Ep. 787: True Crime in the Outdoors

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is the Meeater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Listening past, you can't.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting,
I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds, no compromise,
gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts,
just gear that works. Check it out at first light
dot com. That's f I R S T L I

(00:38):
T E dot com. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we're
fixing the follow. Uh, we're fixing the follow some blood trails.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
You like that?

Speaker 1 (00:49):
That's good. Yeah, it's a good start. Go follow some
serious blood trails. Uh, you guys, listen to the show.
Sometime ago on our on our on the Meat Eater
podcast feed, we ran a thing called blood Trails and
it was put together and hosted by doctor Jordan Sillers.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Who's sitting with me right now.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Not a medical doctor, No, not a medical doctor of
English English, that's right. Yeah, yeah, he specializes in speaking
in this language.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yep. I can only help you study this language.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
Yeah, I can only help you medically if you're you know,
gonna die of bad grammar.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Along those lines are you trying to explain something to
the doctor. You can't get your point across. You might
have come to a doctor like this, there you go,
will help you put it into clear, concise, powerful prose.
So in that way, he's a medical professional. He ran,
We ran blood trails, and the blood trails app it
was kind of like it was like a I don't
know I put it.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
It was a It was an inaugural.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
It was a test episode where we told a story
of an unsolved of an unsolved murder.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
We recap that murder real quick. It's kind of the
who the who, what where why? Yeah? Sure.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
So it was a hunter in Virginia named David Stack
and he went out hunting with his son and his
brother and it was, you know, opening day of turkey season.
He went out and his son and brother came back
to their cabin and he didn't show up, so they
went out searching for him. They searched and searched. Eventually

(02:20):
they found him. He'd been shot with a twenty two
caliber rifle projectile and they had never figured out who
did it. The Virginia Wildlife Agency was in charge of
the murder investigation, and they were never able to name
a suspect. The friend of the family who I spoke with,

(02:42):
has some you know, ideas about some of perhaps the
neighbors maybe knew something or were involved.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
This is just me as a dude.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
Yes, sure, sure, but for whatever reason, they were never
they were never able to collect the evidence.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Then private land, how many people could be there?

Speaker 3 (03:00):
Well, so this is part of the thing, is that
one one of the neighboring landowners was allegedly guiding you know,
turkey hunters, which he was not supposed to do. So
it's possible that there were some people in those woods
who were not neighbors, who were strangers to the area.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
That's one of the thing I meant by his private
land meaning Okay, how many possible people were running around
the woods. I listened to the episode. Mind it blows
my mind.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
I I know, I know. And I talked with like.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
You could fit the people that did it. It's like,
you know, and you could fit them around this table. Yeah,
and it'd be like you'd call them in. I'd be
like with my kids, I'd be like, we're all staying
here until someone admits.

Speaker 3 (03:44):
So you shot the guy. That might be unconstitutional. I'm
not I'm not sure. I'm not a lawyer, but I
don't think that's allowed. But yeah, you know, it really is.
It's like, what can we find evidence for? And if
there's no evidence? And I talked with our buddy Brent Reeves,
who was in law enforcement for a long time, and
he explained to me the difficulty of investigating a crime

(04:05):
scene like this because you don't know how large it is.
It's very difficult to find physical evidence because you know,
the leaves hide things, and you know, it's just tough.
So they were never able to name a suspect. I'm
sure investigators have suspicions, but yeah, but if you're an investigator,
you can't. You know, you got one shot, right, And
this is something that's been as I've reported these other cases. Investigators,

(04:28):
you know, they tell me this, you get one shot
at a conviction, and if you don't have what you need,
you walk.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
Yeah, but they need to bring in one of those
cold case specialists, those real crack commando investigators.

Speaker 3 (04:42):
Yeah, come on, I'm sure I'm sure the family would
welcome that. And I know that there have been I
don't know about crack commandos, but you know people assigned
specifically to this case. Over the years and they haven't
you know, made any headway that they're able to share
with the public. I don't know that they haven't made head.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Well yeah, yeah, that they're will open about open exactly.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
So anyways, we do a piece on this. We did
a piece on this. It's great.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Jordan's like I said, researched it, hosted it, it was great.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
People were very enthusiastic about it.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
So we've were launching this series Blood Trails and doing
a whole bunch of these stories about these like murders
and events.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
That involve hunters, right, hunters and hunters, anglers, outdoorsmen yep.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
So it's like it's like these kind of crime stories
that are very outdoor focused.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
Yes, yeah, they're they're very outdoor focused. I really want
to stick to that. You know, it's hunters, anglers, campers, hikers,
public land users, people who are in the out of
doors doing the things that we all love to do,
and something terrible happens and sometimes, uh, you know, the
hunter is the victim. We do have a pretty serious

(06:03):
story in this first season where the hunter is the
perpetrator of the crime, and so it's related to hunters
and anglers in some way all these stories are and
you know, I think that that gives us a perspective
on these cases that you know, your run of the

(06:23):
mill true crime podcast is not going to have.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah. You know a lot of times.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
My kids, like some of the my kids listen to
my older one especially, he listens to some like crime stuff,
and they're just kind of working off Wikipedia pages, right,
you know what I mean, Like they're not doing And
I tried to explain him all the time, like you
realize these dudes like read a couple of books, right,
and they're just horking people's material.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
Yeah, yeah, a lot of it, Like they're not doing
anything right. Yeah, and that is you know a lot
of true crime podcasts, not all. Some of them do
a really great job. There's lots of original reporting, but
a auto true crime podcasts the format is they read
news articles, they read a book, they read Wikipedia, they
explain to you what happened, and then usually there's two
people and they kind.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Of react to that.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
This this series is not that I really wanted to
make a point of talking with the people who were involved,
whether that's the family of the victim, you know, law
enforcement who investigated the case outside people who have you know,
professionals who have looked at the case. So what you're
getting adds to the story, right, It's not just you
know what you already know about the story. It's it's

(07:33):
information that you didn't know from the people who were involved. So,
you know, I record the interviews and we put them together,
just like in that first episode about the Turkey Hunter.

Speaker 1 (07:44):
Yeah, so how deep is the how deep is the well?
Like when you start looking at when you go back
and you have to explain how far back in time
you went. Yeah, when you start looking like, how many
cases like this, murder cases, disappearance cases involve the outdoor community,

(08:09):
do you find that that it winds up being that
it's that it's dozens that it's hard to find ten.

Speaker 3 (08:16):
There are quite a few, you know, the the example
of a hunter who's killed in the woods, there's going
to be a fairly limited number of those. But if
we're talking about campers and hikers who disappear on public land,
there are you know, potentially thousands.

Speaker 2 (08:36):
There was actually a bill.

Speaker 3 (08:39):
I believe it was called the Trace Act in the
US Congress was introduced and basically the idea was to
start recording and putting together a database of people who
disappear on public land.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
Oh wow.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
And one of the statistics they cited was sixteen hundred
people have disappeared, and I forget that the time for
of that, but you know, nearly two thousand people have
disappeared on public land in the last whatever ten or
twenty years. And obviously the majority of those are not
going to be like a criminal case, right, It's not
going to be like foul play won't be suspected. It

(09:15):
will be just someone you know, got lost and couldn't
find their way out. But you know a certain number
of those there were other people who they were with.
We have a case in this first season of a
hunter who went out with his two friends and disappeared,
and those two friends came back. And the question is
you know, right, like so so there are there are

(09:37):
those types of cases, and you know there are plenty
I think for us to to cover.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
You know, watching you work on this and helping on
a couple of them. A little bit. A thing that
I kept thinking of is I used to where I
grew up.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
I would I used to trap muskrats on a piece
of the Manisteine National Forest I remember it was into
I was trapping this marsh on the firearm opener.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
Okay, yeah, and this guy there's a missing guy.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
And eventually find him and he had shot himself leaning
against the tree, shot himself in the head, leaning against.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Tree, dering gunsies, yeah, okay. And where he was, I
mean I had muskrat traps seventy five yards from there. Yeah,
and I and I was like waiting. I was in
high school.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
I was waiting for someone to come and put the
screws to me a little bit. I had never heard
a word, never heard a word, and I eventually started
to I guess, no one's gonna come talk to me.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
But I was like kind of paranoid. Yeah, yeah, that's
someone to come talk to you. But I'd have to
explain how I like a shot. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
Yeah, don't know anymore than you guys do. I mean,
I got trapped strung all along that hole. He was
like right up in the oaks, like come out of
the cattails, and he was just sitting right up there.
I didn't know he was there. Yeah, But I just
always like come. No one never came and asked me
if I heard something, saw something did something.

Speaker 3 (11:14):
Yeah, I mean maybe it was very clear from the scene,
could have been it was it was a suicide.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
I talked to an investigator one time that did a
guy killed himself at a campfire, and the investigator came
in and he's like, I looked and knew what happened.
But of course I couldn't take that mindset, right, So
I initially, yeah, I'm like, oh, he shot himself, but

(11:44):
don't touch anything.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
Treat it like a crime scene.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (11:48):
Yeah, yeah, I think until he got until they got
to a point where like the obvious was true, but
just ruling out the idea that it was that it
was stage to look that.

Speaker 3 (11:58):
Way right, right, because that's always possible, And that is
one thing law enforcement, you know, says, is always assume
it's a homicide if someone has died, right, assuming it's
a homicide until you have evidence proving otherwise.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
Let's talk about this Wisconsin. Let's talk about this Wisconsin,
this Wisconsin hunter and the Bear Boo Hills there. Yeah,
the reason that one strikes me. Yeah, that story really
strikes me. From the seventies, right, nineteen seventy seven, Yeah, Okay,
I just knew all the place names. Yeah, right, because

(12:33):
every year once or twice a year. Yeah, you know,
a flying to Madison, see the Barboo Hills, right, go
to my buddy dogs. My buddy dog tells me this
that their thing, and so familiar with the roads, been
on the roads.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
Yeah yeah, And so I don't know. It just struck
me because I was like, oh, should I know that spot?
I know the spot? I know those places. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
But talk about that guy a little bit, because here's
another one. Like dudes, they were well, they were very
early bowhunters.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
Yeah, nineteen seventy seven.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
Yeah, like nineteen seventy eight bow hunters. Yeah, and so
that paints a picture in your head immediately because bow
hunting culture was very small.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah in seventy eight yep.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
Yeah, so this this happened again in nineteen seventy seven.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
I keep saying seventy eight. Sorry, seventy eight, Yeah, yes,
seventy seven.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
You know in that that there was opening day of
both season in Wisconsin. The guy's name was Robert Christian.
He went by Bob, and he had he had a
plan with his friend Randy. He lived in Madison, Bob did.
Randy lived up in Barriboo and so they were planning
on hunting some land north of Barriboo on that Saturday,

(13:45):
and so Bob took his mom's car. He had a
motorcycle that he usually drove, but it was in the
shop for some reason.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
But he wouldn't have taken it.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
I know that's a part of it. But he wouldn't
have taken his motorbike out to go. I mean, I mean,
I think he wouldn't.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
Have liked hung his bowl over his back.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
Well, I mean, this is according This is according to
his sister. His sister kind of who I spoke with,
made a point of mentioning he had a motorbike. It
was in the shop, and his his mom let him
drive her brand new AMC Hornet.

Speaker 2 (14:16):
So maybe he would have taken that bike maybe.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
I mean, it seemed like something he drove around a lot.
And this piece is interesting because it kind of speaks
to Bob's character that his mom he was eighteen, so,
you know, not very old. His mom let him take
her brand like this is a brand new car, right,
she just bought it. And so he was. He was

(14:38):
a good kid. He had just started at the University
of Wisconsin Madison. He was going to be a computer
science major. You know, good grades. You know, he had
lots of friends.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
So he's an early adopter on archery season, yeah, and
he's an early adopter on computer science.

Speaker 4 (14:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
He probably would have been a millionaire by now because
he was. He was right there at the beginning. So
he's supposed to meet Randy at six o'clock at his house.
They're gonna spend the night and then get up early
the next morning. Six o'clock rolls around, Bob hasn't shown up.
And like everyone I talked with about Bob really emphasized

(15:16):
like this was unusual for him because again, he's a
good kid. He's there on time. If he says he's
gonna be there, he's not gonna, you know, make Randy's
mom wait to start dinner.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
One of his relatives said, if he says he's gonna
do something, yeah, exactly exactly. So they're kind of immediately concerned.
They don't, you know, they don't think like, oh, he's
been abducted, right, They their first thought is he's been
in some kind of car accident. And so so the

(15:46):
Randy's last name is Griffiths. So the Griffiths call the
Christians and they kind of call back and forth, like
where's Bob.

Speaker 3 (15:51):
We don't know where he went, and so they start
calling like hospitals, they they do call law enforcement, I think,
just to see if there'd been a road accident, you know,
if he'd gotten into some kind of accident on the way,
and they don't. There's there's no sign of him. And
so they spend the next day on Saturday, I think,

(16:12):
like again calling around some of you know, Bob's friends
other family members, like has anyone seen him? Did he
go somewhere else for some reason that that you know,
he didn't say he would, And still no sign of him.
So on Sunday they go out to look for him.
They're just driving the roads and they find the car.

(16:33):
They find Bob's mom's car. It's parked up kind of
on this like it's the road's name is Tower Road.
I think there was like some kind of radio tower.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
It's like up in.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
A very rural kind of remote area, just like a
side road up there, and the car doesn't have any
wheels or tires. It's just like sitting on the ground
for some reason. Bob's his his hunting stuff is gone.

(17:05):
His letterman jacket is in the car. And then I
think Bob's mom was a nurse, and so her nursing
kit is in the car.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Kid just bought some swish or sweets.

Speaker 3 (17:14):
Yeah, that's right. So so we swished.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
Sweets in the car. I don't that really put me
in a certain place in time? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (17:22):
Yeah, because he went got twenty five bucks from the
bank and then went and bought swish or sweets.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
It was like, dude, like, I know this guy.

Speaker 3 (17:28):
Yeah, I mean yeah, yeah, from that, you know his
his sister said he loved hanging out with his friends, smoking,
you know, playing cards, and so yeah, so that's that's
a we know that. The last thing we know that
he did was he made two stops in Madison. One
was at the bank, the other was at a convenience store,
and from there he drove up and we don't know

(17:51):
what happened after that.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
And so there's so many details to it, but like.

Speaker 3 (17:57):
There's there's a lot, there's a lot, you know, but
the kind of bottom line is, to this day, we
don't know what happened to him.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
There are theories, but in none of that archery equipment,
none of that stuff ever.

Speaker 3 (18:10):
Ever turned up. Yeah, none of it ever turned up.
A really important piece of this is that the area
his car was found was an area that he grew
up hunting in, so it wasn't and that's kind of
why they were up there looking because they thought, well,
maybe he went up here right for some reason. Even
though it wasn't on the way to Randy's house. It
was a detour that would have made him late, but

(18:33):
he was familiar with that area. His sister said where
the car was found was not where they usually parked
in that area, So it was kind of odd that
he would have parked up that little side road. But
you wonder maybe he just went up to do some scouting,
took his bow, went in the woods. They conducted obviously

(18:55):
an extensive search of the area. They brought in you know, dogs,
they brought in a helic. They didn't have drones at
the time, but you know, they did do aerial search.
The detective who's in charge of this this investigation told
me that the family, you know, still goes up there
right and like looks around. Maybe he we just never
found him. Maybe he had some kind of medical emergency

(19:16):
and we just never found him in these woods. But
the detective I talked with he didn't because I sort
of asked him, like, could he have just like gotten
hurt or lost in the woods, and he doesn't. He
doesn't think that's likely. He thinks they would have found him.
But it is a weird piece that his hunting stuff,
his bow was not in the car, right, because if

(19:37):
he'd been abducted, why would the abductor take his bow? Right,
That's kind of a weird thing to do.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
Yeah, there's there's.

Speaker 4 (19:46):
There's also that whole wrinkle about that nun who sees
I don't know how much you want to like give
away on the podcast, but there's so many like wrinkles
to it that are so interesting.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:55):
Yeah, So so a few days into the investigation, you're.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
Taking the bait on that.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
Oh yeah, you gotta Phil brings up the nun. You
gotta talk about the nun.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
Film might have a little I don't know, little thing
you're saying.

Speaker 1 (20:14):
I'm a part of this case, Steve, although I thought
maybe maybe he's interested nuns.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
I gave you all the clues.

Speaker 3 (20:21):
So they they found They find out that just about
a mile down the road from where Bob's car was found,
a nun there was there was a convent. Now it's
like a retreat center, but at the time it was
it was a convent.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
A mile from the car was about a mile yep.

Speaker 3 (20:36):
Just down the road. And they realized that that there
was a nun who lived in a cabin and she'd
been gone for a few days. She came back to
her house and realized someone had been living in her house.
They hadn't like ransacked it and stolen stuff. It seemed
like they'd actually been like living in her cabin.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
And so this.

Speaker 3 (20:54):
Obviously freaks her out. She calls her friend, whose name
is Mary, to drive over and just like be with
her because she doesn't know if whoever this is gonna
come back, right he wasn't there at the time, And
so Mary drives over, and when she pulls up into
this driveway, she sees a car that's running but in

(21:17):
the driveway, and she makes a note which is like
pretty incredible. She makes a note of the license plate number.
She writes it down, and she walks up to this
car and the driver rolls down the window and he says,
either I'm looking for my friend or at other times
she said he said I'm looking for my friend Bob,

(21:41):
and her description of him matches Bob. She said he
was a young guy, brown hair, glasses. But then later,
according to the reports, she saw a picture of Bob
and was like, ah, maybe it wasn't him. I don't know,
So that's also a little bit uncuo. So so she

(22:02):
wrote down the license plate number, which is how we
know that was Bob's car. So, whoever, whoever was driving it,
whether it was Bob or someone else, it was Bob's car.
And this was I think like nine nine or maybe
like nine pm, ten pm at nights. This was at
night after you know, people had been worried about him.

(22:24):
This was that Friday night for its got stripped. Yeah,
this was that Friday night. And so and so Mary
said that the car drove back down the driveway and
then turned away from where the car was eventually found.
So for some reason it turned the opposite direction and
then eventually made its way back to where it was found,

(22:45):
after which time the wheels and tires were stripped for
some reason. Those hub caps were eventually found at a
rock quarry, which is another piece of this, but it's
just a really creepy interaction. Man, right, and and Amy,
Bob's sister, thinks that it's possible, and I think Randy

(23:06):
had said this as well, who I also spoke with.
They think it's possible that Bob that someone else was
in the car. It was dark, and so Mary doesn't
know whether anyone else was in the car. They think
someone else could have been in the car, maybe holding
Bob at gunpoint, and he was kind of trying to
drop a hint, like I'm looking for my friend Bob.

(23:28):
He didn't want to say anything that would like upset
this person. But she thinks maybe he was trying to
send a message.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
And you know, we.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Don't know whether that person who was with Bob maybe
could have been the same person who had been staying
in the nun's house. We don't know. We don't even
know that those two things are connected. Yeah, And part
of the problem it's possible. But part of the problem
it was never like investigated super closely, at least right away,
is because there's a county line that separates where Bob's

(23:59):
car was found from the nuns house.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah, because well because if he was in there, if
he was in there for ten minutes, well they wouldn't
have known it, they wouldn't have done it. At the time,
if he was in there for ten minutes.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
There's hair, there's oh yeah, right, but.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
At that time they wouldn't have yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:15):
So at the time, you know, the one law enforcement
the you know, the county sheriff investigated Bob's car and
Bob's disappearance, but then across the county line, another sheriff's
department was investigating the nuns you know, break in, and
they didn't think they were related because according to Amy,
those two departments just didn't like interact, didn't like each other,

(24:38):
didn't communicate well, and so like all the evidence was
cleaned up from the nuns house because they just thought
someone broke in, not a big deal though they didn't
connect it. And you know, who knows if that evidence
would have been preserved. Now we have that ability to
analyze DNA, we could have maybe made some headway there,
but it just doesn't exist. The evidence isn't there.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
Years ago, we did an episode, like there's parts of
the story that remind me of this. We did an
episode with Pat Dirkin, and there was a story of
a couple guys that went missing, a couple of ice
fishermen that went missing for many, many years and there's

(25:27):
just little snippets of what they had done, what might
have happened to them.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
They vanished a winter night.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Some of the people felt that maybe they there was
even this idea merged that they ran off and started
new lives somewhere. The last sighting of them, which seemed
like it would have been them, is they had gone
to a guy that sold live bait and woke them
up like one or two in the morning to buy minnows.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Yeah. They're dedicated, Yeah, dedicated.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
Yeah, And there was questions about who was in the car,
what they had done that night, what their relationship was like.
But anyways, all these years later, a dude, a Walleye fishermen,
a guy that was really interested in side.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
Scan so and iron stuff. You know.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
Yeah, he went he's out puttsing around one time and uh,
finds a car, Yeah, dives down, pulls the license plate.
Dudes are still sitting in the car, pulls the license
plate and knows the car the whole time.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
It was just right there.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah, all this like mystery and what happened is just
sitting at the bottle of lake.

Speaker 3 (26:42):
Whenever anyone goes missing, there are always a million theories
and the same thing.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
Well, did it point out they drove out just to
make for non nice fishermen for Southerners, they bought bait
and drove out on the ice.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
Just sunk.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
Yeah, car went through the ice, probably refroze, snowed, whatever.
Just yeah, thirty years what are what happen of those guys?

Speaker 3 (27:08):
I can't imagine, But yeah, one of the theories with
Bob is that he ran off for.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
It's always a thing, yep, when we you know, we
did a we did one about a guy that in
one of our Campfire Stories volumes, we had one about
a guy was hunting elk. No it was it was
a mountain goat hunter. Either way, he finds a body, yeah,

(27:34):
that have been missing for forever, and that family, the
family the missing man, they do the same thing always
in the back of your head when someone like goes missing.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, there's primary the primary thing.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
Is like that they're dead, But in the back of
your head is that they ran off and started a
new life. And so with this family that I think
for fifty years, their father had been missing. Yeah, and
there was a did he maybe run off in start
a new life and meanwhile he was right where everybody

(28:09):
knew he'd gone hunting. Yeah, but they searched and searched
and searched and searched, and it seems he had pulled.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
A boulder over on himself.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
Oh man, he.

Speaker 1 (28:17):
Was going through he's going through a rocky area and
it seems like grab the wrong boulder at the wrong time.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
And just yeah, it's so like gone. Yeah, it's hundreds
of people searching in the right spot.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
Yep, never found him. Yeah, yeah, And it's it's so
hard for the families, you know, speaking with the people
who are still here, they just struggle so much, right,
And and like like with with you know, Bob's case,
speaking with his sister, you know, she she doesn't she

(28:53):
isn't holding out hope that he's still alive somewhere sure, right,
And the same thing. There's another case of a hunter
who went missing in nineteen seventy five up in Main
that we're going to cover, same thing with his wife,
Like she knows he's not alive, but they just want
that closure, yeah, you know, and that's really important to them.
So they're still and that's why they talk to me,

(29:14):
that's why they keep you know, they want people to
know about the case. So they can figure it out,
figure out what happened.

Speaker 1 (29:20):
Let's jump to another one. This is one both you
and I worked on together a little bit where I
provide a little assistance here and there on it.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
The case of a.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
Family right here in right here, in our area, right
here in Galton Valley in Montana, back in nineteen ninety six,
a young girl, Danielle hutt. This gets confusing because there's
names that are very similar. How does her family pronounce
that last name?

Speaker 2 (29:57):
Pouchins? Does go?

Speaker 3 (29:58):
Yep, Puchins.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
There's a victim, Daniel Houchens.

Speaker 1 (30:02):
Okay, don't get confused, because then we have a murderer
named Paul Hutchinson. But a victim Daniel Houchins goes to
a river access site. So in Montana you have a
lot of you have a lot of state river access sites.
We have the state has a phenomenal stream access law

(30:23):
where as long as you can legally get into a river,
you can then travel blow high watermark. And so these
state access sites are real focal points of activity because
it gives you a legal access into a river and
then you can go up and down the river. In
nineteen ninety six, this this young woman, she was eighteen fifteen.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
Oh geez, yeah, sorry, I forget that.

Speaker 1 (30:45):
This young woman who's fifteen, lives down the road from
a river access site, goes down to the river access
site after having a minor argument with her with her mother,
I believe. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't come home.

Speaker 5 (31:05):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
The eventually search and they find her body. She had
been raped, she had drowned, or Ben drowned in mark right.

Speaker 3 (31:23):
Yeah, Ben drowned.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
Well I'm when I'm when I say, when I point
this out, this discrepancy is it was not immediately openly
treated as a murder.

Speaker 3 (31:38):
Yeah, it It was a mess. The sheriff at the time,
According to the sister of the victim, Stephanie, who was
very kind to speak with me, She says, the sheriff
at the time told the family it's possible that Danny
could have drowned accidentally.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
So but got raped and then Quinn drowned in shallow muck.

Speaker 3 (32:03):
Well, he didn't tell the family. He didn't tell the
family allegedly that she had been raped. That was news
to the family when this came out more recently.

Speaker 1 (32:12):
But yeah, but she was found with her with her
bra up, her underwear down, yep, Yeah, with biological material
from someone else.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
Yep, yeah, fifteen years of age. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
No, they knew, they knew she had been raped. And
and to to kind of give the sheriff credit, he
told the media like just about a year after this happened,
he said, we've always treated this as a homicidek So,
so he acknowledged publicly that they were treating this case
as a homicide. The problem came because the coroner when

(32:53):
he listed the like the manner of death or like
the reason for death, he listed it rather than homicide.
He listed it as undetermined. And you know, we know
now based on speaking with the kind of the most
recent investigator on this case and the case file, it
was pretty clear that she had been that it was

(33:15):
a homicide. She had bruising on the back of her neck,
her lungs were they had mud in them, right, so
she'd been held underwater. There was obviously this horrible struggle,
and so but the family's kind of kept in the
dark about this, and the sheriff says he never lied
to the family, but obviously he didn't tell the family everything,

(33:38):
which is pretty standard practice. You know, even the family
can't have access to all the information because investigators are
concerned that they'll speak to the media or that things
will get out and it will compromise the investigation.

Speaker 1 (33:53):
So I'm not I have zero, Like, I don't know
anything about law enforcement. That feels just sitting here, Yeah,
having a daughter, Yeah, that feels like way off to me.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
Yeah, yeah, it feels way off to me.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
Yeah. And you know, those decisions were made back in
ninety six. We don't know exactly why.

Speaker 1 (34:17):
But put yourself, put yourself in that situation. Oh yeah,
you have kids, Yeah, when your kids killed, and then
years later you're like, oh mat you uh, you didn't
tell me what happened to my daughter.

Speaker 2 (34:30):
Yeah, you kept parts of what happened to my kid
for me.

Speaker 3 (34:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah. No, it's it's like I wasn't allowed to know. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's tough.

Speaker 3 (34:42):
And you know, the reason that the family found out
was because Stephanie, her sister in twenty nineteen, really started
her for twenty years later. Yeah, over twenty years later,
but she applied. In Montana, they have a law that
allows the victims family, allows the victim's family to have

(35:06):
access to the case file. You have to there's a process,
there's a procedure I think a judge has to like
grant access. But Stephanie worked through that process with the
help of the Gallatin County Sheriff's office and the county attorney,
I believe, so she was finally able to see that
whole case file, which is obviously a horrible experience to

(35:27):
have to look is that crime scene photos? Everything's in there, man.
But but you know, eventually the family was given access
to all the information. But it took it took a
long time.

Speaker 1 (35:38):
Yeah, sitting down here, the series is incredible. I want
people to listen to the series. All the episodes are incredible.
I don't want to we're kind of talking high level
impressions of some of this stuff. I just want to
skip ahead for people. But when you listen, you'll understand

(36:03):
how they eventually determined to suspect.

Speaker 2 (36:07):
Thirty years after the fact. Yeah, it's incredible.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
It's a great story.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
Yea. Yeah, it's a determined suspect.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
Turns out this guy the murderer.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
Hiding in plain sight. Man. Yep. He he uh doesn't
go far, stay stays local yep.

Speaker 3 (36:32):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
Becomes a fisheries biologist, yeah, with the BLN. Yeah, becomes
a BLM fisheries biologist. He's real active on like hunt
talk and active on forums.

Speaker 3 (36:43):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (36:44):
He kind of runs this little program where he does
these somewhat formalized hunt swaps yep, where he kind of
does this thing like to guys like, hey, if you
want to come hunt Montana, like, I'll line you out
on spots and then in exchange, you'll kind of line.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
Me out on how to hunt your area.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
Raises a family, two kids, hunts turkeys. Here's kind of
a weird one winds up. I think by his own
count hunts turkeys in twenty five states in the years
following this. So this guy is all over the place.
This guy is all over the country hanging out in rural,

(37:32):
secluded areas. It's insane what happens. But these investigators come
and they don't want it. It's an old, old case
and they don't want to come in and read him

(37:54):
as his rights right to fear that he's just going
to shut up, right.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
It's a tough case. It's thirty years old.

Speaker 3 (38:02):
Yep, and initially initially not listed as a homicide. That
was officially changed at some point, but for twenty years
not listed as a homicide. So you know, a defense
attorney is going to really hammer that, so they had
to be very careful with how they approached it.

Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, we have this footage and this audio that that
Jordan uses. A couple of investigators come with a hidden camera.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
I don't know that it was hidden, but you know, just.

Speaker 2 (38:36):
Sure seems like it. It's not set up on a tripod.

Speaker 3 (38:39):
No, I think it was like a I think it
was like a body cam. That's what I've assumed. It
was like a body cam. And so it's not like
it's not like it was hidden exactly. But it wasn't
like they said, we want to interview you for some documentary, right,
it was just law enforcement.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
Yeah. I only just for clarity.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
I only said that because I realized it was like
on a person when or it was somehow moving around.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
So yeah, I shouldn't say hidden.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, but yeah, they film an interview and and and Jordan,
if you could explain, like, how do they.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
Explain the pretext of the interview? Sure?

Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yeah, so the thinking behind it in the pretext of
of of how they how they approach him to begin
asking about this.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
Day, right, So, so like you said, they're they're worried
he's going to lawyer up, and so they determine that
it's legal for them to conduct an interview with him
as long as it's a public place and he's always
free to go. So they approach him in the parking
lot of the BLM office in Dylan, you know, they

(39:43):
walk up to him, they say, hey, you know, we're
we're looking into cases of women who have been killed
along rivers in Montana. And they say, as a fisheries
biologist who's always on the rivers, we're hoping that you
can provide it's an insight into some.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
Of these cases.

Speaker 3 (40:02):
So they don't just talk about Danny's case. They have
I think four cases.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
That was one of the most sickening things about it, yeah,
is they're like, here's a woman from a river in Livingston. Yeah,
here's a woman from a river. Here, here's a woman
from a river here.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
Was like, how many of these people are right? Right? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (40:22):
So they they did, unfortunately, have some you know, other
cases that they could bring up. And I've looked into
a few of those others and they weren't all you know,
under suspicious circumstances necessarily, but there are real cases. They
didn't just make them up. They are real cases, and.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
I figured they had to have been.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
Yeah, because I think that, like you said, like legally,
I think that if you came with a completely phony
if you if you came in with like completely phony information,
I imagined it would somehow tarnish what you're doing.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
It might I think, you know, they want it to
be as realistic as possible to not tip Paul off
that this is some like you know, sting operation. So
I'm sure they were worried that if they tried to
use fake cases that he would become suspicious. Right if
for whatever reason he knew it was fake, he could
figure it out. So they run through these cases. They say,

(41:18):
you know, they have pictures of each of the victims.
They put them in front of Paul. They say, have
you heard of this person? You know she was killed
on such and such river. Do you know anyone who
might be able to help us, Any fishing guides, you know,
guys who own tackle shops, like anyone we can talk
to you about these. They do this one at a time,
and then the last one is is Danny, and they

(41:40):
they they pushed the picture in front of him and
he'd you know, this is not like an explosive moment
where he just like breaks down, right, But you can
tell he's uncomfortable, like he doesn't know exactly whether to
like look the picture or like look back and be
kind of nonchalant about it.

Speaker 1 (41:59):
He goes into a mega chill affectation.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
Yeah, that's kind of how it came.

Speaker 1 (42:05):
To doing a very dramatic he's kicking back, he's got
his arms behind his head. Yeah, he gets really reclined.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yep. He tries to like go into this real like breezy.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
He keeps asking what was her name?

Speaker 2 (42:21):
Again?

Speaker 3 (42:22):
Right, Yeah, what was her name? Danielle?

Speaker 2 (42:25):
That's a good one. I got no idea, boy, I
don't know. Yeah, he has to be excused for a minute.

Speaker 3 (42:30):
He does multiple times. Yeah, throughout throughout the interview. I
think it's three or four times he has to be excused.
He says that one of his texts is texting him,
one of his you know, subordinates is texting him and
has a problem with something.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
That's the pretext he uses.

Speaker 3 (42:45):
I don't know if that was true or not, but
he does leave multiple times. Oh yeah, it's it's tough
to watch. I mean, it really is just knowing what
what happened, and and the investigators are not like they
they play it pretty cool, but they definitely are there

(43:06):
to get information, right, They're there to ask him, where
were you in nineteen ninety six? We are you familiar
with this fishing access? Were you trapping in that area?
Were you fishing in that area? And so that's really
what they're there for. They want him on tape admitting
to being in the area around that time. And you know,

(43:27):
again he plays it pretty cool, like he keeps asking
what year again, I don't know. It's either I was
either there in ninety five or ninety six. I can't
you know. So he kind of dissembles a little bit,
but again, like plays it fairly cool, considering sure what
they're asking, you know, and considering this may be the
first time he's ever been approached or asked about this.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
Yeah. Yeah, to be fair, man, like, no, when you
watch it, knowing what you know, yeah, you see that
like he's.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
Doing an overblown relaxed right because knowing what you know.
But but to be fair, it wasn't. He didn't there
was no like uh, infallible tell right, But knowing what
you know, there's like, buddy, there's no way you're relaxed
right now, No way, but you're doing a way that
you're kicked back and chatty. Yeah, yeah, trying to be helpful,

(44:25):
but I don't know that's his attitude exactly.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
I'd love to help, but I probably I don't know.
I'm just sound just chilled out down here at the
end of the table. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
One of the one of the kind of unbelievable things
he says is like, I don't I don't know, like
I've never fished these rivers like I just fished, you know,
the little streams are like I don't know any fishing
guides who can help you. I don't know anyone who
can help It's like you're a fishery biologist who is
Like he seemed to be primarily into hunting, but of course,

(44:53):
you know, I'm sure he also did fishing. He had
a fishing boat, like I'm sure he did some fishing.
And just like the idea that he didn't know any
anyone who could help them is kind of unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
You know.

Speaker 1 (45:07):
The thing to surprise me during during as you were
working on this, and I'm curious to see if you
if you ran into this in other cases too, people
that were close. There were a lot of people that
were close to him, were not a lot There was
people that were close to him that that don't want
the story talked about. They don't want the story out

(45:29):
there out of concern for the murderer's family. They just
wanted to go away, right, Yeah, Which you look at
me like, I I I see why you think that,
But I don't think that. I don't feel that way,
Like I don't feel that it's taboo. Yeah, I don't

(45:51):
feel that it's taboo to talk about something like this.

Speaker 5 (45:55):
No.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Uh, but I see why you feel that way.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
But did you find that in other instances did you
did you find that people are like, I don't let's
just leave it be, let's just not talk about it,
let's let it die down.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
Why do we got to relive this?

Speaker 3 (46:10):
Yeah? Yeah, certainly with the cases that are that there's
been some type of resolution too, because not all of
the cases we cover, our cold cases that haven't been solved.
Some of them have been solved, you know, to one
degree of like certainty or another. And on those cases,

(46:32):
I definitely ran into this. People they don't they don't
want to talk about it, they don't want it to
be rehashed, which I do understand. I think I think that,
you know, this is a matter of public interest. These stories,
whether it's it's you know, the job of law enforcement,
or whether the stories have some lesson for you know, hunters,

(46:56):
I think they are a matter of public interest, and
so we should cover them, especially if if we're adding
something new to these stories. But I certainly ran into
that and people said, I don't want to talk to you.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
I don't want to rehash this. Did that you did that?
Sometimes come from the victims family.

Speaker 3 (47:15):
Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, there there there were times.

Speaker 2 (47:20):
I would be more simple, I would be sympathetic to it.
I'm coming from the victim side.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
It's hard for me to be sympathetic to it coming
from the murderer's perspective, right right, And and I think, like, yeah,
I bet you want this to go away, right right.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
I understand that, of course, yeah, I do.

Speaker 3 (47:39):
And I think it's I think it's a question of culpability,
right Like Paul's family didn't do what he did, and
so in a sense, they are victims. But you know, again,
this is a this is a this is a big story,
especially in this area. And I think that we have

(48:00):
an obligation to cover it as truthfully as we can
with you know, whoever will talk to us. And you know, I,
like you say, I feel sympathy with all of these cases,
and that's one thing I really wanted to be sure
that never got lost. I think with a lot of
true crime, like the genre, a lot of people approach

(48:23):
it as like a puzzle to be solved. And that
makes sense. It's an investigation, there's evidence, there's clues. But
because the way we reported this, we talked with the
people involved, we talked with the victims' families. I always
want to center the fact that they are real people involved, Right,

(48:45):
These are real humans who have gone through the worst
imaginable pain, and I'm asking them to talk about it, right,
And so I always feel sympathy and I try to
reflect that in the way that we tell these stories.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
Know, I try to to.

Speaker 3 (49:03):
Really get into who the victim was as a person,
to talk with their family and friends, like what were
they like, what was their character? What are they like
to do? Because I think that's really important and it
reminds the audience like this is not just like a
puzzle to be solved, This is a real person, and
I just think that's really important with this genre, especially

(49:23):
of true crime.

Speaker 2 (49:24):
Tell me about the Terry Brisk murder. The Terry Brisk murder,
so cause here we're jumping up the twenty sixteen.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
Yeah, this is a bit more recent. So Terry Brisk
was he was hunting white tail. It was the third
day of rifle season in Minnesota. He's from Little Falls,
which is in central Minnesota. It's a pretty rural community,
but he'd lived there his whole life. So he went

(49:52):
out on a Monday. He'd taken off that day of work.
He went out on a Monday to go check his stands.
I got the sense it wasn't like a serious hunt.
He had about one hundred and twenty acre property that
it was like family land that he hunted, and he
was just gonna go out check his stands, like maybe
he ran into it, you know, maybe he runs into
a deer, maybe he doesn't, but he's just gonna go

(50:13):
out there.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
So he's out there.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
His son Jonathan comes home from school and immediately wants
to go out hunting. He knows his dad is out
on that property, and so he goes out there. He
finds a stand. I want to say it was a
ground blind, but I can't remember that detail. But he's
texting his dad like, Hey, I'm out here, where are you?
And he can hear a cell phone like dinging, so

(50:39):
he knows like he's close, but he he doesn't like
he keeps hearing the dinging, so so Terry his dad
doesn't silence his phone, and so he's like, that's just strange.
And so he gets out of the blind. He walks
not a very long distance because he can hear the
cell phone, and he finds his dad. He's lying on

(51:01):
the grounds. He's been shot, and so you know, the
investigation kind of the deputies arrive, they bring in some
state law enforcement as well. They investigate the crime scene,
and one of the weird things they notice is that
he's there's no gun, right, And they assume a hunter

(51:22):
is going to go out on his property during deer season,
he's going to have a gun with him, right, because
like the surest way of seeing a deer right is
like to not have your gun with him.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
And if you just check him, if you just even
if you're.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
Just checking, yep, even if you're just checking. So they
so they look for the gun. They can't find it.
The family tells them that it was probably a thirty
thirty Winchester lever action that he liked to hunt hunt with.
They can't find it, can't find it. About a year later,
they go back out because what what the the sheriff
who spoke with me said is, at the time they

(51:56):
were looking, there was a really thick, you know, cover
of leaves on the ground, hm, and so they were
concerned maybe it was hidden somewhere. And so sure enough,
the next spring, when that leaf cover has decomposed a bit,
they go out again and they find the gun. And
that's when they confirm that the gun that killed him
was his own gun. But they also know, based on

(52:21):
you know, the crime scene, that it wasn't a suicide.
They're confident that he was killed with his own gun
by someone else at close range. So the sheriff says,
it's likely that this person spoke with Terry. Certainly they
interacted in some way, and somehow this person got Terry's

(52:42):
gun and shot him, and they they haven't been able
to figure out who did it, or at least they
haven't been able to gather enough evidence to figure out
who did it. And that's kind of where the case
has been.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
How old was the kid.

Speaker 3 (52:59):
He was? I think he was fifteen at the time. Yeah,
in twenty sixteen. So Terry was married and had four kids,
and Jonathan was the oldest.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
How far away was the gun.

Speaker 3 (53:11):
That's undisclosed? I asked the sheriff. He doesn't want to
say where it was found. He said, I think the
words he used were nowhere near the crime scene. Wow,
So yeah, nowhere near the crime scene. One of the
things that was mentioned potentially is that it was on
a different property. But the way it was described to me,

(53:36):
it's not like it was in someone's shed, right and
they found it there.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
It was in the woods somewhere. Thing doesn't make a
ton of sense. If it's far away, what do.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
You mean if it's way far away, they're gonna wait
for the leaves to settle down from rain and decomposition
and then go look way far away.

Speaker 3 (53:55):
I mean, I don't know exactly how they conducted the search.
I assume some kind of grid search, and there's a
lot of like, there's a lot of room in nowhere
near right. It wasn't next to the body. It could
have been twenty five yards away. It could have been.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
It's only one hundred and twenty acres on and twenty acres,
so you could have been five hundred yards away and
not in the yep.

Speaker 3 (54:15):
Yeah, And that is one of the things that's so
tough about, like off property.

Speaker 4 (54:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:19):
A lot of these cases, like the investigators don't know
when to stop right in their search for clues for
evidence because they don't know how big the crime scene is.
And so that was a challenging part of this.

Speaker 1 (54:32):
Unfortunately, they apparently never disclosed where he was shot.

Speaker 3 (54:36):
Like which part of his body. No, they never have.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
I asked that too, Yeah, and like that's like, can
you can you explain why they withhold those little details
because we talk about that, Yeah, like you talk about
that in the original in the original Blood Trails with
the turkey hunter that's found dead out in the woods.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (54:53):
Is they view it like they it's a tool, Yeah,
to no detail that no one else knows, well someone.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
Else knows right exactly, and and that's how they use it.
So when when I talked with Brent, the example he
gave was if if we say we know what the
murder weapon was, the murderer will then go throw that
gun in the river, right. So that's one example of something.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
I think. I think.

Speaker 3 (55:28):
There is definitely validity in wanting to keep information close
to the vest because they can use it, whether that's
in an interrogation, right, They they can better figure out
if someone's lying or telling the truth if they, you know,
haven't released a lot of details. Right, So if they
know if if this person they're interviewing somehow mentions or

(55:51):
let slip a detail that they haven't released to the public, Well,
that's a big deal, right, And so they.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
The thing that only you know, and they interviewing some
guy and he knows, and he just happens to throw out, yeah,
some weird remark.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
And you're like, he wouldn't know that exactly. He never
told me, boy that right, right exactly.

Speaker 3 (56:09):
So So those, especially with the crime scene, those details
are often not disclosed, and I totally get it. Sometimes
I wonder whether whether investigators are being a little too cautious.
And that's just from my perspective as someone who's just
trying to get as much information as possible. So, you know,

(56:29):
it's frustrating for me, it's frustrating for family, can be
frustrating for the public. But they do have reasons for it?

Speaker 1 (56:36):
Yeah, tell me about the Ludger h Bellinger.

Speaker 3 (56:41):
Yeah, it's a Luger Blander, Lugr Bland, Ludia Blanger. I
got that wrong as well until someone corrected me. So
this is another disappearance, but it's it's.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
Also nineteen seventy like kind of like a right around
when I was born. Things were, things were spicy in
the words man.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
Yeah, yes, so this is nineteen seventy five.

Speaker 3 (57:01):
So the fiftieth anniversary of this is actually coming up
here pretty soon. So this is also a disappearance, but
it's a lot different than the Bob Christian disappearance because
we have a lot more information about who did it.
It's just we don't they were never convicted and we
don't know what they did with Lujer.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
So he was a hundred. This is the Big Woods
Man Maine exactly.

Speaker 3 (57:26):
Yeah, in Maine, the Big Woods Washington, Maine, which is
in the eastern portion of the state, not too far
from the coast. Luja went hunting with his wife Linda
and his brother John. They went out kind of before work.
Linda and John both had to work later in the day.
Luja was kind of between jobs. I think, But they
went out early in the morning to see if they

(57:48):
could find any deer tracks and just to sit and
wait and you know, see if anything showed up. They
didn't find anything, so so Linda and John went back
because they had to go to work. Lujar said, I'll,
you know, I want to hunt for a little while
longer and then I'll come back home. At the time,
Lujer well still but Luji and Linda had three young

(58:09):
daughters at the time, so they had three kids. They
were fairly newly married but and fairly young. But but
they had three kids.

Speaker 5 (58:16):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (58:16):
So Lujer again doesn't come home, and he's supposed to
drive Linda to work, and so the way she describes
it is she was kind of mad at him.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
At first.

Speaker 3 (58:26):
She assumes he's just like out hunting and forgot right.
But you know, as the hours stick by and he
still hasn't come home, she starts to become really concerned.
So she calls the main game wardens and they come
out to two game wardens come out and start to
look for him. They searched all night, no sign of him,

(58:48):
and they consider calling like a larger search party, but
it was pretty cold and they figured that would take
too long. They really wanted to find him then, because
he'd been out all night at that point, so so
they finally they talked to a neighbor who says he
saw Ludra go into the woods at this point. And
the neighbor is a big hunter and a trapper, and

(59:10):
so the neighbor says, if Lujra went in that way,
I bet he went to this spot in the woods
where they're often deer. And so sure enough, they go
to that spot, they find his tracks. They figure out
that he'd shot a buck and he dragged it out
to a road. One of the really cool things about
this story is it's a really great example of good

(59:33):
police work, of good detective work. The game wardens were
able to really read the signs in the snow because
it had it had snowed and then gotten warm and
it kind of melted and then it froze again, and
then like a cold snow had come on top of that.
So they were able to kind of figure out a
timeline based on like is the track in yeah, is

(59:56):
the track in the slushy like frozen stuff, or is
it you know, in the top, And so they do
a great job tracking Lujra to this road. They figure
out that a car had driven up and picked Lujra
up and they put the deer in the trunk. And
one of the things they notice is that Lujra had

(01:00:18):
left his gun leaning against a tree, and they figure
out that one of the other guys in the car
was the one who got out of the car and
went over and picked up Luger's gun and brought it
back to the car. And they just think that's kind
of strange, like wouldn't Lujr. Be the one to get
out and go get his gun, And so that sort

(01:00:39):
of tips them off. They also another great piece of
detective work. They find a receipt in the snow for
a local garage like a like an autobody shop, and
it has like the names of the guys who are
driving the car, and so they immediately go to the
autobody shop and they talk to that Apparently, you know,

(01:01:01):
two guys had come in potentially drunk, potentially you know,
on drugs, just like acting crazy. They'd asked for their
car to be fixed something was wrong with the radiator,
and then they left and between them leaving, they leave
the autobody shop pick up Luger, something happens, and then

(01:01:23):
they go back to the autobody shop later. So that's
another piece where they're able to kind of figure out
a timeline. And so they they go to talk to
these guys and they've never been named. The suspects have
never been named. I refer to them as Suspect A
and Suspect B because again, like they've never been officially

(01:01:45):
named as suspects, and I actually don't know. Because so
another part of this story, the the game warns who
investigated this have both passed. They both died, but an author,
a journalist named Darren Worcester, published a book based on

(01:02:10):
the accounts of a bunch of different main game wardens.
His father in law was a game warden, and so
you know, he compiled all of these stories from these
game boardens he'd spoken to, one of which was Lusier's disappearance,
was Ludri's story, And so that's really how we know
a lot of these details is because he spoke with
those wardens before they died. And so I was able

(01:02:31):
to interview Darren, who again very kindly sat down and
talked with me for a long time about this case.
And so that's how we know a lot of the
details because they were never released to the public. I contacted,
you know, the main state police who are right now
like in charge of the investigation, and they declined to
be interviewed.

Speaker 1 (01:02:50):
What are these two guys, Like, what do these two
guys say for themselves?

Speaker 3 (01:02:55):
Well, one of them, one of them died in a
kind of crazy circumstance. The other one is still alive,
and according to Linda, who I spoke with, you know,
maintains his innocence.

Speaker 2 (01:03:10):
But what do they say, where do they say Lujer
in the buck got out of the car.

Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
They I don't know that they ever really got that
far in the investigation. What I mean is they never
accused them and like tried to prosecute them, so they
never actually like got them in a court and said,
you know, what's going on? So they they like they said,
they saw Lujer, but we didn't pick him up, right,

(01:03:43):
someone else must have picked him up. And that's kind
of the story that that they maintain, even though it's
very you.

Speaker 1 (01:03:49):
Know, there were receipts in the snow, well their receipt
is so they were there, right, they say, oh, yeah,
we were there, we.

Speaker 3 (01:03:54):
Saw him, but we didn't pick him up, We didn't
do anything to him. We don't know what happened to him.
And that's sort of the story that they've maintained over
these years. The first, the one suspect. They're both.

Speaker 2 (01:04:12):
Characters, you might say, but the.

Speaker 3 (01:04:14):
One died because he blew up his own house in
an apparent attempt either at insurance fraud or to kill
his wife.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
He filled his house.

Speaker 3 (01:04:27):
With you know whatever gas was being used in the
house and set some kind of I forget I talk
about in the episode. It was some kind of timing device,
right that was going to go off and then like
blow up his house, and it went off too soon
while he was still there, and they were hoping he
would give them a deathbed confession. Because he didn't die immediately.

(01:04:49):
He was flown to a hospital, but he never he
never said anything.

Speaker 1 (01:04:55):
You ever seen the movie in the Bedroom, it's a
lobster trap reference.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
There's a.

Speaker 1 (01:05:03):
There's a murder and they know who did it, Yeah,
but they never face justice until they do.

Speaker 3 (01:05:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:05:09):
It like a little bit surprises me, not surprises me,
but you can imagine the family at a point being
like we're just gonna have to.

Speaker 2 (01:05:20):
Figure this, like we're gonna have to do what needs
to happen.

Speaker 3 (01:05:24):
And I can see that temptation for sure. I think
talking with Linda and Tracy, the youngest daughter, they feel
like knowing what happened won't change what happened. They really

(01:05:44):
just want to give Lujrah a proper burial. They want
to put him to rest in a respectful way that
he deserves. And that's really all that they're motivated to
do at this point. Because Linda has been she has
been pushing, you know, for years. She was part of

(01:06:05):
a group that actually helped to push the state legislature
to open like a cold case unit in the state
police because they didn't have that before. She you know,
runs a Facebook page where she you know, advocates for
both her case but also other people's cases. She posts

(01:06:26):
about other disappearances, other unsolved murders, and so she's just been,
you know, trying for years to to bring some measure
of closure to her and her family. And I think
she's not I don't want to speak for her, but
but I think that's her her primary motivation now, as

(01:06:49):
opposed to, like, you know what I imagine right after
it happened. In the years after it happened, which was
to bring the guys who did it to justice. Now
it's really just we want to find him. We want
to figure out what happened.

Speaker 1 (01:07:05):
Let's let's jump ahead to a twenty eighteen homicide, uh
against Chong Mua Yang, a Mung guy. We've had Monk,
We've had Mung guys from We've had Mung guys by
the last.

Speaker 2 (01:07:23):
Name of Yang.

Speaker 1 (01:07:25):
Our friend Ya Yang comes on the show now and
then it's a clan name.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
Your last name is a clan name. Okay. The mung
as we as we've covered in past podcast episodes.

Speaker 1 (01:07:42):
Uh, there are there's a there's a large mung pot,
not large, there's a there's a significance of substantial mung
population in the United States of America.

Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
The Mung.

Speaker 1 (01:07:54):
Listeners, I'm sure you're you've heard of the Vietnam War. Well, Uh,
the Vietnam War was not confined to Vietnam obviously, and
the US ran a lot of covert operations both in
Cambodian laos. You'll hear mentions of like the Ho Chiman Trail,
for instance, and the Ho Chiman Trail was not like

(01:08:16):
a specific trail that you have to imagine it like
a constantly changing route. And so in trying to attack
supply lines from the north, we would sometimes stray over
into Cambodia or Laos.

Speaker 2 (01:08:29):
And also.

Speaker 1 (01:08:31):
Our enemy in the war, like they had bases and
infrastructure and operations happening outside of Vietnam. So we ran
what we now know as like the secret wars. We
ran these like covert operations which involved US military personnel.

Speaker 2 (01:08:50):
The way.

Speaker 1 (01:08:53):
You know, if you think back to like the way
green brays function, the way some CIA paramility areas function
is they used indigenous forces right like they're regarded as
force multipliers. So when we were fighting the communists in
Vietnam and fighting the Communists in Laos, we were allied

(01:09:17):
with a tribe, the Mung, who were a somewhat stateless people.
They were a mountain tribe. They were a somewhat stateless
people and they hated the Communists. So we are CIA
paramilitary Special operation guys allied with the Mum. When we

(01:09:38):
pulled out of Vietnam, it was very similar to picture
when we pulled out of Afghanistan. How many we took
some of our collaborators with us, but translators, collaborators were
abandoned in Afghanistan to be hunted down and killed by
the Taliban, arrested by the Taliban.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
So when we pulled.

Speaker 1 (01:10:02):
Out of Vietnam, we brought a lot Among. We brought
a lot Among with us. We brought him into Missoula, Montana.
We brought him into Minnesota, and then over the years,
other Monk would slowly make their way out of Laos
cross into Thailand. In Thailand they could go into refugee

(01:10:23):
camps and then also could wind up emigrating to the
US as asylum seekers because they were stateless. They had
assisted the Americans, and the Communists were still hunting for them.
The Mong, being a mountain people, are historic hunters right

(01:10:48):
in the places where the Munks settled that they took
up hunting in America and they This is just me
editorializing here, like I'm doing a crash course in a
little bit of history to understand this case a little bit.
The Mong developed a reputation, developed a reputation as these

(01:11:09):
as violators and poachers.

Speaker 2 (01:11:11):
Okay, Now, when we had Ya yang On, who's.

Speaker 1 (01:11:14):
Who whose family came from Laos And yeah, I was
actually born overseas, but we had Ya yang On and
he he expressed, like we talked about this reputation the
monk had and yeah, didn't apologize for it, and he's
a very law abiding individual obviously, but he was kind

(01:11:37):
of trying to speak to that the people's experience here.
You have a here, you have a stateless people where
the government of your here you are in Laos, the
government is hunting for you. Like you're living a secret

(01:11:57):
existence up in the mountains. You're not represented by the
government at all. Your whole life is like clandestine, right,
And all of a sudden you get brought to the
US and that's your background, right, and you come to
the US and it's kind of like, oh no, no, helmet,

(01:12:19):
You're not supposed to hunt squirrels till September fifteenth and
you're allowed five.

Speaker 2 (01:12:26):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:12:26):
He was like, there was just the sort of like
you're going from no government or your government's hunting you,
you know, to like this completely different system. And so
he said there was a period when it was just
like it was kind of incomprehensible.

Speaker 2 (01:12:46):
Yeah, like they.

Speaker 1 (01:12:46):
Knew to hunt, they wanted to hunt. They fed themselves
on fish, they fed themselves on game, and it was
just hard to understand.

Speaker 2 (01:12:55):
I mean it's hard.

Speaker 3 (01:12:56):
It's hard for American Yeah, it's hard for American unders
to now a gate sometimes.

Speaker 2 (01:13:01):
Yeah. And so they.

Speaker 1 (01:13:05):
Develop this reputation, and of course you have the obvious
just racial tension.

Speaker 2 (01:13:11):
They're racial tension. We see it.

Speaker 1 (01:13:12):
There's other cases where we took guys, so like South
Vietnamese who were fighting with us against the North. A
lot of South Vietnamese wound up getting involved in shrimping
in Louisiana, and there's huge tension between traditional Cajun shrimpers
and these South Vietnamese dudes who are getting set up

(01:13:33):
by churches to compete with them. It's like tension, and
all of a sudden, you're in Minnesota and all of
a sudden, there's all these guys and they don't look
like you, and they're from another country, they have different
cultural practices, and there they are on the landscape and
it's like, oh, they're taking all the game. They're the
reasons I'm not seeing anything. And you have a history

(01:13:56):
of then you have a history of just suspicion.

Speaker 3 (01:14:00):
Easy scapegoat for your own unsuccess.

Speaker 2 (01:14:02):
Mung dudes. Mung dudes are like, these guys don't like us. Right.

Speaker 1 (01:14:08):
In some ways, we like fought for this, We fought
for America, but we're not like but a lot of
people were not welcome. We like sacrificed our families and
lives fighting your enemies. But now we're your enemy. Other
guys are like all all these new dudes, these Asian
dudes are shooting our squirrels or catching our fish or

(01:14:29):
snagging our salmon whatever. Right, and it creates like this atmosphere,
Like I love to think that this is fading now,
but this was a real thing, and and and and
and I had heard about it. Yeah, thank god, I
wanted becoming friends with with like becoming friends with a
Mung family and getting a better sense of the whole picture,

(01:14:52):
right right.

Speaker 3 (01:14:52):
Yeah, And that's and that's the background for this homicide
of a of a Mung hunter and one of the
one of the tricky parts I think, so so with
this story. I have read the case file from the
bath Township Police. They were the detective there was kind

(01:15:15):
of the primary investigator on this case. Just to kind
of preface the rest of this, I haven't spoken with
the family yet, and I will before we before we
you know, put out this episode. But currently the status

(01:15:37):
of the case is somewhat open. There there's an appeals
process that's going on, and so my information comes from
the case file, and I imagine some of this will
be fleshed out a bit after I talk to people,
so just to preface it with that, But reading the
case file, it seemed like it was challenging to investigate

(01:15:58):
because there were so many instances of like racial comments
being made in this particular like, you know, state is
a state park. Hunters in this state park who who
you know, made racist comments right against the munk, and

(01:16:18):
so it was like almost too many options right when
investigators started this because they'd hear oh so and so
said such and such about this mung hunter, Oh so
and so sent a text to their buddy saying this
racist thing.

Speaker 2 (01:16:33):
Because then there was the dudes there. There were a
lot of examples of this.

Speaker 1 (01:16:36):
Yeah, just I just want to just interject the thing
like kind of like how this stuff works. Yanni and
I were down in Missouri hunting in Missouri, and just
in our wandering around and hanging out at boat launches
and stuff, we're just shooting the breeze at all these
guys all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:16:56):
These guys are explaining to us, like flat out telling
us there's no squirrels. There'll be news to people who
live this will be news to Missouri squirrel hunters.

Speaker 1 (01:17:05):
It was funny because we did some squirrel hunting on
this trip and did fantastic there's no squirrels.

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
Because the Mung come down from Minneapolis and do big
squirrel drives, squirrel drive and yeah, you're like.

Speaker 1 (01:17:25):
Mom, some some guys, enough guys, enough Mung guys came
down from Minnesota and conducted a squirrel drive in Missouri,
in Missouri, the likes of which has eliminated squirrels in Missouri.
Mm hmm, yeah, uh huh right, okay, yeah if you
say so.

Speaker 2 (01:17:44):
Yeah, I believe everything everybody tells me.

Speaker 1 (01:17:46):
So okay, right, I mean just lunacy, yeah, but straight
faced right, We're.

Speaker 2 (01:17:53):
Like, can you explain a squirrel drive to me? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:17:57):
How does that work? I'd love to know, honestly.

Speaker 2 (01:17:59):
Because they kind of go into the trees and go
into hole.

Speaker 1 (01:18:03):
You don't push him out ahead of you, like, they
don't drive, They don't put squirrels don't push.

Speaker 3 (01:18:11):
No, no, they don't, they don't.

Speaker 2 (01:18:13):
You don't bump squirrels. You don't moot squirrels.

Speaker 1 (01:18:17):
Yeah yeah, yeah, straight faced dude, right, straight faced, like
a real problem.

Speaker 3 (01:18:24):
Yeah yeah right yeah, And that just adds a whole
wrinkle to this, to this case, to this investigation, right
because you layer that on top of just yeah, because like.

Speaker 1 (01:18:36):
Oh, he must be the guy because he's saying all
this bad stuff about muggs.

Speaker 2 (01:18:39):
Like no, everybody's bitching about the mung guy.

Speaker 3 (01:18:41):
Right, yeah, everyone is. And also just because you say
this doesn't mean you're gonna go shoot some guy. So
so what happens is it happened in twenty eighteen the
Rose Lake State Park in Bathtownship, Michigan. It's similar to
the somewhat similar to the Terry Brisk case, where he

(01:19:01):
goes out hunting by himself. He's pretty familiar with this area,
He's hunted it quite a bit, and he doesn't come home.

Speaker 2 (01:19:08):
It's after dark.

Speaker 3 (01:19:09):
The family launches a search party and he's found he's
been shot in the head once and from there, the investigation,
you know, moves forward, and again it's extremely difficult. There's
limited evidence. There's some footprints around the body that are

(01:19:30):
that investigators have a tough time matching to, you know,
anyone specific person to kind of skip ahead a bit.
The way that they eventually name some suspects is basically
through they they get pings from their cell phones that
they were in this area. They put in a request
basically to Verizon or eighteen t or whoever, like, give

(01:19:52):
me all the cell phones of anyone who's in this
area on this day at this time, and these two
guys pop up. Another thing that happens is is a witness.
So soh Yang is killed and all his stuff has
been stolen, like he doesn't his backpack is gone. He
had a shotgun that was gone. And so a witness

(01:20:16):
sees two guys walking down the road and one of
them is holding two long guns. They're obviously hunters, but
one of them is holding two long guns, which is
obviously strange. And so eventually they're able to, uh, you know,
they identify these guys. The one guy's name is Thomas Olsen.

(01:20:36):
The other guy's name is Robert Roadway. They identify them,
you know, they they interrogate them. They do find a
can of like scent spray. I think it was like
to you put on your boots to like, you know,
remove your scent.

Speaker 2 (01:20:55):
So this guy's a deer hunting.

Speaker 3 (01:20:56):
They're deer hunting. Yeah, they're deer hunting, and believe it
or not, they say it's like one of their first
times deer hunting. They're not like experienced hunters, these guys.
So they find this can of scent spray with Olsen's
DNA on it in the vicinity of the body, and
so they feel like they have enough to charge both

(01:21:18):
of these guys with murder. A thing about this case
that I haven't figured out yet, and this is I
want to talk with people and figure this out, is
Robert Roadway's charges were dropped. They charged both of them initially,
but his charges were dropped, and according to the Attorney

(01:21:40):
General from Michigan, they say they were dropped due to
an unresolved issue regarding admissibility of evidence. And so I
don't know what that like, what specifically that's referring to.
I don't know if the an investigator messed it up.
I don't know if they just decided, like because only
one of them, presume pulled the trigger, yeah right, and

(01:22:03):
so I don't know if they just figured we think
it's Olsen not Roadway. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:22:07):
Well, the other one would be least obstruction of justice,
right right, and they were very.

Speaker 3 (01:22:14):
You know, they sat down for interviews and to be clear,
you know, just so everyone knows. Olsen maintains his innocence
to this day. His family says he was wrongfully convicted.
He says he didn't do it, and they say that
evidence was not substantial enough to convict him. But he
was convicted in twenty twenty four. Last year, a jury

(01:22:36):
convicted him of I believe it was second degree murder.
He got sentenced to twenty to sixty years in prison.
But he's appealing right now as we're recording this. He
has asked for a retrial, which is kind of the
first step. A lot of times in the appeal process,
you ask for a retrial, you say, you know, my
representation wasn't sufficient, they didn't do a good job. I

(01:22:58):
want a new trial, and then I presume they'll go
through the appellate process. So that's where this case is now.
So this is really an ongoing situation.

Speaker 1 (01:23:07):
The text message exchange is right our bizarre where there's
a different guy who has a text message, a different
person of interest in the investigation that had texted someone
about how he was going.

Speaker 2 (01:23:24):
To kill yeah Yang different guy.

Speaker 1 (01:23:28):
Yeah, yeah, uh, I was just kidding, he says, he
was kidding, and I have an alibi. I was just
like making a joke about how someone should kill the
mong guy.

Speaker 3 (01:23:36):
And he did have an alibi, according to the case record.
Because there were a few guys, there was one in
particular that they were really looking into for several years, right,
because remember this happened in twenty eighteen, so there was
this has gone on for the last six years. There
was one guy they were looking into pretty closely. They
eventually ruled him out because they confirmed he wasn't in

(01:23:57):
the area when this happened. And so you're right, these
text messages were one of the most damning pieces of
evidence because you know, Rodway and Olsen are texting back
and forth about this case, joking, joking about it, you know,
making racist comments.

Speaker 1 (01:24:14):
They they go back there and hunt, and they go
back there and hunt. Years two years later they do,
and there's a photo of them and one of the
one of the guys text with the photo text the
other one a couple of cold blooded killers revisiting the
crime scene.

Speaker 2 (01:24:28):
Yep. Yeah, then there's a lot like that.

Speaker 3 (01:24:31):
There's a lot of very yeah, very damn.

Speaker 2 (01:24:35):
It just funny, right, they like they think it's funny.

Speaker 3 (01:24:38):
They think it's funny.

Speaker 1 (01:24:39):
Yeah, yeah, that they they had texted each other in
a Meat Eater article.

Speaker 3 (01:24:44):
They did, yep. Yeah, one of them sent Pat Dirkin
uh covered a story about among guy who killed I
think it was six hunters. It was a pretty famous case.

Speaker 1 (01:25:00):
Want just on this There was among guy who trespassed
mm hm and was hunting in someone else's stand. Yeah,
these guys confront them him, there's a shootout, and the
mung guy who's probably trained, I mean he's probably a veteran. Yeah,

(01:25:21):
they get into a shootout and the mung guy man
somehow kills like five or six guys in a shootout.

Speaker 3 (01:25:28):
Yeah, yeah, some of them as they were running away.

Speaker 1 (01:25:31):
Yeah, now that I mean that Listen, I had my
whole preamble, right, it was unfair of me to not
point out the way that that in like the way
that that case ye, those murders inflamed attentions exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:25:48):
Yes, Yeah, and that's that's another important piece of context.

Speaker 1 (01:25:52):
That's a major omission on my part to not mention
that there's like that.

Speaker 3 (01:25:57):
Right, and and and Pat, you know he wrote an
article for us for the website a couple of years ago,
and these guys apparently you know, we're reading Meat Eater
or they were sent it, and so they send Pat's
article about this incident, this massacre, and they kind of
go back and forth, joking about it, like, you know,
this is us, Well, we're.

Speaker 2 (01:26:17):
Gonna really understanding the article.

Speaker 3 (01:26:19):
Though they didn't. I think they probably just read the headline,
but it was about among guy who you know, killed
a bunch of people, and you know, they were basically
joking about it, going going back and forth.

Speaker 1 (01:26:32):
Yeah, they're like, this will be us next year. The
d n R won't be ready.

Speaker 3 (01:26:36):
Yeah, I just yeah, I just thought it was wild that,
you know, I'm reading this. It's like, you know, four
hundred pages, I'm reading through this case file, and all
of a sudden there's a meat Eater article sent back
and forth. But I used to you know, a alleged
murderers m So, yeah, that there's a lot to that case.

(01:26:56):
And I'm very curious to talk to the detective. Hopefully
he'll speak with me, uh and we'll see, we'll see
where it goes. You know, the evidence was there was evidence,
there was that sense spray. There's these text messages.

Speaker 2 (01:27:12):
There's a lot of cell phone pings.

Speaker 3 (01:27:13):
Yeah, there's cell phone pings. So there's certainly evidence. I
don't know if an appellate court will think that there's enough.
And that's kind of where it is right now.

Speaker 1 (01:27:25):
Dude. I love America. I love our constitution. Right, that's
the greatest document of governance ever produced. But good lord,
do we make it sometimes a little easy.

Speaker 2 (01:27:45):
To have the ability?

Speaker 1 (01:27:47):
Yeah, like you want to now and then imagine the
world in which you can put screws to people a
little bit better to be like, buddy, come on, we're
gonna have a little chat.

Speaker 3 (01:27:58):
Right right, and you know, just like you're not going home?

Speaker 2 (01:28:04):
Yeah uh.

Speaker 3 (01:28:05):
And and just like going back to the victim's family,
I mean, this has been horrible for them. I mean,
and because in this case, file is included like emails
back and forth from the detective and the family members
and they're like have you found anything? He's like, we're
working really hard, you know, and back and forth like
this for years. And to go through not only losing

(01:28:28):
your dad, right, your uncle, but to not know who
did it and to hear all these rumors, right, because
there's there's rumors just swirling on social media that they're
hearing from other people, people joking about exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:28:47):
It's I can't imagine. It's horrible.

Speaker 3 (01:28:49):
And so you know they, I think, we we're very
happy to get this amount of resolution, and they're extremely
you know, stressed, I think, And and again I haven't
talked to them, just like seeing what they post, you know,
brief text exchanges about where this case is going, and
just hoping that they'll get that resolution and it will

(01:29:11):
be final and they can kind of, you know, have
that that closure.

Speaker 2 (01:29:19):
Man, dude, I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:29:22):
It's when when do these one of these is going
to start coming out? When can people start listening to
these krin you.

Speaker 3 (01:29:26):
Know, uh October thirtieth, Yeah, yeah, October thirtieth, right before Halloween.

Speaker 5 (01:29:34):
I'm just going to add one plug, which is important
for the show and for the audience. Please instead of
just go back and listen listening to the trailer in
episode one and two and three and four, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (01:29:47):
Yeah, we skip, we skipped a million of them. We
didn't talk about them more.

Speaker 5 (01:29:50):
Yeah, they're they're a ton, But please, because this is
a net new, brand new podcast feed called Blood Trails.
Please subscribe. Anywhere you listen to podcasts, please subscribe to
the feed.

Speaker 4 (01:30:07):
It's a lot of people use the word follow now
subscribe out of fashion, sorry button or the follow button
or whatever yet, thank.

Speaker 2 (01:30:15):
You, Phil.

Speaker 1 (01:30:16):
Yeah, subscribe follow as Phil puts it, follow so you
can follow along there you go on Blood Trails. And
and then if you got if you got hot tips,
send them in dude.

Speaker 3 (01:30:28):
We uh yeah, We've set up an email actually if
you have a tip about a case that you think
we should cover, or one about one of the cases
we do cover. It's Blood Trails at the meat eater
dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:30:40):
All right, thanks, coming on, Jordan, Yeah, look forward to
doing this again.

Speaker 1 (01:30:44):
Man, look makes me, you know, like sometimes people will
tell me about a health problem they're having, and I
start getting the health problem.

Speaker 2 (01:30:53):
You're not gonna get murdered.

Speaker 1 (01:30:55):
No, but I'm saying I'm having like all like all
body react.

Speaker 2 (01:31:00):
I mean, I'm having an all body reaction.

Speaker 5 (01:31:03):
In these first episodes, Like my muscles are tense. These
first episodes we've listened to.

Speaker 2 (01:31:09):
H They're really good.

Speaker 5 (01:31:11):
They're just so good, you know, original reporting, creepy music,
like yeah, you get whole body feels while you're like
totally just brought into that world.

Speaker 2 (01:31:24):
It gets you right in the fields. That's you, right
in the fields. All right, thanks for coming on.

Speaker 3 (01:31:31):
Yeah, absolutely appreciate.

Speaker 2 (01:31:32):
We'll do it again.

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Host

Steven Rinella

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 787: True Crime in the Outdoors