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The Library Tote in the Maple: Proof of a Hidden Killer · Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: At 7.51 on the morning of January 9th, 22, a
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: woman named Susan Larson stood at the edge of Hatchet
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Pond and looked up at a silver maple tree. Something
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: pale was wedged in the fork of the branches, roughly
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: eight feet off the ground. The snow beneath the tree
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: was unbroken. There were no ladder marks. There were no footprints.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: She had been here a week earlier, on January 2nd.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: There had been nothing in that tree. The bag was
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: pale blue canvas, a vinyl logo as heat pressed across
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: its side, Millhaven Public Library, and whatever had placed it
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: there had done so after two early January snowfalls and
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: below freezing temperatures with no visible means of reaching that
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: branch from the ground. That detail alone should have been impossible.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: It was only the beginning. Inside the bag were three
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: items belonging to a woman who had been missing for
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: 17 years. Christine Williams was 38 years old in January
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: of 2005. She had worked as a reference librarian at
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: the Millhaven Public Library for 11 years. Her colleagues described
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: her as meticulous, the kind of person who color-coded her
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: seed ledger, who tracked her winter garden plantings in a
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: small spiral notebook with a worn cover. Her last entry
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: in that ledger was dated January 1, 2005. She lived
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: alone in a house on the east side of Millhaven.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: She kept a key rack beside her front door. She
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: called her sister Diane every Sunday without fail. On the
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Sunday of January 16th, Diane Williams did not receive a call.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: She called Christine's number twice, then drove to the house.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: The lights were off. The car was gone. She called
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: the police that evening. Millhaven PD assigned Detective Frank Aldo
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: to the case. Within 48 hours, Christine's green Honda Civic
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: turned up in the parking lot of the Millhaven YMCA,
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: roughly two miles from her home. Her purse was gone.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: Her keys were gone. The car was locked. Two days
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: after that, on January 18th, investigators interviewed Christine's neighbors, one
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: of them a woman named Helen Pryor, who lived two
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: doors down mentioned something she had noticed sometime in early January,
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: one of the spare keys from Christine's rack. Christine had
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: given her a key months earlier, appeared to be gone.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Pryor was not certain of the date, but the rack
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: had a missing key. Aldo logged it. At the time,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: it pointed nowhere specific. On January 22nd, a drainage contractor
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: working off County Road 11, approximately two and a half
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: miles from Hatchet Pond, found Christine Williams in a narrow
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: channel running parallel to the road. The medical examiner determined
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: the cause of death was strangulation. There was no evidence
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: of sexual assault. Time of death was estimated between the
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: evenings of January 14th and 15th. She had been missing
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: for eight days. Aldo worked the case through the remainder
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: of 2005. Investigators canvassed Christine's known contacts. They reviewed her
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: phone records. They looked at the YMCA lot for surveillance footage.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: There was none covering that section of the lot. The
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: missing key from her rack became a thread Aldo returned
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: to several times, a neighbor's report, a detail that could
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: mean many things. Without a match, it pointed to nothing.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: By the end of the year, the case was inactive.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: No arrest, no named suspect. The library where Christine had
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: spent her working life stayed open until 2015, when the
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: Millhaven branch closed permanently. Its records were digitized in 2019.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: The key she had signed out on January 13, 2005,
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: a spare key to storage room 4 in the library basement,
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: was logged as unreturned. That entry sat in a database
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: for three years before anyone read it. What no one
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: knew yet was that a man named Roy Perry had
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: serviced that library three times in 2004. He was a
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: maintenance technician. His work took him through nearly every room
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: in the building, including the basement. He had access, a
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: plausible reason to be anywhere, and a face no one
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: would have cause to remember. And by 2019, he was
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: living on Parrish Pike, 140 yards from Hatchet Pond. Roy
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: Perry moved to Parrish Pike in 2019. He lived there quietly.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: His nearest landmark was a pond through the brush. That
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: proximity would mean nothing for three years. Then, on January 9th, 2022,
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: a birder named Susan Larson arrived at Hatchet Pond at 7.51
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: in the morning. She had been there a week earlier,
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: on January 2nd. The path was familiar. The silver maple
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: at the southeast corner was familiar. The pale blue tote
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: bag wedged eight feet up in its fork was not.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: Larson called the sheriff. Deputies, Carl, Ostrovsky, and Paul Shriver
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: reached the pond within the hour. The ground was frozen.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: Two early January snowfalls had laid down a clean, unbroken
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: surface beneath the tree. No tracks. No ladder marks. no
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: disturbed snow in any direction toward the nearest road. The
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: bag had been placed there between January 2nd and January 9th, somehow,
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: without anyone walking to it. Ostrowski photographed the bag in
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: place before it was removed. The fork was a natural cradle,
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: tight enough that the bag sat level and stable. Getting
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: it there would have required either a ladder hauled through
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: 140 yards of dense brush or someone who knew that
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: tree well enough to find another way. Neither explanation was simple.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Inside the bag, a pale blue canvas tote with the
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: Millhaven Public Library logo heat-pressed in vinyl. Inside that, a
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: Ohio driver's license, expired January 2006, bearing the name Christine Williams,
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: a small spiral address book with a broken cover, and
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: a single key on a plain ring stamped with the
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: number 4. The key had been placed inside a Ziploc bag,
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: which had been placed inside a second, identical Ziploc bag, double-sealed, preserved.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: Christine Williams had been dead for 17 years. Detective Ruth
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: Hensley pulled the cold case file that same afternoon. She
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: read through Frank Aldo's original reports. The missing reports filed
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: by Diane Williams on January 16th, the YMCA lot, the
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: drainage channel off County Road 11, the neighbor's note about
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: the spare key. Then she looked at the new evidence
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: on her desk. A library tote. An expired license. A
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: key stamped 4. The library had approximately 200 logo tote
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: bags sold between 2003 and 2004, confirmed by former director
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Al Tran. Any one of them could have wound up anywhere.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: But Christine had checked out a key to storage room
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: 4 in the library basement on January 13th. 2005, one
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: day before she disappeared. The key was never returned. That
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: entry had been sitting in a digitized database since 2019.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: Hensley cross-referenced it. The key in the bag matched the
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: log number. She arranged for the key to be tested
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: against the original lock assembly from Christine's front door, which
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: was still in the evidence room. It fit. That is
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: the moment the investigation shifted direction. Because the key should
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: not have fit anything, the library's storage room 4 no
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: longer existed. The branch closed in 2015. If this was
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: a library key, it should have opened nothing. At the
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: Williams residence, the fact that it fit Christine's front door
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: meant only one thing. Someone had told the original investigation
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: a story about a missing house key, and that story
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: had been accepted because it was plausible. The real key...
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: a library key, had been hidden for 17 years inside
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: a bag inside a pondside tree, and it fit a door.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: It had no business fitting. The neighbor, Helen Pryor, who
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: had reported the missing spare key from Christine's rack back
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: in 2005, had since died. Her account could not be reexamined.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: But Perry's letter, found later, would clarify exactly what happened.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: He had taken the storage room key from Christine's bag,
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: and deliberately allowed the house key narrative to develop. He
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: used the language of precision. He wrote that he placed
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: the key in the bag because he wanted someone, eventually,
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: to understand how careful he had been. By late February,
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: Hensley's team had connected Perry's name to the library's maintenance
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: contractor records. Three visits in 2004. Access to the basement.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: No reason anyone would have noted him, Roy Perry died
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: on February 24, 2022. He was 52 years old. Cardiac event.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: He died before Hensley could reach him. Eight days after
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: Perry's death, on March 3rd, 2022, a woman walked into
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: the sheriff's office without an appointment. She gave her name
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: as Brenda Kowalski. She said she needed to talk about
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: a library woman, and a night in January 2005, Brenda
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: was nine years old in 2005. Roy Perry was her stepfather.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: She remembered the evening of January 14th clearly. A woman
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: had come to the house on Sycamore Court. A brief
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: visit she had stayed only minutes. Perry had spoken to
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: her at the door. Afterward, Perry told Brenda that a
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: library woman had come to drop something off. That was
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: all he said. Brenda had carried that memory for 17 years.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: When she saw the news coverage of the bag found
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: at Hatchet Pond, she recognized enough. She drove to the
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: sheriff's office alone. Her account placed Christine Williams at Perry's
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: home on the evening of January 14th. That was the
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: last confirmed sighting of Christine alive. The distance from Sycamore
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: Court to the Drainage Channel off County Road 11 was
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: consistent with a single vehicle trip. The distance from the
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Drainage Channel to Hatchet Pond was approximately two and a
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: half miles. Hensley requested a search warrant for a storage
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: unit in Langford Township rented under a variation of Perry's
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: middle name. The unit contained three sealed bags. Each bag
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: held personal items. The items in the first bag belonged
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: to Christine Williams. The items in the second bag belonged
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: to a woman named Lynette Cobb, who had disappeared from
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: Sayers County in 2009 and whose body had never been recovered.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: The items in the third bag belonged to Sandra Fitch,
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: whose death in the Breck area in 2012 had been
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: ruled accidental at the time. and flagged for review by
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: a state analyst in 2018. Perry's name had not appeared
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: in either the Cobb or Fitch files, also in the
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: storage unit. Perry's handwritten letter, multiple drafts, paper clipped together.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: He wrote that he had placed the tote bag at
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: Hatchet Pond in January 2022, approximately 12 days before his death.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: He knew he was ill. He wanted a record to
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: exist after he was gone. He described Christine's death in
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: clinical language. He described the storage room key and the
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: decision to place it in the bag. He wrote that
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: he had been careful. He wrote it as though careful
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: were a thing to be proud of. Dennis Perry, Roy's half-brother,
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: cooperated fully with investigators. He later issued a public apology
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: to the families. The storage unit answered some questions and
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: sharpened others. If Perry had wanted to be found, he
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: had an obvious path. A confession, a letter sent to police,
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: a phone call. He chose none of those. He chose
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: a bag in a tree, accessible only if someone already
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: knew what to look for. That is not confession. That
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: is something else. Picture the southeast corner of Hatchet Pond
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: on a January night. Perry knew that tree. He lived
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: 140 yards away. He would have known which fork would
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: hold weight, how to approach from Parrish Pike through the
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: brush without crossing open ground, where snow would register footprints,
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: how to time it between Larson's visits. Because Larson was
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: a regular birder and the pond was a known site,
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: he placed the bag between January 2nd and January 9th.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: Larson had been there January 2nd. He knew she would
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: come back. He was not confessing. He was staging a discovery.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: That framing changes the letter too. The drafts, multiple versions,
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: paper clipped, suggest a man refining language, not unburdening himself.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: He used clinical terms where most people would not. He
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: wrote about the key and about being careful. A man
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: in genuine remorse writes about the person. Perry wrote about
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: the method. But here's the thing that doesn't settle into
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: either account cleanly. The bag contained Christine's license, her address book,
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: and that key. It contained nothing from Lynette Cobb, nothing
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: from Sandra Fitch. If Perry wanted to be understood, as
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: he wrote, why leave Cobb and Fitch in sealed bags
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: in a storage unit no one would have found without
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: the tote leading investigators to him? A complete disclosure would
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: have included all three. What he actually left was a
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: partial key, calibrated to unlock one case and let the
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: rest follow only if someone searched far enough. There is
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: no version of that which is accidental. The items in
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: the storage unit were sorted by victim and sealed separately.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: That is not the disorder of a dying man clearing
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: his conscience. That is curation. The prosecutor's office reviewed the
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: full file that Ruth Hensley submitted in June 2020 to
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: the formal finding attributed cause of death to Roy Perry
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: in the cases of Christine Williams, Lynette Cobb, and Sandra Fitch.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: Perry could not be arrested. He could not be charged.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: He could not stand trial. The finding is a legal
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: conclusion with no criminal consequence attached to it. Lynette Cobb's
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: body has never been found. Sandra Fitch's family received a
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: finding but not a full account. Christine Williams' key fit
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: her own front door, a door it had no reason
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: to fit in a case that had been inactive for
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: 17 years. That key is the thread Perry left. Whether
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: he left it as confession, as evidence of his care,
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: or as the final controlled act of a man who
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: never stopped deciding what others would and would not know,
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: the record does not say. His letter does not say either.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: It only says he wanted someone, eventually, to understand. Christine
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: Williams' family waited 17 years for a name. They received
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: it six weeks after a birder found a pale blue
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: bag wedged in a maple tree, and two weeks after
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: the man responsible was already dead. Roy Perry died on
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: February 24, 2022, cardiac event. Age 52, he had placed
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: the tote at Hatchet Pond approximately 12 days before his
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: heart dave out. According to his own letter, he knew
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: he was ill. The timing was not coincidence. Ruth Hensley
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: submitted the completed case file to the Grover County Prosecutor's
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: Office in June of 2022. The prosecutor reviewed every element.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: The tote, the contents, the key that fit Christine's front door,
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: Brenda Kowalski's testimony, Perry's letter, the storage unit in Langford Township,
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: rented under a variation of his middle name. The formal
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: finding attributed cause of death to Roy Perry in the
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: cases of Christine Williams, Lynette Cobb, and Sandra Fitch. Three women,
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: three separate sealed bags in that storage unit. One man,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: Perry could not be arrested. He could not be charged.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: He could not stand trial. A formal finding is a
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: legal conclusion. It carries no sentence. It opens no cell door.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: Dennis Perry, Roy's half-brother, cooperated with investigators throughout the inquiry.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: After the finding was issued, he released a public apology
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: to the families of all three women. The record does
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: not show what the family said in response. The Geography
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: of Perry's Life reconstructed in the months after his death,
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: traced a pattern that investigators described as deliberate. Between 1998
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: and 2006, he held maintenance contracts in Mill Haven, the
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: town where Christine worked and died. He later moved through
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: the Breck area and Sayers County, the same regions where
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Sandra Fitch died in 2012 and Lynette Cobb disappeared in 2009.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: His name did not appear in the Cobb or Fitch
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: files at the time of either event. Short-term contracts, institutional access,
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: small towns where a maintenance technician moves through without drawing notice.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: The storage unit connected the geography after the fact. Lynette
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Cobb's body has never been recovered. Sandra Fitch's death was
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: ruled accidental in 2012. A state analyst flagged it for
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: review in 2018. The formal finding against Perry gave her
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: family a cause. It did not give them a full
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: account of what happened. The distinction matters, and the families
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: know it. The storage unit in Langford Township held what
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: Perry had kept for years, items belonging to each woman,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: sorted and sealed separately. His letter described placing the tote
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: at Hatchet Pond. It described Christine's death in clinical language.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: It said he left the library key in the bag
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: because he wanted someone... eventually to understand how careful he
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: had been. That phrase is the clearest thing Perry ever
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: said about himself. He was not confessing to error. He
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: was documenting precision. On January 9th, 2023, Susan Larson returned
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: to Hatchet Pond. She had been back several times since
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: the morning she called the sheriff. This visit she logged
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: in her birding journal, the same way she logged every
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: other visit, The silver maple at the southeast corner was
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: still standing. The fork where the bag had rested was empty.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: She noted the tree and moved on. That detail, a
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: woman returning to an ordinary place that had become something else,
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: is where this case settles, not in the prosecutor's finding,
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: not in Perry's letter, but in the fact that the
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: pond still exists, and people still walk to it. Christine
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: Williams was 30 years old. She maintained a seed ledger.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: She tracked what she planted and when it came up,
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: the last entry she made was January 1st, 2005, 13
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: days before she died, the ledger was still in her home.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: Perry never touched it. Whatever she had planned for that
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: spring remained written in her own hand, waiting for a
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: season she did not reach. Diane Williams reported her sister
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: missing on January 16th. She has lived with the absence
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: of an answer for 17 years, and the presence of
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: one for three. Ruth Hensley pulled Christine's case file in
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: February of 2022 because a tote bag appeared in a tree,
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: eight feet off the ground with unbroken snow beneath it,
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: on a frozen morning, beneath it, on a frozen morning.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: next to a road 140 yards away. She worked the
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: thread until it held. The finding she submitted in June
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: of that year is the most complete account that will
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: ever exist of what happened to Christine Williams, Lynette Cobb,
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: and Sandra Fitch. It is not justice in the form
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: any of those families would have chosen. A trial would
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: have been a public record, cross-examination, evidence tested under oath.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: a verdict read aloud in a room. None of that happened.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: What exists instead is a file, a finding, and a
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: letter written by a man who described himself as careful
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: and who was, by every measure, the evidence supports. Exactly that.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: There is something that does not resolve cleanly, and the
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: record is honest about it. Perry decided what to leave
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: and what to keep. He left enough to name him
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: He left Cobb's belongings in a sealed bag in a
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: unit no one would have found without the tote pointing
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: the way. Whether that was remorse, control, or something the
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: clinical language of his letter was designed to obscure, the
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: record does not say. Christine Williams' key is in an
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: evidence room somewhere in Millhaven. It fits a door on
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: a house where she no longer lives, attached to a
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: library that closed in 2015. It was stamped with the
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: number 4. It was never a house key. It was
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: always a library key. Perry made sure no one knew
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: the difference for 17 years. She had planted something for
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: that spring. It did not come up. This show is
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: made by Oboe Media.