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The Dry Birthday Card That Cracked a 42-Year Murder Mystery · Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases

0:03
Speaker 1: On the morning of March ninth, nineteen seventy one, freezing
0:08
Speaker 1: drizzle had been falling over Hollowell Road for more than
0:11
Speaker 1: two hours. Everything within a quarter mile was soaked. The
0:16
Speaker 1: gravel shoulder, the cedar branches, the frozen mud at the
0:20
Speaker 1: ditch's edge, everything that is, except for one thing, a
0:26
Speaker 1: birthday card tucked inside a dead woman's jacket, was completely dry.
0:31
Speaker 1: That single impossible fact sat in a case file for
0:35
Speaker 1: nearly forty years. It would eventually break the whole case open,
0:39
Speaker 1: but first someone had to be willing to ask why.
0:43
Speaker 1: The woman who died on Hollowell Road that morning was
0:46
Speaker 1: Diane Hill. She was forty four years old. She had
0:50
Speaker 1: worked the same payroll route for eleven years without a
0:53
Speaker 1: serious incident, and she had been on schedule when she
0:56
Speaker 1: was shot once from behind with a thirty eight caliber
0:59
Speaker 1: round four miles outside the town of Cordon in eastern
1:03
Speaker 1: Harlan County, Tennessee. Her partner was found unconscious in a
1:07
Speaker 1: drainage culvert sixty feet from the road. Forty one thousand
1:11
Speaker 1: dollars in banded currency was gone. The investigation ran for months,
1:17
Speaker 1: then stalled, then when cold forty two years later, a
1:21
Speaker 1: sixty eight year old man named Dale Burns was arrested
1:24
Speaker 1: at his home in Leland County, and when detectives showed
1:28
Speaker 1: him a photograph, he asked for a lawyer. What led
1:31
Speaker 1: from that frozen road to that front door is one
1:33
Speaker 1: of the stranger journeys in Tennessee cold case history, built
1:37
Speaker 1: on a birthday card, a buried note, a tourist's photograph,
1:41
Speaker 1: and one detective who could not leave well enough alone
1:45
Speaker 1: to understand what was taken from Hollowell Road that morning,
1:49
Speaker 1: it helps to understand who Diane Hill was on the
1:51
Speaker 1: day before it happened. She rented a house on Birch
1:54
Speaker 1: Crossing Road, a modest place suited to a woman who
1:58
Speaker 1: lived practically. Her basset hound Coupe was twelve years old
2:03
Speaker 1: and diabetic. He needed an insulin injection at seven in
2:06
Speaker 1: the morning and another at six in the evening. Without exception,
2:11
Speaker 1: her neighbor, Norma Vance, held a spare key for the
2:14
Speaker 1: days Diane ran even slightly late, though those days were rare.
2:20
Speaker 1: Diane had called in sick exactly twice in eleven years
2:23
Speaker 1: of employment with Consolidated Armored Services. That fact was not
2:28
Speaker 1: a boast. It was simply the rhythm of her life.
2:33
Speaker 1: She left the Cordon depot at six forty five in
2:35
Speaker 1: the morning. Every Wednesday, she ran six stops at Eastern
2:39
Speaker 1: Harlan County manufacturing plants and at the Cordon Farm Cooperative.
2:44
Speaker 1: She was back at the depot by approximately two fifteen
2:47
Speaker 1: in the afternoon. She was never more than twenty minutes
2:51
Speaker 1: off that schedule. Her supervisor, Ted Voss with later tell
2:55
Speaker 1: investigators she could have driven the route in her sleep.
2:59
Speaker 1: The Tuesday before she died, Diane was carrying something in
3:02
Speaker 1: the interior breast pocket of her jacket, a laminated birthday
3:06
Speaker 1: card signed Love Aunt Diane, with a twenty dollar bill
3:11
Speaker 1: tucked inside. She had been holding on to it for
3:15
Speaker 1: three days. Saturday, she planned to drive to Knoxville to
3:19
Speaker 1: deliver it in person. She never made that drive. What
3:22
Speaker 1: her reliability meant. What eleven years of the same route,
3:27
Speaker 1: the same schedule, the same six stops every Wednesday was
3:31
Speaker 1: something investigators in nineteen seventy one did not fully reckon with.
3:36
Speaker 1: Diane's consistency was not just a professional virtue. It was
3:39
Speaker 1: a map, and someone had been reading it. That someone
3:43
Speaker 1: had been watching her arrive at the Cordon Farm Cooperative
3:46
Speaker 1: every Wednesday throughout nineteen seventy he knew when the armored
3:51
Speaker 1: vehicle came. He knew which road it traveled home. He
3:55
Speaker 1: had time to find the right spot on Hollowell Road,
3:59
Speaker 1: a stretch where a logging track ran behind the tree
4:02
Speaker 1: line where vehicles parked south of the shoulder would be
4:05
Speaker 1: invisible in both directions. None of that was known in
4:09
Speaker 1: March of nineteen seventy one. What investigators had instead was
4:13
Speaker 1: a body, a missing payroll, an unconscious second guard, and
4:18
Speaker 1: a theory that pointed entirely in the wrong direction. The
4:22
Speaker 1: case they built would take them further from the truth
4:25
Speaker 1: with every step. The wrong direction had a name. It
4:29
Speaker 1: was called the inside job. Hollowell Road made investigators think
4:34
Speaker 1: in a straight line. Someone had known the schedule. Someone
4:38
Speaker 1: had known the route. Someone had known that the armored
4:41
Speaker 1: vehicle would be on that stretch of road between its
4:44
Speaker 1: fifth and sixth stops at precisely that window of time.
4:48
Speaker 1: The Harlan County Sheriff's Office and the Tennessee Bureau of
4:51
Speaker 1: Investigation pulled the route records. They subpoened ted Voss's files.
4:57
Speaker 1: They interviewed current and former employees of Consolidated Armored Services
5:03
Speaker 1: three men examined, all three cleared. By summer of nineteen
5:07
Speaker 1: seventy one, the case had not moved an inch. By December,
5:12
Speaker 1: the file was open and name only. By nineteen seventy four,
5:16
Speaker 1: it was cold. There were two things in that file
5:19
Speaker 1: nobody solved. The first was the birthday card. James Slater
5:23
Speaker 1: had found Diane facedown in frozen mud at the road's shoulder.
5:27
Speaker 1: The blade of his grater had dragged her weight before
5:29
Speaker 1: he stopped. Her radio was clipped to her belt, Her
5:33
Speaker 1: side arm was still holstered, and when investigators lifted her body,
5:38
Speaker 1: there was a laminated card pinned beneath her right hip,
5:42
Speaker 1: still tucked inside the interior breast pocket of her jacket,
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Speaker 1: signed Love Aunt Diane, with a twenty dollar bill inside
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Speaker 1: completely dry. Freezing drizzle had fallen continuously from nine fifteen
5:56
Speaker 1: that morning until two in the afternoon. Everything within a
6:00
Speaker 1: quarter mile of that road shoulder was soaked through. The
6:03
Speaker 1: mud was frozen, then wet, then frozen again. The grater's
6:08
Speaker 1: blade was sheeted in ice, but the card was dry.
6:12
Speaker 1: Investigators noted the anomaly, they wrote it down, then they
6:15
Speaker 1: moved on because the inside job theory was pulling every
6:19
Speaker 1: resource in the other direction, and a dry card did
6:23
Speaker 1: not fit any theory they already had. The second thing
6:26
Speaker 1: was Victor knowles nose twenty six had been pulled from
6:30
Speaker 1: a drainage culvert sixty feet from the road with a
6:33
Speaker 1: fractured skull. He remembered almost nothing. What he did remember,
6:38
Speaker 1: buried in a single line of his original transcript, was
6:42
Speaker 1: a sound. Before he lost consciousness, he heard a vehicle depart.
6:46
Speaker 1: He described the direction as east. The case reconstruction placed
6:51
Speaker 1: the perpetrator's retreat to the west toward Cordon. East made
6:55
Speaker 1: no sense under the inside job assumption. A consolidated employee
6:59
Speaker 1: would have retreat west, back toward the depot or toward town.
7:03
Speaker 1: So the eastward sound stayed in the transcript and went
7:06
Speaker 1: nowhere a subordinate clause in a paragraph nobody returned to
7:11
Speaker 1: the files sat Vas retired. Knowles moved to Ohio. Sheriff
7:17
Speaker 1: Bud Carlin, who had overseen the original investigation, kept a
7:22
Speaker 1: hand written case summary in the drawer of his home
7:24
Speaker 1: desk until he died in nineteen ninety three. His daughter
7:28
Speaker 1: mailed it to the Harlan County Sheriff's office. It went
7:31
Speaker 1: into an archive box. It stayed there for nine more years.
7:36
Speaker 1: In the spring of two thousand and nine, a detective
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Speaker 1: named Karen Stroud pulled the Hill file. Stroud had fourteen
7:43
Speaker 1: years in cold cases. She had seen files that were thin,
7:46
Speaker 1: a few pages, a single photograph, a name, with no
7:50
Speaker 1: follow up. The Hill file was not thin. It was
7:54
Speaker 1: dense with dead ends, with interviews that circled back to
7:57
Speaker 1: the same cleared employees, with a theory that had been
8:00
Speaker 1: treated as a conclusion before the evidence was finished speaking.
8:04
Speaker 1: She spent three weeks reading before she did anything else.
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Speaker 1: Two things stopped her cold, the birthday card and the
8:12
Speaker 1: sound Knowles had heard going east the card. First, Stroud
8:16
Speaker 1: pulled the climatology records for Harlan County on March ninth,
8:21
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one, freezing drizzle, nine fifteen to two in
8:25
Speaker 1: the afternoon, continuous. She cross referenced the notation in the
8:29
Speaker 1: original file. Card found dry noted no explanation offered. Investigators
8:36
Speaker 1: in seventy one had been careful enough to write it down,
8:39
Speaker 1: they had not been careful enough to ask what it meant.
8:42
Speaker 1: Stroud asked a dry card beneath the body that had
8:45
Speaker 1: been lying in drizzle for somewhere between forty minutes and
8:48
Speaker 1: an hour and a half. The only explanation that worked
8:52
Speaker 1: was geometry. The card was in an interior breast pocket,
8:56
Speaker 1: sealed inside the jacket. If Diane had been moved out
9:00
Speaker 1: after death, moved in a way that kept the pocket
9:02
Speaker 1: facing down and closed, the card would never have been
9:06
Speaker 1: exposed to rain. Someone had dragged her not far. The
9:11
Speaker 1: evidence showed approximately twelve feet from a point slightly off
9:15
Speaker 1: the road's shoulder, toward the drainage ditch. But in that
9:18
Speaker 1: twelve feet the pocket stayed sealed, the card stayed dry.
9:22
Speaker 1: She had not been shot where she was found, She
9:25
Speaker 1: had been moved there. That realization shifted everything Stroud thought
9:30
Speaker 1: she knew about the scene. If the body had been repositioned,
9:33
Speaker 1: then the shooting location was somewhere else, somewhere closer to
9:37
Speaker 1: where a vehicle could have been hidden, somewhere off the
9:40
Speaker 1: road south behind the tree line. Then Stroud went back
9:44
Speaker 1: to Knowles's transcript the eastward Sound. She laid a county
9:49
Speaker 1: road map on her desk and traced Hollowell Road east
9:53
Speaker 1: from the attack site. Six miles east, a farm road
9:57
Speaker 1: connected to a network of logging tracks ran running south
10:00
Speaker 1: of the tree line, the tree line that ran along
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Speaker 1: Hollowell Road's south shoulder. A vehicle parked on a logging
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Speaker 1: track south of the tree line would have been invisible
10:11
Speaker 1: from the road in both directions, coming from the east
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Speaker 1: leaving east. The inside job theory had no east, but
10:18
Speaker 1: the evidence did. There was one more item in the file,
10:22
Speaker 1: a photograph. George Phelps, a tourist from Ohio, had stopped
10:26
Speaker 1: his car on Hollowell Road near Noon on March ninth,
10:30
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one. He had an enstomatic camera and was
10:35
Speaker 1: on his way to a fishing cabin. He did not
10:38
Speaker 1: see Diana Hill. He saw an armored vehicle on the
10:41
Speaker 1: shoulder with its rear doors open, and he thought it
10:44
Speaker 1: looked unusual, so he took a photograph. He mailed the
10:47
Speaker 1: developed print and a handwritten note to the Sheriff's office
10:52
Speaker 1: three weeks later. The photograph showed the rear of the
10:55
Speaker 1: ford step van, the tree line, and at the left margin,
11:00
Speaker 1: partly obscured by a cedar branch, a figure mail dark jacket.
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Speaker 1: The original file labeled it undiinetified figure inconclusive. Phelps had
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Speaker 1: died in nineteen eighty eight. Stroud submitted the photograph to
11:17
Speaker 1: the TBI Digital Forensics Unit in the fall of two
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Speaker 1: thousand nine. The technology to process it properly did not exist,
11:25
Speaker 1: yet she waited. In twenty twelve, TBI processed the image
11:30
Speaker 1: a partial face resolved from the figure behind the cedar branch.
11:34
Speaker 1: The match came back with a description the examiner called
11:37
Speaker 1: substantial picture. Hollowell Road in the fall of nineteen seventy
11:41
Speaker 1: not the crime scene, just the road. On an ordinary Wednesday,
11:45
Speaker 1: the armoured vehicle makes its turn. It slows at the
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Speaker 1: Cordon Farm Cooperative. The rear doors open, the payroll bag transfers,
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Speaker 1: the vehicle pulls away. A man watches this from the
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Speaker 1: cooperative grounds. He is employed there as a grounds keeper
12:01
Speaker 1: and general laborer. He has been working that job for
12:05
Speaker 1: eight months. Every Wednesday, the vehicle comes. Every Wednesday, the
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Speaker 1: same guard climbs down from the same step van and
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Speaker 1: handles the same transaction. He starts to understand the schedule
12:18
Speaker 1: the way you understand a tide, not because anyone told him,
12:22
Speaker 1: but because he watched it long enough. That version of events,
12:26
Speaker 1: the patient watcher, the insider knowledge, would feel like confirmation
12:31
Speaker 1: of everything the original investigators believed. Inside job someone who
12:36
Speaker 1: knew the schedule. But here is where that version collapses.
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Speaker 1: The man on the cooperative grounds had no connection to
12:43
Speaker 1: Consolidated Armored Services. He had never been employed there. He
12:47
Speaker 1: had never applied, no family member work there. He was
12:51
Speaker 1: not in any file the original investigation ever built. He
12:56
Speaker 1: was invisible to the theory because the theory was looking inside
12:59
Speaker 1: the company and he was standing just outside it. His
13:02
Speaker 1: name was Dale Burns. He was twenty six years old
13:06
Speaker 1: and nineteen seventy one. He had grown up on a
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Speaker 1: farm six miles from Hollowell Road. His family had sold
13:12
Speaker 1: it two years earlier. He knew the terrain. He knew
13:16
Speaker 1: the logging tracks south of the tree line, where a
13:18
Speaker 1: vehicle could sit without being seen from the road. He
13:22
Speaker 1: knew which direction was east. Burns had watched Dian's route
13:26
Speaker 1: for the better part of a year. He had found
13:29
Speaker 1: his spot. He had parked behind the tree line. On
13:32
Speaker 1: the morning of March ninth, nineteen seventy one. He had
13:36
Speaker 1: stood in the road the shape Victor Knowles saw before
13:39
Speaker 1: the world went dark. He had shot Dian Hill once
13:42
Speaker 1: from behind with a thirty eight caliber round. He had
13:45
Speaker 1: taken the payroll bag. He had dragged her body twelve
13:49
Speaker 1: feet toward the ditch, not far enough to hide her,
13:53
Speaker 1: just far enough to buy time, and then he had
13:56
Speaker 1: driven east. The forty one thousand dollars in banded currents
14:00
Speaker 1: lasted him approximately four years. When tbi's enhanced image returned
14:05
Speaker 1: his face from the Cedar branch. Burns was sixty eight
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Speaker 1: years old and living in Leland County, approximately sixty miles
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Speaker 1: east of Cordon, sixty miles east the direction Knowles had
14:19
Speaker 1: heard him leave, the direction. The original investigation had never followed.
14:24
Speaker 1: Stroud requested the arrest warrant in early twenty thirteen. On
14:29
Speaker 1: a Tuesday morning in March forty two years almost to
14:32
Speaker 1: the month after Hollowell Road officers arrived at Burns's residence.
14:37
Speaker 1: He was shown the enhanced Phelps photograph. During interrogation, he
14:41
Speaker 1: said he wanted a lawyer. Forty minutes after the lawyer arrived,
14:45
Speaker 1: he agreed to talk. He confessed to the robbery. He
14:49
Speaker 1: confessed to shooting Diane Hill. He said he had not
14:53
Speaker 1: intended to kill her. Then he paused, Then he said
14:57
Speaker 1: he was not sure that was true. He took a
14:59
Speaker 1: guilty plea. The sentence was life six weeks after the
15:04
Speaker 1: arrest was reported in the newspapers, a woman named Connie
15:07
Speaker 1: Marsh called the Harlan County Sheriff's office. She was sixty one,
15:12
Speaker 1: living in Cookville, working at a credit union in Leland County.
15:16
Speaker 1: In February of nineteen seventy three, less than two years
15:21
Speaker 1: after Hollowell Road, a man had followed her for three
15:25
Speaker 1: weeks at home, at the grocery, at the gas station.
15:29
Speaker 1: She had reported it to police at the time. They
15:32
Speaker 1: had told her there was little they could do. Then
15:35
Speaker 1: the man stopped. She never knew why. She recognized his
15:39
Speaker 1: face in the newspaper. It was Burns. Why he stopped
15:43
Speaker 1: following Connie Marsh is not in any record. It is
15:47
Speaker 1: simply a thing that happened and then did not in
15:49
Speaker 1: the years when he was spending Diane Hill's forty one
15:52
Speaker 1: thousand dollars, living sixty miles east of the road where
15:55
Speaker 1: he had left her in the frozen mud. The case
15:58
Speaker 1: of Diane Hill closed in a court room, not on
16:00
Speaker 1: Hollowell Road. But the shape of it the forty two
16:04
Speaker 1: years between the shot and the sentence demands one more
16:08
Speaker 1: look at how it held together for so long, and
16:11
Speaker 1: how it finally fell apart Dale. Burns went to trial
16:15
Speaker 1: knowing what Karen Stroud had built. The enhanced Phelps photograph
16:19
Speaker 1: placed him at the scene. His own knowledge of the
16:22
Speaker 1: Wednesday route, absorbed during eight months of watching armored vehicles
16:26
Speaker 1: arrive at Cordon Farm Cooperative in nineteen seventy, explained what
16:30
Speaker 1: every investigator in nineteen seventy one had refused to consider.
16:35
Speaker 1: That the information did not have to come from inside consolidated.
16:39
Speaker 1: It could come from outside, from a man with seasonal
16:42
Speaker 1: work and a long memory and a logging track behind
16:46
Speaker 1: a tree line that nobody had ever measured. The inside
16:50
Speaker 1: job theory had not been wrong because the original investigators
16:53
Speaker 1: were careless. It had been wrong because it was logical,
16:57
Speaker 1: a six stop Wednesday route, identical for eleven years, no variation,
17:02
Speaker 1: no deviation. The investigators asked who would know that, and
17:07
Speaker 1: they answered someone inside. They were not unreasonable. They were
17:11
Speaker 1: simply looking in only one direction. Burns had been looking
17:15
Speaker 1: from the other direction the entire time. He served no
17:18
Speaker 1: prison time. Between March ninth, nineteen seventy one and March
17:23
Speaker 1: of twenty thirteen, forty two years. He was twenty six
17:27
Speaker 1: years old when he stood on Hollowell Road. He was
17:30
Speaker 1: sixty eight when officers arrived at his door in Leland County.
17:34
Speaker 1: He had lived a full life inside that gap, seasons
17:38
Speaker 1: of work, years of spending at least three weeks in
17:41
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three when he followed a woman named Connie
17:44
Speaker 1: Marsh until he stopped for reasons No record explains. The
17:49
Speaker 1: birthday card went to Diane's family after the investigation closed.
17:53
Speaker 1: The laminated card signed love Aunt Diane, with twenty dollars
17:59
Speaker 1: still folded in see. It had stayed dry because her
18:02
Speaker 1: jacket's interior breast pocket had sealed around it. When Burns
18:06
Speaker 1: moved her body those twelve feet to the shoulder, the
18:09
Speaker 1: drizzle never reached it. The card had been a clue
18:11
Speaker 1: since the morning James Slatter's road grader Blade found her,
18:15
Speaker 1: a clue that waited thirty eight years for someone to
18:18
Speaker 1: pull the right climatology records and ask why Victor Knowles,
18:24
Speaker 1: who had heard a vehicle depart east and whose note
18:27
Speaker 1: had been buried under the weight of a theory, was
18:29
Speaker 1: still alive when the arrest was announced. Whether he was
18:33
Speaker 1: ever formally notified is not in the public record. There
18:37
Speaker 1: is a detail that does not resolve and will not.
18:40
Speaker 1: It sits at the edge of this case, the way
18:42
Speaker 1: the cedar branch sat at the edge of that photograph,
18:46
Speaker 1: partly obscuring something real. In February of nineteen seventy three,
18:51
Speaker 1: Connie Marsh went about her ordinary life in Leland County
18:55
Speaker 1: while a man tracked her movements for three weeks. She
18:58
Speaker 1: reported it. She was told old little could be done,
19:01
Speaker 1: and then he stopped. She spent forty years not knowing why.
19:05
Speaker 1: Then she saw his face in a newspaper above a
19:08
Speaker 1: story about a killing in nineteen seventy one, and she
19:12
Speaker 1: understood at least part of what had been standing near
19:15
Speaker 1: her at the gas station. Why he stopped, Whether he
19:19
Speaker 1: made a calculation, whether something scared him, whether he simply
19:23
Speaker 1: moved on, is not recorded anywhere. That question belongs to
19:27
Speaker 1: Connie Marsh. Now she is the one who carried it.
19:31
Speaker 1: Diane Hill drove the same road for eleven years because
19:34
Speaker 1: she was dependable, because she took her job seriously, because
19:39
Speaker 1: Coop needed his insulin at seven in the morning and
19:42
Speaker 1: six in the evening, and she was never more than
19:45
Speaker 1: twenty minutes off schedule. She was found face down in
19:48
Speaker 1: frozen mud with a birthday card in her pocket and
19:51
Speaker 1: twenty dollars for a niece or nephew she had planned
19:54
Speaker 1: to see on Saturday. She was forty four years old.
19:57
Speaker 1: There is something in the architecture of this case that
20:00
Speaker 1: resists a clean ending, not because the facts are incomplete,
20:04
Speaker 1: but because the method it keeps surfacing. Forty two years,
20:08
Speaker 1: sixty miles east, a dry card in a soap field,
20:12
Speaker 1: a photograph filed as inconclusive in nineteen seventy one that
20:17
Speaker 1: came back from a digital forensics unit in twenty twelve
20:21
Speaker 1: with a face. Karen Stroud spent three weeks reading a
20:24
Speaker 1: cold file before she moved. That was the entire margin.
20:28
Speaker 1: Three weeks of attention paid to something everyone else had
20:32
Speaker 1: set aside. It was enough. The case of Diane Hill
20:35
Speaker 1: is closed. Dale Burns is serving a life sentence. The
20:39
Speaker 1: road at Hollowell is still there four miles outside Cordon,
20:44
Speaker 1: and the tree line where he parked is still there too.
20:47
Speaker 1: The drizzle when it comes in March soaks everything in
20:50
Speaker 1: a quarter mile. This show is made by Obo Media