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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Over Murderer. I'm Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 2: I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: How are you doing there this evening, mister Thomas. It's
been a hot minute since we've talked.
Speaker 2: I'm doing great, just back from a memorial service in Annapolis, Maryland,
and you're just back from an excursion. You sound very
cheaper for someone who's been on the road this.
Speaker 3: Week, because I'm very tired and I'm making the best
of it. Yeah, I was just In. I was given
the amazing opportunity to be a guest at a VDOC
Society meeting courtesy of our friend Agent Fitzgerald. So thank
you very much to fits for that. That was a
wonderful opportunity. So I got to go up and be
a guest at the VDOCK Society luncheon. I'm not allowed
to discuss anything else about it. I went and it
was wonderful.
Speaker 2: For the benefit of our listeners. Why don't you recap
what the VIDOC Society is all about.
Speaker 3: So the vdoc Society is as a private club slash
think tank, and it is comprised of members of law enforcement,
FBI profilers, forensics people, and they function as a think
tank for law enforcement agencies who wish to bring a
cold case in front of them. So the way that
a VDOC Society meeting works is you show up and
you have lunch and you socialize, and after the salad
and the main course, someone from the law enforcement agency
that is presenting a case that day, we'll get up
and they will present the whole entire case to the
whole entire room. I felt like it's as close as
I'm ever going to get to sitting in on a
session at the BAU. It was amazing being surrounded by
all of these people lending their considerable intellect to this
case that is being put forth, and they asked questions
and offer suggestions, and it was amazing to watch this
totally bad ass group of intellectuals do their job. It
was so cool. I had an amazing time, and I'm
so excited that I got to do it. And I'm
so thrilled that Agent Fitzgerald gave me the chance to
do that. That was wonderful and it did cost a
pretty big dent in my teaching schedule. I now have
literally a foot high stack of papers that I need
to grade from when I I was gone for three days.
But I wouldn't trade that for anything. It was a
great experience. I'm so excited.
Speaker 2: Some years back, the Colonial Parkway murders families had asked
that our case be presented to the VIDOC Society because
they often present open cases that might benefit from this
high level discussion. Unfortunately, the only time cases are presented
to the VIDOK Society, which meets once a month in Philadelphia,
is when the law enforcement agency agrees to present their case.
FBI Norfolk turned us down. We were really disappointed because
VIDOC was very interested in discussing the Colonial Parkway murders.
This has got to be in like twenty ten, twenty eleven,
somewhere in that timeframe. It's always held a tremendous amount
of interest for me personally, and I'm thrilled that you
were able to go and it really sounds like an
amazing discussion and experience.
Speaker 3: It was. I am still pinching myself that I actually
got to go and do it, and here's hoping that
I might get a chance to guess again at some point.
But it's wonderful. And I didn't realize that they had merch,
but they do have merch, and so I was able
to get a v DOC Society Runners tech jacket so
I have a warm up for when I go running
or walking, and it's got a nice little feed Doock
Society patch on it, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 2: And some of the investigators we know and forensics experts,
Behavioral Analysis Unit veterans are members of the doc. They're
not all there each month, because what's the requirement. You
have to go at least twice a year at least Wassier.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and these are busy people, so I imagine they wouldn't
be able to make it every single month. There is
some high powered intellect in that room and it was
astounding sitting in the middle of it and watching these
people go to work. It was very cool.
Speaker 2: Welcome back, Thank you.
Speaker 3: We did just celebrate and aniversary here that I think
needs to be acknowledged. Bill, we just passed the thirty
eighth anniversary of Kathy's case. Anything that you'd like to
remark on that occasion now.
Speaker 2: Just that we are hopeful. We understand there have been
some developments in the Colonial Parkway murders case. We hope
that they will lead to further clarity on what has
happened with our case. Of course, back in January, we
had the very exciting news that the Robin Edwards and
David Knobling incident in the Colonial Parkway murders had been solved,
with the identification of Alan Wade Wilmer Senior as the offender,
and of course that tied into Teresa spaw Howell, a
nineteen eighty nine victim, and a case that was being
handled by the Hampton Police Department. So we're hopeful that
we'll see some additional forward movement the thirtieth anniversary. It's
always hard. It just hits me when we get to
be heading into October that here it comes again. I
know all the families probably have similar reaction as the
years pass and we continue to look for.
Speaker 3: Answers before we get into our case. Today, we just
wanted to tee up a couple of upcoming events here.
We have some excellent episodes coming up. We are again
having Catherine Ramslin join us to talk about her career
both as a forensic psychologist and also as a writer
and a creative person and how that job that she
does has shaped her artistic life. So we're looking forward
to that. We're also going to have back on Matt Murphy,
prosecutor and all around amazing person, who is going to
offer us some further insight and discussion on the Menendez
brothers and their potential resentencing which was just announced earlier
this week. We also want to make sure that you
guys are aware we do have another upcoming live event
that is going to be in January at the Montclair
Public Library, which is up in northern Virginia. They are
holding a fantastic little mini crime con where we will
be speaking and doing a live podcast right alongside our
friend and guest, Bruce Goldfarb, author of eighteen Tiny Deaths
and friend of the podcast and many time guest Mark Olshaker,
the author along with John Douglas of the mind Hunter series.
So we will be putting more information about that event
on our social media pages fairly soon so that you
can start getting your plans together. But we would love
to see all of you who are able to make
it come over to Northern Virginia middle of January and
we will be there along with Mark Olshaker, Bruce Goldfarb,
various other members of the law enforcement and true crime
community at the Montclair Public Library. And we are very
much like looking forward to it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're looking forward to it. We have had a
number of requests and this is actually something that we'd appreciate.
We'll put this information up on our social media pages
of course, mind Over Murder and Colonial Parkway Murders. We're
also very curious. We had done two live podcast events
in April and May in Yorktown at the Beautiful Library
There a number of people asked if we had planned
to do more of these. Now we've got the Montclair
event coming up, we'll ask the question on our social
media pages, would you like to see more events of
this type? There did seem to be a lot of interest. Now,
in a perfect world, we would do this after we
had more updates in the Colonial Parkway murders, so fingers
crossed on that front as well.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, we decided to do something that Bill and I
have been kicking around as an idea for about as
long as we've had the podcast. We're about to turn
five years old in January, folks, and that means we
are a particularly well established, may I even say venerable podcast?
Speaker 2: I don't feel old enough to be venerable.
Speaker 3: And looking back on it now, we realize that some
of our early efforts, while very well intentioned, were maybe
not the best sounding efforts that we could ever have
put across into the universe. Would you agree with that,
mister Thomas.
Speaker 2: I shake my head. I think even at the beginning,
when we started this podcast almost five years ago, I
don't think that's our best work. But I don't think
they're horrible.
Speaker 3: No, I don't think they are either. But I would
definitely like I redo on some of these so that
I don't sound nearly as nervous and stumbley, because I
know I did for the first couple of episodes.
Speaker 2: Actually, some people say in the podcasting world that you
should record your first couple of episodes and then scrap
them and only launch episodes once you've done a few.
We did not necessarily follow that advice, although for those
people who are particularly detail oriented, a few people have
noticed that we actually are missing the first two episodes
of Mind Over Murder. When you go back into the
catalog or whatever you would call this.
Speaker 3: Thing, it is the catalog at this point, because there's
a lot of it.
Speaker 2: So among the earliest episodes we did was some coverage
of the so called Child's Metzler murder case from two
thousand and nine. We thought we might revisit that case,
particularly since we're continuing to hope that there will be
some developments in that case as well.
Speaker 3: We'll call this Child's Metzler two point zero or Caldwell
Fields the reboot, or whatever you would want to call it,
but we wanted to go ahead and give this case
it's due now that you have two more experienced voices
who are able to present the information to you in
a more nuanced and thoughtful way. Is that a pretty
fair way to put it.
Speaker 2: I'm feeling creakier by the minute. Here, let's talk about
Child's Metzler.
Speaker 3: The Child's Metzler case refers to eighteen year old Heidi
Lynn Childs and her longtime boyfriend, nineteen year old David
Lee Metzler. Both of them were sophomores at Virginia Tech which,
for anybody outside of Virginia, that is Virginia Polytechnic Institute
in Beautiful Blacksburg, Virginia. Heidi and David were high school
sweethearts who had been dating for four years up to
that point. I think the expectation there was probably going
to be marriage, especially in light of later events. They
are an absolutely adorable couple. If you look for pictures
of the two of them, they are about as all
American as you could possibly want. She's beautiful, he is handsome.
They very clearly were crazy about each other, and it
really brings the tragedy home once you put faces to
the two of them. But they had been dating for
four years, and unfortunately they were found shot to death
on August twenty six, two thousand and nine, in the
Caldwell Fields area of the Jefferson National Forest that is
a wilderness area that is twelve to fifteen miles away
from the Virginia Tech campus. A little bit of background
here on each of the victims. Heidi was a biochem
major who was in the process of switching over to
pre med. Obviously very brainy. She was the fourth of
eight kids in her family. Her father, Don Childs, was
a helicopter pilot for the Virginia State Police.
Speaker 2: Now we've never met Don Childs or any of the
members of these two families, but we've heard reference to
him as a Virginia State Police helicopter pilot a number
of times. Because people that we know from the Colonial
Parkway murders in the Virginia State Police side of our
case know Don and his family very well. And I
know this case is a very frustrating one for the
members of the law enforcement community because they feel like
all this time has gone by fifteen years and they
still don't have answers in this case. And I think
they really feel like this is two of their own.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely. David Metzler was an industrial systems engineering major,
youngest of four children. His father was a doctor from Lynchburg,
which is a town in the middle of the state,
about ninety four miles away from Blacksburg. So Heidi and
David often played guitar together at services at the Heritage
Baptist Church, and so they had gone to the Caldweld
Fields area to practice guitar. After leaving Heidi's apartment on
the evening of August twenty sixth, around eight twenty five pm,
they were traveling in David's nineteen ninety two Toyota. Within
about two hours of their arrival at the Calwell Fields
Wilderness site, they were shot to death with a Winchester
thirty thirty lever action hunting rifle, and the number of
shots fired was not released. I could not find that
information anywhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't call over seeing that, and you had
mentioned the range of the Winchester thirty thirty.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's funny. My dad, my wonderful, long suffering dad,
does not really understand why I do what I do
here with podcasting and crime. It's a little confounding to him.
But when I was taking notes for this episode, I
called him up and I said, hey, Dad, I have
a question about a gun, and he goes, I can
answer a question about a gun I was like, oh, bingo, here,
here's something we can talk about. So I asked him,
I said, can you tell me what is it? A
thirty thirty hunting rifle? And he just went on a
spiel about it, told me everything he knew about hunting rifles.
And I'm starting to get a pretty good lecture going.
And I said, okay. Because I knew my dad was
a hunter, he grew up in that area, I said,
can you tell me a little bit about the range?
According to my dad, shout out to Randall Dilly, who
will never listen to this podcast. But I do know
that he has friends who listened to it. Maybe they'll
tell him I shouted him out on the podcast. According
to my dad, a Winchester thirty thirty lever action hunting
rifle would be good for short range distances of less
than one hundred yards. He said, probably thirty to fifty yards.
And that's because he is hunted with a Winchester thirty
thirty lever action hunting rifle before.
Speaker 2: I've actually shot a Winchester thirty thirty as well in
target practice when I was a boy scout, which is
quite a long time ago. This is not a gun
that you would fire from hundreds of yards away. This
is a fairly close in hunting rifle.
Speaker 3: Heidi and David were found the following morning at the
Caldwell Fields area by a man who was walking his dog.
Heidi was found outside of David's car, the ninety two Toyota.
David was found inside the car. We don't have any
more information on what that scene looked like other than
the fact that authorities characterized it as a quote brutal
and ugly double murder, which it certainly sounds like. They
also revealed that Heidie's purse was taken from the car,
and they released the contents of the purse for further
identification by anyone who may come across it. Heidie's purse
contained a silver Motoroller Rasor phone, a silver Sony Cybershot camera,
her credit card, her identification card, and a Virginia Tech lanyard.
So I assume by ID card they mean like student
ID card.
Speaker 2: And will include links to photographs. The investigators at the
time felt that this was very important because these items
were taken in her purse and they were hoping that
because they were somewhat distinctive, they might have been seen
by someone, so admittedly fifteen years have gone by, but
will include a link to photographs of those items as
provided by law enforcement.
Speaker 3: We unfortunately do not have a lot of information on
the status of the investigation. There is not a lot
out there, and the course of sitting down to do
my case notes, I relied on the notes that I
had taken five years ago, if you can imagine that
it's been that long. But I also checked out to
see if there was new information on the of Heidi
and David, and really, unfortunately there does not seem to
be any. On the tenth anniversary of their murder, which
was five years ago, Heidi's parents spoke to the media,
as did David's parents, but that's really all of the
discussion that has been done in the media. We'll offer
some quotes from that in just a second, but there
has not been a lot released on this case. In particular,
we did talk a couple of years ago with a
local investigator by the name of Lisa Lucas Gardner, who
has a very vested interest in this case, and even Lisa,
who knew a lot about the investigation, was still not
able to offer a whole ton of insider information about this,
so it sounds like the investigation has really been kept
highly under wraps.
Speaker 2: About the only thing we've heard in the last couple
of years was a few years ago, I would say
two maybe three years ago. We did talk to some
people with good knowledge of what was happening inside the investigation,
and they seem to indicate that the investigators feel like
they have a good handle on who might be involved,
but they do not have enough to bring these people
up on charges. So suspicions remain about who might be involved.
But from a public perspective, in terms of official case announcements,
there hasn't been that much.
Speaker 3: In twenty nineteen, ten years after the murder, a new
investigation into the case took place involving up to ten
different law enforcement agencies, and I thought it was very
interesting that there are this many agencies involved. So I'm
going to list off those different agencies, and I think
it would be very interesting to dig into, like why
do we think each one's involved. So the law enforcement
agencies involved in the child's Metzler homicide are the Virginia
State Police, the FBI, the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office, the
US Marshals, the US Attorney General's Office, the US Forest Service,
the Blacksburg Police, and the Virginia Tech campus police. Those
are the various agencies that are currently involved now the
vsp I understand bill. Can you shed light on why
the FBI would be involved with this one.
Speaker 2: I think they're probably providing an assist role with analysis
of the weapons used and the Quantico labs. There are
a number of different labs at the FBI headquarters. I
think the FBI are there in an assist role.
Speaker 3: I'm noticing the US Forest Service, and I assume that
is because the Caldwell Fields is adjacent to the Jefferson
National Forests. I assume that's why they are involved.
Speaker 2: I'm pretty certain you're right there. The National Park Service
may be involved here too somehow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was curious about that because I noticed they
weren't listed. Blacksburg Police would be involved because Blacksburg is
where Virginia Tech is is, and the campus police would
be involved too because David and Heidi were students at
the time. The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office would be involved
for that same reason. So you've got campus police, city police,
county police, and then you've got the state and the
federal I really am interested, though. The one thing I'm
really having trouble with here, Bill, maybe you've got an
idea US Marshals, any idea why the US marshals would be.
Speaker 2: Involved with this some of us feels like more of
an expression of support than anything. The other thing is,
I think law enforcement knows who's involved in this case,
and I think what they're trying to do is by
using all of these different agencies, everyone is trying to
keep their ears to the ground because the feeling is
that sooner or later, somebody's going to say something about
who they think is directly involved in this case. And
with all those law enforcement agencies out there listening for it,
they're hoping that at some point they'll hear the tip
that they need to begin to build a case against
an individual or individuals that are responsible for this double homicide.
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Speaker 3: Now. When twenty nineteen rolled around and all of these
different agencies became again involved in the reinvestigation of this case,
the reward for this case, which is already a substantial
seventy thousand dollars was raised to one hundred thousand dollars
for information leading to an arrest. At that point, we
know DNA and fingerprints were taken from area residents. As yet,
no information has been released on whether or not that
resulted in any leads in this case.
Speaker 2: Very strike though, because them taking DNA and fingerprints from
area residents indicates that they have something in terms of
evidence that they're testing against. I don't think they would
just go out and ask area residence for DNA and
fingerprints for no reason at all.
Speaker 3: Last month, on September fourth, twenty twenty four, WDBJA seven
and Roanoke released a news story about the fifteenth anniversary
of the child's Metzler murder, and the following statement was
released as part of the story. Quote. State police say
they want to reassure the families and friends of Heidi
and David, as well as the affected communities that even
after fifteen years, a robust team is pursuing investigative steps
on a weekly, if not daily basis. That team also
is constantly evaluating new and emerging technologies to leverage scientific advances.
End quote. There was also a very interesting quote here
from Special Agent Scott Mitchell of the VSP bill would
you like to read that?
Speaker 2: Sure? And there's something about this that I was very
struck by. Special Agent Scott Mitchell. The VSP stated, quote,
we intend to resolve this case. That means we intend
to identify and prosecute the person responsible for these brutal murders.
The investigative team believes there are people with relevant knowledge
about what happened the night David and Heidi were murdered
and who have not yet come forward. There are relatives
or associates of the offender who have learned concerning things
in the intervening years, or have held on to secrets
all this time. The odds are very high that the
offender has put his family and friends, through no fault
of their own, in the awful position of knowing things
about that night. We don't want those individuals to be
reluctant to come forward. One thing that's really striking to me,
and I think that you as well, Kristen, is they
talk about individuals as in people that might know someone
who's involved in this case, but they talk about the
offender in the singular. Our sources say that there are
two or more men involved in the murder of David
and Heidi. It might just be the way the language
came out, but I think that they believe there are
two perpetrators here.
Speaker 3: That definitely tracks with some of the interviews that we
did five years ago when we first covered this case.
For anyone who feels that they may have information that
would lead to an arrest in the murder of Heidi
Child's and David Metzler, there is a one hundred thousand
dollars reward, and so we'll put this number for the
VSP tipline up on our social media page. But for
anybody who's listening who suddenly we had a moment of insight,
the VSP tip line for this case is five four
h three seven five nine five eight nine, and that
is a one hundred thousand dollars reward for tips that
lead to an arrest. One of the most interesting, I
guess we'll call it a rabbit hole that we went
down when we were initially looking into this case is
the fact that there were any number of connections to
other cases in that area. We're not necessarily saying that
those connections mean the two cases were perpetrated by the
same person. It just means that there have been, over
the last couple of years, some of heinous and high
profile crimes to happen in the Blacksburg area, and we
found it interesting that some of the areas where those
crimes occurred intersected with places where other of those crimes occurred.
One of the things that I found myself doing as
I was making notes on this is building a section
called other case connections, and I started writing down this
case maybe connected to this other case in some other way.
So they're just a couple of interesting little rabbit holes,
I guess, really is the best way to put it.
And I'll go through them here fairly quickly. Heidi and
David were killed in August of two thousand and nine.
Two months later, in October of two thousand and nine,
Virginia Tech's student Morgan Harrington was murdered by serial killer
Jesse Matthew in Charlottesville after attending a concert at the
John Paul Jones Arena. There was speculation online after the fact,
and before it was understood that Jesse Matthew was the
killer of Morgan Harrington, that maybe the Heidi and David's
murders were linked in some way to Morgan Harrington's and
vice versa. Obviously, now we know Jesse Matthew was the
killer of Morgan Harrington and Hannah Graham, and very likely
there is no connection to Heidi and David. However, the
speculation that came about online after the fact was particularly
interesting and noteworthy.
Speaker 2: I think that just seems like one of those things
where there's just this odd confluence of events. What's very striking, though,
is as you continue through the list, there are a
number of other murders, some of them received a tremendous
amount of national publicity, and seeing them all listed together,
it's actually quite shocking how many different murders and large
scale massacres have occurred that have a direct connection to
Virginia Tech.
Speaker 3: I'll go down those and then we'll link that into
areas that are very near to the call Well Fields.
It's probably been a little too flip of me to
call this. I've been calling it in my notes the
Virginia Tech crime spree, and that's not really accurate one
hundred percent, but it is certainly telling that the campus
of Virginia Tech is a commonality in all of these cases.
Either a student who attended there or someone who was
in the vicinity of the Tech campus. I'm just going
to run through very quickly those crimes, some of them
very noteworthy that you noted here, and we'll talk about
how those may or may not be related to Heidi
Child's and David Metzler. The Virginia Tech crime spree, as
I call it, really starts in April sixteenth of two
thousand and seven with the terribly tragic Virginia Tech massacre,
which was perpetrated by Sun Qui Cho thirty three, who
just went on a mass shooting spree that ended with
thirty two people dead in seventeen injured on the campus
of Virginia Tech. I still remember where I was that day.
That is another one of those things. It's a hallmark
in my life. I remember where I was. I don't
know if you recall where you were a bill, do
you happen to remember? No.
Speaker 2: I remember that day very well, but I don't remember
exactly where I was. It was such a shocking crime,
and usually college campuses are I think of as relatively
safe places. This was just such a shocking event, and
I don't know that i'd even heard of Virginia Tech
before this terrible mass killing, which saddens me because I
think that was for a lot of people their introduction
to the Virginia Tech community.
Speaker 3: And this is actually, I think one of the first
mass shootings that I can recall that happened in someplace
other than high school. By two thousand and seven, we
were used to hearing about high school shootings, but this
is the first one I remember hearing about that took
place at a college. Two years after that, January twenty first,
two thousand and nine, there was a grizzy and awful
stabbing into capitation of a graduate student by the name
of Xinyang by a fellow student, Hayang Zhao in a
campus eatery. This absolutely blew my mind when I came
across it in my research, because I somehow had not
heard about it. And this is the sort of thing
that you think would have made the national news, but
I had not heard of it. Bill, do you remember
had you heard about this at all?
Speaker 2: I had For some reason, this one had stuck in
my mind. It's just a horrible case.
Speaker 3: So this we've named him once. I don't want to
name him again. I'm just going to call him the offender.
The offender stated that he was in love with the victim,
but she ultimately rejected him because she had a boyfriend
and told him that she had plans to marry her boyfriend.
The offender then followed the victim to a campus restaurant
and stabbed her in front of other people with an
eight inch butcher knife. She fought back, which resulted in
multiple defensive wounds on her hands and arms before she
fell to the ground, at which point the offender decapitated
her in front of witnesses.
Speaker 2: We were talking about this a little bit offline, and
I was wondering how it was that people weren't able
to stop him. As I recall, I think this happened
fairly quickly, and people were afraid for their own lives
as this man attacked his victim. It's just one of
these situations that just seem so senseless. It transpired quickly,
and before they knew it, she was dead on the
floor of the restaurant. He is now currently incarcerated for
his offenses.
Speaker 3: Eight months after that, August twenty six, two thousand and nine,
Heidi and David were murdered out at the Caldwell Fields.
Two months later, Morgan Harrington was murdered by Jesse Matthew.
At the time, people positive that the murder of Morgan
Harrington might be related to the murders of Heidi and David.
We now know, of course, that is not accurate, but
obviously I can see why the speculation would have been there.
Two years later, December seventh, twenty eleven, Ross Truett Ashley,
aged twenty two, murdered Virginia Tech police officer Derrick Krause,
aged thirty nine, before also killing himself. Ross treat Ashley
was a part time student at Radford University, which is
about fifteen miles southwest of Blacksburg. He had hijacked a
white twenty eleven Mercedes SUV at gunpoint from a Radford
real estate office the day before, and when the call
came in, Officer Krause went to examine that suv and
Ross Treutt Ashley killed him in cold blood.
Speaker 2: I remember this case as well. Of course, we were
following what was going on at Virginia Tech and in
that community pretty closely by that point.
Speaker 3: Finally, five years later, January twenty second of twenty sixteen,
was the absolutely horrifying murder of thirteen year old Nicole Lovel.
She was lured out of her home by two Virginia
Tech students, David Eisenhower and Natalie Keepers, and was then
brutally murdered, and both of them are currently facing life
in prison for this absolutely heinous crime. We did cover
Nicole's murder at some length on I believe it was
episode three of the podcast, and that one is still up,
so if you want to listen to that one. We
sounded better by that. We sounded like we knew what
we were doing, so we kept that one up. We
decided not to reboot Nicole level, but we wanted to
give Heidi and David a reboot.
Speaker 2: Here a couple of other things about the child's Messler case.
One thing that's been mentioned to us is there was
a shooting range near Caldwell Fields, which was quite popular.
They're actually, I believe our two shooting range is one
properly licensed and one probably much more casual. There was
a strong possibility that the shooter or shooters may have
passed by Caldwell Fields while coming back from the shooting range.
One of the things that was mentioned regarding David Metzler
is they thought that he had been shot through an
open window of his Toyota, and that, of course a
rifle was used. There was also brass collected. If I'm
not mistaken, they were attempting to extract DNA from some
of the cartridges that were found there. I'm very curious
as to whether any of that evidence led to DNA
being available that might eventually tie back into a suspect.
Speaker 3: That's an excellent question. That same firing range is one
that was known to be used by san Quicho, the
Virginia Tech massacar Rushwood Ashley, who murdered Tech police officer
Derrek Krause, and the firing range was also very near
the home on Craig Creek Road of thirteen year old
Nicole Lovell, who was lured out of her home by
Tech freshman David Eisenhower and Natalie Keepers and later stabbed
to death by the two of them. So an interesting
grizzly nexus at the center of all of these terrible
crimes seems to be this firing range. Very sad and
awful history in that area. As I was preparing some
additional notes for this episode, the teacher across the hall
from me is absolutely splendid. Year teacher who had graduated
from Virginia Tech just a couple of years ago, and
so I asked her. I said, hey, I was naming
these cases. I was like, are you familiar with all
of them? She's, oh, my gosh, yeah. She was like,
it's really it's really odd, all of these different things
that happened in and around the campus. And I actually
asked her, like, how do they memorialize these things on
the campus? And so she was writing down a list
of ways that the campus keeps the memory of the
shooting victims alive. And they're very careful to honor and
acknowledge that, yes, horrible things have happened here, but we
acknowledge it, and we hold the people still in the
lighting close to our hearts, which I thought was very nice.
Speaker 2: I still don't know if I understand what a hokey is.
Speaker 3: It's a male turkey. Okay, it's yeah, it's if you
look at the if you look up I know you've
got your computer up. You should look up the Virginia
Tech mascot. It's a hockey bird. It's a male turkey.
Speaker 2: I learned something today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my dad is a Virginia Tech. My dad's a
Virginia Tech alum, and he'll wander around on game days
wearing his hoky sweatshirt and singing the song Hokey Hokey High.
Speaker 2: That's that I'd like to hear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I'm sure you would like I said, though
my dad never listens to this podcast. Doubt you're ever
going to get the opportunity. But yeah, dad is a
Virginia Tech alum, and this is a school after his
own heart. I have a couple of students who are
attending right now, and I have another couple of students
who are playing there.
Speaker 2: And i'd appreciate it if any of your dad's friends
could mention that we said really nice things about them
on the podcast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh, he knows. He knows. We we do good
work and we're out there trying to make the world
safe in a better place.
Speaker 2: We would dearly love to see the child's Mepsler case solved.
If you do have any information. There's no time like
the present. If one hundred thousand dollars reward isn't enough,
I just think the community would love to see Heidi
and David murderer brought to justice.
Speaker 3: Amen to that. So, the vsp tipline for this case
again is five four three seven, five nine, five eight nine.
We'll put a link to that in our show notes.
We'll also put some information up on Heidi and David,
including some photos. And I had alluded earlier to the
fact that it seemed like after a four year relationship,
there was probably going to be the expectation that they
were going to eventually get married. After Heidi and David
were murdered, they were buried side by side next to
each other in a family plot, and they have a
Virginia Tech flag looking over them to this day. That
is going to do it for this episode of mind
Over Murder. Thank you all for listening to our reboot
of episode one of mind Over Murder, the Heidi Childs
and David Metzler murders. If you do have any information
about that case, please do reach out and please stay
tuned for all of our upcoming live events in January,
our excellent new episodes that are dropping, and hopefully we'll
have some more information on the Colonial Parkway murders case
in the next couple of weeks. That is going to
do it for this episode of mind Over Murder. Thank
you so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over 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: Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with Coral 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.
Speaker 2: On Facebook, and finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on
Twitter at Bill Thomas five six.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.