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The Unread Letter That Named Her Killer After Forty Years · True Crime: Killer Confessions

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The purse was sitting in open desert, 30 yards from
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: a dirt track, roughly a quarter mile from the international fence.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Burgundy leather, nearly intact, 40 years after it disappeared. Inside,
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: a Texas driver's license with a cracked laminate, expiration date
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: January 1985, and a sealed envelope addressed to a Catholic
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: priest in Chihuahua City, Mexico, still unread. The woman in
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: the license photo had dark feathered hair, wide set eyes,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: and a small scar above her left eyebrow. Her name
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: was Marilyn Armstrong. She vanished on the afternoon of December 6, 1984.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: The official file said she walked into Mexico voluntarily and
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: never came back. She hadn't crossed any border. She was
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: less than 60 feet from where that purse lay in
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: the dirt. And the letter inside that sealed envelope had
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: been sitting in a consulate archive for about 38 years.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: It named the man who killed her. Marilyn Armstrong arrived
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: in Cibolo Wells in the autumn of 1973. She was
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: 38 years old and newly divorced, and she had driven
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: out from Odessa with two suitcases and a ledger she'd
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: kept since her 20s. She took a job as an
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: accountant at Rancho Vista Feeds, a mid-sized agricultural supply operation
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: on the western edge of town. It was not glamorous work.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: She tracked feed invoices, payroll, and vendor payments in a
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: region where deals were often made on handshakes and settled
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: in cash. She was precise about her numbers in a
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: place that wasn't always precise about its paperwork. Colleagues would
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: later recall two things about her. First, she wore the
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: same brand of shoes, ordered in bulk from a catalog,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: because she said reliable footwear was a sign of sound judgment. Second,
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: she caught arithmetic errors that certified auditors had missed. Not occasionally. Consistently.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: She had no close family in the area. The person
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: she saw most often outside of work was Delores Vance,
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: a neighbor who had been confined to a wheelchair since 1978.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Armstrong drove out to Vance's property on Farm Road 9,
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: most Tuesday evenings. She brought food and stayed long enough
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: to talk. By December 1984, she had been in Cibola
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Wells for 11 years. She had a pension accruing. She
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: had a routine. On Thursdays, she drove 12 miles out
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: along Farm Road 9 and returned after dark. She always
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: returned after dark. That was the routine. On Thursday, December 6, 1984,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: she left the parking lot of a general store in
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: town sometime in the afternoon. She was seen talking in
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: the parking lot to a man nobody could identify. She
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: did not come back that night. She did not come
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: back the following morning. Her supervisor at Rancho Vista Feeds
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: was a man named Bart Nevins. When the detective assigned
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: to the case, Frank Sosa, came asking questions about Nevins
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: told him that Armstrong had recently asked whether her pension
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: was transferable. Two colleagues confirmed seeing the conversation in the
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: parking lot. There was no body, no signs of struggle,
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: no blood. The evidence, taken together, pointed somewhere clear. She
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: had met a man and left for Mexico of her
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: own accord. Detective Sosa had 14 years working the border.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: He had seen people disappear into that gap before. The
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: theory wasn't unreasonable given what he had in front of him.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: By March 1985, the case was inactive. The file went
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: into a banker's box stamped Presumed Voluntary Departure and onto
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: a shelf at the Vega County Sheriff's Office. Frank Sosa
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: retired in 1997. He died in 2009. The case still
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: officially closed. Marilyn Armstrong was gone. And the official record
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: said she had chosen to go. But Dolores Vance, 83
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: years old and still living on Farm Road 9 in 23,
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: remembered something no detective had ever asked her about. She
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: remembered what Marilyn told her in the last week of
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: November 1984. She remembered the name Marilyn used. And she
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: had been waiting without anyone asking for almost 40 years.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Dolores Vance had not been asked to remember. Nobody had
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: come to Farm Road 9 in 32 years. But she
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: remembered the name anyway. The way you remember something that
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: frightened you at the time. The name was Vernon Hicks.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: Marilyn had said it in the last week of November, 1984.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: She told Dolores that Hicks had been pressuring her about
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: certain accounts at Rancho Vista Feeds. Numbers that did not
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: add up the way they should. Payments going somewhere they
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: had no business going. And on December 4th, Two days
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: before she vanished, Hicks had found her in the parking
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: lot and told her to think carefully about what she
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: understood and what she did not. Marilyn Armstrong was a
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: woman who caught errors that auditors missed. She had understood perfectly.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: Kimberly Stroud was 38 years old and had spent nine
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: years working cold cases for the Texas Department of Public Safety.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: She had a method she called reading the noise, meaning
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: documents collected but never explained. Every case file had them,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: pieces of paper that someone gathered, filed, and never followed
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: up on. The noise was where the case lived. The
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: banker's box from Vega County arrived in February 23. Stroud
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: opened it and started reading. Most of it was what
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: she expected. Interview summaries. The pension question. The parking lot conversation.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: The theory of voluntary departure. Written in Sosa's careful handwriting.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: But near the bottom of the box, behind a rubber
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: band that had gone brittle, was a single-vehicle registration receipt,
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: a Ford Pickup 1981 model. Logged crossing at Port Abaja,
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: the date was December 7th, 1984, the day after Marilyn
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Armstrong disappeared. The truck was registered to Vernon Hicks. Sosa
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: had collected it, filed it, and never pulled on that thread.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: Stroud set the receipt on her desk, and did not
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: move it for three days. It sat there while she
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: worked through everything else. Because here was the thing about
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: that receipt. The voluntary departure theory required Armstrong to have
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: crossed the border. Sosa's whole reconstruction depended on it. And
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: if Armstrong had crossed, you would expect her vehicle, her documents,
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: her name on a log somewhere. None of that existed.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: What existed was a record of Hicks crossing, alone the
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: morning after. A truck going south, no record of it
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: returning that day. She pulled Hicks' service records next. Chasing
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: a separate threat, the truck had been sold in 1988
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: and eventually crushed, but a mechanic who had worked on
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: it through the early 80s had kept immaculate files and
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: those files had passed to his widow and the widow
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: had never thrown anything away. Stroud found them in a
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: storage unit outside Cibola Wells three months after she started looking.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: The records showed that Hicks had the bed of the
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: truck repainted in the early 1980s, a small detail, the
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: kind of thing you would not notice unless you were
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: already looking. In June 23, a search team walked awash
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: south of Cibola Wells, roughly a quarter mile from the
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: Saltgrass Flats, where Crystal Bailey had found the burgundy handbag.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: They were working outward from the bag's original position, before
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: the summer rains of 21 had moved it. 60 feet
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: from the bag they found marilyn armstrong the cause of
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: death was blunt force trauma to the posterior skull the
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: dna matched a cousin still living in odessa she had
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: never crossed the border she had never chosen to go
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: anywhere she had been 60 feet from her handbag for
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: nearly 39 years in a wash that no one had
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: searched because the official record said she was in mexico
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: There is something precise about that distance. 60 feet. The
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: bag had traveled in floodwater. The rest had not. The
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: sealed envelope inside that bag had traveled further. In a
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: different way, Stroud had identified the wax seal months earlier.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: It matched the stamp of the Mexican Consulate General in
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: El Paso in a format used before 1978. The letter
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: was addressed in Spanish to a priest named Father Miguel Reyes,
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: who had served from 1980 to 1986 as an informal
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: liaison for cross-border complaints. He had died in 1991. His archive,
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: roughly 400 letters, had been sitting in the El Paso
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: Consulate since that year, pending a review that was never completed.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: Stroud filed a formal request. The Texas Department of Public
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Safety added a diplomatic note through the State Department. In
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: April 23, the consulate opened the archive, letter number 214.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: seven pages, handwritten, dated December 5, 1984, one day before
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: Marilyn Armstrong disappeared. She had written to the priest because
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: she trusted no one local. The letter described cash payments
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: from Rancho Vista Feeds to a company called Transportes del Norte,
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: payments she believed were bribes to customs officials at Puerto Baja,
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: allowing cargo to cross without inspection. She named Bart Nevins.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: She named Vernon Hicks. She described amounts and dates with
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: the precision of a woman who caught errors that auditors missed.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: She had sealed the letter and mailed it the morning
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: of December 5th. The next morning, Hicks found her in
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: the parking lot and told her to think carefully. The
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: morning after that, she was gone. And the morning after that,
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: his truck crossed south at Puerto Baja. The letter had
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: been sitting unread in a consulate box for about 38 years.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: It had arrived, it had been filed, and no one
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: had ever opened it while the man it was addressed
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: to was still alive to pursue the review. His archive
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: was already waiting in a back room for a review
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: that never came. There was a chip of paint. That
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: is where it ended up. When Hicks' truck was crushed
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: in the early 1990s, almost nothing survived. But one collector
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: had pulled the passenger seat before the truck went to
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: the yard. The seat had been in a barn in
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Reeves County ever since. Stroud located it through the mechanic's
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: service records, the same records that showed the bed repainting.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: A forensic examiner found paint transfer on the seat's metal frame,
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: a chip smaller than a thumbnail. the paint matched the
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: formula used on the truck bed. And embedded in the
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: paint were mineral traces, calcium carbonate ratios, specific to the
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: geology of the wash south of Cibola Wells. The probability
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: of that mineral signature occurring by coincidence was less than
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: one in several hundred thousand. That was the testimony the
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: expert gave on day four of the trial, in December 24.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Hicks sat and listened. During the recess, he dismissed his attorney.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: When the court came back into session, He took the
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: stand himself and spoke for 11 minutes. Picture the parking
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: lot of the Rancho Vista Feeds, building on the afternoon
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: of December 6th, 1984. A woman walks to her car.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: She knows she has written the letter. She does not
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: yet know whether it has been received. A man who
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: has been watching her routine for weeks, who knows she
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: drives Farm Road 9 on Thursdays, who knows she returns
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: after dark, follows her out of the lot. That is
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: the version Hicks confirmed. He had watched the routine. He
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: had followed her that afternoon. He knew she had gone
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: to someone outside the county, because Nevins had told him
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: she was asking about more than accounts. The letter to
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: the priest was not confirmed to him at the time.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: He learned about it much later, according to what the
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: record shows. But he knew she had documented something. He
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: acted on what he knew. The version that Sosa had
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: constructed in 1985 was not wrong in its logic. It
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: was wrong in its premise. The pension questioned the parking
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: lot conversation. The man nobody could identify. All of that happened.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: The man nobody could identify was Hicks. And the conversation
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: was not a goodbye. It was a warning she did
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: not fully heed. Or could not fully heed. Because by
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: then the letter was already in the mail. She had
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: made her move first. She had documented everything. Sealed it.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: and trusted it to a man of the church in
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: another country. It was not enough to save her, but
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: it was enough to outlast him. Two months after Armstrong's
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: remains were identified, a search team extended the grid eight
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: miles east along the connecting wash. In August 23, they
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: found Tina Fowler, 36 years old when she vanished in
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: March 1987. Identified by dental records, the same pattern of
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: trauma She had worked briefly for a ranch that was
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: a client of Hicks' brokerage. Hicks confessed to Fowler's death
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: as well, in the same 11 minutes, with what the
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: trial record describes as less elaboration. On December 19th, 24,
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: he was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder. The
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: sentence was life without the possibility of parole. Bart Nevins
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: was never arrested. According to the record, no formal charges
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: were filed against him. What the letter described, the payments,
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: the cargo moving through Puerto Baja without inspection. His name
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: beside Hicks's was enough to convict Hicks. It was not
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: enough in itself to convict Nevins. Whether he knew what
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: Hicks intended to do in that parking lot on the
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: afternoon of December 6, 1984, is a question the trial
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: record does not answer. That absence sits in the case
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: like a splinter. Armstrong named him in the letter. She
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: reported irregularities to him directly. He told her to let
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: it go. Then he told Hicks she was asking about
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: more than accounts, what he believed would happen after that.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: The record does not say, and no charge was ever
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: brought to test it in court. Kimberly Stroud closed her
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: investigation in January 25. The Vega County Sheriff's Office updated
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: the file. The label that had sat on that banker's
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: box for nearly four decades, about 38 years, presumed voluntary departure,
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: was replaced. The case is now classified as solved. two counts.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: Dolores Vance, 83 years old and still living on Farm
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: Road 9, learned the outcome by phone. She had told Stroud,
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: without prompting, what Armstrong said about Hicks in the first
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: week of December 1984. That testimony, Mrs. Cooke, from a
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: woman who had been sitting in a wheelchair since 1978
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: and had held that memory for nearly 39 years, helped
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: Stroud connect the warning in the parking lot to the
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: name in the letter. Vance told the investigator she had
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: always believed Armstrong would not have left without saying goodbye.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: The truck that carried Armstrong south along Farm Road 9
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: was sold in 1988 and crushed. A single seat was
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: recovered years later by a collector who had no idea
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: what he owned. That seat held the paint chip. The
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: paint chip held the mineral trace. The paint chip held
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: the mineral trace. the mineral trace held the calcium carbonate
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: ratio specific to the wash, where the remains lay 60
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: feet from the bag. Nearly 39 years of silence, closed
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: by a fragment of painted steel smaller than a fingernail,
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: the consulted experts put the probability of coincidental match at
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: less than one in several hundred thousand. The jury heard
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: that number on day four of the trial. During the
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: recess that followed, Hicks dismissed his attorney. When court resumed,
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: He took the stand and spoke for 11 minutes. He
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: did not express remorse in the portion of the record
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: that was made public. There is something about this case
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: that resists clean resolution. Even after the verdict, Armstrong walked
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: into December 1984 knowing something was wrong. She had the arithmetic.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: She had the names. She put seven pages into an envelope,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: sealed it with wax, and sent it to a priest
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: in another country. A man she apparently trusted as an
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: informal channel. Someone outside the reach of the people she feared.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: She did not mail it to a newspaper. She did
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: not go to the sheriff. She chose a route that
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: was quiet, indirect, and deniable. It did not protect her.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: But the letter survived every attempt the years made on it.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: It survived in a box in the consulate, in El
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: Paso under 400 other letters, in a file that was
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: never fully reviewed for 32 years. after the priest who
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: received it died. It survived a summer flood in 21
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: that moved the bag from where it had rested and
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: pushed it closer to the surface. It survived because a
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: birdwatcher from San Antonio walked 30 yards off a dirt
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: track on a December morning and took 11 photographs. Crystal
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Bailey had gone out to look for birds. In frame eight,
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: under a scrub oak, there was something else. The cases closed.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: Two convictions. Life without parole. Marilyn Armstrong was 49 years old.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: She had come to Cibola Wells in the autumn of 1973,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: after a divorce, carrying a job offer and very little else.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: She was precise. Colleagues remembered that she caught errors that
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: auditors missed. She cared about her shoes. She visited Dolores
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: Vance every week, for years, in a house at the
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: end of Farm Road 9. She noticed things. She wrote
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: them down. That is what she was, a woman who
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: noticed things, who wrote them down and who trusted that
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: the truth would find its way to someone who could
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: use it. It took nearly 39 years. It was enough.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Oboe Media.