Not the Usual Suspect

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
True Crime Brewery contains disturbing content related to real life crimes.
Medical information is opinion based on facts of a crime
and should not be interpreted as medical advice or treatment.
Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to True Crime Brewery.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
I'm Jill and I'm Dick.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Susan Wood's naked body was found with her head in
a bathtub full of blackwater in nineteen eighty seven in
her small town of Stevensville, Texas. Her murder was especially
shocking and unimaginable. Susan was a soft spoken and beautiful
young woman living alone since her biker husband had left
her and fled the state. So when she missed her

(00:55):
shift at the local sandpaper factory, her father was called
and he would be the one to find her body.
Join us at the Quiet End for not the usual
suspect murders were very rare in Stevensville, and Susan's case
was the worst anyone there had seen. Since there was
no sign of a forced entry, detectives believed that Susan

(01:17):
had known her killer, so suspicions quickly turned to her
estranged husband, Michael. When he left Susan, he'd left behind
a cassette tape disparaging her for destroying their marriage, and
his anger had frightened her, so nearly everyone thought that
he must be responsible. But then the case went cold,
and Susan's loved ones feared no one would ever be

(01:38):
held responsible for her brutal murder. That is until DNA
testing changed everything.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
So the beer for today's case is from a brewery
in Texas I really enjoy called Jester King, and the
beer is the Petit Prince, the Little Prince. This is
a grisette. I'm not sure I've reviewed too many of them. Basically,
it's a low alcohol table beer, drink with lunch or dinner,
and low alcohol for sure. It's three point eight percent,

(02:05):
so you can have a couple of each if you want.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Well, that sounds great. I don't think I've ever heard
of a grist to be honest with you.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
No, it's a different style. So it's a nice looking beer.
It's a tale gold color, huge head and some very
impressive lace, nice aroma lemon and some floral hops. Taste
follows the nose exactly up front. Lemon taste it's a
little tart and some mild hop bitterness. It feels kind

(02:32):
of dry in the mouth. It's not real zapping or unpleasant.
So let's take him on down.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Okay, open me a beer, will you beer me? Maybe
they don't say that anymore.

Speaker 3 (02:42):
I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
All right, now, this is kind of be a long
involved story, but wow, lots of twists and turns for
many years. Yes, So why don't you start us out?
And you can go back to the nineteen eighties.

Speaker 3 (03:12):
So in the nineteen eighties, Stephenville was a quiet town
of about thirteen thousand people, pretty conservative area and lives
are insulated from fears of violent crime. So we're looking
at an area that's dairy farms and cowboys pretty much. Yeah,
big statue of a dairy cow decorated the town square
near the courthouse. And back in those days, the county

(03:33):
was dry. You couldn't even buy a beer. Oh no,
So kids in Stephenville joined the four H club, went
to the rodeo, and on Friday evenings in every fall
attended high school football games. I think of Friday night lights.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yeah, right, sure, that's how Texas is, at least you
know in the media, that's the vibe.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
I get. That's right. Well, that's part of Texas. Yes,
Saturday nights teenagers with cruise Washington Street running between the
two dairy queens each side of town. So friends with
crews together were known as drag buddies. And on Sundays
just about everything was closed because everyone was in church. Sure.
In fact, if you didn't go to church, there's something

(04:12):
wrong with you.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
And if you were a guy in Stephenville and drove
any vehicle other than a pickup truck, you were probably
an outsider.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yes, I would guess. So, so of course everyone noticed
Michael Woods. In a town where cowboy hats and crew
cuts were common, Susan's husband wore a leather jacket and
engineer boots. He had long hair, a beard, and kind
of a bad attitude. He also drove a motorcycle, got
into some fistfights, and never really held a steady job.

Speaker 3 (04:42):
So.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Michael was born in Indianapolis, and in the second grade
he moved to al Paso. His mom was fleeing one
of what he would describe as a series of volatile relationships.
Michael would later describe his upbringing as erratic and abusive.
Money was scarce, they moved, and one of his mother's
boyfriends was usually causing problems, so he would eventually have

(05:05):
seven siblings. When Michael was fifteen, his mom remarried and
the family moved to Virginia, and it was then that
Michael began leaving home for extended periods of time. He
learned to play the guitar, and he loved playing Southern
rock like Marshall Tucker, Leonard Skinnard and the Grey Almand Band,
and while away from home, he played on street corners

(05:26):
and at some small clubs, sleeping on couches and always
just one short step away from being homeless. So when
he was about twenty, a friend in El Paso was
moving to Stephenville and asked Michael to drive a truck
there for him. He arrived there in the late seventies
when the friend needed more help and decided to stay
for a while, just a few years out of high

(05:47):
school at the time. Susan first saw Michael on the
Dairy Queen Drag. There are different stories of their first meeting,
but Michael would remember meeting Susan when he was playing
pinball in a convenience store and she walked in. But
word was that she saw him before that and thought
he was just really cool, she was attracted to him.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
Well, he's certainly different, yep.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
She said he looked like Bob Seger, and he kind
of did in those old pictures.

Speaker 3 (06:13):
Yeah, a little bit yep.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
So if Michael was a bad boy, Susan definitely was
a good girl. She was sweet, a little bit timid,
and very close to her mother. Also very naive of
the ways of the world. According to her friend Cindy,
who sat beside her in the Stephenville High clarinet section,
Susan hadn't dated at all in school, but she thought
this Michael Woods was adorable, especially his shoulder length brown hair.

(06:38):
She said he looked like Bob Seger to Cindy, and
she just kind of rolled her eyes. Her friends just
didn't understand what the attraction was.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
Yeah, Cindy thought Michael was very immature. Yes, Susan's working
long hours at a nursing home, but Michael always wanted
to go out and have a good time. The only
serious fight she and Susan ever had, according to Cindy,
was over Susan's to date Michael. Susan's madly in love
and her her voice of reason. Her best friend has

(07:06):
a different opinion. Yes, it's going to cause some difficulties.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Oh sure, yes.

Speaker 3 (07:10):
But Michael who was different for Susan. He was different
from anyone else she had ever met before. And Michael
thought Susan was gorgeous and and just this vibrant person.
She's always alive. He was twenty three and she was
twenty two when they met. They did love each other,
but Michael just didn't fit in Stephenville. He was a musician,
but most of the places they only wanted to hear

(07:32):
classical country music. So Michael would go from job to job,
mostly fast food places, but he didn't get along with
his coworkers and he would end up getting fired or
quitting the job.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yeah, it kind of seems like he didn't make as
much of an effort as he could have.

Speaker 3 (07:48):
It sounds like he's a drift.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
Yeah. So when it was time for Michael to meet
Susan's parents, he didn't show up in a suit with
flowers for her mother. He showed up on the doorstep
wearing a pair of cutoffs and sandals and no shirt.
So when Susan's mother opened the door, she almost fell over.
I bet she did not approve of a man walking
around with no shirt and short shorts, especially going to

(08:12):
meet a girl's parents. So it was just a bad
start right from the beginning. Her family was not impressed
with Michael.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
It is a bad start, yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
In fact, Susan's father, Joe Atkins, showed Michael the pistol
he had in his closet and told him, if you
ever hurt my daughter, I'm going to shoot you. So
that was how it started, and Michael never managed to
find any steady work in Stephenville. He would blame it
unprejudiced against the way he looked and on being an outsider,
but he also admitted that as a musician and a

(08:42):
night owl, he didn't really want to work any nine
to five jobs. Over the years, he says he worked
in a hayfield, at a sonic fast food joint, at
an autoparts factory, and for a place that made cattle feeders.
He did whatever he could until he got tired of it,
and he definitely had an attitude problem back then. He
would often get into arguments that led to fistfights, and

(09:05):
when talking about the jobs he went through, it was
usually because someone said something he didn't like. He wasn't
going to put up with it. He just had that
kind of attitude, always ready to fight. So it was
nineteen eighty when Michael persuaded Susan to return with him
to El Paso, where his uncle had promised him a job,
and soon after arriving there, they got married. Susan had

(09:27):
told him that if she lived with him out of wedlock,
she would be disowned, so he said, sure, let's get
married tomorrow. They walked into the Justice of the Peace
office alone and came out married just a few minutes later,
but back in Stephenville, Susan's parents were not thrilled about this. Then,
the job in El Paso didn't work out, so soon
Michael and Susan had to pawn their belongings just to survive,

(09:50):
and in a letter that she wrote to Cindy, Susan
complained that she was living on bacon bit sandwiches. And
soon the couple returned to Stephenville, but Michael hated the
town and just about everything about it. Susan wanted to
make him happy, but she found it hard to be
happy anywhere else, at least once they moved to Indianapolis
to be near Michael's brother. Several times they moved and

(10:12):
they got settled in somewhere, and then Michael would get restless,
so they'd have to move again. Susan would quit her job,
sell their stuff, and move again and start over again.
So this got old pretty quickly, but they kept trying,
and until nineteen eighty five they were sharing rental houses
with other people. Then Susan found the bungalow on McNeil Street,

(10:35):
near Stephenville's downtown. There, Michael mostly hung around the house
or sun bathed in the yard. According to Susan's friends,
they thought he was just problematic. After a disagreement with
a neighbor, he was accused of pouring sugar into her
gas tank, so it didn't take long for him to
attract the attention of the Stephenville police, who Michael claimed

(10:56):
would sometimes just stop him for no reason. Our friends
rolled their eyes when he complained, wondering when Susan would
come to her senses.

Speaker 3 (11:05):
Yep, Yeah, but Susan loved Michael. She did.

Speaker 2 (11:08):
It really seems like she did, and.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
She desperately wanted the marriage to work well.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
Plus divorce wasn't really something that was approved of either.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
Right, I'm sure no. Each day Susan would come home
after work and make Michael dinner, but it wasn't working.
The last straw, at least from Michael's perspective, was when
he told her about his idea to begin flipping houses
for money. Susan was really the breadwinner in this marriage,
and she really wasn't that eager to invest in the

(11:36):
business that Michael was describing. So Michael accused her of
emasculating him, and then, finally, in the summer of nineteen
eighty six, just one year before her death, Michael gave
her an ultimatum, Texas or me, and Susan chose Texas.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
She did. Now, maybe the house flipping thing would have
been okay if he'd gotten a job and earned some
money himself.

Speaker 3 (11:56):
Yeah, but I'm sure she's looking at how she's spent
most of all of the wages that she makes, Yes
on them, right, and he wants more. Yes, he's not
shown any inclination to contribute to this family.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
No, he is an. I mean, if he'd been out
working as a carpenter or something and then said I
want to do this, that might have been different. But
he's just hanging around the house, not really contributing, and
now he wants her to invest what little money they
have in something she really can't be confident he would
follow through with. So Michael went to Indianapolis, but after

(12:30):
talking and exchanging letters with Susan, he agreed to return
that winter and they would make a final try at reconciling.
But it didn't work. In February of nineteen eighty seven,
Michael left Susan for good, and he didn't leave nicely.
He took their car with him, and he left behind
a cassette tape recording in which he lashed out at

(12:51):
Susan for ruining their marriage. According to him, everything was
her fault. So this really was not nice, and almost
as bad as the cassette was how Michael had hidden
cruel handwritten notes throughout the house, in the cabinets and
in her coat pockets. So I would have to agree
with Cindy that he was very immature.

Speaker 3 (13:11):
I guess he would now.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
Susan was still finding them weeks after he was gone,
and it was making her feel pretty shaken and upset.
Cindy's mother begged Susan to move into their spare bedroom,
and when she refused to, Cindy actually slept on Susan's
couch for a week or so. Then Cindy's boyfriend, Roy
nailed the windows shut in her house and gave her
his pistol, but she returned the pistol so she wouldn't

(13:36):
have that for self defense later on. But Susan went
ahead and filed for divorce in February of eighty seven,
and once the shock of Michael's tape and notes had
passed for mood had begun to lighten, she bought herself
a car and tried to move forward. One Friday in
late July, Roy and Cindy took Susan to a carnival
and afterward they went to a dairy queen and ordered

(13:58):
hot fudge Sundays. So, according to Cindy, when they were done,
Susan ordered a second one, and that something she had
never seen her do before. So she was really getting
the impression that Susan was becoming more light hearted, more happy,
go lucky. Things were looking up for her. But just
four nights later is when Susan would be found dead.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
Yeah, when Susan missed her shift at this handpaper factory
two days in a row, a supervisor called her father,
Joe Atkins. Joe knew right away that something had to
be wrong. Susan would never miss work without calling or
telling someone.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
She was faithful, yes, very reliable.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
So Joe drove to the small white rental home as
Susan lived in near downtown, just around a corner from
an elementary school. The house was dark, and walking up
onto the porch feeling some dread, Joe found the door unlocked,
and he found Susan in the bathtub off of the bedroom,
certainly a sight that no parent should ever see. Joe

(14:56):
called the police on Susan's living room phone and waited
in the until they showed up.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
So I would have to say there must have been
some kind of odor in the home immediately upon entering
as well. Yeah, I've been there a couple days. In
the water in the water. Yeah, So a horror, just
to complete horror for this man. So when Sergeant Donnie
Hensley got to the house around nine, he hadn't been
told who the victim was, so he was surprised to

(15:21):
see Joe Atkins, who he knew as a volunteer at
the golf course. So Joe told Hensley that someone had
killed his daughter, and Hensley didn't ask Joe too many
questions right away. He knew that the father had to
be in shock. The two men stood together and said
a prayer before Hensley told Joe that he should go
on home. His family was going to need him, and

(15:43):
the family needed to be told before they heard about
Susan's murder from someone else. Then at that point, Susan's
best friend, Cindy just happened to drive up with her boyfriend.
When she learned that Susan was dead. The neighbors could
hear her screaming two blocks away. She was just horror
and of course first her first thought was Michael.

Speaker 3 (16:03):
I think Michael was everybody's first life pretty much.

Speaker 2 (16:06):
Yeah. So inside the house, officers took photos and examined
the scene. Susan, the medical examiner would later confirm, had
been raped and sodomized. There was also an angry red
line across her throat that meant that her killer had
likely tried to strangle her. Hensley looked over the bedroom,
where it looked like there had been a struggle. Betting

(16:28):
was strewn over the floor and the mattress had been
moved off center. A white electrical cord, which could have
been used in the strangulation attempt was on her bed
with the plug lying on the floor. So what would
really stay in everyone's minds after seeing the murder scene
wasn't really what had been done to Susan, although that
was horrific. It was a pillowcase that they found. The

(16:50):
pillowcase was stained with mescara in tears, and as Hensley
looked at it, he realized that he could see the
outlines of a woman's face. The pillowcase had obviously been
pressed over her nose and mouth, and you could see
markings of all of her facial features, so it was
just really horrific.

Speaker 3 (17:08):
In the bathroom, police found two sets of fingerprints and
palm prints, but back in nineteen eighty seven, these are
a very limited value. DNA analysis wouldn't happen for many years,
and fingerprint databases were not yet available in Texas, So
while the detectives had a lot of physical evidence, there
wasn't much that they could do with the fingerprints until

(17:28):
they could be compared with a specific suspect. So officers
canvas the neighborhood, knocking on doors up and down the street.
No one remembered seeing or hearing anything strange. At the
police department the next day, Lieutenant Ken Maltby announced that
no other detectives would be working on the case. It
would be his alone. Hensley would always have concerns about

(17:49):
how the case was investigated. Beginning with maltie takeover, the
multi investigated for two months with very little progress. Then
that October, when Malti's stepped aside and returned to work
in the narcotics unit, Hensley took on the investigation in
his spare time. He wasn't given any help and there
were no written reports. The case is cold. Hensley looked,

(18:12):
but he couldn't find any notes. He had no way
of knowing who had been interviewed right after the murder
or what they had said.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
Hensley really started pretty much from scratch trying to do
a thorough investigation. Because Susan's remains were so badly decomposed,
her upper body appeared to have spent two days in
that bathwater. It was unclear if she'd been smothered, strangled,
or drowned, but Hensley saw that there were two possible scenarios.

(18:59):
Susan had been killed by a stranger, which was a
crime that was simply unheard of in Stephenville, or she
had been killed by someone she knew. There was no
sign of a forced entry, which suggested that she had
known her killer, and the more Hensley studied the crime
scene photos, the more he suspected that Susan had to
have known her killer. But what really struck Hensley about

(19:20):
the crime scene now was the living room table. There
was an open can of coke and an ashtray with
six cigarette butts in it. Susan was not an habitual smoker,
and she also avoided caffeine. One of her friends even
said she only drank water, so the scene on the
table made it clear that she had had company, someone
who had stayed long enough to open the can of

(19:40):
soda and smoke six cigarettes. So once Hensley began interviewing
Susan's friends and family, he realized there weren't many people
she would have invited into her house. Her social circle
had gotten smaller over the years. Michael had taken their
car when he left, which was an old yellow Mustang,
so for months Susan worked six days a week just

(20:02):
to save enough money to buy a new car. Then
she spent Sundays, her only day off, mostly doing laundry
and grocery shopping. But according to notes still in the
case files. A friend from Susan's work, Deborah Hardy, had
told the police about an upsetting call she had received
from Susan just a few weeks before her death. So

(20:22):
she was very upset and she said that she needed
to talk to somebody. So Deborah went to her house
and found her crying. Susan had some dark marks on
her neck which looked like Hickey's, and she said she
didn't know how or why she had let it happen.
She was afraid of what everyone would think of her,
but she wouldn't tell Deborah who had done it. Susan's

(20:42):
best friend, Cindy, though, was able to fill in the blanks.
The Hickeys, she said, were from a bartender in the
nearby town of Granbury. His name was J. C. Bauman,
and Susan had gone out with him a few times.
Cindy had asked Susan what happened back then, and she
had answered that JC had gone gotten a little fresh
and a little carried away. So Hensley drove to Granbury

(21:05):
to see JC, who did admit to an affair with Susan.
After meeting Susan when she and some work friends came
to his bar. Jace had cuddled with her on her
couch for a few nights before they had sex, and
they only had sex once Susan had ended the relationship
after the hickeys. Jace seemed like a nice guy in
Hensley's opinion, and he did pass the polygraph. His prince

(21:27):
didn't match any found at the house either, so he
was pretty much put aside as a suspect, maybe not
completely eliminated, but he wasn't on the top of the list. O.

Speaker 3 (21:37):
Hensley's next suspect was Cindy's boyfriend who later became her husband,
as Roy Hayes. Roy was a big, gentle young man
who often helped Susan around her house. At one point
nailed the windows shut when she was worried about her safety. Now,
his fingerprints were all over her home, but that was
to be expected. But the bad thing about Roy was
that he played dungeons and dragons and those days in

(22:00):
that town connected to Satanism, I remember that.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Oh yeah, many places all over the country.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
Well, in the one documentary we watched about this, they
showed I think it was the PTL Club or one
of those scam operations, right, Yeah, talking about how dungeons
and dragons leads to Satanism and seems kind of silly
looking back, it does.

Speaker 3 (22:21):
So Hensley interviewed Roy and he found nothing suspicious. He
did ask Roy to take a polygraph test just to
clear himself as a suspect, and he agreed to do this.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, he seemed like a nice sky. They gave him
the polygraph test at a Texas Ranger's office in Waco,
and Hensley met him at the door afterward and confronted him,
saying he had failed the test, but of course Roy
knew there was no way because he hadn't done it.
But then when the polygraph tescht came out, he told
Roy he had passed and he was cleared. So Hensley
had been trying to kind of trick him there, which

(22:52):
they do.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
That that's right.

Speaker 2 (22:54):
So by Christmas of eighty seven, five months after Susan's murder,
the investigation was really going nowhere, but many people in
town thought they knew who had killed Susan. Of course,
Susan's dead Joe showed up at Maltby's office almost every
day in those first few weeks, arguing that Michael Woods
was behind his daughter's murder. Transcriptions of several police interviews

(23:16):
set in the District Attorney's files, and in almost every
case there was a version of the same answer to
who killed Susan Michael Woods. It kind of seemed obvious.
Every time the police talked to Joe, he would say
Michael did it. So after he had left Texas for Indiana,
Michael lived a quiet life. He was sleeping in a

(23:37):
tent that he pitched inside a dilapidated house that his
brother had bought to fix up and flip for a prophet.
So the two brothers spent every day working on remodeling
this house, eventually making it into four apartments, one of
which Michael took to live in. One day, Michael was
standing outside when two Indianapolis police officers showed up. So

(23:57):
he and his brother had been arguing with neighbors about
a part working situation, and Michael agreed to go to
the station house, thinking that this was something to do
with that complaint. But once he was at the station,
detectives began asking Michael about his life in Texas, about
his relationship with Susan, and about whether he had gone
back then. In the middle of a conversation which Michael said,

(24:20):
was very confusing to him. A detective told him, you're lying.
We know you killed her. Susan's dead. You killed her. So,
according to Michael, this is how he learned that Susan
had been murdered. He said that he immediately had to
run to the bathroom and he threw up. After this,
the interrogation continued. The police told Michael that they knew

(24:40):
he had done it, but when they asked him to
sign a statement, Michael refused. He demanded a lawyer, and
he left. According to Michael, he hadn't really begun to
even process Susan's death when the police began harassing him.
He said he was pulled over for no reason, and
he was even arrested a couple of times for being
drunk in public when he hadn't even been drinking. They

(25:01):
would just let him go the next morning and say, oh,
you're fine, there's no court, there's nothing. Michael would recall
two officers who came to confront him from Texas, the
first investigator, Ken Maltby, and a Texas ranger. Michael was
standing in his yard when they pulled up and told
him to get in their car. They told him they
were going to take him to the airport. So at

(25:21):
this point Michael had begun carrying a gun, afraid of
this kind of thing happening, And when he refused to
get in the car, they insisted, and he claims that
he then lifted his shirt to show them a three
point fifty seven magnum that he kept in his belt.
He said no, and he told them they could have
a gun battle right there. He said. He used an
old Texas term, see if you clear leather. But a

(25:44):
Stephenville police officer with knowledge of the case said he
doubted that that even really happened. Maybe Michael had a
flare for the dramatic. A little bit seemed like a
smart thing to do, now, Ashley.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
In Texas, it's pretty dumb.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yeah, it kind of is. But Michael's lawyer had advised
him against cooperating with the police. Michael would eventually get
a dozen statements from people who swore they had seen
him in Indianapolis at the time that Susan was killed,
and as lawyer advised him to keep these from the
police for the time being because the Texas police would
try to undermine the witnesses, maybe go to them and

(26:20):
get them to change their minds even but one thing
that frustrated the Stephnville police was their inability to get
Michael's fingerprints. If the police had tried a nicer approach,
they may have gotten them. Court records confirmed that Michael
would have had no problem handing them over as long
as it would happen in Indiana. So he did volunteer

(26:40):
to give blood samples, hair samples, and fingerprints, but the
Texas police insisted that it be done in Texas, where
the police would have full control, and of course Michael
did not trust them. He thought if he went to Texas,
he might get shot and the police would claim he
was trying to run away or escape from them.

Speaker 3 (26:58):
So after Hensley took over the investigation, he knew that
he needed Michael's fingerprints. He had no other suspects, and
he felt sure that Michael's prince whould match those found
beside Susan's body. In April nineteen eighty eight, nine months
after Susan's murder, Hensley would sit inside an unmarked police
car surveillance and in Indianapolis, watching Michael's house with a

(27:18):
periscope that stuck out at the top of the van.
One day, he watched as Michael, his brother, and his
sister in law were setting up items for yard sale.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
So back in Stephenville, Susan's family made a big deal
of the fact that Michael had taken not only the
couple's yellow Mustang, but also Susan's fur coat and a
collection of crystal figurines that they said belonged to Susan. So,
from inside the van, Hensley spotted some of these figurines
and that gave him an idea. If they could arrest
Michael for theft of the figurines, then they could get

(27:50):
his fingerprints. So Hensley had a search warrant drawn up.
Then he and a group of Indianapolis officers returned to
the house. They tore the house apart and took everything
except for his guitars and the clothes that he was wearing. Then,
after their exhaustive search, they found a marijuana roach in
Michael's sister in law's purse. They used this to arrest

(28:11):
Michael and his brother for possession. They put them in jail,
but let them out the next day and no charges
were pursued. So they didn't find the little figurines.

Speaker 3 (28:20):
I guess unless they did find it, well, it would
have been motioned. I guess they could have found him
and they weren't the figurines they.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Thought that's possible. I guess it doesn't really matter, but
there were no charges. Yeah, right, Still, the arrest did
get Hensley what he wanted, Michael's fingerprints, so on the
flight back to Texas, he felt like he was about
to solve the case of Susan's murder. He even began
drawing up an ext tradition request, but he was not
prepared for the news he goat once he returned to

(28:49):
Stephenville and compared the fingerprints because they didn't match.

Speaker 3 (28:53):
Not a match, Nope.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
Detective Hensley couldn't think of a reasonable explanation for this either,
like right down to a bones. He thought he had
known that Michael had murdered Susan, and really everyone in
Stephenville had thought so, but there was no way to
tie him to the murder. Now, desperate for some real answers,
Hensley went to the FBI profiler's class that was being
held in Lampasas. Another attendee asked if he had considered

(29:19):
the idea of autoeroticism. Maybe Susan had died during some
kind of a sex game. So Hensley did look into this,
but soon dismissed the idea. It was too far fetched
and according to everyone who knew her, that would be
completely unlike Susan. I think so, so soon after that,
Hensley was reassigned to patrol duty. A few years had

(29:40):
passed since Susan's death, and the investigation was no longer active.
No one ever told Michael or announced publicly that he
had been eliminated as a suspect, so for him and
for the people of stephen Bell, nothing had really changed.
Susan's dad, Joe Atkins, still told everyone who would listen
that Michael Woods had gotten away with killing his daughter Cindy,

(30:03):
and Roy also felt like he was getting away with murder.
For years, they all believed that Michael Woods was a
murderer and that the police department had let him go.
So there was a lot of bitterness about this.

Speaker 3 (30:15):
Eventually, Susan's family took matters into their own hands. Susan
had a life insurance policy and Michael was due to
receive a death benefit of eleven thousand dollars in nineteen
eighty nine, two years after Susan's death. The family sued Michael,
claiming that he was responsible for Susan's death. He refused
to return to Texas to this civil trial. Now, the

(30:36):
judge not only awarded the family the eleven thousand dollars
from the policy, but the judge also charged Michael with
an additional judgment of seven hundred thousand dollars. Well, Michael
was told that if he stayed out of Texas it
could never be collected. So that's what he did. He
didn't have a fraction of that money anyway.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
No he didn't. But I mean, I do understand if
you can't get a conviction, you want to at least
get some kind of judgment. And I don't think it's
even really about the money. It's just about having someone say, yes,
this man killed your daughter.

Speaker 3 (31:07):
Right.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
It's like with the Oja trial, although we definitely think
oj did it, but it was the same thing. He
didn't get convicted and the family at least got a judgment.
So in Indianapolis, Michael was really sinking into a deep depression.
It wasn't just his paranoia that the Texas police would
come to arrest him any day. In fact, according to Michael,

(31:28):
he'd never taken the idea of divorcing Susan seriously. He
said he still loved Susan, and he felt confident that
she had still loved him. He thought she'd date some
Texans for a while and then she'd remember why she
loved him. Andy thought they would ultimately get back together.
So Michael was trying to move on. He installed a
home alarm system and took some courses at a technical college,

(31:51):
but nothing was keeping his interest. He had to accept
that nothing would ever be the same. What he wanted
most was to be a musician, but his lawyer warned
him that if he traveled outside of Indiana, he could
risk being arrested. He and his brother limited themselves to
local gigs, then, mostly playing in small clubs and at
private parties, performing as the Hamilton Brothers, named for their

(32:13):
birth father. They would split what they earned for each gig.
But you know this money wasn't much, maybe thirty to
forty dollars a night.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
I was not going to get you that far.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
No, and it got worse for Michael when the Indianapolis
newspaper ran an article about Susan's case. After that, people
would come up to him on the stage and say, hey,
aren't you the guy that killed his wife? So this
was not good for him. He was very, very sad.
Over time, his ambition faded and his depression worsened. He
did go to a therapist and was prescribed antidepressants. He

(32:46):
drank to excess and used a lot of recreational drugs too.
He said he would basically take anything that anybody offered
him at a gig, anything to escape his unhappiness. Nothing
seemed to help much, though. His therapist said that Michael
had an identity crisis and needed to learn how to
be himself without Susan in the world. And he also
felt like he could be arrested at any time for

(33:08):
Susan's murder, so that always had him on edge. Actually,
he was even preparing for life in prison, working out
and trying to get more muscular. Susan's birthday was in April,
so every spring, Michael's mood would darken, and then it
would grow worse in the summer and peak around the
anniversary of her death in July. He was working in

(33:29):
construction and he did learn to be a decent carpenter.
He dated sometimes, but he would say he never found
anyone who he loved as he had loved Susan.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
Now by the year two thousand or so, Michael felt
everything slipping away from him. Music was a thing he'd
always loved the most, but he stopped practicing his music
and he stopped writing songs. At his lowest point, Michael
Will attempted suicide. He took a bottle of tranquilizers to
just fall asleep and never wake up. But he did
wake up, and his depression persisted.

Speaker 4 (34:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Finally, in the summer of two thousand and five, Michael
had reached the end of his rope emotionally. He was
performing with his brother at a birthday party and the
eighteenth anniversary of Susan's death was coming up, so he
finished playing he would recall, and then he left the stage.
Then he walked out behind the house and broke into tears.
The host of the party, an acquaintance named Barbara Gary,

(34:23):
followed him and asked him what was wrong. So he
told her about the murder, explaining that it was still unsolved,
and he told her that everyone in Stephenville blamed him
for it. So Barbara thought this was terribly unfair. She
liked Michael, she decided to try and help him so
soon after, she sent an email to the Stephenville Police Department.
By then, Stephenville had a backlog of three unsolved murders,

(34:47):
including Susan's and Detective Hensley's friend Don Miller was asked
to look over the cases. Miller thought Susan's case was
the most promising of the three, but he didn't have
much that he could do with it. DNA tested was
available by then, so Miller sent the six cigarette butts
found in Susan's living room in protesting, but the results

(35:07):
came back unidentified mail, which was no real help without
a suspect's DNA to compare it to. He was working
on one of the other three cold cases in July
of two thousand and five when he heard about Barbara
Gary's email. So when he called Barbara, she said the
situation was killing Michael and his family and she wanted
to know where the case stood. If Michael truly wanted closure,

(35:30):
Miller said he should talk to him. So when Miller
heard nothing from Michael for the next five months, he
called Barbara back, and then he did manage to get
Michael on the phone. Miller asked to come to Indianapolis
and get a DNA sample, but Michael was hesitant. He
agreed at first and then canceled after Miller and his
partner had already bought their plane tickets, but they decided

(35:51):
to go anyway and just see if they could change
his mind.

Speaker 3 (35:55):
So it was a bitterly cold day in Indiana as
the two detectives drove to Michael's address and knocked on
the door. He cracked open the door and Miller told
him who he was, and Michael said, Miller, I told you,
I wasn't going to cooperate. But Miller at least got
Michael to listen to what he had to say. He
explained how the cigarette bets were the only way to
establish Michael's innocence and if he didn't give his DNA,

(36:18):
if he didn't cooperate, then the case would go nowhere,
and eventually Michael agreed, so they took the DNA swab
right there on Michael's front porch. Unlike Detective Hensley and
everyone else in Stephenville, Miller just wasn't sure that Michael
was Susan's murderer. In fact, because his fingerprints hadn't been
at the scene, he believed he could clear him. He
felt confident that Michael's DNA would not match the DNA

(36:42):
taken from the cigarette butts, but he needed to clear
him anyway because when he found another suspect, whoever it was,
might claim that Susan's death had been an accident during
risky sex. He needed someone who could testify that she
had no history of that behavior, and Michael was the
only one who could do that right.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
Miller returned to Texas, sent in the samples, and as
he had expected, they didn't match. So he called up
Michael and he said, you're one hundred percent cleared from
the case. Your fingerprints don't match, and the DNA doesn't match.
You are no longer a suspect. So Michael was so
relieved that he burst into tears, and then he thanked Miller.

(37:39):
Clearing Michael as a suspect was great for Michael, but
really not so great for Miller, because now he had
no real suspects. His only hope came from the prince
that had been lifted from Susan's bathroom mirror and her tub.
In nineteen ninety nine, the FBI had set up an
electronic national fingerprint database. Police departments could now submit unidentified

(38:01):
original prints and have them compared against thousands of others.
But Miller's request to take the Prince to Washington was denied,
and he really didn't want to risk mailing them and
having them maybe get lost. Then Miller heard that the
Texas Department of Public Safety had gained access to the
FBI database. So in May of two thousand and six,

(38:24):
not really expecting that this technology would produce any kind
of a breakthrough, Miller drove to Austin and handed over
the Prince to a DPS officer, and just a few
days later, the DPS officer called Miller back. They had
a match. The match was someone named Joseph Scott Hatley.

Speaker 3 (38:43):
And who is this? This is not just a suspect,
this is probably the killer, right yep. Police had never
heard of Hatley. The officer had no details, only that
Hatley had been arrested in nineteen eighty eight for a
robbery in Nevada. Miller called the County of Prosecutor John Tarrell,
asked him if you knew of Joseph Scott Hatley, and
Terrell did. Hattey had been a local kid. He had

(39:05):
raped a girl, but a grand jury hadn't indicted him.
He sent Hatley's entire file to Miller.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah. When Miller read this file, he was just astounded.
The rape of a sixteen year old girl in nineteen
eighty eight, one year after Susan's murder, was especially brutal. Hatley,
he saw, came from a well known Stephenville family. His
late father, Levi, had operated a Texaco station in town,
then a wholesale ice business, and later an auto repair shop.

(39:33):
His mother, Celia, was a homemaker. Hatlee was the youngest
of three children, and on the surface the family had
lived a normal, small town Texas life that Hatleys were
known as hard working, They had attentive grandparents, and they
went to church every Sunday. Hatley's mother and sister were
still living in Stephenville. There was nothing at this point

(39:54):
tying Hatley to Susan Wood's murder, but Miller kept going
over the gruesome details of the raper. The attack of
the sixteen year old had happened in a roadside park
just south of Stephenville. Miller was able to speak with her,
and at one point, after the girl had already been raped,
she said she got up and ran, but Hatley, she said,

(40:16):
chased and caught her. So after he caught her, he'd
laid on top of her and told her if she
didn't mind him, he would kill her. And it was
her next words that really sent a chill down his spine. Hatley,
she said, told her that he had done it before.
He said, I'd killed before, and I'm not afraid to
do it again. And right then Miller felt like he

(40:36):
had found Susan's killer. So Joseph Scott Hatley, who was
called Scottie by his family and friends, was born back
in nineteen sixty five. From an early age, he was
consumed by anger that he couldn't fully explain. He claimed
that his mother was abusive and regularly slapped him, accusations
that she would deny, but in Hatley's mind, the abuse

(40:58):
had enraged him and he had kept it all inside.
Bullying may have played a role in his anger as well.
Like his sister, Regina, who was three years older, Hatley
was a heavy child, and both were teased about their weight.
The first serious anger he would recall came when he
heard his sister crying in bed one night after being teased.

(41:19):
So at the age of eight, Hatley said he had
started to fantasize about getting revenge against those who had
hurt him or his sister. For hatley questions about sex,
which his parents refused to discuss, were confusing, but news
stories of sexual violence were stirring in him feelings he
couldn't understand. The family was very religious, sometimes debating scripture

(41:41):
at the dinner table. So to Hatley, God and Satan
were tangible beings who could influence people's lives directly.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
At age twelve, when his favorite choir leader was fired,
Hatley quit the church in protest. It may have seemed
like a healthy and happy upbringing from the outside, was
in fact plagued by violent thoughts, and at one point
his favorite daydream was to barge into his school and
kill everyone in sight.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Well, that's really scary, and this was before, you know,
unfortunately we have so many shootings now, but this was
before that was really a thing.

Speaker 3 (42:14):
Yeah, so a little of this was noticed by those
around him. Growing up in the seventies, as a blonde
preteen with a bowl haircut, Hatley played baseball, basketball, and football.
He looked up to the Dallas Cowboys Roger Staubach, and
he was a Cub scout. His sister's friend, Gloria Martin
remembered him as a beaver cleaver type. You know, just
this little nerdy guy, quiet and kind of chubby.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
Yeah, but I think as a teenager, Hatley developed multiple
sides to his identity. At Stephenville High he was quiet,
uninvolved with girls or sports, and arranging his classes so
he could leave early to help his father at work.
But among family he could be outspoken, even pushy. According
to Cindy, who was his first cousin, their mothers were

(42:58):
sisters and the two families would spend Thanksgivings and Christmases together.
Cindy always felt like Scott was the bully in the family.
He often talked down to other family members, like they
were mentally inferior to him. Andy would pick on siblings
and cousins as he got bigger, knowing that his mom
would not let the family stand up to him. He
thought he was smarter than everybody. Roy was one of

(43:20):
the few people in Stephenville who seemed to notice Hatley's
dark side. When Cindy had urged him to bond with
her cousin over their shared love of books, Roy was
really put off by Hatley's preoccupation with true crime, especially
stories of serial killers like the son of Sam. Then,
at age thirteen, Hatley started tagging along when his sister

(43:41):
and her friends would cruise the drag and when one
of them handed him a beer, he said he found
his first true love, and that was alcohol. His other
fixation would be pornography, which in those days he found
in magazines. He would hide them along with a stash
of vodka from his parents, and as a self described fat,
antisocial kid, Hatley would complain that he never had a girlfriend,

(44:04):
so almost like these in cell vibes. Yeah, I bet
if there was social media he would have been into that.

Speaker 3 (44:12):
In nineteen eighty four, during his senior year, Hatley joined
the Air Force Reserve and was training at Carswell Air
Force Base in Fort Worth and his training to become
a munition specialist. Then, after graduation, he did his training
in San Antonio before transferring to Colorado at Lowry Air
Force Base outside of Denver. At the dormitory, he met

(44:33):
a young, pretty, dark haired woman from Ohio. Hatlee had
never even kissed a girl before, and when he met
her was love at first sight. Late night, they slowed
dance to Prince's Purple Rain. On weekends, they made love
in a cheap hotel. It was the happiest time of
his life. Impulsively, they got married. Now they're commanding officers,

(44:55):
and his parents were not quite thrilled.

Speaker 4 (44:57):
With this no.

Speaker 2 (44:58):
But once training at Hatlee decided not to enlist in
the Air Force, but his wife did. She was assigned
to a base on the Pacific island of Guam, and
after a few months of separation, he joined her there.
Walking off the flight, the island was breathtaking to him.
He saw the blue ocean, the white beaches, and the
deep green jungle. When they reunited, though, Hatley knew that

(45:22):
something just didn't feel right. It seemed like she had
cooled off on their relationship. She had rented them a
small apartment in an outlying village, and at first things
seemed okay. They were both really heavy drinkers, which helped
keep them entertained for a while. When she went skydiving
with her new friends, he would wait on the ground
with a machete and slash through the foliage when one

(45:43):
of them landed in the thick jungle. He did take
a job too, at an insurance agency selling policies to
service members, but they just had to admit that the
romance was gone. As the weeks wore on, she became
more distant and they fought most days for the first
time in years. Hatley began to pray, but when things
didn't improve, he decided, well, fuck that, I'm going to

(46:05):
pledge my life to Satan. So that was a pretty
bold change from being God fearing and praying for help
to saying I'm going to be a Satanist.

Speaker 3 (46:14):
Yeah, he didn't give guy the much chance to work.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
No, he had like that time period and then that
was it. He had seen movies and it always seemed
to start with candles when people turned to Satanism. His
wife had a house full of candles, so he gathered
them up and he lit them. Then he got on
his knees and asked Satan to help him out the
way God had not. He prayed to give Satan his soul,

(46:37):
and he drink more to try and forget his problems,
and this soon affected his job. Of course, his sales
commissions dwindled, and whether in need of money or to
keep up appearances, he began using an office copy machine
to forge company checks, and these were very rudimentary. He
wasn't good at it.

Speaker 3 (46:55):
And I got caught pretty quickly. He did, and his
wife meanwhile began going out without him. Hatley believed she
was having an affair. Desperate, he called his mother and
she told him to come home, which she did. He
stepped off the plane so drunk he could barely walk.
Stevenville was the same as he'd left it, but he
realized he wasn't the same.

Speaker 4 (47:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
He was now twenty one years old, and he went
back to work with his father and eventually got a
small apartment, Making an effort to start anew He asked
people to call him by his first name, now Joseph,
but he couldn't put Guama out of his mind. It
hadn't just been the end of his marriage. When his
embezzlement was discovered, his old boss threatened to bring criminal

(47:37):
charges against him unless he repaid what he had stolen,
so he'd had to take out a bank loan to
do that. When he wasn't at work, he drank, usually vodka,
sometimes starting just after breakfast. He knew he'd lost control,
but he didn't care. After he got a cold and
took cough syrup one day, he decided he liked that too,
so he began mixing it with the vodka and he

(47:59):
called this Combat Nation V Syrup. In time, he added
a can of pepsi, mixing it in a forty four
ounce foam cup from Sonic, which he would sip during
long drives in his pickup truck. And this was a
truck that his parents had bought him after graduation. But
they knew he was drinking and they were getting concerned.
He would drive the roads around Stephenville for hours, brooding

(48:20):
and cranking up hard rock on the radio. Any social
life that he did have revolved around his sister, Regina
and her friends, who were all in their twenties. Some
nights he joined Roy and Cindy Hayes and four or
five others to drink and play cards around Regina's kitchen table.

Speaker 3 (48:36):
Would they drink his V syrups at those card games?

Speaker 2 (48:39):
Now? I think that was kind of a secret. That
was his secret stash.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
Well it sounds lethal, doesn't Pepsi vodka cough Madison.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Yeah. Well, well, this group began calling themselves members of
the Round Table, and Hatley started sleeping with one of them,
who was a married woman, but that was short lived.
So it was a night in July of nineteen eighty
seven when a new person showed up at the round table.
This was Cindy's best friend, Susan Woods. She was eight

(49:07):
years older than Hatlee, but Hatley had known Susan and
Michael for years. That night, in his sister's kitchen, Hatlee was,
of course drunk, he always was, and he thought Susan
was flirting with him, and he was flirting back. And
I guess that was all it took, because that set
him off and he had Susan on his mind. The
next Sunday night, after driving around drunk, Hatley decided to

(49:29):
go to Susan's house unannounced. She did welcome him in
because he was the cousin of her best friend. He said,
they listened to records together and at some point he
made a move on her and she slapped him. Hatlee
would say that what had happened after that was a blur.
When Hatlee came out of his blur, he had brutally
raped Susan. At first, she said she was going to

(49:50):
tell the police what he had done to her. Then
she said she wouldn't tell anyone if he would just
let her go. He asked her if she believed in God,
and when she said she'd did. He told her to pray,
so he killed her. And after he killed Susan, he
drove home. The police station was on his way, and
he considered pulling into the station, but continued driving. Four

(50:13):
days later, he saw the murder in the paper, and
Hatley got a real high from reading about what he
had done to Susan. He even went to the funeral,
signed the guest book and noticed the police officers who
were there. When the group got together again in his
sister's kitchen, they were talking about who could have killed Susan,
and they would say that Hatlee was an enthusiastic participant

(50:35):
in these conversations. He would drink heavily and he would
even make jokes about it.

Speaker 3 (50:41):
So Hallie was a little bit surprised that he hadn't
been found out. The detectives decided it had to be
her ex husband. Keep coming back to good old Michael
Huh Absolutely many evenings and every weekend Hattie hung out
at Regina's, drinking vodka and smoking in the backyard late
into the night. Noticed to fifteen year old girl who

(51:01):
lived next door. Shannon Myers was a relative rebellious newcomer
whose family had recently moved to Stephenville from Arkansas, so
Shannon spent time partying at Tarleton State University's fraternity houses.
Her mother had lost control of her. I guess fifteen
year old doing.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
This, Yeah, it's kind of sad. That summer of nineteen
eighty seven, Bored and with little to do, Shannon became
friendly with Hatlee's cousin, Melissa, who baby sat Regina's two children.
Shannon began hanging out at the house. She would remember
her first meeting with Hatley, who was seven years older
than she was. He walked in and they made eye contact,

(51:40):
and he started paying attention to her. They started what
she saw as a friendship. They would sit on the
porch and talk about a lot of things, and she
thought she was seeing a very caring side of Hatley.
Then one night, while they were sitting on Regina's couch,
she kissed her and they started having a relationship. The
next day, they had sex at Regina's house. Soon the

(52:01):
two fell into a routine. Shannon would go out partying
most nights, and then after parking her Mercury Cougar back home,
Hatley was in the back yard waiting for her. She
would wander over and they would end up having sex,
usually in one of Regina's bathrooms. Shannon was very naive
and had low self esteem back then. Looking back, she

(52:23):
would say that he was very controlling of her. Whenever
she left, he would want to know where she was going.
She would tell him, and then he would want to
know when she would return. At this time, Shannon was
being sexually abused by someone close to her family, and
now she thinks that she was easy prey for Hatley.
Because of that, she needed to be loved, and Hatley

(52:45):
used that to take advantage of her. After he had
sex with her, he would tell her that she was special.
So after several weeks, Shannon says, her mother found out
that she was having sex with Hatley. She did not
like the aged difference for one thing. Distraught, Shannon's mother
confronted Hatlee and it came out parking lot and he

(53:05):
promised he would end the relationship. Shannon also promised to
end it, but they didn't. When Hatlee started renting out
an apartment, he and Shannon began meeting up there. Then
one night in September, Shannon took her white poodle, Deedie,
to the apartment she had sensed that Hatley was under
a lot of stress. It probably had something to do

(53:26):
with Susan's murder. Of course, she wouldn't know that at
the time, but what happened came out of nowhere to her.
When they began to have sex, this time, he was
more forceful and he became very aggressive. Shannon tried to
back away and said, hey, stop, you're hurting me, but
as soon as she said stop, he seemed to just
go crazy. In his eyes, all she could see was coldness,

(53:48):
and then he held a knife to her throat. She
really didn't want to fight out of concern that Hatley
might hurt her dog, who'd begun to growl, and when
she finally pushed him off of her, she grabbed her
dog and ran away. Shannon was fast walking home with
her dog when Hatley pulled up beside her in his pickup.
He asked if he could give her a ride, and

(54:08):
at first she refused, but then he apologized to her.
Shannon didn't see the anger in his eyes anymore, so
she got into the pickup. Then, once they were in
her driveway, he looked at her and put his hand
on her face and apologized again. He said I love you,
and she said I love you back.

Speaker 3 (54:25):
Yeah. But when Shannon told her mother about the assault
by Hatley, her mother insisted that they go to the police.
While being interviewed at the station, Shannon could sense the
skepticism of the police officers once she told him that
she and Hatley had an ongoing sexual relationship, so her
reputation as a wild teen likely influenced how she was treated.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Absolutely, I think it did.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
Well, sure, it was just like he said, she said.
They just viewed her as overreacting and probably like she
had asked for it.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
The common thing, right, She was not a good girl,
so just terrible.

Speaker 3 (55:00):
The police gave so little credibility to Shannon's story that
Hatlee didn't even have to deny the accusation. When the
police visited him. He thought he'd be linked to Susan's
murder or at least investigated as a suspect.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
Well wouldn't you think, Well, you have a.

Speaker 3 (55:14):
Dead person who'd been raped, right, and a month later
you have a teen who'd been raped.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
Yeah. Yeah, they could have at least investigated, but it
didn't happen. The officer told Hattie that Shannon was a
messed up little girl, and he should stay away from her.
So how fucked up is that?

Speaker 3 (55:30):
Well, even if they say that she had consensual sex
with him, she was fifteen.

Speaker 2 (55:35):
Yeah, it would have been statutory anyway, wouldn't it.

Speaker 3 (55:38):
Yeah, but they didn't charge him with anything.

Speaker 2 (55:40):
No, no, no, They told him to stay away from her,
like it was her fault.

Speaker 3 (55:44):
Yeah, stay with nick girl, she's trouble, so this would.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
Really mess her up. She's already got a lot to
deal with. Frightened and confused by the police department's refusal
to prosecute Hatee for raping her, Shannon cut off all
contact with Hatley. She did continue to visit his cousin
Melissa next door in the daytime when he wasn't there. Then,
once when she hadn't realized that hate was in the house,

(56:07):
she overheard him arguing with Melissa. They were having a
conversation where Melissa said he shouldn't have been with such
a young girl, and he said that he loved Shannon
it didn't matter to him that she was only fifteen.
The police visit had left Hatlee feeling paranoid, and he
was convinced that he would soon be arrested. He lived
near the police station, and every day he watched as

(56:29):
cruisers drove past his apartment, wondering if they would stop.
Then he dreamed of taking Shannon on a cross country
crime spree like Bonnie and Clyde, But according to Shannon,
the only communication they had during this time was abusive
calls and letters from Hatley to her he'd begun stalking
her and she was ignoring him. Nine months passed and

(56:52):
Shannon tried dating boys her own age, but after a
difficult breakup, she eventually agreed to see Hatley again. So

(57:20):
this was July of nineteen eighty eight, one year after
Susan's death. Shannon was at Regina's house and Hatlee was
already there. He asked to talk with her and he
said he missed her, and she ended up saying she
missed him too.

Speaker 3 (57:34):
Cy later, Hallie called Shannon at home. He kept saying, Shannon,
I really want to see you tonight. I need to
explain why I did what I did to you. The
sixteen year old wanted to answer, and she asked him,
if you love me so much, why did you hurt me?
But they agreed to meet in a wondermet parking lot,
and as soon as Shannon got into his truck. She

(57:55):
knew she had made a mistake. He drove off, locked
the doors, and told her to sit closer to him.
The way he was talking to her felt different. He
had a lot of aggression and anger in his voice.
So Shannon did exactly what he told her to do
because she was terrified. She's thinking she's going to get killed.

Speaker 2 (58:10):
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (58:11):
As they drove, Hatley kept telling her that they were
destined to be together, so she briefly warmed up to him.
Then they pulled up to a roadside park south of
town and Hatlee parked out a site from the road.
According to Shannon, as soon as they got there, everything changed.
He turned back into the man and he had been
that night when he had raped her with a knife,
and she knew she was in real trouble.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
Well, yeah, because now they're out in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 3 (58:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
Hatlee pressured her to have sex, and when she refused,
he slapped her. They got out of the truck and
sat on a picnic table and he immediately started taking
off her clothes. Then they ended up having intercourse. It
was a brutal rape. He started hitting her so hard
it knocked her unconscious. After she woke up, she felt
blood trickling out of her ear. Then he raped her repeatedly,

(58:58):
and he would take breaks to smoke a cigarette and
have a drink. They were out there all night, and
at one point she got up and she ran, but
he caught her, and that's when he told her, I've
killed before and I'm not afraid to kill again. When
he said that, she definitely felt like she was going
to be killed. So she's thinking he's going to kill
her and hide her body. So she began tossing her things,

(59:21):
like her barrett, her bra and the hat she was wearing,
hoping the police might find these things later and it
would lead them so they could at least find her body.
But she did really fight for her life, going in
and out of consciousness and then thinking she'd never get
out of there alive. He told her if she told anyone,
he would come back and finish her off. So there

(59:41):
was a small spring nearby because it had rained a
few days before, it was a little muddy there, and
he took her over to the puddle and the water.
Hatlee had a fascination with water and for having sex
in the bathroom, and that's where he wanted to have sex.
Every time that they had had sex at Regina's house,
he pushed Shannon's face into the water and he raped

(01:00:02):
her again. Police later would believe that this was the
same fantasy that he had acted out when he'd murdered Susan.
This attack of Shannon continued for hours. She knew she
had to convince him that she loved him, so eventually,
when they got back into the truck cab, Shannon sat
as far away from him as she could, but he

(01:00:23):
told her to move closer. She was afraid to make
a sound, and she was very afraid to show him
her face because if she showed her face, he would
see that he had done some visible damage to her,
so he might not think he could bring her back.
If he saw the blood and the bruises and realized
the severity of what he'd done, he wouldn't be able
to deny the rape. So he probably would have killed her.

(01:00:45):
That's likely, yeah, But fortunately he couldn't see the bruises
or the swelling. He was caressing the side of her
face and she was looking down, and he asked her
if she was okay, so she pretended she said she
was okay, and added that she just wanted to start
her life with him. He said, I'm sorry for what
I did, and Shannon said, it's okay. I love you.

(01:01:07):
I just need to listen to you. He told her
not to turn him in, and she said she wasn't
going to say anything, so apparently he believed her. He
drove her to the laundromat parking lot and left her
just before dawn. As soon as he pulled away, Shannon
ran as fast as she ever had in her life,
and when she got home and saw her stepfather, she

(01:01:27):
just fell into his arms. Then he called for her
mother and they both rushed her to the hospital.

Speaker 3 (01:01:33):
Yeah, this time, Shannon's report was taking in a little
more seriously. Nurses did a rape kit. Because the attack
had occurred outside the city limits, investigation was transferred to
the Erath County Sheriff's office, whose deputy soon arrived at
the hospital to interview her. Badly bruised and bloody, but
happy to be alive, Shannon told him everything that had happened.

(01:01:54):
The next morning, Hallie was woken up by a sheriff's
deputy pounding on his door. He took a drink of
Vodkan got his pistol. He's prepared to shoot the deputy
as soon as he entered the apartment, but the officer
left when no one answered the door.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
Hate assumed the authorities would now return in force, so
he packed a bag, threw in his pistol, and drove
to the bank where he emptied his account. Then he
headed west. That night, he drank beer in an Alpasso motel.
The next day he drove farther west and he ended
up in Las Vegas. Hatley had no plan, so he

(01:02:29):
drank and drove around aimlessly. More than once, he thought
of taking his own life. Low on money, he walked
into a shoe store, tried on a pair of shoes,
and then pointed his gun at the saleswoman. He ran
out with one hundred twenty dollars in cash and the shoes.
After that, he tried to rob a hotel clerk, but
the man didn't understand English and started handing him handfuls

(01:02:51):
of coins, so Hatley became enraged. So Hatley became enraged
at the man and thought about shooting him, but then
he ended up running off when someone came to the
outside door. The next day, while Hatley was looking for
new places to rob. He noticed a motorcycle policeman driving
behind him. Then a few seconds later, three patrol cars

(01:03:13):
showed up. He held his gun on his lap, and
a helicopter then hovered overhead. When the patrol cars turned
on their lights, he heard a voice on a loud
speaker telling him to pull over, so he pulled into
a Denny's parking lot under orders from the police. He
crawled out of his vehicle and lay on the pavement.
So he was arrested and held in jail, and then

(01:03:34):
Hatley waited for the Stevenville police to arrive and take
him back to Texas. Right, shouldn't that be what's happening,
one would think, But shockingly, they never came for him.
In Las Vegas, Hatley was convicted of two counts of
armed robbery and faced a thirty year sentence for each,
but a judge sentenced Hatley to one hundred and twenty

(01:03:55):
days in a youth offender program. After he served that
brief sentence, his parents came and drove him home. By
the time he got back to Stephenville, he was realizing
that there was no reason to have fled. A grand
jury had declined to indict him for Shannon's rate unbelievable.
Can you believe that this was a brutal attack all night?

Speaker 3 (01:04:14):
Yeah, I don't have.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
It's just mind boggling.

Speaker 3 (01:04:17):
I guess as to how they could do that, I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:04:20):
I think part of it. Maybe he was like this
local family and he was young. I don't know, but
it's crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:04:26):
His parents had fought the indictment in his absence. His
mother went to the church and got all the members
of the congregation to sign off on what a great
boy he was. According to Don Miller, the Hatley's hired
a private investigator who tore apart Shannon's credibility. No. He
said that at the time, if you could prove the
victim was promiscuous, the charge would likely be dismissed. So

(01:04:47):
here's Hatley, a clean cut, typical Stephenville kid. Shannon was
not given the same consideration, not at all.

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
Shannon, of course, thought Hatlee would be in jail for
years in Nevada, and she was stunned when she saw
him back in town. Can you imagine She told the police,
who hadn't known about it either, and she assured herself
that the sheriff's rape investigator would be putting him away,
But then she got an official letter in the mail
and it told her they were not indicting him for
lack of evidence. So of course she was confused, she

(01:05:19):
was hurt, and she really just felt like she was
raped all over again. There were multiple failings by law
enforcement in this case. The Stephenville police focused too much
on investigating Michael Woods, and they pretty much ignored Shannon's
rape allegations. Another serious criticism of the Sheriff's office was
that they failed to tell the police what Shannon told

(01:05:41):
them about Hatley's admission to a previous murder, but.

Speaker 3 (01:05:44):
None of Susan Woods's friends ever mentioned he was in
her friends circle. The only red flag could have been
of somebody in the Sheriff's office had listened to what
Shannon was saying and connected it to Susan Woods, but
the police did not know that Susan and Hatley even
knew each other.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
Well. As for Shannon, she didn't know what happened with
the grand jury, whose deliberations were kept secret, but afterwards
she noticed that Hatley seemed to turn up in places
where she was so how horrible and frightening for her.
This was he showed up at Regina's. She saw him
at a fraternity party and at the skating rink. It
became clear that he was following her. It seemed like

(01:06:23):
the grand jury decision had emboldened him. After seeing him
at the rink, Shannon took a friend with her and
drove home, and when they got there, Hatley's truck was
already in her driveway, so Shannon called him out. She said, Scott,
you need to come out now, and he refused, and
she said, quit being a chicken shit and come out
and face me like a man. So she stood up

(01:06:45):
to him that night and they had words in the
front yard and she told him to stop. She said,
you know what you did to me. So at least
he did quit harassing her after that. But Shannon's life
was already beginning to fall apart. She'd had a difficult
life and it was getting worse. Her mother and her
stepfather moved away, and she stayed with an uncle. So

(01:07:06):
barely a year after the rape, with a need for
any kind of security of any kind, she suddenly got
married to a local boy, but the marriage only lasted
ninety days. After that, she leaned heavily on a friend
for support, but then that friend was killed in a
motorcycle accident. She was lost and miserable, and at her
lowest point, she really did consider killing herself.

Speaker 3 (01:07:28):
Instead, she decided to move away. She went to Pasadena.
Now that's not the California Pasadena, that's the Texas one. Yes,
it's kind of a suburb of Houston, a ways away though,
a ways away from Stephenville. Yeah, So she'd move there
with her mother at age nineteen, and she would seek
professional counseling for years afterwards.

Speaker 2 (01:07:49):
Look good for her.

Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
Things never came easy for her, but she told herself
she was still alive, she was a survivor, and she'd
finally escape Stephenville.

Speaker 2 (01:07:58):
And she was a survivor. I think a lot of
people wouldn't have been able to deal with it, and
her resources and support afterwards were minimal as well. So
really tough, really heartbreaking, and living with his parents after
getting away with murder and rape, Hatley knew he couldn't
stay in Stephenville. The threat of imminent arrest was always there,

(01:08:18):
so he moved to Nashville in nineteen ninety three. He
got married and he and his wife had two children.
Like his older brother, Hatley became a professional truck driver,
so he worked long hours away from home alone. Out
on the road, he picked up emotionally scarred women, mostly
in roadside bars. If he violated the law while doing this,

(01:08:39):
there was no known record of it, but he did
take pills to stay awake on the road, and he
ended up rear ending another truck in Dallas, which led
to him being fired. After that, Hatley took a job
in a Nashville grocery warehouse that paid pretty well, but
he was never able to get the murder out of
his mind. He drank every night and at all hours
on weekends. His daughter was injured in a car accident

(01:09:02):
and needed physical therapy, and then his wife was diagnosed
with multiple sclerosis. When a tornado damaged their apartment complex,
they moved to a duplex, but then the duplex was
destroyed when a drunk driver plowed through it. So during
this time, Hatley believed that anything bad in his life
was God's punishment for what he had done.

Speaker 3 (01:09:23):
I'd probably be looking at that way, yeah, and the
things that happened to him, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:09:27):
Well.

Speaker 2 (01:09:27):
In the late nineties, Hatley's company offered him a promotion
running a warehouse in round Rock. Returning to Texas was
a serious risk. He knew it probably was a mistake,
but in the end he did take the job. Hatley
and his wife found a nice apartment in round Rock, Texas,
but Hatley's drinking was already destroying their marriage. He and

(01:09:48):
his wife fought, sometimes violently, and he would beat her.
This is a woman with multiple sclerosis. He worked nights
and slept most days, which is what he was doing
one morning in two thousand six, when after nineteen long years,
the authorities finally came for him.

Speaker 3 (01:10:06):
On June sixth, Detective Miller and his partner drove from
Stephenville to round Rock. Miller turned to his partner and said,
make no mistake. The day is sixty six of six,
and we were about to meet the devil himself. Clever
and just months earlier, after reading a file on Shannon's rape,
Miller had tracked down Hatley and round Rock. He asked

(01:10:26):
the police to bring him in for questioning. Hatley came
involuntarily to a police interrogation room the next day. Now
he was a forty year old warehouse supervisor nearly three
hundred pounds with short, dark hair and a mustache. When
Miller told Hatlee why they'd come, he acted very nonchalant,
almost to the point of.

Speaker 2 (01:10:44):
Being bored right, and Miller saw his attitude as a
red flag. Miller said, innocent people tend to be nervous
and to strongly deny any false allegations. But he just said,
I don't have anything to do with it. Maybe I
might have had sex with her, but I don't remember,
but I don't think so. Miller was not expecting a confession,

(01:11:04):
and he didn't need one either. The physical evidence now
was enough for an arrest, and Hatley agreed to give
them his DNA when it matched the DNA found at
the scene. As Miller was confident that it would, a
conviction would be inevitable. When he asked why Hatley's fingerprints
had been found at Susan's, he insisted that members of

(01:11:26):
the round Table had spent many evenings at Susan's. At
one point, a round Rock officer took Miller aside and
told him to keep talking. He told him that Hatley's
wife was considering filing charges of her own for abuse
against her, so the next day, the round Rock police
reinterviewed Hatley, and just as Miller had expected, Hatley was

(01:11:48):
now claiming that he'd had a kinky love affair with Susan.
Miller knew this was a lie, and meanwhile, Hatley's wife
went ahead with the charges of domestic abuse against her.
That same night, when Hatley took his family to dinner
at the Eyehot the round Rock police came and arrested him.
Then a few days later, Miller filed the arrest warrant

(01:12:10):
for Susan's murder. When the results did come back on
the DNA, Hatley's genetic material matched the DNA and the
cigarette butts. So now it's pretty much a slam dunk.

Speaker 3 (01:12:20):
It's gotten easier, haven't it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:22):
Yeah, it's clear that he's guilty.

Speaker 3 (01:12:24):
Yeah, it is. This is huge news in Stephenville. Before
the arrest was announced, Miller found Susan's father at the
golf course and told him that they had the man
who murdered his daughter. Joe Atkins, however, refused to believe
that there could have been anyone other than Michael Woods.

Speaker 2 (01:12:41):
Yeah, it would take a while to convince him, even.

Speaker 3 (01:12:43):
A long while. Yeah, Roy and Cindy Hayes still thought
it had to be Michael as well. Almost twenty years
after Susan's death, Roy he was still upset about his
treatment by police.

Speaker 2 (01:12:53):
Yeah, he was the Dungeons and Dragons player, and they
were kind of looking at him. Made him take a
polygraph from member right. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:13:01):
Rumors of his involvement in Susan's murder had cost Hied
the career in law enforcement he'd been planning. He thought
Cindy's cousin, Joseph Scott Hatley was now being falsely accused
as well. Not until Miller explained the evidence to them,
did Roy and Cindy accept This has caused a rift
with the Hatley family. Hatley's mother told them, we need
to circle the wagons as our family against the cops

(01:13:24):
tore the family apart. Sure.

Speaker 2 (01:13:26):
Michael Woods was in a college class when Detective Miller
called him. Although he'd already been cleared, he really never
felt safe with the case still being unsolved, so he
took the call outside, and it was just surreal to
know that the real killer had finally been arrested. It
took a while for Detective Miller to find Shannon Myers.

(01:13:47):
She'd been so traumatized by those two rapes that she
was hiding from the world for years. She suffered panic
attacks and migraines. Finding out about Hatley's arrest did give
her some solace. Now, after years of therapy, Shannon is
happily married and working in Houston, and she's grateful the
full story is finally being told because she believes there

(01:14:09):
have to be other victims out there, and that does
seem likely.

Speaker 3 (01:14:13):
Yeah, from what we know about Hatley, and.

Speaker 2 (01:14:15):
He was out driving a truck and picking up you know, women,
vulnerable women. If he didn't kill anyone, I'm sure there
were sexual assaults and rapes. Yes, violent, violent things happened.

Speaker 3 (01:14:27):
Yeah. Now, when he was confronted with the physical evidence,
Hatley made a deal for a thirty year prison sentence.
Now it wasn't as long as I'm had hoped for,
but Susan's parents wanted to avoid a trial, and Hatley
agreed to testify against one of his salemates in the
Stephenville jail.

Speaker 2 (01:14:43):
Yeah, so Hatley was sent to Huntsville, where in time
he would claim to have rediscovered religion. Of course, in
twenty seventeen, he was diagnosed with bladder cancer, but it
went into remission and then he was released in twenty
eighteen on good behavior after serving just eleven years. Another
mind boggling thing to me, people knew longer than that

(01:15:06):
just for the rape and he committed murder, Yes he did.
He entered a halfway house in Midland, found a job
repairing oil field trucks, and then after being laid off
at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, he moved into
an RV park outside Abilene to be near one of
his daughters. So at that point he was sober and
things were going okay for a time, but it didn't

(01:15:27):
last long. His daughter would speculate that he must have
started drinking again. He began distancing himself from his family
and he didn't come around for months at a time.
On Halloween twenty twenty one, Hatley told his daughter that
his cancer had returned and it had spread to his spine.
Then six weeks later, his landlord found him dead on
the floor of his trailer. He was just fifty six

(01:15:49):
years old.

Speaker 3 (01:16:11):
Shortly after Hatley died, Detective Miller got a call from
a friend at the police station who had gotten a
call from someone who claimed they had bought the trailer
that Hatley died in now The Caller told investigators they
found many disturbing things inside, including extensive writings. In his writings,
Hatley claimed he had been the victim of physical abuse
by his mother. He said he struggled to fit into school,

(01:16:34):
and he continued explaining through the pages of his writings
how he had violent thoughts throughout his childhood.

Speaker 2 (01:16:40):
Yeah. I have some difficulty with the writings. I mean,
on the one hand, is it good to learn why
people like this are the way they are. Yes, But
on the other hand, I feel that there's just a
lot of making excuses for his behavior, which I don't right.

Speaker 3 (01:16:56):
Yeah, you want to get that last word in.

Speaker 2 (01:16:59):
So for that reason, it's not really great. Hatlee did
write that he allegedly tried to kill his mother. He
wrote about how he thought Susan Woods was flirting with him,
and he went to her house one night after they
allegedly had talked for some time. Hatley claimed he overstepped
his bounds and Susan Woods slapped him, and that's when
he assaulted her. I could have stopped, but I didn't,

(01:17:21):
he wrote. Hatley wrote that he had some thoughts about
turning himself in, but kept on going about his normal
routine as investigators looked at other suspects. Hatley also wrote
about his assault against Shannon and the threats he had
made against her, but he never admitted to his daughter
what he had done in Stephenville. She learned the details
after she read a manuscript that was found in his trailer,

(01:17:44):
but she did know of the abuse he had inflicted
on her mother, so she really wasn't surprised, she said,
she had long ago accepted that her father was a
bad guy. So really, just an incredible story. But I
really can't get over him serving just eleven years. Really
isn't that crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:18:01):
It is I don't know how or good.

Speaker 2 (01:18:03):
Behavior, I don't know. But then also the fact that
he was not indicted for what he did to Shannon,
if not the first time, that second time was just
a horror show. Yeah, it's stunning, stunning, really hard to believe.

Speaker 3 (01:18:17):
Well, we've done cases like this before. We're sort of
incredulous as to how things turned out so well.

Speaker 2 (01:18:24):
Sure, so we do have some great listener feedback today, right,
some case.

Speaker 3 (01:18:29):
Updates we do.

Speaker 2 (01:18:30):
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(01:19:12):
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(01:19:32):
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plug and on to feedback.

Speaker 3 (01:19:47):
It's time for listener feedback.

Speaker 2 (01:20:02):
Okay, So I'm going to start with a quick update
on something I think we mentioned last time, and this
is the Scott Peterson appeal. So the La Innocence Project
has taken up Scott Peterson's case and it's reported there
seeking a new trial for him, claiming several people had
seen Lacey walking her dog on the day she went missing.

(01:20:23):
So these sightings occurred after Scott had left home to
go fishing, and many defense attorneys are calling this a
real long shot, very unlikely to succeed. So Scott is
now fifty two. He's been on death row. He was
arrested and charged with first degree murder in the death
of his wife and second degree murder in the death
of their unborn son, and a jury found him guilty

(01:20:44):
after a six month trial. In two thousand and four.
The Los Angeles Innocence Project claimed Scott Peterson was denied
his rights to due process and a fair trial because
jurors did not hear evidence over two decades ago that
they argue could have a to the outcome of the trial,
and police and prosecutors did not fairly investigate the case

(01:21:05):
and even destroyed some possibly critical evidence. The La Innocence
Project director Paula Mitchell stated in the filing, in addition
to ignoring the eyewitness reports, the police turned a blind
eye to other exculpatory evidence that would have exonerated mister Peterson. So,
she said she believes police press releases including information indicating

(01:21:27):
to the public that the police did not believe mister
Peterson's alibi almost from day one, and this created a
domino effect and ultimately created a tidal wave of media
attention focused on Scott Peterson as the prime suspect in
the case. So I think she's delusional. There were so
many things that made him so guilty. What about the

(01:21:49):
fact that he told his girlfriend before Lacy disappeared that
he'd lost his wife. Just so many things. So I'm
not sure why they would take this on. You think
there would be more cases that deserve of help.

Speaker 3 (01:22:00):
Than his, Yeah, you would. The accusation that the police
had a tunnel vision on Scott, I mean they look
at the evidence that they glean, yes, and they follow.

Speaker 2 (01:22:11):
It up right, So and it was just so obvious.

Speaker 3 (01:22:14):
Really, some people say, well they targeted him, and know
they say, oh, they just follow any evidence.

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
I think most people think he's guilty. I just can't
imagine why you would think he's not guilty. I just
wonder why why would they pick him to help? I
don't know, but I don't see anything happening with that.
I guess what they're really just trying to do is
get him off death row and get him life in prison.
Because there's no way in Hallie's getting out. I would
not think I wouldn't think so. But speaking of getting out,

(01:22:43):
what have you heard about the Menendez brothers lately?

Speaker 3 (01:22:46):
Well, in a nutshow nothing. Their resentencing hearing has been
rescheduled for May ninth.

Speaker 2 (01:22:52):
Why does it keep getting rescheduled?

Speaker 3 (01:22:54):
Well, there's at least this latest delay. People are waiting
for a risk assessment on the Tube boys, two men.

Speaker 2 (01:23:01):
Two fifty year old men.

Speaker 3 (01:23:03):
I guess to see what the risks of the general
public would be if they were released.

Speaker 2 (01:23:08):
Huh.

Speaker 3 (01:23:09):
So we're waiting that, and I would figure in about
ten days or so will have an answer.

Speaker 2 (01:23:14):
Well, that will definitely be interesting. A lot of really
strong opinions about that.

Speaker 3 (01:23:18):
One can't wait.

Speaker 2 (01:23:19):
Well, it's funny. In my Spanish class, we were thinking
of topics to discuss in the Menendez brothers actually came up. Yeah,
a lot of them know that we have the True
Crime podcast, so that might be part of it, but
you know it could be interesting. What else have we got?

Speaker 3 (01:23:33):
Well, I'll give everyone a quick update on Lurie Dabell,
although I'm sure most of us are aware of it.
But on April twenty second this year, Lorii Dabel was
sound guilty of conspiring with her brother to murder her
fourth husband, Charles Vaalo. Now they have the first sentencing
for this until her next trial is completed. And this
trial is where she's accused of plotting with her brother

(01:23:56):
to kill Brandon Boudreau, who is the ex husband of
her niece.

Speaker 2 (01:23:59):
Well, what do you think about this Brandon Boudreau case,
because I'm sure she'll be convicted, But I always wonder
about Melanie boudro Right, what the hell she definitely was
in on it. She showed up in his garage. He
had to go into hiding with their kids. Remember, she
went off and got married in Vegas to someone she'd
known for like a couple of weeks, and then her husband,

(01:24:22):
the father of her children, was shot at. She's just
very sketchy. I think she really lucked out because I
think she could have been just as deep in this
as everyone else's.

Speaker 3 (01:24:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:24:33):
No, she managed to escape it, so I hope she
appreciates that and tries to straighten herself out. I wonder
if she even sees those kids. That would be interesting
to find out. Hopefully not. I think she's just terrible.
She was definitely part of the cult.

Speaker 3 (01:24:46):
Ye there, yep.

Speaker 2 (01:24:48):
So those are the updates we have, and we have
an email from Lisa, and Lisa wrote, I found your
podcast a few months ago and I binge it daily
while I'm at work and even when I'm at home
doing stuff the house. Well thanks Lisa. I will catch
up to current episodes soon enough. As I type this,
i'm listening to First Comes Love, Second Comes Murder from

(01:25:09):
May twenty twenty two. There was a very recent update
to this case. On March twenty fourth, twenty twenty five,
a judge suspended Nicole Kasinska's sentence and she's now eligible
for parole in November. So I don't remember this case.

Speaker 3 (01:25:25):
This was a then sixteen year old or so she
and her boyfriend killed her mother.

Speaker 2 (01:25:30):
Oh okay, and where was this.

Speaker 3 (01:25:31):
At New Hampshire? I think all right.

Speaker 2 (01:25:34):
Well, Lisa goes on, I'm originally from Massachusetts and now
living conquered New Hampshire, literally right down the street from
the prison where Nicole is incarcerated. I know you don't
typically discuss serial killers, but this might be an interesting
case for you. It's pretty old, it's from the mid
eighteen hundreds, and the serial killer is in Massachusetts. Jolly

(01:25:54):
Jane Toppin. She was originally from Boston and when she
was six, her father surrendered her in her c to
an orphanage. Jane was then placed into a home in Lowell,
Massachusetts as an indentured servant. She was never formally adopted
by the family she was placed with, but she did
take their name and they were good to her. She

(01:26:14):
eventually became a nurse and she liked to experiment with
poisons on her patients. She worked at some prestigious hospitals
in the state. She ended up killing her foster sister
and the family ordered a toxicology exam on her and
it was discovered that the foster sister was poisoned and
everything pointed to Jane. Eventually, she confessed to thirty one murders,

(01:26:36):
but it is suspected that there could be one hundred
or more. Fascinating, Lisa. We always love a good healthcare
provider murderer.

Speaker 3 (01:26:45):
It's a good number of victims.

Speaker 2 (01:26:47):
Yeah. So the thing with one that old, I might
have trouble getting court documents, but I will do whatever
research I can and try and come up with. It
is to be fascinating to do an episode that old.
I would say cases in the eighteen hundreds. We've maybe
done two or three of the almost six hundred we've done.

Speaker 3 (01:27:05):
I'm not even sure we get back to the eighteen hundreds. Yeah, yeah,
early nineteen hundreds.

Speaker 2 (01:27:11):
Maybe what about that Starvation Heights. Wasn't that the eighteen Yeah,
that might be the one. Yeah, anyway, yeah, thank you, Lisa.
We will look into.

Speaker 3 (01:27:18):
That in just to see what methods they have of
detecting before fingerprints in DNA and all right, all that
we have now, but.

Speaker 2 (01:27:27):
I think maybe they were quicker to convict someone without
all that evidence, and now people expect more evidence like that.

Speaker 3 (01:27:34):
Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2 (01:27:35):
Things with cell phones is just incredible. You can't get
away with anything. And whenever we see or read about
these cases where a person is texting someone about the
murder or texting their lover or whatever, and then they
think deleting it's gonna what the hell? Come on, people
watch Dateline once in a while if you don't get it,
so that's just something else. All right, why don't you

(01:27:57):
read us our next email which is from Dallas, and
Dallas is her name, not the city?

Speaker 3 (01:28:02):
Right? Yes, okay, Dallas says. I know you probably hear
worst Criminals ever a lot, but I just want to
repitch this one because I genuinely think it stands out
not just for the staggering level of bungling, but for
how it highlights the way real people can die because
others are so catastrophically detached from reality.

Speaker 2 (01:28:21):
That's a great point, I see that.

Speaker 3 (01:28:22):
Yeah. Yeah, The absurdity of the planning is part of
the tragedy, and that's what makes it unforgettable. So this
is a case I left a voicemail about a while back,
and we played it and Dallas appreciated hearing it played.
It's about the kidnapping and murder of Exon executive Sydney
Riso in nineteen ninety two. It's the case it's never

(01:28:44):
left my mind, and I truly think it's a perfect
fit for true crime Brewery's storytelling style. And here's why.
Sidney Riso is a kind, charitable man, a community volunteer,
AD's advocate, and someone genuinely beloved in his He was
a high ranking oil executive, yes, but it was also
a family man and a pillar of his church community.

(01:29:07):
His death is senseless, slow, and absolutely heartbreaking. Now at
the same time, this year in competence of his kidnappers,
Arthur and Jackie Seale is breathtaking, not in a lighthearted way,
but in the sense that every step of this crime
was executed with such logistical chaos, misplaced confidence, in tragic
miscalculations that it becomes a study in both delusion and

(01:29:30):
failure to plan.

Speaker 2 (01:29:31):
I'm jealous. I like the way you write.

Speaker 3 (01:29:33):
They forgot to leave the ransom note. They gave him
tail and off for a gunshot wound. They starved him
because they didn't want him to have to use the bathroom.
They missed their own train during a ransom handoff. Jackie
dialed the wrong phone number for hours because of dyslexia.
The box that kept him in was inspired by a

(01:29:54):
kidnapping that they misunderstood. Wow. It's tragic, yeah, but also
in a way that begs discussion. Sure, in this case
hits so many true crime and brewery beats. It's a devastating,
deeply human victim story, a broken American dream narrative, criminals
who's arrogance and competence are part of the emotional tragedy,

(01:30:15):
and an opportunity to explore not only what happened, but
how a couple got so deep into denial and fantasy
that they believed a plan like this there as could
actually work.

Speaker 2 (01:30:24):
Yeah, it happens all the time, right, it does? It
really does.

Speaker 3 (01:30:27):
I really like your balanced tone, thoughtful, bit unafraid to say,
what the hell were they thinking? Would do this case
justice in a way that very few shows could, And
if you're interested, she's got a full breakdown ready with
a detailed timeline and a compiled list of every jaw
droppingly stupid thing they did. Happy to share at any time.
Thank you, as always for the amazing episodes. The show

(01:30:49):
has become one of my favorite comfort listens, even when
the subject matters anything but comforting.

Speaker 2 (01:30:54):
Well, thanks so much, Dallas. Absolutely did you tell her
to send it along?

Speaker 3 (01:30:58):
I have it, so we need to send her.

Speaker 2 (01:31:00):
You need to write back to her. It's amazing. Yeah,
and very kind. She said very kind things as well.
Thank you very much. So that's feedback for this week.
Hoping for some more voicemails for next week. If you
want to send a voicemail and tell us you love
the show, we're happy to get that, of course, but
we'd really love some voicemails with some thoughts on cases.

(01:31:21):
We've covered some updates, some case suggestions because those are
the ones that we're going to play on the show. Yeah, yeah, okay, everyone, Well,
I really appreciate everyone being here at the Quiet End
today to listen to us and to really just kind
of get a feel for this case which has hurt
a lot of people, really hurt a lot of people,
but finally did come to I guess a decent conclusion,

(01:31:43):
although not one hundred percent. So really appreciate it and
we'll see you next time at the Quiet End. Come
on down, plenty of seats absolutely Bye bye.

Speaker 4 (01:31:54):
Bye guys, Dot and Tottlyt and to Di

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