December 17, 2025 • 54 mins
In this week’s episode, Paul and Kate head to 1956 Southern California where a home invasion leads to a suspicious death. When a sequence of atypical fatalities form a pattern, a dastardly suspect emerges.
Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/4buCoMc
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried Bones.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how are you.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I'm doing well. Happy Christmas break. We're gonna go away
for a little bit for some much needed rest. I
think you need rest more than I do.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Follow Oh, I'm not sure about that. You've got your
hands in a lot of different things.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
I do. I do. It's hard for me to take
a vacation, and we've talked about that for you too.
But I was thinking of taking the fam to maybe
Vermont to do some skiing. But I have, as an
older adult, a fear of hurting myself skiing, even though
I skied a lot when I was younger, and when
I went to Boston University, we would go to Burlington
(01:39):
and you know, ski there. So I just love Vermont
in general. But have you done a lot of skiing.
I don't know if we've talked about that.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I haven't done a lot of skiing, having spent most
of my adult life kind of sort of in the
Bay Area. I've skied a handful of times up in Tahoe.
I can get down the side of a mountain. It's
not pretty. I've gone on black Diamond slopes and I've survived,
you know, But I've also left some gouges in the
(02:07):
side of mountains, you know. So I'm I'm not. I
don't consider myself a good skier, but I can ski,
and you know, of course I live in Colorado now
it's sort of ski heaven. And I will tell you
I do notice the difference. You know. We skied once,
took the family up to Breckenridge, and that's when I
was like, oh, I now understand what powder is. It's
(02:31):
so different than what I experienced during the handful of
times I skied out there in the Tahoe area.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
When I was at Boston University, they would take us
on a bus up there in the winter for I mean,
I feel like it was every weekend. It was almost
like a shuttle and you could go to Burlington, Vermont
and ski. And it was my first time really skiing.
I had skied and Breckenridge when I was a kid,
but I decided to go when I was in college.
But I got pretty far and I remember the person
(03:01):
who was operating the tram or whatever we were on saying, okay,
well watch out for the weather. And I thought, what
does that mean? And I kid you not. I hit
every weather system available going down that mountain. It was
like it started with snow and then it literally started
hailing part of the way through, and then it was rain. Yeah,
(03:22):
And I just thought, I don't know if I can
how many times I can do? This might be it
for me.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
It was the weirdest thing. And it was ice.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
It felt like ice, yeah, you know, And that's at
least that's been my experience in Colorado. You know, that's
when I skied and Breckadridge. When we first started, it
was like white out, blizzard conditions, you know, and you're
going how are we going to make a day out
of this? And then it ended up clearing up and
becoming very nice. You know what. The weather up in
the mountains, of course, can change on a dime.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Well, I love the mountains. I was thinking about my
favorite landscape, and I think it is mountains, and it
is agricultural land, just like vast amount of land, almost
like the marshes that I showed you in one of
our episodes, you know, just like green for acres and
acres and acres. But I have friends who live by
oceans and that's all there is for them, So I.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Go, yeah, you know, I love the mountains. I love
rugged ocean coastline, like northern California, you know, like the
Mendocino going up north from there. I'm not a big
ocean beach person. I don't like to just lounge on
a beach. If I'm going to be by the ocean,
I'd rather at least be in the ocean. Now, I
(04:33):
will tell you, you know, your love of agricultural land.
I've seen like in Iowa. I was shocked at this
beautiful rolling crops and old barns, I mean just amazing beautiful.
But then I had to drive home from Madison, Wisconsin
to Colorado Springs, and there was a stretch from Nebraska
(04:54):
to Colorado through nothing but cornfields that were flat as
far as you could see.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
You didn't like that.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Not my thing at all, the most boring drive I've
ever done.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Oh sorry, Nebraska. Well I understand that. I mean my
dad was from Missouri. I've said that before, and I
love Missouri, but it felt very flat to me. Two
But I have a good friend who adores the desert,
and I don't know how I feel about the desert.
I have been intending to go to West Texas Forever,
which is supposed to be just unbelievably beautiful, So I'm
(05:24):
going to try to keep an open mind. But I
was doing a shoot for one of my documentaries in Perumph, Nevada.
It's tiny. I know, you have that quizzical look.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
That I had never heard of it. But if it's
if it's somewhere in Nevada, I can only imagine what
it looks like.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Parumph, Nevada. And it was gorgeous. I mean, just hills, dunes,
mountains of really white sand. But again going back to
every kind of fear I have driving through it by
yourself when you don't. I was alone when you don't
see people for hours, you know, on these roads because
(06:02):
we were really deep into the Mohave Desert. It was
a little scary because I thought, what happens if I
break down? What happens, you know, in every scenario. But
that's the scaredy cat in me.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
You mummify, that's what happens.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Oh okay, anyway, Yeah, I'm.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Not a big desert person, but you know, like said
a Tucson, Arizona, Yeah, yeah, you know, with those amazing
cacti that you see and the road Runner coyote and
Roadrunner cartoons. I mean, I thought that was really cool.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Well, let's shift over to California, where I know at
least one bit of your heart is because I know
that you were an Army brat and moved around everywhere.
But I think you glow the most when we talk
about California. So I was an Air Force brat, but
you are close air force brat. Pardon me, Okay, let's
just jump right into this. Okay, let's set the scene.
(06:57):
We are in Covina, California, which is it's twenty two
miles east of downtown LA in the San Gabriel Valley.
Are you familiar with that or no?
Speaker 2 (07:07):
I know of it. I can't say I've ever been there.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
So we're starting with a nine to one one call,
and it is nineteen fifty six, is our year. It's
July around ten pm. There's a sergeant with the La
County Sheriff's Office named Harry Andre and he's responding to
this call from a guy named William. His middle name
Dale Archard, he'll go by Dale. So he and his wife,
(07:33):
who is named Zella Austin Archard, have been assaulted and
robbed in their home. So it sounds like a home invasion.
I have in my note here, Paul. It literally says,
let me get through this story. And that's a note
to you.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Got it, You got it, put up.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Your hand if it drives you crazy. So this is
what Dale says. When the sergeant shows up. He says
that the offenders are two Mexican men. One is armed
with a knife, the other one has a gun. They
broke into the house about thirty minutes earlier, and he
immediately called on When they left, they detained him in
the living room and injected him with a hypodermic syringe.
(08:15):
And then he says one of the men covered his
face with his own bathrobe, and then they went into
Zella's bedroom. For the record, she's forty eight, he's forty four.
Dale seems to be seemingly a normal forty four year
old man, perfectly capable of defending himself if needed. So
Zella just also for full transparency the end of this
(08:39):
she is not sexually assaulted, She is not murdered. She
can tell this story. She says that there was one
man who went into the bedroom. He was disguised. He
tried to incapacitate her. She fights back, and the man
in disguise leaves the bedroom. Dale is yelling at the
guy you know, to stop, and he is yelling to
(09:02):
Zella just let him have whatever he needs to have
and then he'll leave. He's essentially begging her to just
not fight this guy again. So the guy comes back
in the bedroom. She allows him to put a pillowcase
over her head and to bind her arms, and he
injects her with a hypodermic syringe, and then they made
(09:23):
off with about one hundred dollars from Dale's wallet. They
found about another five hundred dollars in the house. They
took that, they took a revolver. This is all worth
about seven thousand dollars today. And like I said, Zella
said that she was not seriously assaulted. This seems bananas.
The hypodermic needle or the hypodermic syringe is what alerts
(09:43):
me the most, I think to this whole thing being
just really off the wall. Do you want to comment
now or do you want to hear more a little
bit more about what's happening.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
In this case? Yeah? I want to hear more.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Okay. Sergeant Andrea takes a look around after he hears
the story. He tells Zella to sit down because she's
really dizzy and totally freaked out. He looks at her
wrists and there are rope burns on her wrists. There
are two puncture wounds in her buttocks. But nothing has
really been ransacked. You know, there's some cash that was taken.
(10:15):
As I mentioned before, there's no signs of forced entry
that we know of which, of course, you know we've
talked about if you have a gun, there's not going
to be any signs of forced entry. Jewelry is in
plain sight, nobody takes it. They find a syringe in
a nearby vacant lot. They also find a vial of
long acting n pH you dash eighty insulin, and half
(10:42):
the bottle has been used. There's also a twenty gauge
hypodermic needle that is found in their bathroom, like not
one of theirs. It's laying like it had been tossed.
Then Sergeant Andre calls a doctor. The doctor comes and
looks them over because Zella is feeling very dizzy. The
doctor prescribes second all and it's a very potent barbituate
(11:06):
to calm her nerves, and he leaves. Is there something
to say now or do you want to keep learning
more info?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah? Maybe just a brief comment, you know, right now?
Up front, this sounds like a standard home invasion two
eleven home evasion robbery. The use of the hypodermic syringes
is interesting. And if they're injecting insulin, the only thing
I can think of is they're just trying to plunge
blood glucose levels down in the victims so that they're
(11:35):
not you know, kind of like she's feeling dizzy, So
in essence, she's going into this hypo glycemic state to
where maybe I don't know if it'd render her unconscious,
depending on how much insulin is there, but most certainly
energy levels would go down. That's odd, you know, I'm
not sure what the offenders are thinking if in fact
(11:58):
that's all they're injecting. It's kind of a very interesting
twist to a typical home invasion.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, and they don't find evidence that Dale was injected,
which doesn't make sense to me either, if you're gonna
so to me. At first, I thought this was a
sophisticated chloroform almost kind of thing, like, you know, incapacitator.
She knocks out, why not do that to Dale?
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Also?
Speaker 1 (12:21):
And I'll tell you, let me let me point this
a little bit out. Zella throughout the night is sweating profusely.
Her breathing becomes labored, she starts salivating, and eight o'clock
the next morning she starts convulsing, and she dies within
a day or two.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Well, now it's going to get to where, you know,
what does toxicology show, what's the autopsy result show? The
offenders are very superficial in terms of the financial gain.
They're just taking cash. They're not taking other valuables that
they would have to put effort out like the jewelry
in order to be able to sell it. You know,
maybe this is more targeted against Dale and Zella than
(13:03):
an actual financially motivated crime.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Well, let's go, because you had requested the coroner's report,
here it is. The report says there are four puncture
wounds in Zella's buttocks, two more injection sites than what
was noted at the crime scene, which I was surprised,
but remember Dale called out to her, just let them
do whatever they're going to do, and so she complied.
(13:27):
There are no poisonous substances in Zella's body. They think
that this was an overdose of insulin, but there are
no tests at the time that can reliably indicate excessive
insulin in the blood or tissues of deceased people. Chief
of toxicology also sees no reason why Zella would have
been taking any kind of insulin. There were no cell
(13:50):
tumors in her pancreas, there were no signs of a
pathological disease that would have been treated by insulin. At
the end of the day, the cause of her death
is reported to the bronco pneumonia due to coma of
undetermined origin.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
I guess I have to assume that, you know, a
high dose of insulin could potentially do that. She had
four puncture wounds and there is multiple syringes possibly found
at the scene.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
They found one twenty gauge hypodermic needle, and remember they
found a vial of long acting I don't know what
U eighty means insulin, and half the bottle had been used.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
This is where I would be wanting to talk to
a toxicologist about exactly what's going on. She just doesn't
have insulin in her system. I mean, she also has
the barb in her system, you know, which is a sedative.
You know, So if her glucose levels are just being
absolutely plummeted down to zero because she has such high
insulin and then you throw a sedative on top of that,
(14:54):
is that could that induce a coma? You know? I
would think that's a possibility.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
And remember, you know they found the insulin bottle in
a in like a parking lot, yeah, a vacant lot nearby.
I don't think they're finding that at eleven pm at
night the night this happened, which is when Sergeant Andre
reported to the scene. They must I have to imagine
they would have found it the next morning. So he's
the doctor's giving her barbituate not knowing it sounds like
(15:23):
what she's been injected with. Nobody knows what she's been
injected with, because nobody's found the bottle yet. So that
seems haphazard to me, not knowing when you've got a
woman saying they poked me with a needle, not knowing
what she was shot up with.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
No, well, for sure, I mean you could. I mean,
she could have been, you know, shot up with a
different barb, or she could have been shot up with
another sedative. And now the doc is giving her another
barb on top of it, and it just is now
crashing her system, you know, into a very depressed state.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
So what Sergeant andre comes up with, I mean, the
things that he's trying to piece together are interesting. He
had asked Ella to describe the masked man, because remember
there was another one in the other room with Dale.
She kept saying things like my husband's build, my husband's height,
but she did not say this was my husband. And
(16:19):
Sergeant Andrea really starts to suspect Dale of something because
you know, if you remember the story, Zella is alive,
and is able to recount all this stuff. But she
does not see two men. She only sees one man
who's in disguise. Then that man leaves. Dale screams out,
just let him do what he needs to do, Zella,
(16:40):
and then the masked man comes back inside. So she
can't confirm. There's nobody can confirm except Dale. There's two men,
and Sergeant Andrea is kind of calling bs on this.
And I don't think it's anything about Dale specifically. I
just think he doesn't think the pieces are coming together
very well.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
He may be on to something. You know that Dale
set up some sort of ruse to eliminate his wife
and try to get away with it. You know that
this is a very interesting twist. I would say, let me.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Tell you a little bit about Dale, since Sergeant Andrea
is keeping a close eye on him. He was born
on an Arkansas ranch in nineteen twelve, and he's been
married numerous times. He got married at seventeen, then he
left that woman after a few years and moved to California.
He bopped around a little bit. He ended up working
at several hospitals. He was an orderly He was also
(17:35):
an attendant in a different one but hospitals. He married
at twenty three, he left her too, and then there
was a big gap. He got married again when he
was thirty seven, this time to a nurse. This is
when the legal stuff starts to happen, and it will
lead up to Zella, which will then lead to quite
(17:56):
another host of interesting things happening. And his nurse wife
were charged with a legal possession of morphine and they
were sentenced to five years probation. But a second drug
offense landed Dale in a minimum security prison in Chino,
from which he promptly escaped. Then he moved over to
(18:17):
San Quentin. In fifty one, he finished off his term
at San Quentin and that finished off his third marriage
to the nurse. Then he gets out in fifty three
and he goes back to southern California and he starts
running scams. So Dale is not a good guy, is
what Andrea is figuring out. There are a lot of
scams women he dated for their money. And then in
(18:39):
fifty six he meets Zella. Within six months they get married,
and now she is dead and we find out that
they had been married two months, that she had sold
her house for ten thousand dollars, which is now one
hundred and eighteen thousand today and escrow closed on July thirteenth,
eleven days before this home invasion. He had written two
(19:02):
checks on the shared account and basically to call her money,
and he bought a thunderbird. He collected seven thousand dollars
today six hundred then from her life insurance policy. This
is not a wealthy woman, but it sounds like wealthier
than he is. And you know, all of this is
to say it doesn't mean that he killed her. But
(19:23):
Dale has a history of loving and leaving women. This
appears to be the first one that he left who
is ended up dead shortly thereafter.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Well, Dale has that medical background, you know, and so
now you have this this oddity of these Hispanic males
injecting zella apparently with insulin. You know, so there is
overlap with Dale's skill set, if you will. And you
know this whole set of circumstances around, you know, Zella
(19:55):
cell in the house, getting blocks of money, Dale being
involved in scams. You know, things are really starting to
stack up that maybe this was a ruse. I just
wonder the injection of insulin. How confident could an offender
be that the insulin would actually kill Zella. So you know,
(20:16):
that's I think something that you know, was there an
intent to kill or was this an intent to disable?
Interesting to see how this plays out.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
So in this case, Zella is pacifying herself because her
husband is saying, stay still and let him do whatever
he needs to do. So she is not willingly, but
she is receiving four shots. According to the corner.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Well, you know what, I guess one of the things,
you know, because there's this, you know, one theory that
Dale is actually the offender. He's the one that's injecting Zella.
But if if Zella, while she's still cognizant, has a
male in the room with her and she's hearing Dale's
voice outside the room saying let him do whatever? Now,
(21:03):
do we have an accessory to Dale helping Dale out.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
What I believed happened. And the way Dale described Enzela
is she fought this guy, he backed off and left
the room and then Dale is saying, honey, just let
him do what he's going to do, like yelling back
toward her. When she's by herself, she's not running out
of OK. So she never sees anybody, but this one
(21:28):
masked man, and I think Dale's probably around the corner,
so that's the issue. She does confirm there's somebody who's
masks there, but when she hears Dale, the guy is
out of the room, and of course I think Andrea
thinks it's suspicious when she's sort of like, yeah, he
was my husband's height. Yeah, I mean, she is not
expressing suspicion.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Sure, So okay, So I thought possibly the scenario suggested
that there is somebody else present, But the way that
you just explained it, Dale could have done this whole
thing himself.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
So Dale has a quick rebound because he uh, just
a few months after Zella's death, he moves in with
a forty six year old woman named Juanita Plum. They
met in Tijuana. Doesn't sound like a grieving husband, but whatever.
She is a very well off divorcee. She owns a
forty thousand dollars house in Monrovia, which is in La County,
(22:25):
and she has a lot of expensive furniture, car, fourteen
thousand dollars in notes and bonds, lots of money essentially,
so her estate these days would be worth seven hundred
and sixty five thousand dollars. So This is a big
for him, a much bigger jump to go from Zella
to Juanita. In five months of being with this woman, Juanita,
(22:50):
he cashes out all of her assets and they file
insurance claims for two incidents of arson in nineteen fifty seven.
They collect between eleven and twelve thousand dollars, which is
one hundreds of you know, one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars ish today. The money runs out in late August
of nineteen fifty seven, and they separate, then they reconcile,
(23:14):
and then they marry, and bad things are going to
start happening. But running through that much money in a
state that is you know, almost eight hundred thousand dollars
today and what looks to me to be about a year,
even less than a year, seems incredible.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah. Well, and this is where investigating this. Even though
you have what appears to be you know, robbery slash
homicide going on, this is a white collar type crime.
And anytime he has something like this, it's follow the money.
So if Dale is you know, in essence, embezzling money
(23:52):
from ultimately this this next wife of his, you know,
where is that money going? How is he spending. It,
is he gambling? It is he hiding? It is he
tucking it away? Does he have a different life in
which now he's got a fancy house of cars and
maybe another wife on the side. You know, there's all
sorts of possibilities going on here.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Let me tell you what happens to Juanita. They go
on a honeymoon. They go to Vegas. She falls ill
in their hotel room. She is here's the description. She's incoherent,
She's slipping in and out of consciousness. She is sweating,
which sounds very similar to what happened with Zella. Her
face is bloated. At the Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital, Dale
(24:37):
tells doctors that Juanita has been taking barbituates and drinking
bourbon to go to sleep. At first, they just charge her.
They tell Dale that she should just drink some black
coffee and stay on her feet. I mean, that seems
like terrible advice. But by that afternoon her condition has
significantly declined. He takes her back to the hospital and
(25:00):
when she gets back to the hospital, she is chematose,
She's hardly breathing, and she is cyanautic, which you said
as a lack of oxygen right.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Kind of like if she has this pinkish hue, almost
as if she's been exposed to carbon monoxide.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Okay, her pupils are dilated, her body temperature is subnormal,
and her pulse is extremely low. They prescribe glucose. Does
that make sense?
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Well, are they suspecting that she's hypoglycemic?
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Well, I don't know, because what he had said is barbituous.
Is that a tonic for Barbes and bourbon?
Speaker 2 (25:37):
I don't know. You know, that's that's that's interesting, you know.
I think what they're seeing is is that she is,
you know, somehow in a sedated state, and they're trying
to infuse her with the glucose to provide her sort
of like kind of an energy source for her body
to recover from. But they must be suspecting that, and
(25:58):
maybe they did some blood tests and going, oh, geez,
she's hypoglycemic. We need to get her her glucose, her
blood glucose up.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Well, I think this bit will be helpful. She starts
convulsing and then she dies, and the which is I
think what we knew would happen. The doctor says that
he believes she died of cardiac failure resulting from an
overdose of barbituous, so they believe Dale. Okay, and Sergeant
Andre from La County, this is not as jurisdiction, this
(26:28):
is Nevada, this isn't California. But he finds out about
jan Nita's death and he informs the Clark County Sheriff's
Department in Nevada that Dale's previous wife had also died,
just you know, a year earlier. But it's too late
for an extensive autopsy because they believed Dale, and Dale
(26:51):
said cremator.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Of course he did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but at least,
you know, the LA detective is on it. He obviously
has tremendous suspicions about Dale, and so he's he's like
a dog on a bone and he's going to take
advantage if he sees that old Dale's involved in another case. Well,
now potentially we can get him for something.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
You know, I usually say this is what the story
is about. The insulin part of the story is really interesting.
We have talked about people who target, you know, their
spouses for money, but kind of the way of thinking,
you know, saying that this is an accident or trying
to set it up like it's an accident. It seems
to actually work in Dale's case if this is where
(27:36):
we're heading, because so far you have doctors who have
returned the sick patient to him, presumably for him to
make her more sick. I mean, there's no bones about it.
Obviously Dale is not a good person here.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yeah. Well, and these doctors, you know, they don't know
Dale's history, they don't know what's going on. They're not
even necessarily suspecting that there's a crime that happened, and
they're just now dealing with a sick person. And they
have the husband saying, you know, altering you know, at
least offering up a plausible reason why she is exhibiting
the symptoms that she is, you know, and whether whether
(28:14):
she died of barbs and bourbon or she died of
insulin right now, I think is still a toss up
in this case.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Well, when Nita dies and her estate is divided among
her living relatives, she was getting life insurance from her
husband's you know, her previous husband's death, so she was
getting some money in so it gets divvied up and
she leaves Dale one dollar. Well done, je Nita.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Oh so there was some marital strife before she died.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
I'm sure she knew he blew everything the first time,
but then they ended up getting married. She left him
and then she went back to him and they got married.
But this is what happened. Mean, you know, you don't
trust your spouse. Obviously, she left him a dollar, which
I'm sure just pissed him off beyond belief. Okay, moving
on to another person. A year passes, he doesn't spend
(29:07):
very much time. It just seems like he's going so fast.
And I don't know if that's money or what that is,
but it seems like he's not using a lot of
common sense about suspicion. But he's gotten away with two
so far.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Sure, And of course I think money is a big deal.
When you think if he had the equivalent of today
eight hundred thousand dollars that he just completely blew in
a year, you know, he's needing to have income coming
in in order to do whatever he's doing with that money, and.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
We don't know what he's doing with it yet. We
don't know. So he gets smart and he starts to
use an alias, probably because that psky sergeant Andrea is
floating around in May of nineteen fifty nine, so we
started in nineteen fifty seven, so this is just two years.
(29:58):
He uses an alias Arden, so this is a little confusing.
But when Juanita and Dale separate, there's no need for
like a legal separation because they were never married. They
are separated for about a year. In that year, he
marries somebody else, a woman named Gladys Stuart. They end
(30:20):
up divorcing when Juanita, the rich woman, decides that she'll
take him back, so he divorces Gladys within that year
and goes back to Juanita. So this is like a
real quickie wife in between. So after Juanita dies a
year later, Dale decides he wants to remarry the woman
(30:45):
whom he married when he was separated for about a
year from Juanita. So remember that woman's name was Gladys Stuart.
I don't know why Gladys agrees to this, who knows,
but Gladys is the ex wife of one of Dale's friends,
who is a guy named Frank Stewart. This does not
seem to be a problem at all for Frank or
(31:09):
for Dale, and in fact, they are kind of going
into business together and they are planning a combined business
and pleasure trip to Vegas for the next year. You know,
Gladys will come along. So she was married to Frank,
divorced him, then married Dale, then they got divorced, and
then she remarries Dale. After Janita dies.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
It's hard to stay on top of that.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
It sounds exhausting for everybody involved. Yes, So Dale and
Frank decide that they're going to go to the airport
which is now that Harry Reid International Airport, before it
was called McCarran International Airport, and this is in nineteen sixty.
So before they get on the plane, they stop in
(31:55):
the bathroom. Frank slips on some debris which it sounds
like was a banana peel, and my reaction was seriously
a banan appeal. But he slips and he strikes his
head on the counter top in the bathroom, so I
know that this is convoluted. Dale is scared that Frank
might be concussed. He takes him to the Southern Nevada
(32:18):
Memorial Hospital emergency room that is where Wanda had been.
By ten thirty that night, Frank is dead and these
are all the same symptoms. Yeah, he does have a
contusion on his head, but you know, all the same symptoms,
and the doctors say it is a cerebral hemorrhage, possibly
related to a history of cardiovascular disease. No charges.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
So is it possible when Frank is in this bathroom
at the airport that Dale from behind strikes him with
some sort of weapon, right, yeah, or grabs him and
hits his head against the counter or something, you know.
So Dale's all about Dale, and he's going to eliminate
and financially drain the assets about anybody in his life.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
I agree, and I think I think that is a
good way of thinking about it. So he hits Frank
on the head because Frank is not going to be
someone who's going to voluntarily, you know, take a syringe
to the butt. And then he goes to the hospital
and in the meantime, you know, because he's concussed, he
you know, gets these syringes. He gets a syringe full
(33:29):
of insulin and then same thing and then dies. I mean,
is the hospital must see this every once in a
while or some I mean, these are I guess, are
these normal symptoms? The one I've been describing having a
hard time breathing, you know, dilated pupils. It's just the
same thing with all of these people. It sounds like, yeah, well, it'd.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Be interesting because I could see where there's a variety
of different medical conditions that all have the same symptoms
that you know, these medical professionals see, you know, day
in and day out. You know, I'm thinking Dale hits
you know, Frank in the back of the head, you know,
in this airport restroom, and while he's tending to Frank,
(34:12):
he's injecting him in that that bathroom, you know, because
he could do that right through the clothes.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Yeah, and he's in a trauma so he's not feeling
anything most likely.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Yeah, Frank is like, oh my, you know, whether he's
even still conscious, you know. But at the same time,
you know, Dale's just got this this formula that has
worked on the women, and now he's taken out a guy.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
I mean, this is just a kind of it's kind
of crazy. Is this a serial killer? Because we've talked
about this definition before. It's not for sexual gratification, but
it is multiple people.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Yeah. Well, you know, when you take a look at
the definitions of a serial killer and they have a
tendency to be I feel kind of too vague, you know,
but fundamentally it's having killed three or more with a
cooling off period in between. The definition doesn't discuss the
(35:07):
psychology of the offender. It's just have you killed three
or more and there's time in between each homicide. Then yes,
you have somebody that is by definition a serial killer.
And this is a type of predator. Now, this is
a predator that is financially motivated. So this is very
(35:30):
different than you know, your Ted Bundize or your Jeffrey Dahmers.
You know, you're sexually motivated, your fantasy motivated predators. But
it is a type of serial killer. This is very
different than your mass killer or your spree killer, which
people often convolute with serial killer. Your mass or spree
(35:52):
killers are in essence, in one event which can be
extended over a period of time. But going out and
killing multiple people, such as going into a school yard
or going into a fast food restaurant and killing multiple
people completely different psychology than a serial killer, because that
(36:15):
serial killer, over an expanse of time, is now committing
these crimes for their own personal gain. For Dale, it's financial.
For DiAngelo, Golden State killer, there's a sexual component.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
The story keeps getting walder and wilder. As far as
I'm concerned, Dale in the wake of Frank's death is
I'm presuming excited because he's attached to two different life
insurance policies. Now my notes say that Frank took them
out on himself. I don't know about that, because one
(36:56):
of these policies is for Gladys the beneficiary, who is
of course, you know, frank sex wife, Dale's current wife,
but also Dale's mother, Jenny May Archerd. And I have
no idea why that would have happened. I think it
must have been Dale must have been the one that
took those outright. The policies in today's money would have
(37:19):
been about nine hundred.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Thousand dollars total, pretty good money.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
So he says, ye be. He files claims for the
insurance money, but they are dismissed, and I think that
Gladys finally says we're getting a divorce and she took
the money. So in nineteen sixty one, there is an
officer in charge of all traffic related deaths in La County.
He's called to investigate the death of a young man
(37:47):
named Bernie Kirk Archerd. He's fifteen, and he is Dale's
nephew from his brother, and Dale is also one of
Bernie's guardians because of the my brother has died, Dale
is a guardian. According to the police, the reason why
this sergeant is showing up is because Bernie had been
(38:10):
injured in a hit and run accident a month earlier.
He died thirteen days later at the Long Beach Memorial Hospital.
There is no evidence that he was ever involved in
a hit and run accident, So I think that this
was reported by somebody and we presumed Dale, and when
they came out to investigate, there's no any report. So
(38:32):
let me just tell you about the circumstances real quick.
Bernie's mother, the teenager's mother, had deserted the family when
he was a child. His father, who is Dale's brother,
was Everett Archard. I told you that he had died.
He was an engineer at an oil refinery. He had
died of a heart attack in nineteen sixty, which was
almost two years earlier than when the Sun died. Before
(38:54):
his death, Everett had warned women to not marry his brother.
He said he's a lying bastard. And when Everett died
of that heart attack, Dale was right by his side.
And now Everett's son is dead from a car accident
that never actually happened, and is there.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
A life insurance on Bernie and Dale the beneficiary?
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Since Everett died, Bernie had been living with Jenny Archerd,
who is Dale's mother, who had received money Remember from
Frank Stuart's life insurance policy that we're presuming Dale took
out on him, thinking he would get that money from
his mother and it didn't happen. So Bernie had been
(39:39):
living with his grandmother in Long Beach, and Dale was
stealing Everett's life insurance policy that was left to their mother.
And then it gets worse because Bernie is hit quote
unquote by a car. He goes into a coma before
he dies. Dale's mom, Jenny, has a massive cerebral hemorrhage,
(40:03):
and she dies and she's immediately cremated, and then her
grandson dies four days later. His official cause of death
is terminal bronco pneumonia. He is also quickly cremated. So
you know, I'm sure that this is driving the investigators crazy,
all of whom although these are so these are different. Well,
we're back in La County, so we're back with Sergeant Andre.
(40:27):
So we've really only hit Nevada and La County I
believe so far.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Sure, But by the time Sergeant Andre becomes aware of anything,
these bodies are cremated. You know, Dale's receiving life insurance policies.
You know, because unless somebody is suspecting a crime up
front and reporting that back to the authorities, Sergeant Andre
is not. He's completely unaware of this. He's got a
(40:53):
whole case load elsewhere, right, And so Dale is now
picking off his own family members and financially be a
fitting from it, and law enforcement has no idea what's
going on.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Well, I think you're right, because no one is making
a move on Dale. And he continues on. Now there
is a four year period that I thought was interesting.
I don't know what he was doing in this four
year period, but he resumes using the name Jim Arden.
And he meets a woman who is named Mary brinker Post.
(41:24):
She's sixty, he is fifty three at this point. She
is a famous author. She's a best selling author. She
wrote a book called Annie Jordan in nineteen forty eight.
I read a bit of it. It's pretty good, but
it was a best selling book. They marry after two months,
he burns through her money, which is about two hundred
(41:47):
thousand dollars today, and he racks up about fourteen thousand
dollars in debt then, which is about one hundred and
forty four thousand dollars today. She about a year and
a half after meeting him, files from bankruptcy. He leaves
her because of course, bankruptcy no money. He goes back
to Gladys, who he had killed her ex husband. I'm
(42:09):
sure she doesn't suspect that, but I mean Gladys, they
had divorced. All Races is twice divorced.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Dale. He's a con man. He's got the gift of gab.
Seems like he has the ability to socially interact with
people to keep them where they don't suspect him of
these crimes that he's committee.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
I mean, it's unreal. So now we're going to be
back to Mary. After he leaves Mary and I have
to presume starts divorce proceedings. He's with Gladys. Two weeks
after that, Mary is in a minor car accident for real.
She's in Montclair. Her face is bruised and her nose
is injured and she gets like a two inch bandage.
(42:56):
She is shaken up, and she calls Dale and he
visits her on October thirty first, and then she ends
up in the hospital. Blood tests indicate a low blood
glueclose level and the presence of barbituates. They do an
EEG because this has been in a car accident, and
it shows severe depression of cortical activity with no localizing features.
(43:21):
She dies the next day. Dale says, you know, a
car accident, she had head injuries. But this time the
investigators who are in La County get an autopsy. They
act quickly. Her cause of death is listed as bronco
pneumonia secondary to hypoglycemia. But he is arrested. I don't
(43:43):
know if they see the pattern and they feel like,
I don't know why he's arrested. I don't know how
that changes anything.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Yeah, I'm not sure, because you know, at this point,
it's got to come from these autopsy results and a
pathologist rendering an openion that somebody had injected her or
forced her to be ingest the barbs and the insulin,
and of course they're looking at Dale.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
So he is arrested. In nineteen sixty seven in his
la home. He's charged with three counts of first degree
murder for the deaths of Zella the first wife, his
nephew Bernie, and Mary the author. He pleads not guilty
to all counts, so he is called I have not
(44:32):
heard of this before. He is called a serial matrimonialist killer.
Have you heard that phrase?
Speaker 2 (44:38):
No?
Speaker 1 (44:38):
I mean, I guess we would say, like the low
term would be a bluebeard killer. But I don't know.
This is what they're calling him.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Well, you know, I would like you know, he's the
male version of what is typically called the black widow. Yeah, right,
where females are scamming and killing men for financial gain.
He's doing this same thing, and of course there's many
examples of men doing tho to women.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
Well, he waives his right to jury trial. He goes
with a judge and testimony starts in December of nineteen
sixty seven. So first I think they're establishing the fact
that Dale could have pulled off the insulin. Now, of
course they say he has been shooting people with insulin
to put him in a coma and then they die.
(45:24):
There is a head psychiatrist at a state hospital where
Dale worked in the early nineteen forties, and he details
this procedure that they had used at an insulin shock ward.
So I did not know anything about this at this time.
In the forties, insulin shock therapy was a common psychiatric
treatment for schizophrenia, So you would inject a patient with
(45:48):
large doses of insulin to induce daily comas for a
period of months, and so he was well trained to
give insulin injections. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Yeah, well, you know, I don't know anything about that
for the schizophrenia. But most certainly what it tells me
is Dale is extremely comfortable with, you know, not only
the injection of insulin, but what its response is going
to be. He has a skill set, he has an expertise,
and that is what he is relying upon in order
(46:21):
to commit his crimes. And I suspect that in some
of the cases he's not just injecting insulin, but he's
also combining it with the barbs. The barbs seem to
be a consistent thing, you know, throughout this entire series,
and so he probably recognizes that the combination of high
(46:41):
insulin levels plus this potent sedative, the barbs, which many
people have overdosed on and died. You know, it gives
him the confidence that his victim is going to ultimately
die from it.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Well, remember I told you he was married to a
nurse in the forties, so this was before Zella's death.
She testifies her name is Dorothea, and they got into
trouble together for you know, illegally possessing morphine. She testifies
that after she met Dale, he roped her into a
(47:17):
fraudulent scheme. I mean this scheme designed to obstruct criminal
proceedings against their mutual friend. Listen to this. In nineteen
forty seven, their friend, who was a guy named William
Edward Jones, was facing child molestation charges for raping a
thirteen year old girl. Dale goes to William and says,
(47:38):
let's feign a motoring accident and a head injury to
delay this litigation. And he tells William that we can
make this more convincing if you let me inject you
with insulin. Then he would bribe the girl's family to
drop the case. And he tells William it would cost
about ten thousand dollars. William says, this sounds great. I
(48:00):
mean ten thousand dollars in forty seven would have been
a massive amount of money. So Dorothea gets the insulin
from a hospital and gives it to him. In forty seven,
she remembers telling him that insulin would be the perfect
murder weapon. I don't know why Dorothea would have told
him that, but she did. The men staged a car crash,
William posed by a nearby tree, and Dale injected him
(48:23):
with insulin. Then Dale calls the police anonymously to report
the wreck. When the police get to the scene, they
find William discombobulated and hungry. They take him to a
nearby hospital, where doctors say that he had a you know.
They note that he had a headache and subnormal temperature.
Shortly after his arrival, he begins sweating. I mean the
(48:44):
whole thing. The muscles are twitching, is breathing, his pulse.
Everything is bad. They perform a spinal puncture around eleven am.
They find that his blood pressure and his sugar levels
were dangerously low. He was given fifty percent glucose. He
falls into a coma the next day and he dies.
Doctors listed the cause of death as undetermined. In the meantime,
(49:09):
Dale goes to the family of the girl who William
had raped. He offers him a three hundred dollars used
car on the condition that they leave town immediately. Now
what's probably missing from that story is, remember the ten
thousand dollars. William hands him ten thousand dollars to you know,
(49:29):
create all of this so that the girl's testamenty goes away.
So William dies Dale gets the money, and then he
gives up three hundred dollars to the girl's family, who
I'm presuming must have been, you know, impoverished. And so
that solves that. I mean, that's a lot. And so
Dorothea lays that all out for the judge. You're taking
(49:52):
a drink. Is that bourbon?
Speaker 2 (49:53):
No? Actually, this is just red wine. It's Kabernie just En.
Speaker 1 (50:01):
As I always say, I would be curled up on
the floor if I drank alcohol at all during the afternoon.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
Yeah. No. Well this, you know, Dorothea's testimony just underscores
how far back in time Dale has been committing these crimes,
you know, And it's stunning when you think about his
success over and over again and the amount of money,
because at times he's receiving large sums of money from
(50:30):
his victim or his victim's estate, and it kind of
comes back to, well, where is that money going? How
is Dale spending that money?
Speaker 1 (50:39):
So Dale takes the stand. I don't think he does
a great job. He blames Dorothea no surprise, and says,
I divorced her. She's just trying to get back at me.
He also says, which to me makes sense. You know,
many of these people were alcoholics, and the ones who
weren't were in all of these car accidents. You can't
prove that I injected anybody with anything. But you have
(51:02):
some experts, doctors who take the stand and they say,
all of these people who at least he's being tried
for these people all exhibited symptoms consistent with hypoglossmia. And
Bernie the nephew and Mary the ex wife have slides
that contained their slices of their brains, and it showed
(51:25):
those slides showed uniform damage inconsistent with trauma, but consistent
with massive doses of long acting insulin. So that's part
of the trial, and I think, no surprise. In sixty eight,
the judge finds Dale guilty on all three counts of murder.
He is sentenced to death in the San Quentin State
(51:45):
Prison gas chamber in the early seventies. The Supreme Court
isn't sure. Vacillates back and forth on the legality of
the death penalty. It delayed his execution, but in seventy seven,
before his sentence is carried out, Dale dies of pneumonia
in Vaccaville State Prison at age sixty five. Another one
(52:06):
gets away with it. He's convicted in sixty eight, and
so he dies nine years later for the deaths of
I can't even keep up with how many people he
killed A lot of people.
Speaker 2 (52:17):
Oh yeah, Well, you know, it's funny you mentioned Vacaville.
That was my rear neighbor for much of my life,
you know, or a neighbor if you will. That both
the California Medical Facility as well as you know, the
Solano State Penitentiary was right there in Vacaville, and at
one point in the early nineties, literally I could look
(52:38):
out my back window and I would see those two facilities.
Speaker 1 (52:42):
We've talked about somebody who was housed in Vacaville, because
I remember you saying that, Oh it was right there,
and I can't remember who it was.
Speaker 2 (52:48):
But I don't remember who we talked about. But most
certainly like I think to this day, ed Kemper is
housed at CMF. Charles Manson was there for a long
period of time. Many of the most notorious offenders that
you can think of out of California would have passed
through California Medical Facility because they're being evaluated and then
(53:11):
classified as to where they could be housed within the
California prison system.
Speaker 1 (53:16):
So not the traditional sense of a serial killer. But
this guy destroyed everyone around him.
Speaker 2 (53:23):
Yeah, you know, And it's just there are these types
of people, you know, Greed is controlling them and they're
willing to kill anybody, including their close loved ones, in
order to get that financial gain.
Speaker 1 (53:36):
I will see you in two weeks because we are
off for winter break.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
I have to wait two weeks to see you again, Kate, Yes, sir,
all right, well, I'll suck it up and I'll see
you then. How's that?
Speaker 1 (53:49):
Okay? Bye, bye bye. This has been an exactly right
production for our sources and show notes go exactlyrightemedia dot
com slash Buried Bones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Amiosi.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin, and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (54:11):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 2 (54:13):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (54:16):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hart Stark and Danielle Kramer.
Speaker 1 (54:22):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Buried Bones.
Speaker 2 (54:27):
Pod 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
Speaker 1 (54:34):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life solving America's
cold Cases, is also available now
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried Bones.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how are you.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I'm doing well. Happy Christmas break. We're gonna go away
for a little bit for some much needed rest. I
think you need rest more than I do.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Follow Oh, I'm not sure about that. You've got your
hands in a lot of different things.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
I do. I do. It's hard for me to take
a vacation, and we've talked about that for you too.
But I was thinking of taking the fam to maybe
Vermont to do some skiing. But I have, as an
older adult, a fear of hurting myself skiing, even though
I skied a lot when I was younger, and when
I went to Boston University, we would go to Burlington
(01:39):
and you know, ski there. So I just love Vermont
in general. But have you done a lot of skiing.
I don't know if we've talked about that.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I haven't done a lot of skiing, having spent most
of my adult life kind of sort of in the
Bay Area. I've skied a handful of times up in Tahoe.
I can get down the side of a mountain. It's
not pretty. I've gone on black Diamond slopes and I've survived,
you know, But I've also left some gouges in the
(02:07):
side of mountains, you know. So I'm I'm not. I
don't consider myself a good skier, but I can ski,
and you know, of course I live in Colorado now
it's sort of ski heaven. And I will tell you
I do notice the difference. You know. We skied once,
took the family up to Breckenridge, and that's when I
was like, oh, I now understand what powder is. It's
(02:31):
so different than what I experienced during the handful of
times I skied out there in the Tahoe area.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
When I was at Boston University, they would take us
on a bus up there in the winter for I mean,
I feel like it was every weekend. It was almost
like a shuttle and you could go to Burlington, Vermont
and ski. And it was my first time really skiing.
I had skied and Breckenridge when I was a kid,
but I decided to go when I was in college.
But I got pretty far and I remember the person
(03:01):
who was operating the tram or whatever we were on saying, okay,
well watch out for the weather. And I thought, what
does that mean? And I kid you not. I hit
every weather system available going down that mountain. It was
like it started with snow and then it literally started
hailing part of the way through, and then it was rain. Yeah,
(03:22):
And I just thought, I don't know if I can
how many times I can do? This might be it
for me.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
It was the weirdest thing. And it was ice.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
It felt like ice, yeah, you know, And that's at
least that's been my experience in Colorado. You know, that's
when I skied and Breckadridge. When we first started, it
was like white out, blizzard conditions, you know, and you're
going how are we going to make a day out
of this? And then it ended up clearing up and
becoming very nice. You know what. The weather up in
the mountains, of course, can change on a dime.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Well, I love the mountains. I was thinking about my
favorite landscape, and I think it is mountains, and it
is agricultural land, just like vast amount of land, almost
like the marshes that I showed you in one of
our episodes, you know, just like green for acres and
acres and acres. But I have friends who live by
oceans and that's all there is for them, So I.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Go, yeah, you know, I love the mountains. I love
rugged ocean coastline, like northern California, you know, like the
Mendocino going up north from there. I'm not a big
ocean beach person. I don't like to just lounge on
a beach. If I'm going to be by the ocean,
I'd rather at least be in the ocean. Now, I
(04:33):
will tell you, you know, your love of agricultural land.
I've seen like in Iowa. I was shocked at this
beautiful rolling crops and old barns, I mean just amazing beautiful.
But then I had to drive home from Madison, Wisconsin
to Colorado Springs, and there was a stretch from Nebraska
(04:54):
to Colorado through nothing but cornfields that were flat as
far as you could see.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
You didn't like that.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Not my thing at all, the most boring drive I've
ever done.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Oh sorry, Nebraska. Well I understand that. I mean my
dad was from Missouri. I've said that before, and I
love Missouri, but it felt very flat to me. Two
But I have a good friend who adores the desert,
and I don't know how I feel about the desert.
I have been intending to go to West Texas Forever,
which is supposed to be just unbelievably beautiful, So I'm
(05:24):
going to try to keep an open mind. But I
was doing a shoot for one of my documentaries in Perumph, Nevada.
It's tiny. I know, you have that quizzical look.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
That I had never heard of it. But if it's
if it's somewhere in Nevada, I can only imagine what
it looks like.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Parumph, Nevada. And it was gorgeous. I mean, just hills, dunes,
mountains of really white sand. But again going back to
every kind of fear I have driving through it by
yourself when you don't. I was alone when you don't
see people for hours, you know, on these roads because
(06:02):
we were really deep into the Mohave Desert. It was
a little scary because I thought, what happens if I
break down? What happens, you know, in every scenario. But
that's the scaredy cat in me.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
You mummify, that's what happens.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Oh okay, anyway, Yeah, I'm.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Not a big desert person, but you know, like said
a Tucson, Arizona, Yeah, yeah, you know, with those amazing
cacti that you see and the road Runner coyote and
Roadrunner cartoons. I mean, I thought that was really cool.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Well, let's shift over to California, where I know at
least one bit of your heart is because I know
that you were an Army brat and moved around everywhere.
But I think you glow the most when we talk
about California. So I was an Air Force brat, but
you are close air force brat. Pardon me, Okay, let's
just jump right into this. Okay, let's set the scene.
(06:57):
We are in Covina, California, which is it's twenty two
miles east of downtown LA in the San Gabriel Valley.
Are you familiar with that or no?
Speaker 2 (07:07):
I know of it. I can't say I've ever been there.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
So we're starting with a nine to one one call,
and it is nineteen fifty six, is our year. It's
July around ten pm. There's a sergeant with the La
County Sheriff's Office named Harry Andre and he's responding to
this call from a guy named William. His middle name
Dale Archard, he'll go by Dale. So he and his wife,
(07:33):
who is named Zella Austin Archard, have been assaulted and
robbed in their home. So it sounds like a home invasion.
I have in my note here, Paul. It literally says,
let me get through this story. And that's a note
to you.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Got it, You got it, put up.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Your hand if it drives you crazy. So this is
what Dale says. When the sergeant shows up. He says
that the offenders are two Mexican men. One is armed
with a knife, the other one has a gun. They
broke into the house about thirty minutes earlier, and he
immediately called on When they left, they detained him in
the living room and injected him with a hypodermic syringe.
(08:15):
And then he says one of the men covered his
face with his own bathrobe, and then they went into
Zella's bedroom. For the record, she's forty eight, he's forty four.
Dale seems to be seemingly a normal forty four year
old man, perfectly capable of defending himself if needed. So
Zella just also for full transparency the end of this
(08:39):
she is not sexually assaulted, She is not murdered. She
can tell this story. She says that there was one
man who went into the bedroom. He was disguised. He
tried to incapacitate her. She fights back, and the man
in disguise leaves the bedroom. Dale is yelling at the
guy you know, to stop, and he is yelling to
(09:02):
Zella just let him have whatever he needs to have
and then he'll leave. He's essentially begging her to just
not fight this guy again. So the guy comes back
in the bedroom. She allows him to put a pillowcase
over her head and to bind her arms, and he
injects her with a hypodermic syringe, and then they made
(09:23):
off with about one hundred dollars from Dale's wallet. They
found about another five hundred dollars in the house. They
took that, they took a revolver. This is all worth
about seven thousand dollars today. And like I said, Zella
said that she was not seriously assaulted. This seems bananas.
The hypodermic needle or the hypodermic syringe is what alerts
(09:43):
me the most, I think to this whole thing being
just really off the wall. Do you want to comment
now or do you want to hear more a little
bit more about what's happening.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
In this case? Yeah? I want to hear more.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Okay. Sergeant Andrea takes a look around after he hears
the story. He tells Zella to sit down because she's
really dizzy and totally freaked out. He looks at her
wrists and there are rope burns on her wrists. There
are two puncture wounds in her buttocks. But nothing has
really been ransacked. You know, there's some cash that was taken.
(10:15):
As I mentioned before, there's no signs of forced entry
that we know of which, of course, you know we've
talked about if you have a gun, there's not going
to be any signs of forced entry. Jewelry is in
plain sight, nobody takes it. They find a syringe in
a nearby vacant lot. They also find a vial of
long acting n pH you dash eighty insulin, and half
(10:42):
the bottle has been used. There's also a twenty gauge
hypodermic needle that is found in their bathroom, like not
one of theirs. It's laying like it had been tossed.
Then Sergeant Andre calls a doctor. The doctor comes and
looks them over because Zella is feeling very dizzy. The
doctor prescribes second all and it's a very potent barbituate
(11:06):
to calm her nerves, and he leaves. Is there something
to say now or do you want to keep learning
more info?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah? Maybe just a brief comment, you know, right now?
Up front, this sounds like a standard home invasion two
eleven home evasion robbery. The use of the hypodermic syringes
is interesting. And if they're injecting insulin, the only thing
I can think of is they're just trying to plunge
blood glucose levels down in the victims so that they're
(11:35):
not you know, kind of like she's feeling dizzy, So
in essence, she's going into this hypo glycemic state to
where maybe I don't know if it'd render her unconscious,
depending on how much insulin is there, but most certainly
energy levels would go down. That's odd, you know, I'm
not sure what the offenders are thinking if in fact
(11:58):
that's all they're injecting. It's kind of a very interesting
twist to a typical home invasion.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, and they don't find evidence that Dale was injected,
which doesn't make sense to me either, if you're gonna
so to me. At first, I thought this was a
sophisticated chloroform almost kind of thing, like, you know, incapacitator.
She knocks out, why not do that to Dale?
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Also?
Speaker 1 (12:21):
And I'll tell you, let me let me point this
a little bit out. Zella throughout the night is sweating profusely.
Her breathing becomes labored, she starts salivating, and eight o'clock
the next morning she starts convulsing, and she dies within
a day or two.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Well, now it's going to get to where, you know,
what does toxicology show, what's the autopsy result show? The
offenders are very superficial in terms of the financial gain.
They're just taking cash. They're not taking other valuables that
they would have to put effort out like the jewelry
in order to be able to sell it. You know,
maybe this is more targeted against Dale and Zella than
(13:03):
an actual financially motivated crime.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Well, let's go, because you had requested the coroner's report,
here it is. The report says there are four puncture
wounds in Zella's buttocks, two more injection sites than what
was noted at the crime scene, which I was surprised,
but remember Dale called out to her, just let them
do whatever they're going to do, and so she complied.
(13:27):
There are no poisonous substances in Zella's body. They think
that this was an overdose of insulin, but there are
no tests at the time that can reliably indicate excessive
insulin in the blood or tissues of deceased people. Chief
of toxicology also sees no reason why Zella would have
been taking any kind of insulin. There were no cell
(13:50):
tumors in her pancreas, there were no signs of a
pathological disease that would have been treated by insulin. At
the end of the day, the cause of her death
is reported to the bronco pneumonia due to coma of
undetermined origin.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
I guess I have to assume that, you know, a
high dose of insulin could potentially do that. She had
four puncture wounds and there is multiple syringes possibly found
at the scene.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
They found one twenty gauge hypodermic needle, and remember they
found a vial of long acting I don't know what
U eighty means insulin, and half the bottle had been used.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
This is where I would be wanting to talk to
a toxicologist about exactly what's going on. She just doesn't
have insulin in her system. I mean, she also has
the barb in her system, you know, which is a sedative.
You know, So if her glucose levels are just being
absolutely plummeted down to zero because she has such high
insulin and then you throw a sedative on top of that,
(14:54):
is that could that induce a coma? You know? I
would think that's a possibility.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
And remember, you know they found the insulin bottle in
a in like a parking lot, yeah, a vacant lot nearby.
I don't think they're finding that at eleven pm at
night the night this happened, which is when Sergeant Andre
reported to the scene. They must I have to imagine
they would have found it the next morning. So he's
the doctor's giving her barbituate not knowing it sounds like
(15:23):
what she's been injected with. Nobody knows what she's been
injected with, because nobody's found the bottle yet. So that
seems haphazard to me, not knowing when you've got a
woman saying they poked me with a needle, not knowing
what she was shot up with.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
No, well, for sure, I mean you could. I mean,
she could have been, you know, shot up with a
different barb, or she could have been shot up with
another sedative. And now the doc is giving her another
barb on top of it, and it just is now
crashing her system, you know, into a very depressed state.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
So what Sergeant andre comes up with, I mean, the
things that he's trying to piece together are interesting. He
had asked Ella to describe the masked man, because remember
there was another one in the other room with Dale.
She kept saying things like my husband's build, my husband's height,
but she did not say this was my husband. And
(16:19):
Sergeant Andrea really starts to suspect Dale of something because
you know, if you remember the story, Zella is alive,
and is able to recount all this stuff. But she
does not see two men. She only sees one man
who's in disguise. Then that man leaves. Dale screams out,
just let him do what he needs to do, Zella,
(16:40):
and then the masked man comes back inside. So she
can't confirm. There's nobody can confirm except Dale. There's two men,
and Sergeant Andrea is kind of calling bs on this.
And I don't think it's anything about Dale specifically. I
just think he doesn't think the pieces are coming together
very well.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
He may be on to something. You know that Dale
set up some sort of ruse to eliminate his wife
and try to get away with it. You know that
this is a very interesting twist. I would say, let me.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Tell you a little bit about Dale, since Sergeant Andrea
is keeping a close eye on him. He was born
on an Arkansas ranch in nineteen twelve, and he's been
married numerous times. He got married at seventeen, then he
left that woman after a few years and moved to California.
He bopped around a little bit. He ended up working
at several hospitals. He was an orderly He was also
(17:35):
an attendant in a different one but hospitals. He married
at twenty three, he left her too, and then there
was a big gap. He got married again when he
was thirty seven, this time to a nurse. This is
when the legal stuff starts to happen, and it will
lead up to Zella, which will then lead to quite
(17:56):
another host of interesting things happening. And his nurse wife
were charged with a legal possession of morphine and they
were sentenced to five years probation. But a second drug
offense landed Dale in a minimum security prison in Chino,
from which he promptly escaped. Then he moved over to
(18:17):
San Quentin. In fifty one, he finished off his term
at San Quentin and that finished off his third marriage
to the nurse. Then he gets out in fifty three
and he goes back to southern California and he starts
running scams. So Dale is not a good guy, is
what Andrea is figuring out. There are a lot of
scams women he dated for their money. And then in
(18:39):
fifty six he meets Zella. Within six months they get married,
and now she is dead and we find out that
they had been married two months, that she had sold
her house for ten thousand dollars, which is now one
hundred and eighteen thousand today and escrow closed on July thirteenth,
eleven days before this home invasion. He had written two
(19:02):
checks on the shared account and basically to call her money,
and he bought a thunderbird. He collected seven thousand dollars
today six hundred then from her life insurance policy. This
is not a wealthy woman, but it sounds like wealthier
than he is. And you know, all of this is
to say it doesn't mean that he killed her. But
(19:23):
Dale has a history of loving and leaving women. This
appears to be the first one that he left who
is ended up dead shortly thereafter.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Well, Dale has that medical background, you know, and so
now you have this this oddity of these Hispanic males
injecting zella apparently with insulin. You know, so there is
overlap with Dale's skill set, if you will. And you
know this whole set of circumstances around, you know, Zella
(19:55):
cell in the house, getting blocks of money, Dale being
involved in scams. You know, things are really starting to
stack up that maybe this was a ruse. I just
wonder the injection of insulin. How confident could an offender
be that the insulin would actually kill Zella. So you know,
(20:16):
that's I think something that you know, was there an
intent to kill or was this an intent to disable?
Interesting to see how this plays out.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
So in this case, Zella is pacifying herself because her
husband is saying, stay still and let him do whatever
he needs to do. So she is not willingly, but
she is receiving four shots. According to the corner.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Well, you know what, I guess one of the things,
you know, because there's this, you know, one theory that
Dale is actually the offender. He's the one that's injecting Zella.
But if if Zella, while she's still cognizant, has a
male in the room with her and she's hearing Dale's
voice outside the room saying let him do whatever? Now,
(21:03):
do we have an accessory to Dale helping Dale out.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
What I believed happened. And the way Dale described Enzela
is she fought this guy, he backed off and left
the room and then Dale is saying, honey, just let
him do what he's going to do, like yelling back
toward her. When she's by herself, she's not running out
of OK. So she never sees anybody, but this one
(21:28):
masked man, and I think Dale's probably around the corner,
so that's the issue. She does confirm there's somebody who's
masks there, but when she hears Dale, the guy is
out of the room, and of course I think Andrea
thinks it's suspicious when she's sort of like, yeah, he
was my husband's height. Yeah, I mean, she is not
expressing suspicion.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Sure, So okay, So I thought possibly the scenario suggested
that there is somebody else present, But the way that
you just explained it, Dale could have done this whole
thing himself.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
So Dale has a quick rebound because he uh, just
a few months after Zella's death, he moves in with
a forty six year old woman named Juanita Plum. They
met in Tijuana. Doesn't sound like a grieving husband, but whatever.
She is a very well off divorcee. She owns a
forty thousand dollars house in Monrovia, which is in La County,
(22:25):
and she has a lot of expensive furniture, car, fourteen
thousand dollars in notes and bonds, lots of money essentially,
so her estate these days would be worth seven hundred
and sixty five thousand dollars. So This is a big
for him, a much bigger jump to go from Zella
to Juanita. In five months of being with this woman, Juanita,
(22:50):
he cashes out all of her assets and they file
insurance claims for two incidents of arson in nineteen fifty seven.
They collect between eleven and twelve thousand dollars, which is
one hundreds of you know, one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars ish today. The money runs out in late August
of nineteen fifty seven, and they separate, then they reconcile,
(23:14):
and then they marry, and bad things are going to
start happening. But running through that much money in a
state that is you know, almost eight hundred thousand dollars
today and what looks to me to be about a year,
even less than a year, seems incredible.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah. Well, and this is where investigating this. Even though
you have what appears to be you know, robbery slash
homicide going on, this is a white collar type crime.
And anytime he has something like this, it's follow the money.
So if Dale is you know, in essence, embezzling money
(23:52):
from ultimately this this next wife of his, you know,
where is that money going? How is he spending. It,
is he gambling? It is he hiding? It is he
tucking it away? Does he have a different life in
which now he's got a fancy house of cars and
maybe another wife on the side. You know, there's all
sorts of possibilities going on here.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Let me tell you what happens to Juanita. They go
on a honeymoon. They go to Vegas. She falls ill
in their hotel room. She is here's the description. She's incoherent,
She's slipping in and out of consciousness. She is sweating,
which sounds very similar to what happened with Zella. Her
face is bloated. At the Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital, Dale
(24:37):
tells doctors that Juanita has been taking barbituates and drinking
bourbon to go to sleep. At first, they just charge her.
They tell Dale that she should just drink some black
coffee and stay on her feet. I mean, that seems
like terrible advice. But by that afternoon her condition has
significantly declined. He takes her back to the hospital and
(25:00):
when she gets back to the hospital, she is chematose,
She's hardly breathing, and she is cyanautic, which you said
as a lack of oxygen right.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Kind of like if she has this pinkish hue, almost
as if she's been exposed to carbon monoxide.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Okay, her pupils are dilated, her body temperature is subnormal,
and her pulse is extremely low. They prescribe glucose. Does
that make sense?
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Well, are they suspecting that she's hypoglycemic?
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Well, I don't know, because what he had said is barbituous.
Is that a tonic for Barbes and bourbon?
Speaker 2 (25:37):
I don't know. You know, that's that's that's interesting, you know.
I think what they're seeing is is that she is,
you know, somehow in a sedated state, and they're trying
to infuse her with the glucose to provide her sort
of like kind of an energy source for her body
to recover from. But they must be suspecting that, and
(25:58):
maybe they did some blood tests and going, oh, geez,
she's hypoglycemic. We need to get her her glucose, her
blood glucose up.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Well, I think this bit will be helpful. She starts
convulsing and then she dies, and the which is I
think what we knew would happen. The doctor says that
he believes she died of cardiac failure resulting from an
overdose of barbituous, so they believe Dale. Okay, and Sergeant
Andre from La County, this is not as jurisdiction, this
(26:28):
is Nevada, this isn't California. But he finds out about
jan Nita's death and he informs the Clark County Sheriff's
Department in Nevada that Dale's previous wife had also died,
just you know, a year earlier. But it's too late
for an extensive autopsy because they believed Dale, and Dale
(26:51):
said cremator.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Of course he did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but at least,
you know, the LA detective is on it. He obviously
has tremendous suspicions about Dale, and so he's he's like
a dog on a bone and he's going to take
advantage if he sees that old Dale's involved in another case. Well,
now potentially we can get him for something.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
You know, I usually say this is what the story
is about. The insulin part of the story is really interesting.
We have talked about people who target, you know, their
spouses for money, but kind of the way of thinking,
you know, saying that this is an accident or trying
to set it up like it's an accident. It seems
to actually work in Dale's case if this is where
(27:36):
we're heading, because so far you have doctors who have
returned the sick patient to him, presumably for him to
make her more sick. I mean, there's no bones about it.
Obviously Dale is not a good person here.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yeah. Well, and these doctors, you know, they don't know
Dale's history, they don't know what's going on. They're not
even necessarily suspecting that there's a crime that happened, and
they're just now dealing with a sick person. And they
have the husband saying, you know, altering you know, at
least offering up a plausible reason why she is exhibiting
the symptoms that she is, you know, and whether whether
(28:14):
she died of barbs and bourbon or she died of
insulin right now, I think is still a toss up
in this case.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Well, when Nita dies and her estate is divided among
her living relatives, she was getting life insurance from her
husband's you know, her previous husband's death, so she was
getting some money in so it gets divvied up and
she leaves Dale one dollar. Well done, je Nita.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Oh so there was some marital strife before she died.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
I'm sure she knew he blew everything the first time,
but then they ended up getting married. She left him
and then she went back to him and they got married.
But this is what happened. Mean, you know, you don't
trust your spouse. Obviously, she left him a dollar, which
I'm sure just pissed him off beyond belief. Okay, moving
on to another person. A year passes, he doesn't spend
(29:07):
very much time. It just seems like he's going so fast.
And I don't know if that's money or what that is,
but it seems like he's not using a lot of
common sense about suspicion. But he's gotten away with two
so far.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Sure, And of course I think money is a big deal.
When you think if he had the equivalent of today
eight hundred thousand dollars that he just completely blew in
a year, you know, he's needing to have income coming
in in order to do whatever he's doing with that money, and.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
We don't know what he's doing with it yet. We
don't know. So he gets smart and he starts to
use an alias, probably because that psky sergeant Andrea is
floating around in May of nineteen fifty nine, so we
started in nineteen fifty seven, so this is just two years.
(29:58):
He uses an alias Arden, so this is a little confusing.
But when Juanita and Dale separate, there's no need for
like a legal separation because they were never married. They
are separated for about a year. In that year, he
marries somebody else, a woman named Gladys Stuart. They end
(30:20):
up divorcing when Juanita, the rich woman, decides that she'll
take him back, so he divorces Gladys within that year
and goes back to Juanita. So this is like a
real quickie wife in between. So after Juanita dies a
year later, Dale decides he wants to remarry the woman
(30:45):
whom he married when he was separated for about a
year from Juanita. So remember that woman's name was Gladys Stuart.
I don't know why Gladys agrees to this, who knows,
but Gladys is the ex wife of one of Dale's friends,
who is a guy named Frank Stewart. This does not
seem to be a problem at all for Frank or
(31:09):
for Dale, and in fact, they are kind of going
into business together and they are planning a combined business
and pleasure trip to Vegas for the next year. You know,
Gladys will come along. So she was married to Frank,
divorced him, then married Dale, then they got divorced, and
then she remarries Dale. After Janita dies.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
It's hard to stay on top of that.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
It sounds exhausting for everybody involved. Yes, So Dale and
Frank decide that they're going to go to the airport
which is now that Harry Reid International Airport, before it
was called McCarran International Airport, and this is in nineteen sixty.
So before they get on the plane, they stop in
(31:55):
the bathroom. Frank slips on some debris which it sounds
like was a banana peel, and my reaction was seriously
a banan appeal. But he slips and he strikes his
head on the counter top in the bathroom, so I
know that this is convoluted. Dale is scared that Frank
might be concussed. He takes him to the Southern Nevada
(32:18):
Memorial Hospital emergency room that is where Wanda had been.
By ten thirty that night, Frank is dead and these
are all the same symptoms. Yeah, he does have a
contusion on his head, but you know, all the same symptoms,
and the doctors say it is a cerebral hemorrhage, possibly
related to a history of cardiovascular disease. No charges.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
So is it possible when Frank is in this bathroom
at the airport that Dale from behind strikes him with
some sort of weapon, right, yeah, or grabs him and
hits his head against the counter or something, you know.
So Dale's all about Dale, and he's going to eliminate
and financially drain the assets about anybody in his life.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
I agree, and I think I think that is a
good way of thinking about it. So he hits Frank
on the head because Frank is not going to be
someone who's going to voluntarily, you know, take a syringe
to the butt. And then he goes to the hospital
and in the meantime, you know, because he's concussed, he
you know, gets these syringes. He gets a syringe full
(33:29):
of insulin and then same thing and then dies. I mean,
is the hospital must see this every once in a
while or some I mean, these are I guess, are
these normal symptoms? The one I've been describing having a
hard time breathing, you know, dilated pupils. It's just the
same thing with all of these people. It sounds like, yeah, well, it'd.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Be interesting because I could see where there's a variety
of different medical conditions that all have the same symptoms
that you know, these medical professionals see, you know, day
in and day out. You know, I'm thinking Dale hits
you know, Frank in the back of the head, you know,
in this airport restroom, and while he's tending to Frank,
(34:12):
he's injecting him in that that bathroom, you know, because
he could do that right through the clothes.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Yeah, and he's in a trauma so he's not feeling
anything most likely.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Yeah, Frank is like, oh my, you know, whether he's
even still conscious, you know. But at the same time,
you know, Dale's just got this this formula that has
worked on the women, and now he's taken out a guy.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
I mean, this is just a kind of it's kind
of crazy. Is this a serial killer? Because we've talked
about this definition before. It's not for sexual gratification, but
it is multiple people.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Yeah. Well, you know, when you take a look at
the definitions of a serial killer and they have a
tendency to be I feel kind of too vague, you know,
but fundamentally it's having killed three or more with a
cooling off period in between. The definition doesn't discuss the
(35:07):
psychology of the offender. It's just have you killed three
or more and there's time in between each homicide. Then yes,
you have somebody that is by definition a serial killer.
And this is a type of predator. Now, this is
a predator that is financially motivated. So this is very
(35:30):
different than you know, your Ted Bundize or your Jeffrey Dahmers.
You know, you're sexually motivated, your fantasy motivated predators. But
it is a type of serial killer. This is very
different than your mass killer or your spree killer, which
people often convolute with serial killer. Your mass or spree
(35:52):
killers are in essence, in one event which can be
extended over a period of time. But going out and
killing multiple people, such as going into a school yard
or going into a fast food restaurant and killing multiple
people completely different psychology than a serial killer, because that
(36:15):
serial killer, over an expanse of time, is now committing
these crimes for their own personal gain. For Dale, it's financial.
For DiAngelo, Golden State killer, there's a sexual component.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
The story keeps getting walder and wilder. As far as
I'm concerned, Dale in the wake of Frank's death is
I'm presuming excited because he's attached to two different life
insurance policies. Now my notes say that Frank took them
out on himself. I don't know about that, because one
(36:56):
of these policies is for Gladys the beneficiary, who is
of course, you know, frank sex wife, Dale's current wife,
but also Dale's mother, Jenny May Archerd. And I have
no idea why that would have happened. I think it
must have been Dale must have been the one that
took those outright. The policies in today's money would have
(37:19):
been about nine hundred.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Thousand dollars total, pretty good money.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
So he says, ye be. He files claims for the
insurance money, but they are dismissed, and I think that
Gladys finally says we're getting a divorce and she took
the money. So in nineteen sixty one, there is an
officer in charge of all traffic related deaths in La County.
He's called to investigate the death of a young man
(37:47):
named Bernie Kirk Archerd. He's fifteen, and he is Dale's
nephew from his brother, and Dale is also one of
Bernie's guardians because of the my brother has died, Dale
is a guardian. According to the police, the reason why
this sergeant is showing up is because Bernie had been
(38:10):
injured in a hit and run accident a month earlier.
He died thirteen days later at the Long Beach Memorial Hospital.
There is no evidence that he was ever involved in
a hit and run accident, So I think that this
was reported by somebody and we presumed Dale, and when
they came out to investigate, there's no any report. So
(38:32):
let me just tell you about the circumstances real quick.
Bernie's mother, the teenager's mother, had deserted the family when
he was a child. His father, who is Dale's brother,
was Everett Archard. I told you that he had died.
He was an engineer at an oil refinery. He had
died of a heart attack in nineteen sixty, which was
almost two years earlier than when the Sun died. Before
(38:54):
his death, Everett had warned women to not marry his brother.
He said he's a lying bastard. And when Everett died
of that heart attack, Dale was right by his side.
And now Everett's son is dead from a car accident
that never actually happened, and is there.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
A life insurance on Bernie and Dale the beneficiary?
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Since Everett died, Bernie had been living with Jenny Archerd,
who is Dale's mother, who had received money Remember from
Frank Stuart's life insurance policy that we're presuming Dale took
out on him, thinking he would get that money from
his mother and it didn't happen. So Bernie had been
(39:39):
living with his grandmother in Long Beach, and Dale was
stealing Everett's life insurance policy that was left to their mother.
And then it gets worse because Bernie is hit quote
unquote by a car. He goes into a coma before
he dies. Dale's mom, Jenny, has a massive cerebral hemorrhage,
(40:03):
and she dies and she's immediately cremated, and then her
grandson dies four days later. His official cause of death
is terminal bronco pneumonia. He is also quickly cremated. So
you know, I'm sure that this is driving the investigators crazy,
all of whom although these are so these are different. Well,
we're back in La County, so we're back with Sergeant Andre.
(40:27):
So we've really only hit Nevada and La County I
believe so far.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Sure, But by the time Sergeant Andre becomes aware of anything,
these bodies are cremated. You know, Dale's receiving life insurance policies.
You know, because unless somebody is suspecting a crime up
front and reporting that back to the authorities, Sergeant Andre
is not. He's completely unaware of this. He's got a
(40:53):
whole case load elsewhere, right, And so Dale is now
picking off his own family members and financially be a
fitting from it, and law enforcement has no idea what's
going on.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Well, I think you're right, because no one is making
a move on Dale. And he continues on. Now there
is a four year period that I thought was interesting.
I don't know what he was doing in this four
year period, but he resumes using the name Jim Arden.
And he meets a woman who is named Mary brinker Post.
(41:24):
She's sixty, he is fifty three at this point. She
is a famous author. She's a best selling author. She
wrote a book called Annie Jordan in nineteen forty eight.
I read a bit of it. It's pretty good, but
it was a best selling book. They marry after two months,
he burns through her money, which is about two hundred
(41:47):
thousand dollars today, and he racks up about fourteen thousand
dollars in debt then, which is about one hundred and
forty four thousand dollars today. She about a year and
a half after meeting him, files from bankruptcy. He leaves
her because of course, bankruptcy no money. He goes back
to Gladys, who he had killed her ex husband. I'm
(42:09):
sure she doesn't suspect that, but I mean Gladys, they
had divorced. All Races is twice divorced.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Dale. He's a con man. He's got the gift of gab.
Seems like he has the ability to socially interact with
people to keep them where they don't suspect him of
these crimes that he's committee.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
I mean, it's unreal. So now we're going to be
back to Mary. After he leaves Mary and I have
to presume starts divorce proceedings. He's with Gladys. Two weeks
after that, Mary is in a minor car accident for real.
She's in Montclair. Her face is bruised and her nose
is injured and she gets like a two inch bandage.
(42:56):
She is shaken up, and she calls Dale and he
visits her on October thirty first, and then she ends
up in the hospital. Blood tests indicate a low blood
glueclose level and the presence of barbituates. They do an
EEG because this has been in a car accident, and
it shows severe depression of cortical activity with no localizing features.
(43:21):
She dies the next day. Dale says, you know, a
car accident, she had head injuries. But this time the
investigators who are in La County get an autopsy. They
act quickly. Her cause of death is listed as bronco
pneumonia secondary to hypoglycemia. But he is arrested. I don't
(43:43):
know if they see the pattern and they feel like,
I don't know why he's arrested. I don't know how
that changes anything.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Yeah, I'm not sure, because you know, at this point,
it's got to come from these autopsy results and a
pathologist rendering an openion that somebody had injected her or
forced her to be ingest the barbs and the insulin,
and of course they're looking at Dale.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
So he is arrested. In nineteen sixty seven in his
la home. He's charged with three counts of first degree
murder for the deaths of Zella the first wife, his
nephew Bernie, and Mary the author. He pleads not guilty
to all counts, so he is called I have not
(44:32):
heard of this before. He is called a serial matrimonialist killer.
Have you heard that phrase?
Speaker 2 (44:38):
No?
Speaker 1 (44:38):
I mean, I guess we would say, like the low
term would be a bluebeard killer. But I don't know.
This is what they're calling him.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Well, you know, I would like you know, he's the
male version of what is typically called the black widow. Yeah, right,
where females are scamming and killing men for financial gain.
He's doing this same thing, and of course there's many
examples of men doing tho to women.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
Well, he waives his right to jury trial. He goes
with a judge and testimony starts in December of nineteen
sixty seven. So first I think they're establishing the fact
that Dale could have pulled off the insulin. Now, of
course they say he has been shooting people with insulin
to put him in a coma and then they die.
(45:24):
There is a head psychiatrist at a state hospital where
Dale worked in the early nineteen forties, and he details
this procedure that they had used at an insulin shock ward.
So I did not know anything about this at this time.
In the forties, insulin shock therapy was a common psychiatric
treatment for schizophrenia, So you would inject a patient with
(45:48):
large doses of insulin to induce daily comas for a
period of months, and so he was well trained to
give insulin injections. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Yeah, well, you know, I don't know anything about that
for the schizophrenia. But most certainly what it tells me
is Dale is extremely comfortable with, you know, not only
the injection of insulin, but what its response is going
to be. He has a skill set, he has an expertise,
and that is what he is relying upon in order
(46:21):
to commit his crimes. And I suspect that in some
of the cases he's not just injecting insulin, but he's
also combining it with the barbs. The barbs seem to
be a consistent thing, you know, throughout this entire series,
and so he probably recognizes that the combination of high
(46:41):
insulin levels plus this potent sedative, the barbs, which many
people have overdosed on and died. You know, it gives
him the confidence that his victim is going to ultimately
die from it.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Well, remember I told you he was married to a
nurse in the forties, so this was before Zella's death.
She testifies her name is Dorothea, and they got into
trouble together for you know, illegally possessing morphine. She testifies
that after she met Dale, he roped her into a
(47:17):
fraudulent scheme. I mean this scheme designed to obstruct criminal
proceedings against their mutual friend. Listen to this. In nineteen
forty seven, their friend, who was a guy named William
Edward Jones, was facing child molestation charges for raping a
thirteen year old girl. Dale goes to William and says,
(47:38):
let's feign a motoring accident and a head injury to
delay this litigation. And he tells William that we can
make this more convincing if you let me inject you
with insulin. Then he would bribe the girl's family to
drop the case. And he tells William it would cost
about ten thousand dollars. William says, this sounds great. I
(48:00):
mean ten thousand dollars in forty seven would have been
a massive amount of money. So Dorothea gets the insulin
from a hospital and gives it to him. In forty seven,
she remembers telling him that insulin would be the perfect
murder weapon. I don't know why Dorothea would have told
him that, but she did. The men staged a car crash,
William posed by a nearby tree, and Dale injected him
(48:23):
with insulin. Then Dale calls the police anonymously to report
the wreck. When the police get to the scene, they
find William discombobulated and hungry. They take him to a
nearby hospital, where doctors say that he had a you know.
They note that he had a headache and subnormal temperature.
Shortly after his arrival, he begins sweating. I mean the
(48:44):
whole thing. The muscles are twitching, is breathing, his pulse.
Everything is bad. They perform a spinal puncture around eleven am.
They find that his blood pressure and his sugar levels
were dangerously low. He was given fifty percent glucose. He
falls into a coma the next day and he dies.
Doctors listed the cause of death as undetermined. In the meantime,
(49:09):
Dale goes to the family of the girl who William
had raped. He offers him a three hundred dollars used
car on the condition that they leave town immediately. Now
what's probably missing from that story is, remember the ten
thousand dollars. William hands him ten thousand dollars to you know,
(49:29):
create all of this so that the girl's testamenty goes away.
So William dies Dale gets the money, and then he
gives up three hundred dollars to the girl's family, who
I'm presuming must have been, you know, impoverished. And so
that solves that. I mean, that's a lot. And so
Dorothea lays that all out for the judge. You're taking
(49:52):
a drink. Is that bourbon?
Speaker 2 (49:53):
No? Actually, this is just red wine. It's Kabernie just En.
Speaker 1 (50:01):
As I always say, I would be curled up on
the floor if I drank alcohol at all during the afternoon.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
Yeah. No. Well this, you know, Dorothea's testimony just underscores
how far back in time Dale has been committing these crimes,
you know, And it's stunning when you think about his
success over and over again and the amount of money,
because at times he's receiving large sums of money from
(50:30):
his victim or his victim's estate, and it kind of
comes back to, well, where is that money going? How
is Dale spending that money?
Speaker 1 (50:39):
So Dale takes the stand. I don't think he does
a great job. He blames Dorothea no surprise, and says,
I divorced her. She's just trying to get back at me.
He also says, which to me makes sense. You know,
many of these people were alcoholics, and the ones who
weren't were in all of these car accidents. You can't
prove that I injected anybody with anything. But you have
(51:02):
some experts, doctors who take the stand and they say,
all of these people who at least he's being tried
for these people all exhibited symptoms consistent with hypoglossmia. And
Bernie the nephew and Mary the ex wife have slides
that contained their slices of their brains, and it showed
(51:25):
those slides showed uniform damage inconsistent with trauma, but consistent
with massive doses of long acting insulin. So that's part
of the trial, and I think, no surprise. In sixty eight,
the judge finds Dale guilty on all three counts of murder.
He is sentenced to death in the San Quentin State
(51:45):
Prison gas chamber in the early seventies. The Supreme Court
isn't sure. Vacillates back and forth on the legality of
the death penalty. It delayed his execution, but in seventy seven,
before his sentence is carried out, Dale dies of pneumonia
in Vaccaville State Prison at age sixty five. Another one
(52:06):
gets away with it. He's convicted in sixty eight, and
so he dies nine years later for the deaths of
I can't even keep up with how many people he
killed A lot of people.
Speaker 2 (52:17):
Oh yeah, Well, you know, it's funny you mentioned Vacaville.
That was my rear neighbor for much of my life,
you know, or a neighbor if you will. That both
the California Medical Facility as well as you know, the
Solano State Penitentiary was right there in Vacaville, and at
one point in the early nineties, literally I could look
(52:38):
out my back window and I would see those two facilities.
Speaker 1 (52:42):
We've talked about somebody who was housed in Vacaville, because
I remember you saying that, Oh it was right there,
and I can't remember who it was.
Speaker 2 (52:48):
But I don't remember who we talked about. But most
certainly like I think to this day, ed Kemper is
housed at CMF. Charles Manson was there for a long
period of time. Many of the most notorious offenders that
you can think of out of California would have passed
through California Medical Facility because they're being evaluated and then
(53:11):
classified as to where they could be housed within the
California prison system.
Speaker 1 (53:16):
So not the traditional sense of a serial killer. But
this guy destroyed everyone around him.
Speaker 2 (53:23):
Yeah, you know, And it's just there are these types
of people, you know, Greed is controlling them and they're
willing to kill anybody, including their close loved ones, in
order to get that financial gain.
Speaker 1 (53:36):
I will see you in two weeks because we are
off for winter break.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
I have to wait two weeks to see you again, Kate, Yes, sir,
all right, well, I'll suck it up and I'll see
you then. How's that?
Speaker 1 (53:49):
Okay? Bye, bye bye. This has been an exactly right
production for our sources and show notes go exactlyrightemedia dot
com slash Buried Bones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Amiosi.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin, and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (54:11):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 2 (54:13):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (54:16):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hart Stark and Danielle Kramer.
Speaker 1 (54:22):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Buried Bones.
Speaker 2 (54:27):
Pod 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
Speaker 1 (54:34):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life solving America's
cold Cases, is also available now
Hosts And Creators
Kate Winkler Dawson
Paul Holes
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!