Jack-in-the-Box Murder Mystery Becomes Fugitive Wife Murder Trial

Published Apr 2, 2024, 12:00 PM

Burned remains of a man found inside a foot locker and left in a blueberry field in Michigan were not identified for 13 years. In 2015 the case was called  "The Jack-in-the-Box Murder because it was a catchy title. The remains were not identified until the Ottawa County Sheriff's Office received a tip in 2015 that gave them the information they needed to use dental records to identify the deceased as Robert Caraballo. Investigating Caraballo's life at the time of his death took investigators to the home he shared with his wife and stepdaughter. Joseph Scott Morgan will break down the forensics that brought this case to a conclusion and Dave Mack will help tell the story of how the Jack-in-the-Box Murder became The Fugitive Wife Murder Trial. 

 

 

 

 

Transcript Highlights 

00:00:44 Introduction of story a burned body in a trunk found in blueberry field 

00:02:40 Talk about conspiracy and escaping to other side of the planet 

00:05:28 Discussion of victim being alive with hammer stuck in skull 

00:08:02 Discussion of injury caused by falling downstairs 

00:12:34 Talk about how remains could not be identified 

00:15:11 Discussion of evidence in hammer attack 

00:19:49 Discussion of hitting head with a hammer 

00:23:51Talk about how the skull breaks 

00:28:19 Discussion of destroying a body 

00:32:37 Discussion of “old school” identifying remains 

00:35:15 Talk about the plan to push victim down the stairs, hit him with a bat 

00:35:53 Talk about the conspiracy 

00:38:01 Discussion of law in Italy for hotel guests 

00:39:15 Discussion of cover-up 

00:40:06 Beverly McCallum guilty on all charges 

00:40:42 Talk about keeping a secret 

 

Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I am, by no means a vegetarian. It's not my thing. But I've gotten now where I eat a lot more fruit than I used to. And one of the things that I have come to enjoy more than anything. I guess it's because they're convenient and kind of carry them around my hand, or blueberries, and I will anytime I go to the store buy a brain new pack of blueberries, like to eat them with pecan halves. Actually, blueberries have gotten where they bring me a lot of joy. You don't really think about, you know, where blueberries come from or how they're farmed. All I know is that I like the way they taste. But can you imagine owning a blueberry farm, and day after day you got to the blueberry bushes and you check and see how they're doing. When it's harvest time, you take them all in. But in one particular day, out there in the middle of a blueberry farm, there is found a metal foot locker, and contained within that metal foot locker our charred human remains. And for years they the identity remained a mystery. But just looking upon that in that rather, I'm sure a bucolic environment. You understand that all hell broke loose and there are no explanations, at least initially. Today on body Backs, we're going to talk about a case that involves a metal foot locker, a burned body, a hammer, and a wife that didn't want to be in a marriage any longer. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags. I got to tell you this case. It kind of crossed my desk and some of the things I've been covering on the air. And I was struck by this because there was so much forensic science involved actually in the death of this gentleman, Robert Caraballo up in Michigan, that I was actually astounded. And it wasn't a single perpetrator. It was like a triad of individuals that were involved in this poor man's death. And I was shocked, I really was. And it is truly a mystery, and it involves an individual that was on the run for a long time. When I say on the run, I'm not talking about you know, this happened to Michigan. I'm not talking about somebody that ran off to Ohio or you know, to Wisconsin. I'm talking about somebody that went literally on the other side of the earth to get away from from what she had wrought, right, and so I was fascinated. It had me hooked.

The entire conspiracy that went into this actually is one step further and deeper than I thought when we started, because one thing that has come out they did a test run. The suspects here did a test run of what they were going to do. Now, you said the woman who didn't want to be a part of a marriage, all right, we have a conspiracy that involves Christopher Wayne McMillan. We have Deneen ducharmeat who is the daughter of the main suspect here, Beverly McCallum. Robert Caraballo, the victim, was the stepfather of Deneen dou Charmay. Christopher Wayne McMillan was friends with douch Charmais. They're both college friends at the time. He's forty five now, and this was back in two thousand and two, So do the math. He's twenty one, she's twenty one. Their buddies and when Beverly McCallum comes to them, it says, I'm tired of being married to this guy. I got to get rid of him. I guess divorce is not something that crosses people's minds. I don't know why that is. But in this particular case, rather than divorce, she opted to allegedly kill her husband. And what took place sounds like something out of a movie that we made up, because according to by the way Christopher McMillan turns state's evidence, and he described exactly what happened, and that is that Beverly McKellen pushes her husband down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, her daughter, Deneen du CHARMEI has a hammer. The song if I had a hammer, we'll never have the same meaning anymore, because she had a hammer, and she starts pummeling the man's head with the hammer. Beverly mccalm comes downstairs because give me the hammer. You're not doing good enough. But at some point in time, while the victim here is still alive, Robert Carabella is still alive, and the hammer gets stuck in his skull, Joe the man is killed and suffog well, he was killed by suffocating, put a bag over his head, tied it off with a rope, so all the bludgeting of his dome. Having the hammer stuck was not enough to kill him. He was suffocated with a rope and a bag and then thrown into a locker of some foot locker and burned.

Yeah, isn't that song thing. You're leaving behind so much evidence that can specifically lead back to cause and effect when it comes to this individual's death. Let's go back to this idea of the staircase. I've had a couple of cases over the years where I've had people fall down staircases. It's and it always seems like the staircases that people fall down, I've never had one of these. If you think about gone with the wind with a big grand staircase, you know, never have those kind of cases. It's always somebody that falls down into the basement. And I think it's because places are so dark most of the time, the rails are insufficient to the task, the treads are worn, or whatever the case might be. Or people just trip because you know when you go into the basement. Many times people are going to the basement to store things and they'll be carrying they don't they don't have anything to hold on to, so it'll carry a box or an item or something like that, and they go tumbling what's fascinating is that when you have a fall down a set of stairs, is that you're going to get all of these interesting presentations on the body. Obviously there can be fracturing that goes on, but some of the more fascinating aspects are these contusions and points of what we refer to as points of impact, and you have multiple of them. That's why it makes it sort of odd when you see this thing, because I mean, everybody can identify with falling down a set of stairs if you fall down a great number of these stairs. For every time that you tumble and you make contact with the surface again, first the first time that you fall, if you're falling forward, you might impact I don't know, on a shoulder or on the back of your head. The next time you impact, you might impact on your backside. Then you might impact on the outer thigh, and then you might strike your shoulder again. And so you're making these different different points of contact along the way. And you know, people that survive these falls many times they'll say, well, you know, it's like I was in a tumble dryer with a bunch of rocks, and it's like being in a car accident and you're getting, you know, except for a car accident it's one, you know, kind of one impact. This is multiple impacts. And you think about somebody that's that says, well, gee whiz, you know, they're trying to rationalize this out, and think, how am I going to bring about somebody's death? I know, Hey, let me open the door here, Hey, hon come here, take a look and see what's going on, because this is obviously a planned event, Dave. And so your first stop along the continuum here is to your main your main weapon. You've weaponized the staircase at this point in time, you're going with pushing down the staircase because it's it's almost as if you alluded to the idea that this It's almost like somebody had written this out, you know, like I mean, I don't know, maybe in a fiction form. Yeah, let's go with the staircase. That that's gonna work. It's not necessarily going to work. It's a crapshoot at best. But then you've got somebody that's down there waiting, Dave with a hammer.

Yes, and then the hammer gets stuck. I don't know why that really has me, Joe, but it does the fact that they're using a hammer on this man's head. By the way, this wasn't somebody that was unknown. They didn't come home and have a robbery taking place and they were killing this person, you know, or defending themselves. This was McCallum's husband and stepfather to Denen do Charmeat. So this was somebody They lived part of their life with.

The most violent homicides that I ever worked. It was not dry by shootings and things like that. Those are horrible, but it was domestic related events. Because there's so much anger tied up in it, and you've got people that are striking out at individuals. It's like, I'm not merely going to kill you. I'm going to exact an ounce a pound of floa. Rather, I'm going to exact metaphorically of course here, but a pound of flesh from you. You will in fact suffer. And look, we don't know, We don't necessarily know what you know, kind of the prelude to all of this was, but we do know this the fact that, like you said, this was a husband somebody that was acting at least as a father figure in the environment that I guess at some point in time was a provider. But yet the perpetrator in this case just simply got tired of it and want to end Dave. Just this past week, I was actually teaching my medical Legal Death Investigation class at Jacksonville State and I generally teach it every semester, but the it's it's apropos here because I was just lecturing the other day about blunt force trauma. And let me ask you. I've got a I've got a quizzling here for you. All right, here we go, all right, what do you think is the number one cause of fatal blunt force trauma in America? This even surpasses firearms or anything.

Else making your wife mad.

Motor vehicle accents, motor vehicle accents, And that's the number that that's literally the number one cause of blunt force trauma. And you know, like we had said just a second ago, it's like this guy had been Oh my god, he was he was like in a car accident, just like a couple of times over, just from falling down the staircase. But you know, you got several different types of blunt for here.

I guess I had to ask you this because when I'm looking at this case, they called it the jack in the box case, yeah, and which I know. We try to find names for things because if the media does it to draw attention so that people either click or lank.

Some mean it's really gruesome to me, It truly is, but go ahead.

You know anyway, So in this case, we know, based on the conspiracy that we actually do know what one person involved in this set happened.

Yeah.

Otherwise you know, you're stuck with a cold case, which is exactly what happened. They couldn't even identify this man, and I don't know why, but we'll get to that in a minute. But let me ask you, Joe, because I was trying to picture the wounds and specifically knowing that he was hitting the head with a hammer. But I'm thinking, if I'm falling down the stairs, I'm going to hit my head at some point, and I'm probably going to catch it on a sharp object, you know, the stair footing, the side railing, the crown molding, the stuff, or the shoe molding. There's so many things to hit, so many edges to come in contact with. When you get the bottom, you've got this bloody mass in your head. How can you tell what came from the hammer and what came, you know, from the stairs. How can you delineate where they are from.

That's an excellent question, Dave, And one of the ways that we would do this in the Morgue is, first off, I would you can. I'm not going to say that it wouldn't happen, but you're not necessarily going to have a tearing of the skin with a fall down a staircase that you know is interpreted as a laceration. Remember I talked about this before. Lacerations are not the same as sharp force, but yet many people mis identify them and there's a whole science behind that that I could go into sometime. But with blunt force trauma, you're going to generate injuries to the skin. Sometimes there're pattern injuries, and one of the things that we look for are first off, abrasions on the skin, which means that you're there's like a friction event that's going on when you're let's say, if those stairs are carpeted, Okay, when your your bare skin hits that carpeted surface, it's going to a braid the skin, which is superficial. All of us have fallen down the skin in our knees or our elbows, then underlying that you're going to have these big focal areas of hemorrhage or you know, you'll have a As one of the doctors I used to work with this older gentleman I love dearly, he used to refer to it as a hema tomata and he'd say, yeah, we've got a hema tomato here, and it's a hematoma, you know, so you'll have a large bruise. The trick is is that how do you delineate between the impact that you have on all of these multiple surfaces as you're tumbling down the staircase as opposed to the thing that we had mentioned a second ago is rather gruesome, which is a hammer attack. And the save grace I think it from an investigative standpoint, is that with a hammer attack, the features are very very specific. As a matter of fact, if we can recover the hammer, and I'm talking about in this case, you've got a body that was burned, but if you can recover the hammer at the scene, many times the hammer will be brought to the mork. Isn't that fascinating? And then we will take Yeah, you can match it. Yeah, so just imagine, if you imagine the business end of a hammer, as far as the impact the head of the hammer, that flat surface is almost the shape, and it's dependent upon the type of hammer it is. But I'm just throwing this out here. Think about the shape of a quarter, all right. And if you take that hammer and you drive it into some money's skull multiple times, you will get these kind of elliptical they're kind of half moon shaped lacerations. And then on the skin and then when you reflect the scalp and you pull it back, you'll see that there is what we refer to as a bone plug. So the skull itself will actually fracture. You can almost marry it up to one of the edges of the hammer. You can compare it in other times if they come directly down. You know that the head is oddly it's not oddly shaped, that's kind of the wrong thing to say. But it's got all these kind of curved features to it, all right. The topography of it, it's really really interesting. If you hit it flush, you will I've seen these quarter sized bone fractures and they're shaped like a quarter, and it's really really fascinating to compare that with the head of the hammer and the bone plug manytime is driven in. But I think you you had told me that one of these individuals actually stated that they literally buried this hammer in this man's skull.

Is that and he was alive. That's what got me is that he wasn't dead. They actually got the hammer stuck and couldn't get it out, and I'm sure they did eventually, But yeah, the McMillan here actually said in his test in telling police because he actually copped a plea deal. That's how we have all this information about what actually took place and when it took place, is because he told police that they actually got the hammer stuck and the man was still alive. So when Dianne Ducharmet, when she was the first she was at the bottom of the stairs hitting him first, and Mom McCallum, the wife, didn't like how she was going about this, and so she starts taking the hammer and hitting and he McMillan was specific on the side of the head over here by the temple, and I'm thinking that had to have been much more vicious in terms of because as in the skull thinner in the temple areas.

Yeah, much much thinner in that particular area. The thickest part of the skull, there's two areas, really is going to be the frontal bone, which makes up your forehead. Now, if you move to the left or the right of that and kind of down and forward of your ear, that's where the temporal bone is. Then up above the temporal bone, you have what's referred to as the parietals some people will say parie to heal, and that's thick. Temple bone is not thick, it's rather thin. But really the most the thickest area, uh and I know because I've opened a lot of skulls over the course of my career in the morgue is actually the occiput or the occipital. If you feel if you put your hand behind your head, you can kind of feel that bump on the back of your head. That's called the occipital protuberance. And that's one of the thickest areas. But isn't it interesting that area right there kind of guards that kind of primal brain area, you know, where our base, our base functions, the autonomic nervous system, you know, kind of en dwells in that area. That's you know, we don't have to think about breathing. We don't have to think about, you know, our heart beating or anything like that. That that's really protected. I would imagine that they probably did. Even if they buried the hammer in his skull, that's no guarantee necessarily that that's going to be an immediate fatal blow, right, And I think that a lot of people think that that would happen. I would think I.

Did until I saw it, and I thought, you've got to be kidding me. So he could actually be sitting there breathing with a hammer. This is the actual testimony by this this is ongoing case right now. Yeah, this is what McMillan testified. As I mentioned, he has pleaded guilty now as being a part of this whole thing. This is what he said. He testified in court. Beverly was yelling at Deneen, give me the hammer, give me the hammer, and he says McCallum took the hammer and hit her husband in the left side of the head several times. The hammer became stuck in Caraballo's head. That was the testimony.

Joe. Yeah, and I don't know, I don't know what kind of force the daughter had delivered this discharmat I believe his host pronounced charmaine. I don't know what kind of force she had delivered. Uh, you see the here's the thing about a perpetrator that's trying to kill somebody with a blunt object. And if you shoot somebody, you know relative it's there's a high probably it's gonna be a terminal event. You don't have to do a lot of work other than aim it and pull the trigger. With this, you really get Can you imagine you're put into this position where you're armed with a hammer and you have to Uh, if they're entering into this conspiracy together, you're being told, okay, I'm going to push him downstairs and we're going to kill him. Well, okay, if you're coming to this, if you're coming to the situation, how much much force is required? As grifomeess as is, what's your skill level with a hammer? You know, I don't know anything about the daughter, but I can't imagine she was a finishing contractor, you know, working on homes and framing out houses, which you know, there's a lot of skill with driving a nail. If you're using a hammer to do it, I'm not real good at it myself. I'm always mishitting the nail or hitting my hand or something like that. But how much more so when you're looking down at the body of your stepfather and up at the top of the staircase, maybe for an instant you glance up and there's your mother standing there after she's pushed this guy down the staircase, and you know what you have to do. The problem is you don't know how much force is required, how long you're going to have to do it, which end of the hammer to use in order to kill this individual. If you're an investigator on a case such as this and you're standing over, if you can just put yourself into this position just for a second, all my friends out here, just listen to me. You're the investigator here, and you're standing in a blueberry field and you're standing over what they have termed as a metal box, a metal foot locker specifically, and you're staring down into this box, and you've got this mass that's in there that is charred. You don't know who this person is, and would not know who this person is day for years and years and years to come. I would think this is not like finding a skeleton and you know, maybe it's been partially buried and you've got scattered and no, this is a concentrated collection of human remains that is in that has been placed in a box and that has been burned. There's a lot of there's a lot of activity going on here. There's a lot of thought going into this, and you think about that, and for an investigator, this has got to be one of the most frustrating things. If you don't know who was behind this to begin with, or who your victim is.

I'm trying to figure out how they didn't know who this was based on. If they don't know who it is, then they don't know who the possible suspects are. And they didn't know who he was for ten years or actually thirteen years. But I want to go back to something very quickly, Joe, and I'm yeah, sure, but all right, when somebody is getting beat about the head, Yeah, does the skull? I know when a baby is born, how they have the soft spot on the top of the head and we're all careful of that and the dome seals over time. Does when you're being hit about the head, does it break in a similar fashion that it comes together as you're growing is a brain.

Yeah, you're you're thinking about the suture lines that are in place. If you look, you can go along and see see what I'm talking about. But you have like a sagital sutures, you have a mid line suture. They are the suture lines that you know where when we are developing in uterow. But also and that's where the fontinel comes in. You know what people commonly refer to as a soft spot. And actually you have two. There's one that's more antiror's up to the front. You have another one that's not quite as pronounced, it's more posterior. As a baby grows, that begins to close off. And then the skull will essentially lack of a better term here, really quickly off the top of my head, it will begin to ossify, essentially, And you know, kids can strike their head and it'll be it's not necessarily for you or I a kid striking his head, the same thing might be I might wind up in a hospital bed. But the child skull is so much more pliable. When you get to you know, like middle age, you know, these fracture lines are going to show up, and sometimes they will fracture along the future lines. But if you're being impacted specifically with a hammer in a specific area, the best thing I can suggest if you want to see what this looks like, take a hard boiled egg. Take a hard boiled egg and take it in after it's bowl. Just simply hold it. You can hold it, I don't know, six seven inches above a counter surface and drop it straight down and don't squeeze it or anything like that. If you do it, pick it up and look at that fracture on that kind of curved surface that you'll see on an egg many times with direct impact, you'll see the center. It looks like a spider web that kind of goes out from that concentric area. Many times you'll see that with skulls as well. So if you've got a center point of a fracturing, like with a hammer, it's going to kind of you'll get these kind of in glass examination. In forensics they refer to him as radio lines. They just kind of expand out like that, right, you'll see it almost like a spider web that's there. But you know, Dave, you add you add of heat, well you got yeah, you got heat all right?

Because we have all this damage to the head that we know is caused by a hammer, and we know that based on what we've been told that the victim here is suffocated after you know, he took the beating to the head and survived, and so they put a bag over his head, tied it off with a rope, and he suffocated to death. Right then they burned him inside of a foot locker. And I guess my my thing is, how do you go back now and figure out how many other than a complete hit of the hammer on the head that left a mark? You know, you can't tell if there was if he was had cuts all over him, you know, the death by a thousand cuts. You can't tell that because it's all burned off. Yeah it is, But then what is the fire due to what's left? Is I know that you know I know this from Breaking Bad that they did it in one of the final episodes, that the teeth explode at a certain level of heat. Is that like popcorn? Is that a true thing?

I wouldn't go as far as to say an explosion, but yeah, they begin to fracture, and we have what referred to as heat fractures. And once you attain that kind of really high end temperature that the remains are exposed to, you'll get fracture lines in the long bones. And the trick is are you going to be able to delineate between anti mortem fractures and post mortem fractures? And that requires quite a bit of study. And also with the skull, with the external table of skull where someone's been pounded on with a hammer, you can have that that presenting, You can have that issue presenting where those impacts the specific impacts with a hammer. But then you start exposing the body to heat, and it has to be constant heat, David. It's not something that you just throw a match on it and walk away. You'd have to feed the fire. I don't know how sufficient they were at that task. Most people don't have the stomach for it. They can't stand there and watch a human body be rendered down. You know, beating somebody is one thing, But when you go to apply a safe, for instance, an accelerant to a body, and you initiate the fire with the accelerant and of course a match or whatever you use, are you actually willing to stand there for a protracted period of time until the body is totally rendered down in most cases, know, people don't do that. So what happens is, after exposure to heat, bone begins to fracture. All right, Now, bone is different than teeth. Teeth are much more resilient than bone. Bone will begin to fracture, and once it fractures, it passes into a phase where you have this kind of the calcium begins to break down the bones and you'll have bones that will eventually turn to ash. That's kind of what you have happened in a crematory. But if the body is intact, and this body was to a degree intact, how do you delineate between those hammer fractures and maybe even fall fractures that may have been there and heat fracturing. And that's the big question here. What I can tell you is that if you're struck with an object that's a very specific blunt object like a hammer, you're going to have these very definitive edges in the bone and the bone will plug and you can actually pick up on that even beyond the heat fracturing. So you know, they I would suspect that upon initial observation that the medical legal system up in Michigan, as they're examining the body. They could pick up on some of this. The key to all of this, I think is doing X rays. You know, anytime you have a body that has been severely burned like this, the question you have to ask is, well, what's the purpose of fire and a relative to a dead body. Well, unless you're trying to do a cremation, like in a crematory, you're trying to get rid of something, Dave, So why would you set a body on fire? You don't think that somebody climbed into a steel foot locker of their own accord and set themselves on fire. Suppose that could happen. That's not what's going on here, though. You have to be able to delineate between those anti mortem events and the perry or post morteum events. In a particular case like this.

His body is placed in the foot locker, is set on fire, and we're left with they can't determine who this person is. When the foot locker is found in the blueberry field by the farmer and it takes years to identify the remains, I guess when I'm thinking about this, I'm wondering why it took so long. Because they have DNA that they can take from the bone matter and things like that. I'm sure, but we are limited in our ability to identify who that individual is unless they already have their DNA in the system. Right.

Yeah. On hand, I think that people think that DNA is like this, it's almost like a magic one. You're going to seem like, yes, yeah, it's like boom, you know, the case is solved. That's not what happens. And you could even look at it like fingerprints. Okay, let's just make it even more simple. If you if you have a latent print, which is an unseen print, you know that has to be enhanced with dust and all that stuff. If you find a print, good on you, man, I'm happy that you found a print. Now, where are you going to compare it to, Well, you run it through the system. If nobody's in the system, it's cool that you got a fingerprint, but if you don't have anything compare it to, then it's not going to help you a lot. The same principle with DNA.

And that's what happened here.

Yeah, yeah it is now. I think that this is kind of Dave. This is kind of one of those cases where we probably had to wait for the science just a we bid to catch up, you know, with the circumstances and in this particular case, that we're eventually able to identify this poor man. And you know, it's it's it's like the proverbial string on the sweater that mama tells you not to pull. The whole thing's gonna come unraveled. Well for us, that's good. We want to pull on a string in forensics because it'll make the case unravel or the mystery unravel. That way, you can begin to figure it out. Because if you figure out who this guy is, right, who's he in relationship with? Well, you know if once you figure that out, then you begin to develop leads from that.

They actually used old school method of dental records to get firm who he was. Now, once they had an idea of who the individual was, they went back and that led them back to the you know, where was he living last? You know, what record do we have with this individual? And they tracked it back to a duplex on Horatio Street in Charlotte, Michigan, where police didn't and this got I got to ask you this, Joe, and uh, they found remnants of his DNA in the basement. Underneath some painted services and a concrete patch on the floor. They found his DNA under paint. That to me is remarkable.

Yeah, it is. You you think about that, you begin to think about you know, people talk about I think one of the things you'll you'll hear, you know, in all these cases that we cover and people talking talking about this, they'll talk about the fragility of of of DNA, and it is fragile. However, when something is protected, and you know, you can define that however you want to. When an area is particularly protected and it's even layered in areas, you know, like under carpet or under paint and that sort of thing, it's very resilient and you can still go back and get a match. It all depends on how deep you want to dig from a crime seene perspective, how soon you get out there. And again we've got a real delay here, don't we. I mean, this case occurred the attack, his body was found in two thousand and two, and so thirteen years, thirteen years. You jump forward from that, and it's a grand mystery. And here's the thing. You know, with the body, they have the dental obviously, but they would have you have a source for DNA with the actual body. Okay, if you have that stored and that goes into that particular jurisdiction's care, they're going to hang on to that so that they have a sample that they can go back and compare. So if you if you have an idea who this individual might be, you go through there and you look for the sourcing of his DNA. Well, why in that particular area of the home is this DNA there and concentrated there? Wow? Then the mystery begins to unfold at that point in Tom because there's a narrative to be told here. And we go back to this idea of him coming down the staircase right been beaten with a hammer, which would have been a very bloody affair.

By the way, the original plan as he came down the stairs, after he's pushed down the stairs, the original plan was for McMillan, the other guy, the guy who actually took a plean to hit him with a baseball bat, to mash his melon with a baseball bat. That was the plan. However, as he's coming down the stairs, McMillan swings the bat and misses and hits a pole, and that caused the bat to shatter. That's why they went with that hammer.

Yeah, yeah, this is you know, they always talk poorly about the Keystone Keystone cops in reference to our friends in law enforcement. Equally on the other side of the coin, you begin to think about people that plan these sorts things out, and it has a very Keystone esque quality to it. How could you be this disorganized and backwards when you're thinking about you know, and look, let's think of it like this. The first place they're going to start is by they're heavily depended upon pushing somebody down a stair set of stairs in order to kill them. Or maybe they just thought, well it'll at least incapacitating and stunning for a moment till we can get to him. Again, this goes to planning. You know, why exactly would you be at the base of a staircase holding a baseball bat? To begin with? Are you going out in the backyard you know you're going to knock a few balls around. Are you just collecting it to go out to the car you're going to bat and cage? I don't think that that's the case. And why do they have easy access to a hammer? Well, you know it's the basement. Maybe you keep your tools down there, all right, everybody's got a couple of hammers, but you know, to have it at within reach of a man that is falling down a staircase, not falling, but has been push that led to his fall down the staircase. You know, this goes to who would be served by doing this? Why would they do this? And I think the story is certainly told with McCollum here.

When they finally identified who the victim was, it didn't take long to move from there because obviously, when investigators start investigating a crime and you have a dead person, the people closest to him have to have an alibi right off the bat, and you know, where's your wife and where's your daughter and all that, and that's what led them to them. So they get the indictment. It takes a couple of years, they get it done. And at the time I think the suspect, the main suspect here at the Beverly McCollum, actually is in Pakistan. And you know you mentioned the Keystone Cops and how it applies to criminals as well. At some point in time, Beverly McCallum decides to go to Italy. Italy has a law that and I didn't know this untill we prep this show that when you check into a hotel, your identification is then sent to the police for them to make sure there are no wants and warrants on you. It's an automatic thing, it's the law, and that's what the police did in Italy. They sent it to the police and it is like ding, Hey, she's been indicted for a murder in the US.

Yeah, she popped up on interpolse or probably yeah, right? Did she not see this coming? You know? I've often I've been fascinated, Dave, by these individuals that go on the run like this and try to stay on the run for a protracted period of time, just trying to elude the long arm of the law. And in this case, it's certainly caught up with her, didn't it.

And they were able to get her back home. And that's when by that time, investigators have their hands full on basic crimes. I'm amazed at everything that has to be done to get a conviction when you don't have somebody admitting gilt. And in this particular case, the way they got all their answers was from one of the conspirators, McMillan, because as we mentioned, they actually did a trial run through. We know that because of one of the conspirators, the guy that was supposed hit him with the baseball bat. We know about the paint in the basement because well, he told him they had blood spatter, so they painted over it. And the cement chips, well, same reason. There were blood spatter and there were certain parts of the cement they couldn't get it up, so they chipped it up and replaced that with some cement over the top. So there was a cover up going on that police really couldn't explain and didn't have all the details until they got the first person to crack and that was McMillan. And now here we are where Beverly McCallum is actually on trial for the murder of her husband at the time.

One interesting point along this is that Dianne McCallum's daughter, who keep in mind, was the person that was initially wielding this hammer day. She was convicted in twenty twenty two in the death of mister Carbollo. And you know, the last one who walk through the doors of courthouse, that's going to be tried is Beverly McCallum.

You know, Joe, before you finished, I've got to throw this in there. We just found out a jury has found Beverly McCollum guilty on all charges in what started off as the Jack in the Box murder case and became the Fugitive wife murder trial. It was a conspiracy that fell apart just the way you said it would, Joe.

I think that it just goes to show Dave, particularly when it comes to a case that is so super bizarre and you've got individuals that are essentially entering into a conspiracy together. The old adage applies here. It's very very easy for one person to keep a secret, but if you involve anybody else, you've reached the end. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags