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The Hidden Grave of Flatonia · Crime Night

0:00
Speaker 1: Imagine walking into a sweltering apartment in the middle of
0:03
Speaker 1: a Texas summer. You step over scattered coins near the
0:06
Speaker 1: entry away, you see a kitchen window completely shattered with
0:10
Speaker 1: glass just sprayed all across the linoleum.
0:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the heat in those second story apartments, it
0:16
Speaker 2: just hangs there in the air, making everything feel even
0:18
Speaker 2: more suffocating.
0:19
Speaker 1: Exactly, And as you look across the room, there's a
0:23
Speaker 1: bloody broken acrylic fingernail lying on the carpet. The door
0:27
Speaker 1: itself share signs of a frantic struggle, with a heavy
0:30
Speaker 1: wooden coffee table shoved completely out of the way. A barricade, right,
0:34
Speaker 1: a barricade. Now, I want you to imagine a local
0:37
Speaker 1: sheriff walking into that exact same room, looking around at
0:40
Speaker 1: all that undeniable physical chaos, and writing down a single
0:44
Speaker 1: word on his notepad, suicide.
0:47
Speaker 2: It's honestly baffling when I look at crime scene files.
0:49
Speaker 2: This is a profound example of institutional tunnel vision.
0:53
Speaker 1: Welcome to today's deep dive. We are looking at a
0:55
Speaker 1: case where the physical evidence literally screamed murder. But the authorities, well,
1:00
Speaker 1: they just covered their ears.
1:01
Speaker 2: They absolutely did. When investigators decide on a narrative before
1:05
Speaker 2: they even process the scene. The actual physical evidence becomes
1:10
Speaker 2: an inconvenience. They start building a conclusion in search of evidence.
1:14
Speaker 1: Which is basically drawing the bullseye after you've already shot
1:17
Speaker 1: the era. Exactly, it's backwards investigating, and that is exactly
1:21
Speaker 1: the dynamic we are unpacking today. We have this incredible
1:24
Speaker 1: stack of source material to go through with you, case files,
1:27
Speaker 1: crime scene photographs, autopsy reports, and personal investigation notes.
1:32
Speaker 2: We should mention where these came from. These originate from
1:35
Speaker 2: Julita Wilkinson, a woman who has spent decades fighting to
1:38
Speaker 2: correct the historical record regarding her sister's death.
1:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's been incredible. And the mission of this deep
1:44
Speaker 1: dive today is to bridge that terrifying gap between a
1:48
Speaker 1: rubber stamped police report and a physical crime scene that
1:52
Speaker 1: was just entirely ignored.
1:53
Speaker 2: To really understand how this happened, we have to transport
1:56
Speaker 2: ourselves to the setting. It's the nineteen eighties in Flatonia, Texas.
2:00
Speaker 1: Small town Texas.
2:01
Speaker 2: Very small, isolated, tight knit, the kind of place where
2:04
Speaker 2: local politics dictate reality. You know, we were focusing on
2:08
Speaker 2: a cramped studio apartment situated right above a local saddle shop.
2:12
Speaker 1: And it was inside this room that twenty year old
2:14
Speaker 1: Rowena Wilkinson's zappalac was found dead.
2:18
Speaker 2: She was just a young mother, a talented rodeo rider.
2:22
Speaker 1: And the Fat County Sheriff's office arrived at that apartment
2:25
Speaker 1: above the saddle shop and almost immediately closed the case,
2:28
Speaker 1: just packed it up. Literally. Their official ruling was suicide
2:32
Speaker 1: by autoerotic asphyxiation.
2:33
Speaker 2: Which is I mean, from a purely historical and forensic standpoint,
2:38
Speaker 2: that ruling is a massive red.
2:39
Speaker 1: Flag because of the statistics.
2:41
Speaker 2: Yes, autoerotic asphyxiation is a heavily documented forensic phenomenon, but
2:46
Speaker 2: it has historically been overwhelmingly associated with men. The source
2:50
Speaker 2: material reference is a study in the American Journal of
2:52
Speaker 2: Forensic Medicine and Pathology right I saw it notes the
2:55
Speaker 2: ratio is roughly fifty men to every.
2:58
Speaker 1: One woman, fifty to one, so it's not just uncommon.
3:01
Speaker 1: Prior to nineteen eighty, the data shows there were only
3:03
Speaker 1: two recorded cases of women dying this way in the
3:05
Speaker 1: literature too, So.
3:07
Speaker 2: For a small town sheriff to walk in and immediately
3:10
Speaker 2: jump to a conclusion that is statistically a unicorn, I mean,
3:15
Speaker 2: it requires a willful suspension of logic.
3:17
Speaker 1: It does. It requires investigators to completely ignore the totality
3:21
Speaker 1: of the environment. They focused on one or two salacious details.
3:25
Speaker 1: A nylon rope tied to an iron bedframe, a sex
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Speaker 1: toy on the bed, and they use those to build
3:31
Speaker 1: a convenient box.
3:33
Speaker 2: And that box was handed to a grieving family who
3:35
Speaker 2: was just expected.
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Speaker 1: To accept it, accept it and stay quiet.
3:39
Speaker 2: But the family couldn't accept it because they actually saw
3:41
Speaker 2: the room. The day after Rowena's body was removed, her
3:44
Speaker 2: teenage sister, Julida and their father went to the apartment
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Speaker 2: to clean it out.
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Speaker 1: And the scene they walked into, I mean it was
3:50
Speaker 1: a physical impossibility if you believe the police report of
3:53
Speaker 1: a solitary accidental death.
3:55
Speaker 2: Let's walk through exactly what Julida found, because none of
3:58
Speaker 2: this made it into the official shriff report. First, the
4:01
Speaker 2: door lock didn't even work completely broken, right. The police
4:04
Speaker 2: noted that a neighbor had to push the door open,
4:06
Speaker 2: dislodging a coffee table. Rowena had clearly used that heavy
4:10
Speaker 2: table as a makeshift barricade. And you don't barricade a
4:13
Speaker 2: door against yourself exactly.
4:14
Speaker 1: You do it because you are trying to keep someone out.
4:17
Speaker 2: And when you look at the floor near that force door,
4:20
Speaker 2: there were pennies scattered everywhere. As an investigator looking at
4:24
Speaker 2: crime scene reconstruction, a scattering of coins or small objects
4:29
Speaker 2: is a classic indicator of sudden, violent kinetic energy.
4:32
Speaker 1: Like someone kicking the door in Yes.
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Speaker 2: Someone forced that door open. The barricade scraped violently across
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Speaker 2: the floor, and whatever was resting on it just went flying.
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Speaker 1: Then you have the shattered kitchen window glass everywhere. Julita
4:46
Speaker 1: finds a broken acrylic nail covered in blood lying near
4:49
Speaker 1: that barricaded door.
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Speaker 2: Defensive trauma, and perhaps.
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Speaker 1: The most haunting detail of all, when Julita goes into
4:55
Speaker 1: the bathroom, the shower is still wet.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, that part is chilling.
5:00
Speaker 1: This is a full twenty four hours later in a
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Speaker 1: hot Texas apartment in the summer.
5:04
Speaker 2: That wet shower is a critical anomaly. Moistury evaporates quickly
5:07
Speaker 2: in that kind of sweltering environment. A web shower a
5:10
Speaker 2: day later suggests someone used it well after Rowena was deceased,
5:14
Speaker 2: like to wash off blood most likely. Yeah. Yeah, But
5:17
Speaker 2: we really have to look at the broader failure here,
5:19
Speaker 2: which is the total lack of crime scene preservation. The
5:23
Speaker 2: responding deputies stood in that room, they stepped over the
5:27
Speaker 2: broken glass.
5:28
Speaker 1: Jolita's father even physically handed them the bloody fingernail, didn't he.
5:31
Speaker 2: He did, He picked it up and handed it to
5:33
Speaker 2: a deputy. Yeah, and all of it simply vanished from
5:36
Speaker 2: the official record.
5:37
Speaker 1: This brings up a massive contradiction for me. If the
5:40
Speaker 1: physical space was that chaotic and there was that much
5:44
Speaker 1: obvious evidence of a struggle, how did the medical examiner
5:47
Speaker 1: sign off on this?
5:48
Speaker 2: Well, that's the thing. Surely an autopsy would review the
5:51
Speaker 2: difference between a solo accident and a violent physical assault.
5:54
Speaker 2: R oh.
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Speaker 1: It did reveal the difference. The autopsy absolutely showed it
5:58
Speaker 1: was an assault, but the family didn't know that.
6:01
Speaker 2: For decades because they couldn't get the records.
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Speaker 1: Right in the nineteen eighties in rural Texas, you didn't
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Speaker 1: question the sheriff. The family was just crushed by the
6:09
Speaker 1: stigma of the official ruling.
6:11
Speaker 2: It wasn't until years later, after her parents passed away,
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Speaker 2: that Julida finally obtained the full, unredacted autopsy report, and
6:19
Speaker 2: the medical data inside completely dismandled the police narrative. It's
6:23
Speaker 2: undeniable Let's break down.
6:24
Speaker 1: The forensics for you listening, Starting with that bloody acrylic
6:27
Speaker 1: nail Julita found by the force door.
6:30
Speaker 2: Right. The autopsy explicitly documented that Rowena's fourth right fingernail
6:34
Speaker 2: was missing. It had been violently ricked off.
6:37
Speaker 1: Crucially, it wasn't found next to her body by the
6:39
Speaker 1: bed where she supposedly died.
6:41
Speaker 2: No, it was found across the room, near the point
6:43
Speaker 2: of entry. In forensic terms, that is textbook defensive trauma.
6:47
Speaker 2: She was fighting back near the door, and there.
6:49
Speaker 1: Was biological evidence of another person in the room too.
6:52
Speaker 2: Yes, there was unidentified seamen found on the bedsheets and
6:56
Speaker 2: inside her. Now, this was before DNA testing was widely available,
7:00
Speaker 2: So the lab type the fluid only as containing an
7:02
Speaker 2: H substance H substance.
7:04
Speaker 1: What does that actually mean?
7:05
Speaker 2: To understand that, we have to look at nineteen eighty zerology.
7:09
Speaker 2: Back then, forensic scientists relied on secret status. About eighty
7:13
Speaker 2: percent of the population secretes their blood type antigens into
7:16
Speaker 2: their bodily fluids, so sweat, tears, saliva, semen.
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Speaker 1: So if you leave a biological fluid at a scene,
7:23
Speaker 1: they can test it to figure out your general blood.
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Speaker 2: Type precisely the presence of the H substance suggests the
7:29
Speaker 2: individual might have had typo blood. However, the testing back
7:33
Speaker 2: then was so rudimentary that the lab noted they couldn't
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Speaker 2: definitively rule out a weak type A or type B.
7:39
Speaker 1: So it was practically useless for identifying a specific suspect
7:43
Speaker 1: pretty much.
7:44
Speaker 2: But it was absolute, definitive proof that another biological entity
7:49
Speaker 2: was present in that room.
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Speaker 1: It proves she wasn't alone, period, and the toxicology report
7:54
Speaker 1: paints a very similar picture. She had a blood alcohol
7:57
Speaker 1: level of zero point zero seven, maybe.
8:00
Speaker 2: A couple of beers, not heavily intoxicated at.
8:02
Speaker 1: All, right, But investigators noted a half smoked marijuana roach
8:06
Speaker 1: sitting in an ashtray right next to the bed. Yet
8:08
Speaker 1: her toxicology showed zero marijuana in her system.
8:11
Speaker 2: So someone else was sitting there smoking it exactly.
8:14
Speaker 1: But the most undeniable piece of forensic evidence, the one
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Speaker 1: detail you absolutely cannot explain away as a solitary accident,
8:20
Speaker 1: was the bruising.
8:21
Speaker 2: Yet the bruises are the smoking gun here. The medical
8:25
Speaker 2: examiner documented four symmetrical linear bruises on the inner aspect
8:30
Speaker 2: of both of Rowena's upper arms and.
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Speaker 1: The wording the medical examiner used in the report is
8:35
Speaker 1: just chilling, It really is.
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Speaker 2: The report explicitly states that the size and aspects of
8:40
Speaker 2: the bruises suggest they were the result of the subject
8:43
Speaker 2: being gripped from behind, with the fingertips producing the four
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Speaker 2: separate bruises on each side.
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Speaker 1: Let's just visualize mechanics of that for a second. You
8:51
Speaker 1: do not grip your own over arms from behind.
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Speaker 2: No, Anatomically, it makes zero sense.
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Speaker 1: Somebody stepped up behind her, grabbed her forcefully by the arms,
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Speaker 1: and left finger marked bruises. The autopsy proved murder, yet
9:04
Speaker 1: the authorities buried it. How did they logically justify closing
9:08
Speaker 1: this case so quickly when they had a medical examiner
9:11
Speaker 1: telling them she was grabbed from behind.
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Speaker 2: Well, they relied on a rationale that collapses the second
9:15
Speaker 2: you apply any critical thinking to it. Their logic was
9:18
Speaker 2: built on three really flimsy pillars.
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Speaker 1: Okay, let's go through them.
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Speaker 2: The first was an X ray receipt they found in
9:23
Speaker 2: her closet. The police theorized she had received terrible medical
9:27
Speaker 2: news and took her own life in despair.
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Speaker 1: Which is an incredible leap and entirely false. The family
9:34
Speaker 1: confirmed It was just a routine precautionary mammogram.
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Speaker 2: Right. The women in their family had a history of
9:39
Speaker 2: hereditary breast tissue conditions, so Rowena was just being proactive
9:43
Speaker 2: about our health. She was perfectly fine.
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Speaker 1: So pillar one is garbage. What's the second?
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Speaker 2: The second pillar was purely hearsay. They took a rumor
9:51
Speaker 2: from a man named Joel who was Rowena's boss at
9:54
Speaker 2: a local barbecue joint. Okay, he claimed Rowena had once
9:57
Speaker 2: overdosed on pills, but the police never verified this. Her
10:02
Speaker 2: family had never heard of it, her ex husband had
10:04
Speaker 2: never heard of it.
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Speaker 1: Even her aunt, who was literally the town doctor, said
10:08
Speaker 1: there was absolutely no medical history of an overdose.
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Speaker 2: So they took a single rumor from a barbecue restaurant
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Speaker 2: manager over the actual town doctor.
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Speaker 1: Incredible. And the third piece of their so called evidence
10:19
Speaker 1: was no sign of forced.
10:21
Speaker 2: Entry, which makes absolutely no sense because we know the
10:24
Speaker 2: door didn't even have a working lock.
10:26
Speaker 1: Right, she used a coffee table to barricade it. The
10:29
Speaker 1: coffee table was shoved across the floor, the screen was
10:31
Speaker 1: pushed out, and the window was shattered. How do you
10:34
Speaker 1: force entry on a door that doesn't lock?
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Speaker 2: You don't the Sheriff's department exhibited severe cognitive dissonance at
10:41
Speaker 2: the institutional level. They found the rope, made a snap
10:44
Speaker 2: judgment and then actively filtered out the broken glass, the
10:48
Speaker 2: defensive wounds, and the barricade. Ye because those facts, well,
10:52
Speaker 2: they complicated the paperwork.
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Speaker 1: They chose the easy way out. So decades pass, the
10:56
Speaker 1: paperwork gathers dust. Julita grows up, knowing her sister was
10:59
Speaker 1: more and knowing the local cops just covered their eyes,
11:02
Speaker 1: and then we hit a massive twist in the timeline,
11:06
Speaker 1: a huge twist. It's two thousand and six. The Texas
11:09
Speaker 1: Rangers suddenly reach out to Julida, but they aren't calling
11:11
Speaker 1: to apologize for the botched investigation. They ask her if
11:14
Speaker 1: Romina knew a woman named Melody Bush, and Melody Bush
11:18
Speaker 1: is the key that unlocks the wider context of this
11:20
Speaker 1: entire town.
11:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, six months before Rowena was found dead in that apartment,
11:24
Speaker 2: Melody Bush was murdered in the exact same small town.
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Speaker 1: Melody was found dumped in a culvert just north of Flatonia.
11:30
Speaker 1: Her cause of death was acute acetone poisoning.
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Speaker 2: Now, acetone is essentially nail polish remover to die of
11:37
Speaker 2: acute acitone poisoning is highly unusual in a homicide.
11:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, how does that even happen?
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Speaker 2: Well, it has an incredibly strong chemical odor and it
11:46
Speaker 2: burns severely. A victim doesn't just casually ingest or inhale
11:50
Speaker 2: a lethal dose of acetone without realizing it.
11:53
Speaker 1: So it's not like slipping poison into someone's drink.
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Speaker 2: Not at all. From a toxicological standpoint. It requires overwhelming fours.
12:00
Speaker 2: You either have to force someone to drink a massive quantity,
12:04
Speaker 2: or you have to force a heavily soaked rag over
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Speaker 2: their face until they inhale enough highly concentrated vapors to
12:10
Speaker 2: shut down their central nervous system.
12:12
Speaker 1: That is horrifying.
12:14
Speaker 2: It is a brutal, physically demanding way to kill someone.
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Speaker 2: It implies incapacitation or a violent, drawn out struggle.
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Speaker 1: And the geographic overlap here is eerie. Melody was lasting
12:25
Speaker 1: alive at a local bar called the Stag Club that
12:27
Speaker 1: is the exact same bar Rowena had been partying out
12:30
Speaker 1: on the last night of her.
12:30
Speaker 2: Life, the town same bar, six months apart. But the
12:33
Speaker 2: Texas Rangers were looking into this connection, not because of
12:36
Speaker 2: local police work, but because of a letter.
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Speaker 1: Right a serial killer named Robert Charles Brown was sitting
12:42
Speaker 1: in a Colorado prison.
12:43
Speaker 2: He was claiming up to forty eight victims across the country,
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Speaker 2: and he wrote this cryptic letter to detectives demanding money
12:50
Speaker 2: for information.
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Speaker 1: Classic serial killer playing games exactly.
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Speaker 2: He claimed he killed a woman in Flatonia, Texas, around
12:57
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty four or nineteen eighty five.
12:59
Speaker 1: He specifically wrote, and I'm quoting here Flutonia ether ice pick,
13:05
Speaker 1: meaning he supposedly used ether to knock a woman out
13:08
Speaker 1: in an ice pick to stabber in the heart.
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Speaker 2: The rangers were wondering if this roaming serial killer got Melody,
13:13
Speaker 2: and maybe he got Rowena too.
13:15
Speaker 1: But let's look at the mechanics of this confession, because
13:17
Speaker 1: the modus operande doesn't match.
13:19
Speaker 2: It all got even close.
13:21
Speaker 1: Melody died of acidtone poisoning, not an ice pick to
13:24
Speaker 1: the heart, and ice pick leaves a very specific, undeniable
13:27
Speaker 1: physical puncture wound. And Robert Charles Brown is sitting in
13:31
Speaker 1: a cell asking for cash.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, this looks like a textbook case of a killer
13:36
Speaker 2: seeking infamy by reading local newspapers and claiming unsolved murders
13:40
Speaker 2: to mess with the cops.
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Speaker 1: That happens a lot doesn't it all.
13:42
Speaker 2: The time, And from a criminal profiling standpoint, Brown is
13:46
Speaker 2: a terrible fit for Rowena's murder. When we evaluate serial offenders,
13:51
Speaker 2: we look at their signature, the psychological need they fulfill
13:55
Speaker 2: through the act, versus their mo o, which is just
13:58
Speaker 2: how they pull the crime off. Right, Brown's were scattered everywhere, strangulation, shooting, chloroform,
14:04
Speaker 2: ice picks. But when you look closely at Rowena's crime scene,
14:08
Speaker 2: it lacks the hallmarks of a random roaming predator, right.
14:11
Speaker 1: Because it was highly intimate. It was inside her home,
14:14
Speaker 1: The door was barricaded from the inside. She knew someone
14:16
Speaker 1: was coming, or she was terrified of someone's specific in
14:19
Speaker 1: her orbit. A passing truck driver doesn't usually inspire you
14:22
Speaker 1: to barricade your second story apartment door with a coffee
14:24
Speaker 1: table on a random Tuesday, exactly.
14:27
Speaker 2: The scene implies a level of familiarity, It implies proximity.
14:31
Speaker 2: So if we discard the serial killer theory as just
14:33
Speaker 2: a distraction, we had to look inward who is in
14:36
Speaker 2: the orbit of both Melody Bush and Rowena Zappalac.
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Speaker 1: And this is where the source material gets incredibly dark.
14:42
Speaker 1: When you meticulously cross reference the timelines of both dead
14:45
Speaker 1: women a single name overlaps in both investigations.
14:49
Speaker 2: Cooper Cherry.
14:50
Speaker 1: Let's construct the timeline surrounding Melody Bush. First, the night
14:53
Speaker 1: she disappeared, she was at a CD motel in Flatonia,
14:57
Speaker 1: engaged in a heated fight with her husband.
14:59
Speaker 2: They were partying in that motel room with two other men.
15:02
Speaker 2: One of those men was Cooper Cherry.
15:05
Speaker 1: After the fight, Melody storms out, goes to the Stag
15:08
Speaker 1: Club and is never seen alive again.
15:11
Speaker 2: Now apply Cooper to Rowena's timeline. On the last day
15:15
Speaker 2: of Rowena's life, she actually dropped her young son off
15:19
Speaker 2: with Cooper.
15:20
Speaker 1: Why would you do that?
15:21
Speaker 2: Because Cooper's ex wife was a woman named Ruby Cherry,
15:24
Speaker 2: and Ruby was Rowena's neighbor, living right across the hall
15:27
Speaker 2: of that saddle shop.
15:28
Speaker 1: And it was Ruby who supposedly found Rowena's body the
15:32
Speaker 1: next morning.
15:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, we really need to critically analyze the witness statements
15:36
Speaker 2: from the morning of the discovery. In the immediate aftermath
15:39
Speaker 2: of Rowena's death, Ruby Cherry gave a statement.
15:42
Speaker 1: To the police, and it was a weird statement, very weird.
15:45
Speaker 2: She claimed that on the morning Rowena was discovered, her
15:47
Speaker 2: ex husband, Cooper Cherry and his best friend Bart Moore.
15:51
Speaker 1: Who by the way, was also out at the Stag
15:53
Speaker 1: club that night.
15:54
Speaker 2: Right they showed up at her apartment unannounced.
15:57
Speaker 1: Their excuse for showing up was that they they supposedly
16:00
Speaker 1: had no hot water at their own place, and they
16:03
Speaker 1: asked to use Ruby's shower. Ruby says she left for
16:06
Speaker 1: work and let them stay.
16:08
Speaker 2: Let's connect that statement back to the physical evidence Julita found.
16:11
Speaker 1: A day later, the unexplainable wet shower. Jolita found the
16:15
Speaker 1: shower in a Rowena's apartment still wet. Yes, if Cooper
16:18
Speaker 1: and Bart were next door supposedly using a shower because
16:21
Speaker 1: they needed hot water, what if they didn't use Ruby's
16:24
Speaker 1: shower at all? What if they forced their way into
16:26
Speaker 1: Rowena's apartment across the hall.
16:28
Speaker 2: What if they used her shower to wash off the blood?
16:30
Speaker 1: Exactly?
16:31
Speaker 2: It perfectly aligns with the physical reality of the scene.
16:34
Speaker 2: The west shower, the force door with the scattered pennies,
16:37
Speaker 2: the missing fingernail from a struggle, the symmetrical bruises from
16:41
Speaker 2: being gripped from behind by a man.
16:43
Speaker 1: It's all right there.
16:44
Speaker 2: And when you scrutinize Ruby Cherry's statements to the police.
16:47
Speaker 2: They fracture under pressure. What do you mean well? To
16:50
Speaker 2: the local sheriff, she said she woke up at nine
16:52
Speaker 2: thirty in the morning and went to a babysitters. To
16:56
Speaker 2: the Justice of the Peace, she claims she went to
16:58
Speaker 2: work at eleven. Later, to the Texas Rangers, she said
17:02
Speaker 2: she woke up at nine and went back to sleep.
17:04
Speaker 1: When someone's timeline shifts that dramatically depending on the badge
17:07
Speaker 1: of the person asking the questions, it's a massive indicator
17:09
Speaker 1: of deception.
17:10
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
17:11
Speaker 1: But if you think two dead women connected to one
17:13
Speaker 1: man's orbit is a statistical anomaly, brace yourself. There is
17:18
Speaker 1: a third woman in this web.
17:20
Speaker 2: Yeah. In nineteen eighty, several years before Rowena and Melody Cooper,
17:25
Speaker 2: Cherry's first wife died. Her name was Ronda Stall.
17:29
Speaker 1: They had been married for less than ten months.
17:31
Speaker 2: She died in a highly suspicious single car rollover on
17:34
Speaker 2: a rural stretch of road near some.
17:36
Speaker 1: Train tracks, and the details of Ronda's death are just baffling. Supposedly,
17:40
Speaker 1: she rolled her car, was thrown from the vehicle, and
17:43
Speaker 1: the car landed partially on the train tracks before being
17:45
Speaker 1: clipped and pushed aside by a passing train.
17:47
Speaker 2: A completely chaotic scene.
17:49
Speaker 1: And the state troopers arrived on the scene and decided,
17:52
Speaker 1: without a single eyewitness by the way, that she probably
17:55
Speaker 1: just fell asleep at the wheel.
17:56
Speaker 2: Her official cause of death was listed as intracranial.
17:59
Speaker 1: Trauma, which means what medically.
18:01
Speaker 2: Medically, that means she suffered severe bleeding or swelling inside
18:05
Speaker 2: the skull, usually resulting from high impact blunt force. Now,
18:09
Speaker 2: that could certainly happen in a rollover crash, sure, but
18:13
Speaker 2: it could also happen from being struck in the head
18:15
Speaker 2: with a heavy object before the crash ever occurred. The
18:17
Speaker 2: only way to differentiate between a staged crash and a
18:20
Speaker 2: genuine accident is a thorough post mortem examination.
18:24
Speaker 1: But inexplicably, no autopsy was ever performed on Rhonda stall None.
18:29
Speaker 1: A healthy young woman dies in a bizarre, violent, unwitnessed crash,
18:32
Speaker 1: and the authorities just signed the paperwork and say accident.
18:36
Speaker 1: How does a state trooper legally justify by passing an
18:39
Speaker 1: autopsy on a violent, unwitnessed death.
18:41
Speaker 2: It comes down to the legal mechanics of rural jurisdictions.
18:44
Speaker 2: In the nineteen eighties, in counties without a dedicated centralized
18:48
Speaker 2: medical examiner's office, a local justice of the peace or
18:52
Speaker 2: a responding state trooper often had vast discretion.
18:55
Speaker 1: So they just got to choose pretty much.
18:57
Speaker 2: If they looked at a scene and deemed the cause
18:59
Speaker 2: of death obvious, like a car crash, they could legally
19:03
Speaker 2: waive the requirement for an autopsy to save the county
19:06
Speaker 2: money and you spare the family grief. Wow, it was
19:09
Speaker 2: a loophole that allowed for immense laziness and in some cases,
19:13
Speaker 2: catastrophic cover ups.
19:14
Speaker 1: It's a recurring theme in this town, the total abdication
19:18
Speaker 1: of investigative duty. No autopsy for Ronda, a rubber stamped
19:23
Speaker 1: suicide for Rowena, and a botched surface level investigation for Melody.
19:28
Speaker 2: It's like a small town ven diagram where all the
19:30
Speaker 2: tragic circles overlap on Cooper Cherry, yet he constantly avoids
19:34
Speaker 2: any serious police scrutiny.
19:36
Speaker 1: Why was this one man seemingly untouchable.
19:38
Speaker 2: To understand the why, we have to examine the sociology
19:41
Speaker 2: of a small Texas town in that era. According to
19:44
Speaker 2: Rowena's ex husband, Thomas Cooper didn't just come from an
19:47
Speaker 2: average local family. He came from highly prominent, entrenched local.
19:51
Speaker 1: Money, old Texas oil and ranch money.
19:53
Speaker 2: More than just wealth. It was structural power. His father
19:56
Speaker 2: owned multiple oil wells, a massive ranch, and crucially, he
19:59
Speaker 2: sat on the board of the powerful town bank.
20:02
Speaker 1: And in a small town that's everything.
20:04
Speaker 2: In a municipality of that size, sitting on the bank
20:07
Speaker 2: board means you control the financial lifeblood of the community.
20:11
Speaker 2: You approve the loans for the local small businesses, You
20:14
Speaker 2: approve the municipal funding.
20:15
Speaker 1: So they have real leverage.
20:17
Speaker 2: You quite literally vote on whether the police department gets
20:20
Speaker 2: the budget for new cruisers next year, or whether a
20:23
Speaker 2: local deputy gets approved for a mortgage on his first home.
20:26
Speaker 1: That dynamic creates an invisible shield exactly.
20:30
Speaker 2: The authorities are inherently disincentivized from looking too closely at
20:34
Speaker 2: the son of the man who holds the purse strings.
20:36
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily that there was some grand cinematic conspiracy
20:40
Speaker 1: taking place in a smoke filled room. It operates on
20:44
Speaker 1: a much quieter, more insidious level.
20:46
Speaker 2: It is the path of Lee's resistance. A deputy stands
20:49
Speaker 2: in an apartment, sees a rope, sees a broken window,
20:52
Speaker 2: and knows that one narrative leads to a quiet afternoon
20:55
Speaker 2: of paperwork, while the other narrative leads to dragging a
20:58
Speaker 2: bank board member's son into an interrogation room for murder.
21:02
Speaker 2: They shows the quiet afternoon, and when law enforcement consistently
21:06
Speaker 2: takes the path of least resistance, predators are allowed to
21:09
Speaker 2: operate with absolute impunity. Three dead women, all intersecting with
21:15
Speaker 2: one man's life, and none of it properly investigated.
21:18
Speaker 1: Let's take a step back and look at the sheer
21:20
Speaker 1: weight of what we've uncovered today. What was officially recorded
21:23
Speaker 1: in the archives as a shameful, bizarre suicide by a
21:27
Speaker 1: lazy sheriff was in reality a violently chaotic crime scene.
21:32
Speaker 1: We have ignored evidence, defensive wounds, bloody fingernails, a barricaded door,
21:36
Speaker 1: a wet shower, and we have a trail of three
21:39
Speaker 1: dead women, all leading back to a protected local figure.
21:42
Speaker 2: And amidst all the forensic analysis and the discussions of
21:45
Speaker 2: small town sociology, we really can't lose sight of the
21:48
Speaker 2: human element. Here behind the police reports was a person.
21:51
Speaker 2: Rowena was a young mother.
21:53
Speaker 1: She loved her son, Brandon.
21:54
Speaker 2: She had her whole life ahead of her, and she
21:56
Speaker 2: was violently robbed of it by someone who thought they
21:58
Speaker 2: could get away with it. And who has but.
22:00
Speaker 1: Her family refuses to let the official narrative stand. Julida
22:04
Speaker 1: has launched a petition to get Fayette County to simply
22:06
Speaker 1: change the death certificate from suicide to thomicide.
22:10
Speaker 2: That single piece of paper is the necessary legal key.
22:13
Speaker 1: Right If the cause of death is officially changed to homicide,
22:17
Speaker 1: it legally forces the authorities to reopen the case. It
22:20
Speaker 1: forces them to open the boxes they sealed forty years
22:23
Speaker 1: ago and look at the evidence they actively ignored.
22:26
Speaker 2: History is only permanent if we refuse to challenge it.
22:30
Speaker 2: By looking at cases like this critically, by analyzing the
22:33
Speaker 2: forensics that were swept under the rug, we honor the
22:36
Speaker 2: victims and we demand accountability from the systems that failed.
22:39
Speaker 1: Them, Which brings us back to where we started, the
22:41
Speaker 1: magic trick, where you finally see the wires. I want
22:44
Speaker 1: to leave you with a chilling thought to mull over
22:46
Speaker 1: as you go about your day. If a prominent family
22:49
Speaker 1: name and a path of least resistance police force could
22:52
Speaker 1: so easily write off Rowena A's violently obvious murder as
22:55
Speaker 1: a bizarre solo accident and Ronda's death as just a
22:58
Speaker 1: sleepy car crash, without eve and bothering to perform an autopsy.
23:02
Speaker 1: How many other accidents in small towns across the country
23:04
Speaker 1: during that era are actually undiscovered murders.
23:07
Speaker 2: It makes you wonder how.
23:09
Speaker 1: Many killers are still hiding in dusty, unread archives, just
23:13
Speaker 1: waiting for a grieving sister to finally request the files.
23:17
Speaker 1: Look at the evidence, and see the wires holding the
23:19
Speaker 1: light together. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive,
23:22
Speaker 1: Stay curious, stay sharp, and we'll see you next time.