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Seiko in the Vault: How a Running Watch Became a Murder Clue · True Crime: Killer Confessions

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: At 4.52 in the afternoon on July 14, 2003, a
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: gas station security camera caught Gary Turner walking north on
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Aldine Street. He was 54 years old, wearing a blue
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: work shirt, and he had somewhere specific to be. Nobody
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: would see him alive again. Four days later, a meter
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: reader opened a utility vault. six blocks from Gary's home
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: and found a Seiko watch resting crystal side up on
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: the meter register face. The second hand was still moving.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Gary's fingerprints were on the crystal and the band clasp.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: The vault cap showed no signs of forced entry. There
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: was no way in and no way out. And yet
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: the watch was there keeping perfect time as though someone
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: had set it down deliberately and walked away. That watch
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: would sit in an evidence bin for 17 years It
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: would survive a flood. It would outlast the detective who
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: first handled it, the case file that surrounded it, and
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: nearly every photograph taken that summer. When a cold case
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: investigator finally signed it out in February 2020, it was
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: still running. What it had been waiting to say took
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: another year to become clear, and the answer was hiding
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: in the background of a single photograph that 17 years
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: of prior review had never flagged. There is something about
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: this case that resists easy categories. It is not the
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: story of a body found and a killer caught in
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: the usual order. Gary Turner's remains have never been recovered.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: What investigators ultimately built was a case constructed from a
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: work order, a dispatcher's memory, a survivor account, and one
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: object that refused to stop counting the hours. The watch
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: was the beginning of the question. What came next was
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: the answer the water almost took with it. Gary Turner
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: had lived in Portsmouth for 22 years. The last 14
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: of those years he spent in a half-duplex on Copper
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Mill Road, a modest house in a neighborhood where people
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: recognized each other's cars, and noticed when a porch light
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: stayed dark too long. He was 54 in the summer
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: of 2003. His children were grown. His son Eric had
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: settled in Indianapolis, and his daughter Paige was finishing graduate
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: school in Tennessee. Gary worked as a maintenance supervisor for
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: the Counter County School District, the kind of job that
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: demands reliability above everything else. Boilers, plumbing systems, aging HVAC
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: units in buildings full of children. The work required someone
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: who showed up. He was not a man who disappeared.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: He carried a gambling debt. of roughly $ 4, 000 owed to
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: a man named Tom Wick, enough to cause real pressure
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: not enough to warrant flight. He had refinanced his duplex
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: at a loss to manage it. People who knew him
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: described the debt as a weight he was trying to
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: carry responsibly, not run from. In late June 2003, Gary
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: called his ex-wife Sandra Finch. The conversation was short. He
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: told her he was thinking about making some changes. He
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: did not explain what he meant. Sandra would later describe
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: his tone as settled, not agitated. The sound of someone
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: who had made a decision and was moving toward it,
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: not away from anything. That call was the last known
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: communication Gary Turner had with anyone close to him. His
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: neighbor Frank DeLuca noticed on July 15th that the fish
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: tank in Gary's front window had gone dark overnight. Gary
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: kept the tank light on a timer It had never
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: gone dark before. DeLuca waited a few hours, then contacted
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Portsmouth police. A missing persons report was filed that afternoon.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Investigators found the duplex locked and undisturbed. Gary's car was
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: in the driveway. His wallet, his keys, and most of
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: his personal effects were inside. The only thing missing was
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: the Seiko watch he wore every day. the one engraved
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: on the case back with his initials and the date
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: July 14th. He had been wearing it the previous afternoon,
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: visible on his wrist in the gas station ATM footage.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: By the time anyone thought to look for him, the
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: watch was already in a vault on Aldine Street, still running,
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: waiting for someone to ask the right question. The watch
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: was the first impossible image. Curtis Moore had worked the
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: Aldine Street meter route for 11 years. He knew every
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: vault on the block, the spacing of the bolts, the
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: weight of the cast iron caps, the specific resistance each
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: one gave when he lifted it. On July 18, 2003,
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: he pulled the cap on the vault at 1100 Aldine
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: and stopped. A Seiko automatic watch was resting on the
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: face of the meter register, crystal side up, second hand moving.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: He had not put it there. No one on his
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: crew had. The vault throat was roughly eight inches across,
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: barely wide enough for a forearm, and the cap showed
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: no signs of forced entry. No scratches, no fresh tool marks,
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: no disturbance in the grime around the rim. Whatever had
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: placed that watch inside had done so without breaking anything.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: Moore called it in. Officers photographed the vault, bagged the watch,
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: and submitted it to evidence. Fingerprint technicians pulled Gary Turner's
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: prints from the crystal face and the band clasp. The
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: case back confirmed what it was, initials GT, T, and
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: the date July 14th, the same day Gary had vanished.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: The same day he had been photographed at the ATM
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: two blocks north, walking toward Aldine Street at 4.52 in
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: the afternoon. The watch was running. It had been running
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: inside that sealed vault for four days. There was no
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: blood in the vault, no fiber, no anomalous soil disturbance.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: The vault had not been forced, and there was no
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: mechanism anyone in 2-3 could explain for how the watch
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: had gotten in. That question, how, would take 17 years
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: to answer. But there was a second question underneath it,
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: quieter and more unsettling. Not how did the watch get in,
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: but why was it left there at all? Kellner County
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Utilities Dispatcher Barbara Keene took a call from one of
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: her technicians on July 19, 2003, one day after the
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: watch was found two days before the local paper ran
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: the story. The technician told her he had heard about
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: the watch in the vault on Aldine. He said Turner
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: had probably just run off, said the watch was probably
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: some kind of prank. His name was Melvin Miller. That detail,
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: a utility worker who knew about the watch before it
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: became public knowledge, did not surface as significant in 2003.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: The original investigator, Detective Sergeant Brent Calloway, had already formed
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: a working theory, Gary had a gambling debt. He had
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: refinanced his home at a loss. He had told his
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: ex-wife he was thinking about making some changes. To Callaway,
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: the picture assembled into one conclusion. Gary Turner had staged
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: his own disappearance. The watch was a prop. The vault
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: was theater. Callaway was three months from retirement. He filed
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: his conclusion. And in October 2003, he left. The file
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: went into storage. Dawn O'Connor joined Portsmouth's cold case unit
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: in 2019 at 38 years old. In February 2020, she
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: requested the Turner box. What she received was almost nothing.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: A 2017 flood had taken most of it. A drainage
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: retention wall had failed, and 14 inches of water had
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: moved through the evidence storage facility. Fingerprint cards, gone. The
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: vault cap, gone. The personal effects envelope, gone. Photographs nearly
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: all gone. What the water left, the watch, sealed in
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: a double-bagged evidence pouch, floated to the top of the box.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: A chain of custody log on heavy cardstock, still readable
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: under ultraviolet light. And one 8x10 photograph, misfiled in a
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: sleeve belonging to a different case entirely, that had survived
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: by accident. The photograph had been taken on July 18, 2003,
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: from the east side of the open vault. It showed
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: the watch on the meter face, it showed the vault throat,
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: and in the background at the curb, it showed the
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: lower half of a Kellner County Utilities Service truck, partial plate,
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: and a magnetic work order placard on the door. Nobody
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: had flagged it in 17 years. O'Connor drove to the
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: county annex and requested the undigitized work order records for
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: July 2003, a block range covering Alden Street. The records
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: had never been scanned. She reviewed them by hand. Work order,
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: meter inspection, 1100 block, Alden Street. Completion timestamp, 4.40, 7
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: in the afternoon, July 14, 2003. Five minutes before Gary
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Turner appeared on the ATM camera, two blocks away, walking
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: north toward that same street, the technician assigned to the
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: job was Melvin Miller. Picture Aldine Street at 447 in
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: the afternoon on July 14, 2003. Miller's truck is at
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: the curb. The work order shows the meter inspection complete.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: Under standard calibration procedure, meter removal widens the vault throat. Enough,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: it turns out, for a man's forearm. Miller has county keys,
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: a county uniform, and a legal reason to have the
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: cap off. Five minutes later, Gary Turner rounds the corner
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: from the ATM and walks north. The original 2003 theory
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: about the watch had supposed a string or wire, some
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: device lowered through the vault throat while the cap was sealed.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: That theory was half right. The vault throat had been widened,
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: not by force, by routine. But the evidence against Miller
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: did not rest on the photograph alone. When investigators searched
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: a storage unit connected to Miller during the joint investigation
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: in fall 2020, they found soil matching the geological profile
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: of the area around County Road 7. They found heavy
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: gauge plastic sheeting. They found shirt fibers consistent with the
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: clothing Gary was wearing in the ATM footage, the last
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: confirmed image of him alive. And there was something else.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: In summer 2001, two years before Gary vanished, A billing
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: clerk at Kellner County Utilities named Patricia Hendy had filed
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: an HR complaint against Miller. She reported that he had
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: followed her to her car on two separate occasions. In
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: August 2001, Hendy was reported missing from a neighboring county.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Her remains were found in a drainage culvert on County
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Road 7 during road survey work, work that had been
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: triggered by the same road widened project that was active
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: while the Miller investigation was running in fall 2020 and
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: early 2020 and early 2021. Dental records confirmed her identity.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: The storage unit soil matched that culvert's surrounding terrain. Miller
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: had been confident Gary would be written off as a
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: man who ran. The gambling debt, the refinanced duplex, the
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: phone call to the ex-wife about changes, those facts had
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: been available to the original investigator and they had worked
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: exactly as a disappearance cover tends to work, not fabricated,
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: just reframed. What Miller had not anticipated was a misfiled
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: photograph surviving a flood in a sleeve that did not
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: belong to the Turner case. He had not anticipated a
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: detective who reviewed paper records by hand 17 years later,
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: and he had not anticipated that the watch left in
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: a sealed vault, as what O'Connor would later describe as
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: private accounting proof to himself. that the debt was settled,
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: would still be running when someone finally came to collect it.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Melvin Miller sat across from investigators in March 2021 and
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: talked for four hours. He admitted going to Alden Street
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: on July 14, 2003. He said he went to confront
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: Gary Turner. He said the argument turned physical. He said
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: it was an accident. Then he stopped. Investigators asked him
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: what he did with Gary's body. Miller declined to answer.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: He has never answered that question. Not in the interview room,
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: not at trial, not since. The jury deliberated for two days.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: They returned two verdicts. Murder in the first degree for
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: Gary Turner. Murder in the first degree for Patricia Hendy.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: The physical evidence from the storage unit, the soil, the
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: plastic sheeting, the shirt fibers matching the clothing Gary wore
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: in the ATM footage, placed Gary in Miller's custody after
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: that vault. Hendy's case rested on her remains, the HR
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: complaint she had filed two years before her disappearance, and
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: a pattern the jury apparently found impossible to separate from design.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: Miller's defense argued the ATM footage established proximity, not contact.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: It argued the storage unit evidence was circumstantial. It argued
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: a four-day gap between Gary's last sighting and the watch's
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: discovery left room for an alternative sequence of events. The
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: jury disagreed. Picture the moment the verdict came back. Paige
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: Turner had been in that courtroom every single day. She
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: had watched the evidence photographs. She had listened to the
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: testimony of Barbara Keene, the retired dispatcher, who remembered Miller's
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: exact phrasing. That Gary had probably just run off. That
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: the watch was probably some kind of prank. She had
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: heard the fiber analysis, the soil analysis, the work order timestamp.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: She did not speak to the press when it was over.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: There is one thing the conviction did not provide. Gary
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: Turner's remains have never been found. Miller took that location
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: with him into silence, and the record contains nothing that
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: points to where Gary was left. For a man who
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: spent 22 years in Portsmouth, who coached Little League according
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: to neighbors, who knew the name of every kid on
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: his maintenance crew, that absence is not a small thing.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: His family knows what happened to him in the broadest
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: legal sense. They do not know where he is. That
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: question remains open. There is a detail that stays. When
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Detective Don O'Connor signed the watch out of the evidence
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: bin in February 2020, it was still running. 17 years
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: after Curtis Moore found it resting crystal side up on
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: the meter register face. Four years after the flood sent
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: 14 inches of water through the evidence room and destroyed
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: the fingerprint cards, the vault cap and the personal effects envelope.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: The watch had floated to the top of the box
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: in a double-bagged pouch, and when O'Connor held it, the
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: second hand was moving. She was 38 years old and
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: eight months into the cold case unit when she pulled
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: the Turner box. She had reviewed the chain of custody
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: log by hand because the file had never been digitized.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: She had gone to the county annex and read through
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: paperwork orders, until she found the one that matched the
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: truck in a misfiled photograph. She had done all of
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: that before she ever interviewed a single person. Gary Turner
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: was 54 years old when he walked north on Aldine
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: Street on a July afternoon and did not come home.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: He had a gambling debt he was managing badly and
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: a duplex he had refinanced at a loss and an
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: ex-wife he called when things felt unsteady. He had a
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: daughter in graduate school and a son in Indianapolis, and
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: according to people who knew him, a way of checking
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: in on the younger members of his maintenance crew that
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: they remembered years later. He was not a man without complications.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: He was also not a man who vanished because he
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: chose to. The original investigator decided otherwise. That conclusion filed
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: the case and retired with him in October 2003 for
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: nearly 17 years. The only thing still working on the
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: Gary Turner case was the watch. There is something about
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: that fact that resists easy framing. A man was erased,
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: and the instrument that should have marked his last hour
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: kept running long past the moment anyone was looking. It
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: ran through a flood. It ran through years of procedural silence.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: It ran until someone finally came back for it. After
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: the trial, the watch was returned to Paige Turner. She
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: took it and left. This show is made by Bobo Media.