Ham Reid, accused of taking bribes but never convicted. Triticko
said the sheriff was so paranoid he stayed in his
patrol car and he never answered the telephone at home
unless he heard the right sequence of rings. He described
Salter as a longtime prosecutor whose close friends were mostly
what I called hoodlums. In the nineteen fifties, Salter began
his legal career as an assistant DA for then District
Attorney Ed Shannon. When the senior prosecutor saw reelection in
nineteen sixty, Salter ran against him. Triticko said the major
issue Salter raised was Shanahan had just dismissed too many cases.
Then Frank became DA and he does the same thing.
Dismissals became business as usual in defense. Lawyer's showered office
secretaries with gifts, especially at Christmas. He recalled, it was
easy money. Of course, the victim might not be happy.
He knew about the nineteen sixty two death of Mary
Horton Vale. When his uncle Joe ran against Salter in
nineteen sixty six, her death became a political issue. The
candidate shed a photograph of her body after it was
recovered from the river as proof of Salter's political favor.
I asked Triteco about the City's Service, and he told
me the company was like the General Motors of the
late Charles Louisiana area. I knew Veil's uncle, Thomas Finney,
had worked there as a supervisor and had arranged for
Vale's job. In searching for Salter's obituary, I had run
across the one for his father, who had also worked
at City Service. When I visited Vinnie's ninety four year
old widow, Virginia, she confirmed the couple's friendship with the
district attorney. I shared what Vell said about troutline fishing
that night, and Tritiko shook his head. The longtime fisherman
questioned why Vell would have traveled so many miles up
the Calkashi River when he could have laid trout lines
not far from where he kept his boat. You just
don't run trout lines in deep water, he said. So
where had Felix Veil gone? He had just disappeared, like
the women he professed to once love. I telephoned more
of his relatives and friends. They were just as clueless
as me. Weeks after Gone was published, I received a
telephone call from a man who had read my nearly
nine thousand words story online. We discussed Veil, the case
against him, ain't his disappearance before? The man volunteered. I
know where he is.
Speaker 1: You do, Canyon Lake, Texas? He said. Would you like
his po box? You bet? I said.
Speaker 3: Back In Jackson, I telephoned Insign Yassek of Boston, the
founder of the Serial Homicide Expertise and Information Sharing Collaborative.
Speaker 1: That's a mouthful.
Speaker 3: No matter what questions I had about serial killers, he
had the answers thanks to a huge database he had amassed.
My search for answers in the Veil case led Yazak
to contact Arman Showalter, acting chief for the FBI's Behavioral
Analysis Unit, which specialized in serial homicide investigations. He also
shared a copy of Gone with Showalter, who in turn,
contacted Kaal Kashu Parish Deputy Randy Curtis, now taking on
the Veil case. Curtis telephoned me, explained that he was
a twenty year law enforcement veteran who had been transferred
from the Violent Crimes Unit to the Forensic Cold Case Division.
After reading gone, he caught me back wondering if I
knew where Veil was these days, Canyon Lake, Texas, I said.
Days later, the deputy telephone with news that the FBI
had discovered Veil purchased property on Shady View Drive in
Canyon Lake, and on January eighteenth of twenty thirteen, Curtis
decided to confront Vail. He found the suspected serial killer
at that address, living in a storage shed so large
that it could be a home. Curtis said he read
Veil's rights before asking him about the death and disappearances
of the women, and Veil refused to say anything, accusing
families and the Clarion Ledger of lying about him. The
whole time, Veil couldn't stop smirking, and that's his major arrogance.
Speaker 1: Y'all.
Speaker 3: The sight of that smirk and angered Kurk, who worked
days nights and weekends on that case. One day he
called me to tell me he found something big, and
not long after this call, Will Horton shared the number
of his cousin who was in the same rosary group
with a caretaker for ninety year old Isaac Sunny. Abshire.
I drove to Lake Charles and sat down with the
man who was finishing his lunch in front of the television.
He remembered Vail well. The pair had worked together at
a chemical plant next to the City Service refinery in
nearby Sulfur, Louisiana. Abshire described Vel as my helper and
a good worker.
Speaker 1: I liked him.
Speaker 3: Vale was looking for a place closer to his girlfriend,
Mary Horton, who was living in Lake Charles. Needing the cash,
Abshire offered him a room for rent. He accepted, and
Mary became a frequent visitor. I was kind of like
a big brother to her. He said. She was a
sweet little girl. After the couple decided to get married,
Val moved out. At work, his disposition soured. He talked
about how ugly his wife was when she was pregnant,
and that he didn't like his baby. Even a dog
loves their children, Abshire said on the friday before drowning,
the couple visited, bringing their infant son Bill. Mary confided
in Abshire asking if he thought Val could take her
baby away. Two nights later, word came that Mary had
drowned in the kal Kashu River. Deputies contacted Abshire's father
to help in the search, so Abshire and two fellow
workers they went out the next day to drag the river.
The next morning, October thirtieth, nineteen sixty two, he returned
with one of them, Jimmy May, to continue dragging. While
they're talking, something popped up. A guy with binoculars asked,
does she have blonde hair? I said, yes, that's her.
They were covered the body and Abshire could not forget
what he saw. Her body was rigid and a scarf
was wrapped around her neck before going into her mouth,
and had a big old knot in it, he said.
The deputies on the boat boiled in anger, all voicing
the same opinion Veil had killed Mary. They believed it
was foul play just by looking at the body. A
deputy shared copies of the photographs taken that day, and
Abshar had held on to them ever since, placing them
in a folder he marked, keep you hung onto these
photos for fifty years? I asked, yes, he replied, he
told me. He gave the photos to Deputy Curtis. He
also handed over a copy of the nineteen sixty two
Sheriffs Support, which listed fifteen points suggesting Vail's guilt. Despite
being behind on major bills, Veil had managed to pay
an entire year's premiums in advance for a fifty thousand
dollars life insurance policy on his wife. He had a
second life insurance policy on her for eight thousand dollars,
which promised to pay double if she died by accident.
Deputies reported that witnesses said Veil told them he didn't
love his wife and that she was stupid and she
looked vulgar. Deputies also reported that Veil had sexual relationships
with other females and at least one male. Most witnesses
they talked to felt like he was capable of killing
his wife. Val told deputies that his wife was wearing
an off white leather jacket when she went into the water,
but she wasn't wearing the jacket when her body was recovered.
Inside his boat, deputies found two life preservers, Mary had
not been wearing one, despite her fear of drowning. As
for that troutline, deputies found it coiled inside.
Speaker 1: Veil's tackle box.
Speaker 3: That's why Abshire told me. That's why they thought it
was fishy. When he returned to work, he told his
coworkers what he witnessed were spread, and he said his
boss hauled him in and told him to stop sharing
what he saw. Eventually, Abshire faced off with Vel. He
said he had lawyers that were ready to see me
for everything I had, for all I was saying about him.
Get your lawyer ready, I told him I want to
get on the witness stand and tell everybody what had happened.
After some time past, Abshire said, Val telephoned him, asking
if he still wanted to tell everything to the lawyers.
Get them, Abshire said, He replied, I'm still ready to talk.
I want to get on the stand and tell him
what I know. Not long after Vell left town, I
asked him if he believed thell had killed his wife.
Oh my god, yes, he said. I then met with
Steve Horton, who talked about his aunt Mary, whom his
family adored so much that he and his wife had
named their daughter after her. He showed me her nineteen
sixty two death certificate, signed by the corner doctor Harry Snattick.
The certificate said she fell from the boat while fishing
and accidentally drowning. Horton detailed the many errors Snattic could
put down, the wrong date of her birth for example,
the wrong date of her death, the wrong occupation. He
pointed to the neat signature William Veil. It looked nothing
like the handwriting William Felix Veil typically had. He then
directed me to the date of veil signature October thirty
first of nineteen sixty two. That was the same day
at the funeral, he said, which was in Yennie. How
could he have signed this in Lake Charles. Horton shared
other documents which showed Veil had failed to pay any
money towards the one thy fourteen dollars bill for his
wife's funeral, or her headstone, or even her burial plot.
Dear sir, I would have contacted you sooner if I
would have known anything definite about when I can pay you,
Veil wrote order On's funeral home in nineteen sixty three.
Thank you for your patience and I'll be in your
office in the first part of April to settle the bill. Yours, truly,
Felix Veil. Bell never showed, never paid, despite receiving thousands
on two life insurance policies that he took out on Mary.
The funeral home won a judgment of thirteen hundred and
six dollars in Mississippi against Vail, and he still didn't pay.
It was during a bridge game in nineteen sixty nine
that Mary's mother larned Veil had never put a penny
towards the funeral. She was so embarrassed she went in
and paid it herself. I spoke with the funeral home operator,
Jeane Ordworn. He remembered Mary as a beautiful girl. They
had a marriage not made in heaven, but made in hell,
he said. So I decided to take a trip to
Kenyon Lake, and when I drove into the Canyon Lake
neighborhood where Bell lived, I saw a deer grazing the lawns.
Paperwork I copied at the courthouse prior to my trip
showed David Thomason and d need his property to Veil
after he paid the back taxes. So I dug into
Thomasin's background, and I discovered that he and Vales shared
something in common. Each of those guys had a wife
who died in an accidental drowning, so I decided to
dig deeper. Thomasin's estranged wife, Kathy, she had drowned in
Kenyon Lake.
Speaker 1: This was on.
Speaker 3: July third of two thousand and five. Her family still
had questions. Her mother, Kathy Simon, who still lived in
Kenyon Lake, told me her daughter tried to get away
from Thomasin, who was charged twice with assault but never prosecuted.
She was terrified of him. On the back lot of
Vale's property, I could see the boat Kathy supposedly fell
from and drown Friends told me Thomasin was out of
town at the time. If he did take out a
life insurance policy on her, I couldn't find it, but
I did find insurance companies. Shelled out more than a
half million dollars in preseeds to him, including two hundred
and fifteen thousand dollars for a house fire that the
fire marshal thought was suspicious. Vale now lived on this property,
and when I pulled up outside his home, I noticed
there were no windows. The padlocked fence had barbed wire
across the top. I called out his name and told
him I was interested into speaking with him about the
missing women.
Speaker 1: There was no answer.
Speaker 3: On March tenth of twenty thirteen, I received an email
from someone by the name of Gina Fretzel, a redheaded
private investigator whose colleagues nicknamed her Batgirl. She was obsessed
with serial killers. She had already read the e book
version of Gone before going online to discover Felix. Vale
was now living in Kenyon Lake. That was only an
hour and a half away from her home in Kerrville, Texas,
where her grandfather had been chief of police for twenty years.
I'm a licensed pis, she wrote me. Let me know
if you need any help. I promised I would later.
I sent a second email saying I'd like to find
out more about the suspicious burning of David Thomason's house
on the property.
Speaker 1: Where Veil now lived.
Speaker 3: On April third, she tried to talk to thomasin and
when she was unable to, she telephoned and said she
was going to see Veil. He won't talk to you,
I told her, want to bet. She called back later
with the news that vel had indeed talked. She told
him she was an investigator looking into the Thomasin fire
and he had spoken almost non stop to her. She
returned several more times, recording each of her conversations with Vel.
He shared details about his life and lectured her about
the dangers of ego, even as his own ego overwhelmed
their conversations. He told her he had a genius level
IQ surpassing one pin forty, and talked to memories from
the wound, saying he could fill the sunshine on his
mother's belly. Wow I shared the information him from Frenzel's
visits with the expert Yazzi. He provided many more hours
of advice and insights, saying Val seem more in line
with a cult leader than a suspected serial killer. For
more than a dozen hours, Vale spouted off to frenzle
about diet. He talked about his adventures, which included motorcycling
with a Dutch woman across the US and bicycling with
a teenage boy across California. Val regaled her with stories
of his sexual exploits, having talked of having sex with hundreds,
maybe even thousands of women, before adding that he didn't
consider himself promiscuous.
Speaker 1: He asked her to have sex.
Speaker 3: She told him no, that she didn't know him well
enough to have sex, and I knew that was coming.
By now, Frenzel had begun to play the role of
Vale's girlfriend, despite the fact that they had never even kissed.
The conversations grew darker. He talked about how much he
knew about killing people, murdering, pain incapacitating people. He said
he and Thompson had enough an amenity that we are
held in suspicion by all of our family and friends
for being able to think of something and do it
without looking at whether it's legal or not, or permissible
by society or not. He talked of eating live raw meat, saying,
if you're going to eat animals, you would have to
kill them and drink the blood, suck it out of
the body and drink.
Speaker 1: It right then that would be live meat.
Speaker 3: After Veil talked about a young woman who was obviously
a net, Frienzil asked him if he had talked to
her since his eyes got huge. She told me it
was the most evil luck I've ever seen. Eleven days
after Frienzill first contacted Mevel's sister, Kay Faulkner telephone destroyed
about her younger brother Ronnie's dying.
Speaker 1: She said.
Speaker 3: I replied that I was sorry to hear that his
body had been ra sage for years by the hepatitis
sea he contracted during the Vietnam War. A lever transplant
had saved his life a dozen years earlier, but now
his second lever was failing. Faulkner told me it was
her birthday and that she would never forget this day.
She began weeping. I know God has a plan, but
why couldn't he take Felix instead. After our conversation, I
spoke with Mary Rose, mentioning it was Faulkner's birthday. It's
my birthday too, She said, I had no idea Cay
and I shared the same birthday. We talked about the
case against Felix Veil, and she was worried that authorities
might do nothing. Ever, since Vail had sold his Mississippi property,
she had been wondering if he would also sell his
Tulsa property, property she and Annette had once owned. Weeks later,
she called with the news that Vail had sold that
Tulsa house. The sale price online one hundred and forty
nine thousand dollars. Now that he has all the money,
do you think he's gonna run? Jerry, I don't know,
I replied, he could be running. On April thirtieth, my
telephone reigned that Felix Vale had now left Texas. His
sister told me that he had shown up the previous
morning at the Columbus, Mississippi home of their late brother, Ronnie,
who had died five weeks earlier. Veil had skipped the funeral.
When Ronnie's widow, Bonnie, spotted Vail, she went to a
relative's employer, called police and told them that she didn't
want to talk to him. A worker told Vale to
move on. That afternoon, cal Kashu Parish Deputy Randy Curtis
called me with more news. Val had returned to his
brother's property again, this time when Bonnie was gone. Neighbors
spotted him checking her mailbox, then hopping a fence and
circling her house. Columbus police and other law enforcement officials
found Veil in a white pickup and pulled him over.
He told them he had come there for a funeral
before heading to Montpelier. Curtis said Columbus police were sending
him a photograph of Veil and his truck, and he
could be running. Jerry, I know, I replied. Vel's sister
telephoned again, saying she heard her brother was heading to Montpelier.
She wondered if he was driving to the home of
possible witness Wesley Turnage. I called Turnage to let him
know that Veil might be headed his way if he
sets foot on my property. Turn and said there ain't
gonna be a trial. He called me back later, saying
no one in mott Peelier had seen Veil. Are the
authorities ever going to do anything? I think so well,
they better get moving, he said. In his last conversation
with his dying brother, Veil had confided to Ronnie, a
one time missionary in the Philippines, what he experienced preaching
as a teenager at the Montpelier Baptist Church, seeing a
divine being that shimmered like the sun. It was a
bad mistake, Veil recalled, because he was thinking I was
touched by a demon. I called Frenzel, who speculated the
Veil's visit has to do with something his brother had,
and he wants it now that his brother's dead. Whatever
it is, Felix is willing to rest, going to Mississippi
and breaking into a place to get it. He didn't
even resk going to the funeral. So where's Vel now?
Columbus police didn't know. The Sheriff's office in Lake Charles
didn't know. Even his family didn't know. Frenzid Veil had
talked about living in Switzerland. Could this be the last goodbyes?
Speaker 1: Before leaving?
Speaker 3: At ten thirty pm, Frenzel telephoned, I'm sorry to be
calling so late. It's okay, I'm up, I said. She
talked of the journals she had seen the Veil was
keeping in the plastic bins. She had been unable to
read them so far, but she had taken photoge grass
of the backsides of the pages. She shared the photos
with a computer expert who analyzed them, spotting these words
on the same line, wife, attic and divided. Could Val
have given his brother something to keep? Perhaps stuff something
in the attic? The next morning I spoke with Deputy Curtis.
He said Bonnie had given the police permission to search
her property in case Veil had hid something there. That search,
I told him should include the attic. He called back
later to say the search had turned up nothing. Each day,
I made a run of calls, and each day no
one had heard from Veil. Six days later, Friendze called
Val had just left her message saying he was back
in Kenyon Lake. Elijah, he didn't leave the country. I
telephoned Randy Curtis with the news that Veil was in
Kenyon Lake and he sounded relieved. I talked with Frenzle again.
She was anxious to confront Veil about the missing women.
She was also anxious to stop playing the role of
his girlfriend. But before she could, authorities arrested Veil, charging
him with the murders of his first wife Mary. After
that May seventeenth of rest, Veil wrote friends of letters
telling her he loved her, and telephone calls from jail
in Lake Charles.
Speaker 1: He shared his.
Speaker 3: Explanation of what happened that night on October twenty eighth,
nineteen sixty two, on the Klikashu River. He referred to
his first wife as a kuna ass lady, saying she
was half kneeling on his feet when she saw one
of his float buckets that were.
Speaker 1: On the line.
Speaker 3: He said the boat was going real slow along the
edge of the bank when the boat hit a stump
and it dumped her right out. Dale said he shut
off the murder and jumped in where she had plopped
into the water and the river had sucked her right in.
He said, I dove around until I was exhausted, and
came in immediately to the police station in town and
reported the accident, and that was it. This story differed
greatly from his story in nineteen sixty two, when he
said his wife was sitting on top of a boat
seat when she fell out, and not that she was
kneeling on his feet. Back then, he said nothing about
hitting a stump, just swerving to miss it. Vale told
Frenzel that the case has been an avalanche coming down
a mountain all that time, waiting to hit my head,
and it finally has. He blamed the families in me
an evil, shrimpy reporter for what had happened, called the
charges fabricated, and insisted that a large amount of money, hate,
and political ambition is behind it. At Vale's request, Frenzil
returned his truck to his home and went inside to
take care.
Speaker 1: Of you task.
Speaker 3: While there, she spent sixteen hours photographing all of his journals.
More than twenty four hundred pages. She also photographed letters, documents, photographs,
and business cards, some dating back to the sixties. She
found a hodgepodge of women's jewelry on buttons and pens,
and even a glass dildo. Most disturbingly, she found a
photograph of a naked three year old girl. Frienzel later
spoke with the girl, who is now woman, and the
journals revealed that Veil had stalked her for years. Frienzil
discovered the Burth certificate of a nat craver Veil, who
had used it for previous strips to Mexico. Obviously, she
didn't take that with her. One of her oddest findings
was someone else's birth certificate, a man named Henry Curtis
ware the third. Two weeks after Veil's arrest, I telephoned
public defender Andrew Cassanet. The former prosecutor returned my calls
and asked what I wanted. Are you Felix VAL's lawyer
for now? Why are you calling me? I explained that
I have been working on a story on Veil having
a DNA test in connection with a nineteen ninety double
homicide in Starkville, Mississippi. Where two elderly women were raped
and killed. The crime struck me as the work of
someone else, a double homicide, he asked. He explained that
the Starkville police had just swabbed the inside of Bale's
cheeks testing his DNA. He said he hardly knew anything
about Vale's case from the district attorney because the DA
had been too busy talking to the press. I laughed,
you must be the investigative reporter mentioned in the arrest warrant. Yep,
that's me, I said. I knew it had to be you. Why,
I said, you're the only one who's called me. This
killing happened all the way in Louisiana. Why are you
covering it in Mississippi. Well, it's where Felix Vale was
born and where he was living before he took off,
I said, took off. Sometimes people just leave. If I'm
in high school and I go to college, I just
leave us. I replied, Do you need anything else? Nope,
I replied, so Friendzly and I then plowed through Veil's journals,
noticing gaps that made us believe he had purged them.
Times when he would have been with Sharon and Annette
appeared to have been destroyed. Throughout his journals, his main
topic was sex, describing his exploits of women single and married,
straight and lesbian, conscious and unconscious. Even as he hopped
from bed to bed, he demanded monogamy, referring to women
as whores. Sex dominated his dreams, where women from his
past often appeared as characters. The journals also reflected an
obsession with children. In a March twenty seventh, nineteen eighty
sixth century, Vell described the visit of a woman and
her daughter's in his home. The little girls were delicious,
he wrote. We massage some, hugged and kissed some, and
it was twelve men night, in time for them to go.
Speaker 1: Fucker.
Speaker 3: On August twenty ninth, nineteen ninety two, Vil walked into
the Walmart in West Point, and a one year old
white girl looked in my eyes, loving me as if
there were no age difference between us.
Speaker 1: Good grief.
Speaker 3: On July sixth of twenty thirteen, friends will email me
something she spotted in the photographs of VAL's wife Mary,
taken after her body was discovered in the kayl Kashu River.
It looks like her panties are pulled out over the
top of her jeans in the small of her back.
To me, this would be sign of a struggle. No
woman on the planet would allow that to happen with
her panties. I think it was a situation where he
grabbed for her jeans for leverage and her panty slipped
over the waistband. In the other photograph, her cayamegas sweatshirt
was bunched up and her mid drift was exposed. Her
sleep cuffs looked as if grease had been ground into them.
The autopsy report showed she had a big bruise on
the back of her head. Could she have been struck
from behind and then dragged the full weight of her body,
grinding the grease into her cuffs. That same day, Veil's sister,
Beth Keyes died of a massive heart attack. Her obituary
was an impressive one valedictorian of her high school, successful realtor,
and generous philanthropists. Her obituary listed all of her siblings
dead and living, with one exception, Felix Veil. A day later,
fellow goenurernalist Stanley Nelson emailed me the name of a
man I.
Speaker 1: Should speak with.
Speaker 3: The Next day, I interviewed fifty eight year old Kirk
Germany of saucy A, Mississippi, who had worked alongside Veil
in nineteen seventy seven. Although Veil was aloof he just
seemed to have a strange mind control, trying to bring
people into his world in a manipulative sense. Germany said
he just had that Charles Manson personality. No matter where
they went, Veil attracted women. Felix claimed he was locked
in a Bavarian love not with this woman in Germany
said something like eighteen errors. What the hell is that?
Speaker 1: He said.
Speaker 3: Veil also remarked that the best sex he had ever
had was with either get this as sick.
Speaker 1: A two or three year old girl.
Speaker 3: In fall of twenty thirteen, I telephoned Lee Peck, a
reporter for KPLCTV in Lake Charles who had aired several
stories on Veil. He had told me before that one
of their part time employees was working for Travelers Insurance
when they sold Veil the fifty thousand dollars life insurance
policy on his wife Mary. This time, Peck gave me
her name, Jessine Brooks, whose telephone number I found online.
She answered the call and said she remembered the death well,
it was, she said, the first time she had ever
read an autopsy. She described Veil as cold and unemotional
in his dealings. Deputies told her they knew he had
killed his wife, but they couldn't prove it.
Speaker 1: She said.
Speaker 3: Veil's wife did not sign the policy and she needed
to sign it. The agent got in a little trouble.
Despite being the major breadwinner, Veil didn't take out a
policy on himself. The insurance company wound up settling the claim.
I was surprised he got anything, Brooke said, because she
had not signed it. Friendzil and I tracked down Kurt Ware,
who was stunned to learn that a copy of his
birth certificate had been found at Veil's home. The copy
had been ordered in January of nineteen seventy three. Had
Veil ordered that birth certificate? And if so, why was
he going to adopt this as his new identity. Ware
didn't recognize the name Felix Vel, but he did recognize
Vel and his girlfriend, Sharon Hensley. After I emailed him photographs,
he said he had met them in nineteen seventy two,
possibly at the health food place where he worked.
Speaker 1: In New Orleans.
Speaker 3: His journals, Veil had written that they went by the
aliases Joseph and Helene Martin, and it even married under
those names. Where said, those names did ring a bell.
He also said he and Vel bore a physical resemblance
to each other and would often hang out together on Saturdays.
He recalled Val entering a wine store, removing the sticker
from the most expensive wine and replacing it with a
sticker from the cheapest. He would literally spend three dollars
and come out with the best wine, he said, aloof
and intriguing. Val talked about grape fast where he ate
only grapes, Where said, and he only drank this German
wine made from white grapes. During one conversation, he said,
Val asked him, have you ever killed someone? He felt
to chill. The way he said it made me think
he had killed somebody in his past. I tracked down
Dick White, who recalled Val visiting him and his wife
for a month in their tees Simon in nineteen ninety three,
while working on a roof, They'll accidentally hit his finger
with a hammer, he said. They'll then argued with his
injured finger, you ain't hurting you, son of a bitch,
I'll make you hurt. They'll swung the hammer and smash
his finger a second time. During their work together on
several projects, including building a barn, White said Veil told
him my ego wants to talk to you. White said
he replied Felix, I'm not dealing with you in the
third person. White said Veil drifted in and out of
different levels of sanity and insanity. Talk of mental illness
didn't surprise him. I knew Vel's late father suffered from
bipolar disorder.
Speaker 1: He said.
Speaker 3: They'll often watch television shows on schizophrenia, a popular topic
in his journals. He told Frienzil he believes the whole
human species is schitzo and y'all. That's where I am
going to cut it off today and we should be
able to the next episode will wrap this up. It's
about to really get into it because we're about to
get into the court testimony. But it's very important that
I give you the history of what was going on
prior to that so you can see how sick and
disgusting this asshole is. So I thank you so much
for listening.
Speaker 1: Again.
Speaker 3: Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you're spending it with family. And
friends and loved ones, and I am sure thankful for
all of you. And until next time, I'm Jim Chapman,
your host of Bloody Angoa, a podcast one hundred and
forty two years into making the complete story of America's
bloody is President Peace?
Speaker 1: I walk the.
Speaker 2: Street line shackle change, Oh gluesome Gurdie. It's calling my name.
There is no mercy and it's been a tentery juice
as the hill Stream game rangol the three.
Speaker 1: I'm here, be.
Speaker 2: By, here to die inside these walls, inside the wild.
Speaker 3: And when the.
Speaker 1: Girl, as I know, it's so
Speaker 2: Bloody, anglebody angle o.