Latest / Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases / The Calendar That Proved a Judge's "Suicide" Was Murder

Transcript

The Calendar That Proved a Judge's "Suicide" Was Murder · Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The calendar came out of the Marne River face down
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: and clean. The leather spine was intact. The ribbon markers
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: held no mud. The ink on every page was readable.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Alice Peterson had been running trot lines at that bend
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: since the late 1970s, and she knew exactly what the
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: river did to things it kept. This thing had not
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: been kept. It had been placed. That calendar belonged to
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Ronald Watson. He was 28 years old. and the youngest
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: sitting judge in Calloway County, Illinois. He had been dead
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: for three days. The detail that should stop you is this.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: The calendar surfaced on the morning of April 9th, 2001,
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: three days after Watson was found on April 6th. Watson
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: was found in his chambers on April 6th, and inside
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: that calendar, on the page for April 7th, a date
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: after his death, someone had written a name, a time,
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: and four words, that should not exist, do not log.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Nearly two decades would elapse before anyone understood what those
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: four words meant. Nineteen years before a folder in a
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: university archive, a retired fisherman's offhand observation, and a sign-in
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: sheet nobody had re-examined would pull the whole picture into focus.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: What investigators called a suicide in 2001 was something else.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Entirely and the man who knew that had been working
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: inside the courthouse the whole time. Ronald Watson grew up
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: in Calloway County and never seemed to want to leave it.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: He studied law at a state university downstate, came back,
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: clerked for two years, and by the spring of 2000,
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: he was sitting on the bench, the youngest judge the
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: county had ever appointed to that position. He was 27
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: when he took the oath, 28 when he died. People
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: who worked in the courthouse described him the same way,
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: in almost the same words. Precise, punctual, fair. He was
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: not the kind of man who accumulated drama. His financial
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: records showed nothing irregular. No gambling debts, no creditors, no
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: disputes anyone could name. His Thursday evenings went to a
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: chess club. His mornings went to the river. Every weekday
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: he was up by 5.30. He walked the marne for
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: 40 minutes, then crossed back through town and was at
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: his desk before seven. That walk was not a luxury
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: for Watson. It was load-bearing. His whole day organized itself
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: around that first hour of quiet. Paula Greer was his clerk.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: She arrived at the chambers at 7.15 on the morning
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: of April 6th, 2001, and the first thing she noticed.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Was the outer office. Empty.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: The second thing she noticed was the coffee machine.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Cold. The filter basket was clean.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: No grounds. From that morning, none from the prior evening.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Watson made coffee the moment he arrived. Always. Greer had
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: worked for him long enough to treat that sound, the
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: hiss and drip of the machine starting up, as a
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: signal that the day had begun. The chamber door was unlocked.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: She pushed it open. Watson was at his desk. The
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: revolver was on the floor beneath his right hand. A single.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: 38 caliber gunshot wound to the right temple, stippling on
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: the skin, trajectory consistent with a close-range discharge, plausible for
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: a right-handed shooter, by August of 2001. Sheriff Don Spears
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: had closed the case as a suicide. The coffee machine
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: was cold. The calendar was already gone from the desk.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Nobody connected those two facts yet. What nobody examined closely
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: at the time was the medical examiner's windows. Time of death,
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: somewhere between 12 and 36 hours before discovery. Greer found
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: him at 7.15 on the morning of April 6th. That
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: window opened as far back as the evening of April 5th.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: Watson could have died not on the morning of the 6th,
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: but the night before. That distinction would eventually collapse the
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: entire official account. But in 2001, the investigation moved in
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: one direction only. and closed before anyone thought to push
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: back on the other end of that window. Alice Peterson
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: found the calendar. Three days after Watson's body was discovered,
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: she pulled it from her trotline on the eastern bank
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: of the Marne, south of the Route 7 bridge, on
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: the morning of April 9th. She had been working that
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: stretch of river since the late 1970s, and she knew
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: what a soaked object looked like. The leather was not soaked.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: The spine had not warped. She told the deputy who
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: came to collect it that something put there. Gently comes
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: out looking different than something dropped. The deputy wrote four
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: words in his report. Witness speculates re-condition of item.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: He filed it. The calendar went into an evidence box.
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: The box went into storage.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: And for 19 years, the one person who noticed the
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: most important thing about that object was dismissed in a
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: single subordinate clause. Then there was the sign-in sheet. Howard McCarthy,
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: 63 years old in 2020, had operated McCarthy Facility Services
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: under contract to Callaway County since 1996. He had a
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: permanent after-hours access badge. On April 5th, 2001, the day
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: before Greer found the body, McCarthy signed into the courthouse
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: at four in the afternoon.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: He signed out at 4.50.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: That is the entry any investigator would have found and
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: set aside.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: Routine maintenance visit.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Nothing there. But there was a second line. McCarthy re-entered
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: the courthouse at 6.40 that same evening. There is no
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: out signature beneath it. The sheet sat in an archive
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: for 19 years. A man enters a building after hours
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: and does not sign out. A judge is found dead
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: the next morning. A coffee machine has never been touched.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Each of those facts existed in 2001. None of them
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: were threaded together. They were answered separately in isolation, and
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: they produced the answer that required the least additional work.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: Suicide.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: But the calendar was still sitting in an evidence box.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: And inside it, on the page for April 7th, two
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: days after Watson was found dead, someone had written an appointment.
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: HM4, 30 p.m. Do not log.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: A meeting that was never held, written by a man
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: who was already dead, about someone who had re-entered his
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: courthouse two evenings before and never signed out. The calendar
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: recovered from a river, still legible, spine intact, three days
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: after the body was discovered. What the entry meant and
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: how the calendar reached the Marne River would remain locked
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: inside that evidence box for nearly two more decades. In
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: January of 2020, an archivist at Aldenmore University, 40 miles
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: north of Calloway, was processing a donated estate. The papers
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: came from Frank Sobieski, a retired county administrator who had
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: died in 2019. His family surrendered the boxes without reading them.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Inside one folder, labeled Miscellaneous Correspondence, 2000-2001, a graduate student
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: found photocopies of letters. The letters were addressed to Ronald Watson.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: The sender's initials were H.M. The earliest letters were professional
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: in tone, but then they were not. By the final pages, H.M.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: was making a demand. He wanted Watson to recuse himself
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: from an Aldenmore zoning appeal.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: If Watson refused, H.M.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: Would expose what the letters called certain facts about your appointment.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: The language was deliberate, and the threat was specific enough
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: to mean something to Watson while remaining ambiguous to anyone
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: else reading it. Watson's response, dated March 22, 2001, was
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: calm and exact. He planned to take the letters to
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: the presiding judge. The next letter, dated April 1, 2001,
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: said only that he had not yet done so. There
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: were no letters after April 1. Watson died four days later.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: The graduate student flagged the folder. The archivist alerted the
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: Illinois State Criminal Review Unit. Cold case investigator Connie Walker
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: was assigned to the Calloway County backlog that same month.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: She pulled the Watson evidence boxes within a week. That
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: was when the sign-in sheet came back into the light.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: Two entries, one out signature. There is something specific about
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: the moment Walker would have held that sheet.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: And read those two lines.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: The 4 o'clock arrival, the 4.50 departure, And then the
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: 640 returned with nothing beneath it. The case had been
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: closed for nearly 19 years. The answer to what happened
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: in Watson's chambers that evening had been sitting in a
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: county archive the entire time. Walker questioned McCarthy in March
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: of 2020. He admitted it. Picture the courthouse on the
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: evening of April 5th. It is after 6.30. The building
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: is quiet. McCarthy signs in at 6.40 and walks toward
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Watson's chambers. He carries a. 38 caliber revolver. According to
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: his own statement, he brought it to frighten Watson into silence,
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: not to use it. Whatever was said in that room,
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: the conversation did not end where McCarthy intended. Watson had
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: already written the letter. He had already named what he
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: planned to do. The argument escalated. McCarthy fired once, a
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: single shot to the right temple. That version, McCarthy's version,
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: has him acting in a moment he claims he did
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: not plan. The evidence does not entirely contradict it, Stippling
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: and trajectory were consistent with a close-range discharge. The wound
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: was plausible for a right-handed shooter. The physical scene could
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: support what McCarthy described as an impulsive act. But here
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: is where that account presses against something harder. Two nights
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: after the shooting, McCarthy returned to the Marne River. He
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: walked to the drainage channel and placed Watson's personal calendar
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: into the water. He said later that he set it
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: down carefully because he did not want it to make
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: a splash. That is not the behavior of a man
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: acting on impulse. That is a man thinking about current, distance,
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: and time. That is a man who understood that the
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: calendar existed, that it contained the entry he had written,
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: and that the entry would connect him to Watson's chambers
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: on the very evening he claimed he was not there.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: The calendar said, Hey, M430PM, April 7th, do not log.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: McCarthy had written that appointment with Watson before the shooting,
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: a meeting that would now never take place, in a
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: calendar he needed to disappear.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: He carried it out.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: He placed it in the channel.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: He walked away.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: Alice Peterson pulled it from the marne three days later.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: The leather was dry. The spine was sound. The ink
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: was legible. She told the deputy what it meant. He
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: wrote four words and filed them. What the careful placement
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: of that calendar tells us is not just that McCarthy
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: disposed of evidence. It tells us that he had enough
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: presence of mind within 48 hours of the shooting to
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: calculate exactly how to do it and that he came
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: within four words of succeeding. In October 2020, Howard McCarthy
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: stood in a Callaway County courtroom and said the word guilty.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: He was 63 years old. He had run his maintenance
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: company under county contract for 11 years. He had carried
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: a permanent after-hours access badge into every corridor of the
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: courthouse Watson, called his workplace. And for 19 years, he
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: had lived quietly while a 30-year-old judge's death sat in
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: a file marked closed. The guilty plea on the first-degree
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: murder of Ronald Watson carried a sentence of 32 years.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: That number settled over the courtroom without ceremony. Watson had
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: been 28. He had been the youngest sitting judge in
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: Calloway County history He had been dead longer than some
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: people in that room had been alive. The case did
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: not stop there. In 2021, a federally funded cold case
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: initiative ran McCarthy's DNA profile against an open homicide from
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: three years before Watson's death. In 1998, a 24-year-old maintenance
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: worker named Tim Galvez had been beaten to death in
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: a Mercer County parking garage. No witnesses, no arrest. The
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: case had sat untouched for 22 years. The DNA matched McCarthy.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: Mercer County filed a second murder charge in February 2022.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: McCarthy entered a second guilty plea. He did not contest it.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: There had been a municipal building two blocks from that garage.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: McCarthy held the maintenance contract for it in 1998.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: He had been there before. He had done this before.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: Patricia Galvez had spent 23 years asking what happened to
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: her brother. She was in the courtroom the day McCarthy
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: was sentenced for Tim's death. The record does not tell
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: us what she said or whether she said anything at all.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: It only tells us she was present. Sometimes that is
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: the only fact that matters. There is one more name
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: that belongs in this account. When the Callaway Register reached
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: Don Spears, the retired sheriff who had closed the Watson
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: case as suicide in August 2001, He offered a single sentence.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: He said he had followed the evidence, as it existed
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: at the time. That sentence is technically true. The sign-in
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: sheet with McCarthy's second entry and missing outside nature was archived.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: The coffee machine observation was in Paula Greer's original statement.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: Alice Peterson's account of the calendar's condition was recorded. Every
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: piece of it existed. What the 2001 investigation did not
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: do was sit with those details long enough to ask
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: what they meant together. The sign-in sheet asked one question,
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: the cold coffee asked another, and the calendar asked a third.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: No single question was enough. Together, they pointed at the
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: same evening. The deputy who interviewed Peterson wrote four words.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Witness speculates recondition. Those four words buried the clearest physical
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: argument against the suicide ruling for 19 years. Alice Peterson
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: is 71, now. She still runs trotlines at the same
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: bend in the Marne River, south of the Route 7 bridge,
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: the bend where a leather calendar surfaced face-down on a
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: spring morning in 2001, spine intact, no mud in the ribbons,
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: ink still readable, exactly as she had described it to
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: anyone who would listen. What finally moved this case was
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: not a technological breakthrough. It was a cardboard box in
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: a university archive. Frank Sabisky had kept Watson's photocopied letters
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: for nearly two decades. He died in 2019 without telling
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: anyone what the folder contained. His estate donated his papers
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: without reading them. A graduate student at Alden Moore University
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: opened the folder in January 2020 and found pages that
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: changed everything. That is the part of this story that
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: resists easy reassurance. The resolution did not arrive because the
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: system found a gap and filled it. It arrived because
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: a man died, and his family gave away his belongings,
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: and a stranger opened the right box. Cold case investigator
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Connie Walker was assigned the Calloway County backlog after the
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: Oldmore archivist flagged the letters. She pulled the evidence boxes
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: within a week. She questioned McCarthy in March 2020. By October,
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: he had pleaded guilty. The letters that Watson had written
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: to Sobieski, describing the pressure campaign, describing the pressure campaign,
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: the unauthorized visits, the threat to expose certain facts about
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: his appointment, had been sitting 40 miles north in a
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: miscellaneous correspondence folder since 2001. The last one was dated
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: April 1st. Watson was dead four days later. He had
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: planned to report to the presiding judge, but he had
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: not yet done so. There is something specific in that DAP.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: Not the gap itself, but what Watson chose to do
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: inside it. He did not go quietly. He wrote it down,
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: told someone, held copies, and kept the record. He was
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: 28 years old, the youngest judge in the county, and
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: he was building a case of his own against a
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: man who had a gun and an access badge and
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: nothing to lose. He did not get to finish it,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: but the record he made survived him.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: It survived him.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: 19 years, in a cardboard box. It survived the death
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: of the one man who knew what it meant. It
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: found its way into the hands of someone trained to
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: understand it. And it gave Watson's name back to the
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: truth it had always deserved. The Marne River still runs
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: south past Calloway in April. The drainage channel is still there,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: below the courthouse. Alice Peterson still works the same bend.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: And somewhere in an evidence room... a leather calendar with
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: gold-stamped initials, and a ribbon marker sits logged and catalogued.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: The object that came out of the water looking like
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: someone had set it down carefully and turned 19 years
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: of silence into 32 years of consequence. Ronald Watson was
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: 28 years old. He got up at 5.30 every morning.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: He walked the river. He came to his desk and
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: made his coffee. He played chess on Thursdays. He was
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: trying to do the right thing in the last weeks
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: of his life, and the right thing got him killed.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: The least the record can do is say his name
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: without a question mark attached to it.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: This show is made by Oboe Media.