@GaryandShannon - #TrueCrimeTuesday

This week's #TrueCrimeTuesday - Daughter of a Serial Killer throws her father under the bus.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, it's time for True Crime Tuesday.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
The story is true, that's true. No, it sounds made up.
I don't know. Gerry and Shannon present true Crime.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Okay, you've got a Jeffrey Dahmer nugget. We do have
this woman's claim about her father being a serial killer
who has four hundred bodies in his wake. But first,
can we get to jeopardy because it's true crime related? Oh?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Is it?

Speaker 3 (00:30):
That's why I've waited so long. The category is according
to Black's Law Dictionary for six hundred dollars. Law Dictionary
allowed in cross examination. It's a question that suggests the
answer to the person being interrogated.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
So leading question, Sure.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
Damn right, it is objection.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Council's leading is leading the witness. I'll allow it.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
But you're on a bent fin leash shortly.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Okay, then, oh, here's the quick Jeffrey Dahmer story.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
I saw this today.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
First of all, there are people who are absolutely weird
when it comes to I don't know if celebrating or
honoring serial killers the right way to put it. Just
acknowledging serial killers, and they want to own the stuff
of the stories. Yeah, they buy up murder rebelia, whether
it's evidence that was originally used in a case, or

(01:28):
posters about them, or John Wayne Gacy's paintings, things like that.
In this case, David Adamovich is a doctor of education,
owner of the website Serial Killer murder Abilia. He picked
up a pair of vintage tipmas seven sorry timmas Z

(01:49):
eighty seven five and a half general style glasses the
Jeffrey Dahmer war and he said that he paid a
lot amount a lot of money for it, didn't say
how much, and that he is one hundred percent convinced
of the provenance of these glasses, that they didn't change
hands multiple times. And he said, I've been sitting in

(02:10):
the in this case for over thirty years, and he says,
this is a series of lucky events. I was able
to purchase them and he has them now.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Now.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
When he was interviewed about these glasses, he says, what's
interesting about them is that if you look closely under
the frames, so in the bottom of the glass under
the frame here, he says, there's a reasonable amount of crud.
Oh that is all around the glass.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
I'm disgusting again quoting the doctor here.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
My guess is that it isn't chocolate from the chocolate factory,
the Ambrosia chocolate factory where Jeffrey Dahmer worked. It is
probably a reasonable guest to say it was blood from
his victims.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
I had no idea you worked at a chocolate factory
when you said chocolate. Yeah, well just yeah, sting.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
That's disgusting, it's awful.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
That's why you don't buy Jeffrey Dahmers anything. No, no,
all right, And imagine needing attention so much that you
buy Jeffrey Dahmer's glasses and then purport that they have
human matter on them just to get attention.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
If you're if you're a law enforcement official, if you're
a detective, if you're like a criminologist, if you're a
profile or something like that, and you study serial killers
and murderers, you do it because you want to try
to prevent it in the future, right, or at least
try to understand why people are doing it.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
Sure, what is that guy doing?

Speaker 1 (03:41):
You're you're just getting weird stuff, and you're just gonna
be weird the whole time.

Speaker 3 (03:46):
All right. So there was a woman about a month
ago up in Mendocino who shocked the Internet. She claimed
here's the quote, I am the daughter of a serial killer.
She posted black and white photograph of a square jawed
man sporting black rimmed glasses, a sports coat and a tie.

(04:08):
And they say that this evoked memories of you know,
dB Cooper or the Zodiac, kind of that type of sketch.
She has in her in her own estimation, a trove
of evidence implicating her father to the murders of four
hundred people, from taped confessions, supposed burial sites to sadistic

(04:33):
personal journal entries. She claims, despite all this evidence, the
cops are ignoring the case.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
Yeah, this is I want to read through this post
that she put up the middle of March, so the
middle of last month on Facebook. Galina Trefel is her
name for so many years. This is again her words
for so many years now. I've lived a double life,
carried an impossible secret. This is not a joke. This
is the cold reality which has been strictly on a
need to know basis. Now everyone needs to know. I

(05:04):
am the daughter of a serial killer who knew the
identities of two other uncaught serial sex killers, Michael Frees
and Julius Strandhauser. Doctor John Charles trefil. My father has
admitted for almost a decade, giving a consistent story to
being a serial killer on tape graphically, Police Department, Sheriff's Department,
Mendosino County DA's office. They are all aware of his

(05:26):
concession confessions. This is the secret that the authorities in
Mendocino County are not sharing with the public. She goes
on a whole list of things and times that he
described two law enforcement officers and detectives or in those
diaries that you refer to from killings that started in

(05:48):
the fifties and may have gone all the way until
nineteen ninety nine.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
It should be noted that this woman is a published
horror writer. Yes, the post that you read was on Facebook.
It was posted on March thirteenth, so just over a
month ago. Since then, it's been shared over sixteen thousand times.
It's prompted more than five thousand comments. Oh, and the
Mendocino County Sheriff's Office has weighed in as well. They

(06:17):
say they've conducted an extensive investigation of this woman's claims.
Hours of interviews with her father, cross referencing as DNA
with the cold case database that have led detectives to
one conclusion, there's no evidence John Treyfel has killed anyone,

(06:37):
let alone hundreds of people.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
But that doesn't stop her from going through with copious
amounts of evidence. And we'll talk about some of the
stuff that she has posted again about her own father,
who's still alive. He's eighty six years old.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
Yeah, and here's the thing in her narrative of this,
there was no discrimination ace race, gender, and he had
a go to murder weapon. Strycht nine, we are in
the midst of True Crime Tuesday, and we're talking about
a woman who went on Facebook last month and made
a shocking claim that her father was a serial killer

(07:14):
and that he was guilty of killing about four hundred people.
She claimed that she had evidence, taped confessions, burial sites,
personal journal entries, overwhelming evidence in her estimation. And the
cops say, listen, we've interviewed the father, we've gone through
as DNA, we've checked it against the database. There's no

(07:36):
evidence of any of this.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
So dad, John Trefle, doctor John Treffle was a psychiatrist,
and the daughter claims that he was once working at
a San Francisco hospital and at the jail in Lake
County up in northern California, the latter of which is
corroborated by some of the newspaper reports at the time
from nineteen eighty three that refer to a psychiatrist named

(07:59):
John Treffle that worked at that facility. What they know
is that he did run a private practice in Mendocino
County and Lake County until nineteen ninety nine, and according
to state records, he surrendered his medical license in ninety
nine after some allegations were levered against him, leveled against
him by the executive director of the medical board that

(08:21):
he had made romantic advances toward one of his patients,
forty one year old patient.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
She claims that his hunting grounds when active, stretched across
the country from Illinois and Virginia to California, Oregon, Idaho,
that he took his crimes international Canada, France, Netherlands, that
he had maintained murder cabins Mendocino County, one of them

(08:48):
dubbed the Tomb, where sixteen women and two men were
allegedly buried. She says she her father confessed to her
to being a killer around twenty fifteen, the same time
he reportedly began showing signs of Parkinson's. He's married, by the.

Speaker 1 (09:05):
Way, Yeah, and when you ask the wife, when you
ask Candy Trefle, they've been married for forty plus years.
If her husband is a serial killer, she says absolutely not.
Now Again, the craziness is that the daughter has this
incredible story about her father. She denies that her dad

(09:28):
ever had Parkinson's and says that he is healthy, that
he is lucid. Again, he's alive. He's eighty six years old.
And she said the neurologist actually put it in writing
that no, he does not have Parkinson's all the way
back in twenty fifteen, but when asked to provide such documentation,
she didn't.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
She and a victim's advocate have twice a week for
nearly a year, gone to his skilled nursing facility and
taped him talking about all of this. I guess we
don't know if he knew he was being recorded. I
think that's neither here nor there. Who cares. But she
said that she contrasted her efforts to document her father's

(10:10):
alleged crimes with those of local law enforcement, who, she said,
refused to talk to him for a decade while he
described torturing and sexually assaulting young women. They refuse to
do their job. The sheriff up there disagrees. He says
that a couple of years ago, investigators got their hands
on recordings of the nursing home conversations, the journals and
all of that. And he explained that that victim advocate

(10:34):
posed as a documentary filmmaker, digging into this guy's crimes
a ruse, but that after nearly ten hours of footage,
nothing solid emerged.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
Yeah, part of it was because he doctor John was
mumbling through these responses. I mean, he's eighty six years old.
If he has Parkinson's or has had Parkinson's for ten years,
I mean, he probably is not very communicative. And the
sheriff said, isn't it strange that Galina, the daughter, is
the only person who speaks Dad, that his detectives did

(11:10):
interrogate doctor John Trevel through a proxy rather than their
own detectives, adding the interrogation didn't have anything conclusive, no
evidence of any wrongdoing.

Speaker 3 (11:21):
They went to all of those sites, those murder cabins
and the things we talked about. He said, none of
those things produced any leads. They didn't find any victims
buried there. She also claims her father was behind a
specific cold case from nineteen seventy four, one that the
sheriff confirmed had DNA evidence associated with it.

Speaker 1 (11:43):
Investigators did get a warrant to test the dad's DNA
to test the daughter's story, but there wasn't a match.
The DNA went into COTIS, the Combined DNA Index System,
which is the national crime database. And despite the fact
that the daughter says that her dad is the most
prolific serial killer in American history North American history, with
bodies all over the place, not one hit on any

(12:07):
unsolved case in codis now you mentioned that the murder weapon,
the specific weapon that she believes that her dad used,
was poison. That that was the thing that he was
able to use over and over again. In one post,
she shared a photo of a weathered antique little bottle

(12:31):
that just literally has the word poison on it. I
guess it says strychnine. Also, she says that her dad
kept that STRYC nine in his medicine bag. But you
and I could buy a bottle or empty I hope.
But you and I could buy a bottle of strychnine
labeled poison like that off of eBay.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
Sure, so none of that is a guarantee.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
Many of her allegations they're tied to specific landmarks. Up
in northern California. She insists her father buried victims along
the winding thirteen Curves stretch of Highway twenty in Medicino County.
Very hyper specific if you know the area. They say
it adds of an ear of credibility for the amateur
detectives who have been following her posts. And my goodness,

(13:19):
haven't they in troves?

Speaker 2 (13:21):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (13:21):
This is I mean, this narrative that she has about
her dad being a serial killer takes place in a
very rural area up where that top left quarter of California.
The coast there is beautiful, but it's also home to
all kinds of missing persons and unsolved murders. And they

(13:41):
talk about I think It's Death Mountain was a documentary
that came out several years ago about the unregulated cannabis
economy that is trying to be regulated and how dangerous
that thing has been for the last quarter three quarters
of a century, leaving behind buried bodies, and her story

(14:02):
fits very well with the dark past of that area
and She claims that her dad confessed to the Santa
Rosa hitchhiker murders and even at one point admitted that
he was the Zodiac killer. But remember this, like you said,
she is a horror author, and she told San Francisco

(14:23):
Chronicle that's true. I know that people won't want to
hear that, but and this is the key for me.
I had a horribly abusive childhood and that's how I vent.

Speaker 3 (14:37):
Yeah. Nos, I was going to say, what was the
relationship like between this woman and her parents, her mother,
by the way, who I wanted to hear more from,
because Mom's only quote in this story up until now
was he's not a serious absolutely not when asked was
your husband or is your husband a serial killer? Mom
went on to say that the daughter's creating the story

(14:59):
of about her father because she likes attention more than most.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
That's very sad, too bad.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
Call your parents all your kids, give them a hug,
tell them you love them.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
Do all the things.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
Maybe talk about sex, depending on what how old they
are and if they know anything about it.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
So right, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (15:21):
I'm not getting into that.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
I just saw who you were talking about earlier. By
the way, Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:27):
What do you think. I didn't say anything. You didn't know,
but I didn't have to say anything, did I.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah,