A Wyoming resident finds human bones in a military footlocker.

There was a skeleton in the footlocker

They found a bullet in the skull

CASE DETAILS

3-D reconstruction of the man in the box

In 1986, a long-time resident of Thermopolis, Wyoming, whom we will call Gabby, moved away.  He left some of his belongings in a shed, including an old, locked trunk.  He left the shed with a friend, Newell Sessions.  Then, six years passed.  Finally, Newell couldn’t stand the suspense another minute and opened the trunk.  What he found, shocked him:

“We had uncovered a human skeleton.  And there wasn’t too much said at that time.  I think it was my wife who asked me… to dig a hole and give it a proper burial.”

Newell’s wife told him he had to call the sheriff.  Before he did, though, Newell felt obliged to contact Gabby.  Gabby told Newell that he’d never even opened the footlocker.  He thought he’d bought it at a garage sale.  But according to Newell, when it came to the time and the place, Gabby’s memory failed him:

“He acted probably as surprised as I did when I opened the trunk, that he couldn’t believe it.  He thought I was kidding him.  And I told him, no, I’m not kidding you.  There is a human skeleton in there.”

Newell Sessions contacted John Lumley, the sheriff of Hot Spring County.  Right from the start, Sheriff Lumley was suspicious:

“I’ve talked to a lot of people about this case and everybody said, almost 99.99% or more, that they would’ve opened it immediately upon purchasing it.  They said if they went to a yard sale or garage sale, bought a trunk, that’s half the excitement, it’s like a Christmas present, can’t wait to get home to open it.”

Two days later, the skull was examined by an x-ray machine.  The tests revealed that a bullet was lodged in the skull.  Now Sheriff Lumley thought he might have a murder case on his hands.  He decided to have a chat with Gabby.  But Gabby was unsure about the details.  He said he might have bought the trunk in Wyoming, Iowa, Illinois, or maybe Oklahoma.  It might have been as early as 1973, but maybe not.  According to Gabby, he just wasn’t sure:

“Well, my being a suspect, what do I have to worry about.  I mean really, you know, I know I didn’t do the guy.  I didn’t shoot this dude… I’m not even as old as the gun that shot him.”

But Sheriff Lumley’s primary concern was not Gabby’s age:

“Gabby is in his mid forties.  The footlocker and the lock were made back in the ‘30s time period.  I don’t believe that Gabby was the person that caused the death of this person, but my thoughts have always been that he has knowledge of who the person in the trunk is or where they came from.”

On March 31, 1992, Sheriff Lumley turned the skeleton over to the Wyoming State Crime Lab in Cheyenne, in hopes that maybe the bones could tell him what Gabby could not.  Sandra Mays was the lab technician that examined the skeleton:

“He was in his 50s to 60s.  Probably stood about 5’8, plus or minus an inch and a half, was a Caucasian male.  The bullet was from a .25 caliber weapon that was produced in the in… 1904, and then available in the United States about 1908.”

In an effort to identify the victim, Sandra Mays created a three-dimensional facial reconstruction out of clay.  Only the eyes and hair are guesswork.  Otherwise, Sandra’s facial recreation should be a good likeness of the man who somehow got a bullet in his head, sometime after 1908.

But who was the man?  How and why did he die?  The old trunk appeared to have been used by someone in the U.S. Armed services between World War I and World War II. Perhaps the trunk, alone, holds the key to unraveling this bizarre mystery.

Joseph Mulvaney

Joseph Mulvaney

Joseph Mulvaney

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season five with Robert Stack and in season five with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A biker gang leader is wanted by police.

Randy Yager

Suspect:

Gender: Male
DOB: 8/7/56
Height: 5’11”
Weight: More than 200 lbs.
Eyes: Hazel
Hair: Brown
Remarks: Has gone by the nickname “Mad”

CASE DETAILS

When Nadine Jelovcic of Gary, Indiana, hadn’t heard from her sister, Margie, for several days, she went to her house. Nadine was concerned to find many personal items that Margie always took when traveling. Margie’s car was also left abandoned in the driveway.

Randy Yager as seen in video

Why did Margie Jelovcic suddenly leave? Was it of her own free will? Or was there something more sinister going on?

Six months earlier, Margie’s life seemed ideal. She was a happy newlywed, planning for a bright future with her husband, Nasser, in Detroit. But just six months after their wedding, Nassar was killed in a traffic accident. Shattered, Margie decided to move back to Gary, Indiana.

Margie immersed herself in her new job. She managed the night shift at the tavern owned by her mother. It’s where she first encountered a biker named Randy Yager.

Margie Jelovcic

Yager was a high-ranking member of a notorious biker gang, the Outlaws. He had an outgoing, scruffy charm, an air of danger, which was attractive to the vulnerable young widow. Margie’s sister, Nadine, had met him:

“I think that he complimented her in ways that she needed to be complimented. And she needed perhaps those accolades that made her feel good. He knew how to say the right things to charm her, and she, in turn, was charmed by him.”

But Yager’s charisma covered up a darker side to his personality. Margie had no idea he was an ex-convict with a long criminal record. He and other members of the Outlaws were under investigation for racketeering, drug dealing, and murder.

Soon after they met, Margie began dating Yager. Her family is not sure if or when Margie found out about his criminal past. The only thing they know for certain was that she began to change, according to Nadine:

“She became extremely distant. She became distant with me and my children and distant with the customers. And I don’t know whether she was told to be distant and not to speak or she just totally started to remove herself from society.”

Margie’s sister Nadine

Three months later, Margie left with Yager on a trip to Las Vegas. At that very moment, United States Marshals had already begun an operation to arrest Yager and several members of the Outlaws. Seventeen members of the gang were indicted for a Midwest crime spree that included bombings, robberies, and six murders. But U.S. Marshals had been unable to locate Randy Yager. Margie’s mother was worried:

“I saw the pictures and I said, Oh my God, my daughter went with that man? What’s going to happen to her now?”

Meanwhile, 1,500 miles away, in Nevada, Federal agents traced Yager to Las Vegas, but it was too late. He and Margie had apparently fled the city. Two weeks passed, then Margie returned to Gary. Her family was relieved. But Nadine says Margie remained distant:

“She felt that they would try and find him through her. She was led to believe that her apartment was bugged, that people were following her in her parking lot. She had an extreme paranoia. And I said, “Marge, what should you be paranoid about? Nobody’s after you. You’ve not done a thing.”

Three months after her return, Margie disappeared again. Patrick Amerson, of the United States Marshal Service was involved in the investigation:

“At first, it just seemed like that she had run off and joined Yager wherever he was at. But upon investigation, we found out that she had taken none of her clothes, her car or anything else. We’re really not sure what happened there.”

It’s been several years since Margie disappeared. Nadine says that her family believes that even if she is with Yager, that she is no longer his girlfriend, but his victim:

“I feel that he is holding her back and he won’t let her communicate to her family and, at this point, he’s brainwashed her, because this is so out of character for Margie not to make a phone call to us.”

Over the years, several mysterious phone calls have been made during the morning to the tavern. The caller never speaks, and only after a long pause, hangs up. For her mother, these calls offer the slender hope that they will one day see Margie again:

“I want Margie to come home. Whatever she did, she did, but come home. My heart and my door is always opened for her. I’m waiting for her.”

Margie Jelovcic is not wanted for any crime. She is classified only as a missing person.

Update:

Randy Yager and Margie Jelovcic were discovered living together in a Mexican Beach town called Rosarita. When Mexican authorities arrested Yager and found him in possession of a gun, Margie fled in their car, leading police on a high speed chase. She lost control of her car, flipped it three times, and was found dead beside her vehicle.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eleven with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A career criminal is wanted for murdering a Pennsylvania police chief.

Donald Eugene Webb

CASE DETAILS

Age progressed sketch of Webb

Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, is a community in the truest sense of the word.   Everyone knows everyone else and crime is virtually non-existent.   But on December 4, 1980, 16-year-old Tiger Freehling heard gunshots and the sounds of a fierce struggle outside.   Midge Freehling recalled how her panicked son ran down from his bedroom:

“He came down and he said, ‘Mom I heard someone shooting outside’. And I said,’ Tiger, don’t say that because you know it’s hunting season’.   He said no, somebody was fighting and shooting.   So I went out the door and I looked and I saw someone laying in the bushes.”

Midge was horrified to discover her friend, Saxonburg police Chief Greg Adams, covered in blood:

“And he said I’ve been shot, help me.   And I said who did this to you and he said he didn’t know.   So then I just happened to look up our driveway and I saw a white car pull away.   I didn’t see the man that was driving it, I just saw a figure.   And I said you’ll be okay, you know, you’ll be fine.   And he said no I think you better pray for me.  I don’t think I’m going to make it. I think he knew that he was dying.”

He pulled a gun and killed Chief Adams

Within three minutes, paramedics arrived.   Adams was rushed to the hospital.   He had been shot twice and beaten severely.   31-year-old Greg Adams left behind a wife, two young children, and a grieving community.   Within hours, the State Police had arrived at the murder site and soon made an important discovery. Greg appeared to have been shot in the middle of a routine traffic stop.   According to Corporal Danny McKnight of the Pennsylvania State Police, a driver’s license had been left at the scene:

“It’s our belief that it came out of Greg’s hand when he was shot.   The other piece of evidence at the scene was the gun that was used to shoot Greg, and it was empty.   And void of any serial numbers.   It was untraceable.   We still have yet to trace the gun to see where it came from.   But the operator’s license with the name Stanley John Portas on it and a date of birth and an address in New Jersey was a piece of physical evidence that without that, we have no idea who shot Greg Adams.”

Police immediately traced Portas’ whereabouts to a cemetery in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.   According to Corporal Danny McKnight, he had been dead for 32 years:

“We did our background on Stanley John Portas and found out that he had a wife and when we contacted her, we found out that she was married to a subject named Donald Eugene Webb and Donald Eugene Webb had totally taken on Stanley John Portas’ identification.”

The name on the license: Stanley Portas

Donald Eugene Webb was already a familiar name to law enforcement.   He was a member of the “Fall River Gang,” a group that robbed stores and homes up and down the Eastern seaboard.   Police believe that the day before the shooting, Donald Webb and an accomplice had visited a Saxonburg jewelry store.   According to Corporal McKnight, Webb asked to see some rings:

“They were observing where the jewelry was kept, how it was kept, the location of the alarm systems, how many employees.   What do I need to get in to this place and get out undetected?”

The next day, Greg Adams was working his final shift before taking his annual vacation.   At approximately 1:45 PM, he left the station.   For Gordon Meinhardt and the rest of the Saxonburg Police Department, it would be their colleague’s final patrol:

“Witnesses tell us they last saw Greg on Water Street, heading towards the intersection of Butler Street when they, as well as Greg, observed a white Mercury Cougar not stop for a posted stop sign.   This caught Greg’s attention immediately.   He pulled a u-turn on Water Street and proceeded after the white Cougar.   Greg losing sight of the vehicle upon coming around the turn, probably wondered where the white vehicle went and at that point spotted the white Cougar attempting to turn around in the Agway parking lot.   He then immediately blocked the white Cougar in.”

But Portas had been dead for years

Most police officers are trained to approach a traffic stop from the rear.   However, due to the positioning of the cars, Greg Adams could not make that type of stop.   Adams had to approach that vehicle from the front.   According to Corporal McKnight, Adams was in a bad position:

“If Greg had the New Jersey driver’s license in his hand, he’s scanning that immediately for the vital information, date of birth, does it match the person he has stopped.   I believe, at that point in time, Webb got the drop on him.   He’s hit twice, the blood trails on the ground indicated there was one heck of a struggle there and Greg actually shoots with his gun.   And that struggle took them a long way to the Agway parking lot, back to the Midge Freehling residence where they were found.   Of course Greg is a tough little competitor.   But he looses his gun to Webb and the gun’s empty and Webb just beat him with the gun.”

Webb used the alias “Stanley Portas”

On December 8, 1980, Greg Adams was laid to rest in a funeral attended by fellow officers from all over the state.   The town of Saxonburg has erected a monument to commemorate Greg’s life.   On this monument, a grateful town has inscribed a “thank you” to a man who gave his life protecting their community.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season two with Robert Stack and in season 8 with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Did a woman fall to her death off a cliff or was she murdered?

Jane Doe

Victim:

Gender: Female
DOB: Not available
Height: 5’8”
Weight: 127 lbs
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Light Brown
Remarks: The woman was wearing what appeared to be second-hand clothing, including a pair of men’s underwear.

CASE DETAILS

When a coroner is called to the scene of an unexplained death, it is his job to identify who the “John and Jane Does” are and how they died. This is a story about the unheralded heroes of law enforcement.

Searching for clues

On the morning of October 5, 1983, two lifeguards discovered the body of a young boy. He was floating in a channel near the ocean at Seal Beach, California. According to the lifeguards, the body was so badly decomposed, that it made identification impossible.

Coroner’s investigator, Joe Luckey, was sent to the scene. He found no evidence of foul play. In fact, an autopsy later revealed that the young boy had drowned. But who the boy was and where he came from posed a baffling mystery:

“It takes a while sometimes to get over the fact that you can’t identify these people. You tend to think about your own families and know that there’s somebody out there who’s missing a relative, somebody, but we don’t know who.”

Joe sent a description of the boy to every law enforcement agency in the area. Only one possible match turned up. It was of a boy who had disappeared from Fullerton, California. Fullerton was sixteen miles from where the body was discovered, but Joe still met with the boy’s parents. They told him that their son had vanished shortly after leaving for a neighborhood park. Joe searched the park for any possible clues:

“I found that there was a flood control channel adjacent to the park. I also discovered because of the rainfall the day he disappeared, that the flood control district had opened a local dam and allowed the overflow to come through that channel, raising it six feet higher than normal.”

Tragically, the young boy had fallen into the flood channel and was swept sixteen miles to Seal Beach. Blood samples later provided a positive identification. The mystery had been solved.

Cullen Ellingburgh was a coroner in Orange County at the time of the boy’s disappearance:

“A coroner is probably a good mixture of being a surgeon, a detective, and an attorney. Every day is a challenge. It’s new, a little bit of detective work all the time.”

Cullen Ellinburgh, Coroner

Cullen Ellingburgh has worked on literally thousands of cases. Some take months of painstaking research and legwork. Others are solved solely on the basis of one small piece of evidence. One case, in particular, has haunted Cullen Ellingburgh since May 18, 1987. That morning, the body of a woman in her early 20s, was found at the bottom of a steep cliff in Southern California. According to Ellingburgh, the woman had apparently fallen to her death sometime during the night:

“We weren’t sure at that point if it was an accident… or if she had been pushed. I went to the top of the cliff and there I found a small purse, a half consumed soda, and a map of Southern California.”

Strangely, there was nothing else in her purse. But the map led Cullen to the last person who saw her alive:

“There was a phone number on the map. The phone number was that of a cab company. And the cab company was contacted and they indicated they had a fare, picked up from the area and dropped off at the area of the Dana Point cliffs at about three or four that morning.”

Clues were found at the top of the cliff

When Cullen interviewed the cab driver, he described a woman who fit the Dana Point “Jane Doe.” She had wanted to go to Laguna Beach, but didn’t have enough cash. According to Cullen, the cab driver agreed to take her as far as the money would go:

“The only thing the taxi driver said was that she had very little to say other than that. She was very quiet and he didn’t notice anything really unusual about her.”

The next morning, the young woman’s body was found at the base of the cliff. She was 5’8” tall and weighed 127 pounds. She had light brown hair, brown eyes, and was wearing what appeared to be second-hand clothing, including a pair of men’s underwear.

For Cullen Ellingburgh, the case of the unidentified Jane Doe has never left him:

Update: After remaining a mystery for 26 years, this case has finally been solved. The remains have been positively identified, thanks to DNA testing, as those of Holly Jo Glynn. Holly was 21 years old when she died. Her death was ruled a suicide.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season seven with Robert Stack and in season three with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Five are dead after exposure to anthrax.

Who was sending anthrax through the mail?

The letters were postmarked from Trenton, NJ

CASE DETAILS

On Tuesday, October 16, 2001, Norma Wallace reported for work at the postal office in Trenton, New Jersey. Norma wasn’t feeling well and thought it was a mild case of the flu. But as the day wore on, she became increasingly ill. She could barely breathe.

The letters were all sent by the same person

Some 200 miles away in Washington, DC, another postal worker, Leroy Richmond, was suffering nearly identical symptoms. He too became gravely ill. In a matter of days, both Norma and Leroy were hospitalized and their conditions grew worse by the hour. They seemed to be slowly suffocating to death–and doctors couldn’t figure out why. But after administering a battery of tests, they finally came up with a diagnosis—anthrax poisoning.

Like millions of other Americans, Leroy and Norma were aware that anthrax had killed a man in Florida just days earlier. Now they were suffering from the most deadly form of the disease. Suddenly, in the wake of September 11th, the nation faced a second wave of terrorism.

The perpetrator was identified

The anthrax terror plot came to light on October 5, 2001, in Boca Raton, Florida. 63-year-old Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the Sun newspaper, died after he was exposed to anthrax spores. Experts believed they came from a letter that was opened. But the letter had been thrown away—its origin unknown. Suddenly, Federal investigators were thrust into the world of bio-terrorism. According to Van A. Harp, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Washington field office, it proved to be no ordinary crime scene:

“We don’t have a crime scene in the traditional sense. We don’t have witnesses. And, we really don’t have anyone that we can call an informant at this point.”

The same week in Manhattan, NBC News and the New York Post received anthrax-tainted letters. But this time there was a clue—post marks on the envelopes from Trenton, New Jersey. A swarm of FBI agents checked every mailbox in town for traces of anthrax. They found none.

Then, on October 9th, 2001, in Washington DC, two more letters laced with anthrax were discovered. Once again they were postmarked Trenton, New Jersey. This time, politicians were the targets—Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy at their offices in DC. According to Dr. Meryl Nass, the letters contained a form of anthrax so pure and concentrated, it was termed “weapons grade”:

“This is dangerous, dangerous stuff. It was estimated that two trillion spores went into each of those envelopes, which would have been two grams. One envelope may have had a hundred million lethal doses.”

Under the right conditions, just two grams of anthrax could potentially wipe out one third of the U.S. population. Investigators came to a significant conclusion. Notes contained within the anthrax-laden envelopes had similar handwriting, leading authorities to believe they came from the same source. Did references to 9/11, “Death to Israel” and “Allah is Great” point to Arab terrorists? Or, to someone who wanted investigators to think Arab extremists were involved? Assistant Director Harp said the FBI was looking at three broad possibilities:

“The first being international terrorists. Domestic terrorism. We’re looking at some of the individuals within the United States. And then we’re looking at the lone wolf, as well.”

By October 20th, postal worker Norma Wallace was fighting for her life. Her temperature had soared above 100. She was in shock. The anthrax spores were releasing a lethal toxin, causing blood vessels to break and the bacteria to pulse through her bloodstream:

“I felt like I was dying. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Once the spores enter your lungs they actually attack the tissues and the lymph nodes and this causes the anthrax to actually take possession of your body.”

The prognosis for Leroy Richmond was also grim. Suffering excruciating pain, Leroy laid helpless as his lungs filled with fluids. Even worse was the fact that doctors knew their most powerful drugs were rarely effective in fighting this silent killer. Leroy recalled how he practically stared death in the eye:

“I think I was… as near to death then as I ever was going to get. My breathing had become so shallow that I was actually panting like a dog would breathe. And I heard a couple guys say, man he’s not going to last but a couple hours and that’ll be it for him.”

Miraculously, both Norma and Leroy survived their harrowing ordeals. However, four other anthrax victims were not as lucky–bringing the death toll to five: in Washington, DC, Leroy’s co-workers, Thomas Morris and Joseph Curseen and in New York City, hospital worker Kathy Nyugen. Three weeks later, Ottilie Lundgren in Derby, Connecticut.

Update:

On July 27th, 2008, a government scientist named Bruce Ivins was rushed to a Maryland hospital suffering from a massive overdose of prescription drugs. He died two days later. Shortly after, the FBI announced that Dr. Ivins had been the prime suspect in the anthrax terror of 2001.

One of the country’s leading anthrax researchers, Dr. Ivins helped investigate the attacks that killed five Americans and terrorized the nation. But Ivins eventually became a suspect himself, and according to the FBI, there is no doubt that he was the anthrax killer. The case is officially closed, though a motive for Dr. Ivins’ alleged crimes has not been established.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season twelve with Robert Stack and in season seven with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A bloodhound locates a child’s body, but her killer has never been identified.

Alie Berrelez

The bloodhound searched for Alie

CASE DETAILS

On May 18, 1993, police in Englewood, Colorado, searched door-to-door for five-year-old Alie Berrelez. Alie was last seen playing in the courtyard of the apartment complex where she lived. Her baby-sitter had gone inside for a few minutes. By the time she came back, Alie was gone.

Searchers discovered Alie’s remains

The search dragged on for four days without a single clue. Finally, the police turned to an age-old crime-fighting tool: bloodhounds. When it comes to tracking missing persons or criminals, a bloodhound named Yogi is one of the best.

Yogi and his handler, K9 officer Jerry Nichols, went to work. The dog took Alie’s scent from clothing she had recently worn, then started moving.

First Yogi went up the stairs, zeroing in on a single apartment. It was Alie’s home, and it was a good sign. Yogi was on the right track.

Richard Berrelez, Alie’s grandfather, had high hopes:

“I wanted to have hope that this bloodhound would be able to find our granddaughter. I was watching the dog work, and I felt there was a sort of comfort that I felt, because I felt, ‘Now they’re going to find her. Now they’re going to find her and they’re going to find her alive.’”

The bloodhound covered 40 city blocks

Yogi led Jerry out of the apartment complex and south down the street. A media crush followed close behind, recording every move. The dog paid no attention at all, which is typical of bloodhounds, according to Jerry:

“He didn’t care. He was oblivious to everything other than what he was doing because he’s happy doing that. A bloodhound is by instinct a tracker. By nature, it’s something they’re bred to do and they live to do. Their sense of smell is just incredible. The loose skin around the face acts as a place for the scent to be attracted to, the skin folds. The gels, the slobbering, the moisture that the dog is emitting, will actually help enhance that scent around his face. It’s putting the moisture in the air, and those long, dangling, floppy ears, it kind of stirs it up in front of him.”

A scent trail, whether animal or human, comes from thousands of dead skin cells that are constantly being shed. Jerry explains that unless those cells are swept away by severe weather, the scent could remain for up to a month:

“When a dog is introduced to a specific scent to track, he basically focuses on that scent and forgets and ignores the rest. His job is, ‘This is the scent I have to work. This is what I’m going to go with.’”

As the hound followed Alie’s scent, Jerry quickly recognized that his canine partner was working a familiar pattern:

“If a person is walking on foot, the scent’s a little bit stronger, and they’re going to stay by the sidewalk, but he is working wide between the street, in between the fronts of businesses. And he’s still picking it up on the fringes. Seeing him do that before, in my mind, he was working a car.”

Unbelievable as it seems, we leave scent trails even from moving cars. The skin cells shoot out through the car’s ventilation and exhaust system and are deposited on the side of the road. Jerry says it’s an easy pick up for the nose of a bloodhound:

“We’ve even done scenarios in training where we’ll put a person in a trunk that’s sealed up, and they still can pick it up. His world is his nose.”

Yogi was relentless. He tracked south for several miles, covering almost 40 city blocks. At the entrance to a freeway, he headed straight up the westbound ramp.

That was a turning point for Englewood Police Detective Rick Forbes:

“I was very skeptical that dog was doing anything other than going for a walk, but when he took that first ramp to I-470 and did so with so much confidence, then I started to wonder, you know, maybe the dog is really onto something here.”

The search party drove west to the next exit. Jerry wondered if the scent trail would lead the dog further down the freeway or off the exit ramp:

“And sure enough, he kept on working and he went past it. So then we’d load him up, go to the next exit. We did the same scene several times.”

To speed up the search, police skipped the fourth exit and moved on to the fifth. Yogi made it quite clear. They had overshot the mark. The scent was gone. They backtracked to the previous exit. The hound again picked up the scent. But this time, he led the search party off the freeway, toward a wooded area called Deer Creek Canyon.

By now, Yogi had been tracking Alie over city streets, parking lots, and freeways for more than seven hours. He had covered nearly 14 miles. Jerry noticed signs Yogi was tiring:

“He was slowing down a little bit. The tongue was really dragging, and he’s really slobbering, and I could tell he was getting hot. A hound has a drive. Unfortunately, they will run themselves to death. If they get tired, they don’t care. They don’t stop.”

Yogi’s strength was failing. Still, he wouldn’t abandon the search. Reluctantly, Jerry made the decision to give Yogi some rest:

“He basically kept looking at me as to, ‘Why are we stopping? I’m not ready to stop. I want to keep going. This is my track. I want to get there.’”

With Yogi sidelined, human volunteers picked up the search. It wasn’t long before they knew why Yogi had refused to quit. The body of Alie Berrelez was less than two miles from the point where the dog had been forced to stop.

Without Yogi’s persistence, Alie’s body would never have been discovered. But it was not the result Jerry Nichols had hoped for:

“I think, at first, that didn’t sink in, because I was pretty upset at the fact that Alie was found dead. And then over time I realized everything worked just right. These dogs have a purpose in law enforcement. We’re out here working for the communities and the citizens. And they really have done some amazing things for us.”

Investigators believe Alie’s killer may have lived in her apartment complex or visited someone who lived there.

UPDATE

Alie’s murder was solved, 18 years later. The killer was a neighbor, Nick Stofer. His DNA samples matched those found on Alie’s remains. Stofer died in 2001, and this case has been closed.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season nine with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

An up and coming Seattle musician is murdered.

Mia Zapata

Jesus Mezquia was arrested

CASE DETAILS

Since the 1990s, Seattle has been a hotspot for rock-n-roll music. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains all came out of the local music scene. Many people thought the next breakthrough band would be the Gits, a punk rock group fronted by a charismatic 27-year-old named Mia Zapata. Mat Dresdner, a former member of the Gits, was a personal friend of Mia’s:

“I went to many shows where afterwards people didn’t even know I was up on stage because their eyes were so transfixed on Mia.”

Did Mia take a cab that night?

But on July 7, 1993, Mia’s incredible voice was silenced. At around 2:00 AM, she left a friend’s apartment. An hour later, her body was found a couple of miles away. She was lying face up in an almost Christ-like pose. Mia Zapata had been raped, beaten, and then strangled to death. Her death sent shock waves through the tight-knit music community in Seattle. Why had this promising and popular young singer been killed? Was it an obsessed fan, a jealous enemy, or a complete stranger?

You might say Mia was born to be a star. She grew up in Kentucky, the daughter of two television executives. It was at Antioch College where she met the other three members of her band. After five years of performing together, the Gits were attracting the attention of major record companies and planning their first full-scale U.S. tour. According to Richard Zapata, it was like a dream come true for his daughter:

“I don’t think I can ever remember my daughter looking so satisfied, so content, so at ease with herself.”

The night of July 6, 1993, began at one of Mia’s favorite bars. She met friends there at around 10:00 PM. Mia was in town only briefly. She and the Gits had been on the road for three weeks and the tour was starting in a matter of days. When Mia left the Comet Tavern, she walked a block east, up Pike Street to a local rehearsal studio. She then visited a friend who lived in the same building as the studio. At around 2:00 AM, Mia left her friend’s apartment, saying she planned to take a cab home. Because Mia didn’t have a driver’s license, she took taxis often and knew many of the local cabbies. This led police and private investigator Leigh Hearon to one of their first scenarios—perhaps Mia was murdered by a cabdriver:

“Mia did not have difficulty expressing her opinion and sometimes this got her into trouble… She could’ve said something to a cabdriver that she knew that just made that person angry that night.”

However, none of the cab drivers reported picking up Mia that night. About the same time, the bars were closing, and some of her friends were hailing cabs of their own. No one saw Mia. Private Investigator Leigh Hearon had a second theory:

“She also could’ve gone in the opposite direction. A friend had asked her to spend the night. She lived about five blocks away. She could’ve gone down eleventh, past the reservoir, and something could’ve occurred there.”

In fact, something did occur. But according to Hearon, whether it had anything to do with Mia’s death remains a mystery:

“One of the earliest clues that the police received was from a man who had heard a scream—a terrifying scream that night. He was so distraught by it that he actually rushed to see what was going on, but he saw nothing. He lived, however, very close to the reservoir on eleventh where Mia could’ve gone.”

A third and final theory was that Mia never left the building where she was last seen. The day after her murder, one of Mia’s friends stopped by the rehearsal studio and discovered a Gits demo tape and Mia’s personal microphone. According to Hearon, Mia rarely let her microphone out of sight:

“We don’t know whether she left it there after practice that night or whether she went back to the studio after visiting her friend. Something happened there, and this was simply left.”

Mia’s body was found about two miles from the studio and about three miles from the street where the man heard the screams. Despite a thorough search of the area, Detective Tom Pike of the Seattle Police Homicide Unit noted that little forensic evidence was found:

“This particular investigation has been difficult because we’re faced with a situation where we don’t know where the actual crime scene was where the murder took place. We obviously only know where we found Mia, which we don’t believe is the same.”

Without a crime scene or witnesses, leads quickly faded. As the police investigation stalled, the remaining Gits decided to take action. They hired private investigator Leigh Hearon and staged benefit concerts to raise money for the investigation. The response was overwhelming. Seattle’s leading musicians got involved, including Nirvana and rocker Joan Jett:

“I want more than anything for them to be able to find out what happened so there could be some resolution for everybody, because everyone’s been working real hard trying to find this person who did this.”

Who killed Mia Zapata and why? The police believe it was a random murder. But investigator Leigh Hearon believes otherwise. She is convinced that Mia knew her killer and that the killer may not have acted alone:

“I think it’s entirely likely that a second person was involved in transporting Mia’s body, if not in the actual homicide. I base this on the fact that Mia’s body was found with her arms out and her legs crossed, as if two people had been carrying her and laid her down.”

Update:

Ten years after Mia Zapata was killed, Seattle police tested DNA from the case against a national database. They found a match. Jesus Mezquia, a felon living in Miami, Florida, was arrested and charged with murder. Mezquia did not know Mia Zapata but lived just three blocks from where her body was found. Mezquia was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 36 years in prison.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eight with Robert Stack and in season three with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

An arsonist is finally identified and captured.

The arsonist taped the fire

The videotape was found by the road

CASE DETAILS

On August 15, 1989, an overheated car pulled to the side of a road in Stockton, California. The owner was a man we’ll call Joseph Villa. Joseph inspected the damage while his wife and son looked on. He decided that he and his son should walk to the nearest phone. On the way, they noticed a camouflage jacket on the ground. Inside a pocket was an unlabeled videotape.

They looked for clues to his identity

Joseph and his son decided to take the video home and watch it. The video was of a house on fire. The family immediately turned it over to police, who were convinced that the person holding the camera had also set the fire. Captain Frank Curry of the California Department of Forestry assumed the disturbing voice heard on the tape belonged to the arsonist:

“I’ve never run across anything as eerie as this tape. It frightened me. As a matter of fact, I thought about it that night when I went to bed.”

Captain Curry and investigators studied the videotape in order to pinpoint the location of the fire:

“When we listened to the tape, it was hard to understand certain words that this person was saying. So we sat down and we actually went through this tape, I mean hundreds of times and came up with a script. He says, I told you I’d do it Omar. Is Omar the property owner? It’s a revenge type burn. Is Omar the construction person that maybe hired this person and fired him and made that a revenge motive for the fire? We really didn’t know who Omar is.”

Was the arsonist a Satan worshiper?

A county arson investigator accompanied Joseph Villa’s brother to the spot where the tape had been discovered. Amazingly, the jacket was still there. In it they found a wooden pestle, the kind used to grind herbs for satanic rituals. Nearby, they also found a glove that matched the jacket and a ceramic skull. According to Captain Curry, the skull suggested Satanism, as did the words of the arsonist:

“Those are basically the clues, all we have on the video and that’s why we need to find out where this went down. Where is this home? As we viewed the tape, we realized that there was fire suppression equipment that had responded to the incident. And we thought if we can enhance the tape, bring those shots in a little bit closer to us, we may be able to get a door mark or a house number or maybe even a fire department insignia on the door.”

The tapes matched

Despite a frame-by-frame analysis, the photographic enhancements did not reveal any new details. Investigators were still unable to match the tape with any reported fires in the state of California. The tape was found by the Villa family just a few yards from Interstate 205, near Stockton. Interstate 205 feeds into several major highways. According to Dough Allen, a law enforcement coordinator for the California Department of Forestry, the fire could have happened anywhere in the U.S.:

“I think the person who made this videotape and is responsible for the fire will, without a doubt in my mind, continue to set fires. And the person needs to be apprehended and stopped before his fires become more destructive. And there’s a few of these type of serial arsonists that will move into another criminal area.”

The house appeared to be a one-story ranch with two chimneys. There is another house on the left side of the picture, partly hidden by a white trailer. The trailer indicated that the burning house was possibly under construction.

Update:

Within minutes of our broadcast, several viewers called and identified the house seen burning on the videotape. It was located in Redwood City, California, 80 miles west of Stockton. The house that was destroyed was under construction at the time. Today it has been rebuilt. Surprisingly, on the night of the blaze, Woodside Fire Captain John Dellinges also videotaped the fire:

“While I was setting up the command post, directing companies to extinguish the fire, I had set up my video camera to film the fire for training and investigation purposes.”

By comparing Captain Dellinges’ tape with the video shot by the arsonist, investigators were able to confirm that this was definitely the fire’s location. According to Detective Mark Pollo of the Redwood City Police, authorities had two suspects:

“Some of the calls received led us to a 17-year-old Woodside youth. We interviewed that youth. Through that interview, it led us to a 19-year-old Redwood City youth who was arrested and interviewed and subsequently admitted to burning the house, taking the video and was the one who talked on the videotape.”

Both suspects were underage when they set the fire and were tried as minors. One served time at juvenile hall. The other was committed to a state mental hospital.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season three with Robert Stack and in season four with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Bones found in a backyard may be the former residents missing for years.

John and Linda Sohus

Human bones were found in the backyard

CASE DETAILS

In May 1994, while digging a swimming pool in San Marino, California, a workman made a grim discovery. Three plastic bags and a fiberglass box full of dismembered sections of a human skeleton. According to Det. Ronnie Lancaster of the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department, the bones may belong to two former residents:

“We didn’t really know who this person was and we were later told by uniformed officers from San Marino that in 1985, the people that lived in that house had reported two people missing.”

John and Linda disappeared suddenly

The two missing persons were John Sohus and his wife, Linda, who had once lived in the house with John’s mother. Their sudden disappearance 10 years earlier had mystified everyone who knew them. Now it appeared that either John or Linda or both may have been killed and buried in their own backyard.

According to their friends, John and Linda felt trapped living with John’s mother and looked forward to escaping to a place of their own. John held several part time computer programming jobs. Sue Bermudez Coffman, a friend of Linda’s, said Linda was beginning to find success as an artist:

“Linda was happy with her life. And John approved of everything she had to do and say. And I thought that was great for her because she’d never had a supportive man in her life.”

Now in their late 20’s, it appeared the young couple had finally gotten the break they’d been hoping for. According to Sue, Linda and John had been asked to interview for important new jobs:

“Linda called me and informed me that John had a job with the government and she couldn’t release any information to me. All she could tell me was that he’s got a job with the government and they want us both. And we have to go to New York.”

Linda told Sue that the trip was scheduled to last two weeks. But Linda and John never returned, and the mystery only deepened in the later months.

Linda paid to board her cats for two weeks

Prior to the trip, Linda had boarded her six cats at a local kennel and paid in advance for the two-week stay. But at the end of eight weeks, she still had not claimed her pets. The kennel owner tracked down Linda’s sister, Kathy, who said it was uncharacteristic of her sister to do such a thing:

“I immediately thought that something was wrong. If they were not going to return, they would’ve taken their pets with them. I feel very strongly that Linda would not have left her animals behind.”

Kathy telephoned John’s mother, DiDi Sohus, hoping she had an explanation. In several phone calls, DiDi kept insisting to Kathy that John and Linda were on some sort of a secret mission:

“It did appear to me as though she had been drinking. Sometimes it depended on what time of the day you called as to how wild the story became.”

Postcard supposedly from John & Linda

Linda’s family filed a missing person report and San Marino Police started an investigation. Their first stop: Didi Sohus’ home.

DiDi told the police the same story: that John and Linda were on a secret mission and that she got this information from someone she called “her source.” Didi refused to identify the person. With no evidence of foul play, the police were powerless to investigate further.

Finally, a full three months after the Sohus’ had left for New York, Linda’s friend, Sue, received a picture postcard from France that she said aroused her suspicious:

“I have no clue as to how going to New York could ever wind up being France. And I read the back of it. I was like, I can’t wait, she’s finally going to tell me where she is, what’s going on. And all it said was ‘Dear Sue, Kinda missed New York, oops. But this can be lived with. John and Linda.’ Nothing about ‘I’ll call you later, can’t talk now.’ Nothing. It just didn’t sound like her.”

Then another card was sent from France to Linda’s family. According to Kathy Jacoby:

“My mother received a postcard from Linda. It did not say when she would return or how she had come to be in Paris. If they were planning a trip to Europe, she would have been very excited about going and would certainly have expressed that.”

Three months after refusing to help the police, Didi Sohus had a change of heart. She, too, filed a missing persons report on John and Linda. Didi finally revealed that her “source” was actually the tenant in her guest house, a man who called himself Christopher Chichester. He’d lived there for the past two years, but suddenly moved out, leaving no forwarding address.

A luminol test found blood in the guest house

Didi also reported that her son’s pick-up truck was now missing, though she had no idea when it disappeared. There still was no proof however, that a crime had been committed, and therefore the investigation stalled again.

Soon after filing her missing persons report, DiDi Sohus sold her house and moved to a trailer park. She died two years later, the fate of her son, still a mystery.

The case sprang to life again nine months after Didi died. The Sohus’ truck turned up 3,000 miles away in Greenwich, Connecticut. A man calling himself Christopher Crowe had tried to sell the pick-up to the son of a local minister without the title papers. Rather than buy the truck, the minister’s son reported it to the police. Sgt. Daniel Allen of Greenwich, Connecticut, Police Department did some digging:

“The reverend’s son decided not to purchase the vehicle based on the fact that there was an outstanding lien on the truck. My continued investigation in attempting to locate Mr. Chichester ultimately ended in me discovering that Mr.Chichester and Mr. Crowe were the same individuals.”

Christian Gerhartstreiter

Be it Crowe or Chichester, the ex-tenant seemed to be the one person who might be able to shed light on the Sohus’ disappearance. But he had vanished again. The investigation had stalled, until the dismembered skeleton was discovered five years later. At that time, a forensic anthropologist examined the remains and determined that they fit the physical descriptions of John Sohus. A lack of dental records however, prevented conclusive identification.

Det. Ronnie Lancaster said he was mystified about how the bones might have been buried in the Sohus’ backyard:

“Nothing about the bones themselves said there was murder. There were no bullet holes. But the fact that the bones were buried in three separate plastic bags and the head in a separate bag, makes one think that there was murder involved.”

Detectives hoped to learn more using a chemical called luminol, which emits a distinctive glow when it comes in contact with blood. Luminol was applied to the cement floors in the guesthouse on the former Sohus property. Within moments it would become apparent if there was evidence of murder. There was. The telltale glow was unmistakable. Det. Robert Carr, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department administered the test:

“Although luminal can detect chemicals in other compounds, this was not just a trace element situation. There was a copious amount of something put on that floor. And in our opinion, that was blood.”

But whose blood? Was John Sohus murdered in the guesthouse, then buried in the backyard? If so, what happened to Linda? Officially, both John and Linda Sohus are still missing.

Update:

More than 20 years after John and Linda Sohus disappeared, a man calling himself Clark Rockefeller was identified as a “person of interest” in the investigation. Rockefeller was arrested in a parental abduction case. Fingerprints proved that he was, in fact, Christian Gerhartstreiter — alias Christopher Chichester — the man who’d lived in the guesthouse next to John and Linda Sohus. After further investigation, the Los Angeles County District Attorney recently filed charges against Christian Gerhartstreiter for the murder of John Sohus. Gerhartstreiter has denied any involvement in the case of John and Linda Sohus. However, he was convicted of the murder of John Sohus and sentenced to 27 years to life. No trace of Linda Sohus has ever been found.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season seven with Robert Stack and in season two with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A suburban drug dealer is accused of kidnap and murder.

Jesse James Hollywood

Nick was abducted by young men in a white van

CASE DETAILS

Just north of Los Angeles, in West Hills, California, Nick Markowitz celebrated his bar mitzvah with dozens of friends and loved ones. It would be the last joyous occasion before tragedy ripped the Markowitz family apart. It all started with Nick’s half brother, Ben, who was seven years older. For most of his life, Ben had been in trouble. And soon young Nick would be a victim of Ben’s world of deceit and betrayal.

Jesse ordered them to kill Nick

Ben owed $1,200 to a man named Jesse James Hollywood, who was given his notorious name at birth. Jesse grew up in a loving middle class home and was given every chance to succeed in life. But somewhere along the way, Jesse went off track and turned to a life of crime. According to Commander Bruce Correll of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department, by age 19, Jesse had amassed enough drug profits to buy his own house:

“Jesse James Hollywood was driving expensive cars. He was partying with his friends on nearly a daily basis. And he was living a rather lavish lifestyle for a young man without any legitimate means of employment.”

Nick’s body was in a forest

On August 6, 2000, Jesse allegedly decided to find Ben and collect what was owed to him. According to reports, Jesse and his friends cruised the West Hills area of Los Angeles looking for Ben. They could not find him, but they did locate his younger brother, Nick. According to Commander Correll, Nick Markowitz just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time:

“Witnesses say that they saw a van pull over, and, there was a physical confrontation, and young Nick was forced into the van… On that day… his only problem was that he had an older brother who had provoked the wrath of Jesse James Hollywood.”

After repeated unanswered phone calls to her son, Nick’s mother, Susan Markowitz, knew something was wrong:

“I was making Nick breakfast and went upstairs to get him, and he was not there. I paged him, and he did not return my page. I guess I must have paged him 100 times. I knew something was wrong.”

Police believe that Nick could not return his mother’s call because he’d been kidnapped and taken to a home in Santa Barbara. There he would remain a hostage until his brother Ben paid his debt to Jesse James Hollywood. Ben, however, was in no rush to pay up:

“He’s a real little guy. Very obnoxious. Just the type of guy you’d want to take his stuff. I didn’t fear him. He was… just a little man. I was, like, $1,200? Yeah, sure, I’ll get you later, buddy.”

Jesse was finally captured in Brazil

On the following day, witnesses reported seeing Nick at the Santa Barbara home. Jesse was not at the house. Nick was no longer bound nor gagged. According to Commander Correll, Nick’s captors seemed to treat him like a guest:

“Nick was free to move around the residence. Young people did come and go from the residence, although they were told that he had been in essence kidnapped…he was not acting as they might expect someone that had been kidnapped… I personally feel that Nick had the expectation that at some point in time he would be freed.”

In the ensuing days, there was no reported effort by Jesse James Hollywood to exchange Nick for the money Ben Markowitz owed him. According to witnesses, Jesse realized the situation was quickly spiraling out of control. He telephoned his lawyer for advice. Commander Correll believed that Jesse came to a disturbing realization—if Nick was released and told authorities about the spontaneous kidnapping, Jesse could spend the rest of his life behind bars:

“We believe that as a result of that conversation, Jesse came to the conclusion that he would be in a better situation to kill Nick, as opposed to trying to return him.”

Hollywood awaits trial for murder

Authorities theorize that Jesse then contacted 21-year-old Ryan Hoyt, an acquaintance who also owed him money for drugs. Jesse allegedly offered Ryan a way to pay off his debt. On August 8th, police believe that Ryan Hoyt and two friends led Nick Markowitz to Lizard’s Mouth, a remote area in the Los Padres National Forest, and killed him. Four days later, the body of Nick Markowtiz was discovered.

Within days, police arrested Ryan Hoyt and three accomplices for the crime. Police had been tipped off by a teenager who had seen Nick and his captors at the home in Santa Barbara. However, Jesse James Hollywood was nowhere to be found. Police believe publicity about the murder caused Hollywood to flee. At their trial, each of the four suspects claimed they acted out of fear of Jesse James Hollywood. However, that did not stop the jury from convicting each of them with crimes ranging from aggravated kidnapping to murder.

Update:

Jesse James Hollywood has been captured. Five years after he fled the area, FBI agents tracked him down to a small coastal village near Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. He and his pregnant girlfriend were sitting at an outdoor café when Brazilian police swooped in and grabbed him. Hollywood was turned over to U.S. authorities and flown back to California. He went on trial for murder and was found guilty. Jesse James Hollywood was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eleven with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A teenager is found murdered by his girlfriend, and the prime suspect is the rival for her affections.

Mahfuz Huq

Suspect: Gender: Male DOB: 7/8/66 Height: 5’10” Weight: 160 lbs. approx. Eyes: Brown Hair: Black

CASE DETAILS

Early in the morning of August 9, 1989, Christie Mutzfeld arrived at the home of her boyfriend, only to flee in terror moments later:

“I saw him laying on the floor, and I screamed his name, and I could see just by looking at him that something was very wrong, wasn’t right.”

Christie’s boyfriend, Todd Kelley, was dead. He had been stabbed seven times in the chest, back, and wrist. Christie was in shock. Just hours earlier, the two lovers had been here together.

Todd was found stabbed to death

When Hamilton, Indiana, investigators questioned Christie, they learned that she was at the center of a love triangle. She had been involved with both Todd and another man. Christy’s other lover was now the prime suspect in Todd’s murder.

Christie had met Todd during their junior year in high school. According to Christie, it was love at first sight, especially for Todd:

“After graduation, he asked me to marry him, and I guess I said no. I really wasn’t ready. I thought there were other things I really wanted to do right, and that’s pretty much where we broke it off, right there.”

The next fall, Christie enrolled in a small college just seven miles from Hamilton. She said she soon began dating a student named Mahfuz Huq:

“He was very outgoing, very energetic. He was interested in what I had to say, and he was interested in what I thought and what I believed in.”

A blood stain was found in the bedroom

But Mahfuz was not what he seemed to be. Shortly after he met Christie, he was arrested for three separate robberies. In one of them, he stole $100,000 worth of jewelry from his own aunt. Christie said his personality changed after the incident:

“After he was arrested and put under house arrest, he became very possessive. He said that if he ever saw me with anybody else that he would probably kill them and then kill me.”

A few months later, Christie rekindled her romance with Todd. But Mahfuz, who lived nearby, didn’t back off.   The day before the murder, Todd was at the home of a friend, Mike Kuhn, when Mahfuz showed up unexpectedly:

“Mahfuz asked Todd if he was going to quit seeing her. And Todd told him no. Their voices were never raised or anything like that. They shook hands, I mean. And, really, it just seemed like it was pretty much all over and done with, you know?”

Christie Mutzfeld and Todd Kelly

Thirty-six hours later, Todd was dead, and his house was swarming with police.   Authorities determined that he was murdered at around 3:15 a.m. Investigators immediately noticed that the crime scene had been tampered with.

According to Steuben County, Indiana, Sheriff L.M. McClelland, Todd’s body had been cleaned up, and then moved into the living room from another part of the house:

“Upon further checking of the house, we noticed there were no sheets on the bed in the bedroom. We also discovered a spot where there was blood on the floor in the bedroom. It was very hard to find this at first because it had been wiped clean.”

Mahfuz had previously been arrested for robbery

In the yard, police found several cigarette butts that matched the brand smoked by Mahfuz. He became their prime suspect, but he was no where to be found. Two eyewitnesses told police they had seen Mahfuz between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. on the night of the murder. He had been walking barefoot in the direction of Todd’s house. Christie said that at that very same moment, she and Todd were together inside:

“When we were in bed, I heard noises outside. I really thought that something was outside. And Todd said it was probably just a dog, ’cause he had a dog tied up out back. He said it was nothing to worry about. It was getting kind of late, and I told him I had to go home, ’cause I hadn’t really been home in quite a while, and I knew my father would be upset, so we left. He said he was going to stay up all night and he wanted to get something to drink.”

Christie says that at 2:30 a.m., she and Todd drove into town. She believes Mahfuz entered the house while they were gone:

“We drove back to his house and said goodbye in the car, and he gave me a kiss.”

Mahfuz Huq

Christie says she dropped Todd back at his house right around 3 a.m. The coroner determined that he was murdered just 15 minutes later. At 4:30 a.m., Mahfuz called Christie from his parents’ house, 10 miles away. Two hours later, he showed up in her bedroom. According to Christie, she broke off their relationship for good, not knowing what he had done:

“It kind of scared me, the tone of voice he had. I said, ‘Excuse me?’ He said, ‘I hope you have a happy life,’ and then he walked out.

At first glance, it seemed like an open and shut case. Mahfuz Huq had murdered Todd Kelley in a fit of jealous rage, and fled. But Todd Kelley’s family noticed some inconsistencies in Christie’s story.   Vernon Kelley, Todd’s father, thinks she knows more than she’s saying:

“According to all the evidence that we have dug up and the evidence the police have, there is no way that she was not there. She had to be there during the murder. When Todd and Christie returned home, they probably started making love, and Mahfuz waited in the bushes. When he saw what was happening, that’s when his jealousy took over and he could no longer control himself and decided to finish the act. When Christie said she heard the noise, it was Mahfuz coming in the door. I do believe at that point, Mahfuz convinced her to help him cover up the murder.”

Christie has said that the accusation is just not true:

“I don’t know why they want to blame me. I mean, I know Todd and I had our hardships and I hurt him and he hurt me.”

The idea that Christie was involved hasn’t been given much credence by Sheriff McClelland:

“The possibility of an accomplice is pure speculation at this point in time. There’s no hard evidence.”

Todd’s father thinks Mahfuz had to have help:

“It amazes me how a man could, alone, clean up that entire room, clean up the entire mess he had made, move the body, entirely clean the body, and also walk all the way back home in the amount of time that they had reported receiving another phone call. He had to have some help.”

The Kelley family believes that Christie gave Mahfuz a ride home. They also question her statement about what happened when she returned to Todd’s house at seven that morning. Sheriff McClelland said that Christy claims she did not immediately notice Todd’s body when she returned, even though it was lying right by the front door:

“We’re not accusing Christie. The only problem is that we feel there’s some inconsistencies in the things that she has told us. We’ve asked Christie for a polygraph examination, and she has refused to do that.”

Christie maintains that she’s been maligned:

“Todd’s family, they’ve been very hard on me from the beginning. They harass me, they accuse me, unjustly accuse me of everything. They wouldn’t even let me go to his funeral. I realize they’re hurting, and I don’t think that they realize that I’m hurting, too.”

Update:

Mahfuz Huq was finally arrested in India and was extradited to the United States. Huq pleaded guilty to the murder of Todd Kelley, and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season five with Robert Stack and in season three with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Twelve bank robberies are linked to a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde.

Nova Guthrie & Craig Pritchert

They went on a bank robbery spree

CASE DETAILS

It was a typical day at the Klamath First Federal Bank in Bend, Oregon. The bank was about to close and bank teller Rhonda Dent looked forward to a serene evening at home with her husband and four children. Then suddenly, a gunman entered the bank:

“He took control, and he scared us. He intimidated us. There was no thought in anybody’s mind of trying to set an alarm off. So he made us all go into the vault, and then he had me fill the bags. After I was done, he told me to go over and get on my knees. And he tied me up. I was scared. I was terrified at that point because I thought, ‘He’s going to shoot us all.’”

Pritchert often wore a disguise

Four years… twelve banks… over half a million dollars. That was the track record of two outlaw lovers named Craig Pritchert and Nova Guthrie. No wonder some saw them as a modern day Bonnie and Clyde.

Craig Pritchert once seemed destined for athletic stardom. But when his baseball career fizzled, Pritchert headed for the bright lights of Las Vegas. There, he found a new passion—robbing banks. No one knows exactly how many robberies Pritchert committed before his luck ran out. After a bank teller identified him in a lineup, he was sentenced to five years in an Arizona penitentiary. But according to Special Agent Edward Hall of the Phoenix FBI, rather than learn from his mistakes, Pritchert spent his time behind bars correcting them:

“Five years is a long time to spend in prison, and he met other people that had robbed banks. And from past experience of cases I’ve worked, they exchange thoughts, ideas, a way to perfect robbing a bank.”

Pritchert carried a police scanner

In New Mexico, shortly after his release, Craig met 24-year-old Nova Guthrie. According to Special Agent Jana Monroe of the Denver FBI, Pritchert provided the rebellion and excitement Guthrie desired:

“Nova Guthrie comes from a very small town, and she was raised in a very strict, conservative, very spiritual family setting… After meeting, they went on a bank robbery spree, and that included the states of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Washington, Oregon, across the south and northwest. Pritchert would enter the bank wearing a disguise. He was always armed with an assault weapon. He had a police scanner so he could monitor any of the police in the area.”

Nova always stayed outside the bank, alerting Craig to any dangers via radio. After each robbery, they drove to a pre-determined location, abandoned their car and fled in a second vehicle. According to Special Agent Monroe, the two led lavish lifestyles with the stolen money:

“They liked to frequent nice places—the ski resorts, ocean resort areas. They look like a very nice, normal couple. There is nothing that’s going to stand out that is going to make them different from others.”

She went back to a life of crime

Two years into their crime spree, Craig and Nova risked capture by visiting Nova’s family in Phoenix. At the time, however, Nova was unaware that only Craig was a wanted fugitive. The FBI had no evidence linking her to the robberies. But Nova’s family knew the truth and resented Craig for enticing her into a life of crime. According to Special Agent Hall, Nova’s brother confronted Craig:

“He didn’t like what he had done and what he had gotten Nova involved with. And he didn’t want him to be any part of Nova’s life.”

Without Craig, Nova was uncertain what to do next. Confused and remorseful, she heeded her sister’s advice to meet confidentially with Police Chaplain William Fey of the Colorado State Police:

“I think deep in her heart she wanted to be forgiven, but didn’t know how to go about it. At that point, I took my bible and I began to share scripture with her. I said, ‘What do you think it is now that God would have you do?’ Nova said, ‘Turn myself in.’ I said, ‘Let’s go.’”

Guthrie & Pritchert were finally captured

The FBI hoped that with Nova’s help they could bring Craig to justice. But after her surprising choice to cooperate, she made an equally astonishing turnabout. Nova Guthrie disappeared and returned to a life of crime with Craig Pritchert.

Update:

In August of 2003, Nova Guthrie and Craig Pritchert were captured in Cape Town, South Africa. Guthrie managed a nightclub, and Pritchert bought and sold stocks over the internet. A South African tourist traveling in the United States recognized Guthrie from a wanted poster and contacted authorities. After being extradited to the United States, Craig Pritchert was sentenced to 22-1/2 years in prison. Nova Guthrie received a 10 year sentence and was ordered to pay restitution.

She served her time and has been released.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season twelve with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Who is the infamous Green River Killer?

Victims of the Green River Killer

The bodies were dumped in remote locations

CASE DETAILS

It was one of the largest serial murder cases in U.S. history. Two years, 48 victims, and all young women. Most of them were prostitutes who operated along the Sea-Tac Strip near the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Nearly all of them were strangled and dumped in a remote area. Thousands of leads were investigated. Hundreds of suspects interrogated. One suspect stood out—William J. Stevens. Bill Stevens was a petty thief, in and out of trouble with the law for most of his life. In 1981, he simply walked away from a minimum-security facility where he was serving time for burglary.

Was William Stevens the killer?

Over the next eight years, Stevens avoided arrest, dividing his time in the cities of Seattle, Spokane, and Portland. According to Roderick Thorp, an author who has written extensively on the Green River murders, Stevens was an alienated individual who never held a job:

“He fit all the FBI profiles of serial killers. His poor relationships with women, a mother who throttled his personality in development. He was raging to his friends about how the prostitutes of the Sea-Tac Strip were spreading the AIDS epidemic.”

Bob Stevens, Bill’s adopted brother, claimed his brother told several people how he wanted to murder women:

“He wanted to torture them. He wanted to cut them up, dissect them. He wanted to fill them with rocks. He wanted to fill them with concrete. And he… still put all of this on tape. He thought that would be neat.”

Evidence was found in Stevens’ home

Acting on several tips, police searched the house in Spokane where Stevens lived with his parents. They uncovered a cache of guns and police badges. They also found dozens of Polaroids of nude women, most of them prostitutes. In another room, police discovered dozens of pornographic tapes and fraudulent credit card receipts from 1981 to 1989, the years of the Green River killings. Investigators later searched a second house in Portland, where Stevens had lived until 1985. According to Roderick Thorp, the basement held a secret room which could only be accessed by using a garage door opener:

“The secret room first came to the attention of a neighbor, who lived outside Portland at the same time Stevens did. He invited her in to see this room, and, in the room, as I remember it, there was a bed, and on the bed was a mannequin. A store dummy, that was dressed in women’s underwear, and was struck in an obscene pose.

In January of 1989, Bill Stevens was arrested and charged with felony escape and a series of weapons violations. That summer, Stevens was also publicly named as a prime suspect in the Green River killings. But within months, authorities had cleared Stevens, based on an alibi provided by his younger brother, Bob:

“I visited him in the King County Jail before he was transferred back to Spokane. And he mentioned that he couldn’t have done the killings because he was on a trip in Connecticut, visiting me in 1982, when the killings first happened.”

Vacation receipts for alibi

After the 1982 visit, Bill Stevens then joined his parents on a cross-country trip. Bob produced receipts which seemed to prove that his brother was still traveling with their parents when the first five victims were murdered. However, Bob now believes that his brother got away with murder—at least 48 times. It was a surprising twist for Bob, the very person who provided his brother with an alibi:

“I really believe my brother is the Green River Killer. The police had the killer behind bars in 1989, and I helped get a killer away free.”

Bob Stevens now questions whether his brother was, in fact, with their parents when the first five murders were committed:

“My dad had told me that my brother didn’t always leave with them, he would always just… join them somewhere. Just appear on their trip. And then leave again. That was his way of providing a paper trail. He used my parents as his alibi.”

A suspect pleaded guilty to the killings

However, authorities did not re-interview William Stevens for the Green River murders. Roderick Thorp believed this was the case because Stevens was a police informant:

“The police are involved in misdirection here, because they don’t want the public looking too closely at the various roles Stevens played in his life. Police are only as good as the information they get from people who live as Stevens did, on the edge of society. A guy like Stevens is constantly giving them information about more serious criminals, but at the same time he was indulging in his own little sport there, which was the murder of young girls.”

Bill Stevens died of cancer in 1991, but critics of the investigation still insist that he could have been the serial killer. Roderick Thorp even proposed a theory that suggested others may have been involved:

“It seems very clear that Stevens did not work alone. Stevens’ phone bills were in the possession of the police and one of the detectives told me that they were puzzled about hours and hours of long-distance calls to a certain number. What were they talking about? There have been killings since that are Green River type killing, suggesting that the person who was Stevens’ accomplice has continued.”

Update:

Gary Ridgway, an early suspect in the Green River killings, has been arrested. A lab matched his DNA to evidence found with a number of the victims. Ridgway eventually pled guilty to murdering 48 women. In exchange for the plea, he was given life without the possibility of parole. Despite the evidence, Bob Stevens still insists his brother, Bill, was somehow involved with the Green River killings.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eight with Robert Stack and in season two with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

An 18-year-old former babysitter goes on a murderous rampage.

Margo Freshwater

Margo escaped from prison

CASE DETAILS

The year was 1970. Margo Freshwater, a wide-eyed teenager from Columbus, Ohio, found herself in an unlikely place—the Tennessee State Prison for Women. The one time babysitter had just been convicted of first-degree murder. But Margo would not remain incarcerated for long. On October 4th, Margo and another inmate made an audacious escape. According to Investigator Tommy Lewis of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Margo and her accomplice made a run for the fence while being escorted by a single unarmed guard:

“The guard had to make a decision whether to stay with the main group or chase after them. All the guard could do was try to summon some help and have somebody go after them.”

The robbery spree ended in murder

But the help arrived too late and Freshwater vanished. Margo Freshwater has been a wanted fugitive for more than 30 years. Police believed she had established a new identity and a new life. Those around her were probably unaware that she was a convicted killer.

Margo Freshwater was just 18-years-old when she walked into the office of 41-year-old Glenn Nash. He was a hard-drinking lawyer whose grip on reality was beginning to slip. Nash was being investigated by the Memphis Bar Association for misconduct. According to Investigator Lewis, he had come to the deluded conclusion that agents from the bar were conspiring against him:

“Glenn Nash was an intelligent person, but somewhere along the line his drinking and mental situation apparently deteriorated and he just took a left hand turn.”

Glenn Nash was declared insane

Margo had come seeking Nash’s help in getting her boyfriend out of jail. Margo had no money to pay Nash and couldn’t even afford a place to stay while in town. Although broke himself, Nash agreed to take the case pro bono. He also put Margo up at a local boarding house where they began an intense affair. But Nash was increasingly consumed by paranoid delusions that agents from the Memphis bar were after him. One evening, he told Margo’s landlady they were going bowling. Instead they went on a three-state crime spree. Nash held up a liquor store as Margo watched. He ordered Margo to stay up front while he took the cashier to the back room. When a customer came into the store, Margo waited on him. Meanwhile, Nash remained out of sight, accusing the cashier of being an agent of the Memphis bar. The cashier, Hillman Robbins, was tied up with rope and shot five times in the head. According to Investigator Lewis, a .22 and .38 were both used in the murder:

“I seriously doubt Margo knew that any of this was coming until it got started.”

Witnesses saw two people matching Margo and Nash’s description flee the liquor store and hop into a white Ford Fairlane. Twelve days later, eyewitnesses described an almost identical scene at a Florida convenience store. A couple exited the building and sped off. Inside the store was the body of Esther Boyea. She had been shot in the neck.

She was found after 30 years

Police at first did not connect the two murders until they found Nash’s car abandoned on a highway shoulder. In the trunk they found a rope and bullet shells that matched those used in the Hillman Robbins’ murder. The car was traced to Glenn Nash and an APB was issued. But the couple’s rampage was not over. A cab driver, C.C. Surrett was shot to death shortly after picking up Glenn and Margo. The police staked out the nearby bus stations. According to Investigator Lewis, their efforts soon paid off:

“And when they arrested them they were transported to Hernando, Mississippi, to the Desoto County Jail where they were charged in connection with C.C. Surrett’s murder.”

Glenn Nash and Margo Freshwater were charged with the murder of C.C. Surrett. Nash was declared insane, ruled incompetent to stand trial, and incarcerated at a mental hospital. Margo stood trial for the murder. She testified that she was held prisoner by Nash, and forced to participate in the crimes under threat of death. Twice the jury failed to reach a verdict. Three years later, Margo was tried for the murder of the first victim, Hillman Robbins. She was found guilty and sentenced to 99 years in state prison. But she would not remain there for long. Margo and another inmate hopped a barbed wire fence, hitched a ride, and disappeared. Her accomplice was eventually arrested in Chicago. But Margo Freshwater seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.

Update:

Margo Freshwater has been arrested. It began with a tip that she was using the name “Tanya.” Police found a match between Freshwater’s birth date and the birthday of Tanya McCarter in Columbus, Ohio. Freshwater, aka McCarter, was taken into custody and her true identity was verified. At the time of her arrest, Freshwater, a mother of three, was with her family. They were unaware of her criminal past. Freshwater was returned to the same Tennessee Prison she escaped from 32 years earlier. She served her time and has been released.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season twelve with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Did a hero of the counter-culture murder his ex-girlfriend?

Ira Einhorn

The victim, Holly Maddux

CASE DETAILS

Ira Einhorn was a counter-culture hero. During the 1960’s in Philadelphia, he was the symbol of opposition to the war in Vietnam. In 1970, he organized Earth Day, a pro-ecology festival still celebrated every year. Einhorn also palled around with peace movement superstars like Abbie Hoffman. He even ran for mayor of Philadelphia.

Holly’s body was found in a trunk

However, there was a side of Ira Einhorn the crowds and news cameras never saw. In private, he was jealous, abusive and self-centered. And in 1979, Einhorn became the prime suspect in the disappearance of his one-time girlfriend, Holly Maddux. According to author Steven Levy, Holly was seduced by Einhorn’s charm:

“She was blown away because the force of his personality was considerable. And on the other hand, there was Holly who was really not at a solid stage in her life, and was susceptible to a big come on. To a big con. And really within a few days they were living together.”

But before long, the relationship became abusive. Andrea Boyce worked with Holly in a neighborhood co-op:

“I remember a morning we were trying to get the store stocked. And while we were taking our break she turned her head in such a way that I noticed a mark on her neck.”

By July of 1977, Holly Maddux decided she had enough. She walked out on Einhorn, without even bothering to pack her belongings. Holly ended up at a beach resort near New York City, where she began a romance with Saul Lapidus:

“She was just wonderful, curious, very bright. Knew what was going on. For those many weeks we were kind of inseparable. It was the start of possibly something big.”

The investigator’s report

But according to Joel Rosen, who was Philadelphia’s Assistant District Attorney at the time, Einhorn went ballistic when he learned of Holly’s new beau:

“Einhorn called her and he was going nuts. He said in his words he was off the wall. He threatened to throw all her clothing and all her belongings out into the street unless she came down to Philadelphia immediately to come see him. He could not handle the fact that she was going with this other man.”

Holly never returned from Philadelphia. Consequently, Saul Lapidus and some of Holly’s other friends reported her absence to authorities. According to Joel Rosen, detectives in Philadelphia were quick to interview Ira Einhorn:

“His explanation was that he had gone into the shower, that she was going to the store, and that he never saw her again. She just walked off into the sunset.”

Einhorn was finally captured in Southern France

The Maddux family hired two former FBI agents to investigate. Their ambitious report filled hundreds of pages, contained dozens of interviews, and detailed the events surrounding Holly’s disappearance. The investigators located a couple who had gone to the movies with Ira and Holly during the weekend Holly went to pick-up her belongings. It was the last time she was known to be alive.

A few days later, Einhorn tried to convince friends to help him dump a large trunk into a nearby river. He said it was filled with secret Russian documents. Finally, the tenants in the apartment below Einhorn’s told one of the investigators about a choking stench, seeping into their apartment. That report brought Detective Michael Chitwood of the Philadelphia Police Department to Einhorn’s apartment:

“Once I opened the door I could smell kind of a decaying smell and spending years as a homicide detective I knew that smell to be body smell. And I thought she may be here. There was a sickness, a sadness that Holly Maddux was found. But then there was kind of a feel good that we were going to lock-up Ira Einhorn for killing her.”

Einhorn was extradited to the US

Einhorn soon came up with an explanation. He claimed the FBI and CIA had framed him by planting Holly’s body in his closet. Einhorn’s attorney pulled off the impossible—bail for Ira Einhorn. It was a crushing blow for Detective Chitwood and the rest of the Philadelphia Police Department:

“I was offended when they allowed him out on bail because in my entire career, somebody who’s charged with murder never gets out on bail. And when I sat in that courtroom and I watched the parade of prominent people march before the bar and the court and sing the praises of Ira Einhorn, who was a murderer, who was a murderer but nobody wanted to admit it. I said this guy will never, ever stand trial. He will take off.”

In January of 1981, two days before the start of his trial, Ira Einhorn fled the country. Twelve years passed. Finally, Philadelphia authorities tried Einhorn in absentia for the murder of Holly Maddux. It took the jury only two hours to find Ira Einhorn guilty.

Update:

In 1997, Interpol tracked Einhorn down to a farmhouse in Southern France. He had been living there for several years under an assumed name. Four years after he was captured, Einhorn was extradited to the United States and re-tried for the murder of Holly Maddux. He was found guilty and is currently serving a life term without the possibility of parole.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eight with Robert Stack and in season two with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A woman’s bones found in a roadside dump prove she was murdered.

Nancy Daddysman

Her remains were found on a remote hillside

CASE DETAILS

As two teenagers returned from exploring caves in Barren County, Kentucky, they discovered fragments of a human skeleton in a roadside dump. The county coroner called in Dr. Emily Craig, one of the country’s leading experts in forensic anthropology, to examine the remains:

“Basically, all we had when we first started was a pair of red jeans with the human leg bone still inside. The skull is the best indicator of race and sex. You look at the brow ridge, you look at the nose, you look at the chin, the cheeks, just the general shape.”

She was identified by her clothing

The victim was a white female in her early 40s. Cut marks on one of the bones indicated she might have been stabbed to death. Dr. Craig hoped that the victim’s clothes might match a description in one of the local police department’s missing-persons files:

“When I got these remains back to the lab, I was able to do a very detailed study. And within a very short time, I found a file that almost exactly matched. Age, race, sex, height, and time since death, were all indicative. But absolutely positive was the fact that this victim was wearing red jeans, white tennis shoes, and a button-down blouse.”

The victim was 42-year-old Nancy Daddysman. Before she disappeared two years earlier, she had lost custody of her five children in a bitter divorce. Heartbroken, she had come to Kentucky for a fresh start. Nancy had vanished after her car broke own in Bowling Green. According to Barney Jones, Sheriff of Barren County:

“She was planning on traveling I-65 north to meet a male friend of hers in the Indianapolis, Indiana, area. We were able to verify that it was not possible that he would be a suspect as far as this case is concerned.”

The hillside where Nancy’s remains were found was 30 miles from where she was last seen. Police believe that only someone familiar with this part of Kentucky would choose to place her body there. Dr. Craig now hopes an Unsolved Mysteries viewer might help solve the case:

“Identifying the victim is the first step in solving the crime. We’ve done this first step. Now we have to find out who did it.”

Update:

The ten year mystery of Nancy Daddysman’s death received a major break recently when an inmate already serving time in Indiana for another murder confessed he had killed Nancy Daddysman as well. David M. Bell told authorities he was high on methamphetamine when he picked Nancy up in his car, struck her with a pipe, stabbed her and dumped her body. Bell is currently serving a 65 year sentence for his previous murder conviction.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season twelve with Robert Stack and in season five with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

$3 million dollars is raised for a space age car that’s never built.

Elizabeth Carmichael

The Dale was the answer to the gas crisis

CASE DETAILS

The factory was empty, no cars were being made

In 1973, America was faced with an oil crisis that nearly crippled the country. Consumers wanted a solution—cheaper gas or more fuel-efficient cars. One visionary claimed she had the perfect solution … a revolutionary, three-wheeled vehicle called “The Dale.”

This car supposedly cost less than two thousand dollars and would get 60 miles to the gallon. Made of a special aerospace plastic, its creator claimed it could withstand an impact against a brick wall at 50 miles per hour. According to car dealer Frank Gavrich, the Dale seemed like the perfect answer to the gas crunch:

“We all heard of the gas guzzlers coming from Detroit. And here’s somebody who could put out an automobile that could get 60 miles to a gallon of gas and travel all over the city without a problem. It would’ve been the ideal automobile.”

The entrepreneur who unveiled the Dale was a remarkable and forceful woman named Liz Carmichael, who saw herself as a cross between Howard Hughes and Henry Ford.
A low cost, high mileage car was the right idea at the right time and Carmichael racked up more than $3 million dollars worth of advance sales before a single car rolled off the production line.

Elizabeth was a man: Jerry Dean Michael

In 1973, Liz was a housewife living in Los Angeles with her five children. She claimed she had a degree in mechanical engineering, and in 1974, formed 20th Century Motor Car Corporation to produce her three-wheeled car, the Dale. Liz told investors and the press that her company was renting three huge aircraft hangars where they would soon start production. News of Carmichael and her car spread across the country. Soon she was being interviewed by Newsweek and People Magazine. But back at Carmichael’s headquarters in Encino, California, the authorities began to question her claims. The California Department of Corporations accused her of illegally selling both dealer franchises and cars that did not yet exist. Then, the Department of Motor Vehicles discovered the company had no state permit to manufacture cars. Bill Hall, an Investigator for the California Department of Motor Vehicles, questioned whether the lab was even developing a vehicle:

“We went to the research and development lab… people appeared to be busy. But in wandering through the lab I saw no evidence that they were designing a vehicle or in the process of making a vehicle.”

Bill Hall went to check out the three hangars where Carmichael claimed the cars would be manufactured:

“I went to this airport. Upon entering I discovered… the hangars were absolutely empty. No tools. No machinery. Nothing but a little dirt on the floor. They had rented this for only one month. And the rent had now expired. So they actually did not have a factory that they were representing they had.”

Elizabeth was convicted of fraud

With the authorities closing in, Carmichael decided it was time to move her headquarters to Dallas. But two and a half weeks later, the district attorney filed criminal grand theft charges against Liz Carmichael. Back in California, Bill Hall went to the research and development lab with a search warrant:

“On inspection of this vehicle it was not a viable vehicle at all. It had no engine. Two-by-fours were holding up the rear wheel. The accelerator was just sitting on the floor. It wasn’t even attached. The windows were not safety glass. They would bend back and forth. The doors were put on by regular door hinges, like one might find on a house door. The vehicle just absolutely did not exist.”

The Dallas Police also searched Carmichael’s house. Apparently, she and her five children had moved out in a hurry. Liz Carmichael was gone. But nine weeks later, she was discovered living in Miami with her five children. A neighbor recognized her from a news photo and called the authorities. She was working for a dating service and going by the name of Susan Raines. They also learned that Liz Carmichael had a prior identity — Jerry Dean Michael.

Carmichael claimed she had begun hormone treatments in preparation for a sex change operation. It was later learned that Carmichael was wanted by the Federal authorities for counterfeiting in 1961 and for jumping bail in 1962. Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael was arrested on April 12, 1975. She was extradited to Los Angeles and put on trial for conspiracy, grand theft, and fraud. Robert Youngblood was the Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney at the time of his trial:

“Liz arrived in court everyday in mini-skirts. Now here’s somebody who’s over 200 pounds and over six feet tall, and has a demeanor of ‘ I am a new Henry Ford’. It was rather bizarre. Liz did not give one quarter in the course of the trial. There was never once when Liz gave up her position that the people who supported her would vindicate her.”

Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael was convicted of conspiracy, grand theft, and fraud. She was released on $50,000 bail. For the next four years, she appealed his conviction and lost each time. Finally, in 1980, Carmichael failed to show up in court for sentencing and wasn’t seen again for eight years.

Update:

Within just minutes of our broadcast, we received a tip from a viewer who recognized Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael as a flower vender named Kathryn Elizabeth Johnson. Carmichael had chosen to live in the small community of Dale, Texas, and was arrested at her home. Eight years after she jumped bail, Carmichael was returned to California. There, she was sentenced to 32 months on several counts arising from her auto scam. She was sent to an all-male facility. After serving just over two years, Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael was discharged with three years of parole. A prototype of the Dale is in the permanent collection of the Petersen Automobile Museum in Los Angeles.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season one with Robert Stack and season three with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A Texas man commits murder, then flees the United States.

Edward Harold Bell

The victim, Larry Dickens

CASE DETAILS

Bell exposed himself to children

Bryan, Texas, is the type of place that people have in mind when they dream of escaping the big city. But in September of 1984, the illusion of small-town security was shattered for one local couple whom we will call Sue and Bill. Sue had always considered herself strong and self-reliant. However, the events of September 6th would test her character in ways she never imagined:

“My husband was leaving for work and I went back into the bathroom in the master bedroom to finish getting dressed. I was standing there, looking in the mirror, finishing up my hair, and I picked up the make-up mirror. And I looked and he had a large hunting knife.”

Fearing for the safety of her child, Sue instinctively attacked. She forced the intruder from the bathroom and then drove him out of the house at gunpoint:

“It was very quick. And I don’t think he was expecting me to do that. I think he probably was expecting me to plead with him not to do anything, and I reversed the situation on him.”

Bell was finally captured in Panama

Sue had seen the man up close, but authorities were unable to identify him. She and her husband tried to put the incident behind them. Then four months later, Sue got another look at the attacker:

“I was going through the newspaper and I opened it up, and his picture was in the newspaper. And I was just shocked to have found out what he had done.”

The newspaper listed the state’s most-wanted criminals. Right at the top was the knife-wielding intruder. His name was Edward Harold Bell. Edward Bell’s long criminal record stretched back to 1969 and included aggravated rape and numerous counts of indecent exposure to children. Sue also learned that Edward Bell was wanted for a shocking murder that took place on August 24, 1978. That summer, 26-year-old Larry Dickens was visiting his mother and sister in Pasadena, Texas, a suburb of Houston. An ex-marine and youth counselor, Larry was also the father of a three-year-old girl. According to his mother, Dorothy Lang, Larry was cutting her lawn when Edward Bell pulled up in his pick-up truck:

“I was standing at the kitchen window. And there were a lot of children playing in the intersection right by our house. I saw this pick-up truck drive up. He parked, and he got out of his truck, and he was nude from his waist down.”

Bell was sentenced to seventy years in prison

As Dorothy phoned the police, Larry went out to confront the flasher. His mother watched from the kitchen window as the man pulled out a gun:

“And I said, ‘Please don’t shoot him.’ And the man just shot him, anyway. And then he turned and started running out of our garage. And Larry, even with all those bullets in him, was still trying to stop this man.”

Larry had been shot four times in the chest and once in the head with a .22 pistol. At just that moment, Larry’s 17-year-old sister, Dawna, was returning home from cheerleading practice:

“I pulled up to the stop sign and I saw a man cross the street to the edge of my driveway. And I looked and I got a good close look at the man. And I tried to block his exit. I realized he had just shot my brother. I just started screaming. And I just screamed and screamed, and then, when I couldn’t scream anymore, I remember I just went over and I knelt down beside my brother and I watched him die.”

A dispatcher radioed the suspect’s description as police units headed to the scene. At that very instant, the officers recognized the suspect’s truck. Within 20 minutes of the murder, Bell was in the hands of police and on his way to face Larry’s mother and sister:

“They opened the back door of the police car so that I could see him there. I just wanted to get my hands on him. It hurts me so bad that he killed my brother. There’s always going to be an emptiness. Part of me is missing.”

Incredibly, Edward Bell was released on bail less than two months after the murder. He quietly liquidated his assets, and with more than $140,000 in his pocket, disappeared.

Update:

When this story aired, at least two viewers recognized Edward Bell. One said he had recently met Bell during a business trip to Panama City, Panama. Another viewer claimed that Bell had lived in Panama for several years. According to Special Agent Rolando Moss of the Houston FBI, Bell was prospecting for gold on land he owned near Panama City:

“The Panama police were able to locate Mr. Bell, at which time, they placed him under arrest, and the FBI, along with the Panama City Police Department then brought Mr. Bell back to the United States.”

Edward Harold Bell was convicted of murder and sentenced to 70 years in prison. He has since been named as a “person of interest” in the murders of six young girls in the Galveston area.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season five with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season ten with Robert Stack and in season three with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

An 18-year-old woman is found dead in the North Platte River in Wyoming.

Lisa Kimmel

Lisa had a personalized license plate

CASE DETAILS

On a little-used suspension bridge outside Casper, Wyoming, residents reported seeing unexplained lights in the early morning hours of March 26, 1988. Under the cover of darkness, a killer brought his victim to the bridge. After stabbing her repeatedly, he threw her into the chill waters of the North Platte River. The victim was later identified as 18-year-old Lisa Marie Kimmell from Billings, Montana. She had been sexually assaulted, then killed in a manner that suggested some kind of bizarre torture. Lisa was last seen alive on the night of March 25th, and police believe that she was killed a few hours later. But what complicates the investigation is that many people claimed to have seen Lisa Marie Kimmell, or her car, during a week when police believe she was already dead.

Her body was found on the river bank

At the time of her murder, Lisa Marie Kimmel was living in Denver, Colorado. On March 25th, she left town and headed for Cody, Wyoming, to visit her boyfriend. According to her friend Ed Jaroch, Lisa’s car carried the spunky license plate, “LIL MISS”:

“The plan was that she was supposed to leave Denver… and get to Cody to see me, sometime late that evening. I talked to her about 4:30, and she… thought she’d be in about midnight or something like that.”

Weather conditions were good, so Lisa should have made the trip to Cody in eight or nine hours. She was expected at her boyfriend’s house late Friday night. But by Saturday morning, she still had not arrived. Ed Jaroch frantically telephoned authorities in three different states. Later, Patrolman Alan Lesco of the Wyoming Highway Patrol reported that he stopped Lisa for speeding the night she disappeared:

“I was patrolling southbound on March 25th and I noted a small car northbound at 88 MPH, according to my radar. I turned around and pursued the car. I stopped her, near Oren Junction. She was well-kept, kind of person you’d like to have for a daughter.”

Who was driving Lisa’s car?

Lisa’s signature on the ticket verified her identity. It would be the last confirmed sighting of Lisa Marie Kimmell. As the week went on without any word from her daughter, Lisa’s mother began to worry:

“The outlook was looking a little grim, but even if that, even if the outcome wasn’t as we hoped, we still needed to find her.”

On April 2nd, one week after Lisa disappeared, Greg Bradford, a mechanic who was spending his Saturday fishing on the North Platte River, brought the search for Lisa Marie to a sad end:

“When I stepped up off the side of the bank, I looked over my shoulder and I saw the lady in the water. And then I remember when we were driving up from Cheyenne, they said this young girl was missing from Montana. So, I looked again, and said, ‘Oh my god, it must be her.’”

Dale Wayne Eaton

Police searched the area where Lisa’s body was discovered. On an old highway bridge, one quarter of a mile away, they found blood that was the same type as Lisa’s. Because the bridge is so inaccessible, and so seldom used, police concluded that the murderer probably lived in the area. Based on the eyewitness accounts of unexplained activity on the bridge, they estimated that Lisa was murdered early Saturday morning, roughly five hours after she was stopped for speeding. But soon, authorities began receiving information that complicated their investigation. Numerous eyewitnesses were reporting that they had seen Lisa’s car. According to Sheriff Ron Ketchum of the Natrona County Sheriff’s Department, some even claimed they had seen Lisa herself:

“We’ve had over a thousand sightings of this vehicle. A lot of them from law enforcement officers. And we were deluged with them at the point that we thought they had gone to Canada. We had some sightings in Canada.”

One of the most reliable sightings occurred roughly ten hours after Lisa was supposedly killed. Donna Kirkpatrick, the wife of a local county sheriff, reported that she had seen Lisa driving her car in the city of Buffalo, Wyoming:

“It was Saturday at noon, and I noticed a little black sports car had pulled out right in front of me. Then I noticed the license plate. It was a Montana license plate with ‘little miss’ on it… And, at that point I decided that I needed to see if the car went with whoever was driving it. I am absolutely positive there was a young gal driving it… there’s not a doubt in my mind.”

Another eyewitness reported seeing Lisa more than a day after police believe she was murdered. But this sighting was in Casper, Wyoming—more than 100 miles from Buffalo. Diana Houston was driving through Casper when a car with an out of state license plate caught her attention:

“It was Sunday afternoon, and I saw a Montana license plate on a vehicle. And being from Montana, it caught my eye. So I looked, and the license plate said, ‘little miss.’ I went by I saw somebody with blonde hair driving, and had on a yellow sweater.”

Lisa was last seen at 9:00 PM on Friday night and was reported missing by 9:00 AM Saturday morning. Yet she was reportedly seen twice later that day and once on Sunday. If Lisa was alive, why hadn’t she showed up at her boyfriend’s or her parents’ house? And if she had been killed early Saturday morning as police suspect, who was driving the car with Lisa’s distinctive license plates?

Update:

Fourteen years after Lisa Marie Kimmell was murdered, the Wyoming DNA database matched an inmate named Dale Wayne Eaton to the crime. When police searched Eaton’s property, they found Lisa’s car buried underground. Lisa had been held there for six days. Eaton was tried for murder and other charges. The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to death. The sightings of Lisa Marie Kimmell were never explained. Lisa’s parents were awarded Dale Eaton’s property in a civil suit and burned the buildings to the ground.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season one with Robert Stack and season four with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Can the untimely death of Bruce Lee’s son be blamed on a family curse?

Brandon Lee

Was the Lee family cursed?

CASE DETAILS

Lee was killed by a .44 Magnum

Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee were a father and son linked by the action-packed world of martial arts films and, some say, by an ancient Chinese curse that killed them both. Bruce Lee’s film career began in Hong Kong. With his explosive power and fluid grace, he almost single-handedly created an audience for martial arts films. In the summer of 1973, Lee was 32-years-old and on the brink of international stardom. Then on July 20th, he took a prescription drug for a headache and laid down for a nap. Bruce Lee never got up. His funeral drew more than 25,000 mourners. Some said that Lee died from a family curse. But after an unprecedented nine-day inquest, the coroner announced his findings—Bruce Lee had died from a freak allergic reaction to a pain remedy. Author John Little has written extensively about the life of Bruce Lee:

“Here we have this paragon of fitness, one of the most lethal human beings with his hands or his feet taken out… by a headache tablet. But it happens. And it only seems all the more unbelievable when it happens to someone who is larger than life.

At the time, Bruce’s son, Brandon, was just eight-years-old and already following in his father’s footsteps. This is an excerpt from an interview Brandon recorded just prior to his untimely death:

“I started training with my dad really as soon as I could walk. I mean, my dad was a really diligent trainer, and he always had people over at the house practicing. In fact, I remember when I was a little kid, a lot of my friends didn’t want to come over to the house because there were always these men in the back yard screaming and breaking things.”

A live lead tip was lodged in the gun

Brandon followed Bruce’s path to the big screen as a star of martial arts films. He was 28-years-old when he was fatally shot on the set of his fifth feature, “The Crow”. Was he also a victim of the Lee family curse? Just like Bruce Lee’s death, the shooting of Brandon Lee renewed speculation about the Lee curse. But can this tragedy really be attributed to supernatural forces? After nearly 50 eyewitnesses and more than a dozen ballistics tests, detectives Rodney Simmons and Brian Pettus of the Wilmington, North Carolina Police Department, pieced together the strange six-week journey of the bullet destined to kill Brandon Lee. According to Detective Simmons, the bullets were purchased at a pawnshop:

“They were filming a pawnshop scene. And they needed items from an actual pawnshop. So they went to one of the local pawnshops in Wilmington.”

Was this bullet destined to kill Brandon Lee?

A stagehand gathered hundreds of props, among them was a box of live .44 magnum bullets. According to Detective Pettus, the first link in the fatal chain of events was now in place:

“They dressed the set up with all the items that they received. They placed the .44 rounds on a counter that was used in the scene. The stunt coordinator said when he found the live ammunition on the set, he was livid. The bottom line rule is that you don’t have live ammunition on a set.”

The stunt coordinator locked the bullets in the trunk of his car, where they would remain for another two weeks. It was one of these bullets that would eventually kill Brandon Lee. Understanding the tragic events to come required some knowledge of bullets and blanks. A live bullet has a lead tip, a load of gunpowder, and an explosive charge known as a primer. Once the trigger is pulled the hammer hits the primer. The primer then detonates, igniting the powder. The explosive force of burning powder shoots the lead tip towards the target. Blanks are bullets with a harmless disc of cardboard instead of a lead tip and have a smaller gunpowder load. They may have one-quarter or one half the normal charge. When fired, blanks create a visible but harmless flash. A dummy round looks like a bullet but cannot be fired. It has the cartridge and the lead tip only. No gunpowder, no primer. On the set of “The Crow,” the crew needed blanks. To save time, the fateful decision was made to modify the live rounds that they had. According to Detective Pettus, the crew removed the lead tip and powder, leaving only the cartridge and primer:

“So what they did is they fired off some of the blanks that they’d made and took those casings and put the lead tips back in the casings. But what they didn’t do was check the primers to see if they’d all been fired when they made the dummy rounds. So they got some mixed up. So they made at least one dummy round that had a primer still intact.”

Is an ancient curse to blame for their deaths?

That one dummy round had an explosive primer and a lead tip. The crew used the dummy rounds for close-ups of someone firing a .44 magnum. The detectives said that at least two people heard a popping noise. No one realized it was the sound of a primer firing—exploding with just enough force to dislodge the lead tip from the bullet casing and wedge it into the gun barrel. There it would remain, undetected for another 14 days, awaiting its fateful meeting with Brandon Lee.

North Carolina officials concluded that the film company’s biggest failures were not having a gun expert on the set and taking shortcuts to save time and money. However, the chain of negligence involved so many people that convicting any one of them was unlikely. No criminal charges were filed. In the end, it seemed that Brandon Lee was truly a victim of circumstance. Or was he, as some claim, the final casualty of the family curse?

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eight with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Patty Stallings is finally released after being sentenced to life for the murder of her two boys.

Patty Stallings

Patty was arrested and sent to jail

CASE DETAILS

On July 9, 1989, in St. Louis, Missouri, a young mother rushed her critically ill baby to the hospital. The baby was three-month-old Ryan Stallings. Since birth, Ryan had suffered from chronic gastric distress. On the day Ryan was brought to the emergency room, his breathing had become labored and he was vomiting uncontrollably. According to his father David, Ryan was immediately placed in the pediatric intensive care unit:

“It was just a shock to see a little baby incapacitated the way he was. It was to the point where they said, well, they don’t know how long he’s going to be here. We don’t know what’s wrong with him yet. So you may as well just go to the waiting room and stay out there until we can tell you what’s wrong.”

Did she poison her children?

David and Patty Stallings rented a hospital room to be near their son. After three agonizing days, the Stallings learned that Ryan would recover. The diagnosis, however, was shocking. Ryan had been poisoned. Patty Stallings was annoyed that authorities immediately considered her a suspect:

“They were very polite, yet suspicious. They would not allow us to see Ryan alone. There would have to be two nurses or a doctor present. We were never allowed at his bedside alone. That bothered me, but I still didn’t understand. Because I wasn’t looking at it the way they were, I guess.”

Patty was finally released

That same day, the police were brought in to investigate. According to Patty, detectives interviewed her husband in a separate room:

“We were split up and talked to by detectives. They immediately started asking me, ‘Is there a problem at home? Are you and David fighting?’ They were saying that they knew that that baby had been poisoned by either me or my husband. It infuriated me, and I was just… I was devastated. I was blown away… Ryan was my world… He was perfect.”

Ryan’s condition improved. After twelve days, he was released from the hospital, but not to the custody of his parents. Patty and David’s contact with Ryan was severely restricted. According to Patty, they were allowed only a one-hour visit each week on Thursdays:

“I just could not wait till Thursday. I would tell everybody over and over and over how last Thursday went. That was my life…”

The parental visits continued for five weeks. During the sixth visit, Patty was left alone with Ryan a short time. Three days later, Ryan suffered another severe attack of vomiting. Once again, he was rushed to the hospital. Once again, the diagnosis was poisoning. Authorities came to Patty’s house with an arrest warrant:

“We were getting out of the car, and they said, ‘Stop right there.’ I turned around, and I was, like, ‘Come on into the house.’ They said, ‘You’re not allowed to go into the house.’ They immediately slapped handcuffs on me and said, ‘You’re under arrest for assault.’”

Ryan Stallings

Patty Stallings was arrested and charged with assault. While Patty languished in jail, her son was dying. Ryan was placed on life support systems. David Stallings found himself trapped in a private hell:

“The doctors come up and tell me that they have a feeling that Ryan’s not going to make it and that maybe I should contact a minister and have him baptized. I tried to get Patty up there and all I got from the judge was, ‘No, absolutely not. I’m not going to let a baby-killer up there.’ I said, ‘This lady did not kill this baby.’ When they finally came back to me and told me that ‘We need to know if we can turn him off,’ I told them, ‘Go ahead and shut the machine down.’ But I wanted to be in there with him. So for three hours, I sat there with him in my arms, knowing that Patty couldn’t be there, watching this meter on this machine go down each time his heart would beat.”

On September 7, 1989, Ryan Stallings died. He was not yet six months old. His mother, Patty, was now charged with first-degree murder and held without bail. She was not allowed to attend Ryan’s funeral. A few weeks later, Patty discovered she was pregnant again. Six months later, David Stallings Jr. was born. Even though David Sr. was not a suspect, he was not allowed to take his son home. The baby was placed in foster care. Ironically, this devastating blow would turn out to be a stroke of good luck. Without it, Patty and David Stallings might have been accused of poisoning their second son.

Patty & David Stallings with their son David

When David Stallings Jr. was two weeks old, he began to exhibit symptoms identical to the ones that had plagued his brother Ryan. This time, the diagnosis was different. David Jr. had a rare genetic disorder, MMA, in which the body produces chemical by-products that are similar to the chemicals found in antifreeze. Unsolved Mysteries contacted an independent medical expert about MMA:

“It would be very simple to confuse the diagnosis of MMA with multiple poisonings because the symptoms are very similar. But more importantly than that, MMA and other similar disorders are very rare, and the majority of doctors either will never have seen a case, or if they have seen a case, didn’t know that they saw it, and actually confused it.”

While prosecutors evaluated the medical evidence, Patty Stallings was released from jail. However, Patty was still denied visitation rights with her new born son:

“I thought it was over, as far as the nightmare of being accused of hurting Ryan. I was positive because even my lawyer said it was over. There was no way that they could not see the truth right in front of their eyes.”

Ryan passed away

Yet local officials continued to pursue Ryan’s case. Their position was that Ryan Stallings had not died from MMA. In the judge’s chambers, they cited four expert witnesses. The judge refused to allow the diagnosis of David Jr. presented to the jury. George McElroy was the prosecuting attorney on the case:

“We were concerned that if it came out that David Jr., or Ryan for that matter, had this methylmalonic acidosis, unless it could be shown that he actually died of that or it was some kind of a contributing factor to his death, we believe that that would not be relevant and in fact might cause the jury to go off on a wild goose chase and make a decision based on something that’s really not relevant.”

The Stallings received custody of David

Without the medical testimony, the case against Patty seemed airtight. The prosecution focused on the events of Thursday, August 31, 1989, Patty and David’s sixth parental visits with Ryan. It was on that visit that David’s parents were invited for the first time:

“About twenty minutes into the visit, my mom and dad decided to leave. Patty and I had the rest of the time with him. I escorted my mom and dad out and walked down to the hall. I was out of the room no more than forty-five seconds at the most.”

According to George McElroy, Patty was alone with David anywhere from three minutes to eight minutes:

“During that time she did actually feed the child a bottle. The child again got the same symptoms it had before, came back into the hospital, was diagnosed with ethylene glycol poisoning. But the state believes, and certainly circumstantial evidence suggests, that she slipped ethylene glycol, or antifreeze, into the bottle during that feeding.”

The prosecution believed Patty poisoned her baby

However, David Stallings disagreed that his wife fed their newborn son while she was alone:

“That’s incorrect. What happened was, I walked back to the cubbyhole where Patty was with Ryan. He started getting a little cranky, so I reached into the bag, took the bottle out, and started feeding him. I saw the bottle… I did not see any discoloration in the bottle whatsoever. There was nothing done to that bottle. Absolutely nothing.”

They were allowed supervised visits

But the jury sided with the prosecution and on March 4, 1991, Patty Stallings was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Each visit with her son was limited to one hour. David Stallings Sr. was allowed to see his son once a week:

“I cannot see how they can live with themselves, knowing that they sent an innocent woman to jail for the rest of her life for something that she didn’t do. If Ryan would have been correctly diagnosed with MMA, none of this would have happened. None of these series of events in the last two years would have happened. It all depended on whether he was correctly diagnosed, which he was not.”

Update:

Shortly after this story aired, doctors from all over the county called to say there were familiar with MMA. Dr. Piero Rinaldo, a renowned scientist from Yale University, even performed tests that confirmed MMA was the cause of Ryan’s death. Consequently, the prosecuting attorney dropped all charges against Patty Stallings. David Stallings Jr. was finally allowed to come home.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season three with Robert Stack and in season four with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

The Olympic Bomber is identified and captured.

Eric Rudolph

Alice died in the bombing

CASE DETAILS

Millions of people around the world were shaken by the 1996 Olympic park bombing in Atlanta, Georgia. Security guard Richard Jewell, who was an early suspect, was cleared of any wrongdoing. And the person responsible for planting what the FBI called one of the largest pipe bombs in U.S. history, has yet to be caught. For those in Centennial Park that fateful night, their lives were changed forever.

FBI received letters from “The Army of God”

Fallon Stubbs, and her mother, Alice Hawthorne, were visiting from Albany, Georgia. The last-minute trip was a 14th birthday gift for Fallon:

“We were enjoying the moment, enjoying the people. It was an experience like no other. And… to be in that kind of surrounding, it was a beautiful thing.”

Just before 1:20 AM, Fallon and her mother paused to take a photograph—a memento of a wonderful night. Then suddenly, a huge explosion knocked them to the ground:

“After the explosion, it was chaos. You never forget that moment afterwards, and I ran towards anybody who could help. And I was, like, ‘My mother, my mother. Somebody’s got to help my mother.’”

The bomb killed Robert

44-year-old Alice Hawthorne died instantly from injuries sustained in the explosion. Although hundreds were injured, she was the only person killed by the bomb at Centennial Park. A task force of federal and state investigators was quickly assembled to apprehend the terrorist behind this vicious attack. Over the next seven months, Atlanta was subjected to two more bombings. But an even more disturbing trend had developed. The bomber was now planting a second device apparently designed to harm police and rescue workers who responded to the victims of the first explosion. According to Special Agent Charles Stone of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, there was a reason police did not indicate a specific suspect:

“We were building a good, prosecutable court case based upon the forensic evidence we had where we could tie the bombs together, but we still didn’t know the identity of the bomber. We didn’t know who he was.”

Eric was finally captured in North Carolina

According to Agent Stone, authorities received letters from the so-called Army of God who claimed responsibility for the last two bombings:

“In the letters, he got into the components of the bomb, which had not been made public at that time, so we knew the letters were written by the bomber.”

An FBI profiler analyzed the letters and the details of all three bombings. He came to the conclusion that the bomber’s real target was law enforcement.

Eleven months after the third Atlanta bombing, head nurse Emily Lyons came to work early at a woman’s health and abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. Off-duty police officer Robert Sanderson was working there as a security guard. Just then, Emily spotted something that looked strangely out of place:

“There was an overturned flowerpot kind of buried a little bit. And that was not anything we would have ever had. So at that point, Sandy knew something was wrong.”

The explosion instantly killed security guard Robert Sanderson. Emily Lyons lost her left eye in the explosion. Dozens of masonry nails and screws tore through 90% of her body. Robert Sanderson left behind a wife and two sons. He had been a Birmingham police officer for eight years. Task force members believed the bomber had achieved his objective—to murder a law enforcement officer. But this time the authorities got a break. Forensics later revealed that the bomber had detonated this device by remote control. According to Agent Stone, this meant the bomber had been there:

“That increased his chances of killing police officers, but it also directly increased his chances of being identified and caught.”

Police questioned a witness who saw a man walking away from the scene just after the explosion. When the man removed a wig, the witness became suspicious and followed him. The witness observed the suspicious man getting into a pickup truck, and before losing him, relayed the license plate number to police. The gray Nissan truck was traced to a man named Eric Rudolph, who resided in Western North Carolina. A warrant was issued for his arrest. Investigators learned where Eric Rudolph lived and an FBI SWAT team raided his trailer. The trailer’s air conditioner was still running and food was still on the table. Todd Letcher, coordinator of the Southeast Bomb Task Force, believed they missed Eric Rudolph by just minutes:

“He told friends and associates when he was a teenager that if he got in trouble with law enforcement, he would disappear into the mountains, and we feel that this is something that he was planning for a long time.”

250 law enforcement officers converged on the Nantahala National Forest after Rudolph’s truck was found abandoned nearby. But Eric Rudolph had vanished. Rudolph would prove to be a formidable adversary. Investigators learned he’d been raised in a family that preached white separatism. The experienced outdoorsman and survivalist had also served in the U.S. Army. Deborah Rudolph was married to Eric’s brother and had known Eric since he was a teenager:

“I never really heard him talk about positive things. It was a lot of hateful things. A lot of negativity. You know… our gun laws and government and politics.”

The last known sighting of Eric Rudolph was made by George Nordmann, a health food store owner who lived in a remote mountain cabin. According to Agent Stone, Nordmann had known Eric Rudolph for years:

“When Eric approached him about foodstuffs, George made the decision not to help Eric and I believe became somewhat frightened of him.”

A few nights later, Nordmann’s home was raided. Several hundred pounds of food and Nordmann’s truck were stolen. It was believed Rudolph had made a return visit.

Update:

Five years after Eric Rudolph disappeared, a police officer noticed a suspicious person behind a market in Murphy, North Carolina. Suspecting a burglary, the officer made an arrest. The suspect proved to be none other than Eric Rudolph. He was later convicted for his various bombings and sentenced to four life terms plus 120 years.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season twelve with Robert Stack and in season three with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A computer whiz is convicted of several crimes.

Kevin Poulsen

His pseudonym was Dark Dante

CASE DETAILS

Kevin Poulsen grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of North Hollywood. On his 16th birthday, he received his first computer. Like most devoted hackers, he adopted a colorful pseudonym. Kevin Poulsen became “Dark Dante.” Eventually, he uncovered a telephone number which gave him access to a restricted computer network funded by the Pentagon. But Kevin’s activities were soon detected when he logged on with his real name rather than Dark Dante. Blissfully unaware, Kevin continued his hacking activities, giving authorities even more ammunition against him.

They found stolen equipment

Then on the morning of September 22, 1983, the Los Angeles District Attorney confiscated Kevin’s computer. Because of his age, he was not officially charged, only warned that his computer activities were illegal. The warning apparently fell on deaf ears. On February 8, 1988, the owners of a storage facility in Northern California made a routine stop at a locker on which the rent had not been paid. Standard procedure in such cases is to confiscate the material in the locker, but the contents of this locker were something the men had never seen before. It appeared to be stolen telephone company equipment. The owners notified the authorities. Telephone company investigator Jon Von Brauch, along with the local police, arrived immediately:

“We found a storage locker that contained pieces of electronic equipment, pay phones, and computer printouts, including a printout of the unpublished number of the Soviet embassy in San Francisco. That’s not the type of equipment or material that one would buy at a swap meet or find in a dumpster. It was quite obviously stolen property.”

The storage unit had been rented to Kevin Poulsen, who was now 21-years-old. When Von Brauch and police searched his apartment, they found a wiretapping facility in a spare bedroom:

“The equipment in the switch room allowed Mr. Poulsen not only to enter computer databases… it also gave him the ability to monitor telephone conversations without parties to the conversation being aware that they were being monitored.”

Kevin was captured in Los Angeles

Connected to Poulsen’s computer was an unauthorized “test set,” which could be used to tap into private phone lines. Only the telephone company and law enforcement officials are allowed to use “test sets.” But the smoking gun was a series of photographs Poulsen had taken of himself breaking into a telephone switching trailer, then using the equipment inside. Kevin’s ego provided the phone company with the evidence they needed to bring in Special Agent William Smith of the FBI:

“We determined that the acts Poulsen was involved in had escalated. We found evidence that Poulsen had penetrated the United States government computer and had transferred the passwords of that computer via electronic mail to other individuals.”

Investigators found out that someone matching Poulsen’s description had illegally entered several Northern California telephone facilities using a false ID. Once inside, the intruder found telephone numbers he could use to hack into the telephone company’s computer system. He also had stolen manuals, switching equipment, and a test set like the one found in Poulsen’s apartment. Using the stolen equipment, Poulsen had allegedly infiltrated U.S. military computer transmissions to obtain classified Army information. The FBI suspected that Poulsen might have been engaging in espionage. On October 19, 1989, a two-year investigation resulted in a 19-count indictment against Kevin Poulsen and two fellow hackers. They were charged with conspiracy, computer fraud, wiretapping, embezzlement, and theft of public property and records. The two other men were arrested but Poulsen disappeared.

Update:

Shortly after this story aired, the FBI received information that Kevin Poulsen was living near Los Angeles. Special Agent Terry Atchley of the FBI was called to stake out a Hughes Market in Van Nuys, where Poulsen was reportedly last seen:

“At about 10 minutes to midnight, Kevin Poulsen arrived, drove up and parked immediately in front of the market. Once Kevin was in the store, I took a position near the front door and asked the security guard to go find the evening manager so I could tell him that Kevin Poulsen was in the store.”

As Poulsen was checking out and about to leave the store, he was tackled by two employees. A security guard escorted him to a storeroom where he was held until FBI agents arrived and placed him under arrest. Kevin Poulsen pleaded guilty to seven counts of mail, wire and computer fraud, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. He was sentenced to 51 months in prison and ordered to pay $56,000 in restitution. When Poulsen was released from prison, he was also given five years probation.

After prison, Kevin Poulsen re-invented himself as a journalist and put his criminal past behind him. He wrote a computer script capable of searching the membership of Myspace for sex offenders. He ultimately confirmed the identities of 744 sex offenders with Myspace profiles.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season three with Robert Stack and in season two with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

While wandering in California, a man forgets his name and where he came from.

He had no memory of his life.

He woke up with nothing but a duffel bag

CASE DETAILS

In May of 1992, a man named “Pierre” said he inexplicably found himself along a deserted stretch of California coastline. Feeling weak, hungry, and terribly confused, Pierre spotted a telephone, his first chance to obtain help. Only then, did it dawn on Pierre that he had no one to call:

“Then I realized I couldn’t phone anybody and that’s when I realized I didn’t know anybody, including me. Those first few minutes, you’re literally nothing and you feel so empty. It’s very lonely and painful to be empty.”

Alone and distraught, Pierre searched through his belongings. Tucked into one of his shirts was a crumpled piece of paper. It was a library card from the Boston Public Library. Handwritten on the back was the name, “April, Pierre”:

“It… must be me. It’s in my belongings, with my socks. It’s with my shirt. It’s with my things.”

Pierre’s family found him and sent photos

Pierre claimed he was plagued by hazy memories of San Diego, California, 400 miles to the south. With just $17 in his pocket, he set out hitchhiking. Three days later, Pierre was wandering the streets of San Diego, searching for something that might tell him who he was.

“I was so sure this city would bring everything back and it did not. I saw downtown and said nothing. I looked at the buildings and they meant nothing. And I walked the streets of the city for a long time.”

Pierre felt he was hovering on the brink of madness. Finally, a sympathetic bus driver gave him a ride to the St. Vincent de Paul Homeless Shelter. Dr. Julie Becker was a Counseling Program Manager at the shelter when Pierre walked in:

“We’ve had cases of people pretending they didn’t know who they were. But Pierre was very unique, sometimes in the other cases the residents are after something. And that wasn’t Pierre’s case at all. He didn’t ask for anything. He didn’t even ask for help.”

After six months of physical and psychological examinations, doctors could find no cause for Pierre’s memory loss. They did, however, theorize that Pierre was suffering from “trauma induced amnesia.” While at St. Vincent’s, Pierre concentrated on reviving his lost memory. Soon, fragments of his former self began to emerge. Pierre apparently had considerable knowledge about physics, advanced math, and computers. He even became convinced that he could fly an airplane. Pierre also found that he had a talent for music and learned to play the guitar in just a few hours.

Hoping to add detail to Pierre’s fragmented memories, Unsolved Mysteries arranged for him to consult with a police sketch artist. Two portraits were created of people who may have been significant in Pierre’s past. The first was a man whom Pierre believed was his cousin Luke, nicknamed Curly. The second drawing was a woman whom Pierre believed was once his employer. Pierre thought her name might be Carol:

“If I try to remember something too hard, I get a beautiful headache that I wouldn’t want to inflict on my worst enemy… I just want to find out what the past is, if I can.”

Update:

On the night of our broadcast, the woman Pierre called Carol recognized him as a former employee. She confirmed that his name is indeed Pierre April. Carol contacted Pierre and told him that he has two sisters and that his parents live in Lachine, Canada. The following day, Pierre talked to his dad for the first time in more than five months:

“It was a very emotional moment. And then I even had to tell him that I couldn’t even trust him a hundred percent, that I wanted a package with family pictures in it and with my birth certificate.”

When the package arrived, Pierre and his fiancée, a woman he met in San Diego, sat down with a friend to get a first look at Pierre’s long lost past:

“It is strange to be told who you are and what you did. I am someone again. And for quite a few months, I was nobody and nothing.”

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season five with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Does a notebook contain clues to the disappearance of a Los Angeles model?

Kimberly Pandelios

Kim’s remains were found in the woods

CASE DETAILS

Just outside Los Angeles, nearly seven hundred thousand acres of wilderness covers the sprawling Angeles National Forest. On February 29, 1992, a dedicated off-road enthusiast, who we’ll call Jeff, was exploring a campground area in the Angeles National Forest when his curiosity led him into a mystery. Jeff drove into a campsite and saw an attractive blonde woman sitting on the ground close to a fire:

“I’d noticed this one little road off to the side and I saw that somebody had set up a camp there. As I pulled up, directly in front of me there was an old panel van. To the left of that was a tent. To the left of the tent there was a very attractive girl sitting by herself. Her hair was done up; it was curly and long. She appeared to have make-up on. She was looking down and she very slowly raised her head and we had eye contact.”

The witness was chased off by a group of men

Suddenly, Jeff was ambushed by three men who began pounding on his car, demanding to know what he wanted. Jeff immediately left, assuming that the men were just being protective of their camp:

“I never thought about calling the police, nor did I think that these guys were really dangerous to anybody. I thought they were being protective of their camp.”

David was convicted of Kim’s murder

A year later, on March 3, 1993, the Los Angeles County Coroner was called to investigate a possible murder site in the Angeles Forest. A partial set of skeletal remains were found only fifty yards from the spot where Jeff had seen the young blonde woman. When the coroner checked dental records of missing people in the Los Angeles area, he found a match. The remains were identified as those of 20-year-old Kimberly Pandelios, who had disappeared a year before. When she disappeared, Kimberly was living in Southern California. She was taking business classes and worked part-time as a model.
According to her mother, Magaly Spector, it was a tragic end to a promising young life:

“She was loved by everybody in the family. And she was so sweet, so kind. The very end of her life, I don’t want to even think about it.”

After the remains were identified, Kimberly’s story made headlines on the local news. By coincidence, Jeff, the off-road enthusiast was watching:

“The TV was on and I said, ‘that’s the girl. That’s the girl I saw sitting there.’ In my mind there was no doubt that the girl on TV was the same I saw in the camp…”

Jeff immediately contacted the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and accompanied two deputies to the spot where he had seen the woman. But far too much time had passed. There was not a single clue to the strange disappearance and death of Kimberly Pandelios. The coroner could not determine what caused Kimberly’s death. Police only knew that she was no longer a missing person. Her case was now re-classified as a probable homicide. Sergeant John Laurie of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department learned that the day before Jeff saw Kimberly in the makeshift camp, a burned-out car was found near a campground in the Angeles Forest:

“The fire was started in the passenger compartment on the passenger side of the front seat. We were able to determine that the front seat was pulled forward in a position that would be as if she drove to that location.”

Investigators found the charred remains of a spiral notebook in the car. It belonged to Kimberly Pandelios. After running a DMV check on the plates, the police were able to contact Kimberly’s husband, who had already reported his wife missing. A few weeks later, two hikers found a second notebook under a nearby bridge. It was Kimberly’s “dayrunner”. However, the dayrunner yielded no additional clues. Apparently, a third notebook is still unaccounted for. The day after Kimberly was reported missing, her son’s babysitter told Sergeant Laurie that a man named Paul had telephoned for Kimberly the day she disappeared:

“The notebook that Paul has is probably the most valuable notebook. That might have her appointments or contacts for later that day. There’s a possibility that Kimberly went up into the mountains to meet someone and that appointment might be in her book.”

Kimberly told her husband that she was scheduled to do an outdoor photo shoot. According to Sergeant Laurie, she had responded to an ad in a local newspaper:

“A theory is that she drove to that location by herself and met someone to do an outdoor shoot. And that once she was there, she was taken off the road, back into the area that she was ultimately found.”

Authorities believe Kimberly was abducted sometime on Thursday afternoon. When Jeff drove up, it was just past noon on Saturday:

“In retrospect, she might have been drugged, but you just had no idea. If she would’ve cried out, if she would’ve said something. If she would’ve given me an indication she was in trouble, of course I would’ve done something. But I didn’t know. It just gets to me that I didn’t do something right then and there to help her. This person basically died because of my inaction or my ignorance. You can’t bring the girl back, but I would like justice to be done.”

Update:

In the case of Kimberly Pandelios, justice has finally been served. Twelve years after Kimberly’s disappearance, a convicted sex offender, David Rademaker, was arrested for her murder. Authorities tied Rademaker to Kimberly using phone records and were able to make the arrest, thanks to the testimony of a teenage girl he had been harassing. A judge sentenced Rademaker to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season seven with Robert Stack and in season four with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A serial rapist claims victims in Buffalo, New York, and its suburbs.

The New York serial rapist

He would strangle them and tape their eyes

CASE DETAILS

For more than twenty years, a cunning serial rapist has prowled Buffalo, New York, and its suburbs. A female victim, whose has chosen to have her identity concealed, recalled the horrific events of her attack:

“I was 17-years-old, and I was walking to summer school. I was running a little bit late, so I decided to cut through the pass. I was almost at the end of the path and I heard something behind me…. He looked like a normal, everyday guy. He started dragging me back into the woods, and then he started strangling me. And then I thought, that’s it. I was going to die. I really thought I’d never see any of my family again. And when he was finished, I asked him, ‘What’s going to happen?’ And he told me, ‘Nothing.’ He almost sounded sorry. And then he left.”

Linda Yalem was the first victim to die

The reign of terror had only begun. A few months later, in June of 1988, the rapist was lying in wait as a 16-year-old girl walked to school along an isolated railroad track. According to Lieutenant P.W. Reinig of the Buffalo Police Department, once again the assailant double-wrapped a rope around his victim’s neck and taped her eyes shut:

“Almost a year later, another young girl was using this as a shortcut on her way to school. The same individual passed her and immediately afterwards double-wrapped a rope around her neck, gained control of her, and took her to the bush area. He forced her to place tape over her eyes. He bound her and sexually assaulted her.”

Altemio Sanchez was identified as the rapist

Within a few months, a fourth victim had been raped. Each described the rapist as a short, stocky man in his mid-30s who had a mustache. Four months passed. Then, he claimed a fifth victim in a secluded location in Amherst, New York. Captain Thomas Gould of the Amherst Police Department was one of the first investigators to arrive on the scene:

“He placed a rope around her neck. He wrapped it twice. She described him as a very powerful man. He lifted her over this fence and took her into the wooded area over here, where he bound her hands behind her back, and he placed surgical tape over her eyes. And at that point, he raped her.”

The assailant was described as stocky, with black hair and a black mustache. According to Captain Gould, he attacked two more victims in Amherst:

“A 32-year-old female was using this path early in the morning for exercise. As she got to this point right here, a rope was placed around her neck, and she was immediately rendered unconscious.”

The woman was found one hour later, still unconscious. Double-wrapped marks on her neck told police who they were dealing with. But this time was different. This time he nearly killed his victim.

22-year-old Linda Yalem was a student at the university in Buffalo when she crossed paths with the rapist. Linda was the seventh known victim, and she was the first to die. By Captain Gould’s account, Linda Yalem was left in the woods with her mouth and nose wrapped tight with duct tape:

“It was premeditated murder. He planned to kill her when he grabbed her that day. Once he put that tape over her nose and her mouth, there was no chance for survival.”

After Linda’s murder, the attacks stopped. Authorities wondered if the suspect had moved, gone to prison, or even died. Then four years later, in October of 1999, a 14-year old girl was raped in Buffalo. For Captain Gould and several other law enforcement officials, the reality of the serial rapist’s return proved difficult:

“This guy strikes so infrequently, he’s very hard to profile. Very, very difficult. He’s either got tremendous self-control, or else he’s hitting in other parts of the country that we’re not aware of.”

Update:

More than 20 years after the so-called “Bike Path Rapist” first struck, police arrested Altemio Sanchez, whose DNA matched samples found at the crime scenes. He was convicted of two murders and sentenced to 75 years to life. During their investigation, police learned that Sanchez had committed two other rapes in the same park where he claimed his first victim. They also discovered that an innocent man was serving a 35-year sentence for those two rapes. The wrongly convicted man, Anthony Capozzi, was finally set free after serving 21 years behind bars.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eight with Robert Stack and in season four with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Was an $11 million dollar armored car heist an inside job?

An armored car was robbed

The thieves took close to 11 million dollars

CASE DETAILS

Where did the thieves get a key?

On June 26, 1990, an armored car was on the way to a scheduled delivery in Rochester, New York. Inside the truck was nearly $11 million dollars in cash. Just after 7:00 AM, the armored truck made an unauthorized stop at a convenience store. The driver, Albert Ranieri, waited in the truck. A guard, who we will call Mary Wilson, went inside the store:

“We stopped there about once or twice a week and usually got about the same thing. And that morning there was no one in there when I walked in, it was just me and then a lady came in later on. It was normal.”

While Mary Wilson was buying coffee and doughnuts, a daring assault was unfolding just 100 feet away. A man in a Halloween mask put a gun to Albert’s head while another gunman forced his way into the back of the truck. Five minutes later, Mary Wilson returned to the truck, unaware that her partner was no longer in control:

“It happened so fast, I didn’t really get a chance to get scared. He pushed me to the floor and tied my hands and my feet together with plastic handcuffs.”

Albert Ranieri pleaded guilty to the heist

Albert Ranieri was forced, at gunpoint, to drive to a secluded location, one and a half miles from the convenience store. According to Captain Neil Flood of the Monroe County, New York sheriff’s department, the armored truck was followed by a gray van:

“One couldn’t have picked a better location. It was about 75 to 100 yards off the road and it completely disappears from sight behind a small hill. And we know that the site had been prepared prior to the robbery. There are several tree branches that had been freshly cut to make sure that this large vehicle would fit.”

Authorities believe that the two robbers were met at the location by at least one other accomplice. Albert Ranieri was bound and gagged and forced on top of Mary Wilson. There was little dialogue between the robbers. According to Mary Wilson, the money was transferred with brisk efficiency:

“I sat there quiet, making sure I didn’t hear anymore voices. I was scared for my life. I kept thinking about my son and I just thought I was going to die. That’s why I broke loose because I wasn’t going to sit there and wait for somebody to come back and kill me.”

It took Mary Wilson 15 painful minutes to rip through the plastic handcuffs. Unable to free her partner, she drove the armored truck to company headquarters and reported the robbery. In less than an hour, the thieves had made off with nearly $11 million dollars. The next day, the get-away van was discovered five miles away. The interior was littered with over $13,000 in small bills–the leftovers of what authorities have determined was the largest on-the-road armored car robbery in United States history. It looked like an inside job. A conveniently broken porthole allowed one robber to hold the driver at gunpoint, while the other used a key to get in through the truck’s side door. Both gunmen wore clothing which was nearly identical to the uniforms worn by company employees. Finally, only a limited number of people were aware of the enormous amount of untraceable cash being transported that day.

Update:

It was indeed an inside job. Albert Ranieri, the driver of the hijacked vehicle, was tried and found guilty of unrelated racketeering charges. But at that time he also pled guilty to the armored car robbery. Ranieri refused to name his accomplices. None of the $11 million has ever been recovered.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season four with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A dangerous fugitive eludes authorities in Northern California.

Arthur Lopez Jr.

Suspect:

Gender: Male
DOB: 12/30/80
Height: 5’9”
Weight: 170 lbs.
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Black
Defining Characteristics: Has the letters “Jr” tattooed on his upper-left arm and the letters “AL” tattooed on his upper-right arm.

CASE DETAILS

Carlos Hernandez

The south side of Milwaukee was home to a gang of drug dealers known as the Lopez Family. They owned seven houses in a two-block radius and used the location as headquarters for their drug empire. Anyone who got in their way had to face Arthur, the Lopez family’s hit man. When a rival gang called the Latin Kings tried to move in on their territory, a turf war erupted.

Carlos Hernandez was once a member of the Latin Kings. But according to his family, Carlos had recently left the gang and turned his life around. Gustavo Hernandez is Carlos’ brother:

“He had seen drive-bys, and he started to see how very rarely do they hit their intended target. They’ll hit innocent bystanders, kids playing on their bikes in front of their houses. He knew there was a possibility that it could happen to anybody, and he felt it would be best   if he got out of the gang and turned it around and really tried to help the neighborhood come back to what it was once before.”

Lopez was told to kill Carlos Hernandez

Carlos organized a youth basketball league and worked for a city organization that helps kids stay out of gangs. Det. Dave Klabunde of the Milwaukee Police Department described Carlos’ role in the organization:

“A major part of his job was to try and mediate problems between the gangs in that particular area. The Lopez family had come to Mr. Hernandez with a problem with the Latin Kings over territory.”

Lopez was a violent gang member

Police believe that Carlos tried to end the gang turf war, but was unsuccessful. So the hit man, Arthur Lopez, was told by the Lopez family to “take care of” Carlos. According to witnesses, Arthur Lopez and several family members surrounded the building where Carlos worked. According to Det. Klabunde, the gang had a predetermined code that would be broadcast over a radio when Carlos was spotted:

“The code was: ‘It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.’ And that code was put out when Mr. Hernandez left from his business to his vehicle.”

Authorities believe that around 4:30 pm, Arthur Lopez Jr. was alerted with the code. He put on a mask, hopped on a bike, and pedaled toward his unsuspecting target. Carlos was hit by eight bullets and died instantly in his car.

Though Arthur Lopez Jr. was the prime suspect in the killing of Carlos Hernandez, police had little evidence against him. Then Arthur made what seemed to be a small mistake. He got himself arrested for driving without a license. It would be the beginning of the end for the Lopez Family. While being processed at the police station, Arthur’s father, Arturo, showed up at the station and asked why his son was being harassed. Arturo was second in command of the Lopez gang.   Det. Klabunde said that Arturo was enraged:

“Arturo Lopez demanded the release of his son and threatened to return with a firearm and to kill all the police officers who were involved in Arthur Lopez Jr.’s arrest.”

Arthur could not be held on the traffic charge and was released. But his father, Arturo, was arrested and convicted of threatening a police officer. Arturo was sentenced to 18 months in jail. Det. Klabunde said it was the chance police were looking for:

“While Arturo Lopez was in prison, he made daily phone calls to his son and other members of the Lopez family, basically directing the continued narcotics distribution activities of the Lopez gang. All of these phone calls that were made by Arturo Lopez were recorded by the prison phone system, so there are recorded copies of all the conversations from both ends of the telephone.”

Lopez is wanted for three different murders

As authorities continued to build their case against the Lopez gang, there was another outburst of violence. According to witnesses, Arthur again played a key role. A known member of the Latin Kings named Maximillano Castillo and his girlfriend, Vanessa Rivas, returned home after a quick trip to the grocery store unaware that they were being followed.   Police believe that the driver following them was Arthur and that his passenger was another Lopez gang member named Luis Acevedo. Luis confronted Max and began shooting. Vanessa, a completely innocent bystander and just 15 years old, couldn’t escape the hail of bullets. Asst. District Attorney of Milwaukee County, David Robles, described the trauma:

“We know that Vanessa Rivas was hit once in the side. The bullet did a lot of damage, and she basically bled to death. Mr. Castillo was struck a number of times, at least three times, by the bullets fired by Mr. Acevedo. And he also died from his injuries.”

Authorities used Arturo’s taped phone calls from jail and eyewitness testimony of the shooting to obtain arrest warrants for Arthur and the rest of the Lopez family. A task force moved in to put the Lopez gang out of business for good. With a warrant secured, the police raided the homes of the Lopez family, seizing large stashes of guns, drugs, and cash. Eight people were arrested, finally ending the family’s crime wave.

Only one Lopez family member managed to escape the citywide dragnet: Arthur. Carol’s Hernandez’s brother wants him brought to justice:

“He’s got to pay.   He’s hurt so many people, families, and he’s a coward. He’s hiding. We need to get him off the streets.”

Update:

Arthur Lopez Jr. has finally been captured and convicted and sent to prison.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season twelve with Robert Stack and in season six with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season two with Robert Stack and season five with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.