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He Escaped a Locked Shed - Why He Took the Padlock? · The Kidnapping Files

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At 6.47 in the morning on March 9th, 2019, a
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: retired bookkeeper named Frances Bailey was doing what she had
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: done every winter Saturday for 15 years, watching birds at
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: Sutter Pond. What she found, instead, was a man lying
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: face down in the frozen mud, 30 yards from an
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: old grain-drying shed. His right fist was clenched around a
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: brass padlock, The shed behind him was locked from the outside.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: That padlock had come from inside. There is no clean
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: explanation for how a man escapes a locked shed. There
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: is even less of one. For why he takes the
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: lock with him when he goes. Clifford Foster was 54
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: years old and had lived on Meridian Trace Road in Kellick,
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Deshane County, Wisconsin, for most of his adult life. He
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: worked with his hands. He kept a tidy house. After
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: his divorce in 2013, The property became quieter, but Foster's
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: days stayed structured in the way that only people who
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: genuinely like routine managed to keep them. The anchor of
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: that routine was a 22-year-old quarter horse named Dutch. Dutch
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: had Cushing's disease, which required medication twice a day, every day,
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: at six in the morning and six in the evening.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: Foster had not missed a single feeding in three years.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: His daughter, Paige Werdock, knew that the way you know
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: someone's heartbeat, not because you track it, but because its
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: absence would be the loudest sound in the room. On
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: the evening of February 26th, 2019, Dutch did not get fed.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: Paige noticed first. Then Ed, Curtis, a neighbor who had
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: stopped by, walked into something that looked almost normal and
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: felt entirely wrong. Foster's truck sat in the driveway. The
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: kitchen light was on. The front door was unlocked. On
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: the counter, a coffee mug sat half full and cold.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: On the barn shelf, the feeding bucket had been measured
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: out and set aside. The precise action of a man
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: who intended to walk thirty feet and pour it, he
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: never made it to the barn. Curtis found one displaced
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: chair and a faint drag mark on the linoleum near
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: the back door. Nothing broken. No sign of a struggle
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: that announced itself. Just the specific silence of a house
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: where someone had been a moment before. Dale Pruitt had
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: been running his snowplow route along the county road that afternoon.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Somewhere between 4 and 4.30, he noticed a white panel
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: van parked roughly 150 yards north of Foster's driveway. He
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: noted it the way you note something mildly out of
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: place on a familiar road. Not alarming enough to stop
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: too unusual to forget completely. That van would become one
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: of the first threads Deshan County Sheriff's Investigator Darlene Sheridan pulled.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: Sheridan was 16 years into the job. She had worked
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: enough rural disappearances to know that the cases that looked
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: quiet at the scene were often the ones that had
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: been planned. Her handwritten case card from that first night read,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: He was about to go to the barn. Four words
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: that meant one thing. Whatever happened to Clifford Foster... happened
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: in a window of minutes between a measured feeding bucket
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: and a door he never reached. What Sheridan did not
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: know yet was that this was not the first time.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: The first image that did not make sense was a padlock.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: Not on a door. Not on a chain. In a
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: man's hand, Clifford Foster was found face down in frozen mud,
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: thirty yards from a shed at Sutter Pond, on the
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: morning of March 9th, 2019. His right fist was clenched
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: around a brass padlock. The Hallcourt 7 Series, its hasp
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: bent and broken, a length of orange nylon rope still
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: threaded through the shackle. Behind him, the shed door sat
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: padlocked from the outside, hasp intact. That padlock was fine.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: The one in his fist had come from inside. Darlene
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: Sheridan had two pieces of paper on her desk by
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: March 10th. The first was the case card she had
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: written at Foster's Kitchen on the night of February 26.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: The second was the tire impression report from the north
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: side of the Sutter Pond shed, a partial in thawed mud.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: LT Metric Commercial Van Tire, placed roughly eight feet from
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: a deformed sheet metal vent panel on the shed's southeast corner.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: The panel told its own story. It had been pushed
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: outward from the inside. The gap it left measured 11
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: inches by 14. A metallurgical review of the gauge and
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: corrosion on that shed wall concluded the deformation required sustained
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: effort over multiple days. And in the corrugated lip of
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: the opening, technicians found blood, skin cells, and a fiber
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: consistent with the jacket Foster was wearing when Bailey found him.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: He had not been rescued. He had been leaving when
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: he ran out of road. The blood trail from the
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: panel exit to the recovery site ran 30 yards through
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: frozen ground. His left forearm carried a wound, consistent with
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: sheet metal contact. Blood had frozen on the front of
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: his jacket before he stopped moving. Sheridan's second case card,
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: written the day after the scene was processed, noted one
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: detail about the tire impression. Deliberate concealment. Choice. The vehicle
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: had been pulled far enough onto the north side to
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: sit outside the sightline of the main road and every
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: neighboring property. Whoever parked there had looked at the land first.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: That observation sat alongside a name. Sheridan had already flagged
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Neil Novak, 47, ran Novak Property Services out of Kellwick.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: He owned the Sutter Ponds shed, had inherited it in 2011.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: His business records showed two prior jobs at Foster's property
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: on Meridian Trace Road, a barn door repair in 2015
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: and a fence installation in 2017. He knew the layout.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: He knew the horse. According to Foster's preliminary statement given
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: that same afternoon at Lucena Regional Hospital, Novak had been
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: on the property enough times to know that Dutch, Foster's
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: 22-year-old quarter horse, received medication at six in the morning
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: and again at six in the evening. Foster had not
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: missed a feeding in three years. Novak's alibi placed him elsewhere.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: A hardware receipt from a store in Lucena carried a
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: timestamp of 3.48 in the afternoon on February 26. A
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: woman named Brenda Holt told investigators in her first interview
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: that Novak had come by to help move furniture that
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: same evening. Brenda Holt's statement contradicts every sworn account filed
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: before March. Ten days later, Sheridan's team re-interviewed her. Holt
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: revised her account. Novak had not arrived at 6 that evening.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: He had arrived closer to 7.30. The window between the
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: hardware receipt and the revised arrival was nearly four hours.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: Pruitt's white panel van had been parked near Foster's driveway
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: between 4 and 4.30. The distance from Foster's property to
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: Sutter Pond was less than four miles. The receipt held.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: The alibi did not. There was still the padlock. It
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: sat in an evidence bag, tagged, and photographed. Halcourt Hardware
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: had closed in 2009. The H7 series had been discontinued
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: before that. The lock Foster carried out of that shed
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: was at minimum a decade old at the time of
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: his disappearance. No Hellcourt purchase records appeared anywhere in Novak's
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: receipts or business inventory. The lock was, on paper, unconnected
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: to anyone. Sheridan ordered a second examination of the shed
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: interior in late March. This is where the floor gave
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: something back. Beneath a section of replaced plywood flooring, examiners
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: found a second padlock, Halcourt 7. Intact. Orange nylon rope.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: The serial number was sequential to the one Foster had
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: carried out in his fist. Two locks. Same discontinued line.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: Same rope. One broken and in a survivor's hand. One
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: hidden under the floor of the same building. That was
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: the moment the shed stopped being a location and became
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: a record. By late March, a detective from Wallen County
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: reached out to Sheridan after news coverage of the foster
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: case reached him. His name is not part of the
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: public record, but the detail he carried was. A woman
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: named Patricia Cusse had been found in October 2018, alive, disoriented, malnourished,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: in a drainage culvert near the Wallen County Fairgrounds. She
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: had never been able to identify where she had been held.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: Her case had gone cold within weeks, but Koos had
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: reported one persistent sensory detail during her captivity. She heard
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: a horse. Twice a day. At fixed times. The Sutter
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: Pond shed sat less than four miles from Foster's Paddock.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: On still mornings in that part of Deshan County. Dutch
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: could be heard from there. Picture the shed in February.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Not the investigation of it, the interior of it, in
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: the dark, in the cold, before anyone knew to look.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: If you hold the version where Foster somehow wandered there, disoriented,
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: a medical episode, a fall, you immediately hit the vent panel.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: A man incapacitated by a medical event. does not deform
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: a sheet metal vent from the inside over the course
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: of multiple days. He does not bleed into the corrugated
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: lip in a pattern consistent with sustained pulling. He does
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: not exit through an 11-inch gap and walk 30 yards
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: before collapsing with a broken padlock in his hand. That
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: version collapses the moment you account for the rope. The
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: orange nylon rope threaded through the hasp of the lock,
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Foster carried out, matched the rope on the second lock
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: found beneath the floor. Rope like that is a restraint detail.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: A man with a medical episode does not restrain himself.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: Then hide a spare lock onto the floorboards in case
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: someone checks later. Now picture Novak's version, the one his
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: defense floated at trial. An unknown intruder, a generic white
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: van common to the county. No evidence placing Novak at
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: the shed on February 26th. That version holds right up
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: until you look at what Novak knew. He knew the property.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: He knew the schedule. He knew the gap, the window
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: between when Foster filled the bucket and when Dutch needed
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: it poured. Sheridan's case card said he was about to
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: go to the barn. That observation was not atmospheric. It
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: was a description of precision. Whoever took Foster had stood
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: somewhere near that kitchen and waited for the exact moment
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: the barn was thirty feet away and the door behind
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: him was still open. The hardware receipt placed Novak in
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: Lasana at 3.48. Pruitt saw the van at 4 to 4.30.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: The revised Holtz statement put Novak unaccounted for until 7.30.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: Novak owned the shed. Novak knew the victim. Novak had
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: keys to a building that held a second sequential lock
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: beneath its floor, and when the jury sat down to deliberate,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: on the fifth day, Neil Novak stopped waiting for a verdict.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: He confessed before they came back. Neil Novak confessed on
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: day five of deliberations. He did not wait for the
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: jury to come back. He spoke before the verdict existed,
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: which meant the jury's work became procedural. They convicted on
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: all counts. There was not much left to decide. The
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: confession contained one sentence that investigators had not expected in
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: quite that form. Novak said he selected victims through professional access.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: He knew their properties, their schedules, their habits. He described
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: it as having turned that trust into a map. That
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: phrase reframes everything from the beginning. The barn door in 2015.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: The fence repair in 2017. Every visit Novak made to
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: Meridian Trace Road as a contractor was also a reconnaissance pass.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: He was not a stranger. He was the man. Foster
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: had paid and trusted the man who watched Dutch get
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: fed at six in the morning and six in the
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: evening for years. The man who knew the exact gap
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: between bucket preparation and barn arrival. Clifford Foster led him
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: onto that property. So did the client before him. Patricia
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: Coos had been found in a drainage culvert near the
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: Wallin County Fairgrounds in October 2018, disoriented and malnourished. The
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: case had gone cold. She had never been able to
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: identify where she was held. She remembered hearing a horse
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: twice daily, at fixed times. The sound had been one
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: of her few anchors. It did not help investigators then.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: It had no address attached to it. The Sutter Pond
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: shed sits less than four miles from Foster's paddock. On
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: still mornings, Dutch could be heard from there. When Wallen
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: County detectives contacted Darlene Sheridan in late March 2019, after
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: news coverage of Foster's case, they brought Coos' statement with them.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: The hoarse detail connected two cases that had existed in
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: separate files in separate counties. a sign to separate investigators
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: who had no reason to speak to each other until
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: one man's shed appeared on the map twice. Novak's confession
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: confirmed it. He had held coups at the same shed
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: the previous autumn. The second Halcourt padlock beneath the floor,
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: the one with the sequential serial number, had been hers.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: There is something about that detail that does not loosen easily.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: Two people held in the same building, months apart. neither
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: knowing the other had been there. Foster, working the sheet
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: metal vent in the dark, not knowing that someone else
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: had once listened to Dutch from that same floor. The
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: shed had been a place twice, and only the locks remembered.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: Novak was arrested on April 14th, 2019. He was charged
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: with two counts of kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment in the
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: Foster case, with additional charges added for the Coos case.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: He denied everything at trial. On day five of deliberations,
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: with the jury still out, he stopped. He was convicted
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: on all counts. Frances Bailey, the retired bookkeeper who had
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: been walking Sutter Pond since 2004, was not called to testify.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: She had done the one thing the case required of her.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: She walked her usual path on the morning of March 9th.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: She found a man face down in frozen mud, 30
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: yards from a shed, 30 yards from a shed, and
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: she stayed on the line until she heard sirens. She
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: was present in the gallery the day. The verdict was read.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: She did not need to be there. She came anyway.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: Clifford Foster gave his preliminary statement at La Sina Regional
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: Hospital on the afternoon of March 9, 2019. He had
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: been missing 11 days. He left the shed with a
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: brass padlock clenched in his right fist. A lock he
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: had used to pry open a sheet metal seam over
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: the course of two days, he said. He kept it
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: because it had been his only companion for eleven days.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: That sentence stays. There is a version of this story
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: where the evidence is the center. The tire impression placed
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: eight feet from the deformed vent panel. The biological trace
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: in the corrugated lip. The Hellcourt serial numbers. Sequential. One
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: in Foster's hand and one under the floor. The revised alibi.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: The receipt. timestamp, the cold mug on the kitchen counter,
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: the bucket measured and set on the barn shelf, and
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: never poured. All of it holds. All of it points
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: the same direction. But the center of this story is
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: not the evidence. It is the gap between six in
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: the morning and six in the evening that Dutch depended on,
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: and the man who had memorized it, and the man
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: who had no way of knowing that his daily routine
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: had become a blueprint in someone else's hands. Darlene Sheridan's
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: first case card read. He was about to go to
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: the barn. She wrote that on the day she walked
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: through the kitchen, she had not yet found the padlock,
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: or the tire impression, or the second lock onto the floor.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: She had a cold coffee mug, and an open door,
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: and a feeding bucket that had been measured, but not carried.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: She wrote what the evidence said before she knew where
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: it was going. She was right from the first card.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: Clifford Foster was 54 years old when he spent 11
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: days in a grain-drying shed in Deshane County, Wisconsin. He
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: had divorced in 2013. He lived alone on Meridian Trace Road.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: He had not missed Dutch's feeding in three years. He survived.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: Patricia Koos survived. Francis Bailey heard sirens and put down
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: the phone. Neil Novak is in custody. He described what
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: he had done as turning trust into a map. The
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: people he chose had opened their gates for him, shown
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: him their routines, paid him for his work. He learned
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: the shape of their days and used it. That is
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: not a method that required special resources or rare opportunity.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: It required only that someone trust him, which they had,
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: and that he notice what that trust revealed, which he did.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: The padlock Foster carried out at the shed is not
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: evidence anymore. It was entered, catalogued, and returned. He kept it.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: He said it had been his only companion for eleven days,
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: and that was true in a way the evidence report
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: could not fully contain. He had worked it against a
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: sheet metal seam in the dark. He had held onto
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: it on the thirty-yard walk through frozen mud to the
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: place where Francis Bailey found him. He arrived holding it.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: He left holding it. He left holding the folder, its
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: edges soft from the months his hands had worked. the
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: same corners, the same crease running diagonally across Brenda Holt's name.
• 18:54
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