Latest / Scary Paranormal Stories / The Head in Her Handbag: Six Years of Silence

Transcript

The Head in Her Handbag: Six Years of Silence · Scary Paranormal Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: There is a version of this story where everything makes sense.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: A woman loses her husband. She grieves alone. She moves on,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: but that version collapsed. The moment investigators opened her personal
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: handbag and found a human head inside. There is something
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: about this case that I could not stop turning over.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: Not the crime itself, but the six years that came
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: before anyone thought to look. On May 17th, 2013, detectives
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: arrived at a residential address in New Jersey to execute
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: a warrant. The investigation was about embezzlement, financial irregularities, missing money,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: nothing that suggested what they were about to find. They
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: had no reason to expect anything other than paperwork. Then
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: they smelled it. Before they opened a single bag, before
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: they touched a single container, they smelled it, and what
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: they found Inside those black garbage bags, wrapped in nine,
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: alternating layers of plastic, packed between dryer sheets, and scented
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: beads and air freshness, had been moved at least once,
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: before anyone came looking. To understand why this took six years,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: you have to go back to the beginning. Not to 2007,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: when Daniel Burroughs disappeared. Back further, back to a high
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: school hallway in New Jersey sometime in the 1960s. where
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: a teenage girl named Loretta already knew Daniel's family well
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: enough to babysit his younger half-brother Ray, that detail matters
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: more than it seems. Daniel grew up, married twice, built
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: a life working as an auto-restorer and refurbishing casino wheels,
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: the kind of hands-on, mechanical work that left visible evidence
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: of itself. He was someone who made things. Loretta, meanwhile.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: moved through a different kind of life. She became a
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: caregiver for the elderly. She was trusted inside people's homes,
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: close to their finances, close to their families. By the
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: time she found Daniel again in the 1990s, through an
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: internet search after her first husband died, she had already
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: accumulated a criminal record in two states, embezzlement in Delaware County, Pennsylvania,
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: and theft in New Jersey. Daniel did not appear to
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: know this, or if he did, it did not stop him.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: They married. They moved to a property of roughly 8,000
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: square meters in Mays Landing, New Jersey. From the outside,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: it looked like what people call a second chance. Carolyn,
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: Daniel's daughter, visited two weeks before he disappeared. She brought
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: her own daughter, Amanda. What she found there did not
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: alarm her. Daniel was happy. Genuinely. visibly happy. There was karaoke.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: There were cocktails. There was laughter in a house that
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: felt like it had finally settled into something comfortable. Carolyn
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: left without a single premonition. She left her father waving
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: goodbye from a house that would become the first place
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Loretta chose to hide what she had done. In June
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: of 2007, Daniel Burroughs was gone. Loretta had an explanation ready.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: She told his family that that a yellow Hummer with
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Florida license plates had pulled up to the house. There
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: was a young woman inside. Daniel got in and left.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: No argument, no bags, no warning. Just a man who
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: walked out of his own life and into a stranger's
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: vehicle and disappeared. The story was specific enough to seem
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: credible and vague enough to resist verification. There were no
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: plates to trace. There were no witnesses. Not a single
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: neighbor reported seeing a yellow Hummer on that road. Ray,
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Daniel's half-brother, did not believe it. Ray had been close
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: to Daniel in a way that made the Hummer story
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: feel immediately wrong. He pushed. He asked questions. He tried
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: to reach Daniel through the channels that had always worked before.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: And then, one by one, those channels closed. The security
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: codes at the May's Landing property were changed. Access was blocked.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Ray found himself on the outside of a house where
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: he had once been a familiar face, unable to get in,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: unable to confirm what Loretta kept insisting, that Daniel had
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: simply chosen to leave. By September of 2007, the family
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: had no choice but to involve the police. Loretta repeated
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: the same story to investigators, same yellow hummer, same young woman,
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Same inexplicable departure. The police had no body, no crime scene,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: no evidence that contradicted her. Without something to disprove the story,
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: the case stalled. What no one knew yet was that
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: Daniel had never left that property at all. For three
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: months after Daniel vanished in June of 2007, Loretta Doyle
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: told the same story to anyone who asked. A yellow Hummer,
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: Florida plates, a young woman, behind the wheel. Daniel had
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: climbed in. and driven away, and that was that. She
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: said it with the kind of flat certainty that either
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: belongs to the truth, or to someone who has rehearsed
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: the lie. So many times it stopped feeling like one.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: The family pushed back quietly at first. Ray, Daniel's half-brother,
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: had spoken to Daniel regularly for years. The calls stopped
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: without warning. When Ray tried to reach Loretta, she changed
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: the security codes on the property. The gate that had
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: always been open was locked. Ray couldn't get to the
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: house where he had grown up, knowing his brother, where
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Loretta herself had once babysat him as a child. Something
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: in that reversal, the woman who had watched over him
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: now locking him out, made the wrongness of it physical.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: By September of 2007, the family had filed a missing
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: persons report. Police took Loretta's statement. the yellow Hummer with
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Florida plates. A young woman, Daniel had left voluntarily. There
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: was no body, no crime scene, no contradicting evidence. The
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: story held because it had to, because without something to
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: disprove it, a story is almost as good as the truth.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: No neighbor had seen the Hummer. That detail was quiet
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: in the reports, noted and filed, but no one on
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: that stretch of road. No one on the property had
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: seen a yellow vehicle with Florida plates pick up a
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: man and drive away. The Hummer existed only in Loretta's account,
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: and Loretta's account was the only account. The rational explanation
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: stopped working here, because while the family searched, and the
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: police filed, and Ray stood outside a locked gate, trying
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: to understand what had happened to his brother, Loretta was
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: already moving. She had obtained power of attorney over Daniel's affairs.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: Not through Daniel's signature, but through a rubber stamp and
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: two favors. An attorney whose elderly mother Loretta had cared for.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: A notary whose elderly father she had also tended. A
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: stamp pressed into paper instead of a hand writing its name.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Legally insufficient, legally executed anyway. With that document, Loretta filed
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: for a fictitious divorce from Daniel on grounds of abandonment.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: She published the legal notice in a local newspaper, the
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: kind of notice printed in small type that almost no
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: one reads. The divorce was granted. She then sold the house,
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: the property that measured nearly 8,000 square meters, the home
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: where Daniel's family had once gathered for karaoke. and cocktails
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: two weeks before everything stopped. She kept the proceeds. More
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: than $ 100, 000, the family created a Facebook page in 2010.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: They printed flyers. They placed them in windows and on
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: bulletin boards. The page asked if anyone had seen Daniel Burroughs,
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: if anyone remembered seeing a yellow Hummer, if anyone knew anything.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: The posts gathered the particular silence of unanswered pleas. A
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: handful of shares. Comments from people who said they were praying.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: No information that moved anything forward. Loretta had already moved
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: to a different city in New Jersey by then. She
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: had packed her belongings and relocated. And she had not
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: left Daniel behind. The detectives who arrived at Loretta's new
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: residence on the 17th of May, 2013, were not there
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: about Daniel. They were there about money. a separate investigation
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: into embezzlement. They had a warrant. They knocked, they entered,
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: and almost immediately, before they had opened, a single bag
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: or container. They noticed the smell. It was the smell
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: underneath the smell, beneath layers of something artificially sweet, fabric softener.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: Dryer sheets, the sharp chemical brightness of scented beads, air
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: fresheners stacked like deliberate interference, there was something that did
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: not belong to any product on a shelf, something that
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: a living house does not produce. Investigators described it as
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: the smell you cannot mistake. Once you have encountered it,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: the kind that reaches the brain before the thought forms.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: There were two containers, sealed, air-tight, wrapped in nine layers
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: of black plastic garbage bags, each layer tied off and fed.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Then the next layer placed perpendicular to it, alternating directions,
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: so that the seal was not accidental. but engineered. Between
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: the layers, dryer sheets, scented beads, air fresheners, the construction
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: of it, the deliberateness of nine alternating layers with fragrance
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: barriers between each one, was not concealment in a hurry.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: It was a project. It had taken time and planning
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: and patience. The first container held a wallet. The liquid
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: from six years of decomposition had changed its color had
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: turned what might have been, one shade into something else,
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: into something else, into something else, into something else. Inside
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: the container, a mandible, a human jaw, identifiable later by
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: dental records as belonging to Daniel Burroughs. The second container, larger,
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: held bones, the upper left arm, the lower legs, the ribs,
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: And the ribs carried something the bones of someone who dies, peacefully,
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: do not carry. Cut marks, consistent with a bladed instrument.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: Consistent with someone having worked carefully and deliberately through the
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: body of another person. Loretta's personal handbag was also searched.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: Inside it, investigators found Daniel's head. No one moved. No
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: one breathed. The room that had been full of ordinary
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: investigative procedure became something else entirely in that moment. Something
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: that did not have a professional category that could contain it.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: A woman had been carrying her husband's head in her purse.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Not at the moment of the crime. Not in the
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: initial chaos of whatever had happened in 2007. In 2013,
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: after six years, after a Facebook page, and a missing
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: persons report, and a family standing outside a locked gate,
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: after a fictitious divorce and a legal notice in a newspaper.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: After $ 100, 000, the head had come with her. Dona Fontana,
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: a forensic anthropologist, would later testify at trial that the
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: bones showed no signs of environmental exposure, no weathering, no
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: bleaching from sunlight, no erosion from moisture and soil. The
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: condition of the bones confirmed what the nine layers of
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: bags had already implied. The remains had been protected, stored,
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: maintained in conditions that preserved them. Daniel had been buried
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: in the backyard of the original maze landing property, then
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: at some point dug up, repackaged, and transported to the
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: new residence. Loretta had moved him with her. She had
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: not left him behind. because she could not leave him behind.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: He was evidence. He was the one fact that, if
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: found in a yard, she no longer owned, might one
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: day be traced back to her. The rational explanation for
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: the yellow hummer was already gone. There is no version
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: of this story where everything makes sense. The defense attorney,
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Antonio Probenda, made the argument that the jury was being
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: asked to convict without a cause of death. There was
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: no toxicology that conclusively proved poison, no blunt force trauma
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: recorded in the remaining bones, no wound that a medical
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: examiner could point to and say, this is what killed him.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: The cut marks on the ribs were consistent with dismemberment
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: after death, Rabenda argued. A dismemberment after death, however disturbing,
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: is not the same as murder, he pointed to the
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: toxicology report commissioned by the defense. Methamphetamine had been detected
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: in the remains. Loretta's team suggested that Daniel may have
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: died from a drug-related cause, that his death might not
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: have been at Loretta's hand at all. The prosecution responded
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: with the prescriptions. Daniel had undergone shoulder surgery, and Loretta,
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: his caregiver, the woman who managed his medical care, had
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: administered the post-operative medications. What the defense framed as evidence
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: of independent drug use, the prosecution reframed as Loretta, controlling
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: what went into Daniel's body. The jury deliberated for two hours.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Two hours to weigh six years of concealment. Two hours
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: to consider a woman who filed a fake divorce, forged
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: power of attorney documents, forged power of attorney documents, sold
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: a house that was not legally hers to sell. buried
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: a body in a backyard, dug it up, moved it
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: across the state, and carried a portion of it in
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: her handbag. Two hours to determine that the absence of
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: a confirmed cause of death did not mean the absence
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: of a crime. What the jury understood, what the evidence
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: made unavoidable, was that there is a specific kind of
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: arithmetic in this case. A man is alive in June
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: of 2007. By the time anyone thinks to look, he
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: has been dead long enough that the precise mechanism of
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: his death cannot be recovered. The people who could have
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: preserved that evidence were the people responsible for destroying it.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: The impossibility of determining exactly how Daniel died was not
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: a gap in the prosecution's case. It was, in its
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: own way, the prosecution's case. The defense argument was not
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: wrong on its own terms. There was no cause of death.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: There was no confession. There were cut marks that could
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: technically have been made post-mortem. Every element of reasonable doubt
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: Probender raised was a real element. Ah, was a real element.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: And the jury set it aside in two hours, because
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: reasonable doubt requires that the alternative explanation be reasonable. And
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: no reasonable explanation exists for why a woman carries her
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: husband's decomposed head in her personal bag across a state line.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: For why she engineers nine alternating layers of sealed plastic
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: with fragrance barriers between each one. For why she files
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: a fictitious divorce from a man she claims simply left her.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: There is no version of this where Daniel walked out
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: to a yellow Hummer and never came back. The jury
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: was gone for two hours. Not two days. Not even
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: one afternoon. Two hours to hear everything. The nine layers
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: of bags. The dryer sheets. The head in the handbag.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: And return a verdict. Guilty of murder. Guilty of obstruction
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: of justice. When the foreperson read those words aloud, Loretta
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Doyle showed nothing. The woman who had smiled at investigators
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: walking through her door The woman who had rehearsed the
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: yellow Hummer story for six years sat still and looked
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: straight ahead. The sentence came on the 17th of March, 2015.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: 55 years for the murder, three more for obstruction. The
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: earliest she could be released on parole, assuming she survived
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: every year of that minimum, would be when she was
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: 100 and 10 years old. The judge did not frame
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: it as a metaphor. It was arithmetic. The kind of
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: arithmetic that doesn't leave room for interpretation. What the court
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: could not give the family was an answer to the
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: central question. The cause of Daniel's death was never determined.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: The decomposition had claimed that. What remained were ribs with
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: cut marks, bones, that showed no weathering because they had
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: been kept sealed and dry, and a toxicology report. The
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: jury chose not to believe. The exact moment Daniel died,
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: and what Loretta did to make it happen, belongs to
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: the same silence she maintained for nearly six years. There
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: was one more detail. The financial records confirmed cleanly. Loretta
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: had taken more than $ 100, 000 from the sale of Daniel's
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: home and his possessions. The property on 8,000 square meters
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: in Maze Landing. The car restorations, the casino wheel business.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: Daniel had built all of it converted into cash, she
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: spent while carrying his remains from one address to the next.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: The motive the court assigned was economic. The jury apparently
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: found that sufficient. Carolyn, Daniel's daughter, was not in the
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: courtroom during the trial. There is no explanation on record
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: for why she was absent. What she said publicly afterward
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: was specific and measured. She would attend every appeal, every
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: single one. She also enrolled in criminal science studies after
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: her father's case closed. The woman who had spent the
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: last visit with her father, laughing over cocktails and karaoke,
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: who had watched him, happy and unguarded, two weeks before
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: he vanished. was now learning the language of evidence and
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: forensic testimony. That is not a small thing. That is
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: a person deciding the system needs to be something she
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: understands from the inside. the half-brother who had been locked
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: out first, the one Loretta cut off by changing the
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: security codes before she changed anything else, had known something
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: was wrong before anyone else allowed themselves to say it.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: He had tried. The family's Facebook page, the flyers, the
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: calls to police in September of 2007. Much of that
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: pressure came from people like Ray, who never accepted the
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: yellow Hummer's story, because they had known Daniel and Daniel
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: did not disappear without a word. There is something worth
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: staying with here, and it is one of the details
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: in this case that I have not been able to
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: set aside cleanly. The power of attorney Loretta obtained was
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: not forged in the traditional sense. She did not steal
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: a signature or manufacture a document in secret. She called
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: in favors. The attorney who prepared it was the daughter
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: of an elderly woman Loretta had cared for. The notary
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: who authenticated it was the son of another. She used
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: the same professional identity, caregiver, trusted presence in vulnerable households,
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: to build the legal infrastructure of concealment. The people who
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: helped her were not co-conspirators. They were people returning a
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: kindness to someone they believed, had earned it. The last
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: confirmed image of Daniel Burroughs alive is from two weeks
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: before June of 2007. He is in his own home.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: His daughter and granddaughter are there. Someone is mixing drinks.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Someone is singing. He looked back at Carolyn when they
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: said goodbye, and there was nothing in his face that
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: suggested anything was wrong. He never contacted her again. Loretta
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: moved twice after that. She carried what remained of Daniel
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: in sealed containers, through both moves, packed beneath layers of plastic.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: and scented sheets kept in conditions that prevented any environmental
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: degradation to the bones. Forensic anthropologist Dona Fontana testified to
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: that directly. The remains showed no signs of exposure. He
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: had been maintained. The word is not comfortable to hold,
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: but it is the accurate one. When investigators arrived on
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: the 17th of May, 2013, they were not there for Daniel.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: They were there because of an embezzlement complaint in another county.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: Loretta answered the door. She smiled. And then someone said
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: the words, Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office. And the smile stopped.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: What they found in that house required nine layers of
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: black plastic bags, alternating directions with air fresheners and dryer
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: sheets and scented beads sealed between each layer. It required
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: two airtight containers. It required a personal handbag, in which
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: Loretta had been carrying Daniel's head, not stored in a
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: separate room, not placed in a closet. In the bag
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: she carried, the jury deliberated two hours, then told the
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: court what they had decided. 55 years, plus three. A
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: minimum of 46 years and nine months before any possibility
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: of release. Loretta Doyle was 63 years old when the
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: sentence was read. The mathematics of the sentence mean the
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: system has already made its determination about how this ends
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: for her. Carolyn keeps going. She is studying criminal science.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: She has promised to appear at every appeal. The last
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: night she spent with her father, he was laughing. She
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: did not know it was the last night. That is
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: the part that does not resolve, not with a verdict,
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: not with a sentence, not with any number of years
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: assigned to a courtroom. The handbag was hers. She carried
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: it every day, and inside it, for however long she
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: carried it, before the 17th of May, was what was
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: left of the man she had first known, in high school,
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: the man she had found again, decades later, on the internet.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: The man whose name she still used when she filed
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: the fraudulent divorce papers by abandonment, and published a notice
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: in the local paper. Some details are not meant to
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: make sense. They are just true. This show is made
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: by Obermedia.