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The Bag That Waited 18 Years: K.A., 7 P.M., Unanswered · Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the fourteenth of October two thousand nineteen, a greyhound
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: named Pepper stopped at the base of a birch tree
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: along the Morrow River and would not move. His owner,
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: Connie Hale, tugged the leash once Pepper held. Wedged between
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: the roots, half buried in silt and leaf matter, was
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: a blue nylon bag, dry on the inside, intact as
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: though some one had set it down that morning. The
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: bag had been thrown in October two thousand one, found
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: in October two thousand, nineteen, eighteen years later, inside forty
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  Speaker 1: three dollars in cash, a library card, a driver's license
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  Speaker 1: set to expire in two thousand two, and a small
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: red spiral notebook. Its final entry dated the ninth of
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: October two thousand one, two initials and a time written
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: in ordinary ballpoint K A seven p M. Whoever wrote
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: those words never came home that night. The trail where
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Connie Hale walked her dog did not exist in two
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: thousand and one. The birch grove along the Morro River
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  Speaker 1: was inaccessible then thicket and conservation easement, no path, no
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: foot traffic. The bag had hung above the water line,
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  Speaker 1: sealed inside a plastic liner that trapped just enough air
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: to keep the paper dry through eighteen winters. It waited.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: The world had to build a trail before anyone could
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: find it. What that notebook meant and who KA was
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  Speaker 1: would take two more years to answer, but the answer,
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  Speaker 1: when it finally came, would unravel every assumption made. On
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: a cold October morning in two thousand one, when investigators
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  Speaker 1: stood at a river bank, saw a green Honda Civic
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  Speaker 1: parked on a gravel access road, saw a pair of
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  Speaker 1: shoes on the muddy shore, and decided that already understood
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: what had happened, they did not. Tammy Stevens grew up
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: in Radford Falls, Pennsylvania, in the kind of town where
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: the pediatric clinic on the north end of town knew
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: most families by name. She was born around nineteen seventy,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: the older of two sisters. The younger was Diane, who
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: remembered Tammy as the organized one, the one who kept
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: a paper calendar, color coded by category, and who never
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: forgot a birthday. By two thousand one, Tammy was thirty
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: one years old. She worked in medical billing at that
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: same pediatric clinic where she had once been a patient.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: It was detail work codes insurance filings, corrections, follow ups.
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  Speaker 1: She was good at it. Her supervisor later told investigators
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  Speaker 1: that Tammy was the kind of employee who caught other
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: people's errors before they became problems. Tuesdays were hers in
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  Speaker 1: a different way. For twenty three consecutive months, Tammy volunteered
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: at the Meridian Street food pantry, a few blocks from
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  Speaker 1: the clinic. She sorted donations, stocked shelves, worked the distribution window.
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  Speaker 1: The pantry coordinator later said she never missed a Tuesday
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: without calling a head, not once in nearly two years.
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  Speaker 1: It was the kind of reliability that people stopped noticing
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: because it never broke. She drove a green Honda Civic.
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  Speaker 1: She kept forty three dollars in her bag, along with
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: her library card and a small red notebook where she
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: recorded appointments and notes. She had a library card because
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: she used it. She had the notebook because she believed
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: in writing things down. There is nothing in the record
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  Speaker 1: suggesting Tammy Stevens was anything other than what she appeared
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: to be, a thirty one year old woman living a
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: deliberately organized life in a small Pennsylvania city, making herself
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: useful to children's medical records by day and her neighbour's
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  Speaker 1: food supply on Tuesdays, she had plans. Diane would later
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: see say Tammy had been talking about taking a certification
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: course in the spring, something to move up in medical administration.
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  Speaker 1: She never enrolled. On the evening of October ninth, two
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: thousand and one, a Tuesday, her co worker Patricia Ellison,
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  Speaker 1: saw Tammy walking to her car in the clinic parking
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  Speaker 1: lot at approximately six forty in the evening. Allison remembered
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  Speaker 1: it as unremarkable. Tammy had her bag on her shoulder,
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  Speaker 1: She said good night, She got in the civic and
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  Speaker 1: drove away. That was the last confirmed sighting of Tammy
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  Speaker 1: Stephens alive. The pantry on Meridian Street waited for her
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  Speaker 1: that night. She did not call, she did not arrive,
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  Speaker 1: and nobody at the pantry in all the years that
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: followed could remember a single other Tuesday when that had happened.
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  Speaker 1: The green Honda Civic was still there. The next morning,
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  Speaker 1: someone spotted it parked at the gravel access off the
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Morrow River, engine off doors unlocked, a Tuesday night bag
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  Speaker 1: on the back seat, less than a mile from a
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  Speaker 1: stretch of riverbank that did not yet have a name.
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  Speaker 1: Tammy's shoes were on the shore. That image stopped the
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: original investigation almost before it started. Two shoes side by
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  Speaker 1: side at the water's edge. No note, no sign of struggle,
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  Speaker 1: no witnesses to the detective who first walked that bank.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: The arrangement spoke for itself. Frank Carusoe filed the case
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: as probable suicide and closed it in roughly six weeks.
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  Speaker 1: But here's the thing about those shoes. Nobody who knew
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Tammy Stephens could reconcile them with who she was. She
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: had a certification course she wanted to take in spring.
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  Speaker 1: She had twenty three months of unbroken tuesdays. She had
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: a red note book where she wrote things down. The
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: kind of person who, if she had made a decision,
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  Speaker 1: would have called. Carusoe noticed the pantry anomaly. He wrote
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: it down. Not once in nearly two years had she
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: missed a Tuesday without calling ahead. The evening of October ninth,
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: two thousand and one, she did not call. He flagged
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: it in the file, circled it, then watched the case
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  Speaker 1: close around him. He kept a copy of the file
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: in a manila envelope in his garage for eleven years
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  Speaker 1: until he retired carusoe carried that detail the way you
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: carry a splinter. You can feel but cannot reach. The
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: trail that would eventually break the case open was not
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: built until spring twenty nineteen. A conservation easement converted the
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  Speaker 1: overgrown river bank into the Francis Keller Walking Path, and
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: that autumn a woman named Connie Hale took her rescued
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: greyhound Pepper for a walk along the new trail. Pepper
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  Speaker 1: found the bag. It was wedged between the roots of
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  Speaker 1: a birch tree just above the water line, directly beneath
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  Speaker 1: the pedestrian bridge, A blue nylon bag inside a sealed
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: plastic liner, intact dry were four objects, a library card,
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  Speaker 1: a driver's license expiring in two thousand two forty three
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: dollars in cash, and a small red spiral notebook. The
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: last entry in the notebook read nine October two thousand
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  Speaker 1: one KA seven p m dry paper, eighteen years under
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  Speaker 1: a bridge. The bag had snagged on the roots when
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: it was thrown from above, caught air inside the plastic liner,
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  Speaker 1: and stayed there sealed while the river ran beneath it.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: Season after season. Nobody had walked that bank until the
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: path was built. The bag had simply waited. Detective Amanda
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: Simmons received it fourteen months after it was found December
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty. She had a habit of reading cold case
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  Speaker 1: files on Friday afternoons. She had closed three and four years.
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  Speaker 1: She read the Stephens file over a weekend, and on
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  Speaker 1: Monday morning she called Frank Crusoe. He answered on the
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  Speaker 1: first ring. Simmons brought the contents of the bag to
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: the clinic records archived on microfiche. She was looking for
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: any one in Tammy's documented environment whose initials matched those
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: two letters, K and A. The clinic service records from
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: two thousand one showed three h v A C maintenance
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: calls from a company called Regent Air Services. The technician
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  Speaker 1: assigned to the Meridian Street district for all three visits
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  Speaker 1: was named Keith Andrews. The last visit was logged in
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  Speaker 1: September two thousand one, six weeks before Tammy walked to
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  Speaker 1: her car for the last time. That was the first
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: imagelooke closing, and the moment it closed, a larger one
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  Speaker 1: opened picture. The investigation that followed as a series of
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: concentric circles closing inward. The outermost circle Andrews was no
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  Speaker 1: longer at Regent Air. He had worked as an independent
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  Speaker 1: contractor since two thousand eight. He lived in Allegheny County,
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: married two adult sons. He had coached youth baseball. He
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: had no criminal record. Every surface fact about Keith Andrews
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  Speaker 1: pointed toward a man who had built in the twenty
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: years since Tammy Stephens drowned something that looked exactly like
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  Speaker 1: an ordinary life. But DNA evidence collected from Tammy's clothing
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: in two thousand and one had never been compared to anyone.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: It sat in storage from October two thousand and one
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  Speaker 1: until March twenty twenty one, nineteen years and five months,
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  Speaker 1: because the investigation had closed without producing a single suspect.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: In early twenty twenty one, Tammy's sister Diane submitted her
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  Speaker 1: own DNA to a commercial genealogy database, a step recommended
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  Speaker 1: by a victim advocacy group she had been contacting since
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  Speaker 1: two thousand and six. A certified genealogist named Monica Pratt
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  Speaker 1: worked the result, cling partial familial match backward through a
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  Speaker 1: published family tree. The tree belonged to a cousin of
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  Speaker 1: Andrew's uploaded years earlier. For ancestral research, and it included
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: the paternal line of Andrews's family. Pratt identified the intersection.
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  Speaker 1: Simmons now had a name attached to the initials. She
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: needed a confirmable biological sample. In March twenty twenty one,
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  Speaker 1: Simmons documented Andrew's discarding a paper coffee cup in a
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: public trash bin outside a hardware store in his neighborhood.
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  Speaker 1: That cup went to the lab. The DNA on the
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  Speaker 1: rim matched the biological material recovered from Tammy Stevens's clothing
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  Speaker 1: in October two thousand one, material that had been sitting
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  Speaker 1: in an evidence locker uncompered for exactly nineteen years and
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  Speaker 1: five months. Two concentric circles the initials the DNA, both
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  Speaker 1: pointing at the same man, but Andrews said nothing when
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  Speaker 1: arrested no statement. The investigation held then inside a county
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: jail cell, Andrews sat across from a man named Bobby Ferris,
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  Speaker 1: held on unrelated fraud charges, and told him everything. The
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  Speaker 1: gravel access road, the shoes, the cold of the October water,
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: the bridge. He described throwing the bag because he needed
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  Speaker 1: it to look like she had chosen to go in.
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  Speaker 1: Ferris contacted his attorney the next morning. A cooperation agreement
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  Speaker 1: was in place within a week. Confronted with Ferris's account
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  Speaker 1: and the DNA match, Andrews gave a recorded formal confession.
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  Speaker 1: He confirmed he had built a relationship with Tammy Stevens
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  Speaker 1: through his access to the clinic as a service technician.
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  Speaker 1: He confirmed she had ended the contact and told him
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  Speaker 1: she intended to speak with his wife. He confirmed what
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  Speaker 1: happened at the river. And here is where the head
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  Speaker 1: fake finally lands, because for eighteen years, the investigation such
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: as it was, had been looking at Tammy's state of mind.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: The shoes, the Tuesday absence, the silence, every available data
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  Speaker 1: point seemed to build a case for a woman in crisis.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: The anomalies Caruso had circled the mist call the notebook
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: were not large enough in two thousand and one to
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  Speaker 1: redirect that reading. But the red notebook was never about
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  Speaker 1: her state of mind. It was a record, an appointment
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  Speaker 1: written down by a woman who believed in writing things down.
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  Speaker 1: Seven p m k. A not a farewell note, a
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  Speaker 1: calendar entry. Tammy Stevens went to the River to meet
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  Speaker 1: someone she knew. She brought her back. She brought her notebook.
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  Speaker 1: She wrote it down the way she wrote everything down
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  Speaker 1: because she had no reason to believe she was walking
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  Speaker 1: into anything she would not walk back from. Christine Baxter
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  Speaker 1: understood something about that, though she had never met Tammy Stevens.
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  Speaker 1: In the summer of nineteen ninety eight, Baxter was working
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: as a receptionist at a dental office in Greenfield Township,
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  Speaker 1: another building on an Andrews's service contract. He followed her
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  Speaker 1: to her car one evening in August and grabbed her
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  Speaker 1: arm hard enough to leave bruises. A coworker interrupted. Baxter
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  Speaker 1: did not report it, She said later she did not
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  Speaker 1: know how to name what had happened. Three weeks after
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: Andrews's arrest, when his photograph appeared in a regional news alert,
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  Speaker 1: Baxter called the police within the hour. Her account was
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: admitted at trial as pattern evidence of predatory conduct, a
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: documented behavioral signature stretching back at least three years before
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: Tammy Stevens ever wrote those two initials in her note book.
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  Speaker 1: The last circle closed in September twenty twenty two Radford
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  Speaker 1: County Court one count of first degree murder life without
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  Speaker 1: the possibility of parole. The case against Keith Andrews moved
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: quickly once the confession was recorded. Prosecutors in Ratford County
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: had the DNA from a coffee cup retrieved from a
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: public trash bin. They had the recorded conversation with Bobby Ferris,
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  Speaker 1: delivered in specific detail the gravel access road, the shoes
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  Speaker 1: left on the bank the cold of the October water,
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  Speaker 1: and they had Tammy Stevens's own handwriting two initials and
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: a time, preserved in a red spiral notebook for eighteen
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: years above the water line of the Morrow River. Andrews
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: was arrested in Allegheny County in May of twenty twenty one.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: He was fifty one years old. He had been coaching
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: youth baseball. His two adult children, by all public accounts,
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: had no knowledge of what their father had done two
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: decades earlier. He did not speak to police after his arrest.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: The formal recorded confession came only after detectives confronted him
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: with Ferris's account and the DNA match. At that point,
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: the geometry of the evidence had no exit. Andrews confirmed
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: that he had lured Tammy Stephens to the river on
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: the evening of October ninth, two thousand one. He confirmed
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: that he had drowned her. He confirmed that he had
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: thrown her bag from the pedestrian bridge to make the
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: scene read as a voluntary walk into the water. The
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: trial concluded in September of twenty twenty two one count
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: of first degree murder. The verdict was guilty. The sentence
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: was life without the possibility of parole. Detective Amanda Simmons
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: had opened the case file in December of two thousand,
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: twenty fourteen months after Connie Hale's greyhound pulled a blue
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: nylon bag from between birch roots on a trail that
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: had not existed when Andrews threw it. Simmons had worked
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: the lead from a single notation in a note book,
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: cross referenced against microfiche records of a clinic's service contracts,
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: and obtained a DNA sample from a discarded coffee cup
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: on a public sidewalk. The match to biological material collected
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: from Tammy's clothing in two thousand one, material that had
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: sat uncompered in storage from October two thousand one until
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: March twenty twenty one until March twenty twenty one was confirmed.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: In the spring of twenty twenty one, Frank Caruso the
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: original detective had retired in twenty twelve after thirty one years.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: He had kept a copy of the file in a
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: Manila envelope in his garage. He had written down one
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: anomaly that never went anywhere. Tammy never missed a Tuesday
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: without calling the pantry. October ninth was a Tuesday. She
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: did not call nobody in two thousand one followed that
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: thread far enough to find where it led. Carusoe was
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: in the court room the day the verdict came in.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: He sat in the gallery. He did not speak to reporters.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: He went home, took the Manila envelope from the bottom
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: drawer of the filing cabinet in his garage and put
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: it in the recycling His wife made dinner, he ate it.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: Diane Stevens had been driving to Radford Falls every October
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: ninth since two thousand six. She would park near the river,
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: walk to the bank and sit there for an hour.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: She had spent fifteen years sending Tammy's case to cold
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: case organizations, writing letters, making calls, keeping the file alive
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: with the same quiet discipline her sister had kept her
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Tuesday volunteer shifts. The river had given her nothing. The
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: system had given her a closed case and a manner
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: of death listed as indeterminate. After the conviction, Diane spoke
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: briefly on the record. She said she planned to walk
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: the Francis Keller Trail the following October. She wanted to
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: see the birch trees that is the weight the trail carries.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: Now a conservation path built on land that was inaccessible
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: for eighteen years. A dog named Pepper out for a
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: walk on a Monday afternoon in October of two thousand nineteen,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: pulling a bag from the roots of a birch tree
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: above the water line, a sealed plastic interior that had
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: trapped air and kept paper dry through two decades of
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: Pennsylvania winters. Tammy Stevens was thirty one years old in
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: two thousand one. She kept a note book. She wrote
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: down appointments, dates, names, initials, because she kept records of everything,
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: because that was the kind of person she was. She
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: volunteered every Tuesday for nearly two years. She showed up,
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: she called when she could not. She was methodical and
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: reliable and present in the lives of the people around her.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: The last entry she ever made was also a record,
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: not a farewell, a time and two letters written by
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: a woman who had no reason to believe the evening
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: would end any other way than with her driving home.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: The note book survived. The case is closed. This show
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: is made by Obomedia.