April 22, 2022 • 29 mins
Sandy’s cousin Kim meets with a cold case detective who offers her something unexpected - and transformative.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Before we begin, Please note this series includes talk of
suicide and sexual violence. Please take care while listening. So
I had to be at a friend's house in Annapolis
at six and it was three, and I'm like, I
got time, and I have an address, so I'm going
to go to the house then that I could say hello,
(00:21):
Douglass's house, right. Kim has never forgotten about Doug, the
married state trooper who was in a relationship with Sandy
before her death. In fact, she has amassed an impressive
file on him. She's paid for background checks on his name,
studied his wife's Facebook page, research the properties the couple own.
(00:45):
She even went to the trouble of requesting Doug's training
records from the State Police. And she's done all this
because of her suspicion that Doug knows why Sandy was
in the pollard that night. She thinks he might have
been with her because in the months before Sandy's death,
they had an intimate relationship, one that led, according to
(01:07):
Sandy's writings, to a pregnancy and an abortion, and on
the night of her death, Sandy was dressed up like
she was meeting someone for a date. The medical examiner
found quote numerous well preserved spermatozoa inside her body, and
the location of Sandy's death the Pollard. It was a
(01:28):
local cop hangout a mile from where Doug worked. In
the car with Sandy was a letter for him. As
much as Kim has wanted answers from Doug, she has
always been too afraid to reach out to him directly,
worried about how he might react to her meddling. But
(01:50):
on her last trip to Maryland, she decided to pay
him a visit. So I'm driving down this little cul
de sac and I'm thinking, you know nothing, I'm not
nervous or anything, and so I keep going and there's
this little dinky road because I see a house out
in the woods. So I've already gone down this wooded path.
(02:14):
I'm driving down this road, and my brain must have
registered the sign that said video surveillance stapled to a
tree trunk was a sign that warned visitors they were
being recorded. And then all of a sudden, I see
his house. I trust my instincts and I just hit
my brakes some now because now I'm like, I'm going
(02:36):
deeper into the woods and it's getting a little creepier,
and um, so I stopped and I start thinking, Okay,
I'm getting I'm like taking a little bit too much risk.
I'm going to back out. So I back out and
leaving my Heart's like race in. Kim left without making
contact with Doug. Her courage had only taken her so far.
(03:01):
What Kim didn't know at the time was that Doug
had recently had another unexpected visitor. Just a few days earlier,
a Prince George's County Police detective showed up on Doug's
doorstep asking questions about Sandy. From My Heart Radio, I'm
Melissa Jelson, and this is what happened to Sandy beale
(03:24):
An I Heart Original podcast, Chapter seven, The Unraveling. I'll
come back to Doug later, but first I want to
(03:45):
explain why Kim was in Maryland. To begin with. She
had been invited to meet with a cold case detective
Bernie Nelson at the Prince George's County Police headquarters in Forestville.
Kim had never met Bernie before, but had known of
him since two thousand and six. He's the one who
answered her call when she first tried to get the
(04:06):
police report, and he's also the one in who actually
tracked it down going to Detective Sachelski's house to physically
retrieve it. I mean, I've heard this man's name since
two thousand and six and it's so that was kind
of exciting that I was going to finally meet him.
(04:27):
He could have just blown me off that he did.
And so, on a brisk morning in October, Bernie and
Kim finally met in person, wearing masks. Due to the
coronavirus pandemic. Kim wasn't permitted to record their conversation, but
she invited her sister along and she took diligent notes.
(04:48):
I've used these contemporaneous notes, interviews with Kim, and written
responses from PG County to create this account of the meeting.
So this is eleven o'clock on Monday morning, and he
guess he asks, so how did all this podcast stuff happen?
And uh so he was very interested, and UM I
(05:10):
encouraged him and like, I really think it's in your
best interest to allow them to interview you. Because he's stating,
he goes, well, we don't think that we should have
to do it because we've done our due diligence and
we've done everything that we can and the powers to
be believed. There's nothing else that we can do, And
I'm like, what, how can how can you say you've
done everything? I've got all these questions, and we've had
(05:31):
questions for years. Kim was excited, but nervous. A previous
meeting with the state police years ago had left him
feeling intimidated. She brought with her a list of questions
for Bernie so that she wouldn't forget what she wanted
to say. And this guy was calm and and was
(05:54):
wanting to educate me on his part on how they
saw it. Bernie told her that the department had coal
cases and very hugh staff to work them all, but
he had taken the time to get familiar with Sandy's case.
He knew, for instance, about the ride along notations in
Sandy's calendar, the names and numbers of local police officers
(06:18):
in her address books. Kim told Bernie what she thought
that a number of cops had taken advantage of Sandy
pursuing inappropriate sexual relationships with the teen, and to her surprise,
he didn't dispute it. He agreed that at the time
seventy seven, the climate was not there for females to
be police officers, and they didn't want her, They did
(06:41):
not want females to be there. He agreed that all
these officers were inappropriate. None of their behaviors were was becoming,
and today they would have all been terminated, or at
least they should have been in his opinion, and Nelson's
going on, don't condone any o their behavior. He was
disgusted as we were talking, and I just was floored
(07:02):
that he was being so accountable. Bernie told Kim that
he understood why the Beal family was so suspicious of
PG County Police given the circumstances, and he came across
a sincere to him and he's like, I understand why
you guys doubt everything. He also credited him with the
amount of stuff she'd been able to dig up on
(07:23):
her own, acknowledging her fierce commitment to the case. He said,
you've done your homework. He said, you did a good
job with this, And he's like, that's another reason that
I wanted to follow through, because I knew you're not
gonna let me go here. While Bernie was telling him
all of this, there was another cop in the room,
(07:46):
Detective McDonald. He remained fairly quiet throughout the meeting, Kim
didn't even know why he was there until he started
telling her about his recent visit to Doug's house. Just
days earlier, Detective McDonald had surprised the retired state trooper
at his home and questioned him about his involvement with Sandy.
(08:10):
I was able to confirm with PG County Police that
this visit took place, so um McDonald called him outside
the house and he said we I questioned him for
an hour and a half. An hour and a half,
that's a long time to visit with somebody, according to McDonald.
Doug admitted that he'd had a relationship with Sandy, but
he downplayed its significance. He said he did not know
(08:32):
she was pregnant. He did not know she had an abortion.
He didn't pay for any any abortion. Doug confirmed that
the Pollard where Sandy was found dead was a local
hangout for state troopers and a place Sandy had gone before.
The Bills, including Kim, had suspected this for years. He
told McDonald that Pepco Utility yard was the common spot
(08:55):
for Maryland State Police that gathered and it was called
don't know what that means, but the spot was called.
He said, girls, including Sandy, would come and socialize with
the cops. He said it was kind of like a
groupie thing, like they followed a band, and that the
cops would just s gather there. But that was the
extent of the information Doug would share about Sandy. He
(09:18):
denied being in the pollard the night of Sandy's death
or having anything to do with it. He said he
had not been in the pollard that evening. He said,
I didn't know that she was dead until my supervisor
brought me in a few days later. He said, my
supervisor reported to me, and then I was questioned That
Maryland State Police did interview him made him do a polygraph.
(09:41):
Doug stated that after Sandy's death, his employer, the Maryland
State Police, opened an internal investigation on his relationship with
the team. He said he was polygraphed to determine if
his actions violated the agency's code of conduct. So Doug
was questioned back then, but not by Prince George's County
(10:01):
Police who were investigating Sandy's unnatural death. Rather, he had
to answer to his employer, who probably learned of the
improper relationship from Detective Sachelski. All of this it happened
behind the Bill's back. Joanne, Sandy's mom, was never informed
about this investigation, despite the fact that she called the
(10:23):
state police looking for Doug and expressed her concerns about
the relationship. I want to know what else they learned
from him, and I'm sure it's stuff they didn't want
me to know because it was going to hurt my feelings.
In Kim's eyes, Doug had always existed in this protected bubble, untouchable,
(10:45):
living above the law. Now learning that he hadn't completely
evaded scrutiny that he was compelled to explain his relationship
with Sandy on his front law no less, it left
her feeling elated. To be clear, Kim didn't believe that
Doug told the whole truth, and she had so many
(11:06):
more questions for him, but it felt like a small
victory that he had acknowledged and confirmed his relationship with Sandy,
because this was something I had tried to get him
to do to no avail. Doug never responded to my
many letters and emails, even though I have an email
tracker and I could tell that someone had read my
(11:27):
messages often many times soon after I sent them. But
Doug wasn't able to ignore a detective on his doorstep,
and so four decades after Sandy's death, he was forced
to remember her. The cold case detectives never explained to
(11:50):
him why they visited Doug, And I can't say for
sure because Prince George's County police declined to make anyone
available for an interview. But my instinct just not that
they suspected Doug of murder, but that they wanted to
show the bills that they've done something, because despite the
recent visit to Doug's house, the PG County Police Department
(12:12):
was still convinced that Sandy died by suicide. He stated
that they believed that there was no foul play, that
no further investigation needed to be done, and they didn't
need to investigate anything further because they felt there was
nothing criminal in nature. Bernie told her that based on
the forensic evidence at the scene of Sandy's death, it
(12:32):
was indisputable that she died by suicide. But Kim had
seen all the same evidence as Bernie and had come
to a dramatically different conclusion. And we're going back and
forth arguing, and he's like no, and so I pull
out all my notes and I put them out there.
For years, Kim had been compiling what she believed were
(12:52):
the most compelling pieces of evidence that cast doubt on
the theory of suicide. Now Kim went over each point
one by one. There was the gun discovered without any fingerprints.
There was the cardboard found under Sandy's tires, which indicated
to Kim that Sandy was trying to leave. There was
(13:13):
the fact that Sandy's body was discovered so close to
her boyfriend's place of work, and yet he was not
interviewed by Prince George's County Police as part of the
death investigation. There was the sperm inside sandy, sperm which
could now be tested for DNA and could potentially solve
the question of who was last with Sandy. But most importantly,
(13:36):
there was this strange location of the gunshot wound. Why
would Sandy, who was left handed, reach across her body
to shoot herself in the right side. So we get
into the trajectory part, and I told him that I
didn't understand how one could shoot themselves in the manner
that you're saying, and if she had in fact committed suicide,
(13:58):
and he goes, she was she was shot in the stomach.
I'm like no. Ever since I met Kim, she has
described the bullet as having penetrated Sandy's right side and
exited through the left side of her back. Kim is
not wrong, but when you look at the evidence a
little more closely, a more nuanced picture emerges. According to
(14:19):
the autopsy report, the entrance wound was in Sandy's abdomen
less than three inches to the right of her midline,
not in her flank as Kim had described it. It's
a slight difference, but an important distinction when it comes
to visualizing how someone would inflict such an injury. To
be told that she was mistaken about the location of
(14:41):
the entrance wound, even by a small distance, was genuinely
confusing for Kim. And she and I said, but she
couldn't have. Possibly, she couldn't have. She couldn't be contortionist
and do this. And he's like him. She took the gun,
she braced it on the steering wheel, and she used
(15:03):
her thumbs, and she she put it to her stomach
because it was a direct shot to the stomach. It
went through right here, and it came right out the
back behind her, her back. The trajectory of the bullet
had never been explained to him in this way. Instead
of traveling from right to left, Bernie showed Kim that
(15:23):
the path of the bullet really moved from front to back.
There was a deviation of about five inches, but that
could be accounted for by the angle of Sandy's body
or the angle of the gun, or a combination of
the two. And he says, um, but there was gunpowder
on the steering wheel. And I'm like what. And it
was kind of like this thing came at me where
(15:45):
all of a sudden things were becoming clear. And I'm like,
what do you mean there was gunpowder on the steering
wheel And he goes, yes, there was a spray of
gunpowder on her hands, the gun on the on the
steering wheel and forward. And I'm like, oh god. Kim
had never heard about gunpowder being on the steering wheel
of Sandy's car. The detail wasn't in the police report,
(16:08):
and no one had ever mentioned it to her before,
but now she imagined it. What he said was that's
how it got in her hands, that everything goes backwards,
that this the gunpowder sprays back. That's what they said.
And I don't know in anything about it. But as
he's telling me this, my whole body's I went, oh God,
(16:28):
this is you know. It was the first time I
was able to see that it's a possibility. And I
just was like, I started crying, and I we only
had masks on, so all I could see was his eyes,
and his eyes were watering up too. At that moment,
(16:50):
Kim's certainty in the facts that she had been repeating
for so many years started to break apart. It was
a disorienting and destabilizing feel line. She was able to
glimpse an alternative version of events for Sandy's death that
made just as much sense as the one she had
believed for so long. After Kim and her sister left
(17:18):
the meeting, they drove immediately to the pollard where Sandy
had died. They sat in the car, their heads buzzing
with the information that just received, and it was here
that Kim's sister began talking. We went straight from there
to the Pepco utility yard to just kinda like debrief
and and chill and look um, and she just got
(17:41):
very sad. She's like, I wish that I just knew.
I wish that I could have just told her that
this two she'll pass and this doesn't have to be.
But I know exactly what she was going through if
she was sitting in that car by herself. Kim's sister
confided that she had been in Sandy's position before. She
had too, had thought of suicide a number of times
(18:02):
during her life. Kim later described this moment to me
as one of the most vulnerable she had ever shared
with her sister. Kim listened to her sister talk while
looking out at the Pollard. She had visited the location
nearly a dozen times as part of her investigation into
Sandy's death, and she had pictured all the ways Sandy
(18:25):
could have died at the hands of another. Now she
saw the scene through her sister's eyes, She's like, Kim,
I can tell you that the desire to commit suicide
is really hard and um, it's not a pleasant place
to be and I know exactly what she was tormented
with at that moment. I was in Spain on vacation
(18:56):
when all of this was happening, and my phone lit
up with a text from Kim. She had gone right
from the Pollard to the airport, and as she waited
for her flight back to Texas, she gulped down a
glass of wine, and she texted me this line quote,
I think she committed suicide. When I read this, I
was stunned. I had told him a lot of information
(19:18):
over the last few months that complicated the story she
believed about Sandy's death. She took it all in stride,
but her confidence in her stance remained strong. Now she
had completely reversed her position, abandoning a belief that had
driven her for so long. This belief, it was a
part of Kim. It dictated how she spent her free time.
(19:41):
It reached into her professional life and informed how she
identified with her clients. It molded her personality. How could
a single meeting change her mind? What could Bernie have
said or done to persuade her? I mean, look, think
(20:03):
about you know yourself and what you believe about this story, right,
or like, what would it take to convince you of
a different narrative? And I think when you think about
it that way, you realize that, you know, getting entrenched
in the system of beliefs is actually shockingly easy. Like
that's what we do as human beings. Steven Sloman is
(20:26):
a professor of cognitive linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University.
He studies how people think. How do you actually change mind?
The traditional way to think about it is that if
you just see enough evidence, then finally you'll change your mind.
(20:46):
I think it's very clear that's false. In fact, in
the literature, there are people who propose what are called
backfire effects. You take people who feel strongly about an issue,
and you show them evidence that's inconcern assistant with their view,
and in some conditions, people come to feel even more
(21:07):
strongly the way they felt before, despite the evidence. If
you bombard someone with information that challenges their beliefs, they're
likely to double down on their original stance. But listen
to them, really listen, and the opposite might happen. Research
shows that people who are genuinely listened to feel safer
(21:27):
in the conversation and experience less anxiety. As a result,
they're less defensive and better at seeing both sides of
an argument, and they walk away from the conversation with
a more nuanced perspective. But if we're talking about how
to approach an individual to change their minds, well, the
first thing you do is you acknowledge where that person
(21:53):
is coming from. Right, You don't have to agree with it,
but you have to give the person a sense that
you understand and them, and you understand their values. Right,
if you can acknowledge their most sacred values first, that's
a really good entryway. Then the person feels respected and
feels like they're talking to someone who understands them. So
(22:18):
that's step one. Hearing this, it sounded almost exactly like
what Bernie did. Kim told me how he acknowledged that
PG County police had mistreated Sandy and how wrong it was.
He didn't try to minimize it or shrug it off
as every other police officer had in the years. Kim
(22:38):
had been asking questions. Step two is not to enforce
your own view on the person. What you have to
do is sort of elicit. You have to be kind
of platonic about it. That is, you have to elicit
that person's perspective and then start asking them questions so
(23:00):
that they can see themselves where the inconsistencies are in
their story. And then if you can fill them in,
you might very slowly gradually be able to sort of
turn the corner and allow them to integrate the information
with a different narrative, a new narrative. I thought of
(23:22):
Sandy's gunshot wound. Kim had walked into the meeting believing
one thing about its trajectory and was shown gently that
she was mistaken. I wondered if that moment opened the
door to her being able to see other possibilities. Narratives,
you know, have have teeth that sink into all aspects
(23:43):
of our lives, especially when they concerned really important things
like the death of a child. You have all of
this knowledge that's kind of sitting together in this tight
little story, and you have to loosen up the whole thing,
and then when it falls part, it falls apart as
a whole and reshapes as a whole. What Kim experienced
(24:06):
in that meeting with Bernie may best be described as
an epiphany. And I don't think it was the individual
revelation of gunpowder on the steering wheel that triggered this change.
I think it has a lot more to do with
how she was treated during the meeting and what Bernie
was able to offer her recognition, acknowledgement, a sympathetic ear
(24:29):
I was heard, and I was disarmed with his empathy
and his um compassion. I just I mean, I I
just was blown away, and then I don't know, for
whatever reason, maybe it was his demeanor and the way
he was presenting it opposed to how it was presented
(24:50):
in the past. Kim's previous experience with Prince George's County
police was dotted with contentious interactions, instances where she was
brush off or treated as a nuisance. All the things
she had found suspicious, Sandy's address books, the ride alongs,
her close connections to local police officers were dismissed as insignificant,
(25:13):
and Kim was made to feel as if she was
losing it seeing things that weren't there. For the first time,
a PG County police officer acknowledged that she was justified
in her suspicions. Sandy's involvement with police was relevant, it
did matter, and Bernie went so far as to say
that it may have contributed to Sandy's decision to take
(25:35):
her own life. So I was focused on these eyes,
and his eyes were just kind and he cared, and
it was like he could see the pain and he
could even I mean, he he felt the pain. He
wasn't in tears, but he just had those eyes and
they were so compassionate that it was there was a
(25:58):
connection of you really gotta get it was like, you
really have to believe me. It was like he was
almost begging me, you know, almost get yourself out of
this misery that you're in, because it's just the truth.
When Kim texted me, quote, I think she committed suicide,
(26:22):
it was a bold statement, and in our following conversation
she sounded confident that she now knew the truth, but
letting go of a core belief after all those years.
It's not a linear process. There were days, minutes, hours
where her suspicions resurfaced and her doubts rushed back in,
only to later subside like a pendulum swinging back and forth.
(26:46):
She texted me about the experience, quote, I find myself
shifting often from knowing she was killed and grieving how
much she was really hurting. Kim was undergoing the painstaking
process of rebuilding her understanding of Sandy's death after her
tightly wand belief had started to unravel. I'm still struggling
(27:09):
with the transition of changing the words from killed too,
took her life or whatever that's different, because it does
I still have that resistance in my head to it.
I don't want to believe that that's the truth, but
I do know that what she was facing was really horrible.
(27:31):
How do you feel about like letting some of that
stuff go? I feel like I let her down, but
I feel like a fool that I still have questions. UM,
I feel like I wasted your time, and I feel
like I wasted the Beal's time because it just felt
like a why did you make this into something that
it wasn't. I don't know. That's what I've been struggling with.
(27:57):
After Kim flew home to Texas, she knew she had
to tell the rest of the bills what she now
believed about Sandy's death, but she didn't want to do
it over the phone. She couldn't bear the thought of
having four individual conversations where she tried to put into
words what had happened during her meeting with Bernie, and
so she packed her bags once again and booked a
(28:18):
flight to Maine. Before leaving, she penned an email to
Bernie to say thank you. He rolled back right away.
Here's Kim reading some of his email. And as I
said before, I'm very sorry about what happened to Sandy.
She was put through far too much by people who
should have known better and whom she trusted and looked
(28:39):
up to. It is shameful and it's caused a young
lady with a promising future to die at a very
young age. I hope that answered your question satisfactory, and
please don't hesitate to let me know if you have
any other questions. Have a safe trip. What happened on
that trip is on our next and final episode. We've
(29:00):
come along way with this, but you, Doug and Doug
and so in my mind, I think we've come to
the end of the row when the lads are dropped.
What Happened To Sandy Beale is hosted by me Melissa Jolson.
(29:24):
It's written and produced by me and Katrina Norvell. The
podcast is edited by a Bousafar, sound designed by Aaron Kaufman.
Jason English is our executive producer. Research and production assistance
by Marissa Brown. To find out more about my investigation,
follow me on Twitter at quasimato. That's qu a s
(29:44):
I am a d oh. Thanks so much for listening.
Before we begin, Please note this series includes talk of
suicide and sexual violence. Please take care while listening. So
I had to be at a friend's house in Annapolis
at six and it was three, and I'm like, I
got time, and I have an address, so I'm going
to go to the house then that I could say hello,
(00:21):
Douglass's house, right. Kim has never forgotten about Doug, the
married state trooper who was in a relationship with Sandy
before her death. In fact, she has amassed an impressive
file on him. She's paid for background checks on his name,
studied his wife's Facebook page, research the properties the couple own.
(00:45):
She even went to the trouble of requesting Doug's training
records from the State Police. And she's done all this
because of her suspicion that Doug knows why Sandy was
in the pollard that night. She thinks he might have
been with her because in the months before Sandy's death,
they had an intimate relationship, one that led, according to
(01:07):
Sandy's writings, to a pregnancy and an abortion, and on
the night of her death, Sandy was dressed up like
she was meeting someone for a date. The medical examiner
found quote numerous well preserved spermatozoa inside her body, and
the location of Sandy's death the Pollard. It was a
(01:28):
local cop hangout a mile from where Doug worked. In
the car with Sandy was a letter for him. As
much as Kim has wanted answers from Doug, she has
always been too afraid to reach out to him directly,
worried about how he might react to her meddling. But
(01:50):
on her last trip to Maryland, she decided to pay
him a visit. So I'm driving down this little cul
de sac and I'm thinking, you know nothing, I'm not
nervous or anything, and so I keep going and there's
this little dinky road because I see a house out
in the woods. So I've already gone down this wooded path.
(02:14):
I'm driving down this road, and my brain must have
registered the sign that said video surveillance stapled to a
tree trunk was a sign that warned visitors they were
being recorded. And then all of a sudden, I see
his house. I trust my instincts and I just hit
my brakes some now because now I'm like, I'm going
(02:36):
deeper into the woods and it's getting a little creepier,
and um, so I stopped and I start thinking, Okay,
I'm getting I'm like taking a little bit too much risk.
I'm going to back out. So I back out and
leaving my Heart's like race in. Kim left without making
contact with Doug. Her courage had only taken her so far.
(03:01):
What Kim didn't know at the time was that Doug
had recently had another unexpected visitor. Just a few days earlier,
a Prince George's County Police detective showed up on Doug's
doorstep asking questions about Sandy. From My Heart Radio, I'm
Melissa Jelson, and this is what happened to Sandy beale
(03:24):
An I Heart Original podcast, Chapter seven, The Unraveling. I'll
come back to Doug later, but first I want to
(03:45):
explain why Kim was in Maryland. To begin with. She
had been invited to meet with a cold case detective
Bernie Nelson at the Prince George's County Police headquarters in Forestville.
Kim had never met Bernie before, but had known of
him since two thousand and six. He's the one who
answered her call when she first tried to get the
(04:06):
police report, and he's also the one in who actually
tracked it down going to Detective Sachelski's house to physically
retrieve it. I mean, I've heard this man's name since
two thousand and six and it's so that was kind
of exciting that I was going to finally meet him.
(04:27):
He could have just blown me off that he did.
And so, on a brisk morning in October, Bernie and
Kim finally met in person, wearing masks. Due to the
coronavirus pandemic. Kim wasn't permitted to record their conversation, but
she invited her sister along and she took diligent notes.
(04:48):
I've used these contemporaneous notes, interviews with Kim, and written
responses from PG County to create this account of the meeting.
So this is eleven o'clock on Monday morning, and he
guess he asks, so how did all this podcast stuff happen?
And uh so he was very interested, and UM I
(05:10):
encouraged him and like, I really think it's in your
best interest to allow them to interview you. Because he's stating,
he goes, well, we don't think that we should have
to do it because we've done our due diligence and
we've done everything that we can and the powers to
be believed. There's nothing else that we can do, And
I'm like, what, how can how can you say you've
done everything? I've got all these questions, and we've had
(05:31):
questions for years. Kim was excited, but nervous. A previous
meeting with the state police years ago had left him
feeling intimidated. She brought with her a list of questions
for Bernie so that she wouldn't forget what she wanted
to say. And this guy was calm and and was
(05:54):
wanting to educate me on his part on how they
saw it. Bernie told her that the department had coal
cases and very hugh staff to work them all, but
he had taken the time to get familiar with Sandy's case.
He knew, for instance, about the ride along notations in
Sandy's calendar, the names and numbers of local police officers
(06:18):
in her address books. Kim told Bernie what she thought
that a number of cops had taken advantage of Sandy
pursuing inappropriate sexual relationships with the teen, and to her surprise,
he didn't dispute it. He agreed that at the time
seventy seven, the climate was not there for females to
be police officers, and they didn't want her, They did
(06:41):
not want females to be there. He agreed that all
these officers were inappropriate. None of their behaviors were was becoming,
and today they would have all been terminated, or at
least they should have been in his opinion, and Nelson's
going on, don't condone any o their behavior. He was
disgusted as we were talking, and I just was floored
(07:02):
that he was being so accountable. Bernie told Kim that
he understood why the Beal family was so suspicious of
PG County Police given the circumstances, and he came across
a sincere to him and he's like, I understand why
you guys doubt everything. He also credited him with the
amount of stuff she'd been able to dig up on
(07:23):
her own, acknowledging her fierce commitment to the case. He said,
you've done your homework. He said, you did a good
job with this, And he's like, that's another reason that
I wanted to follow through, because I knew you're not
gonna let me go here. While Bernie was telling him
all of this, there was another cop in the room,
(07:46):
Detective McDonald. He remained fairly quiet throughout the meeting, Kim
didn't even know why he was there until he started
telling her about his recent visit to Doug's house. Just
days earlier, Detective McDonald had surprised the retired state trooper
at his home and questioned him about his involvement with Sandy.
(08:10):
I was able to confirm with PG County Police that
this visit took place, so um McDonald called him outside
the house and he said we I questioned him for
an hour and a half. An hour and a half,
that's a long time to visit with somebody, according to McDonald.
Doug admitted that he'd had a relationship with Sandy, but
he downplayed its significance. He said he did not know
(08:32):
she was pregnant. He did not know she had an abortion.
He didn't pay for any any abortion. Doug confirmed that
the Pollard where Sandy was found dead was a local
hangout for state troopers and a place Sandy had gone before.
The Bills, including Kim, had suspected this for years. He
told McDonald that Pepco Utility yard was the common spot
(08:55):
for Maryland State Police that gathered and it was called
don't know what that means, but the spot was called.
He said, girls, including Sandy, would come and socialize with
the cops. He said it was kind of like a
groupie thing, like they followed a band, and that the
cops would just s gather there. But that was the
extent of the information Doug would share about Sandy. He
(09:18):
denied being in the pollard the night of Sandy's death
or having anything to do with it. He said he
had not been in the pollard that evening. He said,
I didn't know that she was dead until my supervisor
brought me in a few days later. He said, my
supervisor reported to me, and then I was questioned That
Maryland State Police did interview him made him do a polygraph.
(09:41):
Doug stated that after Sandy's death, his employer, the Maryland
State Police, opened an internal investigation on his relationship with
the team. He said he was polygraphed to determine if
his actions violated the agency's code of conduct. So Doug
was questioned back then, but not by Prince George's County
(10:01):
Police who were investigating Sandy's unnatural death. Rather, he had
to answer to his employer, who probably learned of the
improper relationship from Detective Sachelski. All of this it happened
behind the Bill's back. Joanne, Sandy's mom, was never informed
about this investigation, despite the fact that she called the
(10:23):
state police looking for Doug and expressed her concerns about
the relationship. I want to know what else they learned
from him, and I'm sure it's stuff they didn't want
me to know because it was going to hurt my feelings.
In Kim's eyes, Doug had always existed in this protected bubble, untouchable,
(10:45):
living above the law. Now learning that he hadn't completely
evaded scrutiny that he was compelled to explain his relationship
with Sandy on his front law no less, it left
her feeling elated. To be clear, Kim didn't believe that
Doug told the whole truth, and she had so many
(11:06):
more questions for him, but it felt like a small
victory that he had acknowledged and confirmed his relationship with Sandy,
because this was something I had tried to get him
to do to no avail. Doug never responded to my
many letters and emails, even though I have an email
tracker and I could tell that someone had read my
(11:27):
messages often many times soon after I sent them. But
Doug wasn't able to ignore a detective on his doorstep,
and so four decades after Sandy's death, he was forced
to remember her. The cold case detectives never explained to
(11:50):
him why they visited Doug, And I can't say for
sure because Prince George's County police declined to make anyone
available for an interview. But my instinct just not that
they suspected Doug of murder, but that they wanted to
show the bills that they've done something, because despite the
recent visit to Doug's house, the PG County Police Department
(12:12):
was still convinced that Sandy died by suicide. He stated
that they believed that there was no foul play, that
no further investigation needed to be done, and they didn't
need to investigate anything further because they felt there was
nothing criminal in nature. Bernie told her that based on
the forensic evidence at the scene of Sandy's death, it
(12:32):
was indisputable that she died by suicide. But Kim had
seen all the same evidence as Bernie and had come
to a dramatically different conclusion. And we're going back and
forth arguing, and he's like no, and so I pull
out all my notes and I put them out there.
For years, Kim had been compiling what she believed were
(12:52):
the most compelling pieces of evidence that cast doubt on
the theory of suicide. Now Kim went over each point
one by one. There was the gun discovered without any fingerprints.
There was the cardboard found under Sandy's tires, which indicated
to Kim that Sandy was trying to leave. There was
(13:13):
the fact that Sandy's body was discovered so close to
her boyfriend's place of work, and yet he was not
interviewed by Prince George's County Police as part of the
death investigation. There was the sperm inside sandy, sperm which
could now be tested for DNA and could potentially solve
the question of who was last with Sandy. But most importantly,
(13:36):
there was this strange location of the gunshot wound. Why
would Sandy, who was left handed, reach across her body
to shoot herself in the right side. So we get
into the trajectory part, and I told him that I
didn't understand how one could shoot themselves in the manner
that you're saying, and if she had in fact committed suicide,
(13:58):
and he goes, she was she was shot in the stomach.
I'm like no. Ever since I met Kim, she has
described the bullet as having penetrated Sandy's right side and
exited through the left side of her back. Kim is
not wrong, but when you look at the evidence a
little more closely, a more nuanced picture emerges. According to
(14:19):
the autopsy report, the entrance wound was in Sandy's abdomen
less than three inches to the right of her midline,
not in her flank as Kim had described it. It's
a slight difference, but an important distinction when it comes
to visualizing how someone would inflict such an injury. To
be told that she was mistaken about the location of
(14:41):
the entrance wound, even by a small distance, was genuinely
confusing for Kim. And she and I said, but she
couldn't have. Possibly, she couldn't have. She couldn't be contortionist
and do this. And he's like him. She took the gun,
she braced it on the steering wheel, and she used
(15:03):
her thumbs, and she she put it to her stomach
because it was a direct shot to the stomach. It
went through right here, and it came right out the
back behind her, her back. The trajectory of the bullet
had never been explained to him in this way. Instead
of traveling from right to left, Bernie showed Kim that
(15:23):
the path of the bullet really moved from front to back.
There was a deviation of about five inches, but that
could be accounted for by the angle of Sandy's body
or the angle of the gun, or a combination of
the two. And he says, um, but there was gunpowder
on the steering wheel. And I'm like what. And it
was kind of like this thing came at me where
(15:45):
all of a sudden things were becoming clear. And I'm like,
what do you mean there was gunpowder on the steering
wheel And he goes, yes, there was a spray of
gunpowder on her hands, the gun on the on the
steering wheel and forward. And I'm like, oh god. Kim
had never heard about gunpowder being on the steering wheel
of Sandy's car. The detail wasn't in the police report,
(16:08):
and no one had ever mentioned it to her before,
but now she imagined it. What he said was that's
how it got in her hands, that everything goes backwards,
that this the gunpowder sprays back. That's what they said.
And I don't know in anything about it. But as
he's telling me this, my whole body's I went, oh God,
(16:28):
this is you know. It was the first time I
was able to see that it's a possibility. And I
just was like, I started crying, and I we only
had masks on, so all I could see was his eyes,
and his eyes were watering up too. At that moment,
(16:50):
Kim's certainty in the facts that she had been repeating
for so many years started to break apart. It was
a disorienting and destabilizing feel line. She was able to
glimpse an alternative version of events for Sandy's death that
made just as much sense as the one she had
believed for so long. After Kim and her sister left
(17:18):
the meeting, they drove immediately to the pollard where Sandy
had died. They sat in the car, their heads buzzing
with the information that just received, and it was here
that Kim's sister began talking. We went straight from there
to the Pepco utility yard to just kinda like debrief
and and chill and look um, and she just got
(17:41):
very sad. She's like, I wish that I just knew.
I wish that I could have just told her that
this two she'll pass and this doesn't have to be.
But I know exactly what she was going through if
she was sitting in that car by herself. Kim's sister
confided that she had been in Sandy's position before. She
had too, had thought of suicide a number of times
(18:02):
during her life. Kim later described this moment to me
as one of the most vulnerable she had ever shared
with her sister. Kim listened to her sister talk while
looking out at the Pollard. She had visited the location
nearly a dozen times as part of her investigation into
Sandy's death, and she had pictured all the ways Sandy
(18:25):
could have died at the hands of another. Now she
saw the scene through her sister's eyes, She's like, Kim,
I can tell you that the desire to commit suicide
is really hard and um, it's not a pleasant place
to be and I know exactly what she was tormented
with at that moment. I was in Spain on vacation
(18:56):
when all of this was happening, and my phone lit
up with a text from Kim. She had gone right
from the Pollard to the airport, and as she waited
for her flight back to Texas, she gulped down a
glass of wine, and she texted me this line quote,
I think she committed suicide. When I read this, I
was stunned. I had told him a lot of information
(19:18):
over the last few months that complicated the story she
believed about Sandy's death. She took it all in stride,
but her confidence in her stance remained strong. Now she
had completely reversed her position, abandoning a belief that had
driven her for so long. This belief, it was a
part of Kim. It dictated how she spent her free time.
(19:41):
It reached into her professional life and informed how she
identified with her clients. It molded her personality. How could
a single meeting change her mind? What could Bernie have
said or done to persuade her? I mean, look, think
(20:03):
about you know yourself and what you believe about this story, right,
or like, what would it take to convince you of
a different narrative? And I think when you think about
it that way, you realize that, you know, getting entrenched
in the system of beliefs is actually shockingly easy. Like
that's what we do as human beings. Steven Sloman is
(20:26):
a professor of cognitive linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University.
He studies how people think. How do you actually change mind?
The traditional way to think about it is that if
you just see enough evidence, then finally you'll change your mind.
(20:46):
I think it's very clear that's false. In fact, in
the literature, there are people who propose what are called
backfire effects. You take people who feel strongly about an issue,
and you show them evidence that's inconcern assistant with their view,
and in some conditions, people come to feel even more
(21:07):
strongly the way they felt before, despite the evidence. If
you bombard someone with information that challenges their beliefs, they're
likely to double down on their original stance. But listen
to them, really listen, and the opposite might happen. Research
shows that people who are genuinely listened to feel safer
(21:27):
in the conversation and experience less anxiety. As a result,
they're less defensive and better at seeing both sides of
an argument, and they walk away from the conversation with
a more nuanced perspective. But if we're talking about how
to approach an individual to change their minds, well, the
first thing you do is you acknowledge where that person
(21:53):
is coming from. Right, You don't have to agree with it,
but you have to give the person a sense that
you understand and them, and you understand their values. Right,
if you can acknowledge their most sacred values first, that's
a really good entryway. Then the person feels respected and
feels like they're talking to someone who understands them. So
(22:18):
that's step one. Hearing this, it sounded almost exactly like
what Bernie did. Kim told me how he acknowledged that
PG County police had mistreated Sandy and how wrong it was.
He didn't try to minimize it or shrug it off
as every other police officer had in the years. Kim
(22:38):
had been asking questions. Step two is not to enforce
your own view on the person. What you have to
do is sort of elicit. You have to be kind
of platonic about it. That is, you have to elicit
that person's perspective and then start asking them questions so
(23:00):
that they can see themselves where the inconsistencies are in
their story. And then if you can fill them in,
you might very slowly gradually be able to sort of
turn the corner and allow them to integrate the information
with a different narrative, a new narrative. I thought of
(23:22):
Sandy's gunshot wound. Kim had walked into the meeting believing
one thing about its trajectory and was shown gently that
she was mistaken. I wondered if that moment opened the
door to her being able to see other possibilities. Narratives,
you know, have have teeth that sink into all aspects
(23:43):
of our lives, especially when they concerned really important things
like the death of a child. You have all of
this knowledge that's kind of sitting together in this tight
little story, and you have to loosen up the whole thing,
and then when it falls part, it falls apart as
a whole and reshapes as a whole. What Kim experienced
(24:06):
in that meeting with Bernie may best be described as
an epiphany. And I don't think it was the individual
revelation of gunpowder on the steering wheel that triggered this change.
I think it has a lot more to do with
how she was treated during the meeting and what Bernie
was able to offer her recognition, acknowledgement, a sympathetic ear
(24:29):
I was heard, and I was disarmed with his empathy
and his um compassion. I just I mean, I I
just was blown away, and then I don't know, for
whatever reason, maybe it was his demeanor and the way
he was presenting it opposed to how it was presented
(24:50):
in the past. Kim's previous experience with Prince George's County
police was dotted with contentious interactions, instances where she was
brush off or treated as a nuisance. All the things
she had found suspicious, Sandy's address books, the ride alongs,
her close connections to local police officers were dismissed as insignificant,
(25:13):
and Kim was made to feel as if she was
losing it seeing things that weren't there. For the first time,
a PG County police officer acknowledged that she was justified
in her suspicions. Sandy's involvement with police was relevant, it
did matter, and Bernie went so far as to say
that it may have contributed to Sandy's decision to take
(25:35):
her own life. So I was focused on these eyes,
and his eyes were just kind and he cared, and
it was like he could see the pain and he
could even I mean, he he felt the pain. He
wasn't in tears, but he just had those eyes and
they were so compassionate that it was there was a
(25:58):
connection of you really gotta get it was like, you
really have to believe me. It was like he was
almost begging me, you know, almost get yourself out of
this misery that you're in, because it's just the truth.
When Kim texted me, quote, I think she committed suicide,
(26:22):
it was a bold statement, and in our following conversation
she sounded confident that she now knew the truth, but
letting go of a core belief after all those years.
It's not a linear process. There were days, minutes, hours
where her suspicions resurfaced and her doubts rushed back in,
only to later subside like a pendulum swinging back and forth.
(26:46):
She texted me about the experience, quote, I find myself
shifting often from knowing she was killed and grieving how
much she was really hurting. Kim was undergoing the painstaking
process of rebuilding her understanding of Sandy's death after her
tightly wand belief had started to unravel. I'm still struggling
(27:09):
with the transition of changing the words from killed too,
took her life or whatever that's different, because it does
I still have that resistance in my head to it.
I don't want to believe that that's the truth, but
I do know that what she was facing was really horrible.
(27:31):
How do you feel about like letting some of that
stuff go? I feel like I let her down, but
I feel like a fool that I still have questions. UM,
I feel like I wasted your time, and I feel
like I wasted the Beal's time because it just felt
like a why did you make this into something that
it wasn't. I don't know. That's what I've been struggling with.
(27:57):
After Kim flew home to Texas, she knew she had
to tell the rest of the bills what she now
believed about Sandy's death, but she didn't want to do
it over the phone. She couldn't bear the thought of
having four individual conversations where she tried to put into
words what had happened during her meeting with Bernie, and
so she packed her bags once again and booked a
(28:18):
flight to Maine. Before leaving, she penned an email to
Bernie to say thank you. He rolled back right away.
Here's Kim reading some of his email. And as I
said before, I'm very sorry about what happened to Sandy.
She was put through far too much by people who
should have known better and whom she trusted and looked
(28:39):
up to. It is shameful and it's caused a young
lady with a promising future to die at a very
young age. I hope that answered your question satisfactory, and
please don't hesitate to let me know if you have
any other questions. Have a safe trip. What happened on
that trip is on our next and final episode. We've
(29:00):
come along way with this, but you, Doug and Doug
and so in my mind, I think we've come to
the end of the row when the lads are dropped.
What Happened To Sandy Beale is hosted by me Melissa Jolson.
(29:24):
It's written and produced by me and Katrina Norvell. The
podcast is edited by a Bousafar, sound designed by Aaron Kaufman.
Jason English is our executive producer. Research and production assistance
by Marissa Brown. To find out more about my investigation,
follow me on Twitter at quasimato. That's qu a s
(29:44):
I am a d oh. Thanks so much for listening.
Host
Melissa Jeltsen
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