Latest / True Crime: Killer Confessions / The Letter Behind the Shelf: Confession Postmarked June 19, 1999
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: It is 8.47 in the morning on the 4th of June, 2019.
- 0:09Speaker 1: Vicki Bishop is sorting through a cardboard box in a
- 0:12Speaker 1: storage room at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Dunbar, Ohio. The
- 0:16Speaker 1: box is full of old mail, envelopes no one has
- 0:20Speaker 1: opened in years, and then she finds one that is
- 0:23Speaker 1: postmarked June 19th, 1919-1990, nearly 20 years old. addressed to
- 0:30Speaker 1: a police department that never existed at that address. Inside,
- 0:35Speaker 1: a single handwritten page describes, in calm sequential language, how
- 0:39Speaker 1: a 22-year-old man died. That letter had been sitting in
- 0:43Speaker 1: a box behind a shelf for two decades, and the
- 0:47Speaker 1: man it described had never had justice. The case of
- 0:51Speaker 1: Mark Webber had gone cold before the internet changed everything
- 0:55Speaker 1: before DNA databases rewrote cold case investigations, before anyone thought
- 1:00Speaker 1: to look behind that shelf, what Vicky Bishop held in
- 1:03Speaker 1: her hands that morning would unravel something that had been
- 1:06Speaker 1: carefully hidden for 20 years. And it would raise a
- 1:09Speaker 1: question that no one in Dunbar had ever thought to ask.
- 1:13Speaker 1: Why would someone confess to a murder and deliberately send
- 1:16Speaker 1: the letter to the wrong address? There is something particular
- 1:19Speaker 1: about this case that resists easy explanation. The answer, when
- 1:24Speaker 1: it finally came, was not what investigators expected. Dunbar, Ohio
- 1:29Speaker 1: sits in the kind of American geography that announces itself quietly.
- 1:34Speaker 1: Small enough that neighbors know each other's cars. Large enough
- 1:37Speaker 1: that a person can disappear into ordinary routine without anyone
- 1:42Speaker 1: questioning it. Birchfield Drive runs through a residential stretch where
- 1:46Speaker 1: houses sit close together, Driveways shared in the informal way
- 1:50Speaker 1: of streets where children have always played. Mark Webber grew
- 1:54Speaker 1: up on Birchfield Drive. He was 22 years old in
- 1:57Speaker 1: June of 1999, and he had recently finished something. In
- 2:02Speaker 1: December of 1998, he had graduated with a degree in
- 2:06Speaker 1: Applied Communications. Six months later he was still living at
- 2:10Speaker 1: home with his parents, job hunting the way a lot
- 2:13Speaker 1: of new graduates do, sending applications, waiting. figuring out what
- 2:18Speaker 1: comes next. He was not a person in crisis. There
- 2:21Speaker 1: were no documented enemies, no debts that had gone sideways,
- 2:25Speaker 1: no conflicts anyone could name. His mother, Diane, would later
- 2:29Speaker 1: tell investigators that her son was methodical about small things
- 2:34Speaker 1: he kept to routines. He answered his phone. That last
- 2:37Speaker 1: detail mattered more than it seemed. Pete Collier had been
- 2:41Speaker 1: Mark's roommate in Columbus during the university years. After graduation,
- 2:46Speaker 1: they stayed close in the way that good friends do.
- 2:49Speaker 1: Regular calls. Every Wednesday, 11 at night. Collier said later
- 2:54Speaker 1: that the rhythm of those calls was so consistent, he
- 2:57Speaker 1: stopped thinking of it as something they had agreed to do.
- 3:00Speaker 1: It was just what happened on Wednesdays. Mark did not
- 3:04Speaker 1: call on the 9th of June, 1999. Collier thought maybe
- 3:09Speaker 1: something had come up. Mark did not call on the
- 3:12Speaker 1: 16th of June either. By then, Mark had been dead
- 3:16Speaker 1: for two days. His body was found in his ground
- 3:19Speaker 1: floor bedroom at the family home on Birchfield Drive. The
- 3:22Speaker 1: medical examiner placed time of death between 1 and 3
- 3:25Speaker 1: in the morning on June 15th. The cause was a
- 3:28Speaker 1: blunt force injury to the posterior left region of the skull.
- 3:32Speaker 1: There was no sign of forced entry anywhere in the house.
- 3:36Speaker 1: Nothing had been taken. The doors were locked. Diane Weber
- 3:40Speaker 1: had no explanation for it. Neither did anyone else. Mark
- 3:44Speaker 1: had no history that pointed toward violence finding him. He
- 3:48Speaker 1: was 22. He had a degree. He was planning what
- 3:51Speaker 1: came next. And now, there was nothing next. His sister
- 3:56Speaker 1: Amy was 16 that summer. She had been at a
- 3:59Speaker 1: friend's house the night Mark was killed and came home
- 4:02Speaker 1: to a house that would never be the same. In 2019,
- 4:07Speaker 1: Amy was 36, living in Pittsburgh with her husband and children.
- 4:12Speaker 1: She would travel back to Ohio for the trial. So
- 4:14Speaker 1: would Pete Collier who drove in from Columbus the day
- 4:17Speaker 1: the verdict came down. A man who had spent 20
- 4:20Speaker 1: years thinking about two missed Wednesday phone calls. The investigation
- 4:25Speaker 1: in 1999 moved the way investigations did in that era.
- 4:29Speaker 1: Detectives canvassed the neighborhood. They looked at everyone who had
- 4:33Speaker 1: been near the house. One name came up more than once.
- 4:37Speaker 1: a young man who lived three houses down on Birchfield Drive,
- 4:41Speaker 1: someone Mark had known casually since childhood. They had shot
- 4:45Speaker 1: basketball together in the Weber driveway. His name was Jason Hunt.
- 4:50Speaker 1: He was 24 years old. Hunt was interviewed twice in
- 4:54Speaker 1: July of 1999. He was cooperative. His then-girlfriend confirmed he
- 5:00Speaker 1: had been with her until midnight. The medical examiner's window
- 5:04Speaker 1: started at one in the morning. The lead detective, Sergeant
- 5:08Speaker 1: Tom Greer, noted in his case file that Hunt was
- 5:11Speaker 1: not a significant suspect. No follow-up interview was scheduled. By 2002,
- 5:17Speaker 1: the Weber case was formally classified as cold. Greer would
- 5:22Speaker 1: carry it anyway. When he retired in 2011, he told
- 5:26Speaker 1: colleagues that the Weber case was the only one he
- 5:30Speaker 1: was leaving behind that he truly believed he should have solved.
- 5:35Speaker 1: He did not know yet that a letter was already waiting.
- 5:38Speaker 1: Postmarked 1999, sitting behind a shelf in a building that
- 5:42Speaker 1: had changed its name, twice, since the envelope was sealed.
- 5:46Speaker 1: What no one knew in 2002 or in 2011 was
- 5:49Speaker 1: that the detail which would eventually crack the case had
- 5:52Speaker 1: never been made public. The precise location of the wound.
- 5:56Speaker 1: The exact entry point into the house. Those details lived
- 6:00Speaker 1: only in the case file and in the memory of
- 6:03Speaker 1: one other person. the person who was there. The letter
- 6:06Speaker 1: already existed. That is the image that keeps returning. While
- 6:11Speaker 1: Tom Greer filed papers and closed drawers and walked out
- 6:16Speaker 1: of the precinct for the last time in 2011, a
- 6:20Speaker 1: white standard envelope was sitting in the dark behind a shelf.
- 6:24Speaker 1: It had been there since the summer of 1999. Someone
- 6:28Speaker 1: had addressed it in blue ballpoint pen pressed a first-class
- 6:31Speaker 1: stamp to the corner, and dropped it in a mailbox.
- 6:35Speaker 1: The Postal Service had done its job, the letter had arrived,
- 6:39Speaker 1: and then it had simply waited. The address on the
- 6:43Speaker 1: envelope read Dunbar Police Department, followed by 440 Vance Street.
- 6:48Speaker 1: That address had never housed a police department. In 1999,
- 6:53Speaker 1: it was the home of the Dunbar Neighborhood Alliance. a
- 6:57Speaker 1: community organization that closed its doors in 2003. Redeemer Lutheran
- 7:02Speaker 1: Church bought the building in 2006 and renovated it. During
- 7:06Speaker 1: a second renovation in 2017, workers pushed three boxes of
- 7:11Speaker 1: old correspondence behind a storage shelf. No one opened them.
- 7:15Speaker 1: No one threw them away. They sat. On the morning
- 7:18Speaker 1: of June 4, 2019, a volunteer named Vicki Bishop was
- 7:24Speaker 1: reorganizing that storage room. She reached the third box. Inside it,
- 7:29Speaker 1: among the institutional envelopes and expired notices, she found one
- 7:34Speaker 1: that felt different. The handwriting on the front was deliberate. Careful,
- 7:39Speaker 1: the return address was blank. She turned it over. The
- 7:43Speaker 1: postmark read June 19, 1999. She called 911 at 8.47
- 7:45Speaker 1: in the morning. Then she sat down in a folding chair.
- 7:54Speaker 1: and did not move until an officer arrived 14 minutes later.
- 7:58Speaker 1: Detective Jeffrey Mitchell was 41 years old in 2019. He
- 8:03Speaker 1: had been handling cold cases as a secondary assignment for
- 8:07Speaker 1: three years, pulling folders on afternoons when the active caseload
- 8:11Speaker 1: allowed it. He had not worked the Weber case in 1919.
- 8:14Speaker 1: He was 19 that summer when the envelope reached him.
- 8:20Speaker 1: The first thing he did was read the letter without
- 8:23Speaker 1: touching it. One page, blue ballpoint, unlined paper. The handwriting
- 8:28Speaker 1: was measured. The language was what one witness would later
- 8:31Speaker 1: describe as calm and sequential. It described Mark Webber's death.
- 8:37Speaker 1: It named the instrument, a blunt object. It named the
- 8:40Speaker 1: entry point into the house, the north bulkhead door, a
- 8:43Speaker 1: basement access on the rear exterior. that the Weber family
- 8:47Speaker 1: had left unlocked for 11 years, and it named the
- 8:50Speaker 1: location of the wound, with a precision that stopped Mitchell mid-sentence,
- 8:55Speaker 1: the posterior left region of the skull. That detail had
- 8:59Speaker 1: never appeared in any press release. It had never been
- 9:03Speaker 1: given to any reporter. It existed in the case file
- 9:06Speaker 1: and in the medical examiner's report, and nowhere else that
- 9:09Speaker 1: was public. Mitchell picked up the phone and called Tom
- 9:13Speaker 1: Greer that afternoon. Greer confirmed it in under a minute.
- 9:17Speaker 1: The location of the wound had never been made public.
- 9:20Speaker 1: He said he was certain. Mitchell now had a letter
- 9:23Speaker 1: that knew something only the killer could know. The question
- 9:27Speaker 1: was who sent it. The letter carried no signature, no
- 9:31Speaker 1: return address, no fingerprints that survived 20 years in a
- 9:35Speaker 1: cardboard box. Handwriting analysis placed it as likely adult male,
- 9:39Speaker 1: moderately educated. consistent with someone writing under controlled emotional stress.
- 9:45Speaker 1: That was not a name. Then, 13 days later, Mitchell's
- 9:49Speaker 1: phone rang again. Detective Sandra Boyer, of the Carver County
- 9:53Speaker 1: Sheriff's Office, was calling about a man in the county
- 9:56Speaker 1: detention center. He had been picked up on an unrelated demand.
- 10:00Speaker 1: altercation charge. While waiting out his time he had started
- 10:04Speaker 1: talking to his cellmate. Talking at night, Oyer said, with
- 10:07Speaker 1: what she described as a kind of exhausted precision. The
- 10:12Speaker 1: cellmate's name was Dennis Farrell. Farrell had asked to speak
- 10:15Speaker 1: with someone about what he had heard. He submitted a
- 10:19Speaker 1: handwritten statement. Three pages. The man in the next bunk
- 10:23Speaker 1: was named Jason Hunt. He was 44 years old. He
- 10:27Speaker 1: had lived on Birchfield Drive in 1999. Three houses down
- 10:32Speaker 1: from the Weebers. Picture the driveway on Birchfield Drive. Two
- 10:36Speaker 1: kids shooting basketball. One of them the boy who lived there,
- 10:40Speaker 1: the other one from three houses down. That is the
- 10:43Speaker 1: entire relationship. Casual, unremarkable. The kind of proximity that produces
- 10:49Speaker 1: nothing except familiarity with someone's front yard, their routines, the
- 10:54Speaker 1: sound of their door. According to Farrell's statement, Hunt described
- 10:58Speaker 1: the night of June 15th with a specificity that did
- 11:02Speaker 1: not feel like rumor. He described going down the side
- 11:06Speaker 1: of the house in the dark. He described the north
- 11:09Speaker 1: bulkhead door. He described it opening without resistance. He described
- 11:13Speaker 1: the interior. He described what happened inside. and then he
- 11:19Speaker 1: described the letter. He had mailed it. Four days after
- 11:23Speaker 1: the killing, he had addressed it to what he thought
- 11:25Speaker 1: was the police department. He told Farrell he chose that
- 11:29Speaker 1: address because he needed someone to know, someday, but he
- 11:33Speaker 1: could not face what that knowledge would do to the
- 11:35Speaker 1: family right then. He had sent a confession to the
- 11:38Speaker 1: wrong building on purpose. On June 19th, 2019, Mitchell and
- 11:41Speaker 1: Oyer sat across from Hunt in an interview room. Hunt
- 11:47Speaker 1: confirmed the bulkhead entry. He confirmed the time, approximately 1.30
- 11:52Speaker 1: in the morning of June 15th. He described an argument
- 11:55Speaker 1: that had escalated from a dispute over a shared driveway boundary,
- 11:59Speaker 1: a grievance so small it barely has a name, something
- 12:02Speaker 1: that could have been settled with a conversation in the daylight.
- 12:06Speaker 1: Now here is where the case bends back on itself.
- 12:09Speaker 1: Investigators had spent the summer of 1999 looking past Hunt,
- 12:14Speaker 1: because his alibi was partially corroborated. His then-girlfriend confirmed he
- 12:19Speaker 1: was with her until midnight. The medical examiner's window opened
- 12:23Speaker 1: at one in the morning. Clean gap, no overlap. Hunt
- 12:27Speaker 1: moved to the back of the folder, but the corroboration
- 12:30Speaker 1: only went to midnight. The second half of the window,
- 12:33Speaker 1: the half that mattered, had never been accounted for. Tom
- 12:37Speaker 1: Greer had noted in his case file that the transient
- 12:40Speaker 1: theory was weak. He had noted that Hunt was cooperative
- 12:43Speaker 1: What the file did not contain was a follow-up interview,
- 12:47Speaker 1: scheduled for after that initial summer. The cooperation itself had
- 12:51Speaker 1: worked as camouflage. When forensic technicians traced Hunt's 1999 vehicle
- 12:56Speaker 1: through a chain of successive sales, they found it had
- 12:59Speaker 1: not been destroyed. It sat in a salvage yard in
- 13:02Speaker 1: Licking County. Trace evidence was recovered. The formal recorded confession
- 13:06Speaker 1: followed on July 3, 2019, with Hunt's attorney present. It
- 13:12Speaker 1: was read aloud in its entirety. At trial, the verdict
- 13:16Speaker 1: came down on November 14, 2019. First-degree murder. Life without
- 13:22Speaker 1: the possibility of parole. And here is the image that
- 13:25Speaker 1: does not resolve cleanly. In the spring of 2020, a
- 13:30Speaker 1: detective from Shelton County named Brian Howell called Mitchell. Howell
- 13:34Speaker 1: had read about the Weber case in a regional paper.
- 13:37Speaker 1: He had been carrying a file of his own. A
- 13:41Speaker 1: 22-year-old case from Millhaven, 40 miles west of Dunbar. A
- 13:45Speaker 1: young man named Kevin Straw, 20 years old, found dead
- 13:49Speaker 1: in his home in the summer of 1997. Blunt force
- 13:52Speaker 1: trauma to the posterior skull. No forced entry. Nothing. Taken.
- 13:57Speaker 1: The forensic wound profiles matched. Hunt had never been asked
- 14:01Speaker 1: about Kevin Straw. He had never confessed to Kevin Straw.
- 14:05Speaker 1: But the evidence produced a second conviction in Shelton County,
- 14:09Speaker 1: And Jason Hunt's name now sits at the center of
- 14:11Speaker 1: two case files that each look from the outside, like
- 14:15Speaker 1: the work of someone who knew how to leave a
- 14:17Speaker 1: house exactly as he found it. The letter told investigators
- 14:21Speaker 1: what Hunt needed someone to know. It did not tell
- 14:24Speaker 1: them everything he knew. Kevin Straw's family had waited 24
- 14:28Speaker 1: years without a name. They got one not because of
- 14:32Speaker 1: anything they did, but because Brian Howell read a regional
- 14:35Speaker 1: newspaper at the right moment. recognized a wound profile he
- 14:39Speaker 1: had memorized years before, and made a phone call. That
- 14:43Speaker 1: is how the second case closed, not through a confession,
- 14:46Speaker 1: through pattern recognition and a phone call between two detectives
- 14:50Speaker 1: who had never met. The straw conviction followed the Weber
- 14:53Speaker 1: verdict into the record. Hunt offered nothing about Millhaven. He
- 14:57Speaker 1: gave investigators the Weber confession in that July 3rd interview,
- 15:01Speaker 1: measured and detailed, and then the door stayed shut. The
- 15:05Speaker 1: forensic comparison did the remaining work. Two separate trials. Two
- 15:10Speaker 1: separate convictions. Life without parole on each. Jason Hunt is
- 15:15Speaker 1: currently incarcerated. He was 44 years old when the Weber
- 15:19Speaker 1: verdict came down in November of 2019. Under Ohio sentencing
- 15:24Speaker 1: for first-degree murder with no parole eligibility, there is no
- 15:28Speaker 1: release date to track. The Shelton County conviction added a
- 15:32Speaker 1: second permanent layer For the families of both Mark Weber
- 15:35Speaker 1: and Kevin Straw, that is the legal status of the
- 15:38Speaker 1: case as it stands today. What remains open, and the
- 15:42Speaker 1: case file does not resolve this, is what moved Hunt
- 15:45Speaker 1: to write the letter at all. His explanation, relayed through
- 15:49Speaker 1: Dennis Farrell, was that he needed someone to know someday,
- 15:53Speaker 1: but could not bear what that knowledge would do to
- 15:55Speaker 1: the Weber family at that moment. He addressed it to
- 15:59Speaker 1: a building that had never been a police station. The
- 16:02Speaker 1: letter sat in a cardboard box for 20 years, passed
- 16:05Speaker 1: through two institutional hands, and survived a renovation that could
- 16:09Speaker 1: easily have sent it to a dumpster. The margin by
- 16:12Speaker 1: which it reached Vicki Bishop's hands on the morning of
- 16:15Speaker 1: June 4, 2019, is not comfortable to calculate. There is
- 16:20Speaker 1: also the matter of what the letter did not say.
- 16:23Speaker 1: It described the Weber killing with specificity. It said nothing
- 16:27Speaker 1: about Millhaven. Nothing about Kevin Straw, whatever Hunt needed someone
- 16:31Speaker 1: to know. It was bounded. The letter was not a
- 16:34Speaker 1: full accounting. It was a partial one, shaped by limits
- 16:38Speaker 1: only Hunt understood. Tom Greer learned what the letter contained
- 16:42Speaker 1: by phone. From Mitchell, the same afternoon, Bishop found it.
- 16:47Speaker 1: Greer had retired in 2011. He had spent the last
- 16:51Speaker 1: years of his career carrying the Weber case as the
- 16:54Speaker 1: one he should have solved. According to his own notes
- 16:57Speaker 1: from 1999, he had already doubted the transient theory. He
- 17:01Speaker 1: had already flagged the wound location as unusual. He had
- 17:05Speaker 1: interviewed Hunt twice and found him cooperative. The cooperation had
- 17:09Speaker 1: been enough to move the investigation in another direction. The
- 17:13Speaker 1: notes were right. The conclusion drawn from them was not.
- 17:16Speaker 1: Mitchell was 19 years old when Mark Webber died on
- 17:19Speaker 1: Birchfield Drive. He had no connection to the original investigations.
- 17:24Speaker 1: He had been assigned cold cases as a secondary portfolio,
- 17:27Speaker 1: not a primary one. When Vicki Bishop called 911 at 8.47
- 17:33Speaker 1: in the morning, she reached a department that happened to
- 17:36Speaker 1: have a detective. Three years into learning how to read
- 17:39Speaker 1: old files, that detail, like the salvage yard in Licking
- 17:43Speaker 1: County and the cardboard box behind a shelf, belongs to
- 17:46Speaker 1: a category the case record does not have a formal
- 17:49Speaker 1: name for. Pete Collier drove from Columbus for the verdict.
- 17:52Speaker 1: He had spent 20 years unable to account for two
- 17:56Speaker 1: missed Wednesday phone calls. He had no evidence, no theory,
- 18:00Speaker 1: no name, he had only a broken routine, and the
- 18:04Speaker 1: specific weight of a friendship interrupted without explanation. He was
- 18:09Speaker 1: in the courtroom on November 14, 2019, when the jury
- 18:13Speaker 1: foreman read the verdict aloud. Mark Webber was 22 years old.
- 18:19Speaker 1: He had graduated six months before he died. with a
- 18:22Speaker 1: degree in applied communications, and he was living at home
- 18:26Speaker 1: on Birchfield Drive while he looked for work. His bedroom
- 18:30Speaker 1: was on the ground floor. He had no documented enemies,
- 18:33Speaker 1: no outstanding debts, no known conflicts with anyone. His friend
- 18:38Speaker 1: Pete Collier called him every Wednesday night at 11. He was,
- 18:42Speaker 1: by every account in the case file, exactly what the
- 18:44Speaker 1: record says he was. A young man at the beginning
- 18:48Speaker 1: of something. That is what the letter arrived too late
- 18:50Speaker 1: to change, and too late to restore. What the letter
- 18:54Speaker 1: did do, 20 years after Hunt addressed it to the
- 18:57Speaker 1: wrong building, and it sat behind a shelf until a
- 19:00Speaker 1: volunteer found it, was give Mitchell the one detail that
- 19:04Speaker 1: could not be faked, and had never been published. The
- 19:07Speaker 1: exact location of the wound. The bulkhead door. The time.
- 19:13Speaker 1: Those three elements, written in blue ballpoint on unlined paper
- 19:17Speaker 1: and postmarked June 19, 1999, became the architecture of a
- 19:23Speaker 1: conviction two decades later. There is something in this case
- 19:26Speaker 1: that does not settle easily, not the verdict that is
- 19:30Speaker 1: clear and documented. What does not settle is the image
- 19:33Speaker 1: of a man who killed someone he had known since childhood,
- 19:37Speaker 1: then sat down four days later and wrote a letter
- 19:40Speaker 1: describing what he had done and addressed it deliberately to
- 19:44Speaker 1: a place where it would never arrive. He needed someone
- 19:47Speaker 1: to know. He ensured no one. one would. Those two
- 19:51Speaker 1: facts coexisted in him for 20 years, and the only
- 19:55Speaker 1: reason they did not coexist for 20 more is a
- 19:58Speaker 1: volunteer reorganizing church storage on an ordinary Tuesday morning. Diane
- 20:05Speaker 1: Weber attended every day of the trial. She was 67
- 20:09Speaker 1: years old. Amy Weber came from Pittsburgh with her husband.
- 20:13Speaker 1: Pete Collier drove in from Columbus. They were all there
- 20:16Speaker 1: on November 14th when the verdict was read. The case
- 20:20Speaker 1: file does not record what any of them said afterward.
- 20:23Speaker 1: Some things the record is not built to hold. Mark
- 20:26Speaker 1: Weber would have been 42 years old in 2019. Whatever
- 20:31Speaker 1: he was at the beginning of Mitt's that job search
- 20:34Speaker 1: that next chapter, those Wednesday calls. It ended on Birchfield
- 20:38Speaker 1: Drive before any of it had a chance to take shape.
- 20:41Speaker 1: His name is what remains, and the letter, postmarked nowhere useful,
- 20:46Speaker 1: that somehow found its way back to him anyway. This
- 20:50Speaker 1: show is made by Oboe Media.