Latest / Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases / The Receipt That Hid a Killer for Twenty-Seven Years

Transcript

The Receipt That Hid a Killer for Twenty-Seven Years · Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: A folded receipt sat in a dead woman's breast pocket
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: for twenty seven years. It had a name on it.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Investigators photographed it, logged.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: It, and moved on.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: The name they never pulled belonged to the man who
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: killed her. Ruth Fitzgerald was thirty one years old on
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: the night of May eighth, nineteen ninety one. She was
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: a shift supervisor at the Caldwell Textile mill in Holland,
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: North Carolina, the kind of person her coworkers counted on
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: to know where everything was and have the answer before
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: you finished asking the question. She was reliable in the
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: way that makes a person invisible to danger. She was
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: not supposed to be the kind of person found face
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: down in gravel at the edge of a drainage channel
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: before sunrise, but that is exactly where Nancy Allen found
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: her the following morning, beside the culvert under Marsh Road
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: behind the mill where Ruth had worked every second shift
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: for three years. Her shoulder bag was still on her arm,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: her wallet was still inside it, Her keys were still
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: in the bag. Whoever had done this did not want
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: her money. What investigators did not fully understand that morning,
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: and would not understand for nearly three decades. Was that
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Ruth had been carrying the answer with her when she died.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: To understand why the receipt mattered, you have to understand
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: who Ruth was and where she moved through the world.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: She had grown up in Holland. She knew the town
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: the way people know of place they never seriously considered leaving,
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: not from loyalty or lack of imagination, but because everything
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: she valued was already there. Her younger sister, Angie, the
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: church her mother had attended for forty years, the friends
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: she had made in high school who were still her friends.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: At thirty one.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: She had taken the supervisor position at Caldwell Textile in
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine, two years before her death. The second
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: floor ran in dust looms, heavy, loud, precise machines that
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: required people who paid attention. Ruth was good at the job.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Her floor manager, Pete Burwell, later described her as someone
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: who ran a tight operation without making anyone feel managed.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: She knew every machine on that floor and every person
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: who worked it outside the mill. Her life had the
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: kind of structure that comes from choosing it deliberately. She
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: lived with her partner, Steve Haverford. She had a routine.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: She kept to mino, the same diner, the same path
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: to work, the same schedule week after week. She was
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: not someone who wandered. She was not someone who pawned things.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: That last detail would matter enormously. On the morning of
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: May ninth, nineteen ninety one, medical examiners established that Ruth
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: had been manually strangled some time between ten pm and
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: midnight the previous night. The method was delay, liberate, and close.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: This was not a collision or an accident of circumstance.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: Someone had followed Ruth Fitzgerald or waited for her, and
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: they had made.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: A specific decision.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Steve Haverford, her partner, had been at a work dinner
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: in Greensborough that night with colleagues. His alibi was verified
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: quickly and he was cleared. Early in the investigation, the
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: lead detective, Ray Tibbs turned his attention to a thirty
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: eight year old transient named Carl Diekes, who had been
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: seen in the area around the mill. Deeks was detained twice,
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: he was released twice. There was no physical evidence connecting
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: him to Ruth's death, and eventually that thread went nowhere.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: What Tibbs did have, what was photographed and entered into
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: the evidence log was a small folded piece of paper
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: found in the breast pocket of Ruth's green cardigan. It
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: was a pawn shop receipt dated April twenty nine, nineteen
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: ninety one, issued by Brennan's Buy and Sell on Colton Road,
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: roughly four miles from the drainage channel.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: The item on the.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: Receipt was a Cassio wristwatch. The sale price was forty
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: two dollars. The name on the receipt was Wayne Kowalski.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Ruth's family told investigators she had never pawned anything in
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: her life. She had no known connection to Brennan's Buy
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: and Sell. Nobody could explain why she would have had
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: a receipt from that shop made out to a name
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: no one in the Holland Police Department recognized. Ray Tibbs
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: logged it, he photographed it, and the investigation moved on.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: The case went cold in the spring of nineteen ninety two.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Tibbs retired in two thousand four. When he left, he
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: took the file with him, not out of obstruction, but
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: out of the quiet hope that he might still find
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: something he never did. Ray Tibbs died in twenty sixteen,
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: two years before anyone would finally pull that thread, the
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: receipt waited. Terry Smith did not go looking for the case.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: The case found him through a pair of earbuds on
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: a Tuesday morning commute in the spring of twenty eighteen.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: A true crime podcast called Open Files had aired an
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: episode about Ruth Fitzgerald. In March of that year. Her
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: younger sister, Angie had provided evidence log photographs to the
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: show's host. One of those photographs was the receipt. The
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: host read the name on it aloud, Wayne Kowalski, then
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: she said simply that nobody had ever pulled that thread.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: Smith pulled Over that afternoon, he retrieved the Fitzgerald evidence
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: box from storage. He sat with the receipt photograph for
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: a long time, then he made a phone call. Brennan's
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: Buy and Sell had closed in two thousand and three,
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: but businesses keep records, and records survive in boxes in warehouses,
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: and Smith found someone.
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: Who knew where those were boxes were.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: He and a record's clerk named Tom Hess spent the
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: better part of a day going through carbon copies of
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: transactions from nineteen ninety one. When they found the April
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: twenty ninth entry. The carbon copy matched the evidence photograph exactly,
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: same handwriting, same amount, same name. The customer address on
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: the Brennan's copy was a rooming house on Vestal Road.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: The building had been demolished years earlier, but the name
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: was there clear as the day it was written. Wayne
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: Kowalski Smith ran the name. What came back was not
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: a ghost. Wayne Kowalski was fifty nine years old in
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen, living outside Lyncontin, North Carolina. He had
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: prior convictions aggravated assault in nineteen ninety six theft by
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: deception in two thousand nine. Between approximately nineteen eighty eight
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: and nineteen ninety three, he had lived in Holland. He
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: had worked as a parts delivery driver. His route ran
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: along Colton Road. Colton Road pasted Patty's Diner. It passed
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: Caldwell Textile Mill. It ran within a quarter mile of
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: the drainage channel where Ruth Fitzgerald's body had been found.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: Three days a week, Wayne Kowalski drove that road. He
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: had been doing it the spring Ruth died. Smith went
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: back to the original nineteen nineteen ninety one interview transcripts.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Most were thin the canvas around Paddy's Diner had been
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: done quickly. A waitress named Joan Decker had been interviewed,
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: but the questions had been broad aimed. At the night
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: of May eighth, nobody had asked about the days before
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: Smith asked Decker still lived in Holland. She recognized a
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one DMV photograph of Kowalski. She said she
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: had seen him at Patty's a few times that spring.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: Then she said something that shifted the weight of everything.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: On Whendnesday, May first, she had watched a man follow
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Ruth Fitzgerald out of the diner close behind her, close
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: enough that Decker had assumed they knew each other. May first,
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: eight days before Ruth's body was found.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: There was something else.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Pete Burwell, Ruth's floor manager at Caldwell Textile, remembered a
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: conversation he had almost not thought about in twenty seven years.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: In late April of nineteen ninety one, Ruth had mentioned
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: to him informally that a delivery driver had spoken to
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: her in a way that made her uncomfortable. Burwell had
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: told her to report it. He had not followed up.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: He had not documented it. He had not escalated it
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: to any one. He had simply forgotten about it, the
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: way people forget small, uncomfortable things when the moment passes
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: without incident. The incident had not passed. Picture Kouwalski's route
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: on a Wednesday morning in the spring of nineteen ninety one.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: He drives Colton Road three times a week. He stops
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: at Patty's Diner. He sees Ruth Fitzgerald. There may be
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: more than once. He speaks to her in a way
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: that unsettles her enough that she tells her floor manager
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: that is not a casual interaction. That is some one
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: who has noticed her now. Picture the receipt. If Kowlski
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: purchased a Cassio watch at Brennan's on April twenty ninth,
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: he had a receipt a small folded piece of paper.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: One reasonable version of events is that he lost it
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: or left it somewhere along his route.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: Ruth found it.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: She slipped it into her breast pocket, the way people
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: do with small pieces of paper they intend to deal
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: with later. She forgot it was there. A forensic document
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: examiner who looked at the receipt found evidence of something unexpected.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: The paper showed multiple folds and unfoldings, far more than
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: the single horizontal fold it carried when it was discovered
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: in Ruth's pocket. The examiner concluded the receipt had been
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: handled frequently before it ended up where it was found.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: It had been opened and closed, opened and closed by
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: some one who had been carrying it around for days.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: The reconstruction that Smith developed with the examiner and a
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: behavioral consultant named Anne Vargas did not require Ruth to
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: have known whose receipt it was or what it meant.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: She had found a piece of paper, she had pocketed it,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: and she had never had a chance to throw it away.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: The receipt was not a calling card. It was not
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: left deliberately. It was an.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: Accident of proximity, the trace of a man who had
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: been close enough to Ruth Fitzgerald that something of his
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: ended up in her pocket. The question was how close,
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: and for how long? And what had happened in the
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: last hours of May eighth. In September of twenty eighteen,
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: a confidential informant at Gaston County Jail told investigators something
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Kowalski had spoken at some point about a woman he
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: had followed one morning and gone too far with He
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: said it had happened in a mill town years ago.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: He mentioned her green sweater. He called his own decisions
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: stupid green sweater, milltown years ago. On October third, two
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: thousand eighteen, Terry Smith and two Holland County Sheriff's deputies
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: drove to the house outside Lincolton. They knocked on the door.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: When they showed Kowalsky a photograph of the receipt, he
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: looked at it for a long time. He did not speak.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: Then he asked for a lawyer. The arrest did not
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: end the story, It only opened the next chapter. Wain
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: Kowalski was taken into custody on October third, two thousand eighteen.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: He said nothing beyond asking for a lawyer. Inside the
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: house outside Lincolnton, investigators documented what they needed. The warrant
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: had been built on four months of work. The carbon
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: copy copy Joan Decker's account of the man who followed
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Ruth out of Paddy's Diner, Pete Burwell's memory of a
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: delivery driver who had made Ruth uncomfortable, and the words
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: of a confidential informant who had heard Kowalski describe a
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: woman in a green sweater in a mill town years ago.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: In December of twenty nineteen, Kowalski's attorneys opened a plea negotiation.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: He offered a formal confession. The District Attorney's office reviewed
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: the terms and declined the negotiation collapsed. There would be
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: no deal. The trial was held in Holland County in
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: the spring of twenty twenty one. The jury received the
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: case after weeks of testimony and deliberated for nine hours
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: across two days. They returned a verdict of guilty on
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: one count of first degree murder.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: Nine hours.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: That is the time twelve people needed to weigh twenty
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: seven years of silence and come to a conclusion.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: The sentence was.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: Life without possibility of parole. Kowalski will die in prison.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: At sentencing, Angie Fitzgerald stood and read four sentences. She
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: did not look at Kowalski once. She kept her eyes
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: on the judge and said what she needed to say.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: The record does not reproduce those four sentences in full,
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: and that is appropriate. They were hers, They belonged to
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: her and to her sister, and no court transcript changes that.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: Six weeks after the conviction, a detective named Susan Chow
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: from Polk County contacted Terry Smith. She was investigating the
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: death of a woman named Deborah Nance, thirty four years old,
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: strangled in the spring of nineteen ninety near a textile
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: distribution facility in calder The method was manual strangulation. Nance's
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: route had run along a service path near the facility.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: The geographic and behavioral pattern drew Chow's attention toward Kowalski,
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: who had been living and working in the region during
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: that period. As of the time this account was prepared,
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: no physical evidence can next Kowalski to Deborah Nance. He
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: has not been charged in her death. The investigation in
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: Pope County remains open. There is something that resists clean resolution.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: In that fact, a man is convicted and sentenced, the
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: case closes, and then a detective from another county calls
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: with a different name and a different drainage path and
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: the same method. The record stops there because the record
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: has to stop where the evidence stops. But Deborah Nance
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: had a name, she had a route, she walked, She
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: had thirty four years behind her when that route ended,
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: one more thread still unpulled. Ray Tibbs had retired in
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: two thousand and four and died in twenty sixteen. He
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: had carried the physical file home with him when he
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: left the department. He had not closed the case. In
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: his mind, he had kept it. But he died two
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: years before Mara Lund read the pawn ticket aloud on air,
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: two years before Terry Smith drove to the evidence room
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: that same afternoon and pulled the Fitzgerald box, two years
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: before any of it moved. Tibbs did not see the
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: resolution That fact sits quietly alongside everything else. Rufe Fitzgerald
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: was thirty one years old.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: She was a shift.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: Supervisor on the second floor of Caldwell Textile Mill. She
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: left work after her shift and walked a route she
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: had walked before, and she did not make it home.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: For twenty seven years, a piece of paper sat in
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: an evidence log, photographed, numbered, placed in a box. No
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: one followed it to a name. No one followed the
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: name to an address. No one stood at that address
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: with a warrant until a cold case investigator in twenty
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: eighteen heard a podcast episode on his way somewhere and
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: pulled over and listened to the end. The receipt was
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: forty two dollars. The watch was a cassio. The pawn
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: shop closed in two thousand and three, but a carbon
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: copy had been kept in storage, and a record's clerk
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: named Tom Hess founded on the same day. Smith came
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: looking small things, ordinary things. A piece of paper in
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: a breast pocket, a carbon copy in a box and storage.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: An investigator who listened past the first few minutes, any
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: one of those elements removed, and none of the rest follows.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: There is something worth sitting with in that. Not the violence,
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: not the sentence, the fragility of it, the way a
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: case that lasted twenty seven years turned finally on a
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: slip of paper that had been there from the beginning,
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: waiting for someone to.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: Ask whose name was on it.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: Angie Fitzgerald spent those twenty seven years asking. She contacted journalists,
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: she shared photographs from the evidence log. She did not stop.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: The resolution did not come because the system worked flawlessly.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: It came because a woman refused to let her sister
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: stay forgotten, and because one investigator heard her refuse. Rufe
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: Fitzgerald deserved more than twenty seven years. She deserved an
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: investigation in nineteen ninety ninety two to one that followed
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: every thread to its end. She did not get that.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: What she got eventually was a jury that deliberated nine
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: hours and came back with a verdict. And the sister
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: who looked at a judge and said four sentences out
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: loud in a court room. That is not justice restored.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: It is justice, finally, partial, and late delivered at all.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Obomedia