Courtship Casualties In The Magic City

In September of 1980 two Billings residents went on a date in the Magic City. The Next morning George Henrich and Marleen Mazzola were found murdered in the Henirch home. Now 43 years later Yellowstone County investigators still don't know who killed the two or why. They are not even sure which one of the two was the intended victim or the execution style killings. Matti Olson and Sydney Hanson share the condrum of the "Courtship Casualties In the Magic City."

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Been in an accident and have morequestions than answers. The Advocates will guide
you through the process and support youevery step of the way. The Advocates
will stand by your side and fightfor the settlement you deserve. Call today
and pass your stress to the Advocates. You didn't deserve to be in an
accident, but you do deserve anadvocate. Available twenty four seven online at

(00:24):
Montana Advocates dot com. There obviouslywas somebody in the house. I can't
say if they were inside waiting,if they were waiting for them outside,
but at some point they all madeit into the house, and whatever transpired

(00:48):
there, they left those two peoplethere dead and have left had left scene.
It's handword behind his back with eactricaltape and he had a pillowcase over
his head. And then, likeI say, I never ever got in
far enough to see where Marlene was. There was a lot of information that

(01:11):
was generated through information that was releasedthe Sheriff's office, a lot of responses
came back in. It was apretty high profile event in the history of
Billings. A new couple murdered afterreturning home from a date night. Was
it jealousy? A scorn lover orwas it a bad business deal with an
equally bad ending. This is thecourtship casualties in the Magic City. Welcome

(01:42):
to Montana Murder Mysteries. I'm yourhost, Mattie Olsen. In the late
nineteen sixties and going into the earlyseventies, Billings, Montana had an increase
of crime. According to an articleprinted in the Billings Gazette in April of
nine eighty one, the Billings PoliceDepartment I reported that murder cases had quadrupled

(02:05):
an amount from the sixties to theseventies. When including both homicides and manslaughter,
the department recorded forty nine cases thatthey investigated. The issue was that
the department did not get any additionalofficers to help tackle the increase in cases.
There was only nine detectives in thecity homicide unit during this time,

(02:25):
so the critical initial hours of investigationswere not as staffed as the department would
have hoped. So when cases cameup in areas that are harder to investigate,
like the countryside and outskirts of Billings, it was more of a challenge
for the department. There was alot of information that was generated through information

(02:46):
that was released to the Sheriff's office. A lot of responses came back in
It was a pretty high profile eventin the history of Billings. That was
Captain Dan Paris with the Yellowstone CountySheriff's Office. He was entered viewed in
twenty fifteen by Lynn Turner Fitzgerald,a longtime television and radio broadcaster out of
Billings. He was a sergeant atthe time. She had conversations with members

(03:09):
of law enforcement and family members inthis episode, and these full conversations are
gathered from videos that have been madeavailable to the public on the Sheriff's office's
website in order to gain more informationon these cold cases. In September of

(03:29):
nineteen eighty two, Billings residents werekilled after having a night out at the
Elks Lodge, a local center formembers of a nationwide organization. Witnesses remember
seeing Marlene Massola and George Heinrich atthe Elks Lodge until the bar closed somewhere
between one thirty and two am.After leaving, the couple took George's car

(03:50):
back to his house. Calling thetwo a couple might not be the most
accurate description of the two. Theirnight the Elks Club was one of their
first states that the two had beenon. They had only actually met maybe
a month before. This was eitherthe second or third date that they actually
had gone out went together, soI wouldn't really even say that they were
in a dating relationship. They werejust still getting to know each other and

(04:15):
they had made plans to go toa date or a dance at the Elks
Club. Marlene was in the finalstages of divorce with her husband. The
two were separated at the time,and her husband was living in Beaute.
He ran a body shop in themining city. George had been divorced and
was fairly active in the dating scenein Billings, at least according to his

(04:35):
oldest daughter, Cheryl Heimric Dennis.He loved to dance, and he was
dating, and he dated a lotof ladies, and he liked to go
out dancing. The two returned toGeorge's home on the outskirts of Billings on
the road up to Shephard, Montana, with the last time anyone reportedly seeing

(04:55):
them being when they left the ElksClub in the early hours of s September
twentieth. The next time anyone sawthe two was when George's youngest daughter,
Peggy Heinrich Wash, returned home.She was seventeen at the time and had
spent the previous night working on afour AH event. Four Age is a
nonprofit group that has a large numberof young members in the rural and agricultural

(05:17):
communities. Peggy got home around fourpm on September twentieth to find her father
and Marlene murdered in her dad's bedroom. When I walked into the bedroom,
my dad was laying based down onthe floor. His hands were behind his
back with electrical tape, and hehad a pillowcase over his head. And

(05:40):
then, like I say, Inever ever got in far enough to see
where Marlene was. Marlene was bornmarsh of nineteen thirty eight and grew up
in Beau throughout her childhood, graduatingfrom Beau High School in nineteen fifty six.

(06:00):
She moved over two hundred miles awayto the Magic City for her early
adult years for a little over adecade. That wasn't until nineteen seventy four,
when she married and had a fewchildren and raised them back home in
Butte. During her marriage, sheworked for six years on the Butte Silverbow
Chamber of Commerce. After her separationwith her husband, Marlene became the district

(06:24):
manager of Avon Products for the Southcentral region of Montana. Avon Products is
a cosmetic, fragrance and skincare companythat is still around today. It was
founded in eighteen eighty six and isnow an international business with multiple billions of
dollars in revenue every year. Shemoved and was based in Billings, but

(06:45):
was working for the whole area thatspanned over to Forsyth and reached from the
Wyoming border and up to Livingston.She had only been working at Avon since
July of the previous year before beingkilled in the Heirich home. George Heinrich
was born to Jake and Idaheinrich inPark City, Montana, and grew up

(07:05):
in Billings. He served in theNavy in his early twenties at the time
of World War Two. He wasvery successful during his time there, and
his eldest daughter remembers George speaking ofhis time in the service to their whole
family at the breakfast table. Hewas in the war in World War two,
and every December seventh at breakfast,he would say, it's Pearl Harbor

(07:29):
Day. He was in the Navyfor five years and was very successful there,
and as he was discharged, hewas a non commissioned officer, which
was about as good as a personwith his education and so on could do.
He spent the majority of the restof his days working on farms in

(07:50):
ranches throughout Montana, before returning toBillings in nineteen seventy to run his own
cattle ranch. Maybe he was hewell established in the community, especially in
the think the cattle industry, andI remember this as a little girl,
that there wasn't a lot of money. Dad was a barmer and a rancher

(08:11):
and he was always working in thefield with cattle or with crofts. As
George got older, he changed hisfocus from raising cattle to selling and flipping
the cattle at slaughterhouses as the physicaldemands of being a cattle rancher were getting
harder. In his later years,he also bought some of the buildings in
Billings, one of which was theSilver Dollar Bar. He always had told

(08:35):
Mommy wanted to own a bar,and this was the closest he could come
to owning a bar was he ownedthe building. When the reports of the
murders came out, the police wereincredibly close to the chest. They openly
spoke to the press that it wasthe policy of the department to not reveal
anything that could jeopardize the investigation.The cause of death and details from the

(08:58):
autopsy were kept. Officials referred tothe scene as an execution style slayings.
They did reveal that they had atheory from the initial crime scene, but
then the autopsy disproved it. Outsideof the investigation, the public did find
out that George and Marlene were tiedup when their bodies were found. With

(09:20):
this piece of information getting out,but little else, rumors spiraled. People
believed that the two might have beeninjected with something that led to their deaths,
or possibly bound together and killed byshotgun. As the county got nervous,
the sheriff did tell the press thatmembers of the community are likely safe.

(09:41):
It was unlikely that the perpetrator wouldharm anyone else unless that person knew
anything about the case. The nextmonth, the investigators released more information to
the public. Both victims had diedof asphyxiation. Georgian Marlene had been beaten
around their faces. Specifically, bothhad injuries to the throat that suggested they

(10:05):
had been strangled. The Sheriff's officealso officially announced that the two had been
tied up so that their hands weretied behind their backs with electrical tape.
Both were fully clothed, with nosigns of sexual assault to either. As
the days and years went on thepublic had found out more and more information
about the Heinrich house. When GeorgiaMarlene were found, the house had no

(10:30):
signs of force entry to the exteriordoors, and inside the house, the
door to the bedroom was destroyed.The bedroom door had been smashed in,
like they were trying to hold it. My dad was trying to hold this
shut. In one article in theBillings Gazette from nineteen eighty one, it
was reported that the keys to theHeinrich's home were found outside in the garage

(10:52):
between his car and the house.There obviously was somebody in the house.
I can't say if they were insidewaiting, if they were waiting for them
outside, but at some point theyall made it into the house and whatever
transpired there, they left those twopeople there dead and have left had left

(11:16):
the seed. The initial and mostobvious theory was that it was a robbery.
There was a missing clock, George'smason ring had been taken, along
with the diamond ring that was valuedat sixteen thousand dollars. Today that would
be more than fifty five thousand dollars. But as more details came out,

(11:39):
and as Peggy knew looking around thehouse, things didn't quite look right for
a robbery. There was money onmy nightstand. I had sold a horse
the day before, and that wasn'ttouched. Nothing was really out of place
till you got upstairs to his bedroomand according to Peggy, the clock that
was completely worthless, that said sail, and he liked it, he bought

(12:03):
it, he didn't care. Butit was this ugly green clock with little
red stones, and I think thepeople probably thought, or whoever thought,
that it was worth something. Buteverything was fake on it, And as
the sheriff had told people in thepress, investigators didn't think the rest of
the public was at risk, andthat's because they didn't think it was a

(12:24):
robbery. The setup of the bodiesand crime scene didn't support the theory.
One possibility was that George was targeteddue to a business deal that went south.
He seemed to enjoy a little bitof that rough world down in the
Silver Dollar Bar, collecting his rentsonce a month and as his daughter and

(12:46):
just observing him my whole life.I don't believe Dad would put himself in
a criminal element or do something criminal, And I don't believe I'm being naive,
but I think if he thought therewas a dollar to be made,
he might make that dollar. Anothertheory investigators had jealousy, with the timing

(13:09):
of the murders being the night Georgeand Marlene went out to a local community
club for a date. The twowere certainly seen by many, and with
Marlene going through the final steps ofa divorce and George having already signed divorce
papers, both were active in thedating scene. It could have been a
man jealous of Marlene being out ona date with someone else, a spouse

(13:30):
jealous after seeing the person their husbandor wife had an affair with out in
the town, either George or Marlene'sex spouses. Due to their social lives
being looked into for possible motives.Billings brought the BW Police Department into the
investigation since that was where Marlen wasfrom and where her family and ex husband
lived. I would say one personwas an intended victim and the other person

(13:58):
was for lack of a better wordcollateral down. Although the motive to this
day was unclear, investigators have hadone big piece of evidence that they have
gone after Marlen's car was found acrosstown at a truck stop. The truck
stop is no longer there, butwas called Husky Truck Stop and was located

(14:20):
on East Parkway. George owned anineteen seventy eight Chrysler New Yorker that was
found at his home the scene ofthe crime. The belief is that the
two were using that Chrysler to getaround during their evening. So when Marlen's
nineteen seventy nine Pontiac Lemons was foundlater that day by Billing's officers, investigators

(14:41):
hoped they might find more answers.Now, was there any significance with the
truck stop? Did it play anyrole in these people's lives? No,
Well, I think it just wasa convenient place to dump that vehicle.
I know that they watched the truckstop for a period of time after discovering

(15:01):
the vehicle. It's not like theyjust came running in the mirror to see
what they could see. They actuallydid do some surveillance, and since investigators
did not think there was anything significantabout the truck stop. They reached out
to the press, hoping to findanswers from the community. Newspaper outlets across
the state released information and photos onthe Chrysler and Pontiac as early as one

(15:24):
week after the murders, hoping thatsomeone in the community saw something that could
point Yellowstone officials in the right direction. Investigators felt that the answers to who
would kill Georgia Marlene and why weresomewhere in the days leading up to September
twentieth. As time went on andinvestigators kept reaching dead ends, both families

(15:48):
were desperate for answers, so sixmonths after Georgia Marlene were killed, a
reward was set up for any informationrelating to their deaths. The reward was
set for five thousand dollars for anyinformation that helped investigators to the perpetrator of
George and Marlene's murders. This wouldbe around the equivalent of seventeen thousand dollars

(16:12):
today. It was the Heinrich family, through George's estate, who set up
the reward, with the kids gettingpermission from the Mossola family to include her
name in the press releases to hopefullyhelp with their efforts. The reward was
handled through a local billings law firm, the firm of Heywood, Gals and
Gunderson, to allow for any potentialinformants to remain anonymous if they wanted to.

(16:37):
Then, when it hit a yearof George and Marlene being killed and
no suspects being found guilty, CrimeStoppers, a program that pays anonymous informants
in hopes to further investigations, putout press statements reminding the billing's community of
the details of the crime, andoffered one thousand dollars to anyone with new

(16:59):
details. Years have passed and stillthere are no answers for this cold case.
Yet the Heinrich family still holds hopethat maybe one day there will finally
know what happened to their father.I find that I'm a pretty strong person

(17:19):
and I've been successful in my ownlife, and that's because I know how
to put hard situations into a capsuleand kind of push it away. I
would love for anyone who has thebelief that they might have the slightest bit
of information, that even if theythink it wouldn't matter, that they would

(17:44):
come forward with it and provide itto the Sheriff's Department to the Cold Case
Unit. We'd like to see somethingcome out of this. That's a long
time. It's a really long time. I think so much time has passed.
I have a feeling whoever committed acrime might not even be living.

(18:06):
But I think that because two peoplewho are murdered, there has to be
all a statistics show. There's justa higher chance that other people know something
about what may have led up toit that could provide a clue. We're
hoping somebody does. We're hoping thiswill you know, jog somebody's memory.

(18:30):
There's oh yeah, we were withthe elks and we saw something, you
know, left with somebody else,or somebody followed them or something. You
know. We're hoping. There's alwaysthat. Can you ever give up hope?
Ever, it will be forty threeyears in September that the Heinrich and

(18:51):
Mozzola families have been without their lovedones, with no answers to who murdered
George and Marlene or why. Ifyou have any information about George Heinrich and
Marlene Mazzola's case, contact the YellowstoneCold Case Unit at four O six two
five, four seven, nine,eight eight, You can also contact crime

(19:11):
stoppers at four O six two fivefour six six six zero and remain anonymous.
You can also watch the full interviewsLynn Turner Fitzgerald did for this case
along with others, at Yellowstone Coldcasedot com. Thank you for listening to

(19:42):
Montana Murder Mysteries. If there's acase you would like me to cover,
you can send me a tip byemailing me at Mattie dot Olson at Nonstoplocal
dot com, m A T TIdot O L s O N at Nonstoplocal
dot com, or our editor,Sidney Hanson at Sydney dot Hanson at Nonstoplocal

(20:08):
dot com, Sydney dot h AN s O N at Nonstoplocal dot com.
You can also go to the MontanaMurder Mysteries webpage on our website Nonstoplocal
dot com or mobile app NonStop Local. Just head to the Missoula tab fin

(20:33):
select news and lastly Montana Murder Mysteries. From there, you'll find a button
to submit tips. You can alsofind links to each podcast, as well
as pictures, maps, and newspaperclippings as they pertain to each case,
and you can set up notifications toreceive alerts whenever a new podcast drops.

(20:53):
If you like this show, don'tforget to subscribe on your podcast listening platform
and ray and review it. Thankyou to the advocates for sponsoring Montana Murder
Mysteries. Montana Murder Mysteries is hostedby me Mattie Olsen and researched, written
and edited by Sydney Hansen. Seeyou in a few weeks.