Latest / True Crime: Killer Confessions / The Jar in the Crawlspace: Hidden Will, Vanished Woman, 27 Years
Transcript
- 0:04Speaker 1: It was a Tuesday in October of 2019, and Susan
- 0:08Speaker 1: Young was not looking for anything, except a fault on
- 0:11Speaker 1: a secondary power line. She was a utility lineman, and
- 0:15Speaker 1: the crawlspace beneath the old house on Glendale Spur Road
- 0:18Speaker 1: was just another dark, low-ceilinged gap she had to check.
- 0:23Speaker 1: Then her light caught glass. A mason jar, wedged into
- 0:27Speaker 1: the ventilation gap, sealed tight, with papers folded inside it.
- 0:32Speaker 1: The papers turned out to be a will, and the
- 0:34Speaker 1: will turned out to belong to a dead woman whose
- 0:37Speaker 1: body was already there in the dark, 27 years ahead
- 0:40Speaker 1: of anyone who came looking. That is the shape of
- 0:43Speaker 1: this case. A document hidden directly above the person it
- 0:47Speaker 1: was meant to erase, the will named a young woman
- 0:50Speaker 1: as the sole heir to 43 acres of Indiana farmland.
- 0:54Speaker 1: The woman had never received a single inch of it.
- 0:57Speaker 1: She had vanished in January of 1992. and the official explanation,
- 1:02Speaker 1: for nearly three decades, was that she had simply chosen
- 1:06Speaker 1: to leave. No forwarding address. No nursing license. No tax
- 1:11Speaker 1: return filed after the fiscal year 1991. No social security
- 1:15Speaker 1: activity after March of 1992. She had, according to the record,
- 1:20Speaker 1: walked out of Faroe, Indiana and disappeared into a life
- 1:24Speaker 1: nobody could locate. She had not walked anywhere. What follows
- 1:28Speaker 1: is the story of how a genealogist doing unrelated research,
- 1:33Speaker 1: a lineman tracing a power fault, and one detective with
- 1:36Speaker 1: a court order managed to find what a missing person's
- 1:38Speaker 1: investigation failed to find a generation earlier. And it is
- 1:42Speaker 1: the story of what was waiting in that crawlspace when
- 1:45Speaker 1: they did. Farrow, Indiana sits in Draper County, in the
- 1:48Speaker 1: kind of quiet that accumulates over generations. Farms pass from
- 1:53Speaker 1: parents to children. Neighbors track each other's routines the way
- 1:56Speaker 1: farmers track weather, not from nosiness, but from long habit.
- 2:01Speaker 1: In a place like Faroe, a person's absence lands differently
- 2:04Speaker 1: than it would somewhere else. People notice. Delvina Marsh had
- 2:10Speaker 1: lived on Glendale Spur Road for 51 years. She owned
- 2:15Speaker 1: the house and the 43 acres around it, and she
- 2:18Speaker 1: was by every account sharp, private, and attached to her land.
- 2:23Speaker 1: The way some people are attached to a limb. She
- 2:26Speaker 1: had never married. She had no children. When her health
- 2:29Speaker 1: began to decline in her late seventies, she did not
- 2:32Speaker 1: ask for much from many people, but she did ask
- 2:35Speaker 1: for Sherry. Sherry Padgett was Delvina's grandniece. She was born
- 2:40Speaker 1: around 1963, which put her at 28 years old in
- 2:44Speaker 1: the winter of 1991. She drove out to Glendale Spur
- 2:48Speaker 1: Road every Saturday morning with groceries She sat with Delvina
- 2:52Speaker 1: through the long stretches of the afternoon. She did this
- 2:55Speaker 1: for two years. Not because anyone was watching, and not
- 2:59Speaker 1: because there was money in it yet, but because Delvina
- 3:02Speaker 1: was family, and Delvina needed her. The people who knew
- 3:06Speaker 1: Sherry described someone organized and steady. She had a ritual
- 3:11Speaker 1: she had kept since she was 18 years old. Every
- 3:15Speaker 1: Wednesday morning, at 6 o'clock, she called her mother, Nancy.
- 3:19Speaker 1: not approximately 6. 6. The call happened whether Sherry was
- 3:25Speaker 1: tired or busy or had nothing new to report. It
- 3:29Speaker 1: happened because it was Wednesday. Nancy Padgett would say later
- 3:33Speaker 1: that she could set her clock by it. For 27
- 3:35Speaker 1: years after her daughter disappeared, she would say, she still
- 3:39Speaker 1: woke up at 6 on Wednesdays. The habit did not
- 3:42Speaker 1: leave just because the calls did. Delvina Marsh died in
- 3:46Speaker 1: November of 1991. She was 78 years old. Two months
- 3:52Speaker 1: before she died, in September of that year, she had
- 3:56Speaker 1: executed a will. The document was genuine, typed on equipment
- 4:00Speaker 1: consistent with pre-1990s manufacture, signed and witnessed in proper form.
- 4:06Speaker 1: Its terms were straightforward. Sherry Padgett was the sole beneficiary.
- 4:12Speaker 1: The house, the 43 acres, all of it. The last
- 4:15Speaker 1: Wednesday call came the Wednesday before Christmas, 1991. Sherry's voice
- 4:21Speaker 1: on the line, six in the morning, same as always,
- 4:24Speaker 1: then nothing. No call the following Wednesday. No call the
- 4:28Speaker 1: Wednesday after that. Nancy waited. She drove to Farrow, she
- 4:33Speaker 1: asked questions, and got no answers she could use. In
- 4:37Speaker 1: March of 1992. She filed a missing persons report with
- 4:42Speaker 1: Draper County. What she got back from that process was
- 4:45Speaker 1: a detective named Howard Kress and a conclusion she would
- 4:48Speaker 1: spend the next 27 years arguing against. Kress told Nancy
- 4:52Speaker 1: that adult women were allowed to leave. The case was
- 4:55Speaker 1: suspended within 18 months. No forwarding address existed, but that
- 5:00Speaker 1: was explained as a choice. No contact with anyone in Farrow,
- 5:04Speaker 1: but that too was a choice. a woman in her
- 5:07Speaker 1: late 20s who had never missed a Wednesday call, who
- 5:09Speaker 1: had been days away from inheriting 43 acres, had simply
- 5:13Speaker 1: decided the official record held that she wanted a different
- 5:17Speaker 1: life somewhere else. Mancy kept the cardigan, a gray one, Sherry's.
- 5:23Speaker 1: She would wear it to the trial 28 years later.
- 5:26Speaker 1: The property on Glendale Spur Road did not sit idle.
- 5:31Speaker 1: A man named Stanley Brown had been working as property
- 5:33Speaker 1: manager for Delvina Marsh for roughly three years before her death.
- 5:38Speaker 1: He had regular, unsupervised access to the house. In December
- 5:42Speaker 1: of 1991, a will was filed in probate, but it
- 5:47Speaker 1: was not the will Delvina had signed in September. This
- 5:50Speaker 1: one had a handwritten attestation clause. That clause named Stanley
- 5:55Speaker 1: Brown as beneficiary. and the ink it was written in,
- 5:58Speaker 1: as forensic examination would later confirm, was a water-based gel
- 6:03Speaker 1: formulation that did not exist on the commercial market before 1994.
- 6:08Speaker 1: Delvina Marsh died in November of 1991. The ink used
- 6:12Speaker 1: to alter her will had not been manufactured yet. The
- 6:16Speaker 1: will that Delvina Marsh signed in September of 1991 was
- 6:20Speaker 1: typed on equipment consistent with pre-1990s manufacture. A forensic document
- 6:26Speaker 1: examiner named Roger Tate would confirm this decades later. The
- 6:30Speaker 1: body of the document was legitimate, but the attestation clause,
- 6:33Speaker 1: the clause that mattered, the one that named a beneficiary,
- 6:37Speaker 1: had been added afterward. An ink that would not exist
- 6:40Speaker 1: for another three years. That single fact is worth sitting with.
- 6:44Speaker 1: Someone altered a dead woman's will using a pen that
- 6:47Speaker 1: had not yet been invented when she died. And then
- 6:51Speaker 1: that altered version was the one filed in probate. The
- 6:54Speaker 1: original Delvina's actual will, the one naming Sherry Padgett as
- 6:58Speaker 1: sole beneficiary of 43 acres and a house she had
- 7:01Speaker 1: owned for 51 years, vanished. A quit claim deed followed
- 7:06Speaker 1: in January of 1992. The deed transferred the Glendale Spur
- 7:11Speaker 1: Road property to Stanley Brown. The stated consideration was $ 1,
- 7:16Speaker 1: and the signature on that deed, the one appearing to
- 7:19Speaker 1: be Sherry Padgett's, was not hers. Forensic handwriting comparison against
- 7:25Speaker 1: her 1990 driving record and a 1989 lease agreement confirmed it.
- 7:30Speaker 1: Someone had signed her name. Sherry Padgett had not. By
- 7:35Speaker 1: that point, Sherry had not called her mother since the
- 7:37Speaker 1: Wednesday before Christmas of 1991. For 27 years, three things
- 7:43Speaker 1: existed in a kind of suspended contradiction. A missing woman.
- 7:48Speaker 1: A property that had changed hands for $ 1 through a
- 7:51Speaker 1: forged signature. and a will that everyone had seen in
- 7:54Speaker 1: the probate record, but whose original no one could produce.
- 7:58Speaker 1: None of those three things were connected in any official file. Then,
- 8:02Speaker 1: in the spring of 2019, Stanley Brown sold the Glendale
- 8:06Speaker 1: Spur Road property to a couple from Indianapolis. That sale
- 8:10Speaker 1: triggered a routine title search. That title search sent a
- 8:14Speaker 1: genealogist named John Zimmerman to the Draper County Probate Archive
- 8:19Speaker 1: in June of 2019. Zimmerman was not looking for Sherry Padgett.
- 8:24Speaker 1: She was pulling the Marsh probate file for unrelated research.
- 8:28Speaker 1: But once she was in it, she found something that
- 8:30Speaker 1: stopped her. There was no record of Sherry Padgett anywhere
- 8:34Speaker 1: after 1991. Not a tax return, not a license, not
- 8:40Speaker 1: a forwarding address, nothing. Zimmerman called Nancy Padgett on a
- 8:44Speaker 1: Wednesday morning at 6.15. She had no way of knowing
- 8:48Speaker 1: what that time meant. Nancy had been keeping the 6
- 8:51Speaker 1: o'clock Wednesday ritual for 27 years, she answered. Within weeks,
- 8:57Speaker 1: Zimmerman filed a formal review request. A Draper County detective
- 9:02Speaker 1: named Phil Novak pulled the 1992 missing persons file. What
- 9:06Speaker 1: he read there was thin. One report, one suspension, one
- 9:11Speaker 1: conclusion from Howard Kress that an adult woman had made
- 9:15Speaker 1: a choice. Novak obtained an emergency court order for a
- 9:18Speaker 1: ground-penetrating radar survey of the Glendale Spur Road property. The
- 9:22Speaker 1: survey ran on October 9th of 2019. The anomaly showed
- 9:27Speaker 1: up directly beneath the crawlspace. Two days later, on October 11th,
- 9:32Speaker 1: a forensic team recovered Sherry Padgett's remains from that crawlspace.
- 9:36Speaker 1: State forensic anthropologist Dr. Carla Moss determined cause of death
- 9:41Speaker 1: as strangulation, hyoid fracture, ligature evidence, time of death, winter
- 9:46Speaker 1: of 1991 to 1992. She had been there for 27 years,
- 9:52Speaker 1: but the mason jar had already told part of the story.
- 9:56Speaker 1: A utility lineman named Susan Young had been tracing a
- 9:59Speaker 1: fault on a secondary feeder line that same October, a Tuesday.
- 10:04Speaker 1: She found the jar wedged into a ventilation gap in
- 10:07Speaker 1: the crawlspace. Inside it was a document, folded, sealed, intact.
- 10:12Speaker 1: It was the original will, the one Delvina Marsh had
- 10:16Speaker 1: actually signed in September of 1991. The one that named
- 10:20Speaker 1: Sherry Padgett, not Stanley Brown. Someone had hidden it there,
- 10:25Speaker 1: in the same crawlspace. Roger Tate examined both documents. The
- 10:30Speaker 1: filed version, the one that had sat in the probate
- 10:33Speaker 1: record for 27 years, carried an attestation clause in water-based
- 10:38Speaker 1: gel ink that post-dated Delvina's death by at least two years.
- 10:43Speaker 1: The original in the mason jar carried no such clause.
- 10:47Speaker 1: It was clean. It was genuine. It had been there
- 10:51Speaker 1: the entire time. Buried beneath the woman it was meant
- 10:54Speaker 1: to erase. At trial, in September of 20, the prosecution's
- 10:58Speaker 1: case did not require the jury to guess at motive.
- 11:01Speaker 1: Every document spoke. The altered will. The forged deed. The
- 11:06Speaker 1: ink that could not have existed when it was supposedly written.
- 11:10Speaker 1: Three converging impossibilities. All pointing at the same man. All
- 11:14Speaker 1: surrounding the same piece of land. Picture Stanley Brown, in
- 11:18Speaker 1: the fall of 1991. He had been managing the Marsh
- 11:22Speaker 1: property for three years. He knew the house. He knew
- 11:26Speaker 1: the crawlspace. He knew Delvina Marsh was dying, and he
- 11:29Speaker 1: knew what she intended to do with her land because
- 11:31Speaker 1: he had seen the will she executed in September. 43
- 11:35Speaker 1: acres going to a grand-niece who brought groceries on Saturday mornings.
- 11:40Speaker 1: Nothing going to him. One version of events ends there.
- 11:44Speaker 1: A man who felt cheated, decided to take what he
- 11:47Speaker 1: believed he was owed, forged a document, and disappeared, a
- 11:52Speaker 1: woman who stood in his way, clean, calculated, every step planned.
- 11:57Speaker 1: That version fits the paperwork perfectly, but that version collapses
- 12:02Speaker 1: against his own words. On the morning of day seven
- 12:05Speaker 1: of his trial, Stanley Brown confessed. He said he killed
- 12:08Speaker 1: Sherry Padgett in January of 1992 in the crawlspace of
- 12:13Speaker 1: After she confronted him about the estate paperwork irregularities, he stated,
- 12:18Speaker 1: according to the record, that he had not planned it.
- 12:22Speaker 1: He said this as though it mattered to the sequence
- 12:25Speaker 1: of events. The confrontation itself is the detail that recontextualizes
- 12:29Speaker 1: everything planted before it. Sherry had not simply disappeared, she
- 12:33Speaker 1: had found something. She had gone to that house and
- 12:36Speaker 1: challenged him directly. Brown had the altered will in the
- 12:40Speaker 1: probate system by December. The quick clean deed was not
- 12:43Speaker 1: filed until January. Sherry's last call to her mother was
- 12:47Speaker 1: the Wednesday before Christmas. The timeline narrows into a very
- 12:51Speaker 1: short window. Sherry discovers the fraud. She confronts Brown. Brown
- 12:57Speaker 1: kills her in the crawlspace of the house she was
- 12:59Speaker 1: supposed to inherit. Then he files the deed that transfers
- 13:03Speaker 1: the property to himself for $ 1, using her forged name.
- 13:08Speaker 1: He hid the original will in the same space, whether
- 13:11Speaker 1: that was deliberate concealment or something stranger, the record does
- 13:15Speaker 1: not say. What the record does say is this. In
- 13:18Speaker 1: February of 21, 16 months after Brown's arrest, DNA from
- 13:23Speaker 1: the ligature material recovered with Sherry's remains was matched to
- 13:27Speaker 1: a profile connected to the unsolved 1985 strangulation of Deborah
- 13:31Speaker 1: Fulton in Fort Wayne. Fulton had been a title insurance clerk.
- 13:35Speaker 1: She had been processing a property transfer involving a manipulated
- 13:38Speaker 1: trust at the time of her death. That case remains open.
- 13:42Speaker 1: The connection exists in the evidence. The formal resolution does not.
- 13:47Speaker 1: Stanley Brown was convicted of murder in the first degree
- 13:50Speaker 1: and two counts of felony fraud. He was sentenced to
- 13:54Speaker 1: 60 years without parole. He is 61 years old. Nancy
- 13:59Speaker 1: Padgett was 72 years old when she walked into that courtroom.
- 14:03Speaker 1: She wore Sherry's gray cardigan. She sat through five days
- 14:07Speaker 1: of forensic testimony, the hyoid fracture, the ligature evidence, the
- 14:12Speaker 1: ink that did not exist until two years after the
- 14:15Speaker 1: will was supposedly signed. She sat through the moment a
- 14:18Speaker 1: forensic document examiner named Roger Tate held up the original
- 14:23Speaker 1: will in a mason jar and told the court it
- 14:26Speaker 1: was genuine. And then, on the morning of day seven,
- 14:30Speaker 1: before the defense could call its first witness, Stanley Brown confessed.
- 14:35Speaker 1: He said he had not planned it. The record notes
- 14:39Speaker 1: that detail without comment. Sherry had confronted him. He killed
- 14:44Speaker 1: her in the crawlspace of the house she was meant
- 14:46Speaker 1: to inherit. He hid her there for 27 years alongside
- 14:49Speaker 1: the document that proved she was the rightful owner of
- 14:52Speaker 1: everything he took. The confession answered the central question of
- 14:56Speaker 1: the trial. It did not answer all the questions the
- 15:00Speaker 1: evidence had raised. The property Brown acquired for $ 1 through
- 15:04Speaker 1: a forged signature had since changed hands. He sold it
- 15:08Speaker 1: in the spring of 2019 to an Indianapolis couple. The
- 15:12Speaker 1: same sale that triggered the probate search that triggered Gene
- 15:15Speaker 1: Zimmerman's call that woke Nancy Padgett on a Wednesday morning
- 15:19Speaker 1: at 6.15. The chain of events that found Sherry began
- 15:24Speaker 1: with a routine transaction Brown himself initiated. Now, myself, initiated.
- 15:31Speaker 1: He was convicted on all three counts, one count of
- 15:34Speaker 1: murder in the first degree, two counts of felony fraud.
- 15:38Speaker 1: The sentence was 60 years without parole. At 61 years old,
- 15:42Speaker 1: the math of that sentence is not complicated. The mason
- 15:46Speaker 1: jar and the original will were entered into evidence and
- 15:49Speaker 1: confirmed as genuine. The attestation clause that named Brown as
- 15:53Speaker 1: beneficiary The clause that had steered the entire estate through
- 15:57Speaker 1: probate in December of 1991 was written in water-based gel
- 16:01Speaker 1: ink that did not exist until 1994, three years after
- 16:06Speaker 1: the will was supposedly signed, two years after Delvina Marsh
- 16:10Speaker 1: was already in the ground. The forgery had worked for
- 16:13Speaker 1: 27 years because no one had reason to look until
- 16:16Speaker 1: a utility lineman named Susan Young followed a fault on
- 16:20Speaker 1: a secondary feeder line into a crawl space on a
- 16:23Speaker 1: Tuesday in October 2019. Then came February of 21, 16
- 16:28Speaker 1: months after Brown's arrest, the Indiana State Police Laboratory issued
- 16:33Speaker 1: a DNA comparison result. The ligature material recovered with Sherry's
- 16:37Speaker 1: remains carried a biological profile. That profile matched evidence from
- 16:42Speaker 1: an unsolved case in Fort Wayne. The strangulation of Deborah
- 16:46Speaker 1: Fulton in October of 2005. Fulton had been a title
- 16:50Speaker 1: insurance clerk. She had been processing a property transfer involving
- 16:54Speaker 1: a manipulated trust at the time of her death. The
- 16:58Speaker 1: connection is in the evidence. It sits in the record.
- 17:01Speaker 1: No formal charge in the Fulton case has been filed
- 17:04Speaker 1: as of the information available. That case remains open. What
- 17:08Speaker 1: the DNA result means in the context of the trial
- 17:11Speaker 1: record is this. The method was not new. The pattern,
- 17:15Speaker 1: a property transfer, a document irregularity, a woman who processed
- 17:20Speaker 1: or witnessed or inherited, had happened before. Whether it happened
- 17:24Speaker 1: more than twice is a question the evidence has raised
- 17:27Speaker 1: and the record has not yet answered. There is a
- 17:29Speaker 1: version of this story where Sherry Padgett simply disappears, where
- 17:33Speaker 1: a detective tells her mother that adult women are allowed
- 17:37Speaker 1: to leave. and closes the file within 18 months. Where
- 17:41Speaker 1: a property manager collects 43 acres and a farmhouse in Farrow,
- 17:45Speaker 1: Indiana for $ 1 and the paperwork holds, and no one
- 17:49Speaker 1: looks at the ink. That version nearly happened. It held
- 17:52Speaker 1: for 27 years. What broke it was not a task force,
- 17:56Speaker 1: or a reopened investigation. A genealogist pulled a probate file
- 18:01Speaker 1: for an unrelated client, and found a gap where a
- 18:04Speaker 1: living person should have been. She called Nancy Padgett on
- 18:08Speaker 1: a Wednesday morning. Nancy Padgett had been calling that same
- 18:11Speaker 1: time slot, every single week, for 27 years, waiting for
- 18:16Speaker 1: a call that never came back. She already knew. John
- 18:20Speaker 1: Zimmerman filed a review request in August of 2019. Phil
- 18:24Speaker 1: Novak pulled the 1992 file and obtained an emergency court
- 18:29Speaker 1: order for ground-penetrating radar. The survey ran on October 9th.
- 18:34Speaker 1: The recovery was October 11th, three days between the scan
- 18:38Speaker 1: and the answer Nancy Padgett had been carrying in her
- 18:41Speaker 1: body since the Wednesday before Christmas, 1991. She wore the
- 18:46Speaker 1: gray cardigan to court because Sherry had left it at
- 18:49Speaker 1: her house. It still fit. She had kept it exactly
- 18:53Speaker 1: as it was. There is something in this case that
- 18:56Speaker 1: resists easy summary, and it is not the forensics. The
- 19:00Speaker 1: forensics are precise the ink date, the hyoid, The DNA.
- 19:05Speaker 1: What resists summary is the 27 years of a mother
- 19:08Speaker 1: maintaining a ritual for a daughter who could not call
- 19:12Speaker 1: back because the one person who knew why was living
- 19:15Speaker 1: 43 acres away in a house he had taken for $ 1.
- 19:20Speaker 1: Sherry Padgett was 28 years old. She brought groceries on
- 19:24Speaker 1: Saturday mornings. She sat with her great aunt through the
- 19:27Speaker 1: last two years of Delvina Marsh's life because someone had to.
- 19:32Speaker 1: and she was the one who showed up. The will
- 19:35Speaker 1: Delvina signed in September of 1991 was a direct consequence
- 19:40Speaker 1: of that showing up. So, in a different way, was
- 19:44Speaker 1: everything that followed. The case is closed. The sentence is
- 19:49Speaker 1: 60 years. Deborah Fulton's case is not closed. Her name
- 19:54Speaker 1: is in the record now connected by a strand of
- 19:56Speaker 1: biological evidence to the same crawlspace, the same method, the
- 20:00Speaker 1: same man. Her family is still waiting for the formal
- 20:03Speaker 1: resolution the DNA result has not yet produced. That is
- 20:06Speaker 1: where things stand. Two women. One answer delivered. One's still pending.
- 20:11Speaker 1: Sherry Padgett is home. This show is made by Oboe Media.