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The Pill Bottle That Unlocked Thirteen Quiet Murders · Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases

0:03
Speaker 1: On the morning of February fourteenth, nineteen ninety one, a
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Speaker 1: utility lineman named Aaron Bailey was walking a routine meter
0:10
Speaker 1: route along Colton Ridge Road in Harwick, Ohio. He was
0:14
Speaker 1: not looking for anything unusual. Then he crouched beside a
0:18
Speaker 1: basement window and saw a proscription pill bottle sitting on
0:22
Speaker 1: the exterior ledge, half buried in frozen mud, the label
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Speaker 1: still legible. The name on that label was Lorie Hoffman.
0:30
Speaker 1: She had been dead for five days. That bottle would
0:32
Speaker 1: spend twenty three years in a county storage room. Nobody
0:36
Speaker 1: tested it, nobody needed to. Lourie Hoffman was twenty eight
0:41
Speaker 1: years old and had no diagnosed heart condition, but a
0:44
Speaker 1: physician had signed her death certificate in under forty eight
0:48
Speaker 1: hours and written two words cardiac arrhythmia. The case was
0:53
Speaker 1: closed before it began. What nobody in Harwick knew was
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Speaker 1: that the bottle held a secret that could only be
1:00
Speaker 1: read by a laboratory, and that the secret connected to
1:04
Speaker 1: at least thirteen other people whose deaths had also been
1:08
Speaker 1: recorded as natural. This is the story of how one
1:11
Speaker 1: pill bottle, one locked ledger, and one decision made by
1:15
Speaker 1: a young woman cleaning out her grandmother's bedroom finally cracked open,
1:19
Speaker 1: the coldest case in Harwick County history. Laurie Hoffman grew
1:23
Speaker 1: up in Harwick, a mid sized county seat town in
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Speaker 1: central Ohio where most people recognized your last name before
1:30
Speaker 1: they learned your first. She was the youngest of three children.
1:34
Speaker 1: Her mother, Vera Hoffman, would later describe her as the
1:37
Speaker 1: kind of person who remembered every detail about everyone she met,
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Speaker 1: their dogs, names, their kids, birthdays, the exact coffee order
1:47
Speaker 1: they mentioned once six months earlier. By nineteen ninety one,
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Speaker 1: Laurie was twenty eight. She had been working as a
1:56
Speaker 1: dental hygienist at a practice on Route nine for almost
2:00
Speaker 1: four years. She was good at the job in the
2:03
Speaker 1: particular way that put nervous patients at ease, unhurried, specific
2:07
Speaker 1: in her explanations, genuinely interested in people who were not
2:11
Speaker 1: interested in being there. Her colleague said she was usually
2:14
Speaker 1: the first one in the parking lot in the morning.
2:18
Speaker 1: She lived alone in a small rental on Colton Ridge Road.
2:22
Speaker 1: The arrangement suited her. She was saving money and had
2:25
Speaker 1: recently started talking to her mother about eventually buying something,
2:30
Speaker 1: maybe something with a yard. She called Vera every Sunday
2:34
Speaker 1: evening without fail. February ninth, nineteen ninety one, was a Saturday.
2:41
Speaker 1: Laurie did not call that evening. Vera assumed she was
2:45
Speaker 1: out by Sunday. She was worried. By Sunday afternoon, Vera
2:50
Speaker 1: drove to Colton Ridge Road and found her daughter on
2:53
Speaker 1: the kitchen floor. The family doctor on call was doctor
2:57
Speaker 1: Thomas Waverley of Harwick General. Examined Laurie at the scene
3:01
Speaker 1: and found no visible trauma. There were no marks, no
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Speaker 1: signs of struggle, nothing that suggested anything other than a
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Speaker 1: sudden cardiac event. According to the record, he signed the
3:12
Speaker 1: death certificate in under forty eight hours. He did not
3:17
Speaker 1: order a toxicology scream. He did not request an autopsy.
3:22
Speaker 1: Laurie Hoffmann had no history of heart disease, not a murmur,
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Speaker 1: not a diagnosis, not a single clinical note suggesting cardiovascular risk.
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Speaker 1: But at twenty eight, sudden cardiac death was rare enough
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Speaker 1: to be shocking, and just common enough to go unchallenged.
3:39
Speaker 1: The funeral was held the following week. Vera Hoffmann would
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Speaker 1: later tell investigators that she called Laurie's number every Wednesday
3:48
Speaker 1: for three months after the burial, before she could make
3:50
Speaker 1: herself stop. She knew no one would answer she called anyway.
3:55
Speaker 1: There was one detail that did not fit, but it
3:58
Speaker 1: took another quarter century to me matter. Among Laurie's prescriptions
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Speaker 1: on file at Wren Family Pharmacy, located on the corner
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Speaker 1: of Dunbar and Larch and Harwick, was a sleep aid
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Speaker 1: filled in August of nineteen ninety The prescription authorized twenty capsules.
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Speaker 1: The bottle found by Aaron Bailey on the fourteenth of
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Speaker 1: February contained forty one. Nobody counted them in nineteen ninety one.
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Speaker 1: What that number meant and what those twenty one extra
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Speaker 1: capsules actually contained would not become clear until a locked
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Speaker 1: fireproof safe was opened in the spring of twenty fourteen,
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Speaker 1: and the person who opened it was not a detective.
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Speaker 1: She was a thirty four year old paralegal named Kelly Carlson,
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Speaker 1: and she was cleaning out her grandmother's house. Kelly Carlson
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Speaker 1: had come to clean out a house that was all
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Speaker 1: her grandmother, Norma Prentice, had died in the spring of
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Speaker 1: twenty fourteen at the age of eighty one in a
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Speaker 1: care facility outside Columbus. The house on the edge of
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Speaker 1: Harwick still held forty years of a pharmacist's life, shells
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Speaker 1: of reference texts, a kitchen that smelled of cedar, and
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Speaker 1: in the back bedroom a small fireproof safe that Kelly
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Speaker 1: had never seen opened. She found the key in a
5:14
Speaker 1: jewelry box. What was inside was not jewelry. It was
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Speaker 1: a ledger, handwritten in a cramped private shorthand that took
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Speaker 1: Kelly several minutes to begin parsing. There were fourteen names
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Speaker 1: across three years of entries. Beside each name dates, abbreviated notations,
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Speaker 1: and a recurring symbol that Kelly would later learn designated
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Speaker 1: a compound her grandmother had mixed and dispensed. Outside the
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Speaker 1: pharmacy's official inventory at the top of each page, a
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Speaker 1: two letter initiator d Y. Kelly Carlson was a paralegal.
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Speaker 1: She understood exactly what she was holding. She called the
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Speaker 1: Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation that afternoon. She did not
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Speaker 1: speak publicly about what she found. The one thing she
6:00
Speaker 1: said to investigators, according to case records, was that she
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Speaker 1: decided the best things she could do with that knowledge
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Speaker 1: was make sure it did not stay buried. Agent Meg
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Speaker 1: Susa of the BCI's Cold case unit took the call
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Speaker 1: SUSA requested the ledger immediately. Then she requested something else
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Speaker 1: the County property archives, specifically any storage units registered to
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Speaker 1: individuals whose names appeared in the ledger or in connection
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Speaker 1: with the initials d Y. The search returned one result,
6:32
Speaker 1: a second storage unit registered not to Dwyane Yorke directly,
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Speaker 1: but to his wife. The unit had been paying month
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Speaker 1: to month since nineteen ninety three inside a spiral notebook.
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Speaker 1: The notebook was Yorke's mirror of Prentice's ledger. Same names,
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Speaker 1: same dates, recorded from the buyer's side, addresses, visit durations,
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Speaker 1: notes written in plain English about access points, household rooteenes
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Speaker 1: who lived alone. Laurie Hoffman appeared on page eleven. Beside
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Speaker 1: her name, York had written a service call date November
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Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety her address on Colton Ridge Road, duration
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Speaker 1: approximately ninety minutes. Technician listed on the official York Home
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Speaker 1: service record, the owner himself. This is the image that
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Speaker 1: stops everything. A repair man spends ninety minutes in a
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Speaker 1: woman's home in November. Three months later, she is dead
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Speaker 1: and somewhere in a storage unit registered to someone else's name.
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Speaker 1: He has written it all down. The BCI pulled the
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Speaker 1: York Home service records. The November visit was confirmed a
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Speaker 1: service call for an appliance logged and invoiced. Unremarkable on
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Speaker 1: its face, but the visit put York inside that house,
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Speaker 1: and the ledger told investigators what he had been arranging.
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Speaker 1: There was still the question of the capsules. County Storage
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Speaker 1: had held the bottle. Er Inn and Bailey found on
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Speaker 1: the fourteenth of February nineteen ninety one the one detective
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Speaker 1: Owen Marsh had logged and filed without analysis a wabbed
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Speaker 1: and filed without analysis because in nineteen ninety one there
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Speaker 1: was no active crime to justify a lab order. The
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Speaker 1: bottle had sat in an evidence archive for twenty three years, untouched,
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Speaker 1: still sealed with its original cotton plug. SUSA sent it
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Speaker 1: to the lab in twenty fourteen. The BCI chemists separated
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Speaker 1: the contents by compound. Twenty capsules matched the prescription exactly,
8:37
Speaker 1: a standard sleep aid authorized by a physician filled at
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Speaker 1: Wren Family Pharmacy in August of nineteen ninety. The remaining
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Speaker 1: twenty one were different. They contained a slow release barbituate
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Speaker 1: derivative capable of suppressing cardiac rhythm with accumulated dosage. The
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Speaker 1: compound would not produce immediate effects. It would work gradually
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Speaker 1: over days or weeks, until the heart simply stopped keeping pace.
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Speaker 1: Twenty capsules prescribed keep in case. Twenty capsules prescribed twenty
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Speaker 1: one capsules that should not have existed at all. The
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Speaker 1: cotton plug had been intact, the seal had not been
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Speaker 1: broken after manufacture. Whoever had modified those capsules had done
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Speaker 1: so before the bottle was ever handed to Lori Hoffmann.
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Speaker 1: That meant Wren Family Pharmacy. That meant Norma Prentice. There
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Speaker 1: is a moment in every cold case investigation when the
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Speaker 1: evidence stops being separate pieces and becomes a single visible shape.
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Speaker 1: For Agent SUSA, that moment came with the DNA. Yorke
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Speaker 1: had been identified through the ledger and the notebook, he
9:48
Speaker 1: had been interviewed, he had lawyered up. His defense attorney
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Speaker 1: Vincent has argued that the notebook had been obtained through
9:56
Speaker 1: an improper search and that the pharmacy records lacked an
10:00
Speaker 1: unbroken chain of custody. The case as it stood was
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Speaker 1: strong but arguable. Then SUS's team executed a standard surveillance collection,
10:10
Speaker 1: a discarded coffee cup from a vehicle registered to York.
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Speaker 1: The DNA from the cup went to the lab. It
10:16
Speaker 1: matched a partial biological trace found on the interior latch
10:19
Speaker 1: of a medicine cabinet. The medicine cabinet belonged to Leonard's Shott.
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Speaker 1: Shot had died in March of nineteen ninety, eleven months
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Speaker 1: before Lourie Hoffman. His death had been recorded as a
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Speaker 1: heart attack. He was forty four years old. He had
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Speaker 1: lived two streets from a property York serviced during the
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Speaker 1: same week Shot died. His name appeared in Prentice's Ledger
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Speaker 1: fourth entry with the same abbreviated compound notation as Lourie
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Speaker 1: Hoffman's investigator's requested exhumation. A judge granted it. The tissue
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Speaker 1: analysis came back positive for the barbiturate derivative. There it
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Speaker 1: was not circumstantial anymore, not a Ledger entry read in
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Speaker 1: private shorthand A man's body had been in the ground
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Speaker 1: for twenty four years, and the compound was still there
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Speaker 1: measurable confirmed. York's DNA placed him physically inside shots home.
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Speaker 1: The two facts, together, biological trace and toxicological confirmation, closed
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Speaker 1: every gap Hoss had tried to argue open York had
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Speaker 1: been running York Home Service since nineteen eighty seven. He
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Speaker 1: had won prior record a minor receiving stolen goods charge
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Speaker 1: from nineteen eighty four, resolved with a fine to Harwick County.
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Speaker 1: He was an appliance repair technician with a service van
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Speaker 1: and a client list. He was the person you called
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Speaker 1: when the dryer stopped working. He had been inside fourteen homes.
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Speaker 1: The detail that had been sitting in county storage since
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Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one. The bottle on the windowsill, forty one
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Speaker 1: capsules and plug intact was formally entered into the sentencing
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Speaker 1: hearing as evidence. The same bottle Aaron Bailey had carried
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Speaker 1: off an icy meter reading route on Valentine's Day, the
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Speaker 1: same bottle Owen Marsh had logged and sholved because nothing
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Speaker 1: in February of nineteen ninety one looked like a crime.
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Speaker 1: Retired by then, Marsh cooperated with Seus's investigation without being asked. Twice.
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Speaker 1: He confirmed every detail of the nineteen ninety one intake.
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Speaker 1: He said he had made the right call by the
12:35
Speaker 1: standard of what he knew at the time. He was
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Speaker 1: not wrong about that. He was also the person who
12:41
Speaker 1: had put the bottle on a shelf where it would
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Speaker 1: survive long enough to matter. Judge Christine Aldridge rejected every
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Speaker 1: admissibility argument the defense raised. Her written ruling ran forty pages.
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Speaker 1: Yorke confessed to Agent Sousa before sentencing. He confirmed the
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Speaker 1: method the arrangement with Prentice and the Aimes, all of them.
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Speaker 1: There is a version of this story where the bottle
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Speaker 1: does not survive. Evidence storage facilities discard unclaimed materials on rotation.
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Speaker 1: Some counties hold physical evidence for five years, some for ten.
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Speaker 1: Harwick County held the bottle from nineteen ninety one through
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Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, twenty three years because it had been logged
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Speaker 1: as property associated with the reported finding, not classified as perishable,
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Speaker 1: and never formally reviewed for disposal. It stayed because no
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Speaker 1: one had a reason to move it. If the rotation
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Speaker 1: had gone differently, SUSO would have had a ledger and
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Speaker 1: a note book and no chemistry to anchor them. Picture
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Speaker 1: that version has presents the defense argument a handwritten ledger
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Speaker 1: in private shorthand, authored by a woman who is dead
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Speaker 1: and cannot testify, cross referenced against a spiral notebook found
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Speaker 1: in a storage unit registered to someone other than the defendant.
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Speaker 1: Suggestive troubling, possibly inadmissible on its own without the physical
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Speaker 1: compound to confirm the mechanism. The bottle changed the weight
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Speaker 1: of everything that came before it. But consider what the
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Speaker 1: bottle could not do on its own. In nineteen ninety one,
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Speaker 1: it was a found object, an anomaly forty one capsules
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Speaker 1: in a bottle prescribed for twenty discovered on a window
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Speaker 1: sill in February by a utility worker who thought something
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Speaker 1: looked wrong. Detective Marsh had done exactly what the evidence warranted.
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Speaker 1: He logged it, He called a doctor, he filed it.
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Speaker 1: There was no victim, there was no crime scene. There
14:39
Speaker 1: was a dead woman whose physician had already signed a
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Speaker 1: death certificate listing cardiac arrhythmia. The bottle needed the ledger
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Speaker 1: to become evidence of a mechanism. The ledger needed the
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Speaker 1: bottle to become evidence of a murder. Each one alone
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Speaker 1: was almost nothing. Together they were sufficient to put a
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Speaker 1: man away for two consecutive life terms. That interdependence, one
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Speaker 1: artifact activating another across twenty three years is what made
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Speaker 1: the case reconstructible at all. Yorke had kept his own
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Speaker 1: records because he trusted that the original investigation had found nothing.
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Speaker 1: Prentice had kept her ledger in a fire proof safe
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Speaker 1: because she trusted that no one who could read her
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Speaker 1: shorthand would ever look for it. They were right for
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Speaker 1: twenty four years. Then a granddaughter found a key in
15:27
Speaker 1: a jewelry box. The twelve remaining names in the ledger
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Speaker 1: are still under review. According to court records, no additional
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Speaker 1: exhumations had been publicly confirmed at the time of sentencing.
15:40
Speaker 1: The barbiturate confirmation stands only for Leonard's shot for the
15:44
Speaker 1: other names. The ledger is what exists entries in a
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Speaker 1: dead woman's private notation, waiting for the kind of corroboration
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Speaker 1: that may or may not still be recoverable from the ground.
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Speaker 1: Norma Prentice died before any of this surfaced. She was
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Speaker 1: never charged. She was eighty one years old and had
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Speaker 1: operated Wren Family Pharmacy for four decades before closing it
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Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety six. Whatever she knew, and whatever she
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Speaker 1: had decided about what she knew, she took with her.
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Speaker 1: What remained was the ledger. What remained was the bottle.
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Speaker 1: What remained was Vera Hoffman, who had called her daughter's
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Speaker 1: number every Wednesday for three months after the funeral and
16:25
Speaker 1: had spent twenty three years without an answer. Vera Hoffman
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Speaker 1: drove to the sentencing hearing alone. She sat in the
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Speaker 1: front row of the gallery on every one of the
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Speaker 1: four days it ran, and she did not look away.
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Speaker 1: When York's attorney argued that the bottle was inadmissible, that
16:41
Speaker 1: the chain of custody on the pharmacy records was broken,
16:44
Speaker 1: that the ledger was a dead woman's private notation with
16:48
Speaker 1: no verified key. Judge Christine Aldridge rejected each argument in turn.
16:53
Speaker 1: Her written ruling on admissibility ran forty pages. Yorke had
16:57
Speaker 1: confessed before the hearing. He told Agent in Sousa the method,
17:01
Speaker 1: named the victims, and described the arrangement with Prentice in
17:05
Speaker 1: enough detail that the confession became corroborating evidence rather than
17:09
Speaker 1: the foundation of the case. The foundation was already there,
17:13
Speaker 1: the bottle, the lab results, the ledger, the spiral notebook
17:17
Speaker 1: found in the storage unit, registered to his wife, registered
17:21
Speaker 1: to his wife, the service record showing his personal visit
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Speaker 1: to Laurie Hoffman's address in November of nineteen ninety, and
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Speaker 1: the DNA on the cabinet latch in Leonard Shott's bath room.
17:33
Speaker 1: The defense's best argument was that the strongest physical evidence
17:37
Speaker 1: had been sitting in a county evidence locker for twenty
17:39
Speaker 1: three years without analysis. That argument required the jury to
17:43
Speaker 1: believe the evidence had been contaminated or manufactured, rather than
17:46
Speaker 1: simply overlooked. The laboratory findings did not support that position.
17:51
Speaker 1: Duayne Yorke was sixty three years old at sentencing. He
17:55
Speaker 1: received two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole
18:00
Speaker 1: on two counts of aggravated murder. Additional charges remain under review,
18:05
Speaker 1: according to court records for the twelve other names in
18:09
Speaker 1: Printiss's ledger. The bottle that Aaron Bailey found on a
18:12
Speaker 1: February morning in nineteen ninety one was presented as evidence
18:17
Speaker 1: during the sentencing hearing. Twenty four years after Bailey set
18:21
Speaker 1: it on Detective Marsha's desk. It sat in a court
18:24
Speaker 1: room as proof that a woman whose death had been
18:26
Speaker 1: attributed to a heart condition had been given a compound
18:29
Speaker 1: designed to stop her heart. Laurie Hoffmann was twenty eight
18:33
Speaker 1: years old. She had no diagnosed cardiac condition. She was
18:38
Speaker 1: a dental hygienist who had been placed on a witness
18:41
Speaker 1: list in a custody proceeding that touched someone connected to York.
18:45
Speaker 1: That was enough. In the ledger. She was entry number
18:49
Speaker 1: eight in York's spiral note book. She was a date,
18:52
Speaker 1: an address, and a margin note. There is something in
18:55
Speaker 1: this case that resists the usual logic of resolution. The
19:00
Speaker 1: piece is fit, the conviction is real. But Norma Prentice
19:04
Speaker 1: died in two thousand fourteen, having operated a pharmacy for
19:08
Speaker 1: four decades, having compounded and dispensed a lethal agent fourteen
19:13
Speaker 1: times over three years, and having been charged with nothing whatever.
19:18
Speaker 1: She understood about what she was making. She kept that
19:21
Speaker 1: understanding in a private shorthand in a fire proof safe,
19:24
Speaker 1: and she died before Kelly Carlson found the key. The
19:28
Speaker 1: twelve remaining names in the ledger are still under review.
19:32
Speaker 1: No additional exhumations had been publicly confirmed at the time
19:35
Speaker 1: of sentencing. The barbiturate confirmation stands for Leonard shot alone.
19:40
Speaker 1: For the others, there are entries in a dead woman's notation,
19:44
Speaker 1: and the question of whether enough biological material remains in
19:48
Speaker 1: the ground to answer them. That is not a comfortable
19:51
Speaker 1: place to leave it. It is, however, where the record stops.
19:56
Speaker 1: Via Hoffmann had called her daughter's phone number every Wednesday
19:59
Speaker 1: for three month months after the funeral. She did it
20:02
Speaker 1: because she was not ready to accept that the number
20:04
Speaker 1: would never be answered again. Twenty three years later, she
20:07
Speaker 1: was sitting in a courtroom watching the answer arrive. Laurie
20:11
Speaker 1: Hoffmann deserved more than a Ledger entry. She deserved more
20:15
Speaker 1: than the phone that rang in an empty apartment while
20:17
Speaker 1: her mother sat with the receiver. She deserved a physician
20:21
Speaker 1: who asked one more question before signing a death certificate,
20:25
Speaker 1: and a detective who sent one more item to a
20:27
Speaker 1: laboratory before filing the box. None of those things happened.
20:31
Speaker 1: What happened instead was a granddaughter, a key, and an
20:36
Speaker 1: agent who was willing to follow a twenty three year
20:38
Speaker 1: thread back to its origin. That thread ran through a
20:42
Speaker 1: pharmacy on the corner of Dunbar and Larch, through a
20:45
Speaker 1: storage unit registered to another person's name, through a fireproof
20:49
Speaker 1: safe in a back bedroom, and through forty one capsules
20:53
Speaker 1: sitting on a window sill in the February cold. It
20:56
Speaker 1: was enough, It had always been enough. It just needed
21:00
Speaker 1: someone to look. This show is made by Obomedia.