Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders, and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the
social media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway
Murders Facebook page with my partner in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 4: Welcome to mind Over Murder.
Speaker 2: I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 4: We are back on an unseasonably warm November day. I
don't know how it's been up there, Bill that it
was pretty darn toasty here today, nice eighty degrees in
the sun.
Speaker 2: It wasn't that warm, but it was unseasonably warm. A
lot of times. By Halloween first of November, it's quite
cold here. Sometimes it even snows.
Speaker 4: Oh, so you're in the ice box of Connecticut. My dude,
I'm surprised it has not snowed already.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it was like seventy degrees and sunny, absolutely gorgeous.
None of us can get over it. It's very strange.
We had a truly bizarre thing happen here over the weekend,
which we're still cleaning up from. We have a large
hill that heads down through the center of town with
no State Highway Route forty four, which runs east west,
which cuts through the center of our little town early
early Saturday morning at five point fifty eight am. I'm
actually amazed we didn't hear this. A very large gasoline truck,
oh no, filled with eighty two hundred gallons of fuel.
Ask me how I know it is headed down the
hill into the center of our town. This is just
before six am. Somehow the driver manages to get off
the road in this beautiful residential section of town opposite
our elementary school, and then we don't exactly know what
happens next, but he either turns to get back onto
the road or makes a correction or whatever overcorrects. This
giant truck full of gasoline tips on its side and
skids across the road, completely blocking the road in both directions,
whereupon two hundred gallons of gasoline start flowing out of
the truck. Oh no, all over the road, all over
the front lawns of these beautiful homes. And then and
this is where it gets really scary, into the storm drains.
Oh gosh, blowing downhill through the center of town.
Speaker 4: As soon as you said downhill, I'm sitting there going
Was there a mud slide? Was there a flood? No,
this is worse than that. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2: We learned about this around eight thirty am when we
got to notice they were turning off our power on
an emergency basis because they were afraid there was going
to be an explosion in fire. When the truck initially
tipped over, there was no explosion or fire, which we
were very fortunate in that way. They had to evacuate
a number of homes near us. We live on a
street called Maple Avenue just a block over from us.
On Maple Avenue, it's just a little bit lower in
terms of these pretty rolling hills. All those homes in
that slightly lower section of Maple Ave were all evacuated
because people could smell the gasoline flowing through the storm drains,
and these are so scary, so wonder people's houses. We
actually have one that goes through our garden comes out
on the other side. We don't have any direct access
to it, but there's a brook then where these storm
drains dump into which would normally be rain water and
run off. And in this example, it's gasoline headed towards
a beautiful river which is also und store a town
called the BlackBerry River.
Speaker 4: Oh no, oh, so, Buttermilk Falls, where you and I
went to and.
Speaker 2: I came to visit exactly, that also is flowing down
towards the same BlackBerry River. They had to turn off
the power for the whole center section of town for
about four hours. This would have been Saturday morning. And
then of course we heard the ambulances and fire engines
and it just kept coming and coming. They brought in
fire equipment from as far away as sixty five miles
from here. Because these are small towns, they have a
cooperative relationship. It's a regional thing. So we ended up
with our volunteer fire department, who actually very good. But
these are my neighbors, people that just do this out
of the goodness of their heart. We also have volunteer
ambulance corps who are also very good, so they're all scrambled.
And then all of the other fire equipment from surrounding
towns was brought in and they were trying to contain
the gasoline, which is very difficult and without blowing it
or themselves up. Amazingly, the driver of the truck was
not injured. He had managed to extricate himself from the truck.
I don't know what his cover story is going to
be about exactly how he managed to wow his entire
load of gasoline in the middle of our town. But
they've been working on it now, Saturday, all day, Sunday,
all day today.
Speaker 4: Can you smell the gasoline? And if you're stepping outside,
can you smell it?
Speaker 2: Not so much at our house, but we took the
dog for a walk and we went over towards that
slightly lower portion of maple ave, and you could definitely
smell gasoline.
Speaker 4: Oh my goodness.
Speaker 2: And then we took the dog for a walk, and
we've had all of these massive white environmental trucks going
all over town. It's actually an unnatural disaster. And we
ended up chatting with the guys that are working on
the mitigation, is what they call it. And these are
these environmental companies. They come in and for example, when
we were walking the dog, we stopped and I chatted
with the guy for a little bit, and he explained
that they were siphoning off the gasoline from the top
of the brook that runs through the center of town,
and then they pull that into tractor trailers filled with
water and gasoline. Then it goes to a recycling center
where the water and the gasoline are separated again, and
they're doing trailer after trailer, and they're also bringing in
sand and foam and all this equipment to help contain
the gasoline as best they can.
Speaker 4: This is crazy.
Speaker 2: We're just so lucky that we didn't have a fire
that would have burned down these beautiful Victorian homes on
both sides of the street. And this is all like
a block just past our elementary school here in the
center of time.
Speaker 4: You've been doing this two days, and you never called
me and said, by the way, I've got a crazy
story for you. You saved it from the podcast.
Speaker 2: We've been waving and thanking all of the firefighters and
environmental workers and police, and our town has just been
inundated with equipment and personnel. We lived two doors down
from town Hall, and by the way, we're having an
election tomorrow.
Speaker 4: Yes, they.
Speaker 2: Open access back to town Hall where we can all vote,
and they want to open up the streets as best
they can. But even now, that steep hill where the
truck crashed, the truck has been righted and towed away,
but they're still not letting anyone come through because of
the concern of a potential fire. And you can still
smell gasoline depending on where you are.
Speaker 4: This is crazy. So is this going to count?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 4: Is that an election irregularity? If you guys can't get
there to vote, us.
Speaker 2: To allow us to all vote. We want to encourage
people to come out and vote.
Speaker 4: She whizz Wow. That is a whole lot more story
than I've argained for when we signed on here.
Speaker 2: We can't thank the rescue workers. And amazing how many
different people have come through town. And we were walking
the dog. We went by town Hall and there's a big,
beautiful conference room that they use for different meetings. I
go to meetings there as well well, and we went
by their last evening and the room was absolutely filled
with all the different heads of all the different crews,
and they were going through they had white boards and
they're going through all the steps are taking. Except for
thanking them and giving them a big thumbs up, we're
just doing our best stay out of the way and
let them get their work done.
Speaker 4: This is a great time to shout all of them out.
I don't know how many of them listen to our podcasts,
but as you and I are very well acquainted with
members of law enforcement community, but their brethren, the first responders,
all of them, they do amazing, tremendous work and we
really cannot shout them out enough. Yeah, that's incredible.
Speaker 2: Just as a reminder, these are people who've been working
twenty four to seven since this accident took place, and
in our small town, they're all volunteers.
Speaker 4: That is crazy. Well, that is I feel like we
need to do a whole breaking news segment and that's
what's going on in this section of the world, to
you crazy. I really hope that they are able to
get that. Do they have an estimate on when everything
is going to be cleaned up or are they still
having to take it one day at a time.
Speaker 2: They said a couple more days, but I hope that
we've had Saturday, Sunday, now Monday. Hopefully maybe by Tuesday
or Wednesday it'll get cleaned up. They had to turn
the electricity off a second for safety reasons, so we
got a notice from ever source is our electric company.
So we get an email on a text and it
says we're going to be turning the power off at
eleven fifteen pm. So we're we're watching TVA, hanging out
with the dog, that whole thing. We looked at each
other and said, I guess we're going to bed at
eleven o'clock to night. It may be Saturday night, but
we're not staying up late tonight because the lights are.
Speaker 4: Going to be oh my gosh.
Speaker 2: So with a little bit of heads up, we got
ourselves all situated and got ourselves all tucked into bed,
and yep, just after eleven o'clock the lights.
Speaker 4: But honestly, I guess it's a good thing that it's
been unseasonably warm being there in the ice process Connecticut.
This would be so much worse if it was in
the snow in the cold and you didn't have electricity
during the coals, that would be horrible.
Speaker 2: And the communication from our town Emergency Services department has
been incredible. They've kept everyone up to speed on what's
going on. They actually had to go door to door
knocking on doors for our neighbors that are a little bit
down the street from us who were asked to immediately evacuate.
At the same time, they're using social media really effectively
to keep us all abreast of what's going on with
road closures and safety. It's been pretty impressive.
Speaker 4: Actually, wow, that is really something. So we know that
our next edition of Mind of a Murder, you're going
to have to continue to give updates on all of
this and everything.
Speaker 2: Thanking these teams for many moons, and then we're gonna
have to work with the state of Connecticut and our
town officials who've got to get these trucks to slow
down as they come hurtling through our little town.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I have one hundred percent remember hearing very loud
trucks going downhill?
Speaker 2: Yeah they come. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Wow. I really don't know how we're going to top
that story from the Maple House, but I think we're
going to have to try for this episode. And we
are continuing our coverage of true crime news and specifically
we want to talk about some very interesting developments that
have taken place since we recorded our last episode in
the Ruth Marie Terry case, also known as Lady of
the Dunes. This has apparently exploded more than I guess
anybody was really thinking that it would. And Bill, I
know you've been keeping on top of these updates here.
So what have we learned about Ruth Marie Terry's what
did we call him last time? Bunco artist? Is that
was that delightful? Term?
Speaker 2: Was the term they used in one of the newspaper articles,
and I hadn't heard that term in years. A bunco artist,
of course, is a con artist.
Speaker 4: We learned something about her bunco artist husband or former husband.
Why don't you go ahead and fill us in on that.
Speaker 2: There's a lot happening here, as we talked about last time, Kristen.
First of all, for Ruth Marie Terry to finally be
given her name has resulted in so much new information
now being developed because in a situation where they had
these unidentified remains for forty eight years, they weren't really
able to move that investigation forward because they didn't even
know who this poor woman was. This is true in
this example and many other examples where we have missing
and murdered people who go unidentified. After our friends at
Athram were able to help the FBI, Massachusetts State Police,
the Cape Cod Prosecutor's Office, and other agencies identify Ruth
Marie Terry using forensic genetic genealogy, the story gets more
and more bizarre as we go forward. First of all,
a number of other family members have now come forward
and are able to tell us a lot more about
Ruth Marie Arry. We now have a niece, Brittany Nova Glosk,
who's commented to NBC News that her great aunt was
a beautiful and loved member of her family. They had
been missing her for forty eight years. Of course, she's
from Tennessee originally and had moved around quite a bit
and had lived in California and elsewhere. She did have
ties to Massachusetts as well, but they didn't realize that
these unidentified remains found near Provincetown in nineteen seventy four
could possibly be their great aunt. They described her as
a loving and caring person who was a free spirit,
her great niece said, and she wanted to explore life
outside of where she grew up in Tennessee. So she
moved around quite a bit. As you mentioned last time,
she lived in Michigan, California. She'd visited Massachusetts. Apparently she
wandered a bit. Was herself, was married several times. As
we discussed last time, she gave up a son whom
she had when she was quite young, about age twenty
one twenty one. She appears to have been married, perhaps
as many as three times. It was all part of
this kind of adventurous wandering spirit, was how she was described.
Her great niece said. She told us that her mother
and grandmother never stopped searching for terry, but they had
no way of knowing that she was buried in Provincetown
all these years in an unmarked grave. They did know
about Muldovin, and the last they knew about her husband
was he was a boyfriend at that point, and of
course now he's the focus of the investigation into her murder.
You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at
mindover Murder. I know we don't like to get too
graphic here on mindover Murder, but I do want to
add a few additional details as we talked about, Terry's
hands were cut off and her skull was also crushed.
It looked like she might have been hit with something
like a shovel or something quickly that would have been
post mortem, and she was essentially decapitated. Several teeth were
also pulled. Investigators now believe that this was an effort
to disguise who she was.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that makes sense, and.
Speaker 2: Of course we're talking about nineteen seventy four. DNA is
nearly twenty years away. At that point, the way you
would identify a person would likely be through fingerprints, physical description.
There were clearly, as we've said before in other episodes,
forensic countermeasures taken here, likely by her killer. According to
NBC ten in Boston, they've now discovered that Terry married
her husband muldovin five months before her body was discovered
in Reno, Nevada. And of course, yeah, a Las Vegas
or Reno wedding is a classic quickie place to get married.
And there are reports that Muldavan who used names and
a number of different aliases far beyond just the two
or three we've seen so far, and there are reports
coming out now that he bought a sports car in Reno.
The whole thing sounds like such a screaming cliche.
Speaker 4: Wow, it really does.
Speaker 2: Bought a sports car in Reno and was driving across
the country heading to Provincetown with his new wife, whose
name was Terry. So the last thing her family knew
was that she was in California. Her family has said
some very interesting things. Her great niece had said her
family remembers Terry was not herself when Muldovin was at
her side. That our friend Laura Richards would have something
to say.
Speaker 4: About this, Oh yeah, she would.
Speaker 2: Our discussions with Laura about coercive control certainly come to mind.
Her great niece said, Terry was almost inaccessible when she
was with him, and it was like he owned her.
She was his property. And this is a woman who
was usually bubbly, outgoing, friendly, upbeat, who loved to dance
and sing and was a joy to be around, and
yet she's this very controlled figure when she's with her
then boyfriend later husband knee s. Brittany Novagloski said that
it was Moldovin who told her family that Terry went missing.
Now this is supposedly five months after they got married. Sure,
sounds like the honeymoon was over by that point.
Speaker 4: Oh, I would imagine.
Speaker 2: So, yes, Yeah, and Novangloski's great grandfather traveled to California
to look for Terry and hired a private investigator, who
then ultimately informed the family that all of her belongings
had been sold and that she had left the state
of California. All of this stuff is very curious, and
this sense of manipulation and ownership by her then boyfriend
later husband is very suspicious.
Speaker 4: Yeah, classic coercive control. I bet if we put it
in front of Laura, she'd say, that's exactly what it is.
My goodness, I feel awful for this poor woman.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So there are a number of different versions of
the guy Moldovin's story. One is that I struggle with
this because there are so many different stories about him,
and he uses multiple aliases, most often Raoul Rockwell, which
I mean sounds like I made him Raoul. First of all,
as we mentioned last week, he is now dead. He's deceased.
As you mentioned, he was a suspect in the brutal
killing of his ex wife and nineteen year old stepdaughter
in Seattle in nineteen sixty but somehow was never charged
with their murder, despite the fact that their remains were
found in the septic system of the house they lived in.
Speaker 4: How does that happen? How did he not get charged?
Not out as somebody found in the septic system that
we don't need to speculate on that.
Speaker 2: No, but apparently the reason he was not charged is
because they couldn't prove who it was even they found remains.
They found skin in the septic system, but they weren't
able to identify who the victims were.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: So he was briefly charged, but he ended up serving
a remarkably short sentence. As we talked about before, he
was charged with fraud involving his hesitate to put numbers
on this and one of his next wives. He's been
married so many times. Some of the reporting I've seen
said he may have been married as many as six times.
And then he has many girlfriends at the same time,
and then all these different names. It just goes on
and on.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: The NBC ten investigators in Boston had said that Terry
was married several times, but Muldovan seems to hold the
record here. They think he was married at least four times,
and perhaps as many as six times. The Massachusetts State
Police give his name as Guy Rockwell Muldovin born October
twenty seventh, nineteen twenty three, although as they point out,
he also by the names Raoul Guy Rockwell, so switching
his names around, and Guy Muldovan Rockwell. And then Terry
herself also used multiple names. She went by Terry Marie Zena,
Terry M. Vizena, and Terry Shannon. They have this very
curious nomadic lifestyle, and ultimately it appears that shortly after
they were married in Reno, he bought a sports car
under yet another name and then drove off. I read
reporting last night as well that Muldovan's father had extensive
ties to Provincetown. He owned a number of different homes
and businesses in Provincetown, which may be why they were
headed to that location. That makes sense, although it wasn't
like they were in Provincetown for a great length of time.
They think that the family ties have something to do
with that being their final destination, at least the final
destination for Terry herself. I just saw some new reporting
from our friend Robin Warder. He does a very good
podcast called The Trail Went cold and not only is
Robin an outstanding podcaster, he's also a very strong researcher. Yes,
he's reporting something that I haven't seen anywhere else, which
is why we want to be careful to make sure
we're giving credit to Robin. He has discovered newspaper articles
from Eureka, California from the early nineteen sixties that describe
Rockwell as potentially a perpetrator an offender in another series
of murders.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: These newspaper articles from the early nineteen sixties, they described
him as raoul Guy Rockwell in addition to being a
suspect in the murder of Manzanita Rockwell hdi nine and
her daughter Dolores Mere's age eighteen, who had died in
I believe it's April nineteen sixty and the remains were
found inside the septic tank discussed. Apparently, Rockwell had also
lived in Fortuna, California, in Humboldt County from nineteen forty
seven until about nineteen fifty. They were stating that they
are interested in questioning him for that murder ten years before,
and that involved a bread truck driver named Henry Baird,
aged twenty two from Eureka, California, and a young woman
who was only seventeen. Her name was Barbara Kelly, and
she was a waitress at a restaurant in Fortuna, California.
I thought this was very odd. The two people were
found naked except for shoes and socks, the rest of
their clothes piled neatly nearby.
Speaker 4: Similar to how Ruth Murray Terry was found.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. The two of them have been shot to
death and in the very strange coincidence department Rockwell worked
as a short order cook in a restaurant in Fortuna
that was owned by his in laws. His father in law,
Jerome Loop, owned one of the two restaurants in town,
and this young woman, Barbara Kelly, worked as a waitress
in that same restaurant.
Speaker 4: Dead people just keep showing up wherever the sky is.
Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Now, Robin Waterer seems Robin Warders seems to be
ahead of the curve here. I'm not seeing this reporting
anywhere else except in Robin's writing, and I'm sure he'll
be doing some podcasting on the case on the Trail
Went Cold his podcast. Very interesting development. So, actually, if
you start lining all this up up, it looks like
Guy Rockwell or i'm oulde Ben or Raoul Rouel, whatever
name we want to go with today, could be potentially
linked to three separate murders of at least five people,
including two pairs of people, his second wife and her daughter,
his stepdaughter, and then now this young couple Henry Baird
and Barbara Kelly, and their ties to the restaurant where
he worked.
Speaker 4: And if he's been married as many as six times
and we know that two of the wives were murdered,
I'd be very interested to know how many of his
other wives turned up dead or missing.
Speaker 2: So people are doing some digging. And as we talked
about last week, now that we know who Ruth Marie
Terry is, who sometimes goes by Terry, and so we're
flipping those names around as well. Now that we know
who she is and she's no longer the Lady of
the Dunes, we're able to start putting together a number
of other elements of this kind of nomadic life that
these people led. It appears that Muldovin Rockwell, whatever, may
be involved in multiple homicides. I think, as someone said
to me a few minutes ago before we went on here.
I think we're dealing with a serial killer her.
Speaker 4: It certainly sounds that way. But yeah, how interesting this
will be as it continues to unfold, and it would
be of course, there is no way to bring him
to justice. He died in two thousand and two in Salinas, California.
But I think it would certainly be maybe healing in
a way for her family to know exactly the full
circumstances under which she got hooked in with this guy
and what his full criminal history is. Here. My goodness, gracious,
this is absolutely crazy just the way that it's developed. Yeah,
I'm very interested to see where this goes. And props
to Robin Order for all of this excellent work that
he's doing here. That's some great researching. I'll be interested
to see who else picks up on that.
Speaker 2: And it sounds like her extensive family, that Ruth Marie
Terry's extensive family never gave up on her. They were
always looking for her. Of course, many of that older
generation that would have been her parents or grandmother, They
were looking for her, traveling to California, hiring private detectives,
trying to find out what had happened to her and
they never were able to connect a young woman from
Tennessee moving around the country and seeking her fortune and
this mysterious and unknown to them murder victim who has
been unidentified on Cape cod for forty eight years.
Speaker 4: It was an interesting story to begin with, and it
just gets more and more interesting the deeper you dig
and the more layers you peel away. So I'm very
interested to see where this will continue to go. And
we will bring on our friends from Athram for a
future episode to talk about the work that they did
on Ruth Marie Terry's case. As Kristin Middelman teased a
little bit on their DNA Solves page, this was not
easy work that they did. This was a difficult one
for them, and so I know I'm very interested in
what exactly they had to do to find this name
of Ruth Marie Terry. I know that her family is
probably quite thrilled to finally have a name for her
and know where it is that she ended up. We
did mention last episode that her biological son, Richard Hanshitt,
had said that he is looking to bring her body
back to Tennessee so that she can be buried with
her parents.
Speaker 2: It would appear that this new information regarding Raoul Guy
Rockwell slash Muldovin whatever would seem to indicate a much
stronger tie in, at least potentially between this man who
now appears to be a serial killer and his wife
who died under mysterious circumstances five months after marrying this guy,
would seem to make him the most likely offender and
be the person responsible for Lady of the Dunes killing.
I think that means that the Jaws theory and the
idea that she was an extra appearing while they were
filming Jaws on the Cape and Islands that summer of
nineteen seventy four that seems less and less likely.
Speaker 4: Now it does. I still think it's a great story.
I think it would be it would make an excellent book.
I hope Joe Hill actually takes that and runs with
it and decides to turn it into something. But yeah,
it doesn't seem to be the reality of the situation.
Speaker 2: It would also seem to me that the idea that
somehow Whitey Bulger was involved in the murder of Ruth
Marie Terry seems less and less likely as well. I
know that there are some people that have theorized that
he might somehow be involved in the murder of this
beautiful young woman who was found on Cape Cod in
the dunes outside Provincetown, and that seems less likely. Certainly,
it's a fascinating case and there are more and more developments.
I'm also hoping that the Cape Cod Times, who've done
some outstanding reporting here, will continue to report on the
case and will continue to follow up as well.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, I know that you had mentioned last time there
are a couple of different documentaries that have been done
on Lady of the Dunes, so we do encourage you
to hick a documentary and bring yourself up to speed
in addition to listening to our reporting, and of course
tune into all of the other podcasts that are doing
excellent work. And we would like to shout out again
Robin Water of the Trail Went Cold, because he definitely
seems to be onto something here with regard to the
con artist slash serial killer that she had the misfortune
to fall in with. But we will bring you guys
up to speed on any new developments in Ruth Marie
Terry's case. That's going to wrap it up for this
episode of Mind Over murder. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mindover Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and Another
Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Speaker 2: Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.
Speaker 1: Mindover Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media.
Speaker 2: You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Speaker 1: You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
Murders on Facebook.
Speaker 2: And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
Bill Thomas. Five six.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.