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The Glove on the Ice: How a Receipt Cracked a Killer · True Crime: Killer Confessions

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: At 7.15 on the morning of January 14, 1977, a
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: man named Stanley Kowalski pulled his truck off County Road
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: 9 to check the ice on Tanner's Creek before heading
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: to work. What he found sitting on the frozen surface
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: had no business being there. A single burgundy wool glove,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: palm up, cuff, weighted with small stones, and a folded
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: piece of paper tucked inside. And not one footprint of
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: anywhere on the snow or ice around it. Someone had
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: placed that glove where no one could have walked. She
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: was 31 years old, and the people who loved her
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: were already sick with worry. What no one knew yet,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: what would take 29 more years to surface, was that
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: a man had been watching Angela for months, that the
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: paper inside that glove would one day bring him to justice,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: and that the other glove, the left one, was sitting
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: in a coffee can in a storage unit, waiting. Angela
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Thompson grew up in Mercer County, the younger of two
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: daughters in a family that treated punctuality like a religion.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Her sister Patrice was older by four years, and described
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: Angela as someone who returned every phone call the same
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: day she received it. Their mother, Norma, said Angela had
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: never once been late for Sunday dinner Not in 31 years.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: By 1976, Angela had built a life that was small
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: in geography and steady in rhythm. She worked as an
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: accounts clerk at the Mercer County Farm Bureau on State
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Route 40 in Harwick, Ohio. She drove a Buick Skylark.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: She rented a house on Elm Fork Road, a quiet
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: stretch of road where neighbors knew each other by name
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: and nobody locked their doors during the day. She was
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: reliable in the way that makes a person invisible to worry.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: That reliability was also what made her disappearance so immediately
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: alarming to everyone who knew her. Who knew her? On
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Tuesday lunches, Angela sat at the third stool from the left,
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: at the Lakeview Diner, arriving at 12.10 and leaving by 12.50.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: She ordered the same thing every week. Soup, grilled cheese,
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: coffee with one sugar, and no cream. The staff knew
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: her order before she opened her mouth. Several of them
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: would later tell investigators that Angela was the kind of
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: customer who made a place feel anchored, someone you expected
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: to see every week, without exception. That Tuesday ritual was
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: not just habit. It was without her knowing it, a
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: schedule someone else had memorized. The Farm Bureau where Angela
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: worked received deliveries twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, from
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: a Van Wert Agricultural Supply Company For roughly 14 months
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: leading up to January 1977, those deliveries were made by
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: the same driver. His name was Howard Dalton. He was
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: 34 years old, rented a room in Paulding, Ohio, and
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: ran a route that brought him within steps of Angela
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Thompson on a near-weekly basis. Angela's coworkers would later say
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: they barely noticed the delivery drivers. The loading area was
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: at the back of the building, through a service entrance
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: that faced away from the main office. It was a
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: door that investigators in 1977 never examined. Dalton, by his
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: own later account, had seen Angela crossing the Farm Bureau
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: parking lot. He had watched her at the Lakeview Diner
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: during his Tuesday route. He had driven past her house
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: on Elm Fork Road at least three times. Angela had
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: no idea he existed. She did not know him. She
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: had never spoken to him. There was no connection between them,
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: only the geography of his route and the precision of
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: her habits. On the evening of January 8, 1977, Angela
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Thompson's routine ended. The medical examiner would later place her
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: time of death somewhere in the late hours of January
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: 8 or the early hours of January 9. By the
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: morning of January 10, she had not come to work.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: Her supervisor called the house. No answer. A co-worker drove
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: out to Elm Fork Road and found the Buick Skylark
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: sitting in the driveway, the house locked, no sign of
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: forced entry. The missing person's report was filed on January 12.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: Six days after Angela's death, a glove appeared on the
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: ice of Tanner's Creek, and somewhere in that frozen interval,
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: a man who had watched her for months was deciding
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: what he needed to do next. On the morning of
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: January 14, 1977, a man named Stanley Kowalski pulled off
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: County Road 9 to check his ice fishing gear. It
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: was 7.15 in the morning. The temperature was below freezing.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: Tanner's Creek was a solid sheet of white. He saw
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: it from the bank. A single burgundy wool glove lying
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: palm up on the ice, roughly 30 feet from shore.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: The cuff was weighted down with small stones. Something folded
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: was tucked inside it. Kowalski walked to the edge, stopped,
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: looked at the surface in both directions. There were no footprints.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: No boot marks. No drag lines. Just the glove, sitting
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: there as if it had been lowered from the air.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: That image, a glove on unmarked ice, cuff pinned by stones,
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: was the first thing investigators saw when they arrived that morning.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: It was also the last thing they truly examined. Inside
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: the glove was a folded sheet of paper. Carbon copy.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: the kind used for delivery receipts. The document examiner who
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: processed it wrote four words in his report. Generic form,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: agricultural supply. No name, no legible numbers. No follow-up action
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: was recorded. The page was logged, placed in an envelope,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: and filed with the glove. Two days later, on January 16th,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: Angela Thompson was found in a drainage culvert beneath County
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: Road 9, approximately three-tenths of a mile from where Kowalski
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: had parked his truck. She had been strangled. She was
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: 31 years old. The right-hand glove found on the ice
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: matched Angela's coat. Burgundy wool, her size. The left-hand glove
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: was not recovered. Investigators assumed it had been lost in
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: the field, or perhaps never made it out of the car.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: They moved on. The working theory took shape quickly. Angela
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: had last been seen by a neighbor sometime on January 8.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: She was single. She had dated someone the previous year,
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: a man named Victor Slade, an equipment salesman she had
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: met through work. The relationship had ended quietly. Slade was
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: interviewed once, then twice, then a third time. His alibi
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: was consistent. His manner was cooperative. The transcripts show no link,
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: no inconsistency, nothing that pointed anywhere. He was cleared. Investigators
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: never walked to the back of the Farm Bureau building
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: The service entrance, a loading area facing away from the
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: main office, accessible from the county road, was never documented
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: in the case files. The drivers who came through that
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: door were never asked for their names. By 1978, the
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: case had gone cold. The files went into storage in 1983.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: The detective who had led the investigation, Warren Eccles, retired
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: in 1991. He died in 2002, taking with him whatever
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: he remembered And whatever he had chosen not to write down,
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Angela's sister, Patrice Thompson, did not stop. Every January for
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: 29 years, Patrice wrote a letter to the Mercer County Sheriff.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: She received form acknowledgements, and then silence. She wrote to
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: the State Attorney General twice. She eventually wrote to the
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation's Cold Case Unit in 2005.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: That letter worked its way through an administrative chain. and
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: landed on the desk of a BCI investigator named Carol Hoffman.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: Hoffman requested the Thompson case box in January of 2006.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: It arrived in poor condition. Some documents had water damage
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: along the edges. The photograph log was incomplete, but inside
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: the box, still in its original evidence envelope, was the
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: receipts page from the glove. Hoffman sent it for ESDA
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: analysis in March of 2006. ESDA electrostatic detection analysis does
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: not read ink. It reads pressure. When a pen moves
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: across a pad of paper, the sheets beneath receive faint
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: impressions of that movement. Those impressions survive for decades. The
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: original ink may be gone, but the paper remembers the weight.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: The analysis came back with ghost impressions across three separate
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: zones of the page. A partial wrote number. A partial
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: date in early January. and four digits, the last four
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: digits of a vehicle registration number. That was enough. Cross-referencing
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: commercial vehicle registrations for the relevant years and counties took time.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: But the combination of route number, date range, and those
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: four digits narrowed the field to a single delivery truck
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: operating out of Van Wert, Ohio. The truck had been
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: assigned to a driver who ran a Tuesday and Friday route.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: His name was Howard Dalton. In 1977, Dalton had been
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: 34 years old. He had been making deliveries to the
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Mercer County Farm Bureau for approximately 14 months. His route
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: brought him through the back service entrance, the door no
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: one had examined. On a near-weekly basis, his name appeared
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: nowhere in the original case files. Investigators located Howard Dalton
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: in Lima, Ohio, in April of 2006. He was 63
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: years old. He worked part-time at a warehouse. He had
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: never married. His record showed a breaking and entering charge
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: from 1971 that had been dropped, and a criminal trespass
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: suspension from 1989, nothing that would have made him visible.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: The interview on April 19th lasted a long time before
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: anything changed. For roughly 40 minutes, Dalton said nothing of substance.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: Then something shifted. He began to negotiate. Investigators later characterized
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: what followed as a process of cooperation, slow, measured, and
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: eventually complete enough to support a plea agreement, he pled
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: guilty to one count of aggravated murder. Then, he told
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: them where to find the other glove. It was in
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: a coffee can. The can was in a storage unit
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: in Delphos, Ohio, a town roughly 20 miles from where
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Angela Thompson had lived. Dalton had rented that unit for years.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: Inside the can, wrapped in cloth, was a single left-hand
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: burgundy wool glove, It matched the right-hand glove found on
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: Tanner's Creek ice 29 years earlier. He had kept it.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: In his account of events, Dalton described watching Angela cross
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: the Farm Bureau parking lot. He described seeing her at
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: the Lakeview Diner during his Tuesday route, the woman at
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: the third stool from the left soup and grilled cheese,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: coffee with one sugar. He said he had driven past
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: her house on Elm Fork Road at least three times.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: He said there had been no contact between them. No conversation,
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: no interaction of any kind. When investigators asked why he
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: had placed the right-hand glove on the ice of Tanner's Creek,
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: with the cuff weighted by stones and the receipts page
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: folded inside, when they asked what that meant. When they
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: asked what that meant, what he intended by it, he
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: said he did not know. He said it felt like
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: something that needed to be done. That answer did not
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: satisfy anyone in the room. but it was the only
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: one he gave. Picture the ice on January 13th, the
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: night before Kowalski found the glove. Dalton, by his own account,
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: walked onto the frozen creek from the concrete drainage apron,
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: the only surface that would leave no footprints in the snow.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: He set the glove down. He pressed small stones into
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: the cuff to hold it. He placed the folded receipts
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: page inside. Then he walked back, and he kept the
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: left-hand glove. One possible reading of that sequence is that
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: the placement was a confession of sorts, a signal left
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: where it might be found carrying a document that could, theoretically,
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: be traced. By someone who knew what to look for.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: ESDA technology was not widely applied to cold cases until
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: decades after 1977. The ghost impressions on that receipt could
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: not have been read by the document examiner who first
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: handled the page. If Dalton knew that, The placement of
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: the paper was not a risk, it was a near-perfect concealment,
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: dressed as a gesture. But another reading presses harder against
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: the first. A man who wanted to confess does not
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: keep the matching glove in a coffee can for 29 years.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: He does not move it from place to place, store
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: unit to store unit, carrying it through decades of ordinary life.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: The retention of that glove is not the behavior of
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: someone releasing guilt. It is the behavior of someone preserving something.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: What it meant to Dalton, what function that object served
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: across nearly three decades, is a question his account cannot answer.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: Carol Hoffman, summarizing her assessment of Dalton's behavior after the
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: interview concluded, wrote that it did not fit a recognizable pattern.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: She did not elaborate beyond that. Six months after Dalton's arrest,
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: A cold case coordinator in Putnam County flagged a case
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: from 1974. A woman named Ellen Marsh had disappeared near Ottawa, Ohio,
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: similar victim profile, similar geography, similar access pattern. Dalton denied
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: any involvement. Repeatedly, and without variation, no charges were filed.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: Detective Sandra Fuhrer, who reviewed those denials, noted that their
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: quality was recognizable, she did not specify what she recognized.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: The Putnam County case remains officially open. On September 7, 2006,
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: Howard Dalton stood before Mercer County Common Police Court and
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: entered a guilty plea to one count of aggravated murder.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: He was 63 years old. He had been 34 the
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: January he drove his delivery route past the Farm Bureau
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: on State Route 40 and watched Angela Thompson cross the
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: parking lot. The sentence was 25 years to life. Parole
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: eligibility would not arrive until Dalton had served 25 years
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: of that sentence, which, given his age at sentencing, meant
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: he would be eligible in his late 80s. Patrice Thompson
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: was in the courtroom. She read a statement. It referenced
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: 117 letters, the ones she had written every January for
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: 29 years to sheriffs, to the state attorney general, to
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: anyone whose office might still have the box. Norma Thompson,
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: Angela's mother, was 91 by then and could not make
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: the trip. She did not hear the sentence spoken aloud
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: in the room where it was given. The case file
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: for Angela Thompson was officially closed. The receipts page that
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: cracked it, a carbon copy retrieved from inside a burgundy
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: wool glove, logged in 1977, labeled generic and set aside,
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: had carried its ghost impressions through nearly three decades of storage.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: ESDA technology applied in March 2006 pulled those impressions back
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: into legibility. A partial route number, a partial date, the
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: last four digits of a commercial vehicle registration, a cross-reference
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: to records from 1975 through 1978, narrowed the field to
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: one truck, one driver. Carol Hoffman, the Ohio BCI cold
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: case analyst who requested the Thompson box in January 2006,
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: did not find a hidden clue. She found a document
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: that had been there the entire time, examined once, dismissed,
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: and stored. The difference between 1977 and 2006 was not
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: the evidence, it was the instrument used to read it.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: Howard Dalton's name did not appear anywhere in the original
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: investigative files. The back service entrance of the Farm Bureau,
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: where a delivery driver would have been invisible to the
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: front office, was never examined. The working theory in 1977
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: was romantic acquaintance. It pointed every resource away from the
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: loading dock and toward an ex-boyfriend who had nothing to
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: do with it. Victor Slade was interviewed three times. He
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: was cleared three times. The delivery driver finished his route.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Six months after the sentencing, the Putnam County Cold Case
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Coordinator flagged the Ellen Marsh disappearance, 1974, near Ottawa, Ohio.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Similar victim profile, similar geography, similar pattern of access. Dalton
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: denied involvement and continued to deny it. No charges were filed.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: The case remains open. Detective Sandra Fuhrer reviewed those denials
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: and noted their quality. The record contains nothing further. There
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: is no resolution for Ellen Marsh. Angela Thompson was 31
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: years old. She ordered soup and a grilled cheese sandwich
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: every Tuesday. At 12.10, sat on the third stool from
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: the left at Lakeview Diner and took her coffee with
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: one sugar and no cream. She drove a Buick Skylark.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: She rented a house on Elm Fork Road. She worked
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: as an accounts clerk, and she kept a routine, the
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: way people do when they have built a life that
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: fits them. She did not know Howard Dalton. He had
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: watched her. She had never had reason to notice him.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: Her sister wrote 117 letters across 29 years. One of
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: them reached Carol Hoffman. Hoffman requested a box. Inside the
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: box was a glove, and inside the glove was a
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: piece of paper that had been waiting, in the dark,
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: for the right instrument to read it. The case was
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: solved not by a break, not by a witness coming forward,
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: not by a confession freely given. It was solved because
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: one woman kept writing, and because a carbon copy held
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: impressions that no one in 1977 had the means to recover.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: Patrice Thompson sat in a Mercer County courtroom on September 7, 2006,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: and read her statement into the record. 117 letters. 29 Januaries.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: Her mother, at 91, heard the news by telephone. Angela
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Thompson's case is closed. What Dalton understood about that receipts page,
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: whether he knew it was unreadable whether the placement of
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: the glove was a form of concealment or something else entirely,
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: is a question that went unanswered in the interview room
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: and has not been answered since. Some things the record holds,
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: some things it does not. What is certain is this.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: A woman lived a careful, ordinary life in a small
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: Ohio town. A stranger learned the shape of that life
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: without her knowledge. and a piece of paper folded inside
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: a wool glove left on the ice of Tanner's Creek
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: carried enough of the truth to bring him back. 29
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: years later, in a different century, to a courtroom where
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: her name was finally the last word spoken. This show
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: is made by Oboe Media.