August 4, 2021 • 32 mins
Is Ron Thomas a cold-blooded killer, or misunderstood? To really understand Ron, one needs to look at his life before the Stevenson murders. A detective helps reveal where the Stevenson family friend had been hiding every time he evaded cops and fled town–and introduces a woman with a dangerous past.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's been a long difficult search. Hello, but with the
(00:14):
help of my private investigator, I found Drusilla Merita. How
can I help you. We're working on a podcast about
about Ron Thomas, and she was alive, not in prison,
not buried somewhere, and not in any trouble. It's clear
Dick Weston's former girlfriend knows details about what happened to
(00:34):
the Stevenson's that no one else does. She could give
Carol Thompson and her daughter Shannon answers at least some
answers that have escaped that family for the past four decades. Uh.
I'd rather not talk about that right now, thank you
very much. At this point, I've done all I can
(00:56):
to get Drusilla to talk, phone calls, messages, even a
door knock, but you won't, Budge. I can understand why
Drusilla doesn't want to talk. She wants to forget about
all of this move on liver heal life. The problem
I have with that sort of thinking is Stevenson family
members deserve answers, and Drusilla undoubtedly has plenty. Yet, because
(01:22):
there is no statute of limitations on murder, I can
also see why she wouldn't want to say the wrong
thing and wind up with the FEDS standing at her
front door. Previously on Paper Ghosts, this right, he said,
this friend and his run at the FBI was looking
(01:44):
for him. Wait, I figured, if he is involved in
a shootout, I guess he was, and you know I
had something to do with him. Him and that Ron Thomas.
Why do you think Dick protected Roy money he paid Dick?
You think, well, yeah, you get paid too. If you
had two grocery bags slept full of money, that was
(02:05):
your tire to do. But cover up his set of
the deal? I said, Oh my god, he wants to
kill me. He wants me on. My name is m
William Phelps. I'm an investigative journalist and author of forty
four true crime books. This is season two of Paper Ghosts.
(02:28):
Burned cases like the Stevenson murders are generally not too
difficult to unpack, the challenges, providing families with the resolution
they have been searching for, realizing they may not be
(02:50):
ready to accept what you find. Did Billy become entangled
with the wrong people? Was his family collateral? Damn image?
Was family friend Ron Thomas involved? And what's more, did
Ron hired Dick Weston to help him settle a personal
and or monetary debt. These questions have plagued me throughout
(03:14):
the years I have been involved in this case, and
the hardest part. By asking these questions, you are, to
some extent, blaming the victim. Yet it is an unavoidable
facet of mass murder investigation, one you hope to come
away from with an answer that won't hurt the family
(03:35):
more than they have already been. So at times you
find yourself facing an uncomfortable dilemma. Does the family actually
want to know what happened when it's clear there are
disturbing details within that reality, because that truth can be
a hell of a lot uglier than one could have
(03:55):
ever imagined. I grew up here in my mom's story.
I think she had this fear that they were going
to be forgotten, and Ron's name was never tied to it.
You might recall Shannon Group, Carol Thompson's daughter from a
previous episode. Shannon was just three and a half when
her mom pulled her out of bed in the middle
of the night after learning their family's house was on fire.
(04:19):
I remember standing there and watching them bring the bodies
out of the house. Of course, I was devastated. I
didn't know what was going on in there. There's fire
trucks and there's people, and there's police, and you know,
then I see the bodies coming out, and and it
was It's pretty devastating for you know, that's my first
you know, I have minor memories of a kid, you know,
just seeing things, but that's my first real memory. That
(04:42):
just always stuck with me, you know what. I had
nightmares for years. I thought about it for years. Within
all of this, Shannon has remained her mother's rock. One
might think she lives with some sort of secondary PTSD,
having been there weathering the aftermath of watching family suffer
for decades while dealing with the loss herself, But Shannon
(05:04):
has remained steadfast and finding answers, taking on the all
consuming task of digging in and over the course of
twenty years, actually uncovering information so as you grow up,
what's going through your mind about this case and what
is driving I was a strange kid. UM didn't have
(05:28):
a lot of friends in school. I was very quietly reserved.
I had a lot of anxiety, you know, when it
came to people. Um, you know, my mom was kind
of paranoid, and I was, you know, I think it
just kind of rubbed off on me because you know,
I saw firsthand what you know, a friend is capable of.
So I think that kind of just screwed me up.
And as I was growing, you know, I thought a
lot about this case and the fact that Ron got away,
(05:48):
and it always broke my heart that, you know, my
mom would watch over her shoulder for the longest time.
Ron Thomas, that friend Shannon mentions became like a recurring
cant her on this family. Carol Thompson remains terrified to
this day, even after forty years, because of a possible
threat still existing in their world, and that fear she
(06:11):
has passed down to her daughter Shannon is exacerbated by
not knowing what happened and most importantly, who else is responsible.
Fear feeds on itself. I remember this man came to
the door one day knocking, and I opened the door
and he said that he had gotten something in his
(06:34):
eye and could what I let him in to go
rinse his eye out. Me being this native eight year old,
you know, I let this man into my home and
now I'm home alone. I was all by myself, Mom Daoud,
probably at work or something. So you know, Mom got
home and I told her about it, and I just
remember her reaction. She freaked out so bad, she was
(06:54):
so scared because it could have been wrong. To this day,
we don't know who it was. It might have been wrong,
and I don't know, just her reaction and just everything
growing up, and it just ate it even more that
this man is free. You know, who knows who else
he heard after that? Who knows what he went on
into it after that. As I have come to learn
throughout my investigation, I can say with certainty that Ron
(07:17):
Thomas wasn't a family friend as Carol had thought. He
was a cunning sociopath who had masterminded the murder of
her entire family. Every single law enforcement source I have
spoken to has confirmed this Ron was the man behind
the curtain from the very beginning, telling Dick Weston what
(07:40):
to do and when to do it. This became clear
to Carol and Shannon as they tried to move on
with their lives in the decades that followed. I wanted
my mom to have peace. You know, yes, it would
help me too, But me and my mom boys been very,
very close. She was very close to her mom. Me
and her are very very close. We're like best friends.
My mom. You know, she was so scared and it
(08:02):
bothered her so bad. So it kind of turns you
into an armchair investigator, if you will, as I love
to investigate, love it. What do you first do? And
so I contacted UM Records here and the Sheriff's office here,
enquiring if the files were still around, if you know,
(08:23):
because I knew that the files we do not destroy
because they told me on the phone. And I'm like,
how can I get access to these? I know it's
supposed to be public records. So you're beginning to look
into this, and your main goal is to get ahold
of the records so you can find out exactly what
I wanted to torture on I did. I'm not gonna lie.
(08:43):
My goal was to find her on get these records,
and I wanted to send him crime scene photos, newspaper
artists and stuff to make him think about it every
day for the rest of his life. I want him
to get these in the mail once a week, just constantly,
constant reminders I wanted to torture the man. Yeah, so
(09:06):
far I've learned all I can about Ron Thomas's life
before the Stevenson murders, but I need to dig into
what happened to this so called family friend after. I've
come to understand there is one man who knows more
than most about Ron Thomas's life after he ran from Bethel, Ohio,
A detective who has never spoken publicly about any of this,
(09:29):
and who has been hard to track down. In fact,
once I found him, I sensed a bit of trepidation
in his voice about sharing his story, and he chose
to remain quiet. Yet, after some time and a bit
of discussion, one day in early spring, he decided it
was time to talk. Dave. How you doing? M William Phelps, Hey,
(09:54):
how you doing? You're doing all right? I'm doing all right.
I'm doing all right. I get I gotta say, I
can't complain much. You know, wouldn't do any good if
it did. Anyway. That's so true, That's so true. How's
the weather? David Bell is a former Columbia, South Carolina
detective who began his law enforcement career in nineteen seventy
two as a line deputy with the Richland County Sheriff's
(10:17):
Office for I Love Beautiful Division because I loved the
connection with the people, you know, because you know, I
just like trying to help people if I could. And finally, uh,
they said, come on, man, you know, we really need
your you know, your experience and uh, investigation division. So
I went ahead and transferred to investigation division. And I
(10:39):
didn't major crimes in a particular area that I patrolled
as a uniform division, and I was you had a
lot of actions and contacts of that area. You know,
the people we come to me and give me information
on certain crimes and so forth. Those connections in the
community are priceless the cops who lead to become detectives.
(11:01):
The trust is established and for a detective there is
no better information than what he or she can develop
on the street. Ron Thomas's name did not cross David
Bell's desk until the early two thousand's, after Bell had
been assigned to a brand new cold case unit, and
of course that opened up the big can of worms.
(11:24):
That's when we learned about the Stevenson murders, the gold
buying business, nemafia connection, you know, Richard West and all
these all these people you know, connected to all this crime,
from robberies and murders and lower those wardels. Now what
(11:46):
kind of guy did Ron Thomas strike you as when
you began to look into this cold case and look
at his background. Ron Thomas was a scum bay. If
there was something dirtie, he has hands in. It turns
out Ron Thomas left behind his wife in Ohio and
fled the South Carolina, where he owned and operated a gold, silver,
(12:10):
and jewelry exchange. This was the main location where he'd
been running off to each time he evaded the police
looking into his involvement in the Stevenson case. And yet
there was another reason for Ron's frequent visits to South Carolina.
Ron Thomas had a mistress there for what had amounted
to the past fourteen years, a woman named Irene Floyd,
(12:33):
who first met Ron when he was her foreman at
a manufacturing company in nineteen sixty eight and continued to
work for him at his store in South Carolina. To
understand this case, we have to take a few steps
back before the Stevenson murders, because to really know Ron Thomas,
(12:53):
you have to look at Irene Floyd. Irene was no
common middle aged woman living the cozy life in a
warm South She had quite the checkered past, starting with
her first husband, her high school sweetheart who had died
tragically in nineteen sixty six. They had a bad relationship
from the get go, and uh they got a real
(13:16):
bad domestic dispute one night, so she called the Clubia
police department on him. So they were looking for his car,
and when she happened to see the car, and so
she went to go find a police officer to tell
him where he was at. And while she was talking
to the police officer, he actually drove drove by and
(13:37):
she goes there, he goes now, So the police went
to stop him and he took off running from the police. Well,
he got just a couple of blocks and read there
in the middle of Clubia, we have these trains that
come to Clubia, and there was a train coming and
he tried to beat the train and he lost in
(14:02):
his train. His car got hit by the train. He
was killed instantly at the accident. Actually, Irene made a
lot of money on his insurance plus from the train company.
Irene Floyd sued everyone involved after her first husband was
killed by that train. I've been told she was awarded
life changing money, yet nobody could give me an exact figure.
(14:26):
So she uh learned real quick how easy she could
come about money with insurance policies and sue the person's
you know, responsible for the death. So that day is
the husband number two. Not long after, Irene married her
(14:46):
second husband, a Kentucky born transplant named William Floyd. The
following year, Irene met and began working for Ron Thomas. Yeah,
she was a secretary in the photo speak you and
they started having an affair while she was married a
Willyam Floyd. But William says, well, you know, I'd rather
have you share you that lose you. I love you
(15:10):
that much. Even though William Floyd knew his wife was
having an affair with Ron Thomas, William decided against divorcing Irene,
but at some point it became too much to bear
and William filed. The divorce was finalized in July. They divorce,
(15:30):
and then what happens. What happened was we employed never
removed Irene is being beneficiary on residenturance policy. And Irene
found out about this. So Irene kind of let him
along and implied that she wanted to remarry him. So
(15:56):
I renehatched a plan. She convinced William that she had
left Ron Thomas for good and wanted to make their
relationship work, you know, give the marriage a second try.
After a few months, she set up a rendezvous at
a Tennessee motel. William Floyd, still in love with Irene,
(16:17):
agreed to meet and talk. When Irene got to the myths,
you know, she got him drunk because she met him
up there with the pretense of getting remarried. And uh so,
when she got him set up in the motel, she
was supposed to call there's other motel and h and
asked for a gym, and she was supposed to identify
(16:40):
herself as Linda and uh and that was to uh
satan that she told them what room he was in
and that the door was unlocked. Ron Thomas was on
the other end of that call. He had been waiting
in a nearby motel, ready to receive word to set
his next course of action in motion and get this
(17:03):
Ron's so called bodyguard, Dick Weston. He and another man
Ron had hired were not too far away waiting in
the wings for Ron's direction. And Richard Weston and a
guy from Indiana across the state line within there with
baseball bats and beat Bill Floyd's severely with baseball bats
(17:27):
in the head and the pre torso and left him
for dead. You know, I mean they beat him unmercifully.
Here again was Ron Thomas ordering others to do for
him what he did not have the guts to do himself,
and Irene Thomas at for an alibi. She drove herself
(17:48):
as she made the boat goal to a hospital and
says she was having a severe migraine headache to give
herself an alibi. William Floyd did not die from that
motel beating it. He was left severely deformed, with nearly
all of the skin on his face beaten off and
parts of his skull caved in. She called Ron Thomas
(18:10):
and told Ron Thomas that Bill was still alive, and
Ron Thomas as well, Uh, I doubt uh, don't worry,
He's not going to live. There's no way he could
survive that assault. Ron was so certain William Floyd wouldn't
make it, he instructed Irene to call him when that
time came to pass and say this the Lincoln has
(18:34):
been sold. According to police reports, several men posing as
preachers even showed up at the hospital to inquire about
William Floyd's condition. The hospital staff became immediately suspicious and
would not allow them into the room. So he was
put in a facility that cared for people that were
(18:54):
like vegetables. Bill Floyd's family would not allow her to
see him, and so she could get to him. William
Floyd was confined to a wheelchair, incapable of walking, talking,
bending for himself. The guy was left blind in one eye,
deaf in one ear, and would suffer multiple seizures every
(19:16):
single day. All this man did, mind you with She
forgiveness to his cheating wife by agreeing to talk about
moving on and getting back together. And this is how
she repays him. William sat idly all day inside the
rehab facility and staring into space, a shell of the
caring and loving man I have heard he once was.
(19:41):
I don't know how she did it. I could never
did was able to figure it out. But she was
able to sneak him out of this facility, and she
drove him to a probate's office in South Carolina. And
that even though that he was in that condition, that
(20:02):
judge married her and Bill remarried. How she finaggled the
system to be able to remarry him, and his condition
is beyond my imagination. So she immediately took him out
of that facility and took him home to her house
(20:24):
here in glub You to take care of me because
that he still had that internce policy, Shannah. The day
(20:52):
before I planned to leave Ohio, I got a call
from Carol Thompson's daughter, Shannon Group, asking to meet up.
Shannon had a sore close to Ron Thomas, who she's
been messaging with on Facebook, and over time she had
collected close to fifty pages of information about the guy.
A treasure trove if there ever was one. How's it
(21:13):
going really good? Brought those documents you requested? She doesn't
want to be in this at all. She doesn't want
her name in it. Why do you think that beer?
Maybe I don't know. I really don't know, you know,
till many years of past. I don't know why anyone
would you know? And it could be hard on her
(21:34):
to given her relation to the people involved. I know
who this sources, and the information I've been given is
highly credible. Like others who have been hesitant to speak
or prefer to use an alias, I understand and respect
the need to keep a distance. Shannon handed me a
(21:55):
quarter inch thick stack of documents to go through all
of it dealing with Thomas and his relationship to Irene Floyd.
Information no one would be able to find out through
public records while I was looking into Juicilla Merita's whereabouts.
I handed the material off to my producer, Christina Everett
(22:17):
and asked her to find out what she could break
down the social media conversations included in the documents and
determine what we could learn from it. There's a lot
to go through. This woman is really complicated and knows
a lot more than we imagined. Yeah, I mean, you
read through everything and did some digging. What do you
(22:38):
think what did you come up with? Well, what's interesting
is the timing of everything, Right, So William Floyd is
attacked in May, and Irene marries William for the second
time in August, and you know what happened between those months,
the Stevenson murders. Right, So she ends up talking to
(23:02):
the FBI, and we know now that she was still
carrying on her affair with Ron during this time. So
it's really interesting because we get to learn a little
bit more about what Ron was going through during the
months that the murders happened. Um She says that she
talked on the phone with Ron at one point on
(23:22):
June and said that she wanted to come visit him,
but he was adamant and said that under no circumstances
was she to come to either Indiana or Ohio to
visit him, because the next weekend he was carrying off
some big deal that he needed to be there for.
That next weekend would be the fourth of July, and
(23:44):
that big deal turned out to be the Stevenson murders.
We look back and we see that she spoke to
him on the phone about five weeks earlier and at
the end of May, and she's telling Ron that she
doesn't have any money and he doesn't have any i her,
but suggests to her that if money is an issue,
(24:04):
that he could arrange to have her house burned down
for ten thousand dollars and she can just collect the
insurance money on it. So Ron said that he didn't
have any money to lend her, but he was going
to be working on a deal that would really set
him up financially, but was complicated. He said that the
(24:24):
deal would involve several people. He mentioned the name Steve
and Linda in relation to this deal that he was
going to be doing um And according to Irene, Ron
said quote that s ob had more money than he
could ever spend, but yet he wanted to steal everything
that he could from everybody else. So there's a second
(24:48):
call between Ron and Irene that happens July tenth, after
the murders um and the tone of this one is
far different. Ron says the FBI had the goods on him,
that his house was surrounded, the phone was tapped, and
he was going to go prison for a long time.
So Irenes and tears. She's crying. She's asking, are you
(25:09):
in trouble? He says yes. She asks what did you do?
And he says, you wouldn't believe it if I told you. Well,
it sounds there to me like Ron's basically admitting his
involvement in this. There was enough talk beforehand during their
phone calls for Irene to figure out that this was
not a spontaneous attack. This was a planned thing. It
(25:33):
was something that Ron had thought of for weeks at
least before he carried it out. It was not in
the heat at the moment. But Irene did say that
Ron was waiting for somebody else to get out of
prison to help him carry out this deal, and so
Irene figured that that person he was talking about was
Dick Weston, because she knows that Dick had just gotten
(25:55):
out of prison a few months earlier in February for
bank robberies. Considering how long they worked together at this point,
it's puzzling why Irene Floyd would suddenly flip on Ron
Thomas and ran them out to the FEDS. Around the
time when Irene married William Floyd, there was a bump
in Irene's relationship with Ron, and it had to do
(26:17):
with a bankruptcy issue on Ron's behalf um and it
was messy and it involved Irene and her assets. So
it seems like they were on the rocks for some
time and they weren't talking, and maybe Irene thought that
was the end of it, because then she went to
the FBI and ratted him out. That rough patch didn't
(26:41):
last long, though, because Irene and Ron continued their affair
in According to Detective David Bell, Ron continued his business
affairs with Dick Weston all while Dick remained in prison
on suspicion of the Stevenson murders. Do you think Ron
Thomas was involved in running guns and drugs? I don't
(27:04):
know about the the gun, but now if I remember right,
the FBI was looking and this came from Irene that
they suspected Ron and Uh smuggling drugs into prison where
(27:28):
Richard Dick he worked with Dick. I so him and
Dick had a scam going where Ron would get the
drugs into Dick and Dick would sell them. Yeah, that
may not have been actually burned, but that was what
he was suspected. Two years had gone by since Irene
married William Floyd the second time. With Ron Thomas lying
(27:49):
low from the police and Dick Weston still in jail,
Irene had to find someone else to do her dirty work.
Yet again, we got a statement from her I who
knew had connections Uh Irene Irene got to shoot Bill
(28:11):
Floyd and the head was the shotgun and make it
look like a suicide. The name of the person mentioned
is bleeped because although Detective Bell is certain based on
his investigation, nobody was ever arrested for that murder. Now, Irene,
she had convenually left the house that morning and went
(28:32):
some place to give herself an alibi, and while she
was gone, supposedly now her husband and wheelchair pulled down
this attic stairwell under the body stairs, crawled up into
the attic, got a twelve game shotgun, brought it back
(28:55):
down the stairs, went into a bathroom, put the shotgun
in his mouth, and pushed the trigger with the big
toe of his right foot that was paralyzed, and blew
his head off. That's what they expected you to believe.
That what that's what they ruled it. They will actually
(29:15):
ruled it a suicide. And you go back and you
look at the cold case, the autopsy reports, the crime
scene reports, et cetera, and you find it it's not
a suicide. Well, you know, here is here is our problem.
Those records only kept so many years, and those records
(29:37):
are destroyed. We did not have a file copy uh
Floud's suicide because it had been destroyed. The only information
I could get on his suicide was from the Corners
office and you reinterviewed everybody. Yeah, well wherever we those
that we can find, Yeah, yeah, But so that's the
(30:00):
only way that we were able to get the information
on Floyd's led suicide. And it still blew my mind.
I couldn't believe because I knew the investigators that responded
to the scene of Bill Floyd, and apparently they were
lied to on the real condition of Floyd when they
got there, or they would have never ever signed off
(30:23):
on Oh yeah, that's okay, suicide, you know, I mean,
if they knew he was confined to a wheelchair, they
would never you know, I mean, that would just ludicrous anyway. So,
so Bill Floyd was death and was ruled a suicide.
She eventually was got his shed away a little bit longer.
(30:43):
She got the insurance me Ron Thomas happy. William Floyd's
death conveniently paved the way for Irene and Ron Thomas
to ride off into the sunset together with a fat
insurance payout to celebrate with nine dollars to be act.
The only problem was Ron still had a wife back
(31:05):
in Indiana, and Irene, well, unless we forget she had
two dead husbands in her past. In the next episode
(31:26):
of paper Ghosts, let's try to at him. How's he
done it? And I didn't What kind of look did
he give you back? It weren't nice? It was evil.
If Lukes and guilty'd kill him so I decide that
I am going to take a gun to court the
next day, and I'm going to kill Ron on the
(31:48):
courthouse steps. We were looking into Ron Thomas when we
got familiar with Irene Compash. The Black Widow Paper Ghosts
is written in exact, produced by me Am William Phelps
and I Heart executive producer Christina Everett, with script consultant
Matthew Riddle, Audio editing and mixing by a Booze Afar
(32:11):
thanks to Will Pearson at I Heart Radio. Series theme
number four four two is written and performed by Thomas
Phelps and Tom Mooney. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
It's been a long difficult search. Hello, but with the
(00:14):
help of my private investigator, I found Drusilla Merita. How
can I help you. We're working on a podcast about
about Ron Thomas, and she was alive, not in prison,
not buried somewhere, and not in any trouble. It's clear
Dick Weston's former girlfriend knows details about what happened to
(00:34):
the Stevenson's that no one else does. She could give
Carol Thompson and her daughter Shannon answers at least some
answers that have escaped that family for the past four decades. Uh.
I'd rather not talk about that right now, thank you
very much. At this point, I've done all I can
(00:56):
to get Drusilla to talk, phone calls, messages, even a
door knock, but you won't, Budge. I can understand why
Drusilla doesn't want to talk. She wants to forget about
all of this move on liver heal life. The problem
I have with that sort of thinking is Stevenson family
members deserve answers, and Drusilla undoubtedly has plenty. Yet, because
(01:22):
there is no statute of limitations on murder, I can
also see why she wouldn't want to say the wrong
thing and wind up with the FEDS standing at her
front door. Previously on Paper Ghosts, this right, he said,
this friend and his run at the FBI was looking
(01:44):
for him. Wait, I figured, if he is involved in
a shootout, I guess he was, and you know I
had something to do with him. Him and that Ron Thomas.
Why do you think Dick protected Roy money he paid Dick?
You think, well, yeah, you get paid too. If you
had two grocery bags slept full of money, that was
(02:05):
your tire to do. But cover up his set of
the deal? I said, Oh my god, he wants to
kill me. He wants me on. My name is m
William Phelps. I'm an investigative journalist and author of forty
four true crime books. This is season two of Paper Ghosts.
(02:28):
Burned cases like the Stevenson murders are generally not too
difficult to unpack, the challenges, providing families with the resolution
they have been searching for, realizing they may not be
(02:50):
ready to accept what you find. Did Billy become entangled
with the wrong people? Was his family collateral? Damn image?
Was family friend Ron Thomas involved? And what's more, did
Ron hired Dick Weston to help him settle a personal
and or monetary debt. These questions have plagued me throughout
(03:14):
the years I have been involved in this case, and
the hardest part. By asking these questions, you are, to
some extent, blaming the victim. Yet it is an unavoidable
facet of mass murder investigation, one you hope to come
away from with an answer that won't hurt the family
(03:35):
more than they have already been. So at times you
find yourself facing an uncomfortable dilemma. Does the family actually
want to know what happened when it's clear there are
disturbing details within that reality, because that truth can be
a hell of a lot uglier than one could have
(03:55):
ever imagined. I grew up here in my mom's story.
I think she had this fear that they were going
to be forgotten, and Ron's name was never tied to it.
You might recall Shannon Group, Carol Thompson's daughter from a
previous episode. Shannon was just three and a half when
her mom pulled her out of bed in the middle
of the night after learning their family's house was on fire.
(04:19):
I remember standing there and watching them bring the bodies
out of the house. Of course, I was devastated. I
didn't know what was going on in there. There's fire
trucks and there's people, and there's police, and you know,
then I see the bodies coming out, and and it
was It's pretty devastating for you know, that's my first
you know, I have minor memories of a kid, you know,
just seeing things, but that's my first real memory. That
(04:42):
just always stuck with me, you know what. I had
nightmares for years. I thought about it for years. Within
all of this, Shannon has remained her mother's rock. One
might think she lives with some sort of secondary PTSD,
having been there weathering the aftermath of watching family suffer
for decades while dealing with the loss herself, But Shannon
(05:04):
has remained steadfast and finding answers, taking on the all
consuming task of digging in and over the course of
twenty years, actually uncovering information so as you grow up,
what's going through your mind about this case and what
is driving I was a strange kid. UM didn't have
(05:28):
a lot of friends in school. I was very quietly reserved.
I had a lot of anxiety, you know, when it
came to people. Um, you know, my mom was kind
of paranoid, and I was, you know, I think it
just kind of rubbed off on me because you know,
I saw firsthand what you know, a friend is capable of.
So I think that kind of just screwed me up.
And as I was growing, you know, I thought a
lot about this case and the fact that Ron got away,
(05:48):
and it always broke my heart that, you know, my
mom would watch over her shoulder for the longest time.
Ron Thomas, that friend Shannon mentions became like a recurring
cant her on this family. Carol Thompson remains terrified to
this day, even after forty years, because of a possible
threat still existing in their world, and that fear she
(06:11):
has passed down to her daughter Shannon is exacerbated by
not knowing what happened and most importantly, who else is responsible.
Fear feeds on itself. I remember this man came to
the door one day knocking, and I opened the door
and he said that he had gotten something in his
(06:34):
eye and could what I let him in to go
rinse his eye out. Me being this native eight year old,
you know, I let this man into my home and
now I'm home alone. I was all by myself, Mom Daoud,
probably at work or something. So you know, Mom got
home and I told her about it, and I just
remember her reaction. She freaked out so bad, she was
(06:54):
so scared because it could have been wrong. To this day,
we don't know who it was. It might have been wrong,
and I don't know, just her reaction and just everything
growing up, and it just ate it even more that
this man is free. You know, who knows who else
he heard after that? Who knows what he went on
into it after that. As I have come to learn
throughout my investigation, I can say with certainty that Ron
(07:17):
Thomas wasn't a family friend as Carol had thought. He
was a cunning sociopath who had masterminded the murder of
her entire family. Every single law enforcement source I have
spoken to has confirmed this Ron was the man behind
the curtain from the very beginning, telling Dick Weston what
(07:40):
to do and when to do it. This became clear
to Carol and Shannon as they tried to move on
with their lives in the decades that followed. I wanted
my mom to have peace. You know, yes, it would
help me too, But me and my mom boys been very,
very close. She was very close to her mom. Me
and her are very very close. We're like best friends.
My mom. You know, she was so scared and it
(08:02):
bothered her so bad. So it kind of turns you
into an armchair investigator, if you will, as I love
to investigate, love it. What do you first do? And
so I contacted UM Records here and the Sheriff's office here,
enquiring if the files were still around, if you know,
(08:23):
because I knew that the files we do not destroy
because they told me on the phone. And I'm like,
how can I get access to these? I know it's
supposed to be public records. So you're beginning to look
into this, and your main goal is to get ahold
of the records so you can find out exactly what
I wanted to torture on I did. I'm not gonna lie.
(08:43):
My goal was to find her on get these records,
and I wanted to send him crime scene photos, newspaper
artists and stuff to make him think about it every
day for the rest of his life. I want him
to get these in the mail once a week, just constantly,
constant reminders I wanted to torture the man. Yeah, so
(09:06):
far I've learned all I can about Ron Thomas's life
before the Stevenson murders, but I need to dig into
what happened to this so called family friend after. I've
come to understand there is one man who knows more
than most about Ron Thomas's life after he ran from Bethel, Ohio,
A detective who has never spoken publicly about any of this,
(09:29):
and who has been hard to track down. In fact,
once I found him, I sensed a bit of trepidation
in his voice about sharing his story, and he chose
to remain quiet. Yet, after some time and a bit
of discussion, one day in early spring, he decided it
was time to talk. Dave. How you doing? M William Phelps, Hey,
(09:54):
how you doing? You're doing all right? I'm doing all right.
I'm doing all right. I get I gotta say, I
can't complain much. You know, wouldn't do any good if
it did. Anyway. That's so true, That's so true. How's
the weather? David Bell is a former Columbia, South Carolina
detective who began his law enforcement career in nineteen seventy
two as a line deputy with the Richland County Sheriff's
(10:17):
Office for I Love Beautiful Division because I loved the
connection with the people, you know, because you know, I
just like trying to help people if I could. And finally, uh,
they said, come on, man, you know, we really need
your you know, your experience and uh, investigation division. So
I went ahead and transferred to investigation division. And I
(10:39):
didn't major crimes in a particular area that I patrolled
as a uniform division, and I was you had a
lot of actions and contacts of that area. You know,
the people we come to me and give me information
on certain crimes and so forth. Those connections in the
community are priceless the cops who lead to become detectives.
(11:01):
The trust is established and for a detective there is
no better information than what he or she can develop
on the street. Ron Thomas's name did not cross David
Bell's desk until the early two thousand's, after Bell had
been assigned to a brand new cold case unit, and
of course that opened up the big can of worms.
(11:24):
That's when we learned about the Stevenson murders, the gold
buying business, nemafia connection, you know, Richard West and all
these all these people you know, connected to all this crime,
from robberies and murders and lower those wardels. Now what
(11:46):
kind of guy did Ron Thomas strike you as when
you began to look into this cold case and look
at his background. Ron Thomas was a scum bay. If
there was something dirtie, he has hands in. It turns
out Ron Thomas left behind his wife in Ohio and
fled the South Carolina, where he owned and operated a gold, silver,
(12:10):
and jewelry exchange. This was the main location where he'd
been running off to each time he evaded the police
looking into his involvement in the Stevenson case. And yet
there was another reason for Ron's frequent visits to South Carolina.
Ron Thomas had a mistress there for what had amounted
to the past fourteen years, a woman named Irene Floyd,
(12:33):
who first met Ron when he was her foreman at
a manufacturing company in nineteen sixty eight and continued to
work for him at his store in South Carolina. To
understand this case, we have to take a few steps
back before the Stevenson murders, because to really know Ron Thomas,
(12:53):
you have to look at Irene Floyd. Irene was no
common middle aged woman living the cozy life in a
warm South She had quite the checkered past, starting with
her first husband, her high school sweetheart who had died
tragically in nineteen sixty six. They had a bad relationship
from the get go, and uh they got a real
(13:16):
bad domestic dispute one night, so she called the Clubia
police department on him. So they were looking for his car,
and when she happened to see the car, and so
she went to go find a police officer to tell
him where he was at. And while she was talking
to the police officer, he actually drove drove by and
(13:37):
she goes there, he goes now, So the police went
to stop him and he took off running from the police. Well,
he got just a couple of blocks and read there
in the middle of Clubia, we have these trains that
come to Clubia, and there was a train coming and
he tried to beat the train and he lost in
(14:02):
his train. His car got hit by the train. He
was killed instantly at the accident. Actually, Irene made a
lot of money on his insurance plus from the train company.
Irene Floyd sued everyone involved after her first husband was
killed by that train. I've been told she was awarded
life changing money, yet nobody could give me an exact figure.
(14:26):
So she uh learned real quick how easy she could
come about money with insurance policies and sue the person's
you know, responsible for the death. So that day is
the husband number two. Not long after, Irene married her
(14:46):
second husband, a Kentucky born transplant named William Floyd. The
following year, Irene met and began working for Ron Thomas. Yeah,
she was a secretary in the photo speak you and
they started having an affair while she was married a
Willyam Floyd. But William says, well, you know, I'd rather
have you share you that lose you. I love you
(15:10):
that much. Even though William Floyd knew his wife was
having an affair with Ron Thomas, William decided against divorcing Irene,
but at some point it became too much to bear
and William filed. The divorce was finalized in July. They divorce,
(15:30):
and then what happens. What happened was we employed never
removed Irene is being beneficiary on residenturance policy. And Irene
found out about this. So Irene kind of let him
along and implied that she wanted to remarry him. So
(15:56):
I renehatched a plan. She convinced William that she had
left Ron Thomas for good and wanted to make their
relationship work, you know, give the marriage a second try.
After a few months, she set up a rendezvous at
a Tennessee motel. William Floyd, still in love with Irene,
(16:17):
agreed to meet and talk. When Irene got to the myths,
you know, she got him drunk because she met him
up there with the pretense of getting remarried. And uh so,
when she got him set up in the motel, she
was supposed to call there's other motel and h and
asked for a gym, and she was supposed to identify
(16:40):
herself as Linda and uh and that was to uh
satan that she told them what room he was in
and that the door was unlocked. Ron Thomas was on
the other end of that call. He had been waiting
in a nearby motel, ready to receive word to set
his next course of action in motion and get this
(17:03):
Ron's so called bodyguard, Dick Weston. He and another man
Ron had hired were not too far away waiting in
the wings for Ron's direction. And Richard Weston and a
guy from Indiana across the state line within there with
baseball bats and beat Bill Floyd's severely with baseball bats
(17:27):
in the head and the pre torso and left him
for dead. You know, I mean they beat him unmercifully.
Here again was Ron Thomas ordering others to do for
him what he did not have the guts to do himself,
and Irene Thomas at for an alibi. She drove herself
(17:48):
as she made the boat goal to a hospital and
says she was having a severe migraine headache to give
herself an alibi. William Floyd did not die from that
motel beating it. He was left severely deformed, with nearly
all of the skin on his face beaten off and
parts of his skull caved in. She called Ron Thomas
(18:10):
and told Ron Thomas that Bill was still alive, and
Ron Thomas as well, Uh, I doubt uh, don't worry,
He's not going to live. There's no way he could
survive that assault. Ron was so certain William Floyd wouldn't
make it, he instructed Irene to call him when that
time came to pass and say this the Lincoln has
(18:34):
been sold. According to police reports, several men posing as
preachers even showed up at the hospital to inquire about
William Floyd's condition. The hospital staff became immediately suspicious and
would not allow them into the room. So he was
put in a facility that cared for people that were
(18:54):
like vegetables. Bill Floyd's family would not allow her to
see him, and so she could get to him. William
Floyd was confined to a wheelchair, incapable of walking, talking,
bending for himself. The guy was left blind in one eye,
deaf in one ear, and would suffer multiple seizures every
(19:16):
single day. All this man did, mind you with She
forgiveness to his cheating wife by agreeing to talk about
moving on and getting back together. And this is how
she repays him. William sat idly all day inside the
rehab facility and staring into space, a shell of the
caring and loving man I have heard he once was.
(19:41):
I don't know how she did it. I could never
did was able to figure it out. But she was
able to sneak him out of this facility, and she
drove him to a probate's office in South Carolina. And
that even though that he was in that condition, that
(20:02):
judge married her and Bill remarried. How she finaggled the
system to be able to remarry him, and his condition
is beyond my imagination. So she immediately took him out
of that facility and took him home to her house
(20:24):
here in glub You to take care of me because
that he still had that internce policy, Shannah. The day
(20:52):
before I planned to leave Ohio, I got a call
from Carol Thompson's daughter, Shannon Group, asking to meet up.
Shannon had a sore close to Ron Thomas, who she's
been messaging with on Facebook, and over time she had
collected close to fifty pages of information about the guy.
A treasure trove if there ever was one. How's it
(21:13):
going really good? Brought those documents you requested? She doesn't
want to be in this at all. She doesn't want
her name in it. Why do you think that beer?
Maybe I don't know. I really don't know, you know,
till many years of past. I don't know why anyone
would you know? And it could be hard on her
(21:34):
to given her relation to the people involved. I know
who this sources, and the information I've been given is
highly credible. Like others who have been hesitant to speak
or prefer to use an alias, I understand and respect
the need to keep a distance. Shannon handed me a
(21:55):
quarter inch thick stack of documents to go through all
of it dealing with Thomas and his relationship to Irene Floyd.
Information no one would be able to find out through
public records while I was looking into Juicilla Merita's whereabouts.
I handed the material off to my producer, Christina Everett
(22:17):
and asked her to find out what she could break
down the social media conversations included in the documents and
determine what we could learn from it. There's a lot
to go through. This woman is really complicated and knows
a lot more than we imagined. Yeah, I mean, you
read through everything and did some digging. What do you
(22:38):
think what did you come up with? Well, what's interesting
is the timing of everything, Right, So William Floyd is
attacked in May, and Irene marries William for the second
time in August, and you know what happened between those months,
the Stevenson murders. Right, So she ends up talking to
(23:02):
the FBI, and we know now that she was still
carrying on her affair with Ron during this time. So
it's really interesting because we get to learn a little
bit more about what Ron was going through during the
months that the murders happened. Um She says that she
talked on the phone with Ron at one point on
(23:22):
June and said that she wanted to come visit him,
but he was adamant and said that under no circumstances
was she to come to either Indiana or Ohio to
visit him, because the next weekend he was carrying off
some big deal that he needed to be there for.
That next weekend would be the fourth of July, and
(23:44):
that big deal turned out to be the Stevenson murders.
We look back and we see that she spoke to
him on the phone about five weeks earlier and at
the end of May, and she's telling Ron that she
doesn't have any money and he doesn't have any i her,
but suggests to her that if money is an issue,
(24:04):
that he could arrange to have her house burned down
for ten thousand dollars and she can just collect the
insurance money on it. So Ron said that he didn't
have any money to lend her, but he was going
to be working on a deal that would really set
him up financially, but was complicated. He said that the
(24:24):
deal would involve several people. He mentioned the name Steve
and Linda in relation to this deal that he was
going to be doing um And according to Irene, Ron
said quote that s ob had more money than he
could ever spend, but yet he wanted to steal everything
that he could from everybody else. So there's a second
(24:48):
call between Ron and Irene that happens July tenth, after
the murders um and the tone of this one is
far different. Ron says the FBI had the goods on him,
that his house was surrounded, the phone was tapped, and
he was going to go prison for a long time.
So Irenes and tears. She's crying. She's asking, are you
(25:09):
in trouble? He says yes. She asks what did you do?
And he says, you wouldn't believe it if I told you. Well,
it sounds there to me like Ron's basically admitting his
involvement in this. There was enough talk beforehand during their
phone calls for Irene to figure out that this was
not a spontaneous attack. This was a planned thing. It
(25:33):
was something that Ron had thought of for weeks at
least before he carried it out. It was not in
the heat at the moment. But Irene did say that
Ron was waiting for somebody else to get out of
prison to help him carry out this deal, and so
Irene figured that that person he was talking about was
Dick Weston, because she knows that Dick had just gotten
(25:55):
out of prison a few months earlier in February for
bank robberies. Considering how long they worked together at this point,
it's puzzling why Irene Floyd would suddenly flip on Ron
Thomas and ran them out to the FEDS. Around the
time when Irene married William Floyd, there was a bump
in Irene's relationship with Ron, and it had to do
(26:17):
with a bankruptcy issue on Ron's behalf um and it
was messy and it involved Irene and her assets. So
it seems like they were on the rocks for some
time and they weren't talking, and maybe Irene thought that
was the end of it, because then she went to
the FBI and ratted him out. That rough patch didn't
(26:41):
last long, though, because Irene and Ron continued their affair
in According to Detective David Bell, Ron continued his business
affairs with Dick Weston all while Dick remained in prison
on suspicion of the Stevenson murders. Do you think Ron
Thomas was involved in running guns and drugs? I don't
(27:04):
know about the the gun, but now if I remember right,
the FBI was looking and this came from Irene that
they suspected Ron and Uh smuggling drugs into prison where
(27:28):
Richard Dick he worked with Dick. I so him and
Dick had a scam going where Ron would get the
drugs into Dick and Dick would sell them. Yeah, that
may not have been actually burned, but that was what
he was suspected. Two years had gone by since Irene
married William Floyd the second time. With Ron Thomas lying
(27:49):
low from the police and Dick Weston still in jail,
Irene had to find someone else to do her dirty work.
Yet again, we got a statement from her I who
knew had connections Uh Irene Irene got to shoot Bill
(28:11):
Floyd and the head was the shotgun and make it
look like a suicide. The name of the person mentioned
is bleeped because although Detective Bell is certain based on
his investigation, nobody was ever arrested for that murder. Now, Irene,
she had convenually left the house that morning and went
(28:32):
some place to give herself an alibi, and while she
was gone, supposedly now her husband and wheelchair pulled down
this attic stairwell under the body stairs, crawled up into
the attic, got a twelve game shotgun, brought it back
(28:55):
down the stairs, went into a bathroom, put the shotgun
in his mouth, and pushed the trigger with the big
toe of his right foot that was paralyzed, and blew
his head off. That's what they expected you to believe.
That what that's what they ruled it. They will actually
(29:15):
ruled it a suicide. And you go back and you
look at the cold case, the autopsy reports, the crime
scene reports, et cetera, and you find it it's not
a suicide. Well, you know, here is here is our problem.
Those records only kept so many years, and those records
(29:37):
are destroyed. We did not have a file copy uh
Floud's suicide because it had been destroyed. The only information
I could get on his suicide was from the Corners
office and you reinterviewed everybody. Yeah, well wherever we those
that we can find, Yeah, yeah, But so that's the
(30:00):
only way that we were able to get the information
on Floyd's led suicide. And it still blew my mind.
I couldn't believe because I knew the investigators that responded
to the scene of Bill Floyd, and apparently they were
lied to on the real condition of Floyd when they
got there, or they would have never ever signed off
(30:23):
on Oh yeah, that's okay, suicide, you know, I mean,
if they knew he was confined to a wheelchair, they
would never you know, I mean, that would just ludicrous anyway. So,
so Bill Floyd was death and was ruled a suicide.
She eventually was got his shed away a little bit longer.
(30:43):
She got the insurance me Ron Thomas happy. William Floyd's
death conveniently paved the way for Irene and Ron Thomas
to ride off into the sunset together with a fat
insurance payout to celebrate with nine dollars to be act.
The only problem was Ron still had a wife back
(31:05):
in Indiana, and Irene, well, unless we forget she had
two dead husbands in her past. In the next episode
(31:26):
of paper Ghosts, let's try to at him. How's he
done it? And I didn't What kind of look did
he give you back? It weren't nice? It was evil.
If Lukes and guilty'd kill him so I decide that
I am going to take a gun to court the
next day, and I'm going to kill Ron on the
(31:48):
courthouse steps. We were looking into Ron Thomas when we
got familiar with Irene Compash. The Black Widow Paper Ghosts
is written in exact, produced by me Am William Phelps
and I Heart executive producer Christina Everett, with script consultant
Matthew Riddle, Audio editing and mixing by a Booze Afar
(32:11):
thanks to Will Pearson at I Heart Radio. Series theme
number four four two is written and performed by Thomas
Phelps and Tom Mooney. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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