Latest / Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases / Pinned by a Survey Stake: The Sneaker That Reopened Two Cold Cases

Transcript

Pinned by a Survey Stake: The Sneaker That Reopened Two Cold Cases · Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At nine forty seven. On the morning of August eleventh,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, a county surveyor crouched in a dry
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: field off Fallow Creek Road and stared at something that
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: should not have been there. A white canvas sneaker size eight,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: leached pale by four years of sun, pinned to the
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: earth by an aluminum survey stake. The stake was the
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: kind used to mark property lines. Some one had used
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: it to mark something else entirely. The sneaker belonged to
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Karen Schultz. She had been missing for exactly one four
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: hundred and sixty eight days. What followed was not a
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: sudden breakthrough. It was the slow, careful work of a
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: cold case investigator who noticed a number stamp on a
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: collar of metal and pulled a thread that unraveled everything.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: By the time that thread reached its end, it connected
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: two women who had never met, two counties, and a
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: single name. No one had suspected. Karen Schultz was the
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: kind of person a small office notices immediately when she
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: is gone. For fourteen years, she managed the daily operations
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: of Meridian Land Services in garvi Aldrich County, scheduling field crews,
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: tracking equipment, keeping the paperwork moving that let surveyors do
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: their work. She was forty nine years old in the
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: summer of two thousand fifteen. She had been divorced for
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: six years and had settled into a life that was,
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: by every account, exactly what she had built it to be.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Every Thursday evening, she drove to Pembroke Lane for book club,
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: the same six women eight years running. Her neighbor, Connie Marsh,
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: a retired school teacher, would sometimes see Karen's car pull
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: out in the late afternoon and wave from the porch.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: Karen always waved back. Her daughter, Becca, was twenty two
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: that summer, living in Columbus, finishing the kind of early
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: adult hood that requires a mother of phone call away.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: They talked regularly. Becca would say later that her mother
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: was the most organized person she knew, the woman who
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: sent reminder texts before appointments and never, not once failed
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: to call back. On the afternoon of August fourth, twenty fifteen,
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: Karen left the Meridian parking lot at five twenty in
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: the afternoon. Phil Eaton, a survey technician, watched her pull out.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: It was an ordinary Tuesday. Nothing in her demeanor suggested
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: anything was wrong. The next morning, her gray Honda Accord
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: sat on a gravel shoulder of Hessler Road, the route
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: she always took between the office and home. The driver's
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: door was unlocked, her phone was on the passenger seat,
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: her bag was beside it. There was no sign of
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: a struggle, no broken glass, no displaced gravel, no indication
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: that anyone had fought for their life in or around
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: that car. Detective Frank Adler of the Aldrich County Sheriff's
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: Department took the case. The working theory settled early on
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: a transient attacker, someone who had happened upon a woman
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: alone on a rural road. There were no security cameras
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: within four miles in any direction, no forensic evidence on
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: the vehicle, no credible suspect emerged. By early twenty sixteen,
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: the case was filed as inactive. Frank Adler retired in
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, and Karen Schultz remained a missing person in
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: a database. Terry Ogul lived sixty miles east in a
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: different county and a different world. She was forty four
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: years old, working the night shift at a food processing
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: plant in Newcomers Town, because Hockton County. She and Karen
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Schultz had never met. They shared no employer, no neighborhood,
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: no social circle. In March of twenty seventeen, Terry's sister
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Janice reported her missing. The case went to coss Hockton County.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: It did not connect to Aldrich County. There was no
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: reason it would have two women, two counties, two cold
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: cases sitting in two separate filing systems. The thing that
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: linked them had been buried in a dry Ohio field
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: since two thousand fifteen, and it would take a surveyor
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: with a boundary dispute to find it. Glen Wallis was
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: not looking for a body. He was in Minter County
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: on a boundary dispute a neighbor claiming a fence line
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: had shifted. Wallace had eleven years of survey work behind him,
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: and he knew the difference between a line that had
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: moved and one that had never been properly marked. He
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: was scanning a parcel on Fallow Creek Road, checking old
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: pins against current coordinates when he saw it. A white
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: canvas sneaker size eight, bleached pale by years of sun.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: It was not lying on the ground, it was pinned
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: to it. An aluminum survey stake had been driven through
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: the upper fabric, fixing the shoe in place as cleanly
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: as if some one had meant it to stay there forever.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Wallace called the Mintor County Sheriff's Department at nine forty
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: seven in the morning. By noon, partial excavation had exposed
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: human skeletal remains approximately eighteen inches below the surface. No clothing,
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: no identification, just the sneaker and the stake holding it down.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: The last official survey of that parcel had been conducted
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: in two thousand three. Whoever had chosen that ground knew it.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: They had known that no one with a measuring rod
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: and a legal reason to dig would walk that land
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: for years, maybe decades, And they had marked the spot anyway,
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: not with a grave marker, but with a tool of
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: their own profession driven into the earth above a dead
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: woman's shoe. That was the first image that would not
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: let go. Alice Russo ran cold cases for the Ohio
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: Bureau of Criminal Investigation out of the regional office in Dayton.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: She was managing fourteen open cases the week the Fallow
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Creek Road remains came in. Karen Schultz was one name
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: on that list, a missing person from Aldrich County, four
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: years cold, no suspect, no body, no forensic trace from
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: the car. The DNA hit arrived on September twenty third,
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen. The sample extracted from the teeth matched a
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: reference profile that Becca Schultz had submitted to the Missing
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: Person's database in twenty sixteen. The remains were Karen. The
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: case was no longer missing persons. It was homicide. But
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: here is the thing. Alice was not looking at a
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: gravel shoulder in Aldrich County any more. She was looking
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: at a survey stake. The stake had a collar. The
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: caller had a lot number stamped into it. That number
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: could be traced not to a hardware store, not to
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: a county inventory, but to a specific purchase order and
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: a specific delivery. The lot traced to a shipment of
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: aluminum survey markers delivered to Meridian Land Services in the
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: spring of two thousand fourteen. Karen Schultz had managed that
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: office for fourteen years. She had signed every equipment checkout sheet.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Alice pulled the logs for two thousand fourteen and two
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: thousand fifteen dozens of entries, most of them routine stakes
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: going out with survey crews. Coming back, going out again.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: Then she found the entry for July twenty eighth, twenty fifteen,
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: one week before Karen disappeared, a junior technician named Amanda
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Zimmerman had checked out a box of forty stakes from
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: that same lot. The box had never been returned. Amanda
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: Zimmerman was thirty one years old in twenty fifteen. She
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: had worked at Meridian for three years. No criminal history,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: no restraining orders. She had left the company two months
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: after Karen vanished, citing a family situation, and relocated to
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: Milhaven in Coshocton County, roughly sixty miles east. By two
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: thousand sixteen, she was working for a private survey contractor
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: called Freehold Survey Group. By the time Alice found her
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: name in the check out log, Amanda was working at
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: a hardware store in Milhaven, living alone in a rental
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: on Maple trace. Alice also pulled the Manda's field assignment
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: records from Meridian. On August first, two thousand fifteen, three
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: days before Karen Schultz drove out of that parking lot
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: and never came home, Amanda had conducted a boundary survey
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: on a parcel directly adjacent to Hessler road. She knew
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: the gravel shoulder, she had stood on it. That was
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: the second image, and it opened a much larger question.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: In October of two thousand nineteen, a drainage contractor working
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: on Ed Kowalski's farm outside Milhaven struck something two feet underground.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: The Coshoctan County Sheriff's Department logged the remains as Jane Doe.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: No open missing person's case in the county matched the profile.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: The file moved through routine inter agency channels. Alice received
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: the notification in November. She almost filed it. Then she
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: read the forensic detail her counterpart in Coshocton had attached,
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: almost as an afterthought. Buried alongside the remains, a metal
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: survey stake, same construction, same dimensions as the one from
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: Fallow Creek Road. She drove to coushcton the next morning.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: The lot number on the second stake matched same shipment,
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: same spring, two thousand fourteen delivery to Meridian Land Services.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: The burial depth and soiled decomposition put the date of
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: interment somewhere between two thousand sixteen and two thousand eighteen.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: After Amanda Zimmermann had moved to Milhaven. Alice looked at
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: a county map. The Kowalsky farm was approximately four miles
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: from Amanda's rental on maple trace. She checked Freehold Survey
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Group's assignment records. In February of two thousand seventeen, Amanda
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: had conducted a survey on a road running adjacent to
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: the Kowalski property. Six weeks later, in March of two
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: thousand seventeen, Terry Ogle's sister Janice reported her missing. Terry Ogle,
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: forty four years old, night shift worker. No connection to
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Meridian Land Services, no connection to Karen Schultz, two different counties,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: two different lives, two stakes from the same box. The
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: DNA came back in January of twenty twenty. The remains
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: from the Kowalski farm were Terry Ogle picture what Alice
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: Russo was holding at that moment, not a theory, a geometry.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: Two burial sites, two women, two stakes from a box
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: signed out by one person one week before the first
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: victim disappeared, and that same person had conducted field surveys
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: within walking distance of both locations before each woman went missing.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: The evidence did not name a motive, It named the method,
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: and the method was precise what investigators had assumed for
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: four years a transient attacker. A random intersection of a
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: woman and a road was not random at all. Was
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: not random at all. The location on Hessler Road had
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: been scouted. The ground on Fallow Creek Road had been
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: chosen in advance, not in panic. Someone had driven a
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: stake through a dead woman's shoe and left it there,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: knowing the field would not be surveyed again for years.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: The arrest warrant for Amanda Zimmerman was executed on the
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: fourteenth of February twenty twenty at her rental on Maple Trace.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: She did not speak during the arrest. The search of
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: Amanda Zimmerman's storage unit took less than forty minutes. Inside
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: a pair of white canvas sneakers size eight, one shoe missing,
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: a silver woman's watch engraved on the back with the
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: initials KS, and a partially used box of aluminum survey
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: stakes from Meridian Land Services Batch number matching the remaysa
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: pulled from the office on July twenty eight, twenty fifteen.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Amanda had kept the watch. That detail settled something investigators
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: had been trying to articulate for months. This was not
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: a person who had acted in panic and tried to
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: forget this was a person who had kept a souvenir.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: The interrogation ran across two sessions. On the fifteenth of
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: February twenty twenty. Alice Russo and BCI agent Mark de
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: Luca conducted both. For the first hour, Amanda sat composed,
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: correcting minor scheduling details, disputing the physical evidence in a calm,
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: measured voice. She did not raise her tone, She did
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: not cry. She offered small corrections, as though the stakes
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: and the watch could be explained away by administrative error.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: Then Alice placed Karen's watch on the table between them.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Amanda asked for water. She drank half the glass, and
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: then she spoke, not with remorse, with precision. She described
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: three years of working under Karen Schultz the way someone
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: reads a list of grievances they have rehearsed alone for
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: a long time, praised in front of clients, corrected in private,
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: corrected in private, assigned to the worst parcels in the
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: worst weather while Phil Eaton, a male colleague, worked indoors.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: She said Karen made her feel small and invisible. She
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: said it without raising her voice. The fourth of August
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: two thousand fifteen, she said was not planned. Karen's Honda
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: was already stopped on the gravel shoulder of Hessler Road
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: when Amanda came around the bend. Karen was outside the
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: car looking at a flat tire. Amanda stopped because she said,
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: that was what you did. She did not elaborate on
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: what came next. She didn't have to. The physical evidence
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: had already told that story. What Amanda did describe was
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: the ground on Fallow Creek Road. She had walked it
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: months before during a field survey. She had noticed how
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: rarely that parcel was touched. She had noted the last
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: official survey marker was from two thousand three. She knew
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: the timeline. She understood that the land would stay quiet.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: She buried Terry Ogle in Coshocton County in the same period.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: She was working field assignments for Freehold Survey Group. The
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: location near the Kowalski farm was a site she had
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: accessed professionally. She had read the land the way she
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: had been trained to read it. She stopped talking after that.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: The silence in the room, according to the investigative record,
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: lasted almost four minutes before her attorney intervened. Amanda Zimmerman
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: entered a guilty plea to two counts of aggravated murder.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: In November of twenty twenty, A judge sentenced her to
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: two consecutive life terms without the the possibility of parole.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: She was thirty six years old at sentencing. Beccha Schultz
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: attended both hearings. Janice Ogule, Terry's sister, who had first
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: reported her missing in the spring of twenty seventeen, attended
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: as well. The record does not preserve what either woman
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: said publicly that day. What it does preserve is that
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: they were both there. They both saw it end. Glen Wallace,
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: the county surveyor whose boundary dispute call on a Tuesday
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: morning in August of two thousand nineteen had set everything
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: in motion, was never called to testify. The dispute that
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: sent him to follow Creek Road turned out to be
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: a neighbor's error. The fence line was exactly where it
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: had always been. There is something precise and terrible about
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: the way this case finally unraveled, not through a confession
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: volunteered out of guilt, not through a witness who came
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: forward through a shoe staked into the ground in a
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: field that had not been officially measured in sixteen years,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: found because a neighbor put a fence post in the
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: wrong place. Karen Schultz had attended the same book club
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: on Pembroke Lane for eight years, same six women every Thursday.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: Her neighbor, Connie Marsh, a retired school teacher, could set
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: her schedule by the sound of Karen's car pulling out
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: of the driveway. Karen had worked fourteen years at the
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: same company, managed the same equipment logs, signed the same
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: checkout sheets. She was someone whose life had a shape
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: that people around her knew and counted on. That shape
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: disappeared on a Tuesday afternoon in August on a road
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: she drove every day four miles from her house. Terry
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: Ogle worked nights in a food processing plant in Newcomerstown.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: She had a sister who noticed immediately when the calls stopped.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: Janice did not wait. She filed the missing persons report
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: in March of twenty seventeen, within days of last contact.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: Terry did not have any connection to Karen Schultz. They
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: did not share an employer, a neighborhood, or a county.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: What they shared, in the end was a box of
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: aluminum stakes, and the fact that Amanda Zimmerman had surveyed
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: land near each of them before they vanished. Alice Russo
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: had been managing fourteen cold cases simultaneously out of the
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: BCI regional office in Dayton when Glen Wallace made his call.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Karen's case was one of fourteen. The stake changed that.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: What the stake represented, in the clearest possible terms, was
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: that someone had tried to use professional knowledge as a
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: form of permanence. As a form of permanence, Amanda Zimmerman
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: had read the land the way she had been trained
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: to do. She had calculated which ground would stay undisturbed.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: She had been right for four years about Karen. She
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: had been right for nearly three years about Terry. She
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: had understood that a serve goes where no one else goes,
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: and she had used that access as cover. What she
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: had not calculated was another surveyor someone doing the same
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: work for the same mundane reasons, in a field she
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: believed would stay quiet. Glen Wallace was not looking for anything.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: He was resolving a fence dispute that turned out to
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: be a mistake. That is the thing this case leaves behind,
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: not a lesson about detection or investigative genius. Though Alice
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: Russo's work connecting the batch number to the sign out
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: sheet was meticulous and necessary, the thing it leaves behind
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: is simpler than that. Karen Schultz was found because a
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: surveyor went to a field. Terry Ogo was found because
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: Alice drove to cous Hockton the day after an inter
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: agency notification landed on her desk and looked at a
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: stake she had already seen before. Four years nearly three years.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: Two women found because someone kept showing up. Becca Schultz
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: was twenty two years old when her mother disappeared. She
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: was twenty six when she learned where her mother had been.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: She was twenty seven when she sat in a courtroom
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: and watched a sentence get handed down. The record does
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: not say what Becca felt walking out of that court house.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: Some things are not in the record. But she was
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: there when it ended, and so was Janice. And whatever
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: the court house steps looked like that November morning in
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty, whatever the light was, whatever the light was,
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: whatever they said to each other or didn't say, Karen
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: and Terry were finally fully gnome, not as cases as women.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Obo Media.