November 12, 2025 • 35 mins
A trucker calls police to report seeing a body floating in a Mississippi River. When police arrive to investigate, they’re shocked to find a little girl dead in the river brush. They’re even more startled when they find the body of a young man down river a few days later.
America’s Crime Lab is a true crime podcast about how science solves cold cases, missing persons, and other unsolved cases. Hosted by journalist and clinical psychologist Elin Lantz Lesser, and powered by Othram’s forensic DNA lab, the show connects the science to the story, revealing what really happens in the lab and why it matters.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
It was almost like a cold case investigation inside of
a cold case investigation, and it took on the life
of its own.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
In nineteen eighty two, two bodies were found almost right
next to each other. No one knew who these people
were or how they ended up dead in the same location.
Would finding the identity of one victim lead them to
the other. For nearly forty years, investigators tried everything to
(00:45):
hunt down their names and find out what happened to them.
This is America's crime Lab. I'm Alan Lance Lesser, I'm
here with the producers, Catherine Fanlosa, and I gotta say,
this seems like a little different from other cases we've
(01:07):
talked about. What's the story?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Yeah, So this all starts in Moss Pointe, Mississippi. And
Moss Point is between BILEXI and Mobile, Alabama, and it's
right down by the Gulf.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
Now.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
One morning in early December of nineteen eighty two, a
truck driver is driving along a major interstate there, which
is the I ten, And that I ten runs all
the way from Florida to California.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Okay, I can picture it.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
The highway goes over these different tributaries which ultimately flow
into the Gulf, and on this day, the trucker is
driving along and he glances out his window and he
thinks he sees the body of a woman floating in
the water. He gets to the next rest stop and
he pulls over and calls the police and he tells them, listen,
(02:07):
I saw what I think is a woman in a
plaid shirt and jeans floating in the water. So the
police send out an officer and he can't find the woman.
Oh spooky, yeah, definitely. I wanted to find out more
so I called the Jackson County Sheriff's Department and spoke
(02:28):
to Sergeant Eddie Clark.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
He stopped his troll car started looking and saying what
he thought was a baby doll.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
In the water.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
A baby doll, Yeah, that's what the officer thought he saw.
But looking more closely, it's actually the body of a
little girl, and she's caught in the brush in this
swampy area along the side of the river. She has
blonde hair, and authorities determined she's probably about eighteen months old.
They do an autopsy and it shows that she was
(03:02):
alive when she entered the water and that she died
from drowning.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Can they tell how long she'd been in the river.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
It wasn't long. They think, maybe only a day or two.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So if this was a drowning death, I guess it
could have been an accident. But if it was, you'd
also think someone would be out looking for her.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
I was curious about that. Chief Deputy Randy Muffley says,
investigators at the time check their records and as far.
Speaker 6 (03:29):
As we know, there were no reports of any missing
persians or children from this area.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
So the police go back a few days later with
divers and they're searching this area where they found the
little girl looking for any type of clue, and they
go a little farther down the river and they find
another body.
Speaker 6 (03:53):
They were searching the river for a female and come
across the skeletal remains of well later on as a.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Black malk and it's a young man. He's clearly bit
in the water for a little bit longer. He is
wearing all of his clothes, but he's pretty much a.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Skeleton at this point. Oh wow, So based on that timeline,
maybe these are two separate events, like maybe someone is
dumping bodies there or drowning people there. And also at
this point we've heard about a sighting of a woman
in a plaid shirt. We've found a little child only
(04:37):
eighteen months old, and now we've found essentially a skeleton
of a man. This is already different from some of
the other cases we've talked about.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
So police have two mysterious deaths and no clothes. But
you know, there's also the question of the initial call
that came in about a woman who hasn't been discovered.
So the little girl comes to be known as both
Baby Jane and Delta de and her case gets a
lot of publicity, right, I mean, it makes sense because
it's a little girl, she's only been in the water
(05:06):
a day or two before she's found, and people are
obviously desperately looking for her mother or father.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
The Sheriff's office started getting calls saying that they had
seen a white female walking down the interstate with a child.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
With no shoes on, and the female was a straw crime.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
They said they had pulled over and tried to assist her,
and she wouldn't take any help from anybody and just
kept walking.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
You know, this highway has just recently been completed, and
so there are a lot of truckers going back and
forth and there's like chatter on the CBE radio, so
police are able to confirm, yes, there were sightings of
a woman with a toddler around this time, So.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
It almost sounds like it could have been I don't know,
if she's so distraught, like a murder suicide where she
takes maybe her child to the river and kills herself
and takes her child with her, or maybe there's some
other murderer who followed her there that she was in
conflict with.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
They put this information out there and basically they get nothing.
They're hoping like some family member will say, oh my gosh,
you know my cousin went missing, or we've been looking
for her and her little girl. Nothing nothing turns up.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
And that's so weird to me too, because when there's
a little child like that in the picture, it's just
that much less likely that this woman is some kind
of nomadic person who's moving all over the place all
the time, or has no personal connections or is totally
isolated like so often when you have a little child,
you have a community or family or something that's confusing,
(07:01):
so that case goes cold. Oh come on, Catherine, not
another one.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
I know.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
I'm sorry the local community raises money and they hold
a funeral and they bury her. I Meanwhile, there's not
the same publicity for the man whose body is found.
They don't get any calls, there's no missing person reports.
They really have nothing to even begin to go on
(07:33):
with that case. And that case goes cold. Now the
two cases take very different paths. Over the years, Detectives
return to the little girl's case over and over again.
At one point, they exhume her body. They take tissue
samples and run the DNA through codis with no hits.
(07:55):
A few years later, they make a facial reconstruction of
what she may have looked like, and they release that
photo to the public and Allen in the photo, I mean,
she's just so very sweet looking. She has these sort
of soft blonde curls that just brush her shoulder. She's
a cute little nose, and she's wearing this pink gingham
(08:17):
top with white ruffled sleeves. And there are three little
flowers they almost look like they're embroidered just across the
front of her top.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
I can picture it. That's so sweet. I mean, someone
must be missing her.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
They circulate the picture, they put it on social media.
They're just hoping someone will come forward with information that
also goes nowhere. And then in twenty nineteen, the case
is reopened and it's kind of a coincidence. So there
are two officers in the Jackson County Sheriff's Office and
(08:52):
one of them his name is Sergeant Eddie Clark, and
he has just done his own DNA.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
To find out his background.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
Yeah, it was actually me and a friend of mine
who were arguain and we did.
Speaker 5 (09:07):
It together and see who was a bigger mutt. I
guess you could call it.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
But when I did it, it showed me like fifteen
hundred people.
Speaker 5 (09:17):
I had no clue to these people. I have a huge.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
Family here, but I had never heard of these people,
and it just floored me.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
He turns to one of his colleagues, Chief Deputy Randy Muffley.
Speaker 6 (09:31):
And you approached me one day, it said, can we
do this with the Baby Jane case? Because we had
tissue samples from an exclamation from a few years back BINGO.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
And this case was kind of personal for Sergeant Clark
because he actually grew up swimming in that same river
and he was thirteen when her body was discovered.
Speaker 5 (09:54):
I remember how horrible. It was that that baby, poor baby,
not only was killed.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
That she lost everything, her name, everything, she had nothing.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, so they actually find out about Authorm and they
learned that yes, this is possible, but they need to
come up with money to have the DNA and the
forensic genetic genealogy done.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
The age old struggle and one.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Day they get a phone call from a woman in
New York and she's got an offer.
Speaker 6 (10:29):
Oh so she had read about it and she wanted
to know what she could do to help.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
I had an idea that if we could locate some
family at leads, at a bare minimum, we could get
the baby's name back. Yeah, we got a lot more
than what we actually thought we was gonna get.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
So this woman in New York, a stranger, calls the
officers in Mississippi and says she wants to help identify
baby Jane.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Yeah, it's kind of wild, right, So she pays for
the DNA testing and an officer from the Jackson County
Sheriff's Office packs Baby Jane's remains in dry ice in
a cooler and he drives them from Mississippi eight hours
to Authram in Texas. Aylen, remember when police searched the
river after discovering the little girl's body. They didn't find
(11:45):
a woman like the truck driver reported having seen, but
they did find the body of a young black man.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, and I do think it's telling that she got
so much more attention. Unfortunately, I think that happens too
often in our society, where one victim gets a lot
more attention than another whose death is equally as tragic.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
And that's actually something that comes up later in the investigation,
which I'll get to in a minute. But first, police
think he's been in the water a lot longer than
the girl, and if it's possible, authorities knew even less
about Moss Point John Doe then they did about Baby Jean,
but they did know he was a homicide victim.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
I could tell he had been shot in the head.
He was dumped off the bridge where they found him below,
and he still had clothing. He was almost complete, which
is usually unheard of. But I'll believe water had covered him,
which kept a lot of animals from getting to him
and basically dragging Bunes off into the woods.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Darren Forsaga is a lieutenant with the Pascaluga Police Department
in Mississippi. And he basically stumbled upon this case while
researching a completely different cold case, so it's a bit
of a story. But in twenty twelve, he's looking into
the death of a teenage girl and he tracks her
remains down in Oklahoma. So he's on the phone with
(13:08):
an official at the Oklahoma Medical Examiner's office.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
She says, look, we've got five other cases that belonged
to Mississippi, and I went, what, why would you have
Mississippi cases?
Speaker 3 (13:25):
And it turns out at the time that Mississippi didn't
have a forensic anthropologist, so they sent some human remains
to Oklahoma and that included Moss Point John Doe.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
None of these were being tested, which again about what
are we doing. We're dropping the ball here. We've got
all these such remains all over the country that belong
to Mississippi and none of them are being tested. When
DNA is out there now and we should be able
to identify some of these people. And so that became
a whole new task. It was almost like a cold
case investigation inside of a cold case investigation.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
So he starts looking into Moss Point John Doe. He
gets photos from the Medical examiner and he puts what
little information there is into a file and then.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
I take it to the Jackson County Shrif's department to
turn it over to them and say, look, found this case.
They didn't know anything about it, they didn't remember it.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
So the file on Moss Point John Doe goes back
to Jackson County, which is where he was found, and
Lieutenant Versaga goes back to his own cases. You know,
he checks in from time to time, hoping they've made progress,
but nothing happens, and he can't get this case off
of his mind. I mean, at first, he's thinking this
will end up being like a lot of other unidentified
(14:40):
human remains cases that he's worked.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
They were transient, or they had been involved in drugs,
or they had some mental conditions, and the family knew
they were traveling, and so I just assumed, maybe this
is what happened to this set, is that he was
never reported missing, and that was not true.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Lieutenant Forsaga decides to enter Moss Point John Doe's information
into NEMOUS, the National Database for Missing and Unidentified Persons.
Then the FBI has an artist create a picture of
what this man may have looked like.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
And I thought, man, this is going to be great.
I'm going to be able to put him out online.
Now we're going to find out who he is. I
took it to every African American barber shop, every African
American neighborhood, I put up flyers, I did everything.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
And he gets some pushback. It turns out that everyone
remembers the little girl that was found in the river,
but no one knew a young black man had been
found too.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
One of the guys goes, why wouldn't this in publicized?
And I said, I can't tell you that, because yes
you can. You know it's not go why And I said, okay,
because he was black? And they said absolutely.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Finally someone says, I think we should try AUTHORM. So
both Baby Jane and Moss Point John Doe's remains are
sent to Authorm around the same time, and the lab
is able to start on Baby Jane's remains pretty quickly.
But there's a problem when it comes to moss Point
(16:18):
John Doe. His body had been in the water for
months and something else had happened so earlier. When a
medical examiner tried to learn John Doe's age and biographical ancestry,
they treated the remains with heat and chemicals, and to
be fair, that's important for being able to actually do
the forensic anthropology work.
Speaker 7 (16:40):
What heat and detergents do to DNA is a different story.
It's not helpful, it's harmful. And so we came to
realize that there were these processes that were preventing our
hindering authoram's ability to build a profile. And so this
is one of the cases that initially we look at
(17:01):
and we say, sorry, we are not able to work
this case.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Colby Lasion is chief of staff at AUTHRAM, and he says,
sometimes in tough cases, they'll research a solution where they
simulate the circumstances of the remains until they find a
way to successfully extract DNA and moss Point John Doe
was one of those cases.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
That's pretty cool. So it's a real case study. And
I imagine if they can figure out how to test
his remains, they'll be able to use that same method
on other remains which have been exposed to similar conditions.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Yeah, and in talking to everyone at AUTHRAM, it really
became a mission to identify both cases. You know, not
just the little girl who got like a ton of
media attention, but the young black man who basically fell
through the cracks.
Speaker 7 (17:50):
This was a man who was murdered. He had family
looking for him, in the same way that Delta Dawn
had family looking for her, and so it was important
for us to show and provide that equitable justice in
both of these cases.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
So with Delta Don's case or Baby Jane, it's easier
for AUTHORM to work with her remains and do the
forensic genetic genealogy. What do they find out?
Speaker 3 (18:19):
Authoram's able to build a DNA profile and that leads
them to possible family members. One name that AUTHORAM gives
detectives in Mississippi is the name of possibly this little
girl's mother or aunt.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
That's huge.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
So authorities track down this woman. They figure out she's
in Missouri, and they work with a local FBI agent
and one day he goes and knocks on her door
totally unannounced.
Speaker 6 (18:46):
As soon as they showed up at the door, please
tell me you found my sister.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Oh so it Oh so it's actually her sister. I
just got chills. No, is it her twin? Stop?
Speaker 5 (19:05):
What sister?
Speaker 6 (19:06):
It's like you know she went missing in nineteen eighty
two with her daughter. They never seen them.
Speaker 8 (19:10):
Since I literally have goosebumps.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
So it turns out that this woman in Missouri had
been looking for her sister for decades. Her sister's name
is Gwendolen, and in nineteen eighty two, Gwendolen spent Thanksgiving
with their family. Gwendolen was twenty three and she tells
everyone that she and her little girl were moving from
Missouri to Florida with a new boyfriend.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
Her boyfriend he was former law enforcement and also a
dog groomer, and I think he was going to start
a dog grooming business somewhere in Florida.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
They moved, and no one's heard from Gwendolen since.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
So when the FBI agent shows up, this woman is
thinking they've finally found her sister, Gwendolen, but actually they've
maybe found her sister's baby, so my murder suicide theory
could still be accurate.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
Officers get a DNA swab from the potential aunt and
they send that back to AUTHROM for testing. Later on,
Chief Deputy Muffley and Sergeant Clark go to interview her
and Allen. While they're there, they actually get the results
of the DNA test and it confirms that she is
the aunt of the little girl found in the river
back in nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
That was overwhelming. They were upset. They actually believe the
baby was still alive.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
The little girl's name was Alicia Heinrich. She was found
in the river just ten days after the family last
saw her on Thanksgiving. She was just eighteen months old.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
And do we know anything about Gwendolen her mother.
Speaker 4 (21:12):
She was a small person, but they said she had
a mouth like alligator. She jumped on the grisly bearry
just like dynadmite, just go off like that.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
But her sister said that Gwendolen was a good mom
and that she loved her little girl.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
She was adamant that she loved that baby. She showed
us the letter saying where she had met this new guy, was.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
In love with him.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
I think the baby's father had been in prison several times,
and I think she had a rough relationship with him.
Speaker 5 (21:44):
But this new guy, she.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
Was blowing abiding, you know, in love with him, and
I think she wanted to start a new life with
him and the baby.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Now the story gets even stranger. So a short while
after Gwendolen, her baby and the boyfriend left for Florida,
the boyfriend returned to Missouri alone.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
Gwen's father had tracked him down, wondering where's my daughter,
where's my granddaughter. He gives them a story of well,
I drove them to Kansas City and dropped them off
with a millionaire and they're living on a yacht in
Florida right now.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
So he's claiming she's with a different man now.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Yeah, bizarre right. Gwendolen's family even got a few phone
calls from a man claiming to be the new guy.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
The family did receive phone calls from a male saying
that him and Gwynn was together, that they had had
another child or boy, and that when and the baby
at Licia were doing fine.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
That he had found their number in Gwynn's.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
Bible and had called just to let them know that
they were okay and everything.
Speaker 5 (23:03):
He's going to go just she doesn't want any contact
with y'all.
Speaker 8 (23:09):
Now.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Before Authuram helped identify the little girl and authorities learned
this whole backstory, Ailen, they were sort of like you.
I mean, they suspected a murder suicide. You know, maybe
Gwendolen was upset walking down that highway in Mississippi in
the middle of the night, and she threw her baby
off the bridge, and then maybe she jumped off too.
(23:32):
But you know, authorities never found her body. But now
everyone's starting to doubt this whole thing. I mean, maybe
the boyfriend made up this story about the yacht and
the new guy. So Sergeant Clark and Chief Deputy Moufley,
they actually traced the boyfriend to Texas, but unfortunately he
(23:52):
had already passed away.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
But that truck driver did see a female body floating
in the river, at least as he remembers it. So
I wonder if her body was just never found but
she did die.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
I asked Sergeant Clark what surprised him most about this case.
Speaker 4 (24:17):
I think the biggest thing that shocked me. And then
she was never reported missing her on the way to
local authorities, so there would have been no way they'd
have been found without the help of Outram that would
have never ever been named.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Gwendolen Clemens is still an active missing person's case.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
What about the man whose remains were found in the
same river.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
Authorn kept working with sample remains that were exposed to
similar chemicals and heat, and they finally reached back out
to authorities to say, look, we're ready to work on
moss Point John Doe's case.
Speaker 7 (24:54):
We were to build a profile, and ultimately this profile
led back to relatives of a man named Gary Simpson.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Gary was one of five kids raised in a really
tight knit family in New Orleans. I spoke with his
younger sister, Tanya Taylor.
Speaker 9 (25:13):
He still go down all these years as the best
in the most favorite brother. If you look at all
of our family photos, he'd the only one took time
with me. He would be holding me on all of
the photos because a lot of the other ones thought
I was just too spoiled. But we were always very,
(25:36):
very close.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
The family loved to play cards together, listen to music,
and dance.
Speaker 9 (25:44):
He was an awful dancer, but you couldn't tell him that.
And he used to do a dance where he would
put this hand in his mouth and just be looking
like he from the sixties, these little crazy dances. But
that was like his signature dance. He thought he was
(26:06):
John Chavota And I'm telling you, we don't dance like that,
but he did.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
He sounds like the life of the party. Does Tanya
have any idea how he ended up murdered?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
So she says Gary was twenty and he had recently
moved out of the family's house and just like around
the corner with a girlfriend. This was a month or
two before he vanished. And one day the girlfriend shows up.
Speaker 9 (26:37):
I was there.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
She came there hysterical, and his girlfriend said something bad
had happened.
Speaker 9 (26:43):
And she was like, they came and picked him up.
Some guys came and got him from the house. That
was one.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Story, Tanya says. The girlfriend then changed her story, and
then she says, you know, Gary had gone to buy
her cigarettes and he just never came home.
Speaker 9 (27:03):
Because I always remember her saying he had on some
corduroy shorts and like a wife beater T shirt. That's
not how they found him. So honestly, I don't know
whether she was telling us the truth or she had
something to do with it.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Tanya says Gary was a mama's boy. He was always
in touch with the family, so it was really worrying
when no one could find him.
Speaker 9 (27:35):
My mom went to the police station and felt out
a missing report. I do remember how people were sending
her on a wild ghost chase. My mother didn't drive
what my father did, and I remember people saying, who
we just saw him he was at this bar it
(27:55):
was called the Jolly Spot, and my parents would go
there and he wouldn't be there. Then it was rumored
that he was in Houston, Texas, so we had relatives
there and my mama was sending people to look for him.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
This went on for years.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
That must be so frustrating to keep not getting answers.
Speaker 9 (28:20):
It was never like our mother said, don't talk about him.
It was just kind of understood that we never We
never talked about him. I mean, part of it about
to make me cry, because I do remember like one
day you have a brother, and the next day and
(28:43):
I ain't gonna even say the next day after that,
you can't say nothing about him, even at good times
or the bad times.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
We just never had a conversation.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Tanya was only about ten years old when Gary disappeared.
Speaker 9 (28:58):
I couldn't understand, like when people die, everybody have a funeral,
Like why we just couldn't have a funeral for him
if he was dead. And I think that's what my
mother held on to, the fact that it was he
was coming home, like he just was lost, you know,
or something happened to him when he didn't have his
(29:20):
memory anymore, or something like that. So she still had
a lot of hope that her son would come home.
It really became depressing, especially for my mom, and you know,
she diing, not knowing what happened to her son.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
And then one day she got a call from her
older sister.
Speaker 9 (29:41):
He said, these people contacted me and said they think
they found Gary, and oh my god, it just stirred
up everything. And I was like, what you mean, And
I said he living, and she said, no, he not living.
And so it just brought up those old wounds.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
So now do we know what happened to Gary.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
It's still a mystery. I mean, authorities know he was shot.
Tanya believes maybe her brother was kidnapped because he didn't
drive and he didn't know anyone in Moss Pointe, Mississippi,
where his body was found, so she's wondering how he
even got there. Lieutenant Versaga thinks Gary may have actually
(30:31):
been murdered by Sam Little, who's known as the most
prolific serial killer in US history. Sam Little confessed to
ninety three murders and he was known to abduct victims
in the New Orleans area around this time. So, you know,
maybe Gary had a run in with sam Little and
he was driven out to Mississippi where he was shot
(30:54):
and pushed over the bridge and into the water. But
I'm not sure if we'll ever know. It's still an
open murder investigation. Now i'd like to say that that's
the end of the story, but once Gary's identity was known,
his story kind of got lost again.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
That makes me so sad. It's like he's being victimized
over and over again.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Yeah, Lieutenant Versaga comes to find out that Gary's body
wasn't returned to Tanya. I mean, it was still sitting
at the Mississippi Medical Examiner's office, and.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
I said, what the hell, and we need to get
him back.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Gary's family decided to cremate and bury him with his
mother in New Orleans, but they weren't in a position
to pay for the cremation. So one morning, Lieutenant Versaga
goes to have coffee with some friends who are retired
policemen and he tells them all about Gary.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Hey, man, can we pitch in and help this family out?
And let's get Gary cremated so we can get him home.
And I'm going to just start throwing money up on
the type. And before I got out of there, I
had enough to get him cremated, and so that's what
we did.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
He ends up breezing about eight hundred dollars, and after
the Cremetionian he took Gary's urn with the ashes back
to his morning coffee group.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
He was with us while we drank coffee and we
ate breakfast, and we talked about Gary, and each one
of them put your hand on the urn as I
was leaving to take him home, and that was just
a very moving thing. I would swear some of them
guys teared up a little bit, but they would never
be too much over to admit it. But I did,
and I'm not too much out to admit it. I
(32:36):
was so connected that it was almost like I'm bringing
my brother home.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
And then he and his wife drove Gary's ashes to
New Orleans to meet with Tanya and her siblings to
bring Gary home.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
And the way I put it is, last time Gary
was in Mississippi, somebody didn't treat him so nice. They
killed him and threw him off a bridge. And so
this way, this is a way to make bring back
some dignity to humanity for that, and so that's what
we did.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Tanya says, she's relieved.
Speaker 9 (33:07):
It's painful when, especially when you meet new people and
they're asking you if you have any sisters or brothers,
and you always have to explain, I have a brother
that's missing. How long has it been missing?
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Oh?
Speaker 9 (33:23):
Forty years?
Speaker 5 (33:24):
You know.
Speaker 9 (33:24):
It's like you at the point that you can feel
much better saying you know that he was kidnapped and
killed and body found.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
It's incredible how for these families there is peace in
knowing what happened to their loved one, even if that
answer comes decades later, And for victims there's a dignity
in getting their identity back. It does make you wonder
though if pretty soon the whole idea of there being
(34:01):
a John Doe or a baby Jane will become obsolete.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Yeah, when you think about it, I mean, it shouldn't
matter how someone dies, or where or when their remains
are discovered, or especially like what attention their death attracted
in the press. All of these cases deserve to be solved.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.
Erica Lance is our story editor, and sound design is
by David Woji. Our producing team is Catherine Fenalosa Emily
Foreman and Jessica albert Our. Executive producers are Kate Osborne,
Mangesh Hadigadour and David and Kristin Middleman, and from iHeart
(34:51):
Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. Special thanks to Connell Byrne,
Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, Nikki Etoor, Nathani Hosky, John Burbank,
and the entire team at OTHRM. I'm Alan Lance Lessor.
Thanks for listening.
It was almost like a cold case investigation inside of
a cold case investigation, and it took on the life
of its own.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
In nineteen eighty two, two bodies were found almost right
next to each other. No one knew who these people
were or how they ended up dead in the same location.
Would finding the identity of one victim lead them to
the other. For nearly forty years, investigators tried everything to
(00:45):
hunt down their names and find out what happened to them.
This is America's crime Lab. I'm Alan Lance Lesser, I'm
here with the producers, Catherine Fanlosa, and I gotta say,
this seems like a little different from other cases we've
(01:07):
talked about. What's the story?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Yeah, So this all starts in Moss Pointe, Mississippi. And
Moss Point is between BILEXI and Mobile, Alabama, and it's
right down by the Gulf.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
Now.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
One morning in early December of nineteen eighty two, a
truck driver is driving along a major interstate there, which
is the I ten, And that I ten runs all
the way from Florida to California.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Okay, I can picture it.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
The highway goes over these different tributaries which ultimately flow
into the Gulf, and on this day, the trucker is
driving along and he glances out his window and he
thinks he sees the body of a woman floating in
the water. He gets to the next rest stop and
he pulls over and calls the police and he tells them, listen,
(02:07):
I saw what I think is a woman in a
plaid shirt and jeans floating in the water. So the
police send out an officer and he can't find the woman.
Oh spooky, yeah, definitely. I wanted to find out more
so I called the Jackson County Sheriff's Department and spoke
(02:28):
to Sergeant Eddie Clark.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
He stopped his troll car started looking and saying what
he thought was a baby doll.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
In the water.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
A baby doll, Yeah, that's what the officer thought he saw.
But looking more closely, it's actually the body of a
little girl, and she's caught in the brush in this
swampy area along the side of the river. She has
blonde hair, and authorities determined she's probably about eighteen months old.
They do an autopsy and it shows that she was
(03:02):
alive when she entered the water and that she died
from drowning.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Can they tell how long she'd been in the river.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
It wasn't long. They think, maybe only a day or two.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So if this was a drowning death, I guess it
could have been an accident. But if it was, you'd
also think someone would be out looking for her.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
I was curious about that. Chief Deputy Randy Muffley says,
investigators at the time check their records and as far.
Speaker 6 (03:29):
As we know, there were no reports of any missing
persians or children from this area.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
So the police go back a few days later with
divers and they're searching this area where they found the
little girl looking for any type of clue, and they
go a little farther down the river and they find
another body.
Speaker 6 (03:53):
They were searching the river for a female and come
across the skeletal remains of well later on as a.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Black malk and it's a young man. He's clearly bit
in the water for a little bit longer. He is
wearing all of his clothes, but he's pretty much a.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Skeleton at this point. Oh wow, So based on that timeline,
maybe these are two separate events, like maybe someone is
dumping bodies there or drowning people there. And also at
this point we've heard about a sighting of a woman
in a plaid shirt. We've found a little child only
(04:37):
eighteen months old, and now we've found essentially a skeleton
of a man. This is already different from some of
the other cases we've talked about.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
So police have two mysterious deaths and no clothes. But
you know, there's also the question of the initial call
that came in about a woman who hasn't been discovered.
So the little girl comes to be known as both
Baby Jane and Delta de and her case gets a
lot of publicity, right, I mean, it makes sense because
it's a little girl, she's only been in the water
(05:06):
a day or two before she's found, and people are
obviously desperately looking for her mother or father.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
The Sheriff's office started getting calls saying that they had
seen a white female walking down the interstate with a child.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
With no shoes on, and the female was a straw crime.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
They said they had pulled over and tried to assist her,
and she wouldn't take any help from anybody and just
kept walking.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
You know, this highway has just recently been completed, and
so there are a lot of truckers going back and
forth and there's like chatter on the CBE radio, so
police are able to confirm, yes, there were sightings of
a woman with a toddler around this time, So.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
It almost sounds like it could have been I don't know,
if she's so distraught, like a murder suicide where she
takes maybe her child to the river and kills herself
and takes her child with her, or maybe there's some
other murderer who followed her there that she was in
conflict with.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
They put this information out there and basically they get nothing.
They're hoping like some family member will say, oh my gosh,
you know my cousin went missing, or we've been looking
for her and her little girl. Nothing nothing turns up.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
And that's so weird to me too, because when there's
a little child like that in the picture, it's just
that much less likely that this woman is some kind
of nomadic person who's moving all over the place all
the time, or has no personal connections or is totally
isolated like so often when you have a little child,
you have a community or family or something that's confusing,
(07:01):
so that case goes cold. Oh come on, Catherine, not
another one.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
I know.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
I'm sorry the local community raises money and they hold
a funeral and they bury her. I Meanwhile, there's not
the same publicity for the man whose body is found.
They don't get any calls, there's no missing person reports.
They really have nothing to even begin to go on
(07:33):
with that case. And that case goes cold. Now the
two cases take very different paths. Over the years, Detectives
return to the little girl's case over and over again.
At one point, they exhume her body. They take tissue
samples and run the DNA through codis with no hits.
(07:55):
A few years later, they make a facial reconstruction of
what she may have looked like, and they release that
photo to the public and Allen in the photo, I mean,
she's just so very sweet looking. She has these sort
of soft blonde curls that just brush her shoulder. She's
a cute little nose, and she's wearing this pink gingham
(08:17):
top with white ruffled sleeves. And there are three little
flowers they almost look like they're embroidered just across the
front of her top.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
I can picture it. That's so sweet. I mean, someone
must be missing her.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
They circulate the picture, they put it on social media.
They're just hoping someone will come forward with information that
also goes nowhere. And then in twenty nineteen, the case
is reopened and it's kind of a coincidence. So there
are two officers in the Jackson County Sheriff's Office and
(08:52):
one of them his name is Sergeant Eddie Clark, and
he has just done his own DNA.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
To find out his background.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
Yeah, it was actually me and a friend of mine
who were arguain and we did.
Speaker 5 (09:07):
It together and see who was a bigger mutt. I
guess you could call it.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
But when I did it, it showed me like fifteen
hundred people.
Speaker 5 (09:17):
I had no clue to these people. I have a huge.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
Family here, but I had never heard of these people,
and it just floored me.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
He turns to one of his colleagues, Chief Deputy Randy Muffley.
Speaker 6 (09:31):
And you approached me one day, it said, can we
do this with the Baby Jane case? Because we had
tissue samples from an exclamation from a few years back BINGO.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
And this case was kind of personal for Sergeant Clark
because he actually grew up swimming in that same river
and he was thirteen when her body was discovered.
Speaker 5 (09:54):
I remember how horrible. It was that that baby, poor baby,
not only was killed.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
That she lost everything, her name, everything, she had nothing.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, so they actually find out about Authorm and they
learned that yes, this is possible, but they need to
come up with money to have the DNA and the
forensic genetic genealogy done.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
The age old struggle and one.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Day they get a phone call from a woman in
New York and she's got an offer.
Speaker 6 (10:29):
Oh so she had read about it and she wanted
to know what she could do to help.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
I had an idea that if we could locate some
family at leads, at a bare minimum, we could get
the baby's name back. Yeah, we got a lot more
than what we actually thought we was gonna get.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
So this woman in New York, a stranger, calls the
officers in Mississippi and says she wants to help identify
baby Jane.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Yeah, it's kind of wild, right, So she pays for
the DNA testing and an officer from the Jackson County
Sheriff's Office packs Baby Jane's remains in dry ice in
a cooler and he drives them from Mississippi eight hours
to Authram in Texas. Aylen, remember when police searched the
river after discovering the little girl's body. They didn't find
(11:45):
a woman like the truck driver reported having seen, but
they did find the body of a young black man.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, and I do think it's telling that she got
so much more attention. Unfortunately, I think that happens too
often in our society, where one victim gets a lot
more attention than another whose death is equally as tragic.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
And that's actually something that comes up later in the investigation,
which I'll get to in a minute. But first, police
think he's been in the water a lot longer than
the girl, and if it's possible, authorities knew even less
about Moss Point John Doe then they did about Baby Jean,
but they did know he was a homicide victim.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
I could tell he had been shot in the head.
He was dumped off the bridge where they found him below,
and he still had clothing. He was almost complete, which
is usually unheard of. But I'll believe water had covered him,
which kept a lot of animals from getting to him
and basically dragging Bunes off into the woods.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Darren Forsaga is a lieutenant with the Pascaluga Police Department
in Mississippi. And he basically stumbled upon this case while
researching a completely different cold case, so it's a bit
of a story. But in twenty twelve, he's looking into
the death of a teenage girl and he tracks her
remains down in Oklahoma. So he's on the phone with
(13:08):
an official at the Oklahoma Medical Examiner's office.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
She says, look, we've got five other cases that belonged
to Mississippi, and I went, what, why would you have
Mississippi cases?
Speaker 3 (13:25):
And it turns out at the time that Mississippi didn't
have a forensic anthropologist, so they sent some human remains
to Oklahoma and that included Moss Point John Doe.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
None of these were being tested, which again about what
are we doing. We're dropping the ball here. We've got
all these such remains all over the country that belong
to Mississippi and none of them are being tested. When
DNA is out there now and we should be able
to identify some of these people. And so that became
a whole new task. It was almost like a cold
case investigation inside of a cold case investigation.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
So he starts looking into Moss Point John Doe. He
gets photos from the Medical examiner and he puts what
little information there is into a file and then.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
I take it to the Jackson County Shrif's department to
turn it over to them and say, look, found this case.
They didn't know anything about it, they didn't remember it.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
So the file on Moss Point John Doe goes back
to Jackson County, which is where he was found, and
Lieutenant Versaga goes back to his own cases. You know,
he checks in from time to time, hoping they've made progress,
but nothing happens, and he can't get this case off
of his mind. I mean, at first, he's thinking this
will end up being like a lot of other unidentified
(14:40):
human remains cases that he's worked.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
They were transient, or they had been involved in drugs,
or they had some mental conditions, and the family knew
they were traveling, and so I just assumed, maybe this
is what happened to this set, is that he was
never reported missing, and that was not true.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Lieutenant Forsaga decides to enter Moss Point John Doe's information
into NEMOUS, the National Database for Missing and Unidentified Persons.
Then the FBI has an artist create a picture of
what this man may have looked like.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
And I thought, man, this is going to be great.
I'm going to be able to put him out online.
Now we're going to find out who he is. I
took it to every African American barber shop, every African
American neighborhood, I put up flyers, I did everything.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
And he gets some pushback. It turns out that everyone
remembers the little girl that was found in the river,
but no one knew a young black man had been
found too.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
One of the guys goes, why wouldn't this in publicized?
And I said, I can't tell you that, because yes
you can. You know it's not go why And I said, okay,
because he was black? And they said absolutely.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Finally someone says, I think we should try AUTHORM. So
both Baby Jane and Moss Point John Doe's remains are
sent to Authorm around the same time, and the lab
is able to start on Baby Jane's remains pretty quickly.
But there's a problem when it comes to moss Point
(16:18):
John Doe. His body had been in the water for
months and something else had happened so earlier. When a
medical examiner tried to learn John Doe's age and biographical ancestry,
they treated the remains with heat and chemicals, and to
be fair, that's important for being able to actually do
the forensic anthropology work.
Speaker 7 (16:40):
What heat and detergents do to DNA is a different story.
It's not helpful, it's harmful. And so we came to
realize that there were these processes that were preventing our
hindering authoram's ability to build a profile. And so this
is one of the cases that initially we look at
(17:01):
and we say, sorry, we are not able to work
this case.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Colby Lasion is chief of staff at AUTHRAM, and he says,
sometimes in tough cases, they'll research a solution where they
simulate the circumstances of the remains until they find a
way to successfully extract DNA and moss Point John Doe
was one of those cases.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
That's pretty cool. So it's a real case study. And
I imagine if they can figure out how to test
his remains, they'll be able to use that same method
on other remains which have been exposed to similar conditions.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Yeah, and in talking to everyone at AUTHRAM, it really
became a mission to identify both cases. You know, not
just the little girl who got like a ton of
media attention, but the young black man who basically fell
through the cracks.
Speaker 7 (17:50):
This was a man who was murdered. He had family
looking for him, in the same way that Delta Dawn
had family looking for her, and so it was important
for us to show and provide that equitable justice in
both of these cases.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
So with Delta Don's case or Baby Jane, it's easier
for AUTHORM to work with her remains and do the
forensic genetic genealogy. What do they find out?
Speaker 3 (18:19):
Authoram's able to build a DNA profile and that leads
them to possible family members. One name that AUTHORAM gives
detectives in Mississippi is the name of possibly this little
girl's mother or aunt.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
That's huge.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
So authorities track down this woman. They figure out she's
in Missouri, and they work with a local FBI agent
and one day he goes and knocks on her door
totally unannounced.
Speaker 6 (18:46):
As soon as they showed up at the door, please
tell me you found my sister.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Oh so it Oh so it's actually her sister. I
just got chills. No, is it her twin? Stop?
Speaker 5 (19:05):
What sister?
Speaker 6 (19:06):
It's like you know she went missing in nineteen eighty
two with her daughter. They never seen them.
Speaker 8 (19:10):
Since I literally have goosebumps.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
So it turns out that this woman in Missouri had
been looking for her sister for decades. Her sister's name
is Gwendolen, and in nineteen eighty two, Gwendolen spent Thanksgiving
with their family. Gwendolen was twenty three and she tells
everyone that she and her little girl were moving from
Missouri to Florida with a new boyfriend.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
Her boyfriend he was former law enforcement and also a
dog groomer, and I think he was going to start
a dog grooming business somewhere in Florida.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
They moved, and no one's heard from Gwendolen since.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
So when the FBI agent shows up, this woman is
thinking they've finally found her sister, Gwendolen, but actually they've
maybe found her sister's baby, so my murder suicide theory
could still be accurate.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
Officers get a DNA swab from the potential aunt and
they send that back to AUTHROM for testing. Later on,
Chief Deputy Muffley and Sergeant Clark go to interview her
and Allen. While they're there, they actually get the results
of the DNA test and it confirms that she is
the aunt of the little girl found in the river
back in nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
That was overwhelming. They were upset. They actually believe the
baby was still alive.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
The little girl's name was Alicia Heinrich. She was found
in the river just ten days after the family last
saw her on Thanksgiving. She was just eighteen months old.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
And do we know anything about Gwendolen her mother.
Speaker 4 (21:12):
She was a small person, but they said she had
a mouth like alligator. She jumped on the grisly bearry
just like dynadmite, just go off like that.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
But her sister said that Gwendolen was a good mom
and that she loved her little girl.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
She was adamant that she loved that baby. She showed
us the letter saying where she had met this new guy, was.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
In love with him.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
I think the baby's father had been in prison several times,
and I think she had a rough relationship with him.
Speaker 5 (21:44):
But this new guy, she.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
Was blowing abiding, you know, in love with him, and
I think she wanted to start a new life with
him and the baby.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Now the story gets even stranger. So a short while
after Gwendolen, her baby and the boyfriend left for Florida,
the boyfriend returned to Missouri alone.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
Gwen's father had tracked him down, wondering where's my daughter,
where's my granddaughter. He gives them a story of well,
I drove them to Kansas City and dropped them off
with a millionaire and they're living on a yacht in
Florida right now.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
So he's claiming she's with a different man now.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Yeah, bizarre right. Gwendolen's family even got a few phone
calls from a man claiming to be the new guy.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
The family did receive phone calls from a male saying
that him and Gwynn was together, that they had had
another child or boy, and that when and the baby
at Licia were doing fine.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
That he had found their number in Gwynn's.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
Bible and had called just to let them know that
they were okay and everything.
Speaker 5 (23:03):
He's going to go just she doesn't want any contact
with y'all.
Speaker 8 (23:09):
Now.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Before Authuram helped identify the little girl and authorities learned
this whole backstory, Ailen, they were sort of like you.
I mean, they suspected a murder suicide. You know, maybe
Gwendolen was upset walking down that highway in Mississippi in
the middle of the night, and she threw her baby
off the bridge, and then maybe she jumped off too.
(23:32):
But you know, authorities never found her body. But now
everyone's starting to doubt this whole thing. I mean, maybe
the boyfriend made up this story about the yacht and
the new guy. So Sergeant Clark and Chief Deputy Moufley,
they actually traced the boyfriend to Texas, but unfortunately he
(23:52):
had already passed away.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
But that truck driver did see a female body floating
in the river, at least as he remembers it. So
I wonder if her body was just never found but
she did die.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
I asked Sergeant Clark what surprised him most about this case.
Speaker 4 (24:17):
I think the biggest thing that shocked me. And then
she was never reported missing her on the way to
local authorities, so there would have been no way they'd
have been found without the help of Outram that would
have never ever been named.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Gwendolen Clemens is still an active missing person's case.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
What about the man whose remains were found in the
same river.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
Authorn kept working with sample remains that were exposed to
similar chemicals and heat, and they finally reached back out
to authorities to say, look, we're ready to work on
moss Point John Doe's case.
Speaker 7 (24:54):
We were to build a profile, and ultimately this profile
led back to relatives of a man named Gary Simpson.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Gary was one of five kids raised in a really
tight knit family in New Orleans. I spoke with his
younger sister, Tanya Taylor.
Speaker 9 (25:13):
He still go down all these years as the best
in the most favorite brother. If you look at all
of our family photos, he'd the only one took time
with me. He would be holding me on all of
the photos because a lot of the other ones thought
I was just too spoiled. But we were always very,
(25:36):
very close.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
The family loved to play cards together, listen to music,
and dance.
Speaker 9 (25:44):
He was an awful dancer, but you couldn't tell him that.
And he used to do a dance where he would
put this hand in his mouth and just be looking
like he from the sixties, these little crazy dances. But
that was like his signature dance. He thought he was
(26:06):
John Chavota And I'm telling you, we don't dance like that,
but he did.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
He sounds like the life of the party. Does Tanya
have any idea how he ended up murdered?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
So she says Gary was twenty and he had recently
moved out of the family's house and just like around
the corner with a girlfriend. This was a month or
two before he vanished. And one day the girlfriend shows up.
Speaker 9 (26:37):
I was there.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
She came there hysterical, and his girlfriend said something bad
had happened.
Speaker 9 (26:43):
And she was like, they came and picked him up.
Some guys came and got him from the house. That
was one.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Story, Tanya says. The girlfriend then changed her story, and
then she says, you know, Gary had gone to buy
her cigarettes and he just never came home.
Speaker 9 (27:03):
Because I always remember her saying he had on some
corduroy shorts and like a wife beater T shirt. That's
not how they found him. So honestly, I don't know
whether she was telling us the truth or she had
something to do with it.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Tanya says Gary was a mama's boy. He was always
in touch with the family, so it was really worrying
when no one could find him.
Speaker 9 (27:35):
My mom went to the police station and felt out
a missing report. I do remember how people were sending
her on a wild ghost chase. My mother didn't drive
what my father did, and I remember people saying, who
we just saw him he was at this bar it
(27:55):
was called the Jolly Spot, and my parents would go
there and he wouldn't be there. Then it was rumored
that he was in Houston, Texas, so we had relatives
there and my mama was sending people to look for him.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
This went on for years.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
That must be so frustrating to keep not getting answers.
Speaker 9 (28:20):
It was never like our mother said, don't talk about him.
It was just kind of understood that we never We
never talked about him. I mean, part of it about
to make me cry, because I do remember like one
day you have a brother, and the next day and
(28:43):
I ain't gonna even say the next day after that,
you can't say nothing about him, even at good times
or the bad times.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
We just never had a conversation.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Tanya was only about ten years old when Gary disappeared.
Speaker 9 (28:58):
I couldn't understand, like when people die, everybody have a funeral,
Like why we just couldn't have a funeral for him
if he was dead. And I think that's what my
mother held on to, the fact that it was he
was coming home, like he just was lost, you know,
or something happened to him when he didn't have his
(29:20):
memory anymore, or something like that. So she still had
a lot of hope that her son would come home.
It really became depressing, especially for my mom, and you know,
she diing, not knowing what happened to her son.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
And then one day she got a call from her
older sister.
Speaker 9 (29:41):
He said, these people contacted me and said they think
they found Gary, and oh my god, it just stirred
up everything. And I was like, what you mean, And
I said he living, and she said, no, he not living.
And so it just brought up those old wounds.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
So now do we know what happened to Gary.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
It's still a mystery. I mean, authorities know he was shot.
Tanya believes maybe her brother was kidnapped because he didn't
drive and he didn't know anyone in Moss Pointe, Mississippi,
where his body was found, so she's wondering how he
even got there. Lieutenant Versaga thinks Gary may have actually
(30:31):
been murdered by Sam Little, who's known as the most
prolific serial killer in US history. Sam Little confessed to
ninety three murders and he was known to abduct victims
in the New Orleans area around this time. So, you know,
maybe Gary had a run in with sam Little and
he was driven out to Mississippi where he was shot
(30:54):
and pushed over the bridge and into the water. But
I'm not sure if we'll ever know. It's still an
open murder investigation. Now i'd like to say that that's
the end of the story, but once Gary's identity was known,
his story kind of got lost again.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
That makes me so sad. It's like he's being victimized
over and over again.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Yeah, Lieutenant Versaga comes to find out that Gary's body
wasn't returned to Tanya. I mean, it was still sitting
at the Mississippi Medical Examiner's office, and.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
I said, what the hell, and we need to get
him back.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Gary's family decided to cremate and bury him with his
mother in New Orleans, but they weren't in a position
to pay for the cremation. So one morning, Lieutenant Versaga
goes to have coffee with some friends who are retired
policemen and he tells them all about Gary.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Hey, man, can we pitch in and help this family out?
And let's get Gary cremated so we can get him home.
And I'm going to just start throwing money up on
the type. And before I got out of there, I
had enough to get him cremated, and so that's what
we did.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
He ends up breezing about eight hundred dollars, and after
the Cremetionian he took Gary's urn with the ashes back
to his morning coffee group.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
He was with us while we drank coffee and we
ate breakfast, and we talked about Gary, and each one
of them put your hand on the urn as I
was leaving to take him home, and that was just
a very moving thing. I would swear some of them
guys teared up a little bit, but they would never
be too much over to admit it. But I did,
and I'm not too much out to admit it. I
(32:36):
was so connected that it was almost like I'm bringing
my brother home.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
And then he and his wife drove Gary's ashes to
New Orleans to meet with Tanya and her siblings to
bring Gary home.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
And the way I put it is, last time Gary
was in Mississippi, somebody didn't treat him so nice. They
killed him and threw him off a bridge. And so
this way, this is a way to make bring back
some dignity to humanity for that, and so that's what
we did.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Tanya says, she's relieved.
Speaker 9 (33:07):
It's painful when, especially when you meet new people and
they're asking you if you have any sisters or brothers,
and you always have to explain, I have a brother
that's missing. How long has it been missing?
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Oh?
Speaker 9 (33:23):
Forty years?
Speaker 5 (33:24):
You know.
Speaker 9 (33:24):
It's like you at the point that you can feel
much better saying you know that he was kidnapped and
killed and body found.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
It's incredible how for these families there is peace in
knowing what happened to their loved one, even if that
answer comes decades later, And for victims there's a dignity
in getting their identity back. It does make you wonder
though if pretty soon the whole idea of there being
(34:01):
a John Doe or a baby Jane will become obsolete.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Yeah, when you think about it, I mean, it shouldn't
matter how someone dies, or where or when their remains
are discovered, or especially like what attention their death attracted
in the press. All of these cases deserve to be solved.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.
Erica Lance is our story editor, and sound design is
by David Woji. Our producing team is Catherine Fenalosa Emily
Foreman and Jessica albert Our. Executive producers are Kate Osborne,
Mangesh Hadigadour and David and Kristin Middleman, and from iHeart
(34:51):
Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. Special thanks to Connell Byrne,
Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, Nikki Etoor, Nathani Hosky, John Burbank,
and the entire team at OTHRM. I'm Alan Lance Lessor.
Thanks for listening.
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