Latest / The Path Went Chilly / Mary Jane Vangilder Pt. One

Transcript

Mary Jane Vangilder Pt. One · The Path Went Chilly

0:29
So welcome to this week's episode of The Path Went Chili. Ashley is quite
0:33
busy this week, so she is off, But instead we're going to change
0:36
our format a little bit and do an episode where I tell Jules all about
0:40
a case that she's not familiar with. And this one is a little different
0:44
than the norm because it's technically a solved case, a case that got solved
0:48
very recently, so the Path is no longer Chili. Well, I'm excited
0:53
to hear about this case. You had written it in an email, and
0:57
I went out of my way to not look at it again and to not
1:00
google it because the curiosity will get the best of me sometimes. But anytime
1:04
you're about to tell me about a case, I want it to be a
1:08
situation where I go in totally blind. So I'm excited to hear all the
1:11
details. Yeah, and this is not a very well known case. It's
1:15
only been played on a couple of YouTube channels on podcasts, but it hasn't
1:19
got a lot of mainstream publicity. I covered it on The Trail Went Cold
1:25
about three and a half years ago, and like I said, it has
1:27
recently been solved and we kind of hit a milestone because the trail went cold.
1:32
Actually got a shout out at the police press conference, which is a
1:34
first for us. It was a really exciting moment. That's exciting. Do
1:38
you know how many cases that you've covered over the years, Like how many
1:44
years has it been now, like six or seven years? Eight years out?
1:48
Oh my god, eight years? That is crazy. But do you
1:52
know how many have been solved? Slash ones that indirectly or directly you might
1:57
have had a hand in something. Well, this is the only one I
2:00
think that I had a hand in where we've gotten acknowledged by the police that
2:05
they listened to it and kind of used it as an investigative tool. But
2:08
it's been a lot of cases, like we've released four update episodes talking about
2:13
all the cases we've solved and had major developments. And of course the most
2:17
infamous example is the Janelle Matthews case where we found out that the killer was
2:21
one but I talked about that on a previous episode. Yeah, that's crazy.
2:28
And then I remember our Keith Warren episodes. We got some traction on
2:31
that one, and it seemed to be some involvement from the police resulted from
2:36
what was it a city council person hearing our recording, Yes it was.
2:40
I can't remember his exact position, but the Discovery Plus released a documentary series
2:46
about the Keith Warren case where the person in question actually said on camera I
2:51
was listening to a podcast about the case. He didn't say which name it
2:53
was, but I knew he was referring to us. And just recently,
2:58
Keith's sister, Sherry Warren, announced that they've officially changed his cause of death
3:02
from suicide to undetermined, which doesn't mean it's solved, but that is a
3:07
big deal because they've been fighting for that for thirty eight years. That made
3:10
me so happy because I just I love Sherry. I think she's such a
3:15
brave person and to fight against such adversity and like, really, at the
3:20
end of the day, that was all she wanted was to say that you
3:23
don't definitively know that my brother ended his own life, so you can't say
3:29
that it was suicide. So to have a switch to undetermined was her end
3:32
goal. And to know that she reached that and to think that, like,
3:37
maybe we had some small part in it, because I know the guy
3:40
who's the he was the fire captain, but he was the EMT on the
3:44
scene at the time. He was the one who reached out to me and
3:46
told me that somebody had heard like within those circles and that it was our
3:52
podcast that was listened to. So that was a really cool feeling right when
3:57
we were starting out. Amazing. Yeah, and Sherry just posted the letter
4:01
she received confirming that they were changing the cause of death. She put it
4:04
on Twitter, so that's how we know it's official. But it was a
4:06
very momentous occasion. So this one here took place all the way back in
4:13
nineteen forty five, so you wouldn't put this high on the list of cases
4:15
that I would expect to see solved. And what had happened is the granddaughter
4:20
of this woman, Mary Jane van Gilder. She had been reaching out to
4:24
a lot of podcasts and YouTube channels asking if they would cover her grandmother's case.
4:29
Obviously, she wasn't alive and never got to know her grandmother before she
4:32
went missing, but she still wanted to find out answers about what happened to
4:36
her, and she posted in my Facebook discussion group in the fall of twenty
4:42
twenty asking if I would cover it, and needless to say, I get
4:45
to reached out to by families of missing and murdered people all the time,
4:48
but this was the first time I had heard from someone who had a missing
4:51
relative go missing in the nineteen forties, so I was quite surprised by it,
4:56
but I decided to do it and to smile. Also to my surprise,
5:00
she put me in touch with a detective who was working on the case.
5:02
His name was Adam Turner. He works for the police department in Shelby,
5:06
Ohio, and need list to say, I did not expect to be
5:11
contacting a police officer who was working a missing person's case that was seventy five
5:15
years old at this point, but he is one of the most passionate police
5:17
officers I've ever seen, and he pretty much had the attitude that even though
5:21
this is seventy five years old, you should always work unsolved cold cases.
5:26
It's never too late. So he was trying to get the word out to
5:30
see if he could solve this one. The landscape of investigating crimes has changed
5:34
so much, like I think now you've got a lot of police departments who
5:39
are willing to reach out to podcasters, even if they do so on the
5:43
DL and they don't put it out there, like, hey, we've reached
5:45
out to podcasters and we're hoping to get this story out. I think back
5:48
in the eighties, the nineties, the early two thousands, it was like
5:53
they would use psychics and not talk about it, right, It was like
5:57
that was their investigative tool. And I feel like now it's podcasters. And
6:00
so it's really cool that you got to work in tandem with the investigator and
6:06
to see something like this solved, and to know that the granddaughter has that
6:11
kind of resolution to truly know what happened to her grandmother, like that's a
6:15
really beautiful thing. Oh exactly. And this was a case where no missing
6:19
person's report was ever officially filed until twenty eighteen, and that's when Adam Turner
6:26
took over the investigation, and he had the mentality that we have to get
6:30
every piece of information we have about this case out there because maybe the right
6:34
person will hear it and they'll come forward. Because he's got nothing to work
6:38
with. I mean, we don't even we can't even pinpoint an exact moment
6:42
when the victim went missing. We have no evidence, no suspects, no
6:45
eyewitnesses. So he's pretty much working with nothing, but that did not deter
6:49
him. And I know that some police investigators are very defensive. They do
6:54
not want to help podcasts. They kind of have the mentality, oh,
6:57
they're trying to tell us how to do our jobs. They're kind of saying
7:00
that we can't solve this on ro own. But he had the opposite approach,
7:02
saying that podcasts and YouTube shows can be a very helpful medium and they
7:08
have made a difference in a lot of cases. Oh, I think it's
7:11
inarguable at this point, especially like the larger the reach that a podcast has,
7:15
the greater the difference that they can make. You've got a huge listener
7:19
base, and then you see lots of other podcasts like I hate to use
7:24
the example of Crime Junkie because it's such an obvious one, but what they've
7:28
been able to do with their platform to help victims and to help victims' families
7:33
is pretty inspiring. And even like people like Meggie Freelan who cover wrongful conviction
7:41
cases and to be able to get people to listen to these cases, which
7:46
are often those of racial minorities, and it makes a huge difference, and
7:50
that is like just an invaluable tool in the toolbox of investigators if they're willing
7:56
to utilize podcasters. Oh yeah, and another example of wrongful convictions. We
8:01
did an episode a while back of the murders of Harold and Thelma Swain where
8:07
a man named Dennis Perry was wrongfully convicted of the crime, and Undisclosed covered
8:11
it and even invited me to be a guest on it. And back in
8:15
twenty twenty, they finally did do DNA testing and had Dennis exonerated and he
8:20
was released, but he was pretty much in a hopeless situation. And I
8:22
don't think this ever would have happened if Undisclosed hadn't to have covered the case
8:28
and uncovered a lot of new information. So let's start talking about Mary Jane
8:33
van Gilder. She originally hailed from mary In County, West Virginia. She
8:37
got married at a very young age she was only seventeen years old to her
8:41
husband, James Van Gilder, and they had a total of five children.
8:46
Badly, they also had two stillborn children because Mary Jane gave birth to a
8:50
pair of twins in nineteen thirty five but wound up losing them. From what
8:54
everyone has heard, Mary Jane's marriage to James was not a happy one because
8:58
he was alleged to be an alcoholic and was supposedly abusive towards her. We
9:03
really don't know this for sure. It's a lot of hearsay because there are
9:07
just so few firsthand witnesses who are actually around and are still alive to share
9:11
the story. So these are just kind of allegations we don't know they are
9:16
true. But by the end of nineteen forty three, when Mary Jane was
9:20
thirty two years old, she finally decided to separate from James. They've been
9:24
living in a rural area in Marion County, but she decided to move into
9:28
an apartment in the town of Fairmont and got a job at a local restaurant.
9:33
And as you can imagine, this was a pretty big deal because women
9:37
were a lot more reluctant to separate from their husbands back in nineteen forty three.
9:41
Well, I think that speaks to the fact that her marriage must have
9:45
been truly, truly unhappy, and if there was domestic violence in the marriage,
9:50
and you also have to think that this is a woman who was contending
9:54
with a major, major trauma of having birth two babies that died like those
10:01
twins died, and the thing, now we understand the psychology of that's so
10:05
much better. But back in those days, it would just be like you
10:11
better move on, right. And I don't know what they would do in
10:13
hospitals for the grieving process, if they would give them the bodies or they
10:18
let them have time. I know now they do, but back then they
10:22
may have just taken them away and been like, we'll never speak of them,
10:24
or we won't name them. And I think that that could weigh so
10:28
heavily. And when you don't have that support system and you have a partner
10:31
who is an alcoholic, who is potentially violent, I can't even imagine the
10:37
toll that that would take, especially when you're raising five children. That's a
10:41
lot of mouths to feed. So for her to walk away and say I'm
10:46
done, I would rather support myself and my babies than have you in my
10:50
life, I think that is a bold move and it truly speaks to the
10:54
state of their marriage exactly. And I mentioned that she got married at age
10:58
seventeen, which might seem mind blowing today, but it was far more common
11:03
back then for women to get married before they even left thirteen years But here's
11:07
kind of another strange story. I don't know exactly when they found this out,
11:11
but it turned out that one of Mary Jane's children, I think the
11:13
youngest one, was not actually James's, because she had an extramarial affair with
11:18
a man named Delbert Calgar, who had I think done work on the family's
11:22
property. And James apparently found out about this, and to his credit,
11:28
he still wound up raising the child even though he found out it wasn't his.
11:33
Well, what makes the story even crazier is that after Mary Jane went
11:37
missing and they got divorced, James wound up getting remarried to Delbert's sister,
11:41
Virginia Calgar, and they went on to have more children. So it's kind
11:45
of a weird thing that you would get married to the sister of a man
11:50
who was like the unofficial father of one of your children and had an affair
11:52
with your wife, you married your adopted son's aunt. Like it's a little
12:01
it is, yeah, I mean, we don't know many specific details about
12:03
what this was like because there are very few firsthand witnesses, but as far
12:07
as you know, James and Virginia did stay married I think for as long
12:11
as they both were alive, so I guess it was a happier marriage than
12:15
his one to Mary Jane in the long run. Even though Mary Jane was
12:18
living in an apartment in town, all the five children still stayed on the
12:22
property with James and she still kept in touch. But at some point in
12:26
early nineteen forty four, she decided to travel over two hundred and fifty miles
12:31
to the town of Shelby, Ohio, and surprisingly, she did not tell
12:37
anyone she was going to do this beforehand. She did not even tell her
12:39
children, and they only found out about it when she started sending letters to
12:43
them saying that, Hey, I'm now moving in another state. I've got
12:46
a job with the Shelby Army Air Force Depot manufacturing aircraft supplies because World War
12:52
Two was still going on. But I know that everyone was taken by complete
12:56
surprise because she just decided to relocate and start living on her own without telling
13:01
it anyone. Do we know if she was an impulsive person, if this
13:05
would be typical or atypical type of behavior. I mean, it seems at
13:09
the time, and I don't want to characterize somebody leaving their husband as being
13:15
impulsive, but at that time period, it could be described as such because
13:20
it would be like, what are you going to do and how are you
13:22
going to support your children? And from the sounds of it, she was
13:24
walking away not being able to have her children living with her, and for
13:28
a mother, that would be really difficult, especially knowing you're leaving your children
13:33
with an alcoholic. If we're to believe that he truly was an alcoholic,
13:37
somebody with a substance use disorder, we would say nowadays it is something that
13:41
would be really difficult to grapple with because you're doing what's best for you,
13:46
because you're trying to protect yourself, but you will then have to worry about
13:50
your children being in that environment and not being with you. So it's a
13:52
really complex situation. It is, yeah, because we don't really know her
13:58
mindset when she did that. As you know that, even though James was
14:01
alleged to be abusive towards Mary Jane, I haven't heard any stories about him
14:05
being abusive towards his children. I mean, as possible he was, and
14:09
we just don't know that information, but I haven't heard anything about him being
14:13
so bad that his children wanted to estrange from them. So maybe Mary Jane
14:16
thought that things would be okay if he left the children for him to raise.
14:20
But she stayed in Shelby, Ohio for about a year, and she
14:24
did start staying in contact with her children, particularly your oldest daughter Anime,
14:28
who was thirteen years old at the time. She would send them letters,
14:33
clothing, and war bonds. But by the time nineteen forty five year old
14:37
around, things got a bit unusual where Mary Jane suddenly wrote to Anime and
14:41
said, could you please send me back the war bonds, which kind of
14:45
implies that maybe she needed money badly at that point, and I think a
14:48
couple weeks later she did mail one war bond worth twenty five dollars back to
14:54
Anime, but this would turn out to be the last contact they ever had.
14:58
In February of nineteen forty five, Mayor Jane officially filed a petition for
15:01
divorce, accusing her husband of extreme cruelty and gross neglect of duty. And
15:07
we know that that same month she requested a transfer into the labor equipment pool
15:13
at the Shelby Army Air Force Depot to get a job as a high lift
15:16
and fork operator. But then on March the eighth, she just abruptly quit
15:20
her job, and we didn't know the reasons because they just kind of looked
15:24
at her original personnel file and all she wrote for reasons was added household duties.
15:30
And this was the last time she was confirmed to be alive because after
15:33
she quit her job, she caught off all contact with her husband and her
15:35
children and they never heard from her again. And I know that in November
15:41
of that year, James filed for divorce. He responded to the divorce petition,
15:45
but because Mary Jane and her lawyer never responded the petition, the divorce
15:48
was granted and he was awarded full custody of all five of their children.
15:54
Wow, I mean everything pre Internet seems like it was so much easier for
15:58
people to just disappear and to have there be not like its accountability on the
16:04
part of law enforcement, because nobody's going in and being like, hey,
16:07
this person is missing. But it's just people can slip through the cracks so
16:11
much easier. And I've got to say, I think it's so interesting that
16:15
she was going to have a job as like a forklift operator. I love
16:18
that Mary Jane was challenging gender norms at the time. Because that would be
16:23
a job that would be like an atypical job for a woman, would it
16:26
not at that time? Oh, definitely not no, And she it sounded
16:30
like she had a good performance there while working at the depot, and it
16:34
was just a very unusual situation. She was a single woman living on her
16:38
own in a town she was not familiar with working a man's job. And
16:42
that's the thing is that because there were so few people who by the time
16:47
this case got publicity, who were still alive to share their experiences with Mary
16:51
Jane while she was living in Shelby, we really don't know all that much
16:55
about her life there, but it sounds like she was doing pretty well for
16:59
herself. But they all knew that because the war was coming to an end,
17:02
that the depot was probably going to start laying off people eventually. So
17:06
they had theories at the time that maybe she just knew that her days were
17:10
numbered so she decided to quit anyway. But she pretty much just disappeared after
17:15
that, and they could not find any paper trail for her. And when
17:18
you say laying off people, you really mean laying off women. Yeah,
17:22
probably, Yeah, they would probably even the first people to be laid off
17:25
because the men were all out there fighting the war, so they hired a
17:27
lot of women. But once they returned home, then those jobs would go
17:30
to them. Probably. Yeah. So by the time the nineteen fifties rolled
17:36
around, Anime was in her twenty she became an adult, so she started
17:40
wanting to find out what happened to her missing mother. But the problem is
17:44
that, as you know, a lot of the time, many decades ago,
17:47
the police were reluctant to file missing persons reports if there was no hard
17:52
evidence of foul play. They would often give off the excuse that they just
17:56
decided to run away on their own, and they were an adult, so
17:59
they had a right to do so if they wanted to cut off all contact.
18:03
But another night may here was just jurisdictional issues because she was a resident
18:07
of West Virginia, she was living in Ohio, and who was going to
18:11
handle the missing person's report? I mean, she presumably left Ohio, but
18:15
nobody really knew for certain. They couldn't track that down, and Anime even
18:19
at one point wrote to the FBI seeing if they could assist him, but
18:22
they said, we do not have the jurisdiction to over an open investigation because
18:27
this is not a federal crime. We don't know if she was kidnapped and
18:30
brought over state lines, so there was pretty much nothing they could do.
18:34
They could not get an official investigation launched, so everyone just kind of moved
18:40
on with their lives, where James got remarried and had more children, and
18:44
all the children grew up, and I know that this was one of those
18:47
things that the family just never spoke about, where James was reluctant to talk
18:52
about his missing ex wife. They knew it was a bad sign though.
18:55
When Mary Jane's mother passed away in nineteen sixty three, when she didn't show
18:59
up to attend the funeral, they thought, Okay, this is bad.
19:02
She's either dead or she wants nothing to do with her family at all.
19:04
If she's not going to resurface to attend her own mother's funeral, what a
19:08
nightmare for the family. It sounds like a real legal game of hot potato.
19:14
It's like not it not it not it Like we're not going to take
19:17
the case, and we're not going to and the jurisdictional issues end up happening
19:21
where nobody takes it. Nobody's looking into it rather than deciding Okay, well
19:26
maybe we should look at Ohio and see who was she associated with, who
19:30
was she close to, did she have a significant other, was she dating
19:33
anyone? Any entanglements? Could they not have looked into that? And then
19:37
if they had an idea of maybe where she went from there, then they
19:41
could figure out who would then investigate from there. But it feels like the
19:45
family was failed here in that somebody should have looked into it somewhere along the
19:51
way. And then I'm sure everybody at her mother's funeral were probably expecting that
19:56
she would stroll up and that you'd see her and it would be like this
20:00
big reunion, like, oh, we've gone so long without seeing you,
20:04
where have you been? And everyone's tearful but so happy to be reunited.
20:08
And then when she doesn't show up, it's like the hard reality hits.
20:14
She's probably never coming back. Yeah, And that's pretty much how they felt.
20:18
And I know that James died in nineteen eighty five, he never got
20:22
to find out what happened to Mary Jane. And shortly thereafter the family's home
20:26
burned down because of a chimney fire. And what was sad is that this
20:30
destroyed all the letters that Mary Jane had sent to Anime over the years,
20:33
so they literally had no documentation for and we're pretty much just going by Anime's
20:38
memories about what she said. So when they opened an investigation like decades later,
20:44
it's not like they could look at any of the old letters for clues
20:47
and stuff to try to figure out what might have happened to her. It's
20:51
just really unfortunate when it comes to house fires. Back before, you know,
20:55
we could scan documents or put pictures online and they'd be stored in the
20:59
cloud. Nowadays, we've got copies of everything. Like if you've got a
21:03
hard copy of something like you might have it in like a file cabinet.
21:07
But for the most part, we've got everything online digitally. So I mean,
21:11
if like the Internet crashes were all screwed, yeah, but when it
21:15
comes down to those things like pictures and stuff, we're pretty much covered.
21:19
If there's a fire, we've got a backup. But back then, if
21:22
your house burned down, all of your memories could burn down with it.
21:27
And when your mother's she's gone, she's disappeared, and it seems like the
21:32
probability is she's most likely to cease because she hasn't shown back up. To
21:37
think that all of her letters are then gone, like that little bit of
21:40
your mother that you can hold onto and you can actually touch, it's something
21:45
tangible, and then to have that just turned to dust, I can't even
21:49
imagine how Anime felt. Oh yeah, it was very tragic for and thankfully
21:53
they did preserve a few old photos so they were able to use them when
21:57
they launched the missing persons and investigation decades later. But I have heard a
22:02
missing person's investigations where literally there are no surviving photos or maybe one faded out
22:07
photo of the victim. It's kind of sad when you go to the Charlie
22:10
Project and see a profile for someone who went missing like several decades ago,
22:14
and you can barely make out their face on the photograph and you realize that's
22:18
literally all that exists of them now. That's just so sad as you can
22:22
imagine. Because there was not an official missing person's investigation, this didn't get
22:26
any newspaper coverage at all. But it was not until two thousand and four
22:30
when one of Mary Jane's granddaughters was able to get an article published about her
22:34
disappearance in the Plymouth Journal in Ohio, and they said, if there was
22:38
anyone who remembers my grandmother from their time living in Shelby, please come forward.
22:44
And sure enough, she actually received a letter from a guy named William
22:48
King, who had lived in Shelby in nineteen forties and was only thirteen years
22:52
old at the time, and he said that his father and two brothers had
22:56
worked with Mary Jane at the Army Air Force Stepo and their family were friends
23:00
with her. She often come over to have dinner with them and stuff.
23:04
He didn't really have any insights about why she went missing. But it's pretty
23:10
crazy to think that William King is the only person who has ever shared his
23:14
story of his first hand experiences with Mary Jane during her one year living in
23:18
Shelby, because that's because he was a kid at the time. But pretty
23:22
much by that point everyone else who had interacted with her had passed on,
23:26
so there was just no one who could offer any insight into stuff like did
23:29
she have any relationships, was she dating anyone? How is her mood?
23:33
And because William was so young, he didn't really have much insight into that.
23:36
But it's just so crazy to think that he is pretty much the sole
23:40
account of Mary Jane's time living in Shelby. It's eerie, almost right to
23:45
think that she was there and all of these people interacted with her, But
23:51
then all of these people are gone, they're most likely deceased, and the
23:56
only person that remembers her is someone who was literally a child at the time,
24:00
and she came over to their house, like thank god that he actually
24:03
read this article and was like, okay, I'm going to write a letter
24:07
to her daughter. It was to Anime, right, it was actually a
24:11
granddaughter named Misty to Missy, and luckily the Misty had that connection to know
24:18
that somebody knew your grandmother and to know that she was there and she touched
24:22
people's lives. I think that there's there's something the concrete about that, right,
24:29
there's something real, Like she turns from being this ghost into being like
24:33
a person that's tangible that you can like reach out and touch, and you
24:37
in essence, he's like fleshed her out. I'm sure for Misty exactly,
24:41
yeah, because it would have been crazy to think, you're wondering yourself,
24:44
what was she even in Shelby that entire time, Like we have no witnesses
24:48
to confirm that. But and this was another lucky break because I know that
24:52
when they launched a missing person's investigation, they wanted to find her military records
24:56
from this time period. But you may have heard, like during the nineteen
25:00
seventies that a lot of the military records for World War Two were kept at
25:03
the National Personnel Records Center in Over in Missouri. But then there was like
25:07
a huge fire which destroyed approximately sixteen to eighteen million military personnel records. So
25:15
there was a big fear that they were never going to find Mary Jane's record.
25:18
But during his investigation, Adam Turner learned that even though a lot of
25:23
the military records were at this facility, the civilian personnel records for World War
25:27
Two were actually kept the National Archives in Saint Louis, and he was able
25:32
to retrieve it. And this is the only reason we have this information about
25:36
her time at the depot and her promotion to a forklift operator and a decision
25:41
to leave in March of nineteen forty five, because when he started the investigation,
25:45
he had nothing but a bunch of photographs. But as I'm going to
25:48
say later on, this military record would contain a clue that eventually led to
25:52
the case being resolved. Adam Turner like, let me just give credit where
25:57
credits due. He sounds like, are real bad at Yes he is,
26:00
Yes, he is amazing, Like he is the ultimate example of a police
26:03
officer who gives one hundred ten percent to every case he covers, no matter
26:08
how old it is. And he finally got assigned to the case in April
26:12
of twenty eighteen, because that's when Mary James's granddaughter, Mindy Wilson finally decided,
26:18
let's try to get a missing person's report file. Let's see if we
26:22
can find out what happened to her. And I also got to give a
26:25
lot of credit to Lance Combs, who is the chief of the Shelby Police
26:29
Department, because he allowed it. He pretty much decided some police chiefs would
26:33
probably say, we're not going to waste time and resources on a missing person's
26:37
case that's over seventy years old, but he gave permission for Adam Turner to
26:41
take it on and use whatever resources he had to kind of look at it.
26:45
And Adam like, of course, because he's an active detective, he
26:48
had a lot of other work to do, so he often did a lot
26:51
of investigating for Mary Jane's case on his own time and used his own money
26:56
to create his own travel expenses to do stuff to work on the case,
27:00
but because he knew that it would be very difficult to balance this with his
27:03
other work while he was on the job, but he said he became very
27:07
passionate about it and says that if there's any evidence out there, I'll find
27:11
it and I'll try to get this case solved. I just love to hear
27:14
it because we cover so many cases where law enforcement just everything is a mess,
27:22
whether it's the coroner or the police or the prosecutors. We're often dealing
27:27
with unsolved cases, and a lot of times that can be things like the
27:32
police just not doing their jobs, some kind of misconduct. There can be
27:37
allegations of conspiracies. We run the full gamut. So to actually hear that
27:41
we've got investigators, we've got a chief of police, we've got we've got
27:47
Adam Turner, and we've got Lance Combs, the chief of police, who
27:51
actually really seem to care about Misty and her plight and really want to get
27:56
Mary Jane's case solved. I just love to see it because we don't see
28:00
it that often when we cover cases. Yeah, I was about to say
28:03
that though we've done so many cases on this podcast where one of the main
28:06
reasons they are still unsolved is because of bad police work or lazy police work,
28:11
or a corruption. But it just kind of blew my mind to see
28:14
this guy get so passionate about solving a case that most other officers would be
28:18
like, I'm not touching this one because I've got nothing to work with.
28:22
Yeah, I'm sure a lot of police chiefs would look at it and be
28:25
like, well, what's our payout for this? Right, this isn't a
28:26
recent case, so you're not going to have public pressure in the way that
28:30
you would if it was a murder or disappearance of somebody that had happened recently.
28:36
So to go, Okay, we're going to do this solely for the
28:38
fact that, sure, you get to close a case if you solve it,
28:41
but they had to know the probability was low going into it. You're
28:45
really and truly doing it for the family. So that just speaks so highly
28:48
of this whole police department. Oh exactly. And also, even if they
28:53
don't solve it, they're just ensuring that Mary Jane has not been lost to
28:57
history because since he took on the investigation, her profile page was finally being
29:03
added to websites like the Charlie Project, the Dough Network, and NamUs.
29:07
Because if you did a Google search on Mary Jane van Gilder pre twenty eighteen,
29:11
you probably would have gotten nothing, but at least now when you do
29:14
a search for you were seeing her photograph and all her statistics on the missing
29:18
Person's website, so you knew that people remembered her. Of course, because
29:22
Adam Turner did not have a lot to work with, he tried looking through
29:26
any leads that he could, and that involved going through the find Grave website
29:30
to see could there be any candidates here who were buried anywhere or any Jane
29:34
does who have a potential to possibly be Mary Jane, And he came across
29:40
this Jane Doe, who was found dead in Preble County, Ohio on May
29:44
the twenty fifth, nineteen sixty eight. Her skull had been found in a
29:47
wooded area by a group of children and they eventually found her decomposed body nearby,
29:52
but the coroner cannot determine the exact cause of death, but the victim
29:56
was estimated to be between thirty to fifty years old, and the victim they
30:00
thought that she had been dead for about ten to fifteen years, and they
30:03
have theorized that maybe she was buried in a shallow grave because before they discovered
30:08
the remains, there had been a heavy rainstorm, so it could have caused
30:11
the remains to surface and wash up, and that's how she was finally found.
30:15
But because she cannot be identified, the victim was buried as a Jane
30:19
Doe in the town of Eton, and because Eaton is not all that far
30:25
from Shelby, and there were some compelling similarities between the Jane Doe and Mary
30:29
Jane, Officer Turner contacted the Preble County Coroner's office to see if they can
30:33
make arrangements to exhume the remains and extract DNA, and he pretty much,
30:38
Adam pretty much had the mindset that it's a long shot. It may not
30:42
be Mary Jane. But even if if this lea turns out to go nowhere,
30:45
we're going to exume a Jane Doe and potentially identify her and offer a
30:51
potential resolution for another family. So this is totally worthwhile. I'd love to
30:55
see it. It's nice to see that. Adam Turner is like, okay,
30:59
well, if we get the resolution that we want, that we can
31:02
tell Misty, this is what happened to your grandmother, then great. But
31:06
if not, there's another family out there who doesn't know where their loved one
31:10
went. And if we can find DNA that matches and we can let them
31:14
know, then we get to give closure or resolution to someone. And I
31:18
think after so many years, because it's been so many years, you're going
31:22
to be giving it to like grandchildren, and there would always be that lore
31:26
within a family of what happened to Grandma, you know, like everybody would
31:30
talk about it, and whether or not it would be like a secret that
31:33
we aren't supposed to bring it up because it upsets people, or it's something
31:37
that's talked about openly. No matter the way the family communicates it, it's
31:41
something that's going to hang really heavy over a family. So to be able
31:45
to actually have some answers, it would be such a powerful thing, oh
31:49
exactly. And in this case it would eventually turn out that there were answers
31:53
for two families, which is quite amazing. So the exit mation took place
31:59
in August of twenty nineteen, and what was crazy is that when they opened
32:02
the casket, they found some remains, but the skull and the mandible were
32:07
missing, and no one knew what they were. But it was theorized that
32:10
they had been donated to a local public school, as apparently this was a
32:14
common practice for remains found back during that time period. But I don't know
32:19
if they ever did find the skull, but they were hoping that they would
32:22
take DNA and compare it from the DNA from Mary Jane's surviving relatives. But
32:28
unfortunately, because the remains were so degraded after all this time, the DNA
32:31
strand was broken. So when I released my Trail Went Cold episode back in
32:37
September of twenty twenty, this was still in a holding pattern because they didn't
32:42
have enough viable DNA evidence, so we didn't know if they were getting able
32:45
to be able to determine if this Jane Doe was Mary Jane. And spoiler
32:50
alert, it did not turn out to be Mary Jane. But we have
32:52
a two for one special here because this victim was also eventually identified. Well,
33:00
at least you've got some closure here and to be able to get a
33:02
resolution on who this person is to be able to let them rest in peace
33:07
and let their family know what happened. That is a huge, huge accomplishment.
33:14
So Adam Turner must have been really happy. Although it's not the case
33:17
that he wanted to solve with Mary Jane, I'm sure that he was elated
33:22
that somebody's getting a resolution. Oh yeah, because from my conversations with him,
33:25
he is very passionate about identifying decendents John and Jane does. He just
33:30
thinks it's so sad that there can be people buried and you don't know who
33:35
they are, and their families out there may not have been able to figure
33:38
out what happened to him. And he even told me that this cemetery where
33:42
the Preble County Jane Doe is buried, he thinks that there might be some
33:45
decedents buried under there who don't have any grave markers or tombstones and have just
33:50
been lost to history. And that just made me think, like, how
33:52
many unidentified people are buried throughout the United States that we don't even know about
33:58
because they have no grave marker? Oh yeah, and like Popper's graves,
34:01
and would they stack people in certain places we just don't know And I think
34:07
it's such a beautiful thing to be able to give somebody back their identity after
34:12
it's been lost and nobody knows for sure what happens, you know, after
34:16
we die. But if somebody is sticking around and wondering, like am I
34:21
ever going to be discovered? Are they ever going to know? It's me?
34:23
Well, my family ever know what happened to me? At least then
34:27
their spirit can rest easy, exactly. And as we're going to find out
34:31
here, somebody was identified who had been lost to history for a really long
34:36
time, but now their memory has finally been preserved. Well, it was
34:39
not until twenty twenty two when the Shelby Police Department got in contact with an
34:44
organization called Moxie Forensic Investigations, who specialize in providing investigative genetic genealogy services.
34:52
And as you know, genetic genealogy has led to the identification of so many
34:57
John and Jane does over the past six years. And it was sent to
35:01
a place called inter Mountain Forensics, a DNA testing laboratory located in Salt Lake
35:07
City, Utah. And they pretty much were the type of people where even
35:09
though the DNA strand had been broken on these remains, they said, we
35:15
can't do it. If there's anyone who can still manage to extract a DNA
35:17
sample from degraded remains, it would be them, and the procedure would cost
35:22
five thousand dollars. But the full funding was actually provided by business called Criminal
35:28
Coffee Company, which is run by Stephanie Harlow and Derek Lavassar from the Crime
35:32
Weekly podcast and YouTube show. And I know you've listened to them, right,
35:37
Oh yeah, I've heard them talk about Preble County dough To on their
35:43
podcast. But I think this is a different person. Where they thought it
35:45
was a woman, that it was actually a man. Yep, that would
35:49
be correct. It's the same one, the same one. Yep. Okay,
35:52
okay, yep. They were able to finally extract some usable DNA and
35:55
build a DNA profile, and early on they had found some male DNA on
36:00
the remains and they figured, well, it might have been there through cross
36:04
contamination, or it might have belonged to Jane Doe's killer, But nope,
36:07
that was because the Jane Doe was actually a John Doe, as gender had
36:12
been misidentified because this was the late nineteen sixties and forensics were not as advanced,
36:17
and I guess the coroner mistakenly thought that this victim was a female because
36:22
of its small stature and it even the corner even said that we believe the
36:27
victim might have been pregnant and given birth to a child at one point.
36:30
But as we're about to find out, they could not have been more wrong.
36:35
Wow, that is crazy because I wasn't really aware of the details of
36:38
the case, but I've heard Derek and Stephanie talk about it in different episodes
36:44
and how it used to be called she was called Preble Penny. Yes,
36:47
well they formally thought was as she he was called Preble Penny, but is
36:52
now called Preble p and that through Criminal Coffee they were able to fund that.
36:57
So just again talking about podcasts are able to make a difference through their
37:01
outreach and through their fundraising. It's just it's so incredible. Good for Derek
37:06
and Stephanie. Yeah, this was excellent. This is one of their crowning
37:08
achievements. So was officially announced. They had a press conference in November of
37:14
twenty twenty three where the Preble County Penny or Preble County John Doe was officially
37:19
identified as a young man named Albert Alan Frost, and as you can imagine,
37:24
Albert was completely lost to history. He had never been reported missing.
37:28
He had just one of those people that just vanished off the face of the
37:30
earth. But here's his backstory. He was originally born in Hamilton, Ohio,
37:36
in nineteen thirty five and was the youngest of eight children. He was
37:39
a veteran who served in the military. He was apparently very proud of it
37:44
because he would wear his army jacket around virtually all the time. But he
37:49
was also known as a shy but very rebellious individual who was kind of a
37:52
drifter. He would just kind of jump from place to place where he would
37:55
go and stay with the relative for a while and crash with them, and
37:59
then he would just move on his way. So he pretty much lived a
38:02
transient lifestyle. And one of his relatives, let me just see here,
38:07
his grand niece, said that in retrospect, she thinks that Albert might have
38:10
been on the autism spectrum because he was so shy and socially awkward with people.
38:15
But back in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, nobody knew what autism
38:20
was. So he went diagnosed and they just kind of thought, well,
38:22
here's a odd little Albert, kind of the black sheep of the family,
38:25
just doing his own thing. Well, we think of like mental health where
38:30
we're at now versus the way people were treated back then. There was little
38:35
empathy and little understanding for medical professionals. I mean, unless you were fortunate
38:40
enough to have access to like the greatest psychological care at the time. But
38:44
even if you're going to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, chances are good that
38:50
you aren't going to be properly diagnosed, nor are you going to get the
38:53
support that you need. But where we're at now is such a different place.
38:58
So to be able to look back and to think how people must have
39:01
suffered if they were dealing with autism, spec and disorder or any other diagnosis,
39:07
to be able to to not have that ability to have people understand you
39:14
in that way, and to have that sense of community that people have access
39:17
to now. There's plenty of different groups. You can talk to people that
39:22
are very similar to you in that they are dealing with the same types of
39:25
disorders and they just didn't have that back then. So to be labeled as
39:30
you know, odd Albert, which I think a lot of family members were
39:34
back then. They are just quote unquote crazy or like the unhinged one.
39:38
And I think that that was typical, like every family had a quote unquote
39:43
crazy person, and they were just people with likely dealing with mental illness.
39:47
It just weren't properly diagnosed. So this is a good time to bring an
39:52
in to part one. Join us again next week when we release part two
39:54
about the unexplained disappearance of Mary Jane van Gilder Vin, do you want to
40:00
tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold Patreon? Yes. The
40:02
Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three years now, and we offer these
40:07
standard bonus features like early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers
40:13
and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up with us on Patreon.
40:16
If you join our five dollars tier tier two, we also offer monthly bonus
40:22
episodes in which I talk about cases which are not featured on the Trail Went
40:25
Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon. And if you join our
40:30
highest tier tier three, the ten dollar tier, one of the features we
40:34
offer is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsaved Mysteries where you can
40:39
download an audio file and then boot up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon
40:45
Prime or YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in the background,
40:50
where I just provide trivia and factoids about the cases featured in this episode.
40:53
And incidentally, the very first episode that I did a commentary track over was
40:58
the episode featuring in this case. So if you want to download a commentary
41:01
track at which I make more smart ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be
41:06
sure to join Tier three. So I want to let you know a little
41:08
bit about the jeweles and Nashty patreons. So there's early ad free episodes of
41:14
The Path Went Chili. We've got our Pathwent Chili mini's, which are always
41:17
over an hour, so they're not very mini, but they're just too short
41:21
to turn into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those, So we
41:23
hope you'll check out those patreons. We'll link them in the show notes.
41:28
So I want to thank you all for listening, and any chance you have
41:30
to share us on social media with a friend or to rate and review is
41:34
greatly appreciated. You can email us at The Pathwentchili at gmail dot com You
41:38
can reach us on Twitter at the pathwin. So until next time, be
41:42
sure to bundle up because cold trails and chili pass call for warm clothing.
41:46
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy