Latest / True Nightmare Stories / The Phone Number on Her Palm: How Dawn's Ink Unmasked a Killer
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: She had a phone number written in her palm, not
- 0:06Speaker 1: in a notebook, not saved in a phone, written in
- 0:09Speaker 1: ink on her skin, because she knew she might need
- 0:12Speaker 1: it fast. When they found her body on the morning
- 0:14Speaker 1: of March 24th, 1993, that number was nearly gone. The
- 0:19Speaker 1: cold had done its work. The ink had faded to
- 0:22Speaker 1: almost nothing, and the only way to read it was
- 0:24Speaker 1: to remove the skin. That detail is what broke this
- 0:27Speaker 1: case open. and it is what almost let a killer
- 0:30Speaker 1: walk free. There is something in this story that never
- 0:33Speaker 1: settled for me, a 17-year-old girl. A few months from graduation,
- 0:38Speaker 1: carrying one phone number as her only safety net, writing
- 0:41Speaker 1: it on herself like she already knew the road ahead
- 0:44Speaker 1: wasn't going to be kind. She was right, and the
- 0:47Speaker 1: fact that numbers survived at all is the reason we
- 0:50Speaker 1: know her name. Her name was Dawn Marie Birnbaum. She
- 0:53Speaker 1: was 17 years old, blonde, and less than four months
- 0:57Speaker 1: from graduating a residential program for at-risk youth in Poland Springs, Maine,
- 1:02Speaker 1: she had moved through foster homes. She had run away before,
- 1:06Speaker 1: but in the winter of 1993, by every account from
- 1:09Speaker 1: the people who knew her, she was close, genuinely close,
- 1:13Speaker 1: to finishing something she had started. Her counselor, Mark Rosenberg,
- 1:17Speaker 1: described her as motivated, Her friend Heidi Hansen said she
- 1:21Speaker 1: was counting the days. On the evening of Sunday, March 21st,
- 1:25Speaker 1: Dawn and Heidi were at a movie showing at the school.
- 1:28Speaker 1: Dawn left partway through. She did not tell Heidi she
- 1:31Speaker 1: was leaving for good. She made her way to the
- 1:33Speaker 1: road and stuck out her thumb. She was heading to Bangor, Maine,
- 1:36Speaker 1: roughly 90 miles northeast. The reason was a young man
- 1:40Speaker 1: named John Hoffpower, a friend she had been trying to reach.
- 1:44Speaker 1: Hoffpower had disappeared the previous September. His car had been
- 1:47Speaker 1: found near his home in Mississippi, with multiple bullet holes
- 1:51Speaker 1: in it. He was presumed dead, but no body had
- 1:54Speaker 1: ever been recovered. Dawn had not stopped looking. That detail
- 1:58Speaker 1: matters for what comes next. She was not running away
- 2:01Speaker 1: from something. She was running towards someone who was almost
- 2:04Speaker 1: certainly already gone. Dawn spent Monday, March 22nd at Dysart's
- 2:09Speaker 1: truck stop in Bangor, a large interstate rest point where
- 2:13Speaker 1: long-haul drivers fueled up and passed through. She made phone calls.
- 2:17Speaker 1: She talked to people she trusted. At 10 in the morning,
- 2:20Speaker 1: she reached her friend Mandy Gray in Georgia. That was
- 2:23Speaker 1: the last confirmed call anyone received from her. Before she
- 2:26Speaker 1: found a ride south, she took a pen and wrote
- 2:29Speaker 1: a phone number on the inside of her left palm.
- 2:32Speaker 1: The number for Mark Rosenberg, her counselor. Not on paper,
- 2:35Speaker 1: on her hand. Wherever she was going, she wanted that
- 2:38Speaker 1: number with her. Sometime that same morning, a truck driver
- 2:42Speaker 1: named James Robert Cruz Jr., was also at Desarts. A
- 2:46Speaker 1: fuel receipt placed him there with a timestamp and his
- 2:49Speaker 1: name printed on the slip. He was standing approximately 15
- 2:52Speaker 1: feet from the spot where Dawn made her calls. The
- 2:56Speaker 1: prosecution's theory is that Cruz offered her a ride south.
- 2:59Speaker 1: She accepted. She had no reason not to. He was
- 3:02Speaker 1: a commercial driver, a professional, someone who looked exactly like
- 3:06Speaker 1: the kind of person you were supposed to trust on
- 3:08Speaker 1: a highway. What happened over the next 36 hours would
- 3:11Speaker 1: not be confirmed until months later. And it would require
- 3:15Speaker 1: forensic work that in 1993 was still close to the
- 3:18Speaker 1: edge of what laboratories could do. But before any of that,
- 3:22Speaker 1: before the science, and the receipts, and the testimony, there
- 3:26Speaker 1: was just a body on a snowbank at the entrance
- 3:28Speaker 1: ramp of an interstate near Belfonte, Pennsylvania. Population just under 7,000.
- 3:34Speaker 1: A quiet college town in a valley locals called Happy Valley.
- 3:38Speaker 1: a place that had not seen a homicide in 13 years.
- 3:41Speaker 1: The mortician who received the body that morning, a man
- 3:44Speaker 1: named Steven Mondock, gave her a working name while they
- 3:48Speaker 1: waited for identification. He called her Spring Dawn for the
- 3:51Speaker 1: season and for the place they found her. He did
- 3:54Speaker 1: not know her real name yet. Neither did anyone else.
- 3:57Speaker 1: The coincidence of that name, Spring Dawn, Dawn Marie, is
- 4:01Speaker 1: the kind of thing investigators remember for the rest of
- 4:04Speaker 1: their careers. But in the hours after discovery, she was
- 4:07Speaker 1: simply unknown. No bag. No wallet. No identification of any
- 4:12Speaker 1: kind beside the body. Her fingerprints ran through the National
- 4:15Speaker 1: AFS system and returned nothing. Her physical descriptors matched no
- 4:19Speaker 1: open missing persons report. She was a girl with no name.
- 4:23Speaker 1: On a ramp no one was supposed to stop at.
- 4:26Speaker 1: In a town where nothing like this was supposed to happen.
- 4:29Speaker 1: The morning of March 22nd, 1993... Don Marie Birnbaum sat
- 4:33Speaker 1: inside Dysart's truck stop in Bangor, Maine, and made phone calls.
- 4:37Speaker 1: She had been there most of the day. She used
- 4:40Speaker 1: the payphone. She talked to friends. She talked to her counselor,
- 4:43Speaker 1: Mark Rosenberg, and before she hung up, she pressed his
- 4:46Speaker 1: number into the skin of her left palm with a pen,
- 4:49Speaker 1: pressing hard enough that the ink would hold through the cold.
- 4:52Speaker 1: She was 17 years old, and she was trying to
- 4:55Speaker 1: find someone. John Hoffpower had been her friend, and he
- 4:58Speaker 1: had been missing since September of 1992. His car had
- 5:02Speaker 1: been found near his home in Mississippi with multiple bullet
- 5:05Speaker 1: holes in it. No body, no explanation. Dawn had been
- 5:09Speaker 1: searching for him for months, and on that Sunday she
- 5:11Speaker 1: had slipped away from her residential program in Poland Springs,
- 5:15Speaker 1: left her friend Heidi Hansen at the school movie, and
- 5:18Speaker 1: started hitchhiking north toward Bangor because she believed she could
- 5:21Speaker 1: find him if she kept moving. The last call she
- 5:24Speaker 1: made from Disarts was at 10 in the morning to
- 5:27Speaker 1: Mandy Gray in Georgia. After that, there is no record
- 5:30Speaker 1: of where she went or who she spoke to. Sometime
- 5:33Speaker 1: that same morning, a truck driver named James Robert Cruz Jr.
- 5:37Speaker 1: stopped at Dysart's to pay for fuel. The register log
- 5:40Speaker 1: placed him approximately 15 feet from where Dawn was making
- 5:44Speaker 1: her calls. His name was on the receipt. The time matched.
- 5:48Speaker 1: Neither of them could have known the other was there.
- 5:50Speaker 1: And yet, according to the prosecution's timeline, that was the
- 5:54Speaker 1: moment the distance between them collapsed to nothing. Investigators would
- 5:58Speaker 1: later say that Cruz agreed to give Dawn a ride south.
- 6:01Speaker 1: The direction made sense for her. She was trying to
- 6:04Speaker 1: find John. South was where Leeds had last pointed. She
- 6:07Speaker 1: got in. The prosecution's account of what happened next was
- 6:11Speaker 1: built not from witnesses, but from paper. Cruz kept a
- 6:14Speaker 1: driver's logbook, as all long-haul truckers were required to do.
- 6:18Speaker 1: It was meant to record stops, fuel purchases, hours of service,
- 6:23Speaker 1: a running account of where the truck had been and when.
- 6:26Speaker 1: When investigators examined Cruz's log for the night of March
- 6:29Speaker 1: 22nd into March 23rd, they found gaps. Entries that should
- 6:33Speaker 1: have matched his fuel receipts did not. The timestamps were off.
- 6:37Speaker 1: The distances didn't add up. The log had been falsified,
- 6:41Speaker 1: and the falsified sections corresponded precisely to the hours the
- 6:44Speaker 1: prosecution argued. Don was in that truck. That detail. The
- 6:49Speaker 1: altered log was the first place the rational explanation stopped working.
- 6:53Speaker 1: Cruz drove for a company based in Ohio. His route
- 6:56Speaker 1: was documented. His fuel receipts placed him in Bangor on
- 6:59Speaker 1: the morning of March 22nd and in Milesburg, Pennsylvania, just
- 7:03Speaker 1: a few miles from Bellefontaine. In the early hours of
- 7:07Speaker 1: March 24th, the drive from Bangor to central Pennsylvania takes
- 7:11Speaker 1: roughly 10 hours under normal conditions. The timeline fit. The
- 7:16Speaker 1: receipts were signed. His name was on both of them.
- 7:19Speaker 1: Trooper Madden of the Pennsylvania State Police and Special Agent
- 7:22Speaker 1: Randy Cohick of the FBI began working the case from
- 7:26Speaker 1: opposite ends, one starting with the body, one starting with
- 7:29Speaker 1: the road. What they found when those two lines converged
- 7:32Speaker 1: was a truck, specifically truck number 44. The tire impressions
- 7:37Speaker 1: left near the body on the snow-covered ramp were distinctive.
- 7:40Speaker 1: They were Michelin XD, one low-profile duals, not a common
- 7:45Speaker 1: tire for the region, not standard issue. The molds taken
- 7:48Speaker 1: from the scene matched the tires on Cruz's truck. That
- 7:51Speaker 1: was the second place the rational explanation ran out. Inside
- 7:55Speaker 1: the cab of truck 44, investigators found a single blonde
- 7:58Speaker 1: hair woven into the carpet of the passenger door. One hair.
- 8:02Speaker 1: It was consistent with Dawn's. Then, beneath the knot of
- 8:06Speaker 1: the rope that had been tied around her neck, they
- 8:08Speaker 1: found something else. A loose, dark hair. It did not
- 8:11Speaker 1: belong to Dawn, who was blonde. It was collected, lobbed,
- 8:15Speaker 1: and sent to the FBI forensic laboratory. The rope itself
- 8:19Speaker 1: was still around her neck when she was found. Her
- 8:22Speaker 1: hands were bound. The cause of death was strangulation. The
- 8:25Speaker 1: autopsy indicated she had been dead fewer than 12 hours
- 8:28Speaker 1: when the motorist found her on the morning of March 24th,
- 8:31Speaker 1: which placed her death in the overnight hours, the same
- 8:34Speaker 1: window when Cruz's log went dark. When investigators first brought
- 8:38Speaker 1: Cruz in for questioning, he did not appear nervous. He
- 8:42Speaker 1: answered questions. He was cooperative enough that investigators later acknowledged
- 8:46Speaker 1: he briefly stopped being their primary suspect. He seemed too calm,
- 8:51Speaker 1: too professional, too ordinary. A driver with a route and
- 8:54Speaker 1: a schedule and a name on his receipts. That calmness
- 8:57Speaker 1: was the head fake. It held until the DNA results
- 9:00Speaker 1: came back. The FBI laboratory processed the dark hair found
- 9:04Speaker 1: under the knot of the rope. They also processed the
- 9:07Speaker 1: single blonde hair from the truck's passenger carpet. Then they
- 9:10Speaker 1: obtained a court order for samples from Cruz himself. Hair
- 9:14Speaker 1: and DNA. The results matched. The dark hair under the
- 9:17Speaker 1: knot belonged to Cruz. The biological material recovered from Dawn's
- 9:21Speaker 1: body during the autopsy. material consistent with sexual assault, matched
- 9:26Speaker 1: Cruz's DNA profile. The blonde hair in the carpet was
- 9:29Speaker 1: consistent with Dawn's. Three separate pieces of physical evidence, collected
- 9:33Speaker 1: from two different locations, pointed to the same man. Cruz
- 9:37Speaker 1: was arrested on September 8, 1993, five months and 15
- 9:42Speaker 1: days after Dawn's body was found on that ramp in
- 9:44Speaker 1: the snow. But the arrest itself surfaced something that the
- 9:47Speaker 1: investigation had not previously disclosed. James Robert Cruz Jr. had
- 9:52Speaker 1: a prior conviction, not for a traffic violation, not for
- 9:55Speaker 1: a misdemeanor. He had been convicted in a military court
- 9:59Speaker 1: for attempted homicide. The method, strangulation. He had served his
- 10:03Speaker 1: sentence at Fort Leavenworth. After his release, he had returned
- 10:07Speaker 1: to civilian life, taken a job driving trucks, and resumed
- 10:10Speaker 1: his routes across the eastern half of the United States.
- 10:14Speaker 1: The rational explanation had not just stopped working. It had
- 10:17Speaker 1: been replaced by something that was, in some ways, worse,
- 10:20Speaker 1: because it was entirely mundane. A man who had already
- 10:23Speaker 1: tried to kill someone this way. A job that gave
- 10:26Speaker 1: him access to highways and anonymity. And a schedule no
- 10:29Speaker 1: one questioned. And a 17-year-old girl who needed a ride
- 10:33Speaker 1: south and had no way to know what was sitting
- 10:35Speaker 1: beside her in that cab. When investigators examined his blood
- 10:38Speaker 1: type against the biological evidence, it was consistent. Type A positive.
- 10:43Speaker 1: 14 hours. That is how long the jury deliberated before
- 10:47Speaker 1: returning a verdict of guilty on the charge of murder
- 10:50Speaker 1: in the first degree. The trial concluded on June 14.
- 10:53Speaker 1: The trial concluded on June 14. Cruz was sentenced to
- 10:57Speaker 1: life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was
- 11:01Speaker 1: remanded to Greene County Maximum Security Prison in Western Pennsylvania,
- 11:06Speaker 1: where he remains. The jury had all the evidence, the DNA,
- 11:10Speaker 1: the hair, the tire tracks, the falsified log, the receipts.
- 11:15Speaker 1: The prior conviction, they deliberated for 14 hours anyway, which
- 11:19Speaker 1: means for 14 hours, 12 people sat in a room
- 11:23Speaker 1: and tried to find a version of this story where
- 11:25Speaker 1: everything made sense, where the numbers added up differently, where
- 11:29Speaker 1: the dark hair under the rope had another explanation. There
- 11:32Speaker 1: is no version of this story where everything makes sense.
- 11:35Speaker 1: There is a question that the case file does not answer,
- 11:37Speaker 1: and it is not about Cruz. John Hoffpower disappeared in
- 11:41Speaker 1: September of 1992. His car was found near his home
- 11:45Speaker 1: in Mississippi with multiple bullet holes in the body of
- 11:47Speaker 1: the vehicle. He was presumed dead. No body was ever recovered.
- 11:52Speaker 1: Dawn had been searching for him for months before she
- 11:54Speaker 1: left Poland Springs that Sunday. She told people she believed
- 11:57Speaker 1: she could find him. She was hitchhiking toward Maine, toward
- 12:01Speaker 1: the last people who had heard from him, because she
- 12:03Speaker 1: could not stop looking. The investigators working Dawn's case never
- 12:07Speaker 1: established a connection between Hoffpower's disappearance and her death. They
- 12:12Speaker 1: are documented as separate events, separated by geography and by
- 12:16Speaker 1: six months. But they are also the beginning and end
- 12:18Speaker 1: of the same story. A girl who lost someone, who
- 12:22Speaker 1: refused to accept that loss, who got on the highway
- 12:25Speaker 1: to look for him, and who never came home. What
- 12:28Speaker 1: Dawn could not have known, and what no one in
- 12:30Speaker 1: her life could have told her, is that the friend
- 12:32Speaker 1: she was searching for was almost certainly already gone. The
- 12:36Speaker 1: bullet holes in his car suggested violence. The absence of
- 12:39Speaker 1: a body suggested deliberate concealment. She was moving toward a ghost.
- 12:44Speaker 1: The rope, the falsified log, the dark hair under the knot,
- 12:48Speaker 1: these are the pieces. Investigators could hold and measure and
- 12:51Speaker 1: present to a jury. They are not the whole story.
- 12:54Speaker 1: They are the part of the story that fits inside
- 12:57Speaker 1: a courtroom. There is also this. After Cruz's arrest in
- 13:01Speaker 1: September of 1993, FBI records indicated that a pattern of
- 13:05Speaker 1: similar crimes in Ohio went quiet. Women found on highways.
- 13:09Speaker 1: Methods consistent. The FBI did not establish a formal link.
- 13:13Speaker 1: No charges were filed in connection with those cases. The
- 13:17Speaker 1: approximately 600 women found dead on American roadsides in the
- 13:20Speaker 1: decade prior to 1993 remain. In official terms, unconnected to Cruz,
- 13:26Speaker 1: official terms cover a specific kind of truth. Dawn's counselor,
- 13:29Speaker 1: Mark Rosenberg, recognized her from a photograph. He recognized her
- 13:33Speaker 1: because she had called him from that truck stop two
- 13:36Speaker 1: days before she was found, and he had heard her voice.
- 13:39Speaker 1: and he knew it was her. The second phone number
- 13:42Speaker 1: recovered from her palm, the one that appeared to originate
- 13:44Speaker 1: from Florida, was never conclusively identified. No one came forward
- 13:49Speaker 1: to claim it. No one has since. She wrote two
- 13:52Speaker 1: numbers on her hand before she got in that truck.
- 13:55Speaker 1: One of them brought her home after a fashion. It
- 13:57Speaker 1: brought her name back to her body, and her body
- 14:00Speaker 1: back to the people who had known her. The other
- 14:02Speaker 1: number goes nowhere. A line written in ink on skin,
- 14:05Speaker 1: pressed hard enough to last, pointing toward something that was
- 14:09Speaker 1: never found. The mortician who received her body on March
- 14:12Speaker 1: 24th named her Spring Dawn, for the season and the
- 14:15Speaker 1: time of day she was discovered. He did not know
- 14:18Speaker 1: her real name. He gave her a name because he
- 14:20Speaker 1: could not leave her without one. Her name was Dawn.
- 14:24Speaker 1: It was already there, in the season, and the ramp
- 14:27Speaker 1: in the snow, waiting for someone to look closely enough
- 14:30Speaker 1: to find her. The jury deliberated for 14 hours, 14
- 14:34Speaker 1: hours to weigh a falsified logbook, a strand of dark
- 14:38Speaker 1: hair knotted beneath a rope, a name written in fading
- 14:41Speaker 1: ink on the palm of a 17-year-old girl. On June 14th, 1993,
- 14:47Speaker 1: they returned a verdict of guilty on the charge of
- 14:50Speaker 1: first-degree murder. James Robert Cruz Jr. received a sentence of
- 14:54Speaker 1: life without the possibility of parole. He was transferred to
- 14:57Speaker 1: Greene County Maximum Security Prison in Western Pennsylvania, where he
- 15:01Speaker 1: remains today. There is something that still sits uneasily with
- 15:04Speaker 1: the investigators who worked this case. Cruz had been calm
- 15:08Speaker 1: during his initial interview. Measured, he answered questions without flinching,
- 15:13Speaker 1: and for a brief window, the team shifted focus elsewhere.
- 15:16Speaker 1: The man who had strangled a woman in the United
- 15:19Speaker 1: States Army, who had served time at Fort Leavenworth for
- 15:22Speaker 1: attempted homicide by the same method, had simply appeared unremarkable.
- 15:26Speaker 1: The system that should have flagged him had not surfaced
- 15:28Speaker 1: that record in time to prevent Dawn from ever climbing
- 15:31Speaker 1: into that truck. The DNA match changed everything. Hair from
- 15:35Speaker 1: the passenger carpet of truck 44. Biological evidence from Don's body.
- 15:40Speaker 1: A blood type consistent with the seminal evidence recovered. Each
- 15:43Speaker 1: element independently pointed to the same man. Together, they closed
- 15:47Speaker 1: a door that crews had apparently assumed would stay open.
- 15:51Speaker 1: But some doors stayed locked from the other side. The
- 15:54Speaker 1: second phone number recovered from Don's palm was never identified.
- 15:58Speaker 1: Investigators traced one number to Mark Rosenberg. Her counselor, the
- 16:01Speaker 1: man whose voice was the last familiar one she heard
- 16:04Speaker 1: before she walked out of that truck stop. The second number,
- 16:07Speaker 1: the one that seemed to originate from Florida, led nowhere.
- 16:11Speaker 1: No one ever claimed it. No one ever called back
- 16:14Speaker 1: to ask why a 17-year-old girl had written their number
- 16:17Speaker 1: on her hand before accepting a ride that would kill her.
- 16:20Speaker 1: John Hoffpower, the friend Dawn had set out to find,
- 16:23Speaker 1: had been missing since September of 1992. His car was
- 16:27Speaker 1: discovered riddled with bullet holes a few miles from his
- 16:30Speaker 1: home in Mississippi. No body was ever recovered. Dawn spent
- 16:34Speaker 1: her last days trying to reach someone who was almost
- 16:37Speaker 1: certainly already gone. She had no way to know that.
- 16:40Speaker 1: She wrote a phone number on her palm and made
- 16:43Speaker 1: one more call and stepped forward into something she could
- 16:46Speaker 1: not have imagined. There is a detail that has stayed
- 16:49Speaker 1: with everyone who worked the case. When the mortician Steven
- 16:52Speaker 1: Mondock received the unidentified body on the morning of March 24th,
- 16:57Speaker 1: he gave her a name. He called her Spring Dawn
- 17:00Speaker 1: because of where she was found and what time of
- 17:02Speaker 1: year it was. He could not have known. No one
- 17:05Speaker 1: in that room could have known. Her name was Dawn.
- 17:08Speaker 1: It had always been Dawn. The name he chose landed
- 17:12Speaker 1: so close to the truth. that investigators who later learned
- 17:15Speaker 1: it went quiet for a moment before they said anything else.
- 17:19Speaker 1: Dawn Marie Birnbaum was 17 years old, a few months
- 17:22Speaker 1: from graduation, carrying a phone number in her hand and
- 17:26Speaker 1: a plan that almost worked. She had survived enough to
- 17:29Speaker 1: know how to move through the world alone. She just
- 17:32Speaker 1: didn't know what was parked at that fuel station at
- 17:34Speaker 1: 15 feet away, watching the same door she was about
- 17:37Speaker 1: to walk through. The second number on her palm has
- 17:40Speaker 1: never rung. This show is made by Oboe Media.