Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 787: True Crime in the Outdoors

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Ep. 787: True Crime in the Outdoors · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is the Meeater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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• 0:15
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  Speaker 1: dot com. That's f I R S T L I
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: T E dot com. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we're
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: fixing the follow. Uh, we're fixing the follow some blood trails.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: You like that?
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: That's good. Yeah, it's a good start. Go follow some
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: serious blood trails. Uh, you guys, listen to the show.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Sometime ago on our on our on the Meat Eater
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  Speaker 1: podcast feed, we ran a thing called blood Trails and
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: it was put together and hosted by doctor Jordan Sillers.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: Who's sitting with me right now.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Not a medical doctor, No, not a medical doctor of
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: English English, that's right. Yeah, yeah, he specializes in speaking
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: in this language.
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: Yep. I can only help you study this language.
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I can only help you medically if you're you know,
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: gonna die of bad grammar.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Along those lines are you trying to explain something to
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: the doctor. You can't get your point across. You might
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: have come to a doctor like this, there you go,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: will help you put it into clear, concise, powerful prose.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: So in that way, he's a medical professional. He ran,
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: We ran blood trails, and the blood trails app it
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: was kind of like it was like a I don't
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: know I put it.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: It was a It was an inaugural.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: It was a test episode where we told a story
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: of an unsolved of an unsolved murder.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: We recap that murder real quick. It's kind of the
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  Speaker 2: who the who, what where why? Yeah? Sure.
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: So it was a hunter in Virginia named David Stack
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: and he went out hunting with his son and his
• 2:07
  Speaker 3: brother and it was, you know, opening day of turkey season.
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  Speaker 3: He went out and his son and brother came back
• 2:14
  Speaker 3: to their cabin and he didn't show up, so they
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: went out searching for him. They searched and searched. Eventually
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  Speaker 3: they found him. He'd been shot with a twenty two
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  Speaker 3: caliber rifle projectile and they had never figured out who
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  Speaker 3: did it. The Virginia Wildlife Agency was in charge of
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: the murder investigation, and they were never able to name
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: a suspect. The friend of the family who I spoke with,
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: has some you know, ideas about some of perhaps the
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: neighbors maybe knew something or were involved.
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  Speaker 2: This is just me as a dude.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, sure, sure, but for whatever reason, they were never
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: they were never able to collect the evidence.
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  Speaker 2: Then private land, how many people could be there?
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  Speaker 3: Well, so this is part of the thing, is that
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  Speaker 3: one one of the neighboring landowners was allegedly guiding you know,
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: turkey hunters, which he was not supposed to do. So
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  Speaker 3: it's possible that there were some people in those woods
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  Speaker 3: who were not neighbors, who were strangers to the area.
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  Speaker 1: That's one of the thing I meant by his private
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  Speaker 1: land meaning Okay, how many possible people were running around
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: the woods. I listened to the episode. Mind it blows
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: my mind.
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: I I know, I know. And I talked with like.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: You could fit the people that did it. It's like,
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: you know, and you could fit them around this table. Yeah,
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: and it'd be like you'd call them in. I'd be
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: like with my kids, I'd be like, we're all staying
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: here until someone admits.
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: So you shot the guy. That might be unconstitutional. I'm
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: not I'm not sure. I'm not a lawyer, but I
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: don't think that's allowed. But yeah, you know, it really is.
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  Speaker 3: It's like, what can we find evidence for? And if
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: there's no evidence? And I talked with our buddy Brent Reeves,
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: who was in law enforcement for a long time, and
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: he explained to me the difficulty of investigating a crime
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: scene like this because you don't know how large it is.
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  Speaker 3: It's very difficult to find physical evidence because you know,
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  Speaker 3: the leaves hide things, and you know, it's just tough.
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  Speaker 3: So they were never able to name a suspect. I'm
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: sure investigators have suspicions, but yeah, but if you're an investigator,
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  Speaker 3: you can't. You know, you got one shot, right, And
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  Speaker 3: this is something that's been as I've reported these other cases. Investigators,
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  Speaker 3: you know, they tell me this, you get one shot
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  Speaker 3: at a conviction, and if you don't have what you need,
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  Speaker 3: you walk.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, but they need to bring in one of those
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  Speaker 1: cold case specialists, those real crack commando investigators.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, come on, I'm sure I'm sure the family would
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  Speaker 3: welcome that. And I know that there have been I
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: don't know about crack commandos, but you know people assigned
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  Speaker 3: specifically to this case. Over the years and they haven't
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  Speaker 3: you know, made any headway that they're able to share
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: with the public. I don't know that they haven't made head.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Well yeah, yeah, that they're will open about open exactly.
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  Speaker 2: So anyways, we do a piece on this. We did
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: a piece on this. It's great.
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  Speaker 1: Jordan's like I said, researched it, hosted it, it was great.
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: People were very enthusiastic about it.
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  Speaker 1: So we've were launching this series Blood Trails and doing
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: a whole bunch of these stories about these like murders
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: and events.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: That involve hunters, right, hunters and hunters, anglers, outdoorsmen yep.
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  Speaker 1: So it's like it's like these kind of crime stories
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: that are very outdoor focused.
• 5:40
  Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, they're they're very outdoor focused. I really want
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: to stick to that. You know, it's hunters, anglers, campers, hikers,
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: public land users, people who are in the out of
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  Speaker 3: doors doing the things that we all love to do,
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  Speaker 3: and something terrible happens and sometimes, uh, you know, the
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  Speaker 3: hunter is the victim. We do have a pretty serious
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: story in this first season where the hunter is the
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: perpetrator of the crime, and so it's related to hunters
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: and anglers in some way all these stories are and
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: you know, I think that that gives us a perspective
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: on these cases that you know, your run of the
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: mill true crime podcast is not going to have.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. You know a lot of times.
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  Speaker 1: My kids, like some of the my kids listen to
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: my older one especially, he listens to some like crime stuff,
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  Speaker 1: and they're just kind of working off Wikipedia pages, right,
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like they're not doing And
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: I tried to explain him all the time, like you
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: realize these dudes like read a couple of books, right,
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: and they're just horking people's material.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: Yep.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, a lot of it, Like they're not doing
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  Speaker 3: anything right. Yeah, and that is you know a lot
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: of true crime podcasts, not all. Some of them do
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  Speaker 3: a really great job. There's lots of original reporting, but
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: a auto true crime podcasts the format is they read
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: news articles, they read a book, they read Wikipedia, they
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: explain to you what happened, and then usually there's two
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: people and they kind.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: Of react to that.
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  Speaker 3: This this series is not that I really wanted to
• 7:15
  Speaker 3: make a point of talking with the people who were involved,
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: whether that's the family of the victim, you know, law
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  Speaker 3: enforcement who investigated the case outside people who have you know,
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: professionals who have looked at the case. So what you're
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: getting adds to the story, right, It's not just you
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: know what you already know about the story. It's it's
• 7:33
  Speaker 3: information that you didn't know from the people who were involved. So,
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: you know, I record the interviews and we put them together,
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  Speaker 3: just like in that first episode about the Turkey Hunter.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, so how deep is the how deep is the well?
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  Speaker 1: Like when you start looking at when you go back
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  Speaker 1: and you have to explain how far back in time
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  Speaker 1: you went. Yeah, when you start looking like, how many
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  Speaker 1: cases like this, murder cases, disappearance cases involve the outdoor community,
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  Speaker 1: do you find that that it winds up being that
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  Speaker 1: it's that it's dozens that it's hard to find ten.
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  Speaker 3: There are quite a few, you know, the the example
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  Speaker 3: of a hunter who's killed in the woods, there's going
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  Speaker 3: to be a fairly limited number of those. But if
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  Speaker 3: we're talking about campers and hikers who disappear on public land,
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  Speaker 3: there are you know, potentially thousands.
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  Speaker 2: There was actually a bill.
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  Speaker 3: I believe it was called the Trace Act in the
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  Speaker 3: US Congress was introduced and basically the idea was to
• 8:47
  Speaker 3: start recording and putting together a database of people who
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  Speaker 3: disappear on public land.
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  Speaker 2: Oh wow.
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  Speaker 3: And one of the statistics they cited was sixteen hundred
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  Speaker 3: people have disappeared, and I forget that the time for
• 9:00
  Speaker 3: of that, but you know, nearly two thousand people have
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  Speaker 3: disappeared on public land in the last whatever ten or
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  Speaker 3: twenty years. And obviously the majority of those are not
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  Speaker 3: going to be like a criminal case, right, It's not
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  Speaker 3: going to be like foul play won't be suspected. It
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  Speaker 3: will be just someone you know, got lost and couldn't
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  Speaker 3: find their way out. But you know a certain number
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  Speaker 3: of those there were other people who they were with.
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  Speaker 3: We have a case in this first season of a
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  Speaker 3: hunter who went out with his two friends and disappeared,
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  Speaker 3: and those two friends came back. And the question is
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  Speaker 3: you know, right, like so so there are there are
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  Speaker 3: those types of cases, and you know there are plenty
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  Speaker 3: I think for us to to cover.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: You know, watching you work on this and helping on
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: a couple of them. A little bit. A thing that
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: I kept thinking of is I used to where I
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: grew up.
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  Speaker 1: I would I used to trap muskrats on a piece
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  Speaker 1: of the Manisteine National Forest I remember it was into
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  Speaker 1: I was trapping this marsh on the firearm opener.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, and this guy there's a missing guy.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: And eventually find him and he had shot himself leaning
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: against the tree, shot himself in the head, leaning against.
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: Tree, dering gunsies, yeah, okay. And where he was, I
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: mean I had muskrat traps seventy five yards from there. Yeah,
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: and I and I was like waiting. I was in
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: high school.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: I was waiting for someone to come and put the
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: screws to me a little bit. I had never heard
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: a word, never heard a word, and I eventually started
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: to I guess, no one's gonna come talk to me.
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: But I was like kind of paranoid. Yeah, yeah, that's
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: someone to come talk to you. But I'd have to
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: explain how I like a shot. I don't know.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, don't know anymore than you guys do. I mean,
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: I got trapped strung all along that hole. He was
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: like right up in the oaks, like come out of
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: the cattails, and he was just sitting right up there.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: I didn't know he was there. Yeah, But I just
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: always like come. No one never came and asked me
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: if I heard something, saw something did something.
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean maybe it was very clear from the scene,
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: could have been it was it was a suicide.
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: I talked to an investigator one time that did a
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: guy killed himself at a campfire, and the investigator came
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: in and he's like, I looked and knew what happened.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: But of course I couldn't take that mindset, right, So
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: I initially, yeah, I'm like, oh, he shot himself, but
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: don't touch anything.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: Treat it like a crime scene.
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: Yep.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think until he got until they got
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: to a point where like the obvious was true, but
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: just ruling out the idea that it was that it
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: was stage to look that.
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: Way right, right, because that's always possible, And that is
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: one thing law enforcement, you know, says, is always assume
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: it's a homicide if someone has died, right, assuming it's
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: a homicide until you have evidence proving otherwise.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about this Wisconsin. Let's talk about this Wisconsin,
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: this Wisconsin hunter and the Bear Boo Hills there. Yeah,
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: the reason that one strikes me. Yeah, that story really
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: strikes me. From the seventies, right, nineteen seventy seven, Yeah, Okay,
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: I just knew all the place names. Yeah, right, because
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: every year once or twice a year. Yeah, you know,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: a flying to Madison, see the Barboo Hills, right, go
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: to my buddy dogs. My buddy dog tells me this
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: that their thing, and so familiar with the roads, been
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: on the roads.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, And so I don't know. It just struck
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: me because I was like, oh, should I know that spot?
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: I know the spot? I know those places. Yeah.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: But talk about that guy a little bit, because here's
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: another one. Like dudes, they were well, they were very
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: early bowhunters.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, nineteen seventy seven.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like nineteen seventy eight bow hunters. Yeah, and so
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: that paints a picture in your head immediately because bow
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: hunting culture was very small.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah in seventy eight yep.
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so this this happened again in nineteen seventy seven.
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: I keep saying seventy eight. Sorry, seventy eight, Yeah, yes,
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: seventy seven.
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: You know in that that there was opening day of
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: both season in Wisconsin. The guy's name was Robert Christian.
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: He went by Bob, and he had he had a
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: plan with his friend Randy. He lived in Madison, Bob did.
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: Randy lived up in Barriboo and so they were planning
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: on hunting some land north of Barriboo on that Saturday,
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: and so Bob took his mom's car. He had a
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: motorcycle that he usually drove, but it was in the
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: shop for some reason.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: But he wouldn't have taken it.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: I know that's a part of it. But he wouldn't
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: have taken his motorbike out to go. I mean, I mean,
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: I think he wouldn't.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: Have liked hung his bowl over his back.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean, this is according This is according to
• 14:04
  Speaker 3: his sister. His sister kind of who I spoke with,
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: made a point of mentioning he had a motorbike. It
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: was in the shop, and his his mom let him
• 14:13
  Speaker 3: drive her brand new AMC Hornet.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: So maybe he would have taken that bike maybe.
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: I mean, it seemed like something he drove around a lot.
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: And this piece is interesting because it kind of speaks
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: to Bob's character that his mom he was eighteen, so,
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: you know, not very old. His mom let him take
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: her brand like this is a brand new car, right,
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: she just bought it. And so he was. He was
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: a good kid. He had just started at the University
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: of Wisconsin Madison. He was going to be a computer
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: science major. You know, good grades. You know, he had
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: lots of friends.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: So he's an early adopter on archery season, yeah, and
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: he's an early adopter on computer science.
• 14:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: He probably would have been a millionaire by now because
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: he was. He was right there at the beginning. So
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: he's supposed to meet Randy at six o'clock at his house.
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: They're gonna spend the night and then get up early
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: the next morning. Six o'clock rolls around, Bob hasn't shown up.
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: And like everyone I talked with about Bob really emphasized
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: like this was unusual for him because again, he's a
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: good kid. He's there on time. If he says he's
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: gonna be there, he's not gonna, you know, make Randy's
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: mom wait to start dinner.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: One of his relatives said, if he says he's gonna
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: do something, yeah, exactly exactly. So they're kind of immediately concerned.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: They don't, you know, they don't think like, oh, he's
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: been abducted, right, They their first thought is he's been
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: in some kind of car accident. And so so the
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Randy's last name is Griffiths. So the Griffiths call the
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: Christians and they kind of call back and forth, like
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: where's Bob.
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: We don't know where he went, and so they start
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: calling like hospitals, they they do call law enforcement, I think,
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: just to see if there'd been a road accident, you know,
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: if he'd gotten into some kind of accident on the way,
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: and they don't. There's there's no sign of him. And
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: so they spend the next day on Saturday, I think,
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: like again calling around some of you know, Bob's friends
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: other family members, like has anyone seen him? Did he
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: go somewhere else for some reason that that you know,
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: he didn't say he would, And still no sign of him.
• 16:24
  Speaker 3: So on Sunday they go out to look for him.
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: They're just driving the roads and they find the car.
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: They find Bob's mom's car. It's parked up kind of
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: on this like it's the road's name is Tower Road.
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: I think there was like some kind of radio tower.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: It's like up in.
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: A very rural kind of remote area, just like a
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: side road up there, and the car doesn't have any
• 16:54
  Speaker 3: wheels or tires. It's just like sitting on the ground
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: for some reason. Bob's his his hunting stuff is gone.
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: His letterman jacket is in the car. And then I
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: think Bob's mom was a nurse, and so her nursing
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: kit is in the car.
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: Kid just bought some swish or sweets.
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. So so we swished.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: Sweets in the car. I don't that really put me
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: in a certain place in time? Yeah?
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because he went got twenty five bucks from the
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: bank and then went and bought swish or sweets.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: It was like, dude, like, I know this guy.
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean yeah, yeah, from that, you know his
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: his sister said he loved hanging out with his friends, smoking,
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: you know, playing cards, and so yeah, so that's that's
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: a we know that. The last thing we know that
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: he did was he made two stops in Madison. One
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: was at the bank, the other was at a convenience store,
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: and from there he drove up and we don't know
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: what happened after that.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: And so there's so many details to it, but like.
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: There's there's a lot, there's a lot, you know, but
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: the kind of bottom line is, to this day, we
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: don't know what happened to him.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: There are theories, but in none of that archery equipment,
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: none of that stuff ever.
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: Ever turned up. Yeah, none of it ever turned up.
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: A really important piece of this is that the area
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: his car was found was an area that he grew
• 18:20
  Speaker 3: up hunting in, so it wasn't and that's kind of
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: why they were up there looking because they thought, well,
• 18:25
  Speaker 3: maybe he went up here right for some reason. Even
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: though it wasn't on the way to Randy's house. It
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: was a detour that would have made him late, but
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: he was familiar with that area. His sister said where
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: the car was found was not where they usually parked
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: in that area, So it was kind of odd that
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: he would have parked up that little side road. But
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: you wonder maybe he just went up to do some scouting,
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: took his bow, went in the woods. They conducted obviously
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: an extensive search of the area. They brought in you know, dogs,
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: they brought in a helic. They didn't have drones at
• 19:01
  Speaker 3: the time, but you know, they did do aerial search.
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: The detective who's in charge of this this investigation told
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: me that the family, you know, still goes up there
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: right and like looks around. Maybe he we just never
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: found him. Maybe he had some kind of medical emergency
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: and we just never found him in these woods. But
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: the detective I talked with he didn't because I sort
• 19:23
  Speaker 3: of asked him, like, could he have just like gotten
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: hurt or lost in the woods, and he doesn't. He
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: doesn't think that's likely. He thinks they would have found him.
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: But it is a weird piece that his hunting stuff,
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: his bow was not in the car, right, because if
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: he'd been abducted, why would the abductor take his bow? Right,
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: That's kind of a weird thing to do.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's.
• 19:46
  Speaker 4: There's also that whole wrinkle about that nun who sees
• 19:49
  Speaker 4: I don't know how much you want to like give
• 19:50
  Speaker 4: away on the podcast, but there's so many like wrinkles
• 19:52
  Speaker 4: to it that are so interesting.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So so a few days into the investigation, you're.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: Taking the bait on that.
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, you gotta Phil brings up the nun. You
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: gotta talk about the nun.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: Film might have a little I don't know, little thing
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: you're saying.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: I'm a part of this case, Steve, although I thought
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: maybe maybe he's interested nuns.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: I gave you all the clues.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: So they they found They find out that just about
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: a mile down the road from where Bob's car was found,
• 20:28
  Speaker 3: a nun there was there was a convent. Now it's
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: like a retreat center, but at the time it was
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: it was a convent.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: A mile from the car was about a mile yep.
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: Just down the road. And they realized that that there
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: was a nun who lived in a cabin and she'd
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: been gone for a few days. She came back to
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: her house and realized someone had been living in her house.
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: They hadn't like ransacked it and stolen stuff. It seemed
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: like they'd actually been like living in her cabin.
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: And so this.
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: Obviously freaks her out. She calls her friend, whose name
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: is Mary, to drive over and just like be with
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: her because she doesn't know if whoever this is gonna
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: come back, right he wasn't there at the time, And
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: so Mary drives over, and when she pulls up into
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: this driveway, she sees a car that's running but in
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: the driveway, and she makes a note which is like
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: pretty incredible. She makes a note of the license plate number.
• 21:23
  Speaker 3: She writes it down, and she walks up to this
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: car and the driver rolls down the window and he says,
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: either I'm looking for my friend or at other times
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: she said he said I'm looking for my friend Bob,
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: and her description of him matches Bob. She said he
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: was a young guy, brown hair, glasses. But then later,
• 21:51
  Speaker 3: according to the reports, she saw a picture of Bob
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: and was like, ah, maybe it wasn't him. I don't know,
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: So that's also a little bit uncuo. So so she
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: wrote down the license plate number, which is how we
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: know that was Bob's car. So, whoever, whoever was driving it,
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: whether it was Bob or someone else, it was Bob's car.
• 22:14
  Speaker 3: And this was I think like nine nine or maybe
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: like nine pm, ten pm at nights. This was at
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: night after you know, people had been worried about him.
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: This was that Friday night for its got stripped. Yeah,
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: this was that Friday night. And so and so Mary
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: said that the car drove back down the driveway and
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: then turned away from where the car was eventually found.
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: So for some reason it turned the opposite direction and
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: then eventually made its way back to where it was found,
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: after which time the wheels and tires were stripped for
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: some reason. Those hub caps were eventually found at a
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: rock quarry, which is another piece of this, but it's
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: just a really creepy interaction. Man, right, and and Amy,
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: Bob's sister, thinks that it's possible, and I think Randy
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: had said this as well, who I also spoke with.
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: They think it's possible that Bob that someone else was
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: in the car. It was dark, and so Mary doesn't
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: know whether anyone else was in the car. They think
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: someone else could have been in the car, maybe holding
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: Bob at gunpoint, and he was kind of trying to
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: drop a hint, like I'm looking for my friend Bob.
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: He didn't want to say anything that would like upset
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: this person. But she thinks maybe he was trying to
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: send a message.
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: And you know, we.
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: Don't know whether that person who was with Bob maybe
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: could have been the same person who had been staying
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: in the nun's house. We don't know. We don't even
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: know that those two things are connected. Yeah, And part
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: of the problem it's possible. But part of the problem
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: it was never like investigated super closely, at least right away,
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: is because there's a county line that separates where Bob's
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: car was found from the nuns house.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because well because if he was in there, if
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: he was in there for ten minutes, well they wouldn't
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: have known it, they wouldn't have done it. At the time,
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: if he was in there for ten minutes.
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: There's hair, there's oh yeah, right, but.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: At that time they wouldn't have yeah. Yeah.
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: So at the time, you know, the one law enforcement
• 24:20
  Speaker 3: the you know, the county sheriff investigated Bob's car and
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: Bob's disappearance, but then across the county line, another sheriff's
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: department was investigating the nuns you know, break in, and
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: they didn't think they were related because according to Amy,
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: those two departments just didn't like interact, didn't like each other,
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: didn't communicate well, and so like all the evidence was
• 24:41
  Speaker 3: cleaned up from the nuns house because they just thought
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: someone broke in, not a big deal though they didn't
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: connect it. And you know, who knows if that evidence
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: would have been preserved. Now we have that ability to
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: analyze DNA, we could have maybe made some headway there,
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: but it just doesn't exist. The evidence isn't there.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: Years ago, we did an episode, like there's parts of
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: the story that remind me of this. We did an
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: episode with Pat Dirkin, and there was a story of
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: a couple guys that went missing, a couple of ice
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: fishermen that went missing for many, many years and there's
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: just little snippets of what they had done, what might
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: have happened to them.
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: They vanished a winter night.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: Some of the people felt that maybe they there was
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: even this idea merged that they ran off and started
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: new lives somewhere. The last sighting of them, which seemed
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: like it would have been them, is they had gone
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: to a guy that sold live bait and woke them
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: up like one or two in the morning to buy minnows.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah. They're dedicated, Yeah, dedicated.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And there was questions about who was in the car,
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: what they had done that night, what their relationship was like.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: But anyways, all these years later, a dude, a Walleye fishermen,
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: a guy that was really interested in side.
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: Scan so and iron stuff. You know.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he went he's out puttsing around one time and uh,
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: finds a car, Yeah, dives down, pulls the license plate.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: Dudes are still sitting in the car, pulls the license
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: plate and knows the car the whole time.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: It was just right there.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all this like mystery and what happened is just
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: sitting at the bottle of lake.
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: Whenever anyone goes missing, there are always a million theories
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: and the same thing.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: Well, did it point out they drove out just to
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: make for non nice fishermen for Southerners, they bought bait
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: and drove out on the ice.
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: Just sunk.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, car went through the ice, probably refroze, snowed, whatever.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: Just yeah, thirty years what are what happen of those guys?
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: I can't imagine, But yeah, one of the theories with
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: Bob is that he ran off for.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: It's always a thing, yep, when we you know, we
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: did a we did one about a guy that in
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: one of our Campfire Stories volumes, we had one about
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: a guy was hunting elk. No it was it was
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: a mountain goat hunter. Either way, he finds a body, yeah,
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: that have been missing for forever, and that family, the
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: family the missing man, they do the same thing always
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: in the back of your head when someone like goes missing.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's primary the primary thing.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: Is like that they're dead, But in the back of
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: your head is that they ran off and started a
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: new life. And so with this family that I think
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: for fifty years, their father had been missing. Yeah, and
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: there was a did he maybe run off in start
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: a new life and meanwhile he was right where everybody
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: knew he'd gone hunting. Yeah, but they searched and searched
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: and searched and searched, and it seems he had pulled.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: A boulder over on himself.
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: Oh man, he.
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: Was going through he's going through a rocky area and
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: it seems like grab the wrong boulder at the wrong time.
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: And just yeah, it's so like gone. Yeah, it's hundreds
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: of people searching in the right spot.
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: Yep, never found him. Yeah, yeah, And it's it's so
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: hard for the families, you know, speaking with the people
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: who are still here, they just struggle so much, right,
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: And and like like with with you know, Bob's case,
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: speaking with his sister, you know, she she doesn't she
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: isn't holding out hope that he's still alive somewhere sure, right,
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: And the same thing. There's another case of a hunter
• 28:58
  Speaker 3: who went missing in nineteen seventy five up in Main
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: that we're going to cover, same thing with his wife,
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: Like she knows he's not alive, but they just want
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: that closure, yeah, you know, and that's really important to them.
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: So they're still and that's why they talk to me,
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: that's why they keep you know, they want people to
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: know about the case. So they can figure it out,
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: figure out what happened.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: Let's jump to another one. This is one both you
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: and I worked on together a little bit where I
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: provide a little assistance here and there on it.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: The case of a.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: Family right here in right here, in our area, right
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: here in Galton Valley in Montana, back in nineteen ninety six,
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: a young girl, Danielle hutt. This gets confusing because there's
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: names that are very similar. How does her family pronounce
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: that last name?
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: Pouchins? Does go?
• 29:58
  Speaker 3: Yep, Puchins.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: There's a victim, Daniel Houchens.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: Okay, don't get confused, because then we have a murderer
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: named Paul Hutchinson. But a victim Daniel Houchins goes to
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: a river access site. So in Montana you have a
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: lot of you have a lot of state river access sites.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: We have the state has a phenomenal stream access law
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: where as long as you can legally get into a river,
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: you can then travel blow high watermark. And so these
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: state access sites are real focal points of activity because
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: it gives you a legal access into a river and
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: then you can go up and down the river. In
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, this this young woman, she was eighteen fifteen.
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: Oh geez, yeah, sorry, I forget that.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: This young woman who's fifteen, lives down the road from
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: a river access site, goes down to the river access
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: site after having a minor argument with her with her mother,
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: I believe. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't come home.
• 31:05
  Speaker 5: Uh.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: The eventually search and they find her body. She had
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: been raped, she had drowned, or Ben drowned in mark right.
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Ben drowned.
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: Well I'm when I'm when I say, when I point
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: this out, this discrepancy is it was not immediately openly
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: treated as a murder.
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it It was a mess. The sheriff at the time,
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: According to the sister of the victim, Stephanie, who was
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: very kind to speak with me, She says, the sheriff
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: at the time told the family it's possible that Danny
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: could have drowned accidentally.
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: So but got raped and then Quinn drowned in shallow muck.
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: Well, he didn't tell the family. He didn't tell the
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: family allegedly that she had been raped. That was news
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: to the family when this came out more recently.
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: But yeah, but she was found with her with her
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: bra up, her underwear down, yep, Yeah, with biological material
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: from someone else.
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: Yep, yeah, fifteen years of age. Yeah.
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: No, they knew, they knew she had been raped. And
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: and to to kind of give the sheriff credit, he
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: told the media like just about a year after this happened,
• 32:40
  Speaker 3: he said, we've always treated this as a homicidek So,
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: so he acknowledged publicly that they were treating this case
• 32:47
  Speaker 3: as a homicide. The problem came because the coroner when
• 32:53
  Speaker 3: he listed the like the manner of death or like
• 32:56
  Speaker 3: the reason for death, he listed it rather than homicide.
• 32:59
  Speaker 3: He listed it as undetermined. And you know, we know
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: now based on speaking with the kind of the most
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: recent investigator on this case and the case file, it
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: was pretty clear that she had been that it was
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: a homicide. She had bruising on the back of her neck,
• 33:19
  Speaker 3: her lungs were they had mud in them, right, so
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: she'd been held underwater. There was obviously this horrible struggle,
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: and so but the family's kind of kept in the
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: dark about this, and the sheriff says he never lied
• 33:34
  Speaker 3: to the family, but obviously he didn't tell the family everything,
• 33:38
  Speaker 3: which is pretty standard practice. You know, even the family
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: can't have access to all the information because investigators are
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: concerned that they'll speak to the media or that things
• 33:49
  Speaker 3: will get out and it will compromise the investigation.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: So I'm not I have zero, Like, I don't know
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: anything about law enforcement. That feels just sitting here, Yeah,
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: having a daughter, Yeah, that feels like way off to me.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it feels way off to me.
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And you know, those decisions were made back in
• 34:14
  Speaker 3: ninety six. We don't know exactly why.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: But put yourself, put yourself in that situation. Oh yeah,
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: you have kids, Yeah, when your kids killed, and then
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: years later you're like, oh mat you uh, you didn't
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: tell me what happened to my daughter.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you kept parts of what happened to my kid
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: for me.
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah. No, it's it's like I wasn't allowed to know. Yeah, yeah,
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: it's it's tough.
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: And you know, the reason that the family found out
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: was because Stephanie, her sister in twenty nineteen, really started
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: her for twenty years later. Yeah, over twenty years later,
• 34:54
  Speaker 3: but she applied. In Montana, they have a law that
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: allows the victims family, allows the victim's family to have
• 35:06
  Speaker 3: access to the case file. You have to there's a process,
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: there's a procedure I think a judge has to like
• 35:12
  Speaker 3: grant access. But Stephanie worked through that process with the
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: help of the Gallatin County Sheriff's office and the county attorney,
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: I believe, so she was finally able to see that
• 35:22
  Speaker 3: whole case file, which is obviously a horrible experience to
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: have to look is that crime scene photos? Everything's in there, man.
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: But but you know, eventually the family was given access
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: to all the information. But it took it took a
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: long time.
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, sitting down here, the series is incredible. I want
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: people to listen to the series. All the episodes are incredible.
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: I don't want to we're kind of talking high level
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: impressions of some of this stuff. I just want to
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: skip ahead for people. But when you listen, you'll understand
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: how they eventually determined to suspect.
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: Thirty years after the fact. Yeah, it's incredible.
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: It's a great story.
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: Yea. Yeah, it's a determined suspect.
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: Turns out this guy the murderer.
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: Hiding in plain sight. Man. Yep. He he uh doesn't
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: go far, stay stays local yep.
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: Yep.
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: Becomes a fisheries biologist, yeah, with the BLN. Yeah, becomes
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: a BLM fisheries biologist. He's real active on like hunt
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: talk and active on forums.
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: Yep.
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: He kind of runs this little program where he does
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: these somewhat formalized hunt swaps yep, where he kind of
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: does this thing like to guys like, hey, if you
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: want to come hunt Montana, like, I'll line you out
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: on spots and then in exchange, you'll kind of line.
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: Me out on how to hunt your area.
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: Raises a family, two kids, hunts turkeys. Here's kind of
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: a weird one winds up. I think by his own
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: count hunts turkeys in twenty five states in the years
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: following this. So this guy is all over the place.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: This guy is all over the country hanging out in rural,
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: secluded areas. It's insane what happens. But these investigators come
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: and they don't want it. It's an old, old case
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: and they don't want to come in and read him
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: as his rights right to fear that he's just going
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: to shut up, right.
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: It's a tough case. It's thirty years old.
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: Yep, and initially initially not listed as a homicide. That
• 38:09
  Speaker 3: was officially changed at some point, but for twenty years
• 38:11
  Speaker 3: not listed as a homicide. So you know, a defense
• 38:14
  Speaker 3: attorney is going to really hammer that, so they had
• 38:17
  Speaker 3: to be very careful with how they approached it.
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we have this footage and this audio that that
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: Jordan uses. A couple of investigators come with a hidden camera.
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: I don't know that it was hidden, but you know, just.
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: Sure seems like it. It's not set up on a tripod.
• 38:39
  Speaker 3: No, I think it was like a I think it
• 38:41
  Speaker 3: was like a body cam. That's what I've assumed. It
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: was like a body cam. And so it's not like
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: it's not like it was hidden exactly. But it wasn't
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: like they said, we want to interview you for some documentary, right,
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: it was just law enforcement.
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I only just for clarity.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: I only said that because I realized it was like
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: on a person when or it was somehow moving around.
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: So yeah, I shouldn't say hidden.
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but yeah, they film an interview and and and Jordan,
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: if you could explain, like, how do they.
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: Explain the pretext of the interview? Sure?
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so the thinking behind it in the pretext of
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: of of how they how they approach him to begin
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: asking about this.
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: Day, right, So, so like you said, they're they're worried
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: he's going to lawyer up, and so they determine that
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: it's legal for them to conduct an interview with him
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: as long as it's a public place and he's always
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: free to go. So they approach him in the parking
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: lot of the BLM office in Dylan, you know, they
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: walk up to him, they say, hey, you know, we're
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: we're looking into cases of women who have been killed
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: along rivers in Montana. And they say, as a fisheries
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: biologist who's always on the rivers, we're hoping that you
• 39:59
  Speaker 3: can provide it's an insight into some.
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: Of these cases.
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: So they don't just talk about Danny's case. They have
• 40:07
  Speaker 3: I think four cases.
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: That was one of the most sickening things about it, yeah,
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: is they're like, here's a woman from a river in Livingston. Yeah,
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: here's a woman from a river. Here, here's a woman
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: from a river here.
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: Was like, how many of these people are right? Right? Yeah?
• 40:22
  Speaker 3: So they they did, unfortunately, have some you know, other
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: cases that they could bring up. And I've looked into
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: a few of those others and they weren't all you know,
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: under suspicious circumstances necessarily, but there are real cases. They
• 40:39
  Speaker 3: didn't just make them up. They are real cases, and.
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: I figured they had to have been.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because I think that, like you said, like legally,
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: I think that if you came with a completely phony
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: if you if you came in with like completely phony information,
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: I imagined it would somehow tarnish what you're doing.
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: It might I think, you know, they want it to
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: be as realistic as possible to not tip Paul off
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: that this is some like you know, sting operation. So
• 41:08
  Speaker 3: I'm sure they were worried that if they tried to
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: use fake cases that he would become suspicious. Right if
• 41:13
  Speaker 3: for whatever reason he knew it was fake, he could
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: figure it out. So they run through these cases. They say,
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: you know, they have pictures of each of the victims.
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: They put them in front of Paul. They say, have
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: you heard of this person? You know she was killed
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: on such and such river. Do you know anyone who
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: might be able to help us, Any fishing guides, you know,
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: guys who own tackle shops, like anyone we can talk
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: to you about these. They do this one at a time,
• 41:35
  Speaker 3: and then the last one is is Danny, and they
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: they they pushed the picture in front of him and
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: he'd you know, this is not like an explosive moment
• 41:48
  Speaker 3: where he just like breaks down, right, But you can
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: tell he's uncomfortable, like he doesn't know exactly whether to
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: like look the picture or like look back and be
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: kind of nonchalant about it.
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: He goes into a mega chill affectation.
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's kind of how it came.
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: To doing a very dramatic he's kicking back, he's got
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: his arms behind his head. Yeah, he gets really reclined.
• 42:14
  Speaker 2: Yep. He tries to like go into this real like breezy.
• 42:19
  Speaker 3: He keeps asking what was her name?
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: Again?
• 42:22
  Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, what was her name? Danielle?
• 42:25
  Speaker 2: That's a good one. I got no idea, boy, I
• 42:28
  Speaker 2: don't know. Yeah, he has to be excused for a minute.
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: He does multiple times. Yeah, throughout throughout the interview. I
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: think it's three or four times he has to be excused.
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: He says that one of his texts is texting him,
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: one of his you know, subordinates is texting him and
• 42:42
  Speaker 3: has a problem with something.
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: That's the pretext he uses.
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: I don't know if that was true or not, but
• 42:47
  Speaker 3: he does leave multiple times. Oh yeah, it's it's tough
• 42:54
  Speaker 3: to watch. I mean, it really is just knowing what
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: what happened, and and the investigators are not like they
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: they play it pretty cool, but they definitely are there
• 43:06
  Speaker 3: to get information, right, They're there to ask him, where
• 43:10
  Speaker 3: were you in nineteen ninety six? We are you familiar
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: with this fishing access? Were you trapping in that area?
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: Were you fishing in that area? And so that's really
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: what they're there for. They want him on tape admitting
• 43:22
  Speaker 3: to being in the area around that time. And you know,
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: again he plays it pretty cool, like he keeps asking
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: what year again, I don't know. It's either I was
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: either there in ninety five or ninety six. I can't
• 43:35
  Speaker 3: you know. So he kind of dissembles a little bit,
• 43:38
  Speaker 3: but again, like plays it fairly cool, considering sure what
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: they're asking, you know, and considering this may be the
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: first time he's ever been approached or asked about this.
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, to be fair, man, like, no, when you
• 43:57
  Speaker 2: watch it, knowing what you know, yeah, you see that
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: like he's.
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: Doing an overblown relaxed right because knowing what you know.
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: But but to be fair, it wasn't. He didn't there
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: was no like uh, infallible tell right, But knowing what
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: you know, there's like, buddy, there's no way you're relaxed
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: right now, No way, but you're doing a way that
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: you're kicked back and chatty. Yeah, yeah, trying to be helpful,
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: but I don't know that's his attitude exactly.
• 44:28
  Speaker 2: I'd love to help, but I probably I don't know.
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: I'm just sound just chilled out down here at the
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: end of the table. Yeah.
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: One of the one of the kind of unbelievable things
• 44:34
  Speaker 3: he says is like, I don't I don't know, like
• 44:38
  Speaker 3: I've never fished these rivers like I just fished, you know,
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: the little streams are like I don't know any fishing
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: guides who can help you. I don't know anyone who
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: can help It's like you're a fishery biologist who is
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: Like he seemed to be primarily into hunting, but of course,
• 44:53
  Speaker 3: you know, I'm sure he also did fishing. He had
• 44:55
  Speaker 3: a fishing boat, like I'm sure he did some fishing.
• 44:58
  Speaker 3: And just like the idea that he didn't know any
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: anyone who could help them is kind of unbelievable.
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: The thing to surprise me during during as you were
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: working on this, and I'm curious to see if you
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: if you ran into this in other cases too, people
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: that were close. There were a lot of people that
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: were close to him, were not a lot There was
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: people that were close to him that that don't want
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: the story talked about. They don't want the story out
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: there out of concern for the murderer's family. They just
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: wanted to go away, right, Yeah, Which you look at
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: me like, I I I see why you think that,
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: But I don't think that. I don't feel that way,
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: Like I don't feel that it's taboo. Yeah, I don't
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: feel that it's taboo to talk about something like this.
• 45:55
  Speaker 5: No.
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: Uh, but I see why you feel that way.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: But did you find that in other instances did you
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: did you find that people are like, I don't let's
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: just leave it be, let's just not talk about it,
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: let's let it die down.
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: Why do we got to relive this?
• 46:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, certainly with the cases that are that there's
• 46:15
  Speaker 3: been some type of resolution too, because not all of
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: the cases we cover, our cold cases that haven't been solved.
• 46:22
  Speaker 3: Some of them have been solved, you know, to one
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: degree of like certainty or another. And on those cases,
• 46:32
  Speaker 3: I definitely ran into this. People they don't they don't
• 46:37
  Speaker 3: want to talk about it, they don't want it to
• 46:40
  Speaker 3: be rehashed, which I do understand. I think I think that,
• 46:45
  Speaker 3: you know, this is a matter of public interest. These stories,
• 46:48
  Speaker 3: whether it's it's you know, the job of law enforcement,
• 46:51
  Speaker 3: or whether the stories have some lesson for you know, hunters,
• 46:56
  Speaker 3: I think they are a matter of public interest, and
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: so we should cover them, especially if if we're adding
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: something new to these stories. But I certainly ran into
• 47:07
  Speaker 3: that and people said, I don't want to talk to you.
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: I don't want to rehash this. Did that you did that?
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: Sometimes come from the victims family.
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, there there there were times.
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: I would be more simple, I would be sympathetic to it.
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: I'm coming from the victim side.
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: It's hard for me to be sympathetic to it coming
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: from the murderer's perspective, right right, And and I think, like, yeah,
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: I bet you want this to go away, right right.
• 47:36
  Speaker 2: I understand that, of course, yeah, I do.
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: And I think it's I think it's a question of culpability,
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: right Like Paul's family didn't do what he did, and
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: so in a sense, they are victims. But you know, again,
• 47:53
  Speaker 3: this is a this is a this is a big story,
• 47:55
  Speaker 3: especially in this area. And I think that we have
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: an obligation to cover it as truthfully as we can
• 48:03
  Speaker 3: with you know, whoever will talk to us. And you know, I,
• 48:10
  Speaker 3: like you say, I feel sympathy with all of these cases,
• 48:14
  Speaker 3: and that's one thing I really wanted to be sure
• 48:16
  Speaker 3: that never got lost. I think with a lot of
• 48:19
  Speaker 3: true crime, like the genre, a lot of people approach
• 48:23
  Speaker 3: it as like a puzzle to be solved. And that
• 48:25
  Speaker 3: makes sense. It's an investigation, there's evidence, there's clues. But
• 48:32
  Speaker 3: because the way we reported this, we talked with the
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: people involved, we talked with the victims' families. I always
• 48:41
  Speaker 3: want to center the fact that they are real people involved, Right,
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: These are real humans who have gone through the worst
• 48:48
  Speaker 3: imaginable pain, and I'm asking them to talk about it, right,
• 48:53
  Speaker 3: And so I always feel sympathy and I try to
• 48:56
  Speaker 3: reflect that in the way that we tell these stories.
• 49:00
  Speaker 2: Know, I try to to.
• 49:03
  Speaker 3: Really get into who the victim was as a person,
• 49:06
  Speaker 3: to talk with their family and friends, like what were
• 49:08
  Speaker 3: they like, what was their character? What are they like
• 49:10
  Speaker 3: to do? Because I think that's really important and it
• 49:13
  Speaker 3: reminds the audience like this is not just like a
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: puzzle to be solved, This is a real person, and
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: I just think that's really important with this genre, especially
• 49:23
  Speaker 3: of true crime.
• 49:24
  Speaker 2: Tell me about the Terry Brisk murder. The Terry Brisk murder,
• 49:29
  Speaker 2: so cause here we're jumping up the twenty sixteen.
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a bit more recent. So Terry Brisk
• 49:36
  Speaker 3: was he was hunting white tail. It was the third
• 49:40
  Speaker 3: day of rifle season in Minnesota. He's from Little Falls,
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: which is in central Minnesota. It's a pretty rural community,
• 49:47
  Speaker 3: but he'd lived there his whole life. So he went
• 49:52
  Speaker 3: out on a Monday. He'd taken off that day of work.
• 49:56
  Speaker 3: He went out on a Monday to go check his stands.
• 49:59
  Speaker 3: I got the sense it wasn't like a serious hunt.
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: He had about one hundred and twenty acre property that
• 50:04
  Speaker 3: it was like family land that he hunted, and he
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: was just gonna go out check his stands, like maybe
• 50:09
  Speaker 3: he ran into it, you know, maybe he runs into
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: a deer, maybe he doesn't, but he's just gonna go
• 50:13
  Speaker 3: out there.
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: So he's out there.
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: His son Jonathan comes home from school and immediately wants
• 50:20
  Speaker 3: to go out hunting. He knows his dad is out
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: on that property, and so he goes out there. He
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: finds a stand. I want to say it was a
• 50:27
  Speaker 3: ground blind, but I can't remember that detail. But he's
• 50:31
  Speaker 3: texting his dad like, Hey, I'm out here, where are you?
• 50:34
  Speaker 3: And he can hear a cell phone like dinging, so
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: he knows like he's close, but he he doesn't like
• 50:43
  Speaker 3: he keeps hearing the dinging, so so Terry his dad
• 50:46
  Speaker 3: doesn't silence his phone, and so he's like, that's just strange.
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: And so he gets out of the blind. He walks
• 50:54
  Speaker 3: not a very long distance because he can hear the
• 50:56
  Speaker 3: cell phone, and he finds his dad. He's lying on
• 51:01
  Speaker 3: the grounds. He's been shot, and so you know, the
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: investigation kind of the deputies arrive, they bring in some
• 51:10
  Speaker 3: state law enforcement as well. They investigate the crime scene,
• 51:14
  Speaker 3: and one of the weird things they notice is that
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: he's there's no gun, right, And they assume a hunter
• 51:22
  Speaker 3: is going to go out on his property during deer season,
• 51:25
  Speaker 3: he's going to have a gun with him, right, because
• 51:27
  Speaker 3: like the surest way of seeing a deer right is
• 51:30
  Speaker 3: like to not have your gun with him.
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: And if you just check him, if you just even
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: if you're.
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: Just checking, yep, even if you're just checking. So they
• 51:36
  Speaker 3: so they look for the gun. They can't find it.
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: The family tells them that it was probably a thirty
• 51:42
  Speaker 3: thirty Winchester lever action that he liked to hunt hunt with.
• 51:46
  Speaker 3: They can't find it, can't find it. About a year later,
• 51:50
  Speaker 3: they go back out because what what the the sheriff
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: who spoke with me said is, at the time they
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: were looking, there was a really thick, you know, cover
• 51:59
  Speaker 3: of leaves on the ground, hm, and so they were
• 52:01
  Speaker 3: concerned maybe it was hidden somewhere. And so sure enough,
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: the next spring, when that leaf cover has decomposed a bit,
• 52:08
  Speaker 3: they go out again and they find the gun. And
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: that's when they confirm that the gun that killed him
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: was his own gun. But they also know, based on
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: you know, the crime scene, that it wasn't a suicide.
• 52:24
  Speaker 3: They're confident that he was killed with his own gun
• 52:28
  Speaker 3: by someone else at close range. So the sheriff says,
• 52:32
  Speaker 3: it's likely that this person spoke with Terry. Certainly they
• 52:37
  Speaker 3: interacted in some way, and somehow this person got Terry's
• 52:42
  Speaker 3: gun and shot him, and they they haven't been able
• 52:48
  Speaker 3: to figure out who did it, or at least they
• 52:50
  Speaker 3: haven't been able to gather enough evidence to figure out
• 52:54
  Speaker 3: who did it. And that's kind of where the case
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: has been.
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: How old was the kid.
• 52:59
  Speaker 3: He was? I think he was fifteen at the time. Yeah,
• 53:03
  Speaker 3: in twenty sixteen. So Terry was married and had four kids,
• 53:07
  Speaker 3: and Jonathan was the oldest.
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: How far away was the gun.
• 53:11
  Speaker 3: That's undisclosed? I asked the sheriff. He doesn't want to
• 53:15
  Speaker 3: say where it was found. He said, I think the
• 53:19
  Speaker 3: words he used were nowhere near the crime scene. Wow,
• 53:22
  Speaker 3: So yeah, nowhere near the crime scene. One of the
• 53:26
  Speaker 3: things that was mentioned potentially is that it was on
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: a different property. But the way it was described to me,
• 53:36
  Speaker 3: it's not like it was in someone's shed, right and
• 53:39
  Speaker 3: they found it there.
• 53:40
  Speaker 2: It was in the woods somewhere. Thing doesn't make a
• 53:43
  Speaker 2: ton of sense. If it's far away, what do.
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: You mean if it's way far away, they're gonna wait
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: for the leaves to settle down from rain and decomposition
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: and then go look way far away.
• 53:55
  Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know exactly how they conducted the search.
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: I assume some kind of grid search, and there's a
• 54:02
  Speaker 3: lot of like, there's a lot of room in nowhere
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: near right. It wasn't next to the body. It could
• 54:07
  Speaker 3: have been twenty five yards away. It could have been.
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: It's only one hundred and twenty acres on and twenty acres,
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: so you could have been five hundred yards away and
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: not in the yep.
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, And that is one of the things that's so
• 54:17
  Speaker 3: tough about, like off property.
• 54:18
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 54:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 54:19
  Speaker 3: A lot of these cases, like the investigators don't know
• 54:22
  Speaker 3: when to stop right in their search for clues for
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: evidence because they don't know how big the crime scene is.
• 54:29
  Speaker 3: And so that was a challenging part of this.
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: Unfortunately, they apparently never disclosed where he was shot.
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: Like which part of his body. No, they never have.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: I asked that too, Yeah, and like that's like, can
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: you can you explain why they withhold those little details
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: because we talk about that, Yeah, like you talk about
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: that in the original in the original Blood Trails with
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: the turkey hunter that's found dead out in the woods.
• 54:52
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: Is they view it like they it's a tool, Yeah,
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: to no detail that no one else knows, well someone.
• 55:02
  Speaker 3: Else knows right exactly, and and that's how they use it.
• 55:05
  Speaker 3: So when when I talked with Brent, the example he
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: gave was if if we say we know what the
• 55:14
  Speaker 3: murder weapon was, the murderer will then go throw that
• 55:17
  Speaker 3: gun in the river, right. So that's one example of something.
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: I think. I think.
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: There is definitely validity in wanting to keep information close
• 55:33
  Speaker 3: to the vest because they can use it, whether that's
• 55:36
  Speaker 3: in an interrogation, right, They they can better figure out
• 55:40
  Speaker 3: if someone's lying or telling the truth if they, you know,
• 55:44
  Speaker 3: haven't released a lot of details. Right, So if they
• 55:47
  Speaker 3: know if if this person they're interviewing somehow mentions or
• 55:51
  Speaker 3: let slip a detail that they haven't released to the public, Well,
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: that's a big deal, right, And so they.
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: The thing that only you know, and they interviewing some
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: guy and he knows, and he just happens to throw out, yeah,
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: some weird remark.
• 56:04
  Speaker 2: And you're like, he wouldn't know that exactly. He never
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: told me, boy that right, right exactly.
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: So So those, especially with the crime scene, those details
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: are often not disclosed, and I totally get it. Sometimes
• 56:17
  Speaker 3: I wonder whether whether investigators are being a little too cautious.
• 56:25
  Speaker 3: And that's just from my perspective as someone who's just
• 56:27
  Speaker 3: trying to get as much information as possible. So, you know,
• 56:29
  Speaker 3: it's frustrating for me, it's frustrating for family, can be
• 56:33
  Speaker 3: frustrating for the public. But they do have reasons for it?
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, tell me about the Ludger h Bellinger.
• 56:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a Luger Blander, Lugr Bland, Ludia Blanger. I
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: got that wrong as well until someone corrected me. So
• 56:49
  Speaker 3: this is another disappearance, but it's it's.
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: Also nineteen seventy like kind of like a right around
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: when I was born. Things were, things were spicy in
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: the words man.
• 56:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, so this is nineteen seventy five.
• 57:01
  Speaker 3: So the fiftieth anniversary of this is actually coming up
• 57:03
  Speaker 3: here pretty soon. So this is also a disappearance, but
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: it's a lot different than the Bob Christian disappearance because
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: we have a lot more information about who did it.
• 57:15
  Speaker 3: It's just we don't they were never convicted and we
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: don't know what they did with Lujer.
• 57:23
  Speaker 2: So he was a hundred. This is the Big Woods
• 57:25
  Speaker 2: Man Maine exactly.
• 57:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, in Maine, the Big Woods Washington, Maine, which is
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: in the eastern portion of the state, not too far
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: from the coast. Luja went hunting with his wife Linda
• 57:38
  Speaker 3: and his brother John. They went out kind of before work.
• 57:42
  Speaker 3: Linda and John both had to work later in the day.
• 57:44
  Speaker 3: Luja was kind of between jobs. I think, But they
• 57:46
  Speaker 3: went out early in the morning to see if they
• 57:48
  Speaker 3: could find any deer tracks and just to sit and
• 57:51
  Speaker 3: wait and you know, see if anything showed up. They
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: didn't find anything, so so Linda and John went back
• 57:57
  Speaker 3: because they had to go to work. Lujar said, I'll,
• 58:01
  Speaker 3: you know, I want to hunt for a little while
• 58:03
  Speaker 3: longer and then I'll come back home. At the time,
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: Lujer well still but Luji and Linda had three young
• 58:09
  Speaker 3: daughters at the time, so they had three kids. They
• 58:11
  Speaker 3: were fairly newly married but and fairly young. But but
• 58:15
  Speaker 3: they had three kids.
• 58:16
  Speaker 5: Uh.
• 58:16
  Speaker 3: So Lujer again doesn't come home, and he's supposed to
• 58:21
  Speaker 3: drive Linda to work, and so the way she describes
• 58:23
  Speaker 3: it is she was kind of mad at him.
• 58:26
  Speaker 2: At first.
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: She assumes he's just like out hunting and forgot right.
• 58:31
  Speaker 3: But you know, as the hours stick by and he
• 58:33
  Speaker 3: still hasn't come home, she starts to become really concerned.
• 58:37
  Speaker 3: So she calls the main game wardens and they come
• 58:42
  Speaker 3: out to two game wardens come out and start to
• 58:44
  Speaker 3: look for him. They searched all night, no sign of him,
• 58:48
  Speaker 3: and they consider calling like a larger search party, but
• 58:52
  Speaker 3: it was pretty cold and they figured that would take
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: too long. They really wanted to find him then, because
• 58:57
  Speaker 3: he'd been out all night at that point, so so
• 59:01
  Speaker 3: they finally they talked to a neighbor who says he
• 59:05
  Speaker 3: saw Ludra go into the woods at this point. And
• 59:07
  Speaker 3: the neighbor is a big hunter and a trapper, and
• 59:10
  Speaker 3: so the neighbor says, if Lujra went in that way,
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: I bet he went to this spot in the woods
• 59:15
  Speaker 3: where they're often deer. And so sure enough, they go
• 59:19
  Speaker 3: to that spot, they find his tracks. They figure out
• 59:22
  Speaker 3: that he'd shot a buck and he dragged it out
• 59:25
  Speaker 3: to a road. One of the really cool things about
• 59:28
  Speaker 3: this story is it's a really great example of good
• 59:33
  Speaker 3: police work, of good detective work. The game wardens were
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: able to really read the signs in the snow because
• 59:40
  Speaker 3: it had it had snowed and then gotten warm and
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: it kind of melted and then it froze again, and
• 59:47
  Speaker 3: then like a cold snow had come on top of that.
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: So they were able to kind of figure out a
• 59:52
  Speaker 3: timeline based on like is the track in yeah, is
• 59:56
  Speaker 3: the track in the slushy like frozen stuff, or is
• 59:59
  Speaker 3: it you know, in the top, And so they do
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 3: a great job tracking Lujra to this road. They figure
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 3: out that a car had driven up and picked Lujra
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 3: up and they put the deer in the trunk. And
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 3: one of the things they notice is that Lujra had
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 3: left his gun leaning against a tree, and they figure
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 3: out that one of the other guys in the car
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: was the one who got out of the car and
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 3: went over and picked up Luger's gun and brought it
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 3: back to the car. And they just think that's kind
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 3: of strange, like wouldn't Lujr. Be the one to get
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 3: out and go get his gun, And so that sort
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 3: of tips them off. They also another great piece of
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 3: detective work. They find a receipt in the snow for
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: a local garage like a like an autobody shop, and
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 3: it has like the names of the guys who are
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 3: driving the car, and so they immediately go to the
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 3: autobody shop and they talk to that Apparently, you know,
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: two guys had come in potentially drunk, potentially you know,
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 3: on drugs, just like acting crazy. They'd asked for their
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 3: car to be fixed something was wrong with the radiator,
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 3: and then they left and between them leaving, they leave
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 3: the autobody shop pick up Luger, something happens, and then
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 3: they go back to the autobody shop later. So that's
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: another piece where they're able to kind of figure out
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 3: a timeline. And so they they go to talk to
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 3: these guys and they've never been named. The suspects have
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 3: never been named. I refer to them as Suspect A
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 3: and Suspect B because again, like they've never been officially
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 3: named as suspects, and I actually don't know. Because so
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: another part of this story, the the game warns who
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 3: investigated this have both passed. They both died, but an author,
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 3: a journalist named Darren Worcester, published a book based on
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: the accounts of a bunch of different main game wardens.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 3: His father in law was a game warden, and so
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 3: you know, he compiled all of these stories from these
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 3: game boardens he'd spoken to, one of which was Lusier's disappearance,
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 3: was Ludri's story, And so that's really how we know
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 3: a lot of these details is because he spoke with
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 3: those wardens before they died. And so I was able
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 3: to interview Darren, who again very kindly sat down and
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 3: talked with me for a long time about this case.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: And so that's how we know a lot of the
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: details because they were never released to the public. I contacted,
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 3: you know, the main state police who are right now
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 3: like in charge of the investigation, and they declined to
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: be interviewed.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: What are these two guys, Like, what do these two
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: guys say for themselves?
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 3: Well, one of them, one of them died in a
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 3: kind of crazy circumstance. The other one is still alive,
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 3: and according to Linda, who I spoke with, you know,
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 3: maintains his innocence.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 2: But what do they say, where do they say Lujer
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: in the buck got out of the car.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: They I don't know that they ever really got that
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 3: far in the investigation. What I mean is they never
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 3: accused them and like tried to prosecute them, so they
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: never actually like got them in a court and said,
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 3: you know, what's going on? So they they like they said,
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 3: they saw Lujer, but we didn't pick him up, right,
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 3: someone else must have picked him up. And that's kind
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 3: of the story that that they maintain, even though it's
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 3: very you.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: Know, there were receipts in the snow, well their receipt
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: is so they were there, right, they say, oh, yeah,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: we were there, we.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 3: Saw him, but we didn't pick him up, We didn't
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 3: do anything to him. We don't know what happened to him.
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 3: And that's sort of the story that they've maintained over
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 3: these years. The first, the one suspect. They're both.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 2: Characters, you might say, but the.
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 3: One died because he blew up his own house in
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 3: an apparent attempt either at insurance fraud or to kill
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 3: his wife.
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 2: He filled his house.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 3: With you know whatever gas was being used in the
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 3: house and set some kind of I forget I talk
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 3: about in the episode. It was some kind of timing device,
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 3: right that was going to go off and then like
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 3: blow up his house, and it went off too soon
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 3: while he was still there, and they were hoping he
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 3: would give them a deathbed confession. Because he didn't die immediately.
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 3: He was flown to a hospital, but he never he
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 3: never said anything.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: You ever seen the movie in the Bedroom, it's a
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: lobster trap reference.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 2: There's a.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: There's a murder and they know who did it, Yeah,
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: but they never face justice until they do.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: It like a little bit surprises me, not surprises me,
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: but you can imagine the family at a point being
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: like we're just gonna have to.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 2: Figure this, like we're gonna have to do what needs
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 2: to happen.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 3: And I can see that temptation for sure. I think
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 3: talking with Linda and Tracy, the youngest daughter, they feel
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 3: like knowing what happened won't change what happened. They really
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 3: just want to give Lujrah a proper burial. They want
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 3: to put him to rest in a respectful way that
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 3: he deserves. And that's really all that they're motivated to
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 3: do at this point. Because Linda has been she has
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 3: been pushing, you know, for years. She was part of
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 3: a group that actually helped to push the state legislature
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 3: to open like a cold case unit in the state
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: police because they didn't have that before. She you know,
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 3: runs a Facebook page where she you know, advocates for
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 3: both her case but also other people's cases. She posts
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 3: about other disappearances, other unsolved murders, and so she's just been,
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 3: you know, trying for years to to bring some measure
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 3: of closure to her and her family. And I think
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 3: she's not I don't want to speak for her, but
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 3: but I think that's her her primary motivation now, as
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 3: opposed to, like, you know what I imagine right after
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 3: it happened. In the years after it happened, which was
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 3: to bring the guys who did it to justice. Now
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 3: it's really just we want to find him. We want
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 3: to figure out what happened.
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: Let's let's jump ahead to a twenty eighteen homicide, uh
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: against Chong Mua Yang, a Mung guy. We've had Monk,
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: We've had Mung guys from We've had Mung guys by
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: the last.
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 2: Name of Yang.
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: Our friend Ya Yang comes on the show now and
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: then it's a clan name.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 2: Your last name is a clan name. Okay. The mung
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 2: as we as we've covered in past podcast episodes.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: Uh, there are there's a there's a large mung pot,
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: not large, there's a there's a significance of substantial mung
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: population in the United States of America.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: The Mung.
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: Listeners, I'm sure you're you've heard of the Vietnam War. Well, Uh,
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: the Vietnam War was not confined to Vietnam obviously, and
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: the US ran a lot of covert operations both in
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: Cambodian laos. You'll hear mentions of like the Ho Chiman Trail,
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: for instance, and the Ho Chiman Trail was not like
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: a specific trail that you have to imagine it like
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: a constantly changing route. And so in trying to attack
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: supply lines from the north, we would sometimes stray over
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: into Cambodia or Laos.
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 2: And also.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: Our enemy in the war, like they had bases and
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: infrastructure and operations happening outside of Vietnam. So we ran
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: what we now know as like the secret wars. We
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: ran these like covert operations which involved US military personnel.
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: The way.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: You know, if you think back to like the way
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: green brays function, the way some CIA paramility areas function
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: is they used indigenous forces right like they're regarded as
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: force multipliers. So when we were fighting the communists in
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: Vietnam and fighting the Communists in Laos, we were allied
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: with a tribe, the Mung, who were a somewhat stateless people.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: They were a mountain tribe. They were a somewhat stateless
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: people and they hated the Communists. So we are CIA
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: paramilitary Special operation guys allied with the Mum. When we
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: pulled out of Vietnam, it was very similar to picture
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: when we pulled out of Afghanistan. How many we took
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: some of our collaborators with us, but translators, collaborators were
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: abandoned in Afghanistan to be hunted down and killed by
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: the Taliban, arrested by the Taliban.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 2: So when we pulled.
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: Out of Vietnam, we brought a lot Among. We brought
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: a lot Among with us. We brought him into Missoula, Montana.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: We brought him into Minnesota, and then over the years,
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: other Monk would slowly make their way out of Laos
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: cross into Thailand. In Thailand they could go into refugee
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: camps and then also could wind up emigrating to the
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: US as asylum seekers because they were stateless. They had
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: assisted the Americans, and the Communists were still hunting for them.
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: The Mong, being a mountain people, are historic hunters right
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: in the places where the Munks settled that they took
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: up hunting in America and they This is just me
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: editorializing here, like I'm doing a crash course in a
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: little bit of history to understand this case a little bit.
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: The Mong developed a reputation, developed a reputation as these
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: as violators and poachers.
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 2: Okay, Now, when we had Ya yang On, who's.
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: Who whose family came from Laos And yeah, I was
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: actually born overseas, but we had Ya yang On and
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: he he expressed, like we talked about this reputation the
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: monk had and yeah, didn't apologize for it, and he's
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: a very law abiding individual obviously, but he was kind
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: of trying to speak to that the people's experience here.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: You have a here, you have a stateless people where
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: the government of your here you are in Laos, the
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: government is hunting for you. Like you're living a secret
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: existence up in the mountains. You're not represented by the
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: government at all. Your whole life is like clandestine, right,
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: And all of a sudden you get brought to the
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: US and that's your background, right, and you come to
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: the US and it's kind of like, oh no, no, helmet,
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: You're not supposed to hunt squirrels till September fifteenth and
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: you're allowed five.
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: He was like, there was just the sort of like
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: you're going from no government or your government's hunting you,
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: you know, to like this completely different system. And so
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: he said there was a period when it was just
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: like it was kind of incomprehensible.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like they.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: Knew to hunt, they wanted to hunt. They fed themselves
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: on fish, they fed themselves on game, and it was
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: just hard to understand.
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 2: I mean it's hard.
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 3: It's hard for American Yeah, it's hard for American unders
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 3: to now a gate sometimes.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And so they.
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: Develop this reputation, and of course you have the obvious
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: just racial tension.
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 2: They're racial tension. We see it.
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: There's other cases where we took guys, so like South
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: Vietnamese who were fighting with us against the North. A
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: lot of South Vietnamese wound up getting involved in shrimping
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: in Louisiana, and there's huge tension between traditional Cajun shrimpers
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: and these South Vietnamese dudes who are getting set up
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: by churches to compete with them. It's like tension, and
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: all of a sudden, you're in Minnesota and all of
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: a sudden, there's all these guys and they don't look
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: like you, and they're from another country, they have different
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: cultural practices, and there they are on the landscape and
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: it's like, oh, they're taking all the game. They're the
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: reasons I'm not seeing anything. And you have a history
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: of then you have a history of just suspicion.
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 3: Easy scapegoat for your own unsuccess.
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 2: Mung dudes. Mung dudes are like, these guys don't like us. Right.
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: In some ways, we like fought for this, We fought
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: for America, but we're not like but a lot of
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: people were not welcome. We like sacrificed our families and
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: lives fighting your enemies. But now we're your enemy. Other
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: guys are like all all these new dudes, these Asian
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: dudes are shooting our squirrels or catching our fish or
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: snagging our salmon whatever. Right, and it creates like this atmosphere,
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: Like I love to think that this is fading now,
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: but this was a real thing, and and and and
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: and I had heard about it. Yeah, thank god, I
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: wanted becoming friends with with like becoming friends with a
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: Mung family and getting a better sense of the whole picture,
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: right right.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's and that's the background for this homicide
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 3: of a of a Mung hunter and one of the
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 3: one of the tricky parts I think, so so with
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 3: this story. I have read the case file from the
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 3: bath Township Police. They were the detective there was kind
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 3: of the primary investigator on this case. Just to kind
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 3: of preface the rest of this, I haven't spoken with
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 3: the family yet, and I will before we before we
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 3: you know, put out this episode. But currently the status
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 3: of the case is somewhat open. There there's an appeals
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 3: process that's going on, and so my information comes from
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 3: the case file, and I imagine some of this will
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 3: be fleshed out a bit after I talk to people,
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 3: so just to preface it with that, But reading the
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 3: case file, it seemed like it was challenging to investigate
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 3: because there were so many instances of like racial comments
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 3: being made in this particular like, you know, state is
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 3: a state park. Hunters in this state park who who
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 3: you know, made racist comments right against the munk, and
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 3: so it was like almost too many options right when
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 3: investigators started this because they'd hear oh so and so
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 3: said such and such about this mung hunter, Oh so
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 3: and so sent a text to their buddy saying this
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 3: racist thing.
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 2: Because then there was the dudes there. There were a
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 2: lot of examples of this.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, just I just want to just interject the thing
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: like kind of like how this stuff works. Yanni and
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: I were down in Missouri hunting in Missouri, and just
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: in our wandering around and hanging out at boat launches
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: and stuff, we're just shooting the breeze at all these
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: guys all the time.
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 2: These guys are explaining to us, like flat out telling
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 2: us there's no squirrels. There'll be news to people who
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 2: live this will be news to Missouri squirrel hunters.
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: It was funny because we did some squirrel hunting on
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: this trip and did fantastic there's no squirrels.
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 2: Because the Mung come down from Minneapolis and do big
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 2: squirrel drives, squirrel drive and yeah, you're like.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: Mom, some some guys, enough guys, enough Mung guys came
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: down from Minnesota and conducted a squirrel drive in Missouri,
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: in Missouri, the likes of which has eliminated squirrels in Missouri.
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: Mm hmm, yeah, uh huh right, okay, yeah if you
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: say so.
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I believe everything everybody tells me.
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: So okay, right, I mean just lunacy, yeah, but straight
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: faced right, We're.
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 2: Like, can you explain a squirrel drive to me? Yeah?
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 3: How does that work? I'd love to know, honestly.
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 2: Because they kind of go into the trees and go
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 2: into hole.
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: You don't push him out ahead of you, like, they
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: don't drive, They don't put squirrels don't push.
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 3: No, no, they don't, they don't.
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 2: You don't bump squirrels. You don't moot squirrels.
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, straight faced dude, right, straight faced, like
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: a real problem.
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah yeah right yeah, And that just adds a whole
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 3: wrinkle to this, to this case, to this investigation, right
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 3: because you layer that on top of just yeah, because like.
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: Oh, he must be the guy because he's saying all
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: this bad stuff about muggs.
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 2: Like no, everybody's bitching about the mung guy.
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 3: Right, yeah, everyone is. And also just because you say
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 3: this doesn't mean you're gonna go shoot some guy. So
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 3: so what happens is it happened in twenty eighteen the
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 3: Rose Lake State Park in Bathtownship, Michigan. It's similar to
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 3: the somewhat similar to the Terry Brisk case, where he
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 3: goes out hunting by himself. He's pretty familiar with this area,
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 3: He's hunted it quite a bit, and he doesn't come home.
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 2: It's after dark.
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 3: The family launches a search party and he's found he's
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 3: been shot in the head once and from there, the investigation,
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 3: you know, moves forward, and again it's extremely difficult. There's
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 3: limited evidence. There's some footprints around the body that are
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 3: that investigators have a tough time matching to, you know,
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 3: anyone specific person to kind of skip ahead a bit.
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 3: The way that they eventually name some suspects is basically
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 3: through they they get pings from their cell phones that
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 3: they were in this area. They put in a request
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 3: basically to Verizon or eighteen t or whoever, like, give
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 3: me all the cell phones of anyone who's in this
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 3: area on this day at this time, and these two
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 3: guys pop up. Another thing that happens is is a witness.
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 3: So soh Yang is killed and all his stuff has
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 3: been stolen, like he doesn't his backpack is gone. He
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 3: had a shotgun that was gone. And so a witness
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 3: sees two guys walking down the road and one of
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 3: them is holding two long guns. They're obviously hunters, but
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 3: one of them is holding two long guns, which is
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 3: obviously strange. And so eventually they're able to, uh, you know,
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 3: they identify these guys. The one guy's name is Thomas Olsen.
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 3: The other guy's name is Robert Roadway. They identify them,
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 3: you know, they they interrogate them. They do find a
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 3: can of like scent spray. I think it was like
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 3: to you put on your boots to like, you know,
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 3: remove your scent.
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 2: So this guy's a deer hunting.
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 3: They're deer hunting. Yeah, they're deer hunting, and believe it
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 3: or not, they say it's like one of their first
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 3: times deer hunting. They're not like experienced hunters, these guys.
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 3: So they find this can of scent spray with Olsen's
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 3: DNA on it in the vicinity of the body, and
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 3: so they feel like they have enough to charge both
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 3: of these guys with murder. A thing about this case
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 3: that I haven't figured out yet, and this is I
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 3: want to talk with people and figure this out, is
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 3: Robert Roadway's charges were dropped. They charged both of them initially,
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 3: but his charges were dropped, and according to the Attorney
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 3: General from Michigan, they say they were dropped due to
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 3: an unresolved issue regarding admissibility of evidence. And so I
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 3: don't know what that like, what specifically that's referring to.
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 3: I don't know if the an investigator messed it up.
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 3: I don't know if they just decided, like because only
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 3: one of them, presume pulled the trigger, yeah right, and
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 3: so I don't know if they just figured we think
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 3: it's Olsen not Roadway. I don't know.
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 2: Well, the other one would be least obstruction of justice,
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 2: right right, and they were very.
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 3: You know, they sat down for interviews and to be clear,
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 3: you know, just so everyone knows. Olsen maintains his innocence
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 3: to this day. His family says he was wrongfully convicted.
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 3: He says he didn't do it, and they say that
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 3: evidence was not substantial enough to convict him. But he
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 3: was convicted in twenty twenty four. Last year, a jury
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 3: convicted him of I believe it was second degree murder.
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 3: He got sentenced to twenty to sixty years in prison.
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 3: But he's appealing right now as we're recording this. He
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 3: has asked for a retrial, which is kind of the
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 3: first step. A lot of times in the appeal process,
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 3: you ask for a retrial, you say, you know, my
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 3: representation wasn't sufficient, they didn't do a good job. I
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 3: want a new trial, and then I presume they'll go
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 3: through the appellate process. So that's where this case is now.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 3: So this is really an ongoing situation.
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: The text message exchange is right our bizarre where there's
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: a different guy who has a text message, a different
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: person of interest in the investigation that had texted someone
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: about how he was going.
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 2: To kill yeah Yang different guy.
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, uh, I was just kidding, he says, he
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: was kidding, and I have an alibi. I was just
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: like making a joke about how someone should kill the
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: mong guy.
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 3: And he did have an alibi, according to the case record.
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 3: Because there were a few guys, there was one in
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 3: particular that they were really looking into for several years, right,
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 3: because remember this happened in twenty eighteen, so there was
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 3: this has gone on for the last six years. There
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 3: was one guy they were looking into pretty closely. They
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 3: eventually ruled him out because they confirmed he wasn't in
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 3: the area when this happened. And so you're right, these
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 3: text messages were one of the most damning pieces of
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 3: evidence because you know, Rodway and Olsen are texting back
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 3: and forth about this case, joking, joking about it, you know,
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 3: making racist comments.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: They they go back there and hunt, and they go
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: back there and hunt. Years two years later they do,
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: and there's a photo of them and one of the
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: one of the guys text with the photo text the
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: other one a couple of cold blooded killers revisiting the
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: crime scene.
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, then there's a lot like that.
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of very yeah, very damn.
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 2: It just funny, right, they like they think it's funny.
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 3: They think it's funny.
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that they they had texted each other in
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: a Meat Eater article.
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 3: They did, yep. Yeah, one of them sent Pat Dirkin
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 3: uh covered a story about among guy who killed I
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 3: think it was six hunters. It was a pretty famous case.
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: Want just on this There was among guy who trespassed
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: mm hm and was hunting in someone else's stand. Yeah,
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: these guys confront them him, there's a shootout, and the
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: mung guy who's probably trained, I mean he's probably a veteran. Yeah,
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: they get into a shootout and the mung guy man
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: somehow kills like five or six guys in a shootout.
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, some of them as they were running away.
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, now that I mean that Listen, I had my
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: whole preamble, right, it was unfair of me to not
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: point out the way that that in like the way
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: that that case ye, those murders inflamed attentions exactly.
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 3: Yes, Yeah, and that's that's another important piece of context.
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: That's a major omission on my part to not mention
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: that there's like that.
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 3: Right, and and and Pat, you know he wrote an
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 3: article for us for the website a couple of years ago,
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 3: and these guys apparently you know, we're reading Meat Eater
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 3: or they were sent it, and so they send Pat's
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 3: article about this incident, this massacre, and they kind of
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 3: go back and forth, joking about it, like, you know,
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 3: this is us, Well, we're.
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 2: Gonna really understanding the article.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 3: Though they didn't. I think they probably just read the headline,
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 3: but it was about among guy who you know, killed
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 3: a bunch of people, and you know, they were basically
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 3: joking about it, going going back and forth.
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like, this will be us next year. The
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: d n R won't be ready.
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I just yeah, I just thought it was wild that,
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 3: you know, I'm reading this. It's like, you know, four
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 3: hundred pages, I'm reading through this case file, and all
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 3: of a sudden there's a meat Eater article sent back
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 3: and forth. But I used to you know, a alleged
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 3: murderers m So, yeah, that there's a lot to that case.
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 3: And I'm very curious to talk to the detective. Hopefully
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 3: he'll speak with me, uh and we'll see, we'll see
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 3: where it goes. You know, the evidence was there was evidence,
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 3: there was that sense spray. There's these text messages.
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of cell phone pings.
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, there's cell phone pings. So there's certainly evidence. I
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 3: don't know if an appellate court will think that there's enough.
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 3: And that's kind of where it is right now.
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: Dude. I love America. I love our constitution. Right, that's
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: the greatest document of governance ever produced. But good lord,
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: do we make it sometimes a little easy.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 2: To have the ability?
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like you want to now and then imagine the
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: world in which you can put screws to people a
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: little bit better to be like, buddy, come on, we're
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: gonna have a little chat.
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 3: Right right, and you know, just like you're not going home?
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah uh.
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 3: And and just like going back to the victim's family,
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 3: I mean, this has been horrible for them. I mean,
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 3: and because in this case, file is included like emails
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 3: back and forth from the detective and the family members
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 3: and they're like have you found anything? He's like, we're
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 3: working really hard, you know, and back and forth like
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 3: this for years. And to go through not only losing
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 3: your dad, right, your uncle, but to not know who
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 3: did it and to hear all these rumors, right, because
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 3: there's there's rumors just swirling on social media that they're
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 3: hearing from other people, people joking about exactly.
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 2: It's I can't imagine. It's horrible.
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 3: And so you know they, I think, we we're very
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 3: happy to get this amount of resolution, and they're extremely
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 3: you know, stressed, I think, And and again I haven't
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 3: talked to them, just like seeing what they post, you know,
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 3: brief text exchanges about where this case is going, and
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 3: just hoping that they'll get that resolution and it will
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 3: be final and they can kind of, you know, have
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 3: that that closure.
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 2: Man, dude, I love it.
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: It's when when do these one of these is going
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: to start coming out? When can people start listening to
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: these krin you.
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 3: Know, uh October thirtieth, Yeah, yeah, October thirtieth, right before Halloween.
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 5: I'm just going to add one plug, which is important
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 5: for the show and for the audience. Please instead of
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 5: just go back and listen listening to the trailer in
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 5: episode one and two and three and four, et cetera.
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we skip, we skipped a million of them. We
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: didn't talk about them more.
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 5: Yeah, they're they're a ton, But please, because this is
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 5: a net new, brand new podcast feed called Blood Trails.
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 5: Please subscribe. Anywhere you listen to podcasts, please subscribe to
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 5: the feed.
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 4: It's a lot of people use the word follow now
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 4: subscribe out of fashion, sorry button or the follow button
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 4: or whatever yet, thank.
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 2: You, Phil.
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, subscribe follow as Phil puts it, follow so you
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: can follow along there you go on Blood Trails. And
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: and then if you got if you got hot tips,
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: send them in dude.
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 3: We uh yeah, We've set up an email actually if
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 3: you have a tip about a case that you think
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 3: we should cover, or one about one of the cases
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 3: we do cover. It's Blood Trails at the meat eater
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 3: dot com.
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 2: All right, thanks, coming on, Jordan, Yeah, look forward to
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 2: doing this again.
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: Man, look makes me, you know, like sometimes people will
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: tell me about a health problem they're having, and I
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: start getting the health problem.
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 2: You're not gonna get murdered.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: No, but I'm saying I'm having like all like all
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: body react.
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 2: I mean, I'm having an all body reaction.
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 5: In these first episodes, Like my muscles are tense. These
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 5: first episodes we've listened to.
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 2: H They're really good.
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 5: They're just so good, you know, original reporting, creepy music,
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 5: like yeah, you get whole body feels while you're like
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 5: totally just brought into that world.
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 2: It gets you right in the fields. That's you, right
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 2: in the fields. All right, thanks for coming on.
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely appreciate.
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 2: We'll do it again.