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Dragged Through Metal: How a Missing Farmer Escaped His Kidnapper · Missing person stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At 9.14 in the morning on March 11th, Frances Mitchell
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: was driving a Pratt County land management truck along a
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Cutter Road easement when she saw something at the base
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: of a drainage ditch that should not have been there.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: A man, face down in the mud, no jacket, no shoes.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: The temperature that night had dropped to 31 degrees and
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: remained around 31 the following morning. He was alive. What
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: no one could explain, not that morning, not for days,
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: was the pattern of marks running across the lower half
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: of his back. Parallel scrapes, precise and evenly spaced, as
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: if something had dragged him through a comb with teeth
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: made of metal. They were not consistent with the ditch.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: They were not consistent with the window frame through which
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: investigators initially believed he had escaped. They were consistent with
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: something else entirely. Something that would take a forensic consultant,
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: a second evidence sweep, and a surviving man's deliberate act
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: of memory to finally name. This is the story of
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Chad Hensley, how he disappeared on an ordinary March evening,
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: what he did to survive, and what he remembered in
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: the dark that would eventually convict the man who took him.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Six miles from the Pratt County seat, Graber Mill Road
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: runs through a stretch of flat Indiana farmland where properties
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: sit wide apart and neighbors count as close if they
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: share a fence line. Chad Hensley had lived on that
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: road long enough that the routines of his life had
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: settled into a shape everyone around him recognized. He was
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: 54 years old, retired from a career as a line supervisor,
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: the kind of work that runs on schedules, on checklists,
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: on the disciplined habit of noticing when something is off.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: A bad back had slowed him down in recent years,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: and nerve damage along his left leg meant certain tasks
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: required more planning than they used to. He managed the
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: property alone. He kept goats. He was the kind of
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: man whose absence would be noticed quickly because his presence
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: was so reliably consistent. Two properties south, a neighbor named
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Bev Corson knew his routines well enough to have his
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: gate code and his vet's phone number. That detail mattered
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: more than anyone expected it to. On the evening of
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: March 9th, Chad left his house at 5 o'clock in
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: the afternoon. The errand was straightforward. A trip to Whitmore's Hardware,
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: roughly six miles from his home. Security footage there would
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: later place him inside the store from 5.12 to 5.30.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: One purchasing a float valve bag, a small plumbing part,
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: a small plumbing part, The kind of thing a man
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: buys on a Tuesday, because the toilet tank needs adjusting.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Nothing about it was out of the ordinary. He never
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: made it home. At 6.40 that evening, Bev Corson walked
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: past Chad's property and heard the goats. They had not
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: been fed. She looked toward the porch. The float valve bag,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: the one Chad had bought less than 90 minutes earlier,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: was not there. She noted it, kept moving, assumed he
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: would be back. Sometime after 6.40, the bag appeared on
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: the porch. Chad was not the one who put it there.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Deputy Chris Vance took the missing persons report at approximately
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: 9 that night called in by Chad's son Kevin, who
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: had driven in from Fort Wayne and could not reach
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: his father. Vance noted the truck sitting in the driveway,
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Chad's phone still pinging the local tower, and the float
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: valve bag resting on the porch. On paper, Everything pointed
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: to a man who had stepped out briefly and would return,
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: except Beeve Cawson knew the bag had not been there
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: at 6.40. And Chad Hensley, by every measure of his life,
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: did not leave his goats unfed. Detective Sarah Phillips was
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: assigned the following morning. The picture she was inheriting had
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: one clean contradiction at its centre, a man whose truck
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: was home, whose phone was home, and who was not,
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: Phillips found Chad's truck on County Road 400 North the
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: morning of March 10th, one and a half miles from
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: his house. Door unlocked. Phone on the seat. Wallet in
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: the cup holder. Not a single sign of a struggle.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: No scuffed gravel. No broken glass. Nothing overturned. The truck
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: looked like a man had parked it and walked away.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: That was the first image that would not leave the
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: investigation alone. A man with a bad back and nerve
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: damage in his left leg does not park a truck
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: on a county road and walk anywhere voluntarily. And he
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: certainly does not leave his wallet behind. Phillips pulled the
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Whitmore's hardware footage. She watched Chad select the float valve bag, pay, leave.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: She watched the timestamp, 5.31. She calculated the drive back
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: to Graber Mill Road. He should have been home before six.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: His truck turned up a mile and a half short
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: of his driveway, parked undisturbed as though the distance between
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: point A and point B had simply swallowed him. On
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: March 11th, at 9.14 in the morning, Frances Mitchell changed everything.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: Mitchell worked for Pratt County Land Management. She was checking
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: a drainage easement off Cutter Road when she found Chad
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: Hensley face down in a ditch. He was alive. The
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: temperature the night before... had dropped to 31 degrees, and
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: remained around 31 the following morning. He had no shoes.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: He had no jacket. He had been outside for roughly
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: 36 to 40 hours. The hospital intake on March 12th
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: produced a medical picture that forensic consultant Dr. James Croft
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: would spend the next several weeks trying to read. Frostbitten
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: left toes, dislocated left shoulder, and across Chad's lower back
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: and hips, A series of lateral abrasions, roughly two inches long,
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: running parallel to each other, spaced approximately one and a
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: quarter inches apart. Croft noted the spacing. He said nothing
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: definitive yet. But he wrote the measurement down. Chad's account,
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: given once he could speak coherently, filled in the darkness
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: he had survived. He had been held in a room
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: he could not see. Treated, lumber smell. A male voice.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Local accent. a habit of clearing his throat. The captor
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: had used Chad's name before Chad had said a word.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: That detail lodged itself inside the investigation like a splinter.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: Whoever took Chad Hensley already knew who he was. Chad
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: had heard the vehicle leave at some point. He had
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: been given water once. At some point, he had been moved,
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: in the dark, in what felt like the bed of
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: a truck. And in that darkness, methodically, deliberately, he had
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: run his fingers along the surface beneath him, and memorised
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: what he felt. Parallel rails. Metal, spaced at a fixed interval.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: He told investigators he memorised the spacing because he believed
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: the details would matter if he survived. He was right.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: Slater Property Services appeared in the record on March 19th,
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: the same day a road crew found a duffel bag
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: in a culvert below Renner Bridge at the eastern edge
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: of Pratt County. The bag contained personal effects belonging to
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: a man named Howard Pruitt, 61 years old, a widower
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: from Alderton. Pruitt had been reported missing approximately 13 months earlier.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: Two days after the duffel was found, his body was
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: recovered from the drainage channel below that same bridge. He
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: had been weighted with rebar and submerged. The Pruitt discovery
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: cracked the case open sideways. Records Deputy Angie Vorey, pulled
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: property service contracts. Leon Slater, 57, licensed pest control and
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: property maintenance operator. Slater Property Services had performed a winterization
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: inspection at a farmhouse on Cutter Road 11 months prior.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: The same Cutter Road where Mitchell had found Chad in
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: the ditch. Slater had the lockbox combination. He had been
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: inside that building before. Vore also found a gutter-cleaning contract
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: to Chad's Graber Mill Road address, completed the previous October,
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: paid in cash, and a service contract in Alderton, two
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: doors from Howard Pruitt's home. The geography of Lee and
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: Slater's work history traced a line directly through the lives
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: of both men. Phillips obtained a warrant. Inside Slater's white
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: Dodge pickup, in the truck bed, there was a custom
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: aluminum equipment rack, horizontal rails. Investigators measured the spacing, one
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: and a quarter inches. Croft's second sweep of the truck
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: came after he matched his own measurement to the rack.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: He was not looking for blood. He was looking for transfer,
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: cellular material that moves when skin drags across a surface
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: under pressure. Chad Hensley had been pulled across those rails.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Chad's DNA was on the aluminum. That finding closed one
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: loop and opened a larger one, because it answered... where
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: but not the full sequence of what had happened. The
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: initial reconstruction had placed Chad at the Cutter Road farmhouse first,
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: then escaping through a jealousy window on the utility room's
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: north wall. The window was 14 inches high and 22
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: inches wide, its louvers remained. There was a blood smear
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: on the frame. Drag marks in the mud below. Everything
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: pointed to the window as the origin of those marks
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: on Chad's back. But Croft's one and a quarter inch
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: measurement did not match window tracks. It matched the rack.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: The sequence had been inverted. Chad had been in the
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: truck bed first, and at some point during transport, when
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: the vehicle stopped, he had attempted to move. That attempt failed,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: or was only partial. Slater returned him to the farmhouse.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Chad was held there in the dark room. Later, on
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: his own, Chad forced himself through the jealousy window, 14
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: inches of clearance, a dislocated shoulder, a damaged left leg,
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: and crawled approximately 300 yards through freezing ground, before he
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: went down in the drainage ditch where Mitchell would find him.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: The window marks and the rack marks were both real.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: They told two different moments of the same ordeal. When
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: that recontextualization landed on the jury at trial, on day four,
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Croft showed the truck rack photographs alongside the abrasion measurements.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: The one and a quarter inch spacing appeared side by
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: side with the parallel marks on Chad's body. Then the
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: DNA result. The jury heard it in sequence. Six hours later,
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: they came back unanimous. There was one more thing inside
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: the farmhouse that Slater had not found when he wiped
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: the interior. Behind a baseboard in the utility room, investigators
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: recovered a gas station receipt. March 8th. Drover's Hollow. Fuel
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: and water. The pump camera at that station had caught
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: a white Dodge pickup, plates obscured, deliberately, by mud. The
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: receipt placed Slater at that station the day before Chad
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: was taken. The mud on the plates was not road grime.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: It was preparation. Picture the moment Chad's truck was found
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: on County Road 400 North. Door unlocked. Phone on the seat.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: No sign of struggle. Every instinct, says the man left voluntarily.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: Maybe a medical episode. Maybe he wandered. A bad back.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: Nerve damage. In one leg. A man who stumbles, disoriented,
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: into the fields. That version holds until you look at
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: the float valve bag. Someone drove Chad's truck back to
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: his property and placed the bag on the porch. That
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: is not the action of a man in a medical crisis.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: That is someone managing the scene, buying time before the report,
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: keeping the picture ordinary for as long as possible. The
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: bag on the porch was a deliberate signal to anyone passing.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: Nothing wrong here. He's home. But Bev Cawson had already
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: seen the porch at 6.40. The bag had not been there,
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: so whoever placed it arrived after 6.40, with Chad's truck,
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: after Chad was already taken. That errand took calculation. Now
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: hold that image next to a second one. The captor
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: used Chad's name before Chad spoke a word. This was
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: not a random encounter on a county road. Whoever stopped
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: Chad's truck on March 9th already knew his name, knew
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: his face, knew his route well enough to intercept him
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: between Whitmore's hardware and his front door. Slater's service records
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: showed he had been inside Chad's property in October, gutter cleaning,
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: paid in cash, no paper trail meant to be found.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: He had stood in Chad's yard. He had seen how
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: Chad lived. He had learned the rhythms of a man
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: who lived alone and whose nearest neighbor was two properties south.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: Slater had also been inside the Cutter Road farmhouse 11
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: months prior. He had the lockbox combination. He knew the
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: utility room. He knew the jealousy window in the north wall.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: He knew what the building could hold and how to
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: get in without forcing anything. And two doors from Howard
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: Pruitt's home in Alderton, Slater had a service contract Pruitt
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: had been dead for 13 months before anyone found him. Rebar,
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: a drainage channel, a location that required knowing the geography
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: of Pratt County's eastern edge in detail. The physical evidence
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: placed Slater's truck at the scene of Chad's transport. His DNA,
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: Chad's DNA, was on Slater's aluminum rack rings. A receipt
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: put Slater's truck at a fuel stop at the day
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: before plates muddied over. His own service history put him
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: inside every location that mattered. No stated motive ever entered
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: the record. The question of why Chad was taken and
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: why Howard Pruitt did not survive when Chad did was
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: never answered publicly. Slater said nothing from his arrest through
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: the early weeks of trial. He offered no explanation. What
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: the record shows is this. Leon Slater moved through the county,
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: as a man with keys and access codes and work
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: orders entering properties that trusted him, learning the details of
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: lives that had no reason to distrust him. That access
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: was the mechanism. The evidence confirmed it from multiple directions.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: The rack, the receipt, the service contracts, the lockbox combination,
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: each thread independent, each one pointing to the same man.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: Chad Hensley took the stand on day five. He had
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: crawled 300 yards in roughly 31 degree conditions with a
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: dislocated shoulder and nerve damaged leg to reach that ditch.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: He had memorized the spacing of metal rails in the
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: dark because he believed the details would matter. They did.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: The jury took six hours, six hours to weigh, 36
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: hours of darkness, a dislocated shoulder, frostbitten toes, and the
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: spacing between aluminum rails that one man had memorized with
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: his fingers because he believed the details would matter if
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: he lived. On April 3rd, Leon Slater had been arrested
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: without incident. He said nothing. Through the hearings, through the
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: early weeks of trial, he offered no statement, no explanation,
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: no account of any kind. The silence held until the
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: evidence dismantled it, piece by piece in open court. The
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: verdict came back unanimous. Unlawful confinement. Aggravated kidnapping, second-degree murder,
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: all counts. The judge sentenced Slater to 62 years. At
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: 57 years old, his earliest eligibility falls at age 119
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: by any measure of arithmetic. That sentence is a life sentence.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: The record closed on that number without ceremony. Chad Hensley
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: returned to Graber Mill Road. The goats were still there.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: The float valve bag had been sitting on the porch,
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: placed there by someone who knew the property well enough
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: to find it and put it in the right place
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: on the right night. That detail never fully resolved. What
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: it confirmed was that Slater had not acted blindly. He
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: had moved through Chad's life with the quiet precision of
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: someone who had studied it from a service contract distance,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: close enough to know the routines, careful enough never to
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: seem like a threat. Howard Pruitt had no one to
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: memorize the details in the dark. He had been dead
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: for 13 months before the road crew found his duffel
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: bag in the culvert below Renner Bridge. His body was
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: recovered two days later from the drainage channel, weighted with rebar,
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: at the eastern edge of Pratt County. Death placed roughly
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: 13 months before March 19th. He had simply vanished from Alderton,
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: and no one had formally connected his disappearance to anything
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: larger until the duffel surfaced. The question that the record
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: cannot answer is the distance between those two outcomes. Chad survived.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: Howard did not. Slater never explained that gap. No motive
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: was entered into evidence. No stated reason was ever offered
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: for why one man was left in a ditch and
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: freezing cold, and another was placed underwater with iron weight.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: The jury convicted on physical evidence and on the voice
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: of one survivor. The why remained sealed inside a silence
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: that the sentence could not break. What the investigation did establish,
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: methodically and without speculation, was the geometry of access. Slater
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: held service contracts across Pratt County and three adjacent counties.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: He had been inside the Cutter Road farmhouse 11 months
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: before Chad was brought there. He had cleaned gutters at
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: Chad's property the previous October and been paid in cash.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: He had a contract two doors from Howard Pruitt's home
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: in Alderton. He knew lockbox combinations. He knew which windows opened.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: He knew the back routes of a county that trusted
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: men with work orders and white pickups. Detective Sarah Phillips
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: had built the case incrementally, each thread independent. The rail
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: spacing measurement from Dr James Croft the second forensic sweep
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: that found Chad's DNA on the aluminum, the gas station
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: receipt from March 8 at Drover's Hollow, plates deliberately muddied,
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: the service records that placed Slater inside every location that mattered.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: No single thread was the case. All of them together were.
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: There is something that stays in the record long unheard.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: after the sentencing. On the morning of March 11th, at 9.14,
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: Frances Mitchell was driving a county land management route on
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: the Cutter Road easement when she saw a shape at
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: the south fence line. A face down, no shoes, no jacket,
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: 31 degrees. Chad Hensley had crawled approximately 300 yards on
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: a dislocated shoulder with nerve damage already working through his
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: left leg, across frozen ground in the dark. Wearing nothing
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: that would protect him from a temperature that had been
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: dropping since sundown, he had no way of knowing anyone
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: would come down that road. He crawled because stopping meant
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: not surviving. He had spent the hours in the truck
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: bed doing one thing, feeling the spacing between the rails
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: with his hands. committing the measurement to memory because he
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: had decided that if he made it out the details
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: would be what mattered one and a quarter inches he
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: held that number across 36 hours of darkness a crawl
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: through a field two days of hospitalization and a trial
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: that did not begin until weeks later on day five
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: he sat in that courtroom and he spoke the jury
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: came back in six hours What Leon Slater understood, and
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: what the record confirms, is that he had built a
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: life around access. Keys, codes, work orders, the quiet permission
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: that comes when a county knows your truck and your
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: business name. He moved through that trust for years, and
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: then he used it. How many times before Chad Hensley,
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: and in what ways is not part of the public record?
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: The record holds what it holds. Howard Pruitt was 61
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: years old. He was a widower from Alderton. He had
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: been missing for over a year before anyone knew to
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: look for him in connection with this case. He deserves
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: to be named here, plainly because the verdict covered him
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: and the silence around him should not. Chad Hensley is
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: back on Graber Mill Road. The case is closed. The
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: sentence is 62 years. And somewhere in that courtroom, on
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: the fifth day of trial, A retired line supervisor with
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: frostbitten toes and a repaired shoulder told a jury exactly
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: what he had memorized in the dark. And the dark
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: answered for it. This show is made by Obermedia.