Latest / True Crime: Killer Confessions / The Shoe Under the Floor: How Dunnfield Forgot a Boy for 32 Years
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: The shoe was standing upright. Not lying on its side,
- 0:07Speaker 1: not scattered across the dirt the way something dropped would land. Standing.
- 0:12Speaker 1: Left foot, white canvas with a blue stripe. A child's sneaker,
- 0:16Speaker 1: perfectly balanced in the dark beneath a concrete floor, as
- 0:19Speaker 1: if the boy who wore it had simply stepped out
- 0:22Speaker 1: of it and forgotten to come back. Leon Hicks had
- 0:25Speaker 1: come to fix a transformer. He almost didn't look down.
- 0:28Speaker 1: That shoe had been in the ground since September of 1989.
- 0:32Speaker 1: 32 years under the East Bay floor of Stedman Fabricating,
- 0:36Speaker 1: a shuttered industrial plant in Dunfield, Indiana, while the town
- 0:40Speaker 1: above it aged, while a mother waited, while a detective
- 0:43Speaker 1: worked himself to the edge of retirement and still couldn't
- 0:46Speaker 1: close the file. The floor had been poured two days
- 0:49Speaker 1: after a nine-year-old boy vanished on a Tuesday afternoon. That
- 0:53Speaker 1: timing is not a coincidence, but for three decades, no
- 0:56Speaker 1: one looked at the pour date and the disappearance date
- 0:59Speaker 1: in the same sentence. This is the case of Scott Powell, Dunfield, Indiana,
- 1:04Speaker 1: sits in the flat middle of Fulton County, the kind
- 1:07Speaker 1: of place where the same families have lived on the
- 1:10Speaker 1: same blocks for two and three generations. In 1989, it
- 1:14Speaker 1: was a working town, a fabricating plant on the south end,
- 1:19Speaker 1: a grain elevator on the north, a main street with
- 1:22Speaker 1: a hardware store, a diner and the kind of small
- 1:25Speaker 1: grocery on Granger Avenue, where a kid could walk in
- 1:28Speaker 1: alone after school, and nobody worried about it. Scott Powell
- 1:32Speaker 1: was nine years old that fall. He lived on Fenton
- 1:35Speaker 1: Street with his mother, Diane, and his younger sister, Nora.
- 1:39Speaker 1: By every account, he was a boy of reliable habits,
- 1:42Speaker 1: which in a nine-year-old is a way of saying he
- 1:44Speaker 1: was the kind of child who made life a little
- 1:46Speaker 1: easier for the people around him. He knew the route.
- 1:50Speaker 1: He knew the schedule. He never made his mother guess.
- 1:54Speaker 1: Every Tuesday, the routine was the same. School let out.
- 1:58Speaker 1: Scott walked to the store on Granger Avenue. bought a
- 2:01Speaker 1: package of peanut butter cookies, sat at the table by
- 2:05Speaker 1: the window and did his homework. Then, he walked home.
- 2:08Speaker 1: The round trip took about 40 minutes. Helen Stroud, the
- 2:12Speaker 1: woman behind the counter who was in her mid-fifties that year,
- 2:15Speaker 1: had watched Scott do this enough Tuesdays that she knew
- 2:18Speaker 1: his order before he asked. On September 12, 1989, Scott
- 2:24Speaker 1: came in at around 3.40 in the afternoon. He bought
- 2:27Speaker 1: his cookies. He sat at his table. He left at 4.15.
- 2:32Speaker 1: He never arrived home. Diane Powell called the school. She
- 2:37Speaker 1: called neighbors. She walked the route herself before it got dark.
- 2:42Speaker 1: By evening, Dunfield police had a missing child report. By
- 2:47Speaker 1: the next morning, Detective Ray Kowalski had it on his desk.
- 2:50Speaker 1: Kowalski was 38 that year, a methodical man by reputation,
- 2:55Speaker 1: the kind of investigator who worked a grid and didn't
- 2:58Speaker 1: leave blocks unchecked. He canvassed the route between Granger Avenue
- 3:02Speaker 1: and Fenton Street. He interviewed neighbors. He coordinated with the
- 3:06Speaker 1: state police. He did what the procedures of 1989 allowed.
- 3:10Speaker 1: And he did it thoroughly. A witness came forward within days.
- 3:14Speaker 1: A woman who lived near the store said she had
- 3:17Speaker 1: seen Scott that Tuesday afternoon, standing beside a gray pickup
- 3:21Speaker 1: truck on Granger Avenue, talking with a man inside, white
- 3:24Speaker 1: male heavyset over 40. She caught a partial plate, the
- 3:28Speaker 1: prefix D.W. That detail went into the file. Kowalski pulled
- 3:33Speaker 1: a list of every vehicle in the county registered with
- 3:36Speaker 1: a DW prefix. 17 trucks. He started working through them.
- 3:41Speaker 1: He never finished the list. By spring of 1990, the
- 3:45Speaker 1: leads had dried up. The witness had moved out of Dunfield.
- 3:50Speaker 1: The search had found nothing. Kowalski's working theory was that
- 3:54Speaker 1: Scott had been taken by someone from outside the area,
- 3:58Speaker 1: someone without local ties. someone who had passed through and
- 4:01Speaker 1: left no thread to follow. It was a reasonable theory.
- 4:05Speaker 1: It was also wrong. The Stedman Fabricating Plant sat less
- 4:09Speaker 1: than a mile and a quarter from Scott's front door.
- 4:13Speaker 1: Kowalski searched the exterior. He searched the ground floor. He
- 4:18Speaker 1: asked Harold Finch, the plant manager, whether anyone had been
- 4:22Speaker 1: inside on the night of September 12. Finch said the
- 4:25Speaker 1: building had been locked since the night shift ended on
- 4:27Speaker 1: the 11th. Kowalski believed him. He did not obtain a
- 4:31Speaker 1: warrant to search the interior. There was a repair permit
- 4:34Speaker 1: in the file, a 40-square-foot section of the East Bay floor,
- 4:39Speaker 1: broken up and report on September 14th and 15th, 1989,
- 4:45Speaker 1: two days after Scott disappeared. The contractor's name was Frank Mason.
- 4:49Speaker 1: No one connected those two facts for 32 years. That
- 4:52Speaker 1: repair permit sat in Kowalski's file for 32 years, unopened, unread.
- 4:58Speaker 1: read a single sheet of paper that held the answer
- 5:01Speaker 1: to where Scott Powell was sitting inside a folder, inside
- 5:05Speaker 1: a box that no one touched until a woman named
- 5:08Speaker 1: Denise O'Brien ate a muffin at a corner table in
- 5:12Speaker 1: Patton's Diner on Church Street. O'Brien was 44 years old
- 5:17Speaker 1: in 2021. She worked cold cases for Dunfield PD, and
- 5:22Speaker 1: she had a routine. Every Wednesday, 7.15 in the morning,
- 5:26Speaker 1: same corner table, black coffee, toasted English muffin, and a
- 5:31Speaker 1: case file. The camarera who worked that shift, Jesse Turnbull,
- 5:36Speaker 1: later told a documentary crew that the folder was like
- 5:40Speaker 1: a third regular. O'Brien had picked up the Powell materials
- 5:44Speaker 1: in 2019 after Kowalski died of a heart attack in
- 5:48Speaker 1: February of that year. His widow donated everything to the department.
- 5:53Speaker 1: O'Brien cataloged it, read the file during a lunch break,
- 5:57Speaker 1: and went home and read it again that night. What
- 6:00Speaker 1: stopped her was not the witness description, not the partial plate.
- 6:05Speaker 1: It was a number buried near the back of the file.
- 6:09Speaker 1: Forty square feet. That was the size of the section
- 6:12Speaker 1: of East Bay floor broken up and reported Stedman fabricating
- 6:16Speaker 1: on September 14th and 15th, 1989. The contractor of record,
- 6:21Speaker 1: Frank Mason, licensed since 1984. Three prior jobs at Stedman,
- 6:27Speaker 1: including a drainage channel repair in 86 and a loading
- 6:30Speaker 1: dock resurface in 88. He knew the building. He knew
- 6:35Speaker 1: which sections of floor could be broken and resealed without
- 6:38Speaker 1: drawing attention. O'Brien pulled Mason's vehicle registration from the county records.
- 6:43Speaker 1: A 1986 Chevrolet pickup truck, gray, plate prefix DW. He
- 6:50Speaker 1: was number 11 on Kowalski's list. The list Kowalski never finished.
- 6:56Speaker 1: O'Brien spent the next several weeks verifying what she had
- 6:59Speaker 1: before she moved. She tracked the Granger Avenue witness through
- 7:03Speaker 1: marriage records. The woman had left Dunfield in the spring
- 7:07Speaker 1: of 1990 and was living in Terre Haute under her
- 7:11Speaker 1: married name, Connie Bassett. O'Brien drove to Terre Haute and
- 7:16Speaker 1: sat across a kitchen table from Connie Bassett and showed
- 7:19Speaker 1: her a photo array. Bassett identified Mason's truck without hesitation.
- 7:25Speaker 1: She said she had thought about that boy for years.
- 7:28Speaker 1: She said she had assumed someone eventually found him. No
- 7:31Speaker 1: one had. O'Brien filed for a ground-penetrating radar survey of
- 7:36Speaker 1: the East Bay floor at Stedman Fabricating. The building had
- 7:39Speaker 1: been scheduled for demolition by Hollis Brothers Contracting. A crew
- 7:44Speaker 1: was already on site, pulling up sections of flooring to
- 7:47Speaker 1: check for buried tanks and conduits. Standard pre-demolition procedure. On
- 7:52Speaker 1: September 21, 2021, a utility technician named Leon Hicks arrived
- 7:59Speaker 1: to repair a transformer on the Northeast Pole. He asked
- 8:02Speaker 1: the site foreman, Doug Pratt, for access through the East Bay.
- 8:07Speaker 1: The crew had already lifted a section of floor. Hicks
- 8:10Speaker 1: stepped through the opening and stopped. Standing upright in the earth,
- 8:14Speaker 1: below the concrete was a child's sneaker. Left foot, white
- 8:18Speaker 1: canvas with a blue stripe. Hicks called the authorities before
- 8:21Speaker 1: he reached the transformer. The ground-penetrating radar team arrived shortly after.
- 8:27Speaker 1: What they found confirmed why that shoe was still standing.
- 8:30Speaker 1: The poured section in the East Bay measured 41 square
- 8:34Speaker 1: feet in area, but the depth was not the standard
- 8:37Speaker 1: 4 inches of a patched floor. It was 14 inches deep,
- 8:41Speaker 1: nearly four times the volume that a standard repair required.
- 8:45Speaker 1: Mason had billed Stedman for concrete sufficient to cover approximately
- 8:49Speaker 1: 35 square feet at 4 inches depth. The discrepancy in
- 8:53Speaker 1: material volume had been papered over by a second invoice,
- 8:56Speaker 1: a driveway paving job at the home of a man
- 8:59Speaker 1: named Ed Novak in a neighboring township that same week.
- 9:03Speaker 1: Novak confirmed that Mason had arrived with more material than
- 9:07Speaker 1: the driveway needed and told him it was excess from
- 9:11Speaker 1: another job. Novak had not thought twice about it. The
- 9:15Speaker 1: material balance sheet balanced. On paper. The concrete went somewhere legitimate.
- 9:22Speaker 1: Except the East Bay floor was 14 inches deep. And
- 9:25Speaker 1: there was a child's shoe standing in the dark underneath it.
- 9:29Speaker 1: Forensic recovery began on October 1, 2021, and continued for
- 9:34Speaker 1: 11 days. On October 22, Frank Mason was arrested at
- 9:38Speaker 1: his trailer outside Briar Falls, roughly 40 miles east of Dunfield.
- 9:44Speaker 1: He was 67 years old. He said nothing to the
- 9:48Speaker 1: arresting officers. He asked for a lawyer. The mitochondrial DNA
- 9:53Speaker 1: comparison took three weeks. The reference sample came from Diane Powell,
- 9:58Speaker 1: Scott's mother, now 70 71 years old and living in Indianapolis.
- 10:02Speaker 1: She had moved there years after Scott disappeared. The confirmation
- 10:06Speaker 1: came back. The remains beneath the East Bay floor were
- 10:09Speaker 1: Scott Powell. He had been nine years old when he disappeared.
- 10:13Speaker 1: He had been under that floor for 32 years. There
- 10:17Speaker 1: is something that does not ease with confirmations. The answer
- 10:21Speaker 1: to the question does not dissolve the weight of it.
- 10:24Speaker 1: Diane Powell had spent more than three decades not knowing
- 10:28Speaker 1: whether her son was alive somewhere, whether someone was caring
- 10:31Speaker 1: for him, or whether he had suffered. The confirmation gave
- 10:35Speaker 1: her a location. It gave her a date. It did
- 10:38Speaker 1: not give her back 32 years. At trial in March 2023,
- 10:43Speaker 1: the Fulton County Circuit Court heard from Connie Bassett, who
- 10:48Speaker 1: identified Mason's truck. It heard about the repair permit, the
- 10:52Speaker 1: concrete discrepancy, and the anomalous depth of the East Bay floor.
- 10:57Speaker 1: It heard from a woman named Tina Morrow. Morrow was
- 11:00Speaker 1: 49 years old in 2021. She had grown up in
- 11:05Speaker 1: Briar Falls. In the summer of 1987, she was 15
- 11:10Speaker 1: years old and doing gravel work at a church parking
- 11:14Speaker 1: lot when Mason offered her a ride home. She got
- 11:18Speaker 1: into the truck When she realized he was not driving
- 11:21Speaker 1: her home, she jumped from the moving vehicle on Callaway Road.
- 11:25Speaker 1: She told her mother. Her mother told her not to
- 11:28Speaker 1: cause trouble for a working man. Tina Morrow spent 34
- 11:32Speaker 1: years wondering whether she had imagined the danger. Whether she
- 11:35Speaker 1: had overreacted. Whether Mason had gone on to hurt someone else.
- 11:40Speaker 1: Her testimony was admitted as prior acts evidence. The jury
- 11:44Speaker 1: took less than four hours to reach a verdict. Guilty.
- 11:48Speaker 1: murder in the first degree, life without the possibility of parole.
- 11:52Speaker 1: Mason filed an appeal in 2024 on evidentiary grounds. The
- 11:57Speaker 1: appeal was denied in full in the spring of 2025.
- 12:01Speaker 1: Picture the East Bay of Stedman fabricating on the evening
- 12:05Speaker 1: of September 12, 1989. The building was supposed to be locked.
- 12:09Speaker 1: The night shift had ended the previous evening. Harold Finch
- 12:13Speaker 1: had told Kowalski, there was no one inside. That statement
- 12:17Speaker 1: closed the building as a search area. It was enough.
- 12:20Speaker 1: Kowalski moved on. But Mason's repair permit was scheduled for
- 12:24Speaker 1: the following week. He had legitimate business in that building.
- 12:28Speaker 1: He had a key, or access, or simply a familiarity
- 12:32Speaker 1: with the site that meant a locked door was not
- 12:34Speaker 1: a locked door to him. The concrete repair was already
- 12:37Speaker 1: on the calendar. It was not improvised after the fact.
- 12:41Speaker 1: Mason used a job that already existed as cover for
- 12:44Speaker 1: something that had not yet happened when the job was scheduled.
- 12:48Speaker 1: That is the detail that reframes everything. The repair was
- 12:52Speaker 1: not a plan. It was an opportunity that fit a
- 12:55Speaker 1: moment of panic. Mason's own words, given on June 3, 2025,
- 13:00Speaker 1: at Westfield Correctional Facility, fill in what the physical evidence
- 13:06Speaker 1: had already outlined. He stated that Scott had entered the
- 13:10Speaker 1: East Bay, and seen him moving materials. He stated that
- 13:14Speaker 1: he panicked. He stated that the scheduled repair gave him
- 13:17Speaker 1: a means of concealment that he had not designed but
- 13:20Speaker 1: recognized in the moment. He stated that he had not
- 13:23Speaker 1: slept well in 30 years. That admission recontextualizes the concrete invoice.
- 13:29Speaker 1: The material billed to Ed Novak's driveway was not sloppy accounting.
- 13:33Speaker 1: It was the mechanism by which an extra 10 inches
- 13:36Speaker 1: of depth disappeared into a legitimate paper trail. Mason knew
- 13:41Speaker 1: how to move concrete. He knew how to make one
- 13:44Speaker 1: job absorb the volume of another. He had been doing
- 13:47Speaker 1: contract work for two decades. The excess went to Novak's driveway.
- 13:52Speaker 1: The death stayed hidden. The floor looked like a patch.
- 13:56Speaker 1: Walk the question of premeditation through the physical evidence, and
- 13:59Speaker 1: it collapses one way. The repair was pre-scheduled. The building
- 14:04Speaker 1: access was known. The volume discrepancy was papered over before
- 14:08Speaker 1: anyone asked a question. That sequence looks deliberate. Walk it
- 14:12Speaker 1: through Mason's confession, and it collapses the other way. He
- 14:16Speaker 1: said it was panic. He said he did not plan it.
- 14:19Speaker 1: He said the repair was already there, and he used it.
- 14:22Speaker 1: The sentencing jury found premeditation beyond a reasonable doubt. The
- 14:26Speaker 1: appeals court agreed. What the concrete record cannot answer, what
- 14:31Speaker 1: no record can answer, is the 11 minutes between when
- 14:34Speaker 1: Scott left the store on Granger Avenue at 4.15 and
- 14:38Speaker 1: when the afternoon was over. What the record can answer
- 14:41Speaker 1: is everything else. The truck with the DW prefix, the
- 14:45Speaker 1: partial plate a witness caught and reported and then carried
- 14:48Speaker 1: alone for three decades. The repair two days after. The
- 14:52Speaker 1: depth that should not have been. The shoe standing upright
- 14:55Speaker 1: in the dark. Scott Powell was nine years old. He
- 14:59Speaker 1: bought peanut butter cookies on Tuesday afternoons and did his
- 15:03Speaker 1: homework at the table by the window. He walked home
- 15:06Speaker 1: the same way every week. On September 12, 1989, he
- 15:11Speaker 1: did not arrive. For 32 years, the answer to why
- 15:15Speaker 1: was 14 inches beneath an unremarkable patch of concrete floor
- 15:20Speaker 1: in a building scheduled for demolition. The forensic team worked
- 15:23Speaker 1: the East Bay floor for 11 days. They removed concrete
- 15:27Speaker 1: in careful layers. documenting each inch. What they recovered confirmed
- 15:32Speaker 1: the mitochondrial DNA match against a sample Diane Powell had
- 15:36Speaker 1: provided 32 years after she stopped waiting for her son
- 15:40Speaker 1: to walk through the front door. She was 71 years
- 15:43Speaker 1: old when she received the call. The identification was official
- 15:47Speaker 1: within three weeks of the discovery. Frank Mason was arrested
- 15:51Speaker 1: on October 22, 21. He walked out of his trailer
- 15:55Speaker 1: in Briar Falls, asked for a lawyer and said nothing else.
- 15:59Speaker 1: The case went to trial in March 23 at the
- 16:01Speaker 1: Fulton County Circuit Court. The jury found him guilty of
- 16:05Speaker 1: murder in the first degree. The sentence was life without parole.
- 16:09Speaker 1: Mason's legal team filed an appeal in 24 on evidentiary
- 16:14Speaker 1: grounds arguing that Tina Morrow's testimony about the 1987 incident
- 16:19Speaker 1: should not have been admitted. The full appeals court considered
- 16:23Speaker 1: it and denied the appeal in the spring of 25.
- 16:26Speaker 1: The conviction stands. On June 3rd, 25, at Westfield Correctional Facility,
- 16:33Speaker 1: Mason gave a statement. He said Scott had seen him
- 16:36Speaker 1: moving materials through the East Bay on September 12th. He
- 16:40Speaker 1: said he panicked. He said the floor repair had already
- 16:43Speaker 1: been scheduled for the following week, and he used it.
- 16:47Speaker 1: He said he had not planned any of it. He
- 16:50Speaker 1: also said he had not slept well in 30 years.
- 16:53Speaker 1: The jury weighed that statement against the invoice discrepancy, the
- 16:57Speaker 1: depth that exceeded the bill by 10 inches. The extra
- 17:00Speaker 1: concrete absorbed into Ed Novak's driveway, the pre-existing access to
- 17:05Speaker 1: the building and the two-day window between the disappearance and
- 17:08Speaker 1: the repair. They had already rendered their verdict two years
- 17:11Speaker 1: before Mason said a word. Mason said a word. The
- 17:16Speaker 1: appeals court read the same record and reached the same conclusion.
- 17:21Speaker 1: Detective Denise O'Brien was 44 years old when she pulled
- 17:25Speaker 1: the Powell file out of storage in 2019. She found
- 17:30Speaker 1: Connie Bassett in Terre Haute after a name change and
- 17:33Speaker 1: three decades of silence. She traced the permit that Ray
- 17:37Speaker 1: Kowalski never followed. She measured the distance between what was
- 17:41Speaker 1: billed and what was poured. None of it was new
- 17:44Speaker 1: evidence in the sense of new material. It was old evidence,
- 17:48Speaker 1: read in full, for the first time. Kowalski had died
- 17:52Speaker 1: in February 2019, months before O'Brien reached the bottom of
- 17:57Speaker 1: his notes. He never knew the list of 17 trucks
- 18:00Speaker 1: with the DW prefix contained the answer at number 11.
- 18:04Speaker 1: Connie Bassett carried a partial plate number for 34 years.
- 18:08Speaker 1: She wrote it down that Tuesday afternoon on Granger Avenue,
- 18:12Speaker 1: told police, and then moved away and was not contacted again.
- 18:16Speaker 1: She spent three decades not knowing whether what she had
- 18:19Speaker 1: seen mattered or whether she had simply watched a child
- 18:22Speaker 1: get into a truck and go home safely. When O'Brien
- 18:26Speaker 1: placed the photo lineup in front of her in Terre Haute,
- 18:29Speaker 1: she identified Mason's Chevrolet without hesitation. She had remembered correctly
- 18:34Speaker 1: the entire time. Tina Morrow jumped from a moving truck
- 18:38Speaker 1: in 1987 on Callaway Road and spent 34 years wondering
- 18:43Speaker 1: if she had overreacted. Her mother told her not to
- 18:46Speaker 1: cause trouble for a working man. She came forward two
- 18:50Speaker 1: weeks after Mason's name appeared in local coverage. Her testimony
- 18:53Speaker 1: was admitted at trial. Two women held pieces of this
- 18:56Speaker 1: case for over three decades. One held the license plate prefix,
- 19:00Speaker 1: one held the memory of a door handle, and a
- 19:03Speaker 1: moving road. Neither of them had been wrong. Scott Powell
- 19:08Speaker 1: was nine years old. He walked a mile and a
- 19:11Speaker 1: quarter every Tuesday after school, bought peanut butter cookies, did
- 19:15Speaker 1: his homework at the table by the window, and started home.
- 19:18Speaker 1: He had a younger sister named Nora. His mother, Diane,
- 19:22Speaker 1: was 39 years old when he disappeared. and 71 when
- 19:26Speaker 1: she learned where he had been. There is no version
- 19:29Speaker 1: of this story where Scott gets more than nine years.
- 19:32Speaker 1: But there is a version, the one that actually happened,
- 19:36Speaker 1: where the shoe standing upright in the dark was found
- 19:39Speaker 1: before the building was gone, where the partial plate was
- 19:42Speaker 1: matched to the right truck, and where the floor told
- 19:45Speaker 1: the truth it had been holding since 1989. That version
- 19:50Speaker 1: took 32 years. It got there. This show is made
- 19:55Speaker 1: by Oba Media.