September 30, 2024 • 51 mins
I’ve said this many times: unsolved cases frustrate me. I need a solution, or a conclusion. But cold cases are so important: and my next guest wants to talk about missing women…several that are more than 100 years old. And she can use our help. Author Kathleen Brunelle tells me about her book called: She’s Gone: Five Mysterious Twentieth- Century Cold Cases.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Often we take of people as victims, but these women
were so strong and yet they disappeared. They too let
their guard down.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:48):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublish details behind their stories. I've said this many times.
Unsolved cases frustrate me. I need a solution or a conclusion.
(01:10):
But cold cases are so important. And my next guest
wants to talk about missing women one case that is
more than one hundred years old and she can use
our help. Author Kathleen Brunel tells me about her book
called She's Gone Five Mysterious twentieth century cold cases. So
(01:32):
you have these five cases of five missing women, and
we know it is very difficult to prosecute a case
with no body because there's of course the argument. And
I would say, particularly with the exception of maybe your
nineteen seventy seven case, that these are people who could
pick up and leave and it would be very hard
to trace them. Otherwise, why pick women who have gone
(01:56):
missing versus women who have been murdered? What intrigues you
about this idea?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
What intrigued me about this idea is when I found
the first case, which was Anna's case. I was very
intrigued by this because Anna, when she went missing, her
husband told everybody that she ran away because she did
not want to have a family anymore. She didn't want
to be a mother anymore. She wanted to go to cabarets,
(02:24):
and she wanted to have fun, and she didn't want responsibility,
and he really bad mouthed her to the whole community.
I felt that a huge injustice had been done to her.
It'd be really upset. I felt that she had no
more voice and for her. When I started researching her case,
it had been one hundred years since she disappeared, and
(02:45):
I really felt that I want in this book to
give a voice to these women who can no longer
speak for themselves. And I feel that it's really important
to give them that voice, because one of the things
in these cases is that when somebody's been missing and
been missing for a long time, it's almost as if
they just disappear and it doesn't matter anymore. But it
(03:06):
does matter, and they matter, and I want to write
this book to give them a voice and to keep
speaking their names and giving them that voice, and to
note that they're not forgotten and that they are real
people with real lives, and people who often made a
real difference. And so part of writing the book is
just to tell the stories of like these incredible people
(03:29):
and all of the wonderful things that they did, to
not just write about their disappearances, but to write about
their lives.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Victim Forward, we know that's really important, rather than putting
the Killer forward and my other show to fold more Wicked.
You know, we wrapped up a season that was set
in sixteen seventy eight about a potential wrongful conviction, and
a family member from this family of the man who
may or may not have murdered his mother reached out
to me and said, please be open minded. Don't think
(03:57):
that he did it necessarily. We have written to Queen
Elizabeth and said please posthumously exonerate him. Now that she's gone,
we're writing to King Charles. And I just thought, my goodness,
this is three hundred and something years ago and this
family still cares that much. And I encounter that all
the time. So I absolutely agree with you that these
(04:18):
cases deserve closure. And let me ask you, there is
no doubt based on your research with these five cases,
that these are women who did not simply walk away.
That something must have happened to them to stop them
from returning to their family or to their friends.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yes, absolutely, there's lots of little clues and information within
that gave you this sort of information, so that you know,
holidays go by, there's certain things. So then the cases
is for instance, with Agnes two percent, when her briefcase
was found, her sisters knew that was it. That briefcase
(04:55):
was a symbol that she had made it. And so
she carried that briefcase with her every where she went.
And so when they found that briefcase, her sisters knew
that she was born.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
I mean, you know, now with people when they disappear.
You can look at CCTV, you can look at credit cards,
you can look at bank statements, you can look at
cell phone records, so many other ways now that police
can say, pretty unlikely this person just walked away from
their life. But in the nineteen eighteen, nineteen twenties and
thirties and forties, it was really easy to kind of
(05:28):
pick up and move somewhere and not and not tell anybody.
And so it's I think you're right, it's those little
clues the context of somebody's life. Knowing that you know
this person is a wonderful mother and would have never
walked away, that must have given the police something to
really think about, unless you're about to tell me that
in these cases the police cared about some and then
(05:50):
didn't care about others.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Well, Agnes two for since she was very lucky because
in a lot of the cases, what's interesting is you know,
you have the family coming in and really fighting for
these women, and sometimes you have the police really fighting
in other cases not so much. With Anna Lakazio, you
know that situation, you really did not have anything happening
(06:12):
in that case for two years, and it wasn't until
the family came in, and then you had her uncle
reaching out for help with Grace Hemistead coming in, who
is if anyone who read the book, missus Sherlotte Holmes
and I know that you've had that here on your show,
so you know, she actually came in on this case,
(06:33):
and she came in to fight, and the sheriff in
the town basically said, I won't let a woman come
in here and tell me how to do my job.
You know what I'm going to do. So that was
very interesting because at that point he did not have
one slip of paper regarding Anna's disappearance, and that's two
years on in her disappearance, nor had it figured in
(06:53):
the newspaper. Nothing, There was nothing on her disappearance. It
was as if she was just gone and they just
moved on. So that was just a very upsetting case.
And that's the first case I came across. So it
was just a very upsetting case until her uncle got
involved and started demanding answers, whereas on a supercent's case,
(07:15):
she had four sisters who were demanding answers and her
husband he called them the four Furies. He did not
like it very much, but they were not going to
relent at all. So they did everything they possibly could.
But even in the face of that, they could not
(07:38):
They couldn't get him, you know, they couldn't. But they tried,
they really really tried.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Well, let's get into the story. So this is nineteen eighteen,
and this is Anna Laicassio. And you said that she's
a mother of a married mother of four. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Yep, she's married, mother of four. She married when she
was fifteen years old.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
So she married Franklcazio and he was older at the time.
They married in New York and they settled after having
three children, they settled in Richfield Park, New Jersey. He
was a barber and they settled in a barbershop which
had the shop on one side and had their house
(08:20):
on the other side, so that you know, she took
care of the children and he took care of the shop.
And this, you know, they had this arrangement and this
worked well, and then they had their fourth child there
in New Jersey. One of the things I think happened
was that she was so young when she got married.
You know that after she had her children, she was
looking for some freedom and her family was back in
(08:40):
New York. Her sister worked in the Shirtwais factories, and
Anna wanted to work too. She wanted to get out
of the house, and by the time her youngest was five,
you know, she wanted a little more freedom, and so
she started working with her sister in New York, so
she would take the train out to work.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
What's the dynamic before where this happens between Frank and Anna?
Do we see hints of violence or I mean, I
know there's controlling, but in nineteen eighteen, do we see
any sort of violent tendencies or anything.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
The neighbors do say there's a lot of fighting going on.
So this was the case that was interesting for me
because there wasn't a lot of information and in the
papers for me, and that's where you know, I was looking.
So I got most of the information at the trial
and from genealogy records as bus as I could going
(09:34):
in and so what I found is out there was
a lot of fighting between them. And as you say,
this is where I'm trying to try to look at
it from Frank's perspective and the fact that it's a
really interesting dynamic to me that here you have this
woman who marries at fifteen, and Frank is a little
older at the time, in his twenties, and you know,
(09:56):
Frank's established in her job, and he's ready to have
his family and they you know, they move to this
small town and he's ready to do the family thing.
And she I think that fifteen is thinking that's attractive
to her at the time because she can get out
of her big family home and start her life, and
that looks good to her at the time probably, But
(10:19):
then after four children so fast, and she's just a
teenager herself, and now she's in her twenties, and I
think she's just starting to think like, oh, I can
live my life and I want to have a good time,
and he's think, no, that looks like that's not what
I want. And so that's where I think they start
to come to odds, you know, and they start to
(10:40):
have a tough time understanding one another at that point.
And so they're having trouble surely in the marriage at
that point, and a difficult time understanding one another. And
in a lot of the cases, I'm finding that that
it's difficult for women, especially in the historic cases. The
older kid, he says that it's difficult for women to
(11:03):
express themselves and to in a time when they're just
learning to express themselves, and that poses a problem. And
there's a point where Frank said that, you know, he
told her you're not going back to work anymore, and
she said, I will do his act please, you know,
and being like that. There's a phrase in one of
(11:23):
my other cases where the husband issuing his wife for
custody of their daughter, and you know, she's an actress,
and he calls her a pretty girl. She has pretty
girl priorities because she's trying to be an actress and
she can't be a mother if she is an actress.
And the judge at the time says, well, I know
(11:43):
many actresses that are good.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Mothers and actually side to a car which I think
is pretty interesting because he's so adamant that she can't
do both and it's the nineteen forties, and that it's
just a very interesting thing to me.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
I write about in one of my books. I mentioned
this one in the show that I Have Bury Bones.
I write about the heartlawm lawsuits. I don't know if
you've run across those where men say to women, I'll
marry you, and I know this is against the rules,
but let's go ahead and have sex because we are
going to get married. And then they have sex, and
then he says his engagements off, and they were allowed.
(12:19):
Women could sue, and they got a lot of money
because then you've got your talking about the other side.
We're talking about sort of like women sexuality and liberation,
and as we're approaching the twenties, a little more open mindedness.
But at the same time, that's sort of understanding the
value of a woman's virtue and the expectation in this
time period that that is, her value is in that
(12:43):
and when a man comes and quote unquote ruins her
before marriage, her value has plummeted and she is now
legally able to go to the courts and demand money
from him for ruining her. So I feel like we're
straddling in this time period a little bit two different
worlds of sort of that can mentional wear a corset
and have a chaperone with you, versus sort of women becoming,
(13:05):
especially with the war, able to embrace more independence and
more work and all of that.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Yes, absolutely absolutely, they had a neighbor upstairs who was
a little bit of a busy body.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Thank goodness, those busy bodies are the ones who make
these stories good sometimes, aren't they?
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yes, yes, And she noted that Anna I was spending
some time at the Cargarets on her way home when
she was supposed to be still sort of at work.
And you know, Frank had made dinner by that point
with the kids, and so one night he went and
he checked on her, and sure enough, she was a
saloon down the street, and he didn't let her know
(13:47):
that he saw her. He asked her where she had been,
and she said, oh, she had missed the train and
she had to walk or well, this is all according
to Frank, because we don't have Anna's word for any
of this. This all came out at trial later, and
so he became increasingly upset by this, and he decided
he didn't want her to go to work anymore because
when she went to work, well, she could go anywhere
(14:09):
on the way home and he wouldn't know where she
was or what was going on. And so they started
fighting about her going to work. This is nineteen eighteen,
and so war is raging and the Red Cross is
looking for nurses because a lot of the established nurses
are overseas, and so they're looking for volunteer nurses, and
there were ads in the local paper in her town,
(14:31):
you know, looking for women to come up and train.
And his mother thought that that would be a good
idea for Anna to do something like that, and her
sister Katie thought so as well, and Anna wanted to
and she brought this up again. According to Frank, Anna
had brought this up, and so she decided that she
she wanted to do this, and Frank again thought this
(14:51):
was not a good idea, and she did not want
her to do this. He wanted her to stay home
with the children. Apparently they thought about these things on
the night in question when they had this screaming match
the night she disappeared. A few days prior to the argument,
Anna had come home from work. They had fought, and
(15:13):
Anna ended up not going to work the next day,
the children said because she had so. Her oldest at
the time was ten, a girl, and the child below
that was eight, and the other two were much younger.
And so those girls testified, and what they said was
that their mother was thick and so she couldn't go
(15:33):
to work, and that their father had taken their mother
in a taxi to the hospital. She did not go
back to work for a few days now. One of
the girls said she thought it had been two weeks,
but the other said she thought it was a few days.
So they don't know. They're testifying two years later, and
they're young. She doesn't go back to work until the
(15:55):
day she disappears. She comes home that night, Frank has
dinner waiting. He says she sits down to dinner, but
she doesn't eat, and that he hears her tell the children,
this will be the last night that you ever see me.
Then the two they put the children to bed, She does,
and they go into their bedroom. She tells him that
(16:15):
she doesn't want the house anymore, she doesn't want the
children anymore, she doesn't want to be a wife anymore,
that she wants to go, that he needs to let
her go. She tried to leave the room, and that
he physically barred the door. The lawyer asked him, how
long did you bar the door? He said for a
couple of hours. That's what he testified, and he said
(16:39):
that she bit his finger. One of the girls corroborated
that she saw her mother bite her father's finger as
she was trying to get out of the room. Then
the girls testified that they heard their mother's scream, like
a really horrible scream that woke them, so they came
(16:59):
to the room. This is the scream that neighbors heard
and that prompted them to call the police. The upstairs neighbor,
Missus Fletcher, who had told Frank before that she saw
his wife at besselone, she heard the scream as well.
It was so loud it woke her and her husband.
They knocked on the floor to see what is going on.
(17:22):
Even came down to knock on the door. Everyone said
that after they heard the scream, there was silence. The
girls testified that they saw their father with his hands
around their mother's neck and that she then like fell
and then he dragged her over to the bed and
he laid her down and faced her head to the wall.
(17:44):
It said, he said that she was sick. The girls
went to bed. When they went into the room the
next morning, she was in the same clothes she was
in the night before. She was in the same position
as the night before, and she was looking in the
same direction as the night before. And they asked, did
you speak to her? No, why didn't you speak to her?
(18:04):
Was afraid to disturb her.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Were there any other suspects from the police's point of
view once they found out, I mean, what led up
to this? Does he report her missing or how does
this work?
Speaker 2 (18:16):
He did not report her missing at first. He told
his upstairs neighbor, Missus Fletcher, who said, what happened last night?
What prompted this argument? Like what's going on? Because she
wanted to know, and he said, like, what you thought
happened happened, basically referring to you know, she was out
of a saloon with other people, and so we were
(18:36):
arguing about that. His brother was living with them at
the time, and his brother said he didn't hear anything
that night. So Drank told his brother we had been
in an argument, and the brother said, well, she was
arguing with Missus Fletcher the night before, saying, stay out
of my husband's and my business. You know, that's my business,
(18:56):
not your business to tell my husband where i'd or
you know whatever. So she had had an argument with
Missus Fletcher. You know. Frank alluded to the fact that
she he thought she was seeing some man at the saloon,
so maybe that had something to do with it. So
later somebody said that they thought they saw Anna with
(19:17):
a man down by the docks. But it turned out
that Frank had given that man who said he saw Anna,
he had given him some wine. Just Frank made wine,
and so they dismissed that as relevant. So no other
than that they did not investigate the case. So there
(19:37):
was no investigation at the local police station into the
case at all. And he did not go to the
police until three days after her disappearance because he said
she ran away, so she hadn't disappeared, she left by
choice in the middle of the night. But he also
(19:58):
he also got rid of the sheets and the mattress
of the bed like that week, saying that there were
bed bugs, like an infestation of bed bugs, and that's
why he had to get rid of them. Lots of
little things like that happened. He did go to her
uncle to tell him what happened, and he was very
afraid to go to her uncle and tell him. He
(20:18):
was nervous around her family because they had some money
and Frank really didn't, and he felt that they felt
they were like higher up than Frank was, and so
he was a little bit nervous around her family. The
father told him and Frank cried on the stand when
he talked about it, that if you don't find my daughter,
(20:38):
then I will be one of the men to kill you.
And so Frank was very nervous about it. But then
apparently Frank said that after a little bit of time,
and his father said, never mind, just go take care
of your children. The children ended up going to an
orphanage and they were there basically until they were old
enough to work, and then they slowly came back to
(21:00):
live with Frank. He eventually sold the house on Paulison
Street and built a new area on Main Street where
he had a thriving business. He lived a good long life.
His son took over the business for him, and he
had you know, children, grandchildren, all of that. He did
(21:21):
get in trouble for selling wine and making wine during prohibition.
During that time. That's when I was able to verify
because this was three years after the trial that he
got in trouble, and the newspaper made a reference to
the fact that still no one had seen Anna at
(21:41):
that point, that she was still missing and no one
had seen her. He never remarried, but no one ever
saw her again, and there was money waiting for her
at her job at the short rates factory, and she
never collected it, and they thought about her going to
join the Red Cross and to work. There's no evidence
(22:02):
of her training for the Red Cross. She never went
to go be with her family, which she argued about
wanting to do, because they were looking for her and
they couldn't find her. There was a fresh patch of
cement in the cellar that missus Fletcher saw because they
showed the cellar, and she wanted to know why that
was there, and she smelled lime, so she wanted to
(22:23):
know what this was all about. And she didn't trust
the local sheriff because she knew nothing was being done
about the case. So she went to the town over
to that police station and she told them about it.
They told their sheriff, who promptly told all the roads
wild self. So Frank tried to sue her for defamation
of counter and she actually stopped talking about the case,
(22:47):
and when they tried to come talk to her, she
said that she wouldn't speak to anybody, so she stopped
talking about the case altogether. So two years later, when
Grace Hemmiston came in, she wanted to dig that cellar
up and she wanted of animals there because one of
the things that was happening in the case, and something
that Grace Humiston was very well known for, is that
(23:07):
Anna's reputation was being called into question, that she was
a bad wife, she was a bad mother, that she
had caused this, and you know, Grace Hemmiston famously in
the Krugel case said no, she's not a bad girl.
She did not cause this. So here Anna's uncle read
about her and wanted her to come, you know, find
(23:28):
Anna and bring those same rules into Anna's case. Now,
whether they dug up this seller, I could not verify.
I don't think they ever did dig up the cellar.
I know that the sheriff would not let them. I
don't believe that she ever did. And we don't really
have papers for her, and I can't find any notes
from her on this case. She did testify in the
(23:50):
trial and she said that Frank would not contribute money
to the case. And in his defense, he said, well,
why would I she left me, Why would I give
money to somebody who loved me? So in his defense,
I'm trying to stay in partial to It's hard to
but I tried to because in some ways he said difficult.
(24:11):
But in other ways try and stay open to him.
So if you look at it from that perspective, if
she did leave him, he says, well, why would I
Why would I put money, you know, to hope in
that sense, you know, I just want to get on
with my life. So so that would make sense in
that in that case. And he said he didn't have
a picture of her to put in the paper, and
that's why he didn't put any in the paper. Her
(24:33):
sister testified, and they said, why didn't you help him
get a picture of your sister, And she said, because
he had plenty of that, you know. And he said
and he said, you're you're mad, and she said no,
she said, dogs get mad. I'm not mad. So she
was very interested, I understand, and his sister.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
So, Frank, if he's responsible, gets away with it.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
And again maybe he had nothing to do with it.
There's a lot of circumstantial evidence, but I think the
jury without a body, yeah, the jury did not feel
comfortable condemning him, especially when he had a good reputation
in town, and it's a small town. It really didn't
feel comfortable condemning him without the evidence of a body
(25:22):
or any emidence.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Well, now, we're going to the other end of the
spectrum in your book to nineteen seventy seven. Tell me
about I mean, we'll just take this chronologically. What we
know if she is a victim, and I think we
believe that this young woman is a victim. Actually she's
a girl, we're saying, a teenager, right, Okay, what do
we need to know about Simone Reniger?
Speaker 2 (25:44):
So Simone was raised Originally she was in Pittsburgh, but
when she was just about five years old, her father
passed away and so her mother, Jane, brought Simone back
to New York, where Jane's parents lived. And at about
that time, across the street, John Ridinger was living with
(26:07):
his daughter Betsy and his wife, and his wife unfortunately
passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage. And so you had
these two widowers living across from one another with young daughters,
and they met and they eventually married, and so the
(26:29):
daughters were only two years apart, Betsy and Simone. John
adopted Simone and Jane adopted Betsy and they became a family.
John joh brought him to Massachusetts to sherborn and that's
where Simone spent one of her teenage years. She was
(26:50):
a very smart girl. She was fluent in French as
a youngster. She's a gifted musician. She played by year.
She loved horseback riding. Spirited girl, very creative. Her mom
was very creative. The girls just had a lot of
fun together. They had a very close bond, these two girls.
(27:11):
And they had the family home on chap Equatic, which
is just off with Edgar Town on Martha's Vineyard. This
home had no it's in the seventies. It didn't have
any running water, electricity, phone, like, none of that, but
like a really fun place. They loved going there. One year,
they spent the entire summer there. They also usually spent
(27:31):
at least two weeks there and they would go sailing
and collecting shells and just reading and puzzles and spending
time with cousins, and you know, they just love to
be there. It's a great place for them. Simone, by
the time she was in high school, Oh, she didn't
really want to be there. She didn't like to go.
Her sister remembers hearing Simone's name over the intercom because
(27:53):
they were calling her for detention because she had skipped school.
But she wasn't there when they were calling her for
She's gidding more detention.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Wow, So she just kind.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Of eventually dropped out all together. By the time she
was a sophomore, she got her own place in Framingham,
which is close to Schadbye, and her mom helped her
pick out her place. She was getting her a Genie
d and she got a job at a local diner
in Native. So these are all kind of like in
close proximity at about this time. This is when John
(28:26):
and Jean they divorced. They're not together anymore, so all
this is going on at about the same time, and
Betty was living with her father.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
What happens to Simone in between being fluent in French
and gifted musician and somebody who seemed to got to
be on the track to maybe staying in school or
accomplishing things, and to all of a sudden it seems
like out of nowhere rebelling and having problems in high school.
(28:56):
Was it the divorce between Jane and John or is
it or anything that you have sorted out about the
switch with this.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Betty just told me that, you know, Simone's just so
smart that traditional school was just not really her thing. Okay,
And she just was such a creative mind, do you
know what I mean? H Like she enjoyed going to
concerts and being creative, and like she still loved all
of that. It's just not in a traditional sense. Yeah,
(29:26):
that's an area that Betsy kind of explained it to me.
This didn't seem to be any kind of break at
all with her personality. This kind of seemed to go
with her personality, like this was kind of who she was.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Did she get along with her folks?
Speaker 2 (29:38):
She did, and she got along with everyone at school.
Betsy said, like she was like the friendliest person at school,
that everyone knew her, everyone liked her, Her teachers loved her.
Like everyone loved her. She said that she was your
friend before you even knew her. That was just who
she was. She was just like incredibly friendly, wonderful, everyone
(30:00):
loved her. This will play into when she disappears, because
it was not uncommon for her to just decide she's
supposed to be one place, but she'll decide, oh, there's
a party, I'll go there, you know, and like it
just was not uncommon for her to do that. So
this is how she's you know, she's she wants to
get herded and start her life instead of going to
(30:21):
traditional school every day. So that was just like very
in keeping with her character, like with who she was.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
What about boyfriends.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
She had a boyfriend at the time and on again,
off again boyfriend who was considered a suspect, but they
marked him off pretty fast because he was incarcerated at
the time.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Oh there you go.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yeah, And she was in fact supposed to visit him
on the day that the police went to see him
to speak to him. She was on the visitor list
from that day and she didn't show up on that day,
and he in fact was like very concerned, but she
had stopped writing to him and he didn't understand what
was going on, so he was very worried about her.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
So she's seventeen. She is working on getting her ged.
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Yep, she's working on getting a ged. She has her
own place. She's working at a diner called the Rainbow Restaurant.
It's a natick. The one thing that's happening is she's
getting everywhere by hitchhiking, and hitchhiking is big at the time,
and she hitches everywhere. I mean, that's how she gets around,
you know. And in talking with her sister, you know
(31:27):
they all did this. You know, everybody did this. She said,
even one time that their mother hitched, you know, to
get them where they needed to go. And I mean
that's just what they did. And Simone did this all
the time, and how she got to work, you know,
it's how she got to parties, It's how she got
everywhere she needed to go. Her mom asked her to
(31:47):
go maybe day weekend on a Friday, to go to
the vineyard with her and her new friend. Boyfriend set
the time and Simone would have gone with them on
the Friday, but she had to work a shift on Saturday,
so she said she would meet them on Saturday instead,
So they were going the day before Betsy came. Her
(32:08):
sister came to the restaurant Saturday morning and asked if
she wanted a ride to the bus which was traveling
down to the Cape. Someone said no, she was all set.
Betsy said, okay, because Betsy was staying back home, she
wasn't blowing down to the vineyard. So Betsy said, okay,
you know, and she left and then Simon finished out
her shift. She planned to hitch down to the Cape.
Her friends were a little nervous about that because that's
(32:31):
a much longer treat from Boston down to the Cape
and just a regular you know, you're going to a party,
you're getting a ride to work or whatever. But you know,
she was determined. She was a very determined person. She
was to do what she was going to do. So
that was that she left the restaurant and that was
the last time that anyone saw her. The problem was
(32:51):
when she didn't arrive on the vineyard, her mother thought, oh,
she ran up with some friends and decided not tonight.
You know, she'll come tomorrow. And when she didn't show up,
then oh, maybe she said she just not to come
for Labor Day. I'll see her when I get home.
Because this was very characteristic of Simon. Now, her sister
(33:13):
Betsy thought she's on Cape, and the thing is, you
would she wouldn't have had contact with her because there
was no way to contact the Cape house. So in
her mind, Simon's on Cape. In the mom's mind, Simone
found something else to do, so nobody knew she was missing,
is what I'm trying to say. For days until Jane
(33:34):
came home. And when Jane came home, the first thing
she did. So this was September tewond was the last shift.
We don't know the exact day that Jane came home,
but the missing person's file did not go through until
September eleventh.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Right, So the first thing Jane did when she came
home was go to Simone's apartment and to say where
were you? What's going on? Simone's not there. She called
Betsy and said it's where's Simon? Have you seen some moon?
And she said, well, no, she's with you and she
said no, she's not with me. And they started looking
around for her, and then tryally, they went to the
(34:11):
police station. Now here's an instance where the police said, oh,
she's probably just out and about. And she had a
little reputation for herself. So the police, you know, they
kind of knew her, and you know, Betsy said, they said, oh,
she probably just ran away, to which Betsy said, well,
she lives on her own.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Where is she running from?
Speaker 2 (34:28):
You know, she has her own apartment.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
She doesn't need space.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah, yeah, she's not running away. She's got her own apartment.
They realized pretty quickly that they were on their own,
that there really wasn't going to be much of an investigation.
So Betsy said that in the early days, you know, Jane,
their mom really took over and it was very helpful
because she just she just organized everything and they were
posters together. They knocked on doors. Their dad he knew
(34:57):
a lot of cb It was probably like a cb
or organization. And they had all the truck drivers organized, searching,
searching sides of roads. They got the Salvation Army involved
to do city searches. They hired private investigators. They really
just took this on themselves. A strange thing that happened
(35:17):
was that a man contacted them to say that he
had taken pictures of Samoa. He didn't know her, but
he had seen her any aust if he could take
her pictures. So there are these beautiful pictures of Simone
into nature, and he offered to let the family have
copies of them for hosters. So Betsy went and picked
these pictures up, and these are the pictures that we
(35:39):
have of her. They're very beautiful pictures. The priest did
interview him. He has since passed. Really, I mean, they
just kept searching and searching with no leads at all.
Ten years later, there was a post in the Metro
news where they posted the pictures again, and an elderly
gentleman called the place station shared more police and said,
(36:03):
I gave that girl a ride. They said, can you
come down to the station. He said yes, So he
came down to the station and he said, I gave
her a ride on the Sunday. So now the Saturday
was her last shift. I gave her ride on Sunday morning,
I was heading down to the Cape and he lived
in framing him, okay, which is right there, all these
(36:24):
bordering towns. I was heading on one twenty eight down
to the Cape on Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend.
Then I've heard people right in and saying, oh, he's
lying because there's traffic on Labor Day on the Cape,
and so that's not true. Well, if you're coming on
Sunday morning, right in early six forty five and you're
heading toward the Cape, he would have been fine, okay,
(36:45):
so it could be true. So it'd he's six forty
five in the morning heading to the Cape, and he
said it was about Westwood and he was pulled over
by a state trooper. He was heading to the Cap
to pick up clock parts because he had a hobby,
but together he was a retired elderly man. He said,
the state triper pulled him over for some violation whatever.
(37:06):
I don't know if he was speeding or what. He
didn't say. And when he told the officer that he
was heading to the Cape, the officer pointed to the
back of his squad car and said, Oh, I have
a girl in the back of the car who is
also heading to the Cape. Can you give her a ride?
Which sounds very bizarre. Yeah, and so he said, okay.
So he said he gave her a ride to Hyanna's,
(37:29):
which is a town on the Cape, to the rotary
at Hyena's and he dropped her off there. He described
what she was wearing, and the police took down the description.
He said the white T shirt, ripped jeans, grubby white sneakers,
that she was carrying a Duffel bag. He gave her height,
which would have been off. He put out taller than
she would have been and said she waited a little
(37:52):
more than she would have wayed said. She said her
name was Sissy. And so they took all this down.
He left what was that. Her file was only two
long at the time they closed it. They put it away.
Now we moved to twenty fourteen. Her mom's gone, dad's gone.
Everyone in the family's bone pretty much except for her
sister cousin. And her sister is thinking, you know, what
(38:16):
is going on with this case. So she goes into
the police station and says, mom's own sister, I'd like
to know the state of the case. And this is
why Sergeant Goudino, who was a detective at the time
in the Sherbrook Police Force, he opens up the case
file and reading it, he said was the easiest part
because there was really nothing in there. And now what
he did was he put together a series of questions
(38:36):
and he said, I want to put together some practical questions.
One of those questions was who are the last people
to see Simone? Even though the original people on the
case did say that they spoke to the people at
the restaurant that day, there was no record of you
know what did they say? Who are these people? So
(38:56):
there aren't even records of their names in the file.
So he puts like a media blitz out to try
to find these people, and he's able to find three waitresses.
He speaks to these three waitresses. Now one of the
reasons that the people in the eighties dismissed this elderly
gentleman is because what he said she was wearing is
(39:17):
not what was in the posters of her missing posters.
They said she was wearing boots and a skirt and
a blouse and a hat and all these things. When
he goes to interview the waitresses, Detective Gadino, they say, oh,
we always changed at the end of our shift because
we hated our waitressing outfit was awful. It was like
uncomfortable and looked terrible. And she had a great Duffel bag,
(39:40):
and she changed out of her outfit and she changed
into a T shirt and ripped jeans and white high
chop sneakers, and he thought, old on. So he went
back to that paperwork that was never published, that was
never put out anywhere. So now he's thinking about this
and then but the gentlemen had died by that point.
(40:03):
He interviewed the song. But the gentleman had never told
his kids about this. So that's something I mean, this
is an open case. I mean that's something that who knows,
you know, the gentleman could have just been a concerned
citizen who maybe had given whether that was Simone or not.
I don't know. It could be a coincidence, say, an
outfit whatever, but it's interesting if that's true. She got
(40:26):
to hyenas, and that's one of the things in the
case that they need to know. How far did she
get because if she didn't get to the cape, that
helps them with their search because they need to know
where to look and where to confine the case because
otherwise they're looking everywhere, you know, So they really need
to know. Because one of the other things they're thinking
(40:46):
is what if she stopped at a party and what
if she hitched yes, and she ended up being picked
up by a friend, because friends picked her up all
the time, and what if they decided to go to
a party, and what if something happened on a party
that was just an accident and people just tried to
(41:06):
cover it up because they didn't know what to do.
That is an option, and so if that happened, one
of the things that they're saying now is, you know,
come forward, somebody, come forward, because right now we just
want to bring Simone home and we just want closure
for the family. And so if something like that happened, please,
(41:30):
you know, so mom would only be in her sixties
right now. So they believe that in this case, somebody
out there knows something. Somebody knows something. Somebody had to
have seen her somewhere along getting from ned It to
wherever she made it, you know, like she had She
didn't do a straight hitch all the way down, right,
(41:51):
So like somebody saw her somewhere and somebody has some
kind of answers and they just want somebody to come
forward to give them some kind of information. So, I mean,
their theories are that either she met an accidental death
and somebody is just covering because they're afraid to come forward,
(42:12):
or they're covering for somebody else and it was just
an accident, like a hit and run.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
She's walking down the highway, you know and somebody hits her.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Or an accidental situation at a party, whether in a
car or at a party, or she was the victim
of some kind of situation through hitchhiking, or how far
did she make it if people can even come forward
they saw her here or there, they need to know
did she make it to the cape if he did
in fact bring her to the cape and drop her off,
(42:42):
as he said, because she knew kids in Hyennas because
they often went to the Capes through Hyennas because she
had relatives and could do it, which is close to
Hyanna's and so they would travel that down to a
toll Did she meet up with friends there and then
something happened? Right, It's really difficult for them because they're
trying to narrow and they need help. So they really
(43:07):
are relying on the public to try to give them
some help, which is one of the reasons why I
wanted to put this case in the book, because any
little bit of publicity that we can try to get
this case, Yeah, any little hope, you know, that we
can get the case. Man.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
I had flashed on Tony Costa for a minute, you know,
the serial killer who was in this area. He was
on Cape cod but died about three years before she
went missing, because I thought these circumstances sound so familiar,
because I've interviewed now two different people who have covered
that story of a serial killer who has picked up women,
(43:43):
you know, who just were wanting a ride. He had
some hitchhikers, So I had thought I had wondered had
they looked into were there any people in the area
who had a history of picking up hitch hikers or
some well known serial killer. I'm assuming they've done all
of that, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
They've been working, you know, every angle in the case
and a lot of it too. They have well, they
have two Sergeant Gadino and then you have the Native
Police now working the case, because what Sergeant Gadino found
was that he couldn't work the case by himself anymore,
you know, because they have so many cases that they're working,
and so he now has Native detective working the case
(44:24):
with him as well, and now he's sergeant. So the
case passed in twenty twenty three to a new detective
on the Sharborn Police, and so you have those two
detectives working the case. So anyone with any information can
call the Shareborn Police or the Native Police and ask
for the detective on the Simone Ryde in their case.
(44:45):
But it really is just a matter of confining the
area in which they're looking to try to figure out.
They also are using DNA evidence now because a detective
working the case before, detect If Gadino, was able to
get DNA from Simone's uncles and so they used that DNA.
(45:06):
They did not extract DNA from Simone's mother before she passed,
but Nancy did have cards from Jane and at that time,
you know, you licked stamps, so they thought, could we
get DNA from those stamps, And it turns out that
we think you can, and so they sent all that
to the FBI and they're waiting for that to come back.
(45:29):
So they're hoping they can get the mitochondrial DNA from
the stamps, so that would be great if they can
round out her DNA profile and they can use that.
And they have tried to match Simone to thirty missing
women through mammals, so they've also worked through namos, so
they've been working really every angle that they can. Sergia
(45:51):
Gadino has been amazing and he is really determined to
work this case and to really try to bring Simone home.
So they've been just exceptional, and Betsy's been amazing. She's
just she does not want to let her sister down
and she is just out there fighting for her sister.
So she's doing everything that she can. And I see
(46:14):
that again and again in these cases, like with Agnes two,
for some sisters giving up their jobs for certain courses
of the time while one of them is in New
York and the others working and then switching over and
just telling people like, we're here and we're going to
keep fighting and we're not going to be quiet, you know,
and we're going to do everything we can and we're
(46:34):
not going away. It's amazing to have family members like
that on your side when you can't speak for yourself.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Do you ever become I mean, I don't know if
it's emotionally exhausted over these cases in this book, or
what the right phrase is, because open cases really drive
me crazy. I feel like I need closure, and then
all of my cases essentially, you know, I have closure
(47:02):
one way or the other. You are working with cases
that don't have any closure whatsoever. How do you reconcile
that where they might be sold but they might be
in forty fifty years or never. And you have all
of these different families you've spoken to who are desperately
looking for closure and hoping that your book is going
(47:22):
to help in that, and that seems like a lot
of pressure to me.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
A previous book that I wrote is sort of the
same thing, So I'm not sure I had looked previously
at a case having today. I don't know if you've
heard of Sam Bellamy on the Cape. He was a pirate.
His ship went down in the seventeen hundreds and they
have a museum on the cape now. When they found him.
Originally they thought that his story was just folklore, and
(47:47):
it wasn't until they found the pirate ship. And even
when they found the pirate ship, they still said, oh,
it's not Bellamy's ship. And when they found the bell
that said win a, you know, seventeen seventeen, and they
knew that, no, this is actually real. And what I
was looking for was, Okay, well what about the girl
in the story? You know, I always settle on women
(48:09):
a lot, I'm like, and I love history, so I
love to go back. And so I thought, well, what
about Maria Helett. If he's real, then she must be real.
And so all the folklore, I know, a lot of
that is made up, but there's a grain of truth
in there, right, So she's got to be real. And
so I started I love genealogy too, so I started
pouring into the records, and you know, I wanted to
(48:30):
find out, like, what was the real story there. So
Barry Clifford, you know, he believed in that story, and
he believed in the pirate and he found that ship,
and I wanted to find her, you know. So I
wrote Bellamy's Bride, and at the end of the book,
I didn't find out if she was real. Then I
(48:50):
didn't mind. I did find I did narrow her down,
you know, to a few options, and at the end
of that book, I thought, well, you know what, the
story are so beautiful, and I think I would have
been disappointed if I had narrowed that one down because
I would have maybe burst the stories. And so maybe
it is supposed to be this legend or whatever. But
(49:11):
with these stories, I think that I feel hopeful in
Simone's case because I feel like in writing this, like
I said, maybe I can do a small part in
some way to be a little bit helpful. I think
it takes so many different pieces to try to bring
some closure to this case. But at least with her case,
(49:32):
there's a chance, with all of these pieces working together,
that maybe there will still be something done for Betsy,
And so there's still hope that we can do something
for Simone. With the other cases, I feel like bringing
them forward in the book is what I want to
do because I feel like what's happened to them is
they're forgotten, and so I feel like what I'm doing
(49:55):
here is making sure they're not because their cases aren't
going to be solved, to make sure that they're not forgotten,
That's what I want to do.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, Scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(50:38):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More
Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod. D him
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Often we take of people as victims, but these women
were so strong and yet they disappeared. They too let
their guard down.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:48):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublish details behind their stories. I've said this many times.
Unsolved cases frustrate me. I need a solution or a conclusion.
(01:10):
But cold cases are so important. And my next guest
wants to talk about missing women one case that is
more than one hundred years old and she can use
our help. Author Kathleen Brunel tells me about her book
called She's Gone Five Mysterious twentieth century cold cases. So
(01:32):
you have these five cases of five missing women, and
we know it is very difficult to prosecute a case
with no body because there's of course the argument. And
I would say, particularly with the exception of maybe your
nineteen seventy seven case, that these are people who could
pick up and leave and it would be very hard
to trace them. Otherwise, why pick women who have gone
(01:56):
missing versus women who have been murdered? What intrigues you
about this idea?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
What intrigued me about this idea is when I found
the first case, which was Anna's case. I was very
intrigued by this because Anna, when she went missing, her
husband told everybody that she ran away because she did
not want to have a family anymore. She didn't want
to be a mother anymore. She wanted to go to cabarets,
(02:24):
and she wanted to have fun, and she didn't want responsibility,
and he really bad mouthed her to the whole community.
I felt that a huge injustice had been done to her.
It'd be really upset. I felt that she had no
more voice and for her. When I started researching her case,
it had been one hundred years since she disappeared, and
(02:45):
I really felt that I want in this book to
give a voice to these women who can no longer
speak for themselves. And I feel that it's really important
to give them that voice, because one of the things
in these cases is that when somebody's been missing and
been missing for a long time, it's almost as if
they just disappear and it doesn't matter anymore. But it
(03:06):
does matter, and they matter, and I want to write
this book to give them a voice and to keep
speaking their names and giving them that voice, and to
note that they're not forgotten and that they are real
people with real lives, and people who often made a
real difference. And so part of writing the book is
just to tell the stories of like these incredible people
(03:29):
and all of the wonderful things that they did, to
not just write about their disappearances, but to write about
their lives.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Victim Forward, we know that's really important, rather than putting
the Killer forward and my other show to fold more Wicked.
You know, we wrapped up a season that was set
in sixteen seventy eight about a potential wrongful conviction, and
a family member from this family of the man who
may or may not have murdered his mother reached out
to me and said, please be open minded. Don't think
(03:57):
that he did it necessarily. We have written to Queen
Elizabeth and said please posthumously exonerate him. Now that she's gone,
we're writing to King Charles. And I just thought, my goodness,
this is three hundred and something years ago and this
family still cares that much. And I encounter that all
the time. So I absolutely agree with you that these
(04:18):
cases deserve closure. And let me ask you, there is
no doubt based on your research with these five cases,
that these are women who did not simply walk away.
That something must have happened to them to stop them
from returning to their family or to their friends.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yes, absolutely, there's lots of little clues and information within
that gave you this sort of information, so that you know,
holidays go by, there's certain things. So then the cases
is for instance, with Agnes two percent, when her briefcase
was found, her sisters knew that was it. That briefcase
(04:55):
was a symbol that she had made it. And so
she carried that briefcase with her every where she went.
And so when they found that briefcase, her sisters knew
that she was born.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
I mean, you know, now with people when they disappear.
You can look at CCTV, you can look at credit cards,
you can look at bank statements, you can look at
cell phone records, so many other ways now that police
can say, pretty unlikely this person just walked away from
their life. But in the nineteen eighteen, nineteen twenties and
thirties and forties, it was really easy to kind of
(05:28):
pick up and move somewhere and not and not tell anybody.
And so it's I think you're right, it's those little
clues the context of somebody's life. Knowing that you know
this person is a wonderful mother and would have never
walked away, that must have given the police something to
really think about, unless you're about to tell me that
in these cases the police cared about some and then
(05:50):
didn't care about others.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Well, Agnes two for since she was very lucky because
in a lot of the cases, what's interesting is you know,
you have the family coming in and really fighting for
these women, and sometimes you have the police really fighting
in other cases not so much. With Anna Lakazio, you
know that situation, you really did not have anything happening
(06:12):
in that case for two years, and it wasn't until
the family came in, and then you had her uncle
reaching out for help with Grace Hemistead coming in, who
is if anyone who read the book, missus Sherlotte Holmes
and I know that you've had that here on your show,
so you know, she actually came in on this case,
(06:33):
and she came in to fight, and the sheriff in
the town basically said, I won't let a woman come
in here and tell me how to do my job.
You know what I'm going to do. So that was
very interesting because at that point he did not have
one slip of paper regarding Anna's disappearance, and that's two
years on in her disappearance, nor had it figured in
(06:53):
the newspaper. Nothing, There was nothing on her disappearance. It
was as if she was just gone and they just
moved on. So that was just a very upsetting case.
And that's the first case I came across. So it
was just a very upsetting case until her uncle got
involved and started demanding answers, whereas on a supercent's case,
(07:15):
she had four sisters who were demanding answers and her
husband he called them the four Furies. He did not
like it very much, but they were not going to
relent at all. So they did everything they possibly could.
But even in the face of that, they could not
(07:38):
They couldn't get him, you know, they couldn't. But they tried,
they really really tried.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Well, let's get into the story. So this is nineteen eighteen,
and this is Anna Laicassio. And you said that she's
a mother of a married mother of four. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Yep, she's married, mother of four. She married when she
was fifteen years old.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
So she married Franklcazio and he was older at the time.
They married in New York and they settled after having
three children, they settled in Richfield Park, New Jersey. He
was a barber and they settled in a barbershop which
had the shop on one side and had their house
(08:20):
on the other side, so that you know, she took
care of the children and he took care of the shop.
And this, you know, they had this arrangement and this
worked well, and then they had their fourth child there
in New Jersey. One of the things I think happened
was that she was so young when she got married.
You know that after she had her children, she was
looking for some freedom and her family was back in
(08:40):
New York. Her sister worked in the Shirtwais factories, and
Anna wanted to work too. She wanted to get out
of the house, and by the time her youngest was five,
you know, she wanted a little more freedom, and so
she started working with her sister in New York, so
she would take the train out to work.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
What's the dynamic before where this happens between Frank and Anna?
Do we see hints of violence or I mean, I
know there's controlling, but in nineteen eighteen, do we see
any sort of violent tendencies or anything.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
The neighbors do say there's a lot of fighting going on.
So this was the case that was interesting for me
because there wasn't a lot of information and in the
papers for me, and that's where you know, I was looking.
So I got most of the information at the trial
and from genealogy records as bus as I could going
(09:34):
in and so what I found is out there was
a lot of fighting between them. And as you say,
this is where I'm trying to try to look at
it from Frank's perspective and the fact that it's a
really interesting dynamic to me that here you have this
woman who marries at fifteen, and Frank is a little
older at the time, in his twenties, and you know,
(09:56):
Frank's established in her job, and he's ready to have
his family and they you know, they move to this
small town and he's ready to do the family thing.
And she I think that fifteen is thinking that's attractive
to her at the time because she can get out
of her big family home and start her life, and
that looks good to her at the time probably, But
(10:19):
then after four children so fast, and she's just a
teenager herself, and now she's in her twenties, and I
think she's just starting to think like, oh, I can
live my life and I want to have a good time,
and he's think, no, that looks like that's not what
I want. And so that's where I think they start
to come to odds, you know, and they start to
(10:40):
have a tough time understanding one another at that point.
And so they're having trouble surely in the marriage at
that point, and a difficult time understanding one another. And
in a lot of the cases, I'm finding that that
it's difficult for women, especially in the historic cases. The
older kid, he says that it's difficult for women to
(11:03):
express themselves and to in a time when they're just
learning to express themselves, and that poses a problem. And
there's a point where Frank said that, you know, he
told her you're not going back to work anymore, and
she said, I will do his act please, you know,
and being like that. There's a phrase in one of
(11:23):
my other cases where the husband issuing his wife for
custody of their daughter, and you know, she's an actress,
and he calls her a pretty girl. She has pretty
girl priorities because she's trying to be an actress and
she can't be a mother if she is an actress.
And the judge at the time says, well, I know
(11:43):
many actresses that are good.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Mothers and actually side to a car which I think
is pretty interesting because he's so adamant that she can't
do both and it's the nineteen forties, and that it's
just a very interesting thing to me.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
I write about in one of my books. I mentioned
this one in the show that I Have Bury Bones.
I write about the heartlawm lawsuits. I don't know if
you've run across those where men say to women, I'll
marry you, and I know this is against the rules,
but let's go ahead and have sex because we are
going to get married. And then they have sex, and
then he says his engagements off, and they were allowed.
(12:19):
Women could sue, and they got a lot of money
because then you've got your talking about the other side.
We're talking about sort of like women sexuality and liberation,
and as we're approaching the twenties, a little more open mindedness.
But at the same time, that's sort of understanding the
value of a woman's virtue and the expectation in this
time period that that is, her value is in that
(12:43):
and when a man comes and quote unquote ruins her
before marriage, her value has plummeted and she is now
legally able to go to the courts and demand money
from him for ruining her. So I feel like we're
straddling in this time period a little bit two different
worlds of sort of that can mentional wear a corset
and have a chaperone with you, versus sort of women becoming,
(13:05):
especially with the war, able to embrace more independence and
more work and all of that.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Yes, absolutely absolutely, they had a neighbor upstairs who was
a little bit of a busy body.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Thank goodness, those busy bodies are the ones who make
these stories good sometimes, aren't they?
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yes, yes, And she noted that Anna I was spending
some time at the Cargarets on her way home when
she was supposed to be still sort of at work.
And you know, Frank had made dinner by that point
with the kids, and so one night he went and
he checked on her, and sure enough, she was a
saloon down the street, and he didn't let her know
(13:47):
that he saw her. He asked her where she had been,
and she said, oh, she had missed the train and
she had to walk or well, this is all according
to Frank, because we don't have Anna's word for any
of this. This all came out at trial later, and
so he became increasingly upset by this, and he decided
he didn't want her to go to work anymore because
when she went to work, well, she could go anywhere
(14:09):
on the way home and he wouldn't know where she
was or what was going on. And so they started
fighting about her going to work. This is nineteen eighteen,
and so war is raging and the Red Cross is
looking for nurses because a lot of the established nurses
are overseas, and so they're looking for volunteer nurses, and
there were ads in the local paper in her town,
(14:31):
you know, looking for women to come up and train.
And his mother thought that that would be a good
idea for Anna to do something like that, and her
sister Katie thought so as well, and Anna wanted to
and she brought this up again. According to Frank, Anna
had brought this up, and so she decided that she
she wanted to do this, and Frank again thought this
(14:51):
was not a good idea, and she did not want
her to do this. He wanted her to stay home
with the children. Apparently they thought about these things on
the night in question when they had this screaming match
the night she disappeared. A few days prior to the argument,
Anna had come home from work. They had fought, and
(15:13):
Anna ended up not going to work the next day,
the children said because she had so. Her oldest at
the time was ten, a girl, and the child below
that was eight, and the other two were much younger.
And so those girls testified, and what they said was
that their mother was thick and so she couldn't go
(15:33):
to work, and that their father had taken their mother
in a taxi to the hospital. She did not go
back to work for a few days now. One of
the girls said she thought it had been two weeks,
but the other said she thought it was a few days.
So they don't know. They're testifying two years later, and
they're young. She doesn't go back to work until the
(15:55):
day she disappears. She comes home that night, Frank has
dinner waiting. He says she sits down to dinner, but
she doesn't eat, and that he hears her tell the children,
this will be the last night that you ever see me.
Then the two they put the children to bed, She does,
and they go into their bedroom. She tells him that
(16:15):
she doesn't want the house anymore, she doesn't want the
children anymore, she doesn't want to be a wife anymore,
that she wants to go, that he needs to let
her go. She tried to leave the room, and that
he physically barred the door. The lawyer asked him, how
long did you bar the door? He said for a
couple of hours. That's what he testified, and he said
(16:39):
that she bit his finger. One of the girls corroborated
that she saw her mother bite her father's finger as
she was trying to get out of the room. Then
the girls testified that they heard their mother's scream, like
a really horrible scream that woke them, so they came
(16:59):
to the room. This is the scream that neighbors heard
and that prompted them to call the police. The upstairs neighbor,
Missus Fletcher, who had told Frank before that she saw
his wife at besselone, she heard the scream as well.
It was so loud it woke her and her husband.
They knocked on the floor to see what is going on.
(17:22):
Even came down to knock on the door. Everyone said
that after they heard the scream, there was silence. The
girls testified that they saw their father with his hands
around their mother's neck and that she then like fell
and then he dragged her over to the bed and
he laid her down and faced her head to the wall.
(17:44):
It said, he said that she was sick. The girls
went to bed. When they went into the room the
next morning, she was in the same clothes she was
in the night before. She was in the same position
as the night before, and she was looking in the
same direction as the night before. And they asked, did
you speak to her? No, why didn't you speak to her?
(18:04):
Was afraid to disturb her.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Were there any other suspects from the police's point of
view once they found out, I mean, what led up
to this? Does he report her missing or how does
this work?
Speaker 2 (18:16):
He did not report her missing at first. He told
his upstairs neighbor, Missus Fletcher, who said, what happened last night?
What prompted this argument? Like what's going on? Because she
wanted to know, and he said, like, what you thought
happened happened, basically referring to you know, she was out
of a saloon with other people, and so we were
(18:36):
arguing about that. His brother was living with them at
the time, and his brother said he didn't hear anything
that night. So Drank told his brother we had been
in an argument, and the brother said, well, she was
arguing with Missus Fletcher the night before, saying, stay out
of my husband's and my business. You know, that's my business,
(18:56):
not your business to tell my husband where i'd or
you know whatever. So she had had an argument with
Missus Fletcher. You know. Frank alluded to the fact that
she he thought she was seeing some man at the saloon,
so maybe that had something to do with it. So
later somebody said that they thought they saw Anna with
(19:17):
a man down by the docks. But it turned out
that Frank had given that man who said he saw Anna,
he had given him some wine. Just Frank made wine,
and so they dismissed that as relevant. So no other
than that they did not investigate the case. So there
(19:37):
was no investigation at the local police station into the
case at all. And he did not go to the
police until three days after her disappearance because he said
she ran away, so she hadn't disappeared, she left by
choice in the middle of the night. But he also
(19:58):
he also got rid of the sheets and the mattress
of the bed like that week, saying that there were
bed bugs, like an infestation of bed bugs, and that's
why he had to get rid of them. Lots of
little things like that happened. He did go to her
uncle to tell him what happened, and he was very
afraid to go to her uncle and tell him. He
(20:18):
was nervous around her family because they had some money
and Frank really didn't, and he felt that they felt
they were like higher up than Frank was, and so
he was a little bit nervous around her family. The
father told him and Frank cried on the stand when
he talked about it, that if you don't find my daughter,
(20:38):
then I will be one of the men to kill you.
And so Frank was very nervous about it. But then
apparently Frank said that after a little bit of time,
and his father said, never mind, just go take care
of your children. The children ended up going to an
orphanage and they were there basically until they were old
enough to work, and then they slowly came back to
(21:00):
live with Frank. He eventually sold the house on Paulison
Street and built a new area on Main Street where
he had a thriving business. He lived a good long life.
His son took over the business for him, and he
had you know, children, grandchildren, all of that. He did
(21:21):
get in trouble for selling wine and making wine during prohibition.
During that time. That's when I was able to verify
because this was three years after the trial that he
got in trouble, and the newspaper made a reference to
the fact that still no one had seen Anna at
(21:41):
that point, that she was still missing and no one
had seen her. He never remarried, but no one ever
saw her again, and there was money waiting for her
at her job at the short rates factory, and she
never collected it, and they thought about her going to
join the Red Cross and to work. There's no evidence
(22:02):
of her training for the Red Cross. She never went
to go be with her family, which she argued about
wanting to do, because they were looking for her and
they couldn't find her. There was a fresh patch of
cement in the cellar that missus Fletcher saw because they
showed the cellar, and she wanted to know why that
was there, and she smelled lime, so she wanted to
(22:23):
know what this was all about. And she didn't trust
the local sheriff because she knew nothing was being done
about the case. So she went to the town over
to that police station and she told them about it.
They told their sheriff, who promptly told all the roads
wild self. So Frank tried to sue her for defamation
of counter and she actually stopped talking about the case,
(22:47):
and when they tried to come talk to her, she
said that she wouldn't speak to anybody, so she stopped
talking about the case altogether. So two years later, when
Grace Hemmiston came in, she wanted to dig that cellar
up and she wanted of animals there because one of
the things that was happening in the case, and something
that Grace Humiston was very well known for, is that
(23:07):
Anna's reputation was being called into question, that she was
a bad wife, she was a bad mother, that she
had caused this, and you know, Grace Hemmiston famously in
the Krugel case said no, she's not a bad girl.
She did not cause this. So here Anna's uncle read
about her and wanted her to come, you know, find
(23:28):
Anna and bring those same rules into Anna's case. Now,
whether they dug up this seller, I could not verify.
I don't think they ever did dig up the cellar.
I know that the sheriff would not let them. I
don't believe that she ever did. And we don't really
have papers for her, and I can't find any notes
from her on this case. She did testify in the
(23:50):
trial and she said that Frank would not contribute money
to the case. And in his defense, he said, well,
why would I she left me, Why would I give
money to somebody who loved me? So in his defense,
I'm trying to stay in partial to It's hard to
but I tried to because in some ways he said difficult.
(24:11):
But in other ways try and stay open to him.
So if you look at it from that perspective, if
she did leave him, he says, well, why would I
Why would I put money, you know, to hope in
that sense, you know, I just want to get on
with my life. So so that would make sense in
that in that case. And he said he didn't have
a picture of her to put in the paper, and
that's why he didn't put any in the paper. Her
(24:33):
sister testified, and they said, why didn't you help him
get a picture of your sister, And she said, because
he had plenty of that, you know. And he said
and he said, you're you're mad, and she said no,
she said, dogs get mad. I'm not mad. So she
was very interested, I understand, and his sister.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
So, Frank, if he's responsible, gets away with it.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
And again maybe he had nothing to do with it.
There's a lot of circumstantial evidence, but I think the
jury without a body, yeah, the jury did not feel
comfortable condemning him, especially when he had a good reputation
in town, and it's a small town. It really didn't
feel comfortable condemning him without the evidence of a body
(25:22):
or any emidence.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Well, now, we're going to the other end of the
spectrum in your book to nineteen seventy seven. Tell me
about I mean, we'll just take this chronologically. What we
know if she is a victim, and I think we
believe that this young woman is a victim. Actually she's
a girl, we're saying, a teenager, right, Okay, what do
we need to know about Simone Reniger?
Speaker 2 (25:44):
So Simone was raised Originally she was in Pittsburgh, but
when she was just about five years old, her father
passed away and so her mother, Jane, brought Simone back
to New York, where Jane's parents lived. And at about
that time, across the street, John Ridinger was living with
(26:07):
his daughter Betsy and his wife, and his wife unfortunately
passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage. And so you had
these two widowers living across from one another with young daughters,
and they met and they eventually married, and so the
(26:29):
daughters were only two years apart, Betsy and Simone. John
adopted Simone and Jane adopted Betsy and they became a family.
John joh brought him to Massachusetts to sherborn and that's
where Simone spent one of her teenage years. She was
(26:50):
a very smart girl. She was fluent in French as
a youngster. She's a gifted musician. She played by year.
She loved horseback riding. Spirited girl, very creative. Her mom
was very creative. The girls just had a lot of
fun together. They had a very close bond, these two girls.
(27:11):
And they had the family home on chap Equatic, which
is just off with Edgar Town on Martha's Vineyard. This
home had no it's in the seventies. It didn't have
any running water, electricity, phone, like, none of that, but
like a really fun place. They loved going there. One year,
they spent the entire summer there. They also usually spent
(27:31):
at least two weeks there and they would go sailing
and collecting shells and just reading and puzzles and spending
time with cousins, and you know, they just love to
be there. It's a great place for them. Simone, by
the time she was in high school, Oh, she didn't
really want to be there. She didn't like to go.
Her sister remembers hearing Simone's name over the intercom because
(27:53):
they were calling her for detention because she had skipped school.
But she wasn't there when they were calling her for
She's gidding more detention.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Wow, So she just kind.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Of eventually dropped out all together. By the time she
was a sophomore, she got her own place in Framingham,
which is close to Schadbye, and her mom helped her
pick out her place. She was getting her a Genie
d and she got a job at a local diner
in Native. So these are all kind of like in
close proximity at about this time. This is when John
(28:26):
and Jean they divorced. They're not together anymore, so all
this is going on at about the same time, and
Betty was living with her father.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
What happens to Simone in between being fluent in French
and gifted musician and somebody who seemed to got to
be on the track to maybe staying in school or
accomplishing things, and to all of a sudden it seems
like out of nowhere rebelling and having problems in high school.
(28:56):
Was it the divorce between Jane and John or is
it or anything that you have sorted out about the
switch with this.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Betty just told me that, you know, Simone's just so
smart that traditional school was just not really her thing. Okay,
And she just was such a creative mind, do you
know what I mean? H Like she enjoyed going to
concerts and being creative, and like she still loved all
of that. It's just not in a traditional sense. Yeah,
(29:26):
that's an area that Betsy kind of explained it to me.
This didn't seem to be any kind of break at
all with her personality. This kind of seemed to go
with her personality, like this was kind of who she was.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Did she get along with her folks?
Speaker 2 (29:38):
She did, and she got along with everyone at school.
Betsy said, like she was like the friendliest person at school,
that everyone knew her, everyone liked her, Her teachers loved her.
Like everyone loved her. She said that she was your
friend before you even knew her. That was just who
she was. She was just like incredibly friendly, wonderful, everyone
(30:00):
loved her. This will play into when she disappears, because
it was not uncommon for her to just decide she's
supposed to be one place, but she'll decide, oh, there's
a party, I'll go there, you know, and like it
just was not uncommon for her to do that. So
this is how she's you know, she's she wants to
get herded and start her life instead of going to
(30:21):
traditional school every day. So that was just like very
in keeping with her character, like with who she was.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
What about boyfriends.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
She had a boyfriend at the time and on again,
off again boyfriend who was considered a suspect, but they
marked him off pretty fast because he was incarcerated at
the time.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Oh there you go.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yeah, And she was in fact supposed to visit him
on the day that the police went to see him
to speak to him. She was on the visitor list
from that day and she didn't show up on that day,
and he in fact was like very concerned, but she
had stopped writing to him and he didn't understand what
was going on, so he was very worried about her.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
So she's seventeen. She is working on getting her ged.
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Yep, she's working on getting a ged. She has her
own place. She's working at a diner called the Rainbow Restaurant.
It's a natick. The one thing that's happening is she's
getting everywhere by hitchhiking, and hitchhiking is big at the time,
and she hitches everywhere. I mean, that's how she gets around,
you know. And in talking with her sister, you know
(31:27):
they all did this. You know, everybody did this. She said,
even one time that their mother hitched, you know, to
get them where they needed to go. And I mean
that's just what they did. And Simone did this all
the time, and how she got to work, you know,
it's how she got to parties, It's how she got
everywhere she needed to go. Her mom asked her to
(31:47):
go maybe day weekend on a Friday, to go to
the vineyard with her and her new friend. Boyfriend set
the time and Simone would have gone with them on
the Friday, but she had to work a shift on Saturday,
so she said she would meet them on Saturday instead,
So they were going the day before Betsy came. Her
(32:08):
sister came to the restaurant Saturday morning and asked if
she wanted a ride to the bus which was traveling
down to the Cape. Someone said no, she was all set.
Betsy said, okay, because Betsy was staying back home, she
wasn't blowing down to the vineyard. So Betsy said, okay,
you know, and she left and then Simon finished out
her shift. She planned to hitch down to the Cape.
Her friends were a little nervous about that because that's
(32:31):
a much longer treat from Boston down to the Cape
and just a regular you know, you're going to a party,
you're getting a ride to work or whatever. But you know,
she was determined. She was a very determined person. She
was to do what she was going to do. So
that was that she left the restaurant and that was
the last time that anyone saw her. The problem was
(32:51):
when she didn't arrive on the vineyard, her mother thought, oh,
she ran up with some friends and decided not tonight.
You know, she'll come tomorrow. And when she didn't show up,
then oh, maybe she said she just not to come
for Labor Day. I'll see her when I get home.
Because this was very characteristic of Simon. Now, her sister
(33:13):
Betsy thought she's on Cape, and the thing is, you
would she wouldn't have had contact with her because there
was no way to contact the Cape house. So in
her mind, Simon's on Cape. In the mom's mind, Simone
found something else to do, so nobody knew she was missing,
is what I'm trying to say. For days until Jane
(33:34):
came home. And when Jane came home, the first thing
she did. So this was September tewond was the last shift.
We don't know the exact day that Jane came home,
but the missing person's file did not go through until
September eleventh.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Right, So the first thing Jane did when she came
home was go to Simone's apartment and to say where
were you? What's going on? Simone's not there. She called
Betsy and said it's where's Simon? Have you seen some moon?
And she said, well, no, she's with you and she
said no, she's not with me. And they started looking
around for her, and then tryally, they went to the
(34:11):
police station. Now here's an instance where the police said, oh,
she's probably just out and about. And she had a
little reputation for herself. So the police, you know, they
kind of knew her, and you know, Betsy said, they said, oh,
she probably just ran away, to which Betsy said, well,
she lives on her own.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Where is she running from?
Speaker 2 (34:28):
You know, she has her own apartment.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
She doesn't need space.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah, yeah, she's not running away. She's got her own apartment.
They realized pretty quickly that they were on their own,
that there really wasn't going to be much of an investigation.
So Betsy said that in the early days, you know, Jane,
their mom really took over and it was very helpful
because she just she just organized everything and they were
posters together. They knocked on doors. Their dad he knew
(34:57):
a lot of cb It was probably like a cb
or organization. And they had all the truck drivers organized, searching,
searching sides of roads. They got the Salvation Army involved
to do city searches. They hired private investigators. They really
just took this on themselves. A strange thing that happened
(35:17):
was that a man contacted them to say that he
had taken pictures of Samoa. He didn't know her, but
he had seen her any aust if he could take
her pictures. So there are these beautiful pictures of Simone
into nature, and he offered to let the family have
copies of them for hosters. So Betsy went and picked
these pictures up, and these are the pictures that we
(35:39):
have of her. They're very beautiful pictures. The priest did
interview him. He has since passed. Really, I mean, they
just kept searching and searching with no leads at all.
Ten years later, there was a post in the Metro
news where they posted the pictures again, and an elderly
gentleman called the place station shared more police and said,
(36:03):
I gave that girl a ride. They said, can you
come down to the station. He said yes, So he
came down to the station and he said, I gave
her a ride on the Sunday. So now the Saturday
was her last shift. I gave her ride on Sunday morning,
I was heading down to the Cape and he lived
in framing him, okay, which is right there, all these
(36:24):
bordering towns. I was heading on one twenty eight down
to the Cape on Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend.
Then I've heard people right in and saying, oh, he's
lying because there's traffic on Labor Day on the Cape,
and so that's not true. Well, if you're coming on
Sunday morning, right in early six forty five and you're
heading toward the Cape, he would have been fine, okay,
(36:45):
so it could be true. So it'd he's six forty
five in the morning heading to the Cape, and he
said it was about Westwood and he was pulled over
by a state trooper. He was heading to the Cap
to pick up clock parts because he had a hobby,
but together he was a retired elderly man. He said,
the state triper pulled him over for some violation whatever.
(37:06):
I don't know if he was speeding or what. He
didn't say. And when he told the officer that he
was heading to the Cape, the officer pointed to the
back of his squad car and said, Oh, I have
a girl in the back of the car who is
also heading to the Cape. Can you give her a ride?
Which sounds very bizarre. Yeah, and so he said, okay.
So he said he gave her a ride to Hyanna's,
(37:29):
which is a town on the Cape, to the rotary
at Hyena's and he dropped her off there. He described
what she was wearing, and the police took down the description.
He said the white T shirt, ripped jeans, grubby white sneakers,
that she was carrying a Duffel bag. He gave her height,
which would have been off. He put out taller than
she would have been and said she waited a little
(37:52):
more than she would have wayed said. She said her
name was Sissy. And so they took all this down.
He left what was that. Her file was only two
long at the time they closed it. They put it away.
Now we moved to twenty fourteen. Her mom's gone, dad's gone.
Everyone in the family's bone pretty much except for her
sister cousin. And her sister is thinking, you know, what
(38:16):
is going on with this case. So she goes into
the police station and says, mom's own sister, I'd like
to know the state of the case. And this is
why Sergeant Goudino, who was a detective at the time
in the Sherbrook Police Force, he opens up the case
file and reading it, he said was the easiest part
because there was really nothing in there. And now what
he did was he put together a series of questions
(38:36):
and he said, I want to put together some practical questions.
One of those questions was who are the last people
to see Simone? Even though the original people on the
case did say that they spoke to the people at
the restaurant that day, there was no record of you
know what did they say? Who are these people? So
(38:56):
there aren't even records of their names in the file.
So he puts like a media blitz out to try
to find these people, and he's able to find three waitresses.
He speaks to these three waitresses. Now one of the
reasons that the people in the eighties dismissed this elderly
gentleman is because what he said she was wearing is
(39:17):
not what was in the posters of her missing posters.
They said she was wearing boots and a skirt and
a blouse and a hat and all these things. When
he goes to interview the waitresses, Detective Gadino, they say, oh,
we always changed at the end of our shift because
we hated our waitressing outfit was awful. It was like
uncomfortable and looked terrible. And she had a great Duffel bag,
(39:40):
and she changed out of her outfit and she changed
into a T shirt and ripped jeans and white high
chop sneakers, and he thought, old on. So he went
back to that paperwork that was never published, that was
never put out anywhere. So now he's thinking about this
and then but the gentlemen had died by that point.
(40:03):
He interviewed the song. But the gentleman had never told
his kids about this. So that's something I mean, this
is an open case. I mean that's something that who knows,
you know, the gentleman could have just been a concerned
citizen who maybe had given whether that was Simone or not.
I don't know. It could be a coincidence, say, an
outfit whatever, but it's interesting if that's true. She got
(40:26):
to hyenas, and that's one of the things in the
case that they need to know. How far did she
get because if she didn't get to the cape, that
helps them with their search because they need to know
where to look and where to confine the case because
otherwise they're looking everywhere, you know, So they really need
to know. Because one of the other things they're thinking
(40:46):
is what if she stopped at a party and what
if she hitched yes, and she ended up being picked
up by a friend, because friends picked her up all
the time, and what if they decided to go to
a party, and what if something happened on a party
that was just an accident and people just tried to
(41:06):
cover it up because they didn't know what to do.
That is an option, and so if that happened, one
of the things that they're saying now is, you know,
come forward, somebody, come forward, because right now we just
want to bring Simone home and we just want closure
for the family. And so if something like that happened, please,
(41:30):
you know, so mom would only be in her sixties
right now. So they believe that in this case, somebody
out there knows something. Somebody knows something. Somebody had to
have seen her somewhere along getting from ned It to
wherever she made it, you know, like she had She
didn't do a straight hitch all the way down, right,
(41:51):
So like somebody saw her somewhere and somebody has some
kind of answers and they just want somebody to come
forward to give them some kind of information. So, I mean,
their theories are that either she met an accidental death
and somebody is just covering because they're afraid to come forward,
(42:12):
or they're covering for somebody else and it was just
an accident, like a hit and run.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
She's walking down the highway, you know and somebody hits her.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Or an accidental situation at a party, whether in a
car or at a party, or she was the victim
of some kind of situation through hitchhiking, or how far
did she make it if people can even come forward
they saw her here or there, they need to know
did she make it to the cape if he did
in fact bring her to the cape and drop her off,
(42:42):
as he said, because she knew kids in Hyennas because
they often went to the Capes through Hyennas because she
had relatives and could do it, which is close to
Hyanna's and so they would travel that down to a
toll Did she meet up with friends there and then
something happened? Right, It's really difficult for them because they're
trying to narrow and they need help. So they really
(43:07):
are relying on the public to try to give them
some help, which is one of the reasons why I
wanted to put this case in the book, because any
little bit of publicity that we can try to get
this case, Yeah, any little hope, you know, that we
can get the case. Man.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
I had flashed on Tony Costa for a minute, you know,
the serial killer who was in this area. He was
on Cape cod but died about three years before she
went missing, because I thought these circumstances sound so familiar,
because I've interviewed now two different people who have covered
that story of a serial killer who has picked up women,
(43:43):
you know, who just were wanting a ride. He had
some hitchhikers, So I had thought I had wondered had
they looked into were there any people in the area
who had a history of picking up hitch hikers or
some well known serial killer. I'm assuming they've done all
of that, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
They've been working, you know, every angle in the case
and a lot of it too. They have well, they
have two Sergeant Gadino and then you have the Native
Police now working the case, because what Sergeant Gadino found
was that he couldn't work the case by himself anymore,
you know, because they have so many cases that they're working,
and so he now has Native detective working the case
(44:24):
with him as well, and now he's sergeant. So the
case passed in twenty twenty three to a new detective
on the Sharborn Police, and so you have those two
detectives working the case. So anyone with any information can
call the Shareborn Police or the Native Police and ask
for the detective on the Simone Ryde in their case.
(44:45):
But it really is just a matter of confining the
area in which they're looking to try to figure out.
They also are using DNA evidence now because a detective
working the case before, detect If Gadino, was able to
get DNA from Simone's uncles and so they used that DNA.
(45:06):
They did not extract DNA from Simone's mother before she passed,
but Nancy did have cards from Jane and at that time,
you know, you licked stamps, so they thought, could we
get DNA from those stamps, And it turns out that
we think you can, and so they sent all that
to the FBI and they're waiting for that to come back.
(45:29):
So they're hoping they can get the mitochondrial DNA from
the stamps, so that would be great if they can
round out her DNA profile and they can use that.
And they have tried to match Simone to thirty missing
women through mammals, so they've also worked through namos, so
they've been working really every angle that they can. Sergia
(45:51):
Gadino has been amazing and he is really determined to
work this case and to really try to bring Simone home.
So they've been just exceptional, and Betsy's been amazing. She's
just she does not want to let her sister down
and she is just out there fighting for her sister.
So she's doing everything that she can. And I see
(46:14):
that again and again in these cases, like with Agnes two,
for some sisters giving up their jobs for certain courses
of the time while one of them is in New
York and the others working and then switching over and
just telling people like, we're here and we're going to
keep fighting and we're not going to be quiet, you know,
and we're going to do everything we can and we're
(46:34):
not going away. It's amazing to have family members like
that on your side when you can't speak for yourself.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Do you ever become I mean, I don't know if
it's emotionally exhausted over these cases in this book, or
what the right phrase is, because open cases really drive
me crazy. I feel like I need closure, and then
all of my cases essentially, you know, I have closure
(47:02):
one way or the other. You are working with cases
that don't have any closure whatsoever. How do you reconcile
that where they might be sold but they might be
in forty fifty years or never. And you have all
of these different families you've spoken to who are desperately
looking for closure and hoping that your book is going
(47:22):
to help in that, and that seems like a lot
of pressure to me.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
A previous book that I wrote is sort of the
same thing, So I'm not sure I had looked previously
at a case having today. I don't know if you've
heard of Sam Bellamy on the Cape. He was a pirate.
His ship went down in the seventeen hundreds and they
have a museum on the cape now. When they found him.
Originally they thought that his story was just folklore, and
(47:47):
it wasn't until they found the pirate ship. And even
when they found the pirate ship, they still said, oh,
it's not Bellamy's ship. And when they found the bell
that said win a, you know, seventeen seventeen, and they
knew that, no, this is actually real. And what I
was looking for was, Okay, well what about the girl
in the story? You know, I always settle on women
(48:09):
a lot, I'm like, and I love history, so I
love to go back. And so I thought, well, what
about Maria Helett. If he's real, then she must be real.
And so all the folklore, I know, a lot of
that is made up, but there's a grain of truth
in there, right, So she's got to be real. And
so I started I love genealogy too, so I started
pouring into the records, and you know, I wanted to
(48:30):
find out, like, what was the real story there. So
Barry Clifford, you know, he believed in that story, and
he believed in the pirate and he found that ship,
and I wanted to find her, you know. So I
wrote Bellamy's Bride, and at the end of the book,
I didn't find out if she was real. Then I
(48:50):
didn't mind. I did find I did narrow her down,
you know, to a few options, and at the end
of that book, I thought, well, you know what, the
story are so beautiful, and I think I would have
been disappointed if I had narrowed that one down because
I would have maybe burst the stories. And so maybe
it is supposed to be this legend or whatever. But
(49:11):
with these stories, I think that I feel hopeful in
Simone's case because I feel like in writing this, like
I said, maybe I can do a small part in
some way to be a little bit helpful. I think
it takes so many different pieces to try to bring
some closure to this case. But at least with her case,
(49:32):
there's a chance, with all of these pieces working together,
that maybe there will still be something done for Betsy,
And so there's still hope that we can do something
for Simone. With the other cases, I feel like bringing
them forward in the book is what I want to
do because I feel like what's happened to them is
they're forgotten, and so I feel like what I'm doing
(49:55):
here is making sure they're not because their cases aren't
going to be solved, to make sure that they're not forgotten,
That's what I want to do.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, Scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(50:38):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More
Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod. D him
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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