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The Single Shoe on the Bridge: How Two Counties Lost Her · True Crime: Killer Confessions

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: At 11 minutes into his morning run on August 14, 2001,
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Curtis Jenkins stopped cold on a pedestrian bridge over Pell Creek.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: A single tan canvas flat sat balanced on a two-inch
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: concrete railing, size 7, left foot, tied, laces tucked. No woman.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: No second shoe. No bag. No foam. Just that one shoe,
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: standing upright above a 12-foot drop. as if someone had
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: placed it there with great care and then simply ceased
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: to exist. The bridge was Marker 7 on the Pell
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Creek Greenway, Harwick County, Indiana. Jenkins stood there for about
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: two minutes. He would later say he did not know
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: what he was looking at, but something in the stillness
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: of that shoe told him it was wrong. He called
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: it in and finished his run, because he did not
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: know what else to do. Hours later, 40 yards downstream
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: and 12 feet below, investigators found Susan Coleman. She was
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: 29 years old. She had been strangled. Her body had
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: been moved there after death, and whoever had placed that
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: shoe on the railing had left no fingerprint, no footwear impression,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: no fiber, nothing. Just the shoe. For 20 years, that
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: shoe and the woman beneath it would remain separated by
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: the one thing investigators could not bridge. a county line.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Susan Coleman had grown up in Granton, the kind of
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: mid-sized Indiana city where people recognize the name of your
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: high school before they ask your last name. By the
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: summer of 2001, she was 29 and had built something
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: quiet and specific for herself there. She worked as a
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: dental hygienist at a practice on Founders Avenue, three blocks
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: from the courthouse. Her colleagues described her as meticulous. Patience
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: remembered her by name. She had been at that job
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: for four years. She lived alone on the second floor
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: of a Victorian on Keswick Street, mustard yellow Honda Civic
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: in the lot. She was the kind of person who
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: watered her plants on a schedule and kept her gas
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: tank above a quarter full. Her friend Donna Scalf said
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: Susan was the one in the group who nearly always
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: texted when she got home safe. Nearly always. Tuesday nights
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: belonged to trivia at Hannigan's, Susan went most weeks. Her
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: team called themselves the Unsolved Mysteries. She was tied for
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: first place entering the August session. That detail, once you
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: know what happened, lands somewhere between irony and cruelty. On
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: the evening of August 12, 2001, Susan Coleman did not
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: show up to Hannigan's. She did not text Donna. She
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: did not text anyone. Her phone went to voicemail throughout
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: the night, then stopped ringing entirely by 10. Donna Scalf
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: called until midnight. She drove past Keswick Street twice. The
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Mustard Civic was gone. By morning, Donna filed a missing
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: persons report with the Toll County Sheriff's Office, and Deputy
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Warren Fisk opened a file. About 48 hours after Donna
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: filed the report, Curtis Jenkins found the shoe. There was
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: something already working against Susan Coleman before the investigation even began.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: She lived in Toll County. The greenway where her body
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: was found was in Harwick County, 41 miles east. Two
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: separate jurisdictions. Two separate filing systems. No shared database. In
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: those first weeks, the lead detectives on each side spoke
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: by phone three times and met in person once. Both
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: departments were operating on an implicit assumption. One that no
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: one ever wrote down in a report, but that shaped
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: every interview they conducted. Whoever killed Susan Coleman was someone
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: from her life, an ex-boyfriend, a coworker, a neighbor, someone
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: she knew. The interviews went inward, toward her circle, and
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: the answer, it turned out, was nowhere in that circle
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: at all. What the two detectives did not yet know
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: was that each of them had a statement sitting in
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: a separate file. Two witnesses, two sightings of the same
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: dark-colored pickup truck, 41 miles apart, filed in separate counties.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: never compared. That gap between two filing cabinets would cost
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Susan Coleman's family 20 years. Two statements. Two filing cabinets.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: 41 miles apart. Detective Bud Waverly worked out of Toll County.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: On the evening of August 12, 2001, a woman named
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: Trish Amos had been leaving her apartment building on Keswick
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: Street when she noticed her neighbor Susan on the front steps.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: Susan was not alone. A man stood beside a dark-colored
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: pickup truck Older model. Possibly a Ford. With one rear
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: tire flat. Or sitting very low. The truck was listing
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: to one side. The man was white. Late 20s to
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: mid 30s. Medium build. Gray t-shirt. From what Trish could see,
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Susan appeared to be giving him directions. Trish went inside.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: She did not see Susan go back in. She did
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: not see the truck leave. Waverly took the statement. He
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: filed it. 41 miles east. In Harwood County, Detective Paul
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Sherry had a different statement. A volunteer named Ed Pruitt
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: had been working near the Pell Creek Greenway on the
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: afternoon of August 13th hours before Jenkins found the body,
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: when he noticed a dark colored pickup parked on an
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: unpaved access road behind the Greenway's eastern fence. What made
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Pruitt look twice was the rear tire on the driver's side.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: It was brand new, different tread pattern, slightly cleaner rim
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: than the others. Sherry filed it. Neither detective called the
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: other about a truck. Neither man ever formally wrote down
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: the assumption that governed their investigation. But the shape of
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: every interview they conducted told the story. Both were looking inward,
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: toward Susan's life, toward people she knew. The truck was
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: an anomaly. Anomalies that don't fit the working theory tend
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: to get filed and forgotten. By winter 2002, the case
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: was cold. What stayed in the record, untouched, was a
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: partial profile. Technicians had recovered male DNA from under Susan
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: Coleman's fingernails. It was partial. It was insufficient for a
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: direct database match, in 2001. But it existed. It sat
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: in evidence storage in Harwick County, logged and sealed, for
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: the next 20 years. There was one more thing that
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: stayed in the record. The shoe. Forensic examiners had documented
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: it in precise detail. A single tan canvas flat. Size 7,
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: left foot, laces tied, laces tucked. Balanced on a 2-inch
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: concrete railing above a drainage channel. No scuff marks on
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: the railing. No disturbed surface. No fingerprints, no footwear impressions
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: on the bridge deck. Whoever placed it there had left
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: nothing of themselves behind except the act itself. Investigators at
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: the time noted it and moved on. There was no
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: explanation for it. An explanation was not available, so it
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: became a detail without a frame. A fact waiting for
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: a question no one had asked yet. In the summer
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: of 2019, the Harwick County Cold Case Unit assigned Marsha
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: O'Connor to a review rotation. She was 38 years old.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: She pulled Susan Coleman's file in October of that year.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: The Harwick file was incomplete. O'Connor noticed the gap immediately.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: There was no toll county material. She contacted an archivist
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: named Pete Voss, who located Waverly's file and sent it over.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: O'Connor set both files on her desk and read them
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: side by side. She got to Trish Amos' statement. Dark pickup,
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: flat rear tire, man in a gray t-shirt. Keswick Street, 6.30
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: to 7 in the evening, August 12. She got to
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: Ed Pruitt's statement. Dark pickup, access road behind the Greenway's
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: eastern fence, afternoon of August 13. brand new replacement tire
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: on the driver's side rear. She read both a second time.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: By February 2020, O'Connor had reached a formal conclusion. Both
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: witnesses had described the same truck, the flat tire on
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: the evening of August 12th, the brand new replacement tire
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: the following afternoon. Same vehicle, two counties, the hours in
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: between containing everything that had happened to Susan Coleman. This
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: is where the case pivots. Because for 20 years, everyone
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: who worked this file had looked at two separate sightings
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: and seen two separate things. O'Connor looked at them and
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: saw one vehicle making a round trip. She submitted the
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: DNA sample to the Indiana State Lab in March 2020
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: under updated familial search protocols that had not existed in 2001.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: The lab ran the profile against relatives of known offenders.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: In August 2020, a result came back. The match was
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: not to Susan's killer directly. It was to a man
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: named Derek Graham, who had a felony conviction out of
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: Randolph County from 2011. The familial algorithm indicated a close
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: male relative. Derek Graham had a brother. Picture Keswick Street
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: at 6.30 on a warm August evening. A truck pulls
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: to the curb. One rear tire is nearly flat. The
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: truck lists, visibly, a man gets out. He walks toward
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: the steps of the building where Susan Coleman is sitting outside.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: He is white medium build, wearing a gray t-shirt. He
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: is 27 years old. He has no criminal record. He
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: is not anyone Susan has ever met. That last detail
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: is the one that took 20 years to surface. Every
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: interview conducted in 2001 had gone inward. Ex-boyfriends. Coworkers. A
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: neighbor who'd had a dispute over parking. The logic felt sound.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: Violent crime against a woman. Her own front steps. An
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: intimate geography. The working assumption was reasonable. It was also
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: completely wrong. Chad Graham had grown up roughly 40 miles
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: from Granton. In 2001, he was running an informal roadside
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: assistance sideline. He helped stranded motorists, changed tires, jump-started cars.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: He drove a dark blue 2000 Ford F-150. He had
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: never been to Susan's practice on Founders Avenue. He had
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: never been to Hannigan's. He was not in her phone.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: not in her address book, not in her circle, in
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: any direction investigators thought to look. The flat tire was
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: not an accident of timing. Graham confirmed it himself during
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: a voluntary interview in October 2020, conducted by O'Connor and
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: Randolph County investigator Frank Dibble. In Sutter, Graham came without
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: a lawyer. When O'Connor showed him the DNA result, there
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: was a long silence. Then he said, what are you offering?
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: He had staged the flat tire. It was a pretext.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: He had approached Susan on the steps when the street
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: was briefly empty, and when it was briefly empty, he
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: had forced her into the truck. He killed her that evening,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: in a rural area of Harwick County. Before dawn on
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: August 13th, he moved her body to the drainage channel
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: below the pedestrian bridge, at marker 7. and concealed it
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: under a collapsed corrugated culvert. Then he drove to an
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: access road behind the Greenway's eastern fence where Ed Pruitt
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: noticed his truck the following afternoon, with a brand new
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: tire on the driver's side rear. He had changed the flat.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: He had been methodical. He had left no fibers, no
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: footwear impressions, no fingerprints on the railing. He had left
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: one thing. The shoe, balanced on the concrete, laces tucked,
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: which he could not explain in any way that resolved
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: into meaning. He said it had felt, at the time,
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: like something he needed to do. Graham led O'Connor and
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: Dibble to a field in eastern Harwick County. Beneath the surface,
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: Susan Coleman's phone, her bag, her keys, buried there since
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: August 2001. He told them he had returned to that
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: field once, in 2004. He did not explain why. In
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: spring 2021, Chad Graham was sentenced in Harwick County to
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: 38 years for murder in the second degree. The charge
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: reduction came through a negotiated plea. He had cooperated. Murder
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: in the first degree, with life without parole, came off
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: the table. That sentencing, the DNA match that had identified Graham,
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: was run against unsolved cases in adjacent jurisdictions. It returned
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: a result in Beaufort County, two states south, Peggy Dunstan,
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: 31 years old, strangled, found in a drainage ditch in 1998,
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: three years before Susan Coleman. Graham was charged separately in
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: that jurisdiction. He declined to cooperate. He claimed no memory
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: of Peggy Dunstan. That case remains unresolved. Elaine Coleman sat
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: in the third row at sentencing. She was 71 years old.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: She had been writing letters to the Harwick County Sheriff
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: every August 14, For 20 years, one letter for each
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: year her daughter had been gone, the acknowledgments had grown
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: shorter over time. She attended the sentencing, and she did
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: not speak to the press. When it was over, she
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: drove home to Granton alone. Chad Graham received 38 years
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: for the murder of Susan Coleman in the second degree.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: The plea negotiation had removed the first-degree charge and the
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: possibility of life without parole. In exchange, he had cooperated.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: He had confirmed the flat tire. He had confirmed the
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: steps on Caswick Street. The moment the street went empty,
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: the field in eastern Harwick County, where Susan's phone and
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: bag and keys had waited underground for 20 years. What
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: the plea could not extract was why he went back
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: to that field in 2004. He declined to say. That
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: answer belongs to him alone. Curtis Jenkins still runs the
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: Pell Creek Greenway. After Graham's conviction, a reporter reached him.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Jenkins said he thinks about the bridge at Marker 7
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: every time he crosses it. He did not elaborate. He
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: did not need to. The DNA match that broke the
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: case was not the first result the sample returned. When
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Indiana updated its familial search protocols and O'Connor submitted the
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: sample in March of 2020, the database connected her to
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: Derek Graham through a felony conviction in Randolph County. Derek
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: was not the man. But Derek had a brother. That
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: chain of inference, a relative's conviction, a shared bloodline, an
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: independent auto mechanic in Sutter who had never been in
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: Susan's social circle and had never been interviewed, is what
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: closed the distance between a shoe on a railing and
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: a man sitting across a table from Marsha O'Connor. At sentencing,
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: investigators ran Graham's DNA against unsolved cases in adjacent jurisdictions.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: Beaufort County Two states south returned a match. Peggy Dunstan,
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: 31 years old, strangled, found in a drainage ditch in 1998,
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: three years before Susan Coleman. Graham was charged separately in
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: that jurisdiction. He claimed no memory of Peggy Dunstan. He
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: declined to cooperate. That case remains open and unresolved. A
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: woman's name is still waiting for the same conclusion Susan
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: Coleman's family finally reached. Marsha O'Connor left the courtroom and
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: returned to her office. She pulled the next file. Susan
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: Coleman was 29 years old. She was a dental hygienist.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: She drove a mustard yellow Honda Civic and showed up
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: most Tuesdays for trivia at Hannigan's, and she was tied
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: for first entering the August session. Her team was called
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: the Unsolved Mysteries. She was on the front steps of
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: her building on Keswick Street at approximately half past six
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: in the evening on August 12th. 2001. A woman named
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: Trish Amos saw her there, talking to a man beside
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: a truck with a flat tire, and then went inside.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: She did not see Susan go in. No one did.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: 20 years passed. An archivist named Pete Voss found a box.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: A detective named Marsha O'Connor read two witness statements, side
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: by side, and saw what no one had seen before.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: A DNA database connected a bloodline to a brother. and
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: a man who had never known Susan Coleman, who had
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: only watched the street go quiet at the right moment,
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: finally told investigators where her keys were. There is something
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: in this case that resists a clean close. Graham left
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: a shoe on a railing above the place where Susan's
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: body lay, tied the laces, and tucked them in. He
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: stood on that bridge in the dark and placed it
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: there and then walked away. He said it felt, at
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: the time, like something he needed to do. He could
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: not say more than that, and the record does not
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: push further. What it means is not clear. That it
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: happened is, Susan Coleman deserved a Tuesday in August. She
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: deserved to defend her trivia lead and drive home in
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: her yellow Civic and go to sleep. She deserved an
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: ordinary evening that did not end at a culvert in
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: Harwick County. This case took 20 years to reach a courtroom.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: It should not have taken that long. The two detectives
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: who worked it in 2001 were not careless men. They
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: worked with what they had in separate rooms, in separate counties,
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: with no shared database and no bridge between their files.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: The system failed before either of them could. That is
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: worth remembering the next time a file gets closed too soon.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: Elaine Coleman was 50 years old when her daughter disappeared.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: She was 71 when she sat in the third row.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: and watched a man sentenced for what he had done.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: She drove home alone. Whatever she carried on that drive
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: is hers. But she had the answer. After 20 letters
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: and 20 Augusts, she finally had the answer. This show
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: is made by Oble Media.