Latest / Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases / The Rosemary Pot: How a Green Cutting Broke a 19-Year Silence
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: At seven fourteen in the morning on January tenth, two
- 0:07Speaker 1: thousand three, a police officer crouched beside a terra cotta
- 0:11Speaker 1: pot sitting upright against a chain link fence in eighteen
- 0:15Speaker 1: degree air. The rosemary inside it was green, pliable, alive.
- 0:21Speaker 1: Four consecutive nights had dropped below twenty degrees, and that
- 0:25Speaker 1: plant should have been dead. It wasn't, and neither was
- 0:28Speaker 1: the question of who put it there, a question that
- 0:31Speaker 1: would take nineteen years, two victims, and the sealed letter
- 0:35Speaker 1: to answer. Six feet north of that pot, Officer Bryan
- 0:39Speaker 1: cho could see the body of a man, the Perry.
- 0:42Speaker 1: She was fully dressed for the cold. Her handbag was beside,
- 0:46Speaker 1: her contents untouched. She had left her bowling league two
- 0:50Speaker 1: hours earlier and walked to her car alone. Now she
- 0:54Speaker 1: was here at the eastern fence of Sutter Park, in
- 0:57Speaker 1: a place that was not on any route between the
- 0:59Speaker 1: bowling alley and her car.
- 1:02Speaker 2: The pot was from her porch.
- 1:04Speaker 1: One of her neighbors would confirm that within the day,
- 1:07Speaker 1: and the rosemary inside it had been grown from a
- 1:10Speaker 1: single cutting Amanda brought home in nineteen eighty nine, a
- 1:14Speaker 1: plant she had tended for fourteen years before someone carried
- 1:17Speaker 1: it out of her life, along with everything else. That detail,
- 1:22Speaker 1: the living plant in the killing cold, is the first
- 1:24Speaker 1: thing investigators could not explain. It would not be the last.
- 1:29Speaker 1: Amanda Perry had lived on Winthrop Lane in Calloway Lanes
- 1:32Speaker 1: for twenty two years. She knew which neighbors left their
- 1:35Speaker 1: porch lights on late. She knew the sound the heating
- 1:38Speaker 1: pipes made in January. She had built that life deliberately, incrementally,
- 1:44Speaker 1: the way she tended her container garden, one season at
- 1:47Speaker 1: a time. She was fifty four years old and worked
- 1:51Speaker 1: the orthopedic floor at Pembroke General as a registered nurse.
- 1:55Speaker 1: The work was physical and demanding, and she was good
- 1:58Speaker 1: at it. Colleagues remain remembered her as someone who noticed things.
- 2:02Speaker 1: A patient's posture shifting before they said anything was wrong,
- 2:06Speaker 1: a family member standing too still in the hallway. Her
- 2:10Speaker 1: garden lined the front porch in rows of terra cotta pots.
- 2:14Speaker 1: The rosemary was the oldest plant out there. She had
- 2:17Speaker 1: propagated it from a single cutting, brought home in nineteen
- 2:21Speaker 1: eighty nine, and over fourteen years it had become a
- 2:24Speaker 1: kind of landmark on Winthrop Lane. Her neighbor Karl Oxner,
- 2:28Speaker 1: would later tell investigators he could tud identify her pots
- 2:33Speaker 1: by sight. On Thursday evenings, she bowled at Callaway Lan's.
- 2:38Speaker 1: It was not a complicated habit league night, same people,
- 2:42Speaker 1: same lane assignments, same drive home. On the evening of
- 2:45Speaker 1: January ninth, two thousand three, she left the alley at
- 2:49Speaker 1: nine fifteen alone. Her phone showed no calls and no texts.
- 2:54Speaker 1: In the ninety minutes that followed. Her car was found
- 2:57Speaker 1: locked on Draper Avenue, two blocks from Sutter Park, undisturbed.
- 3:02Speaker 1: Whatever happened between the parking spot and the park's eastern fence,
- 3:06Speaker 1: Amanda walked into it without apparent alarm. There was no
- 3:09Speaker 1: sign of a struggle at the car, no broken glass,
- 3:12Speaker 1: no forced entry. Her ex husband was out of state
- 3:16Speaker 1: with a confirmed alibi. Her daughter Noel twenty six at
- 3:20Speaker 1: the time, was not in Tallaway Lanes that night. The
- 3:24Speaker 1: people closest to Amanda pointed investigators outward, not inward. What
- 3:28Speaker 1: the case file did not yet contain, what it would
- 3:31Speaker 1: take nineteen more years to surface, was a single piece
- 3:35Speaker 1: of information. Someone had been watching Amanda Perry long before
- 3:39Speaker 1: January ninth, someone who knew her name, her route, her schedule,
- 3:45Speaker 1: someone who had already been inside Pembrouke General twice and
- 3:49Speaker 1: who on the second visit, had asked a nurse named
- 3:52Speaker 1: Sandra Overbeck about Amanda by name. That person lived three
- 3:57Speaker 1: blocks from Sutter Park. His van had been ticketed on
- 4:00Speaker 1: Calvert Street twice in the two weeks before the murder,
- 4:03Speaker 1: both times after eight in the evening, and on the
- 4:07Speaker 1: night Amanda Perry died, a young woman who shared his
- 4:11Speaker 1: building watched him walk out the back door carrying something
- 4:14Speaker 1: small and dark, place it in the rear of his van,
- 4:18Speaker 1: and come back inside within three minutes. She did not
- 4:22Speaker 1: call the police that night. She would not call them
- 4:25Speaker 1: for nineteen years. The reasons she stayed silent and what
- 4:29Speaker 1: it cost her to finally speak are part of this
- 4:32Speaker 1: story too. The blue nylon cord was eight inches long.
- 4:37Speaker 1: That is a small thing, a scrap, the kind of
- 4:40Speaker 1: item that disappears into evidence bags and stays there for
- 4:44Speaker 1: decades unread, because in two thousand and three there was
- 4:48Speaker 1: not enough biological material on it to build a profile.
- 4:52Speaker 2: But the cord was not accidental.
- 4:55Speaker 1: It had been threaded through the interior latch of the
- 4:57Speaker 1: maintenance gate and tied back to the the chain link,
- 5:01Speaker 1: so that pulling from outside would lift the bar from within.
- 5:05Speaker 1: No lock was forced, no padlock was cut, The gate
- 5:09Speaker 1: simply opened. Someone had engineered that entry weeks in advance.
- 5:13Speaker 1: Weathering on the cord when forensic technicians finally examined it
- 5:16Speaker 1: in twenty two, was consistent with outdoor exposure since early December,
- 5:21Speaker 1: nearly a month before Amanda Perry died. That detail lands
- 5:25Speaker 1: differently once you absorb it. This was not a crime
- 5:28Speaker 1: of opportunity. The gate was ready, the park was ready.
- 5:32Speaker 1: The only variable left was Amanda. Consider what investigators had
- 5:37Speaker 1: in January two thousand three, a woman dead in a park,
- 5:41Speaker 1: a locked car two blocks away, an intact handbag, a
- 5:46Speaker 1: rosemary plant still green in eighteen degree cold, and a
- 5:51Speaker 1: gate that had never been forced. Detective War and Pruitt
- 5:55Speaker 1: worked the case through two thousand four.
- 5:57Speaker 2: He interviewed neighbors, co workers, the bowling league.
- 6:00Speaker 1: He ran the ex husband's alibi to ground confirmed out
- 6:04Speaker 1: of state and air tight. He looked at every name
- 6:08Speaker 1: Amanda's daughter, No well provided. The file grew thick, and
- 6:13Speaker 1: every lead bent back to the same wall. No physical
- 6:17Speaker 1: evidence pointing at a specific person, no witnesses to the
- 6:20Speaker 1: act itself, no call on a man this phone in
- 6:23Speaker 1: her final ninety minutes. The case went cold in spring
- 6:27Speaker 1: two thousand four. Pruitt retired in twenty eleven. He took
- 6:31Speaker 1: a personal copy of the file with him. That copy
- 6:34Speaker 1: matters remember it. Seventeen years passed. Then, in summer twenty
- 6:40Speaker 1: twenty one, a maintenance crew working a drainage culvert outside
- 6:45Speaker 1: Glenfield found human remains. The manner of death, once the
- 6:50Speaker 1: medical examiner completed the analysis, was ligature strangulation. The victim
- 6:55Speaker 1: was Patricia Morse, forty seven, who had vanished from Glenfield
- 6:59Speaker 1: and nightnineteen ninety eight.
- 7:01Speaker 2: She had been missing for twenty three years. The County Cold.
- 7:05Speaker 1: Case Unit assigned the Morse file to Detective Howard Anderson
- 7:09Speaker 1: in fall twenty twenty one. Anderson pulled records he cross referenced,
- 7:14Speaker 1: and then he found a name that connected both Glenfield
- 7:17Speaker 1: and Callaway Lanes through service contracts, A name attached to
- 7:23Speaker 1: an appliance repair business that had performed work at a
- 7:26Speaker 1: storage facility in Glenfield four times in the eight months
- 7:29Speaker 1: before Patricia Morse disappeared. The same business had sent a
- 7:33Speaker 1: technician to Pembroke General twice. On the second visit, that
- 7:37Speaker 1: technician had asked a nurse named Sandra Overbeck about Amanda
- 7:41Speaker 1: Perry by name. Anderson spent three weeks in archives locating
- 7:45Speaker 1: a former employee of that business named Doug Wetzel. Wetzel
- 7:50Speaker 1: told him about a van he had seen at the
- 7:52Speaker 1: rear service door of the Glenfield facility without an active
- 7:55Speaker 1: work order. The van matched the one registered to his
- 7:59Speaker 1: former employer. The employer's name was Bruce Norris in two
- 8:03Speaker 1: thousand three. He had been forty one years old. He
- 8:06Speaker 1: lived on Calvert Street, three blocks from Sutter Park. His
- 8:10Speaker 1: van had been ticketed on that same street twice in
- 8:12Speaker 1: the two weeks before Amanda Perry's murder, both times after
- 8:16Speaker 1: eight in the evening. Pruet had interviewed Norris in two
- 8:19Speaker 1: thousand three co operative home alone the night of January ninth. Unverifiable,
- 8:26Speaker 1: no criminal record, no arrest. Now, Anderson requested a forensic
- 8:31Speaker 1: re examination of the original evidence, The blue nylon cord
- 8:35Speaker 1: from the maintenance gate nineteen years in a property locker
- 8:39Speaker 1: still held a recoverable touch DNA profile. Early two thousand
- 8:43Speaker 1: twenty two, that profile came back as a match to
- 8:46Speaker 1: Bruce Norris for nineteen years. The assumption had been reasonable.
- 8:51Speaker 1: Whoever killed Amanda Perry was a stranger, a predator she
- 8:55Speaker 1: crossed paths with on a single terrible night, some one
- 8:58Speaker 1: who could never be traced because the contact was too
- 9:01Speaker 1: brief to leave a record. That assumption was wrong in
- 9:05Speaker 1: almost every direction. Four days after Norris's arrest in March
- 9:09Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, a woman named Lynette Grover walked into
- 9:13Speaker 1: the County Cold Case Unit. She was twenty four in
- 9:17Speaker 1: January two thousand three. She had lived above Norris's repair
- 9:21Speaker 1: shop on Calvert Street. On the night of January ninth,
- 9:25Speaker 1: at approximately nine forty five in the evening, she had
- 9:29Speaker 1: watched Norris come out the back door of the building.
- 9:34Speaker 1: He was carrying something small and dark. She described it
- 9:37Speaker 1: as a dark pot the size of a flower pot.
- 9:40Speaker 1: He placed it in the rear of the van. He
- 9:43Speaker 1: was back inside within three minutes. When she asked, he
- 9:48Speaker 1: said he had been finishing an invoice. She had not
- 9:51Speaker 1: called the police that night. She had not called them
- 9:54Speaker 1: in the weeks and months that followed, or in the
- 9:56Speaker 1: years after that. She told the detective she had been
- 10:00Speaker 1: and afraid of Norris. She had not believed anyone would
- 10:03Speaker 1: take her word against a cooperative man with no record
- 10:06Speaker 1: and an explanation ready, so she carried it. She was
- 10:09Speaker 1: present in the court room when Norris died. Bruce Norris
- 10:12Speaker 1: suffered a cardiac event in county custody in January twenty
- 10:16Speaker 1: twenty three, three weeks into his trial.
- 10:20Speaker 2: He was sixty years old.
- 10:22Speaker 1: The judge ruled that the evidence already admitted, combined with
- 10:26Speaker 1: recorded testimony, was sufficient to proceed. In spring twenty twenty three,
- 10:31Speaker 1: Norris was convicted of the first degree murder of Amanda Perry.
- 10:35Speaker 1: In fall twenty twenty three, he was convicted of the
- 10:38Speaker 1: second degree murder of Patricia Morse. He was not alive
- 10:42Speaker 1: to hear either verdict. A posthumous appeal filed by his
- 10:46Speaker 1: estate attorney on DNA chain of custody grounds failed in
- 10:49Speaker 1: twenty twenty five. That winter, his sealed letter was released.
- 10:54Speaker 1: In it, Norris confirmed he had called Amanda from a
- 10:57Speaker 1: blocked number on the night of January nine, telling her
- 11:01Speaker 1: he had found something near the maintenance gate. He confirmed
- 11:05Speaker 1: he had taken the rosemary pot from her car after
- 11:08Speaker 1: she parked on Calvert Street. He confirmed he had placed
- 11:11Speaker 1: it at the fence. He offered no explanation for that
- 11:14Speaker 1: last act, none that he expected anyone to understand. Picture
- 11:19Speaker 1: the gate. On an early December evening, Norris crouches at
- 11:23Speaker 1: the latch, threading cord through cold metal, testing the pole.
- 11:28Speaker 1: He comes back on other evenings to check it. The
- 11:30Speaker 1: cord weathers, the plan waits, and somewhere across Calloway Lanes,
- 11:35Speaker 1: Amanda Perry tends her rosemary on a porch row she
- 11:38Speaker 1: has kept since nineteen eighty nine, not knowing that the
- 11:41Speaker 1: particular deliberate shape of her habits the bowling night the
- 11:46Speaker 1: root home the plants she cared for has been studied
- 11:50Speaker 1: from the outside. The scenario built from Norris's own words.
- 11:53Speaker 2: As this.
- 11:54Speaker 1: The call reached her while she was en route to
- 11:57Speaker 1: her car, or just after she parked. She tried, rusted
- 12:00Speaker 1: the message enough to walk toward the gate. She had
- 12:03Speaker 1: no reason not to. The gate opened without force. The
- 12:07Speaker 1: cord made sure of it. The rosemary pot left at
- 12:10Speaker 1: the fence after her death was never explained in language
- 12:14Speaker 1: Norris chose to offer. The act is in the record.
- 12:17Speaker 1: The motive behind it lives only in the silence.
- 12:20Speaker 2: He kept and then took with him.
- 12:22Speaker 1: What the letter did resolve entirely was the question investigators
- 12:26Speaker 1: carried for nineteen years whether anyone had deliberately engineered access
- 12:31Speaker 1: to that park weeks before Amanda Perry died, or whether
- 12:35Speaker 1: the gate's opening had been coincidence. It was not coincidence.
- 12:40Speaker 1: He had planned it in December and waded through the cold.
- 12:43Speaker 1: Bruce Norris died in county custody in January of twenty
- 12:47Speaker 1: twenty three, three weeks into his trial. He was sixty
- 12:51Speaker 1: years old. He never heard a verdict read aloud. The
- 12:55Speaker 1: judge did not close the case. Evidence already admitted into
- 12:59Speaker 1: the record, combined with recorded testimony, was ruled sufficient to
- 13:03Speaker 1: support a verdict in absentia. In the spring of twenty
- 13:06Speaker 1: twenty three, Bruce Norris was convicted of first degree murder
- 13:10Speaker 1: in the death of Amanda Perry. In the fall of
- 13:13Speaker 1: that same year, second conviction followed second degree murder in
- 13:18Speaker 1: the death of Patricia Morse. He was not present for
- 13:21Speaker 1: either of them. An estate attorney filed a posthumous appeal
- 13:25Speaker 1: in twenty twenty four, challenging the DNA evidence on chain
- 13:29Speaker 1: of custody grounds. The appeal was heard and failed in
- 13:32Speaker 1: twenty twenty five, every legal avenue was exhausted. That winter,
- 13:38Speaker 1: the sealed letter was released. Detective Howard Anderson, who had
- 13:42Speaker 1: spent months in storage archives linking two cases that had
- 13:47Speaker 1: never officially been joined, had retired by then. Detective Warren Pruitt,
- 13:52Speaker 1: who carried a personal copy of the Peri file for
- 13:55Speaker 1: nineteen years and never stopped believing the investigation was unfinished,
- 14:00Speaker 1: did not live to read the letter. Lynette Grover, who
- 14:04Speaker 1: waited two decades before walking into the cold case unit,
- 14:07Speaker 1: attended the trial. She was in the room when Norris collapsed.
- 14:12Speaker 1: She had driven herself. She stayed. What the verdicts established
- 14:17Speaker 1: legally and permanently is this. Amanda Perry did not walk
- 14:21Speaker 1: into that park by accident. She was called there. The
- 14:26Speaker 1: gate was not left open by maintenance error. It was
- 14:29Speaker 1: engineered weeks in advance with a length of blue nylon
- 14:33Speaker 1: chord and a patience that is difficult to hold in
- 14:36Speaker 1: the mind without revulsion. The chord connected those two facts,
- 14:41Speaker 1: the planning and the night, and the touch DNA on
- 14:44Speaker 1: that cord connected both of them to one man. Patricia
- 14:48Speaker 1: Morse's family had spent twenty three years without an answer
- 14:51Speaker 1: to where she had gone, or why the culvert where
- 14:54Speaker 1: her remains were found had been within county boundaries the
- 14:58Speaker 1: entire time. The The ligature mark on her remains matched
- 15:02Speaker 1: the manner of Amanda Perry's death. No physical evidence had
- 15:06Speaker 1: linked both women to Norris before Anderson began his archive
- 15:10Speaker 1: review in the fall of twenty twenty one. Three weeks
- 15:13Speaker 1: of work, one recovered name. Everything followed from that. The
- 15:18Speaker 1: open question the letter did not close is the Rosemary pot.
- 15:22Speaker 1: Norris confirmed he took it from Amanda Perry's car. He
- 15:26Speaker 1: confirmed he carried it to the fence and placed it
- 15:29Speaker 1: upright in the cold ground. He wrote that he had
- 15:32Speaker 1: no explanation he expected anyone to understand. Investigators interpreted the
- 15:37Speaker 1: act as deliberate. The letter does not contradict that it
- 15:41Speaker 1: simply offers nothing else. The pot is an evidence. The
- 15:45Speaker 1: reason it was placed there belongs to a logic that
- 15:48Speaker 1: Norris chose not to translate and then died before anyone
- 15:52Speaker 1: could press the question further. There is a detail from
- 15:55Speaker 1: the original discovery that stays with this case long after
- 15:58Speaker 1: the verdicts. On the bad morning of January ninth, two
- 16:01Speaker 1: thousand three, Kelly Sullivan ran her usual route along the
- 16:05Speaker 1: eastern fence of Sutter Park. The temperature was eighteen degrees.
- 16:10Speaker 1: The soil in that eight inch terra cotta pot was
- 16:13Speaker 1: freshly watered, still pliable, still alive. Twelve hours after Amanda
- 16:18Speaker 1: Perry had left a bowling alley at nine fifteen and
- 16:21Speaker 1: walked toward a gate that had been prepared for her
- 16:24Speaker 1: a window of ninety minutes before. Linnette Grover watched Norris
- 16:27Speaker 1: load a dark pot into his van at approximately nine
- 16:32Speaker 1: forty five. The rosemary cutting was green. It had been tended.
- 16:37Speaker 1: That fact, the living green of a plant in frozen
- 16:40Speaker 1: air was the first thing that told investigators something deliberate
- 16:44Speaker 1: had happened here. Not the body, the pot, because a
- 16:48Speaker 1: plant that has been watered does not survive eighteen degrees
- 16:51Speaker 1: by accident. Some one had cared for it recently enough
- 16:55Speaker 1: that it still held warmth. Noel Perry was twenty six
- 16:59Speaker 1: years old when her her mother did not come home
- 17:01Speaker 1: from bowling league. She was forty six when the sealed
- 17:04Speaker 1: letter was released, and she read what Bruce Norris had
- 17:07Speaker 1: chosen to say and had chosen not to say. Whatever
- 17:11Speaker 1: she found in those pages is hers. What the record
- 17:14Speaker 1: holds is this. Amanda Perry spent twenty two years building
- 17:19Speaker 1: a life on Winthrop Lane. She nursed patience on an
- 17:22Speaker 1: orthopedic floor. She grew rosemary from a single cutting she
- 17:27Speaker 1: had carried since nineteen eighty nine, tending one plant into
- 17:31Speaker 1: a full porch row, giving pieces of it away to neighbors,
- 17:35Speaker 1: propagating something that was supposed to outlast a season. It did,
- 17:40Speaker 1: just not in the way she intended. The investigation that
- 17:43Speaker 1: recovered her case began not with new technology, not with
- 17:47Speaker 1: a tip, but with a detective a sign to review
- 17:50Speaker 1: a separate disappearance from nineteen ninety eight, a woman named
- 17:55Speaker 1: Patricia Morse, whose remains were found in a culvert twenty
- 17:59Speaker 1: three years after she vanished. Anderson pulled the Morse file,
- 18:03Speaker 1: found a name in the service records, and followed it
- 18:05Speaker 1: into the Perry case.
- 18:07Speaker 2: The connection was not obvious.
- 18:09Speaker 1: It took three weeks of archive work to surface Doug
- 18:12Speaker 1: Wetzel's account of a van at the Glenfield storage facility.
- 18:15Speaker 1: From there, the chord from the chord, the DNA from
- 18:19Speaker 1: the DNA, the arrest two women two decades apart. One
- 18:24Speaker 1: chain of custody that held the cases of Amanda Perry
- 18:28Speaker 1: and Patricia Morse are closed by verdict, the appeals are exhausted,
- 18:33Speaker 1: the letter is public. What remains open, and what no
- 18:37Speaker 1: verdict can fully address, is the distance between legal resolution
- 18:41Speaker 1: and the kind of understanding a daughter needs or a
- 18:45Speaker 1: family needs, when what they are handed is a conviction
- 18:49Speaker 1: belonging to a.
- 18:50Speaker 2: Man who is already gone.
- 18:52Speaker 1: Bruce Norris was convicted of both murders and heard neither judgment.
- 18:57Speaker 1: That fact belongs in the record alongside everything else. It
- 19:01Speaker 1: does not cancel the verdicts. It does not undo the
- 19:04Speaker 1: nineteen years Amanda Perry's case sat cold, or the twenty
- 19:09Speaker 1: three years Patricia Morse's family spent without her remains. It
- 19:14Speaker 1: is simply where the timeline ends. Two women named, two convictions, entered,
- 19:19Speaker 1: one man dead before the gavel fell the Rosemary cutting.
- 19:23Speaker 1: Kelly Sullivan found that January morning did not survive the
- 19:26Speaker 1: evidence process. But the plant on Amanda Perry's porch, the
- 19:31Speaker 1: one that came from a single cutting in nineteen eighty nine,
- 19:34Speaker 1: the one her neighbors remembered, the one she had tended
- 19:37Speaker 1: through every winter on Winthrop Lane.
- 19:40Speaker 2: Her daughter still has it. This show is made by
- 19:44Speaker 2: Obomedia