Connie Smith Pt. Two

July 16, 1952. Salisbury, Connecticut. While spending the summer at Camp Sloane, ten-year old Connie Smith skips breakfast and leaves the campground. Numerous witnesses see Connie walking down the road and attempting to hitchhike, but before she reaches the nearest town, she vanishes without a trace. Since Connie’s grandfather is the former Governor of Wyoming, there is a massive search effort and her case receives extensive publicity. Over the years, there are a number of unusual leads, including an anonymous letter stating that Connie might be an unidentified murder victim named “Little Miss X”, whose skeletal remains were found in Arizona in 1958. Did Connie Smith become an unidentified Jane Doe? If not, what actually happened to her? And what compelled her to walk away from Camp Sloane to begin with? We explore one of America’s most baffling unsolved missing children’s cases on this week’s episode of “The Path Went Chilly”.

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Additional Reading:

http://charleyproject.org/case/constance-christine-smith

https://www.registercitizen.com/news/article/Missing-girl-s-unsolved-case-draws-theories-13164163.php

https://www.courant.com/hc-cc-smith-051709-story.html

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1193ufaz.htmlhttp://charleyproject.org/case/donnis-marie-redmanhttp://charleyproject.org/case/michael-lawrence-griffin

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Welcome back to the Path Went Chile for part two
of our series about the disappearance of Connie Smith. Robin,
do you want to catch everyone up on what we
talked about in our previous episode?

Speaker 2 (00:43):
Well, the victim of this Connie Smith, she went missing
in Salisbury, Connecticut in July of nineteen fifty two. She
was only ten years old and hailed from a very
prominent family, as her paternal grandfather had once been the
governor of Wyoming, and this was her first time at
summer camp away from her family, because she mostly used
to spend time on their family's ranch, and this was

(01:04):
her first time hanging out with other kids. And while
this has never been confirmed, there have been rumors that
maybe she was bullied or tormented because she suffered a
few injuries before she went missing, and while the cover
stories that they were accidents, there's been speculation that she
was not getting along well with the other kids at
camp and maybe got so upset that she wanted to

(01:25):
go home and contact her parents. Because the morning she
went missing, while all the other campers were going to breakfast,
Connie just decided to leave the campground and a whole
bunch of witnesses saw her walking alone down a road
towards the nearest town, but before she arrived there, she
just vanished without a trace, and the most logical explanation
is that she may have been picked up with someone
who harmed her. But she has not been seen since,

(01:47):
and while they have looked at a number of potential
suspects over the years, they haven't found any evidence implicating anyone.
Many years later, there would be a promising lead when
the authorities got an anonymous letter that Connie was a
unidentified child known only as Little Miss X, whose skeleton
remains have been found in Arizona in nineteen fifty eight.

(02:08):
They compared dental records at the time and were inclined
to believe that it wasn't Connie, but there's been speculation
that the dental testing back then was flawed, so they
wanted to do DNA testing, But unfortunately, little Miss X
is buried somewhere, and because records weren't kept, they don't
know the exact spot she's buried at, so they've been
unable to exhume her to do the DNA comparison. So unfortunately,

(02:31):
after over seventy years, Connie is still a missing person
that we don't know what happened to her. So this
is one of those missing persons cases where the explanation
for what actually happened in the victim seems fairly obvious.
Since Connie was last seen attempting a hitchhike on Route
forty four, it's likely that she was picked up by
an unknown person who did her harm, and unfortunately, this

(02:53):
happened to take place during a narrow window of time
when no one else was around. If Connie was taken
away in a vehicle, then she could have been murdered
at an entirely different location outside the search area, which
is why no one ever found her. But even so,
there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the
circumstances of why Connie wound up in this situation to

(03:13):
begin with, and the case also has a number of
interesting side stories which may or may not be connected.
In missing children's cases, it's always frustrating when the victim
is last seen at a location they had no reason
to be at. One of the most famous examples of
this is the disappearance of Asia Degree, which we briefly
talked about on our last episode, as she inexplicably left

(03:34):
her home in the middle of the night and was
last seen walking down the road by motorists before she vanished.
The circumstances here are a bit similar, except that it's
not hard to dream up a logical reason for why
Connie may have wanted to walk away from Camp Sloane.
In the preceding twelve hours or so, she suffered a
bruised tip, a bloody nose, and broken eyeglasses, and while

(03:55):
the cover story is that these incidents were purely accidental,
a number of people suspect that Connie was being violently
bullied and just decided that enough was enough. It's really
hard to get a handle on what exactly happened to
Connie before she left the camp, as almost no details
have ever been released publicly about the other girls she
was sharing a tent with, and that's understandable since they

(04:17):
were all miners and deserved to have their names kept private.
But it's easy to come up with reasons why there
might have been some friction, especially when you consider that
this was the first time Connie had ever attended summer camp,
and she had probably never spent this much time away
from her family before. All of these other girls came
from the big city, whereas Connie came from a wealthy,

(04:37):
privileged family who lived on her large ranch, and she
had a more tom boyish personality. You also have to
factor in that Conyie was quite tall for her age
and had developed earlier than normal at age ten, So
you can see why she might have been an ideal
target for a group of bullying mean girls.

Speaker 3 (04:55):
Oh yeah, I could absolutely see that.

Speaker 4 (04:57):
And I could see where as a young girl who's
never been really a from your family and you're with
kiddos that don't have a whole lot of similarities with you,
feeling like the odd one out. You're more tomboyish, you
come from a different ranching style, not the big city,
And so I could see that kind of mean girl
mentality where she might be the target of kid's abuse.
I also could see where there's a chance that maybe

(05:19):
there's a young counselor or something there who gets into
an altercation with her. You know, they always have things
like junior counselors and kids that are fifteen sixteen helping
to lead a troop, and so who knows if there
was an issue like that, or even worse, an adult
who could have been targeting.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
Connie as well.

Speaker 4 (05:37):
But it's it's really interesting because if you remember us talking,
she had had visit from family members and talked about
actually wanting to stay longer.

Speaker 3 (05:45):
So what's really.

Speaker 4 (05:46):
Sad is it it sounds like this almost took a
really sudden turn for her where I feel like, had
she been a target, had she been bullied, especially physically hurt,
when her family visited, I don't think she'd be asking
to stay longer. I think she'd be like you to
get me out of here. But she wanted to stay.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
More, yeah, exactly, which makes me wonder if something bad
didn't happen until after her visit from her family. And
it is kind of a shame that none of these
other kids have spoken out publicly about their experiences with Connie.
I mean, at the time, obviously, because they were miners,
they wanted to keep their identity secret. But I've kind
of hoped that as the years went on and they
became adults, more of them would have opened up and

(06:24):
confirmed that, yes, Connie was being treated badly or so
and so did this to her. But surprisingly they'd been
silent about it. So that's why I'm not willing to
rule out the possibility that maybe she was being tormented
by an adult, that maybe someone who worked for the
camp may have been molesting her or something, and that's
what caused her to run away. And because the predator

(06:45):
was the only one who knew about this, that's why
no one has ever found out about it.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
It's interesting how Connie gave her mother and grandmother the
impression that she was having such a great time at camp.
It is possible that she was just putting on a
happy face to worrying them, particularly since Connie was reportedly
seen crying right after they left during their last visit.
And of course, Alice Walsh, one of the last witnesses

(07:10):
to see Connie on the morning she disappeared, would report
that Connie appeared to have been crying when she gave
her directions to Lakeville. If Connie's eyeglasses were broken intentionally
by her tent mates, then I'm guessing this was her
breaking point, since it sounds like she could barely see
anything at all without them. Since the kids were discouraged

(07:31):
from using the telephone at camp, it seems pretty believable
that Connie was heading into Lakeville in order to find
a payphone to call her mother and planned to ask
her to come pick her up and take her home.
But I also could not overlook the fact that Connie
was only about a half mile outside of Lakeville when
she was seen sticking out her thumb, and given that
she had already walked nearly a mile and a half

(07:53):
by this point, it's a bit odd that she would
elect a hitchhike when she was such a short distance away. Furthermore,
she knocked on Alice Walsh's front door to ask for
directions to Lakeville, So if Connie was planning to call
her mother, she could have conceivably asked whal she used
her phone, rather than finding a payphone in town. This

(08:13):
is what makes me wonder if perhaps Connie was hitchhiking
in hopes that somebody would give her a ride to
her grandmother's house in Greenwich, as it was located about
eighty miles south and her mother was spending the summer there.
But on the other hand, Connie did leave all her
extra clothing and belongings behind the camp, which seems to
indicate that she was planning to return at some point.

Speaker 4 (08:36):
Yeah, that's the part that's really sad, because you think
about her trip to Alice Walsh's house. And so, like
you said, why not just ask to use her home phone?

Speaker 3 (08:46):
Why would you continue to walk?

Speaker 4 (08:47):
You had the confidence to go and knock on Alice
Walsh's front door, why not just say can you help me?

Speaker 3 (08:53):
Can you help me? Call my mom?

Speaker 4 (08:55):
I'm wondering, I'm wondering why why was she so set
on this location that she needed to go to that
was not convenient? It was not something we know her
to be familiar with, and it was such a determined
point it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's
almost like, if it was not a modern case, I'd
say it had someone connected with her own technology and
said meet me there. But this is an older case

(09:18):
that didn't happen in this one. So why why was
it that she needed to get to Lakesville?

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yeah, this is a big mystery. I mean, I have
thought about the possibility that if she was being groomed
by an adult, perhaps this person said leave the campgrounds
and meet me in Lakeville. But they checked with all
the witnesses there and no one recalled seeing her in
the town that morning, So it does seem clear that
something happened before she arrived. So you're thinking, if there
was some predator who was grooming her, why would they

(09:44):
pick her up before she even arrived in town unless
they wanted to do something to her before she was
seen by any more witnesses.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
That makes a lot of sense. If you're going to
pick her up on the side of the road with
the least amount of eyeballs on her, you've got less
chance than any eye with seeing her once you go to town.
I don't know how big the town was, but it
sounds like you could then interact with a lot of
these people. They could see your face, and then your
chance of being identified as being the last person with

(10:12):
her would kind of go up exponentially.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
Now I should mention that there's been speculation that Camp
Sloane orchestrated some sort of cover up, especially since the
camp director, Ernest Roberts, had a bit of a shady history.
The camp was once implicated in a scandal when an
eleven year old boy died there in nineteen forty after
contracting septocemia. It turned out the camp's doctor at the

(10:38):
time was not licensed to practice medicine, and since Roberts
knew about this, he was arrested and received a fine
in spite of this. Roberts was still working against the
camp's director in nineteen fifty two and known for being
very protective of his camp's image. Since Connie was first
noticed to be missing at around eight forty five and
Roberts did not notify the police for nearly three hours,

(11:00):
I've seen presented is that Connie's bullying at the hands
of her tent mates escalated so out of control that
she wound up dead and everyone involved covered the whole
thing up by hiding her body. But I don't find
this likely at all. We have no fewer than nine
eye witnesses placing Knnie outside Camp Sloan on Indian Mountain
Road and Route forty four at the exact same time

(11:21):
the other campers would have been at the mess hall
having breakfast, so she clearly left of her own volition.
While Connie's tentmates may have done something to compel her
to walk away from the campground, they clearly had no
involvement in her actual disappearance. Another theory I've seen pushed
forward is that Connie was being molested by someone who
worked at the camp, which is why she appeared to

(11:41):
be so upset. That morning. Of course, that's certainly not impossible,
but no evidence was ever found to support this theory.

Speaker 4 (11:49):
I've mentioned that already. I think it is a possibility.
I think again, it could be an older camper. I
think it could be an older youth helper because I
remember I remember being fish teen in charge of kids
at a summer camp, right, And it could be also.
And remember she looks older than she is, So if
a fifteen year old camp counselor thought she was thirteen,

(12:10):
you know, is that is that something that could have
been happening? And then you have the chance that maybe
there's an adult employee at the camp.

Speaker 3 (12:18):
Now. To get away again, all you got to do is.

Speaker 4 (12:21):
Get off that campground and get to somebody, and she
did that multiple times she was seen.

Speaker 3 (12:27):
But again, this is a ten year old.

Speaker 4 (12:29):
So I'm thinking, Okay, kiddo, get off the property, get
to someone who's safe, who's not related to the camp,
and ask for help. But at ten, does she have
a safe person in Lakesville? Does she have a place
they went on a field trip with camp, and she
knows if I could just get back to that ice
cream shop, if I could just get back to this place,
I could call my mom. You know, I got to

(12:51):
remind myself, this is a ten year old, so all
of the times I go, why didn't you just tell
someone or ask for help? We don't know what she
was thinking in the of a child.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
I wish we knew more about the staff too. Like
I can think back to I went to Bible camp
when I was a little kid till from like I
don't know, maybe six until the age of ten, and
the last year that I went there, so I would
have been the same age. I remember being in love
with this camp counselor all the girls were. He was
about sixteen, and everybody called him mister Jeff. And so

(13:22):
I could see a situation or a scenario where somebody
who all these young girls think is super attractive, but
their children and that older individual could potentially groom them.
Maybe it's a scenario like that. So I can totally
see what you're saying, Ash, that makes complete sense. And
I could see a scenario where something happened and she

(13:44):
wasn't happy about it, and so she needed to get
off the grounds of the camp in order to seek help.
But she didn't feel safe calling from there, and she
needed to get that physical distance in order to feel safe.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
That would make sense, Like it's never been specified if
she had ever been to Lake Phill before. I know,
ashe mentioned the possibility of a field trip, but I
don't know if they ever did that. So since she
had to stop past for directions, she probably was not
familiar with the area and maybe didn't know anyone was there.
But it could be, like you said, a thing where
she was upset because this older tamp counselor she had

(14:20):
a crush on was not interested in her. So she
just decided she had to leave the campground and go anywhere,
and it didn't really matter where.

Speaker 3 (14:27):
It was, yeah, or was he interested in her?

Speaker 4 (14:30):
And it went, it went, you know, quickly became a
physical thing, and she became uncomfortable and said, what just happened?

Speaker 3 (14:36):
You know?

Speaker 4 (14:37):
And again think about the time. This is back in
the fifties, and so they're not going to be able
to understand, no talk about any kind of inappropriate behavior
because it was very hush hush, you didn't talk about it,
and if you did talk about it, it was your fault.
And so I could see here if she was like, oh,
I love mister Jeff, he's so cute, and then mister

(14:58):
Jeff says, ooh, I think you're cute too, Connie, And
all of a sudden it goes from sweet to scary
and then too dangerous and then to hurtful. I could
see her really not knowing what else to do. I
just have to get away. And so back then, remember
she couldn't say, hey, this man just hurt me. This
man made me feel uncomfortable. She would have never even
heard what it means to be hurt by an adult. Right,

(15:20):
all adults were trusted. You listen to your elders, You
didn't talk back, you didn't talk bad about adults. So
very very different times she was living in too.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
I totally get that. And I'm gonna share a story
with you guys. That is like the creepiest story about
my former neighbor who I was in love with. I
was twelve years old, if he lived next door to
my parents. He was in his last year of university,
and I thought he was so smart and so hot.
And I remember I would sit out in the summer
and I would read books on the patio so that

(15:51):
I could see him. He would lend me his books
and we would talk about books because something we were
both interested in. And then one day he invited me
over to go like look at his library or whatever,
and he was this I think he was twenty one
at the time. I was twelve. He tried to hook
up with me, and I remember just being like, oh
my god, I'm in love with him, but like, I'm

(16:13):
not ready for this. What is happening. This is wrong,
and I ran away and I never thought out on
my patio again. But you can see how a scenario
with somebody who's older, they can manipulate a situation and
they could potentially have put Connie in a situation that
she just wasn't ready for and that no child should
have been put in in the first place.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
That's very creepy. Do you know whatever happened to that guy?
Did he ever get in trouble with the law?

Speaker 1 (16:38):
I have no idea. But the funny thing is his
mom used to be my second grade teacher, and she
used to be the mayor of where I grew up.
So I was one of those weird things where like
I literally never told anybody, because I don't think I've
ever told anybody this story so weird that I just
said it. This podcast yeah, it just it just triggered

(16:59):
that memory for me. It wasn't like he was forceful
or like whatever, But it's just the whole idea that
a twenty one year old is going to try to
make a move sexually on a child is just creepy
enough as it is without any force being applied.

Speaker 4 (17:14):
I'm so thankful as a mother because Jewels, you're not alone.
Thank you for sharing that. That's scary, but I mean,
it happened, and so you're not alone. I mean I
can think back to many inappropriate age gap relationships that
I had. They didn't go anywhere, right, there was no
physical movement, but there was definitely emotional grooming. And so
I talk so openly with Reagan and my other baby.

(17:36):
I talk so openly about hey, this is what is real, right,
this is what is safe conversation with an adult. You
are never to be viewed as super special where you
need alone time with them, right, There's no reason that
you need extra training with them alone, none of this.
Because you know you're special, but no adult needs to

(17:58):
single you out as so special that other students couldn't
be around you, right, or other people couldn't be with you,
or an older boy. As much as as cute as
he is, there's no reason you need to be alone
with him.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
And here's why.

Speaker 4 (18:09):
And it's sad we have to have those conversations. But again,
in Connie's day, they weren't having those conversations.

Speaker 1 (18:16):
And I think it's so important that you're having those
conversations with Reagan and that you're letting her know that
that is not okay, because I could see a scenario
where if that went down differently for me, and pressure
was applied and force was used, that there would be
that guilt and that shame and you wouldn't feel comfortable.
It would be like I was in love with him.

(18:36):
I did ABC and D, so maybe I was asking
for it would have been the way that my twelve
year old brain likely would have processed that. So I'm
glad that nothing happened, but I'm so happy that today
these conversations are being had with young girls and young women,
that there are these people out here who will try

(18:56):
to take advantage of you, and it can look like love,
but it definitely isn't that. The fact of the matter
is that the last confirmed sighting of Connie occurred on
Route forty four, a half mile outside of Lakeville at
eight forty five am. Even though the village was a
pretty busy place at that time of the morning because

(19:17):
a number of people were opening up their businesses, none
of them remembered seeing Connie, so it's very likely that
an unknown motorist picked up Connie before she made it
to Lakeville. Another sad detail about this case is that
many of the witnesses who saw or interacted with Connie
after she left the camp that morning have expressed regret
that they didn't do more to assist her. They pretty

(19:39):
much all mistakenly assumed that Connie was a teenager and
were genuinely surprised to learn that she was only ten
years old. It probably should have been a major warning
sign to see a ten year old hitchhiking, but from
a brief glance at her, the witnesses probably thought she
was old enough to fend for herself. You also have
to remember that nineteen fift was simply a much different time,

(20:02):
and a young girl being abducted or murdered while walking
alone down a country road on a sunny morning was
just not a thought which popped into most people's heads
back then. Whatever happened, it sounds like there is no
lack of effort to find Connie, and I imagine that
if a disappearance like this took place today involving a
girl from an affluent family whose grandfather was a former governor,

(20:25):
it would be all over the media NonStop. Since Connie's
parents were divorced during a time period, but that sort
of thing was a lot more uncommon. There was some
initial speculation that one parent may have kidnap Connie to
keep her away from the other, but that theory doesn't
make sense at all, since the Smith's divorce was pretty amicable,

(20:46):
as both parents got to live on the same property
and see Connie whenever they wanted. The ransom kidnapping theory
also doesn't work, as it's very unlikely that anyone could
have predicted Connie would leave the camp and be walking
down the road alone on that particular morning.

Speaker 3 (21:03):
Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 4 (21:04):
At first, I had asked, is there any chance that
someone knew she was the governor's daughter and that you know,
her granddaughter, and that you know, maybe she was going
to be at this camp. But again, how the heck
would they even know she had left the camp? All
of these things just don't line up, and so it's
either one of two things. To me. Somebody had told
her you need to meet me in Lakeville, and it's
an adult or an older person grooming her. You meet

(21:26):
me there, I'm going to take you away. I'm gonna
rescue you from this right, making her some kind of promise.
I'll help you get home to your family. Whatever it is,
someone's told her to go, or she's just set off
ready to go. She doesn't have anyone she's meeting. She
just has a goal to get to Lakeville and then
has some other plan and she's abducted by an opportunistic
offender and predator. I think the second one I don't know.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (21:49):
I'm torn between those two. But go back to what
you said just a second ago, when you said many
of these people either expressed or surely fell.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
Like they had failed, Connie.

Speaker 4 (22:02):
I'm telling you, oh my lord, even with the information
that I have today, there have been times as a woman,
a mother, a sister, a daughter, that I've seen things
and it's eaten me alive that i didn't say something.
And then there's times that I've said something and I've
looked like an absolute lunatic and so even today, having
all this knowledge and being someone who's very aware of

(22:26):
the realities of criminal behavior and victimization and things like that,
I struggle to say, Hey, I'm going to do something
more here, right, I'm going to make an assumption that
something bad is going on here, and I'm going to
say something.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
I've lost friends over it.

Speaker 4 (22:42):
I've separated, you know, Reagan from friends, and it's been heartbreaking.
And sometimes I'm wrong and I feel like a fool.
And then sometimes I don't say anything and I feel heartbroken.
And so it's a hard thing now to navigate, but
I do try to say things like I remember we
had a little girl over and she was messaging this
quote seventeen year old boy. She's like thirteen, And I

(23:05):
called her mom and I said, we don't have a
cell phone here. I don't mind that your baby has
a cell phone to check in, but I wanted to
know that she's supposedly messaging with an older boy. And
I said, if it was me, I would want her
cell phone and I would want to know who she
was communicating with. Sure Enough, when that baby got home
and mom got her phone, it was a twenty two
year old boy who was grooming this thirteen year old child.

(23:26):
And so you know, sometimes you say it you're right,
sometimes you say it you're wrong, and sometimes you don't
know how to say it. So back in the fifties,
can you imagine you see this young kid crying walking
down the road that you think is a teenager. We
didn't talk about domestic violence, we didn't talk about sexual abuse,
and we just didn't talk about trauma in general. So
whatever was going on, I'm sure they said, like, that's
their business, she'll figure it out and she's safe. So

(23:49):
I mean, yes, would they feel guilt, but should they
know it's it? They didn't know that something was going on,
Nor did they know that they're likely was an opportunistic
predator waiting around the corner.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
Oh yeah, definitely. Like this is not the first case
I've seen involving missing children from like the nineteen forties
or nineteen fifties where people just felt they should have
done more where they saw a child in a situation
that could have been potentially dangerous, but they just didn't
think that way because it was a much more innocent time.
I recently did a case about three boys who went
missing from the nineteen fifties, and their parents were approached

(24:23):
with the idea that they were allured by the child predator,
and they flat out said, we had no idea that
child predators or child molesters even existed back then, and
the first time when they told us about it, because
you just didn't learn about that stuff back in the fifties.
And it's because of cases where children go missing and
are harmed that they've now learned to be more cautious.
This definitely seems like a crime up opportunity from a predator.

(24:46):
So let's look at possible suspects. I guess the most
prominent one is William Henry Redmond, whom we know already
murdered one girl the year before Connie went missing, and
allegedly confessed to killing at least three more girls which
were never linked to them. Redman has been looked at
as a possible suspect in numerous cold cases from the
nineteen fifties involving young girls, including the unsolved nineteen fifty

(25:08):
one disappearance of ten year old Beverly Potts, who vanished
while attending a summer festival at a park in Cleveland.
Redmond did have a nomadic lifestyle as a carnival worker
during this time period, a profession which allowed him to
travel to different states and be in the company of
numerous potential victims to prey on. However, it's worth noting
that by the time Connie disappeared, Redmond was already a

(25:29):
wanted fugitive for the murder of Jane Marie Althoff, and
no one could find him until he was tracked down
in Nebraska over three decades later, so they'd never been
able to determine if Redmond could have been in Connecticut
in nineteen fifty two. The only reason Redmen even popped
up on the radar as a potential suspect was because
of a state trooper, Leo Turkhot, remembering an odd phone

(25:51):
call he received from a man named William Dugan who
said he was a former carnival worker who had information
about Connie's disappearance. It's pretty amazing that Turcott was able
to remember this phone call nearly thirty three years later,
so kudos to him. But other than the former carnival
worker connection, there really isn't much else to suggest that
Redmond might have been the mysterious William Dugan. I would

(26:15):
not be surprised at all if Redmond really was responsible
for the mergers of three other girls. But there really
isn't anything to conclusively prove or disprove that he cross
paths with Connie, and the connection to him is tenuous
at best. It is unfortunate that Redmond was already seriously
ill by the time he was arrested, as this may
have prevented information about additional crimes he committed from surfcing.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Oh for sure.

Speaker 4 (26:39):
I mean, is it possible that he was linked to this.
It's possible, but I think it's a very very loose connection.
It's just interesting, right, But what's really intriguing to me
is that you'll hear these cases where Okay, we know
that there was this known child sex predator writer, there's
this known assailant that has this mo that travels from

(26:59):
here to hear to hear. But what's the scarier reality
is that there's probably ten men just like him in
that town. So it's like, you know, are they abusing
and then killing the kids?

Speaker 1 (27:09):
No?

Speaker 4 (27:10):
Are there people that are predating on our children in
our communities?

Speaker 3 (27:14):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (27:15):
And so are there these people that we say, oh,
was there any link to Connecticut? You know, how many
people in Connecticut would have been prone to hurt somebody
if given the opportunity. So, yes, it's possible, But my goodness,
I bet there were thousands of very questionable men in
that area, right in that state that they could have said, oh,

(27:38):
we know this person's record, we know this person's record.
And then I'm even more horrifying, what about the ones
who have never been caught that are doing this to children?
So Connie is, let's say taken and possibly killed, But
that doesn't mean there weren't other children before that that
were attacked and abused by this person and maybe not
killed or raised such a media fuzz.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
It feels like Henry le Lucas, Like it isn't always
Henry le.

Speaker 4 (28:01):
Lucas right right right where they're looking for someone who
has this repetitive history.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
But yeah, we see that a lot in missing children's
cases today, where investigators will check into the nose registered
sex offenders living in the same area and then you
find out, wow, that's a lot of sex offenders. I
had no idea there were so many living together, that
so many of them existed, And I can only imagine
what it was like back then in the nineteen fifties
where there was no sex offender registry. So you have

(28:28):
a lot of people possibly living in this community who
have harmed and abused children, but nobody knows about it.

Speaker 3 (28:35):
Yeah, I challenge everybody to go look up their address.
It's horrifying. I'm like, oh.

Speaker 4 (28:39):
Wait, what a level three offender three doors down. That's adorable.
You know, it's really really scary. And sometimes it's people
you would not suspect. When we listen to the news
and we're watching, you go oh wow, okay, And they're
quite common and now today they're recognized. Back in the fifties,
they didn't even recognize that. You wouldn't have gotten punished

(29:01):
probably if you were caught hurting children. So children were
part property and the myths and misconceptions around abuse of
children was very disturbing back then. So, man, this is
complicated now.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
One lead involving a potential suspect, which turned out to
be a hoax, was the confession by Frederick Pope, who
claimed that he ended accomplice Jack Walker, picked up Connie
hitchhiking before Walker killed her, They buried her remains, and
he killed Walker in retaliation. Well, I see no reason
to believe this story is true, as the red flag

(29:38):
was his claim that Connie wanted to ride back home
to Wyoming. Given that Wyoming is nearly two thousand miles
away from Connecticut, I find it a lot more likely
that if Connie wanted to visit her parents, she would
have asked for a ride to see her mother in
Greenwich instead. It became a parent that Pope completely made
the story up and that this Jack Walker never existed.

(30:02):
But the only reason we've mentioned this again is because
of the fact that Pope claimed that Connie's remains were
buried in Arizona. Pope's confession took place in nineteen fifty three.
Little Miss X's remains were discovered in Arizona five years later,
and the Connecticut State Police received an anonymous letter from
Colorado claiming little Miss X was Connie in nineteen sixty two,

(30:26):
and as far as I know, the writer of the
letter has never been identified. The Arizona connection is probably
nothing more than a coincidence. And I know that Connie's
case received a whole bunch of false tips, but this
situation is pretty odd. A bunch of ten year anniversary
articles were published about Connie's case during the summer of
nineteen sixty two, so it's probably not surprising that the

(30:50):
police got some new leads. But how did this letter
writer know about little Miss X. These days, online sleus
try to match up missing people and una identified decedents
all the time by looking up their profile pages at
websites like the Dough Network. But this was the pre
internet world of nineteen sixty two, and Arizona and Connecticut

(31:10):
are a great distance apart. So I wonder who might
have had the knowledge about both of these cases, as
I don't think little Miss X got nearly as much
publicity as Connie's disappearance did. So now we have to
talk more about little Miss X, which is quite an
interesting unsolved mystery in its own right. For starters, I'm
going to express my skepticism that little Miss X and

(31:33):
CONNYE are one and the same. I know there's been
a lot of debate about whether the methods used to
rule Kanye out via dental records in nineteen sixty two
were accurate, but even if you ignore all that, the
facts just don't fit. Little Miss X was believed to
have been dead approximately nine to eighteen months before her
remains were found but kanye had been missing for over

(31:54):
six years by that point. Unless someone abducted Kanyie and
was holding her in captivity for a few years before
she was killed, it doesn't make sense for the remains
to be her, especially when you consider that Arizona is
on the opposite side of the country. But the big
question is if little Miss X isn't Connie, then.

Speaker 3 (32:13):
Who is she?

Speaker 4 (32:15):
That's exactly right, So little Miss X has a family too,
Little Miss X, no matter what kind of background she had,
she's somebody's person. And so the fact that there was
this little unidentified body there and then we're also still
missing Connie is incredibly traumatic. I don't think that little
Miss X and Connie are the same person. My what

(32:36):
I would give if we could compare them now, because
we do have relatives who have signed up to have
DNA on file four Connie, and so if little Miss X,
if we had any kind of remnants of that that
little girl in her remains, then you'd be able to
conclusively say, because when there's that question mark, it's a

(32:57):
lead still. But in my mind, this is not the
same person.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Well, the most bizarre aspect of this case is that
even though little Miss X's remains were unclothed when she
was found. The clothing suddenly appeared when the scene was
searched again a short time later. On the surface, it
appears like the clothing was planted there, and even if
you believe investigators simply missed it during the initial search,
the clothes still appeared to be way too big for

(33:23):
Little Miss X and probably did not belong to her.
So now we have to sag into our third unsolved
cold case on this series of episodes, and that's the
disappearances of Michael Griffin and Donnis Pinky Redman. They went
missing eight months before Little Miss X was found, and man,
I really wish there was more information out there about
this one. The only sources I could find were their

(33:45):
profile page is at the Charlie Project and the Dough Network,
which only have brief summaries and leave me with so
many questions. There are good reasons to believe there might
be a connection to the Little Miss X case. A
nail file case with the initials p R, which possibly
stood for Pinky Redmen, were found near the scene. The
clothing Pinky was last seen wearing seems similar to the

(34:07):
clothes that were there and Michael's abandoned car was discovered
in the nearby town of Williams. Little Miss X's profile
page of the Dough Network says that Pinky was excluded
as being her, but it doesn't specify how they determined that,
since they've been unable to find little Miss X's remains
and extract DNA from her. But I think they probably

(34:27):
came to that conclusion based on the fact that little
Miss X had reddish brown hair and may have been Hispanic,
whereas Pinky was pale skinned and had strawberry blonde hair. However,
if the clothing and nail file case found near Little
Miss X's murder scene did belong to Pinky, then I
have to believe the cases are connected, because it would
otherwise be a massive coincidence that evidence from two separate

(34:50):
crimes would be disposed of in that same remote area.
I suppose an alternate explanation is that whoever was responsible
for Pinky's disappearance read about the discovery of Little Miss
X in the papers and then decided to plant Pinky's
items at the scene, hoping that investigators would automatically assume
they belonged to little Miss X. It's possible that little

(35:11):
Miss X, Pinky Redman, and Michael Griffin were all murdered
by the same person, but since Michael was never found,
for all we know, perhaps he could have killed the
two females and went on the run. But without more
information about Michael and Pinky's cases, I can't make any conclusions.
This whole story involving Little Miss X, Pinky, and Michael

(35:32):
is a pretty intriguing mystery within a mystery, but I
ultimately feel it doesn't have any connection to Connie's disappearance.
All that being said, it sounds like investigators from the
Coconino County Sheriff's Office were making a concerted effort to
try and find Little Miss X's burial spots and recover
her remains, and I definitely hope they're successful and are

(35:53):
able to extract some DNA. Even though I don't believe
she is Connie, little Miss X is still a murdered child,
was gone unclaim for nearly seventy years, and extracting your
DNA will go a long way at helping her get
her name back.

Speaker 4 (36:07):
Oh yeah, absolutely, It's this sad reality that without being claimed,
without having any kind of identity, she was put in
this kind of community burial grave. And so to know
where that exactly is, to know where her little remains
exactly are and not mixed in with other peoples. It's
really difficult for people to do. And so my prayer

(36:28):
would be that they could find that and then they
could say, hey, listen, we need to run this these
remains through a DNA database and see what we can
find and see. I don't think they're going to match
Connie either, but I do wonder is there any way
it could be linked back to Pinky? Is there any
way we could have a connection or identify who this
little girl is so that she's not in this mass

(36:50):
burial grave, that she has her own little headstone, and
that she has recognition because she had a life. And
like I said, I don't care what kind of family
life she had or what kind of child she had become,
you know, if she had run away, if she had
become a thrown away child, those kinds of things. It's
still a human being who had a name, who had
a story, who had a legacy right and so to

(37:13):
have her name would be profound. But at this time
it seems like a really complicated effort to get to that,
And I'm wondering, with all the unsolved more recent cases,
are there still people pushing for that those the case
that had the p on it for maybe linking it
to Pinky. It's really really interesting and when we talk
about this is kind of a remote area, what's the

(37:34):
chances that these multiple different murders are having things dumped
in this site if it's the same person. There is
a chance if there's one person who's disposing of all
of these individuals and their things because it's a place
they felt safe, it's a place that they're familiar with,
and they know that it's remote. And so while it
would be odd to go and dump something after another

(37:56):
one of your victims, you know, body has been found,
would be really really risky. But what if they weren't
you know, what if they weren't worried about that. What
if they're to a point where they have no emotional
attachment to what they're doing and they said, who cares,
that's my dumping side, I'm gonna go dump some more
and kind of laugh in the face of police.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
Oh yeah, And that sort of thing does happen where
sometimes killers are familiar with certain areas, so they decided
to dump all the remains of their victims and all
their evidence there, And it would not surprise me if
maybe they killed Little Miss X and then later killed
Pinky and Michael, that they decided to come back to
this location and dump the evidence there. But if they
can find little Miss X's remains, I don't think it's

(38:36):
impossible she could be identified because a couple of years
ago they actually managed to identify another deceased child who
was discovered in Arizona all the way back in nineteen
sixty and went by the nickname little Miss Nobody, And
in twenty twenty two, they used DNA testing to identify
or as a missing child named Sharon Lee Diegos. So

(38:57):
I do truly believe that if they can find little
Miss X's remains, then they might have the necessary DNA
to give her name back as well.

Speaker 1 (39:06):
So let's get back to discussing Connie Sadly, Like we
said before, I think the truth about what happened to
her is very simple. She crossed paths with a motorist
on Route forty four who picked her up before she
made it to Lakeville and ultimately harmed her after they
drove away from the scene. I've seen some people push
forward the theory that Connie could have accidentally been hit

(39:27):
by a car and whoever was responsible took her body
away from the scene and disposed of it before they
were discovered. But I have my doubts this would have
occurred without leaving any evidence behind or anyone seeing anything.
So I think Connie voluntarily climbed into a vehicle with
someone who pulled over to give her a ride. In

(39:48):
twenty ten, author Michael C. Dooling published a book titled
Clueless in New England, which not only covered Connie's case,
but the nineteen forty six disappearance of eighteen year old
Paula Jeane Weldon from Bennington, Vermont, and the nineteen thirty
six disappearance and death of twenty two year old Catherine
Hall from Lebanon Springs, New York. Since all three victims

(40:09):
disappeared while hitchhiking, Julie explores the possibility that they were
all murdered by the same killer, though I personally have
my doubts considering the geographical and time differences, but I
would not be surprised at all if Connie was specifically
targeted by a predator who was under the mistaken impression
that she was a teenager. That she was a teenager.

(40:32):
Given how extensively the area surrounding Camp's Loan was searched
at the time, it would not surprise me at all
if Connie's body was disposed of at a location which
was a great distance away. Sadly, there is no hard
evidence pointing towards a specific suspect, so the person responsible
could have been passing through the area and was long

(40:53):
gone by the time the search for Connie began.

Speaker 4 (40:56):
Absolutely, so one of two things could happen. This is
someone who's local and is familiar with the fact that
there's a summer camp there, and so they kind of
troll that area waiting to see do any of the
kids sneak off the property? Are there any kids that
you know leave and they're walking. It's like someone who
would be close to a school and watching for the
kiddo who walks home by themselves, right, you know children

(41:18):
are there, and you know that sometimes children leave the
property because you drive by all the time, or you're
scoping out that area waiting to see if there's a
vulnerable child that leaves, and so it's very possible that's
someone who's very familiar with the area. But again, it's
all so very possible that it's a passerby on that
busy route forty four who's they're driving. They see this kiddo,

(41:40):
they thinks about thirteen, fourteen years old, she's all alone.
In fact, if she looks distressed, even more vulnerable, and
they pull over and they either physically apprehend her or
they convince her that they'll help her get where she's going.
Remember there's cases where a husband and wife are doing
a crime together and they convince a child to get
in because they're safe. There's times when you have, you know,

(42:03):
a man who's not too much older and he's pulling over.
There's someone who reminds her of her grandfather who pulls over.
So as a ten year old, there's many, many circumstances
that you could feel pretty safe, especially back in the fifties. Again,
when we don't have social media telling you every ten
minutes that another baby's been hurt, that you're safe, and
that hey, I don't know where I'm going. I'm overwhelmed

(42:26):
someone pulled over and said they would help me. I've
asked so many people and I still don't know where
I'm going, I'm going to get in this car, they
seem safe, and or she's walking and she gets physically
apprehended and simply can't defend herself.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
It's so sad.

Speaker 4 (42:38):
There's so many options that this case becomes one of
those that's so open ended. It almost feels helpless in
the time that's passed in the way that it could
be someone close, it could be someone far away. It
could be someone's first crime, it could be their ninth.
You know, we just don't know. And so this is
one of those cases where, my goodness, I wish that
not as much time had passed so that we were

(42:59):
maybe a to dig deeper and get some more information.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
Of course, the big mystery in this case will always
be why Connie walked away from the camp to begin with,
But it was probably just a combination of her being
bullied or feeling homesick, and it was just a tragic
coincidence that this ultimately led to her being in the
wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong person.
But the good news is that even though over seventy
years have passed, law enforcement has not given up on

(43:25):
trying to solve this case, as it still gets covered
in the local media from time to time. So if
by chance, you happen to have any information on the
disappearance of Connie Smith, where you happen to know anything
about the identity of little Miss X, or the unsolved
disappearances of Donnis, Pinky Redman and Michael Griffin for that matter,
please contact the appropriate authorities. Jules Ashley any final thoughts

(43:47):
in this case.

Speaker 4 (43:49):
I think the thing that hits hard about this case
is it could be any of our children. This is
a little girl who's going away to summer camp, and
again it's the first summer that her routine is kind of,
you know, not what it's been her whole life. This
is his first summer. She's exploring this idea of being
away at summer camp. And in fact, as a parent,
you go to visit and you hear how exciting it is,

(44:11):
how wonderful it is, and then she even wants to
stay longer, Like I made the right decision sending my
baby there. She's thriving, she's so happy, she's learning new things.
This is good for her social and emotional growth. I'm
so happy, and then the next thing, I know, my
child's missing, and multiple people saw her. No one can
tell me where she is, no one can tell me

(44:33):
what happened. I can't imagine being the family surrounding this
baby and going missing. She walked away from a camp
at ten, thinking, Hey, I can get somewhere, I can
get help for whatever I'm trying to do. She even
had the guts to go and knock on someone's door
and ask for help, show me how to get to
this place. So she had a little plan in her

(44:54):
ten year old mind, and no matter what she was
running from, no matter who she needed, she had a plan.
And somehow she was intercepted at that time. But my
heart is broken for the family who said, we're going
to give our baby a memory, We're going to give
her an opportunity. We're going to really push her outside
of her comfort zone and let her grow as a
human being. I can't tell you how many times I

(45:16):
do that and send my child off into the world,
praying that she's safe and sound and so having so
much fun. And I can't imagine getting a phone call
or arriving and having someone say, we have no idea
where she is. And that's exactly what happened here. Connie's
never been found. So the really difficult thing here is
that if she's not found right, yeah, deceased or alive,

(45:40):
then what had been happening to her? How long was
she kept alive? It creates such a tremendous grief journey
that that family had to go on, and friends of
Connie's family had to go on.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
Is she still alive? Is she being hurt? Is she scared?

Speaker 4 (45:54):
Is she calling for me? And I can't hear her?
And by this point I would think that Connie is deceased,
even of old age, even if she had been raised
by somebody else. But it's pitiful to think that her
family lived their lives wondering could she still be alive?
What happened to her? And it's quote our fault because
we sent our baby to this camp and trusted them

(46:16):
to take care of her. It's no one's fault. They
did what every parent does on a daily basis. They thought,
I'm going to do something really exciting or cool or
right for my child, and it just ended in an
absolute tragedy.

Speaker 3 (46:28):
It's so so sad.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
It's literally one of those worst case scenarios that you
hope never happens, but unfortunately, in this situation. It happened
to Connie, and so her family is to deal with
this trauma that just cycles around. They maybe get a tip,
they get more information it's potentially connected to little Miss X,
and then in the end they're left disappointed because they

(46:52):
really get no new information. I really don't believe that
she is little Miss X. I do think that it's
interesting that the caller had that in about both cases,
but I do tend to think that they are not
one and the same, and that the forensic identologist or
whomever examined her skull initially was correct. But it's so

(47:14):
frustrating because you think, oh, my gosh, my child is
going to the summer camp, What a wonderful experience they're
going to have, And then when all these other parents
get to go pick up their children, you're searching for
your child who's missing, and you feel like they should
have been protected by the camp, by the counselors, that
somebody should have done more. But thinking about the time period,

(47:37):
nobody thought that she would walk away from this camp
and that some opportunistic offender would end up abducting her
and like the ending her life. It's just such a
sad case.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
Yeah, We talked in our last episode about Connie's family,
how her mother died at a very young age, which
they think was because of a broken heart, and her
father lived to a very old age up to the
age of ninety seven before he passed away, and her
brother went on to have a successful political career, but
just two years ago he and his wife were killed
in a car accident when he was eighty four years old.

(48:10):
So there's just been so much tragedy in the family,
and it is a shame that they never found out
what happened to Connie, because I know that her father
and her brother just never stopped publicizing it for the
rest of their lives. I think that if this case
had happened today, we might get more insight in what
happened to her, because even though what happened to her
at camp may not have played any role in her disappearance,

(48:32):
I happened to think that in today's days of social
media and people talking, that if she was being bullied,
or if she had been groomed or harassed by anyone
at the camp, then it would have eventually come out.
There would have been a lot of gossip, a rumors
at the very least, and we might have gotten more
insight into why Connie left the campground in the first place,
which is still a mystery within a mystery that it's

(48:55):
very possible she was being sexually harassed or targeted by someone,
but she may have decided to leave and then cross
paths with an entirely different predator who was the one
who killed her. But it is frustrating because in missing
persons cases, you're often going to find a lot of
mistaken eyewitness sightings, but they're pretty credible. In this case,
we have a number of witnesses who corroborate each other

(49:18):
and provide a timeline of Connie's path when she walked
away from the campground that morning, but before she reached
the town of Lakeville, she just vanished without a trace.
So it seems that it's just bad luck that she
may have been picked up in a vehicle by the
wrong person and no one saw or heard anything, and
then they managed to get away with it. And I
do agree that Connie is unlikely to be little Miss X,

(49:40):
but I do hope that the efforts are still going
underway to try to recover Little Miss X's remains, because
she is someone's child who deserves to be identified and
get her name back. So I am glad that there's
these cases are in conjunction to each other, because if
people never mentioned Connie's case, then little miss X may
have been long forgotten about long long time ago. But

(50:01):
who knows. Yeah, maybe one of these days they will
find Connie's remains and we'll finally get some resolution on
what actually happened to her.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit
about the Trail Went Cold Patreon?

Speaker 2 (50:13):
Yes, The Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three
years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like
early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers
and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up
with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars
tier tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in
which I talk about cases which are not featured on

(50:36):
the Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon,
and if you join our highest tier tier three, the
ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is
a audio commentary track over classic episodes of unsolved mysteries,
where you can download an audio file and then boot
up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or
YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in

(50:59):
the back, where I just provide trivia and factoids about
the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very
first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to
download a commentary track in which I make more smart
ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join
Tier three.

Speaker 5 (51:18):
So I want to let you know a little bit
about the Jewels and Nashty patreons. So there's early ad
free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our
Pathwent Chili mini's, which are always over an hour, so
they're not very mini, but they're just too short to
turn into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those.

Speaker 1 (51:34):
So we hope you'll check out those patreons. We'll link
them in the show notes.

Speaker 2 (51:38):
So I want to thank you all for listening, and
any chance you have to share us on social media
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You can email us at The Pathwentchili at gmail dot com.
You can reach us on Twitter at the Pathwin So
until next time, be sure to bundle up, because cold
trails and chili pass call for warm clothing.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Call, Doller's
comedy