Prime and Only Suspect Part 1 : The Unsolved Disappearances of Kip Hess, Keith Fleming, and Charles Collingwood

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
When a young teen vanishes on his way to school,
A single note left behind makes police believe that he
had run away, but the people who knew him best
never believed that, and as the days stretched on, that
theory began to crumble. In a prime suspect emerged on
this podcast, I never center the perpetrator, and that will

(00:32):
remain true here, but to show just how unsafe the
so called simpler times could be today and tomorrow, I
am walking you through a pattern of violence and how
one man's repeated behavior, combined with a weak response from
the systems meant to protect children, allowed him to continue

(00:52):
harming young boys.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
And likely take multiple lives.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
I'm your host, Megan, and each week on a Simpler
Time True Crime, I cover older unsolved cases and challenge
the idea that a simpler time means a safer time.
This week, I'm bringing to you the unsolved Disappearances of
Kipling Has the Third Charles Collingwood and Keith Fleming Part

(01:18):
one today. This week, I'm doing something a bit different,

(01:43):
and I'm splitting the episode into two parts because this
crime spree here stretches over decades and involves so many people.
This episode today will focus first on the disappearance of
a boy named Kipling, how a suspect emerged, and then
to the earliest known crime that the suspect committed. The

(02:04):
following day, Part two will be released, so don't worry.
I won't make you wait too long. It just was
so much information to take in it once and I wanted.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
To break it out for you guys.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
The cases featured in that episode will largely be that
of teen Keith Fleming as well as young man Charles Collingwood,
but Kipling's story will also continue to be woven in
as well, because police will finally stop this suspect after
yet another boy goes missing. While these two episodes do

(02:36):
have a highly probable suspect and may appear as solved, Kipling, Keith, Charles,
and possibly some other boys i'll mention are still missing
and their families still don't have answers. One more thing
before we get started.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
At the top of this episode, I do want to
give a content warning.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
Because today's episode discusses sexual abuse violence towards children, and
much of it will be really difficult to hear, so
please take.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Care when listening. If you look at a.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Picture of Kipling, Randolph hes the third, you'll see a
twelve year old boy with a gentle smile whose disposition
almost shows through in his photographs. Not to be confused
with his father, Kipling Hesse Junior.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
He went mostly.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
By Kip, and that's what I'll refer to him as
from here on out. Kip was on the smaller side
of his middle school aged peers in May Island, Florida,
at just five foot four and ninety pounds. He loved
attending church and participating in church events. He also enjoyed

(03:46):
hanging out with his friends and doing boy Scouts. He
had a silly side to him too. His father would
recall how even years later, he could still hear the
sound of his son's voice in his head, singing the
song Evergreen by Barbara streisand even having the same inflections
as the singer with the lyrics love Soft as an

(04:08):
easy Chair.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
Kip was very musical.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
In fact, he enjoyed learning the piano, and he was
blooming into his independence. But he was a good and
respectful boy, and his parents didn't have any major issues
with him at home. So that's what made the events
of April twenty eighth, nineteen seventy seven so off, it

(04:32):
was a Thursday, and Kip hopped on his bike and
headed to school. There are some discrepancies in the early
reporting on this case, what little reporting there was. In fact,
I couldn't even find an article in the paper until
May tenth, nearly six weeks after he vanished, But that

(04:54):
paper said he showed up to his first period class. However,
as we know from other king, attendance keeping wasn't always
the best, and sometimes families went an entire day just
going about their business, thinking that their child was safe
at school, when in reality they had never made it,
and this was the case with Kip Hess. Besides that

(05:18):
one early article, every other one I found said he
never made it to school that day. His parents were confused.
Left behind at their home was a note in Kip's
handwriting that just said goodbye Mom and Dad. When Kip
didn't return home. This was out of character for him,

(05:39):
but police didn't take it very seriously given the note.
They took it that as their clue that the boy
had run away, something they shared was a common problem
in the state of Florida, particularly in this area. In fact,
the Brevard County Sheriff's Office cited a statistic of around
fifty to sixty runaways a month at that time. At

(06:02):
the same time, he was just twelve years old. How
far could he have gotten with no money and without
his bike, Because you see, in the days that followed,
Kip's bike was found in a wooded marshy area across
from Old Humpback Bridge Road and Sikes Creek Parkway in

(06:24):
Merritt Island.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
Police took the bike in but didn't dust.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
It for fingerprints or really try anything of a forensic
examination of the bike. Even with those options being limited
in the late seventies, Kip's mom and dad felt something
was off, and they also knew law enforcement wasn't going
to do much to help them, so they put pictures
in storefronts, they spread the word. They at one point

(06:51):
hired a private investigator and paid a pretty penny out
of pocket, even though they didn't really have that kind
of money to be able to do so, and they
did put out a five hundred dollars reward just looking
for any information about anyone who could have information on
their son. They did have a lot of friends and
family that were helping to look for Kip, and another

(07:16):
man offered his help as well a man named John
Rodney mcray. He contacted the huss family early on and
offered to help search. Mcray was married with a young son.
He worked and lived nearby the Hests residence, and he
had recently befriended Kip. Just two days prior to Kip's disappearance,

(07:41):
he had volunteered with his boy Scout troop at the
Divine Mercy Catholic Church fair. Mcray was working security detail
that night, and that she had spoken, particularly as Kip
was helping with cleanup after the fair had closed down
for the evening. There was something off about McRae. But

(08:02):
to understand Kip's story, you have to step into the
story of other young boys and men and learn of all.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
The ways Kip and others could.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
Have had different endings to their stories if only one
man wasn't free to roam the streets looking for victims.
It was Saturday, September ninth, nineteen fifty, nearly twenty six

(08:35):
years before Kip has vanished. A young eight year old
boy named Joey Housey was in a bit of trouble
with his parents. He had gone to a little carnival
think of like a fireman's carnival earlier that afternoon, and
he hadn't had permission from his parents first, so they
reprimanded him at dinner, but it wasn't any huge blow

(08:57):
up or anything he did. He'd planned to go back
out and play that evening, to play a little more
with friends play in the neighborhood. Joey Housey lived with
his parents and two older brothers in Saint Clair Shores, Michigan.
It's tucked along Lake Saint Clair, just north of Detroit.

(09:18):
Joey liked to play at the park near the water,
both the lake and the nearby canals.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
About a quarter.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
Mile from Joey's Madison Street home was Jefferson Beach, which
was an amusement park that ran from nineteen twenty seven
to nineteen fifty nine until it closed and was replaced
by a large marina. And that is where Joey said
he was going to go that evening. He was quite
independent and his parents didn't think much of it until

(09:46):
he never returned. Because of Joey's age, police took this
seriously from the beginning, and a large search group banded together.
It was a combination of official law enforcement and first
responder searching as well as neighbors volunteering canvassing and looking
for witnesses. Police spoke to someone who said they saw

(10:09):
Joey with a young boy named Billy, who was Joey's age.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
And a friend of his.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
The two had popped their head into a nearby venue hall,
not far from their homes, and they were peeking in
at a wedding reception that was happening Curiosity and all
nobody seemed to be able to place Joey. After that,
police in Joey's family feared that he had slipped into
one of the nearby waterways and drowned. There were so

(10:38):
many and so by Monday, September eleventh, nineteen fifty they
decided to drag the canal to see if joe had
met with an unfortunate accident. The canal was not all
that wide and it was about six feet deep, and
so that would have been over Joey's head. This was
conducted and searchers walked all over the park, the wooded areas,

(11:03):
the marshy areas, and police distributed a description of the
boy to all major police departments in Michigan. Of course,
back in the nineteen fifties, there were no mass email
distribution lists to send a flyer to, nor were their
databases to track things in. But law enforcement did their

(11:23):
best with the tools they had at the time. When
they didn't find him. After this extensive search, law enforcement
told the papers they believed that Joey had either fallen
in the water and they just hadn't found him, or
that someone had lured him into a vehicle. In fact,
there had recently been two other children who reported a

(11:45):
man trying to lure them into a vehicle without success,
and police were trying to track down this person. One
piece of crucial evidence was found early on, and that
was Joey's bike on the night he went missing.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
That was found.

Speaker 1 (12:02):
It was parked in an area a bit obscured from view,
but just inside the park. By the fourteenth, coworkers of
Joey's father and the family had put up a five
hundred dollars reward, which grew to fifteen hundred dollars before long.
By the fifteenth, nearly a week after Joey went missing,

(12:22):
one witness reported seeing a boy matching Joey's description being
led out of a candy shop by a woman. Police
looked into it, but nothing really came of that lead.
National guardsmen and the FBI were brought in. The more
they dredged canails and waterways without any sign of Joey,

(12:42):
the more they were beginning to suspect the boy had
been abducted. On Saturday the sixteenth, another crucial clue was found.
Some people who saw Joey out that night described him
walking around with a car headlamp that he had found.
From what I understand, he had planned to take the
headlamp out to one of the canals and put it

(13:05):
in the water and use it as target practice.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
For his baby gun.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
About four blocks from Joey's home, a searcher had found
the headlamp in some underbrush of a wooded area surrounding
a sewage disposal system.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
This was a.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
Teenage boy who had offered to join in the search
early on, and he was fifteen year old John Rodney McRae.
Police released this finding to the public, but they were
short on any other clues. Despite the renewed presence of
federal law enforcement and the headlamp, the physical searches for

(13:42):
Joey were winding down. Law enforcement was treating it as
an abduction at this point, and their belief was Joey
wouldn't be found in the water or the nearby land.
His abductor had lured him into a car and taken
him out of the area. But Joey's his father had
something tugging at him. Call it fatherly instinct, but he

(14:05):
asked his coworkers, who had been searching relentlessly all along,
to join him and his older boys on one last
search right at the two week mark, and they, of
course agreed.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
He kept calling it that too, the.

Speaker 1 (14:21):
Last search, one last try, one last effort to rule
out that his boy wasn't just somewhere nearby and not found.
One of his colleagues was walking through a marshy area
that had already been searched three separate times by searchers,
and suddenly he saw what he thought was a feather
sticking out of the ground. As he got closer, the

(14:44):
object came into focus and it wasn't a feather at all.
It was a tiny elbow sticking out of the ground.
Police were called in and everyone's worst nightmare came true.
Little joe had been found, and not in the way
that anybody had hoped. Recent rain had washed away some

(15:06):
of the soft dirt of a shallow grave that was
obscured by a heavy piece of stone placed on top.
Just as another quick trigger warning, This next part is
where I'm going to talk about some of the more
graphic details, but it's important to capture some of them
ou The autopsy revealed that Joey had died a brutal death.

(15:27):
The McCombe County corner had a difficult time even talking
about it and keeping his voice steady, calling it the
worst case of sexual mutilation he'd ever seen in his life.
Joey had been sexually abused and then had been cut
all over with a small blade, including mortal wounds to

(15:48):
his wrists and his neck. The killer had then bludgeoned
him in the head with a heavy object. The corner
believed the knife to be a small, sharp switchblade type.
While details on the sexual violence were respectfully not released
to the public, detectives wanted to make it clear that

(16:10):
this was absolutely a sexually motivated case and that whoever
was out there and did this was dangerous. The case
shifted from finding Joey to finding his killer, and it
was an all out manhunt. Police released that they were
following a trail of BB gun pellets to see if

(16:30):
that gave them any clues on the killer. The same
ones found were a match to one found in Joey's
pocket where his body was found and when his body
was found. The trail of BB pellets were found about
thirty feet away from the shallow grave his body was
found in, and owners of a local hardware store said
they saw Joey by himself at four pm on the

(16:52):
afternoon he went missing, and that he had purchased two
packs of pellets, and another matching pellet was found in
a nearby abandoned house. As police questioned known sexual predators,
which was a little trickier to round up in a
pre sex offender Registry timeline, they also continued following other leads,

(17:15):
and just a few days after the body was found,
police interviewed a potential suspect, a man named Walter m.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
Walter had been.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
Arrested a few times over for pulling up beside a
woman on the street and attempting to abduct her. She
began screaming as he tried dragging her into his vehicle. Ultimately,
she was able to get away and he was arrested.
When he was pulled over, he had loaded guns, whiskey, cigarettes,
and stockings in the car. Even though this was different,

(17:47):
they decided to question him in Joey's murder fairly quickly
though they were able to determine he wasn't in the
area and he was cleared.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
And this made sense because for a.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
Couple of weeks now they actually had their sights set
on a different suspect. Detectives found it pretty convenient that
John Rodney mcray happened upon this car light that Joey

(18:22):
had been carrying that day. At fifteen years old, mcray
was already tall and stocky, which gave him the appearance
of an adult, if not for his youthful face. They
also found mcray's over eagerness to participate in the searches
a bit off, and his stories of his whereabouts were
not adding up. But probably the final nail in his

(18:46):
coffin was that he owned a switchblade, one that had
blood on it when police collected it. So on September thirtieth,
they let him know that they'd be coming to his
saint Clair Shore's home the next morning to pick him
up and administer a lie detector test. But when police arrived,
mick Ray had fled in the middle of the night.

(19:08):
He left a note for his parents saying, quote, I
want you to know I had nothing to do with
the housy boy. I love you and I've caused you
too much trouble. Mcray initially tried swimming across Lake Saint
Clair to get to a certain area where he knew
he could steal a boat in fuel, but the current

(19:30):
was too strong and he had to turn back, so
he did so and stole a neighbor's boat instead. He
made it all the way over to an uncle's home
in Canada. The story overall is pretty wild, but to
try to wrap this part up without going on too
much of a tangent. He ultimately was turned in and
brought back to the US for an interview with police,

(19:53):
and with that, in early October of nineteen fifty, mick
Ray confessed to the murder of Joey Housey. Here are
some direct quotes from his interrogation and confession, as captured
in the Detroit Free Press. McRae said, my mother sent
me to Tom's Market for butter. After I got it,

(20:16):
I went across the street and bought a paper. I
saw Joey talking to a boy named Gus, who works
in Bennett's grocery. Joey showed me the sealed beam light
he was carrying. He wanted to go to the canal
and throw it in the water and pitch rocks at it.
Then we got in the car. We drove to a
vacant lot near the canal. Kids have been playing there

(20:40):
for years. I stopped and we both got out of
the car. He then went on to admit that this
had been an area that he had come to a
lot to drink, and he had come to parties he
had attended here. He actually went on the side tangent
and talked about how he drank too much beer and
whiskey and got sick. He then went on to say quote,

(21:02):
I don't remember why or how, but I opened the
car trunk and got out a pairing knife I had
been using to repair the wiring of a backup light.
I'm hazy about this, but I slashed at Joey's neck
with the knife. I don't remember attacking him. I dragged
Joey over to where I buried him. I scooped out

(21:22):
the grave with a board, covered him up, and was
going to leave when I saw the slab of concrete.
I carried it to the grave and set it on
top so the sand.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Wouldn't blow away.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
End quote, and officers would confirm that mcray carried the
heavy concrete slab at least forty five feet. He said
he then went home and that he was late for
supper and his mom was upset with him, but he
ultimately ate dinner and then laid down on the couch
and thought about what he had done and why and
what he was going to do about it. Mcray refused

(21:58):
to admit any sexual elements of the crime, which is
not uncommon for offenders. Instead, he said it was a
blur and he couldn't remember any of it. Mcray was
arrested and charged with first degree murder, and while awaiting trial,
he was in a psychiatric hospital undergoing testing, and while
doing so, he escaped but turned himself back in when

(22:21):
he just didn't like the cold, snowy weather. This was
after he had gotten out and stolen multiple cars and
then he ran out of gas and was cold, so
he just walked into a police station and turned himself
back in. While awaiting trial, he also recanted his confession,
saying he dreamt everything he had confessed to, but it

(22:42):
didn't matter. Mcray went to trial and he was found
guilty of first degree murder in February of nineteen fifty one,
and he was sentenced to life in prison without the
possibility of parole. Mcray showed no remorse at all, and
when asked if he had any comment at sentencing, he said, quote,

(23:03):
I'm disgusted, that's all. Digging into the life of McRae,
a double life came into the public purview. According to
reporting in the Detroit Free Press, McRae was a star
athlete at the school, a bright student, and he was
involved in many community activities. He was a paper boy

(23:25):
and he worked two jobs at local restaurants as well.
But beneath the surface was something much darker. He was
part of a local teen gang, and according to those members,
mcray was known to strip cars, pilfer money from his parents,
steal beer, money and other items from neighbors, and act
sexually inappropriate towards girls. He couldn't land a girlfriend and

(23:50):
seemed angry towards women. If he didn't like a kid,
he'd deface their home and threaten them. At one point,
his family had shipped him to military school for being temperamental.
He had run away as au teen boy as well.
He didn't have a lot of friends, and he was
kind of stained offish and trigger warning here for animal

(24:12):
abuse and death of an animal. One of the more
alarming things that happened was that mcray had actually killed
a dog and cut it open. Despite all of this,
people were genuinely shocked that he could do something so
vile as to murder and sexually assault. Joey McRae was

(24:35):
shipped off to the Michigan Reformatory in Ionia, Michigan. Prior
to his sentencing, he had been horrible while in lockup.
He had been cursing at the guards and kicking and stomping.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
They just said they could not wait to get rid
of him after his sentencing, but.

Speaker 1 (24:51):
Going to prison and accepting his fate of always being
behind bars seemed to mellow him. He became a model
citizen and he learned the auto ma mechanic trade. He
participated in several sex offender rehabilitation programs, and he never
engaged in any of the prison violence. In nineteen seventy one,

(25:12):
the Supreme Court began to question the death sentence and
life without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders. As
a result, Governor William Milliken commuted McRae's sentence to life
in prison with the possibility of parole by executive order.
That possibility was granted just a year later, and in

(25:34):
February of nineteen seventy two, after serving just twenty one
years for the murder of Joey Howsey, he was released
from prison and Joey's family wasn't even notified. In his
late thirties, McRae had a news start at his life,
something that was never afforded to Sweet Joey mcray got

(25:58):
married and his wife quickly gave bak to his son
Martin in nineteen seventy four, and it seemed like maybe
he had put his troubles behind him. But before long,
his problematic behavior picked back up again, and this time
new boys in a new state would start to go missing.

(26:19):
I'll be going into all of that and more tomorrow,
so make sure to check out part two then

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Ruthie's Table 4

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Prime and Only Suspect Part 1 : The Unsolved Disappearances of Kip Hess, Keith Fleming, and Charles Collingwood

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

Ruthie's Table 4

Dateline NBC

All Episodes

Prime and Only Suspect Part 1 : The Unsolved Disappearances of Kip Hess, Keith Fleming, and Charles Collingwood

Stuff You Should Know