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The Shoe on the Trotline: Coin-Sized Bruise That Broke Delray · Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Before dawn on the 14th of May, 1989, a fisherman
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: named Neil Harris waded into the shallows of Sycamore Fork
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: and found something caught in his trotline. It was a shoe,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: a white canvas sneaker, size 7, with a seam repaired
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: by hand in purple embroidery thread. The inside was dry.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: No mud, no waterline, no swelling of the canvas. It
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: looked like someone had set it in the river within
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: the last few hours. That detail should have changed everything.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: It didn't. Not for 26 years. Crystal Draper had lived
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: in Delray, Indiana for 22 years by the spring of 1989.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: She knew every neighbor on Orchard Trace Road by name.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: She knew which gardens got afternoon sun and which needed
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: shade cloth in July. She had four raised beds of
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: her own, and every year, without exception, she put seeds
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: in the ground on the 10th of May. Not the 9th,
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: not the 11th, the 10th. She worked at Delray Veterinary Associates,
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: and her colleagues described a woman who arrived before opening
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: and stayed until the last animal was settled. On Wednesdays,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: she bowled in Lane 7 at Tri-County Lanes on Route 9.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Her team was called the Split Sisters. The other three members,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Donna Kepler, Marie Ashford and Tina Solt had bowled beside
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: her for years. Her average was 162, consistent enough that
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: her teammates could predict her score within a handful of pins.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Sunday mornings, she called her son Marcus every Sunday without fail.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Crystal was 54 years old. She was not someone who
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: forgot appointments, missed routines, or disappeared without a word. That
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: is not a characterization. That is the record. On the
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: evening of Tuesday, the 13th of May, she did not
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: appear at the bowling alley. Her lane sat empty. Donna
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Kepler tried her home number twice. Before the night was over,
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: no answer. Marcus Draper was in his twenties when his
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: mother died. He had grown up watching her tend that garden,
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: watching her write the 10th of May on the kitchen
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: calendar each year as though it were a religious date.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: She had planted her seeds four days before she was
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: found in the Sycamore Fork. He would spend the next
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: 26 years writing letters. To understand what those letters meant,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: you have to understand what Marcus was told in 1989.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: Detective Lou Siebert of the Delray Police Department closed the
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: case in six weeks. The official conclusion was accidental drowning.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: Crystal walked the Sycamore Fork Trail in the afternoons. The
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: East Bank was eroded, unstable. Her blood alcohol was. 08,
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: the equivalent of one or two glasses of wine. The
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: county pathologist, Dr. Arnold Quist, found no ligature marks, no
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: defensive wounds, no sign of struggle, accidental drowning. Case closed.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: That was the version Marcus received. That was the version
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: that sat in the file for decades. What Marcus was
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: never told. What no one mentioned in the summary in
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: the case narrative. Or... in any communication with the family,
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: was a note buried at the back of Dr. Quist's report.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Two paragraphs, supplemental addendum. It described a contusion on the
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: posterior right parietal region, a bruise above and behind the
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: right ear. Quist's own words stated that given the condition
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: of the body, he could not rule out that the
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: injury had occurred before death. Siebert's summary did not mention it.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: The accident narrative did not mention it. The accident narrative
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: did not mention it. It sat at the bottom of
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: the file, unread and unreferenced for 26 years. Beverly Marsh,
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Crystal's sister, was still alive in 2015, living in a
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: care facility in Lafayette. When investigator Heather Coleman came to
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: visit her, Beverly remembered something from the spring of 1989,
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: a few weeks before Crystal died. She had found a
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: work truck parked at the end of Orchard Trace Road,
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: just sitting there. The driver was watching the houses. Beverly
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: had told Lou Siebert about it. It was not in
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: the file either. Coleman spread the autopsy photographs across the
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: review table in Indianapolis. On a Tuesday morning in April 2015,
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: she had requested them from the state archive three weeks earlier.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Most came back blurred, degraded by time. Two did not.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: In those two photographs, above and behind Crystal Draper's right
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: ear there was a swelling, roughly the size of a
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: half-dollar coin. Dr. Paula Strick, a forensic pathologist at Indiana University,
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: examined the images and produced a written opinion. The contusion
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: was more likely antemortem than post. Its location and geometry
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: were inconsistent with a fall on an eroded riverbank. They
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: were consistent, Strick wrote. with a blow from a handheld
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: object delivered to a person who was seated or kneeling.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: That one image, a bruise the size of a coin,
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: photographed in 1989 and never mentioned again, had just rewritten
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: 26 years of official history. But Coleman was not finished reading.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: The soil under the bridge mattered more than anyone in 1989,
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: had thought to check by May 2015. Coleman's team collected
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: samples from beneath a replaced plank on the wooden footbridge
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: over the drainage canal, a point where the service road
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: running behind Orchard Trace Road converged with the Sycamore Fork Trail.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: That convergence was the only place the two paths met
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: before the trail turned east toward the river. The samples
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: preserved under the planking matched particulate matter embedded in Crystal's clothing.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: They did not match the sediment at the east bank
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: where her body was found. They matched a point 440
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: meters upstream. Crystal had not gone into the water at
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: the bank. She had gone into the water near the bridge.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: And then there was the shoe. The left sneaker, recovered
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: from Neil Harris's trotline, was white canvas, size 7, with
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: a seam repaired using purple embroidery thread. When Coleman requested
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: a reexamination of the shoe's interior, the analyst found a
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: soil transfer pattern on the insole. The pattern was directional.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: It was consistent with a shoe removed from an immobile
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: foot on dry ground. Not with a shoe pulled from
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: a body moving through water. Not with a shoe lost
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: in a current. Someone had taken it off her foot
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: after she was already still. The shoe had been placed
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: in the river separately from the body. Donna Kepler remembered
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: the night of Tuesday, May 13th, 1989. She and the
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: other split sisters waited at Lane 7 of Tri-County Lanes
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: on Route 9. until nearly nine in the evening. Crystal
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: had never missed a Tuesday without calling. Kepler tried Crystal's
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: number twice from the payphone near the snack bar. No answer.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: She assumed Crystal had the flu. She went home. She
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: did not call police that night, because Crystal was a
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: grown woman who sometimes had long days. That Tuesday evening,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: the gap between Crystal's last known location and the discovery
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: of her body was when the timeline had always gone
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: dark In 1989, Siebert had no way to account for
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: those hours. In 2015, Coleman had the service road records.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Harwick Grounds kept handwritten daily route logs. Dale Harwick, the
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: retired owner, had stored them in a rented unit on
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: County Road 12. He handed them to Coleman without hesitation.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: The log for May 13, 1989. showed a crew vehicle
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: assigned to Orchard Trace Road. Departure time, 4.50 in the afternoon.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: The driver's name on that log was Russell Turner. The
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: service road that Turner drove ran parallel to the Sycamore
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: Fork Trail for nearly half a mile. It ended at
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: the wooden footbridge. After the footbridge, the trail continued east.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: The road did not. That was the point where the
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: two paths stopped running parallel. That was the only place
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: they met. There is a detail that changes the shape
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: of the entire case. It does not come from the
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: soil analysis. It does not come from the shoe. It
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: comes from a second woman who died in a creek.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: Two years after Crystal Draper, 30 miles south of Delray,
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: in a town called Rosemont, Angie Pollard was 49 years old.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: In 1991, her body was recovered from a shallow arroyo
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: in Rosemont, Indiana, in June of that year. The Rosemont
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: coroner ruled accidental drowning. The case was filed and forgotten.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: In the spring of 2015, Detective Chris Farwell of Vigo
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: County had been quietly reviewing the Pollard file. When he
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: entered a consultation flag on Russell Turner's name into the
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: state database, Coleman's case lit up next to his. He
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: called her the same afternoon. The Pollard autopsy report contained
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: a supplemental addendum. It described a contusion behind the right ear,
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: the same side, the same location. The detail had been noted, filed,
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: and never acted upon. Turner had worked briefly for a
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: landscaping company in Rosemont during the spring of 1991. His
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: work route ran regularly through the neighborhood where Angie Pollard lived.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: Two women, two drowning rulings. two buried addenda describing bruises
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: behind the right ear, two towns where Russell Turner had
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: driven a work vehicle along routes that passed near where
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: those women were last seen. The theory that had built
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: steadily through 1989 had pointed toward one answer. A chance
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: encounter an unstable bank. A man who panicked and said nothing.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: That was the version Turner himself would eventually offer. A push.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: An accident he hadn't meant for it to end the
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: way it did. But the Pollard file collapsed that version completely.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: An accident does not repeat itself. In the same anatomical location.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: In the same manner. In a different county. Two years later,
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: with the same man, working the same kind of job,
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: on the same kind of route. An accident leaves a
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: bruise where the fall dictates. It does not leave a
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: bruise in a location consistent with a deliberate blow documented twice,
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: buried twice, in cases that never spoke to each other
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: until Heather Coleman and Chris Farwell were in the same
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: phone call. Coleman drove to the Delray Parks Department facility
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: on an early Thursday morning in June 2015. Russell Turner
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: was in the equipment shed at seven in the morning.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: exactly where his shift schedule said he would be. He
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: had spent 26 years maintaining the Sycamore Fork trail system.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: He knew every inch of that path. He had been
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: walking it in an official capacity since the late 1990s.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: He cooperated when they approached him. He said nothing for
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: the first four hours. Picture the wooden footbridge over the
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: drainage canal on the afternoon of May 13, 1989. The
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: service road ends there. The trail continues east. It is
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: the only place those two paths meet. If Crystal walked east,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: along the trail that evening, which she did, regularly, in
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: the late afternoon, and Turner drove the service road to
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: its end, at 4.50, both of them would have arrived
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: at that bridge within minutes of each other. That geography
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: is not speculation. It is a fact from two independent sources.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Crystal's known walking habit and Turner's logged departure time from
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: Orchard Trace Road. The soil under the replaced plank put
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: Crystal at that bridge, not at the bank, not in
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: the water from the east side, at the bridge upstream
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: where the road ends and the path continues. Now test
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: Turner's own statement against that geography. He said Crystal attacked
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: him on the trail. He said he pushed her. He
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: said she fell. But the bruise behind her right ear
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: was not the bruise of a person who fell forward
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: from a push. Dr. Strick's opinion was specific. The location
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: and geometry pointed to a blow from a held object
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: delivered downward to someone already low, someone seated or kneeling.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: A push produces a fall. A fall produces impact on
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: the hands, the face, the front of the skull. It
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: does not produce a half-dollar bruise above and behind the
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: right ear. from a downward angle. Turner's statement described one thing.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: The physical evidence recorded another. And the shoe placed in
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: the water separately from the body is not a detail
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: that fits any version of panic. A man who pushes
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: someone and runs does not stop to remove a shoe.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: He does not carry it to the water. He does
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: not set it downstream in a current that will carry
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: it to a fisherman's line before dawn. That shoe was
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: placed there. It required thought. It required time. Angie Pollard's
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: bruise was behind the right ear. Crystal's bruise was behind
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: the right ear. The addendum in Pollard's file used almost
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: the same anatomical language as Quist's buried note. Two pathologists
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: in two counties, neither aware of the other's case, recorded
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: the same injury in the same location and filed it
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: in the same kind of supplemental note that no one
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: then followed. What the evidence built across two counties and
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: 26 years was not a portrait of a man who
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: panicked once. It was a pattern, a method, applied once,
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: filed as an accident, applied again, filed as an accident,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: maintained in silence by a man who spent the following
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: decades walking the same trail where the first woman died.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: The jury deliberated for 11 hours. They returned guilty verdicts
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: on two counts of first-degree murder and one count of
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: felony murder. Russell Turner stood and said nothing. He has
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: said nothing since. Marcus Draper attended every single day of
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: the trial. He sat in the same seat each morning.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: He carried a photograph of his mother face down on
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: the bench beside him, and he turned it over only
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: when the jury came back in. The verdict took 11 hours.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: Two counts of first-degree murder, one count of felony murder.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: The jury found Russell Turner guilty on all three. Turner
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: stood at sentencing in the spring of 2016. He did
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: not speak. The judge imposed two consecutive life sentences without
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: the possibility of parole. Turner was 67 years old. He
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: will die in prison. The photograph Marcus carried showed Crystal
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: in her garden on Orchard Trace Road. Four raised beds,
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: full sun, the first week of May. She is kneeling
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: between the rows. It was taken, Marcus later said, the
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: year before she died. Heather Coleman closed the file in
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: July of 2016. She had spent 14 months on a
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: case that sat untouched for more than two decades. The
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: supplemental note Dr. Quist buried at the back of the
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: 1989 file, two paragraphs, no bold text, no flag, was
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: the first thread she pulled. Everything else unraveled from there.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Detective Farwell's parallel review in Vigo County produced a formal
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: reclassification of Angie Pollard's death. Accidental drowning was removed from
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: her record. The manner of death was changed to homicide.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Her family received written notification in the fall of 2015,
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: three months before Turner's trial began. Turner spent the years
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: between 1989 and 2015 maintaining the Sycamore Fork Trail system
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: for the Delray Parks Department. He walked that trail regularly.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: He knew its condition in every season. The bridge where
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: soil evidence placed Crystal's body before it entered the water,
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: Turner would have crossed it on his work routes. He
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: would have watched the planks age, watched them get replaced,
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: not knowing that the soil compressed beneath one of them
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: had kept its record. The ground remembered what the file
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: did not, Beverly Marsh. Crystal's sister was in a care
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: facility in Lafayette by the time Coleman interviewed her. She
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: described Turner's truck parked at the end of the street
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: in late April of 1989, two weeks before Crystal died,
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: watching the houses, she had told Siebert. It was never
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: written down. She was 81 years old in 2015, and
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: she remembered it precisely. Some things stay clear because they
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: frightened you. Crystal Draper planted her garden every 10th of
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: May without exception. She bowled a 162 average. She called
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: her son every Sunday. She had lived in Delray for
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: 22 years, and she was known there, genuinely known. By
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: first name, by lane number, by the purple embroidery thread
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: she used to mend a canvas sneaker, rather than throw
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: it away. That sneaker is the reason this case exists
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: at all. Mule Harris pulled it from his trotline before
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: dawn on May 14th, 1989. He did not know whose
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: it was. He did not know what it meant. He
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: flagged it because a shoe in a river is strange,
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: and strange things deserve a second look. That instinct, to
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: stop to flag, to refuse the easy explanation, is the
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: only thing that kept the thread alive long enough for
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: Heather Coleman to find it 26 years later. Coleman found
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: the note because she read the whole file, not the summary,
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: not Siebert's narrative, the whole file, including the two paragraphs
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: at the back, that no one had followed. She photographed
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: them on a Tuesday afternoon in a document review room
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: in Indianapolis, and she did not move on until she
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: understood what they said. Marcus Draper had sent written requests
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: for review every three or four years since 2001. 14
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: years of letters, 14 years of waiting for someone to
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: read what he believed was there. There is something in
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: this case that resists easy comfort. Two women are dead.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: One file was buried in a county archive for 26 years.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: The other was filed 60 miles away, in a different
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: county under a different detective, and no one connected them
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: until a flag in a state database caught a detective's
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: eye in 2015. The system that should have found Turner
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: in 1989 did not. The system that should have connected
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: Crystal and Angie in 1991 did not. What worked in
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: the end was a fisherman's instinct, a son who would
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: not stop writing letters, and an investigator stubborn enough to
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: read every page. Crystal Draper would have turned 80 years
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: old this year. Her garden on Orchard Trace Road is
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: gone now, the beds long since removed, but Marcus still
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: planned something every 10th of may he has done it
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: every year since his mother's name was finally spoken aloud
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: in a marion county courtroom not as a case number
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: but as a person who deserved better from the system
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: that failed her and who got it finally from the
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: people who refused to let her disappear This show is
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: made by Oba Media.