Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / They were Murdered Execution Style - for the Darkest Family Secret

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They were Murdered Execution Style - for the Darkest Family Secret · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Imagine it is a freezing late November morning in Michigan.
• 0:05
  You're walking up to a pickup truck parked outside this
• 0:07
  very quiet, isolated country house, and inside the driver is
• 0:12
  just slumped over the center console, dead right.
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: It's a brutal scene.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, But here is the thing that really gives me.
• 0:20
  He's wearing dress slacks, a crisp buttondown shirt, suspenders, and
• 0:23
  then inexplicably heavy rubber work galoshes pulled right over his
• 0:28
  formal dress shoes.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: Which just doesn't fit the rest of the outfit at all.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Not at all. And even though it's well below freezing
• 0:33
  outside and the truck's engine is completely off, the manual
• 0:37
  window on the passenger side is rolled like three quarters
• 0:40
  of the way down.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it is a scene that actively defies
• 0:43
  physical and behavioral logic. You know, the visual data you
• 0:46
  were taking in contradicts itself on almost every single level exactly.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: So today we are taking a deep dive into a
• 0:52
  case that is completely defined by those exact jarring contradictions.
• 0:56
  We're looking at a nineteen eighty seven double homicide out
• 0:59
  of Holland, Michigan.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Yes, and we're drawing from an incredibly meticulous breakdown by
• 1:03
  the true crime source called True Crime Fix.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Right, And our mission today is to really tear this
• 1:08
  case down to the studs. Yeah, I mean, we want
• 1:10
  to look at the exact anatomy of how cold case
• 1:13
  detectives take a shattered timeline, apply modern forensic tools, and
• 1:17
  ultimately unearthed family secrets so dark that they were buried
• 1:21
  for twenty six years.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: What makes this specific case such a masterclass in investigation
• 1:26
  is really watching the evolution of the detective work itself.
• 1:29
  Like it forces us to look at how initial assumptions,
• 1:33
  even totally reasonable ones, can blind an investigation, oh for sure,
• 1:37
  And how a completely fresh set of eyes can find
• 1:39
  a killer hiding right in plain sight, just you know,
• 1:42
  sitting within the dusty pages of the original case file.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because we need to start with
• 1:47
  the environment. The setting provides the entire baseline for why
• 1:50
  this crime was so shocking to begin with. Holland, Michigan
• 1:54
  in nineteen eighty seven is portrayed in our source as
• 1:57
  this quintessential picture perfect Midwest.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: Town, right, very traditional.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it has very deep Dutch community roots. This is
• 2:05
  a high trust environment, like people famously left their front
• 2:08
  doors unlocked. They would literally leave their keys sitting right
• 2:12
  in the ignition of their cars in the driveway.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: And I mean a hy trast society relies on informal
• 2:17
  social controls. The community regulates itself through shared values and
• 2:22
  close interpersonal networks, right, rather than say, a heavy police presence.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, everyone just knows everyone exactly.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: So when violence infiltrates that kind of ecosystem, the psychological
• 2:34
  shockwave is massive because the baseline assumption of safety has
• 2:38
  been fundamentally breached.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: And the victims at the center of this breach are
• 2:42
  Rick and Gaeale Brink. They are young newlyweds. They had
• 2:45
  just purchased a fixer upper house out in the country
• 2:47
  on Ransom Street.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and they spent months pouring their own sweat equity
• 2:51
  into renovating it.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: Right. Rick was a highly reliable salesman, doing really well
• 2:55
  for his age. Gaale was outgoing, very social, deeply loved
• 2:59
  by her friends. Something. They had absolutely no known enemies,
• 3:02
  no dark underworld ties, just a completely normal couple building
• 3:06
  a life together.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: They really represent that idealized American trajectory, you know, working hard,
• 3:12
  investing in property, surrounded by an active social circle. There
• 3:15
  are just no obvious fliction points in their daily routine
• 3:19
  that would invite extreme violence.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: But that routine comes to a violent, abrupt halt. On
• 3:25
  a Monday morning in late nineteen eighty seven, Rick, who
• 3:29
  is described as just a clockwork employee, does not show
• 3:33
  up for work.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: Which is immediately out of character completely.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: His employer instantly knows something is wrong, so they call
• 3:39
  Gail's workplace, and Gail hasn't arrived either, So alarm bells
• 3:43
  start ringing through their network and word reaches Rick's parents, right,
• 3:47
  so his mother decides to make the drive out to
• 3:49
  the new house on Ransom Street to do a welfare check.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: And stepping into the shoes of those parents for a moment,
• 3:54
  it really reveals a level of trauma that is hard
• 3:57
  to even articulate. You are driving out there to check
• 3:59
  on what you think is a simple miscommunication.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like maybe a broken alarm clock or.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: Something exactly, or a dead car battery. Yeah, you are
• 4:06
  completely unequipped for the visual assault of a double homicide.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: So the local law enforcement officers who responded to that
• 4:13
  frantic nine when one call were immediately hit with a paradox.
• 4:17
  The clues left behind were just a chaotic mess. Let's
• 4:21
  break down the exterior of the house first. Okay, Rick
• 4:24
  is found in his truck, shot twice in the left
• 4:26
  side of the head, and we talk about his clothing
• 4:28
  in the hook, the dress, slacks, the suspenders, and those
• 4:32
  bizarre rubber galoshes.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: Right, clothing in a crime scene is what behavioral analysts
• 4:37
  consider a transient fossil.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: A transient fossil.
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it tells us the immediate anticipated action of the victim.
• 4:43
  So the slacks and suspenders indicate he had just returned
• 4:46
  from a formal or semi formal gathering.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: Right, they had been at a wedding reception exactly.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: But sliding heavy rubberwork galoshes over dress shoes and throwing
• 4:55
  on a heavy work coat over those suspenders indicates an unexpected,
• 5:00
  highly immediate interruption. I mean, you don't change your entire
• 5:03
  outfit for a quick chore.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: No, you just grab whatever's closest, right.
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: You just throw the easiest protective layers over whatever you
• 5:09
  are currently wearing to step out into the elements.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Boop, Wait stop there, because a manual window in freezing weather.
• 5:18
  I am really struggling to understand the physical state of
• 5:20
  the truck.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: It is definitely the strangest part of the scene.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: Right, because the ignition is completely off, meaning the heater
• 5:26
  isn't running. If you are stepping out into the freezing
• 5:29
  Michigan cold, you don't sit in a freezing truck with
• 5:32
  the engine off and crank a manual window down to
• 5:35
  let the wind in. You just don't do it.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: No, you only do that if the cold is secondary
• 5:40
  to a conversation you're having. I mean, think about it.
• 5:42
  You don't roll your window down for a stranger who
• 5:44
  startles you in your driveway and the dead of night.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: Obviously not. My instincts would be to lock the door
• 5:49
  and start the engine immediately, exactly.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: Rolling the window down three quarters of the way is
• 5:54
  an act of accommodation. It strongly suggests Rick was engaged in,
• 5:58
  or at least anticipating, a face to face dialogue with
• 6:02
  a recognized familiar person standing directly outside his door.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: Okay, so the moving inside the house, the visual data
• 6:08
  gets even stranger. Gail is found in the master bedroom.
• 6:12
  She is lying on her back in bed, having been
• 6:15
  shot three times in the head, but on the floor
• 6:17
  next to the bed, her formal dress matching the formality
• 6:20
  of Rick's attire is just dropped casually in a pile.
• 6:24
  It looks exactly like the universal motion of coming home exhausted,
• 6:28
  unzipping a dress, letting it follow the floor, and crawling
• 6:31
  street under the covers.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: And that dropped dress gives investigators their first real anchor
• 6:36
  point for the timeline. The medical examiner solidifies this by
• 6:40
  analyzing the victim's stomach contents. Oh, because the biology of
• 6:44
  digestion is highly predictable. A typical mixed meal takes about
• 6:49
  four to six hours to empty from the stomach into
• 6:51
  the small intestine. So by examining the volume and state
• 6:55
  of the undigested food and knowing they had attended a
• 6:57
  catered wedding reception on Saturday evening, the pathologists can calculate
• 7:02
  the gastric emptying rate.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: So they can dial in exactly when it happens.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: Yes, this securely narrowed the time of death to very
• 7:09
  late Saturday night or the early hours of Sunday morning.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: Okay, so we know when they died, But the scene
• 7:14
  itself looks like a movie set where the props department
• 7:16
  got the instructions totally mixed up.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: Because look, Gale's purse has been entirely dumped out on
• 7:22
  a surface, which screens robbery. But Rick's wallet is lying
• 7:27
  wide open in plain sight, completely untouched. And even crazier
• 7:31
  investigators find over four hundred dollars in cash sitting completely
• 7:35
  undisturbed in a drawer, And.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: Four hundred dollars in nineteen eighty seven is the equivalent
• 7:40
  of like one thousand dollars today, Exactly. A burglar operating
• 7:43
  under the frantic stress of a home invasion does not
• 7:46
  leave a stack of cash behind. The dumped purse combined
• 7:49
  with the untouched money is a massive behavioral red flag.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: It totally contradicts itself. It does.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: It tells the detectives that the scene is either intentionally
• 7:57
  staged to mimic a robbery, or the killer was frantically
• 8:01
  searching for a very specific item that held absolutely no
• 8:04
  monetary value.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: And then we look at the ballistics or I guess
• 8:07
  the total lack of them. The autopsy confirms that both
• 8:11
  Rickingale were killed with a point two two caliber weapon,
• 8:15
  But investigator scour the truck, the driveway, the hallway, the bedroom,
• 8:18
  and they cannot find a single shell casing anywhere.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: And to understand why that is so vital. We have
• 8:24
  to look at the mechanics of firearms. You know, a
• 8:27
  semi automatic pistol relies on the kinetic energy of the
• 8:30
  fired bullet to force the slide backward, which ejects the
• 8:33
  spent brass casing into the surrounding area.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Right, they go flying everywhere.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: Exactly, So, if the killer used a semi automatic, the
• 8:40
  absence of casings means they stood in the freezing dark
• 8:44
  and then in a dark bedroom meticulously hunting down tiny
• 8:48
  brass cylinders to hide their tracks.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: Which would require a terrifying level of cold blooded composure,
• 8:54
  it really would. Or or they use a completely different
• 8:57
  tool for the job.
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: Precisely. The alternative is that used a revolver. A revolver
• 9:02
  cycles the ammunition through a rotating cylinder, meaning the spent
• 9:05
  brass casings are retained inside the gun itself. But either scenario,
• 9:09
  the meticulous cleanup or the deliberate choice of a revolver,
• 9:13
  eliminates the theory of a panicked, random break in.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: Because this was an execution. Two shots to the head
• 9:19
  for him, three for her. That is what profilers call overkill. Yes,
• 9:23
  absolutely so. Once detective Louren was Sink realized the missing
• 9:26
  casings and the untouched cash meant he wasn't looking for
• 9:29
  a burglar. He knew he had to pivot. He was
• 9:32
  looking for someone who hated Rick or Gale enough to
• 9:35
  execute them methodically. So he naturally starts knocking on the
• 9:39
  doors of their immediate.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: Inner circle, because the investigation spirals outward from the victims.
• 9:44
  When you have a crime of extreme violence with zero
• 9:47
  material gain, you look for emotional drivers. You look for
• 9:50
  crimes of passion.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: Which brings Lars right into the spotlight. While the police
• 9:54
  are actively processing the grim scene at the house, Gail's brother,
• 9:58
  Ryan Wingard arrives. He is understandably distraught. He tells the
• 10:02
  police that he and his girlfriend Pam were out of
• 10:04
  town or away all weekend and just got the horrific news.
• 10:08
  But Ryan wastes no time redirecting the detectives. He immediately
• 10:11
  points a firm finger at Lars, who is Gail's ex boyfriend.
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: And Lars is not just some casual x. He and
• 10:18
  Gail had a very serious cohabitating relationship with plans for marriage.
• 10:22
  But the dynamic fracture, particularly when Rick entered the picture.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Oh I see and.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: Ryan provides the detectives with behavioral history that is just
• 10:30
  absolute goal for investigator. He tells them the breakup was
• 10:33
  physically violent.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, according to Ryan, when Lars was packing up Gail's
• 10:37
  belongings to move out, this massive argument erupted and Lars
• 10:41
  slapped Gail across the face. Ryan tells police he had
• 10:44
  to physically step in and aggressively back Lars down to
• 10:48
  protect his sister.
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: Which is huge. Jealousy mixed with a history of physical
• 10:52
  escalation is a profoundly potent combination. I mean, jealousy isn't
• 10:56
  just an emotion, it is a perceived threat to a person,
• 11:00
  territorial bonds. When it consumes someone, it overrides rational thought.
• 11:05
  So for a detective, a violent ex boyfriend is almost
• 11:08
  always suspect number one.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: And when they bring Lars in for questioning, his own
• 11:12
  words seemed to dig his grave even deeper. Like he
• 11:15
  is shockingly candid he really is. He admits he still
• 11:18
  loves Gail. He admits he actively wished Rick and Gale
• 11:21
  would get divorced. He confesses to routinely driving past their
• 11:24
  new house on Ransom Street, fueled by what he himself
• 11:27
  described as infatuation. He even kept a framed wedding picture
• 11:30
  of Rick and Gale in his personal belongings.
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: The psychology of obsession is really fascinating here. Keeping a
• 11:36
  photograph of the woman you love marrying the man she
• 11:39
  left you for is an agonizing psychological tether.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: It's so intense.
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: It shows a complete inability to sever the emotional bond.
• 11:49
  The line between a broken hearted obsessive X and a
• 11:52
  legal stalker can be very thin, and investigators have to
• 11:55
  determine if Lars actually crossed it.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: And initially the timeline makes it look like he absolutely
• 12:01
  crossed it because Ryan drops another crucial detail to the cops.
• 12:05
  He tells police he bumped into Lars at a laundromat
• 12:08
  on Saturday evening, the exact night of the murders. Right
• 12:12
  Lars asked about Gail and then casually mentioned he was
• 12:15
  heading out to a specific local bar called Calypso's later
• 12:18
  that night.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: And Calypsos is the lynchpin here because that is the
• 12:20
  exact same bar where Rick and Gale went to celebrate
• 12:23
  after leaving the wedding reception on Saturday night.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: It's just wild. So put yourself in detectivelessing shoes in
• 12:28
  those first forty eight hours. You have an obsessed, previously
• 12:32
  violent ex boyfriend who keeps a shrine like photo of
• 12:35
  the victims, and he places himself at the exact same
• 12:38
  geographic location as the victims on the night they are executed.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: The narrative essentially writes itself at that point.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: It really does. Lars goes to Calypso's, sees Gail looking
• 12:47
  incredibly happy with her new husband. The alcohol lowers his
• 12:50
  In additions, the jealousy boils over into rage. He follows
• 12:54
  their truck back to the dark country road on Ransom Street,
• 12:58
  waits for Rick to step outside, and acts revenge.
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: It is a highly compelling theory, but this is exactly
• 13:04
  where the rigorous mechanics of police work must override a
• 13:07
  seductive narrative. You cannot build a conviction on a narrative alone.
• 13:11
  You build it on corroborated data.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: Right, You need facts, exactly.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: Investigators have to retrace every single step taken inside that bar.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: So they do. They track down every wedding guest and
• 13:22
  patron they can find who was at Calypsos that night,
• 13:25
  and the explosive confrontation they are expecting to find simply
• 13:28
  doesn't exist.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: Not at all.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: The witnesses paint a picture of total mundane normalcy. Gail
• 13:33
  had a few glasses of champagne, got a little tipsy,
• 13:36
  was just having a good time. Rick played the responsible
• 13:40
  designated driver husband and decided it was time to get
• 13:43
  his wife home safely. Dozens of people confirm they walked
• 13:47
  out of the bar peacefully between ten thirty and eleven
• 13:49
  thirty PM.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: And more importantly, Lars's timeline holds up completely under scrutiny.
• 13:54
  He admits to being at the bar sure, but insists
• 13:57
  he never even crossed paths with Gail, eventually going home
• 14:01
  around midnight. No one witnessed any stalking behavior or aggressive interactions.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: So to put the final nail in the theory, the
• 14:08
  police ask Lars to take a polygraph examination, and he agrees,
• 14:12
  immediately sits down for the test, and passes it with
• 14:15
  flying colors.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: Let's unpack the mechanics of a polygraph for a second,
• 14:18
  because there is a massive misconception about what they actually do.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, please do.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: A polygraph does not detect lies. It detects physiological markers
• 14:26
  of autonomic arousal, the body's fight or flight response. The
• 14:30
  machine uses numographs around the chest to measure respiration, a
• 14:34
  blood pressure cuff to monitor cardiovascular activity, and galvanometers on
• 14:38
  the fingers to measure skin conductivity, which is essentially sweat.
• 14:43
  When a person is deceptive, the cognitive load of maintaining
• 14:46
  that lie usually triggers the sympathetic nervous system, causing spikes
• 14:50
  and all these metrics.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: So if Lars passed, his sympathetic nervous system just wasn't
• 14:55
  reacting to questions about the murder.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: Correct. If a subject genuinely believes there own innocence, or
• 15:01
  if they have absolutely no guilty knowledge of the specific
• 15:04
  details of the crime, their physiological baseline just remains stable.
• 15:08
  Lars pass because the stress of the questions didn't trigger
• 15:11
  a deceptive cognitive load.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: So detective Wessinc Looks at the past polygraph, the corroborated
• 15:17
  timeline from the bar patrons, and Lars's sheer willingness to cooperate,
• 15:21
  and he realizes he has to let him go. As
• 15:24
  was sink noted, just because someone wrongs you, it doesn't
• 15:26
  mean you escalate to double homicide.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Right. So when the crime of passion theory collapses, the
• 15:31
  detectives are just staring at a brick wall. But then
• 15:35
  the investigation takes a hard left turn into a narrative
• 15:39
  that feels like it belongs in I don't know, a
• 15:41
  gritty organized crime thriller. It really does, because if the
• 15:45
  killer wasn't an angry ex lover, the sheer, ruthless efficiency
• 15:50
  of the murders, you know, the lack of casings, the
• 15:52
  double taps to the head, the ignored cash suddenly starts
• 15:56
  looking like the hallmark of a professional hit.
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: But the immediate friction point there is motive. Why on
• 16:01
  earth would organized crime target a respectable salesman and his
• 16:05
  young wife, Right, The answer usually lies in the geography
• 16:09
  of the crime. If the targets don't fit the profile,
• 16:12
  you look at the history of the location itself.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: Okay, So tips start rolling into the precinct about the
• 16:17
  previous owner of the Ransom Street house. Before Rickingale bought
• 16:20
  it as a fixer upper, the property was occupied by
• 16:23
  a man named Sid Colby.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: Right, and Sid is a completely different character from anyone
• 16:27
  in Rickingale's orbit.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: Totally different. He is heavily involved in the local narcotics trade,
• 16:33
  He is deeply paranoid, and he associates with an outlaw
• 16:37
  motorcycle gang in Holland known as the Road Nights.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: Now we are penetrating a completely different societal strata. Here,
• 16:44
  we are moving away from high trust community networks into
• 16:47
  a paranoid, heavily armed criminal subculture where violence is just
• 16:52
  a standard business practice.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: So when detectives finally locate Sid Colby, the man is
• 16:57
  jumping at shadows. He is visibly terrified, but he isn't
• 17:01
  scared of the police arresting him for the murder. He
• 17:04
  is terrified because he is absolutely convinced the killers were
• 17:07
  actually sent to assassinate him. Right.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: Sid presents the wrong place, wrong time theory, also known
• 17:12
  as a mistaken identity hit, and he provides a highly specific,
• 17:16
  very dangerous motive to back it up.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: He does. Sid tells the detectives about a botched business
• 17:21
  deal with a much larger, much more dangerous motorcycle club
• 17:24
  operating out of Detroit. The arrangement was that Sid was
• 17:27
  supposed to repair a vehicle for the girlfriend of one
• 17:30
  of the Detroit gang members, but instead of fixing it,
• 17:33
  Sid and his own girlfriend, woman named Chico, just sold
• 17:36
  the car, pocketed the cash, and essentially told the Detroit
• 17:40
  club to pound.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: Sand in the hierarchy of outlaw motorcycle clubs. Stealing from
• 17:46
  a patched member or their immediate family is a fatal transgression.
• 17:50
  I mean, it is a direct insult to the club's reputation,
• 17:53
  and retaliation is not just expected, it is mandatory to
• 17:57
  maintain their intimidating status in the underworld.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: And Sid knew his life was on the line. He
• 18:02
  tells the police that a few weeks prior to the
• 18:04
  murders and forces from the Detroit Club it actually rolled
• 18:07
  up to the Ransom Street house and Sid had to
• 18:10
  physically run them off the property while brandishing a fully
• 18:13
  automatic rifle. Wow. Yeah, So Sid's thesis is this, the
• 18:17
  Detroit club contracted a hitman. They handed the hitman a
• 18:20
  slip of paper with a Ransom Street address and told
• 18:22
  him there's a guy and his old lady at this house.
• 18:25
  Erased them right, So the hit man drives across the
• 18:27
  state in the middle of the night, pulls up to
• 18:29
  the house, sees a young couple, and executes them, completely
• 18:32
  unaware that Sid had been evicted and an innocent newlywed
• 18:35
  couple had just moved in.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: From a purely forensic standpoint, this theory actually neatly answers
• 18:41
  the lingering questions. A contracted hit man from Detroit doesn't
• 18:46
  care about four hundred dollars in a drawer. A professional
• 18:49
  brings a revolver to avoid leaving brass, or meticulously cleans
• 18:53
  up his workspace. The methodology matches the crime scene.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: But hold on, I am really struggling with the logic
• 18:59
  of this hit man theory. Oh so you're telling me
• 19:02
  a professional killer from Detroit walks up to a house,
• 19:05
  looks through a window, and mistakes a clean cut guy
• 19:08
  wearing dress slacks and suspenders for a paranoid, heavily armed
• 19:13
  drug dealing biker. I mean, surely you visually confirm your
• 19:16
  target before pulling the trigger.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: Right, That is the logical assumption, Yes, but the reality
• 19:20
  of contract violence is often incredibly sloppy. Really, Yeah, you
• 19:23
  have an out of town shooter operating in the pitch
• 19:26
  black of a rural country road. He is shooting through
• 19:29
  a partially obstructed truck window and then firing into a
• 19:32
  dark bedroom at a sleeping figure. Positive visual identification under
• 19:37
  those high stress, low light conditions is actually incredibly difficult.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: I guess that makes sense if.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: The address matches. The hit man often just assumes the
• 19:45
  target matches. The police simply could not afford to dismiss
• 19:49
  this theory, so.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: They decide to go full undercover. The local halland detectives
• 19:53
  reach out to the Michigan State Police, who have a
• 19:56
  highly sophisticated intelligence apparatus. The State actually have confidential informants
• 20:02
  deeply embedded inside this specific Detroit motorcycle club.
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: Embedting informants is a high wire act of law enforcement.
• 20:09
  You are typically dealing with lower level gang members who
• 20:12
  are facing severe mandatory minimum sentences for narcotics or weapons.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: Charges, right they use that as leverage.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: Exactly the state leverages those charges to flip them, creating
• 20:23
  a controlled, highly dangerous information pipeline directly into the gang's
• 20:28
  leadership structure.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: So the informants tap into the underworld chatter and come
• 20:31
  back with two specific street names of known enforcers who
• 20:34
  take on contract work, guys known as Ghetto Rat and Griz.
• 20:38
  But the investigation immediately hits a bizarre wall. Within a
• 20:42
  week of Rickingale's murder, Grizz is shot and killed on
• 20:46
  the streets of Detroit in a completely unrelated gang shootout.
• 20:50
  He takes whatever he knows straight to the grave, but they.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: Do manage to locate and interrogate Ghetto Rat, and the
• 20:56
  dynamic of interviewing a hardened cartel or gang enforcer is
• 21:00
  vastly different from interviewing an ex boyfriend like Lars.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: Oh I bet so, the detectives sit across from Ghetto
• 21:06
  Rat and he gives them this chillingly honest denial. He
• 21:09
  basically licks in the eye and says, look, if our
• 21:12
  club had green laed a hit on that guy Colby,
• 21:15
  I would have been the one standing in his driveway
• 21:17
  pulling the trigger and it didn't happen.
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: There is a paradoxical code of honesty within that specific
• 21:22
  criminal tier. When an embedded informant network spanning the entire
• 21:26
  state can't pick up a single whisper of a contracted
• 21:29
  hit and the primary enforcer denies it with absolute casual conviction,
• 21:33
  the theory just loses its structural integrity, right, And to.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: Verify it, they put Sid Korby, the paranoid biker on
• 21:40
  a polygraph, and, just like Lars, Sid passes the machine
• 21:44
  confirms he is genuinely terrified, but he has zero actual
• 21:48
  knowledge of the murders. He had nothing to do with it.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: So let's look at the board. At this point, the
• 21:52
  tip jar is empty. The crime of passion theory failed,
• 21:56
  the organized crime syndicate theory completely evaporated. The detectives have
• 22:00
  exhausted every physical lead and every logical suspect.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Detective Wassinc describes this period as absolutely soul crushing.
• 22:07
  He had to go back to the break and wind
• 22:09
  guard families week after week, month after month, looking them
• 22:12
  in the eyes and telling them he had absolutely nothing
• 22:14
  new to report. That is so hard, it really is.
• 22:17
  The leads dry up, the case goes cold, and it's
• 22:20
  tays frozen in a filing cabinet for twenty four years.
• 22:24
  Detective Wisig retires in nineteen ninety five, just carrying the
• 22:27
  ghost of this unsold double homicide with him.
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: The passage of time is the greatest enemy of a
• 22:32
  standard investigation. You know, witnesses pass away, memories degrade, and
• 22:36
  physical locations are renovated or bulldozed. But this brings us
• 22:39
  to the foundational philosophy of modern cold case investigation. While
• 22:43
  the outside world changes, the case file itself acts as
• 22:46
  a perfectly sealed time capsule, and.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: In twenty eleven, that time capsule is finally cracked open,
• 22:52
  the case is reassigned to a new cold case team,
• 22:55
  detectives Venus Repper and David Blakey, and their approach is
• 22:59
  critically here. They don't start by hitting the streets to
• 23:02
  find new suspects.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: No, they operate on a core investigative belief. The name
• 23:06
  of the killer is almost always sitting somewhere in the
• 23:09
  original box of evidence. Always it is a statistical reality.
• 23:13
  And homicide investigations, the original detectives usually interview the right
• 23:17
  person within the first week, but in the chaos of
• 23:20
  the immediate aftermath, that person slips through the cracks because
• 23:22
  law enforcement is distracted by louder, more dramatic suspects like.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: A violin ex boyfriend or a paranoid biker gang.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: Exactly so, Repper and Lakely's entire job is to chronologically
• 23:32
  reconstruct the original notes, scrutinize the nineteen eighty seven crime
• 23:36
  scene photos, and just hunt for the anomaly. They are
• 23:39
  looking for the puzzle piece that was forced into the
• 23:41
  wrong spot, and.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: The breakthrough comes from a photograph. I want you to
• 23:46
  think about rewatching a movie you have seen a dozen times,
• 23:50
  you know the plot by heart, but on your thirteenth viewing,
• 23:54
  you suddenly notice a detail in the background of a
• 23:57
  scene that completely recontextualizes the entire story.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy, right, That is.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: Exactly what happened to Detective Venus Repper. She is staring
• 24:07
  at the crime scene photos of Gail's body in the
• 24:09
  master bedroom and she zeros in on a pillow.
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: But it is not a standard bed pillow. That is
• 24:15
  the critical distinction here.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: Sorry, I mean that is the defining detail. It is
• 24:19
  a decorative throw pillow, and based on photos of the
• 24:21
  rest of the house, this specific decorative pillow belonged exclusively
• 24:25
  on the couch out in the living room.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: Yet in the crime scene photo, this living room throw
• 24:30
  pillow is placed squarely over Gail's face as she lies
• 24:33
  deceased in her bed.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: So let's rigorously analyze the forensic sequence of that pillow
• 24:38
  because it changes the entire geometry of the case. If
• 24:42
  the killer had brought the pillar into the bedroom and
• 24:44
  placed it over Gail's face before firing the weapon, perhaps
• 24:48
  in a misguided attempt to muffle the sound of the gunshot,
• 24:51
  the physics of the ballistics would leave an undeniable signature.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: Because the bullets would have to pass through the pillow.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: Yes, a high velocity point two two caliber bullets passing
• 25:00
  through fabric leaves a distinct entry and exit hole, and
• 25:04
  it physically pulls synthetic fibers from the pillow directly into
• 25:08
  the woundtrack.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: But when Repper examines the physical evidence logs from nineteen
• 25:12
  eighty seven, there are no bullet holes in the pillow none.
• 25:16
  What the lab did find was a biological transfer stain, basically,
• 25:20
  blood residue smeared on the underside of the fabric.
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: Which turns a strange detail into a forensic certainty. The
• 25:26
  sequence of events is locked. The killer stood over Gale
• 25:29
  and shot her. Then the killer turned around, walked out
• 25:33
  of the bedroom, navigated all the way down the hallway
• 25:36
  into the living room, specifically retrieved this decorative throat pillow,
• 25:40
  walked all the way back into the bedroom, and gently
• 25:43
  placed it over her shattered face.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: The psychological weight of that action is just staggering. I mean,
• 25:49
  if you are a random hit man from Detroit who
• 25:52
  just executed a target for cash, you do not care
• 25:54
  what the victim looks like, not at all. And if
• 25:57
  you are a frantic burglar, your adrenaline is telling you
• 26:00
  to spreant out the back door, not play intereor decorator
• 26:02
  with a corpse exactly.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: In behavioral profiling, this is known as an act of undoing.
• 26:08
  It is a textbook psychological indicator of profound immediate remorse.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: An act of undoing.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, The killer experience is a sudden, catastrophic rush
• 26:17
  of guilt or shame regarding the violence they just unleashed.
• 26:21
  They physically cannot tolerate the visual feedback of looking into
• 26:24
  the dead eyes of the human being they just destroyed.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: Placing the pillow is a desperate, subconscious attempt to depersonalize
• 26:31
  the horror, to sort of undo the visual reality of
• 26:34
  the murder.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: So the pillow acts like a laser pointer. It instantly
• 26:38
  obliterates the biker gang theory and the random robbery theory.
• 26:41
  It points squarely back to the inner circle. It tells
• 26:44
  Rubber and Blakely that the person holding the gun had
• 26:47
  a deep, pre existing emotional bond with Gail.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: Right, the suspect pool instantly shrinks from anyone in the
• 26:54
  criminal underworld down to just the immediate family tree and
• 26:57
  standard investigative procedure dictator that you systematically eliminate the closest
• 27:02
  relatives working your way outward.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: So they start with Rick's side of the family, focusing
• 27:06
  on his brother Bud. Now, on paper, if you are
• 27:10
  looking for a motive within a family, Bud has a
• 27:13
  massive one.
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: Money, Because financial gain is one of the oldest motives
• 27:17
  in human history. Inheritance disputes can fracture families permanently. If
• 27:22
  Rick passed away, Bud stood to inherit a highly significant
• 27:25
  portion of the family estate.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: But when the cold case team applies modern scrutiny to Bud,
• 27:30
  the profile simply doesn't fit. Bud is highly educated, independently
• 27:35
  wealthy through his own successful career, and utterly transparent with the.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: Detectives plus his alibi.
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: Right most importantly, his nineteen eighty seven alibi is rock solid.
• 27:45
  He was at home with his wife and there is
• 27:47
  zero documented history of animosity between him and Rick. They
• 27:52
  were supportive brothers. The financial motive was a total mirage.
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: Bud is cleared, which forces the detectives to cross the
• 27:59
  aisle and examine gael side of the family. And this
• 28:02
  is exactly where the idyllic picture of the young, happy
• 28:05
  newlyweds starts to reveal a much darker background.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, good tective. Start digging into the wind Guard family history,
• 28:11
  and it is a stark contrast to the life Gael
• 28:14
  was building. Gail grew up in a very large, profoundly
• 28:17
  dysfunctional household. Her mother struggled with the sheer volume of children,
• 28:22
  leading to systemic long term neglect. Yeah, the kids were
• 28:25
  essentially left in a lord of the fly scenario, forced
• 28:27
  to raise themselves and fiercely compete for basic resources.
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: When children are raised in a highly neglectful, chaotic environment
• 28:33
  like that, they develop intense survival mechanisms. The sibling dynamic
• 28:38
  often warps well. They formed strategic alliances, and very frequently
• 28:43
  one sibling steps into a dictatorial, highly controlling role. They
• 28:47
  impose rigid, often abusive order on the siblings just to
• 28:51
  establish a sense of control over the household chaos.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: Okay, So to map out this toxic dynamic, Repper and
• 28:56
  Blakeley tracked down Cheryl Murphrey, who is Gail's older sister.
• 29:00
  And Cheryl is a gold mine for investigators because she
• 29:03
  had physically removed herself from the family. She moved out
• 29:06
  of state years ago.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: That geographical distance gave her an objective, clear eyed view
• 29:11
  of the family's pathology.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: Exactly, and Cheryl immediately raises massive, glaring red flags about
• 29:17
  their brother.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: Ryan Wingard, the exact same brother who was first on
• 29:21
  the scene in nineteen eighty seven and the one who
• 29:23
  aggressively pointed the original detectives toward Lars, the ex boyfriend.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: Right, so, Cheryl describes Ryan using one specific phrase, an
• 29:30
  absolute control freak. She details how Ryan demanded absolute submission
• 29:35
  from his siblings, dictating their choices and furious if they disobeyed.
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: It's a classic power dynamic, it is.
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: But then Cheryl hands the cold case detectives a massive
• 29:45
  puzzle piece that completely slipped past the nineteen eighty seven investigation.
• 29:50
  She tells them about a vicious, escalating family dispute that
• 29:53
  exploded just days before the murders.
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: In victimology, detectives are always looking for the precipitating stressor
• 29:59
  right bark that ignites the powder keg right before the crime,
• 30:02
  and this was it.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: Ryan had a housing crisis. He was renting a property
• 30:06
  and he had arbitrarily allowed his parents and several younger
• 30:09
  siblings to move into a rundown trailer parked directly in
• 30:12
  his driveway. Oh boy, yeah, the landlord discovered this unauthorized
• 30:16
  encampment and was livid, threatening to evict Ryan entirely if
• 30:20
  the trailer wasn't removed immediately. Ryan was panicking, So on
• 30:23
  the Friday before the murders, Ryan picked up the phone
• 30:26
  and called Gail. Okay, He aggressively demanded that since she
• 30:29
  and Rick had just purchased this nice, spacious house out
• 30:32
  in the country, she was obligated to let their parents
• 30:35
  move in with her.
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: He is attempting to exert his historical dominance. He wants
• 30:39
  to solve his own self created crisis by forcibly imposing
• 30:42
  on his sister's newly established peaceful life.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: But Gail did something that absolutely shocked him. She stood
• 30:49
  her ground. She told Ryan absolutely not. She said Rick
• 30:52
  would never allow it, and she refused to compromise her
• 30:54
  new marriage to fix this problem. Good for her, yeah,
• 30:57
  But according to Cheryl, Gail called her immediately after this
• 31:01
  confrontation and said Ryan was completely unhinged, like he was
• 31:06
  enraged beyond reason.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: The psychological mechanism here is critical to understanding the escalation
• 31:12
  to murder. Why is that because when a sibling who
• 31:15
  fundamentally relies on controlling others is suddenly denied by the
• 31:19
  very sister he used to easily dominate. It doesn't just
• 31:22
  close frustration. It causes a narcissistic injury.
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: A narcissistic injury.
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: Right, Gail was empowered by a healthy marriage and a
• 31:29
  secure life. By telling Ryan no, she collapsed his perceived
• 31:34
  hierarchy to a deeply controlling personality. That kind of rejection
• 31:38
  is an existential threat to their ego.
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: Wow and Cheryl also provides a chilling behavioral anomaly from
• 31:44
  the mourning the bodies were discovered. When the father received
• 31:46
  the phone call that Rick and Gil were dead, he
• 31:49
  gathered the family and announced the tragedy. Brian immediately sprinted
• 31:52
  to his truck and drove straight to the new house
• 31:55
  on Ransom Street. Cheryl points out with just haunting clarity
• 32:00
  that Ryan never asked anyone where the bodies have been found.
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: That is the definition of guilty knowledge. I mean, if
• 32:05
  your sister is tragically killed, she could have been in
• 32:08
  a fatal car accident on the highway, shot in a
• 32:11
  robbery at a grocery store, or attacked at her workplace.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: You wouldn't just automatically know exactly.
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: You don't instinctively know to drive to her house. Ryan
• 32:20
  didn't ask for the location because he had personally designed
• 32:23
  the crime scene.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: It is staggering that this behavior wasn't flagged in nineteen
• 32:27
  eighty seven, but you know, families are complicated ecosystems. They
• 32:31
  often close ranks instinctively terrified of acknowledging that a monster
• 32:35
  might be sitting at their dinner table.
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: It happens all the time.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: But armed with Cheryl's testimony, detectives reperend Blakely finally have
• 32:42
  their suspect. They have a motive of rage and control,
• 32:45
  and they have the psychological profile. Now they have to
• 32:48
  systematically dismantle the shield that protected Ryan for two decades.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: His alibi, and that entire alibi is structurally dependent on
• 32:57
  a single load bearing pillar, Pam wing Guard. Back in
• 33:02
  nineteen eighty seven, Pam was Ryan's compliant girlfriend. By twenty eleven,
• 33:07
  she is his wife and the mother of his children.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: Right the original accepted alibi was that Ryan and Pam
• 33:12
  went to a local laundromat from five to eight pm,
• 33:15
  visited a friend's house, and were safely home together in
• 33:18
  bed by two am.
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: So the detectives know they are dealing with a control freak,
• 33:23
  so they deploy a classic, highly effective interrogation strategy known
• 33:27
  as divide and conquer.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: Oh, this is so smart.
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: They ask Ryan and Pam to come down to the
• 33:31
  station for a routine follow up, but when they arrived,
• 33:34
  the detectives deliberately isolate them. They purposefully bring Pam into
• 33:38
  an interview room first entirely alone. Ryan, expecting to sit
• 33:42
  next to her and dictate her answers, is told to just.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: Wait in the lobby, which has to infuriate him. Oh.
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, This immediate isolation strips Ryan of his coercive presence.
• 33:51
  It changes the entire atmospheric pressure for Pam. Detective Wrapper
• 33:55
  takes the lead in this room, and she utilizes a
• 33:57
  technique rooted in cognitive interviewing.
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: What does that mean?
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: She does not use the confrontational, high stress read technique.
• 34:04
  She is soft spoken, empathetic, and builds rapport. She appeals
• 34:08
  directly to Pam's identity as a mother and her underlying conscience.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: And Pam initially tries to deploy the safest defense mechanism,
• 34:15
  selective amnesia. She repeats over and over that it was
• 34:18
  twenty five years ago and her memory is.
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: Just a fog, which is completely understandable from her perspective right.
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: But Repper refuses to escalate. She just keeps gently pushing,
• 34:29
  reminding Pam that the victim's families deserve the truth and
• 34:33
  that holding onto a lie is destroying her from the inside,
• 34:36
  and slowly the structural integrity of the alibi begins to crack.
• 34:40
  Pam finally admits one devastating fact, Ryan was not with
• 34:43
  her that entire Saturday night.
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: The nineteen eighty seven alibi is officially shattered. The timeline
• 34:48
  is wide open, but Pam's reaction to her own admission
• 34:50
  is deeply telling. She becomes physically terrified she does. She
• 34:54
  refuses to elaborate further and demands to leave the station.
• 34:59
  Repper is so concerned by Pam's palpable fear that she
• 35:02
  genuinely asks, are you going to be okay? Repper recognizes
• 35:06
  that Pam is about to walk out of the station
• 35:08
  and get back into a vehicle with a highly dangerous
• 35:10
  man whose alibi she just destroyed.
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and while Pam is retreating, Detective Blakely is in
• 35:16
  a separate room confronting Ryan, and this interaction is a
• 35:19
  masterclass in reading baseline body language. Blakely informs Ryan that
• 35:24
  his wife just completely contradicted their timeline for the night
• 35:27
  of the murders.
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: Okay, so think about this. An innocent man hearing that
• 35:31
  his alibi for his sister's murder has collapsed would likely panic,
• 35:34
  ask what the confusion is, or demand to speak to
• 35:37
  his wife to clarify the misunderstanding. Of course, Ryan does
• 35:40
  none of that.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: No, Ryan instantly pivots to gaslighting the detectives. His posture
• 35:45
  is rigid, defensive. He immediately states, she's confused. No, she's
• 35:49
  just confused. This is what we did.
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: He is attempting to exert his standard control tactics on
• 35:54
  a season homicide detective. His complete lack of curiosity about
• 35:58
  the investigation into his sister's day is the loudest signal
• 36:01
  in the room. He is entirely consumed by self preservation, and.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: This leads to one of the most intense, suffocating moments
• 36:08
  I have ever heard of in an interrogation setting. Blakely
• 36:12
  starts pressing Ryan hard about his historical relationship with Gail,
• 36:15
  proing for the tension. Ryan keeps dodging the questions, his
• 36:19
  voice rising defensively, asking what do you get in need? Dave,
• 36:22
  what's your point? And then Blakely just stops. He stops talking,
• 36:26
  He crosses his arms, sits back in his chair, and
• 36:29
  just stares Ryan dead in the eyes for forty agonizing seconds,
• 36:33
  total heavy silence in a small, claustrophobic room.
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: I want to emphasize how powerful silence is as an
• 36:38
  interrogation tool, a conversational vacuus, psychologically agonizing for a human being.
• 36:43
  We are socially conditioned to fill silent.
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: We really are.
• 36:45
  Speaker 2: For a control freak like Ryan, who relies on dominating
• 36:49
  the verbal narrative to maintain his power, silence strips him
• 36:52
  of his weapons. He doesn't know what evidence Blakely has.
• 36:55
  He doesn't know what Pam actually said.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: He's just left the spiral.
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: Exitically, the silence forces his internal anxiety to compound until
• 37:03
  the suspect feels a desperate urge to confess or offer
• 37:06
  a concession, just to relieve the crushing atmospheric pressure.
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: If you are listening to this right now, just pause
• 37:12
  and count to five in your head. Feel how unnatural
• 37:16
  a five second silence is in a conversation. Now will
• 37:19
  multiply that by eight.
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: It is brutal, But Ryan's self preservation instincts hold out
• 37:24
  he survives the stare down without confessing. The detectives know
• 37:27
  he is guilty, but there are seasoned enough to know
• 37:29
  that a broken alibi and defensive body language are not
• 37:32
  enough to secure a first degree murder conviction after two decades, right,
• 37:36
  They need concrete proof of a darker motive, and they
• 37:39
  need an undeniable objective flaw in his timeline.
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: They need their Aha moment, and they find it by
• 37:46
  pulling on another seemingly minor thread from the nineteen eighty
• 37:49
  seven file. Back then, Ryan was apparently living a double life.
• 37:54
  He wasn't just dating Pam, he was also simultaneously dating
• 37:57
  another woman named Chris.
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: Oh Wow Wow Yeah.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: Repper and Blakely track Chris down for an interview. They
• 38:04
  speak with her for about an hour. She explains that
• 38:07
  she and Ryan eventually broke up because she learned she
• 38:09
  couldn't have children, and the conversation seems to naturally wind down.
• 38:13
  The detectives are literally packing up their notes, standing up
• 38:16
  and getting ready to walk out the.
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: Door, and as they have one foot out the door,
• 38:19
  Chris stops them and says, well, there is this one thing.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: It is always the final thought that blows the case wide.
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: Open it really is.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: Chris tells the detectives that two days after the bodies
• 38:30
  were discovered, Ryan drove over to her house in a
• 38:32
  state of extreme erratic agitation. He demanded she go for
• 38:36
  a ride with him. He drove her to an isolated
• 38:39
  local park, threw the car in park, and completely broke down, sobbing.
• 38:43
  He kept repeating, what a monstery was, what a terrible
• 38:46
  person he was. Chris was sitting in the passenger seat,
• 38:49
  absolutely terrified that he was about to confess to butchering
• 38:53
  his sister and her husband.
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: He didn't confess to the physical act of the murder
• 38:56
  in that car, though, but he confessed to the underlying catalyst.
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: Yes, Ryan tearfully admitted to Chris that he had been
• 39:03
  involved in an ongoing, highly abusive, and completely unwilling sexual
• 39:08
  relationship with his own sister, Gail.
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: And suddenly the entire architecture of the crime makes horrifying sense.
• 39:15
  The puzzle pieces locked together. This case was never just
• 39:18
  about a landlord dispute over a trailer in a driveway.
• 39:21
  That was merely the spark that ignited a massive powder
• 39:25
  keg of deeply buried, profoundly destructive family secrets.
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: Think about the leverage Gail held em that Friday phone call.
• 39:32
  She is newly married, She is empowered by Rick, a
• 39:35
  good protective man. If she had finally reached her breaking
• 39:38
  point with Ryan's control, she had the ultimate trump card.
• 39:41
  If Gail told Rick about the history of sexual abuse,
• 39:45
  Ryan's entire life would evaporate. He would be exposed, ruined,
• 39:50
  and excommunicated from society. The Friday argument escalated because Ryan
• 39:55
  realized he could no longer control her silence. He didn't
• 39:59
  just want to forced her to house their parents. He
• 40:02
  realized he needed to permanently silence her to protect his
• 40:04
  own survival.
• 40:05
  Speaker 2: The motive is now crystal clear, supported by third party testimony,
• 40:09
  but investigators still need the final nail in the coffin.
• 40:12
  They need independent proof that Ryan had guilty knowledge of
• 40:15
  the crime scene before the police were ever.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: Notified, and they find that definitive proof in the man
• 40:20
  named Jim Meechim. Jim was a close friend of Ryan's
• 40:23
  in the late eighties. They ran in the same social circles.
• 40:26
  The detectives tracked Jim down and simply asked him to
• 40:29
  recall how he first learned about the murders. Jim explains
• 40:32
  that He had a routine of going over to Ryan's
• 40:34
  house very early in the morning to have coffee before
• 40:37
  they headed to work. On the Monday morning the bodies
• 40:39
  were discovered, Jim arrived at Ryan's house for coffee. He
• 40:43
  walked in to find Ryan and Pam wide awake, both
• 40:45
  of them weeping uncontrollably. Jim naturally asked what was wrong,
• 40:49
  and Ryan looked at him and choked out, my sister's
• 40:52
  been murdered.
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: Which is the fatal glitch in Ryan's timeline. It is
• 40:56
  the piece of data that proves he pulled.
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: The trigger exactly. I mean, let's look at the clock.
• 41:01
  Jim is having coffee with Ryan early in the morning,
• 41:05
  but Rick's employer didn't notice he was missing until later.
• 41:08
  Rick's mother didn't drive out to the house and discover
• 41:10
  the bodies until eleven zero am on that Monday.
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: The logic is inescapable. You cannot actively mourn a double
• 41:17
  homicide hours before the victims have even been discovered by
• 41:20
  the outside world, unless, of course, you are the architect
• 41:23
  of the crime. Jim Meacham unwittingly provided the exact chronological
• 41:27
  proof that Ryan possessed guilty knowledge, so the cold case.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: Team is now armed with a shattered alibi, a horrifying
• 41:34
  motive of sexual abuse provided by Chris, and the definitive
• 41:38
  timeline glitch from Jim.
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: The trap is set, yes, But to guarantee a conviction
• 41:43
  and ensure this doesn't fall apart in a courtroom, they
• 41:45
  need one final monumental piece of evidence. They need a full,
• 41:49
  on the record confession from the only other human being
• 41:52
  on earth who knows exactly what happened in the dark
• 41:54
  that night, Pam Pam. Securing that confession requires an incredibly
• 41:59
  delicate psychological touch. The detectives understand that Pam occupies a
• 42:04
  dual role here. She is technically an accessory after the fact,
• 42:08
  legally complicit in hiding a murder, but psychologically she is
• 42:12
  a victim of severe trauma bonding right. She has been
• 42:15
  held hostage by Ryan's terror in control for her entire
• 42:19
  adult life.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: So detectives Rapper and Blakely orchestrate a targeted approach. They
• 42:25
  surprise Pam at her workplace. They don't walk in with handcuffs.
• 42:29
  They quietly pull her into a private room and they
• 42:31
  lay all the cards on the table.
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: They tell her the alibi is gone. They know about
• 42:35
  the abuse. They know about the timeline glitch.
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: They look at her and tell her that the truth
• 42:39
  is out and she needs to finally come clean, not
• 42:41
  just to save herself from prison, but to protect her
• 42:43
  children from the fallout. The psychological pressure in that room
• 42:47
  is immense, I can't even imagine, and finally, the crushing
• 42:50
  burden of carrying a double homicide in her head for
• 42:53
  a quarter of a century breaks her. Pam collapses and confesses.
• 42:56
  She tells the detectives that very late on that Saturday
• 42:59
  night in nineteen eighty seven, Ryan burst into their home, violently, agitated,
• 43:04
  and explicitly told her I killed Rick Gale.
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: Wow. With Pan's confession acting as the keystone, the detectives
• 43:12
  are finally able to rebuild the exact sequence of events.
• 43:15
  They can overlay the physical evidence with the behavioral motive
• 43:18
  to reconstruct the final hours of Rerick and Gale brink.
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: Based on the synthesis of all this evidence, here is
• 43:25
  the tragic reality of that Saturday night. Sometime around eleven
• 43:28
  thirty PM, Rick and Gale drive home from Calypsos. They
• 43:31
  are happy, winding down for the wedding, perhaps getting ready
• 43:34
  for bed. Shortly after they arrive Ryan's truck pulls into
• 43:38
  the driveway, he knocks on the door. A massive confrontation
• 43:41
  ignites in the hallway. It is fueled by Ryan's seating
• 43:44
  jealousy of his sister's independence, his blinding rage over the
• 43:47
  housing dispute, and his paralyzing terror that Gail is going
• 43:50
  to expose the history of abuse to her new husband.
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: It's the perfect storm of motive, but Gail.
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: Does not submit. She stands her ground. She kicks him
• 43:57
  out of the house and tells him never to return.
• 43:59
  She turns her back on him, walks down the hall,
• 44:02
  drops her dress on the floor, and gets into bed. Rick,
• 44:05
  acting as the protective husband, stands at the door and
• 44:08
  firmly tells Ryan he needs to leave the property.
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: And Ryan retreats out the front door, but he doesn't
• 44:14
  leave the property. His perceived control has been utterly shattered.
• 44:18
  His narcissistic ego has collapsed. He pivots to lethal retaliation
• 44:22
  and devises a trap designed to exploit Rick's good nature.
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: Right, Ryan walks back up to the front door and
• 44:28
  knocks again. He claims his truck's engine is stalling out
• 44:31
  in the freezing cold and asks for help. And Rick,
• 44:34
  who every witness, described as a genuinely good, helpful guy,
• 44:38
  doesn't hesitate for a second.
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: It's so tragic.
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: He grabs his heavy work galoshes, pulls them over his
• 44:42
  dress shoes, throws his heavy coat over his suspenders, and
• 44:46
  walks out into the freezing Michigan knight to help the
• 44:48
  brother in law who just screamed at his wife. Rick
• 44:52
  slides into the driver's seat of Ryan's truck to check the.
• 44:54
  Speaker 2: Ignition, and this is when he rolls the window down.
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: Yes, he rolls the manual window down three quarters of
• 45:00
  the way to talk to Ryan's standing outside, and while
• 45:03
  Rick is sitting there trying to fix the truck, Ryan
• 45:06
  raises a point two to two caliber revolver and shoots
• 45:09
  him twice in the left side of the head through
• 45:11
  the open window.
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: It is the ultimate betrayal of familial trust. He weaponized
• 45:15
  Rick's willingness to help against him.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: Ryan then turns and walks into the quiet house. He
• 45:21
  navigates down the hallway directly to the master bedroom. Gail
• 45:24
  is lying in bed, likely dozing off, entirely unaware that
• 45:28
  her husband is dead. In the driveway, Ryan shoots his
• 45:30
  own sister three times in the head. God but then
• 45:33
  the adrenaline receives the reality of what he has just
• 45:36
  done crashes into his consciousness. He physically cannot endure looking
• 45:40
  at her shattered face. He turns, walks out to the
• 45:43
  living room, picks up a decorative throw pillow, walks back
• 45:46
  into the bedroom, and places it over her face to
• 45:48
  hide his own sin.
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: And the timeline of horror does not end there. The
• 45:51
  actions he takes immediately following the murders cement his profile
• 45:54
  as a psychological terrorist.
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Ryan leaves the scene, ensuring he takes the revolver
• 45:59
  there ocasing's left behind. He drives back to his own
• 46:03
  home and wakes Pam up. And he doesn't just verbally confess.
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: To her, No, he does something so much worse.
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: He violently forces her out of bed, shuts her into
• 46:12
  his truck, and drives her back to the active crime scene.
• 46:15
  He marches Pam into the house, drags her into the
• 46:18
  master bedroom, and forces her to look at Gail's murdered body.
• 46:23
  He looks his terrified girlfriend in the eye and tells her,
• 46:26
  if you tell anybody this will happen to you.
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: It is a calculated act of supreme psychological domination. He
• 46:32
  binds Pam to a secret through sheer, paralyzing trauma and
• 46:36
  the absolute threat of death. He then gathers the gun
• 46:39
  and the blood spattered clothes he was wearing, puts them
• 46:41
  in a bag, and disappears them into the dark, leaving
• 46:44
  the scene to be discovered by his own parents on
• 46:46
  Monday morning.
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: For twenty six years, Ryan Wingard went on living a
• 46:49
  seemingly normal life. He married Pam, he raised children with her.
• 46:53
  He attended family holidays hiding in plain sight while his
• 46:56
  own parents grieve the slaughter of their daughter.
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: But forensic evidence is incredibly patient.
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: It really is the cold case. Detectives finally secure the
• 47:05
  arrest warrant for Ryan, and, true to his psychopathic nature,
• 47:09
  when the handcuffs click, he shows absolutely zero remorse. He
• 47:14
  doesn't shed a tear for his sister, of course not. Instead,
• 47:17
  he furiously blames Pam, claiming to the detectives that she's
• 47:21
  just making the whole story up because she wants a
• 47:23
  favorable divorce settlement.
• 47:25
  Speaker 2: He maintained his defensive gas lighting posture to the very end,
• 47:29
  but the sheer weight of the reconstructed evidence was insurmountable.
• 47:32
  On March twenty eighth, twenty fourteen twenty six, agonizing years
• 47:37
  after he pulled the trigger, a jury found Ryan Windinguard
• 47:40
  guilty of two counts of first degree murder.
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: It is a profound testament to the persistence of detectives Repper, Blakely,
• 47:46
  and especially the original investigator was Sink, who carried the
• 47:49
  heavy burden of this unsolved case deep into his retirement.
• 47:52
  The truth finally.
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: Surfaced, but as the True Crime Fixed Breakdown emphasizes, this
• 47:56
  resolution is an absolute staggering tragedy for both families, and
• 48:00
  the wind Guards lost their daughter to the violence of
• 48:02
  their own son. The Brinks lost their son and daughter
• 48:05
  in law to a toxic darkness they never even knew
• 48:07
  was in the room.
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: Cases like this really force us to acknowledge how fragile
• 48:12
  our understanding of the people closest to us can truly be.
• 48:16
  We operate on the baseline assumption that families are built
• 48:19
  on a foundation of love and mutual.
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: Protection, right, But sometimes the architecture of a family is
• 48:26
  built entirely on fear control and secrets so toxic they
• 48:30
  eventually become lethal.
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: It really makes you reflect as you go about your week,
• 48:34
  wondering how well you actually know the people in your
• 48:37
  own orbit. We all maintain public faces while harboring private lives,
• 48:42
  and it is staggering to think that a single, seemingly
• 48:45
  insignificant piece of physical evidence, a decorative pillow sitting in
• 48:48
  the wrong room, can be the exact thread that unravels
• 48:51
  a quarter century of lies.
• 48:53
  Speaker 2: That is the enduring power of physical evidence. It doesn't lie,
• 48:56
  it doesn't degrade like memory, and it certainly cannot be
• 48:59
  intimidated by a controlling personality.
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: Before we wrap up this deep dive, I want to
• 49:03
  leave you with a provocative thought, something that wasn't fully
• 49:06
  explored in our source text, but that I simply cannot
• 49:09
  stop thinking about. Think about the unimaginable psychological toll on
• 49:13
  pam Oh deaf. Imagine being twenty five years old, being
• 49:17
  violently dragged into a house in the middle of the
• 49:19
  night and being forced to look at the murdered body
• 49:22
  of your boyfriend's sister. Imagine him looking you bed in
• 49:25
  the eye and promising you the exact same bloody fate
• 49:28
  if you ever speak a word of it.
• 49:30
  Speaker 2: It's just horrific.
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: Now, imagine marrying that man, Imagine sharing a bed with him,
• 49:35
  Imagine raising innocent children with him. Waking up next to
• 49:38
  a ruthless murderer every single day for twenty six years,
• 49:43
  carrying that suffocating, terrifying secret while smiling at family barbecues,
• 49:47
  attending school plays, and going to the grocery store. How
• 49:51
  does a human mind compartmentalize that kind of profound, agonizing
• 49:55
  darkness for decades without completely fracturing It raises.
• 49:59
  Speaker 2: A terrifying question about the outer limits of human endurance
• 50:02
  and the paralyzing, life altering power of fear.
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: It really does. Thank you for joining us on this
• 50:07
  incredibly complex journey today. Remember, just because the situation looks
• 50:11
  idyllic on the surface doesn't mean there isn't a much
• 50:13
  darker reality operating right beneath it. Until next time.