Latest / Dead Serious / The Skull In Boone County: Marlene Oakes

Transcript

The Skull In Boone County: Marlene Oakes · Dead Serious

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Dead Serious, a true crime podcast.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Ames Murray.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast contains mature themes.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Your discretion is advised.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: November 29th, 1981.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: A hunter is walking the woods in Boone County, Kentucky, when he finds something that does not belong there.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: It is part of a human skull.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: No teeth, no name.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: It will sit in an evidence room for 23 years.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: One mile away is a trailer where 13 months earlier a young mother named Marlene vanished in the middle of the night.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Her husband says she ran off.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Her diary says something very different.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the person who finally gives that skull its name back will be the little girl he left behind.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Hey guys, welcome back to Dead Serious.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Ames Marie, and today's story has everything: a love triangle, a diary, a missing woman, a skull in the woods, and a husband so confident in his own cleverness that he basically narrated his crime plans to anyone who would listen.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Spoiler, that did not age well for him.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: This is the story of Marlene Oaks.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Helen Marlene Oaks was born on December 7th, 1954.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody called her Helen.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: She went by Marlene.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: By 1980, she was 25 years old, living near Verona, Kentucky, and married to a man named William Alexander Major.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone called him Bill.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: They had been married for nine years and had two children, a son named Donald and a daughter named Lilana.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Marlene was a Lancaster, Kentucky girl.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Her parents, Bill and Lorraine Oaks, lived on Turner Avenue in Lancaster, and she was one of five daughters.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Her sisters were Sandy, Sheila, Debbie, and Patricia.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Three of them lived in Gerard County, and Patricia lived up in Hamilton, Ohio.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: This was a big, close family, and that is going to matter.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: The newspapers described Marlene as five foot one, about 115 pounds, with short, curly blonde hair and hazel eyes.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: She wore glasses when she drove.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: In the photo they ran, she is grinning so wide, her eyes are nearly closed.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Bill, meanwhile, was a self-employed mechanic with his own shop.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Hold on to that detail too.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the major household was not exactly a Hallmark movie.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: At some point, Bill and Marlene met a man named Glenn St.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Hilaire.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Glenn's truck had broken down while he was driving from Ohio to Texas, and the couple stopped to help.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: Bill ended up employing Glenn for a while, and eventually Glenn moved into a mobile home right there on the property.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because nothing says healthy marriage like a live in acquaintance in the backyard.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Marlene and Glenn grew close and they began an affair.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: And here's the part that should send your eyebrow all the way up.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: Bill reportedly encouraged it.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: He encouraged it.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: Meanwhile, Bill was rumored to be seeing another woman himself.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: So everyone in this house had a side plot, but only one person had a secret that could put him in prison.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Bill Major had a history.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: In 1975, he was convicted of molesting two boys.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: Marlene stayed married to him anyway.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then around 1980, she saw something that confirmed her worst fear.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: She witnessed Bill abusing their son, Donald.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: Marlene kept a diary, and what she wrote about that moment is not the diary of a woman who was confused or scared into silence.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: It is the diary of a mother who was done.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: She told Bill never to touch her again.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: She wrote that if he touched Donald, she would kill him.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: And she wrote that no judge in the world would hand him custody of her children over her.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: She was right about that.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: She just never got the chance to prove it.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Marlene started planning her exit.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: She was going to take both kids and leave.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: According to her diary, Bill had agreed to sign divorce papers on one condition.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: The abuse stayed quiet.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: Marlene wrote that if he went back on that, she would tell his mother.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: She also told her own sister about the divorced and about what Bill had done to Donald.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then she did something incredibly smart.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: She gave her diaries to Glenn for safekeeping.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: Why would a woman need someone else to hold her diaries?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because Bill had been telling people, several people, that if Marlene ever ended things, he would kill her.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And not just that, he went into detail about how he would make her body impossible to identify.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Which is a totally normal thing to share at a cookout, you know, obviously.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: On October 11th, 1980, Marlene and Bill had an argument.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: Glenn left the property to cool off.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: When he came back around midnight, the house was a mess and Marlene was gone.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: Bill's story?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: Marlene had left and taken the kids with her.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Very dramatic, very tragic, also completely false, because Bill had personally dropped both children off at a neighbor's house.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: So just to review, his wife supposedly kidnapped children who were at that very moment sitting at the neighbor's place where he'd put them.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: That was not the only strange thing Bill did.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: He handed several of his guns to another neighbor and started talking about moving back home to Rhode Island.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: Totally normal behavior for a man whose wife just walked out, nothing to see here.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: On October 13th, two days later, Marlene was officially reported missing.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: And here's a twist.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: According to the newspapers at the time, the person who walked into the police station and made that report was Bill.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: He told police there had been an argument before she left.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Glenn, meanwhile, figured out that Bill had been lying about the kids.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: He knew Marlene would never have abandoned her children, and he went to the police too.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: So Bill got his version on the record first.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Funny how that works.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: The case went to the Boone Florence felony squad under its commander, Major Don Stamper.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: The official version was that Marlene left her home in Verona late on Saturday night, October 11th.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: Police put out her description: blue jeans, a blue and green plaid flannel shirt, and a tan waist-length winter coat lined with white fleece.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: They also put out the car, a light blue 1972 Ford Pinto with a black interior and a CB radio, Kentucky.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Remember that car.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: When investigators looked closer, the picture was bleak.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Marlene had not taken anything with her.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: Her driver's license was still in the house.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: The only thing missing was that pinto.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: By mid-November, Boone County and Kentucky State Police were planning to take to the air and search for it from above around Verona.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: By November 24th, more than six weeks after she vanished, the story had spread to the Lexington paper, which reported that state police were still searching.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: The car never turned up.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Today, it is believed the car ended up in the Ohio River.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Police searched the property and found nothing.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: They saw no obvious signs of foul play in the trailer.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them thought, well, maybe she just left an unhappy marriage.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: They had her diary and they agreed it showed motive, but it was not considered enough to charge anyone with murder.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: And to be fair to the detectives, there was one detail that made she left sound plausible.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Felony squad detective Bruce Graham told the paper that Marlene had left home once before after another argument with Bill.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: But Graham also said that when she did, she called Bill's parents in Riverside, Rhode Island right away.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: This time, nobody heard a word.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: And there was something else.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Marlene's mother, Lorraine, was in the hospital in Danville with a ruptured appendix.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Graham spoke with Marlene's sister, Patricia, who said that if Marlene knew their mother was in the hospital, she would call.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: She never called because she could not.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: So let me make sure I have this right.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: A woman writes down that her husband amuses their son, that he has threatened her, and that she is leaving.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Then she vanishes without her license, and the official vibe is, hmm, could go either way.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: Both Bill and Glenn denied any involvement.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Detectives asked Bill to take a polygraph.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: He declined.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: Then within about a month of his wife vanishing, he sold his mechanic shop, packed up both kids, and moved to Rhode Island, where his family lived.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: By the time the newspapers were running Marlene's missing person story in November, Bill was already gone.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: He told Donald and Lalana that their mother had abandoned them because of drugs, alcohol, and prostitution.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: So not only did he take their mother from him, he took her reputation too.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: In Rhode Island, the abuse continued, including while Bill was at work, where he could bring one of the children along.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: So remember that hunter from the top of the show?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: On November 29th, 1981, a little over a year after Marlene disappeared, he found a partial skull about a mile from the major home.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: It had no teeth.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Examiners determined it belonged to a white woman around 30 years old.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: She had been shot multiple times, and there were signs of dismemberment.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now you might be thinking, a young woman goes missing, and a year later, a mile from her house, a woman's skull turns up with gunshot wounds.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Case close, right?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: Not in 1981.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Back then, dental records were the main way to identify skeletal remains and remember what Bill told people fee would do, make her unidentifiable.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: No teeth, no dental match.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: People suspected early that it was Marlene, but nobody could prove it.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: Years later, when nuclear DNA testing became possible, the bone was too deteriorated for it to work.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: So the skull sat unidentified.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: Meanwhile, every time a woman's body matching Marlene's description turned up somewhere, her dental records were sent off again.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: And every time, nothing.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: She was a mile from home the whole time.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: In 1981, Bill remarried.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Of course he did.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: His second wife, Pauline, eventually learned the truth from Donald and Lalana.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: The children told her their father had threatened to kill one of them if the other ever reported him.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: In 1984, Pauline went to the police.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Pauline, we salute you.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Days after being confronted, Bill held Lalana at gunpoint and told her to keep her mouth shut.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: He was arrested and convicted in 1985 and sentenced to 15 years.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: He served 11.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: Donald and Lalana went to live with their maternal grandmother, Marlene's mother, who had suspected Bill from day one.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: When Bill got out in 1996, Kentucky officials wanted to bring additional charges.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: But between the statute of limitations and what they called insufficient evidence, nothing happened.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Investigators also confirmed two more boys had been abused by him.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: So let us recap his record at this point.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Convicted twice for abusing children, the prime suspect in his wife's disappearance, and still walking around free.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like seriously.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: After Lalana moved in with her grandmother, her grandmother told her the truth as she saw it.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: She believed Marlene had been dead since the night she vanished.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: So Lalana went to her father and asked him where her mother was.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: She even offered him a deal.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: She would not pursue charges as long as her mother could have a proper burial.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: That is how badly she just wanted her mom back.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: His answer, more or less, if you think I am going to tell you where your mother is buried, you are crazy.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Which for the record is not a sentence on an innocent, you know, man says.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: So Lalana did it herself.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: She taught herself how investigations work by watching true crime documentaries.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, I am going to take a moment to appreciate that because some of you listening right now are building the exact same skills.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: When she was 20, Boone County police gave her access to her mother's case file.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: She interviewed witnesses, she searched for more of her mother's remains.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: She never found any, but she did not stop.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: In 2001, Lalana submitted her DNA for a mitochondrial test.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Mitochondrial DNA is passed down through the mother's line.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: It is easier to pull from old damaged bone than nuclear DNA, though it is less specific.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: The test would cost nearly$20,000, and the county initially said no.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: Marlene's sister offered to use her own retirement savings to pay for it.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Eventually, the county reversed course and paid.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: The result?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Lalana was maternally related to the woman whose school had been found in the woods back in 1981.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: After roughly 20 years, Marlene had her name back.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now, here is where Bill's own father enters the chat.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: He told authorities that Bill had confessed the murder to him while in prison, and he was disgusted by it.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: But on its own, that was not enough.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: The prison did not record inmate calls, and the two men had serious bad blood.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: So a defense attorney would just have a field day.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: So Bill's father agreed to let police tap his phone and he called his son.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: And Bill admitted it on tape to his dad.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: The man who once bragged about how carefully he would cover his tracks just talked himself right into handcuffs.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Bill was arrested.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: He later confessed to police and said he felt no remorse.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: His defense argued that a stroke he had in 1995 made him delusional.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, the stroke, that must explain 1980, too.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: Bill Major was formally charged in July 2001.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: His trial wrapped on July 28, 2003, and the jury took a grand total of 43 minutes to find him guilty.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: 43 minutes.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: He was sentenced to life in prison.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: In 2005, the conviction was reversed on appeal, so Kentucky tried him again.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: In 2009, the second jury convicted him again, and again he received a life sentence.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that wiretap call to his father, it was not vague.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: Bill told his dad that he killed Marlene, put her body in a sinkhole, pushed her pinto into the Ohio River, and got rid of the gun.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, he said it did not bother him at all.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: After his arrest, Bill switched strategies and went straight to blaming the victim.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: He told police Marlene had pulled a gun on him, that he lost his temper, and that he shot her.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: Twice in the face and four times more in her body.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Some lost temper.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: By the time of the trial in Boone Circuit Court, Bill was in a wheelchair from his stroke.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: He asked to skip his own trial because of his health.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: The judge said no.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: Donald and Lalana both testified.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Lalana told the jury about the day her father pointed a gun at her and told her to keep quiet.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: That little girl he tried to silence was now a grown woman, telling a courtroom exactly what he did.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: When the guilty verdict came in, the newspapers reported that Donald leaned over to his sister and told her it was finally over.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: And when Lalana got her chance to speak to her father, she told him, I hope you spend the rest of your life behind bars.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: He was sent to the Kentucky State Reformatory in LaGrange.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: And according to reports, that is exactly where he stayed.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Phil Major reportedly died in prison in October of 2017.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: No one claimed his body, and he is said to be buried in the prison cemetery.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: As for Marlene, the rest of her body was never found.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: But after more than 20 years in an evidence room, her skull was finally released to her family, and she was laid to rest in Lancaster Cemetery in Kentucky.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Her mother, Lorraine, later told the Cincinnati in choir how painful it had been all those years, knowing her daughter was sitting in a lab somewhere.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Marlene finally got to go home.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: And Donald and Lalana, they dropped the name Major.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Lalana went on to use the last name Bramble.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: So she's now Lalana Bramble.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: And Donald took his mother's maiden name.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: He became Donald Oaks.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Now for the ripple effect.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Something really beautiful is that how Lalana taught herself to investigate by watching true crime documentaries.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then her mother's case went on to become one.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Several, actually.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: The student became the syllabus.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: First, AE's Cold Case Files did an episode called Daddy Knows Best.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Then in August of 2004, Forensic Files also told the story on season nine, episode 13.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: In 2013, Investigation Discovery took its own pass at this case on a series called Catch My Killer.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then the big one in 2019, my favorite murder covered Marlene's case live on stage.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: So Marlene's story was told to a room full of Kentuckians about an hour and a half down the road from where she grew up.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: And also Forensic Files fans, which I love Forensic Files, the blog Forensic Files Now also did a deep dive recap of the case that pulls in old newspaper coverage and court details.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: It is a great rabbit hole.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: So there's always a ripple effect of these cases.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I guess I shouldn't say always, but oftentimes it creates a lot of different documentaries and books and whatnot.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: And those are always good to take a look at.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: So check those out if you're interested.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: Marlene Oakes knew exactly who her husband was.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: She wrote it down.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: She told her sister, she put her diaries in safe hands.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: She made a plan to protect her children.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: The system took more than 20 years to catch up to what she already knew in 1980.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the person who finally made it happen was the daughter Bill tried to silence at gunpoint.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review me as it truly helps the podcast growth you can listen wherever you get your podcast.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: You can subscribe on YouTube.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time, stay safe, stay skeptical, and stay dead serious.