March 1, 2025 • 10 mins
Introducing: Killer Communications
AbJack Entertainment, the same network that brings you Zodiac Speaking, has a brand new show launching March 1,2025. It's called Killer Communications, and it's hosted by Mike Morford.
In each episode of Killer Communications, Mike discusses a true crime case where one of the clues is a mysterious form of contact; whether it's a frightening phone call to a victim, a mysterious email to the press, or a taunting letter sent to the press, these bizarre communications happen more often than you might think, and sometimes have deadly consequences.
In this short preview of Killer Communications, Season 1 Episode 1, you'll hear about the case of Dale Williams, a father and husband, who was lured from the Nucla, Colorado body shop he owned by a mysterious caller in 1999. He was never seen again. His abandoned truck was found submerged in a local waterway, but there was never any sign of Dale himself. Despite an ex-friend of Dale's being a longtime suspect in the case, police were never able to make an arrest. But that all changed in 2024 when an arrest and answers finally came.
After you listen to this preview of Killer Communications, head over to your favorite podcast app, and be sure to subscribe to Killer Communications, so you can hear the full episode on Dale Williams, and catch every new episode of Killer Communications.
Visit the Killer Communications homepage for news about the show, and past episodes.You can also follow Killer Communications on social media, via X or Facebook.
AbJack Entertainment, the same network that brings you Zodiac Speaking, has a brand new show launching March 1,2025. It's called Killer Communications, and it's hosted by Mike Morford.
In each episode of Killer Communications, Mike discusses a true crime case where one of the clues is a mysterious form of contact; whether it's a frightening phone call to a victim, a mysterious email to the press, or a taunting letter sent to the press, these bizarre communications happen more often than you might think, and sometimes have deadly consequences.
In this short preview of Killer Communications, Season 1 Episode 1, you'll hear about the case of Dale Williams, a father and husband, who was lured from the Nucla, Colorado body shop he owned by a mysterious caller in 1999. He was never seen again. His abandoned truck was found submerged in a local waterway, but there was never any sign of Dale himself. Despite an ex-friend of Dale's being a longtime suspect in the case, police were never able to make an arrest. But that all changed in 2024 when an arrest and answers finally came.
After you listen to this preview of Killer Communications, head over to your favorite podcast app, and be sure to subscribe to Killer Communications, so you can hear the full episode on Dale Williams, and catch every new episode of Killer Communications.
Visit the Killer Communications homepage for news about the show, and past episodes.You can also follow Killer Communications on social media, via X or Facebook.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, listeners, this is Mike Morphort, co host of Zodiac Speaking,
and I want to invite you to listen to a
brand new podcast from this network that I'll be hosting.
It's called Killer Communications. In each episode of Killer Communications,
I'll walk you through true crime cases that involved some
element of contact from the potential perp. Whether it's a
tawning email sent to police, a mysterious text to a
(00:22):
victim or their family, or a threatening letter in the
mailbox of a newspaper. I'll unwrap these cases and how
these sinister communications played a role in the case. You'd
probably think that the bad guys in these cases want
to keep their distance and not provide any extra clues
that may lead to them being identified, but you'd be
surprised just how often it happens. I'm about to play
(00:42):
you a portion of episode one of Killer Communications, the
case of dal Williams, who vanished from Nuclear Colorado in
nineteen ninety nine after receiving a mysterious phone call. For decades,
his case went unsolved before an arrest was finally made recently.
After listening to this preview, go over and listen to
the complete dal Wing episode to see how the case
kicked off, and how it was finally solved. It's available
(01:04):
now wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes of Killer
Communications publish every other Saturday, so be sure to find
Listen and subscribe to it on her favorite podcast to
app or player so you don't miss an episode. Thanks
for listening. Chapter two Where did Dal Go? The caller
of Dale's shop had indicated they had broken down in
(01:26):
the town of Bedrock, about twenty six miles from Nuclea.
On his way to Bedrock, Dale stopped at a gas
station owned by his neighbor and good friend, Tammy Lawrence,
where he gassed up and let her know that he
was on his way to help a stranded person and
that he wouldn't be able to fix her car's windshield.
In hindsight, Tammy felt this was odd and dal would
normally just call her on the phone about something so small.
(01:48):
Tammy got the feeling Dale was uneasy about something and
maybe he wanted her husband to go along with him,
but he wasn't home. So Dale left Tammy's gas station
and was never seen again. Chapter three Missing Persons Report.
By nine pm on the night of the twenty seventh,
Dale hadn't returned home well. His wife, Diana wasn't really
(02:10):
worried at this point because it was normal for Dale
to be working late on projects. She did find it
a little strange that he wasn't answering the shop's phone
just a reminder. This was nineteen ninety nine, and according
to Dale's daughter Tony, her family only had one cell
phone they used if they were traveling, so Dal didn't
have a cell phone with him. Diana figured Dal was
(02:30):
just busy with his work, and although she was a
little uneasy as she went to sleep that night, she
felt confident that in the morning she'd wake up with
Dal next to her. But the next morning, when Dal
wasn't there, Diana couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong,
very wrong. She called Dal's mother, who lived a few
blocks away, and the two women went over to the
shop to see if Dal had fallen asleep at work.
(02:51):
But what they found there raised all of the alarm bells.
The shop doors were wide open, the hood of a
car Dal had been working on was still propped upright,
and his tools were scattered around like he had left
them in the middle of his project. The scene looked
like he had literally just walked away for a few
minutes with intentions to return. The only thing missing was
a shop truck and Dalla's toolbox. Both women thought maybe
(03:15):
dal had gotten so into a project that he'd gone
to one of the local junkyards to pick up some parts,
but when they visited the junkyards at Dale frequented, no
one had seen him. Beginning to panic and at a
loss for what to do next, Diana called the local
police to file missing persons report. Oh fallon Police Department.
Is this an emergency? Chapter four? The search begins. Police
(03:38):
called in the Colorado Bureau of Investigations or CBI and
the Montrose County Sheriff's Department to help investigate. The Williams
family also organized citizen searches of the area to see
if they could find Dale. According to Dall's brother Dick,
over one hundred people came out to help search in
those first few days, but aside from finding some tools
on the side of the highway near the town bedrock,
(04:01):
search has turned up nothing. Police had a few eyewitness
accounts that stated they'd seen Dale's truck on the side
of the highway with another vehicle on the afternoon of
May twenty seventh, but no one could identify the driver
of the other car. There were no surveillance cameras in
the Bedrock area, and though police were able to determine
that the caller had contacted Dale's shop from a stolen
(04:21):
cell phone, they were unable to trace it to a
legitimate person. Dal's daughter Tony, has strong beliefs that the
caller couldn't have been in Bedrock when they made the call,
as the town sits in a deep valley between large
mountain ranges, and even today, cell phone reception there is
incredibly spotty. In nineteen ninety nine, it would have been
near impossible to have made a cell phone call from
(04:42):
that area. With very little evidence to go on, police
speculated that perhaps Dale had interrupted some criminal activity like
a drug exchange and become the victim of a larger crime,
or perhaps someone had a nefarious purpose for the phone call.
But why would anyone want a lure Dale Williams to
a secluded location with the intention of harming him. By
(05:04):
all accounts, he was a respected and deeply admired member
of the community. But there was one person who didn't
admire Dale, a man who remains unnamed for reasons of
privacy and was a friend of Dale's turned out to
be extremely abusive towards his wife and son. Dal and
Diana had been friends with his family, but when the
wife told them she was trying to get a divorce
and afraid for her safety, Dall and Diana helped her
(05:26):
and her son escape to a safe location while the
husband was out of town. The husband was extremely angry
when he came home to find his wife and son gone,
and he knew that only Dale and Diana could have
done something since no one else knew about this abuse.
But when he confronted down Diana, they claimed they didn't
know anything about where the man's family might have gone.
(05:48):
Chapter five break Ins, Vandalism, and a possible suspect. About
a year after they'd helped their ex friend's wife and
son escape, Dale came to a shop one morning and
it had been broken into. His twenty two caliber handgun
was missing, and the bullets had been scattered all over
the garage. There were also several photos of Dale, Diana,
(06:10):
and this strange couple from their happier times together that
had been ripped up and left by the garage door.
Then a few months after this break in, Diana found
Dale's missing gun and the movie returned dropbox at their
video store. Well, what was never proven that Dale's ex
friend was the vandal or the thief of his gun.
Dale's family always felt that it was him. As far
(06:30):
as Dale's daughter Tony knows, her father never called the
police about these issues or brought charges against his ex friend.
Her feelings are that her dad wasn't the kind of
person who called the police on his friends, and may
not have felt the issue was serious enough to warrant
calling them without definitive proof. What is very interesting is
that during the community's search for Dale, the police department
(06:51):
provided hundreds of missing persons posters with Dale's information and
photo on them that would be hung around the surrounding areas.
One of these places was at the nucle Post Office,
and Diana noticed that the poster she hung in the
post office waiting room had been ripped from the board
and thrown away. She replaced the poster and came the
next day, only to find that that poster too had
(07:11):
been ripped down. This went on for several days, and
Diana felt that it was no mistake. Someone was deliberately
removing Dal's flyers from this prominent location. Diana was proactive.
She asked the post office if they could install a
camera in the waiting room to see if they could
catch the perpetrator, and they agreed to do that. Within
just a few days, Footage from this camera captured Dal's
(07:33):
ex friend clearly ripping the flyer down and crumpling it
up for tossing it in the garbage can. Why would
he do this? Did he not want Dal to be found?
Or was he just an angry man who hadn't let
go of his grudge against his ex friend. Diana took
this information to the police and they did question this
man about Dell's disappearance. He did seem to be a
(07:55):
viable person of interest. Unfortunately, he had a solid alibi
and another location on the day Dale disappeared, and he
also agreed to take two polygraph tests, which he passed,
and he was quickly ruled out as a suspect. Chapter six,
Dale's truck was found. Investigators trying to save Dale's case
(08:17):
didn't have much until the weekend of July fourth, nineteen
ninety nine. Just outside of Nuke, at a swimming hole
down a dirt road, a local teenager named Levi was
fishing with his brother. Levi's lawyer got hung up on
something out in the water, and he decided to swim
out to retrieve it. The lure was caught on the
window of a submerged truck. As Levi swam around the vehicle,
(08:39):
he wondered if it could belong to Dal Williams, and
he was able to pool the dash cover off the
truck's upper windshield and bring it to the surface for
a better investigation. And sure enough, when he read the
words William's Autobody Garage, he knew the truck was Dale's.
Levi immediately contacted the police in the Williams family and
a team was sent to the swimming hole to investigate
(09:00):
this first piece of evidence. The truck was in ten
feet of water and stuck in about three feet of
soft silk, so it required a huge backhoe to remove
it from the water. This did quite a bit of
damage to the vehicle, and Tony would later say that
because the windows of the truck were open, some items
from the truck's interior escaped downstream, and investigators never bothered
(09:24):
to retrieve those things. Whether or not this would have
been useful evidence will never be known. Dal's body was
not in the truck, so he remained missing. At first,
police wondered if perhaps Dal had gone off the road
and into the water as a result of an accident,
but when they searched the area, it became clear that
it was no accident, that the truck was placed into
(09:44):
that body of water on purpose. Police were able to
determine that the truck had been running when it went
into the water, and that it had gone at a
very low rate of speed. It was believed that the
truck was literally walked into the lake by someone walking
beside it and staring it into the water via the
open window. In later interviews, Tony would explain that the
(10:05):
swimming hole was not well known to anyone outside of
the local community, and it wasn't visible from the road,
so if someone had stolen her father's truck, they would
have had to know the area to know that the
swimming hole was there. One thing notably missing from the
truck was a large toolbox Dale had in the back bed.
It had been removed, and due to the water, it
made taking finger prints or doing other preliminary forensics extremely difficult.
(10:30):
The investigation once again stalled,
Hey, listeners, this is Mike Morphort, co host of Zodiac Speaking,
and I want to invite you to listen to a
brand new podcast from this network that I'll be hosting.
It's called Killer Communications. In each episode of Killer Communications,
I'll walk you through true crime cases that involved some
element of contact from the potential perp. Whether it's a
tawning email sent to police, a mysterious text to a
(00:22):
victim or their family, or a threatening letter in the
mailbox of a newspaper. I'll unwrap these cases and how
these sinister communications played a role in the case. You'd
probably think that the bad guys in these cases want
to keep their distance and not provide any extra clues
that may lead to them being identified, but you'd be
surprised just how often it happens. I'm about to play
(00:42):
you a portion of episode one of Killer Communications, the
case of dal Williams, who vanished from Nuclear Colorado in
nineteen ninety nine after receiving a mysterious phone call. For decades,
his case went unsolved before an arrest was finally made recently.
After listening to this preview, go over and listen to
the complete dal Wing episode to see how the case
kicked off, and how it was finally solved. It's available
(01:04):
now wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes of Killer
Communications publish every other Saturday, so be sure to find
Listen and subscribe to it on her favorite podcast to
app or player so you don't miss an episode. Thanks
for listening. Chapter two Where did Dal Go? The caller
of Dale's shop had indicated they had broken down in
(01:26):
the town of Bedrock, about twenty six miles from Nuclea.
On his way to Bedrock, Dale stopped at a gas
station owned by his neighbor and good friend, Tammy Lawrence,
where he gassed up and let her know that he
was on his way to help a stranded person and
that he wouldn't be able to fix her car's windshield.
In hindsight, Tammy felt this was odd and dal would
normally just call her on the phone about something so small.
(01:48):
Tammy got the feeling Dale was uneasy about something and
maybe he wanted her husband to go along with him,
but he wasn't home. So Dale left Tammy's gas station
and was never seen again. Chapter three Missing Persons Report.
By nine pm on the night of the twenty seventh,
Dale hadn't returned home well. His wife, Diana wasn't really
(02:10):
worried at this point because it was normal for Dale
to be working late on projects. She did find it
a little strange that he wasn't answering the shop's phone
just a reminder. This was nineteen ninety nine, and according
to Dale's daughter Tony, her family only had one cell
phone they used if they were traveling, so Dal didn't
have a cell phone with him. Diana figured Dal was
(02:30):
just busy with his work, and although she was a
little uneasy as she went to sleep that night, she
felt confident that in the morning she'd wake up with
Dal next to her. But the next morning, when Dal
wasn't there, Diana couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong,
very wrong. She called Dal's mother, who lived a few
blocks away, and the two women went over to the
shop to see if Dal had fallen asleep at work.
(02:51):
But what they found there raised all of the alarm bells.
The shop doors were wide open, the hood of a
car Dal had been working on was still propped upright,
and his tools were scattered around like he had left
them in the middle of his project. The scene looked
like he had literally just walked away for a few
minutes with intentions to return. The only thing missing was
a shop truck and Dalla's toolbox. Both women thought maybe
(03:15):
dal had gotten so into a project that he'd gone
to one of the local junkyards to pick up some parts,
but when they visited the junkyards at Dale frequented, no
one had seen him. Beginning to panic and at a
loss for what to do next, Diana called the local
police to file missing persons report. Oh fallon Police Department.
Is this an emergency? Chapter four? The search begins. Police
(03:38):
called in the Colorado Bureau of Investigations or CBI and
the Montrose County Sheriff's Department to help investigate. The Williams
family also organized citizen searches of the area to see
if they could find Dale. According to Dall's brother Dick,
over one hundred people came out to help search in
those first few days, but aside from finding some tools
on the side of the highway near the town bedrock,
(04:01):
search has turned up nothing. Police had a few eyewitness
accounts that stated they'd seen Dale's truck on the side
of the highway with another vehicle on the afternoon of
May twenty seventh, but no one could identify the driver
of the other car. There were no surveillance cameras in
the Bedrock area, and though police were able to determine
that the caller had contacted Dale's shop from a stolen
(04:21):
cell phone, they were unable to trace it to a
legitimate person. Dal's daughter Tony, has strong beliefs that the
caller couldn't have been in Bedrock when they made the call,
as the town sits in a deep valley between large
mountain ranges, and even today, cell phone reception there is
incredibly spotty. In nineteen ninety nine, it would have been
near impossible to have made a cell phone call from
(04:42):
that area. With very little evidence to go on, police
speculated that perhaps Dale had interrupted some criminal activity like
a drug exchange and become the victim of a larger crime,
or perhaps someone had a nefarious purpose for the phone call.
But why would anyone want a lure Dale Williams to
a secluded location with the intention of harming him. By
(05:04):
all accounts, he was a respected and deeply admired member
of the community. But there was one person who didn't
admire Dale, a man who remains unnamed for reasons of
privacy and was a friend of Dale's turned out to
be extremely abusive towards his wife and son. Dal and
Diana had been friends with his family, but when the
wife told them she was trying to get a divorce
and afraid for her safety, Dall and Diana helped her
(05:26):
and her son escape to a safe location while the
husband was out of town. The husband was extremely angry
when he came home to find his wife and son gone,
and he knew that only Dale and Diana could have
done something since no one else knew about this abuse.
But when he confronted down Diana, they claimed they didn't
know anything about where the man's family might have gone.
(05:48):
Chapter five break Ins, Vandalism, and a possible suspect. About
a year after they'd helped their ex friend's wife and
son escape, Dale came to a shop one morning and
it had been broken into. His twenty two caliber handgun
was missing, and the bullets had been scattered all over
the garage. There were also several photos of Dale, Diana,
(06:10):
and this strange couple from their happier times together that
had been ripped up and left by the garage door.
Then a few months after this break in, Diana found
Dale's missing gun and the movie returned dropbox at their
video store. Well, what was never proven that Dale's ex
friend was the vandal or the thief of his gun.
Dale's family always felt that it was him. As far
(06:30):
as Dale's daughter Tony knows, her father never called the
police about these issues or brought charges against his ex friend.
Her feelings are that her dad wasn't the kind of
person who called the police on his friends, and may
not have felt the issue was serious enough to warrant
calling them without definitive proof. What is very interesting is
that during the community's search for Dale, the police department
(06:51):
provided hundreds of missing persons posters with Dale's information and
photo on them that would be hung around the surrounding areas.
One of these places was at the nucle Post Office,
and Diana noticed that the poster she hung in the
post office waiting room had been ripped from the board
and thrown away. She replaced the poster and came the
next day, only to find that that poster too had
(07:11):
been ripped down. This went on for several days, and
Diana felt that it was no mistake. Someone was deliberately
removing Dal's flyers from this prominent location. Diana was proactive.
She asked the post office if they could install a
camera in the waiting room to see if they could
catch the perpetrator, and they agreed to do that. Within
just a few days, Footage from this camera captured Dal's
(07:33):
ex friend clearly ripping the flyer down and crumpling it
up for tossing it in the garbage can. Why would
he do this? Did he not want Dal to be found?
Or was he just an angry man who hadn't let
go of his grudge against his ex friend. Diana took
this information to the police and they did question this
man about Dell's disappearance. He did seem to be a
(07:55):
viable person of interest. Unfortunately, he had a solid alibi
and another location on the day Dale disappeared, and he
also agreed to take two polygraph tests, which he passed,
and he was quickly ruled out as a suspect. Chapter six,
Dale's truck was found. Investigators trying to save Dale's case
(08:17):
didn't have much until the weekend of July fourth, nineteen
ninety nine. Just outside of Nuke, at a swimming hole
down a dirt road, a local teenager named Levi was
fishing with his brother. Levi's lawyer got hung up on
something out in the water, and he decided to swim
out to retrieve it. The lure was caught on the
window of a submerged truck. As Levi swam around the vehicle,
(08:39):
he wondered if it could belong to Dal Williams, and
he was able to pool the dash cover off the
truck's upper windshield and bring it to the surface for
a better investigation. And sure enough, when he read the
words William's Autobody Garage, he knew the truck was Dale's.
Levi immediately contacted the police in the Williams family and
a team was sent to the swimming hole to investigate
(09:00):
this first piece of evidence. The truck was in ten
feet of water and stuck in about three feet of
soft silk, so it required a huge backhoe to remove
it from the water. This did quite a bit of
damage to the vehicle, and Tony would later say that
because the windows of the truck were open, some items
from the truck's interior escaped downstream, and investigators never bothered
(09:24):
to retrieve those things. Whether or not this would have
been useful evidence will never be known. Dal's body was
not in the truck, so he remained missing. At first,
police wondered if perhaps Dal had gone off the road
and into the water as a result of an accident,
but when they searched the area, it became clear that
it was no accident, that the truck was placed into
(09:44):
that body of water on purpose. Police were able to
determine that the truck had been running when it went
into the water, and that it had gone at a
very low rate of speed. It was believed that the
truck was literally walked into the lake by someone walking
beside it and staring it into the water via the
open window. In later interviews, Tony would explain that the
(10:05):
swimming hole was not well known to anyone outside of
the local community, and it wasn't visible from the road,
so if someone had stolen her father's truck, they would
have had to know the area to know that the
swimming hole was there. One thing notably missing from the
truck was a large toolbox Dale had in the back bed.
It had been removed, and due to the water, it
made taking finger prints or doing other preliminary forensics extremely difficult.
(10:30):
The investigation once again stalled,
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