March 20, 2024 • 48 mins
With the discovery of a second young female murder victim just over the Missouri border, 20 minutes away from where Dana Stidham’s body was found, a new suspect seems to be playing cat-and-mouse with law enforcement. Phelps drills down and compares the similarities in the cases—as infamous serial killer Dennis “BTK” Rader enters the narrative as a major suspect in both homicides.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Human beings are not conditioned to react to a gruesome
homicide scene. Those who come across bodies during the normal
course of life display a wide range of emotion shock, disbelief, confusion, horror, fear,
and of course guilt. When I began to focus my
(00:27):
career on missing people long ago, what unnerved me most
was that a loved one had vanished and family members
were left to wonder, to wait, to suffer, not knowing
what happened or where they were. You would think, as
I used to, that the discovery of a body resolves
(00:48):
a small part of the emotional puzzle surrounding a missing person.
But that's not always the reality. So you come upon
on the skull, you and your husband. Your husband sees
the skull, you walk over to it. What is your
first thought? What are you thinking?
Speaker 2 (01:08):
We didn't know really what to think.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
If you recall at the end of the previous episode,
Randy and Linda Grohler happened upon the skull and remains
of a young woman just up the road from their Anderson,
Missouri home.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
I'll tell you what it looked like if somebody had
set a skull off in museum's jailp on the ground
it was just as shiny as could be, just as
bleached out as it all could be.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
And were there any clothes or were there any ligatures
around the neck or head or body of the.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Skull was detached from the body, and the rib cage
was detached from the body.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
You know.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
The only clothes that was on the body that we
found was where the pelvis and legs were in ten
shoes it had. She had tennis shoes on. Heclass cable
around her neck, but her hands we didn't move anything
until after the corner got there. But the hands were
tied to the rope looked like clothesline rope.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
And how did this make the both of you feel
when you it settled into you that you had found
a body.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Well, it was disturbing to me, but you know I
had been in the martuary business before, so I wasn't
too upset. My wife, Linda, she got real upset about it.
Matter of fact, she had she had to go to
the doctor and get medication to help her sleep at night.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Tell me about that, Linda, what was troubling you?
Speaker 2 (02:42):
They thought that she was dumped there and we couldn't
help her.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
That here is somebody's daughter sister mother, and nobody knows
she's there. She's missing.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
And the part that bothered me for years was, I
somebody did reporter missing, You know, if you got a
child and you.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
As I listened to the Rollers described their experience, the
bindings they mentioned jumped out at me. Although it was
a point of contention among law enforcement, one could argue
that bindings could have been part of the Dana Stidham
crime scene.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
It was kind of like a clothesline rope and stuff
like that. It was different times.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Finding the skull and remains of a young woman so
close to their home had jogged the memory.
Speaker 5 (03:33):
For the Rollers.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
And then we got to think of this bones in
our front, all right, This is the part that really
bothers me. Our dog at Siberian Husky had brought part of.
Speaker 5 (03:44):
Her home with him.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
We thought it was dear bones. We didn't look at
it closely, but I think it was what part of
her vertebrate we're backbone rhythm, the bottom over?
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Is there anything else that you remember?
Speaker 3 (04:01):
When the sheriff and the coroner were up there, the
corner happened to be Gayl Duncan. At the time. I
remember Gail telling me that This is not going to
be a problem identifying the body because of the extensive
dental work.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
That plausible offhand comment about Jane Doe's teeth and her
eventual identity will turn out to be the understatement of
this case and send law enforcement on a thirty year
quest to identify her. Previously on Paper.
Speaker 6 (04:40):
Ghosts, he went down there and he took something from
a little dead girl, and I didn't like it.
Speaker 7 (04:47):
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, sneaking up behind them in some
cases groping them.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
But I went back there with him and we saw
the skull, and then on further looking we can see
the rest of the body.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
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 Pay for Ghosts the Ozarks.
Speaker 8 (05:29):
This road here that we just turned off of would
have been US seventy one Highway, So this road here
would have been so much busier.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Okay, have heard.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Justice Oscar Tally Road in Anderson, Missouri was a bit
confusing for this new englander trudging through the Ozarks in
early twenty twenty three, searching for answers in two decades
old cold cases. I met Detective Lorie Howard and her partner,
Detective Ronda Wise, from the McDonald County Sheriff's Office out
(06:00):
at the crime scene.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
Hi, how are you, Detective Lorie Howard? How's it going?
Speaker 4 (06:10):
You know I might not be the best person to ask.
Speaker 9 (06:12):
I have no idea.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
You've been busy, huh.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
I have been so busy, so busy.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
And the word Laurie Howard is one of the most
dedicated investigators I have ever had the privilege of calling
a friend. She's disciplined, resolute, and laser focused on making
sure murder victims have a voice. Detective Howard picked up
the Oscar Tally Road Jane Docase about fifteen years ago.
(06:40):
Do you think there's possibility it can be solved?
Speaker 9 (06:42):
I know it will.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
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 (06:53):
Oscar Tally is what I would call a backcountry road.
There are a lot of these throughout the Ozas, unpaved
name streets surrounded by vast forests thickly settled on both sides.
Lorie Howard and Ronda Wise work under current McDonald County,
(07:14):
Missouri elected Sheriff Rob Evenson. The grit and persistence they
display to work a case and stick with it despite
barriers is a skill not all law enforcement possesses. As
the years passed after Jane Doe was found, the course
of events surrounding this case can only be described as bizarre.
(07:42):
After I pulled up to where Jane Doe's remains were
found by the grollers, Detective Howard jumped in my vehicle
and put me right into the mindset of the killer.
She is hunting, all right.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
So the working theory is more than likely they would have.
Speaker 9 (07:59):
Come from this direction, the direction that we came off
of the main highway.
Speaker 10 (08:02):
Far off the main highway.
Speaker 9 (08:03):
Oh yeah, the whole road looked essentially really really narrow.
It's been widened since then. If you go with my theory,
he would have come from that side and come out
this way and gone out this way. Either way, whether
you're a neighbor here or whether you're a neighbor here,
this sits in an area that's echoe because there's a
park with some water down here, so this truck would
(08:24):
have been.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
Loud at the time.
Speaker 11 (08:26):
I mean, you hear birds, so a really loud, mufflered
truck would be heard by all of these people.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
There's that mention of a truck again, which figures so
prominently in Danis Stidham's case. As we chatted, a man
came walking out of the woods toward us. Laurie knew
exactly who he was, A guy whose name I have
to bleep out, she shouted, calling him by his name,
(08:52):
making his way to the vehicle he couldn't hear as
we continued talking.
Speaker 9 (08:58):
So this guy hay stuff.
Speaker 11 (09:00):
People come out here and look, we've been out here
a lot at times, and he's just not crazy about it.
We have people that think he did it.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
There was a Mac truck without a trailer parked nearby.
Speaker 11 (09:11):
I'm not one of them, but you know, but there's
people that can say that he's had something to do
with it because he's a little hinky.
Speaker 10 (09:19):
He's a trucker. Truckers are the largest number of serial
killers in the country.
Speaker 11 (09:23):
They are.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
But I'm not sold.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
The man was just a few yards from my vehicle.
Speaker 4 (09:29):
He's getting ready to probably show you there was an old,
abandoned house, creepy as hell, and that's where they would play.
But more importantly, what I'm going to show you is
going to be this concrete pad which was in front
of that garage, which is where she was like.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
He stood now at the window on Lori's side and
demanded to know what we were doing.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
Well, I'm Detective Howard, so it's nice to meet you.
Speaker 12 (09:50):
I'm Matthew. Matthew okay, So I explained to him that we.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Were just The guy was cautious and preoccupied with why
we were out there, but he also mentioned he might
have some information. He said he knew Randy and Linda
Grohler very well, that couple up the road who found
Jane Doe. We stepped out of the vehicle and stood
together as Laurie and the guy started to discuss people
(10:17):
in the area they both knew. I gave them the
space to speak privately and pulled Detective Ronda Wise aside
for a little chat. What's it about the cold case
work that attracts you to it.
Speaker 7 (10:29):
I've been saying this a lot in the last couple
of days.
Speaker 12 (10:32):
It doesn't matter.
Speaker 8 (10:33):
Who solves the cold case, as long as it gets
solved so that that family can have that closure.
Speaker 12 (10:40):
Perfect.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
You know, as Ronda and I talked, Laurie walked over
with a surprised look on her face. The curious dude
she was speaking to apparently had something.
Speaker 10 (10:51):
Laurie, we good here.
Speaker 9 (10:52):
You think I want you to talk to this man?
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Okay.
Speaker 9 (10:55):
I had no idea that he had something to offer.
But he was here the night that he heard this.
He was down the road where the party was taking place.
He can validate there was a party. He can validate
that the kids said there was a scream. He can
validate what happened to me.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Back in nineteen ninety three, kids reported that they heard
a female scream on Halloween night, and that's not exactly
evidence of a murder, which was why law enforcement back
then had not given much weight to the statements. But
this new witness, who just appeared as I was at
(11:43):
the Jane Doe crime scene with detectives Laurie Howard and
Ronda Wise, seemed to corroborate the information. I walked over
to the man and asked him to start at the.
Speaker 5 (11:56):
Beginning, and I won't use your name.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Okay, Okay, So it's Halloween night and what happens.
Speaker 12 (12:05):
A bunch of us kids are just having a party
at a house there, and one of the couples left
and came started up the hill, heard a scream, came
back down, told us a couple guys walked up here.
We didn't hear nothing.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
After that, And did anybody hear a truck.
Speaker 12 (12:25):
Just to see what was going on?
Speaker 10 (12:26):
Okay? Okay?
Speaker 1 (12:27):
And nobody saw a vehicle leave anything like that.
Speaker 12 (12:31):
It had been several minutes, so the truck had probably
had already been gone. They heard a scream and it
freaked them out, and they went back down because it's
dark up here.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
A ten year old boy who lived on Oscar Tally
RoadHead reported coming across Jane Doe's body on November three,
about a month before she was found, closer to that
Halloween night date. He told his parents, but they rode
it off as a Halloween prank. Then those three additional
young witnesses, two boys and a girl at a Halloween
(13:06):
party nearby, reported hearing a truck drive down Oscar Tally
and stop before hearing a woman's scream and the truck
then taking off in a hurry. For Laurie Howard, it
all now made sense. So it was a terrifying scream. Yeah,
it wasn't some like they're playing volleyball or something.
Speaker 13 (13:30):
It was a it was a shriek.
Speaker 14 (13:32):
So that's the second person that has I didn't know existed,
and we know that it was around Halloween, which we suppositioned,
but he can tell us for sure that it was
a Halloween party going on.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
According to the official report written on December second, nineteen ninety,
Jane Doe was found in high grass twenty feet off
Oscar Tally Road near an old Rundown barn. Binder twine,
electrical cord, nylon rope, and paracord were used to restrain her.
(14:06):
She wore blue jeans and a denim jacket. She was
thought to be between twenty and thirty years old. Her
upper rib cage was found near the porch of the barn,
dragged there, likely by wild animals. Those bindings were significant
and appeared to be important to Jane Doe's killer, maybe
(14:27):
even his signature. Here's former Sheriff Don Slessman, who investigated
the case in the years after Jane Doe's body was discovered.
Speaker 15 (14:40):
See they had a towel wrapped around her head and
they had attached that with electrical wire single strand electrical
wire with the insulation on it. That don't make sense
in poachords just a much crazy.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
And was she hogtie hands and.
Speaker 5 (14:59):
Feet, a towel around her head.
Speaker 15 (15:02):
Yeah, after a towel around.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Her head, around her face as well, or just.
Speaker 15 (15:06):
Her head her face so she couldn't finally see.
Speaker 5 (15:11):
Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
With the electrical cord, the bendable electrical cord with the.
Speaker 15 (15:16):
Copper in it, right, Yeah, the solid copper center and
then it had the good black insulation you know, like
you were a house with. But it looked like they
just a grab player they could and tie her up
with it. M four five different things. And the para
cord you know back in those days paara cord is
(15:39):
something not everybody.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Had unless you were in the military.
Speaker 15 (15:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
For investigators in the case, those very particular bindings at
the gene Do crime scene brought to mind one particular
serial killer of record, Dennis Rader, self proclaimed to bind, torture,
kill his victims. You might also know him as B. T. K.
(16:16):
In early twenty twenty three, detective Laurie Howard went out
to speak with Rader the first of many visits specifically
about Jane Doe. In fact, the night before I met
with Ronda and Laurie at Jane Doe's crime scene, they
brought btk's daughter, Kerry Rawson and interviewed him again. The
(16:39):
Sheriff's office in Pahuska, Oklahoma had created a task force
looking into the forty seven year old cold case murder
of Cynthia don Kinney and additional cold cases, including Detective
Howard's Jane Doe. The sheriff was kind of stuck on
linking BTK Laurie's oscar tally Jane Doe. I sent some
(17:04):
frustration from Laurie and Ronda not to mention disagreement with
where Sheriff Eddie Verdon of Osage County was with BTK
and Jane Doe. Ronda and Laurie saw no evidence connecting
BTK directly to their Jane Doe, and the more they
spoke to Rader about it, the more they felt Osage
(17:25):
County was only interested in closing cases, not solving murders,
and BTK seemed like as good a scapegoat as any. Still,
it didn't mean that Detective Howard wasn't looking at Raider
as a serious suspect in Jane Doe's case.
Speaker 8 (17:46):
Early on, I would have been remiss if I had
not said I have to see Dennis Raider aka BTK
because of the bindings. They're massive, it's overkill. It's obviously
something that's important to the crime.
Speaker 10 (18:05):
How many different bindings are we talking about? How many
different types of twine attire.
Speaker 8 (18:10):
Six and eight and essentially you're gonna have coax cable,
You're gonna have parachute cord, nylon cord, which is like
a camping type of cord, raided rope. We call this
yellow cord that we're looking at here. That would be
like a tree trimmer type of cord. You also have
what we refer to as baling twine. It's a type
(18:31):
of sisle twine that you might see in hay bails.
Speaker 10 (18:35):
All of that was used on her.
Speaker 8 (18:37):
All of it was used on both for our wrists
and her feet and then tied together with a shoelace.
Speaker 10 (18:43):
Well, that's pretty significant. I think it is.
Speaker 16 (18:46):
Significant, and BTK thought it was significant. He's meticulous.
Speaker 10 (18:51):
That is not meticulous.
Speaker 16 (18:52):
That is not meticulous.
Speaker 10 (18:53):
That's very unorganized.
Speaker 8 (18:55):
This would be indicative of somebody who tighter left her,
came back tighter, lefter came back.
Speaker 16 (19:03):
Possibly for quite.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
A while, I wondered what BTK thought about all this
new attention directed at him.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
He was very anxious to see his name plastered all
over the media again. He said, I don't have very
much longer to live, and he said I can see
the headlines now BTK gives last confession and all of
this kind of thing.
Speaker 12 (19:29):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So what I heard was BTK could not yet be
ruled out of Oscar Tally Jane Doe's murder.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
What I would say about that is, I do believe
wholeheartedly that there are other victims in Kansas, and more
than likely parts of Oklahoma, you know that are close
to Kansas. But really that was his thomping grounds. I
can put him in Missouri, I can put him in
Southwest Missouri. But what I don't think he was ever
(20:00):
alone there. I believe that every time he came to
Southwest Missouri he was with his family and it was
as a fishing trip.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
I had heard BTK was very ill, so I asked
Laurie about it.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
I mean, he was animated and the person that I
saw when they wheeled him in, because he's now in
a wheelchair. He has scoliosis, he's doubled over, he doesn't
walk well. Yes, cellulitis in both legs. He's got kind
of an ashen appearance. And by his own account, he said,
I probably won't live that much longer.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
The Oscar tally Jane doe murder felt somewhat disorganized, not
to mention outside btk's comfort zone of a confined space
such as a house. Plus, if we're comparing Jane Doe's
murder with Dana Stidhams as potentially being linked, BTK could
(20:56):
mostly be excluded from Dana's case based on how she
went missing, the multiple sightings of her after, and where
she was found. So what did BTK have to say
about Jane Doe's case specifically?
Speaker 4 (21:12):
And so when I would put, you know, his work
in front of him, I'll say it was a code,
and I was asking him about his own code. He
would become very animated and excited. He'd go, oh, look
at that, that's mine, you know, And we'd go over
what the code meant and what he wrote and how
he wrote it, and you know, how the codes were
written out. He was very forthcoming on all of his work.
(21:36):
And then when we would, I would slide over some
of his journal entries that had projects, his different projects
and things.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
BTK was known to use the word project for his murders, and.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
I would say, you know, hey, what about this, and hey,
tell me about it. He had no problems talking about
the ten that he'd already killed, and even some of
the journal entries that weren't that we know of, he
would explain them. So every time I would put a
piece of paper in front him, he was overjoyed that
I had his work, and I had one project in
(22:12):
particular that I had mentioned to him, and you know,
he was just a totally different person, and he said,
nobody's ever asked me about that, and he was very
excited about it, which leads me to believe that's probably
a potential victim.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Laurie then showed BTK a photo of the bindings used
on Jane Doe.
Speaker 4 (22:31):
No animation, nothing. He literally almost had a look of
disgust on his face, and it was what he said
was that's overkill. I don't know why anybody would do that.
So it was almost like he had a lack of
respect for the work that he was looking at.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
I cannot undersell the incredible amount of bindings found at
this crime scene, but it's the parachord and ropes that
most interested me at that time. Would have been very
hard to find and purchase if you were not in
the military. Jack Lenny, the new suspect and Dani's case
(23:10):
I mentioned in the last episode, had done a long
stint in the military. He also lived in between Bellavista, Arkansas,
and Anderson, Missouri, and was known to come up into
Anderson at times, and he drove a truck with the
(23:33):
discovery of Jane Doe not far from the Danastidham crime
scene in Bella Vista. The BCSO took notice. By then,
the BCSO had latched onto the guy I'm calling Jack Lenny.
Here's Lieutenant Hunter Petray, who begins by explaining why the
bcso's case against their chief suspect, Mike McMillan went stagnant
(23:56):
and the focus turned to Lenny.
Speaker 13 (23:59):
Part of the problems physical evidence DNA witnesses. You know,
you have to realize in law enforcement that sometimes you
can arrest people and you think your case looks good,
but you have to also think about the prosecutor's office.
They have to be able to get a jury to
convict somebody. So you don't just want to arrest somebody
(24:19):
if you don't think the case is good and you
don't think that the case is going to make it
through prosecution. You know, from everything, there's just not enough
at this point in time to.
Speaker 5 (24:28):
Make an arrest.
Speaker 13 (24:29):
And it's complicated because there are other people associated with
this case that are good for it as well, like
as far when I say good for it, I mean
as far as their history and their sexually harassing people.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
And I bleeped it out, but Hunter portray mentioned Lenny
by his real name and also made a valid point
regarding Lenny's behaviors around women. Let's call them the suspects
because I'm not going to name him. I'm gonna knock
on his door Friday, but I'm not going to name
him unless he talks to me. Okay, but jeez, that
(25:07):
fucker looks like I mean.
Speaker 13 (25:09):
You know, we talked early on about a little bit
of victimology, but you know, you also have to think
about suspectology going back and looking at his history. He
just made comments at Walmart at other places of.
Speaker 5 (25:23):
Employment to females.
Speaker 13 (25:25):
So I'm talking sexual advances and sexual harassment, and he
would come into Phillips there more Dana worked and other
females that work there and make those comments to them.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
This type of misogynistic criminal treatment of women was common
and sadly normalized back in the eighties and nineties. Sexual harassment,
cat calling, demoralizing and abusive as it was, was barely
frowned upon back then. But what Hunter Portray tells me
next Pruce, the sexual harassment Lenny had been allowed to
(26:02):
get away with was next level.
Speaker 13 (26:05):
There was also a female in Bentonville and she was
actually driving to work and he got in behind her
and almost ran her off the road and followed her
all the way up to the parking lot there at
Phillips where she ran inside, and she pretty much penned
it as that was.
Speaker 5 (26:25):
You know, he made comments when.
Speaker 13 (26:27):
He was interviewed as far as was it possible that
he may have stopped Dana, Well, maybe you know she
had a flat tire or something like that, which again circumstantial,
but we know that Dana had a low tire. He
also made comments of somebody had a seat belt or
something that was hanging out the door or something. He
would just stop people and not that he just would,
(26:50):
but that he had in the past stopped.
Speaker 5 (26:52):
People for things.
Speaker 13 (26:55):
He's one of those guys that, you know, by his
own admission, would could talk to anybody. He kind of
played it off as far as comments that they were
harmless that I just you know, I think he made
one comment to a girl, had she ever been eight?
Which has sexual you know in the windows there, but
(27:16):
he referred to it as well. She just took it wrong.
I was talking about her age, you know, comments like that.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Another thing we weren't aware of or knew much about
in the eighties was gaslighting. Didn't he show up at
a store once in a ski mask?
Speaker 13 (27:31):
He showed up outside and made a comment, but he
was wearing like a ski mask, and they asked him
about that, and he says, yeah, you know, if it's
cold outside and sometimes I wear a ski mask. But
it's not like I was trying to rob anybody or
anything like that.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Let's talk about what he drove at the time. He
drove a station wagon and a truck, right.
Speaker 13 (27:50):
A few different vehicles, you know, And he was kind
of looked at initially because he worked.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
For the company Lieutenant Petray Mentions here conducted work all
over Bella Vista and up toward the Missouri border where
Jane Doe was discovered. Lenny, in his forties, then living alone,
traveled all over those areas. And I should know this
(28:19):
was at a time when Dana Stidham worked at Phillips.
You see, Lenny knew her from going into that store
for breakfast and lunch nearly every day.
Speaker 13 (28:30):
They did find some maps in his vehicle, but yeah,
he would have known the area like good because they
worked there.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Those maps, I might add, were marked with a pen
in areas where Dana was seen during the time she
was missing.
Speaker 10 (28:45):
And he was an army guy too, right, the military.
Speaker 13 (28:49):
Yeah, And in fact, I think even when he was
doing some stuff, he would still do some weekend stuff
with the military.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Sheriff Don told me the other day, he said, yeah,
he went down went down to Panami. Yeah, track that
Panama allegation included Lenny beating a sex worker. Do you
think Dana's case is connected to those cases?
Speaker 5 (29:12):
Well, I can't rule it out.
Speaker 13 (29:13):
And here's why I say that is, so you have Dana.
In summer of eighty nine, we had another case that
we call a bone woman, which we've now identified. Oh,
you have Yeah, that was in February of ninety. There
was another individual first part of ninety that was just
a couple of miles away from where Dana was found,
(29:35):
off that same road. And then of course you had
the one just across the line there in McDonald County.
All of this stuff within a year, like four homicides
within a one year period. Now, bone woman, we've been
able to identify and we pretty much we've closed it out.
We have a suspect, but the suspect's dead. We're pretty
(29:57):
sure that he did it, so we've closed that case out.
Don't think it's connected to the others. But when you
get that many homicides in that short of a period,
and also within that condensed area, you can't rule it out.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
I asked about any similarities the BCSO found in Dana's
and Jane Doe's cases and if they considered the bindings
important within that scope.
Speaker 5 (30:20):
Yeah, she was bound for certain.
Speaker 11 (30:23):
For sure.
Speaker 13 (30:23):
We can't say that Dana was. We've got some red twine,
that's all we got. Possibly maybe, but you know, the
crime lab, the Emmy's office couldn't get any connection that
that stuff had.
Speaker 5 (30:36):
Been used as any type of ligature or anything, So
maybe I don't know.
Speaker 13 (30:42):
You know, when you start talking about Dana's case and
when you start looking at victimology, you know, Dana, you
look at low, moderate, high risk. To me, when I
look at this case and put everything together, Dana is
or was high low to modern risk. And I say
(31:04):
that just because of the lifestyle. But the lifestyle was
that of a teenager that runs around. Yeah, they party
at times, you know, they drink at times, But by
no means was her risk what I would consider high risk.
When you start talking about high risk, you start talking
about prostitutes.
Speaker 5 (31:22):
So when you look at.
Speaker 13 (31:23):
Dana, I don't see that same similarity.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Remember Brandon Howard, the journalist you've heard in previous episodes.
He had gotten hold of some information about one of
Lenny's ex wives and eventually wound up speaking to her.
Speaker 7 (31:41):
I remember her bringing up the fact they never found
Dana's purse. That was brought up unprompted, which stood out
to me because a year or so later she mentions
that this suspect might have had female purses at his
mother's house.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
His ex wife insinuated that he had a fetish for
purses and he collected them. If you recall, although the
contents of Dana's purse were found, her large, unique denim
bag was not.
Speaker 7 (32:14):
She also mentions that they met hitchhiking in the early
eighties and that they struck up a relationship. That's pretty
much it that She tells Binton County, Well, not only
did they meet hitchhiking, but he made sexual advances fairly
quickly in the vehicle.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Linny's ex wife went on to say she knows her
ex husband killed Dana, but doesn't think there is any
way for law enforcement to prove it. She mentioned finding
blood in a station wagon they owned, and remembered him
cleaning it and throwing his clothes away afterward. The way
(32:51):
she put it, he covered his ass when it came
to Dana. But get this, she was also there on
the Lenny flunked a polygraph and when he came out
of the room quote, he had a look on his
face like he knew he was caught. The oscar Talie
(33:22):
Jane Doe took on a different name not long after
her remains were discovered. It was clear early on that
identifying Jane Doe was going to take time and technology,
if it was even possible. So clear in fact, a
detective said in passing one day, only by the grace
of God, will you identify her? From that moment on,
(33:46):
she became Grace Doe, which is an important moment in
this case. The name Jane Doe is such a common
reference that it fails to conjure emotion or personalize in
an unidentified murder victim. Jane Doe suggests a more societal
need to help. But place another name in front of
(34:08):
Doe and suddenly there's an emotional connection. Based on the
state of decomposition, the only option to identify her was
to send dental X rays in for comparison, considering there
were several missing girls in the area fitting her general description,
in particular twenty one year old Patricia Ann Smith from Glencoe, Oklahoma,
(34:34):
and thirty four year old Trevor Ann Castile from Springfield, Missouri.
Within two weeks, both tests came back negative, no match.
Not knowing the identity of Grace Doe made finding her
killer that much more difficult, and, as Detective Lorie Howard explains,
(34:57):
when she came aboard in two thousand and seven, she
started literally from scratch without a body.
Speaker 8 (35:07):
Couldn't find her. I couldn't find the evidence. I couldn't
find skeletal remains. I didn't have a report, so essentially
I still just had a story. Years later, driving people
absolutely crazy, I called the Emmy's office.
Speaker 16 (35:21):
I called Columbia. I made various trips to North Carolina.
I went all over the place, and then one day.
Speaker 8 (35:30):
I got a phone call from the Emmy's office in Colombia.
Speaker 16 (35:34):
And she said, Okay, I found her.
Speaker 8 (35:39):
So I immediately made a trip back up to Columbia,
Murray and I retreat her skeletal remains.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
The first goal was to get a facial reconstruction done
so they had some idea of what she might have
looked like. This would also allow the Sheriff's department to
reach out publicly. While I was in Missouri, I met
with Sheriff Rob Evenson from the McDonald County Sheriff's Office.
Grace Stowe's murder is Evenson's case.
Speaker 10 (36:10):
And when she's found, what happens. What was the most
difficult thing about it?
Speaker 17 (36:16):
The most difficult thing about it, this goes on for
nearly thirty years, was to get an identification of who
the remains belonged or who.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
She was, So you have a young woman her exact
age a guess found off the side of a secluded
backcountry road with houses and farms spread sporadically all over
the place. Nobody knows who she is. There are no
missing person reports linked to her, and she had been
(36:45):
out in the elements for about two.
Speaker 17 (36:47):
Months, and so she went nearly thirty years without having
a name to go with those remains.
Speaker 10 (36:56):
So it's hard to work a case if you're in
an investigator when you don't have an ID.
Speaker 17 (37:03):
And my previous employment identity detective for about nine years,
so I've worked a fair number of homicides, and of
course that is the first thing besides your immediate crime scene,
that's the first thing that you need to do is
get your victim identified. Your victimology usually leads you to
your suspects and it leads you to the solution of
the case.
Speaker 10 (37:23):
Okay, so her case goes cold because they can't identify her.
So there's really nothing you can do, right, I mean,
you can send DNA out, but at the time DNA
is in its infancy.
Speaker 17 (37:37):
That's correct. Of course, technology has changed so much over
the most recent few years, so new opportunities, new tools
every year, things get better and better with DNA technology.
Of course, Laurie worked on this in her off time,
in her downtime when she wasn't working on something else,
and just kept trying and kept trying, and kept try ryan,
(38:00):
and eventually she was able to get with somebody with
a laboratory that was able to extract that DNA.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Extracting DNA from advanced decomposed remains is not as simple
as taking a hair or tissue sample and sending it
off to the lab for a profile. It's a complicated
scientific process with many different variables involved, chief among them
the funding to get the DNA to a place where
(38:28):
it's scientifically possible to even create a profile. Here's Lorie
Howard again.
Speaker 8 (38:36):
I needed to get DNA in the system, and that
was actually harder than it sounds.
Speaker 16 (38:41):
What I had was a fingernail. I had some hair.
Speaker 8 (38:44):
So I was talking to North Texas Health and Human
Sciences in Texas and I was pretty much begging them
to take a fingernail and they said, you know, I
don't think I don't think it's going to work. It
doesn't mean our protocol speak. They're funded, and how they're
funded sometimes requires them to have a particular way of
(39:06):
receiving evidence. But they eventually said, okay, let's just see
if we can get some mitochondrial DNA, and I sent
them part of a fingernail. The mitochondrial DNA went into
the system but wasn't very helpful.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Of course, McDonald County's goal was to submit Gracetow's DNA
to all the ancestry genealogical forensic databases, with the hope
that someone with a connection to Grace was in one
of those databases.
Speaker 8 (39:37):
I kept saying, can you please go back and look
and see if you have a Janeo? And they just
repeatedly said, no, I don't think we have anything that
meets what you're giving us. It was a matter of
figuring out what my best source of DNA might be,
and ultimately I took her mandible and I sat one
evening and extracted her teeth because I knew the molars
(39:59):
would probably be my best source.
Speaker 10 (40:02):
Now she had really good teeth. She did, she did,
and what did that tell you?
Speaker 8 (40:06):
I spoke to the forensick orthodonist and he basically said,
this woman was well cared for. But that was kind
of a dichotomy for people that aren't in the system
are not reported as a missing person. So I had
a hard time figuring out she was either loved and
had a good life and was well taken care of,
(40:28):
versus she's not in the system, nobody's recorded or missing.
Speaker 16 (40:32):
Is she a runaway? So it tells you a lot
about the care generally speaking, but.
Speaker 8 (40:39):
In her case that that wasn't the case because she actually.
Speaker 16 (40:43):
Grew up in foster care.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Another major hurdle, gray Stow had been bounced from home
to home. None of these families would have a blood
DNA connection to her. That other possibility of an expensive
facial reconstruc dirouction gnawed at Lorie. She needed to know
what this woman might have looked like, even more importantly,
(41:09):
getting that image out onto social media and the Internet
to see if anyone recognized her.
Speaker 8 (41:16):
So ultimately what happened is I I asked Victoria Livewood
Forensic Reconstruction, it's out of Canada, to help me. And
I was very upfront and said I can't pay you.
I'm asking you for a lot and I really need it.
(41:37):
And Victoria was gracious and the best person to work with,
and she said I'll do it. But then the problem
became you can't just ship a skeletal remains over the border.
So I ran up against an I how am I
going to do this? And so I called our local
hospital in Neoshio, Missouri, and I spoke with some on
(42:00):
the board and I said, I'm about to ask you
something and I don't want you to tell me no.
And he said, oh, dear, and he said okay. And
I said, I really want to bring a skull and
mandible into you of a deceased person, a homicide victim,
and I'm asking you to take MRI an MRI photos
(42:22):
you know of the skull and mandible and give me
some images for free.
Speaker 16 (42:30):
And he said, oh, oh, okay, I see.
Speaker 8 (42:32):
And I said, please, I have no funds, I'm working
with very limited funds, but I have.
Speaker 16 (42:38):
To do this.
Speaker 8 (42:38):
And so he said, if you will bring her in
in the middle of the night, you know, midnight till
one o'clock, in a box covered, I don't want any
anybody to touch this, I don't want to know you're here.
Speaker 16 (42:49):
Essentially, just do what you have to do and I'll
set it up.
Speaker 10 (42:52):
And he did.
Speaker 16 (42:53):
And so what I didn't know at the time was
that's never been done before.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
They wound up using over three hundred images out of
what were hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 8 (43:05):
And then I sent them, of course digitally to Canada,
and she had never worked that way either, so it
took a long time. She said, what do you think
the color of the eyes, the hair. We went back
and forth for a really long time. Clothing, and to
Victoria's credit, she said, this was the eighties, tell me
what this jean jacket looked like. She searched and found
(43:26):
the identical clothing for the most part that she was wearing,
and for I'm going to say probably two years. We
went back and forth with this process, and true to form,
one day I come in and I open up and
I'm looking at my emails, and it says, Laurie met
Grace and there she was, there, her Grace.
Speaker 10 (43:45):
And so what did she look like to you when
you saw that? And then she who was she?
Speaker 16 (43:50):
She looked exactly like I thought she would look like.
I didn't know her, but Yana knew her, and she
looked exactly like what I thought she would look like.
And I just knew this was really who she is.
Speaker 8 (44:00):
And I was so comfortable with it that I immediately
start calling media and said, hey, I want her everywhere.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
The reconstruction by Victoria Linwood, which is available online with
a quick Google search, depicts a woman with brown hair,
brown eyes, and olive skin. She appears to be in
her late twenties early thirties.
Speaker 10 (44:24):
Now when does she get identified?
Speaker 16 (44:28):
The answer to that is forensic genealogy.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
Submitting Grace's DNA into the forensic genealogy databases and thus
paying for it fell on Sheriff Rob Evenson's office.
Speaker 17 (44:41):
Well, we have to give credit to Mike Hall. Mike
was the former sheriff and he was sheriff until the
end of twenty twenty. And while he was in office,
he did keep Grace's case alive and he was able
to get hooked up with a lab that where he
(45:04):
was able to submit her DNA profile and this lab
was able to do some of this forensic genealogy and
came up with a possible familial match.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
The company involved, Oathram, was able to extract DNA from
Grace Doe's remains and more significantly, create a profile that
was September twenty twenty. By January twenty twenty one, Oathram
called the McDonald County Sheriff's office. They had a match.
(45:36):
Grace Doe is Shawna Garber, and yet identifying Shauna produced
an entire new set of difficulties because though they had
a name, when Shauna was in her early teens, she
disappeared from any public record. She simply had no history.
(45:56):
What's more, the life Shauna ran from and the one
she ran toward turned out to complicate Detective Laurie Howard's
murder investigation even further.
Speaker 6 (46:09):
I think it was KU Medcenter. At first she was
in the hospital near to Pete. I think it was
to Peka, and then she was transferred to the KU Medcenter.
Was she sick, No, she was burned.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
How was she burned?
Speaker 6 (46:31):
Our mother Ford lighting fluid on her.
Speaker 5 (46:35):
And lit a match.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
If you're enjoying Paper Ghosts, check out my other podcasts,
Crossing the Line with m William Phelps and White Eagle
wherever you get your favorite shows. Coming up next on
Paper Ghosts.
Speaker 4 (46:54):
Well, first, he chose his own moniker, Find them, torture them,
kill them.
Speaker 7 (46:59):
Bet.
Speaker 6 (47:01):
She was removed from several foster homes because our mother
would interfere, to the point she even threatened to kill
one foster family's kids. Our mother was an evil, vindictive
spawn Accoult.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
I just remember being in the basement of this individual's
house and there had to been like over one hundred
spools of different chords.
Speaker 5 (47:26):
It just was pretty ominous.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Paper Ghost Season four is written and executive produced by
me and William Phelps. Script consulting by Rose Baci, sound
design by Matt Russell, executive production by Catherine Law, and
audio editing and mixing by Brandon Dicker Takaboom Productions. The
series theme and four four to two is written and
(47:49):
performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Won.
Human beings are not conditioned to react to a gruesome
homicide scene. Those who come across bodies during the normal
course of life display a wide range of emotion shock, disbelief, confusion, horror, fear,
and of course guilt. When I began to focus my
(00:27):
career on missing people long ago, what unnerved me most
was that a loved one had vanished and family members
were left to wonder, to wait, to suffer, not knowing
what happened or where they were. You would think, as
I used to, that the discovery of a body resolves
(00:48):
a small part of the emotional puzzle surrounding a missing person.
But that's not always the reality. So you come upon
on the skull, you and your husband. Your husband sees
the skull, you walk over to it. What is your
first thought? What are you thinking?
Speaker 2 (01:08):
We didn't know really what to think.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
If you recall at the end of the previous episode,
Randy and Linda Grohler happened upon the skull and remains
of a young woman just up the road from their Anderson,
Missouri home.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
I'll tell you what it looked like if somebody had
set a skull off in museum's jailp on the ground
it was just as shiny as could be, just as
bleached out as it all could be.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
And were there any clothes or were there any ligatures
around the neck or head or body of the.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Skull was detached from the body, and the rib cage
was detached from the body.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
You know.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
The only clothes that was on the body that we
found was where the pelvis and legs were in ten
shoes it had. She had tennis shoes on. Heclass cable
around her neck, but her hands we didn't move anything
until after the corner got there. But the hands were
tied to the rope looked like clothesline rope.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
And how did this make the both of you feel
when you it settled into you that you had found
a body.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Well, it was disturbing to me, but you know I
had been in the martuary business before, so I wasn't
too upset. My wife, Linda, she got real upset about it.
Matter of fact, she had she had to go to
the doctor and get medication to help her sleep at night.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Tell me about that, Linda, what was troubling you?
Speaker 2 (02:42):
They thought that she was dumped there and we couldn't
help her.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
That here is somebody's daughter sister mother, and nobody knows
she's there. She's missing.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
And the part that bothered me for years was, I
somebody did reporter missing, You know, if you got a
child and you.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
As I listened to the Rollers described their experience, the
bindings they mentioned jumped out at me. Although it was
a point of contention among law enforcement, one could argue
that bindings could have been part of the Dana Stidham
crime scene.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
It was kind of like a clothesline rope and stuff
like that. It was different times.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Finding the skull and remains of a young woman so
close to their home had jogged the memory.
Speaker 5 (03:33):
For the Rollers.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
And then we got to think of this bones in
our front, all right, This is the part that really
bothers me. Our dog at Siberian Husky had brought part of.
Speaker 5 (03:44):
Her home with him.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
We thought it was dear bones. We didn't look at
it closely, but I think it was what part of
her vertebrate we're backbone rhythm, the bottom over?
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Is there anything else that you remember?
Speaker 3 (04:01):
When the sheriff and the coroner were up there, the
corner happened to be Gayl Duncan. At the time. I
remember Gail telling me that This is not going to
be a problem identifying the body because of the extensive
dental work.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
That plausible offhand comment about Jane Doe's teeth and her
eventual identity will turn out to be the understatement of
this case and send law enforcement on a thirty year
quest to identify her. Previously on Paper.
Speaker 6 (04:40):
Ghosts, he went down there and he took something from
a little dead girl, and I didn't like it.
Speaker 7 (04:47):
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, sneaking up behind them in some
cases groping them.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
But I went back there with him and we saw
the skull, and then on further looking we can see
the rest of the body.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
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 Pay for Ghosts the Ozarks.
Speaker 8 (05:29):
This road here that we just turned off of would
have been US seventy one Highway, So this road here
would have been so much busier.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Okay, have heard.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Justice Oscar Tally Road in Anderson, Missouri was a bit
confusing for this new englander trudging through the Ozarks in
early twenty twenty three, searching for answers in two decades
old cold cases. I met Detective Lorie Howard and her partner,
Detective Ronda Wise, from the McDonald County Sheriff's Office out
(06:00):
at the crime scene.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
Hi, how are you, Detective Lorie Howard? How's it going?
Speaker 4 (06:10):
You know I might not be the best person to ask.
Speaker 9 (06:12):
I have no idea.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
You've been busy, huh.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
I have been so busy, so busy.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
And the word Laurie Howard is one of the most
dedicated investigators I have ever had the privilege of calling
a friend. She's disciplined, resolute, and laser focused on making
sure murder victims have a voice. Detective Howard picked up
the Oscar Tally Road Jane Docase about fifteen years ago.
(06:40):
Do you think there's possibility it can be solved?
Speaker 9 (06:42):
I know it will.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
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 (06:53):
Oscar Tally is what I would call a backcountry road.
There are a lot of these throughout the Ozas, unpaved
name streets surrounded by vast forests thickly settled on both sides.
Lorie Howard and Ronda Wise work under current McDonald County,
(07:14):
Missouri elected Sheriff Rob Evenson. The grit and persistence they
display to work a case and stick with it despite
barriers is a skill not all law enforcement possesses. As
the years passed after Jane Doe was found, the course
of events surrounding this case can only be described as bizarre.
(07:42):
After I pulled up to where Jane Doe's remains were
found by the grollers, Detective Howard jumped in my vehicle
and put me right into the mindset of the killer.
She is hunting, all right.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
So the working theory is more than likely they would have.
Speaker 9 (07:59):
Come from this direction, the direction that we came off
of the main highway.
Speaker 10 (08:02):
Far off the main highway.
Speaker 9 (08:03):
Oh yeah, the whole road looked essentially really really narrow.
It's been widened since then. If you go with my theory,
he would have come from that side and come out
this way and gone out this way. Either way, whether
you're a neighbor here or whether you're a neighbor here,
this sits in an area that's echoe because there's a
park with some water down here, so this truck would
(08:24):
have been.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
Loud at the time.
Speaker 11 (08:26):
I mean, you hear birds, so a really loud, mufflered
truck would be heard by all of these people.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
There's that mention of a truck again, which figures so
prominently in Danis Stidham's case. As we chatted, a man
came walking out of the woods toward us. Laurie knew
exactly who he was, A guy whose name I have
to bleep out, she shouted, calling him by his name,
(08:52):
making his way to the vehicle he couldn't hear as
we continued talking.
Speaker 9 (08:58):
So this guy hay stuff.
Speaker 11 (09:00):
People come out here and look, we've been out here
a lot at times, and he's just not crazy about it.
We have people that think he did it.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
There was a Mac truck without a trailer parked nearby.
Speaker 11 (09:11):
I'm not one of them, but you know, but there's
people that can say that he's had something to do
with it because he's a little hinky.
Speaker 10 (09:19):
He's a trucker. Truckers are the largest number of serial
killers in the country.
Speaker 11 (09:23):
They are.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
But I'm not sold.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
The man was just a few yards from my vehicle.
Speaker 4 (09:29):
He's getting ready to probably show you there was an old,
abandoned house, creepy as hell, and that's where they would play.
But more importantly, what I'm going to show you is
going to be this concrete pad which was in front
of that garage, which is where she was like.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
He stood now at the window on Lori's side and
demanded to know what we were doing.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
Well, I'm Detective Howard, so it's nice to meet you.
Speaker 12 (09:50):
I'm Matthew. Matthew okay, So I explained to him that we.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Were just The guy was cautious and preoccupied with why
we were out there, but he also mentioned he might
have some information. He said he knew Randy and Linda
Grohler very well, that couple up the road who found
Jane Doe. We stepped out of the vehicle and stood
together as Laurie and the guy started to discuss people
(10:17):
in the area they both knew. I gave them the
space to speak privately and pulled Detective Ronda Wise aside
for a little chat. What's it about the cold case
work that attracts you to it.
Speaker 7 (10:29):
I've been saying this a lot in the last couple
of days.
Speaker 12 (10:32):
It doesn't matter.
Speaker 8 (10:33):
Who solves the cold case, as long as it gets
solved so that that family can have that closure.
Speaker 12 (10:40):
Perfect.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
You know, as Ronda and I talked, Laurie walked over
with a surprised look on her face. The curious dude
she was speaking to apparently had something.
Speaker 10 (10:51):
Laurie, we good here.
Speaker 9 (10:52):
You think I want you to talk to this man?
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Okay.
Speaker 9 (10:55):
I had no idea that he had something to offer.
But he was here the night that he heard this.
He was down the road where the party was taking place.
He can validate there was a party. He can validate
that the kids said there was a scream. He can
validate what happened to me.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Back in nineteen ninety three, kids reported that they heard
a female scream on Halloween night, and that's not exactly
evidence of a murder, which was why law enforcement back
then had not given much weight to the statements. But
this new witness, who just appeared as I was at
(11:43):
the Jane Doe crime scene with detectives Laurie Howard and
Ronda Wise, seemed to corroborate the information. I walked over
to the man and asked him to start at the.
Speaker 5 (11:56):
Beginning, and I won't use your name.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Okay, Okay, So it's Halloween night and what happens.
Speaker 12 (12:05):
A bunch of us kids are just having a party
at a house there, and one of the couples left
and came started up the hill, heard a scream, came
back down, told us a couple guys walked up here.
We didn't hear nothing.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
After that, And did anybody hear a truck.
Speaker 12 (12:25):
Just to see what was going on?
Speaker 10 (12:26):
Okay? Okay?
Speaker 1 (12:27):
And nobody saw a vehicle leave anything like that.
Speaker 12 (12:31):
It had been several minutes, so the truck had probably
had already been gone. They heard a scream and it
freaked them out, and they went back down because it's
dark up here.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
A ten year old boy who lived on Oscar Tally
RoadHead reported coming across Jane Doe's body on November three,
about a month before she was found, closer to that
Halloween night date. He told his parents, but they rode
it off as a Halloween prank. Then those three additional
young witnesses, two boys and a girl at a Halloween
(13:06):
party nearby, reported hearing a truck drive down Oscar Tally
and stop before hearing a woman's scream and the truck
then taking off in a hurry. For Laurie Howard, it
all now made sense. So it was a terrifying scream. Yeah,
it wasn't some like they're playing volleyball or something.
Speaker 13 (13:30):
It was a it was a shriek.
Speaker 14 (13:32):
So that's the second person that has I didn't know existed,
and we know that it was around Halloween, which we suppositioned,
but he can tell us for sure that it was
a Halloween party going on.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
According to the official report written on December second, nineteen ninety,
Jane Doe was found in high grass twenty feet off
Oscar Tally Road near an old Rundown barn. Binder twine,
electrical cord, nylon rope, and paracord were used to restrain her.
(14:06):
She wore blue jeans and a denim jacket. She was
thought to be between twenty and thirty years old. Her
upper rib cage was found near the porch of the barn,
dragged there, likely by wild animals. Those bindings were significant
and appeared to be important to Jane Doe's killer, maybe
(14:27):
even his signature. Here's former Sheriff Don Slessman, who investigated
the case in the years after Jane Doe's body was discovered.
Speaker 15 (14:40):
See they had a towel wrapped around her head and
they had attached that with electrical wire single strand electrical
wire with the insulation on it. That don't make sense
in poachords just a much crazy.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
And was she hogtie hands and.
Speaker 5 (14:59):
Feet, a towel around her head.
Speaker 15 (15:02):
Yeah, after a towel around.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Her head, around her face as well, or just.
Speaker 15 (15:06):
Her head her face so she couldn't finally see.
Speaker 5 (15:11):
Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
With the electrical cord, the bendable electrical cord with the.
Speaker 15 (15:16):
Copper in it, right, Yeah, the solid copper center and
then it had the good black insulation you know, like
you were a house with. But it looked like they
just a grab player they could and tie her up
with it. M four five different things. And the para
cord you know back in those days paara cord is
(15:39):
something not everybody.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Had unless you were in the military.
Speaker 15 (15:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
For investigators in the case, those very particular bindings at
the gene Do crime scene brought to mind one particular
serial killer of record, Dennis Rader, self proclaimed to bind, torture,
kill his victims. You might also know him as B. T. K.
(16:16):
In early twenty twenty three, detective Laurie Howard went out
to speak with Rader the first of many visits specifically
about Jane Doe. In fact, the night before I met
with Ronda and Laurie at Jane Doe's crime scene, they
brought btk's daughter, Kerry Rawson and interviewed him again. The
(16:39):
Sheriff's office in Pahuska, Oklahoma had created a task force
looking into the forty seven year old cold case murder
of Cynthia don Kinney and additional cold cases, including Detective
Howard's Jane Doe. The sheriff was kind of stuck on
linking BTK Laurie's oscar tally Jane Doe. I sent some
(17:04):
frustration from Laurie and Ronda not to mention disagreement with
where Sheriff Eddie Verdon of Osage County was with BTK
and Jane Doe. Ronda and Laurie saw no evidence connecting
BTK directly to their Jane Doe, and the more they
spoke to Rader about it, the more they felt Osage
(17:25):
County was only interested in closing cases, not solving murders,
and BTK seemed like as good a scapegoat as any. Still,
it didn't mean that Detective Howard wasn't looking at Raider
as a serious suspect in Jane Doe's case.
Speaker 8 (17:46):
Early on, I would have been remiss if I had
not said I have to see Dennis Raider aka BTK
because of the bindings. They're massive, it's overkill. It's obviously
something that's important to the crime.
Speaker 10 (18:05):
How many different bindings are we talking about? How many
different types of twine attire.
Speaker 8 (18:10):
Six and eight and essentially you're gonna have coax cable,
You're gonna have parachute cord, nylon cord, which is like
a camping type of cord, raided rope. We call this
yellow cord that we're looking at here. That would be
like a tree trimmer type of cord. You also have
what we refer to as baling twine. It's a type
(18:31):
of sisle twine that you might see in hay bails.
Speaker 10 (18:35):
All of that was used on her.
Speaker 8 (18:37):
All of it was used on both for our wrists
and her feet and then tied together with a shoelace.
Speaker 10 (18:43):
Well, that's pretty significant. I think it is.
Speaker 16 (18:46):
Significant, and BTK thought it was significant. He's meticulous.
Speaker 10 (18:51):
That is not meticulous.
Speaker 16 (18:52):
That is not meticulous.
Speaker 10 (18:53):
That's very unorganized.
Speaker 8 (18:55):
This would be indicative of somebody who tighter left her,
came back tighter, lefter came back.
Speaker 16 (19:03):
Possibly for quite.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
A while, I wondered what BTK thought about all this
new attention directed at him.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
He was very anxious to see his name plastered all
over the media again. He said, I don't have very
much longer to live, and he said I can see
the headlines now BTK gives last confession and all of
this kind of thing.
Speaker 12 (19:29):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So what I heard was BTK could not yet be
ruled out of Oscar Tally Jane Doe's murder.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
What I would say about that is, I do believe
wholeheartedly that there are other victims in Kansas, and more
than likely parts of Oklahoma, you know that are close
to Kansas. But really that was his thomping grounds. I
can put him in Missouri, I can put him in
Southwest Missouri. But what I don't think he was ever
(20:00):
alone there. I believe that every time he came to
Southwest Missouri he was with his family and it was
as a fishing trip.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
I had heard BTK was very ill, so I asked
Laurie about it.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
I mean, he was animated and the person that I
saw when they wheeled him in, because he's now in
a wheelchair. He has scoliosis, he's doubled over, he doesn't
walk well. Yes, cellulitis in both legs. He's got kind
of an ashen appearance. And by his own account, he said,
I probably won't live that much longer.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
The Oscar tally Jane doe murder felt somewhat disorganized, not
to mention outside btk's comfort zone of a confined space
such as a house. Plus, if we're comparing Jane Doe's
murder with Dana Stidhams as potentially being linked, BTK could
(20:56):
mostly be excluded from Dana's case based on how she
went missing, the multiple sightings of her after, and where
she was found. So what did BTK have to say
about Jane Doe's case specifically?
Speaker 4 (21:12):
And so when I would put, you know, his work
in front of him, I'll say it was a code,
and I was asking him about his own code. He
would become very animated and excited. He'd go, oh, look
at that, that's mine, you know, And we'd go over
what the code meant and what he wrote and how
he wrote it, and you know, how the codes were
written out. He was very forthcoming on all of his work.
(21:36):
And then when we would, I would slide over some
of his journal entries that had projects, his different projects
and things.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
BTK was known to use the word project for his murders, and.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
I would say, you know, hey, what about this, and hey,
tell me about it. He had no problems talking about
the ten that he'd already killed, and even some of
the journal entries that weren't that we know of, he
would explain them. So every time I would put a
piece of paper in front him, he was overjoyed that
I had his work, and I had one project in
(22:12):
particular that I had mentioned to him, and you know,
he was just a totally different person, and he said,
nobody's ever asked me about that, and he was very
excited about it, which leads me to believe that's probably
a potential victim.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Laurie then showed BTK a photo of the bindings used
on Jane Doe.
Speaker 4 (22:31):
No animation, nothing. He literally almost had a look of
disgust on his face, and it was what he said
was that's overkill. I don't know why anybody would do that.
So it was almost like he had a lack of
respect for the work that he was looking at.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
I cannot undersell the incredible amount of bindings found at
this crime scene, but it's the parachord and ropes that
most interested me at that time. Would have been very
hard to find and purchase if you were not in
the military. Jack Lenny, the new suspect and Dani's case
(23:10):
I mentioned in the last episode, had done a long
stint in the military. He also lived in between Bellavista, Arkansas,
and Anderson, Missouri, and was known to come up into
Anderson at times, and he drove a truck with the
(23:33):
discovery of Jane Doe not far from the Danastidham crime
scene in Bella Vista. The BCSO took notice. By then,
the BCSO had latched onto the guy I'm calling Jack Lenny.
Here's Lieutenant Hunter Petray, who begins by explaining why the
bcso's case against their chief suspect, Mike McMillan went stagnant
(23:56):
and the focus turned to Lenny.
Speaker 13 (23:59):
Part of the problems physical evidence DNA witnesses. You know,
you have to realize in law enforcement that sometimes you
can arrest people and you think your case looks good,
but you have to also think about the prosecutor's office.
They have to be able to get a jury to
convict somebody. So you don't just want to arrest somebody
(24:19):
if you don't think the case is good and you
don't think that the case is going to make it
through prosecution. You know, from everything, there's just not enough
at this point in time to.
Speaker 5 (24:28):
Make an arrest.
Speaker 13 (24:29):
And it's complicated because there are other people associated with
this case that are good for it as well, like
as far when I say good for it, I mean
as far as their history and their sexually harassing people.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
And I bleeped it out, but Hunter portray mentioned Lenny
by his real name and also made a valid point
regarding Lenny's behaviors around women. Let's call them the suspects
because I'm not going to name him. I'm gonna knock
on his door Friday, but I'm not going to name
him unless he talks to me. Okay, but jeez, that
(25:07):
fucker looks like I mean.
Speaker 13 (25:09):
You know, we talked early on about a little bit
of victimology, but you know, you also have to think
about suspectology going back and looking at his history. He
just made comments at Walmart at other places of.
Speaker 5 (25:23):
Employment to females.
Speaker 13 (25:25):
So I'm talking sexual advances and sexual harassment, and he
would come into Phillips there more Dana worked and other
females that work there and make those comments to them.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
This type of misogynistic criminal treatment of women was common
and sadly normalized back in the eighties and nineties. Sexual harassment,
cat calling, demoralizing and abusive as it was, was barely
frowned upon back then. But what Hunter Portray tells me
next Pruce, the sexual harassment Lenny had been allowed to
(26:02):
get away with was next level.
Speaker 13 (26:05):
There was also a female in Bentonville and she was
actually driving to work and he got in behind her
and almost ran her off the road and followed her
all the way up to the parking lot there at
Phillips where she ran inside, and she pretty much penned
it as that was.
Speaker 5 (26:25):
You know, he made comments when.
Speaker 13 (26:27):
He was interviewed as far as was it possible that
he may have stopped Dana, Well, maybe you know she
had a flat tire or something like that, which again circumstantial,
but we know that Dana had a low tire. He
also made comments of somebody had a seat belt or
something that was hanging out the door or something. He
would just stop people and not that he just would,
(26:50):
but that he had in the past stopped.
Speaker 5 (26:52):
People for things.
Speaker 13 (26:55):
He's one of those guys that, you know, by his
own admission, would could talk to anybody. He kind of
played it off as far as comments that they were
harmless that I just you know, I think he made
one comment to a girl, had she ever been eight?
Which has sexual you know in the windows there, but
(27:16):
he referred to it as well. She just took it wrong.
I was talking about her age, you know, comments like that.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Another thing we weren't aware of or knew much about
in the eighties was gaslighting. Didn't he show up at
a store once in a ski mask?
Speaker 13 (27:31):
He showed up outside and made a comment, but he
was wearing like a ski mask, and they asked him
about that, and he says, yeah, you know, if it's
cold outside and sometimes I wear a ski mask. But
it's not like I was trying to rob anybody or
anything like that.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Let's talk about what he drove at the time. He
drove a station wagon and a truck, right.
Speaker 13 (27:50):
A few different vehicles, you know, And he was kind
of looked at initially because he worked.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
For the company Lieutenant Petray Mentions here conducted work all
over Bella Vista and up toward the Missouri border where
Jane Doe was discovered. Lenny, in his forties, then living alone,
traveled all over those areas. And I should know this
(28:19):
was at a time when Dana Stidham worked at Phillips.
You see, Lenny knew her from going into that store
for breakfast and lunch nearly every day.
Speaker 13 (28:30):
They did find some maps in his vehicle, but yeah,
he would have known the area like good because they
worked there.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Those maps, I might add, were marked with a pen
in areas where Dana was seen during the time she
was missing.
Speaker 10 (28:45):
And he was an army guy too, right, the military.
Speaker 13 (28:49):
Yeah, And in fact, I think even when he was
doing some stuff, he would still do some weekend stuff
with the military.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Sheriff Don told me the other day, he said, yeah,
he went down went down to Panami. Yeah, track that
Panama allegation included Lenny beating a sex worker. Do you
think Dana's case is connected to those cases?
Speaker 5 (29:12):
Well, I can't rule it out.
Speaker 13 (29:13):
And here's why I say that is, so you have Dana.
In summer of eighty nine, we had another case that
we call a bone woman, which we've now identified. Oh,
you have Yeah, that was in February of ninety. There
was another individual first part of ninety that was just
a couple of miles away from where Dana was found,
(29:35):
off that same road. And then of course you had
the one just across the line there in McDonald County.
All of this stuff within a year, like four homicides
within a one year period. Now, bone woman, we've been
able to identify and we pretty much we've closed it out.
We have a suspect, but the suspect's dead. We're pretty
(29:57):
sure that he did it, so we've closed that case out.
Don't think it's connected to the others. But when you
get that many homicides in that short of a period,
and also within that condensed area, you can't rule it out.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
I asked about any similarities the BCSO found in Dana's
and Jane Doe's cases and if they considered the bindings
important within that scope.
Speaker 5 (30:20):
Yeah, she was bound for certain.
Speaker 11 (30:23):
For sure.
Speaker 13 (30:23):
We can't say that Dana was. We've got some red twine,
that's all we got. Possibly maybe, but you know, the
crime lab, the Emmy's office couldn't get any connection that
that stuff had.
Speaker 5 (30:36):
Been used as any type of ligature or anything, So
maybe I don't know.
Speaker 13 (30:42):
You know, when you start talking about Dana's case and
when you start looking at victimology, you know, Dana, you
look at low, moderate, high risk. To me, when I
look at this case and put everything together, Dana is
or was high low to modern risk. And I say
(31:04):
that just because of the lifestyle. But the lifestyle was
that of a teenager that runs around. Yeah, they party
at times, you know, they drink at times, But by
no means was her risk what I would consider high risk.
When you start talking about high risk, you start talking
about prostitutes.
Speaker 5 (31:22):
So when you look at.
Speaker 13 (31:23):
Dana, I don't see that same similarity.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Remember Brandon Howard, the journalist you've heard in previous episodes.
He had gotten hold of some information about one of
Lenny's ex wives and eventually wound up speaking to her.
Speaker 7 (31:41):
I remember her bringing up the fact they never found
Dana's purse. That was brought up unprompted, which stood out
to me because a year or so later she mentions
that this suspect might have had female purses at his
mother's house.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
His ex wife insinuated that he had a fetish for
purses and he collected them. If you recall, although the
contents of Dana's purse were found, her large, unique denim
bag was not.
Speaker 7 (32:14):
She also mentions that they met hitchhiking in the early
eighties and that they struck up a relationship. That's pretty
much it that She tells Binton County, Well, not only
did they meet hitchhiking, but he made sexual advances fairly
quickly in the vehicle.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Linny's ex wife went on to say she knows her
ex husband killed Dana, but doesn't think there is any
way for law enforcement to prove it. She mentioned finding
blood in a station wagon they owned, and remembered him
cleaning it and throwing his clothes away afterward. The way
(32:51):
she put it, he covered his ass when it came
to Dana. But get this, she was also there on
the Lenny flunked a polygraph and when he came out
of the room quote, he had a look on his
face like he knew he was caught. The oscar Talie
(33:22):
Jane Doe took on a different name not long after
her remains were discovered. It was clear early on that
identifying Jane Doe was going to take time and technology,
if it was even possible. So clear in fact, a
detective said in passing one day, only by the grace
of God, will you identify her? From that moment on,
(33:46):
she became Grace Doe, which is an important moment in
this case. The name Jane Doe is such a common
reference that it fails to conjure emotion or personalize in
an unidentified murder victim. Jane Doe suggests a more societal
need to help. But place another name in front of
(34:08):
Doe and suddenly there's an emotional connection. Based on the
state of decomposition, the only option to identify her was
to send dental X rays in for comparison, considering there
were several missing girls in the area fitting her general description,
in particular twenty one year old Patricia Ann Smith from Glencoe, Oklahoma,
(34:34):
and thirty four year old Trevor Ann Castile from Springfield, Missouri.
Within two weeks, both tests came back negative, no match.
Not knowing the identity of Grace Doe made finding her
killer that much more difficult, and, as Detective Lorie Howard explains,
(34:57):
when she came aboard in two thousand and seven, she
started literally from scratch without a body.
Speaker 8 (35:07):
Couldn't find her. I couldn't find the evidence. I couldn't
find skeletal remains. I didn't have a report, so essentially
I still just had a story. Years later, driving people
absolutely crazy, I called the Emmy's office.
Speaker 16 (35:21):
I called Columbia. I made various trips to North Carolina.
I went all over the place, and then one day.
Speaker 8 (35:30):
I got a phone call from the Emmy's office in Colombia.
Speaker 16 (35:34):
And she said, Okay, I found her.
Speaker 8 (35:39):
So I immediately made a trip back up to Columbia,
Murray and I retreat her skeletal remains.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
The first goal was to get a facial reconstruction done
so they had some idea of what she might have
looked like. This would also allow the Sheriff's department to
reach out publicly. While I was in Missouri, I met
with Sheriff Rob Evenson from the McDonald County Sheriff's Office.
Grace Stowe's murder is Evenson's case.
Speaker 10 (36:10):
And when she's found, what happens. What was the most
difficult thing about it?
Speaker 17 (36:16):
The most difficult thing about it, this goes on for
nearly thirty years, was to get an identification of who
the remains belonged or who.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
She was, So you have a young woman her exact
age a guess found off the side of a secluded
backcountry road with houses and farms spread sporadically all over
the place. Nobody knows who she is. There are no
missing person reports linked to her, and she had been
(36:45):
out in the elements for about two.
Speaker 17 (36:47):
Months, and so she went nearly thirty years without having
a name to go with those remains.
Speaker 10 (36:56):
So it's hard to work a case if you're in
an investigator when you don't have an ID.
Speaker 17 (37:03):
And my previous employment identity detective for about nine years,
so I've worked a fair number of homicides, and of
course that is the first thing besides your immediate crime scene,
that's the first thing that you need to do is
get your victim identified. Your victimology usually leads you to
your suspects and it leads you to the solution of
the case.
Speaker 10 (37:23):
Okay, so her case goes cold because they can't identify her.
So there's really nothing you can do, right, I mean,
you can send DNA out, but at the time DNA
is in its infancy.
Speaker 17 (37:37):
That's correct. Of course, technology has changed so much over
the most recent few years, so new opportunities, new tools
every year, things get better and better with DNA technology.
Of course, Laurie worked on this in her off time,
in her downtime when she wasn't working on something else,
and just kept trying and kept trying, and kept try ryan,
(38:00):
and eventually she was able to get with somebody with
a laboratory that was able to extract that DNA.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Extracting DNA from advanced decomposed remains is not as simple
as taking a hair or tissue sample and sending it
off to the lab for a profile. It's a complicated
scientific process with many different variables involved, chief among them
the funding to get the DNA to a place where
(38:28):
it's scientifically possible to even create a profile. Here's Lorie
Howard again.
Speaker 8 (38:36):
I needed to get DNA in the system, and that
was actually harder than it sounds.
Speaker 16 (38:41):
What I had was a fingernail. I had some hair.
Speaker 8 (38:44):
So I was talking to North Texas Health and Human
Sciences in Texas and I was pretty much begging them
to take a fingernail and they said, you know, I
don't think I don't think it's going to work. It
doesn't mean our protocol speak. They're funded, and how they're
funded sometimes requires them to have a particular way of
(39:06):
receiving evidence. But they eventually said, okay, let's just see
if we can get some mitochondrial DNA, and I sent
them part of a fingernail. The mitochondrial DNA went into
the system but wasn't very helpful.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Of course, McDonald County's goal was to submit Gracetow's DNA
to all the ancestry genealogical forensic databases, with the hope
that someone with a connection to Grace was in one
of those databases.
Speaker 8 (39:37):
I kept saying, can you please go back and look
and see if you have a Janeo? And they just
repeatedly said, no, I don't think we have anything that
meets what you're giving us. It was a matter of
figuring out what my best source of DNA might be,
and ultimately I took her mandible and I sat one
evening and extracted her teeth because I knew the molars
(39:59):
would probably be my best source.
Speaker 10 (40:02):
Now she had really good teeth. She did, she did,
and what did that tell you?
Speaker 8 (40:06):
I spoke to the forensick orthodonist and he basically said,
this woman was well cared for. But that was kind
of a dichotomy for people that aren't in the system
are not reported as a missing person. So I had
a hard time figuring out she was either loved and
had a good life and was well taken care of,
(40:28):
versus she's not in the system, nobody's recorded or missing.
Speaker 16 (40:32):
Is she a runaway? So it tells you a lot
about the care generally speaking, but.
Speaker 8 (40:39):
In her case that that wasn't the case because she actually.
Speaker 16 (40:43):
Grew up in foster care.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Another major hurdle, gray Stow had been bounced from home
to home. None of these families would have a blood
DNA connection to her. That other possibility of an expensive
facial reconstruc dirouction gnawed at Lorie. She needed to know
what this woman might have looked like, even more importantly,
(41:09):
getting that image out onto social media and the Internet
to see if anyone recognized her.
Speaker 8 (41:16):
So ultimately what happened is I I asked Victoria Livewood
Forensic Reconstruction, it's out of Canada, to help me. And
I was very upfront and said I can't pay you.
I'm asking you for a lot and I really need it.
(41:37):
And Victoria was gracious and the best person to work with,
and she said I'll do it. But then the problem
became you can't just ship a skeletal remains over the border.
So I ran up against an I how am I
going to do this? And so I called our local
hospital in Neoshio, Missouri, and I spoke with some on
(42:00):
the board and I said, I'm about to ask you
something and I don't want you to tell me no.
And he said, oh, dear, and he said okay. And
I said, I really want to bring a skull and
mandible into you of a deceased person, a homicide victim,
and I'm asking you to take MRI an MRI photos
(42:22):
you know of the skull and mandible and give me
some images for free.
Speaker 16 (42:30):
And he said, oh, oh, okay, I see.
Speaker 8 (42:32):
And I said, please, I have no funds, I'm working
with very limited funds, but I have.
Speaker 16 (42:38):
To do this.
Speaker 8 (42:38):
And so he said, if you will bring her in
in the middle of the night, you know, midnight till
one o'clock, in a box covered, I don't want any
anybody to touch this, I don't want to know you're here.
Speaker 16 (42:49):
Essentially, just do what you have to do and I'll
set it up.
Speaker 10 (42:52):
And he did.
Speaker 16 (42:53):
And so what I didn't know at the time was
that's never been done before.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
They wound up using over three hundred images out of
what were hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 8 (43:05):
And then I sent them, of course digitally to Canada,
and she had never worked that way either, so it
took a long time. She said, what do you think
the color of the eyes, the hair. We went back
and forth for a really long time. Clothing, and to
Victoria's credit, she said, this was the eighties, tell me
what this jean jacket looked like. She searched and found
(43:26):
the identical clothing for the most part that she was wearing,
and for I'm going to say probably two years. We
went back and forth with this process, and true to form,
one day I come in and I open up and
I'm looking at my emails, and it says, Laurie met
Grace and there she was, there, her Grace.
Speaker 10 (43:45):
And so what did she look like to you when
you saw that? And then she who was she?
Speaker 16 (43:50):
She looked exactly like I thought she would look like.
I didn't know her, but Yana knew her, and she
looked exactly like what I thought she would look like.
And I just knew this was really who she is.
Speaker 8 (44:00):
And I was so comfortable with it that I immediately
start calling media and said, hey, I want her everywhere.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
The reconstruction by Victoria Linwood, which is available online with
a quick Google search, depicts a woman with brown hair,
brown eyes, and olive skin. She appears to be in
her late twenties early thirties.
Speaker 10 (44:24):
Now when does she get identified?
Speaker 16 (44:28):
The answer to that is forensic genealogy.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
Submitting Grace's DNA into the forensic genealogy databases and thus
paying for it fell on Sheriff Rob Evenson's office.
Speaker 17 (44:41):
Well, we have to give credit to Mike Hall. Mike
was the former sheriff and he was sheriff until the
end of twenty twenty. And while he was in office,
he did keep Grace's case alive and he was able
to get hooked up with a lab that where he
(45:04):
was able to submit her DNA profile and this lab
was able to do some of this forensic genealogy and
came up with a possible familial match.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
The company involved, Oathram, was able to extract DNA from
Grace Doe's remains and more significantly, create a profile that
was September twenty twenty. By January twenty twenty one, Oathram
called the McDonald County Sheriff's office. They had a match.
(45:36):
Grace Doe is Shawna Garber, and yet identifying Shauna produced
an entire new set of difficulties because though they had
a name, when Shauna was in her early teens, she
disappeared from any public record. She simply had no history.
(45:56):
What's more, the life Shauna ran from and the one
she ran toward turned out to complicate Detective Laurie Howard's
murder investigation even further.
Speaker 6 (46:09):
I think it was KU Medcenter. At first she was
in the hospital near to Pete. I think it was
to Peka, and then she was transferred to the KU Medcenter.
Was she sick, No, she was burned.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
How was she burned?
Speaker 6 (46:31):
Our mother Ford lighting fluid on her.
Speaker 5 (46:35):
And lit a match.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
If you're enjoying Paper Ghosts, check out my other podcasts,
Crossing the Line with m William Phelps and White Eagle
wherever you get your favorite shows. Coming up next on
Paper Ghosts.
Speaker 4 (46:54):
Well, first, he chose his own moniker, Find them, torture them,
kill them.
Speaker 7 (46:59):
Bet.
Speaker 6 (47:01):
She was removed from several foster homes because our mother
would interfere, to the point she even threatened to kill
one foster family's kids. Our mother was an evil, vindictive
spawn Accoult.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
I just remember being in the basement of this individual's
house and there had to been like over one hundred
spools of different chords.
Speaker 5 (47:26):
It just was pretty ominous.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Paper Ghost Season four is written and executive produced by
me and William Phelps. Script consulting by Rose Baci, sound
design by Matt Russell, executive production by Catherine Law, and
audio editing and mixing by Brandon Dicker Takaboom Productions. The
series theme and four four to two is written and
(47:49):
performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Won.
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