Sandy's Police File — Sandy Beal E5

Sandy’s newly released police file reveals that she sought help from law enforcement months before her death.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Vehicle scene. Am body lying on a white cloth coat
with fur collar. Ten cents in pocket, black mark bottom
left eye, three ruger on coat, powder blowback on barrel,
key in off position with Sandy key ring park lights

(00:23):
on mud on rear tire still wet. Left yesterday afternoon
to see boyfriend father's gun. From My Heart Radio, I'm
Melissa Jolson and this is what happened to Sandy Beale
and I Heart Original podcast, Chapter five listener update. Instead

(00:52):
of releasing a full episode this week, I'm taking a
small detour to explain some new information. I received. What
you just heard were notes from the scene of Sandy's death,
written over four decades ago. A few weeks back, in
the middle of putting together this podcast, I got an
unexpected email from the Prince George's County Office of Law,

(01:13):
attached with Sandy's police file. Kim had given me the
police report on Sandy's death when I first met her,
but several months ago I requested quote the entire police
file of Sandy Beale to see if I'd get anything different.
I'd all but put the request out of my mind,
so I was shocked when I opened this email to
find that the file was pages long. A few of

(01:39):
the pages are fully redacted, and a good chunk of
the file is made up of photocopies of Sandy's personal books.
This content was all familiar to me, of course, but
on page eighty four the new stuff starts. It's Detective
Shoelski's handwritten notes jotted down at the scene of Sandy's death.

(02:02):
Reading these pages, you can sort of follow along with
his investigation. He writes when he arrives, who we talked to,
what he did, what he saw, And on one page
he writes down the items that sat on top of
Sandy's dashboard. The first item he notes is a quote
p G County Police rig. I didn't know what that was,

(02:25):
so I asked him. He didn't remember this detail, but
he said a rig can refer to a police duty belt,
which officers used to carry equipment around their waist. I'm
sure you can picture one. It's unclear if the rig
was hers, perhaps given to her as part of the
Explorer program, or maybe it was someone else's. Also on

(02:48):
Sandy's dashboard was a quote personal card of a Prince
George's County police officer, Mark Murphy. His name was also
listed in Sandy's address book. He died on the job,
but I confirmed he did work in the Explorer program
at the time Sandy was there. After that, Selski writes

(03:09):
several police clippings. Again, he didn't recall this detail, but
he thought the note may have referred to newspaper clippings
about PGI County cops. He vaguely remembered that the local
paper used to run an Officer of the Week story
along with a photo. Maybe Sandy had kept some copies. Lastly,

(03:30):
he notes that Sandy had a quote schedule card on
her dash. Selski was pretty sure this was for the
Prince George's County Police Department. All of these items they
confirmed Sandy's close connections to pg County police and her
likely involvement in the Police Explorer program. Not only did

(03:53):
she have address books with the names and numbers of
local cops in her car, she had a police frigg
sitting right on top off of her dash. I sent
the handwritten notes to Selski to see what he made
of them so many years later. There are some things
in here that I had forgotten, like the black mark.

(04:16):
Selski's notes document that Sandy had a black mark under
her left eye. I don't know what that was. I think,
I said, if it would have been a bruise, I
want to know it. But I don't know what it was.
And I don't like that. I don't don't you don't

(04:36):
like that. I don't like to that I don't remember.
The file also includes a crude diagram drawn by Selski
showing where Sandy's car was located in the pollard and
the track marks around it. The drawing is very rudimentary,
and so I didn't want to read too much into it.
But there are two sets of tracks next to each other.

(04:59):
I a car pulled up next to another car. I
asked him about this. Doesn't it look like maybe there
was more than one car there? From what I have there,
it does either that or try ton't make a note
of it. It would have been her tracks well, certainly

(05:19):
in the police report it says that there were tracks
like she had been trying to get out of the mud.
But the way that you've drawn this doesn't just look
like a person like backing up and you know, reversing
and going forward and trying to get out of the mud.
It looks like someone pulled up, yeah, next to her
but I'm pretty sure that one in the case. Okay,

(05:43):
how does it make you feel reading these notes from
so long ago? Well, I feel though it's still suicide.
Schelski is still confident that he made at the right call.
Those things that bother him now, the black mark, the

(06:04):
tire tracks, they bother him because he can't remember exactly
what he meant at the time when he made his notes,
not because he thinks there was foul play. The notes
also revealed that Sholski did a search on Sandy's name,
calling the records department to see if Sandy had any
previous involvement with the police department, either as a suspect

(06:27):
or as a victim. At first, he wrote no records,
Then he scribbled it out because the search revealed that
in the last year and a half of her life,
Sandy sought helped from police on three separate occasions. It
appears that a man had been following her at the mall.

(06:47):
As you might remember, Sandy worked at the Landover Mall
in her senior year of high school. She was part
of a work study program where students would go to
school until lunch and then work the rest of the
day at a local job um. According to Schelski's notes,
in November nine, when she was seventeen, Sandy was assaulted

(07:08):
at the mall by a twenty eight year old man
who she said had been following her for three months.
He grabbed her and made threats to harm her before
being sent on his way by the security guard. Then,
in April nineteen seventy six, five months later, another incident occurred.
The man followed Sandy's through the mall again. In July,

(07:33):
there's a third report. This time the man apparently threatened
Sandy forgetting a warrant for the assault. I called Sandy's
mom to ask her about all of this. Hello, yeah, Nolica,
Hi Joanne, I just missed a call from you. Yeah, yeah, Well,

(07:55):
how he's going? I told Joanne what I found, the
reference to the three police reports involving Sandy as a victim.
She didn't know about them, she said, but she faintly
recalled that something strange had happened at the mall. I
never heard that from Sandy, but her good friends Sandra
Sheridan had told me, and I think Sandy might have

(08:18):
said something to her father, But I don't know. If
I didn't know how it ended, or how it came
out of what happened to it? What did Sandy Sheridan
tell you? And when did she tell you? After Sandy's
death or before that? I think it was before that.
I think she called me because she wanted me to
talk to Ronald about it, because she said, we have

(08:39):
a security guy that marks her out to the car
now or after she gets through her shift. Because she
worked at the mall and it was a new you know,
it was a big mall and it was new, and
I guess somebody was, you know, following her. I didn't
know that she had been assaulted. Almost every time I

(08:59):
talked to Joanne, she brings up Sandy Sheridan, And this
is one of the reporting goals I really wanted to
achieve for the bills. I wanted to find her because
she was Sandy's best friend and probably knows more than
anyone else about what was going on in her life.
I think she's married and has a different last name now,
so it's been hard to track her down. Joanne hasn't

(09:22):
lost hope though. The last time I talked to her,
she said she was optimistic that Sandy Sheridan might hear
the podcast and come forward, Sandy, if you're listening, we
want to hear your story. I asked Joanne why she
thought Sandy Sheridan called the house all those years ago
to tell her about the situation at the mall. I

(09:44):
don't know, because we never discussed it. I took it
for granted that it was taken care of, either by
the security guard or her father talked her into doing
something different. I didn't know if Romo got involved with
that or not. Uh, you know, maybe when she told

(10:04):
him that somebody was the security guard was going to
help her, you know, talk. You know, maybe Ronald felt
but I won't get involved. You know. He was busy,
you know, trying to take care of the family work,
and so I don't know all the ins and outs
about what happened here. In my many conversations with Joanne,

(10:26):
she had never mentioned this to me, the fact that
a man had been following Sandy at the mall. She
had completely forgotten about it, and so had Detective Shoelski
until I refreshed his memory with these notes. To be honest,
it wasn't that surprising to me these incidents. They happened
months before her death, and the actual conduct the stalking.

(10:51):
In the seventies, stalking wasn't called stalking, and it wasn't
taken all that seriously. The threshold for tolerating unwanted male
attention was front at that time, and I imagine that
the guy who was following Sandy was seen as an
annoyance and nothing more. I wasn't able to track him
down based on the information included in Sachelski's notes, and

(11:12):
the original reports are no longer available. Well, Alissa, it's
good talking to you, honey. Oh, good talking to you too.
I did a news archive search about the Landover Mall,
and it turns out that it wasn't such a safe
place when Sandy worked there. In the same year Sandy

(11:37):
was assaulted, three different women were abducted from the parking
lot and raped in three separate incidents. The victims were fifteen, seventeen,
and twenty five years old. The perpetrators were caught, and
none of their names matched Sandy Stalker. But this context
might help explain the safety measures put in place to

(11:57):
help Sandy, like the security guard who walked her to
her car. I don't have any evidence that Sandy Stalker
continued to bother her after the last known incident in July,
seven months before she died, and there's nothing at the
scene of her death that points to his involvement. But
knowing about his existence it puts her whole experience with

(12:21):
law enforcement in a new light. We already knew that
Sandy had met cops just going about her day. She
saw them in the neighborhood and interacted with them at
the drug store, but now we know that on multiple
occasions Sandy appealed to them for help as a victim
of a crime. Selski told me that Sandy would have

(12:44):
reported these incidents at the Seat Pleasant Station, which was
the police precinct around the corner from Sandy's house. A
lot of the officer names in her address books worked
at this station, including Ray from My Life as a
Cop Freak and Mark, whose cards she had on her
when she died. In the last episode, I put out

(13:09):
a call to listeners to share their experiences with police
Explorer programs or police sexual violence in general, and I've
received a number of powerful messages so far. One person
told me how they had a positive experience in an
Explorer program and learned a lot of great skills, But
most of those who emailed were survivors speaking their truth.

(13:34):
One woman described how she joined and Explorer program when
she was sixteen, a junior in high school, and was
sexually abused by a cop in his thirties. She wrote, quote,
it has been hard for me to come to terms
with it because at the time, it was what I
thought I wanted. I was infatuated. I felt noticed, wanted,

(13:57):
and special by someone who was seen as a here
row and role model by a whole community. I can
relate to Sandy so much because of this, and it
breaks my heart that her memory was smeared to save
the reputation of monsters. It was always drilled into our
head that females just caused problems and we were to
blame for male law enforcement officers getting in trouble. They

(14:19):
create this environment that makes the few women feel like
it's a privilege for them to be involved, like they
owe every man something just for doing the same job.
It's like there's an unwritten code among females and male
dominated fields. We never acknowledge any wrongdoing against us because
we are quite tough and we just want to fit in.

(14:41):
Next week, we jumped back into Sandy's story, revisiting the
evidence at the scene of her death with top experts.
Was she meeting with someone who did she have relations
with in the hours for her death? What happened? Was
there a breakup? We don't know, and that that's kind
of the big question here, you know, why why she
in this muddy area, you know, sort of next to

(15:03):
the barracks. I'm Melissa Jolson and this is what happened
to Sandy Beale. Thank you so much for listening. M
h m hmm.