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The Grand Rapids Serial Killer · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So imagine for a second that you're a detective.
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: Okay, I'm with you.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: And you're out hunting a serial killer in the woods.
• 0:08
  You have your flashlight out, your tracking footprints, and you
• 0:11
  are just like laser focused on finding this one specific
• 0:15
  monster that's been taking people in the.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: Night right, the classic lone wolf scenario exactly.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: But as you push deeper into the trees, you start
• 0:23
  to notice something terrifying. You aren't just tracking one wolf.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Oh wow, Yeah.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: You are standing in a forest completely infested with different
• 0:32
  packs of wolves, lone wolves, scavengers, all hunting the exact
• 0:37
  same prey in the exact same territory.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: That is a terrifying mental image.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: It really is, and it makes you wonder, you know,
• 0:45
  what do you do when the dark forest is full
• 0:47
  of monsters and you only brought one met Welcome to
• 0:50
  today's deep dive.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: It's a phenomenal question to start with. It really gets
• 0:53
  to the heart of the absolute nightmare we are unpacking.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Today because for a long time people just assumed there was.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: One wolf looking for a single boogeyman.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Today, our mission is to take you down a very real,
• 1:05
  very dark path in American history. We're looking at Grand Rapids, Michigan.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: Specifically, it's a single stretch of road.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah Division Avenue, and we're focusing on this tight window
• 1:14
  from roughly nineteen ninety four to nineteen ninety six, Over
• 1:18
  just a couple of years, this street became an absolute
• 1:21
  hunting ground.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: Which is just devastating to think about it.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: We are looking at a terrifying cluster of at least
• 1:27
  twelve murdered women. The vast majority of them were sex workers.
• 1:31
  Many were struggling with severe addiction, and they were caught
• 1:34
  in a system that just utterly failed them.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: And to help us navigate this, we're drawing from an
• 1:39
  incredibly exhaustive transcript of a true crime documentary.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah by the YouTube channel Ruined Road. They chronicled what
• 1:47
  the media often dubbed the Grand Rapid serial Killer. But
• 1:50
  as you'll see, the truth is so much more complicated
• 1:53
  than just to catch you headline.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: The source material is essential here because it doesn't just
• 1:57
  give us a timeline of body right. It goes way
• 1:59
  deep exactly. It meticulously tracks the decades long quest for justice,
• 2:05
  the evolution of forensic science, and crucially, it forces us
• 2:09
  to look at the sociology of crime.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: It forces us to ask why this specific street and
• 2:14
  why these specific women exactly. So put yourself in Grand
• 2:18
  Rapids in the early to mid nineteen nineties. Every city
• 2:21
  has its red light district, right, a place where poverty, addiction,
• 2:25
  and vulnerability all intersect.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: And in Grand Rapids, Division Avenue was that place.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: It was this corridor of neon signs, cheap motels, and
• 2:33
  dark cross streets. But to understand how this street became
• 2:37
  harvesting ground, we have to talk about a concept the
• 2:40
  source material brings.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: Up right, the sociological concept.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a term that genuinely made my stomach turn.
• 2:46
  They call it the less dead.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a very real, very formal concept in criminal
• 2:51
  sociology and victimology.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: So it's not just some media buzzwords.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: No, not at all. It was actually coined by Stephen Egger,
• 2:56
  a criminologist. He used it to describe marginalized popular So
• 3:00
  we're talking.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: About like sex workers, the unhoused, drug addicts, runaways exactly.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: The concept describes this chilling reality that society, the media,
• 3:11
  and often the justice system treat these victims as if
• 3:15
  their lives somehow matter.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: Less, which is just heartbreaking.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: It is. Think about it, if a suburban college student
• 3:21
  or a wealthy business executive goes missing, you have helicopters
• 3:25
  in the.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: Air, you get national news coverage, massive task forces formed overnight.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: Right. But when a woman who struggles with crack addiction
• 3:34
  goes missing from Division Avenue, the response is often just
• 3:37
  a shrug.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: Because the assumption is, while they lived a dangerous lifestyle,
• 3:41
  what did they expect?
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: Precisely, and that assumption is the exact mechanism that serial
• 3:46
  predators rely on.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Wait, they rely on it like it's part of their strategy.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely. Predators don't just hunt for sport, they hunt
• 3:53
  for success. They are highly risk averse, so.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: They know that if they target the less dead, the
• 3:59
  police response will be slower.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: Exactly, They know the victim might not even be reported
• 4:04
  missing for weeks, if at all. They know the media
• 4:07
  won't splash the victim's face across the evening news.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: It's like they're exploiting a blind spot in society.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: That's exactly what it is. By targeting the martins of society,
• 4:16
  a killer drastically reduces their chances of getting caught.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: So being a high risk victim doesn't mean your murder
• 4:21
  is inevitable.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: Right, It means your vulnerability is a tool that a
• 4:25
  predator is actively using against.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: You, which brings us to the warning signs. Because the
• 4:30
  explosion of violence between nineteen ninety four and nineteen ninety
• 4:33
  six didn't just it didn't just happen overnight.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: You know, the table is being set years earlier.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Let's look back the nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety one.
• 4:42
  We have to establish this baseline of danger because the
• 4:45
  violence was already like testing the waters.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: The ecosystem of violence on Division Avenue was already well
• 4:50
  established by then, it was escalating.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: We start in August of nineteen ninety a woman named
• 4:55
  Denise Ruth Griffin is stabbed to.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: Death, and the killer doesn't just hide the body.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: No thrown from a moving vehicle on US Highway one
• 5:02
  thirty one near.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: Rockford, which is just north of Grand Rapids.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Just the sheer brazenness of it, tossing a human being
• 5:09
  onto a highway like trash.
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: It shows a complete lack of fear of being seen.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: And then just three months later, in November nineteen ninety,
• 5:17
  the nude, beaten body of Linda fay Bore is found
• 5:21
  floating near a boating ramp in Plainfield, township, and.
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: Her background is something we really need to pause on.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it really stopped me in my tracks when I
• 5:29
  read the source material.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: It completely shatters that stereotype people have of.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: The less dead, right, because Linda wasn't a runaway who
• 5:36
  had been on the streets her whole life. She was
• 5:38
  a divorced mother of two.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: She had recently been laid off from her factory job.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: The source notes that she turned to the streets essentially
• 5:45
  just to feed her children.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: We really have to unpack the mechanism of that descent
• 5:50
  because it explained so much about this specific era, the
• 5:53
  early nineties, right. Yeah, in nineteen ninety the Russ built
• 5:56
  was experiencing severe economic turbulence. You had this massive loss
• 6:01
  of manufacturing jobs.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: And when a factory closes in a mid size city
• 6:05
  like Grand Rapids, it.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: Doesn't just affect the economy, it creates a socioeconomic pipeline directly.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: To the streets because there's no safety net exactly.
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: So you have a mother suddenly without income, she has
• 6:17
  mouths to feed, and the rent is due.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: The leap from a factory floor to division avenue isn't
• 6:22
  born of like a moral failing.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: No, it is born of sheer, terrified desperation.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: And the tragedy is within months of being forced into
• 6:30
  that environment, she was murdered.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: It completely strips away that judgmental distance people like to maintain.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: She was a mother trying to survive an economic downturn,
• 6:39
  but the violence, it just didn't stop.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: January nineteen ninety one begins with absolute terror.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: A twenty two year old sex worker named Lisa Kolik
• 6:48
  is in a pickup truck traveling north on one point
• 6:50
  thirty one and to escape her attacker, she literally jumps
• 6:55
  out of the moving truck onto the.
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: Highway at highway speeds.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: You have to be facing a fate worse than death
• 7:00
  to think jumping onto asphalt at sixty miles an hour
• 7:03
  as your safest option.
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: She was actually hit by two other vehicles before traffic.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: Could stop, but miraculously she survived.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: And you would think an incident that dramatic would prompt
• 7:12
  a massive police crackdown.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: You would think so, but look at what happens next.
• 7:16
  Just three days later, while Lisa is still in critical
• 7:19
  condition in the ICU, another woman is attacked.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: Right an anonymous woman reports that a middle aged man
• 7:26
  held a knife to her throat. In a car.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: She screams, manages to get out of the vehicle, and
• 7:32
  she runs to a state police officer.
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: And that officer, completely by coincidence, had just pulled the
• 7:37
  car over for a traffic violation.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: Talk about being in the right place at the right time.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: The attacker actually manages to hit the gas and escape,
• 7:45
  but the woman survives with minor cuts.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: And this is where the reality of the streets just
• 7:50
  hits you like a ton of bricks. The source notes
• 7:52
  of this woman who literally just survived having a blade
• 7:55
  pressed to her jugular. Yeah, she refused medical treatment and
• 7:58
  was back working on the corner the very next night.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: It really speaks to the physiological mechanics of addiction.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: How so, like, how do you go back out there?
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: Well, when you are dealing with severe substance dependency, the
• 8:10
  brain survival hierarchy is completely rewired.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: So the drugs become more important than safety exactly.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: The fear of being murdered is overpowered by the immediate
• 8:19
  biological demand.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: For the substance or the money to avoid withdrawal.
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: Right, you survive a knife to the throat, but the
• 8:27
  withdrawal is what scares you more.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: Eventually, the news does start paying attention to this cluster
• 8:32
  of attacks. Articles appear, but the police publicly states something
• 8:37
  very specific about the vehicles. Right yeah, They say that
• 8:40
  while all these women worked on Division Street, the vehicle
• 8:42
  descriptions from witnesses and survivors were all different.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: And this is the first hint of that dark forest
• 8:48
  metaphor you open with.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: It's the core mystery that plagued this investigation for decades.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: Are detectives looking at one highly active, highly adaptable serial
• 8:57
  killer who just frequently change cars.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: Or are they looking at a terrifying convergence of multiple
• 9:03
  totally disconnected predators.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: Creditors who have all simultaneously realized that Division Avenue isnt
• 9:09
  all you can eat buffet where the police aren't looking
• 9:11
  too closely.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: Well, let's look at the first real suspect they cash.
• 9:15
  March nineteen ninety one, a twenty three year old woman
• 9:19
  named Carrie Mansfield pulls into the back parking lot of
• 9:22
  a Methodist.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: Church and this is just minutes from downtown, right.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: Neighbors hear her screaming, They look out, see a vehicle fleeing,
• 9:30
  and crucially they manage to get the license.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: Plate, which is a huge break.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: The police run the plate, and who does it belong to?
• 9:37
  Richard Jensen Junior.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: A forty four year old high school teacher and hockey.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Coach, the quintessential double life.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: It's a psychological profile we see often in these cases.
• 9:47
  By day, he is a respected, authoritative figure in the community.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: He has the trust of parents and students.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: But by night he is a violent predator cruising the
• 9:57
  red light.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: District, he confesses. He tells police he argued with Carrie
• 10:01
  after deciding not to go through with the transaction, and
• 10:04
  in a quote fit of rage, he stabbed her fifty
• 10:07
  five times.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: I mean fifty five times is not an argument.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: No, that is extreme pathological overkill.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: He is later picked out of a lineup by the
• 10:15
  woman who had the knife to her throat in January.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: Actually, he was even suspected in some of the other murders,
• 10:21
  but he ultimately only receives a life sentence for carry
• 10:23
  Mansfield's murder.
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: And this is a turning point.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this is where I get really frustrated looking at
• 10:29
  the timeline, because Jensen goes to prison and the streets
• 10:33
  seemingly cool down.
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: The headline's fade. The public just assumes the monsters in
• 10:39
  a cage but wasn't this.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: Just putting a band aid on a bursting dam op?
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, I mean.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: If you catch Richard Jensen, did the streets of Grand
• 10:46
  Rapids actually get safer or did it just pacify the
• 10:49
  public while other predators watched the news and took notes.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: The grim reality is it was entirely an illusion of safety.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: Catching him didn't fix the avenue.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: Catching Jensen solve the immediate threat he posed. Absolutely, it
• 11:02
  removed one very violent man from the.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: Ecosystem, but it did precisely nothing to change the ecosystem itself, exactly.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: I didn't cure the addiction on Division Avenue. It didn't
• 11:12
  reopen the factories, and it didn't change the fact that
• 11:15
  these women were highly vulnerable.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: If we lean into the dark forest metaphor, when you
• 11:19
  shoot one wolf, the other wolves don't leave the forest.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: No, they just learned to be quieter.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: They learn what gets you caught.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: Exactly. They learned that the police and Grand Rapids were
• 11:28
  perfectly capable of catching you if a witness saw your
• 11:31
  license plate.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: So the predators adapted.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: He realized that killing someone in a church parking lot
• 11:36
  downtown was.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: Just too risky, and this adaptation leads us directly into
• 11:40
  the darkest chapter of this story. Because the illusion of
• 11:44
  safety causes everyone to lower their.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: Guard, the public, the media, and the police.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: And lower their guard they did right up until nineteen
• 11:51
  ninety four. This brings us to the eruption of violence.
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: The quiet period ends violently.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: We move from this uneas easy multi year quiet period
• 12:02
  to a sudden, explosive resumption of bodies being discovered.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: But as we just said, the killers adapted. The victims
• 12:08
  aren't being found in church parking lots or downtown alleys anymore.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: The killers are taking them out to rural areas.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: This is a massive evolution in criminal.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: Tactics because it takes planning.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: Yes, when a killer takes a victim to a rural location,
• 12:21
  it implies premeditation, It requires transportation logistics, and most importantly,
• 12:26
  it shows a conscious desire to delay the discovery of
• 12:29
  the body.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about the logistics of that, because the distances
• 12:32
  are jarring. In March nineteen ninety four, Lesa at Burr,
• 12:35
  a twenty four year old mother of three, is found
• 12:38
  strangled in the woods off Hackley Avenue. But she isn't
• 12:41
  in Grand Rapids, No, she is in Muskegon. That is
• 12:44
  a city nearly forty miles northwest of Grand Rapids.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: And according to the source, her body had lain in
• 12:50
  those woods for an estimated three months.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: A forty mile drive is not a crime of sudden passion.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: Not at all. That requires a predator willing to drive
• 12:59
  nearly an hour with a victim either terrified and captive
• 13:03
  or already deceased in their vehicle.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: It means they are comfortable on the highways, they know
• 13:07
  the rural back.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: Roads, and they understand the distance equals.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: Time time to destroy evidence.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: Yes, from a forensic standpoint, a rural dump sight is
• 13:16
  a nightmare for investigators. So well, when a body is
• 13:20
  left in the elements for three months, the environment systematically
• 13:23
  dismantles your evidence. Rain washes away trace DNA and fibers.
• 13:27
  Animals get to scavenging, animals disrupt the scene, and scatter remains.
• 13:31
  Insect activity accelerates decomposition.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: So by moving lessa forty miles away into the woods,
• 13:37
  the killer essentially let nature sanitize the crime scene for him.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Nature does the cleanup.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: And they just keep doing it. In June nineteen ninety five,
• 13:46
  Pamela Vero, a thirty three year old mother of three
• 13:50
  is found beaten to death in a thicket off veterans
• 13:53
  drive along the Grand River.
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: Out in the suburb west of the city.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: A boat launch is less than six hundred feet away.
• 13:59
  But the most haunting rural discovery, the one that really
• 14:02
  gets under my skin, is from November of nineteen ninety four.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: The case of the Marn Jane Doe.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the investigators dubbed her Matilda.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: The jextaposition in this specific case is incredibly unsettling. Yeah,
• 14:15
  it perfectly captures how easily this kind of violence hides
• 14:18
  just out of sight of normal, everyday life.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: So put yourself in the scene. It's November sixth A
• 14:23
  pair of rabbit hunters are out near the village of Marn,
• 14:25
  which is roughly halfway between Muskegon and Grand Rapids. Okay,
• 14:29
  they are walking down a dirt path just off the
• 14:31
  highway and they stumble upon a human skeleton.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: The killer had purposefully placed the body on its back
• 14:38
  against some brush, tucked underneath some saplings, and then piled
• 14:41
  more dead brush on top to camouflage it.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: Investigators eventually pull some clothing from a nearby creek, but
• 14:47
  a metal detector sweep finds no murder weapon. But here
• 14:51
  is the detail that is just horrific. Yeah, this secluded
• 14:55
  dead end dirt path. It was a highly popular high
• 14:59
  school park spot.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: Yes. The source quotes a local farmer, Jim Record, who
• 15:03
  lived right by the property.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: Right and he recalled to investigators that his son had
• 15:07
  come home early from a massive spring bonfire party along that.
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: Exact path, And why did he come home early.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: Because he was complaining about an awful, overpowering smell, which
• 15:18
  is just chilling. And then the farmer noted that unusually
• 15:22
  nobody parted at that spot for the rest of the summer.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: I want you to really picture that that poor woman's
• 15:27
  body lay there, actively decomposing, just yards away from where
• 15:30
  teenagers were drinking beers.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: And hanging out four months.
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: It's a macabre reality. And because of that passage of time,
• 15:37
  the medical examiners were severely limited.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: They couldn't figure out how she died.
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: They could determine it was a homicide, but the exact
• 15:44
  cause of death was unspecified due to the advanced decomposition.
• 15:49
  The clothes in the creek didn't yield any immediate clues.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: And they couldn't just test her DNA.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: They sent her bones to the FBI hoping for DNA testing,
• 15:58
  but the technology of the mid nineties just wasn't advanced
• 16:01
  enough to pull a profile from degraded bone marrow.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: So she became a Jane Doe.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: And you mentioned they called her Matilda.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, why do they do that.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: It's a very common practice in law enforcement. Investigators give
• 16:14
  Jane Does a nickname to humanize them. They didn't want
• 16:17
  her to just be a case number in a filing cabinet.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: They wanted her to be a person they were fighting for.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: But despite that humanizing effort, she would remain nameless for
• 16:25
  twenty eight years.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: We are definitely going to come back to Matilda and
• 16:29
  how science eventually gave her her name back.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: It's an incredible part of the story.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: But as these bodies are being found in the woods
• 16:35
  and creeks around the city, we have to look at
• 16:38
  how the system was failing them in real time.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: This ties directly back to the lasted.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: The absolute invisibility of these victims. Let's look at Galenette Cook.
• 16:48
  Her body is found in October nineteen ninety five.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: She was strangled with a rope and left at a
• 16:53
  creek bed in the northeast quadrant of the city.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: She had a history of arrests, and at the time
• 16:58
  she was murdered, she was actually a runaway from a
• 17:01
  prison work release center over in Lansing for.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: A drug distribution charge. Her background made her the ultimate vulnerable.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Target because she couldn't go to the cops.
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: Think about her situation. She's actively on the run from
• 17:16
  the state. If she gets in a car with a
• 17:18
  man and he becomes violent, she cannot go to.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: The police because if she walks into a precinct to
• 17:24
  report an assault, she goes straight back to prison.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Predators have a radar for this kind of desperation.
• 17:29
  She was completely off the grid, which made her invisible.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: But it's not just that she was invisible to the killer.
• 17:34
  She was invisible to the people supposed to be reporting.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: On this the media coverage.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: The source explicitly points out these shocking inaccuracies in the
• 17:42
  media coverage of her death. A police press release said
• 17:45
  she was forty two. A local newspaper article listed her
• 17:49
  age as thirty seven, but her actual obituary, submitted by
• 17:53
  her family, noted she was thirty nine.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: The numbers are all over the place.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: How does a discrepancy like that even happen. If a
• 18:00
  prominent local business owner was murdered, you can bet every
• 18:03
  single paper in the state would have their exact age,
• 18:06
  their biography, and their timeline verified by three different editors.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: But for Gail, they couldn't even agree on what decade
• 18:13
  of life she was in.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: And this isn't just a matter of disrespect. It is
• 18:16
  the mechanical failure of the investigation.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: How does it mechanically fail it?
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: We need to break down exactly how media and accuracies
• 18:23
  actively destroy criminal investigations. When law enforcement hits a wall.
• 18:28
  They rely entirely on the public for tips. Okay, but
• 18:31
  public memory is fragile and highly suggestible. If the evening
• 18:34
  news is broadcasting that a forty two year old woman
• 18:37
  was killed, but Gail's associates on the street knew her
• 18:40
  as a thirty nine year old, or maybe she looked
• 18:42
  even younger, they might.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Not make the connection exactly. They think, oh, I saw
• 18:45
  someone getting into a blue van, but she was in
• 18:47
  her thirties, so it can't be the woman on the
• 18:49
  news exactly.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: It filters out the truth. Furthermore, it floods the tip
• 18:53
  line with garbage.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: People calling in about the wrong age bracket.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: Police have to spend hundreds of man hours chasing down
• 18:59
  leads about forty two year old women that go nowhere.
• 19:03
  When the media cannot get the basic biographical facts correct,
• 19:07
  it sends a subconscious signal to the public that this
• 19:10
  case isn't a priority.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: It degrades the quality of information, and it allows the
• 19:15
  killer to slip right through the cracks of incompetence. It's
• 19:17
  a tragic compounding effect. Society push them into the margins
• 19:21
  in life and then structurally erase them in death.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: And this profound indifference leads us directly into nineteen ninety six.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: Which is when the escalation reaches an absolute breaking point.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: The violence hits such a fever pitch that the authorities
• 19:35
  can no longer wave these off as isolated incidents or runaways.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: Nineteen ninety six is the year the gam finally breaks.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: The pace of the murders accelerates dramatically, and the sheer
• 19:45
  tragedy of the victims' lives becomes impossible for the city
• 19:48
  to ignore.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: I want to spend some time on the shattered potential
• 19:51
  of these women because it is far too easy for
• 19:54
  people reading old headlines to just label them addicts or
• 19:57
  prostitutes and stop thinking about them as human beings.
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: We have to remember who they were before the avenue.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: Let's look at don Marie Shaver in nineteen eighty nine.
• 20:05
  She was an all state academic high school achiever.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: She was brilliant, capable, recognized by her state for her intelligence.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: She had the entire world in front of her. Just
• 20:15
  seven years later, in nineteen ninety six, at age twenty five,
• 20:19
  she is found dead in Indian Mill Creek.
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: She had developed an arrest record for prostitution, and.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: The medical examiner determined she died of strangulation and severe
• 20:28
  blunt force trauma to her head, chest, and abdomen. In
• 20:32
  just seven years, she went from an all state academic
• 20:35
  to a victim dumped in a creek.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: It's just devastating.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: How does a fall happen that fast.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: To understand that rapid descent, we have to talk about
• 20:42
  the specific mechanics of the crack epidemic in the nineteen nineties.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: The source material mentions crack a lot.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: It's vital context. Crack wasn't just another drug on the street.
• 20:52
  It was a uniquely destructive force that altered the socioeconomic
• 20:56
  landscape of American.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: Cities because of how it's consumed.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: Right, like powder, cocaine, crack is smoked, which means it
• 21:03
  hits the brain's dopamine receptors almost instantaneously.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: It creates a massive euphoric high.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: But that high lasts only a few minutes.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: And when it crashes, it crashes hard.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: Right, the ensuing crash is so severe, so psychologically agonizing,
• 21:19
  that the brain immediately demands more.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: It functionally rewires a person's survival instincts.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: Everything, food, shelter, safety, past academic achievements, family becomes secondary
• 21:30
  to acquiring the next hip.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: It pushes people into incredibly dangerous situations with astonishing speed.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: A brilliant student like Dawn wasn't making rational choices to
• 21:39
  live dangerously.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Her brain had been hijacked.
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: Hijacked by a chemical dependency that demanded she put herself
• 21:44
  in harm's way on Division Avenue just to stave off
• 21:46
  the withdrawal.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: And we see that exact same hijacking in the story
• 21:50
  of Michelle Becker.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: She was thirty six years old.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: Her story is just incredibly bleak. According to investigators, her
• 21:56
  own brother dropped her off on the avenue so she
• 21:59
  could buy cocaine.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: And just days later her skeleton is found on a
• 22:04
  wooded hillside.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: Her family reported her missing ten days after she vanished.
• 22:09
  Later in interviews, her mother revealed that Michelle had gotten
• 22:12
  married at nineteen, but her husband died of a sudden
• 22:15
  heart attack.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: So she turned to prostitution to feed her crack habit
• 22:20
  to cope with the grief.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: And though she talked about getting clean and finding God,
• 22:24
  her mother gave this haunting quote to her reporter. She said, quote,
• 22:28
  the devil had a hold on her.
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: The devil had a hold on her. That phrase perfectly
• 22:33
  encapsulates the utter despair of families during this epidemic.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: They were just watching them slip away.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: They're watching their daughters, sisters, and mothers slip away right
• 22:41
  in front of them. They could see the danger, they
• 22:43
  knew monsters were driving up and down Division Avenue, but
• 22:46
  the pull of the addiction was stronger than the fear
• 22:48
  of death.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: And it's at this point in nineteen ninety six, that
• 22:51
  the scope of the investigation begins to widen in a
• 22:54
  very significant, very disturbing way.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: Up until this point, all the known victims we discussed
• 23:01
  were young white women.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: But the timeline shifts and we start to see the
• 23:05
  violence encompassing African American women whose murders shared incredibly stark similarities.
• 23:11
  Explain how this fits into the pattern.
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: It shows that while the racial profile of the victims
• 23:15
  was expanding, the methodology of the killer and the tragic
• 23:19
  vulnerability of the targets remained identical.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: We see this shift clearly with the heartbreaking story of
• 23:26
  Sherry Jeans Stuart Brown.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: Her story is gut wrenching. She was thirty two years old.
• 23:32
  She became a mother at sixteen, eventually had four children,
• 23:35
  and was married until the crack epidemic hit Grand Rapids
• 23:39
  and tore her life apart.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: Her parents ended up taking custody and raising her children,
• 23:43
  while Sherry lived alone in an apartment, constantly battling.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: Her addiction, and the details surrounding her disappearance really highlight
• 23:50
  the suddenness of these crimes.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: It really does. In August, her parents visit her apartment
• 23:55
  to celebrate her son's birthday.
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: They bring her a peach cobbleret yeah.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: Which was her absolute favorite dessert. They have a nice visit,
• 24:01
  they leave, and when they return just three days later
• 24:04
  to check on her, the apartment is empty and the.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: Peach cobbler is sitting on the counter half eaten.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: But Sherry is gone. She just vanished into thin air, and.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: It took years to find her.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: It wasn't until nineteen ninety eight, two full years later,
• 24:18
  that a driver passing by the former Butterworth gypsum mine
• 24:22
  saw feral dogs dragging human bones into the street.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: The skull was eventually identified by the FBI using DNA
• 24:29
  testing as Sherry Brown.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: And we have to pause and look at the geography
• 24:32
  of where she was found, because.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: This underscore is how active and brazen these dumping grounds were.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: Just a month after Sherry went missing, a jogger using
• 24:41
  a trail in the underbrush across from that exact same
• 24:44
  former gypsum mine discovered the body of twenty seven year
• 24:47
  old Sonya Maray Campos.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: So you have two women taken from the same environment,
• 24:51
  dumped in the exact same desolate industrial area within a
• 24:55
  month of each other.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: It is staggering. You would think two bodies at the
• 24:59
  same abandoned mine within a month would be enough to
• 25:01
  sound every single alarm in the city government, but it actually.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: Took yet another discovery to finally force the police department's hand.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: Yes, the threshold for action was tragically high.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: In Ittober nineteen ninety six, a delivery truck driver is
• 25:15
  on his route on seventy sixth.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: Street, which was a heavily wooded rural area back then.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: And he spot something wrapped in a blanket to scart
• 25:22
  it in a ditch. It was the strangled body of
• 25:25
  twenty nine year old Sharon Kay Hammock.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: She was closed only in a bra and a necklace.
• 25:30
  She was a mother of two, and she was one
• 25:31
  month pregnant with her third child.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: She had last been seen standing on the corner of
• 25:35
  Division and Banner.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: It was her death, the eighth known victim linked to
• 25:39
  this specific geography that finally prompted the creation of a
• 25:43
  fourteen member police task force.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: Think about that number.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: Eight victims, eight women dead.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: It took eight bodies found scattered in ditches, woods and
• 25:52
  creeks before a coordinated, multi agency task force was established.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: Okay, I have to push back on the police narrative
• 25:58
  here because the source notes that even as they formed
• 26:00
  this massive fourteen member task force, the police were still
• 26:04
  publicly reticent to use the words serial killer.
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: They kept issuing statements saying they believe they were multiple perpetrators.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: Yet in at least one local interview Captain Kevin Bell stated, quote,
• 26:16
  certainly some of these cases are related, if.
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: Not all of them, so they knew.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: So what is going on behind closed doors? Is this
• 26:23
  hesitation to declare a serial killer's standard investigative caution or
• 26:28
  is it a fundamental reluctance to admit a massive systemic
• 26:32
  failure in protecting the public. Are they just covering their asses?
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: It is a phenomenal question, and the answer is a
• 26:39
  very messy combination of both.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: Let's break down the tactical side first.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: From a purely investigative standpoint, declaring a serial killer is
• 26:47
  like dropping a bomb on your own department.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: It causes panic.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: It instantly induces citywide panic. Panic leads to flooded tip
• 26:55
  lines where detectives have to sift through thousands of false
• 26:58
  sightings of suspicious fans.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: Everyone thinks their neighbor is the killer.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: It creates immense political pressure from the mayor's office to
• 27:05
  make a quick arrest, which can lead to sloppy police work.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: And does it affect the killer's behavior?
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: Perhaps most dangerously, it can cause the killer to go
• 27:13
  to ground. If the killer knows you know, it's one purser,
• 27:16
  they might stop hunting, making them impossible to catch.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: That makes sense.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: Furthermore, investigators fear tunnel vision. If you announce one serial killer,
• 27:26
  detectives might ignore forensic evidence pointing to a second or third,
• 27:30
  unrelated murderer.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: Right, they try to force a square peg into a
• 27:34
  round hole just to fit the serial killer profile.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: But on the other hand, exactly on the other hand,
• 27:39
  there is absolutely a defensive posture at play.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: Admitting that a serial killer has been operating in your city,
• 27:45
  hunting on a single street for over two years, racking
• 27:48
  up a body count of eight or more women is
• 27:51
  a devastating admission of failure.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: It means your vice squads, your patrol routes, and your
• 27:55
  initial homicide detectives completely failed to connect the dots in time.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: Is a peace we are nightmare for a police chief.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: So focusing the public narrative on multiple perpetrators subtly diffuses
• 28:06
  the blame.
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: It suggests a general societal rise in violent crime, rather.
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: Than a single unstoppable monster that the police are too
• 28:13
  incompetent to catch.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: But regardless of what they called it, the formation of
• 28:18
  the task force didn't stop the bleeding id all. In fact,
• 28:22
  immediately after it was formed in October. More victims were
• 28:25
  found in the exact same month.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: Thirty nine year old Cheryl Lynn Mason is found in
• 28:30
  an empty field behind a factory in downtown Grand Rapids.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: Her life was described in the Source as chaotic. She
• 28:37
  was homeless, addicted to cocaine, with six children scattered between
• 28:41
  grandparents and foster care.
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: The medical examiner believed she was killed around August, but
• 28:46
  she wasn't even reported missing until nine days after her
• 28:49
  unidentified body was found.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: Then, another victim, twenty nine year old Victoria More, is
• 28:55
  found by a squirrel hunter in a wooded clearing near
• 28:58
  the Rogue River.
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: She disappeared in September, right after testifying in a murder
• 29:02
  trial over a drug debt.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: The sheer volume of violence was overwhelming the system.
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: The Source mentions a nonprofit organization called rose Haven Ministries,
• 29:10
  which worked with women on the street.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: They reported that an influx of women were coming to
• 29:15
  their doors trying to leave prostitution and an absolute abject
• 29:18
  fear for their lives.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: The director noted that five of the murdered victims had
• 29:22
  been in contact with them previously.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: The Women Working Division Avenue knew they were being hunted.
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: They didn't need a police press conference to tell them
• 29:30
  a predator was out there. They were living the horror
• 29:32
  every night.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: And as we talk about the death toll, we absolutely
• 29:35
  cannot forget the uncounted missing.
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: The task force was counting bodies, but what about the
• 29:41
  women who just vanished?
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: The source highlights for women from nineteen ninety five alone
• 29:46
  who were never officially included in the serial killer count
• 29:49
  because their bodies were never found.
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: This is the shadow count. It is the most terrifying
• 29:54
  unknown of the entire case.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: Let's name them. Thirty seven year old Robin Scott vanishes
• 29:58
  in January, twenty six year old Fonda Lockridge vanishes in June,
• 30:03
  twenty eight year old Kathleen Davis in July, an eighteen
• 30:06
  year old Jizill Casarios in October.
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: As we pointed out earlier, only two known victims were
• 30:12
  officially recorded in the summer of nineteen ninety five.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: But with these four women vanishing so quickly from the
• 30:18
  same geographic area, it is highly probable they met the
• 30:21
  exact same fate.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: It means the official number of twelve might just be
• 30:26
  a fraction of the reality. The true toll of the
• 30:29
  violence on Division Avenue.
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: Might be much higher, and this reality brings us to
• 30:33
  the most complex, bewildering and frustrating phase of this story.
• 30:38
  The suspects right because just a year after it formed,
• 30:41
  by the summer of nineteen ninety seven, the massive fourteen
• 30:45
  member task force was disbanded.
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: They packed up the whiteboards, all.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: Their leads had gone cold. So we have to look
• 30:50
  at who the police were looking at during this intensive year.
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: And what emerges from the source material isn't a clean
• 30:57
  Hollywood narrative of a single.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: Boogeyman's annibal lecter playing cat and mouse.
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: No, it is an incredibly terrifying ecosystem of violent men.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: This is where we return to your dark forest metaphor.
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: And why the debate over one killer versus many was
• 31:11
  so paralyzing for the task force.
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: When the police finally shook the trees in Grand rapis
• 31:16
  an astonishing number of violent predators fell out.
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: Let's explore why that is. If you are looking for
• 31:22
  one giant wolf who leaves a specific bite mark, say
• 31:25
  a signature of strangulation, you start ignoring the victims who
• 31:29
  were stabbed or beaten.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: You assume those are unrelated.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: This profile tunnel vision allows multiple different predators to operate
• 31:36
  with impunity because they don't fit the specific narrative the
• 31:39
  task force is hunting for.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about the close calls, because they prove exactly
• 31:44
  how many wolves were in the woods.
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: In November nineteen ninety six, at the height of the
• 31:48
  task force's panic, a woman working Division Avenue gets into
• 31:52
  a car with a.
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: Man she actually called nine to one one from a
• 31:55
  New York jail years later to report this. They drive
• 31:58
  six miles north to a gravel pit in.
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: Sparta, and just for the geographic record, the source notes,
• 32:04
  this gravel pit is exactly in a straight line six
• 32:07
  miles west of where the very first nineteen ninety victim,
• 32:11
  Denise Ruth Griffin, was dumped.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: While there at this gravel pit, the man turns violent.
• 32:16
  He asks her if she will ever see her family again,
• 32:18
  and then leans in and tells her a quote, You'll
• 32:20
  never see them again, a.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: Textbook psychological terror tactic. He is asserting total physical and
• 32:26
  psychological control.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: Somehow miraculously she escapes, but addiction brings her right back.
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: Two weeks later, she's back working on Division Avenue and
• 32:34
  that same man tries to pull her into his car again.
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: But what he didn't know is that the police task
• 32:39
  force were actively surveilling her, and they swooped in and
• 32:42
  arrested him.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: They dubbed him the calm stock Man.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: But here is the infuriating part of the justice system.
• 32:48
  He was charged with kidnapping, but he ultimately only pled
• 32:51
  guilty to attempted gross indecency.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: His mother actually defended him to the press, saying her
• 32:56
  darling boy was cleared of the big stuff.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: The police took it DNA, but eventually stated they had
• 33:02
  taken the investigation as far as they could and they
• 33:04
  let him go.
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: It's cases like this that keep detectives awake at night.
• 33:09
  You have to wonder how many narrow escapes there were
• 33:11
  that were never reported.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: But the investigative web gets even more tangled.
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: I want to map out this next sequence slowly because
• 33:18
  it is dizzying and it perfectly illustrates the absolute chaos
• 33:22
  the police were dealing with before modern DNA testing was instantaneous.
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: We have to look at the violent triangle of James Allen,
• 33:29
  Kenny Garrin, Leon Mason, and Mark Osborne. Okay, I admit
• 33:32
  I got a bit lost in the source material. Here
• 33:35
  lay this out for us, because this sequence of events
• 33:37
  is wild.
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the detectives. In
• 33:42
  November nineteen ninety seven, a twenty two year old nurse's
• 33:45
  aide named Billy Joe Watson is found raped and strangled
• 33:49
  along some railroad tracks under a freeway.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, terrible crime scene.
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: Police process the scene and they find a car parked nearby.
• 33:55
  They pull fingerprints off the car and they belong to
• 33:58
  a man named James Allen Ka.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: Kenny is a fifty year old Vietnam veteran and a
• 34:03
  known transient drifter.
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: Crucially, they discover he had checked into a veteran's clinic
• 34:08
  in Grand Rapids in nineteen ninety six, right during the
• 34:11
  absolute peak of the Division Avenue murders.
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: And shortly after Watson is killed, Kenny flees the state
• 34:17
  to Iowa, leaving all his belongings behind.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: Soon, alerts come in that he's wanted for a similar
• 34:22
  murder in Virginia, and police in Ohio are looking for
• 34:25
  him too.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: So to a task force desperate for a win, Kenny
• 34:29
  looks like the perfect serial killer candidate.
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: He's transient, he has a violent history, he was in
• 34:33
  town during the murders, and his prints are at a
• 34:36
  fresh crime.
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: Scene exactly they think they found their wolf, But while.
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: They are actively hunting Kenny across state lines, panic strikes
• 34:43
  Grand Rapids again.
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: An eighteen year old girl named Jessica Ledford is found raped, stabbed,
• 34:48
  and strangled in the exact same park area.
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: The local community is utterly terrified. They think the serial killer,
• 34:55
  who they assume is Kenny, has returned to taunt them.
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: But the forensics eventually proved that completely wrong.
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: Jessica Ledford wasn't killed by a serial killer. She was
• 35:04
  killed by her friend Mark Osborne during a personal dispute.
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: He eventually got a life sentence. Okay, so Kenny didn't
• 35:11
  kill Ledford, Osborne did. But what about the first girl
• 35:14
  at the railroad tracks? Did Kenny kill Billy Joe Watson?
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: No? And this is where the lack of nineteen nineties
• 35:21
  technology really hindered them.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: When did they figure it out?
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: Years later, when DNA technology finally banced, they tested the
• 35:28
  evidence from Billy Joe Watson's body, it proved she was
• 35:32
  actually killed by a completely different man, Garren le On
• 35:35
  Mason Wait Mason. Mason had only been out of prison
• 35:37
  for three weeks when he killed Watson, and when they
• 35:40
  ran Mason's DNA through the system, it also linked him
• 35:43
  back to a completely unrelated nineteen eighty two cold case
• 35:47
  rape and murder in Grand Rapids.
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: He was sentenced to life for both.
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: This is exactly what we mean by the dark forest.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: The police are tracking Kenny thinking he's the mastermind, while
• 35:56
  they are distracted, Osborne kills his.
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: Friend, and the original murder they were investigating was actually
• 36:02
  committed by Mason, who was also a completely separate serial
• 36:06
  predator operating in the exact same zip code.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: It is terrifying to realize how many monsters were overlapping
• 36:12
  in this one small city.
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: It is the perfect analogy. The police were trying to
• 36:17
  find a signal in an environment that was nothing but
• 36:19
  deafening noise.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: And the list of predators operating in the same tight
• 36:23
  geographic area just keeps going.
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: The source outlined several more men who were actively preying
• 36:29
  on this specific demographic.
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: You had Troy Blake, who in two thousand and eight
• 36:33
  picked up a woman on Division Avenue, dragged her by
• 36:36
  her hair to a picnic table, smashed a glass bottle
• 36:39
  over her head, raped her, and tried to strangle her
• 36:42
  with her own coat.
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: Thankfully, a police officer on patrol spotted him.
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: Blake was later convicted of that assault, and horrifyingly, he
• 36:50
  was also convicted of a quadruple family murder in Right Township.
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: A quadruple murder he wasn't even on the original tax
• 36:57
  force radar.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: Then you have sid Terrell Jones, who was linked to
• 37:01
  a body found behind a truck repair shop in two
• 37:03
  thousand and eight, who had previously been arrested for holding
• 37:06
  a knife to a prostitute's throat.
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: You have Gregory Kelly, a notoriously violent pimp who transferred
• 37:11
  women in between Grand Rapids and Detroit.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: Known for brutally assaulting women in the street and kicking
• 37:16
  a pregnant woman in the stomach. He denied involvement in
• 37:19
  the murders and eventually died in prison in twenty twenty.
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: You have Edward Joseph Hill, who was publicly named as
• 37:25
  a suspect after robbing a prostitute.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: And Jamal Lacey, who was suspected in at least three
• 37:30
  of the original Division Avenue murders and is currently serving
• 37:33
  a life sentence for attempting to strangle to other women.
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: And we absolutely cannot overlook the mention of Larry Dwayne Hall.
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: This element elevates the threat from a localized tragedy to
• 37:44
  a national nightmare.
• 37:45
  Speaker 2: Paul is an incredibly notorious figure in true crime. He
• 37:48
  was a Civil War reenactor, suspected in up to fifty
• 37:51
  murders across the Midwest.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: Source notes that his very first suspected kill was a
• 37:56
  fifteen year old schoolgirl in Grand Rapids back in nineteen
• 37:59
  eighty one one.
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: Hall would use his van to travel the country for
• 38:03
  these historical re enactments, utilizing the interstate highway system to
• 38:07
  abduct and murder women along his routes.
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: To think he might have crossed paths with the Division
• 38:13
  Avenue victims utilizing the same highway off ramps is a
• 38:16
  chilling possibility.
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: It just reinforces the reality that Division Avenue wasn't just
• 38:21
  dealing with a local anomaly. It was a geographic hunting ground.
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: Because it was located right off the major highways, it attracted,
• 38:30
  or at least harbored, a staggering concentration of violent men
• 38:33
  who were just passing through.
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: So the task force disbands in nineteen ninety seven. The
• 38:38
  years turn into decades. The killers moved on. They died,
• 38:41
  or they went to prison for other unrelated crimes.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: The women of Division Avenue became cold cases and cardboard
• 38:46
  boxes in a basement evidence room.
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: But here's where the narrative finally shifts toward hope. Because
• 38:51
  while the police hit a wall and funding dried up,
• 38:54
  science did not stop moving exactly.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: Science was quietly evolving in the background.
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: The turn of the century brought exponential advancements in computing
• 39:02
  and genetics that would completely rewrite the endings of these
• 39:05
  tragic stories.
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: This brings us to the most incredible part of this
• 39:08
  deep dive. Science catches up and naming the dead, because
• 39:12
  before you can catch a killer, you have to know
• 39:14
  who they killed.
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: In twenty twenty two, there were massive breakthroughs, largely thanks
• 39:18
  to organizations like the DNA Doe Project.
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: Let's go back to Matilda, the women found by the
• 39:24
  Rabbit Hunters in nineteen ninety four near that high school party.
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: Spot, The one who lay decomposing for months while teenagers
• 39:30
  party nearby.
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: Yes, for twenty seven long years, she was just Matilda
• 39:36
  in a file folder. But in January twenty twenty two,
• 39:40
  police called a press conference to announce she finally had
• 39:43
  her name back.
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: She was identified through advanced DNA testing connected to distant
• 39:47
  family in Minnesota.
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: Her name was Shelley Ray Kephart.
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: And then there was the Ada Jane Doe. She was
• 39:52
  found in July nineteen ninety seven at a rural roadside
• 39:55
  park on M twenty one east of Ada.
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: A municipal worker picking up trash found her skeleton hit
• 40:00
  in the heavy brush.
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: She had a heel fracture on the left side of
• 40:03
  her nose, and the only identifying item found nearby was
• 40:06
  a single dark blue leg warmer.
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: For decades, detectives had forensic sketches. They had clay composite
• 40:12
  models of her skull, but they have no name.
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: But the science caught up for her too. She was
• 40:17
  identified as thirty one year old Stephanie Renee Judson.
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: She lived in nearby Benton Harbor. Her history reflected the
• 40:23
  exact same systemic struggles as the other victims. At eighteen,
• 40:27
  she was jailed for not paying child support. She was
• 40:29
  caught stealing clothes from kmart.
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: It was a life of economic struggle that ended violently
• 40:34
  in a roadside brush.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: Now play the expert for me here. Why is it
• 40:39
  from a strictly investigative standpoint so crucial to get these
• 40:42
  names back decades later, why spend the money if the
• 40:45
  trail's twenty five years cold.
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: Because a name is the foundational building block of any
• 40:50
  homicide investigation. How So, the source includes a fantastic quote
• 40:55
  from a cold case detective emphasizing exactly this point. Without
• 40:59
  a name of victim is an island. You have a body,
• 41:02
  but you have no context.
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: You don't know who they were talking to.
• 41:04
  Speaker 2: You cannot trace their last known locations. You cannot interview
• 41:08
  their friend's family or associates. You don't know who they
• 41:10
  owed money to, who they were dating, or who they
• 41:12
  were fighting with.
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: Which is how you solve most crimes.
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: Victimology, the comprehensive study of the victim's life and habits,
• 41:19
  is how you find the suspects. Getting their names back,
• 41:22
  even twenty seven years later, is the first real, actionable
• 41:26
  step toward justice.
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: It opens up the investigation again.
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: It allows detectives to subpoena old employment records, find living relatives,
• 41:33
  and open up avenues of inquiry that were previously completely
• 41:36
  sealed off by anonymity.
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: And that persistence, that fundamental belief that science could eventually
• 41:43
  unlock those sealed doors led to the most satisfying fist
• 41:47
  pumping resolution in this entire source material.
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: In August twenty twenty two, the news broke.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: An arrest was finally made for the nineteen ninety six
• 41:56
  rape and murder of Sharon k Hammock. Remember she was
• 41:59
  the twenty nine year old mother found in the ditch
• 42:01
  by the delivery driver, the one who is a month pregnant.
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: The breakthrough here is an absolute masterclass in modern forensics,
• 42:07
  specifically the revolutionary field of genetic genealogy.
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: Break it down for us, like, I'm five years old,
• 42:12
  How exactly did they do it after twenty six years?
• 42:15
  What is the actual mechanism?
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: It starts with foresight. When Sharon was found in nineteen
• 42:19
  ninety six, she had been bound. The detectives at the
• 42:22
  time carefully preserved the rope used to tire up an
• 42:25
  a sterile evidence bag. In twenty twenty two, cold case
• 42:29
  detectives submitted that rope for advanced testing, testing for what
• 42:33
  they were looking for. Touch DNA microscopic epithelial skin cells
• 42:37
  that slough off a person's hands when they tie a
• 42:40
  tight knot.
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: But the sample would be tiny, right right, But.
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: Using a process called PCR amplification. Scientists took those microscopic
• 42:48
  invisible traces of DNA and essentially photocopied them until they
• 42:51
  had a large enough sample to build a genetic profile.
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: Okay, so they have a profile. But in the nineties,
• 42:56
  if that profile wasn't already in the FBI database, it
• 42:59
  was a dead end exactly.
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: But in twenty twenty two, instead of just running it
• 43:03
  through the criminal database CODIS and hoping for a direct
• 43:06
  match of a prior offender, they used genetic.
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: Genealogy, the family tree stuff.
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: They took this suspects DNA profile and uploaded it to
• 43:14
  public genealogy databases like gd match or Family Tree DNA.
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: These are the databases where normal people casually submit their
• 43:21
  DNA to find out what countries their ancestors came from.
• 43:24
  Speaker 2: The database compares the suspects DNA to millions of users
• 43:28
  looking for shared segments of DNA measured in units called
• 43:31
  senda morgans.
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: So they are looking for cousins, right.
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: They find a third or fourth cousin in the database,
• 43:37
  and then what then? Specialized genealogists use census records, obituaries,
• 43:42
  and marriage certificates to build a massive reverse family tree
• 43:46
  tracing that cousin's lineage all the way back to a
• 43:49
  set of great grandparents, and then mapping every single descendant
• 43:53
  forward to the present day.
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: Through this painstaking process of triangulation, the genetic markers led
• 43:58
  the genealogists to one specific family tree, pinpointing a single
• 44:03
  couple that had four sons.
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: This is where the science gets so precise. It's almost terrifying.
• 44:07
  If you're a criminal of for us, you got away
• 44:09
  with it.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: It is the ultimate dragnet. Of those four sons, investigators
• 44:12
  looked at their life histories. Only one son had geographic
• 44:16
  ties to the state of Michigan in the nineteen nineties.
• 44:19
  Speaker 2: His name was Gary Dean Hartman.
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: The police z rode in on his profile, and suddenly,
• 44:23
  twenty six years of mystery evaporated. Everything clicked into place perfectly.
• 44:28
  Speaker 2: Artman was a sixty four year old over the road
• 44:30
  trucker currently living quietly in Florida, but back.
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety six, records showed he lived right near
• 44:36
  where Sharon's body was found in Kent County.
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: Furthermore, he had a prior brutal rape conviction in Michigan
• 44:42
  from the nineteen eighties, where he served eleven years in
• 44:45
  prison before being parolled into the exact window of the
• 44:48
  Division Avenue murders.
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: And if that wasn't enough to seal his fate, this
• 44:52
  same new DNA testing simultaneously linked his exact genetic profile
• 44:57
  to the unsolved murder of another sex worker all the
• 45:00
  way in Maryland.
• 45:01
  Speaker 2: It gives you profound relief mixed with absolute awe at
• 45:04
  how the universe works.
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: Think about the mechanics of this. A microscopic, invisible trace
• 45:09
  of sweat left on a piece of rough rope and
• 45:11
  a ditch in nineteen ninety six. It sits in a dark,
• 45:14
  climate controlled evidence locker for twenty six years.
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: Meanwhile, totally random people across the country decide they want
• 45:21
  to build a family tree, so they spit in a
• 45:23
  tube and mail it off to a lab.
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: And because of that completely innocent curiosity, a mathematical web
• 45:28
  is drawn that drops right onto the head of a
• 45:30
  cross country monster hiding in plain sight in a Florida suburb.
• 45:34
  It's incredible.
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: It is the ultimate checkmate. Artman thought he had beaten
• 45:38
  the system, he had lived a whole life in those
• 45:40
  twenty six years, but.
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: The science was just patiently waiting for him to run
• 45:44
  out of time, and.
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: It immediately raises a terrifying question for law enforcement nationwide.
• 45:49
  If Artman, an over the road trucker is responsible for
• 45:52
  Sharon Hammock in Michigan and another victim in Maryland, how
• 45:56
  many other women along his interstate trucking roads met the
• 45:59
  exist same fate.
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: He is currently awaiting trial, but his arrest is a
• 46:04
  monumental victory for the cold case detectives who refuse to
• 46:08
  let the Division Avenue cases fade away completely.
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: And as we bring this deep dive to a close,
• 46:13
  we really have to look back and recap the sheer
• 46:16
  tragedy and the immense tangled complexity of what happened in
• 46:19
  Grand Rapids.
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: The murders on Division Avenue from nineteen ninety four to
• 46:22
  nineteen ninety six weren't just a failure of a fourteen
• 46:25
  member police task force to catch a killer fast enough.
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: It was a profound societal failure.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: These women, mothers, daughters', former academics were forced into the
• 46:34
  margins by economic downturns, ravaged by the crack epidemic, and
• 46:38
  left incredibly vulnerable in an environment that literally treated them
• 46:41
  as the less dead.
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: Their stories are a harsh mirror. They highlight the deep
• 46:46
  flaws and how we view and protect the most vulnerable
• 46:49
  among us.
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: But at the exact same time, the resolution we are
• 46:52
  finally beginning to see showcases the relentless power of modern
• 46:57
  forensic science.
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: The DNA dough Project, genetic genealogy, PCR amplification. These aren't
• 47:03
  just cool scientific tools. They are literal instruments of delayed justice.
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: They are finally bringing the names of these women back
• 47:10
  into the light, ensuring that they are remembered not just
• 47:13
  as statistics on a dangerous street, but as human beings
• 47:16
  whose lives mattered and whose killers will be held accountable exactly,
• 47:20
  And I want to leave you the listener with a
• 47:22
  final chilling concept to ponder as you go about your day.
• 47:25
  We spent this time mapping out the terrifying ecosystem of
• 47:29
  grand rapids.
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: We saw how a single stretch of road in one
• 47:32
  mid sized Michigan city could harbor so many overlapping violent predators.
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: From Gary Dean Hartman to Garann Leon Mason to the
• 47:40
  comstock Man, all hunting in plain sight over just a
• 47:43
  few short ears. So ask yourself this, if one street
• 47:47
  in Michigan had that many wolves in the woods. What
• 47:49
  does that say about the true scale of undetected violence nationwide?
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: Our way as a society so obsessed with finding this
• 47:57
  singular evil mastermind, serial killer Ted Bundy's and the Zodiacs,
• 48:02
  that we are completely blinding ourselves to the systemic vulnerabilities
• 48:05
  that allow multiple predators to operate freely right in our
• 48:08
  own backyards.
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: It's a question that demands an answer, and one that
• 48:11
  should fundamentally change how we look at every cold case
• 48:14
  going forward. Thank you for joining us for this deep dive.
• 48:16
  Stay safe out there.