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Was foul play involved in the death of an exotic dancer?

CASE DETAILS

Crystal Lene Spencer was raised in a small northern California town. At 17, she dropped out of high school and took a job to help support the family. In the summer of 1982, she moved to Los Angeles to chase her Hollywood dream. But she soon realized that stardom was not so easy to come by. Crystal reluctantly took a job as an exotic dancer to pay her bills. On a good night, she took home $400 in tips, but she never fully accepted the fact that she was basically a stripper. According to Crystal’s friend, Patti Jo Millhouse, the fact bothered Crystal:

“She would just start crying. Like she felt degraded about herself, of what she’d done.”

In May of 1987, friends invited Crystal to a barbeque. She was eager to socialize with people who might help with her acting career. It was there that she met Anton Kline:

“There was something very alluring and compelling about Crystal that would readily catch your eye. She knew that she would become, not only an actress, but she’d become a very famous actress, and it was just a matter of time.”

Anton Kline was an aspiring screenwriter and Ph.D. candidate. He and Crystal came from totally different backgrounds, but they soon fell in love. Anton took it upon himself to help Crystal broaden her horizons. Anton says he introduced her to art galleries, museums, and concerts:

“She loved classical music. She loved fine art. She wanted to know more about these other wonderful things of life that she had never been exposed to before.”

Anton had no idea that Crystal worked as a stripper. She walked a fine line, discovering art and culture by day, and working Hollywood’s dark side by night. Patti Jo said Crystal did her best to keep her night job a secret:

“Crystal loved Anton very much. She was very scared about him finding out, and she said, ‘Well, I better quit dancing then before he finds out.’”

Finally, four months after they met, Anton says he found out about Crystal’s other life:

“A neighbor saw her dancing at the club by the airport where she worked. And he said, ‘I saw that girl on stage.’ I said, ‘No, you couldn’t have.’ He said, ‘That was her.’ Of course it was her. And I was shocked.”

According to Patti Jo, Anton forgave Crystal:

“He was very upset, but he said it was OK. He accepted it. Which shocked her, and she didn’t know what to say.”

On Wednesday, May 4, 1988, Crystal was home sick with the flu. Anton stopped by and they talked about an offer she had received to work in Japan. The next night, Anton said he spoke the Crystal on the phone and she said she was feeling better:

“The conversation lasted about fifteen minutes. I said, ‘I’ll be in touch’, and she said OK, and I hung up the phone, and that was the last time I ever spoke with her.”

Three days later, Anton tried to reach Crystal by phone, but he kept getting a busy signal. An operator told him the receiver was off the hook. Anton said he just assumed that Crystal had left for Japan without saying good-bye:

“I was expecting, any day, to receive a very excited phone call from Crystal saying, ‘It’s wonderful here.’ And instead, I got a phone call from the Burbank police department.”

On Friday, the 13th of May, 1988, police had discovered Crystal’s decomposed body in her apartment. She appeared to have been dead for almost a week. Anton Kline was questioned:

“They at first just said she was found dead at her apartment and they wanted to know when I’d last seen her. And I said I last saw her Wednesday. They asked, ‘And how was she?’ I said, ‘Well, she had a cold.’ And they said they believe she died of natural causes.”

An autopsy revealed no trace of drugs or alcohol in Crystal’s system. There were no obvious signs of foul play or suicide. The coroner ruled that her death was a result of “undetermined causes.” Deputy District Attorney Robert L. Cohen:

“The body of Miss Spencer was in such an advanced state of decomposition, they were not able to ascribe the cause of death so they have no finding.”

Anton could not believe that Crystal had died of natural causes:

“When I last saw her, she was a young woman with a cold. I was suspicious because of the way I was told the body was found in an obscure corner of her apartment, nude from the waist down. And I learned that neighbors had heard terrible screams coming from her apartment, that someone had described as ‘the sounds of torture.’”

On May 7, three days after Crystal had been at home sick, two of her neighbors, Susan Akin-Taylor and Jet Taylor were woken up around 4 A.M. by a strange crying sound. According to Susan:

“I laid there thinking, ‘Someone’s being tortured. Someone’s being hurt. Something’s going on.’”

Jet Taylor:

“Susan was very adamant about calling the police, but out of my fear of what I heard, I didn’t want to get involved.”

Susan Akin-Taylor:

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live with the fact that I didn’t call the police. If I had, maybe she would still be alive.”

Crystal’s body was discovered a week after her neighbors heard the screams. They finally told their story to the police. Jet Taylor said the police officer seemed disinterested:

“He just took my statement and my name, asked me for my driver’s license, and that was it. And he was just very nonchalant about it.”

Crystal’s family requested to view the body several times, but the coroner’s office continually refused, claiming the body was in no condition to be seen. Anton was denied access to the police records. However, in September of 1988, four months after Crystal’s death, he was able to obtain the autopsy report. Anton says he was shocked by what he found:

“Crystal Spencer was barely five foot tall. The autopsy report claimed that she was an amazing five foot seven. Crystal weighed approximately 105 pounds. The autopsy claims the body is a well-nourished, 140 pounds. I was stunned. I said, ‘This is the not the body of Crystal Spencer. Where is the real body of Crystal Spencer?’”

Deputy District Attorney Robert L. Cohen:

“We do have the remains identified by fingerprints from two different agencies, and those really eliminate any possibility of the coroner’s autopsying the wrong remains.”

Anton has come to the conclusion that the police know more than they’re admitting:

“I was told by one law enforcement official, ‘Bad things happen to bad girls.’ And I said, ‘You mean, bad girls die of natural causes?’ And he said, ‘You know what I mean’, and hung up the phone on me.”

Two weeks after Crystal’s body was found, family and friends gathered for a private memorial service. Crystal’s ashes were scattered beneath the famous Hollywood sign. Anton Kline is still searching for the truth:

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Tony Lombardi’s family believes he was murdered… police say it was suicide.

CASE DETAILS

The Lombardis were a typical middle class family living in the Columbus, Ohio, suburb of Westerville.  But on August 30, 1990, Cheryl Lombardi, a housewife and mother, made a tragic discovery, one that would forever rip the family from the tranquility of suburban life.

Cheryl had come home at around midnight.  She assumed that her 22-year-old son, Tony, would also be home soon.  According to Cheryl, at around 12:45 AM, she heard a door closing and the sound of footsteps.  Cheryl went into Tony’s room to say goodnight.  It was there that Cheryl discovered the lifeless body of her son.  Police arrived shortly after at around 1:15 AM.  They discovered Tony’s car was missing from the garage, perhaps stolen by an assailant.  According to Sergeant Michael Hatzo, the investigation moved swiftly and by the book:

“Our normal procedure is to contact the detectives and have them come and we treat all death scenes as a homicide until we prove it otherwise.”

Inside, on the floor near the body, police found a .38 caliber semi-automatic pistol.  On the bed was a single, spent .38 shell.  Then, investigators found a drunk-driving citation in Tony’s pants pocket, which pushed the inquiry in an entirely new direction.  Two days before his death, Tony had been arrested for driving while intoxicated.  Detectives quickly solved the mystery of Tony’s missing car.  It had been impounded by Columbus police at the time of the arrest.  In addition, Tony had faced fines and possible suspension of his driver’s license.

To Sergeant Hatzo, a portrait had now emerged of a young man, stripped of his freedom and despondent over impending legal problems:

“Right now, everything that we have, any evidence that we have indicates Tony’s death was a suicide.”

But for Cheryl Lombardi, her son’s death was nothing short of cold-blooded murder:

“I believe that there was a struggle.  He had an inch and a half gash over his left eye.  He had a broken jaw, he had bruises.  And he was found nude.  He would never let anyone see him nude.  Those are all things that I think should have been looked into.” 

Based on her observations that morning, Cheryl believed that not only was her son murdered, but the killer was still in Tony’s bedroom, even as she moved about the house.  Her evidence is disarmingly simple: the light in Tony’s bedroom:

“Going up and down the steps you can see my son’s room and the door was closed and there was no light on.  Going up and down the steps as many times as I did, there is no way I could have missed the light being on.”

Cheryl assumed Tony’s light was turned off because he wasn’t home.  45 minutes later, she heard the door closing.  The light in Tony’s room was now on.  Cheryl assumed her son had finally come home:

“Then I opened the door and that’s when I found my son dead.” 

Who could have turned on the light?  Cheryl believed it was the killer who became trapped in Tony’s room when she arrived home:

“I believe that I surprised him, and then when I went to my bedroom to get ready for bed they thought that was a good opportunity for them to leave.  And I believe that’s what I heard, was someone leaving.”

To Tony’s parents, there was further evidence pointing to murder.  In the week before he died, Tony was the target of two different death threats.  A woman who lived next door witnessed the driver of a white pick-up truck screaming at Tony.  Tony’s father, Tony Lombardi Sr., overheard the second death threat just a few days later:

“I was checking my messages and I heard this threat on our voice mail, of a gentleman, a young person, telling Tony that he had a gun and was going to use if it Tony didn’t stay away from his girlfriend.  And at that point I brought that up to Tony and he said not to worry about it.”

Tony’s best friend, Andy Royer, agreed to mediate:

“I told Tony that, I’d talk to the guy and see what the deal was on it, and he said to me that his problem was not with me, it was with Tony, and that he would take care of it.  Tony would get what was coming to him.”

Tony’s parents disputed the official conclusions drawn from some of the physical evidence.  For Cheryl Lombardi, a test that revealed Tony had recently handled a metal object was problematic:

“He worked on a can line, downtown at the Columbus plant.  He handled cans daily.  Naturally, you would have metal on your hands from working with that.”

According to Tony’s father, the position of Tony’s body and the trajectory of the fatal bullet were also subjects of bitter controversy:

“The bullet hole does not make sense to me, unless there was some pressure on top of Tony holding him down, the bullet would have been much higher in the headboard.”

Finally, Cheryl says the county coroner found bruises on Tony’s chest, directly under his clenched hands.  To Cheryl, that is proof her son was forcibly held down by an assailant.

The last minutes of Tony Lombardi’s life remain clouded by controversy.  As far as the police are concerned, the 22-year-old took his own life, a conclusion supported by the county coroner, the sheriff’s department, and the district attorney.  His parents will never agree with that conclusion.

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Was Police Captain Michael O’Mara murdered with his own gun or did he commit suicide?

CASE DETAILS

To those who knew him best, Captain Michael O’Mara was the straightest of straight arrows. He was a devoted husband, a loving father, and the only officer in the Cook County Sheriff’s Police trained at the FBI Academy. In the 1960s, O’Mara became famous for leading raids on the Illinois Mafia.

By 1988, Michael had been moved to a desk job in the records department and was getting ready for a quiet retirement. It should have been the gentle twilight of a brilliant career, but it never happened.

On May 30th, 1988, a patrolman pulled into the private service area at the Cook County Courthouse to gas up his car. An unmarked police car was parked at the pump, with the gas nozzle in the tank. There was no officer in sight.

As the patrolman’s flashlight searched the lawn around the service area, he caught a glimpse of a gruesome scene. Michael O’Mara’s body was slumped over a rock in the middle of the lawn. He had been shot once through the forehead. His wallet and his briefcase had not been touched. There was no sign of a robbery.

James Houlihan, a Sergeant for the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department, was one of the first officers to arrive on the scene:

“You approach a death scene as… possibly a homicide initially… There was a gun to the right side of the… body near the right hand. And there was a very visible gunshot wound to the forehead. There was a flashlight found next to a rock that… we can identify as… his flashlight. The gun is his gun. And there was one… bullet that was discharged from that cylinder of that weapon… The victim’s pockets were intact. His money was intact. His car was intact. If you were going to weight this, there would be more… weight towards a suicide or an accident than there would be towards… a murder.”

Two weeks after Michael O’Mara died, the Coroner determined his death was a suicide. Michael’s friends and family felt there had been a rush to judgment. Despite the coroner’s ruling, they were convinced that Michael had been murdered.

The last person known to see Michael alive was his wife Barbara:

“Right before he left, he said he was gonna stop on the way back to get yogurt and he asked everybody what… flavor they wanted. And of course the day before payday and he didn’t have any money in his wallet, so he asked me for some money to go. Why would… he take my last couple of dollars to get the yogurt if he was planning on not coming back. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Barbara hired Dr. Vincent DiMaio to review the coroner’s findings and the events leading up to Michael’s death:

“In this case, you can take any isolated fact and say it can be consistent with suicide. The problem… is the whole scenario when you look at that, it’s not that of a suicide. There was no financial problems, no personal problems, no fatal disease. That does not completely rule out suicide, but it kind of makes the conclusion that a death is suicide a little more difficult.”

Based on his investigation, Dr. DiMaio believes that Michael was murdered:

“The evidence at the scene suggests that Mr. O’Mara began to fill the tank of his car when he saw or heard something in field. He then took the gun from his briefcase and went to investigate. When he got into the field, he met somebody or a number of people and he was shot.”

William Burke was the Chief of the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department:

“When our investigators went to the scene and they looked in the field, it didn’t appear that there was any… evidence of a struggle.”

If Michael O’Mara was murdered, what was the motive? Could it have been a long lost enemy from the past? The police still stay Michael’s death was a suicide and consider the case closed.

But Dr. DiMaio points to one additional fact that he believes rules out suicide:

“When people shoot themselves, they tend to put the gun firmly against the head at the time of discharge. In this case the muzzle of the weapon was between two and four inches away from the skin and you could see that by the powder tattooing on the skin around the entrance wound.”

According to Chief William Burke, Michael knew what he was doing when he pulled the trigger:

“He may have chosen to have it not be a contact wound because… he taught homicide investigation. I mean he… taught courses and he taught about suicides. So he knows if he wanted to make it look like something other than it was, he may have deliberately done that.”

What happened to Captain Michael O’Mara on the night of May 30th, 1988? Is it possible he chose to end his own life? Or is his killer still at large? His friends and family believe the answer is obvious. Michael O’Mara was not a man to commit suicide.

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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.

Did a government scientist jump to his death from a New York hotel? Or was he pushed?

CASE DETAILS

In the early morning hours of November 28, 1953, a crowd gathered outside of New York’s Hotel Statler. A man had apparently jumped to his death from a 13-story window. The victim was later identified as a government scientist named Frank Olson. Olson left behind a wife and three small children. His sons are now grown men and are still trying to find out what really happened to their father.

According to Nils Olsen, Frank Olsen’s son, Frank worked at Fort Detrick, Maryland, headquarters for the military’s biological warfare research and development program, also known as germ warfare.

“My father was a research scientist who was involved with germ warfare, associated with the SO division, which stood for Special Operations. That was the most top secret kind of research that was done out at Fort Detrick, and some of that research was being done in coordination with the CIA.”

Nils said that two weeks before his death, his father went to a three-day conference with some of his colleagues and came home a changed man:

“The weekend after that meeting my father was severely depressed. He felt that he did something terribly wrong. And he told my mother he had done something wrong but he couldn’t tell her what and she asked him whether or not he had broken security. And he indicated that he would never do such a thing, but he felt that he had done something terribly wrong.”

Frank’s boss, Vincent Ruwett, told the Olsons he believed Frank was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Just before Thanksgiving, Ruwett took Frank to New York for treatment.

In New York, Frank shared a hotel room with Dr. Robert Lashbrook, a CIA scientist. Eric Olson, another of Frank’s sons, said that nearly a week passed before they finally heard from their father:

“My father seemed a little more peaceful than he had. He made a call to my mother to say he was all right. They went to sleep fairly early, about 11. And the next thing we know from Lashbrook is that he was awakened by the sound of crashing glass.”

Frank Olson was dead at the age of 43. Investigators determined that he had either jumped or fallen to his death, something a young Eric Olsen had trouble reconciling:

“I remember as a nine year old, and actually for years after that I was completely stumped and dumbfounded by trying to resolve that alternative. There’s a big difference between a fall or a jump and I couldn’t understand how either of them could’ve occurred.”

The night manager of the hotel, Armond Pastore, found Frank’s death suspicious as well:

“I rushed out to find Frank Olson, eyes wide open, looking straight at me, trying to tell me something. He was definitely trying to speak but there was nothing coming out but grumbles. He was in terrible condition. And I stepped back because now I had to find out where he came from. I looked up the building and finally I saw a little movement of a window shade. And when I concentrated on that, then I see that the window shade was stuck through a broken window.”

Armond said he immediately took the police to Room 1018A:

“And here is Lashbrook sitting on a john in his skivvies and the police thought to question him and I heard him say, ‘Well all I heard was a crash.’ I walked around the room to look around. Nobody ever jumps through a window. They open the window and they go out, not dash through a shade and a sheer drape. You know, there’s no sense to that.”

But the Olsons weren’t told about the doorman’s suspicions. They were told simply that Frank had a nervous breakdown and jumped out a window. And they believed that for the next 22 years.

In 1975, a government commission was formed to investigate past abuses committed by the CIA. Among other incidents, the official report made mention of a scientist who had plunged to his death from a hotel room ten days after being dosed with LSD. That scientist turned out to be Frank Olson.

A year and a half later, the Olson family received a formal apology from President Gerald Ford and a check from the government for $750,000. Nils Olsen recalled how he and his family met with then CIA Chief, William Colby:

“As a result of meeting with William Colby at the CIA, we were given what was supposedly a complete set of documents relating to the events of the last nine days of my father’s life. We learned that he had gone to a retreat in Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland with a group of other scientists. The principle of the meeting was that they were going to be discussing ongoing research, but in fact there were agents in the CIA who were meeting with them who decided that they were gonna give them each a dose of LSD without their knowledge or consent and then see what their reaction was.”

The Olsons learned that the LSD was slipped into an after-dinner liqueur by either Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, or by his deputy, Dr. Robert Lashbrook. The CIA reportedly feared that the Soviet Union might use LSD on captured CIA agents. Gottlieb believed that his “test” would prepare American spies for that possibility.

The laced drinks were served to eight of the ten scientists present. Some of them, including Frank Olson, were not warned about the test. Within an hour, the LSD began to take effect. According to Nils Olsen, when Gottlieb told the group that their drinks had been spiked with LSD, his father became angry.

“We understood that my father was quite agitated and was having a serious confusion with separating reality from fantasy.”

Less than a week later, Frank made his fatal trip to New York, supposedly suffering from a nervous breakdown. Frank was taken to see Dr. Harold Abramson, an LSD expert, who worked extensively with the CIA. Accompanying Frank were Robert Lashbrook and Frank’s boss, Vincent Ruwett.

Frank remained in New York, and over the next several days, made repeated visits to the doctor’s office. Eric Olsen says his family was dubious about the supposed treatment:

“It’s impossible to deduce what was accomplished in those meetings. And you certainly don’t see any indication that a treatment process was occurring. You can suspect that some kind of assessment process was going on, the process of which was more to protect the CIA’s interests than it was to help my father.”

Nils Olsen said his father was exhibiting strange behavior:

“One of the nights that my father was up in New York, he was having delusions that he was hearing voices and in the middle of the night. He woke up and went and threw all of his identification out and his money.”

Apparently, the pattern continued in the immediate aftermath of Frank’s death. For some unexplained reason, Robert Lashbrook never phoned for help. However, according to Armond Pastore, Lashbrook allegedly did make a disturbing call, which was overheard by the hotel operator:

“In those days all of the calls were manual. You call the operator and you tell her what number you want and she would dial it for you. And then she listened to see that you got connected. When the man in the room called this number he said, ‘Well, he’s gone.’ And the man on the other end said, ‘Well, that’s too bad.’ And they both hung up. I mean, what’s more suspicious than that? You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that there’s something amiss. Or, Hamlet said, ‘There’s something rotten in Denmark.’ I mean, I knew there was something rotten at the hotel that night.”

In 1993, Frank’s widow, Alice, passed away. Eric and Nils had their father’s body moved to rest beside her. But before Frank was re-interred, they asked forensic scientist, James Starrs, to perform an autopsy:

“Quite frankly, we had no idea what the condition of the remains would be after 41 years. We were delighted that the remains were in perfect condition for our analysis.”

As part of his overall investigation, Professor Starrs and his colleagues went to the old Hotel Statler. The first thing that Professor Starrs looked for was evidence that Frank had indeed, smashed through a window. According to Starrs:

“The medical examiner in New York who had done an external examination back in 1953 said there were multiple lacerations on the face and neck. At some point, he had to hit some glass. I cannot believe that he wouldn’t have gotten cuts in the lower extremities of his body, on the front of the legs. We don’t find any cuts.”

Eric Olson said the new finding is further proof of a continued cover up:

“Soon after that finding was made public, Lashbrook changes his story, which he’s held to for 40 years and suddenly now starts saying that he can’t remember whether the window, in fact, was open or closed.”

After years of research and investigation, the Olson family has become convinced that Frank Olson was murdered by agents of the US government. The Olson’s believe Frank was silenced because he had become extremely critical of illegal, top-secret programs and policies of the CIA and US government, with which his own research group was deeply involved. Frank Olson’s family hopes that someday the entire story will be exposed.

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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.

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When a woman is found dead from a shotgun blast outside her boyfriend’s home, police rule her death a suicide, but her parents believe she was murdered.

CASE DETAILS

On February 4th, 1986, at 7:53 p.m., a single shotgun blast ripped through a quiet Roanoke, Virginia, neighborhood. When police arrived, they found a woman’s body on the ground next to a car. Twenty-one year-old Rae Ann Mossor was pronounced dead at the scene with a shotgun wound to the chest. M. David Hooper was the chief of police for the City of Roanoke:

“When officers arrived at 7:57, they found a shotgun lying on the trunk of the car pointed in the direction of where the young lady would have been standing. She had dated a young man who lived in the house nearby. It was his car that she was lying beside.”

When police questioned Rae Ann’s boyfriend, he said that he and Rae Ann had an argument that ended with her saying, “What do I have to do to prove my love for you”? She then ran out the door. Three witnesses said she had threatened to kill herself. The police found no evidence of foul play and her death was ruled a suicide.

But Rae Ann’s parents believe they’ve found evidence proving that she was murdered, and they want an investigation. Ann Mossor is Rae Ann’s mother:

“When our daughter was murdered, she was charged and convicted of a crime she did not do to herself.  And the power within me and my husband both is to find out why, who, and what happened.”

When they examined police reports, Rae Ann’s parents discovered evidence that cast doubt on suicide as the cause of death. Rae Ann’s car was parked directly across the street from where she died. They discovered her car door was wide open, music was blaring from the radio, and her key was still in the ignition. She seemed to have left the car in a hurry.

The police found the 12-gauge shotgun lying on the trunk of the car. Rae Ann’s parents believe that if Rae Ann had shot herself, the weapon would have fallen to the ground beside her body. According to Ann Mossor, Rae Ann’s arm measured 29 inches, but the distance from the trigger of the shotgun to the muzzle was 36 inches:

“My arm length was very close to my daughter’s arm length. So I took a broomstick and measured it out to be able to push that trigger with my thumb and to be able to get it in after we’d seen the body diagram. I couldn’t reach it.”

On the night of Rae Ann’s death, authorities told her parents there would be an autopsy.  Two weeks later, Ann Mossor says, she and Ron discovered that it had never been performed or even requested. The Mossors had Rae Ann’s body exhumed. Finally, six months after her death, an autopsy was performed by Dr. David Oxley, the original medical examiner.

According to Oxley’s report, Rae Ann was killed by a contact wound to the chest, meaning the muzzle of the gun was against her skin. In addition, powder burns were found on Rae Ann’s left wrist. After the autopsy, the medical examiner declined to change the ruling of “suicide.” Ann Mossor wasn’t satisfied:

“There was nothing matching. Things weren’t adding up right, so that’s when we decided to get another opinion.”

The Mossors contacted Dr. John Butts, the Chief Medical Examiner for the State of North Carolina. Dr. Butts said his conclusions differed significantly from the findings of the autopsy:

“It seems like suicide is extremely unlikely. I could see that the muzzle of the weapon was several feet from her body at the time of the discharge. The appearance of the powder on her hand indicate that that hand was close to the muzzle of the gun at discharge, perhaps grabbing at the gun, perhaps holding the gun. Now, whatever was at the other end of that gun, I don’t know.”

Based on Dr. Butts’ findings, the medical examiner officially changed the manner of death from “suicide” to “pending.”  Still, Ann Mossor says, there was no investigation:

“We knew when we read Dr. Butts’ statement that it had to go on until we found out what happened.”

The Mossors set out to get a third opinion. They contacted Dr. Vincent DiMaio, one of the country’s leading forensic scientists:

“When I received the material that they had, I thought that the case had been screwed up.  The police had a pre-set notion as to what had happened and they just didn’t follow through with an investigation. The medical examiner should have performed an autopsy.  He should’ve been suspicious as soon as he saw the pattern of injuries. It’s not a contact wound. She couldn’t have inflicted it.”

According to test performed by Dr. DiMaio and an assistant, Dr. DiMaio showed that it was physically impossible for Rae Ann to have shot herself in the chest:

“This means that somebody else pulled the trigger. It’s possible that the reason her left hand was adjacent to the muzzle at the time it was fired was that she had grabbed it and was attempting to push the gun away at the time it was fired.”

Again, the Mossors asked for the investigation to be reopened. Again, their request was denied. Ronald Mossor is Rea Ann’s father:

“He was stonewalling.  He just would not do anything. He just was sitting on his buns and wasn’t doing anything.”

The Mossors next contacted R.J. Breglio, a ballistics investigator. He tried to figure out if Rae Ann could have accidentally discharged the gun by dropping it on the ground or hitting it against the car in anger. According to Breglio:

“The butt test is a test to see if by dropping or slamming the butt of the gun against the floor when it is cocked, if it could fire. I performed this time many times with the shotgun and I could not get it to discharge. In my opinion, I don’t see how it would have landed neatly on the trunk of that car. I think it would shoot off of the ground in whichever way it happened to fall.”

Again, the Mossors sent the new evidence to Donald Caldwell, the Commonwealth Attorney, and requested that the case be reopened. According to Ann Mossor,
all he did was acknowledge receipt of the letter and nothing more:

“I made a promise to my daughter, before that casket lid was closed. I said, ‘Rae Ann, if this is not what it looks like, if it takes me the rest of my life, I’ll find out what happened to you.’”

Three years after Rae Ann died, the state medical examiner changed the manner of death to “undetermined.” There has still been no investigation, and the medical examiner and Commonwealth Attorney declined to be interviewed for this story.

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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.

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Authorities believe a businessman’s death was suicide, while others believe he tried to buy his way out of contract killing and failed.

CASE DETAILS

On March 22, 1977, in Tucson, Arizona, escrow company owner Chuck Morgan left his home as usual, and then disappeared. Morgan was a potential witness in a state land fraud case involving a known organized crime boss. On March 25, three days later, Chuck stumbled back home at two in the morning. Chuck’s wife, Ruth Morgan, woke up to a thump at the back door:

“I was in bed and the dog started barking. I got up, went to the door and opened it and there was Chuck. He was missing a shoe and had one plastic handcuff around one ankle and a set around his hands. When he motioned to his throat, and didn’t say a word, I asked him, ‘Can you talk? Can you write?’ He shook his head, ‘yes,’ so I went and got a tablet and a pen. He wrote that his throat had been painted with a hallucinogenic drug and that the drug could drive him irrevocably insane or destroy his nervous system and kill him. I wanted to call a doctor and the police, but he was adamant that that would be signing a death warrant for the entire family.”

Over the next week, Ruth nursed her husband back to health. Before his voice returned, he began to hint to her that he had a secret identity as an agent for the federal government:

“He wrote, ‘They took my Treasury identification.’ That was the first I’d heard of it. Then he told me he had been working for them for about two or three years. And that was it.”

Was Chuck Morgan really a Treasury agent, secretly fighting organized crime? And who was it that abducted him?

In the 1970’s, the mafia established Arizona as a narcotics pipeline and a haven for money laundering. More than 500 racketeers set up shop there. What made Arizona attractive to crime syndicates was a state law which allowed anyone to buy up land through numbered blind trust accounts. This meant they could launder money and it couldn’t be traced.

Chuck Morgan had done real estate escrow work for at least one mafia family, and possibly helped with the purchase of gold bullion and platinum, a more convenient way to launder money. Journalist Don Devereux investigated Chuck’s story:

“He was around the edges of a couple of very large organized crime groups in Arizona at that time. It was very easy to get in over your head, and I suspect that over the years, Mr. Morgan was in that kind of situation. He was doing, perhaps, upwards of a billion dollars of escrow work in bullion and platinum. These were transactions that only existed on paper. He was a straight businessman that probably got a little a too close to the flame.”

Ruth knew little of her husband’s work:

“Chuck mentioned to me once that there was money laundering going on, but nothing that he himself was involved in. He told me, ‘The less the girls and you know, the better off you will be.’”

After his kidnapping, Chuck took no chances. He wore a bulletproof vest and made sure he was the only one who drove his daughters to and from school. But two months after his first disappearance, Chuck vanished again. Nine days later, Ruth Morgan received a mysterious phone call. An unidentified woman gave her a reference from the Bible:

“This woman said, ‘Ruthie?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘Chuck is all right. Ecclesiastics 12, 1 through 8’. And then she hung up.”

The passage reads, in part:

“Men are afraid of a high place and of terrors on the road. Remember him before the silver cord is broken and the golden bowl is crushed. Then the dust will return to the earth as it was and the spirit will return to God who gave it.”

Two days later, Chuck’s body was discovered. He was wearing his bulletproof vest and had died from a single bullet fired at close range into the back of his head. The bullet came from his own .357 magnum, which was lying beside him. The investigators also found a piece of paper with directions to the murder site written in Chuck’s handwriting, and a pair of sunglasses which definitely did not belong to him.

The police made one additional discovery. Chuck had clipped a $2 bill inside his underwear. Written on the bill were seven Spanish names, beginning with the letters A through G. Above them was the notation, “Ecclesiastes 12,” with the verses one through eight marked by arrows drawn on the bill’s serial number. This was the same Bible verse the mysterious female caller had given to Chuck’s wife. On the back of the bill, the signers of the Declaration of Independence were numbered one through seven, and there was a roughly-drawn map. The map led to an area between Tucson and Mexico, to the towns of Robles Junction and Salacity, both known for smuggling.

Despite the unusual evidence, many in the sheriff’s department believed Chuck’s death was a suicide. They claimed he had shot himself in the back of the head. Ruth believed otherwise:

“There is no way Chuck would’ve committed suicide, and if he had even contemplated suicide, he would’ve left a letter for his girls and for me.”

Don Devereux has his doubts as well:

“I’ve never seen, in all my years as a journalist, a fellow take himself out in the desert wearing a bulletproof vest and shoot himself in the back of the head.”

Two days after Chuck’s death, a woman called the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. She said Chuck had come to meet her at a local motel just before he died. The woman called herself “Green Eyes” and said she was the same person who had called Chuck’s wife, quoting the Bible passage. Green Eyes said that in the motel, Chuck had showed her a briefcase containing thousands of dollars in cash. He told her that the money would buy him out of a contract the mob had put on his life.

The theory goes that organized crime put the word out that they wanted Chuck dead. The hit man then told Chuck, who came up with money to buy off the hit man. But when the two of them met in the desert, the hit man killed Chuck anyway, and took his money. Don Devereux believes Chuck might have not fully realized who he was involved with:

“There is a great likelihood that Mr. Morgan was, in fact, doing something with the government. I think this was a guy who was extremely naïve about a lot of things. I think somebody blew his cover and he got killed.”

After her husband’s death, Ruth Morgan was visited by two men claiming to be from the FBI:

“They opened and closed their identification very fast. They said they wanted to come in and look through the house. They never said what they were looking for. And to this day, I don’t even know what they were looking for.”

The men tore the house apart, looking for something that they never found. Ruth was so upset she didn’t write down their names. No one knows for sure if the men really were from the FBI. Don Devereux contacted the FBI to get more information on the Morgan case:

“When I made a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI, they had never heard of Mr. Morgan, despite the fact that they obviously opened an investigation, despite the fact the FBI interviewed Mr. Morgan’s attorney. They were all over this thing like a blanket for a while. But now they’ve never heard of the guy. He never existed. No card, no file, no nothing.”

If Chuck Morgan was doing undercover work for the government, Don Devereux believes the clues he wrote on the two dollar bill might have been an attempt to pass coded messages to the FBI:

“I think the $2 bill provided the basis for some kind of a code. What seemed to be missing, however, was the document that the $2 bill would unlock. If he was quietly providing assistance to the U.S. government and monitoring the activities of one or more major organized crime families, then he wasn’t a villain. He was a good guy. And they need to know that.”

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

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During the search, investigators found writings, audio tapes, and biological evidence that they believe are connected to Shane and Sally’s murders.

Gilbreath has not been charged in connection with the murders, but has been named as a person of interest.

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

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A skull found in a restaurant flower box reignites debate over whether a Missouri man orchestrated his wife’s disappearance.

CASE DETAILS

In Bridgeton, Missouri, at the Casa Gallardo Restaurant, two women having lunch noticed something strange outside the window. There, in the bushes, was a human skull. Police Chief Walter Mutert described the bizarre scene:

“It’s a very well-manicured area. Plants and gravel and what have you.  And the way it was situated, it would give one the impression that, you know, somebody put it there so you would see it. During that time period, there was the relocating of a cemetery that was in the area, and a lot of bodies were being exhumed, graves were being moved, so it gives you the impression now that this may be a prank, and there would be no reason to suspect that there was any foul play.”

The skull, determined to be from an adult woman, went into the evidence room at the morgue and was soon forgotten. One year later, at a police station 25 miles away, a mysterious letter arrived.  It stated, “The Bridgeton Police have L. Sherman’s skull.”
Dental records showed the skull was, in fact, that of Linda Sherman, a 27-year-old wife and mother who had been reported missing five years earlier, on April 22, 1985.

A missing person’s case suddenly became a puzzling murder mystery with many unanswered questions: What motive would someone have for leaving Linda Sherman’s skull outside the restaurant? Where was the rest of her body? And, most importantly, who was responsible for her death?

Linda was only 17 when she married Don Sherman, her high-school sweetheart. When her daughter Patty was born, Linda could always count on her mom to watch the baby while she completed her senior year. Don Sherman said he took a job at a local gas station to support his new family:

“It was hard, but it was rewarding. We were very happy together. The relationship was rocky later on in our marriage, but not in the early years.”

Money problems and working opposite shifts at their jobs strained the relationship. During the 10-year marriage, Linda took Patty and moved out several times, but the couple always reconciled. According to Linda’s older brother, Dennis Lutz, Don was obsessed with knowing Linda’s every move:

“Don was very possessive of her. She said, ‘When I get off of work, if I’m not home within five minutes, he wants to know what’s goin’ on, who are you seein’?  What are you doin’ out that late?’ He was always hitting her and things just weren’t right.”

Linda told her family that she was afraid of Don’s violent temper. According to Sam Miller, Linda’s brother-in-Law, Linda once got a restraining order to keep Don away:

“She’d already made the decision to move out. She had filed for divorce. She had definitely made plans to start a new life.”

On April 22nd, 1985, Linda left her night job at around two in the morning. Don Sherman offered his account of that night:

“She didn’t come home from work until about 3:00 in the morning. We got into an argument about the fact that she wouldn’t tell me where she’d been.  And we stayed up until at least 4:00 in the morning discussing that.”

Linda was lying on the sofa later that morning when her daughter Patty left for school:

“She always took me to school, but my dad took me to school that day. And I remember her laying on the couch with her face to the back of the couch. And she didn’t get up. She didn’t get up to kiss me good-bye. She didn’t say anything to me. She was just laying there.”

That would be the last time Patty ever saw her mother. Don claimed that when he returned to the house that afternoon, Linda was on edge:

“When I came back home, Linda was still there. She should’ve been at work by then. And she was mad ’cause she was running late.”

Don says Linda drove off at about 6 p.m., but there are no witnesses that saw her leave.  Linda never arrived at work and never returned home.  Don claimed to know nothing about her disappearance:

“When she didn’t come back, I assumed it was typical of the previous times that she had left and I thought that she took off with somebody.”

Linda’s brother, Sam, said he knew Linda had met a violent end:

“We knew that if she left, there’s no way she’s leaving without the daughter. And the daughter was still at home, and so there was definitely foul play.”

Linda’s parents insisted that Don go to the police station to file a missing person’s report. Meanwhile, Sam and Fran searched frantically for Linda. On a hunch, according to Sam, they headed to the local airport:

“As we pulled into the short-term parking, why, there’s Linda’s car sitting right there. We went to look inside the car and we could see her schoolbooks and her hat and everything.  So we contacted the airport police. And they came, and the car was locked, but they tried the trunk, and the trunk was open. They’d said, ‘Well, we fully expected Linda to be in there.’  And she wasn’t.”

Don claimed he saw Linda with another man in the days after her disappearance. He said that she drove past him in a van and quickly ducked out of sight.  Don’s sighting was the last time anyone reported seeing Linda. Five years later, when the skull turned up at the restaurant, no one even thought it might be Linda’s. In what seems like a bizarre coincidence, Don revealed that the restaurant was one of his favorite hangouts:

“I was at the restaurant that evening, after the skull had been found. I’d heard about it that day, when it happened, but never any connection to it until later on.”

No one made a connection until a year later, when the mysterious letter arrived at the Vinita Park police station. Lieutenant Michael Webb interpreted the display of Linda’s skull as a brazen message from her killer:

“I was rather astounded. It was obvious to me that someone wanted us to know that we had obviously missed something and was trying to tell us that Linda’s remains had been recovered.”

Don Sherman said he was just as incredulous as anyone:

“It was scary. And somebody that put those remains here at the restaurant obviously knew me, or knew that I hung out there. We’re not talking about a place that I casually visited. We’re talking about a place that I would visit two, three times a week.”

Was it possible that the killer placed the skull there to threaten Don?  Or did Don have a reason to put it there himself? Some speculated that Don wanted to remarry and needed proof that Linda was dead.  Only one thing is certain: for Don, the skull provided the perfect piece of evidence. But for Linda’s daughter Patty, the find was devastating:

“When the skull was found, I just kinda lost all hope in life.  I didn’t know that she was dead.  I guess there was always some hope that she had just left.”

For Lt. Michael Webb, the evidence pointed in only one direction:

“The only suspect that I’ve been unable to eliminate is Don Sherman. At this point in time, he has never been ruled out as a suspect.”

Don’s daughter Patty doesn’t see how it can be any other way:

“In my heart, I think that he might’ve done it. You know, I can’t think of anybody else who would’ve.”

And Don Sherman has never stopped proclaiming his innocence:

“I had nothing to do with Linda Sherman’s disappearance or her death. I still think that she left with someone and obviously met with foul play and died.”

Police hope new technology in soil sampling will someday lead them to Linda’s body and, eventually, her killer.

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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.

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A father’s search for his missing son leads him to believe the local police department covered up his death.

CASE DETAILS

On April 2, 1988, 30 volunteer firemen gathered on a steep bluff overlooking the Monongahela River just south of Pittsburgh in Baldwin Borough, Pennsylvania. At the suggestion of a psychic, they were there to search for the remains of Michael Rosenblum, a young Pittsburgh man who had been missing for more than eight years.

For Michael’s father, Maurice, the search was another desperate attempt to find out what happened to his son, who disappeared on Valentine’s Day 1980, from a road that runs along the foot of the cliff. According to Maurice:

“There is not the slightest possibility in my mind that he could be out there alive. I pray that that one-in-ten million chance would happen. I guess you always have some hope.  As long as I don’t have a body, there’s always hope.”

During high school, Michael began experimenting with drugs and soon became a heavy user of prescription painkillers. His life spun wildly out of control, and his family struggled to help him get back on track. They insisted that he go to drug rehab.

On the night of February 13, 1980, a month after Michael was released from drug rehab, he began behaving oddly. His mother, Barbara, found a bottle of painkillers in his bedroom, and she kicked him out. Michael left with his girlfriend, Lisa, in her car. According to Barbara Rosenblum:

“I said to Michael, ‘Don’t come back until you’re completely off drugs, until you want to live your life the way you should. And that’s the way it is.’  I have always faulted myself for that. And I probably will ‘til I die, that I didn’t say, ‘Okay, well, we’ll try again, maybe tomorrow will be different.’”

But the next day wasn’t different. After a night of partying, Michael became extremely agitated. He insisted on driving Lisa’s car. Then he left her stranded at a local gas station.  Michael’s last words were, “Go to my parents’ house.  I’ll see you there in two hours.”  Michael’s father, Maurice, said he thought his son would return:

“I figured, ‘Well, he took her car and he took off for a day or two.  He’ll be back or he’ll call.’  We waited that night. There were no calls. I became seriously worried. My wife felt immediately that it was a terminal situation and that he was dead. I didn’t.”

Michael’s mother said it was not characteristic of her son to disappear:

“He would never have just left. When he left, there was money in his bank account. His clothes were in his closet, and if he was going to go anywhere, he would’ve said to us, ‘I plan to do such-and-such and I’m going to take my money and go.’ But his money’s still in his bank account.” 

The following day, the Rosenblums filed a missing persons report with the Pittsburgh Police Department. Private Investigator Stephen Tercsak was a detective for the department at the time Michael vanished:

“You need a starting point. In any homicide case, your dead body is your starting point.  In this case, the car would’ve been your starting point. So it’s important that we find the car as quickly as possible and then take the steps to notify the media for their help, and ask the general public if anybody saw the boy who was in the car, or if they know what happened to him.”

But after two weeks, they had found nothing. So Michael’s father began his own search.  He offered a reward for information, posted flyers, and traveled as far as California to find friends Michael might have contacted. Maurice said that he hoped to find his son and “put him on the right track again.”

Three months later, on May 21, 1980, police in a Pittsburgh suburb notified Lisa that her car had been found. Official records show that the car had been impounded on the very day that Michael vanished. Maurice said he was shocked:

“We couldn’t believe they had that car for 91 days. Absolutely couldn’t believe it. The Pittsburgh police had contacted every police department in this area looking for that specific car. And here that car was discovered in the police-bonded tow yard, less than three miles from where we’re sitting right now.”

According to police reports, just two hours after Michael left Lisa, a Baldwin Police unit found the car on River Road. Two of the tires were flat, the keys were gone, and the engine was cool. The car had been towed to the Baldwin Borough car impound, where it remained, resting on its bent tire rims, for the next three months.  According to private investigator Tercsak:

“If we knew that car was on River Road, the whole picture would’ve changed drastically.  If we had known that car was found in Baldwin that morning, within hours, I strongly believe we would’ve known by now what had happened to Michael.”

When Maurice found out that the police had found the car, he said that he immediately thought his son was dead. He demanded an explanation. The Baldwin police claimed that they’d mailed Lisa a letter the day after the car was found, saying they had impounded it.  Lisa says she never received it. They eventually produced a copy of the letter dated the day after Michael disappeared. But Lisa still insisted she never received a letter from the Baldwin police. Maurice Rosenblum suspected a police cover-up:

“In my opinion, they deliberately misled the Pittsburgh police in the search, assuming that my son was never even involved. Why didn’t they search for the young lady that owned the car? Because all this was done to cover a more sinister fact, that’s why.”

Around that same time, Maurice claims that he received two anonymous phone calls:

“The first, they said that Michael was arrested. And I wrote it off as a crackpot. After the car was found, I received a second telephone call, just simply said that, ‘Your son was arrested by the Baldwin Police.’ Click. They were gone.”

Maurice offered a reward for information about Michael. But after five months, the only concrete clues were the discovery of the car and the two anonymous phone calls. Then, on July 15, 1980, a shocking turn of events: the Baldwin Police issued a warrant for Michael’s arrest. They claimed he was wanted in connection with a robbery that had taken place two and a half months after he had vanished. According to private investigator Tercsak:

“Now the big twist in this whole thing was that everybody that has talked to the people who were the victims of the robbery, they both told everyone from day one that the person that came in there was a white man and he had aviator mirrored sunglasses on that covered right above his eyebrows and down almost to the bridge of his nose. So the only part they actually could see would be the forehead and the chin line. But yet the composite was made without sunglasses. There was no doubt in my mind that this composite was made from that first flyer put out on Michael Rosenblum back in February.  It’s just too perfect.”

One week after it was issued, the warrant was suddenly dismissed. Something very strange was going on in the borough of Baldwin.  Were the Baldwin police working to solve this missing person case, or were they trying to hide the truth?  A full inquiry into the case cleared the department of any wrongdoing. But years later, new evidence emerged.

Six-and-a-half years after his son disappeared, Maurice Rosenblum received an unsigned letter. It urged him to talk to a former Baldwin police dispatcher named Margaret Haslett.  The tip ultimately led to accusations that the department, headed by Police Chief Aldo Gaburri, had mishandled Michael’s case. According to Margaret:

“Mr. Rosenblum showed me an anonymous letter that he had received indicating that if he contacted me, I had information regarding the vehicle that the Baldwin police towed.  I then told him that approximately two or three months after the vehicle had been towed, the chief of police ordered his clerk, Fred Cappelli, to type a letter notifying the owner of the vehicle, that it had been towed. And the letter was backdated to February 15, the day after the vehicle was towed.”

The chief’s former clerk, Fred Cappelli, confirmed Margaret’s disturbing story:

“Approximately May 20, the chief told me to type a letter in reference to the car that was towed from River Road. I never thought anything about it. I did what I was told to do.  You know, he’s my boss. So I did what he told me to do. And I didn’t question it.”

Fred claims that after he typed the letter, the Chief ordered him to sign the name of Chester Lombardi, the senior officer at the River Road scene that day.  Lombardi is now deceased.  According to Fred Cappelli:

“He had asked if Chester Lombardi had signed the letter, and Chester refused to sign it because it was backdated. So the chief told me to go ahead and sign Chester Lombardi’s name to it, but don’t mail it. Put it in the file. And that’s what I did.”

Based on these new revelations, Maurice wrote an angry letter to the Baldwin Borough Council, demanding an investigation into what he thought was a cover-up.  The Council held a hearing on the matter and dismissed Chief Gaburri for interfering with the investigation into Michael’s disappearance. But the Civil Service Commission voted to reinstate Gaburri as police chief, finding there was no misconduct. They have never published a transcript of their hearings, but clearly they didn’t believe Fred Cappelli.  Fred thinks it’s because the chief had friends on the commission.  At the time, the secretary of the Civil Service Commission was Robert C. McFall:

“There’s been some innuendos made about the way it was handled, and all I can say is this commission rendered its decision strictly on the evidence and the testimony that was presented at the hearing.”

In April 1988, eight years after Michael disappeared, a bone fragment and some scraps of clothing were found near River Road. The bone couldn’t be identified, but the pieces of clothing matched those Michael had been wearing. Maurice Rosenblum:

“I’d contended all along that something had happened. The possibility that I might have proof in my pocket makes you kind of sick.”

The final proof was discovered four years later. A hiker in the River Road area found a piece of human skull and turned it in to authorities. Tests confirmed that it belonged to Michael Rosenblum. After 12 years of searching and wondering, Michael’s parents were finally able to bury their son. But for them, the agony isn’t over. They still want to know how and why Michael died.

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

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Police rule suicide when a man is found with a gun on his lap and a bullet in his head, but some experts conclude it’s murder.

CASE DETAILS

It’s a situation every parent dreads. Larry and Lois Williams hadn’t heard from their son, Danny, in nearly two days. So Larry decided to drive over to Danny’s house to see what he could find. After he let himself in with his own key:

“I kept calling Danny’s name, saying, ‘Danny! This is your dad, this is me coming in!’ Because he did have a gun in the house for protection, and I didn’t want to be in a situation where he was asleep and shot his own dad.”

As he entered the den, it was clear to Larry that Danny was dead:

“He was sitting on the couch in an upright position with a bullet in his head and a gun in his lap. So the comment that I made as I went through the door was, ‘Oooh, Dan, don’t let this be what it looks like.”

Twenty-three year-old Danny Williams was Larry and Lois’s youngest son. He managed distribution for the family’s multi-million-dollar apparel manufacturing company.

Larry Williams called the Galesburg Police. Chief John Schlaf described the police’s appraisal of the scene:

“The position of the body, the type of wound, the absence of any specific evidence of foul play indicated to us that the gunshot wound could have been self-inflicted and caused us to classify the case as a suicide.”

Larry Williams hired private detective, Mike Turnquist, to investigate. Soon, he had something to report; the police said Danny died very early Saturday morning. But a neighbor named Darlene Sayrs told Turnquist that she had seen Danny alive a full eight hours after the time of death:

“I shouldn’t admit it, but I watch everybody’s business. It was Saturday morning that I saw Danny get in the car with this woman. So naturally, being nosy as I am, I looked her over real good. She had dark hair; she would’ve been between 25 and 30.”

The police dismissed the account, saying Mrs. Sayrs had her days mixed up. It was already established that Danny had been picked up by his mother on Friday, the day before he died. But Darlene did not change her account:

“No. It was not Friday, it was Saturday. And the lady in the blue car was too young to have been his mother.”

Other witnesses noticed activity at Danny’s house on Sunday, 24 hours after he died. According to Chief Schlaf, at least one person reported seeing a young man with curly brown hair, approximately five feet, four inches tall. But Schlaf thinks the witness got something wrong:

“Eyewitness testimony can easily be mistaken, it’s as simple as that. They may have seen some activity there, but it’s a distinct possibility that the days may have been confused as to when they had seen that movement.”

Danny’s father claims that some of the physical evidence turned up by police argued against suicide. The bullet that supposedly killed Danny exited through his head and lodged in the wall. When the police removed the bullet, there was only one small spot, which appeared to be blood, on the paneling. Private investigator Michael Turnquist finds this suspicious:

“With the head being that close to the wall, you most certainly would expect to find larger, massive amounts of blood splatter, either at or near the back of the couch, and most certainly on the back wall.”

By now, Larry Williams was convinced his son had been murdered. He brought in independent forensic scientist, Mark Boese:

“I had this feeling that I was gonna go out, see the house, see a typical messy scene, and tell Larry that, ‘I think your son committed suicide.’ But we get to the house, and there’s a lack of evidence to support the suicide.”

Mark Boese used a laser luminescence scanner to look for blood evidence invisible to the naked eye. He found significant samples in several places, even on the television set:

“If Danny had just shot himself sitting there, you definitely would not have a pattern at all behind the TV set, and there’s nothing to indicate Danny got up after shooting himself and walked around. So someone else obviously dropped the blood droplets everywhere else that we found.”

Blood analysis later revealed the presence of two different bloods types in the house.
Danny’s blood was type B. Mark Boese found type B and type O blood in the den, where Danny’s body was. Boese also found type O in the bathroom, as well as inside the pocket of Danny’s jeans. Forensic serologist Cecilia Guzman says it’s not physically possible for both blood types to be Danny’s:

“It’s an impossibility. This evidence suggests to me that two people in the room were bleeding. Two separate individuals.”

The official police position was that the alleged type O blood samples were compromised by the crime scene clean-up crew. Samples of the blood were submitted to the Illinois State Crime Lab for testing. However, according to Cecilia Guzman, the lab claimed that the samples could not be definitively typed:

“I could guarantee you; send that evidence to five different independent laboratories that have no idea what this case is about, that this was a murder or a suicide or anything, and they will come back with type B blood and type O blood.”

Chief John Schlaf was confident in his lab’s results:

“We feel just strongly about the results of the Illinois State Crime Lab, that there was no evidence of a type O blood in that home.”

According to Larry Williams, Mark Boese’s investigation appeared to turn up one new piece of evidence that undercut the police theory and supported his theory that the blood of two different people was in Danny’s house:

“Mark was processing the room. He opened the couch up and a shell casing fell out. Later tests showed that this shell did come from Danny’s gun, and it had been recently fired, so there were two shells found on the couch that came from Danny’s gun.”

Private Investigator Mark Boese:

“Danny’s gun was laying on his lap, his hand was laying on top of the gun, just as if he shot it and then set it back down. It’s a little inconsistent with a suicide.”

Next, Boese tried to match the bullet path to Danny’s position on the couch. According to Boese:

“The body would have gone forward. The body wouldn’t have moved back into the position it was in, and the gun probably would not have been in his lap. It probably would be on the floor or the coffee table.”

Mark Boese now believes that Danny was probably not shot in his house. Here’s how it might have happened: there was a fight somewhere else that left Danny and another person bleeding. That person took Danny’s keys out of his pocket, leaving behind a trace of type O blood, and drove Danny’s body back to his house. There, the crime scene was arranged to make Danny’s death look like suicide. But Chief Schlaf is not convinced:

“We can advance theories all day long, everyone can. But the factual data that we’ve gathered, we feel comfortable with.”

Larry Williams was certain that the evidence points to foul play:

“The investigators, crime labs, and what have you, that I’ve had working on this from the beginning, as soon as they went into the house and saw the evidence that was in there then, and is still in there now, were convinced, as I was, that it was cold-blooded murder.”

Was Danny Williams murdered or did he kill himself? The official coroner’s report lists Williams’ cause of death as “Uncertain.”

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

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A young couple vanishes after a frightening car crash in South Dakota.

CASE DETAILS

On the morning of December 12, 1992, a car stopped at a remote intersection at the edge of the Yankton Sioux Indian Reservation in Lake Andes, South Dakota. It was cold and the road was icy.

The driver was 20-year-old Arnold Archambeau. One of the passengers was his girlfriend, 19-year-old Ruby Bruguier. The other passenger was Ruby’s cousin, 17-year-old Tracy Dion. All three had been drinking when the car crashed in a frozen ditch.
Tracy recalled what happened:

“We came up to that stop sign. That’s all I remember is just him looking and, saying there are no cars and him spinning out from the stop sign. And it was just like the snap of a finger and the next thing you know, we ended up in the ditch. I was upside down in the ditch and Ruby and I was in the car you know. Arnold wasn’t in the car. I don’t know where he was. Ruby was crying. She was saying oh my God, oh my God. She just kept hitting the car. The next thing I know, the door, it was open a little ways and she had enough room where she slid out. And then so I was going to reach over and then it was just like that, the door went shut.”

By the time help arrived, Tracy was the only person still in the car. For some unexplained reason, Arnold and Ruby had abandoned her.

By daybreak, the police had already searched the area. Although the ice underneath the car was frozen solid, they feared that Arnold and Ruby had wandered off and fallen through the ice at another location.

Bill Youngstrom was a Deputy for the Charles Mix County Sheriff’s Department at the time of their disappearance:

“We walked around the ice part. We had one officer walk on the opposite side of the railroad tracks, thinking maybe they wandered off toward the lake area, which was also frozen. I’ve been to a number of accidents where there hasn’t been somebody around. The driver hasn’t been there, no passengers there. And a lot of times it’s because they’ve been partying. Out drinking. I mean we do have a DWI law. That was initially my first thought. Maybe Arnold was out drinking and didn’t want to get arrested, so we figured he’d show up in a few days.”

Arnold’s aunt, Karen Tuttle, did not accept that theory:

“I knew he wouldn’t hide, he would’ve come home to us or called us and told us I’m over here don’t worry about me. But we never heard anything from him.”

Over the next three months, Deputy Youngstrom investigated every possible lead. Day after day he came up empty. Then the spring thaw arrived. In early March, a passing motorist saw a body in the ditch, just 75 feet from the accident site. It was Ruby Bruguier. Deputy Youngstrom witnessed a gruesome scene:

“Her glasses were missing. Both shoes were missing. Her clothes were in tact. It appeared to be the same clothes that she had on the night of the accident. But the body was very decomposed. It was hard to recognize. And in fact we had to get down to look at a tattoo to get a positive identification of the body. At that time, our department decided that we would start pumping the ditch out. And about noon the next day we found the body of Arnold submerged in the water, about 15 feet away from where we found Ruby. Arnold’s body was very well kept. His skin color was fine. He was not frozen to the ground. The clothes were not frozen to the ground. There is a question mark as far as in our investigation if he was wearing the same clothes that he was the night of the accident.”

The bodies were immediately autopsied but there was no way to determine the time of death. The coroner concluded that Arnold and Ruby had both died of exposure. But Deputy Youngstrom suspected foul play:

“Death by exposure is like they froze to death. I cannot actually buy that. They may have froze to death. But they didn’t freeze to death at that ditch. It’s impossible that they could have been there the entire three months. I myself personally walked that ditch several times during that period. I’ve gotten written affidavits from people that’s also watched, walked it, people that have nothing to do with the case. They couldn’t have been there. They couldn’t have missed.”

Deputy Youngstrom was further baffled by the discovery of two items that seemed to support the theory that Arnold and Ruby had not died in the ditch:

“We found a tuft of hair alongside the road. This hair was later determined by the forensic laboratory to belong to Ruby Bruguier. That hair couldn’t have stayed there for three months. In my opinion, it was when whoever brought the bodies back to the ditch, that’s when that piece of hair fell off of Ruby. At the time we pulled Arnold’s body from the ditch, I found a set of keys in his pocket, the keys were a car or vehicle key. And what appeared to be two house keys. I still have these keys in my possession. And to this day I have not found the vehicle nor that house that these keys fit.”

Soon there was another startling revelation. A witness claimed to have seen Arnold, accompanied by three other people on New Year’s Eve, almost three weeks after he was reported missing. Authorities brought the witness in for a polygraph exam. She passed.

But how did the bodies of Arnold Archambeau and Ruby Bruguier end up in the very same ditch where they crashed their car three months earlier? Ruby’s father, Quentin Bruguier, had his own theory:

“They had to die someplace else. Somebody had to come and put them back in there again, to make it look like that’s where they died.”

Were Arnold Archambeau and Ruby Bruguier victims of foul play? How and why their bodies were discovered in a ditch 75 feet from the crash site remains a troubling mystery.

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A California deputy is shot to death during an attempted burglary of his home.

CASE DETAILS

On January 24, 1987, a deputy sheriff named Charlie Anderson was gunned down in his Burbank, California home. Anderson was a 14-year veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He distinguished himself as a highly skilled driver, teaching hundreds of officers how to handle themselves and their vehicles in dangerous situations. Sergeant George Grein was a close colleague of Anderson’s:

“Charlie was probably one of the most talented drivers that I have ever met. It was a natural talent for him. Charlie was able to get along with everybody. He was serious on the job. But he had a good sense of humor when he was around the rest of the staff.”

Charlie was also a dedicated father, never too busy to spend evenings and weekends with his two sons. To those who knew him, Charlie did not seem to have an enemy in the world—until he was shot and killed in his own home. Charlie’s wife, Beth, told Detective Roger Mason of the Burbank Police Department that on the night of the murder, the couple and their two sons arrived home around midnight:

“They arrived home, and because Mrs. Anderson was suffering from a back injury, her husband offered to go inside the house with their oldest boy first. He asked her to wait in the car and she did so. Charlie Anderson went in the house with the oldest son and, we believe, took him upstairs. A few moments later, Mrs. Anderson heard what sounded like backfires from where she was parked in the driveway. She was still seated in the car. Because the sound was unusual, she walked to the house and called in to see if there was anything wrong. She ran downstairs, picked up her younger son, and ran to a next-door neighbor’s house.”

Police at the scene found the Anderson’s older son unharmed. Their first impression was that Charlie had surprised a burglar and had been shot. But according to Detective Mason, there were other signs that the burglary had been staged:

“While they had selected certain items and placed them together to be taken from the house, they had overlooked other items that were much more valuable that were in plain sight. This led to a second theory that this might have been someone that perhaps knew Deputy Anderson that confronted him and shot him.”

Charlie’s sister, Trish, was at the crime scene. She agreed with Detective Mason’s theory that the robbery was staged:

“But what really surprised me was the look on his face. He had a wide-eyed look as if he’d been shocked or betrayed. It’s something that lingers with me today.”

In the end, the evidence collected at the crime scene was ambiguous. The only identifiable fingerprints were from members of the family. Police were left with a murder victim and virtually no leads, until a mysterious phone call one day later:

“The man on the line was very, very, nervous. He was very concerned about his voice being taped, about… the call being traced or in any way the police identifying who he was.”

The call could not be connected to an unrecorded line. The detective had to ask the witness to hang up and call again. The man agreed. But the phone call never came.

On January 31, 1987, Charlie Anderson was laid to rest with the full honors reserved for officers killed in the line of duty. Since then, a lack of evidence has dragged the investigation to a standstill. Detective Mason and the rest of the Burbank Police Department are still searching for the unidentified caller:

“We feel it’s very, very important to locate this caller because he was concerned enough to call us right at the beginning of the investigation. He has never been identified and we’re very, very interested in speaking to him, to find out what he does know about this case.”

Burbank Police firmly believe that the mystery witness is their last hope to close this case. A $25,000 reward is being offered and police have guaranteed confidentiality for anyone coming forward with information.

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Mexican police say a man jailed for drunken behavior hung himself in his cell, but the forensic evidence points to murder.

CASE DETAILS

The town of Rosarito Beach, Mexico, lies only 25 miles south of San Diego, California, just below Tijuana. It’s known for its beautiful sunsets and romantic beaches. That’s why two Los Angeles couples headed there one summer weekend in June of 1992. But their vacation soon turned into a deadly nightmare. Less than 24 hours after arrival, one of them, Mario Amado, was arrested after a fight with his girlfriend. Two hours later, he was dead. The local authorities claimed that he committed suicide. His brother, Joe Amado, thinks differently:

“I say it was murder, plain murder, and I knew that from the beginning, because I know my brother very well. They stole his life away from him. And we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

Mario and Joe Amado arrived in Rosarito Beach at 1:00 A.M. on June 6, 1992, ready to party. Mario’s girlfriend, whom we’ll call Paula, provided the condo. Joe and his girlfriend, Debbie, were just happy to be invited.

The two couples quickly broke out the tequila. They partied through the night, and around 4:00 A.M., Joe and Debbie went to bed. They awoke at around 7 A.M. to find Mario and Paula still awake, arguing. Mario told Joe and Debbie that he wanted to go home. Debbie was worried:

“I felt very disturbed, because I know Mario liked this girl very much, and he wouldn’t have wanted to leave if it wasn’t something serious.”

By late the next morning, Mario and Paula had apparently made up. It was the last time Joe would see his brother alive:

“I can still remember the expression on his face. He seemed very happy, like nothing was wrong.” 

That afternoon, Joe and Debbie took a long romantic drive along the coast. Meanwhile, back at the condo, Mario and Paula got in another heated argument on the front porch. Police soon arrived at the scene. Mario was arrested for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct, and taken to the police station. He was placed in a holding cell, but was never formally charged with a crime.

At around 6:30 P.M., Joe and Debbie returned to the beach house. To their surprise, nobody was home, and there was no key under the mat. A housekeeper explained that there had been trouble a few hours earlier.

Debbie crawled through a window to get inside the condo. Almost immediately, four police officers from Tijuana showed up. They asked for Paula by name. Debbie was immediately suspicious:

“A little later, Mario’s girlfriend comes just waltzing in the house. Like nothing was wrong. We asked her where Mario was. She said she didn’t know.”

Two hours after Paula returned, a group of detectives arrived looking for a relative of Mario’s.  Joe still had no idea that his brother had been arrested. The detectives informed him that his brother Mario was dead.

“I was hoping they had made a mistake and I was just in disbelief that this could be happening.”

Detectives took Joe to identify Mario’s body. When he got there, he noticed that Mario was not wearing a shirt. The detectives claimed that Mario used his shirt to kill himself. Joe didn’t believe it:

“I’m said, ‘Oh no, you can’t kill yourself with a sweater.’ So I asked, ‘Wasn’t anybody in the jail that would have stopped him from doing this?’ He said ‘No, they were all sleeping.’ Four guys sleeping at 5:30 in the afternoon? I just couldn’t believe that.”

Mario Amado died three months before his 30th birthday. The Mexican authorities refused to release his body until after their autopsy. Joe was forced to return to the United States without his brother. Within a week, the Mexican autopsy was complete. It listed the cause of death as “a loss of oxygen to the brain,” the result of Mario hanging himself. Joe believed that was ridiculous and contacted Congressman Howard Berman, who did some digging:

“The Mexican autopsy confirmed the report of the jailers in Tijuana, that Mario Amado had hung himself with his own sweater. This is the oldest excuse for a jail murder, that the prisoner hung himself.”

As soon as Mario’s body was returned to the United States, Joe hired a pathologist to do a second autopsy. This examination revealed internal injuries to Mario’s liver, strong evidence he had been punched in the upper abdomen. The report stated that with such injuries, “the victim would not likely have been able to hang himself.”

Ultimately, the Los Angeles County coroner reviewed both the American and Mexican autopsy reports. He determined that Mario Amado had probably been murdered.  There is another disturbing aspect to this case. Mexican authorities violated International agreements by not contacting the U.S. consulate as quickly as possible following Mario’s death. Congressman Berman suspected a cover up:

“The people involved in this incident did not want authorities coming quickly to the scene of the crime.  They wanted the period of time to elapse. They hoped that Joe Amado would forget about it, that his brother was dead, and that he’d go back to the United States and drop the whole issue.”

Joe Amado remains determined to find the person or persons behind his brother’s death.

Update:

Congressman Berman wrote to the President of Mexico and eventually got the case opened. Mario’s body was exhumed. This time, a new autopsy found enough evidence to call the death a murder. Soon after, a Mexican police officer was arrested, tried and convicted of Mario’s murder. However, his conviction was overturned four months later and he was released.

To date there are no new suspects and the case is still unsolved.

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A chartered military plane crashes after take off.

CASE DETAILS

On December 11th 1985, the 101st Airborne unit of the U.S. Army left Cairo, Egypt, on a chartered Arrow Air DC-8. They were going home to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, after a six-month peacekeeping mission in the Sinai. After one stop in Germany, they landed for refueling at the Gander Airport, in Newfoundland, Canada. Just after takeoff, the DC-8 suddenly crashed, killing 248 soldiers. Wreckage was strewn over nearly a quarter mile.

Almost immediately, a terrorist organization, Islamic Jihad, claimed responsibility. But U.S. Army officials quickly dismissed the possibility of terrorist involvement. Later, a Canadian Board of Inquiry stated that ice on the plane’s wings had brought it down.

However, four of the board’s nine members publicly disagreed, insisting that ice didn’t cause the crash. Aeronautical Engineer Les Filotas was one of the dissenting board members:

“There was certainly some kind of an explosion. A small explosion that disabled the control system. But what caused that explosion, whether it was sabotage or whether it was the accidental detonation of some kind of military equipment that was carried against regulations, we really don’t have a better idea than we had in 1988.”

To the four dissenting board members, the crash itself seemed highly irregular. Usually, in a takeoff crash, large sections of the plane remain intact, and many passengers can survive. But at Gander, according to Les, the wreckage was extremely fragmented and no one survived:

“A normal kind of take-off accident can be quite serious and can involve a fire, but basically, the aircraft isn’t completely destroyed.”

The U.S. Government strongly denied that either explosives or ammunition were carried as cargo. However, eyewitness reports from the Cairo airport contradict the government’s claim. They say that several large wooden boxes were loaded onto the airplane. Many believe the boxes contained some type of classified weapons. One of the rescue workers, Harvey Day, said he saw five wooden boxes at the Gander crash site:

“I decided to walk down to see what was in this area. And I saw five large wooden boxes. They were black, a bit burnt from the fire, and I saw things like missiles, and little metal boxes, they looked like ammunition boxes. And it was all piled up very neatly into this cordoned off area.”

Day said he also saw an unusual pile of wreckage burning out of control. Two firefighters were trying to put it out with water:

“And the minute he took the water away, it just flared back up again. And he said, ‘We have to do this until it burns out or it cools down to the point where we can remove what’s there.”

Within weeks, Harvey and several other rescue workers began to complain of health problems. The symptoms sounded suspiciously like radiation poisoning. Robert Cox is the president of the Union of Canadian Transport Employees:

“I think we had over thirty members who described some type of malady or sickness as a result of the crash. They range from liver problems to what people thought were heart attacks, and just general illnesses. And this is what was checked out and it got to be rather scary.”

Harvey Day said he received some disturbing health news:

“When the medical reports came in, the receptionist called me. And I went to him, and I’ll never forget this, he said, ‘Harvey, how much do you drink?’ I said, ‘Pardon me?’ He said, ‘How much do you drink?’ I said, ‘I don’t drink. Why?’ He said, ‘You’ve got a liver that is equivalent to somebody who’s been drinking excessively for 20 years or more.’ I couldn’t believe what he said.”

According to one unnamed source, the U.S. government sealed its records of the crash for seventy years. However, several government agencies, including the Department of Defense and the National Transportation Safety Board, deny that any such records exist.
Doug Phillips is the father of one of the crash victims:

“The files on the Gander incident would not be sealed for seventy years if it was simply ice. We know that there had to be something politically embarrassing that could have been very harmful to the Reagan administration that had to be covered up.”

Zona Phillips stepson died in the crash:

“As one family member put it, she wants to know if her family member died protecting this country or if he died because our government was protecting itself.”

U.S. government investigators did appear to behave strangely. For one thing, the crash site was bulldozed within three months, a highly unusual practice. The U.S. Army says it was done simply to discourage souvenir hunters. As a rule, downed airplanes are reassembled in order to study the crash. But in a highly unusual move, authorities quickly buried wreckage from the Gander site in a dump.

Dr. Douglas Phillips and his wife Zona were troubled by the official reports. Their son died in the crash and they formed an organization called Families for Truth about Gander. They requested several pieces of the wreckage and were surprised when the government actually sent them. An expert hired to analyze the scraps claimed that the edges were bent outwards, showing that a blast had occurred inside the plane. For Doug Phillips, this meant only one thing:

“The airplane exploded in mid-air and then went down and hit the ground with a gigantic fireball when the fuel ignited. But there’s no doubt in my mind that there was a fire or explosion, while the plane was still in flight.”

Dr. Phillips turned up one final telling fact. Autopsies revealed that many of the dead soldiers had a significant amount of carbon monoxide in their bodies:

“The toxicology report showed that the victims had indeed breathed in carbon monoxide prior to the plane hitting the ground and exploding. This had to be from a detonation, a fire or explosion on board the craft.”

In 1990, Congress convened a hearing on the Gander disaster. The committee faulted the government’s investigation, but didn’t insist on a new one. The families of the soldiers who were killed at Gander have been left to wonder why and how their loved ones really died.

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The death of a young man found in a Tennessee parking lot remains a mystery.

CASE DETAILS

On a gray July morning in 1996, strangers found a dead man beaten and half-naked in a parking lot in Knoxville, Tennessee. Scattered around his body was German, Canadian, and U.S. currency totaling nearly $4,000. The contents of the man’s wallet identified him as 31-year-old Blair Adams of Surrey, British Columbia. Lieutenant Jim Jones was the Chief of Detectives for the Knox County Sheriff’s Department at the time Blair’s body was discovered:

“Every aspect of this case is mysterious… there’s no explanation for it.”

No one knows why Blair Adams left his home in British Columbia or how he ended up in Knoxville, Tennessee. Could he have been running away from a killer, or just running away from himself?

Before his mysterious death, Blair was a foreman with a construction company in Surrey, British Columbia. Those who knew him say he liked his work and did it well. However, in the summer of 1996, Blair’s cheery demeanor began to change. According to his mother, Sandra Edwards, Blair began having wild mood swings:

“Something was obviously very much the matter. He hadn’t been sleeping well. Something was wrong. I asked him numerous times what was wrong. And he said, I don’t think I should tell you about ‘it.’ And to this day I don’t know what ‘it’ is.”

Blair’s strange behavior came to a head on Friday, July 5, 1996. He withdrew his savings and emptied his safe deposit box of more than $6,000 in cash and thousands more in jewelry, gold, and platinum. It was the first stop on his dead-end run to Tennessee.

The next stop was the Canadian-American border. On Sunday, Blair tried to enter the United States. But as an unmarried young man carrying a large amount of cash, Blair fit the profile of a drug trafficker. He was refused entry. The next day Blair showed up at his job. But he wasn’t there to work. He asked his boss for his check and quit.

Blair’s erratic behavior continued. That afternoon, he spent $1,600 on a round trip airline ticket to Frankfurt, Germany. His flight would leave the following day, but just hours after buying the ticket, Blair was again desperate to get into the United States. He showed up at a friend’s house in a panic, terrified that someone was trying to kill him. But his friend was unable to take him over the border.

Then on Tuesday, instead of leaving for Germany, Blair turned in his tickets, rented a car, and headed back to the border. This time, he managed to slip through. He ended up in Seattle, where, according to Lieutenant Jones, he bought a one-way ticket to Washington D.C.:

“He paid about $770 for a one-way ticket when he could’ve purchased a round-trip ticket for approximately $350 or $400. So it would’ve been half the price for… a round-trip ticket as he paid for a one-way ticket. It just seemed very unusual.”

Blair arrived in D.C. early Wednesday morning and headed to Knoxville, more than 500 miles southwest. Perry Moyers, a detective for the Knox County Sheriff’s Department, was one of the many perplexed investigators working on the case:

“I mean why go to D.C. to turn around and come back to Knoxville? He had no reason to be in east Tennessee. He had no reason to be in Knoxville. He knew no one in east Tennessee or the eastern United States.”

Blair was first seen at a gas station in Knoxville around 5:30 that afternoon. He complained to the gas station attendant that his car wouldn’t start. The attendant told him he had the wrong keys. However, the rental car company was already closed for the day. Blair was stranded in Knoxville until the morning. Luckily, he was able to hitch a ride to a nearby hotel.

Ticca Hartsfield, an employee at the hotel, remembered Blair vividly:

“The best way to describe him would be paranoid. He just was very nervous, agitated, expecting someone to come in on him even though there wasn’t anybody there. I don’t know who he was looking for, but he was waiting for somebody to walk in for him.”

The hotel’s security camera showed that in the space of an hour, Blair went in and out of the lobby five times before finally paying for the room.

After checking in, Blair pocketed the key to his room. But instead of going to his room, he marched out the front door and never came back. It was 7:37 PM, the last time Blair Adams was known to be alive.

Twelve hours later, Blair’s body was found in a parking lot about a half mile from his hotel. He was naked from the waist down.

Lieutenant Jones recalled the gruesome scene:

“His pants were removed in a way not like someone would take their own pants off, but in a way that someone else would remove your pants from you. His socks were turned inside out. His shoes were off and his shirt was ripped open.”

Scattered around Blair’s body was $4,000 in American, Canadian, and German currency. A small pack held another $2,000 worth of gold and jewelry.

According to the autopsy report, Blair had sustained many cuts and abrasions. Police believed some of the wounds came from fending off an attack. Blair was ultimately killed by a violent blow that ruptured his stomach.

Although Blair thought his life was in danger, authorities believed the threat was imaginary, and that Blair’s journey was an escape from his own delusions. Either way, Blair Adams wound up dead, just as he had feared.

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

When two soldiers are found hanged, the Army concludes suicide, but the men’s families suspect a cover-up.

CASE DETAILS

The National Cemetery in Little Rock, Arkansas, is the final resting place for hundreds of soldiers, sailors, and pilots. Two men buried here are at the center of a mystery that has no easy answers. Their names are Sergeant Billy Ray Hargrove and Sergeant Mike Carmichael. The Army says both men killed themselves, but their families say the army is dead wrong. Harvey Hargrove is Billy Ray’s father:

“Mike didn’t have anything to die for, no more than Billy had anything to die for.  Neither one of them committed suicide. They didn’t do it.”

Billy Ray Hargrove and Mike Carmichael led similar lives. Both had planned careers in the military since they were kids. Both joined the Army in their teens. And both married Korean women while stationed in the Far East. They became best buddies as they climbed through the ranks.

During the first Gulf War, Billy and his outfit were sent to Saudi Arabia. However, according to Billy Ray’s mother, Sue Nunnally, the conflict ended before their platoon saw any action:

“When Billy finished Desert Storm, he was disappointed because his men did not get a merit award, a medal that he felt like they deserved. And he set about trying to get the medal for them, and no matter what direction he went in, he just couldn’t accomplish it.”

Billy just couldn’t accept the Army’s decision and made a questionable decision of his own. He forged his superior’s signature on the appropriate documents. A short time later, his men received their medals. In June of 1991, he arrived in Korea for another tour of duty and was arrested at the airport by military police for forgery.

Billy’s court martial was not his only problem. His marriage was also falling apart. Billy Ray’s mother, Sue Nunnally, said Billy and his wife were fighting frequently:

“There was a lot of jealousy. She was constantly accusing him of having a girlfriend and having a child somewhere that she didn’t know anything about. And it wasn’t true at all.”

On February 20, 1992, Billy missed a summons to report to duty. Even after one of his fellow sergeants informed him that he was late, Billy never reported. Instead, he took his dog for a walk. Twenty minutes later, Billy’s wife heard the dog barking. When she went to see what was going on, she found Billy hanging from a tree by an elastic parachute string.

A suicide note was found in his pants pocket. It read, in part:  “My life is really screwed up now. And I just don’t know how to fix it.  I’ve been thinking a lot about taking my life for a long time now.”  Sue Nunnally had doubts that her son wrote the note:

“I looked at the writing and I did not believe it was his writing. It did not look to me like his writing.”

The Army acknowledged that the note might not have been in Billy’s handwriting. Even so, they ruled his death a suicide. According to Billy’s mother, they concluded that he had been depressed about his upcoming court martial and divorce:

“He was not the type of person to commit suicide, no matter what. Especially putting a rope around his neck.  I just could not believe it and I still don’t believe it.  Something happened to him, but he did not commit suicide.”

The autopsy report also contained evidence that it might not be suicide. Billy had cuts and abrasions on his face, hands, and knuckles. Billy’s mother thinks Billy may have been involved in a fight before he died:

“But the military, in their report, didn’t question anyone or ask where the scratches came from. They just ignored them.”

When Billy Ray Hargrove was laid to rest on March 4, 1992, one of the mourners at his funeral was his friend, Mike Carmichael. Billy’s father recalled a conversation he and Mike had:

“When I finally met Mike, it was at Billy’s funeral when he brought Billy’s body back home. And he told me, he said, ‘We’ll give ‘em hell. We’re gonna make ‘em pay, the SOBs pay, for what they done.”

After the service, Mike returned to the Hargroves’ house with Billy’s family. Billy’s mother also spoke to Mike Carmichael:

“He looked at me and he promised and he told me that if it was the last thing he ever did, he was going to find out what happened to Billy Ray.”

But six weeks later, Mike was also found dead. Mike’s uncle, Oscar Carmichael, served in the Marines for 20 years. He said Mike believed there was a larger conspiracy involved:

“There had been three other Army personnel there in Korea that had supposedly committed suicide, and my nephew told his birth mother, he said, ‘Don’t be surprised if I’m next.’”

Mike Carmichael returned to Korea and began his own investigation. He and his wife, Sun Hui, visited Billy Ray’s widow and collected his personal papers. Included was a letter Billy wrote to his father a few days before the hanging. But that letter never made it home to Harvey:

“He was supposed to have written me a letter sometimes in February. And I’m sure if I could  find that letter, it would explain everything.”

Mike continued to collect Billy’s papers and stored them with his own papers in a metal box. Mike told his Uncle Oscar that if anything were to happen to him, Oscar should immediately open the box. But Mike never said what was in it.

Then, on April 3, 1992 — Mike Carmichael’s 38th birthday — he received an unexpected phone call, ordering him back to the base. According to his wife, Sun Hui, by the next morning, Mike had still not returned home:

“On Sunday morning, I called the Army base to find out where my husband was. I talked to a security guard. I was told that he did not see my husband. So I asked him to try to knock on the door of his barracks room. He said that there was no response and the door was locked.”

An hour later, Sun Hui found Mike Carmichael’s body in his barracks’ office. He was hanging by parachute cord and was leaning in an odd position against his locker. Like Billy, he had abrasions on his face and a gash on his forehead. He had been dead for several hours.

The Army’s investigation concluded that Mike Carmichael had taken his own life because he was depressed over financial matters and Billy’s death. His uncle, Oscar, doesn’t believe it:

“There was no way that Mike would take his life and take the chicken way out. He was happier than I had seen him in a long time, due to the fact that he and Sun Hui had just gotten married in July. They were like couple of overgrown kids, really. And he had his retirement to look forward to. I think he was angry and I think he was going to direct his anger towards finding out the reason why or who caused his friend or killed his friend.”

The Carmichael and the Hargrove families absolutely refuse to believe the deaths were suicides. They launched a letter writing campaign asking for the official reports from the military. Unsatisfied with the Army’s response, they contacted the office of U.S. Congressman Jay Dickey. Greg Stein was Congressman Dickey’s legislative assistant:

“Even the reports that I could get were lacking in the photos of the crime scene. Other things were withheld or whited-out for certain reasons. And after looking at it, I don’t think that they took into account all of the different aspects of the case.”

Congressman Jay Dickey says he believes there’s been a cover-up:

“I don’t want to accuse anybody at this time, but the reason why there would be a cover-up, I don’t know. That’s one of the things we want to find out. But I happen to think that if we open this thing up, that we will find an answer.”

The two families are especially troubled by the many similarities of the two deaths. Both Billy and Mike died just after they were summoned to the Army barracks. Both were tied with parachute cord. Both had cuts and abrasions on their faces and hands. And both men were found hanging just inches from the ground.

Congressman Dickey thinks the position Mike Carmichael’s body was found in raises questions:

“The question marks that come up about Sergeant Carmichael start with the fact that he was found in a sitting position some three inches from the floor. Even the natural instincts of a person would have your hands falling down, or pushing against it.”

The metal box that contained Mike and Billy’s personal papers was sitting on a desk, across the room from Mike’s body. The box of letters later disappeared. No one knows what happened to it and military personnel deny its existence. The men’s families suspect a cover-up. Billy Ray’s mother, Sue Nunnally:

“I believe that in Billy Ray’s case, and in Mike’s case too, something had to be going on that wasn’t right. Something that they found out about, or knew about, or maybe something that they were going to expose:

A congressional hearing upheld the Army’s finding of suicide. They found that Mike had choked himself with a rope while sitting on the ground. Billy’s mother says the hearing was just a formality, put on for show. She insists the two buddies were murdered.

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

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An outspoken Marine is found murdered.

CASE DETAILS

Audiences lined up to see Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise in the hit movie, “A Few Good Men”. But not many were aware that it was based on a true story, one that may have led to the murder of a courageous former Marine.

David Cox joined the Marine Corps straight out of high school and was stationed at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. One day, while on duty, David became aware of a problem. Another platoon member, PFC William Alvarado, had written to his senator complaining about Marine misconduct.

David’s former squad leader, Christopher Valdez, explains how Alvarado was targeted for a “Code Red,” or hazing:

“We didn’t actually decide to have a Code Red for Alvarado on our own. Our platoon commander had given us an implied order that if we were good Marines, something should happen. Saturday night we went into Alvarado’s room. We blindfolded him and gagged him and then dragged him off of his bed. Dave (Cox) started shaving his head, and within five minutes, he had stopped struggling.”

David Cox convinced his platoon to stop the hazing. When they removed the gag and untied Alvarado, he was unconsciousness.

Alvarado was rushed to the hospital. He recovered, but his 10 attackers, including David Cox, were brought up on charges. Cox was going to be charged with attempted murder. But he said he was just following orders.

Don Marcari was appointed to defend David Cox:

“I told David, that this was a defense – obedience to orders – that had not been successful at Nuremberg, had not been successful for Lt. Calley at My Lai. And plus, we had a colonel denying he ever gave an order.”

David claimed the Code Red started with implied orders from his superior officers.
For Don Marcari, that meant an even more uphill battle loomed:

“We had the additional burden of now saying he was following an implied order. And it was a very difficult case to win, and I told David that. He decided he wanted to fight it because he believed in his heart that he didn’t do anything wrong. “

At his trial, David was convicted of simple assault. He was sentenced to time already served in the brig. He then completed his duty and received an honorable discharge. He returned to civilian life in his hometown near Boston.

Years later, “A Few Good Men” was released. David felt that the filmmakers had stolen his story. David Cox’s girlfriend, Elaine Tinsley, recalls at the time:

“He was stunned. Here was this movie company that was making tons of money off of his story, and if it weren’t for him, the story never would have existed in the first place.”

David and some of the other Marines involved in the Code Red, sued the movie production company. While they waited for a ruling, David spoke out about his case on radio talk shows.

By January 1994, David was living with Elaine and hoping his temporary job with UPS would become permanent. The night before he was supposed to get the good news, David’s back was giving him trouble, so he spent the night on the couch. The next morning, Elaine left at about 8:30, and then called home at about noon. David didn’t answer, but there was a message for him on the machine: UPS wanted to hire him. Elaine was happy David would be getting his wish:

“I was like, cool, Dave’s gonna get this job and he’s gonna be so excited. Then I called back again at 1:00 to check the messages, and that message was still there, and the UPS guy had called again, too.”

At 5:30 pm, Elaine returned home:

“When I came into the house that night after work, I realized right away that the doors to all the rooms were open, and our rabbit, who we usually just kept in the kitchen, was hopping all over the place.”

David’s truck was still in the driveway, with the keys in the ignition. His un-cashed paycheck was on the dashboard and his 9-millimeter gun was in the glove box. But David was gone. Elaine didn’t know what to make of the situation:

“As the days went on and there was no news from him– we checked his bank account. There was no activity on his bank account. You start to believe that, you know, maybe something did happen, but why?”

The answer came with the spring thaw. The body of David Cox was discovered on the banks of a river in Medfield, Massachusetts, about five miles from his apartment.

Sgt. Kevin Shea of Massachusetts State Police, describes the manner of death:

“He was shot, according to the ME, four times– once at the base of the rear of the neck and three times in the left side torso area.”

It was clear that robbery was not the motive. David’s cash and his credit cards were still in his wallet. And police ruled out a random attack.

Sgt. Shea believes David left home with someone he knew:

“It’s our belief that he got in the car willingly, that he knew who was coming to pick him up, and that he went to this area and walked into the woods with this person. I think that if it was somebody that was just holding a gun on him or something like that, that they would do it within the first 30 or 40 yards into the woods. David was found almost three-quarters-to-a-mile walk into the woods.”

David’s attorney, Donald Marcari, thinks the murder was somehow related to the military:

“I don’t know why David was killed. I personally believe it had something to do with the military. He was taken out of his house without signs of struggle, he was wearing his Marine Corps jacket, which he never wore. He was found between two hunting ranges where gunshots would not be unusual, and he was murdered execution style.”

But what was the motive?

After the release of “A Few Good Men,” David gave an interview on the radio. He was quite vocal about his story and the U.S. activities in Cuba. David’s mother worried that he had been too outspoken:

“After I heard that interview on the radio, I spoke to him, and I said, ‘I don’t like what you’re doing. I think what you’re doing is dangerous’ I think he felt far too free to just speak his mind.”

David’s brother, Steve, had a different theory suggesting another possible scenario. He thought that perhaps the murder was connected to David’s job at UPS:

“A couple of months before Dave disappeared, he’d mentioned to me that he had come upon a supervisor and one of the drivers involved in some type of activity, what he believed to be was theft.”

According to Sgt. Kevin Shea, nothing has been ruled out and the investigation is still open:

“It’ll remain open until we solve it. Again, we’ll follow any leads that come through vigorously, and do that until it is solved.”

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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.

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A trucker mysteriously disappears in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest.

CASE DETAILS

It was Memorial Day weekend, 1995. Arizona’s Tonto National Forest was a popular getaway for families and campers. The last thing anyone would have expected to see was a ten-ton semi truck crashing through the woods. The driver of the truck was Devin Williams, a 29 year old father of three.

Two campers had a frighteningly close experience as Devin’s 18 wheeler barreled towards their SUV. Lynn Yarrington was an eye witness:

“There was no expression on his face at all. He didn’t attempt to slow down or look over to see if they needed help or anything, he just kept on going.”

Later that day another eye-witness, Charles Hall, came upon the 18 wheeler stalled in a field. Hall recalls the trucker’s last words being, “I’m going to jail.”

“I envisioned a hostage situation, a hijacking, kidnapping, whatever. A jail break, maybe, and someone had a gun on someone in the cab. He made no effort to keep us there, no effort to ask for help, do anything for him.”

Late Sunday afternoon, Deputy Dean Wells followed up on a report that a 48 foot semi was stranded in the forest. When Deputy Wells arrived on the scene he found the truck’s cargo to be completely intact. The driver was nowhere to be found and when he checked the National Crime Computer, there was no record of either a missing truck or driver.

The inside of the cab appeared to be very clean and well maintained. According to Deputy Wells, there was no reason to believe foul play was involved.

Devin Williams was a loving husband and the father of three. By all accounts, he was not the type to dump a fully loaded rig in the middle of the forest. However, the abandoned truck was indeed his.

Six days before his wild ride in the forest, Devin had left his home in Kansas and headed west. It was a route he had taken many times. After delivering his load in California, Devin checked in with his boss, Tom Wilson:

“Looking back, I can’t see anything out of the ordinary to make me suspect anything. Everything indicated it was just a very normal trip in the time frame and that everything’s going real good.”

On Saturday evening, the day before his disappearance, Devin telephoned headquarters for the last time. He complained of being unable to sleep, yet was determined to get back on the road. By Sunday morning he was barreling through the woods of the Tonto National Forest, miles from any highway. To this day, no one knows why, and none of the theories make sense.

Reports of Devin’s disoriented behavior and incoherence prompted suspicions that he was on drugs. But according to Tom Wilson, that was not the case with Devin:

“We’d had no drug problem with him. He had passed his drug tests and everything…”

Devin’s wife, Mary Lou Williams, is confident that something must have happened to her husband. The young couple had recently purchased a house and, according to Mary Lou, were at the happiest point in their marriage. It was unlike Devin to go off his route, let alone be that irrational.

If Devin Williams didn’t run off, where was he? Foot patrols, canine searches and rescue teams all came up empty handed. Hunters and hikers in the area never reported finding so much as a bone fragment or a scrap of clothing.

UPDATE:

Nearly two years after Devin’s disappearance, hikers discovered a human skull, just a half mile from where he had last been seen. Dental records confirmed the skull belonged to Devin Williams. The cause of his death and his strange behavior is still an unsolved mystery.

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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.

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The death of a woman found in a barrel at the bottom of a pond is ruled an accident, but her family believes she was murdered.

CASE DETAILS

On Wednesday, December 25, 1985, after completing her shift at the hospital, Debbie Wolfe of Fayetteville, North Carolina, left work, presumably heading home. According to Debbie’s mother, Jenny Edwards:

“The next morning, Debbie should have been at work. She had to be at work at eight. Debbie did not go to work. Debbie did not answer her telephone. It wasn’t like Debbie at all. She never missed work.”

Debbie’s parents and a family friend named Kevin Gorton hurried over to her house, an isolated cabin, four miles outside Fayetteville. Knowing that Debbie took good care of her home and her pets, Debbie’s mother was surprised by what they found:

“We looked around and we saw beer cans laying in the yard. Her dogs had not been fed. There was a uniform laying on the floor, in the kitchen, and other things thrown on the floor, like maybe she took them off.”

Debbie’s purse was not in its usual place. Kevin found it shoved under her bed. There was also an odd message on Debbie’s answering machine recorded earlier that day. A man from the hospital was calling to see how Debbie was doing. He mentioned that she had missed many days of work. This made no sense to Debbie’s mother:

“What concerned me about his message was that he said that she had missed a lot of days at work, and she hadn’t. In fact, she had only missed a few hours at work at the time that he put the message on the answering machine.”

The search continued outside the cabin and around a nearby pond. There were no signs of Debbie. Debbie’s mother called the Sheriff’s office and was told they would investigate only after Debbie had been missing for three days. But five days passed before authorities began a full-scale search:

“They searched the cabin. Later that afternoon they brought the bloodhounds out and they could find nothing at all. They then walked around the edge of the pond. I was there for that.”

Captain Jack Watts of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department:

“I think it was mentioned that they had already looked in the pond…there was no use for us to look in the pond, so I don’t think we did a dive of the pond or a complete search of the pond on that day. No, we did not.”

Jenny Edwards decided to hire her own divers. On January 1, 1986, Kevin Gorton and another friend, Gordon Childress, returned to the pond. Both men were familiar with rescue work. Childress dragged the pond looking for evidence. According to Kevin Gorton:

“He was in the water approximately two minutes when he called out to me and told me that he had found what looked like a set of footprints and a drag mark.”

In fact, according to Gordon Childress, he found two sets of footprints pressed into the thick mud, along with the drag marks. Once he went under the murky water, it wasn’t long before Childress came across a body:

“It was inside of what looked like a burn barrel. That’s a rusty, 55-gallon oil drum type thing with holes in it.”

The police were called to the scene. The dead woman was identified as Debbie Wolfe.
The coroner concluded that she had drowned. An autopsy revealed no trace of drugs, no alcohol in her system, and no signs of foul play. Kevin Gorton does not believe Debbie’s death was as a result of drowning:

“A typical coroner drowning would be eyes open, mouth open, hands and arms in a very clawed state, you know, just a fight for life. Which was quite on the contrary to what Debbie was. The eyes were closed, the mouth was closed, arms were in a relaxed state, just her whole body was relaxed. She looked like she was asleep.”

Capt. Jack Watts proposed a theory:

“Her dogs were running loose when the family members and the Sheriff’s Department first met over there. Possibly, she was playing with the dogs and fell in.”

As the investigation continued, Debbie’s mother said, police began to deny that Debbie’s body had been found inside of a barrel:

“I asked one of our friends who was there, I said, ‘What happened? Do they have the barrel?” And they said, ‘No, they decided to leave it there. They’ll get it in the morning.’ The next day, they went back to get the barrel, and they said that the barrel was gone. All of a sudden it didn’t exist. The same barrel that had been there the night before.”

Capt. Jack Watts denies there ever was a barrel:

“In my opinion, and the opinions of some of the investigators, what appeared to be a barrel to some of the divers could have been Debbie’s jacket which may have ballooned out as she was laying at that angle in the bottom of the pond.”

Gordon Childress is certain of what he saw:

“There was no doubt in my mind, I’m a hundred percent positive that it was an old burn barrel or something of that nature. You know, metal, rusted, 55-gallon type drum, that the body was in.”

Jenny Edwards then recalled a barrel she had seen near Debbie’s cabin:

“I went over to the spot where the barrel was and the barrel was gone. The indentation of the barrel was still there, on the ground, but the barrel was no longer there.”

A few months later, Jenny discovered another inconsistency:

“When I got a chance to examine the clothes that were on Debbie’s body, I looked at them very carefully and realized that those were not Debbie’s clothes. The pants were very, very much too long for Debbie. The bra cup-size was three sizes too large for her and around-size, it would be two sizes too large for her. The shoes, Debbie wore a ladies size seven, and these were a men’s size six, which winds up being about three sizes larger.”

Debbie’s family became convinced that she had been murdered. One of Debbie’s responsibilities at work was coordinating the hospital’s volunteers. According to Jenny Edwards:

“There was a volunteer at the hospital that wanted to become romantically involved with Debbie. Debbie discussed this with everyone, including him, and told him that she would be his friend but nothing else.”

Jenny is convinced that this was the man who called Debbie the day after she disappeared, expressing concern that she’d been missing from work. Capt. Watts says the man was investigated:

“Anyone that the family requested that we talk to or interview, we tried to interview. Of course, through the information we received through these interviews, there was nothing there that we could use in any criminal prosecution, or there was nothing there that would indicate to us that this was a homicide.”

Jenny Edwards said the volunteer had since left the area:

“He was investigated by the Sheriff’s department the night that the body was brought to the surface. However, he provided an alibi and refused to take a polygraph. So he wasn’t questioned any longer. He left several days after that to go out of state.”

What really happened to Debbie Wolfe? Her mother believes she was taken hostage and then murdered. She believes that, later, someone returned to the pond to remove the barrel, so that the death would seem accidental:

“There are people out there who know what happened to Debbie. And I’m hoping that they will come forward and finally say something. She was loved by very, very many people. And I think that she has a right to be put to rest, finally. And I’d like to do that.”

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

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