March 13, 2024 • 38 mins
The investigation by the Benton County Sheriff’s Office heats up in Dana Stidham’s gruesome murder, zeroing in on one particular suspect. Phelps digs deeper, speaking to the suspect and wonders if law enforcement has been chasing the wrong man. Just over the Missouri border, not far from the Dana Stidham crime scene, a second young woman’s body is discovered. Are the cases linked? Phelps uncovers several exclusive, recorded interviews never-before-heard, speaks to several sources who claim that not only are the cases the work of one killer, but the suspect has been hiding in plain sight, taunting police, all along.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
At the end of the last episode, a source told
us about a guy named Mike allegedly at a dance
with Dana and a sinking feeling she had that Mike
was going to do something very bad to Dana. And
while you can't spend much time in the world of
true crime without learning that you should definitely listen to
(00:32):
your gut. A sinking feeling is not evidence of wrongdoing,
and it means nothing in the scope of Dana's murder investigation.
At best, it's hearsay. If my source would have stopped there, however,
we could write off the information as coming from an
over excited teenager wanting to be caught up in the
(00:54):
drama of a local murder. But she didn't. Who told
you his name was Mike.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Just some other people that kind of knew her, that
were a little bit younger than me, that were more
of her age. They told me because I had been
telling him to watch out for this guy, that something's wrong.
And then I think it was a guy that knew
and Mike he said that, uh yeah, he said, she
she is missing. You know, some guy named Mike was
(01:26):
with her that night. And then I, you know, asked him, well,
what did he look like And then they told me
I said, yeah, that's the guy. I think he was
going to kill her. And then next thing I know,
and I said, well, they found her. And they found
her a few miles from that wonderland cave in Bella Vista.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
My source wound up talking to a few other friends
from Bella Vista voicing her concerns about Dana and that
night she supposedly saw her. And I need to point
out there was more than one person of interest the
bcs SO looked at named Mike, and Mike McMillan told
me I worked at the cave, but not until years
(02:07):
after Dana went missing, when I turned twenty one. No way,
I was there that night.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
So they said, well, they hang out at the hill.
What's that And they said it's up there at Bella Vista.
They said, you go up there and you go past
that grocery store about two or three miles and then
there'll be a little dirt road off to the left
right before you go up a hill. So I drove
out there and I seen this little road. It's like
(02:36):
a Friday or Saturday night because that's where they said
people her age and then kids from grabbing hung out.
So I drove out there. I guess they partied out there.
It was like an open field and there were four
people out there. There was three guys and another girl.
(02:57):
And I get out of the car and it's that
same guy Mike again, this other guy that I knew
that was a little a little younger than me, Diana's ages,
and then this kind of longheaded blondish girl. And I said, oh,
I said, do y'all know Dana Stidham. Didn't she go
(03:17):
missing around here somewhere? Those guys didn't say that that
they were drinking beer, you know, out of cans. She says, yeah,
I'll tell you what. You better leave here right now,
because if you don't, she says, the same thing's going
to happen to you.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
I asked my source the name of the girl on
the hill as we'll call her. As it turns out,
she's someone Dana knew very well and was seen by
several witnesses with Dana that night she disappeared. Unfortunately, I
can't interview her. She died some time ago. After our conversation,
(03:58):
I spoke to a detective and related this information. The
detective knows this source how she can ramble, and how
tempted I might be to write off what she says
as hyperbolic nonsense. But the detective stressed to me, quote,
don't discount what she tells you. After that warning from
(04:20):
the girl on the hill, my source became unsettled.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
And I went and got in my car and left.
I was like, I got to get out of here,
because I don't know what they're going to do, you know.
And I went and told a few more people about it,
and they just said, well, the guy that was with
Dana that night, he's friends with some dirty cops, so
you don't want to get involved in it because they
might do something to you. So about fifteen years ago,
(04:48):
I knew a die work the Shriff's office that I
talked to a little bit about it.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
I verified that she had told others about this. What
she relayed to me next is the mo most disturbing
part of her account. And you'll hear a name bleeped up.
It's the name of a police officer.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
What I understand is that Dana went out to man
cave in Bella Vista that night. The men decided they
were going to trade off girl friends, and they was
going to have a sex party, and that they got
ended up getting in a fight and a lover's quarrel
broke out, and that that Stidham girl got cut and
(05:34):
that told him to put her in his car or
his truck, take her and bury her.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Previously on Paper Ghosts, Yes.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
It was a young guy close to his age of
the policeman and he really felt like he may have
done it.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
You don't have an intact body, but they found there
was a knit on the collarbone that they felt like
was from a knife. Now, whether she was stabbed, you know,
in the neck.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Something in my mind told me that this guy is
fixing to kill this girl. Oh my god, this is
some kind of a murder.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
My name is em William Phelps. I'm an investigative journalist
and author of more than forty true crime books. This
is season four of Paper Ghosts.
Speaker 5 (06:29):
The Ozarks.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Cold case work for me has always been about gathering
as much information as I can without judging it or
allowing any bias to seep in. I collect the data,
do some fact and see what shakes out. And before
I decide on a line of inquiry, I like to
know as much about a case as possible. Far beyond
(07:10):
the public record, so I kept calling people and reviewing
all the documentation, which, let me tell you, amounts to
a mountain of police interviews, witness statements, official reports, and
various other documents associated with the case, some thirty odd
years old. All these sex party people, my source mentions
(07:34):
that crowd Dana hung around well for maybe obvious reasons,
none of them wanted to speak to me about what
they knew. Make of that what you will. I asked
Dana's mother, Georgia Stidham, about the now deceased girl on
the hill. I've bleeped out her name, but that's who
(07:55):
we're referring to in this exchange. And it's clear that
Georgia remembers her very well.
Speaker 6 (08:03):
And did she ever mention or did you ever meet up?
Speaker 7 (08:07):
Yes?
Speaker 8 (08:08):
And you do not want me to tell you what
I think of Tell me I think the bitch had
a lot to do with it, and that a bitch
is exactly what she was. She came in and told
me that she was only nineteen and she was working
with Dana down there at the store, and now she
(08:29):
was still in school and everything. But she had one
son that lived with her mom and dad. And she
was lying all the way through. She was married and
she had the one son. That was the only truth then.
Speaker 6 (08:45):
It So what kind of person was she? Was she
a drug at it?
Speaker 8 (08:50):
Was a bitch.
Speaker 6 (08:51):
I got that she was a bitch.
Speaker 9 (08:53):
She was.
Speaker 8 (08:54):
She was smart mouthed, and she wanted to be a
big and doing things, I guess, and she couldn't quite
carry it off.
Speaker 6 (09:05):
Was she into drugs? Dope that sort of thing? Yes,
what kind of drugs?
Speaker 8 (09:10):
All kinds from what I've understood.
Speaker 6 (09:13):
Do you think she was dealing drugs too?
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yes?
Speaker 8 (09:16):
I know she was dealing. Dana had told.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Me that the Girl on the Hill, along with two
other girls Dana knew, were said to be muling drugs
from Texas into Arkansas, information I found in a police
report and an interview with her. In my experience, at
this level of drug dealing, transporting quantities of dope over
(09:41):
state lines a federal offense which can get you decades
in prison, the stakes become very high. Could Dana have
seen something she wasn't supposed to and.
Speaker 8 (09:54):
She'd lie in line, lie just to get Diana out.
Diana was on her writer, her house.
Speaker 6 (10:02):
And you're talking about when that night.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
I ended up verifying this with three other sources. Next,
I needed to understand what Georgia thought about Mike McMillan.
Detectives Danny Varner and Mike Sidoriac would not let go
of Mike. Detective Sidoriac had told the reporter quote, we
(10:27):
want to show that our victim was in McMillan's vehicle,
referring to that hair found in Mike's truck, which, along
with one of Dana's hares and George's DNA, had been
submitted for testing. If you recall, in a previous episode,
the BCSO was focused on the idea that if Mike
(10:48):
McMillan had stolen Dana's grave marker, then that behavior somehow
spoke to his guilt. So when you heard about Mike
McMillan making the grave marker from your daughter's grave, what
was your first thought?
Speaker 7 (11:04):
That he was a little chicken shit?
Speaker 6 (11:06):
Why chicken shit?
Speaker 8 (11:08):
He went down there and he took something from a
little dead girl, and I didn't like it a little
thing anyway. I don't like Mike McMillan, and I can't
stand his parents.
Speaker 6 (11:20):
Why do you think he did it?
Speaker 8 (11:22):
Because he's chicken shit? And that's just the truth of it.
He thought it might him look big.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
If Mike McMillan had been involved in Dana's murder. I
think the last thing the guy would want to do
is steal the marker from her grave. If he was
feeling nostalgic or upset, or, as Georgia said, wanted to
show off, well, that would make more sense to me.
Law enforcement seemed to be taking advantage of this situation
(11:50):
in order to keep someone in their crosshairs, and that
person was Mike. Still, they weren't the only ones who
thought Mike knew war than he was saying.
Speaker 6 (12:02):
Did you ever consider him a suspect?
Speaker 8 (12:04):
Yes, I still think you knew who it was for
a deadder and everything else, and I probably always will.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
When new information from a case comes in, I compare
it to what I've learned up until that point. A
new thread can pop out of nowhere and things can
start to make sense or not. Sidoriak and Varner would
dialed into Mike McMillan, but they also continued interviewing scores
(12:46):
of other people. Mike eventually married and moved far away
from Bella Vista. Here's his ex wife who we met
in the last episode and so when you guys, you know,
as the time went on, did law enforcement ever contact
him again?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Yes, they actually came and interviewed me first.
Speaker 10 (13:06):
They took him.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
They had him for like six or eight hours, showed
in pictures, you know, the hole graphic how they do it,
and he was pretty shaken up after that because it's
not something you want to see. So little background. My
step dad was a chief of police in the town
where we lived, so I grew up around law enforcement
(13:28):
and all that. They showed up at my work, two
detectives and asked to speak to me. They asked me
if Mike had any kind of personal possessions at the
house that had like pictures of ex girlfriends and things
like that, and I'm like, well, yeah, I mean everybody
kind of has something like that from high school that
(13:48):
you kept your notes in or your little momentos. And
they were like, oh, well, have you ever seen this
perse and this, And I'm like no, And they asked
if they could take it, and I was young and
naive and I told him yes. So they went to
my house and got that box. They interviewed Mike shortly.
Speaker 6 (14:09):
After that, and he was shaken up about them coming again.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Was just playing these pictures that they said Ordina out
in front of him. It would shake anybody yet, but
he's like, I didn't do it. I don't know if
it did it.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
You know, I was able to obtain the recording of
this marathon interview. Detective Danny Varner begins.
Speaker 11 (14:33):
She shouldn't hear about the skeletal The folks still don't know,
but got there do.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
The audio in that previous clip has degraded over time,
but Detective Varner says, little old skeletal remains and that's it.
Her folks still don't know. Well, but God does, don't
he And Mike McMillan responds, Yeah, he does. That's what
I am counting on. Werner then used a carefully chosen
(15:13):
tactic by trying to align Mike with the harshest criminals,
strategically in my opinion, to scare him.
Speaker 11 (15:22):
Like we interview people all the time, We've interviewed murderers,
ripest murderers, child molestors, and watching you here today, you've
got the gestures in that seat and you're cool. I
won't say you're I'm playing right, man. You're cool.
Speaker 12 (15:41):
You've learned to live with this and it's been your lifestyle,
and it makes it easy by the way you talk,
and by your way you deny your.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
Our man, they accuse him. They put tremendous pressure on
Mike to admit he killed Dana, but he continues to
say what he has always said, even interrupting them at
times to stand up for himself.
Speaker 11 (16:10):
And you know, we got you, man.
Speaker 10 (16:12):
It's gonna look a lot better on you. You just say, listen,
I don't do it.
Speaker 11 (16:17):
I think you did.
Speaker 13 (16:19):
If you put me into afore you getting wrong and.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Somebody get away, then Danny Varner does something we don't
expect upstanding officers to do. He lies.
Speaker 14 (16:31):
I don't think so much.
Speaker 11 (16:34):
I don't have somebody else to think.
Speaker 10 (16:36):
A pan in her car, Well, you got somebody else
getting little murder.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
The BCSO did not have Mike's fingerprints inside Dana's car.
They had no fingerprints. In fact, lying, however, is totally
within the boundaries when you're interviewing a suspect, and I
understand why detectives sometimes do it. This of you was
conducted close to the time Mike willingly gave his blood
(17:04):
and hair for DNA comparison. As I stated in an
earlier episode. People like to put a face on evil.
It helps them deal with the pain and loss. But
as Mike McMillan told me, they decided that I had
done this and that was it.
Speaker 10 (17:23):
Both of you.
Speaker 11 (17:28):
I agree with that it's been none. And Andrew tell
us michaelcmillan that if you get it.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Varner then gets into the grave marker Mike was arrested
for stealing.
Speaker 10 (17:42):
Tell us how long he was after at the cemetary. Oh,
it's been five minutes. It's been five hours.
Speaker 11 (17:52):
What do you think?
Speaker 1 (17:55):
It doesn't matter this night, of course, had been years before.
As the interview continues, they talk about how Mike's alibi
fell apart when they interviewed the girl he claimed to
have been with that night. They talk about how the
truck Mike drove was his dad's and it fit the
description they had of the person parked behind Dana that morning,
(18:20):
evidence that was all highly circumstantial at best. They then
focused on a picture of Dana they found inside Mike's house.
Speaker 13 (18:30):
Oh there, sure, I'm taking out? Oh good, okay, Well,
I know I screwed up. I'm taking a little mark
or do, but I don't get where all the rest
of the ship comes from.
Speaker 10 (18:52):
I mean, I understand it's just a little town and
get one of the things that I don't understand. How
even after I walk in and say, hey, look I did,
I'm sorry they did. You know I was stupid for
doing it. That's mitly what happened.
Speaker 13 (19:08):
Mike asked me whether or not I who took the marker,
and I said, yeah, I did, And he said, well,
hold on, we need to.
Speaker 10 (19:15):
Read your rus I remember that perfectly because that's important
to me. I got arristed that day.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Throughout this entire interview, they kept ratcheting up the pressure
on Mike. At one point, they raised the idea of
capital felony murder charges, which brought in the possibility of
the death penalty. This approach, which potentially crosses a line
into intimidation, was specifically designed to scare Mike into a confession,
(19:49):
but Mike kept insisting that he did not kill Dana.
Speaker 10 (19:59):
To get me contend to something mindy and do it,
which is all at all? Could you take her for
a rise?
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Love Warner got into the polygraphs they had given to
over a dozen people by that Mike had taken one
during the early days of the investigation, and passed years later,
he took a second one. During the second polygraph, he
was asked if he was with Dana the day she disappeared,
(20:32):
if at the time Dana was killed, he did anything
to cause her death, and was he present when Dana's
body was left in that creek bed. Mike answered no
to each question. In the official report, the polygraphist said
the results created quote such a pattern as to indicate
(20:56):
he was deceptive in answering all of the relevant questions.
When asked about his responses and how he'd scored on
the test, Mike said, quote, sometimes I think I did
kill Dana, but I know I didn't. The polygraph examiner
concluded that, in his opinion, Mike was responsible for the
(21:20):
death of Dana Stidham. During his interview with Sidoriak and Varner,
the two detectives brought up that failed polygraph.
Speaker 10 (21:31):
How can they help? If I asked him, you can't.
Speaker 5 (21:35):
The same questions.
Speaker 10 (21:40):
I didn't have anything to do with Ames Todham's dead.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
If you were to read press reports only about Mike McMillan,
you'd walk away feeling that he was hiding something and
possibly committed this crime. But listening to him in these interviews,
how direct and sharp, he is not one bit nervous.
It clear he is emphatically denying any involvement this, mind you,
(22:06):
As he is poked and prodded and accused of it
over and over for years and years, he sticks to
his story and never waivers. They thought they could break me,
Mike told me when I interviewed him. Throughout the police interview,
Mike continues to repeat himself, I didn't.
Speaker 10 (22:29):
Have anything to do with things. Tom's dead. Did you
ever do anything by yourself? Took dance Jim.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Such benign questions which have very little to do with
evidence and everything to do with tunnel vision and closing
a case. I obtained the FBI report from the hair
blood analysis, the only forensic evidence in Dana's case. The
(23:19):
BCSO says it has, and here's a quote from it.
The DNA sequences from the hair and specimen from Georgia
Stidham are different. Therefore, Dana's dittum can be eliminated as
the donor of the head haair found inside Mike McMillan's vehicle.
(23:42):
The BCSO had no forensics to back up what I
would call a very weak, circumstantial case against Mike McMillan.
The case, including the second polygraph, which Mike allegedly failed,
was sent to the district attorney. Mc millan has never
been charged. But why after trailing him and pressing him
(24:07):
for years. The simple answer is they had no evidence
against him, because no matter how much the BCSO believed
that Mike McMillan had murdered Dana, they didn't have any
tangible proof to support such an accusation or make it stick.
(24:28):
Here's former Benton County Prosecutor Nathan Smith, whom you've heard
in previous episodes.
Speaker 14 (24:35):
Sometimes in cases there's too many suspects and they all
look good, right.
Speaker 9 (24:41):
Part of the problem with that is if you have
one or two other pretty good suspects, that's almost by
definition reasonable doubt. And so when you have multiple suspects
out there from a time where it was difficult to
collect the kind of evidence we get today routinely, that
could be a problem. I can't imagine the pressure in
(25:02):
nineteen eighty nine, nineteen ninety to make an arrest, to
make the arrest, and I actually think looking back that
the investigators who worked on it at the time probably
should be commended for not making you an arrest simply
because if the evidence isn't there, you don't want to
start the process.
Speaker 14 (25:22):
Now, just stepping back a minute too, the murder scene
or where the body dumps sight, so, was there evidence there,
any type of evidence that could lead to somebody like,
is there something to test if you know, you develop
a good suspect.
Speaker 9 (25:41):
Well, I guess at this point I've got to be
careful not to, you know, get out in front of
the skis of the actual investigation. But certainly anything that
we have today it becomes easier and easier going forward
to do those kinds of testings. Now that the real
issue is if you're referencing DNA or whatever, unless you
just say, in a normal case, is was their DNA
(26:03):
evidence preserved that can be tested today? Do you remember
nineteen eighty nine that wasn't a thing people were doing, right,
They didn't think about doing that. So I think it's
really going to be just leaning into the facts more
and trying to uncover any additional information.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Although Mike McMillan somewhat faded from the public picture as
a suspect, the BCSO were still searching for a piece
of evidence that could tie him to the murder which
they would never find. And yet the entire time the
BCSO was pursuing Mike McMillan, there was a different suspect.
(26:46):
They had their eye on, a guy unknown to the public,
a much better suspect who was being looked at once again,
when all of a sudden, Dana's case took a remarkable turn.
(27:06):
It's impossible to overestimate the depth of loss of family
experiences when a young person is murdered, or the feelings
associated with that loss as they manifest and increments over time.
You see, grief is universal. It comes in five stages denial, anger, bargaining, depression,
(27:31):
and acceptance, with pangs of guilt being an unofficial sixth.
Dana was eighteen years old. She missed out on so
much life, but even more than that, she was missed.
Time doesn't change that, and I think law enforcement especially
(27:53):
must be careful when a case runs cold. What they do,
what they say, what they don't say, how they respond
to suspects, and undoubtedly to victims' families. Dana's cousin, Christy Smith,
put it quite sincerely to.
Speaker 15 (28:10):
Me, it was a lost a lot of family that
was very sad and very worried and very confused. The
police didn't seem too worried. Still, it just seemed like
there was a lot of things that should have been
done that wasn't. That I don't believe was handled correctly.
Like they only kept a car for a few days
(28:30):
and then they gave it back to her parents. I mean,
if the last place she was known to have been
was in her car, why would you not keep the car,
you know, for future reference, right. I think it was just,
you know, we weren't I don't believe that our police
departments at that time were handled to handle a case
like this.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
As investigators continued to reinterview co workers and employees at
Phillip's grocery, a name emerged, a name that had been
there all along. He's never been mentioned publicly in this case,
so I'm going to call him Jack Lenny, a local
older guy with a reputation for not only hanging around
(29:11):
Phillips Grocery daily, but sexually harassing women throughout his entire
adult life. And by reputation I mean a documented trail
of serial sexual harassment of the worst kind wherever this
dude went. By the time I met investigative journalist Brandon
(29:36):
Howard in twenty twenty three. He had done a lot
of work on Jack Lenny And to be clear, this
is not the same man from earlier in the podcast,
the guy I referred to as the perverb who liked
dirty magazines and lived up near Wellington Road, close to
where Dana's car was found.
Speaker 16 (29:57):
Well there was another suspect at the store who worked
in the area and was sexually harassing some of the women.
But beyond the harassment in the store, he was also
following them on the highway, and he had a long
history of picking up hitchhikers, harassment at other stores in
the Bellevista area, and vehicles that seemed to match more
(30:18):
closely with what witnesses reported seeing behind Dania's vehicle the
day she disappeared. That made me way more interested in
him and how little he was fleshed out.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Brandon means and I agree that this suspect was not
pursued anywhere near as aggressively as Mike McMillan, which raises
the question, why the hell not.
Speaker 6 (30:40):
Let's talk about him for a minute. What's his background like?
Speaker 16 (30:44):
This is a person who's well educated, as I would say,
a few degrees, but works way below their station, does
lots of construction jobs, can't keep jobs very long. Had
actually been in the teaching profession, but potential harassment incidents
also derailed that career. They were also the victim of
(31:11):
a major brain injury that seemed to unencumber their potency
for sexual deviancy and self control.
Speaker 6 (31:23):
So you're saying the suspect had a brain injury and
ever since then has been out of control with sexual
harassment and even sexual assault.
Speaker 16 (31:31):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
I mean, you know, I'm looking at the timeline you created,
and what just blows my mind is it's not one, two,
three girls over a period of time.
Speaker 6 (31:46):
It's five, six, seven, eight who don't know each other,
definitely telling the same story about this one guy.
Speaker 16 (31:54):
Voracious appetite is the best. I mean, he's insatiable. It
seems that woman or job or building as in a
grocery store or outlet he frequents, has not had a
story of some unnerving incident of harassment or behavior we
(32:14):
would consider stalking. I would consider stalking.
Speaker 6 (32:16):
I mean, this isn't cat calling. This is be way
beyond that sort of thing.
Speaker 16 (32:21):
It's frightening. It seems, you know, like someone, it seems
to check all the boxes for a sexual predator, going
into the store with a hood on their face, standing
behind the women, oggling them, making circles around the store,
sneaking up behind them, waiting for them in the parking
lot after work, following them on the highway, trying to
(32:43):
pull them over, in some cases, groping them.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
You start looking into this guy, and one of the
things that I do is I look to exclude people
with this guy. Can you exclude him from Dana's case?
Speaker 16 (33:00):
Yes, I would argue no. The best exclusion probably would
have been his alibi, which initially was that he was
not in the area and that he was at a
family reunion. That's refuted by the evidence that they found
that he worked the week of Dana's disappearance in Bella Vista,
a full work week, I think, even some overtime. Now,
(33:22):
the biggest attraction is that most of the sexual harassment,
if not all, the sexual harassment incidents at the store,
occurred in nineteen ninety three, four years after Dana's murder,
but we know he was in the area in nineteen
eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
I began looking deeper into this dude's life, talking to
my sources in Benton County and beyond about him. I
also heard there were recorded interviews that BCSO had done
with him about Dana's case, which I set out to find.
Each source. I spoke to, many of whom you'll soon
(33:58):
hear in the podcast. Knew Jack Lenny very well, including
no fewer than five in law enforcement, and every single
one of them said the same thing. Lenny could most
certainly be responsible for Dana's murder, but also additional homicides
throughout the Ozarks. And wouldn't you know. As Lenny's name
(34:25):
pops up on the bcso's radar in late nineteen ninety,
something happens, something incredible, something changing the entire dynamic of
Dana's case. It's December two, nineteen ninety and elderly couple
(34:48):
Linda and Randy Grohler are walking along Oscar Tally Road,
just east of Indian Creek in Anderson, Missouri, only twenty
minutes north of Bella Vista, where INA's body was found
the previous year. The main route near Oscar Tally Road
is fifty nine or North Main Street. Oscar Tally is
(35:10):
off that the rollers live in a small house near
the end of the road, and we.
Speaker 7 (35:18):
Had came home, got her dinner going in the oven,
and we went for a walk because I have back problems,
so one of the deals is take a hike. And
we went for a walk and we were picking up
cans for the church to sell for our sighting aluminum cans.
You know, you do what you can. And on the
(35:40):
way back we were just within maybe a block and
a half of the house. There was just around the
curve up there. It was a deserted house.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
That deserted house was on its last legs, just waiting
for the right gust of wind to come along and
flatten it.
Speaker 7 (36:00):
To grass had grown and the leaves, everything had been
knocked down. And Rady told me, he says, it's looking
as grass because it's kind of windloan and stuff, and
maybe we'll find some cans in here. And I said okay,
And then he was all of a sudden, he says, Linda,
(36:21):
I see a skull. I says, oh, surely not. But
I went back there with him and we saw the skull,
and then on further looking we could see the rest
of the body on the kind of a lean to
on the old house, on a concrete slab. We could
(36:43):
see the rest of the body.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
If you are enjoying Paper Ghosts, check out my weekly podcast,
Crossing the Line with m William Phelps wherever you get
your favorite shows. Coming up next time Paper Ghosts.
Speaker 17 (37:01):
The stoll was detatched from the body and the ribcage
was detached from the body. You know, the only clothes
that was on the body that we found was where
the elves and legs were in ten shows it had.
She had ten of.
Speaker 11 (37:17):
Shoes on it.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
He can validate there was a party. He can validate
that the kids said there was a screen.
Speaker 7 (37:24):
I'm not tooting my horn here, but I'm not out
to give up on it, and I have reason to
believe that it will be solved.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
Paper Ghosts Season four is written and executive produced by
me Em William Phelps and Catherine Law. Script consulting Rose Bachi,
audio editing and mixing by Brandon Dickert, and sound design
by Matt Russell. The series theme number four four to
two is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Mooney.
At the end of the last episode, a source told
us about a guy named Mike allegedly at a dance
with Dana and a sinking feeling she had that Mike
was going to do something very bad to Dana. And
while you can't spend much time in the world of
true crime without learning that you should definitely listen to
(00:32):
your gut. A sinking feeling is not evidence of wrongdoing,
and it means nothing in the scope of Dana's murder investigation.
At best, it's hearsay. If my source would have stopped there, however,
we could write off the information as coming from an
over excited teenager wanting to be caught up in the
(00:54):
drama of a local murder. But she didn't. Who told
you his name was Mike.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Just some other people that kind of knew her, that
were a little bit younger than me, that were more
of her age. They told me because I had been
telling him to watch out for this guy, that something's wrong.
And then I think it was a guy that knew
and Mike he said that, uh yeah, he said, she
she is missing. You know, some guy named Mike was
(01:26):
with her that night. And then I, you know, asked him, well,
what did he look like And then they told me
I said, yeah, that's the guy. I think he was
going to kill her. And then next thing I know,
and I said, well, they found her. And they found
her a few miles from that wonderland cave in Bella Vista.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
My source wound up talking to a few other friends
from Bella Vista voicing her concerns about Dana and that
night she supposedly saw her. And I need to point
out there was more than one person of interest the
bcs SO looked at named Mike, and Mike McMillan told
me I worked at the cave, but not until years
(02:07):
after Dana went missing, when I turned twenty one. No way,
I was there that night.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
So they said, well, they hang out at the hill.
What's that And they said it's up there at Bella Vista.
They said, you go up there and you go past
that grocery store about two or three miles and then
there'll be a little dirt road off to the left
right before you go up a hill. So I drove
out there and I seen this little road. It's like
(02:36):
a Friday or Saturday night because that's where they said
people her age and then kids from grabbing hung out.
So I drove out there. I guess they partied out there.
It was like an open field and there were four
people out there. There was three guys and another girl.
(02:57):
And I get out of the car and it's that
same guy Mike again, this other guy that I knew
that was a little a little younger than me, Diana's ages,
and then this kind of longheaded blondish girl. And I said, oh,
I said, do y'all know Dana Stidham. Didn't she go
(03:17):
missing around here somewhere? Those guys didn't say that that
they were drinking beer, you know, out of cans. She says, yeah,
I'll tell you what. You better leave here right now,
because if you don't, she says, the same thing's going
to happen to you.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
I asked my source the name of the girl on
the hill as we'll call her. As it turns out,
she's someone Dana knew very well and was seen by
several witnesses with Dana that night she disappeared. Unfortunately, I
can't interview her. She died some time ago. After our conversation,
(03:58):
I spoke to a detective and related this information. The
detective knows this source how she can ramble, and how
tempted I might be to write off what she says
as hyperbolic nonsense. But the detective stressed to me, quote,
don't discount what she tells you. After that warning from
(04:20):
the girl on the hill, my source became unsettled.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
And I went and got in my car and left.
I was like, I got to get out of here,
because I don't know what they're going to do, you know.
And I went and told a few more people about it,
and they just said, well, the guy that was with
Dana that night, he's friends with some dirty cops, so
you don't want to get involved in it because they
might do something to you. So about fifteen years ago,
(04:48):
I knew a die work the Shriff's office that I
talked to a little bit about it.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
I verified that she had told others about this. What
she relayed to me next is the mo most disturbing
part of her account. And you'll hear a name bleeped up.
It's the name of a police officer.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
What I understand is that Dana went out to man
cave in Bella Vista that night. The men decided they
were going to trade off girl friends, and they was
going to have a sex party, and that they got
ended up getting in a fight and a lover's quarrel
broke out, and that that Stidham girl got cut and
(05:34):
that told him to put her in his car or
his truck, take her and bury her.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Previously on Paper Ghosts, Yes.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
It was a young guy close to his age of
the policeman and he really felt like he may have
done it.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
You don't have an intact body, but they found there
was a knit on the collarbone that they felt like
was from a knife. Now, whether she was stabbed, you know,
in the neck.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Something in my mind told me that this guy is
fixing to kill this girl. Oh my god, this is
some kind of a murder.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
My name is em William Phelps. I'm an investigative journalist
and author of more than forty true crime books. This
is season four of Paper Ghosts.
Speaker 5 (06:29):
The Ozarks.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Cold case work for me has always been about gathering
as much information as I can without judging it or
allowing any bias to seep in. I collect the data,
do some fact and see what shakes out. And before
I decide on a line of inquiry, I like to
know as much about a case as possible. Far beyond
(07:10):
the public record, so I kept calling people and reviewing
all the documentation, which, let me tell you, amounts to
a mountain of police interviews, witness statements, official reports, and
various other documents associated with the case, some thirty odd
years old. All these sex party people, my source mentions
(07:34):
that crowd Dana hung around well for maybe obvious reasons,
none of them wanted to speak to me about what
they knew. Make of that what you will. I asked
Dana's mother, Georgia Stidham, about the now deceased girl on
the hill. I've bleeped out her name, but that's who
(07:55):
we're referring to in this exchange. And it's clear that
Georgia remembers her very well.
Speaker 6 (08:03):
And did she ever mention or did you ever meet up?
Speaker 7 (08:07):
Yes?
Speaker 8 (08:08):
And you do not want me to tell you what
I think of Tell me I think the bitch had
a lot to do with it, and that a bitch
is exactly what she was. She came in and told
me that she was only nineteen and she was working
with Dana down there at the store, and now she
(08:29):
was still in school and everything. But she had one
son that lived with her mom and dad. And she
was lying all the way through. She was married and
she had the one son. That was the only truth then.
Speaker 6 (08:45):
It So what kind of person was she? Was she
a drug at it?
Speaker 8 (08:50):
Was a bitch.
Speaker 6 (08:51):
I got that she was a bitch.
Speaker 9 (08:53):
She was.
Speaker 8 (08:54):
She was smart mouthed, and she wanted to be a
big and doing things, I guess, and she couldn't quite
carry it off.
Speaker 6 (09:05):
Was she into drugs? Dope that sort of thing? Yes,
what kind of drugs?
Speaker 8 (09:10):
All kinds from what I've understood.
Speaker 6 (09:13):
Do you think she was dealing drugs too?
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yes?
Speaker 8 (09:16):
I know she was dealing. Dana had told.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Me that the Girl on the Hill, along with two
other girls Dana knew, were said to be muling drugs
from Texas into Arkansas, information I found in a police
report and an interview with her. In my experience, at
this level of drug dealing, transporting quantities of dope over
(09:41):
state lines a federal offense which can get you decades
in prison, the stakes become very high. Could Dana have
seen something she wasn't supposed to and.
Speaker 8 (09:54):
She'd lie in line, lie just to get Diana out.
Diana was on her writer, her house.
Speaker 6 (10:02):
And you're talking about when that night.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
I ended up verifying this with three other sources. Next,
I needed to understand what Georgia thought about Mike McMillan.
Detectives Danny Varner and Mike Sidoriac would not let go
of Mike. Detective Sidoriac had told the reporter quote, we
(10:27):
want to show that our victim was in McMillan's vehicle,
referring to that hair found in Mike's truck, which, along
with one of Dana's hares and George's DNA, had been
submitted for testing. If you recall, in a previous episode,
the BCSO was focused on the idea that if Mike
(10:48):
McMillan had stolen Dana's grave marker, then that behavior somehow
spoke to his guilt. So when you heard about Mike
McMillan making the grave marker from your daughter's grave, what
was your first thought?
Speaker 7 (11:04):
That he was a little chicken shit?
Speaker 6 (11:06):
Why chicken shit?
Speaker 8 (11:08):
He went down there and he took something from a
little dead girl, and I didn't like it a little
thing anyway. I don't like Mike McMillan, and I can't
stand his parents.
Speaker 6 (11:20):
Why do you think he did it?
Speaker 8 (11:22):
Because he's chicken shit? And that's just the truth of it.
He thought it might him look big.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
If Mike McMillan had been involved in Dana's murder. I
think the last thing the guy would want to do
is steal the marker from her grave. If he was
feeling nostalgic or upset, or, as Georgia said, wanted to
show off, well, that would make more sense to me.
Law enforcement seemed to be taking advantage of this situation
(11:50):
in order to keep someone in their crosshairs, and that
person was Mike. Still, they weren't the only ones who
thought Mike knew war than he was saying.
Speaker 6 (12:02):
Did you ever consider him a suspect?
Speaker 8 (12:04):
Yes, I still think you knew who it was for
a deadder and everything else, and I probably always will.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
When new information from a case comes in, I compare
it to what I've learned up until that point. A
new thread can pop out of nowhere and things can
start to make sense or not. Sidoriak and Varner would
dialed into Mike McMillan, but they also continued interviewing scores
(12:46):
of other people. Mike eventually married and moved far away
from Bella Vista. Here's his ex wife who we met
in the last episode and so when you guys, you know,
as the time went on, did law enforcement ever contact
him again?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Yes, they actually came and interviewed me first.
Speaker 10 (13:06):
They took him.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
They had him for like six or eight hours, showed
in pictures, you know, the hole graphic how they do it,
and he was pretty shaken up after that because it's
not something you want to see. So little background. My
step dad was a chief of police in the town
where we lived, so I grew up around law enforcement
(13:28):
and all that. They showed up at my work, two
detectives and asked to speak to me. They asked me
if Mike had any kind of personal possessions at the
house that had like pictures of ex girlfriends and things
like that, and I'm like, well, yeah, I mean everybody
kind of has something like that from high school that
(13:48):
you kept your notes in or your little momentos. And
they were like, oh, well, have you ever seen this
perse and this, And I'm like no, And they asked
if they could take it, and I was young and
naive and I told him yes. So they went to
my house and got that box. They interviewed Mike shortly.
Speaker 6 (14:09):
After that, and he was shaken up about them coming again.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Was just playing these pictures that they said Ordina out
in front of him. It would shake anybody yet, but
he's like, I didn't do it. I don't know if
it did it.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
You know, I was able to obtain the recording of
this marathon interview. Detective Danny Varner begins.
Speaker 11 (14:33):
She shouldn't hear about the skeletal The folks still don't know,
but got there do.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
The audio in that previous clip has degraded over time,
but Detective Varner says, little old skeletal remains and that's it.
Her folks still don't know. Well, but God does, don't
he And Mike McMillan responds, Yeah, he does. That's what
I am counting on. Werner then used a carefully chosen
(15:13):
tactic by trying to align Mike with the harshest criminals,
strategically in my opinion, to scare him.
Speaker 11 (15:22):
Like we interview people all the time, We've interviewed murderers,
ripest murderers, child molestors, and watching you here today, you've
got the gestures in that seat and you're cool. I
won't say you're I'm playing right, man. You're cool.
Speaker 12 (15:41):
You've learned to live with this and it's been your lifestyle,
and it makes it easy by the way you talk,
and by your way you deny your.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
Our man, they accuse him. They put tremendous pressure on
Mike to admit he killed Dana, but he continues to
say what he has always said, even interrupting them at
times to stand up for himself.
Speaker 11 (16:10):
And you know, we got you, man.
Speaker 10 (16:12):
It's gonna look a lot better on you. You just say, listen,
I don't do it.
Speaker 11 (16:17):
I think you did.
Speaker 13 (16:19):
If you put me into afore you getting wrong and.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Somebody get away, then Danny Varner does something we don't
expect upstanding officers to do. He lies.
Speaker 14 (16:31):
I don't think so much.
Speaker 11 (16:34):
I don't have somebody else to think.
Speaker 10 (16:36):
A pan in her car, Well, you got somebody else
getting little murder.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
The BCSO did not have Mike's fingerprints inside Dana's car.
They had no fingerprints. In fact, lying, however, is totally
within the boundaries when you're interviewing a suspect, and I
understand why detectives sometimes do it. This of you was
conducted close to the time Mike willingly gave his blood
(17:04):
and hair for DNA comparison. As I stated in an
earlier episode. People like to put a face on evil.
It helps them deal with the pain and loss. But
as Mike McMillan told me, they decided that I had
done this and that was it.
Speaker 10 (17:23):
Both of you.
Speaker 11 (17:28):
I agree with that it's been none. And Andrew tell
us michaelcmillan that if you get it.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Varner then gets into the grave marker Mike was arrested
for stealing.
Speaker 10 (17:42):
Tell us how long he was after at the cemetary. Oh,
it's been five minutes. It's been five hours.
Speaker 11 (17:52):
What do you think?
Speaker 1 (17:55):
It doesn't matter this night, of course, had been years before.
As the interview continues, they talk about how Mike's alibi
fell apart when they interviewed the girl he claimed to
have been with that night. They talk about how the
truck Mike drove was his dad's and it fit the
description they had of the person parked behind Dana that morning,
(18:20):
evidence that was all highly circumstantial at best. They then
focused on a picture of Dana they found inside Mike's house.
Speaker 13 (18:30):
Oh there, sure, I'm taking out? Oh good, okay, Well,
I know I screwed up. I'm taking a little mark
or do, but I don't get where all the rest
of the ship comes from.
Speaker 10 (18:52):
I mean, I understand it's just a little town and
get one of the things that I don't understand. How
even after I walk in and say, hey, look I did,
I'm sorry they did. You know I was stupid for
doing it. That's mitly what happened.
Speaker 13 (19:08):
Mike asked me whether or not I who took the marker,
and I said, yeah, I did, And he said, well,
hold on, we need to.
Speaker 10 (19:15):
Read your rus I remember that perfectly because that's important
to me. I got arristed that day.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Throughout this entire interview, they kept ratcheting up the pressure
on Mike. At one point, they raised the idea of
capital felony murder charges, which brought in the possibility of
the death penalty. This approach, which potentially crosses a line
into intimidation, was specifically designed to scare Mike into a confession,
(19:49):
but Mike kept insisting that he did not kill Dana.
Speaker 10 (19:59):
To get me contend to something mindy and do it,
which is all at all? Could you take her for
a rise?
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Love Warner got into the polygraphs they had given to
over a dozen people by that Mike had taken one
during the early days of the investigation, and passed years later,
he took a second one. During the second polygraph, he
was asked if he was with Dana the day she disappeared,
(20:32):
if at the time Dana was killed, he did anything
to cause her death, and was he present when Dana's
body was left in that creek bed. Mike answered no
to each question. In the official report, the polygraphist said
the results created quote such a pattern as to indicate
(20:56):
he was deceptive in answering all of the relevant questions.
When asked about his responses and how he'd scored on
the test, Mike said, quote, sometimes I think I did
kill Dana, but I know I didn't. The polygraph examiner
concluded that, in his opinion, Mike was responsible for the
(21:20):
death of Dana Stidham. During his interview with Sidoriak and Varner,
the two detectives brought up that failed polygraph.
Speaker 10 (21:31):
How can they help? If I asked him, you can't.
Speaker 5 (21:35):
The same questions.
Speaker 10 (21:40):
I didn't have anything to do with Ames Todham's dead.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
If you were to read press reports only about Mike McMillan,
you'd walk away feeling that he was hiding something and
possibly committed this crime. But listening to him in these interviews,
how direct and sharp, he is not one bit nervous.
It clear he is emphatically denying any involvement this, mind you,
(22:06):
As he is poked and prodded and accused of it
over and over for years and years, he sticks to
his story and never waivers. They thought they could break me,
Mike told me when I interviewed him. Throughout the police interview,
Mike continues to repeat himself, I didn't.
Speaker 10 (22:29):
Have anything to do with things. Tom's dead. Did you
ever do anything by yourself? Took dance Jim.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Such benign questions which have very little to do with
evidence and everything to do with tunnel vision and closing
a case. I obtained the FBI report from the hair
blood analysis, the only forensic evidence in Dana's case. The
(23:19):
BCSO says it has, and here's a quote from it.
The DNA sequences from the hair and specimen from Georgia
Stidham are different. Therefore, Dana's dittum can be eliminated as
the donor of the head haair found inside Mike McMillan's vehicle.
(23:42):
The BCSO had no forensics to back up what I
would call a very weak, circumstantial case against Mike McMillan.
The case, including the second polygraph, which Mike allegedly failed,
was sent to the district attorney. Mc millan has never
been charged. But why after trailing him and pressing him
(24:07):
for years. The simple answer is they had no evidence
against him, because no matter how much the BCSO believed
that Mike McMillan had murdered Dana, they didn't have any
tangible proof to support such an accusation or make it stick.
(24:28):
Here's former Benton County Prosecutor Nathan Smith, whom you've heard
in previous episodes.
Speaker 14 (24:35):
Sometimes in cases there's too many suspects and they all
look good, right.
Speaker 9 (24:41):
Part of the problem with that is if you have
one or two other pretty good suspects, that's almost by
definition reasonable doubt. And so when you have multiple suspects
out there from a time where it was difficult to
collect the kind of evidence we get today routinely, that
could be a problem. I can't imagine the pressure in
(25:02):
nineteen eighty nine, nineteen ninety to make an arrest, to
make the arrest, and I actually think looking back that
the investigators who worked on it at the time probably
should be commended for not making you an arrest simply
because if the evidence isn't there, you don't want to
start the process.
Speaker 14 (25:22):
Now, just stepping back a minute too, the murder scene
or where the body dumps sight, so, was there evidence there,
any type of evidence that could lead to somebody like,
is there something to test if you know, you develop
a good suspect.
Speaker 9 (25:41):
Well, I guess at this point I've got to be
careful not to, you know, get out in front of
the skis of the actual investigation. But certainly anything that
we have today it becomes easier and easier going forward
to do those kinds of testings. Now that the real
issue is if you're referencing DNA or whatever, unless you
just say, in a normal case, is was their DNA
(26:03):
evidence preserved that can be tested today? Do you remember
nineteen eighty nine that wasn't a thing people were doing, right,
They didn't think about doing that. So I think it's
really going to be just leaning into the facts more
and trying to uncover any additional information.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Although Mike McMillan somewhat faded from the public picture as
a suspect, the BCSO were still searching for a piece
of evidence that could tie him to the murder which
they would never find. And yet the entire time the
BCSO was pursuing Mike McMillan, there was a different suspect.
(26:46):
They had their eye on, a guy unknown to the public,
a much better suspect who was being looked at once again,
when all of a sudden, Dana's case took a remarkable turn.
(27:06):
It's impossible to overestimate the depth of loss of family
experiences when a young person is murdered, or the feelings
associated with that loss as they manifest and increments over time.
You see, grief is universal. It comes in five stages denial, anger, bargaining, depression,
(27:31):
and acceptance, with pangs of guilt being an unofficial sixth.
Dana was eighteen years old. She missed out on so
much life, but even more than that, she was missed.
Time doesn't change that, and I think law enforcement especially
(27:53):
must be careful when a case runs cold. What they do,
what they say, what they don't say, how they respond
to suspects, and undoubtedly to victims' families. Dana's cousin, Christy Smith,
put it quite sincerely to.
Speaker 15 (28:10):
Me, it was a lost a lot of family that
was very sad and very worried and very confused. The
police didn't seem too worried. Still, it just seemed like
there was a lot of things that should have been
done that wasn't. That I don't believe was handled correctly.
Like they only kept a car for a few days
(28:30):
and then they gave it back to her parents. I mean,
if the last place she was known to have been
was in her car, why would you not keep the car,
you know, for future reference, right. I think it was just,
you know, we weren't I don't believe that our police
departments at that time were handled to handle a case
like this.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
As investigators continued to reinterview co workers and employees at
Phillip's grocery, a name emerged, a name that had been
there all along. He's never been mentioned publicly in this case,
so I'm going to call him Jack Lenny, a local
older guy with a reputation for not only hanging around
(29:11):
Phillips Grocery daily, but sexually harassing women throughout his entire
adult life. And by reputation I mean a documented trail
of serial sexual harassment of the worst kind wherever this
dude went. By the time I met investigative journalist Brandon
(29:36):
Howard in twenty twenty three. He had done a lot
of work on Jack Lenny And to be clear, this
is not the same man from earlier in the podcast,
the guy I referred to as the perverb who liked
dirty magazines and lived up near Wellington Road, close to
where Dana's car was found.
Speaker 16 (29:57):
Well there was another suspect at the store who worked
in the area and was sexually harassing some of the women.
But beyond the harassment in the store, he was also
following them on the highway, and he had a long
history of picking up hitchhikers, harassment at other stores in
the Bellevista area, and vehicles that seemed to match more
(30:18):
closely with what witnesses reported seeing behind Dania's vehicle the
day she disappeared. That made me way more interested in
him and how little he was fleshed out.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Brandon means and I agree that this suspect was not
pursued anywhere near as aggressively as Mike McMillan, which raises
the question, why the hell not.
Speaker 6 (30:40):
Let's talk about him for a minute. What's his background like?
Speaker 16 (30:44):
This is a person who's well educated, as I would say,
a few degrees, but works way below their station, does
lots of construction jobs, can't keep jobs very long. Had
actually been in the teaching profession, but potential harassment incidents
also derailed that career. They were also the victim of
(31:11):
a major brain injury that seemed to unencumber their potency
for sexual deviancy and self control.
Speaker 6 (31:23):
So you're saying the suspect had a brain injury and
ever since then has been out of control with sexual
harassment and even sexual assault.
Speaker 16 (31:31):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
I mean, you know, I'm looking at the timeline you created,
and what just blows my mind is it's not one, two,
three girls over a period of time.
Speaker 6 (31:46):
It's five, six, seven, eight who don't know each other,
definitely telling the same story about this one guy.
Speaker 16 (31:54):
Voracious appetite is the best. I mean, he's insatiable. It
seems that woman or job or building as in a
grocery store or outlet he frequents, has not had a
story of some unnerving incident of harassment or behavior we
(32:14):
would consider stalking. I would consider stalking.
Speaker 6 (32:16):
I mean, this isn't cat calling. This is be way
beyond that sort of thing.
Speaker 16 (32:21):
It's frightening. It seems, you know, like someone, it seems
to check all the boxes for a sexual predator, going
into the store with a hood on their face, standing
behind the women, oggling them, making circles around the store,
sneaking up behind them, waiting for them in the parking
lot after work, following them on the highway, trying to
(32:43):
pull them over, in some cases, groping them.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
You start looking into this guy, and one of the
things that I do is I look to exclude people
with this guy. Can you exclude him from Dana's case?
Speaker 16 (33:00):
Yes, I would argue no. The best exclusion probably would
have been his alibi, which initially was that he was
not in the area and that he was at a
family reunion. That's refuted by the evidence that they found
that he worked the week of Dana's disappearance in Bella Vista,
a full work week, I think, even some overtime. Now,
(33:22):
the biggest attraction is that most of the sexual harassment,
if not all, the sexual harassment incidents at the store,
occurred in nineteen ninety three, four years after Dana's murder,
but we know he was in the area in nineteen
eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
I began looking deeper into this dude's life, talking to
my sources in Benton County and beyond about him. I
also heard there were recorded interviews that BCSO had done
with him about Dana's case, which I set out to find.
Each source. I spoke to, many of whom you'll soon
(33:58):
hear in the podcast. Knew Jack Lenny very well, including
no fewer than five in law enforcement, and every single
one of them said the same thing. Lenny could most
certainly be responsible for Dana's murder, but also additional homicides
throughout the Ozarks. And wouldn't you know. As Lenny's name
(34:25):
pops up on the bcso's radar in late nineteen ninety,
something happens, something incredible, something changing the entire dynamic of
Dana's case. It's December two, nineteen ninety and elderly couple
(34:48):
Linda and Randy Grohler are walking along Oscar Tally Road,
just east of Indian Creek in Anderson, Missouri, only twenty
minutes north of Bella Vista, where INA's body was found
the previous year. The main route near Oscar Tally Road
is fifty nine or North Main Street. Oscar Tally is
(35:10):
off that the rollers live in a small house near
the end of the road, and we.
Speaker 7 (35:18):
Had came home, got her dinner going in the oven,
and we went for a walk because I have back problems,
so one of the deals is take a hike. And
we went for a walk and we were picking up
cans for the church to sell for our sighting aluminum cans.
You know, you do what you can. And on the
(35:40):
way back we were just within maybe a block and
a half of the house. There was just around the
curve up there. It was a deserted house.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
That deserted house was on its last legs, just waiting
for the right gust of wind to come along and
flatten it.
Speaker 7 (36:00):
To grass had grown and the leaves, everything had been
knocked down. And Rady told me, he says, it's looking
as grass because it's kind of windloan and stuff, and
maybe we'll find some cans in here. And I said okay,
And then he was all of a sudden, he says, Linda,
(36:21):
I see a skull. I says, oh, surely not. But
I went back there with him and we saw the skull,
and then on further looking we could see the rest
of the body on the kind of a lean to
on the old house, on a concrete slab. We could
(36:43):
see the rest of the body.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
If you are enjoying Paper Ghosts, check out my weekly podcast,
Crossing the Line with m William Phelps wherever you get
your favorite shows. Coming up next time Paper Ghosts.
Speaker 17 (37:01):
The stoll was detatched from the body and the ribcage
was detached from the body. You know, the only clothes
that was on the body that we found was where
the elves and legs were in ten shows it had.
She had ten of.
Speaker 11 (37:17):
Shoes on it.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
He can validate there was a party. He can validate
that the kids said there was a screen.
Speaker 7 (37:24):
I'm not tooting my horn here, but I'm not out
to give up on it, and I have reason to
believe that it will be solved.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
Paper Ghosts Season four is written and executive produced by
me Em William Phelps and Catherine Law. Script consulting Rose Bachi,
audio editing and mixing by Brandon Dickert, and sound design
by Matt Russell. The series theme number four four to
two is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Mooney.
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