Latest / The Path Went Chilly / Ruth Marie Terry Pt. One

Transcript

Ruth Marie Terry Pt. One · The Path Went Chilly

0:29
Welcome to our latest episode of The Path Went Chili. And because we're recording
0:33
this right before Christmas, and Ashley is a very busy person around the holidays
0:37
with how those kids around in our household, Jules and I will be recording
0:41
this one alone. And because she doesn't know all that much about this case,
0:45
I'm going to share the details with her and she's going to provide the
0:48
reaction. So the case we're going to be covering is the murder of a
0:52
woman named Ruth Marie Terry, who up until last year, was known as
0:56
an unidentified decendent nicknamed the Lady of the Dunes. And Jules, you said
1:00
that you heard some basic details about this case, but don't know a lot
1:04
about it. Yeah. I think for me, this case just really stuck
1:08
because of the name. There's something like otherworldly about the name, the Lady
1:15
of the Dunes. It's like a movie title or something from a comic book,
1:19
and so it really stuck with me. It's sort of like the Orange
1:23
Socks. Yeah, you know, Jane do that one really stuck with me
1:26
because of the name. So I don't really know any details about this case.
1:30
This is when where I'm completely in the dark. I just remember the
1:34
name because it had this like eerie resonance that I couldn't shake. So I'm
1:38
really glad we're going to be talking about it today. Yeah. I always
1:42
say that whenever you find a deced in who cannot be identified, it's best
1:46
to give them a memorable name, because then people will remember it. Because
1:49
this took place all the way back in nineteen seventy four, but people never
1:53
stopped talking about it until the identification was made recently. And this is a
1:57
little different from the norm because because it is technically a solved case. But
2:02
at the time of this recording, I'm working on one of my Trail Went
2:06
Cold Update episodes, where I provide updates about cases featured on the Trail Went
2:10
Cold that have been solved or in major developments, and there was just so
2:14
much to write about with this particular case. I find in a lot of
2:17
these stories involving John or Jane does that for years, the Internet comes up
2:22
with all these wild theories about who they might have been and what their backstory
2:25
was, and more often than not, when they are identified, the explanation
2:30
is pretty mundane. But this is one of the rare examples where the real
2:34
story actually might be crazier than a lot of the theories that were shared about
2:38
her. So this case is solved and that she has her identity back,
2:44
or do we know who murdered her? They've done both. They identified her
2:47
last year and this year they finally announced that they're pretty sure they're certain who
2:52
killed her. Wow, because we see a lot of these Jane and John
2:57
Doe cases and it's almost like it's solved in that we've given them their identity
3:02
back, but at the end of the day, we still don't know who
3:07
murdered them. So this is a pretty unique case to be able to give
3:12
to be able to give Ruth Marie Terry her identity back, and also to
3:16
know who killed her. So I really can't wait to get into the details
3:21
exactly. And when I share the details, you'll probably be saying yourself,
3:23
I cannot believe this wasn't solved a long time ago. So fortunately some mistakes
3:28
were made. So this case takes place in nineteen seventy four in Barnstable County,
3:32
Massachusetts, in the Cape Cod area, and it took place on July
3:38
the twenty sixth, when a thirteen year old girl was walking her dog around
3:42
the Race Point Dunes, which is a beach located just outside of Provincetown,
3:46
and this poor girl wound up stumbling across the decomposing nude body of a woman
3:51
who was lying on top of a towel. The police were notified and they
3:54
estimated that the victim had been between twenty to forty years old and had been
3:59
dead approximately ten days to three weeks at that point, but because of the
4:03
decomposition, her face was unrecognizable, though she still had some long auburn reddish
4:10
blonde hair at the back of her head, which was used as one of
4:13
the big clues. Her head was resting on top of some clothing which likely
4:16
belonged to her, and one of these clothing was a blue bandana, and
4:21
there was no sign of any struggle, so the evidence showed that she was
4:25
probably in the middle of sunbathing before someone came up from behind her and attacked
4:30
her. They did find some footprints in the sand which likely belonged to her
4:34
killer, as well as some tire tracks, and because this was a pretty
4:39
remote area, that probably explains how she was not discovered for a couple weeks.
4:43
Well. What was crazy was the level of brutality with her murder because
4:47
she had been hit with a blunt instrument been killed with a blow to the
4:51
back of the head which crushed the left side of her skull. Her throat
4:56
had also been slashed so deeply that it nearly reached her spine and almost completely
5:00
severed her head from her body, and there were signs that she may have
5:04
been sexually assaulted post mortem with an object, though the actual object was never
5:10
found. And not only that, but her hands had been removed, probably
5:15
to help prevent identification from her fingerprints, and a number of her teeth were
5:19
also removed. They didn't remove all her teeth, but because a lot of
5:23
them were missing, they were unable to make a comparison with dental records,
5:28
which was frustrating because she looked like she had extensive dental work done with some
5:32
gold crowns to her teeth, but because they didn't have her full set of
5:35
teeth, it was impossible to make a comparison. Wow, that literally made
5:42
me feel sick to my stomach. The idea that somebody would come upon her,
5:46
whether they were following her or just by happenstance, and decided to victimize
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her cave in her skull, slash her throat so deep that it almost reaches
5:57
her spine, and then to okay, well, now we need to do
6:02
some friends and countermeasures. We don't want her to be identified. And then
6:05
that makes me think, if you're worried about that and you're gonna go so
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far as to remove teeth and hands, do you know her? Could you
6:14
be tied to her in some capacity? Because this is well before DNA,
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So even if there was DNA left behind, if there was no link between
6:24
the killer and Ruth Marie Terry, then it makes you wonder, like,
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why go to all this trouble when somebody could come upon you while you're taking
6:34
her hands off? And what did he use? Did you just have this
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with you whatever it would be to remove the hands. Yeah, that's a
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good question because we've technically never found out how this was done, like how
6:47
they removed the hands and how they removed the teeth. So it just seems
6:51
so precalculated that she just happens to be sunbathing in a remote area and whoever
6:57
this was just happened to have maybe a hacksaw or a pair of pliers inside
7:00
their car while they did this. So needless to say, investigators figure this
7:05
was not this person's first homicide. It sounded like this was someone with experience
7:11
at killing people and doing whatever they could to prevent identification. That just really
7:15
took me kind of for a ride because I was not expecting there to be
7:20
Like when you first describe the scene, okay, you were saying that she's
7:24
found on a towel, you almost picture this kind of idea of this serene
7:29
scene where this woman is found kind of sunbathing and she's just passed away on
7:34
a towel. But then when you go further and you describe it and just
7:39
the utter brutality of it all. And to think that this poor thirteen year
7:44
old girl is the one that happens upon the body, I cannot even imagine
7:48
the trauma that that inflicted upon her. Oh exactly, Like you're just out
7:53
there with your family, just taking your dog for a walk, and you
7:56
not only find a body, but someone who has been brutalized and killed in
8:00
the most gruesome fashion possible. And the way that the towel was spread out
8:03
made investigators think that it was possible that someone else had been lying next to
8:09
her before she was murdered. So just imagine her position. You're just out
8:11
there for a relaxing day of sunbathing before your partner just decides to attack you
8:18
by bludging you to death and then removes like a lot of your extremities.
8:22
Yeah, I can even imagine what that would have been like for all the
8:26
first responders and the people who are typically going to investigate a crime, because
8:31
in this area, I'm just going to take a wild guest and say,
8:33
there probably aren't a lot of murders, would I be correct? Yes,
8:37
definitely. They do some weird things I'm going to talk about during the investigation,
8:41
which seemed to indicate that they probably did not have a lot of experience
8:46
with homicides. Yeah, that was kind of my gut feel. Just when
8:50
you said the area and everything, I thought, well, this might not
8:52
be something that they run across all too often, So the experience of the
8:58
investigators would be called into question, and hence why she remained a Jane Doe
9:03
for so many years. Yes, uh, exactly. They did search a
9:05
whole bunch of missing persons cases but could not find any matches, so that's
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why they gave her the nickname the Lady of the Dunes, which, like
9:13
you said, is a very haunting, memorable name and I think has allowed
9:16
this case to stand out over the past fifty years or so. So she
9:22
was just buried in a cemetery in Province Town under a headstone which simply read
9:26
unidentified female body. They didn't even put her nickname on the tombstone, just
9:30
like the most generic name there. And here we're going to talk about the
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inexperience of the investigators because the police chief did a very bizarre thing. Instead
9:39
of burying the victim's skull, he decided to keep it on a desk inside
9:43
his office, saying that he was going to use it as a constant motivator
9:48
in order to kind of drive him to solve the case and identify her.
9:52
And I guess the bright side is that because her face was so heavily decomposed
9:56
and they didn't know what she looked like, a couple of year years later,
10:00
he finally decided, hey, I still have the skull. Maybe we'll
10:03
use this to make a clay bust of like her face to show what she
10:07
might have looked like. And then he turned the skull over to the forensic
10:09
artists and they did it. But I cannot imagine that a police chief would
10:13
get away with that today, taking the skull of a murder victim and keeping
10:16
it on his desk, Uh, sir, That is definitely not the right
10:22
choice. But I can understand it was a different time and his intentions were
10:26
good. Even though I believe a body should be at rest, I think
10:31
the feelings that underlied his decision to do that were good ones. He wanted
10:37
to solve the case. He wanted to give her her name back and find
10:39
out who murdered her. And it did provide some assistance, I guess in
10:45
doing those clay busts. Did you see the clay bust of her? I
10:48
did, yeah, and it's floated around for many, many years, and
10:52
it's always been my visual of what she looked like, so it was very
10:56
helpful. But believe it or not, I looked through some old newspaper articles
11:00
and the police chief actually photographed himself with the skull on his desk, and
11:03
it was printed in the local newspapers. And I can only imagine if this
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happened in a cold case today, there would just be so much outrage over
11:11
the internet over his decision to do that. Yeah, it's a little bit
11:16
tone death. But it was, like I said, it was a different
11:18
time. I think our sensitivity towards crime victims and just our emotional intelligence with
11:26
regards to murders and those types of things, and like what a victim should
11:31
and would require in death is just completely different. So when we look at
11:35
it through the lens of now, it's like, what like fifty years later,
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it's a long time we're looking to like half a century. So at
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least we can say that it provided something good out of it. But yeah,
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if it happened today, it would be extremely macabre and weird and people
11:52
would be like, what is wrong with this person? It just it would
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not happen today. There's no way that you could get away with it in
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the age of the internet exactly. And to be fair, the skull was
12:01
eventually buried with the rest of her remains, so she did finally get a
12:05
proper burial. Well that's good. At least she got to rest in totality
12:09
her entire body. So now we're going to talk about some leads that were
12:15
used to try to identify the woman. Of course, it turned out that
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a lot of these turned out to be false, but many of these leads
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are quite interesting. Of course, they went through a number of candidates of
12:24
missing women, and sometimes when they launched an investigation, it turned out that
12:30
the woman was still alive, so she obviously could not have been the Lady
12:33
of the Dunes. But a interesting candidate was a twenty five year old woman
12:37
named Rory Gene Kessinger who was actually part of this big criminal organization. I
12:43
think it was kind of a radical group and stuff where they would like commit
12:48
robberies and stuff in order to finance like a lot of their activities. And
12:52
she had a pretty tough life. She had run away from home at the
12:54
age of fifteen and became involved in drugs and bank robbery and lived under a
12:58
number of different ali and by nineteen seventy three she had become a member of
13:03
a gun running drug smuggling syndicate. And in nineteen seventy three she was actually
13:09
arrested in Pembroke, Massachusetts by federal agents. So and Kessinger when the police
13:15
buss did it and actually picked up a gun and fired at the police officer.
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She didn't hit anyone, but it was just added to her charges.
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So it seemed likely that she was going to go to prison for a long
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time, but she was held in the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, which is
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not too far away from Provincetown, and on May the twenty seventh, nineteen
13:35
seventy three, a corrupt guard managed to smuggle her a hack saw blade,
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which she used to cut through the bars of her cell and escape out a
13:43
window by using some sheets to climb out, which is like an old school
13:46
thing you'd see in a cartoon, someone tying up some sheets to climb out
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a window. Yeah, whenever I think of prison escapes, I always think
13:54
of, like, you know, like escape from Alcatraz or something like that,
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and like the crazy length that they went to, and this is right
14:03
in line with something like that. And it's crazy to think that she was
14:09
so adept at being able to commit all of these crimes and move around and
14:13
then she goes to prison and manages to break out. I mean it's one
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of those like Body and Clyde type stories where you're like, WHOA, that
14:22
is pretty incredible that somebody was able to do that and to have the wherewithal,
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and the fact that she was a woman is just adds another layer of
14:31
interest to it. So I could see why Kessinger would have been a really
14:35
good kind of suspect, because if you're running with this criminal syndicator organization,
14:39
you're running drugs, guns, whatever, you know. I think that there
14:43
could be a motivation to not have your body be identified if they had the
14:48
reason to end your life, so to take teeth, to take hands,
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that would totally make sense. And to know that she was in the area,
14:56
well that's just another check towards yeah, it could possibly be her.
15:00
And here's the big twist is that Rory Kessinger's fate is technically still a mystery.
15:05
She has not been seen since she escaped from the jail in nineteen seventy
15:09
three. There was always speculation that her criminal associates may have killed her and
15:13
disposed of her body because they didn't want her to talk and possibly reveal more
15:18
information about their organization. And it did make sense, like you said,
15:22
that if they didn't want her to be identified, they would cut off her
15:26
hands, because obviously, since she was arrested, Cassinger's fingerprints would have been
15:30
on file. But in the two thousands, they finally started doing DNA testing
15:35
on this case, an option that was not available back in nineteen seventy four,
15:39
and they finally tracked down Cassinger's mother got a sampler of her DNA and
15:43
it did not match the Lady of the Dunes DNA, so she was ruled
15:48
out as being the victim. But to this day, Rory gene Kessinger has
15:52
still not been found. And I do think the explanation that she was murdered
15:56
by her criminal associates is the most logic, because I can't imagine how a
16:00
twenty five year old woman who escaped from jail would manage to stay off the
16:04
radar for the next fifty years without being found. But it's still a very
16:08
intriguing mystery within a mystery. I mean, it is possible. It sounds
16:14
like she had quite a lot of special skills. I don't know I who
16:18
want to call them those, but I think that there's a possibility in the
16:22
seventies that she may have been able to acquire a new identity, go somewhere,
16:27
get married, have a normal life. I think it is equally as
16:32
likely, maybe even more likely, that her criminal organization could have killed her.
16:36
But I think given the time period, she could have just slipped by
16:41
unnoticed, got a driver's license, under this new identity. It was pretty
16:45
easy back then to fake identities, So I think we can't discount the possibility
16:51
that maybe she just she knew that if she ever came back to where she
16:56
was from or got in contact with her family, that she would be found
17:00
out. And maybe she had a new family and they didn't know that she
17:03
used to be a criminal, so going back to her old life just wasn't
17:07
an option. Yeah, that has happened where people who were involved in criminal
17:11
activity when they were young women and then managed to escape from jail did wind
17:17
up starting a family and living an ordinary life for several years before they were
17:21
captured. I don't know if you've heard of a woman named Margo Freshwater,
17:23
but she broke out of jail in the nineteen sixties after being arrested for a
17:27
murder, and I don't think she was found till like the late nineteen nineties,
17:30
early two thousands, and at that point she was living with a husband
17:36
and had children of her own and had just lived like she was like a
17:37
pta mom, practically just an ordinary looking woman. And then everyone was just
17:42
shocked when she was recaptured and it turned out that she had killed someone several
17:45
decades earlier. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me because I think back at that
17:52
time period, even if you were on the run from the law, if
17:55
you had the connections to be able to acquire a new identity, and of
18:00
course it was not nearly as difficult as it is now because you're not dealing
18:03
with things like you know, watermarks and all those types of things that are
18:07
in special holograms that are on identity like IDs. You could just basically find
18:12
somebody who was deceased and take their identity. I don't think it took the
18:18
special skills that it requiring connections to criminals that it requires today. I think
18:22
you just had to have a little bit of knowledge. So I think that
18:26
would be probably a good option for a lot of people rather than having law
18:30
enforcement be after you. You just change your identity, move somewhere new,
18:34
and all of a sudden you're that person, and essentially you're like in witness
18:37
protection, but you put yourself there, so you just know that you can't
18:41
reach out to your family or people from your old life exactly. So if
18:45
Roy gene Kessinger does get arrested sometime in the future, I won't be the
18:48
least a bit surprise if she's still alive living a normal life somewhere, But
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now we're going to talk about her. Next lead a convicted murderer named hatt
18:57
And Clark who has been in prison since nineteen ninety two. He's only been
19:02
officially tied to two murderers, but there has been speculation that he's a serial
19:06
killer who could have killed at least eleven victims. And he popped up on
19:11
the radar in two thousand and four because he sent a letter to a prison
19:14
pen pal which showed a hand drawn map of the Cape Cod area, which
19:18
featured a home where his grandparents lived, which was not too far from where
19:22
the Lady of the Dunes was found, and he wrote on the letter,
19:26
the murder is still unsolved, but what the police are looking for is in
19:29
my grandmother's garden. And he also included a drawing of a new woman lying
19:33
on her stomach with her hands missing and the words summer nineteen seventy four,
19:38
which seems oddly specific. And since Clark he would have been in his twenties
19:42
at the time he was living in the area, he did look like a
19:47
promising suspect. But the problem was that he was a paranoid schizophrenic who had
19:52
a history of lying, and he also when he was questioned about this,
19:56
he said that, oh, yeah, I did murder her, but I'm
19:59
not going to reveal identity because the police were not nice to me and beat
20:02
me up during my interrogation, so I'm not going to reveal too many details.
20:06
And then people started thinking, maybe this guy is just doing this for
20:08
attention. How much of that information was revealed in the media, pretty much
20:15
all of it, Like, if you were living in the area, there's
20:18
a good chance you would have found out that this woman had been found in
20:22
Cape Cod in the summer of nineteen seventy four, and that she was found
20:25
with her hands missing. That was all public knowledge, so it's possible that
20:29
Clark could have just read about it and then just decided to take credit for
20:33
it. And there were a lot of mental health issues with them, like
20:37
he once claimed that he was responsible for eleven additional murders, but it turned
20:41
out that the reason he did is because he had a bearded cell mat and
20:45
he literally thought the guy was Jesus Christ. So that's why he decided to
20:48
come clean and reveal all this new information. But because he had grandparents who
20:53
were living in the Cape Cod area. They finally said, okay, let's
20:56
take him out there and perform a search of his because he said something about
21:02
evidence being buried in his grandfather's garden. But because Clark was kind of a
21:06
weird guy, he insisted that this bearded innate come along with him on the
21:10
search because he still believed he was Jesus and wanted him there when they found
21:15
all this evidence. And he also insisted on dressing up in women's clothing wearing
21:18
a dress while this was going on. And not surprisingly, during this search,
21:22
they didn't find anything at all in his grandfather's garden, and they've pretty
21:26
much realized that, yeah, Clark was just taking a credit for a crime
21:30
he did not commit, and ruled them out as having any infolvement in the
21:33
lady of the dude's case. I feel like the detail about the missing hands
21:40
maybe should have been holdback information, because if you say that you murdered somebody,
21:45
you know you're going to know specifically that you took the hands. But
21:49
when you put that in the paper and you release that on the news,
21:55
then it becomes part of the public knowledge and it's sort of like, how
21:57
do you then identify who is the actual killer if people come forward and start
22:03
trying to confess. But I guess at that point in time it was very
22:07
rare that they thought that somebody would confess if they didn't do it. I
22:11
mean, given the fact that he had a history of doing this and he
22:15
was a paranoid schizophrenic, maybe made them raise a couple of eyebrows. But
22:19
I think at that time in the seventies, if you confess to something,
22:23
you did it exactly. And like we talked about, the Province down Police
22:29
department didn't have a lot of experience with homicide investigations, so back in nineteen
22:33
seventy four, they may not have been thinking about stuff like pullback information,
22:37
like let's keep the detail about her hands being cut off away from the public
22:41
in order to weed out false tips. And of course Clark he was not
22:45
arrested until the early nineteen nineties, and the crime took place in nineteen seventy
22:48
four, so he would have had ample opportunity to read about this crime in
22:52
the newspapers and then remember it when he made a false confession years after the
22:56
fact. Do you know if they were ported the detail about the teeth in
23:00
the paper, I think, so, yeah, it sounded like they were
23:04
just looking for any leads they can find. They probably thought, well,
23:07
that's because she also had like an expensive gold crown dental work, so I
23:12
can understand why they would want to release that because that's very distinctive. It
23:15
sounded like she came from wealth or money, so they were thinking, maybe
23:18
someone will read about her dental work and say, oh, I remember giving
23:22
a procedure that to a woman matching her description back in the nineteen seventies.
23:27
But it didn't really lead to any new tips. So here is a very
23:32
interesting new lead which occurred in twenty fifteen. You might be familiar with Joe
23:37
Hill. He's the son of the legendary Stephen King, and he's also a
23:41
horror novelist. And in twenty fifteen he started getting an interest in cold cases
23:45
and he read a book about amateur sluice and how they can help solve crimes.
23:52
And he also read about the Lady of the Dunes case because he is
23:55
from the New England area, so he took a particularly interest in it.
24:00
And then during the summer of twenty fifteen he went to a fortieth anniversary screening
24:03
of the all time classic movie Jaws, and about fifty four minutes into it,
24:08
they got to a crowd scene which showed this young woman with dark flowing
24:14
hair, and he blew bandana, and he became convinced this might be the
24:18
Lady of the Dunes because she bore resemblance to the composite sketch of her.
24:22
And it turned out that Jaws was filmed in Martha's vineyard during the summer of
24:27
nineteen seventy four, the approximate time of the murderer, and I think it
24:32
was only about one hundred miles away from Provincetown. So he went back and
24:37
watched the movie again on DVD, kept pausing it and looking at her,
24:41
and I think it was one of those things where if he had been watching
24:42
it on home video the first time around, he never would have noticed her.
24:45
But because he was watching it on the big screen for an anniversary showing,
24:51
he saw this woman and it just popped into his head, thinking that
24:53
might be the Lady of the Dunes. So they looked into it. He
24:57
passed on information to investigator, but of course it really wasn't much to work
25:00
with because after all this time they're not going to be keeping records of every
25:06
single person who was an extra in a crowd scene in a movie that came
25:08
out forty years ago. And of course, like she looks like any other
25:14
woman from the nineteen seventies, wearing like long hair and a bandana, so
25:17
there was nothing really distinct to really show that she would have been the lady
25:22
of the Dunes. But on the bright side, even though like investigators thought
25:25
it was a major long shot, it helped bring the case back into the
25:27
spotlight. And to this day, this is the detail that many people remember
25:32
about this case, that there was a murder victim who could potentially been an
25:34
extra in Jaws, one of the most famous films of all time. Wow,
25:40
that's such an interesting detail. And I can't even imagine being Joe Hell
25:45
and watching this, being so familiar with what the bus looks like, and
25:48
then seeing this extra, which I imagine would have had that reddish blonde hair,
25:53
like you'd said, right, because there was didn't she have like reddish
25:56
blonde hair, And that was part of what they used to try to identif
26:00
fire her. Yes, though if you look at on screen it looks more
26:03
like darker hair. But because she's from a distance away, it could have
26:07
been reddish blonde. But I've seen Jaws a bazillion times, so of course,
26:11
before I learned about this development, I had never noticed her in the
26:14
crowd scene before. But I guess it must have been on Joe Hill's brain
26:17
because he's just watching the movie and he's like, Oh my god, I
26:19
think that's her. That is so crazy. Have you watched Jaws since you
26:25
found out? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, Like I've seen
26:29
that film so many times, and I looked, I paused the frame and
26:32
I look at her, and it's like, yeah, she does kind of
26:33
look like her, but it's just such a generic look, like she looks
26:37
like a million other young women from the nineteen seventies. So there's nothing you
26:41
can really point to and say that absolutely had to have been the Lady of
26:45
the Dunes. I think it was just kind of confirmation bias on Hill's part,
26:48
where he wanted to solve this case so badly that he was really really
26:52
hoping it was her. But in retrospect, it turns out that this was
26:56
nothing more than a red herring. Well, it didn't end up doing a
27:00
disservice to the case, though, because like you said, it brought it
27:03
into the forefront again and people can go, WHOA, there's this association with
27:07
Jaws. We've got Stephen King's son, and we've got this really eerie name,
27:12
the Lady of the Dunes. So I can see how that would peque
27:15
everybody's interest. Oh exactly, Like a lot of people who had never heard
27:19
of the case before finally did learn about it in twenty fifteen because of the
27:23
whole Jaws Joe Hill connection. So I can't really blame him for bringing public
27:27
even though it turned out to be a false lead, because it gave a
27:30
lot of extra exposure to the case. So I covered this on the trail
27:34
went cold in twenty sixteen, and at that time she had still not been
27:37
identified, And at the time I thought one of the most intriguing leads to
27:42
explain her murder was the notorious gangster James Whitey Bulger. And I'm sure you've
27:48
heard of him, right, Oh, yeah, for sure. Isn't he
27:51
the one that was like working with the FBI for so many years where they
27:55
like left him out there to keep committing his crimes and he was just like
27:59
a rat on other people. Exactly, Yeah, he was a major organized
28:02
crime boss who headed the Winter Hill Gang in Boston from like the late nineteen
28:07
seventies until the mid nineteen nineties. And if you've seen the Martin Scorsese film
28:11
That Departedge, you'll know that the Jack Nicholson character the mob Boss is totally
28:15
based on Whitey Bulger. And in twenty fifteen they flat out made a movie
28:19
based on Balger's life called Black Mass where he was portrayed by Johnny Depp.
28:25
And of course, for many years he was one of the FBI's most wanted
28:27
fugitives. He went on the run in nineteen ninety four, and even though
28:32
he was one of the more recognizable criminals in the United States, he actually
28:34
managed to stay off the radar for seventeen years until twenty eleven, where at
28:40
the age of eighty one, he was finally tracked down and arrested in Santa
28:44
Monica, California. I've seen both those movies. He's an incredibly interesting figure
28:52
and was brutal, and it's just it's incredible that he was giving information about
28:57
other people an other organizations. But it's like he's the head of the snake.
29:02
He's the very worst of the worst, and you guys are in league
29:04
with him. Some of these choices are really interesting that law enforcement makes with
29:10
regards to who they choose to get into bed with, because he really and
29:15
truly was a horrifically scary guy and he did really, really horrible things.
29:19
It's not just like he's dealing in guns and drugs and whatever. Like.
29:25
There's a lot of murders attached to Whitey Bulger, oh exactly. And one
29:29
of the reasons he's been associated with this case is because he was known for
29:33
cutting off the hands of his victims to avoid fingerprint identification, and also removing
29:37
their teeth to avoid them being identified by their dental records. So since he
29:42
was from Massachusetts in the nineteen seventies, I can see why he became a
29:47
compelling suspect in this case. But as an aside, I've always found it
29:52
amusing that the movie The Departed came out in two thousand and six when Bulger
29:56
was still on the run as a wanted fugitive, and apparently there was like
30:00
a former Massachusetts police officer who went to a screening of the movie and was
30:03
convinced that he saw Whitey Bulger in the audience, but he was never able
30:07
to get him tracked down and arrested. But I've always wondered how Bolger thought
30:11
watching like Jack Nicholson on screen portraying a character who's loosely based on him,
30:17
And I wonder if he was flattered by the betrayal. I can imagine that
30:22
maybe in the looks department you might not be all that flattered, but I'm
30:26
thinking every other department you're like, Wow, this guy has charisma. Because
30:30
Jack Nicholson is undeniably charismatic, and when he's on screen, you want to
30:37
watch him not because he's beautiful, but because he's magnetic. And so I'm
30:41
sure that Whitey Bulger would have been one of the first butts in the seats
30:45
to be able to see who is going to be playing me? What is
30:48
this film all about? When you find out that it's Score, Sce and
30:52
Nicholson, and then you've also got DiCaprio and Damon attached to it, so
30:56
you've got all of these huge names. It was a huge blockbuster film.
31:02
So for him, I'm sure he got some kind of smug satisfaction in knowing
31:06
that this film is bringing in millions and millions and hundreds of millions of dollars
31:10
and he's still on the run. Oh definitely, yeah, I'm sure he
31:14
probably had some satisfaction thing I'll never be caught, even though a movie based
31:18
on me is being released. And of course, the reason he was allowed
31:22
to remain free is because he had made a deal with an FBI agent named
31:25
John Connolly who would just provided information about his rivals and in return, Connolly
31:30
would ensure that he was never arrested for his own criminal activities and then to
31:33
depart. In Matt Damon plays a undercover officer who works for Jack Nicholson's character
31:40
who infiltrates the police and feeds some information and this character was loosely based on
31:45
John Connolly and the final apologue dwhyite Bulger is that after he went to prison,
31:49
he was actually murdered. In twenty eighteen, at the age of eighty
31:53
nine, he was transferred to a new prison and shortly after he arrived he
31:59
was ambushed and and brutally beaten, which just shows that even if you're eighty
32:02
nine years old, if you've done a lot of horrible things and made a
32:06
lot of enemies, then people are not going to forget that, and they're
32:08
not going to let your age prevent you from being the victim of a horrible
32:13
death. So quite a fitting ending to his life. Oh that's rough.
32:17
At eighty nine years old, you'd think, oh my gosh, well this
32:22
guy's going to die soon, so let's not, you know, inflict any
32:25
violence. It seems like a waste. But you've got some people that you've
32:29
clearly really pissed off and that are holding major grudges because to kill an eighty
32:35
nine year old man in such a violent way so many years after the fact,
32:39
says you inflicted a lot of harm on a lot of people. Oh
32:43
yes, and he was in a wheelchair at the time when they attacked him.
32:45
So karma, God, karma did get this guy back at the end,
32:49
because he did some horrible things. And I think that's just the only
32:52
appropriate ending to his life considering the circumstances. So here's the reason that Bulger
32:58
was looked at as a suspect in the Lay of the Dunes case. I'm
33:01
kind of skeptical about this story. But there's this woman named Sandra Lee who
33:06
claimed that she found the victim's body before it was discovered by the thirteen year
33:10
old girl. She said she had been camping with her family outside of Provincetown
33:15
and took her dog for a walk and then she stumbled across the decomposing body
33:20
of this nude woman. But at the time, she was just so terrified
33:23
that she never bothered to report this discovery and only came out about it many
33:28
years after the fact, And that was probably because she grew Sandra grew up
33:31
to become a mystery writer and published a fictionalized book based on the case,
33:36
which was titled Shantytown Provincetown's Lady in the Dunes. But she was the one
33:42
who was certain that Whitey Bulger might have been the victim's killer, because apparently
33:47
Sandra's stepfather said that, even though Whitey Bulger was from Boston, that when
33:52
her stepfather went to Provincetown, he would often like to drink at a bar
33:55
called the Crown an Anchor, And the stepfather said that apparently Whitey Bulger was
34:00
there a lot. But the interesting anecdote is that the Crown and Anchor was
34:06
a gay bar, and there's been a lot of rumors going around that Whitey
34:09
Bulger was bisexual. I don't know if they were ever conclusively confirmed, but
34:15
Also, another detail which Sandras spread, which I'm not entirely sure is true,
34:20
is that the towel that the Lady of the Dunes was found on may
34:22
have belonged to the Crown and Anchor Bar. It might have had its name
34:27
on it. So this led to the speculation that there were apparently rumors that
34:31
Whitey Balger had been seen with a woman matching the Lady of the Dune's description
34:37
sometime in nineteen seventy four, So they wondered it could have been a thing
34:40
where maybe he was hanging out at this gay bar and he wanted to keep
34:45
this a secret because he's the most powerful mob boss in Boston and he doesn't
34:49
want anyone to find out that he takes these secret trips to Provincetown in order
34:52
to hook up with men. And her theory, Sandra's theory is that maybe
34:57
if this woman found out about it, why decided he had to keep her
35:00
quiet, so he lured her to this beach and then decided to kill her
35:05
and also went to the trouble of removing her hands and removing her teeth so
35:08
she would not be identified. And even though this whole gay bar theory does
35:13
seem a bit far fetched. The sheer brutality of the crime does sound like
35:17
something that Whitey Bulger would have done, so I can understand why he was
35:22
considered to be a possible suspect. Yeah, that's just another interesting layer to
35:28
Whitey Bulger for sure, whether or not it's true, I could see why
35:32
she would think that that is a viable connection, especially if the towel did
35:37
have the crown and anchor embroidered on it or you know, screen printed on
35:42
it. That would be an interesting thing when you're going, okay, well,
35:45
not only is there a connection with Whitey Bulger to Provincetown, but we
35:50
also have a connection to this very specific bar. And then we have a
35:54
very similar em o to what we know to other murders that he's committed with
35:59
the removed of the teeth in the hands. And then the woman is lying
36:02
on a towel which has the bar emblazoned on it so or embroidered on it,
36:08
and I can see why she would be convinced that this is a really
36:14
good suspect because at the time, we didn't have the Internet at the time,
36:19
in the seventies. I mean, I don't know how much law enforcement
36:22
talk to each other. So the knowledge that there would be other people out
36:28
there removing hands and teeth, I just don't think there would be a lot
36:31
of public knowledge of that. You might read about somebody like Whitey Bulger in
36:35
the paper, and you might know about that specifically, but you're just not
36:38
going to know that there's other killers that have done this, or even think
36:43
that it would be something that anybody would do for any other reason than maybe
36:46
they were in the mob and they didn't want that person to be identified.
36:52
So it was just an interesting time back then. I can imagine exactly.
36:57
Yeah, I mean, there really wasn't any conclusive evidence to tie Bulger,
37:00
but the detail about the crown and anchor thing on the towel, I never
37:04
saw that at any public source. It was only revealed by Sandra Leie.
37:07
And I'm still not one hundred percent certain if that detail is true or if
37:10
she might have exaggerated things. But there was also rumors that like Whitey Bulger
37:15
was like trafficking sex workers at that point, and they figured maybe the lady
37:20
of the dunes is from another country, she was trafficked in from Europe or
37:22
something, and if she didn't have any family or friends in the United States
37:27
that could have played a role in the reason why she was never identified.
37:31
Well, that would make total sense too, if it's somebody that you're not
37:35
looking for, somebody that hasn't been reported missing. I'm sure her family wants
37:38
to know where she is, but she comes to these shores and she's murdered,
37:44
and nobody knows to even look for her. So she's not even on
37:47
the radar of law enforcement or anybody else because she hasn't made any connections.
37:52
It just highlights how easy it would be for criminal figures to get rid of
37:58
women that they deemed to be aquote unquote problem who were under their employ with
38:02
regards to sex work, because nobody's going to be reporting the missing exactly.
38:07
Yeah. So that's why I figured, is it turns out that was completely
38:10
wrong, That would turn out that the lady of the dunes was just a
38:14
regular person with a family who did miss her, that she was not a
38:17
sex worker who didn't have any close family and friends in the area. But
38:21
I can understand why people believe that at the time. So when I covered
38:24
this on the Trail Went Colled back in twenty sixteen, I did think that
38:29
the white Balger theory was the most logical, and he was still alive that
38:32
at that point he was in prison, but he hadn't admitted to any more
38:36
murders. So I was thinking to myself, even if he did this,
38:39
he may never come out and admit it, even though he was going to
38:43
remain in prison for the rest of his life. And of course, in
38:45
twenty sixteen, we had not started, not yet started using genetic genealogy as
38:51
a tool for identifying John and Jane does. I think that was only after
38:55
twenty eighteen, after the identification of the Golden State Killer, that they started
39:00
using genetic genealogy in a whole bunch of cold cases, and that has led
39:05
to the identification of a lot of decendents these past several years, Like it
39:08
seems to be like a weekly occurrence now where they announced that a John or
39:13
Jane Doe had been identified. So I started thinking to myself, when are
39:16
they going to identify the Lady of the Dunes. It almost seems like it's
39:21
inevitable. And little did I know that they were secretly working on this case
39:24
behind the scenes. And what was crazy is that was last Halloween October thirty
39:30
first, twenty twenty two, which I think is one of the biggest days
39:34
in the history of true crime because there were just so many developments within the
39:37
case of a few hours. I know, in the morning, they held
39:40
a press conference that Richard Allen had been charged with the Adelphi murders, which
39:45
was a pretty big deal. Later that day they announced that our old friend
39:50
Steve Panke had been found guilty of the murder of Janelle Matthews because the jury
39:53
had reached a verdict during the early morning hours. So I'm thinking to myself,
39:58
Wow, this is quite a day. And then later that afternoon they
40:00
announced that the lady of the Dunes had positively been identified as Ruth Marie Terry,
40:07
which completely took me by surprise because I had no idea they were even
40:09
working on the case. But I'm thinking to myself, wow, this is
40:13
three high profile cases that have been solved in one day. It was pretty
40:16
incredible. That is a lot of true crime news in one day. And
40:22
I do remember that day because it was a lot of excitement on Twitter,
40:25
right, like people were so jazzed up to be able to I mean,
40:30
Delphi is right up there with one of the cases that I think most people
40:34
who love true crime. I mean, you know, are very interested in
40:37
true crime. Love true crime might not be the right phrase, but they
40:40
would like to have seen Delfi solved because you have, you know, two
40:45
young girls, and anytime that there's children involved, I think that it hits
40:49
home and it's particularly painful for a lot of people to listen to. So
40:53
to know that there is an actual suspect arrested in Delphi, I know that
40:59
caused a lot of excitement. And then on the Janelle Matthew's case was Steve
41:02
Panky, and then with the lady of the Dunes being identified, it's just
41:07
it's a hugely exciting day it was, and I distinctly remember it was a
41:12
Monday and I was working my day job from home, but needless to say,
41:15
I did not get much work done. I was constantly on social media
41:17
and read it following all these developments. So she had finally been identified as
41:23
Ruth Marie Terry, and not surprisingly, it was done through genetic genealogy by
41:29
the organization AUTHROM Incorporated, who have identified a lot of John and Jane does
41:34
these past couple years. They built a DNA profile from the victim's skelter remains,
41:39
turn it over to the FBI, who entered the profile into a genealogical
41:44
database, and within a few months the DNA wound up matching biological relatives of
41:49
the victim and paved the way for the Lady of the Dunes identification. It
41:53
would turn out that Ruth Marie Terry had originally been born in the small mining
41:58
town of Whitwell, ten and this was a like a mountain town, like
42:02
a very like she was from like a country family. She was literally born
42:07
inside a mountain side shack and a very large family with a lot of siblings,
42:12
and it sounded like she had it quite a tumultuous childhood because her mother
42:16
died I think within a few months after Ruth was born, and her mother
42:21
I think was only twenty three at that time, so she was pretty young.
42:23
And Ruth got married when she was only thirteen years old. Oh my
42:29
god, yeah, which is pretty young. She subsequently got divorced from her
42:32
husband and remarried him, and got divorced from him a second time before she
42:37
reached the age of nineteen. And it was after that when she left Tennessee.
42:40
I think she realized, I need to have some more normalcy in my
42:44
life, because I think she didn't want to be held down in this constructive,
42:49
constrictive town where she gets married at such a young age. She wanted
42:52
to see the world, so she subsequently moved to Michigan. Okay, so
42:57
one thing doesn't really line up for me. The family life and the background
43:01
and the type of husband that I'm sure that she married aren't in alignment with
43:07
all of this expensive dental work. That is true. Like I still haven't
43:13
been able to find out where she got this dental work. I'm presuming it
43:15
happened later in her life after she left Tennessee, because we're going to talk
43:20
about she would get remarried several years later, so I guess possibly when she
43:23
maybe met her husband later on, he had enough money to give her the
43:29
dental work. But I can understand why they wouldn't think it was Ruth because,
43:32
for all we know, her family probably never knew that she had ever
43:36
gotten dental work later in her life, So if they had heard about the
43:38
lady of the Dune's case, they're probably not thinking to herselves that this woman
43:42
with special dental work who was found in Massachusetts might be Ruth. Definitely not,
43:49
because given the dental work. I thought, Okay, this is somebody
43:52
who's been cared for and taken care of, and so I would think that
43:57
she would come from a family that was had some love of affluents to be
44:00
able to afford all of these you know, gold fillings and whatnot. And
44:05
then to find out that she grew up and I guess like relative poverty and
44:08
like a mountain town with all of these different siblings, with this tumultuous situation
44:14
and her mother dying when she was very young. It's really sad and not
44:16
at all the background that I had expected that she would have exactly Like,
44:22
it's just kind of crazy that she would be married and divorced at the same
44:25
man twice during your teen years from the ages of thirteen to nineteen. So
44:30
I think this would be a good place to end Part one. So join
44:34
us next week for part two of our coverage about the murder of Ruth Marie
44:37
Terry Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail
44:40
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