September 28, 2022 • 55 mins
On today's episode, Kate and Paul assess the evidence left at the scene of a Fresno, CA murder in 1935. Teenager Mary Louise Stammer is killed at home with her parents absent. But before the killer vanishes, he leaves behind clues.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried bones.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how's it going.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
It's going really well. Now there's something I've got to
ask you about.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Uh oh, it's your aquarium, my aquarium.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
This sound that comes out of your aquarium, which I hear,
can cause sound issues sometimes, So I'm curious about what
is up with your aquarium. I've never known someone with
a saltwater aquarium.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, you know, technically it's still a very young aquarium.
It's about eight months old. So saltwater aquariums are not
like goldfish tanks. This is truly sort of replicating the
ocean inside a window box. And it has a whole
life support system, so that is really what is the
issue when it comes to the sound, is there's pumps going,
(01:45):
there's supportive equipment that make noises. And when I record,
since it's in the space that we do the podcast
from out here in my man cave, I have to
literally shut down the life support to this aquarium in
order to try to get my room as quiet as
possible so the people who are listening aren't hearing the
(02:05):
rumblings and the gurglings and everything else that's going on.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Is that risking the lives of your aquatic animals though,
But we have to shut down the whole system.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
It is in a way now, I will tell you
we recorded two episodes the other day and that's the
longest that I had shut my tank down. And when
I looked I don't know if you remember, but in
between recordings, I was like, Hey, I got to go
check on my fish, and I have a flashlight because
I you know, basically I'm sitting here in the dark
(02:37):
right now. So I take the flashlight and two of
my fish were laying on the sand bottom and I
was just like oh no, that fast, you know, that
was my uh oh, and it was I have a
royal Grammar, which is a beautiful purple and yellow fish,
and then I had just put in a relatively young
(02:57):
six line rass and both were literally just laying on
the bottom of the sand, which is what you typically
see when fish die. Oh no, So I was really concerned.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
And then I you see aside it and well.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
That I flipped on my lights to the tank and
they both just got up off the sand and started
swimming away, and I was like, okay, they were fooling me.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
You and I talk a lot about reducing anxiety, since
that's what your book was about, was the amount of
anxiety that you've gotten in life. And so we've worked
you towards the kava right drinking the car and that's
very calming and nothing wrong with bourbon, but just you know,
working on some other things. So I assume that the
salt water aquarium is one of the ways that you
tried to reduce anxiety. I need like three of those,
(03:45):
so maybe you can sit need a lot of salt
water animals to reduce my anxiety.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
It's not a cheap hobby, but yes, I will sit
there and just watch my tank. I've even sat in
front of it sipping bourbon, watching my tank. I love
these creatures. They all have their own little personalities, the
way they interact with each other, the engineering some of
these animals do. Like your coral reefs, right, don't you
have coral? I have a few pieces of coral, but
(04:11):
the tank's not quite ready to really put a lot
of coral in there. But I have creatures, both fish
and this invertebrate, this pistol shrimp that build structures. They
will take shells and build homes and it's amazing, awesome. Yeah,
and now the one thing that I cannot control about
noise out of this tank is the pistol shrimp. Can
you imagine why it's called a pistol shrimp?
Speaker 1 (04:36):
What does it sound like?
Speaker 2 (04:37):
It has a super large claw that it can close
so fast it causes the water to cavitate, and it
creates this loud crack. It's a defense mechanism. It can
literally stun other fish or invertebrates with this claw. And
every now and then you'll hear this loud pop and
it's just because it's feeling threatened and I can't control it.
(05:00):
So listeners may hear a pop from here. You know,
this pistol shrimp's trying to just get by during its day.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
It's good to know, well, and everybody should be able
to get by during their day. So I'm gonna forgive
the pistol shrimp for interrupting us. So this has been
a fantastic episode of fish Talk with pole Holes.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
There we go here. This is our spinoff podcast, right.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Love it.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
It's gonna be a hit.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Gonna be a hit. But let's get serious because I
have a really interesting case that still confounds me today.
It's a little bit of a who done it? But
it's also how do they figure out who this person is?
So let's go ahead and jump in, and let's set
the scene.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
So this is.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Fresno, California. We have a lot of California stories just
for right now. I love this area and it's really
where I concentrated a lot of research on American Sherlock,
which is why I gravitate towards California, and you gravitated
obviously towards California too. So this is Fresno. Do you
know anything about Fresno?
Speaker 2 (05:58):
I have been down to Free know, I've driven through it.
It's about the middle of California. If you're driving from
north to south, it's in the middle of Central Valley.
Central Valley, California a huge farming area in terms of
its production of fruits and nuts. It leads the world,
I believe, in terms of how much produce it is
(06:20):
able to produce. But also Central Valley, California is so
blasted hot in the summertime. Where I lived in California
was technically sort of Central Valley, this town called Vagabille,
and it was routinely getting to one hundred and ten
to one hundred and fifteen in the summertime. And I
was just like, Nope, I'm not subjecting myself to that anymore.
(06:42):
And that was one of the factors in moving out
of California.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Wow, yeah, that sounds Texas hot. It's we are hot, hot,
hot here, and it's a humid hot. People make fun
of us for that all the time. It'sid.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Humid hot is the worst.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
But this is a family that we're centered on, the Stammers,
and they are upper middle class. If we're going to
frame how this family is, the father, Walter Stammer, is
a corporate attorney and he's got four children, three daughters,
one son, two very young children, and then a fourteen
year old girl and then a girl a couple of
(07:17):
years younger. Living a nice life in Fresno, tree lined street,
long driveway, really safe area, and this family that seems
to be very loving and supportive, and he sporadically travels
kind of goes back and forth. He has to hop
on the train. This is November of nineteen thirty five,
and he hops on the train to go see clients.
(07:38):
And they's such a tight knit family that often they'll
just drive with him to the train station. It's fifteen
or twenty minutes away, and they'lldrop them off and come back.
So that is what happens on this particular night. So
in November of nineteen thirty five, it's foggy, it's dark,
late at night, and the two little kids are sleeping.
So there is a six year old little and a
(08:00):
two year old boy who are sleeping upstairs. And then
fourteen year old Mary Louise Stammer, who is the center
of the story. So she's fourteen, she's very studious, she's
a sophomore in the local high school. She wants to
be a lawyer like her dad, and she likes to
read a lot. So she is in their music room,
so wealthy enough to have a music room. She plays
(08:22):
instruments and she's sitting in her dad's chair and she's
reading through a trial transcript, which at fourteen is kind
of amazing. She's reading all of this legal ease and
really taking it in. So smart young woman. This is
I'm going to tell you right now, are victim no
known enemies? So fourteen year old girl seemingly not at
(08:43):
high risk lifestyle. This is someone who is going to
die shortly. This would be a surprising victim to have,
I'm assuming.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, depending on the circumstances.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Yeah. So Walter and Dorothy Stammer decide that they are
going to go to the train station with their youngest
daughter under Mary Louise. So there's Dorothy Stammer, the younger daughter,
and they want to go with Walter Stammer because he
is this attorney and he's going onto a train to
go see a client. So this is kind of a
last minute thing. So the three of them leave, leaving
(09:17):
Mary Louise Stammer alone, the fourteen year old for the
first time ever, she had never been alone in the
house before. At night, she's in charge of her younger
sister and her younger brother, who are six and two.
They're asleep upstairs. Her mother says, lock the door behind us,
which they never did. Okay, I grew up in the
eighties and nineties in a farmhouse and we never locked
(09:37):
the doors ever.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Ever.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Ever, So the mom was concerned enough for Mary Louise
that she wanted to make sure that she locked the door.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Do you know what time the parents are leaving the
house that evening?
Speaker 1 (09:50):
It is dark enough, it is six o'clock, seven o'clock,
so it's dark and like I said, foggy, so limited visibility.
And this was a last minute thing. So the younger
do decides to go, leaving Mary Louise at home, and
the parents leave. They get into the car. So Mary
Louise is sitting in her dad's chair. She's reading through
(10:10):
one of his trial transcripts, just sort of flipping through it.
Who knows how much she understood, but she was a
very smart young lady. And there's somebody watching. We don't
know who this person is. He is watching the car leave,
and he sneaks up to the window and after they
pull away. He waits and mister Stammer forgot something, so
he comes back in the car. They hop out. He
(10:33):
grabs something from his briefcase and goes back and gets
back in. So the man stands and waits. He's hiding.
Then he sneaks up. When he feels like they are gone,
he sneaks up to the window and he pulls out
a gun. So he crouches and he watches the girl
for about five minutes of fourteen year old And this
is the third time that he's done this three nights.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Okay, so he's been there. He's watching this fourteen year
old girl right now. The house is vacated of adults
and she is alone with two younger siblings upstairs.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Yep. So he's watching long enough, right to know what
the routine is. And he's looking for an opportunity, is
that right?
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yes, And he may not have expected an opportunity this
night because you said this was the last second planned
trip by the parents. So now he's presented with an opportunity.
And this is where the offenders have to determine whether
or not they're going to seize that opportunity.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
And it's risky because the parents have already come back.
Once they left for a few minutes, he forgot something,
they came back. So already, when I'm hoping you're going
to do is start building a little profile in your
head of this person, because he becomes more interesting the
things that he thinks about doing. Okay, so he has
been watching her. This is the third time we've talked
about that. And he's crouching by the window and he
(11:53):
pulls out a gun. And we do a lot of
research for this show, and there are a lot of
different resources that we pull from, and I found contradictory
data about the gun that he used. He definitely used
a gun. I hear it being called a twenty two rifle.
I also hear it called a twenty two pistol. So
what should we do because I can't say for certain
(12:15):
what kind of gun this is.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Well, the common descriptor is twenty two caliber, and both
pistol and rifle designated. Well, one's a handgun. One is
something that is designed to be shot from the shoulder
and typically will have a longer body to a dand
or longer barrel. But I think, not knowing the particulars,
we might just be better off calling it a twenty
(12:37):
two caliber gun.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Okay, so we'll say that. So he takes this twenty
two caliber gun and he points at her head, and
he is not far from her at all. He's kind
of behind her, probably five to ten feet, and he
points it through the window which is closed, and he
fires it and he hits her at the base of
her brain.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Oh, so he's standing outside and shoots.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Her, yep, through the window, window brakes, and it hits
her one shot. The autopsy said, right at the base
of the brain, and doctors were pretty confident that this
would have killed her immediately.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Well, I'm surprised a little bit about this twenty two
penetrating through the window and then still being on target
to strike the victim. These windows back in the day,
probably single pain windows versus the double pain windows. Yeah,
fairly thin glass ten feet away, still having enough energy
(13:29):
to actually penetrate into the skull. Quite frankly, with that information,
and this is more educated speculation, that would cause me
to start thinking he had more of a rifle. Generally
rifles will have greater accuracy across greater distances and more
power behind the bullet. But can't say that for sure.
But Okay, so she struck, you said, in the back
(13:50):
of the head.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Yeah, hitting her in the head at the base of
her brain is what the coroner said. Oh wow, and
they assumed killing her instantly she slumped over just like that.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yeah, And most certainly that is entirely possible, even with
a small twenty two. It's funny because people when they
envision somebody being shot, the general person is relying on
what they see on TV or in the movies, and
oftentimes when somebody gets shot on TV and in movies,
they drop instantly. Well, in real life, that typically is
(14:20):
not what happens unless something very vital, such as, you know,
part of the brain that is involved in locomotion and consciousness,
or part of your spinal cord. When these structures are hit,
then yes you lose locomotion, but doesn't mean that you
die instantly. You still can survive. And I've even had
cases where somebody is shot in the head, shot in
(14:43):
the brain, and they survive. They're still able to move
after being shot. And it really comes down to well,
what is hit? What part of the brain is hit?
And I like to use when I talk to like
citizens academies, and I start talking about this issue is
if you've taken any like high school or college psychology courses,
(15:04):
you've probably been introduced to Phineas Cage, the railroad worker
who had a iron rod from an explosion go up
underneath his chin out the top of his head. He
remained conscious. The doctor is able to put a finger
in the entry wound and a finger in the exit
wound and touch his fingers inside this guy's head, and
(15:26):
it was like it didn't hit those vital structures that
either would have killed him or caused him to lose
consciousness or motor function. And so this is where in
assessing a crime scene, I have to assess the possibility
that the victim has potentially maintained consciousness and or motor
(15:46):
function after being shot. And in this case, so the
shooter is saying that Mary Louise just immediately slumped.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
That's what he said. But we'll find out in a
little bit that this is not the most trustworthy person
obviously when he gives us some more details about what happened.
So he has shot her, and this is what he
says he did, which I know you don't. You're not
totally on board with organized versus disorganized in that category,
and we'll talk about that in a little bit. Like
the person who plans meticulously, this seems like somebody who
(16:17):
didn't know what he was doing and then definitely knew
what he was doing at the same time. He says
that he held his hand over the breach of the
gun to catch the shell. Is the breach the little
whole thing. I'm sorry for being ignorant about guns, but
is that the thing that you put the cartridges in?
Is that what it breaches?
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Well, what this is telling me is that whether this
is a pistol or a rifle, that it's a semi
automatic gun or bolt action type gun. If it's a
semi auto, the gun utilizes the recoil of the round
in order to push a slide back, extract and eject
the empty cartridge case and then rechamber another round. You
(16:58):
can also have a bolt action where you manually he
checked that cartridge case and catch it. So he is
policing his brass in a way. Typically you're not catching
it as you're doing it. I'm thinking it's bold action.
He must have manually done it and grabbed this empty
cartridge case versus a semi auto, which would immediately be
ejecting the cartridge case out. Okay, I think there'd be
(17:20):
no way that he'd be able to fire at Mary
Louise kill her and he'd catch the cartridge case at
the same time of committing that homicide. But it's telling
me that he's concerned about that cartridge case as possibly
being evidence.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, and just to summarize, we have someone who has
been to this house and stalked the people in this
house three times. He waited for an opportunity. He knows
how to use a gun, he seems to know how
it operates, and he is starting to show some knowledge
of forensics. So he takes this cartridge and he bites it, okay,
(17:55):
which doesn't sound great for your teeth, But he's obviously
doing it because he must enough about ballistics to know
that something on that cartridge could be traced back to him.
Do you think that's the case?
Speaker 2 (18:06):
I mean, I couldn't imagine putting an expended cartridge case
in my mouth and starting to chew on it. You know,
even though this is not a real hard metal, you know,
it's still metal. He's having to apply a lot of
force with his jaws in order to change the shape
of this cartridge case. Now, it does seem like he
(18:27):
is trying to obliterate the marks that this gun would
have left on the cartridge case that could have been
used to tie that evidence back to the gun that
he possesses. I believe that is what his intent would be. However,
it's possible that those marks under a microscope that came
from the firearm would survive this chewing process. Really, yes,
(18:50):
So occasionally out let's say a shooting on a street,
We'll have empty cartridge cases laying on the street and
then a car runs over or somebody steps on. Firearms
examiners are able to tell the difference from marks left
from the road and the tires being crushed that way
versus the extractory jector firing pin marks that are left
(19:11):
by a gun the same thing with teeth. Teeth don't
leave the same types of marks that the firearm is
going to leave. So this cartridge case is still valuable
evidence that can be used to tie that cartridge case
back to the weapon if it was recovered.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Okay, so he might be wrong, but he's showing some
level of intelligence, right, So he goes he knows that
the front door is locked because he's seen Mary Louise
open and close the door for her mom lock it.
He goes through the back. He probably wouldn't gone through
the front door anyway. He goes through the back. He
knows she's in the music room dying or has already died.
(19:48):
He smashes the back door window in, so they have
the kind of door that's got the windows in it,
kind of an ornate door. He smashes it and then
gets this. He pulls out all of the shards in
that wind and throws them into the bushes next to
the door. Why would he.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Do that, Well, he's removing these shards first because he's
planning on reaching through that window in order to unlock
the door. And so he's removing the shards. Now do
we know if he has gloves on.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
He did not have gloves on, which seems like an
aut of mission to me.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Well, but this gives me some insight in terms of
what his plans were that night. He may be realizing
that in order to reach in with those shards in place,
he's risking being cut. And we see this all the
time today with burglars. They get cut, they're bleeding at
these burglary scenes, they're leaving their DNA and agencies that
(20:45):
have the resources to pursue burglaries with DNA testing, which
some agencies will those guys get caught. Well, so he's
not thinking DNA back in nineteen thirty five, but he's
thinking I don't want to get cut, I don't want
to get hurt. But now I'm leaving fingerprints behind on
these shards as I pull him out, and so that's
why he's hiding them. Yep. But he's savvy enough to
(21:08):
chew on a cartridge case to try to prevent it
from being identified. If he was planning that night on
going into the house, he most certainly is probably aware
of the fingerprint discipline and that those fingerprints could be
used to identify him. So how come he isn't wearing gloves? Right?
This tells me that again, this was an opportunity that
(21:29):
he was not expecting. He may have just been planning
on being there for another night of observation. I suspect
that this is probably a peeping Tom scenario where he
is sexually aroused by watching this fourteen year old girl inside,
and then all of a sudden, fourteen year old girl
is essentially alone and he sees, oh, I can actually
(21:50):
reach out and touch my fantasy now.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
But he is a gun. Would a peeping Tom usually
bring a gun? I mean, I don't know, Maybe this
is escalating past peeping Tom by night three.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
These types of offenders, they're going to be armed, some
of them for just their own protection. Wow. Okay, so
they can be very dangerous if confronted. So just because
he has a gun doesn't indicate he's planning on committing
a homicide that night. If he's confronted. He wants to
be able to protect himself and get away.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
So he walks in and he finds her in the
music room, which just seems insane to me. He knows
these two little kids are upstairs asleep, he knows the
parents could come back whenever where the mom and the
sister could come back, So he walks in, he picks
her up. Now, just as a disclosure before we get
into this, this was not a sexual assault. It was
(22:43):
going to be a sexual assault, but something happens. So
I just want to explain that to listeners straight away. Okay,
I am bothered by hearing sexual assault stories. I thought
this was an important story to tell, but I just
want to say, this is not what happens. Okay, that
was his intention though. He picks her up and he
takes her to the nearby bedroom. Blood is spilling all
along the way and he's stepping in this blood, so
(23:05):
there are bloody footprints. The kids are still asleep. He
lays her down. He starts to undress her on the ground,
and then something occurs to him, because he doesn't seem
one hundred percent experienced at getting this far, doesn't seem
like it. He is worried about the gun. Where the
hell did I put that gun? What did I do
with the gun? So he leaves her. He does not
assault her. She is either dying or already gone at
(23:28):
that point. He goes to the back door and he
starts looking in the bushes where those shards are for
the gun. Where did I put that gun? Because that
gun might be able to be traced back to me.
(23:50):
Someone comes home. It's the mom and she's trying to
open the door. Mary Louise has locked the door. She's
banging on the door. Where's Mary Louise? Where are you?
What's going on? What's going on? And he hides. The
mom goes through the back She looks at the blood
that's in the music room. She goes to the bedroom
where Mary Louise's She obviously is screaming and crying, and
(24:11):
then she hears a door unlock and someone running, and
he goes out the front door and no one sees him.
He disappears, but they've got evidence. There's blood in places,
he's got handprints. They have these huge columns in their
front porch. She's got a bloody handprint on the front porch.
So this did not go the way that he was
expecting it to go.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
No. In fact, this is showing the lack of planning,
and it's also showing an offender, just like a normal
person about to do something that is nervous, It causes nervousness,
it causes anxiety. Well, these offenders experience that type of
emotion too. They're excited about this is going to be
a sexually motivated crime. They're excited about what they're about
(24:51):
to experience, but also they're nervous about this, especially earlier
in their careers. And this really shows that when things
go sideways, certain people do not respond well. And that
works to law enforcements advantage because this is now they're
leaving evidence in that panicked state. And this is part
(25:15):
of when I was working the Golden State killer case
when it was unsolved, and I'm assessing that offender and
how when things would go sideways or he had to
resort to Plan B or plan see, how methodical he remained,
how in charge he remained, how he still prevented leaving evidence.
This told me he's a cool cat, he's a cool customer.
(25:36):
He's intelligent, he's sophisticated, and things don't rile him up,
whereas this offender simply thinking, oh, oh, where's my gun?
And then mom comes home. He's just panicked. He doesn't
know what to do, and she.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Doesn't spot him. It's just an open door where it
was once locked and handprints, and of course she calls
the police and Mary Louise is dead and they call
the father back, and it's chaos within the family for
quite a while, and the police in Fresno are alarmed.
Wealthy family, daughter of a prominent lawyer, safe neighborhood. Of course,
(26:12):
you know, a young white woman high school student who
was well liked. This sets off so many alarm bells
in the town, and it's just a panic because it
seems a phrase that you read a lot in the
eighteen hundreds and the nineteen hundreds is sex craze killer,
the lust killer, all different names for rapist, and I
(26:32):
haven't read the term rapist in a very long time.
They would say molested, but they determined that she had
not been sexually assaulted because his own panic prevented that
from happening. So they go and look for the forensic
evidence they have, which is the showed up cartridge. They
find the gun, They have fingerprints, as you said, on
(26:53):
the glass yards, They have the bloody shoe prints, bloody fingerprints.
All of this stuff is pretty good evidence. Particularly they
think the glass yards are good evidence, because I've said
this before with fingerprinting, it totally depends on the sample
that you're receiving. If you've got a smeared fingerprint, you're
not going to be able to see the swirls and
everything else. Very well, this seemed like a pretty clean
fingerprint on one of the glass yards.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, Well, that also is a misperception about fingerprints, is
that as soon as you touch the surface, you're leaving
your fingerprints behind that are good enough to be able
to be identified back to you. The reality is is
most of the time when you're grabbing objects, especially during
the commission of a crime, you're not leaving prints in
a static state. There are a lot of smears, there's
(27:39):
a lot of fragments that fingerprint examiners are dealing with.
It's actually the unusual print that is that nice, beautiful
print looking like somebody just put their thumb down, like
when they are being printed by DMVAH. So to get
a print like that, that is huge. I've had that
happen in my career in some cases, and it's just like,
this is a gold mine, and it came from the
(28:00):
offender and it's easily identifiable, Versus most of the prints
that I've collected in the course of my processing their
smears and they're fragments. It's really tough to work with those.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
And many of those are inconclusive, and you can't hang
a case on one fingerprint. Besides the fact that he
could have said, oh, yeah, I came to the door
one time and I knocked on the door. I was lost,
that would have put some reasonable doubt, I would think
in there, but who knows. They decided that they were
going to canvas all of Fresno I thought this was
really impressive. They had hundreds of volunteers who did what
(28:33):
they called a fingerprint drive, oh, where they had every
boy and man fingerprinted, three thousand boys and men fingerprinted
for this case. Can you even imagine would they do
something like that. They wouldn't do that today.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Right, No, in fact, I don't think you could. This
is a kin to the mass screenings that are done
over in Britain, going back to the call in Pitchfork case,
where now in a small town they're basically drawing DNA
amples from every eligible male within a certain geographic area
that doesn't pass the civil rights test. Over here in
(29:09):
the United States, you can voluntarily ask, but you cannot
compel all these men and boys to give their prints.
And quite frankly, law enforcement today just doesn't have the
resources yeah to do that. You rely now on the databases,
the FBI's database, the state databases, and the ability to
do searches within those fingerprint databases.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Well, I'll tell you what's interesting is the fingerprint drive
turns up some really good results we'll talk about in
a minute. But they start profiling, which profiling in the
nineteen thirties was very rudimentary. So they start profiling who
this person is, and the local police say, this is
a kid. This is definitely a kid who knew Mary
Louise Stammer or maybe her sister. This is inexperienced, this
(29:54):
is poorly planned. This is someone who one of the
two young girls in this family. They must have said, oh,
one of us is going out tonight. We're going to
go to the train station to go take the data.
And this young boy saw it as an opportunity. And
here's what tells you about the times. The most the
police did not believe that an older man would be
enough of a degenerate huh to try to sexually assault
(30:16):
a fourteen year old. So that tells you a lot
about society, at least in Fresno, California, in the nineteen thirties.
They just didn't think a grown man would have been
capable of doing this.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
You know, you have your chronologic age, but you do
have criminals that at different stages in their life. You know,
somebody may start earlier and then somebody may start much
later in their life in terms of when they commit
let's say a peeping Tom style crime. So the chronological
(30:46):
age is sometimes tough to assess there's well, what about
the psychological age of the person. Is there other mental
aspects to the person that could potentially have manifest themselves
at an older age. So it's really tough to say, well,
it's got to be a kid. This is where one
of the things that I would be and I have
(31:07):
been wondering about, was the age of the offender. You
said that he was identified, and it was like, well,
how old is he? That would tell me a lot
in terms of where he was potentially at in the
evolution of his crimes as it relates to sexually motivated crimes.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
Well, this case is really interesting because as you learn
more and more about the offender, you'll see how a
lot of this stuff makes sense. They of course found
out very quickly that this was a spur of the
moment trip to the train station. The dad didn't even
know he was going, so there was no Now they said, oh, okay,
this is not some fourteen year old kid who was obsessed.
He was not a sex fiend obsessed with Mary Louise.
(31:46):
This is now the work of an older person who
is attempting at least to be organized. So here's the
thing that happens Fresno in nineteen thirty five was a
fairly safe place, except there had been a recent series
of break in so burglaries right including at the Stammer
house twice Walter Stammer chased off somebody he couldn't identify,
(32:10):
somebody dressed in black who had tried to break into
a house. And listen to this, whoever did that to
Walter's house, to the victim's house had cut the telephone
lines on the last one.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Oh, okay, and again nineteen thirty five. That's interesting. This
is like a half century before and maybe not quite
a half century before, you know, nine to one one.
So the cutting the phone lines was to prevent victims
inside the house from being able to call the operator
in order to get help to respond. This is somebody
(32:42):
who is thinking a bit in terms of self preservation,
whether it is the intent that I'm going to go
hands on with these victims, or in case I am
seen and I have to make an escape, I want
to delay the first responders from getting to the location
so I have enough time to be able to get
as far away from the scene as possible.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Yep, it's smart, and we hear that in horror movies
all the time where the lines have been cut, and
I had not read of a case actually of that happening,
and I think it's hard to believe that this is
not connected. And we'll find out a little bit more
about that in a minute. So let's talk about nineteen
thirty five forensics Doberman pictures. I had never heard of
Doberman's being used to track the scent, but they use
(33:24):
Doberman's in Fresno. First of all, is that a thing?
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Really?
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Do dogs really do a good job? Have they ever
broken a case before?
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Well, dogs are a tool. Dogs are amazing animals when
it comes to being able to smell, and they do
have success in terms of tracking. But again, they're a tool.
I've seen dogs track and evidence is found along the
path that they've tracked. Dogs will track to where an
(33:54):
offender is hiding. That happens frequently, and it's typically in
cases that never make the newspaper. So the K nine
handlers out there can tell stories after stories of that scenario.
But I've also seen dogs miss, you know, whether it
be scent dogs or decomp dogs, they miss, and it's
part of that human animal interaction. Is it the animal
(34:15):
missing or is it the handler who's not interpreting the
animal's behavior as to is there an alert going on? Yeah?
Or is the dog scent if it's a scent dog
has a dog keyed in on the right scent. You know,
if you have an item that maybe multiple people have handled.
So this is something where they're a tool, but yes,
they can be valuable. They also can have your false leads.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
This brings up a good point that I make a lot,
which is that there are lots of forensic tools that
you could use, dogs and fingerprinting. But the problem is
is when there's just one of those tools used to
convict someone and it's something that is on shaky brown
forensically that could be considered junk science. And I'm not
saying fingerprints or dogs or any of that stuff is science.
(35:00):
I'm saying that the problem we have is when we
have investigators who aren't able to gather, for one reason
or another, more evidence than evidence connected to something that
could be argued in adulbert hearing where you're protesting the
admission of some evidence. So I think that's why I
really appreciate the story because in nineteen thirty five, the
Fresno Police worked really hard to gather things on this case.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
When it comes to trial and making a case. You know,
of course, in this day and age where we have DNA,
DNA does not stand alone. There should be other circumstantial
evidence and other aspects of the case that is built
up and presented in front of the jury. There are
(35:44):
times where DNA is that is the big smoking gun.
The smoking guns, thank you. But typically the prosecutors, the
people's representatives are going to try to build a case,
and this is relying on the original investigators at the
investigating agency, and then the DA's office typically has investigators
(36:05):
that will go out and try to show, Okay, this
is the totality of the facts that we believe show
that this person is responsible for committing this crime. And
whether you have a fingerprint like it sounds like we
have in this case, you still need other aspects to
present to be confident that you have the right person. Now,
(36:27):
he's left a fingerprint in the victim's blood, I believe
you said, that's pretty damning evidence. It wouldn't necessarily stand alone,
but he has a lot of explaining to do. It's
more than just while I was at the house before. Yep,
he was out the house after Mary Louise started bleeding. Yep.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
So they continue to gather all of this evidence. They
go on the idea that maybe he was cut by
those shards because he spent a lot of time picking
the shards out of the glassdoor. They look at all
the drug stores, did anybody buy bandages recently? They go
to the hospitals, did anybody coming injured? They did bullet
trajectory using string to try to figure out how tall
(37:05):
this guy was turned out to be average height, which
is useless. I mean, essentially, yeah, they're shaking down every
person in Fresno at this point.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Well, to use the string, here you have Mary Louise
who's been shot in the back of the head. Her
position has been changed by the offender. She's been moved
to a different point in the house. So you've lost
that data point in terms of the trajectory. And then
now you have a window, which is likely a single
pain window. From my perspective, there's no utility in trying
(37:38):
to string that trajectory. You don't have enough information. You
can just basically say that the muzzle of the firearm
was at this height at the time the shot was fired,
and was at this distance. Maybe if they have shoe
impressions or they have firearms discharge on the window in
order to say yep, at this distance from the window
when the bullet passed through, and then we know that
(37:59):
Mary Louise was sitting in that chair. But you don't
have any true objective evidence to be able to say
I've got a valid trajectory. I'd basically be at that
scene going up. A fender was standing outside the window
and shot in there, and I can guess it was
along this trajectory, but I would not be making any
measurements to that fact, nor testifying to anything related to
(38:20):
that trajectory.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Well, and it ended up not being helpful whatever information
from that string. What was helpful was the pressure from
this fingerprint drive that they held. So there were men
and boys who came up voluntarily. I said three thousand.
There were people who did not volunteer, and they, of
course immediately became suspects. They narrowed it down to thirteen
men who said, no, I'm not doing this for one
(38:43):
reason or the other. So they compelled them to give
their thumbprints. But they missed somebody, and this is what
cracked the case. They got a tip, an anonymous tip,
which is so often something that we hear of that
is the turning point in a case that said you
need to look at this ex convict. So now we're
on an ex convict and his name is Elton Stone
(39:05):
and you need to take a look at him. And
it turns out that he was a neighbor of Mary
Louise Stammer and the Stammer family. Oh okay, they have
his fingerprint old school because he went to prison. He
was at fulsome and he had a fingerprint on the
good old school index cards that they always took.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
And of course it matches. And that's not the interesting
part of this. So this is an ex convict who's
thirty years old. So now we're going to go back
to your thinking about this profile. An ex convict thirty
years old in and out of prison primarily for robbery,
not in prison for sex assaults or murder, violent crime,
lots of robbery, lots of grand theft auto from the
time he was probably twenty, okay.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
And I just want to make sure that when you
say robbery that we are talking the legal definition of robbery,
which is taking a possession by force or fear from
a person. Yep, okay, because a lot of people will
misuse the term robbery with Burglary. Yeah, so he is
somebody who has a history of being willing to confront
(40:06):
somebody and take some possession of value away from them.
This is a serious offender. When somebody's willing to take
that step, this person has a dangerous aspect to them.
So now I'm starting to think about, Okay, what was
the intent with this repeated surveillance of Mary Louise. He
(40:27):
lives in the neighborhood. Going back to the famous quote
out of Silence of the Lambs, you covet what you see.
So here's a thirty one year old man who's seeing
this fourteen year old girl in his neighborhood. Everything about
this tends to suggest that he's watching Mary Louise. Who
knows what his ultimate goal was, but he may just
(40:50):
be a peeper. And then all of a sudden that
opportunity presented itself where he realized, oh, I can actually
go physical with her. What is really interesting is he
shoots and kills her before he even makes the attempt
to go physical with her. Yeah, is he lacking confidence
to be able to get into this house and get
(41:11):
her subdued without alerting neighbors, without alerting the other two
children inside the house. He must have plenty of confidence
in the use of a gun in order to shoot
through a window at this fourteen year old girl and
then still break into the house and spend some time
with Mary Louise until he goes, well, where's my gun?
And then mom comes home and things go sideways on him.
(41:33):
So he resorts to what he's comfortable with, and that's
the gun. And that tells me he's probably very familiar
with firearms, probably used firearms during the commission of his
robberies in order to intimidate his victims, you know. So
he's somebody that that is his weapon of choice. And
he didn't shy away from picking Mary Louise up after
she's bleeding from that mortal headwound and there would be
(41:55):
a lot of blood yep, and he goes and undresses
her in a room he was planning on still following
through with a sexual assault with in essence a dead girl.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
I find Elton Stone to be confusing because this is
what happens next.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Here we go, Here we go.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
He says, Okay, you're right, I did it. I shot her,
but I wasn't ever going to sexually assault her. He said,
I have a grudge against Walter Stammer and the whole family,
and if Walter Stammer and his wife had been home,
I would have killed them. I would have killed everybody
in the family. I wasn't focused on Mary Louise, and
he was adamant about that. So the police go to
(42:35):
Walter Stammer and said, what did you do to this guy?
He said, I've never met this guy in my life.
So of course the police say, okay, you're full of it.
Elton Stone, So why is he deflecting in that way?
I wonder in the thirties, is it as bad a
thing now to be in prison as someone who raped
and killed a child. I wonder if that's what the
(42:56):
motivation was for him to just put out this non
sensical story.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
This is the typical excuse that is given by somebody
who's admitting to the crime. But then they're trying to
minimize certain aspects because whether it be their own internal
morality conflict or because of fear of having that type
of stigma associated with them being an offender that is
(43:23):
sexually assaulting young girls, young boys. You are a target
of course today imagine and you would know better than
I in nineteen thirty five with kind of the morality
of the culture at that point, the stigma is huge
in the general population about somebody who's willing to sexually
assault a fourteen year old girl. I bet that general
(43:44):
population culture is also concentrated within the prison system. And
so he's now realizing when he makes this statement, he goes, Okay,
I know I'm going to get convicted on this, but
I need to minimize what's going to happen to me
once I'm sentenced and put in prison. And that's my guess.
This whole thing about I had a grudge against the father,
(44:05):
and I was going to kill everybody in the house,
and I wasn't going to sectually assault Mary Louise. That's
just in a way, he's minimizing the morality of sexually
assaulting the fourteen year girl. The fact is he picked
her up, put into her a different room, and took
her clothes off. It's a sexually motivated crime.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
And I don't think this is the first time he's
done it. Oh and the police don't either, so they
start questioning him because there are two unsolved cases on
either side of his prison term, in addition to Mary
Louise Stammer. Okay, so Elton Stone went to prison in
nineteen thirty one for grand theft, auto and robbery, two
separate things. But before that, there was a woman who
(44:45):
was sexually assaulted very violently in her home. She wasn't killed,
but she was sexually assaulted and phone lines cut beforehand.
Same thing that happened at Walter Stammer's house the one
time when he was clearly practicing and this was an
on health case he couldn't be identified. This was in
Mary Louise Stammer's neighborhood, which at one point was his neighborhood.
(45:07):
So this is right before he went into prison.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Okay, So he has prior familiarity with this neighborhood. He
has familiarity with the dynamics of trying to commit this
type of crime. Do we know what he was cut
on in that first case? Was it, by chance a
broken window shard as he was reaching in too unlock
a door.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
You know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
Let's take that as maybe that's the case. He breaks
in a window and he gets cut. Now with Mary Louise.
He takes the time, realizing he's leaving fingerprints that could
identify him, but he still takes the time to remove
the shards out of the window pane itself. This is
how offenders learn. This is a minor m O adjustment
(45:53):
in order to prevent something the offender thought was negative
in the past. MO changes from case to case as
offenders learn, as well as as offenders have to adapt
to the dynamics of the crime they're committing, because sometimes
victims do things that they're not expecting, or mom comes home,
then they weren't expecting that, right, So this is what
(46:15):
complicates trying to link cases when you don't have fingerprints
or DNA the identifying evidence to link cases. Now you
start looking at MO and behavioral aspects, and MO does
change and sometimes well is this a different person or
is it the same person? And they've had to adapt
based on prior experience or the dynamics of the current case.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
So now we're about to talk about really adapting. So
he goes to prison, he gets out. This young woman
is attacked in nineteen thirty one. He goes to prison
for something else because that's an unsolved case. He comes
out in nineteen thirty four. So Mary Louise Stammer was
murdered in nineteen thirty five. Before that, there's a woman
who worked for an inn and she was sexually assault
(47:00):
and bludgeoned to death. But the killer made a mistake.
He left her alive for too long, and when the
police arrived, she was still alive. They asked her who
did this and she said Stone. Huh, And they said
which Stone, because I guess there were multiple stones. She
said Clayton Stone, and Clayton Stone was her neighbor, fourteen
(47:22):
year old neighbor. They cleared him and this went cold
because they said, she doesn't know what she's talking about.
She knew Elton Stone. He had come to the end,
so they said trauma. Of course, she was being bludgeoned
to death. She just misspoke. She was trying to say
Elton Stone, but because she said the wrong first name,
he got away. Then a year later he kills Mary
(47:42):
Louise Stammer.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
Okay, assuming the original investigations into these cases are solid
and Elton Stone is responsible for all three of those,
of course, now you have he's a serial predator. He's
willing to commit a broad variety of crimes, so there's
a level of criminality to him. But this adaptation the
(48:06):
nineteen thirty four case, the woman was bludgeoned, yet she
lived for a period of.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Time yep, long enough to id him almost.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Noah, So now I'm starting to question his intent going
to Mary Louise and he has the pistol. He's now
bringing a firearm. Is it because I bludgeing somebody? But
they live long enough? But does he know at this
point that's really going to be a big factor. He
may not even know that she made any statements implicating
him in the nineteen thirty four case, So I would
(48:38):
want to know that to see if he's bringing a
pistol for the fact that he'll be more confident that
he'd be able to kill Mary Louise after he leaves.
So there's that, Or is he normally armed with a
pistol because of his just general criminality. Maybe he's going
to run across somebody later that night after he peeped
on Mary Louise and is going to get a wallet,
you know, and he's going to use the twenty two gun.
(49:00):
I don't know if it's a pistol rifle, but the
twenty two gun. If he is aware that that prior
victim in nineteen thirty four lived after a bludgeting, I
can see where now, okay, I need to use a
gun the next time yep. And then he's bringing a
gun to Mary Louisa's house. Did he intend to go
in that night or did he just happen to be
prepared and the parents left and now he seizes that opportunity.
(49:22):
So this is interesting, you know, from my perspective, I
would want to kind of drill down on the details
of what was known when and exactly what the original
investigators knew in order to really study the evolution of
this offender. But it does look like you have somebody
who is a serial predator and he's also been in prison.
In prison is the great learning institution for felons, so
(49:45):
he's talking to people and now he's more well versed
and maybe a broader area of criminality when he comes out.
So fascinating offender from my perspective from nineteen thirty five.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
Well, I'll tell you some state prison at that time
period was known for the repeat offender route. So that
was the thing is most of the guys there had
been there two or three times, So this was somebody,
you're right, who could have been easily educated. That case
from nineteen thirty four I looked into and it was
very widely reported. Unless he wasn't intentionally looking, he would
(50:19):
have known that was very unusual, especially because she was
accusing her fourteen year old neighbor and Fresno was not
a huge place, and he would have known. And I
think that he took a gun because he didn't want
to make that mistake again because he was almost caught.
He knew this woman, he had been seen with her,
he knew her.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
And I bet in nineteen thirty four, and correct me
if I'm wrong, they probably didn't have the protections of
juvenile identity. So I'm sure the fourteen year old boy
with the last name Stone, his name was in the newspaper.
So if Elton Stone is saying, oh geez, they got
it half right, that's a little bit of an o
shit moment for him.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
Yeah, big o' shit moment. And I think that he
saw it by using a gun the next time. And
as you said, he's a robber and he's familiar with guns.
So the police in Fresno start pressing on him and
They say, we know you killed Mary Louise Stammer, we
know it was an attempt at sexual assault. We think
you were all so responsible for these other two cases.
(51:19):
And he said, maybe, maybe not. I don't know. I'll
give you a few details. Now here's what's screwed up
about this guy. I mean, beyond everything that he did,
Elton Stone gives them some details about the other two cases.
And this is how we know that he knew about
the second case. He had just enough information of what
was in the newspapers. He wasn't giving them anything else.
But what was interesting about Elton was he wasn't asking
(51:42):
for anything. He was just having fun with the police.
Speaker 2 (51:45):
There's a little bit of where now he's able to
express a level of control, you know, power and control
over his accusers because he knows the facts and he
knows they want to know the facts. That's what these
offenders do. They'll tease it out but not divulge everything,
and that can be very frustrating. You know, you're on
(52:06):
the right path, and this guy's willing to talk. I
mean it's like a Ted Bundy. Yeah, he's willing to
give out some details, but he's not telling everything.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
No, and so he is ultimately convicted and he is
sentenced to the death penalty to the gallows in nineteen
thirty six. And his quote at the end I thought
was very telling. Before he died, he said, hanging is okay,
it will clear up my debt.
Speaker 2 (52:32):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
Interesting quote.
Speaker 2 (52:34):
Yeah, his debt to who, his debt to the devil.
Speaker 1 (52:39):
Not that he had a conscience, but I think that
there are times when people sort of reflect back and think,
maybe I did make some mistakes. I don't know if
that's the case, but it so minimizes the profound effect
that Mary Louise's death had on her family and on
that community. This was a woman who had so much
promise fourteen, wanted to be an attorney. I've never been
(53:00):
in trouble, just you know, someone who had nothing but
a bright future ahead of her and to take that away.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
Yeah, these types of crimes, in many ways, are the
ultimate selfish act that somebody does. They will take somebody
else's life for their own personal gratification, and in essence,
that is what Elton Stone did. And it's just terribly
sad to think about the future that Mary Louise would
have had. Many of these cases that have seen this
(53:29):
type of outcome over and over again, and that's just
part of the tragedy of somebody just trying to fulfill
a fantasy and they steal somebody else's life.
Speaker 1 (53:40):
Well, thank you for your insight on this case. I've
been reading about it for years. It's been haunting me
for quite a while. And now I need to buy
myself a salt water aquarium and I think decompress a
little bit. This was a hard case and I appreciate
all everything that you contributed to You always surprise me,
Paul with your insight.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
Well, you're such a good storyteller. You got me hanging
on the edge going okay, what's coming next? And the
twists and turns are great. Good. It's a tragic case,
but it also is an important case for us to
kind of sort through and digest and learn from.
Speaker 1 (54:13):
Well, go say hi to your fish for me, and
I will see you next time.
Speaker 2 (54:16):
All right, sounds good.
Speaker 1 (54:22):
This has been an exactly right production for our sources
and show notes go to Exactlyrightmedia dot com slash Buried
Bones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Emirosi.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
Research by Maren mcclashan and Kate Winkler Dawson.
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Speaker 2 (54:38):
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Speaker 1 (54:40):
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Speaker 2 (54:43):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia hard Stark and Daniel Kramer.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
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Speaker 2 (54:52):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race of decode the
criminal mind, is available for pre order now
Speaker 1 (55:00):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life solving America's
cold cases is also available now.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried bones.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how's it going.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
It's going really well. Now there's something I've got to
ask you about.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Uh oh, it's your aquarium, my aquarium.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
This sound that comes out of your aquarium, which I hear,
can cause sound issues sometimes, So I'm curious about what
is up with your aquarium. I've never known someone with
a saltwater aquarium.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, you know, technically it's still a very young aquarium.
It's about eight months old. So saltwater aquariums are not
like goldfish tanks. This is truly sort of replicating the
ocean inside a window box. And it has a whole
life support system, so that is really what is the
issue when it comes to the sound, is there's pumps going,
(01:45):
there's supportive equipment that make noises. And when I record,
since it's in the space that we do the podcast
from out here in my man cave, I have to
literally shut down the life support to this aquarium in
order to try to get my room as quiet as
possible so the people who are listening aren't hearing the
(02:05):
rumblings and the gurglings and everything else that's going on.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Is that risking the lives of your aquatic animals though,
But we have to shut down the whole system.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
It is in a way now, I will tell you
we recorded two episodes the other day and that's the
longest that I had shut my tank down. And when
I looked I don't know if you remember, but in
between recordings, I was like, Hey, I got to go
check on my fish, and I have a flashlight because
I you know, basically I'm sitting here in the dark
(02:37):
right now. So I take the flashlight and two of
my fish were laying on the sand bottom and I
was just like oh no, that fast, you know, that
was my uh oh, and it was I have a
royal Grammar, which is a beautiful purple and yellow fish,
and then I had just put in a relatively young
(02:57):
six line rass and both were literally just laying on
the bottom of the sand, which is what you typically
see when fish die. Oh no, So I was really concerned.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
And then I you see aside it and well.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
That I flipped on my lights to the tank and
they both just got up off the sand and started
swimming away, and I was like, okay, they were fooling me.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
You and I talk a lot about reducing anxiety, since
that's what your book was about, was the amount of
anxiety that you've gotten in life. And so we've worked
you towards the kava right drinking the car and that's
very calming and nothing wrong with bourbon, but just you know,
working on some other things. So I assume that the
salt water aquarium is one of the ways that you
tried to reduce anxiety. I need like three of those,
(03:45):
so maybe you can sit need a lot of salt
water animals to reduce my anxiety.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
It's not a cheap hobby, but yes, I will sit
there and just watch my tank. I've even sat in
front of it sipping bourbon, watching my tank. I love
these creatures. They all have their own little personalities, the
way they interact with each other, the engineering some of
these animals do. Like your coral reefs, right, don't you
have coral? I have a few pieces of coral, but
(04:11):
the tank's not quite ready to really put a lot
of coral in there. But I have creatures, both fish
and this invertebrate, this pistol shrimp that build structures. They
will take shells and build homes and it's amazing, awesome. Yeah,
and now the one thing that I cannot control about
noise out of this tank is the pistol shrimp. Can
you imagine why it's called a pistol shrimp?
Speaker 1 (04:36):
What does it sound like?
Speaker 2 (04:37):
It has a super large claw that it can close
so fast it causes the water to cavitate, and it
creates this loud crack. It's a defense mechanism. It can
literally stun other fish or invertebrates with this claw. And
every now and then you'll hear this loud pop and
it's just because it's feeling threatened and I can't control it.
(05:00):
So listeners may hear a pop from here. You know,
this pistol shrimp's trying to just get by during its day.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
It's good to know, well, and everybody should be able
to get by during their day. So I'm gonna forgive
the pistol shrimp for interrupting us. So this has been
a fantastic episode of fish Talk with pole Holes.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
There we go here. This is our spinoff podcast, right.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Love it.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
It's gonna be a hit.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Gonna be a hit. But let's get serious because I
have a really interesting case that still confounds me today.
It's a little bit of a who done it? But
it's also how do they figure out who this person is?
So let's go ahead and jump in, and let's set
the scene.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
So this is.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Fresno, California. We have a lot of California stories just
for right now. I love this area and it's really
where I concentrated a lot of research on American Sherlock,
which is why I gravitate towards California, and you gravitated
obviously towards California too. So this is Fresno. Do you
know anything about Fresno?
Speaker 2 (05:58):
I have been down to Free know, I've driven through it.
It's about the middle of California. If you're driving from
north to south, it's in the middle of Central Valley.
Central Valley, California a huge farming area in terms of
its production of fruits and nuts. It leads the world,
I believe, in terms of how much produce it is
(06:20):
able to produce. But also Central Valley, California is so
blasted hot in the summertime. Where I lived in California
was technically sort of Central Valley, this town called Vagabille,
and it was routinely getting to one hundred and ten
to one hundred and fifteen in the summertime. And I
was just like, Nope, I'm not subjecting myself to that anymore.
(06:42):
And that was one of the factors in moving out
of California.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Wow, yeah, that sounds Texas hot. It's we are hot, hot,
hot here, and it's a humid hot. People make fun
of us for that all the time. It'sid.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Humid hot is the worst.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
But this is a family that we're centered on, the Stammers,
and they are upper middle class. If we're going to
frame how this family is, the father, Walter Stammer, is
a corporate attorney and he's got four children, three daughters,
one son, two very young children, and then a fourteen
year old girl and then a girl a couple of
(07:17):
years younger. Living a nice life in Fresno, tree lined street,
long driveway, really safe area, and this family that seems
to be very loving and supportive, and he sporadically travels
kind of goes back and forth. He has to hop
on the train. This is November of nineteen thirty five,
and he hops on the train to go see clients.
(07:38):
And they's such a tight knit family that often they'll
just drive with him to the train station. It's fifteen
or twenty minutes away, and they'lldrop them off and come back.
So that is what happens on this particular night. So
in November of nineteen thirty five, it's foggy, it's dark,
late at night, and the two little kids are sleeping.
So there is a six year old little and a
(08:00):
two year old boy who are sleeping upstairs. And then
fourteen year old Mary Louise Stammer, who is the center
of the story. So she's fourteen, she's very studious, she's
a sophomore in the local high school. She wants to
be a lawyer like her dad, and she likes to
read a lot. So she is in their music room,
so wealthy enough to have a music room. She plays
(08:22):
instruments and she's sitting in her dad's chair and she's
reading through a trial transcript, which at fourteen is kind
of amazing. She's reading all of this legal ease and
really taking it in. So smart young woman. This is
I'm going to tell you right now, are victim no
known enemies? So fourteen year old girl seemingly not at
(08:43):
high risk lifestyle. This is someone who is going to
die shortly. This would be a surprising victim to have,
I'm assuming.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, depending on the circumstances.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Yeah. So Walter and Dorothy Stammer decide that they are
going to go to the train station with their youngest
daughter under Mary Louise. So there's Dorothy Stammer, the younger daughter,
and they want to go with Walter Stammer because he
is this attorney and he's going onto a train to
go see a client. So this is kind of a
last minute thing. So the three of them leave, leaving
(09:17):
Mary Louise Stammer alone, the fourteen year old for the
first time ever, she had never been alone in the
house before. At night, she's in charge of her younger
sister and her younger brother, who are six and two.
They're asleep upstairs. Her mother says, lock the door behind us,
which they never did. Okay, I grew up in the
eighties and nineties in a farmhouse and we never locked
(09:37):
the doors ever.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Ever.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Ever, So the mom was concerned enough for Mary Louise
that she wanted to make sure that she locked the door.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Do you know what time the parents are leaving the
house that evening?
Speaker 1 (09:50):
It is dark enough, it is six o'clock, seven o'clock,
so it's dark and like I said, foggy, so limited visibility.
And this was a last minute thing. So the younger
do decides to go, leaving Mary Louise at home, and
the parents leave. They get into the car. So Mary
Louise is sitting in her dad's chair. She's reading through
(10:10):
one of his trial transcripts, just sort of flipping through it.
Who knows how much she understood, but she was a
very smart young lady. And there's somebody watching. We don't
know who this person is. He is watching the car leave,
and he sneaks up to the window and after they
pull away. He waits and mister Stammer forgot something, so
he comes back in the car. They hop out. He
(10:33):
grabs something from his briefcase and goes back and gets
back in. So the man stands and waits. He's hiding.
Then he sneaks up. When he feels like they are gone,
he sneaks up to the window and he pulls out
a gun. So he crouches and he watches the girl
for about five minutes of fourteen year old And this
is the third time that he's done this three nights.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Okay, so he's been there. He's watching this fourteen year
old girl right now. The house is vacated of adults
and she is alone with two younger siblings upstairs.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Yep. So he's watching long enough, right to know what
the routine is. And he's looking for an opportunity, is
that right?
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yes, And he may not have expected an opportunity this
night because you said this was the last second planned
trip by the parents. So now he's presented with an opportunity.
And this is where the offenders have to determine whether
or not they're going to seize that opportunity.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
And it's risky because the parents have already come back.
Once they left for a few minutes, he forgot something,
they came back. So already, when I'm hoping you're going
to do is start building a little profile in your
head of this person, because he becomes more interesting the
things that he thinks about doing. Okay, so he has
been watching her. This is the third time we've talked
about that. And he's crouching by the window and he
(11:53):
pulls out a gun. And we do a lot of
research for this show, and there are a lot of
different resources that we pull from, and I found contradictory
data about the gun that he used. He definitely used
a gun. I hear it being called a twenty two rifle.
I also hear it called a twenty two pistol. So
what should we do because I can't say for certain
(12:15):
what kind of gun this is.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Well, the common descriptor is twenty two caliber, and both
pistol and rifle designated. Well, one's a handgun. One is
something that is designed to be shot from the shoulder
and typically will have a longer body to a dand
or longer barrel. But I think, not knowing the particulars,
we might just be better off calling it a twenty
(12:37):
two caliber gun.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Okay, so we'll say that. So he takes this twenty
two caliber gun and he points at her head, and
he is not far from her at all. He's kind
of behind her, probably five to ten feet, and he
points it through the window which is closed, and he
fires it and he hits her at the base of
her brain.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Oh, so he's standing outside and shoots.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Her, yep, through the window, window brakes, and it hits
her one shot. The autopsy said, right at the base
of the brain, and doctors were pretty confident that this
would have killed her immediately.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Well, I'm surprised a little bit about this twenty two
penetrating through the window and then still being on target
to strike the victim. These windows back in the day,
probably single pain windows versus the double pain windows. Yeah,
fairly thin glass ten feet away, still having enough energy
(13:29):
to actually penetrate into the skull. Quite frankly, with that information,
and this is more educated speculation, that would cause me
to start thinking he had more of a rifle. Generally
rifles will have greater accuracy across greater distances and more
power behind the bullet. But can't say that for sure.
But Okay, so she struck, you said, in the back
(13:50):
of the head.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Yeah, hitting her in the head at the base of
her brain is what the coroner said. Oh wow, and
they assumed killing her instantly she slumped over just like that.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yeah, And most certainly that is entirely possible, even with
a small twenty two. It's funny because people when they
envision somebody being shot, the general person is relying on
what they see on TV or in the movies, and
oftentimes when somebody gets shot on TV and in movies,
they drop instantly. Well, in real life, that typically is
(14:20):
not what happens unless something very vital, such as, you know,
part of the brain that is involved in locomotion and consciousness,
or part of your spinal cord. When these structures are hit,
then yes you lose locomotion, but doesn't mean that you
die instantly. You still can survive. And I've even had
cases where somebody is shot in the head, shot in
(14:43):
the brain, and they survive. They're still able to move
after being shot. And it really comes down to well,
what is hit? What part of the brain is hit?
And I like to use when I talk to like
citizens academies, and I start talking about this issue is
if you've taken any like high school or college psychology courses,
(15:04):
you've probably been introduced to Phineas Cage, the railroad worker
who had a iron rod from an explosion go up
underneath his chin out the top of his head. He
remained conscious. The doctor is able to put a finger
in the entry wound and a finger in the exit
wound and touch his fingers inside this guy's head, and
(15:26):
it was like it didn't hit those vital structures that
either would have killed him or caused him to lose
consciousness or motor function. And so this is where in
assessing a crime scene, I have to assess the possibility
that the victim has potentially maintained consciousness and or motor
(15:46):
function after being shot. And in this case, so the
shooter is saying that Mary Louise just immediately slumped.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
That's what he said. But we'll find out in a
little bit that this is not the most trustworthy person
obviously when he gives us some more details about what happened.
So he has shot her, and this is what he
says he did, which I know you don't. You're not
totally on board with organized versus disorganized in that category,
and we'll talk about that in a little bit. Like
the person who plans meticulously, this seems like somebody who
(16:17):
didn't know what he was doing and then definitely knew
what he was doing at the same time. He says
that he held his hand over the breach of the
gun to catch the shell. Is the breach the little
whole thing. I'm sorry for being ignorant about guns, but
is that the thing that you put the cartridges in?
Is that what it breaches?
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Well, what this is telling me is that whether this
is a pistol or a rifle, that it's a semi
automatic gun or bolt action type gun. If it's a
semi auto, the gun utilizes the recoil of the round
in order to push a slide back, extract and eject
the empty cartridge case and then rechamber another round. You
(16:58):
can also have a bolt action where you manually he
checked that cartridge case and catch it. So he is
policing his brass in a way. Typically you're not catching
it as you're doing it. I'm thinking it's bold action.
He must have manually done it and grabbed this empty
cartridge case versus a semi auto, which would immediately be
ejecting the cartridge case out. Okay, I think there'd be
(17:20):
no way that he'd be able to fire at Mary
Louise kill her and he'd catch the cartridge case at
the same time of committing that homicide. But it's telling
me that he's concerned about that cartridge case as possibly
being evidence.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, and just to summarize, we have someone who has
been to this house and stalked the people in this
house three times. He waited for an opportunity. He knows
how to use a gun, he seems to know how
it operates, and he is starting to show some knowledge
of forensics. So he takes this cartridge and he bites it, okay,
(17:55):
which doesn't sound great for your teeth, But he's obviously
doing it because he must enough about ballistics to know
that something on that cartridge could be traced back to him.
Do you think that's the case?
Speaker 2 (18:06):
I mean, I couldn't imagine putting an expended cartridge case
in my mouth and starting to chew on it. You know,
even though this is not a real hard metal, you know,
it's still metal. He's having to apply a lot of
force with his jaws in order to change the shape
of this cartridge case. Now, it does seem like he
(18:27):
is trying to obliterate the marks that this gun would
have left on the cartridge case that could have been
used to tie that evidence back to the gun that
he possesses. I believe that is what his intent would be. However,
it's possible that those marks under a microscope that came
from the firearm would survive this chewing process. Really, yes,
(18:50):
So occasionally out let's say a shooting on a street,
We'll have empty cartridge cases laying on the street and
then a car runs over or somebody steps on. Firearms
examiners are able to tell the difference from marks left
from the road and the tires being crushed that way
versus the extractory jector firing pin marks that are left
(19:11):
by a gun the same thing with teeth. Teeth don't
leave the same types of marks that the firearm is
going to leave. So this cartridge case is still valuable
evidence that can be used to tie that cartridge case
back to the weapon if it was recovered.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Okay, so he might be wrong, but he's showing some
level of intelligence, right, So he goes he knows that
the front door is locked because he's seen Mary Louise
open and close the door for her mom lock it.
He goes through the back. He probably wouldn't gone through
the front door anyway. He goes through the back. He
knows she's in the music room dying or has already died.
(19:48):
He smashes the back door window in, so they have
the kind of door that's got the windows in it,
kind of an ornate door. He smashes it and then
gets this. He pulls out all of the shards in
that wind and throws them into the bushes next to
the door. Why would he.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Do that, Well, he's removing these shards first because he's
planning on reaching through that window in order to unlock
the door. And so he's removing the shards. Now do
we know if he has gloves on.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
He did not have gloves on, which seems like an
aut of mission to me.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Well, but this gives me some insight in terms of
what his plans were that night. He may be realizing
that in order to reach in with those shards in place,
he's risking being cut. And we see this all the
time today with burglars. They get cut, they're bleeding at
these burglary scenes, they're leaving their DNA and agencies that
(20:45):
have the resources to pursue burglaries with DNA testing, which
some agencies will those guys get caught. Well, so he's
not thinking DNA back in nineteen thirty five, but he's
thinking I don't want to get cut, I don't want
to get hurt. But now I'm leaving fingerprints behind on
these shards as I pull him out, and so that's
why he's hiding them. Yep. But he's savvy enough to
(21:08):
chew on a cartridge case to try to prevent it
from being identified. If he was planning that night on
going into the house, he most certainly is probably aware
of the fingerprint discipline and that those fingerprints could be
used to identify him. So how come he isn't wearing gloves? Right?
This tells me that again, this was an opportunity that
(21:29):
he was not expecting. He may have just been planning
on being there for another night of observation. I suspect
that this is probably a peeping Tom scenario where he
is sexually aroused by watching this fourteen year old girl inside,
and then all of a sudden, fourteen year old girl
is essentially alone and he sees, oh, I can actually
(21:50):
reach out and touch my fantasy now.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
But he is a gun. Would a peeping Tom usually
bring a gun? I mean, I don't know, Maybe this
is escalating past peeping Tom by night three.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
These types of offenders, they're going to be armed, some
of them for just their own protection. Wow. Okay, so
they can be very dangerous if confronted. So just because
he has a gun doesn't indicate he's planning on committing
a homicide that night. If he's confronted. He wants to
be able to protect himself and get away.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
So he walks in and he finds her in the
music room, which just seems insane to me. He knows
these two little kids are upstairs asleep, he knows the
parents could come back whenever where the mom and the
sister could come back, So he walks in, he picks
her up. Now, just as a disclosure before we get
into this, this was not a sexual assault. It was
(22:43):
going to be a sexual assault, but something happens. So
I just want to explain that to listeners straight away. Okay,
I am bothered by hearing sexual assault stories. I thought
this was an important story to tell, but I just
want to say, this is not what happens. Okay, that
was his intention though. He picks her up and he
takes her to the nearby bedroom. Blood is spilling all
along the way and he's stepping in this blood, so
(23:05):
there are bloody footprints. The kids are still asleep. He
lays her down. He starts to undress her on the ground,
and then something occurs to him, because he doesn't seem
one hundred percent experienced at getting this far, doesn't seem
like it. He is worried about the gun. Where the
hell did I put that gun? What did I do
with the gun? So he leaves her. He does not
assault her. She is either dying or already gone at
(23:28):
that point. He goes to the back door and he
starts looking in the bushes where those shards are for
the gun. Where did I put that gun? Because that
gun might be able to be traced back to me.
(23:50):
Someone comes home. It's the mom and she's trying to
open the door. Mary Louise has locked the door. She's
banging on the door. Where's Mary Louise? Where are you?
What's going on? What's going on? And he hides. The
mom goes through the back She looks at the blood
that's in the music room. She goes to the bedroom
where Mary Louise's She obviously is screaming and crying, and
(24:11):
then she hears a door unlock and someone running, and
he goes out the front door and no one sees him.
He disappears, but they've got evidence. There's blood in places,
he's got handprints. They have these huge columns in their
front porch. She's got a bloody handprint on the front porch.
So this did not go the way that he was
expecting it to go.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
No. In fact, this is showing the lack of planning,
and it's also showing an offender, just like a normal
person about to do something that is nervous, It causes nervousness,
it causes anxiety. Well, these offenders experience that type of
emotion too. They're excited about this is going to be
a sexually motivated crime. They're excited about what they're about
(24:51):
to experience, but also they're nervous about this, especially earlier
in their careers. And this really shows that when things
go sideways, certain people do not respond well. And that
works to law enforcements advantage because this is now they're
leaving evidence in that panicked state. And this is part
(25:15):
of when I was working the Golden State killer case
when it was unsolved, and I'm assessing that offender and
how when things would go sideways or he had to
resort to Plan B or plan see, how methodical he remained,
how in charge he remained, how he still prevented leaving evidence.
This told me he's a cool cat, he's a cool customer.
(25:36):
He's intelligent, he's sophisticated, and things don't rile him up,
whereas this offender simply thinking, oh, oh, where's my gun?
And then mom comes home. He's just panicked. He doesn't
know what to do, and she.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Doesn't spot him. It's just an open door where it
was once locked and handprints, and of course she calls
the police and Mary Louise is dead and they call
the father back, and it's chaos within the family for
quite a while, and the police in Fresno are alarmed.
Wealthy family, daughter of a prominent lawyer, safe neighborhood. Of course,
(26:12):
you know, a young white woman high school student who
was well liked. This sets off so many alarm bells
in the town, and it's just a panic because it
seems a phrase that you read a lot in the
eighteen hundreds and the nineteen hundreds is sex craze killer,
the lust killer, all different names for rapist, and I
(26:32):
haven't read the term rapist in a very long time.
They would say molested, but they determined that she had
not been sexually assaulted because his own panic prevented that
from happening. So they go and look for the forensic
evidence they have, which is the showed up cartridge. They
find the gun, They have fingerprints, as you said, on
(26:53):
the glass yards, They have the bloody shoe prints, bloody fingerprints.
All of this stuff is pretty good evidence. Particularly they
think the glass yards are good evidence, because I've said
this before with fingerprinting, it totally depends on the sample
that you're receiving. If you've got a smeared fingerprint, you're
not going to be able to see the swirls and
everything else. Very well, this seemed like a pretty clean
fingerprint on one of the glass yards.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, Well, that also is a misperception about fingerprints, is
that as soon as you touch the surface, you're leaving
your fingerprints behind that are good enough to be able
to be identified back to you. The reality is is
most of the time when you're grabbing objects, especially during
the commission of a crime, you're not leaving prints in
a static state. There are a lot of smears, there's
(27:39):
a lot of fragments that fingerprint examiners are dealing with.
It's actually the unusual print that is that nice, beautiful
print looking like somebody just put their thumb down, like
when they are being printed by DMVAH. So to get
a print like that, that is huge. I've had that
happen in my career in some cases, and it's just like,
this is a gold mine, and it came from the
(28:00):
offender and it's easily identifiable, Versus most of the prints
that I've collected in the course of my processing their
smears and they're fragments. It's really tough to work with those.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
And many of those are inconclusive, and you can't hang
a case on one fingerprint. Besides the fact that he
could have said, oh, yeah, I came to the door
one time and I knocked on the door. I was lost,
that would have put some reasonable doubt, I would think
in there, but who knows. They decided that they were
going to canvas all of Fresno I thought this was
really impressive. They had hundreds of volunteers who did what
(28:33):
they called a fingerprint drive, oh, where they had every
boy and man fingerprinted, three thousand boys and men fingerprinted
for this case. Can you even imagine would they do
something like that. They wouldn't do that today.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Right, No, in fact, I don't think you could. This
is a kin to the mass screenings that are done
over in Britain, going back to the call in Pitchfork case,
where now in a small town they're basically drawing DNA
amples from every eligible male within a certain geographic area
that doesn't pass the civil rights test. Over here in
(29:09):
the United States, you can voluntarily ask, but you cannot
compel all these men and boys to give their prints.
And quite frankly, law enforcement today just doesn't have the
resources yeah to do that. You rely now on the databases,
the FBI's database, the state databases, and the ability to
do searches within those fingerprint databases.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Well, I'll tell you what's interesting is the fingerprint drive
turns up some really good results we'll talk about in
a minute. But they start profiling, which profiling in the
nineteen thirties was very rudimentary. So they start profiling who
this person is, and the local police say, this is
a kid. This is definitely a kid who knew Mary
Louise Stammer or maybe her sister. This is inexperienced, this
(29:54):
is poorly planned. This is someone who one of the
two young girls in this family. They must have said, oh,
one of us is going out tonight. We're going to
go to the train station to go take the data.
And this young boy saw it as an opportunity. And
here's what tells you about the times. The most the
police did not believe that an older man would be
enough of a degenerate huh to try to sexually assault
(30:16):
a fourteen year old. So that tells you a lot
about society, at least in Fresno, California, in the nineteen thirties.
They just didn't think a grown man would have been
capable of doing this.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
You know, you have your chronologic age, but you do
have criminals that at different stages in their life. You know,
somebody may start earlier and then somebody may start much
later in their life in terms of when they commit
let's say a peeping Tom style crime. So the chronological
(30:46):
age is sometimes tough to assess there's well, what about
the psychological age of the person. Is there other mental
aspects to the person that could potentially have manifest themselves
at an older age. So it's really tough to say, well,
it's got to be a kid. This is where one
of the things that I would be and I have
(31:07):
been wondering about, was the age of the offender. You
said that he was identified, and it was like, well,
how old is he? That would tell me a lot
in terms of where he was potentially at in the
evolution of his crimes as it relates to sexually motivated crimes.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
Well, this case is really interesting because as you learn
more and more about the offender, you'll see how a
lot of this stuff makes sense. They of course found
out very quickly that this was a spur of the
moment trip to the train station. The dad didn't even
know he was going, so there was no Now they said, oh, okay,
this is not some fourteen year old kid who was obsessed.
He was not a sex fiend obsessed with Mary Louise.
(31:46):
This is now the work of an older person who
is attempting at least to be organized. So here's the
thing that happens Fresno in nineteen thirty five was a
fairly safe place, except there had been a recent series
of break in so burglaries right including at the Stammer
house twice Walter Stammer chased off somebody he couldn't identify,
(32:10):
somebody dressed in black who had tried to break into
a house. And listen to this, whoever did that to
Walter's house, to the victim's house had cut the telephone
lines on the last one.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Oh, okay, and again nineteen thirty five. That's interesting. This
is like a half century before and maybe not quite
a half century before, you know, nine to one one.
So the cutting the phone lines was to prevent victims
inside the house from being able to call the operator
in order to get help to respond. This is somebody
(32:42):
who is thinking a bit in terms of self preservation,
whether it is the intent that I'm going to go
hands on with these victims, or in case I am
seen and I have to make an escape, I want
to delay the first responders from getting to the location
so I have enough time to be able to get
as far away from the scene as possible.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Yep, it's smart, and we hear that in horror movies
all the time where the lines have been cut, and
I had not read of a case actually of that happening,
and I think it's hard to believe that this is
not connected. And we'll find out a little bit more
about that in a minute. So let's talk about nineteen
thirty five forensics Doberman pictures. I had never heard of
Doberman's being used to track the scent, but they use
(33:24):
Doberman's in Fresno. First of all, is that a thing?
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Really?
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Do dogs really do a good job? Have they ever
broken a case before?
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Well, dogs are a tool. Dogs are amazing animals when
it comes to being able to smell, and they do
have success in terms of tracking. But again, they're a tool.
I've seen dogs track and evidence is found along the
path that they've tracked. Dogs will track to where an
(33:54):
offender is hiding. That happens frequently, and it's typically in
cases that never make the newspaper. So the K nine
handlers out there can tell stories after stories of that scenario.
But I've also seen dogs miss, you know, whether it
be scent dogs or decomp dogs, they miss, and it's
part of that human animal interaction. Is it the animal
(34:15):
missing or is it the handler who's not interpreting the
animal's behavior as to is there an alert going on? Yeah?
Or is the dog scent if it's a scent dog
has a dog keyed in on the right scent. You know,
if you have an item that maybe multiple people have handled.
So this is something where they're a tool, but yes,
they can be valuable. They also can have your false leads.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
This brings up a good point that I make a lot,
which is that there are lots of forensic tools that
you could use, dogs and fingerprinting. But the problem is
is when there's just one of those tools used to
convict someone and it's something that is on shaky brown
forensically that could be considered junk science. And I'm not
saying fingerprints or dogs or any of that stuff is science.
(35:00):
I'm saying that the problem we have is when we
have investigators who aren't able to gather, for one reason
or another, more evidence than evidence connected to something that
could be argued in adulbert hearing where you're protesting the
admission of some evidence. So I think that's why I
really appreciate the story because in nineteen thirty five, the
Fresno Police worked really hard to gather things on this case.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
When it comes to trial and making a case. You know,
of course, in this day and age where we have DNA,
DNA does not stand alone. There should be other circumstantial
evidence and other aspects of the case that is built
up and presented in front of the jury. There are
(35:44):
times where DNA is that is the big smoking gun.
The smoking guns, thank you. But typically the prosecutors, the
people's representatives are going to try to build a case,
and this is relying on the original investigators at the
investigating agency, and then the DA's office typically has investigators
(36:05):
that will go out and try to show, Okay, this
is the totality of the facts that we believe show
that this person is responsible for committing this crime. And
whether you have a fingerprint like it sounds like we
have in this case, you still need other aspects to
present to be confident that you have the right person. Now,
(36:27):
he's left a fingerprint in the victim's blood, I believe
you said, that's pretty damning evidence. It wouldn't necessarily stand alone,
but he has a lot of explaining to do. It's
more than just while I was at the house before. Yep,
he was out the house after Mary Louise started bleeding. Yep.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
So they continue to gather all of this evidence. They
go on the idea that maybe he was cut by
those shards because he spent a lot of time picking
the shards out of the glassdoor. They look at all
the drug stores, did anybody buy bandages recently? They go
to the hospitals, did anybody coming injured? They did bullet
trajectory using string to try to figure out how tall
(37:05):
this guy was turned out to be average height, which
is useless. I mean, essentially, yeah, they're shaking down every
person in Fresno at this point.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Well, to use the string, here you have Mary Louise
who's been shot in the back of the head. Her
position has been changed by the offender. She's been moved
to a different point in the house. So you've lost
that data point in terms of the trajectory. And then
now you have a window, which is likely a single
pain window. From my perspective, there's no utility in trying
(37:38):
to string that trajectory. You don't have enough information. You
can just basically say that the muzzle of the firearm
was at this height at the time the shot was fired,
and was at this distance. Maybe if they have shoe
impressions or they have firearms discharge on the window in
order to say yep, at this distance from the window
when the bullet passed through, and then we know that
(37:59):
Mary Louise was sitting in that chair. But you don't
have any true objective evidence to be able to say
I've got a valid trajectory. I'd basically be at that
scene going up. A fender was standing outside the window
and shot in there, and I can guess it was
along this trajectory, but I would not be making any
measurements to that fact, nor testifying to anything related to
(38:20):
that trajectory.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Well, and it ended up not being helpful whatever information
from that string. What was helpful was the pressure from
this fingerprint drive that they held. So there were men
and boys who came up voluntarily. I said three thousand.
There were people who did not volunteer, and they, of
course immediately became suspects. They narrowed it down to thirteen
men who said, no, I'm not doing this for one
(38:43):
reason or the other. So they compelled them to give
their thumbprints. But they missed somebody, and this is what
cracked the case. They got a tip, an anonymous tip,
which is so often something that we hear of that
is the turning point in a case that said you
need to look at this ex convict. So now we're
on an ex convict and his name is Elton Stone
(39:05):
and you need to take a look at him. And
it turns out that he was a neighbor of Mary
Louise Stammer and the Stammer family. Oh okay, they have
his fingerprint old school because he went to prison. He
was at fulsome and he had a fingerprint on the
good old school index cards that they always took.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
And of course it matches. And that's not the interesting
part of this. So this is an ex convict who's
thirty years old. So now we're going to go back
to your thinking about this profile. An ex convict thirty
years old in and out of prison primarily for robbery,
not in prison for sex assaults or murder, violent crime,
lots of robbery, lots of grand theft auto from the
time he was probably twenty, okay.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
And I just want to make sure that when you
say robbery that we are talking the legal definition of robbery,
which is taking a possession by force or fear from
a person. Yep, okay, because a lot of people will
misuse the term robbery with Burglary. Yeah, so he is
somebody who has a history of being willing to confront
(40:06):
somebody and take some possession of value away from them.
This is a serious offender. When somebody's willing to take
that step, this person has a dangerous aspect to them.
So now I'm starting to think about, Okay, what was
the intent with this repeated surveillance of Mary Louise. He
(40:27):
lives in the neighborhood. Going back to the famous quote
out of Silence of the Lambs, you covet what you see.
So here's a thirty one year old man who's seeing
this fourteen year old girl in his neighborhood. Everything about
this tends to suggest that he's watching Mary Louise. Who
knows what his ultimate goal was, but he may just
(40:50):
be a peeper. And then all of a sudden that
opportunity presented itself where he realized, oh, I can actually
go physical with her. What is really interesting is he
shoots and kills her before he even makes the attempt
to go physical with her. Yeah, is he lacking confidence
to be able to get into this house and get
(41:11):
her subdued without alerting neighbors, without alerting the other two
children inside the house. He must have plenty of confidence
in the use of a gun in order to shoot
through a window at this fourteen year old girl and
then still break into the house and spend some time
with Mary Louise until he goes, well, where's my gun?
And then mom comes home and things go sideways on him.
(41:33):
So he resorts to what he's comfortable with, and that's
the gun. And that tells me he's probably very familiar
with firearms, probably used firearms during the commission of his
robberies in order to intimidate his victims, you know. So
he's somebody that that is his weapon of choice. And
he didn't shy away from picking Mary Louise up after
she's bleeding from that mortal headwound and there would be
(41:55):
a lot of blood yep, and he goes and undresses
her in a room he was planning on still following
through with a sexual assault with in essence a dead girl.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
I find Elton Stone to be confusing because this is
what happens next.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Here we go, Here we go.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
He says, Okay, you're right, I did it. I shot her,
but I wasn't ever going to sexually assault her. He said,
I have a grudge against Walter Stammer and the whole family,
and if Walter Stammer and his wife had been home,
I would have killed them. I would have killed everybody
in the family. I wasn't focused on Mary Louise, and
he was adamant about that. So the police go to
(42:35):
Walter Stammer and said, what did you do to this guy?
He said, I've never met this guy in my life.
So of course the police say, okay, you're full of it.
Elton Stone, So why is he deflecting in that way?
I wonder in the thirties, is it as bad a
thing now to be in prison as someone who raped
and killed a child. I wonder if that's what the
(42:56):
motivation was for him to just put out this non
sensical story.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
This is the typical excuse that is given by somebody
who's admitting to the crime. But then they're trying to
minimize certain aspects because whether it be their own internal
morality conflict or because of fear of having that type
of stigma associated with them being an offender that is
(43:23):
sexually assaulting young girls, young boys. You are a target
of course today imagine and you would know better than
I in nineteen thirty five with kind of the morality
of the culture at that point, the stigma is huge
in the general population about somebody who's willing to sexually
assault a fourteen year old girl. I bet that general
(43:44):
population culture is also concentrated within the prison system. And
so he's now realizing when he makes this statement, he goes, Okay,
I know I'm going to get convicted on this, but
I need to minimize what's going to happen to me
once I'm sentenced and put in prison. And that's my guess.
This whole thing about I had a grudge against the father,
(44:05):
and I was going to kill everybody in the house,
and I wasn't going to sectually assault Mary Louise. That's
just in a way, he's minimizing the morality of sexually
assaulting the fourteen year girl. The fact is he picked
her up, put into her a different room, and took
her clothes off. It's a sexually motivated crime.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
And I don't think this is the first time he's
done it. Oh and the police don't either, so they
start questioning him because there are two unsolved cases on
either side of his prison term, in addition to Mary
Louise Stammer. Okay, so Elton Stone went to prison in
nineteen thirty one for grand theft, auto and robbery, two
separate things. But before that, there was a woman who
(44:45):
was sexually assaulted very violently in her home. She wasn't killed,
but she was sexually assaulted and phone lines cut beforehand.
Same thing that happened at Walter Stammer's house the one
time when he was clearly practicing and this was an
on health case he couldn't be identified. This was in
Mary Louise Stammer's neighborhood, which at one point was his neighborhood.
(45:07):
So this is right before he went into prison.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Okay, So he has prior familiarity with this neighborhood. He
has familiarity with the dynamics of trying to commit this
type of crime. Do we know what he was cut
on in that first case? Was it, by chance a
broken window shard as he was reaching in too unlock
a door.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
You know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
Let's take that as maybe that's the case. He breaks
in a window and he gets cut. Now with Mary Louise.
He takes the time, realizing he's leaving fingerprints that could
identify him, but he still takes the time to remove
the shards out of the window pane itself. This is
how offenders learn. This is a minor m O adjustment
(45:53):
in order to prevent something the offender thought was negative
in the past. MO changes from case to case as
offenders learn, as well as as offenders have to adapt
to the dynamics of the crime they're committing, because sometimes
victims do things that they're not expecting, or mom comes home,
then they weren't expecting that, right, So this is what
(46:15):
complicates trying to link cases when you don't have fingerprints
or DNA the identifying evidence to link cases. Now you
start looking at MO and behavioral aspects, and MO does
change and sometimes well is this a different person or
is it the same person? And they've had to adapt
based on prior experience or the dynamics of the current case.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
So now we're about to talk about really adapting. So
he goes to prison, he gets out. This young woman
is attacked in nineteen thirty one. He goes to prison
for something else because that's an unsolved case. He comes
out in nineteen thirty four. So Mary Louise Stammer was
murdered in nineteen thirty five. Before that, there's a woman
who worked for an inn and she was sexually assault
(47:00):
and bludgeoned to death. But the killer made a mistake.
He left her alive for too long, and when the
police arrived, she was still alive. They asked her who
did this and she said Stone. Huh, And they said
which Stone, because I guess there were multiple stones. She
said Clayton Stone, and Clayton Stone was her neighbor, fourteen
(47:22):
year old neighbor. They cleared him and this went cold
because they said, she doesn't know what she's talking about.
She knew Elton Stone. He had come to the end,
so they said trauma. Of course, she was being bludgeoned
to death. She just misspoke. She was trying to say
Elton Stone, but because she said the wrong first name,
he got away. Then a year later he kills Mary
(47:42):
Louise Stammer.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
Okay, assuming the original investigations into these cases are solid
and Elton Stone is responsible for all three of those,
of course, now you have he's a serial predator. He's
willing to commit a broad variety of crimes, so there's
a level of criminality to him. But this adaptation the
(48:06):
nineteen thirty four case, the woman was bludgeoned, yet she
lived for a period of.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Time yep, long enough to id him almost.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Noah, So now I'm starting to question his intent going
to Mary Louise and he has the pistol. He's now
bringing a firearm. Is it because I bludgeing somebody? But
they live long enough? But does he know at this
point that's really going to be a big factor. He
may not even know that she made any statements implicating
him in the nineteen thirty four case, So I would
(48:38):
want to know that to see if he's bringing a
pistol for the fact that he'll be more confident that
he'd be able to kill Mary Louise after he leaves.
So there's that, Or is he normally armed with a
pistol because of his just general criminality. Maybe he's going
to run across somebody later that night after he peeped
on Mary Louise and is going to get a wallet,
you know, and he's going to use the twenty two gun.
(49:00):
I don't know if it's a pistol rifle, but the
twenty two gun. If he is aware that that prior
victim in nineteen thirty four lived after a bludgeting, I
can see where now, okay, I need to use a
gun the next time yep. And then he's bringing a
gun to Mary Louisa's house. Did he intend to go
in that night or did he just happen to be
prepared and the parents left and now he seizes that opportunity.
(49:22):
So this is interesting, you know, from my perspective, I
would want to kind of drill down on the details
of what was known when and exactly what the original
investigators knew in order to really study the evolution of
this offender. But it does look like you have somebody
who is a serial predator and he's also been in prison.
In prison is the great learning institution for felons, so
(49:45):
he's talking to people and now he's more well versed
and maybe a broader area of criminality when he comes out.
So fascinating offender from my perspective from nineteen thirty five.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
Well, I'll tell you some state prison at that time
period was known for the repeat offender route. So that
was the thing is most of the guys there had
been there two or three times, So this was somebody,
you're right, who could have been easily educated. That case
from nineteen thirty four I looked into and it was
very widely reported. Unless he wasn't intentionally looking, he would
(50:19):
have known that was very unusual, especially because she was
accusing her fourteen year old neighbor and Fresno was not
a huge place, and he would have known. And I
think that he took a gun because he didn't want
to make that mistake again because he was almost caught.
He knew this woman, he had been seen with her,
he knew her.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
And I bet in nineteen thirty four, and correct me
if I'm wrong, they probably didn't have the protections of
juvenile identity. So I'm sure the fourteen year old boy
with the last name Stone, his name was in the newspaper.
So if Elton Stone is saying, oh geez, they got
it half right, that's a little bit of an o
shit moment for him.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
Yeah, big o' shit moment. And I think that he
saw it by using a gun the next time. And
as you said, he's a robber and he's familiar with guns.
So the police in Fresno start pressing on him and
They say, we know you killed Mary Louise Stammer, we
know it was an attempt at sexual assault. We think
you were all so responsible for these other two cases.
(51:19):
And he said, maybe, maybe not. I don't know. I'll
give you a few details. Now here's what's screwed up
about this guy. I mean, beyond everything that he did,
Elton Stone gives them some details about the other two cases.
And this is how we know that he knew about
the second case. He had just enough information of what
was in the newspapers. He wasn't giving them anything else.
But what was interesting about Elton was he wasn't asking
(51:42):
for anything. He was just having fun with the police.
Speaker 2 (51:45):
There's a little bit of where now he's able to
express a level of control, you know, power and control
over his accusers because he knows the facts and he
knows they want to know the facts. That's what these
offenders do. They'll tease it out but not divulge everything,
and that can be very frustrating. You know, you're on
(52:06):
the right path, and this guy's willing to talk. I
mean it's like a Ted Bundy. Yeah, he's willing to
give out some details, but he's not telling everything.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
No, and so he is ultimately convicted and he is
sentenced to the death penalty to the gallows in nineteen
thirty six. And his quote at the end I thought
was very telling. Before he died, he said, hanging is okay,
it will clear up my debt.
Speaker 2 (52:32):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
Interesting quote.
Speaker 2 (52:34):
Yeah, his debt to who, his debt to the devil.
Speaker 1 (52:39):
Not that he had a conscience, but I think that
there are times when people sort of reflect back and think,
maybe I did make some mistakes. I don't know if
that's the case, but it so minimizes the profound effect
that Mary Louise's death had on her family and on
that community. This was a woman who had so much
promise fourteen, wanted to be an attorney. I've never been
(53:00):
in trouble, just you know, someone who had nothing but
a bright future ahead of her and to take that away.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
Yeah, these types of crimes, in many ways, are the
ultimate selfish act that somebody does. They will take somebody
else's life for their own personal gratification, and in essence,
that is what Elton Stone did. And it's just terribly
sad to think about the future that Mary Louise would
have had. Many of these cases that have seen this
(53:29):
type of outcome over and over again, and that's just
part of the tragedy of somebody just trying to fulfill
a fantasy and they steal somebody else's life.
Speaker 1 (53:40):
Well, thank you for your insight on this case. I've
been reading about it for years. It's been haunting me
for quite a while. And now I need to buy
myself a salt water aquarium and I think decompress a
little bit. This was a hard case and I appreciate
all everything that you contributed to You always surprise me,
Paul with your insight.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
Well, you're such a good storyteller. You got me hanging
on the edge going okay, what's coming next? And the
twists and turns are great. Good. It's a tragic case,
but it also is an important case for us to
kind of sort through and digest and learn from.
Speaker 1 (54:13):
Well, go say hi to your fish for me, and
I will see you next time.
Speaker 2 (54:16):
All right, sounds good.
Speaker 1 (54:22):
This has been an exactly right production for our sources
and show notes go to Exactlyrightmedia dot com slash Buried
Bones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Emirosi.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
Research by Maren mcclashan and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (54:35):
Our mixing engineer is Ryo Baum.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryvogel.
Speaker 1 (54:40):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia hard Stark and Daniel Kramer.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Buried Bones Pod.
Speaker 2 (54:52):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race of decode the
criminal mind, is available for pre order now
Speaker 1 (55:00):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life solving America's
cold cases is also available now.
Hosts And Creators
Kate Winkler Dawson
Paul Holes
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