June 11, 2025 • 52 mins
In this week's episode, the first part of a two-part-episode, Kate and Paul head to 1970 Sacramento, California where a young woman is found dead after not showing up for work. After interviewing over 500 people, something connected to the investigation happens that police cannot ignore.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'm a journalist who's spent the last twenty five years
writing about true crime.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried bones.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how are you.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
I'm doing well. How about you?
Speaker 3 (01:05):
I'm doing good. It's getting warm here, so it gets
a warm in this office.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I think we've all heard about that, the man cave.
I'm glad you're calling it in an office now. I
think it was usually just your man cave. But for video,
it's a little different.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Right, No, that's absolutely it. I'm hoping not to start sweating.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
No, me too. I had to turn my little air
conditioner off in the cottage. It's going to be steamy
in here. Pretty soon, but I'll just talk faster.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
No big deal, all right, I'll try to keep up.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
So I've been working on some stress relief stuff. And
I know you do a lot of outdoor stuff, and
I do too. My mom is a huge gardener, and
so I sort of started picking up gardening and I'll
enjoy it. Do any planting or you and your wife
do any kind of vegetables or anything out there.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Well, living in California, I did a lot of not
so much gardening, but a lot of landscaping. I installed
multiple backyards, from the sprinkler system, degrading to building retaining
walls and planting all the various you know, types of
trees and shrubs and stuff. I did try at one
point to have a little vegetable garden where I lived.
(02:11):
I mean, it gets so hot, you know, it just
didn't really work out very well. And then now here
in Colorado you really can't where I live. You know,
if you plant anything, you're going to attract the deer
or you're going to attract the bears. And so it's
just like now I'll just keep the natural, you know,
plants and stuff around the house.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I understand that we have tons and tons of loads
of deer in our neighborhood, and people try everything, including
my mom. They put the little tents over them to
try to get them to stop eating. We don't really
have them over in our joint. So a friend of
mine had built me a raised bed a long time ago,
and I could not handle a raised vegetable bed, and
(02:50):
so I bought myself just a small little vegetable box
and killed everything. Last year. The heat did. I'm gonna
blame Texas heat. The heat did, except I'll tell you
what survived. Strawberries were awesome. Okay, tomatoes were great, except
the stupid squirrels. I love squirrels, but they're stupid in
this case. And then jolapenos did really well. So guess
(03:13):
what I bought this year. Because I want my self
esteem to continue to go up.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
You're going to be redoing jlapenos, tomatoes, and strawberries.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah. I was a big failure with cucumbers. But I
bought a peach tree this year, and so I'm really
excited about those. But now I have a whole bird
netting that goes over it because the squirrels and the
birds love these peaches that are green, little peaches now,
so I get with my mom. My Mom has just
been so into plants for so long, and I get
(03:42):
what she likes about it. It's really relaxing and you
go out every morning and kind of check on everything.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Yeah, you know, I think I travel so much I
would not be able to give it the attention that
it probably would something like that would need.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Well, I really took an interest when I got the
cottage because it's sort of a I've put pictures on
Instagram of it. It's we have a forested area in
the back, even though you know, we have a fenced
in backyard. And when we bought it from the original owners,
it had just been so overgrown. I didn't even know
what was back there, and we eventually cleared it out
kept all the trees. We have cedar, and we have
(04:18):
some cedar elm and a lot of different kinds of trees.
And I was sitting in here in the fall last
year and the cedar elm was this beautiful color. When
it turned, it was like a mustard color. A wind
came through and it like rained cedar elm leaves all
over the place. And I think that's what convinced me
to go ahead and start trying with trees and vegetables
(04:40):
and everything else. So it's satisfying to me. Yeah, I
find it relied.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Boy.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Both of us need anything that can relax us. Besides,
I know, whiskey and cider for me.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Now you'll have to have to send me some photos
of some success.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
I will.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
I'm going to try to post more photos I posted.
Starting a couple of months ago, I started posting on Sundays,
just cute photo of something that's going on in my life.
Usually it's like the dogs people love Ruby and Bailey,
or why I have a hummingbird feeder. My kids love
the hummingbird feeder, and so I did post some cottage stuff,
but I'm going to try to do some trees and vegetables.
(05:14):
It makes me happy. Yeah, And you know, not everything
that you know I post, of course, has to do
with the shows or the death or anything else. And
so I'm trying to look really more positively.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
You know, these days, especially well, you have to have
something that distracts you. And that's where like me taking
my jeep out or mountain biking. You know, it just
gets the mind away from sort of the drudgery of
the cases. You know, because I get involved in so
many different cases.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Now, yeah, speaking of getting dragged into the drudgery of cases,
that's what we're doing now. I'm going to drag you
into the drudgery in the case. I wonder if you're
going to know this case. It's from nineteen seventy Sacramento.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Oh yeah, well you know, of course I wasn't living
in California back in nineteen seventy and Sacramento. You know,
my focus was the unsolved cases in the Bay Area,
so very very familiar. Okay, down in the Bay Area,
but there's a chance I could have heard something up
in Sacramento.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
When I was in San Francisco working for a network,
we were in Sacramento all the time. I don't really
like to go. I loved visiting there, one of my
favorite places to go, visit, going back and forth. So
let's go ahead and set the scene. This is autumn
of nineteen seventy in Sacramento, and this is the story
of a woman named Nancy Binilac, and she's twenty eight
(06:36):
years old, and she is a native of Grass Valley, California,
which is nearby, but she's in Sacramento. Is Grass Valley
Are you familiar with that. I hadn't been there before.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
I don't think yep. You know, that's just kind of
in the foothills past the Sacramento Full sum area. It's
a beautiful place at a lot of law enforcement relocates
there when they retire.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Okay, well this sounds like a really really, really nice
are Nancy is someone who has been well liked by
her peers. She was a cheerleader in high school. Doesn't
always mean you're well liked, but it's a point she was.
She was in high school. Everybody, you know, when she
was in high school, people seem to really like her.
(07:17):
She made good grades, she had a lot of friends,
and she graduated in nineteen sixty. So she went to
school for stenography, and then she became a court reporter
at the Sacramento County Juvenile Court in nineteen sixty six.
I am beyond fascinated with court reporters and what they do.
And I know it's changed, and I don't you know,
(07:38):
I've had to write about it several times just because
I have, you know, of course, these old cases. I
think my nineteen fifty two case we had to touch
on whatever the court reporter was doing in the device
they were using at the time. I don't know very
much about it. I know you've been there with them,
but do you know a lot about court reporting?
Speaker 3 (07:55):
No, you know, of course I've testified a ton. Yeah,
you know, I've testified close to two hundred times over
the course of my career. And I was the court
reporter's worst nightmare because when I'm testifying, I'm a very
fast talker, and literally these gals throw up their hands
and say slow down. So I'd have to kind of
(08:18):
remind myself I need to talk, you know, very purposefully.
And then of course with the scientific side, you know,
there's sometimes there's some of the some of the technical
terms that have to be spelled out for them, but
how they are able to keep track in real time
with that device, because there's many times where you know,
(08:39):
the judge or an attorney needs something read back that
was just stated and that she's able to take a
look at, you know what at the time was printed.
I think I'm sure they're electronic today and go back
and say, okay, defense attorney asked this question, the witness,
you know, respond it this way, the prosecutor kind of
you know, and so how they keep track of all
that is amazing.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
I guess attention to detail and definitely keeping attention in general,
and Nancy seemed to do that very well. So she
is twenty eight, she's a court reporter in Sacramento. She
is a very full personal life. There are quite a
few people in this story. Luckily, you know, we'll have
a lot of clarity later on, but I'll just start
introducing them to you. She's engaged to a guy named
(09:23):
Ferris Salami, and he is the chief public Defender for
the county. What does that person do is that? I
don't know why. I feel like I've not heard that
phrase very often. Chief public defender for the county.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Yeah, you know, the various public defender's offices in DA's
office have different rank structures, so I'm interpreting chief public
Defender as he is, in essence, the top administrator for
the public defender's office probably has had a very significant
legal career and then promoted up through the ranks. So
(10:00):
I'm somewhat surprised she's at the time twenty eight and
she's dating the chief public defender. You know, in court
they would be bumping into each all the time, so
you could see where they would be getting to know
each other. Just because of the court I would expect
him to be older. How old is he?
Speaker 2 (10:17):
So what I'm reading about Ferris is that he represented
some of the Capitol's most notorious killers. He died in
twenty eighteen at eighty four, so he was born in
nineteen thirty, so he was forty. Okay, But I mean,
is that a conflict of interest? Would you think that
would be a conflict of interest or now?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
No, you know, because the court reporter really is a
part of that neutral party of the court, you know,
So I don't see where there would be any issues
there at all.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Okay, So this is an exciting time in her life.
She's planning her wedding, she's trying on dresses, looking forward
to the future, and you know, as I sometimes do,
I wanted you to see what she looks like. So
open up your document that I sent you and look
on page one, but don't go past page one, and
then you'll see a photo of Nancy.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
I see a photo of Nancy. It's a crop photo.
There appears to be maybe a man's arm around, you know,
around her shoulder, like he was standing next to her
holding her but he's been cropped out. So taking a
look at the photo of Nancy, it's I mean, she's
attractive woman. She's got the old style hair. I'm not
sure what you'd call that, like a boufont or something.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
That's a big that's a big head of hair. I
love it.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
She was stylish, yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
You know. And it's that's like when I do the
cases from this era, you know, that's part of the
the interesting aspect is looking at you know, the victims
in terms of in life, you know, the family photos
or whatever. You know, it was a different era.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Okay, so we are in wedding planning phase, right, and
she's supposed to quit around November thirtieth. So now we
go back a couple of more weeks. It's probably about
two and a half weeks, and we're on Monday, October
twenty sixth, nineteen seventy and this is where people start
becoming alarmed about this story. She doesn't come to work
(12:10):
that day, so this is her last few weeks of
work essentially, and she doesn't show up. Nobody can reach
her by phone. She has a phone at home, of course,
no cell phone because it's nineteen seventy. But you know,
she's a phone at home and nobody can get a
hold of her. They think that this is odd, of course,
and out of character, because she's a very reliable person.
Somebody reaches out to Nancy's sister, whose name is Linda,
(12:31):
and they want to know if she has any information.
So her sister does some brainstorming, and then about ten
o'clock she calls a family friend who's a guy named
Jack Moncreef. He lives in the same apartment building as Nancy.
So she's on the second floor and Jack is on
the first floor, just beneath her, and over the phone, Jack,
who is looking out his window towards the building's parking lot,
(12:54):
he says, to Linda, your sister's car is here. She's
in the parking lot, and he said, you know, I'll
go upstairs and make sure she's okay. But when Jack
knocks on Nancy's door, she doesn't answer and the door's locked.
So let's pause here so that you can kind of
gather your thoughts on what we have. I know it's
pretty vague right now. Nobody's seen her since it sounds
(13:16):
like Sunday, and her car is in the parking lot.
She was expected to be at home anyway, she was
in for the night, and her door is locked. And
Jack will say in a minute, he doesn't see anybody
jimmy ing anything open. There doesn't look like any violence
that's happened on the exterior of that door.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
You know, this sounds like the you know, prototypical. We
need to do a welfare check. You know, Nancy is
a very responsible woman, has a stable job, has not
had this type of absence. And the fact that her
car is in the parking lot and her apartment is locked,
(13:55):
it's like, well, she in the apartment has has she
suffered some sort of health issue, you know, like say
she had a stroke, or has foul play happened? Again?
Was she a victim inside the apartment or was she
a victim that has been abducted away from this location taken?
And let's say in the offender's vehicle.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
If you are Jack, do you if we have three doors,
do you try to find another way in because you're
worried about your friend? Do you contact the apartment manager
to try to get a key, or you just fought
out call the police because you're worried at this point, well.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
I think, you know, at this point, I'm not sure
what you know, how much concerned Linda is expressing just like, hey,
this is unusual. So I imagine Jack is just kind
of you know, walked around the perimeter of what he
can of this apartment. Are there any open you know,
are there any windows where he can have you know,
visibility inside? And then eventually that's where it's like, well,
(14:48):
let's get the apartment manager and have that you know,
person go in. That's typically what ends up happening. And
then then if something's discovered, if something bad is discovered,
now you're getting law enforcement role in out.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Okay, but what if they open the door and she's
sleeping with another guy or you know, something else is happening.
I mean, you're running that risk of a manager using
the key when all this woman wanted was privacy.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
And locked her door, right, you know, And so that
sometimes happens. You know, sometimes you know, law enforcement does
a welfare check and see something where they have to
force themselves in and turns out, well, the person was
just living their life and didn't want to be disturbed.
But some you know, private party on the outside, whether
it be a family member, or somebody else has called
law enforcement say hey, can you check you know, because
(15:31):
this is not this is not right.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
That's why we're looking for patterns. Right, she didn't show
up to work. That was weird. Yeah, and her car
is in the parking lot. Okay, So Jack does what
you say. He finds the apartment manager. It's a guy
named Victor Anderson. And see, now we've already come up
with three or four male names, and then we've got Linda,
so this is kind of a big cast. So Victor
is the apartment manager. They go up this second floor
to Nancy's apartment. He uses his master key. They get inside,
(15:58):
and they look around the apartment. Nothing's happening, nothing seems touched.
And then they get into the bedroom and that's where
they find Nancy and she is deceased and she's laying
down in a pool of blood in her bedroom. And
I actually have a photo that Maren was able to
grab off of a TV show. She sometimes has to
(16:20):
do this when we can't figure out where photos are.
She'll just take her camera and take a photo of
it so that we can at least show you some stuff.
She has a photo that this show cut out that
shows the position of her body, and then of course,
you know, we'll have medical examiner stuff, and then there's
how everybody reacts to this. So what do you want
to do first.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
Well, just describe what they see, Okay.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
So he rushes back down to the apartment and he
tells Linda that you know, this is what's happened. She's dead.
I don't know anything about it. She's face down and
she's has blood everywhere. The police arrive and here's what
the scene is. She is naked except for a pair
of under where she has more than thirty stab wounds.
(17:03):
Many of these are on the front of her body.
But investigators also think that Nancy's attacker rolled her over
so onto her stomach before he tried to or she
tried to decapitate her. She has defensive wounds on her
hands and arms, and there is a large slash on
her leg, suggesting that she might have put up a fight.
(17:26):
And I have a photo of the position of the body,
but it's been cut out just for you know, privacy sake,
I guess. And then there are some other clues at
the scene. But that's where we are. Thirty stab wounds
and there is evidence of sexual assault.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, so I'm looking at a photo and this is
a photo that shows on the left hand side of
the photo appears to be the bed, and then you
have this white almost like a mannequin laying face down
on the floor. So somehow, you know, with computer graphics,
(18:00):
they were able to very precisely remove the visual aspect
of Nancy, but maintain the proportions of her body, the
arms being folded up, the legs kind of sticking straight out,
and then it appears that her head might be on
what looks like a pillow with some blood staining on
(18:20):
the pillow. I don't know if they remove so let's
say the blood pool or any other of the blood
patterns that may have been present, if they digitally remove
those from this photo, because that's what I'd be interested
in taking a look at. Plus, I'd want to see
the stab wounds. I want to see the types of
blood flows out of the stab wounds to indicate the motion.
You know, you imagine that the offender is probably initially
(18:44):
attacking her and they're face to face. That's why she
has a lot of these stab wounds to the front
of her plus the defensive injuries, you know, and a
lot of the blood in stabbing scenes often come from
cuts to the hands, cut to the arms. And now
during during the commotion, during the battle, you're now getting
blood being flung off from the limbs.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Is that blood on the pillow? Do you think is that?
I mean, I know it looks kind of weird with
this photo, and they've obviously altered some stuff, But does
that Is that a big blood pooling on the pillow
that her head's face down in?
Speaker 3 (19:15):
You know, well, it's it's hard to say how big
that that blood pool is. What ends up happening is
is you get the fabric the blood flows through capillary
reaction spreads as as the blood feeds that fabric. So oftentimes,
you know, it looks a lot larger than the amount
of blood that was probably deposited. But if if she's
(19:36):
if he tried to decapitate her, and if she may
have already been dead at this point, her heart isn't pumping,
but there could be a significant amount of blood from
what I'm assuming is going to be a cut neck,
a cut throat, and that would all be underneath her.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Okay, so this is something unusual, I think, And you
could tell me what you think about the police theory.
Near Nancy's body and now I don't think you can
see that in the photo, but I have a separate photo.
Near her body, police find a bloody piece of masking
tape which has been curled into a circle shape, kind
of like a band aid that you would put on
the tip of your finger. I think. Okay, they theorized
(20:15):
that the murderer had wrapped tape around each of his
fingers to hide his prints. I don't know why you
wouldn't just wear gloves, but that's what they think. And
one of these popped off. That of course, suggests to
them that there is pre planning involved here, which I
think probably is the case. Anyway, what do you think
about that theory? Number one and number two? If you
(20:35):
look on I think it's page three, you'll see what
they're talking about.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Yeah, I was when you initially described it. I was like,
that doesn't sound right, but this does look like you know,
in essence, it looks like a band aid that was
over the end of a finger. Yeah, and it appears
to be quite bloody. You know, why would the offender
wear something like that? You know, it's possible maybe he
had you know, some pre existing cut and that was
(21:00):
all he had available to put on his finger and
it just is coincidental that it drops off during during
the attack on Nancy. Now, back during this era in
the nineteen seventies, fingerprints is the primary concern of the
offenders because that's how law enforcement could actually identify you.
And so these offenders will try, you know, a variety
of different things to hide their fingerprints from being from
(21:22):
leaving their fingerprints behind, you know. Most commonly it's wearing gloves,
you know, but you do have some offenders that will,
you know, they've they've tried to use sandpaper to file down,
you know, the ends of their fingers and try and
you know, put glue you know, on the ends of
their fingers, you know. And it's just sometimes some of
these alterations just make their fingerprints more unique, particularly when
(21:47):
it's scars. So I'm not sure what's going on here
just yet, but yeah, that is odd. But it also
is potentially a great source of offender DNA.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
And it looks like they've saved that, which is good.
And there's more DNA floating around that I can tell
you about. So we've got that finger covering, they say,
investigators don't think that the killer intentionally took, of course,
this piece of tape off and left it behind. They
think it slipped off in the struggle. And there's a knife,
which we know gets really bloody and people get cut
(22:18):
when they stab people, so it looks like because of
the defensive wounds, she was fighting back to begin with.
There's no murder weapon found at the scene, but a
pathologist will later guess that it was a very sharp
knife with a three or four inch long blade that
was used to kill Nancy. Is that because he found
a pattern of depth that showed kind of a consistency.
(22:41):
Is that where he would have come.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Up with that, right? So, and this is where sometimes
the size of the knife can be exaggerated because they
will misinterpret the wounds. So you think about aspects on
your body. Let's say a stabbing to your abdomen where
there's no bony structure underneath, So a very short blade
you can push much deeper into the abdomen, and so
(23:05):
the stab wound is much deeper than the actual length
of the blade. So for the pathologists to kind of
conclude this was a three to four inch long blade,
I'm assuming he's looking at a stab wound in let's
say the chest area where now you have the ribs,
you're not getting that compression, and probably found a stab
wound that wasn't significantly distorted. When a stabbing is occurring
(23:28):
and the victim is moving, oftentimes the stab wounds the
knife cuts you stab in, but then the victim kind
of moves and now the stab wound is much larger
looking than what the actual width of the blade is.
And so that's where pathologist has to evaluate the stab
wounds and find a stab wound in which it would
be okay, this is not a compressible area on the body,
(23:52):
and it doesn't appear that the knife cut sideways if
you will, while it was in the body. So that's
where he can take a look and go, okay, it's
a it's a single edge blade, or it's a double
edged blade. It's so long, it's you know, it has
a certain width, and starts forming opinions in terms of
the type of knife. Is a pocket knife? Is this
something you know that that's like a bowie knife, a big,
(24:14):
you know, big like hunting type of knife.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
If this turns out to be a stranger versus you know,
somebody in her social circle. Do you think that you
know what I hear a lot is that term overkill,
thirty stand wounds trying to decapitate her. I hear that
assumption a lot that this must be something personal, And
I think you've said before absolutely doesn't have to be
(24:37):
personal at all. It could be pure anger or control
or whatever it is. So why don't we talk a
little bit about dispelling that myth too?
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Well? I think you know it is not uncommon to
have this number of stab wounds. Stabbings occur, they can
be very quick, and I've previously talked about I'm not
sure if it was with you or or in a
different setting, but just watch prison shankings. You know, they'll
(25:05):
release the videos of some guy walking across the yard
and another guy comes up and all of a sudden,
he's stabbing him with a shank, and within seconds there's
ten twenty stab wounds on the victim. In those situations.
Here with Nancy, you know she is being attacked and
who knows what type of interactions occurred between the offender
(25:27):
and Nancy prior to the stabbing starting. But once that
stabbing starts, they often can go very quick in terms
of the number of wounds, and it's not like the
offender is sitting there counting one, two, three, it's just
boom boom, boom boom. She's still moving, you know, and
the offender is just trying to get get control it. Ultimately,
(25:48):
you know, in something like with Nancy, you know, it's
when is she going to die? When's she going to
stop moving? I would be looking more if there is
something really significant about the location of the stab wounds.
I mean, this could be tough, but like I have
some you know, some of these women victim cases. You
(26:08):
know there's some significant mutilation and you can see a
focus let's say, you know, a stabbing to the left eye.
You know, why did the offender do that? When I
see that in multiple cases, like it's a serial killer,
it's not just the number of stab wounds, but also
how is the offender utilizing that knife? And there's so
(26:29):
many different ways and all, you know, each case can
be different. So right now I'm going to assume that
there isn't anything that I'm going, oh, there's a significant
behavior with how the offender stabbed the victim. This was
more a matter of getting control over the victim and
killing the victim during the dynamics of this, you know,
(26:50):
offender victim interaction, the cutting of the throat, and I
would want to know why they thought he was trying
to decap Did it appear that the knife was being
used to try to saw through the vertebrae like significant,
like to literally remove her head or are they just
assuming because you know, homicidal's throat cuts, I mean typically
(27:13):
go all the way through the neck with a sharp knife,
So they just maybe making an assumption he tried to
cut her head off. I would say, what he's doing
is he's ensuring she's dead, you know. And this is
part of what people don't recognize, you know. And I
saw this with Golden State killer Joseph DiAngelo. Just because
they're a serial killer doesn't mean that they're an expert
on how to kill somebody, right, And I saw at
(27:34):
DiAngelo he would check and some of his homicide victims,
even though they're bludgeoned, he's checking, he's poking them, are
you alive? With this case, that throat cut could just
be merely that offender is making sure Nancy is dead
when he or she walks out of that apartment. It's
just like an offender maybe strangles a victim and then
(27:56):
puts a ties a ligature on the victim to ensure
that that victim is not going to come back to life.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
And it sounds like she's really fighting because, as I
said before, she has several defensive wounds on her hands,
in her arms, she's got the slash on her leg.
It sounds like she was really fighting. But let's go
outside the bedroom for a moment, because the police are
trying to figure out what else happened in the apartment,
of anything, to just get some clues on who this
might have been. The bedroom is obviously where the scene
(28:23):
of the action has been, but there's nothing touched in
the rest of the apartment, which I'm assuming is not
particularly big. There wasn't forced entrees I had mentioned on
her front door, and the I think robbery was pretty
quickly ruled out as a motive. I think your sister
came in and identified what was there and what wasn't,
(28:43):
or another family member. It definitely seems like it was
sexually motivated. They found evidence of semen in the apartment,
but they were very vague about it. We don't know
who this belongs to, and it doesn't seem like they
collected it. They collected a lot of blood evidence includes
and of course that that masking tape, but I don't
think they collected the semen. And even though they don't
(29:07):
say explicitly that she was raped, there saying that there's
obviously been sexual violence that's happened here. So that's where
they settle on that this is, you know, a sexually
motivated attack. And I'm assuming you would agree with that.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
You have a nude female that's what stabbed to death
in her apartment, I would say, in all likelihood it's
sexually motivated. You know. Now, could there have been let's say,
consensual sex between Nancy and the offender, whoever that is,
and then an argument ensues and now the offender kills Nancy,
you know, so it's the sex aspect is not related
(29:41):
to the violence. You had mentioned early on in the
description that she's nude except her underwear is still on.
Is it like completely on her, like she in normal,
like she's just wearing it? Yes, you know, and there's
different ways to interpret that. You know, that's part of
taking a look at blood patterns and every thing else.
Did she have that on, you know, prior to the
(30:03):
stabbing start. You know, it is again was her consensual interaction?
And she starts to redress and then things go sideways.
Did the offender redresser? Because offenders do redress their victims
for whatever reason. And then of course with the semen evidence,
you know, it sounds like they're finding a semen stain
on the bedding or on a pillow.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Your ear, the body. We don't know.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Yeah, until DNA technology came along, you know, it's really
hard to say, well, is that something from a prior
consensual encounter or is this something that the offender left behind.
I'm surprised that there they must just be looking at
here's a krusty stain. They could see it, but they
don't collect it. And it's typically requires the lab to
(30:45):
verify that, yes, that's a semen stain. But nineteen seventy
you could do very very little in terms of all
basically you could say, yeah, that semen, there's a sexual
aspect here, but you can't You couldn't really type it
back to a particular person. And of course they didn't
know about the DNA that that semen stain would have contained.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Well, that's what my question was going to be in
the seventies or earlier. What would be the motivation to
collect a semen's stain and preserve it as evidence if
the only thing we could really use biologically actually in
the seventies was blood typing and that was it. Would
they just think, well, we're just going to collect this
for some future thing or what.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
It's evidence of a crime. You know, we have statutes
for you know, different sex based crimes, and so that
semen is evidence that a sexual crime had been committed,
depending on where it's deposited and everything else. So that's
just part of normal proper crime scene investigative processes. You
collect this evidence, even though at that point in the
(31:46):
nineteen seventies you couldn't do much in Nancy's case. You know,
right now, I don't know enough about the semen stain,
but it's that is a significant item of evidence, and
it may just come back to you know, her fiance
from a prior sexual encounter, or it could be the offender,
you know, and that could be what could have been
(32:06):
used to solve the case if it had been collected.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Now this question might seem a little odd, but would
you be able to tell within a certain time period
if the man who contributed to the semen if he
was sterile or not compared to you know, a different man,
and would that be in some case be somewhat helpful
at least like exonerate the husband or something. If there's
clearly a sample where the semen is not normal.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
Well, the forensic testing does not address fertility per se.
What we look at is we look at are there
sperm present? You know, So if we have a stain
and are able to through testing determined this is a
semen stain, but it's a sperm there's no sperm present, Well,
(32:55):
that could be due to a genetic condition, but often
it's due to a vasectomy. And so now that could
be you know expressed. We're now during an interview, you know,
let's say, you know, the fiancee Ferris was like, have
you had a physeectomy? You know, and so even back
in nineteen seventy you could say, okay, so that possibly
is Ferris a semen there from a prior consentual encounter.
(33:17):
Because it's a it doesn't have the sperm present. In
part I mean, there's I could go into a you know,
much deeper dive in terms of how we you know,
interpret you know what we're seeing underneath the microscope when
it comes to semen, when it comes to sperm, when
the sperm was deposited, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
So let's talk about now, blood one of my favorite things.
So let's talk about the exit and what they think happened. So,
no front door that's been locked, no violence outside of
the bedroom, no robbery outside of the bedroom, and then
how does this person get out? So police look and
there's a bloody trail. And I'm going to put trail
in quotes because it sounds more like droplets. But okay,
(33:58):
you can see where this person went. There's a bloody
trail leading through the sliding glass door. So she's got
a door in her bedroom. There's a balcony on the
other side of her bedroom, and then there's, you know,
a staircase that goes down. They see this bloody trail
going from the sliding glass door that opens to her balcony,
looks out onto the back of the apartment building, and
(34:20):
on the balcony they find another piece of that bloody
tape that I showed you before. It seems like they're right.
He must have put it on several of his fingers
all of his fingers, which I mean, just as a
side note, just seems a little laborious or inefficient or something.
I don't think i've ever heard that before, somebody doing
something like that.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
Yeah, No, it's odd. You know, it's almost as if
you remember those true detective magazines. Yeah, you know, it's possible.
This guy was just reading a story and you know
in that story, you know the offender and you know
in the story had done something like that, so he thought, well,
that's a way to possibly do it. Seems odd, but
it appears that you know, masking tape is not very
(34:59):
sticky to begin with, but also if it's now truly
getting saturated with blood, it's now coming off right, and
that appears to be what's happening here.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Yeah. Yeah, and it's great evidence, thank goodness. So you
know they collect that tape. Also, when you were talking
about that, it reminds me of all of the bad,
botched kidnappings that we've dealt with on this show, where
it's clear people have watched bad, hard boiled detective movies
or read the books and they think that you're supposed
to make things as complicated as possible, and then you
(35:31):
know it all goes awry, the bloody trail drops down
about thirteen feet onto the ground below, where the killer
appears to have left some shoe prints. So I don't think.
Let me look real quick. So he's on the balcony,
there's the bloody tape, and then the bloody trail drops
off about thirteen feet. Okay, So I'm gonna go back
(35:53):
and say I was not right. There was not a staircase,
so he would have had to have dropped down thirteen
feet onto the ground and that's where the drops commence.
And they said that the killer appeared to have left
shoe prints in the dirt. Another good thing. They said
that they were made by a quote casual boating shoe.
I almost look that up because I don't know what
(36:14):
that is. It seems kind of speculative, but maybe not.
I mean, would you you would have now been able
to identify kind of a combat boot versus you know,
a lady's shoe, So I don't Maybe this isn't speculative.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
Well, we use outsai the you know, the tread patterns
all the time to determine make and model the shoe
and even possibly the size range of the shoe that
the offender was wearing. So I'm not sure what the
tread pattern for this would look like. I'm envisioning like
a deck shoe. He almost like a topsider type shoe.
(36:46):
And so maybe there was sufficient detail that indicated this
is the type of shoe that they're looking for. You know,
in this day and age, there are you know, tread
databases that we can we would end up like back
when I was doing this in the nineties, we would
take a photo of the bottom of the shoe impression
that we got from the you know cast at the
(37:08):
crime scene, and that could go to the FBI, and
then they could search their database and give us a
list of possible makes and models of shoes. And then
now I'm at a shoe store flipping shoes trying to
find you know what match. So I'm imagining they probably
went through that type of process.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
So, because I am a crack researcher and know how
to type into Google it's a moccasin, I would not
call this a boat shoe these days, but I mean
that's what they were. So this is would you think
this is distinct?
Speaker 3 (37:39):
Well, you know, that's exactly like when I said topsider,
that's exactly what I was envisioning is that style of shoe.
You know, in terms of what's unique or not, it's
that tread pattern. You know, what did they recover at
the crime scene. You know, is there something unique about
the tread pattern from a particular brand of this topsider
boat shoe or how they go? Okay, it's this type
(38:01):
of shoe. On how how rare is this shoe? You know,
most shoes are not very rare, so oftentimes you don't
get investigative leads, but you have to at least consider
there's a chance that this is an unusual shoe. You know,
where is it sold? Is there a customer you know,
database that you can get from the store, like they
use credit cards and you start checking the box.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Well, I don't know how helpful that shoe was, but
I thought the boat shoe part of it was interesting. Okay,
the trail of blood goes from the shoe print over
to it wraps around the apartment building on the sidewalk
and ends in the parking lot. So then, of course
the police say, because it ends in the parking lot
and goes nowhere else, that suggests that the person hopped
(38:47):
in a car and left. Does that make sense to you.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
It does, and at all, you know, the extent of
this trail is telling me the offender is bleeding. So
you think about Okay, let's say you have a bloody knife. Well,
there's only so much of the victim's blood on this knife,
so as you are walking away, there may be a
few drips coming off of it, but it's not like
there's a source of blood that's constantly feeding it, so
(39:11):
that trail diminishes over time. Here you have a trail
that's going out of the victim's apartment, down onto the
ground and around the apartment complex of the parking lot
that's not coming just off the knife. To me, that
tells me he possibly got cut on his hand and
is now as he's fleeing the victim's apartment, leaving his
(39:32):
own blood behind. That is obviously key evidence.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Yeah, I think he's regretting putting those little finger coverings
on the tops of this. I mean, that just does
not seem smart. Okay, So what they think happened is
that the offender climbed onto a fence which is just
outside of Nancy's apartment, pulled himself over the railing of
her balcony, and then entered her bedroom through the sliding
glass store. I'll explain, Okay, the sliding glass door and
(39:58):
why they think that it's simply nobody in the seventies
locked their doors, because people did lock their doors, so
given the trail of blood, this is also how they
think he exited.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
Now.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
I don't know how helpful this photo is. I feel
like I say that all the time. But if you
look on page four of your nifty photo package, you'll
see the back of her building trying to figure out privacy.
I'm assuming we might be looking. I don't know where
the parking lot would be, but you tell people what
you see here.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Yeah, so this you know I'm looking at. It's a
black and white photo. Two story apartment complex. Appears that
the upper story there's windows and balconies and so this sounds,
you know, like the description of the sliding door for
Nancy's apartment. There appears to be this fence that's in
(40:49):
the foreground a little bit, and then pass that fence,
which is very much in the foreground. There's a lot
of vegetation, like biny type of vegetation growing up on
two scaffolding of some sort, you know, So you know,
if the offenders leaving through this, you know, this is
a he's possibly getting some of this, you know, vegetable matter,
(41:11):
you know, on his clothing, caught up in his shoes,
et cetera. So that would be something from a trace
evidence standpoint I would be paying attention to.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
I love forensic botany. I'm so fascinated by forensic botany.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Okay, So now you kind of know. And also you
can see there's privacy, so much of it has overgrown.
It's not front and center. It seems like there's especially
because if this happens late at night, he probably is
able to slip over being unseen. And we don't have
witnesses right now who say they've seen anything that the
police have spoken to. Okay, so they collect the pieces
(41:44):
of rolled up tape and they say they can't pull
any prints off of these pieces of rolled up tape,
and they can't produce any prints from the scene. So
does that make sense? Would that be tough though from
what you saw those kind of band aid looking things.
Plus they're not finding any prints at the scene that
they can use.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
Yeah, I would say, you know, it's possible that if
he had that tape on all his fingers. It would
prevent the fingertips from leaving prints, you know, but we
use all the ridge patterns, so the palms, you know,
the interdigital area, all of that surface area of your
hands can also leave laytent prince behind that can be
(42:25):
used to identify you. Just covering the fingertips is not
necessarily going to be as effective as what this offender
might might think. Now, if they're saying that they're not
developing or finding prints, you can go into any residence.
You're going to find prints. It's just that are they
from the offender? And in this case, I would be
(42:47):
looking to see I do I have any ridge detail
in the victim's blood, because now that tells me that's
a focus area for me, versus some random print that
was deposited, you know, by you know, Ferris, you know,
coming over to Nancy Place three weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Do my favor and go back to your photos because
I forgot to ask you something. Go to page two,
the body positioning one. I want to ask you about
blood spatter and the patterns that you and I had
talked about. So this is on a carpet, a carpet
versus linoleum versus wood. What makes life easier for investigators
when they're trying to look at these patterns with blood.
(43:24):
Is it the carpet, because once blood's in there, even
stomping over it might not drag it out. I would
think wood floors would be terrible.
Speaker 3 (43:33):
Well, the easiest is typically your non porous surfaces. So
when you start talking, let's say you're vinyl or linoleum floor.
You know there the blood isn't necessarily getting disturbed. You
imagine a blood drop hitting a vinyl floor. It makes
a nice circular drop pattern, you know, that tells me
(43:55):
it hit that vinyl floor perparticularly, versus something that's oblog
tells me it struck that floor at an angle. And
so I can start interpreting movements based off of that
type of pattern off of that surface versus a drip
onto carpet. It just gets absorbed into the texture of
the carpet. And if you do have a textured surface,
(44:17):
like a very heavily grained wood floor, that can also
disrupt some of the interpretive aspects of the blood patterns.
So the smooth, non porous surfaces are usually the best.
Good to know.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
I had been wondering about that and I was waiting
for kind of a carpety type case. I knew that
would jog my memory. Okay, so you know, as I said,
they collect the blood, and they collect all of the
little finger coverings that he made, and you know, they're
hoping that if they find it an offender, obviously they're going
to be able to compare the blood type, which I
(44:49):
know is not always helpful. It was helpful with the
Jeffrey McDonald case. This time period actually could have been
this year with four different people in the house with
four different types of blood. But generally, I mean, was
was blood typing something that would break a case? Do
you think before DNA came along? Or was it really fingerprints?
Speaker 3 (45:08):
It's fingerprints back in the day. Now you know the
ABO typing every now and then you'd have somebody who's
you know, type B, you know, which is four percent
of the population roughly, but most of the time you
are dealing with A or O, you know, and that's
most of the population. And then there was other things
as the nineteen seventies progress, there's other types of typing
(45:30):
that we would do, enzyme typing, protein typing, and so
if you had sufficient evidence blood evidence behind you could
generate a better, more discriminating profile. But it's was nothing
like you know what we can do with DNA, never
even approach that. But you could at least say, okay,
this blood trail that's leading out to the parking lot,
(45:52):
well that's different than the victim's blood. And so now
you're excited and we go okay, so we've got a
fender blood and what type is it? And then now
you start talking to you know, potential suspects and part
of what you could do, you know, back in the day,
you could either get a direct blood sample, or you
could determine secretor status and through their saliva determine their
their blood type if they're a secretor you know, so
(46:14):
there's there's ways to more rapidly screen, you know, the
suspects using that blood type. Most of the time, it
really didn't. You could you could eliminate, you could exclude,
but the inclusion was so weak it didn't make a
big difference in the cases.
Speaker 2 (46:31):
Well, let's see what you think about this next pieces
of evidence. Here we have earwitnesses. Okay, they're trying to
establish a timeline. They have interviewed in the one month,
so the month of October and then intwo when she
was supposed to be married, and of November. They speak
to more than five hundred people, and this includes a
neighbor who says that she thought she heard a baby's
(46:52):
cry on the night that she was murdered, followed by
hurried footsteps. And then there's another neighbor who heard a
car pulling out of the complex. If these reports have
anything to do with Nancy at all, this puts her
murder or the attack and the murder somewhere between one
am and two thirty am Monday morning, and then she's
(47:13):
found some like seven or eight hours later. Okay, so
what do you think about that?
Speaker 3 (47:17):
Well, that's probably as good as what you're going to get,
you know, in terms of this baby's cry, of course,
could be Nancy's, you know, screaming as she's being attacked.
In the hurried footsteps. I mean, this ear witness, of course,
is not necessarily going to know what law enforcement knows.
And so if it's a proper interview of the witness,
she is relaying sounds that are lining up with the
(47:41):
physical evidence with the crime scene. So it kind of
gives a level of veracity to what she's hearing as
being related to Nancy being killed and the offender getting
out of there.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
There is a report of an unfamiliar prowler in the
area around this time. They're not saying this night, but
around this time. So this is one of the more
vague descriptions. Five foot nine, one hundred and seventy pounds
having a Glenn Campbell style haircut. Okay, right, because you
had that look on your face, I got you a
(48:13):
photo of Glenn Campbell so you could see his haircut.
That's on page five.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
Well, I can actually, you know what, I actually can.
I can remember what he looked like. You did. I
think I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
It's a smart cut.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
Oh yeah, no, I absolutely, that's exactly what I was
I was saying. Now, this is a fairly popular hairstyle
for guys in the nineteen seventy, so it really isn't
something that is all that useful. But that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
I mean, you know, I think it's making a comeback
because I feel like half the boys at my kids'
school have this sort of haircut. Now, if you go
right below that, but don't go past page six, you'll
see the sketch Okay, so this is what somebody said
the prowler looked like. Who may or may not have
anything to do with this case, but we like looking
at sketches and from sketch artists, and you know, you
(49:02):
tell me, on a scale of one to ten compared
to the other ones we've had, what do you think
about this sketch.
Speaker 3 (49:07):
I'm having a hard time seeing how they generated this.
If this was through a what did we call him?
It was? You had these identa sketches, these kits that
had sort of standardized eyes and nose, and you could
kind of piece like a jigsaw puzzle, like.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
A Mister Potato Head for offenders.
Speaker 3 (49:26):
Sort of yeah, you know, and so the you know,
the the witness would sit there and say, no, the
eyes are bigger or smaller, and they would just swap
out those pieces here, you know, because it almost looks
like that's what it is. I just can't see because
you could normally see the kind of the lines between
the different parts. But he doesn't look very generic. You know.
(49:47):
There appears to be some facial details, you know, sort
of this large round chin and you know, the bigger eyes,
and of course that hairstyle to where I could see
where that that might be a decent enough sketch for
somebody go oh, I think I know who that is.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
Well, we'll see if it's helpful at all. So where
we are now is police and Sacramento are trying to
find this woman. Clearly they're working hard at it. They've
interviewed five hundred people, and they are going to now
start looking at her inner circle, so her fiance, her friends,
they look at her own father. They're really digging around here.
So we are also going to need to talk a
(50:27):
little bit about another murder that happens that is very
close and is very familiar, and it makes police wonder
if there's a serial killer at work in nineteen seventy Sacramento.
But this is all stuff we have to talk about
next week. Of course, I know you like this case.
(50:48):
You really you perk up with it, so I know
this is kind of your thing. I find it so interesting,
you know how cases were investigated, especially in the nineteen
seventies when we were sort of on the edge of
really being able to figure out some pretty cool stuff.
But just please collect all your evidence, even if you think,
Lord knows what people are not collecting right now, which
could be incredibly helpful in forty years with technology. So
(51:11):
I think that to me, so far as the lesson,
please collect the semen sample.
Speaker 3 (51:14):
Yes please? So okay, So it sounds like we have
another case that I'm going to listen to and we'll
see if it's related or not.
Speaker 2 (51:21):
You got it? Okay, see you next week.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
All right? Sounds good.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
This has been an exactly right production.
Speaker 3 (51:31):
For our sources and show notes go to exactlyrightmedia dot
com slash Buried Bones sources.
Speaker 1 (51:36):
Our senior producer is Alexis Emosi.
Speaker 3 (51:39):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin, and Kate Winkler Dawson.
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Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
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Executive produced by Karen Kilgaroff, Georgia hard Stark, and Daniel Kramer.
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You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Buried Bones.
Speaker 3 (52:00):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now, and.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life solving America's cold cases.
Speaker 1 (52:12):
Is also available now.
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Listen to Baried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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I'm Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'm a journalist who's spent the last twenty five years
writing about true crime.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.
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And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
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This is buried bones.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how are you.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
I'm doing well. How about you?
Speaker 3 (01:05):
I'm doing good. It's getting warm here, so it gets
a warm in this office.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I think we've all heard about that, the man cave.
I'm glad you're calling it in an office now. I
think it was usually just your man cave. But for video,
it's a little different.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Right, No, that's absolutely it. I'm hoping not to start sweating.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
No, me too. I had to turn my little air
conditioner off in the cottage. It's going to be steamy
in here. Pretty soon, but I'll just talk faster.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
No big deal, all right, I'll try to keep up.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
So I've been working on some stress relief stuff. And
I know you do a lot of outdoor stuff, and
I do too. My mom is a huge gardener, and
so I sort of started picking up gardening and I'll
enjoy it. Do any planting or you and your wife
do any kind of vegetables or anything out there.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Well, living in California, I did a lot of not
so much gardening, but a lot of landscaping. I installed
multiple backyards, from the sprinkler system, degrading to building retaining
walls and planting all the various you know, types of
trees and shrubs and stuff. I did try at one
point to have a little vegetable garden where I lived.
(02:11):
I mean, it gets so hot, you know, it just
didn't really work out very well. And then now here
in Colorado you really can't where I live. You know,
if you plant anything, you're going to attract the deer
or you're going to attract the bears. And so it's
just like now I'll just keep the natural, you know,
plants and stuff around the house.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I understand that we have tons and tons of loads
of deer in our neighborhood, and people try everything, including
my mom. They put the little tents over them to
try to get them to stop eating. We don't really
have them over in our joint. So a friend of
mine had built me a raised bed a long time ago,
and I could not handle a raised vegetable bed, and
(02:50):
so I bought myself just a small little vegetable box
and killed everything. Last year. The heat did. I'm gonna
blame Texas heat. The heat did, except I'll tell you
what survived. Strawberries were awesome. Okay, tomatoes were great, except
the stupid squirrels. I love squirrels, but they're stupid in
this case. And then jolapenos did really well. So guess
(03:13):
what I bought this year. Because I want my self
esteem to continue to go up.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
You're going to be redoing jlapenos, tomatoes, and strawberries.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah. I was a big failure with cucumbers. But I
bought a peach tree this year, and so I'm really
excited about those. But now I have a whole bird
netting that goes over it because the squirrels and the
birds love these peaches that are green, little peaches now,
so I get with my mom. My Mom has just
been so into plants for so long, and I get
(03:42):
what she likes about it. It's really relaxing and you
go out every morning and kind of check on everything.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Yeah, you know, I think I travel so much I
would not be able to give it the attention that
it probably would something like that would need.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Well, I really took an interest when I got the
cottage because it's sort of a I've put pictures on
Instagram of it. It's we have a forested area in
the back, even though you know, we have a fenced
in backyard. And when we bought it from the original owners,
it had just been so overgrown. I didn't even know
what was back there, and we eventually cleared it out
kept all the trees. We have cedar, and we have
(04:18):
some cedar elm and a lot of different kinds of trees.
And I was sitting in here in the fall last
year and the cedar elm was this beautiful color. When
it turned, it was like a mustard color. A wind
came through and it like rained cedar elm leaves all
over the place. And I think that's what convinced me
to go ahead and start trying with trees and vegetables
(04:40):
and everything else. So it's satisfying to me. Yeah, I
find it relied.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Boy.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Both of us need anything that can relax us. Besides,
I know, whiskey and cider for me.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Now you'll have to have to send me some photos
of some success.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
I will.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
I'm going to try to post more photos I posted.
Starting a couple of months ago, I started posting on Sundays,
just cute photo of something that's going on in my life.
Usually it's like the dogs people love Ruby and Bailey,
or why I have a hummingbird feeder. My kids love
the hummingbird feeder, and so I did post some cottage stuff,
but I'm going to try to do some trees and vegetables.
(05:14):
It makes me happy. Yeah, And you know, not everything
that you know I post, of course, has to do
with the shows or the death or anything else. And
so I'm trying to look really more positively.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
You know, these days, especially well, you have to have
something that distracts you. And that's where like me taking
my jeep out or mountain biking. You know, it just
gets the mind away from sort of the drudgery of
the cases. You know, because I get involved in so
many different cases.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Now, yeah, speaking of getting dragged into the drudgery of cases,
that's what we're doing now. I'm going to drag you
into the drudgery in the case. I wonder if you're
going to know this case. It's from nineteen seventy Sacramento.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Oh yeah, well you know, of course I wasn't living
in California back in nineteen seventy and Sacramento. You know,
my focus was the unsolved cases in the Bay Area,
so very very familiar. Okay, down in the Bay Area,
but there's a chance I could have heard something up
in Sacramento.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
When I was in San Francisco working for a network,
we were in Sacramento all the time. I don't really
like to go. I loved visiting there, one of my
favorite places to go, visit, going back and forth. So
let's go ahead and set the scene. This is autumn
of nineteen seventy in Sacramento, and this is the story
of a woman named Nancy Binilac, and she's twenty eight
(06:36):
years old, and she is a native of Grass Valley, California,
which is nearby, but she's in Sacramento. Is Grass Valley
Are you familiar with that. I hadn't been there before.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
I don't think yep. You know, that's just kind of
in the foothills past the Sacramento Full sum area. It's
a beautiful place at a lot of law enforcement relocates
there when they retire.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Okay, well this sounds like a really really, really nice
are Nancy is someone who has been well liked by
her peers. She was a cheerleader in high school. Doesn't
always mean you're well liked, but it's a point she was.
She was in high school. Everybody, you know, when she
was in high school, people seem to really like her.
(07:17):
She made good grades, she had a lot of friends,
and she graduated in nineteen sixty. So she went to
school for stenography, and then she became a court reporter
at the Sacramento County Juvenile Court in nineteen sixty six.
I am beyond fascinated with court reporters and what they do.
And I know it's changed, and I don't you know,
(07:38):
I've had to write about it several times just because
I have, you know, of course, these old cases. I
think my nineteen fifty two case we had to touch
on whatever the court reporter was doing in the device
they were using at the time. I don't know very
much about it. I know you've been there with them,
but do you know a lot about court reporting?
Speaker 3 (07:55):
No, you know, of course I've testified a ton. Yeah,
you know, I've testified close to two hundred times over
the course of my career. And I was the court
reporter's worst nightmare because when I'm testifying, I'm a very
fast talker, and literally these gals throw up their hands
and say slow down. So I'd have to kind of
(08:18):
remind myself I need to talk, you know, very purposefully.
And then of course with the scientific side, you know,
there's sometimes there's some of the some of the technical
terms that have to be spelled out for them, but
how they are able to keep track in real time
with that device, because there's many times where you know,
(08:39):
the judge or an attorney needs something read back that
was just stated and that she's able to take a
look at, you know what at the time was printed.
I think I'm sure they're electronic today and go back
and say, okay, defense attorney asked this question, the witness,
you know, respond it this way, the prosecutor kind of
you know, and so how they keep track of all
that is amazing.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
I guess attention to detail and definitely keeping attention in general,
and Nancy seemed to do that very well. So she
is twenty eight, she's a court reporter in Sacramento. She
is a very full personal life. There are quite a
few people in this story. Luckily, you know, we'll have
a lot of clarity later on, but I'll just start
introducing them to you. She's engaged to a guy named
(09:23):
Ferris Salami, and he is the chief public Defender for
the county. What does that person do is that? I
don't know why. I feel like I've not heard that
phrase very often. Chief public defender for the county.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Yeah, you know, the various public defender's offices in DA's
office have different rank structures, so I'm interpreting chief public
Defender as he is, in essence, the top administrator for
the public defender's office probably has had a very significant
legal career and then promoted up through the ranks. So
(10:00):
I'm somewhat surprised she's at the time twenty eight and
she's dating the chief public defender. You know, in court
they would be bumping into each all the time, so
you could see where they would be getting to know
each other. Just because of the court I would expect
him to be older. How old is he?
Speaker 2 (10:17):
So what I'm reading about Ferris is that he represented
some of the Capitol's most notorious killers. He died in
twenty eighteen at eighty four, so he was born in
nineteen thirty, so he was forty. Okay, But I mean,
is that a conflict of interest? Would you think that
would be a conflict of interest or now?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
No, you know, because the court reporter really is a
part of that neutral party of the court, you know,
So I don't see where there would be any issues
there at all.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Okay, So this is an exciting time in her life.
She's planning her wedding, she's trying on dresses, looking forward
to the future, and you know, as I sometimes do,
I wanted you to see what she looks like. So
open up your document that I sent you and look
on page one, but don't go past page one, and
then you'll see a photo of Nancy.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
I see a photo of Nancy. It's a crop photo.
There appears to be maybe a man's arm around, you know,
around her shoulder, like he was standing next to her
holding her but he's been cropped out. So taking a
look at the photo of Nancy, it's I mean, she's
attractive woman. She's got the old style hair. I'm not
sure what you'd call that, like a boufont or something.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
That's a big that's a big head of hair. I
love it.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
She was stylish, yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
You know. And it's that's like when I do the
cases from this era, you know, that's part of the
the interesting aspect is looking at you know, the victims
in terms of in life, you know, the family photos
or whatever. You know, it was a different era.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Okay, so we are in wedding planning phase, right, and
she's supposed to quit around November thirtieth. So now we
go back a couple of more weeks. It's probably about
two and a half weeks, and we're on Monday, October
twenty sixth, nineteen seventy and this is where people start
becoming alarmed about this story. She doesn't come to work
(12:10):
that day, so this is her last few weeks of
work essentially, and she doesn't show up. Nobody can reach
her by phone. She has a phone at home, of course,
no cell phone because it's nineteen seventy. But you know,
she's a phone at home and nobody can get a
hold of her. They think that this is odd, of course,
and out of character, because she's a very reliable person.
Somebody reaches out to Nancy's sister, whose name is Linda,
(12:31):
and they want to know if she has any information.
So her sister does some brainstorming, and then about ten
o'clock she calls a family friend who's a guy named
Jack Moncreef. He lives in the same apartment building as Nancy.
So she's on the second floor and Jack is on
the first floor, just beneath her, and over the phone, Jack,
who is looking out his window towards the building's parking lot,
(12:54):
he says, to Linda, your sister's car is here. She's
in the parking lot, and he said, you know, I'll
go upstairs and make sure she's okay. But when Jack
knocks on Nancy's door, she doesn't answer and the door's locked.
So let's pause here so that you can kind of
gather your thoughts on what we have. I know it's
pretty vague right now. Nobody's seen her since it sounds
(13:16):
like Sunday, and her car is in the parking lot.
She was expected to be at home anyway, she was
in for the night, and her door is locked. And
Jack will say in a minute, he doesn't see anybody
jimmy ing anything open. There doesn't look like any violence
that's happened on the exterior of that door.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
You know, this sounds like the you know, prototypical. We
need to do a welfare check. You know, Nancy is
a very responsible woman, has a stable job, has not
had this type of absence. And the fact that her
car is in the parking lot and her apartment is locked,
(13:55):
it's like, well, she in the apartment has has she
suffered some sort of health issue, you know, like say
she had a stroke, or has foul play happened? Again?
Was she a victim inside the apartment or was she
a victim that has been abducted away from this location taken?
And let's say in the offender's vehicle.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
If you are Jack, do you if we have three doors,
do you try to find another way in because you're
worried about your friend? Do you contact the apartment manager
to try to get a key, or you just fought
out call the police because you're worried at this point, well.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
I think, you know, at this point, I'm not sure
what you know, how much concerned Linda is expressing just like, hey,
this is unusual. So I imagine Jack is just kind
of you know, walked around the perimeter of what he
can of this apartment. Are there any open you know,
are there any windows where he can have you know,
visibility inside? And then eventually that's where it's like, well,
(14:48):
let's get the apartment manager and have that you know,
person go in. That's typically what ends up happening. And
then then if something's discovered, if something bad is discovered,
now you're getting law enforcement role in out.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Okay, but what if they open the door and she's
sleeping with another guy or you know, something else is happening.
I mean, you're running that risk of a manager using
the key when all this woman wanted was privacy.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
And locked her door, right, you know, And so that
sometimes happens. You know, sometimes you know, law enforcement does
a welfare check and see something where they have to
force themselves in and turns out, well, the person was
just living their life and didn't want to be disturbed.
But some you know, private party on the outside, whether
it be a family member, or somebody else has called
law enforcement say hey, can you check you know, because
(15:31):
this is not this is not right.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
That's why we're looking for patterns. Right, she didn't show
up to work. That was weird. Yeah, and her car
is in the parking lot. Okay, So Jack does what
you say. He finds the apartment manager. It's a guy
named Victor Anderson. And see, now we've already come up
with three or four male names, and then we've got Linda,
so this is kind of a big cast. So Victor
is the apartment manager. They go up this second floor
to Nancy's apartment. He uses his master key. They get inside,
(15:58):
and they look around the apartment. Nothing's happening, nothing seems touched.
And then they get into the bedroom and that's where
they find Nancy and she is deceased and she's laying
down in a pool of blood in her bedroom. And
I actually have a photo that Maren was able to
grab off of a TV show. She sometimes has to
(16:20):
do this when we can't figure out where photos are.
She'll just take her camera and take a photo of
it so that we can at least show you some stuff.
She has a photo that this show cut out that
shows the position of her body, and then of course,
you know, we'll have medical examiner stuff, and then there's
how everybody reacts to this. So what do you want
to do first.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
Well, just describe what they see, Okay.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
So he rushes back down to the apartment and he
tells Linda that you know, this is what's happened. She's dead.
I don't know anything about it. She's face down and
she's has blood everywhere. The police arrive and here's what
the scene is. She is naked except for a pair
of under where she has more than thirty stab wounds.
(17:03):
Many of these are on the front of her body.
But investigators also think that Nancy's attacker rolled her over
so onto her stomach before he tried to or she
tried to decapitate her. She has defensive wounds on her
hands and arms, and there is a large slash on
her leg, suggesting that she might have put up a fight.
(17:26):
And I have a photo of the position of the body,
but it's been cut out just for you know, privacy sake,
I guess. And then there are some other clues at
the scene. But that's where we are. Thirty stab wounds
and there is evidence of sexual assault.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, so I'm looking at a photo and this is
a photo that shows on the left hand side of
the photo appears to be the bed, and then you
have this white almost like a mannequin laying face down
on the floor. So somehow, you know, with computer graphics,
(18:00):
they were able to very precisely remove the visual aspect
of Nancy, but maintain the proportions of her body, the
arms being folded up, the legs kind of sticking straight out,
and then it appears that her head might be on
what looks like a pillow with some blood staining on
(18:20):
the pillow. I don't know if they remove so let's
say the blood pool or any other of the blood
patterns that may have been present, if they digitally remove
those from this photo, because that's what I'd be interested
in taking a look at. Plus, I'd want to see
the stab wounds. I want to see the types of
blood flows out of the stab wounds to indicate the motion.
You know, you imagine that the offender is probably initially
(18:44):
attacking her and they're face to face. That's why she
has a lot of these stab wounds to the front
of her plus the defensive injuries, you know, and a
lot of the blood in stabbing scenes often come from
cuts to the hands, cut to the arms. And now
during during the commotion, during the battle, you're now getting
blood being flung off from the limbs.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Is that blood on the pillow? Do you think is that?
I mean, I know it looks kind of weird with
this photo, and they've obviously altered some stuff, But does
that Is that a big blood pooling on the pillow
that her head's face down in?
Speaker 3 (19:15):
You know, well, it's it's hard to say how big
that that blood pool is. What ends up happening is
is you get the fabric the blood flows through capillary
reaction spreads as as the blood feeds that fabric. So oftentimes,
you know, it looks a lot larger than the amount
of blood that was probably deposited. But if if she's
(19:36):
if he tried to decapitate her, and if she may
have already been dead at this point, her heart isn't pumping,
but there could be a significant amount of blood from
what I'm assuming is going to be a cut neck,
a cut throat, and that would all be underneath her.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Okay, so this is something unusual, I think, And you
could tell me what you think about the police theory.
Near Nancy's body and now I don't think you can
see that in the photo, but I have a separate photo.
Near her body, police find a bloody piece of masking
tape which has been curled into a circle shape, kind
of like a band aid that you would put on
the tip of your finger. I think. Okay, they theorized
(20:15):
that the murderer had wrapped tape around each of his
fingers to hide his prints. I don't know why you
wouldn't just wear gloves, but that's what they think. And
one of these popped off. That of course, suggests to
them that there is pre planning involved here, which I
think probably is the case. Anyway, what do you think
about that theory? Number one and number two? If you
(20:35):
look on I think it's page three, you'll see what
they're talking about.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Yeah, I was when you initially described it. I was like,
that doesn't sound right, but this does look like you know,
in essence, it looks like a band aid that was
over the end of a finger. Yeah, and it appears
to be quite bloody. You know, why would the offender
wear something like that? You know, it's possible maybe he
had you know, some pre existing cut and that was
(21:00):
all he had available to put on his finger and
it just is coincidental that it drops off during during
the attack on Nancy. Now, back during this era in
the nineteen seventies, fingerprints is the primary concern of the
offenders because that's how law enforcement could actually identify you.
And so these offenders will try, you know, a variety
of different things to hide their fingerprints from being from
(21:22):
leaving their fingerprints behind, you know. Most commonly it's wearing gloves,
you know, but you do have some offenders that will,
you know, they've they've tried to use sandpaper to file down,
you know, the ends of their fingers and try and
you know, put glue you know, on the ends of
their fingers, you know. And it's just sometimes some of
these alterations just make their fingerprints more unique, particularly when
(21:47):
it's scars. So I'm not sure what's going on here
just yet, but yeah, that is odd. But it also
is potentially a great source of offender DNA.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
And it looks like they've saved that, which is good.
And there's more DNA floating around that I can tell
you about. So we've got that finger covering, they say,
investigators don't think that the killer intentionally took, of course,
this piece of tape off and left it behind. They
think it slipped off in the struggle. And there's a knife,
which we know gets really bloody and people get cut
(22:18):
when they stab people, so it looks like because of
the defensive wounds, she was fighting back to begin with.
There's no murder weapon found at the scene, but a
pathologist will later guess that it was a very sharp
knife with a three or four inch long blade that
was used to kill Nancy. Is that because he found
a pattern of depth that showed kind of a consistency.
(22:41):
Is that where he would have come.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Up with that, right? So, and this is where sometimes
the size of the knife can be exaggerated because they
will misinterpret the wounds. So you think about aspects on
your body. Let's say a stabbing to your abdomen where
there's no bony structure underneath, So a very short blade
you can push much deeper into the abdomen, and so
(23:05):
the stab wound is much deeper than the actual length
of the blade. So for the pathologists to kind of
conclude this was a three to four inch long blade,
I'm assuming he's looking at a stab wound in let's
say the chest area where now you have the ribs,
you're not getting that compression, and probably found a stab
wound that wasn't significantly distorted. When a stabbing is occurring
(23:28):
and the victim is moving, oftentimes the stab wounds the
knife cuts you stab in, but then the victim kind
of moves and now the stab wound is much larger
looking than what the actual width of the blade is.
And so that's where pathologist has to evaluate the stab
wounds and find a stab wound in which it would
be okay, this is not a compressible area on the body,
(23:52):
and it doesn't appear that the knife cut sideways if
you will, while it was in the body. So that's
where he can take a look and go, okay, it's
a it's a single edge blade, or it's a double
edged blade. It's so long, it's you know, it has
a certain width, and starts forming opinions in terms of
the type of knife. Is a pocket knife? Is this
something you know that that's like a bowie knife, a big,
(24:14):
you know, big like hunting type of knife.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
If this turns out to be a stranger versus you know,
somebody in her social circle. Do you think that you
know what I hear a lot is that term overkill,
thirty stand wounds trying to decapitate her. I hear that
assumption a lot that this must be something personal, And
I think you've said before absolutely doesn't have to be
(24:37):
personal at all. It could be pure anger or control
or whatever it is. So why don't we talk a
little bit about dispelling that myth too?
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Well? I think you know it is not uncommon to
have this number of stab wounds. Stabbings occur, they can
be very quick, and I've previously talked about I'm not
sure if it was with you or or in a
different setting, but just watch prison shankings. You know, they'll
(25:05):
release the videos of some guy walking across the yard
and another guy comes up and all of a sudden,
he's stabbing him with a shank, and within seconds there's
ten twenty stab wounds on the victim. In those situations.
Here with Nancy, you know she is being attacked and
who knows what type of interactions occurred between the offender
(25:27):
and Nancy prior to the stabbing starting. But once that
stabbing starts, they often can go very quick in terms
of the number of wounds, and it's not like the
offender is sitting there counting one, two, three, it's just
boom boom, boom boom. She's still moving, you know, and
the offender is just trying to get get control it. Ultimately,
(25:48):
you know, in something like with Nancy, you know, it's
when is she going to die? When's she going to
stop moving? I would be looking more if there is
something really significant about the location of the stab wounds.
I mean, this could be tough, but like I have
some you know, some of these women victim cases. You
(26:08):
know there's some significant mutilation and you can see a
focus let's say, you know, a stabbing to the left eye.
You know, why did the offender do that? When I
see that in multiple cases, like it's a serial killer,
it's not just the number of stab wounds, but also
how is the offender utilizing that knife? And there's so
(26:29):
many different ways and all, you know, each case can
be different. So right now I'm going to assume that
there isn't anything that I'm going, oh, there's a significant
behavior with how the offender stabbed the victim. This was
more a matter of getting control over the victim and
killing the victim during the dynamics of this, you know,
(26:50):
offender victim interaction, the cutting of the throat, and I
would want to know why they thought he was trying
to decap Did it appear that the knife was being
used to try to saw through the vertebrae like significant,
like to literally remove her head or are they just
assuming because you know, homicidal's throat cuts, I mean typically
(27:13):
go all the way through the neck with a sharp knife,
So they just maybe making an assumption he tried to
cut her head off. I would say, what he's doing
is he's ensuring she's dead, you know. And this is
part of what people don't recognize, you know. And I
saw this with Golden State killer Joseph DiAngelo. Just because
they're a serial killer doesn't mean that they're an expert
on how to kill somebody, right, And I saw at
(27:34):
DiAngelo he would check and some of his homicide victims,
even though they're bludgeoned, he's checking, he's poking them, are
you alive? With this case, that throat cut could just
be merely that offender is making sure Nancy is dead
when he or she walks out of that apartment. It's
just like an offender maybe strangles a victim and then
(27:56):
puts a ties a ligature on the victim to ensure
that that victim is not going to come back to life.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
And it sounds like she's really fighting because, as I
said before, she has several defensive wounds on her hands,
in her arms, she's got the slash on her leg.
It sounds like she was really fighting. But let's go
outside the bedroom for a moment, because the police are
trying to figure out what else happened in the apartment,
of anything, to just get some clues on who this
might have been. The bedroom is obviously where the scene
(28:23):
of the action has been, but there's nothing touched in
the rest of the apartment, which I'm assuming is not
particularly big. There wasn't forced entrees I had mentioned on
her front door, and the I think robbery was pretty
quickly ruled out as a motive. I think your sister
came in and identified what was there and what wasn't,
(28:43):
or another family member. It definitely seems like it was
sexually motivated. They found evidence of semen in the apartment,
but they were very vague about it. We don't know
who this belongs to, and it doesn't seem like they
collected it. They collected a lot of blood evidence includes
and of course that that masking tape, but I don't
think they collected the semen. And even though they don't
(29:07):
say explicitly that she was raped, there saying that there's
obviously been sexual violence that's happened here. So that's where
they settle on that this is, you know, a sexually
motivated attack. And I'm assuming you would agree with that.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
You have a nude female that's what stabbed to death
in her apartment, I would say, in all likelihood it's
sexually motivated. You know. Now, could there have been let's say,
consensual sex between Nancy and the offender, whoever that is,
and then an argument ensues and now the offender kills Nancy,
you know, so it's the sex aspect is not related
(29:41):
to the violence. You had mentioned early on in the
description that she's nude except her underwear is still on.
Is it like completely on her, like she in normal,
like she's just wearing it? Yes, you know, and there's
different ways to interpret that. You know, that's part of
taking a look at blood patterns and every thing else.
Did she have that on, you know, prior to the
(30:03):
stabbing start. You know, it is again was her consensual interaction?
And she starts to redress and then things go sideways.
Did the offender redresser? Because offenders do redress their victims
for whatever reason. And then of course with the semen evidence,
you know, it sounds like they're finding a semen stain
on the bedding or on a pillow.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Your ear, the body. We don't know.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Yeah, until DNA technology came along, you know, it's really
hard to say, well, is that something from a prior
consensual encounter or is this something that the offender left behind.
I'm surprised that there they must just be looking at
here's a krusty stain. They could see it, but they
don't collect it. And it's typically requires the lab to
(30:45):
verify that, yes, that's a semen stain. But nineteen seventy
you could do very very little in terms of all
basically you could say, yeah, that semen, there's a sexual
aspect here, but you can't You couldn't really type it
back to a particular person. And of course they didn't
know about the DNA that that semen stain would have contained.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Well, that's what my question was going to be in
the seventies or earlier. What would be the motivation to
collect a semen's stain and preserve it as evidence if
the only thing we could really use biologically actually in
the seventies was blood typing and that was it. Would
they just think, well, we're just going to collect this
for some future thing or what.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
It's evidence of a crime. You know, we have statutes
for you know, different sex based crimes, and so that
semen is evidence that a sexual crime had been committed,
depending on where it's deposited and everything else. So that's
just part of normal proper crime scene investigative processes. You
collect this evidence, even though at that point in the
(31:46):
nineteen seventies you couldn't do much in Nancy's case. You know,
right now, I don't know enough about the semen stain,
but it's that is a significant item of evidence, and
it may just come back to you know, her fiance
from a prior sexual encounter, or it could be the offender,
you know, and that could be what could have been
(32:06):
used to solve the case if it had been collected.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Now this question might seem a little odd, but would
you be able to tell within a certain time period
if the man who contributed to the semen if he
was sterile or not compared to you know, a different man,
and would that be in some case be somewhat helpful
at least like exonerate the husband or something. If there's
clearly a sample where the semen is not normal.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
Well, the forensic testing does not address fertility per se.
What we look at is we look at are there
sperm present? You know, So if we have a stain
and are able to through testing determined this is a
semen stain, but it's a sperm there's no sperm present, Well,
(32:55):
that could be due to a genetic condition, but often
it's due to a vasectomy. And so now that could
be you know expressed. We're now during an interview, you know,
let's say, you know, the fiancee Ferris was like, have
you had a physeectomy? You know, and so even back
in nineteen seventy you could say, okay, so that possibly
is Ferris a semen there from a prior consentual encounter.
(33:17):
Because it's a it doesn't have the sperm present. In
part I mean, there's I could go into a you know,
much deeper dive in terms of how we you know,
interpret you know what we're seeing underneath the microscope when
it comes to semen, when it comes to sperm, when
the sperm was deposited, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
So let's talk about now, blood one of my favorite things.
So let's talk about the exit and what they think happened. So,
no front door that's been locked, no violence outside of
the bedroom, no robbery outside of the bedroom, and then
how does this person get out? So police look and
there's a bloody trail. And I'm going to put trail
in quotes because it sounds more like droplets. But okay,
(33:58):
you can see where this person went. There's a bloody
trail leading through the sliding glass door. So she's got
a door in her bedroom. There's a balcony on the
other side of her bedroom, and then there's, you know,
a staircase that goes down. They see this bloody trail
going from the sliding glass door that opens to her balcony,
looks out onto the back of the apartment building, and
(34:20):
on the balcony they find another piece of that bloody
tape that I showed you before. It seems like they're right.
He must have put it on several of his fingers
all of his fingers, which I mean, just as a
side note, just seems a little laborious or inefficient or something.
I don't think i've ever heard that before, somebody doing
something like that.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
Yeah, No, it's odd. You know, it's almost as if
you remember those true detective magazines. Yeah, you know, it's possible.
This guy was just reading a story and you know
in that story, you know the offender and you know
in the story had done something like that, so he thought, well,
that's a way to possibly do it. Seems odd, but
it appears that you know, masking tape is not very
(34:59):
sticky to begin with, but also if it's now truly
getting saturated with blood, it's now coming off right, and
that appears to be what's happening here.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Yeah. Yeah, and it's great evidence, thank goodness. So you
know they collect that tape. Also, when you were talking
about that, it reminds me of all of the bad,
botched kidnappings that we've dealt with on this show, where
it's clear people have watched bad, hard boiled detective movies
or read the books and they think that you're supposed
to make things as complicated as possible, and then you
(35:31):
know it all goes awry, the bloody trail drops down
about thirteen feet onto the ground below, where the killer
appears to have left some shoe prints. So I don't think.
Let me look real quick. So he's on the balcony,
there's the bloody tape, and then the bloody trail drops
off about thirteen feet. Okay, So I'm gonna go back
(35:53):
and say I was not right. There was not a staircase,
so he would have had to have dropped down thirteen
feet onto the ground and that's where the drops commence.
And they said that the killer appeared to have left
shoe prints in the dirt. Another good thing. They said
that they were made by a quote casual boating shoe.
I almost look that up because I don't know what
(36:14):
that is. It seems kind of speculative, but maybe not.
I mean, would you you would have now been able
to identify kind of a combat boot versus you know,
a lady's shoe, So I don't Maybe this isn't speculative.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
Well, we use outsai the you know, the tread patterns
all the time to determine make and model the shoe
and even possibly the size range of the shoe that
the offender was wearing. So I'm not sure what the
tread pattern for this would look like. I'm envisioning like
a deck shoe. He almost like a topsider type shoe.
(36:46):
And so maybe there was sufficient detail that indicated this
is the type of shoe that they're looking for. You know,
in this day and age, there are you know, tread
databases that we can we would end up like back
when I was doing this in the nineties, we would
take a photo of the bottom of the shoe impression
that we got from the you know cast at the
(37:08):
crime scene, and that could go to the FBI, and
then they could search their database and give us a
list of possible makes and models of shoes. And then
now I'm at a shoe store flipping shoes trying to
find you know what match. So I'm imagining they probably
went through that type of process.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
So, because I am a crack researcher and know how
to type into Google it's a moccasin, I would not
call this a boat shoe these days, but I mean
that's what they were. So this is would you think
this is distinct?
Speaker 3 (37:39):
Well, you know, that's exactly like when I said topsider,
that's exactly what I was envisioning is that style of shoe.
You know, in terms of what's unique or not, it's
that tread pattern. You know, what did they recover at
the crime scene. You know, is there something unique about
the tread pattern from a particular brand of this topsider
boat shoe or how they go? Okay, it's this type
(38:01):
of shoe. On how how rare is this shoe? You know,
most shoes are not very rare, so oftentimes you don't
get investigative leads, but you have to at least consider
there's a chance that this is an unusual shoe. You know,
where is it sold? Is there a customer you know,
database that you can get from the store, like they
use credit cards and you start checking the box.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Well, I don't know how helpful that shoe was, but
I thought the boat shoe part of it was interesting. Okay,
the trail of blood goes from the shoe print over
to it wraps around the apartment building on the sidewalk
and ends in the parking lot. So then, of course
the police say, because it ends in the parking lot
and goes nowhere else, that suggests that the person hopped
(38:47):
in a car and left. Does that make sense to you.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
It does, and at all, you know, the extent of
this trail is telling me the offender is bleeding. So
you think about Okay, let's say you have a bloody knife. Well,
there's only so much of the victim's blood on this knife,
so as you are walking away, there may be a
few drips coming off of it, but it's not like
there's a source of blood that's constantly feeding it, so
(39:11):
that trail diminishes over time. Here you have a trail
that's going out of the victim's apartment, down onto the
ground and around the apartment complex of the parking lot
that's not coming just off the knife. To me, that
tells me he possibly got cut on his hand and
is now as he's fleeing the victim's apartment, leaving his
(39:32):
own blood behind. That is obviously key evidence.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Yeah, I think he's regretting putting those little finger coverings
on the tops of this. I mean, that just does
not seem smart. Okay, So what they think happened is
that the offender climbed onto a fence which is just
outside of Nancy's apartment, pulled himself over the railing of
her balcony, and then entered her bedroom through the sliding
glass store. I'll explain, Okay, the sliding glass door and
(39:58):
why they think that it's simply nobody in the seventies
locked their doors, because people did lock their doors, so
given the trail of blood, this is also how they
think he exited.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
Now.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
I don't know how helpful this photo is. I feel
like I say that all the time. But if you
look on page four of your nifty photo package, you'll
see the back of her building trying to figure out privacy.
I'm assuming we might be looking. I don't know where
the parking lot would be, but you tell people what
you see here.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Yeah, so this you know I'm looking at. It's a
black and white photo. Two story apartment complex. Appears that
the upper story there's windows and balconies and so this sounds,
you know, like the description of the sliding door for
Nancy's apartment. There appears to be this fence that's in
(40:49):
the foreground a little bit, and then pass that fence,
which is very much in the foreground. There's a lot
of vegetation, like biny type of vegetation growing up on
two scaffolding of some sort, you know, So you know,
if the offenders leaving through this, you know, this is
a he's possibly getting some of this, you know, vegetable matter,
(41:11):
you know, on his clothing, caught up in his shoes,
et cetera. So that would be something from a trace
evidence standpoint I would be paying attention to.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
I love forensic botany. I'm so fascinated by forensic botany.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Okay, So now you kind of know. And also you
can see there's privacy, so much of it has overgrown.
It's not front and center. It seems like there's especially
because if this happens late at night, he probably is
able to slip over being unseen. And we don't have
witnesses right now who say they've seen anything that the
police have spoken to. Okay, so they collect the pieces
(41:44):
of rolled up tape and they say they can't pull
any prints off of these pieces of rolled up tape,
and they can't produce any prints from the scene. So
does that make sense? Would that be tough though from
what you saw those kind of band aid looking things.
Plus they're not finding any prints at the scene that
they can use.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
Yeah, I would say, you know, it's possible that if
he had that tape on all his fingers. It would
prevent the fingertips from leaving prints, you know, but we
use all the ridge patterns, so the palms, you know,
the interdigital area, all of that surface area of your
hands can also leave laytent prince behind that can be
(42:25):
used to identify you. Just covering the fingertips is not
necessarily going to be as effective as what this offender
might might think. Now, if they're saying that they're not
developing or finding prints, you can go into any residence.
You're going to find prints. It's just that are they
from the offender? And in this case, I would be
(42:47):
looking to see I do I have any ridge detail
in the victim's blood, because now that tells me that's
a focus area for me, versus some random print that
was deposited, you know, by you know, Ferris, you know,
coming over to Nancy Place three weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Do my favor and go back to your photos because
I forgot to ask you something. Go to page two,
the body positioning one. I want to ask you about
blood spatter and the patterns that you and I had
talked about. So this is on a carpet, a carpet
versus linoleum versus wood. What makes life easier for investigators
when they're trying to look at these patterns with blood.
(43:24):
Is it the carpet, because once blood's in there, even
stomping over it might not drag it out. I would
think wood floors would be terrible.
Speaker 3 (43:33):
Well, the easiest is typically your non porous surfaces. So
when you start talking, let's say you're vinyl or linoleum floor.
You know there the blood isn't necessarily getting disturbed. You
imagine a blood drop hitting a vinyl floor. It makes
a nice circular drop pattern, you know, that tells me
(43:55):
it hit that vinyl floor perparticularly, versus something that's oblog
tells me it struck that floor at an angle. And
so I can start interpreting movements based off of that
type of pattern off of that surface versus a drip
onto carpet. It just gets absorbed into the texture of
the carpet. And if you do have a textured surface,
(44:17):
like a very heavily grained wood floor, that can also
disrupt some of the interpretive aspects of the blood patterns.
So the smooth, non porous surfaces are usually the best.
Good to know.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
I had been wondering about that and I was waiting
for kind of a carpety type case. I knew that
would jog my memory. Okay, so you know, as I said,
they collect the blood, and they collect all of the
little finger coverings that he made, and you know, they're
hoping that if they find it an offender, obviously they're going
to be able to compare the blood type, which I
(44:49):
know is not always helpful. It was helpful with the
Jeffrey McDonald case. This time period actually could have been
this year with four different people in the house with
four different types of blood. But generally, I mean, was
was blood typing something that would break a case? Do
you think before DNA came along? Or was it really fingerprints?
Speaker 3 (45:08):
It's fingerprints back in the day. Now you know the
ABO typing every now and then you'd have somebody who's
you know, type B, you know, which is four percent
of the population roughly, but most of the time you
are dealing with A or O, you know, and that's
most of the population. And then there was other things
as the nineteen seventies progress, there's other types of typing
(45:30):
that we would do, enzyme typing, protein typing, and so
if you had sufficient evidence blood evidence behind you could
generate a better, more discriminating profile. But it's was nothing
like you know what we can do with DNA, never
even approach that. But you could at least say, okay,
this blood trail that's leading out to the parking lot,
(45:52):
well that's different than the victim's blood. And so now
you're excited and we go okay, so we've got a
fender blood and what type is it? And then now
you start talking to you know, potential suspects and part
of what you could do, you know, back in the day,
you could either get a direct blood sample, or you
could determine secretor status and through their saliva determine their
their blood type if they're a secretor you know, so
(46:14):
there's there's ways to more rapidly screen, you know, the
suspects using that blood type. Most of the time, it
really didn't. You could you could eliminate, you could exclude,
but the inclusion was so weak it didn't make a
big difference in the cases.
Speaker 2 (46:31):
Well, let's see what you think about this next pieces
of evidence. Here we have earwitnesses. Okay, they're trying to
establish a timeline. They have interviewed in the one month,
so the month of October and then intwo when she
was supposed to be married, and of November. They speak
to more than five hundred people, and this includes a
neighbor who says that she thought she heard a baby's
(46:52):
cry on the night that she was murdered, followed by
hurried footsteps. And then there's another neighbor who heard a
car pulling out of the complex. If these reports have
anything to do with Nancy at all, this puts her
murder or the attack and the murder somewhere between one
am and two thirty am Monday morning, and then she's
(47:13):
found some like seven or eight hours later. Okay, so
what do you think about that?
Speaker 3 (47:17):
Well, that's probably as good as what you're going to get,
you know, in terms of this baby's cry, of course,
could be Nancy's, you know, screaming as she's being attacked.
In the hurried footsteps. I mean, this ear witness, of course,
is not necessarily going to know what law enforcement knows.
And so if it's a proper interview of the witness,
she is relaying sounds that are lining up with the
(47:41):
physical evidence with the crime scene. So it kind of
gives a level of veracity to what she's hearing as
being related to Nancy being killed and the offender getting
out of there.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
There is a report of an unfamiliar prowler in the
area around this time. They're not saying this night, but
around this time. So this is one of the more
vague descriptions. Five foot nine, one hundred and seventy pounds
having a Glenn Campbell style haircut. Okay, right, because you
had that look on your face, I got you a
(48:13):
photo of Glenn Campbell so you could see his haircut.
That's on page five.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
Well, I can actually, you know what, I actually can.
I can remember what he looked like. You did. I
think I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
It's a smart cut.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
Oh yeah, no, I absolutely, that's exactly what I was
I was saying. Now, this is a fairly popular hairstyle
for guys in the nineteen seventy, so it really isn't
something that is all that useful. But that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
I mean, you know, I think it's making a comeback
because I feel like half the boys at my kids'
school have this sort of haircut. Now, if you go
right below that, but don't go past page six, you'll
see the sketch Okay, so this is what somebody said
the prowler looked like. Who may or may not have
anything to do with this case, but we like looking
at sketches and from sketch artists, and you know, you
(49:02):
tell me, on a scale of one to ten compared
to the other ones we've had, what do you think
about this sketch.
Speaker 3 (49:07):
I'm having a hard time seeing how they generated this.
If this was through a what did we call him?
It was? You had these identa sketches, these kits that
had sort of standardized eyes and nose, and you could
kind of piece like a jigsaw puzzle, like.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
A Mister Potato Head for offenders.
Speaker 3 (49:26):
Sort of yeah, you know, and so the you know,
the the witness would sit there and say, no, the
eyes are bigger or smaller, and they would just swap
out those pieces here, you know, because it almost looks
like that's what it is. I just can't see because
you could normally see the kind of the lines between
the different parts. But he doesn't look very generic. You know.
(49:47):
There appears to be some facial details, you know, sort
of this large round chin and you know, the bigger eyes,
and of course that hairstyle to where I could see
where that that might be a decent enough sketch for
somebody go oh, I think I know who that is.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
Well, we'll see if it's helpful at all. So where
we are now is police and Sacramento are trying to
find this woman. Clearly they're working hard at it. They've
interviewed five hundred people, and they are going to now
start looking at her inner circle, so her fiance, her friends,
they look at her own father. They're really digging around here.
So we are also going to need to talk a
(50:27):
little bit about another murder that happens that is very
close and is very familiar, and it makes police wonder
if there's a serial killer at work in nineteen seventy Sacramento.
But this is all stuff we have to talk about
next week. Of course, I know you like this case.
(50:48):
You really you perk up with it, so I know
this is kind of your thing. I find it so interesting,
you know how cases were investigated, especially in the nineteen
seventies when we were sort of on the edge of
really being able to figure out some pretty cool stuff.
But just please collect all your evidence, even if you think,
Lord knows what people are not collecting right now, which
could be incredibly helpful in forty years with technology. So
(51:11):
I think that to me, so far as the lesson,
please collect the semen sample.
Speaker 3 (51:14):
Yes please? So okay, So it sounds like we have
another case that I'm going to listen to and we'll
see if it's related or not.
Speaker 2 (51:21):
You got it? Okay, see you next week.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
All right? Sounds good.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
This has been an exactly right production.
Speaker 3 (51:31):
For our sources and show notes go to exactlyrightmedia dot
com slash Buried Bones sources.
Speaker 1 (51:36):
Our senior producer is Alexis Emosi.
Speaker 3 (51:39):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin, and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Toliday.
Speaker 3 (51:46):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgaroff, Georgia hard Stark, and Daniel Kramer.
Speaker 2 (51:55):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Buried Bones.
Speaker 3 (52:00):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now, and.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life solving America's cold cases.
Speaker 1 (52:12):
Is also available now.
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Listen to Baried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Kate Winkler Dawson
Paul Holes
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