Buried Bones - a historical true crime podcast with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul HolesIn this week’s episode, the first part of a two-parter, Paul and Kate take us to late 1950s Los Angeles where a young model goes to a photo shoot and doesn't return. When a body is discovered, a manhunt for a possible serial killer begins.
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I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last twenty five years writing about true crime.
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling.
True crimes, and I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a twenty first century lens.
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
This is buried bones.
Hey, Kate, how are you?
I'm doing really well. I feel like I have a tiny bit of a hangover, even though I didn't drink yesterday. It was my kid's birthday, my twins' birthday yesterday.
A hangover just because of all the activity. I mean, at first I thought, oh, good for you, Kate.
It was all the sugar. So they insist on separate cakes and all that, and I have to try both. I mean, what are you gonna do? It would be impolite to not do that, So I think I have a little bit of a if you I know you don't you're not a big sugar fan. Because of that, I do feel hungover after sugar. I eat too much sugar sometimes.
Yeah, you know, I pretty much cut out sweets with one exception. But I haven't been eating sweets probably for a decade. But every now and then I have to have my scoop of vanilla ice cream.
That's the exception. Okay. And you said you like ice cream. We talked about We had the whole Halloween thing where you said that you eat candy sometimes, but it's not really your thing.
Right, No, not at all. I mean I do like it. I just want to avoid the sugar. And in part it is, you know, sort of like you're feeling bad the next day. I get that.
Yeah, okay. One I wanted to ask, was you are this big time forensic investigator you have worked with the police. I want to know what can I expect for the age of fifteen With my twins, they have just turned fifteen, and they are they are getting their little provisional licenses and like I already had taught them how to drive on our family farm. They drove everywhere on the farm, which was terrifying. For me, So what do I expect at age I know you've had a couple of fifteen year olds. What do I expect to have happened at age fifteen? Or did you have perfect children?
Of course my kids are great up, but I've had four go through that age. Oh my gosh, you know, two boys and two girls. You know, And I think this is everybody's experience, whether they remember back to age fifteen or they are dealing with kids that are at this age. Is this is now where you know, the teenagers are getting their independence and you know, even though they're still your kids, they start thinking independently. The concern is, of course, what kind of online relationships are they're getting into. They're going to keep certain things secret because they want their independence. And you know, I think that you know the best and I'm not necessarily the best person to be making these statements, but you know, in terms of recommendations, is you just have to keep open dialogue and keep your kids knowledgeable about, you know, sort of the kind of the bad things that are out there without scaring them.
Yeah, I think the without scaring them part is hard. I have one kid who is super into horror films. Does not like true crime, it scares her too much. But she will watch literally anything so on my mom So they watch stuff together all the time, every kind of slasher anything, zombie anything. And then the other kid just really started getting into true crime. We're looking at all of the worst roommate ever, worst ex ever, Lacy Peterson. I mean, everything that you can think of, she'll watch or listen to. So, yeah, they're both sort of like I feel like they're both kind of on edge, but at the same time there maybe they're becoming a little desensitized to that. And we do talk about online stuff a lot, but they are, I will say, remarkably out of their rooms for teenagers. They are always kind of floating around me in our living room, which is nice, but I know that still kids can be secretive, so I just try to always keep an eye out.
Yeah, you know, and we really adopted the no electronic devices in the bedrooms where they're isolated, you know, so you know, they do have privacy when they're on their electronic devices, but they also are aware that we at any point could potentially, you know, check them out to see what they're up to, you know, at that age, you know, and then of course, I all my kids now, I think my youngest she's turning seventeen this year, so obviously now where my other kids are adults and they do what they want and we just continue to advise them.
Did you ever use the tools at your disposal, i e. Background checks or anything else on anybody who your kids were hanging out with? For real? Honestly did you do that? Because I would do it on everybody.
I can't recall anybody that my kids were interacting with, both my older kids or younger kids, that gave me great concern, good at all? You know what I did do? Like when my oldest daughter, you know, she she got married, you know, has her own kids. You know, she moved to a new neighborhood. Of course I'm checking to see who lives in that neighborhood, and you know, just advising her, you know, be careful. Seems like a safe neighborhood. But you know, in any neighborhood you potentially have people that are registered sex offenders or have other criminal aspects to them. But just because you can go online and see who's living around, you don't forget that the people you don't know about are probably the one have to be the most concerned about, so you can't let your guard down.
Well, this has been a fantastic, light, fun little conversation before we talk about Oh boy, what we're getting ready to talk about. This is a two parter and you are going to find out pretty quickly why. This is a story that was recommended by actually several listeners. This is set in LA, so this is sort of your at least your state stomping grounds. And this is a series of murders that I will tell you straight away as a serial killer.
Okay, you're what LA is known for. And you know, even though I did my entire adult life and career up in the Bay Area, you know, since I've retired, I have spent a lot of time in LA for the true crime side, you know, so I've gotten to know LA much better than what I knew of it before.
Well, you're gonna really help me out with this story. Let's go ahead and set the scene. Okay, nineteen fifty seven, Los Angeles. I'm not sure we've done anything in LA. Have we done a story in LA? I can't remember. We're pretty deep into this show, So do you remember in LA story? Not that I'm recalling Yeah, truly, La, I don't think so.
We never did Black Dahlia, did we.
No? I know people would love us to do it, and we are probably going to do it in some form or the other, but we have not done Black Dahlia, all.
Right, So no, I think this might be the first one we've done.
Okay, So nineteen fifty seven, Los Angeles, there is a nineteen year old woman. Her name is Judy Ann Dull and she's a model and she needs to make some really fast money, which is a dangerous combination. I'm afraid. She has a fourteen month old daughter, and she's in the middle of a divorce and there is a big custody dispute with the father, and so she needs money. Nineteen boy, she needs money, and the quickest way for her to get money as a doing some modeling. There's a lot of demand for pin up style pictures, detective magazines, and the covers of pulp novels. Now, you have kind of made some comments about True Detective. I know there is controversy around the True Detective magazine covers. Will you give me any kind of background on that? Is it? Because they're super sexy and exploitative, that kind of thing.
Oh boy, where do I start?
Oh my gosh, keep it brief, But tell me what why is it such a big deal?
Yeah? Well, you know, I you know, I can remember the true detective magazines or the various permutations. I mean, there is a wide variety of different titled magazines, but they all did the same thing. And yes they told stories, true crime stories, and some of the articles are very well written, but the type of imagery in these magazines was very sillacious. There's a forensic psychiatrist who has an article out and this is doctor Park deats and these types of magazines. He related them as porn for the sexual sadist because of the imagery. Because the imagery generally is depicting women in very compromising positions, scantily clad with you know, like an offender holding a knife to their neck or a gun at them or chasing them down. These women are often bound, and this is the type of imagery that serial predators that are sexual sadists enjoy because these women are obviously you could see the fear depicted on their face being put into this imagery of imminent violence. And so that's something I have seen over and over again. I've got multiple examples that as serial predators were identified, you know, back in the seventies, and their residents were searched. Guess what was found true detective magazines. That's where they're getting their fantasy material.
You know. In our neighborhood in Austin. This was a long time ago, and these residents have since moved. This is probably five or six years ago. There were people who lived on a major road in our neighborhood who put up a depiction of what looked to me like maybe like kind of a scene from Halloween or from Friday the thirteenth, and it was a woman trying to climb up a tree like a mannequin, definitely kind of positioned as that sort of thing, and then someone chasing after her. And you know, it was fake and it was based on a movie, but it was disturbing kind of the way that it was accurate in the way that how terrified a woman looks right before she's being murdered. And there was a lot of sort of protests and argument, and finally I think they ended up taking it down. But people were saying, I don't want to walk by with my kid and see this kind of thing. It's so violent looking and I don't think they meant anything by it, but I totally get it when you see some of those covers, and I just know you had mentioned it before, so I wanted to clarify.
Yeah, you know, And it's just it is is a particular type of imagery that does select type of offender that not only do they get sexual gratification of looking at that imagery, but it feeds their fantasy and it can guide them on how they want to commit their crimes.
Well, Judy is someone who is a pin up model, so she does that sort of thing. She is just so you know, about five foot four, so probably not a runway model, but she does do this photography one hundred and ten pounds. So let's get back to the story. She is in an apartment in West Hollywood and she's with two other models. They're all young, eighteen to twenty two. And Judy we don't know a lot about her as far as her personality goes, but she's going through a rough divorce and she needs money. So on Thursday, August first, one of Judy's roommates has a gig she can make this modeling gig, so she tells Judy, will you take it for me? And Judy says yes, and a photographer comes to the apartment to pick up Judy and he's going to drive her to a photo studio for a shoot. This would have been typical in nineteen fifty seven for you know, the photographer to come and escort the person to a studio. So I don't think anybody thought anything of this. But when she doesn't come home that night, her roommate Betty Carver, who's about eighteen, calls the photos studio that the photographer left behind this phone number and it's actually for a private residence and that people who answer the phone have no idea what she's talking about. So now she's worried.
Okay, so this wasn't the photographer's own residence. He gave her a false address.
Correct, Yeah, a false phone number for this studio. So Betty freaks out and she calls the police and says, my roommate's missing. And it's great because for me, it's good to hear this because she acts really quickly, and you know, you and I talk about this sometimes, boy, it takes forever for people to call the police. I've actually been surprised in some of our cases that I will say are quite old, where the parents kind of just wait and wait, where the friends just wait and wait, and it feels like it's much longer than twenty four hours. And I don't think it's Naivety. I don't know if it's the time period, but Betty jumps on it. She's very concerned. So I had thought, I wonder if Betty has encountered sleazy photographers as a model in the past and was sort of always on guard.
Well, I would say that that's probably a good chance, you know. But it's also you know, when we start talking about reporting somebody missing, it's the circumstances, you know. And oftentimes, and I think in some of these older cases, you know, the societal culture within the time periods we've talked about, Oh, you let your kids go out and play and they come home at certain times, etc. And so it takes a while for somebody recognize that, oh, something is off, something's not right here. Betty knew that Judy was going to go with a in essence, this photographer, and that the general I would say, the business transaction should have occurred that day, and Judy should have come home, and when she doesn't come home, Betty's going, uh oh, something's up.
And I was wondering why she didn't take somebody with her. Taking a female friend or even a male friend will not stop certain offenders, obviously, but it would have maybe deterred him. I think this is the first time that they had met this man, so I don't know. Again, you know, we're definitely not thinking about blaming the victim. It's just sort of I guess they felt like they were comfortable enough where she could go by herself. Obviously, this was a dicey situation.
I've just seen over and over from not as far back in time as nineteen fifty seven, but from the particularly the nineteen seventies, where individuals would just go and meet potential employers, you know, by themselves, you know, including I've got one one gal who went to meet serial killer Roger Kibbi in his van in a parking lot, and his excuse was, well, my office is being built, you know, was at a shopping center that was under construction. My office is being built here, you know, let's just meet in my vehicle. It's almost that we were naive about how predators operated and the victims just didn't recognize that. Predators took advantage of this naivity, you know, and thought, well, I'll be good. I'll just go meet with this guy. He'll take me to a studio, take photos of me, and then I get paid and I go back to my apartment. I'm sure that's what Judy thought.
You know. One of my girls we were talking about a true crime story and one of my girls was just floored that people used to hitchhike. She still can't wrap her head around that. How would you ever get into a stranger's car. I never did hitchhike, but it was a very prevalent part of a culture, you know. I mean, people felt comfortable with it, even though we do know that throughout history people have been snatched off the road through hitch hiking.
Yeah, you know, and this is part where your predators go to where the praise at. Yeah, you know. So you know, for predators. See, let's say it's not just women. I mean men were hitch hiking. Men were being victimized as well, but women were the primary targets, you know. And then as time went on, people understood, oh, you know, this is dangerous, it's so dangerous that now culturally, you rarely see women hitchhiking. Today, you see men hitchhiking, but you don't see women as as frequently as what was happening back in the sixties and the nineteen seventies. And it's because people started to recognize this is a bad scenario, because the predators are now going, well, I'm just going to go pick somebody who's going to voluntarily get in my car. I don't have to get out and grab them. You know, it makes it easy.
Yeah, Now I want to talk about witness descriptions. Okay, because Betty, the roommate, tells the police when they respond, it's the sheriff's deputy. When the sheriff's deputy response, she says, listen, I got a great look at this guy, and I can tell you exactly what he looks like. So she says he is five foot nine, he has an olive complexion, he wears horn rimmed glasses, and he weighs about one hundred and fifty pounds. She says his name was Johnny Glenn. That's what he said his name was. So, you know, we don't know yet Johnny Glenn. You know, if he's involved, or if this is just somebody who encounters a would be victim and you know, somebody else meets with her later on. But this description seems pretty specific. And I know we've talked about kind of the inaccuracies of eyewitness descriptions in the past. What do you think about Betty's description five to nine all of complexion, glasses, one fifty, one hundred and fifty pounds.
Well, you know, she's giving some pretty straightforward descriptors. It's not vague, it's not oh, you know, five seven to five eleven, one hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds. It seems like she's pretty solid in terms of this is how big this guy is. He's got all of complex at skin. She's recognizing or is able to recall the type of glasses. I'm just kind of curious. It was originally Betty that was supposed to meet with this photographers. Do we know how she initially ran across him? Was like an ad in the classifieds?
You know, it was one of their roommates. So there were three women living together, so it could have been the third roommate and she wasn't there, But I'm not sure if it was a classified situation or not. But I do think we get a little bit more information further down about you know, this photographer and kind of where how he connects with victims.
Yeah, because obviously, you know, if he's given a false phone number that goes to a residence, we don't know the address of the studio where we took Judy. You know, now investigatively, you're going to have to backtrack as to Okay, how does you know the resident within this apartment come across this photographer, How does that business transaction occur? And what can be discerned from the information from that initial transaction prior to Judy going with this photographer.
Well, Betty's instincts set off alarm bells with her with Johnny Glenn, the photographer. She says, there's something off about this guy. But you know, she said, see a Judy and Judy left. She says that Johnny told Judy that he wanted to shoot her for pin ups. But Betty thought it was weird because he told Judy to bring a selection of street clothes with her, which she did, and Betty just thought that was really weird. Why would she need street clothes as well as you know, something that a pin up girl would wear, and then the clothing that she was using. If it was just going to be a shoot that was a couple of hours, why would he say street clothes?
You know that may, at least on the surface, may be something where this photographer has got a model, And it's just an absolute okay, if I'm going to have this this woman posing for me, even though I have maybe a customer that's going to be buying pin up photos from me, I might as well take advantage of this model and take other more standard photos for whatever customer that photographer may have. It may be an innocent thing, right now, I have no idea.
Well, the timing of all of this is very strange because Judy is actually due in court for this custody hearing with the man that she's divorcing, and this fourteen month old little girl, so she has been missing for a few days. The Sheriff's department is investigating, but they don't really have very much to go off of, right there's no CCTV, there's no cell phones anything like that. They're having a hard time tracing this guy. But the newspapers pick up the story because she's a missing mom who is a model, and they start digging in and find out about this custody hearing, and the journalists start to speculate that she is really just trying to skip down and not go to this custody hearing for some reason. This is totally baseless. You know, maybe they were accusing her of maybe not having enough money and kind of throwing up her hands and giving up, But her family said absolutely in her roommate said she was planning to be there, that she really wanted at least joint custody, full custody of this little girl. A week later, after she goes missing, is the hearing, and she is not at the hearing, so the judge grants custody of the little girl to the estranged husband, who is currently living with his brother and his sister in law. The husband perked my ears up a little bit before, I I mean, I really try to kind of go into the story thinking about who all the possible suspects could be, because obviously this seems like Taylor made for an estranged husband killing the wife so that he could get custody of the little girl. But her ex husband is very worried. He said, I don't think she would have skipped this. I think something happened and that could have been all for show. But man, the timing is really weird. If the husband is not involved in her disappearance somehow.
Well, you know, at this point, we really don't know what happened to Judy. We know she went to meet up with this photographer. He picked her up, so at least you know that there was that that connection had been made. But after that point we don't know. Did Judy finish the photography and did you know, did the husband swing by? Was it pre arranged for her to be picked up to take him back home, or you know, do something else? Sounds like the state of the relationship probably not. Did the husband follow the photographer out to where Judy's at with bad intent? You know? And so when Judy gets released, you know, he snatches her and kills her. I mean, I think at this point it's wide open. But obviously the investigatively, they have to possibly figure out where the husband was, you know that day that Judy went missing. Interview him, but you still have to identify this photographer. This is the last person Judy has seen with.
Yeah, tell me a little bit about you know, they say, sort of the first forty eight hours. I would say, would you think statistically that the longer this goes on, the worse the news would be no matter what time period we're talking about, right, I mean, is it really like a kind of a rule that statistically things go down really down fast after forty eight hours on being able to locate somebody alive.
Well, it all is dependent upon the case and the case circumstances. So when you start talking about cases that you have a greater likelihood of them being solved within the first forty eight hours. Oftentimes those are cases in which there is a connection between the victim and the offender and they are able to very rapidly do an investigation and drill down onto somebody. As time goes on, now the offender can separate themselves both temporarily as well as distance wise geographic, from the crime itself and from the connection to the victim, it does get harder, However, I would not I know, you know, there's like the TV show The First forty eight which I actually loved, you know, it shows reality, right, but I would not put any statistic on it. Obviously, there's criminologists that study this type of thing, and they'll say, yeah, you know, if you identify a suspect within the first forty eight then you've got a much greater likelihood of solving the case. But they're not teasing out the finer contextual details of the each case separately because certain types of cases, the solvability remains, but it takes longer for the investigation to get to the point where now you can build probable cause against the suspect. If that makes any type of sense, you can't just say, oh, you know, if you don't solve the case within the first forty eight hours, then you have a ninety five percent less likelihood of being able to solve the case. I just don't buy that.
Well, the trail goes cold for Judy, you know, just weeks after she disappears. They're going to keep trying to work the case, but they don't know where she is. Her ex husband is worried. I was thinking about something and I want to ask you about an emerging technology because I was watching Gosh. I mean, I feel like all I do is teach, write, do podcasts with you, or consume true crime, and you know, deal with my kids. And I was watching and then reading a case about a technology they called an emerging technology that I thought would have been interesting with this case where it's happening in twenty twenty four, the geofencing stuff. Yeah, so I had never heard of that. Will you explain it? So it's like I'm thinking, whoever this photographer is shows up at the door and then leaves, and police would be able to try to figure out if he had a cell phone today? Who has a cell phone in this like block two block radius and start investigating those people. Is that how geofencing kind of works?
It does, and that's so cool. I have to be somewhat careful about what I say about geo fencing. You know. This is something like when I was an FBI Task Force officer. Of course, you know, the FEDS had technologies that were being deployed in casework that were somewhat sensitive technologies, and geofencing since that time has somewhat come into the public domain and public has become more aware of it, and it's become controversial because in essence, this is where geo fencing you can put a let's say a boundary over a geographic area and say I want to identify all the smart devices that have location services turned on within this area during this timeframe. This has been huge at solving cases. However, let's say you were to draw that boundary several city blocks downtown Manhattan. How many innocent people are you scooping up within that geograph area during that timeframe? And so many people look at this as a as a Big Brother scenario. And now there's requirements for search warrants making sure that you have a magistrate that is overlooking you know what you are asking for and saying Nope, that's overreaching, or will grant that. And you know, Google has also come out saying that they're going to get rid of the data, which just kills me, you know, because this is such a valuable tool when the case circumstances are appropriate for it to be used.
Wow. Well I was impressed because it felt like sort of like the reverse of I don't know what to how to even explain it, Like if you have a suspect and you're able to figure out where their cell phone is pinging, Now it's like the opposite. It's like, Okay, well here's my victim, where my victim was dumped? Who has been in this area? Is that kind of a good example of how you would use it.
Well, let me let me give you a I'm gonna call it a high pathetical scenario, but it's potentially a reality. Is the Delphi case with the two young girls. They definitely had a cell phone. They captured video of this man walking across a railroad trestle coming at them. This was in a relatively unpopulated area. They're at sort of a park area that has very few people in there. With something like a geo fence, you can say, give me all the smart devices within this area, and you could literally see the girl's smart device and the killer smart device in essence pair up the killer approaching the girls, and the girls were removed a distance from where that railroad trestle was, and you could see the offender's smart device also move with the girl's device. So it becomes very compelling with the type of information as you tabulate the information during the investigation. That is a scenario, and again I'm just saying that's just a hypothetical scenario with Delphi, but that is a scenario in which geo fencing is an amazing technology and doesn't intrude upon you know this, this idea that you're just you know, fishing and scooping up a whole bunch of innocence people's locations.
But you said location services has to be on for this to work. Is that right.
I don't want to come off as an expert in this technology, but it does in part utilize location services. This is very different than cell phones ping and off of cell towers. You know, you get much more granular information from location services. If you've ever you know, used Google Maps and it shows you exactly where you're at on the freeway within a certain you know, margin of error, Well, that's kind of the granular data you can get utilizing a geofence.
Because I was thinking this is probably best used before a murder happens, right, Like, if this is a crime of passion murder and the killer is not expecting to have to turn on location services, they're gonna be smart enough to turn off the phone or take the SIM card out and not bring the phone with them and all of that. I think the case that I saw it was who was hanging out with this guy at the time, That was really what it was. I'm sure before it entered anybody's mind to kill him. So does that make sense to you that it's sort of like a before the event happens, because when the event is happening or after the murder is happening, I'm assuming the killer is trying to get smart and start turning things off.
Oh that's just so variable, because.
They're stupid sometimes, thank god, exactly. Well, I know this was a long detour, but sometimes I'd like to I would like to actually even more bring in some of the new tools that I'm learning about and running past you and anything that you have heard about, Like we talked a little bit about AI. Because you now have the inside lane here with Othrum, it's a reminder to me of what a disadvantage the police are at in nineteen fifty seven trying to find this woman, you.
Know, for sure, you know that's where you know. Of course, over the course of my career with the types of cases, I saw the progress of technology, you know, and what we could do. You know, from let's say, starting out in the mid nineties to when I retired in twenty and eighteen, you know, the huge advances in technology, not only just your typical forensic technology, but the high tech, the pervasive cameras, the surveillance if you will that that is out there. It is harder and harder for somebody to move around and get away with committing a crime without leaving some sort of evidence that law enforcement can utilize in order to catch them. But in nineteen fifty seven, they're so handicapped relative to today.
Yeah, well, let's get back to the case. In nineteen fifty seven, Judy Doll is missing. We have no idea who this photographer is. And we are now at the end of December, so this is five months later. And boy, I hate it when kids are the ones that make these terrible discoveries. I feel like this is the twentieth story of kids that I've told of kids stumbling onto you know, really awful scenes from my book American Sherlock Bessie Ferguson case you and I talked about. A little kid was the one who found the scalp with the ear attached that Oscar Heinrich had to use to try to identify. It's just awful. But they're poking around and doing stuff, you.
Know, that's just set. The kids are going out, they're going to places where adults don't want to go. You know, let's say, like down into the muddy marsh so they can play and find the frogs or whatever they're they're up to. And yeah, time and time again. Off, you do have children discovering remains, just because they're the ones that are out there doing their thing.
The kids and the recycling the bottle, the bottle and the canned collectors, right, you had said that too. Those are also people who tend to run across bodies and I said rowers on the on the legs and the rivers.
Yeah, yeah, the bottle collector. You know obviously that that one is one that I've seen over and over again from these older cases, just because you have people that are scouring the creek beds looking for, you know, bottles after a storm, after the water has rushed through old bottles that had been discarded you know, way back in the day. That have all said and appeared.
Well, unfortunately, these two little boys are I'm sure have never forgotten this. They are ten and thirteen. They are out hunting dove nests in the Hollywood Hills, pair of brothers. They find bones, so this is five months later. They find bones that look like a forearm, a wrist in a hand. They take the bones to their neighbor, not the parents. The neighbor. Maybe the parents weren't home, and he's a doctor who thinks that they belonged to a small adult, probably a woman. The police take the bones to a different physician, not a corner. It sounds like a medical examiner, a different doctor who says that he thinks the bones have been exposed for less than five years. He says, because there's still skin on the hand, is that a good assessment? That's another little aside, is it? What do you think about that skin on the hand? Does that mean anything?
Well, if there is any tissue, then it is variable in terms of how long the tissue is going to persist. But if this is you know, let's say the lower arm bones and the hand, and it's actually surface, you know, you do have the environmental insults. You have decomposition. You have environmental insults, whether it be you know, the sun desiccating the tissue. You have rain moisture that's going to allow you know, bacteria and other microorganisms to further degrade this tissue. Of course, you have carnivorous animals and insects that will go after it. If her arm this I'm assuming this is Judy, her arm is exposed then and on the surface have all this stuff going on. But if it's during the warm, warmer months, it's possible she mummified and then now you get almost like a raw hide with the skin, and then that can persist for a longer period of time. If she does mummify. For the pathologist or this doctor to say, you know, within five years, that's probably as good as you can say with just that limited type of information that he's evaluating, just because of the variability of how long it takes for a body to fully skeletonize.
Well, I had wondered in nineteen fifty seven, how would they identify her? Judy is one of several missing women in LA and I thought, well, how would they even do that in nineteen fifty seven. I mean, now what it would be DNA? I'm assuming right.
Yeah, it can be DNA, But there's still the tried and trude methods, you know, dental comparisons as well as radiographic comparisons where let's say Judy had had a broken leg during life and there are some X rays of that and these remains have the same fracture. You know, a radiologist or an anthropologist today could look at, you know, the healing of the bone, the way the bone healed, the various random features that develop within everybody's bones, and go this this, let's say, femur of these remains matches the femur of Judy while she was alive, after it was taken, you know, when when she broke her legs, as a hypothetical scenario, and there could be unusual things, you know, tattoos. Yeah, you know, if you if you have the remains with a very unusual tattoo and you have photos of that tattoo on the victim during life, that can also be used. So there's a variety of other mechanisms that are still utilized today in addition to DNA.
You know, I was reading a little bit about the radiocarbon dating being used to test on the human bone, whether it's ancient or modern, and I did not know this that it's helpful, because in the fifties and the sixties there was a massive spike in radiocarbon in the atmosphere because of the nuclear testing, and that's been some sort of a I don't know if it's like a touchstone or what that is where it makes it much more useful to be able to figure out, you know, who the person is or someone's age. Does that sound right to you?
Yeah? You know, and radioisotope analysis is a fascinating forensic tool. And whether it's you're dealing with the carbon aging, which generally is are you dealing with ancient remains like indigenous remains, or are you dealing with somebody who's modern. And of course throughout geologic history, there's all these various alterations to these radio isotopes in any particular environment that as we live, we absorb the ratio of these different radioisotopes into our body. And so expert when they do this radioisotope analysis will look for those types of kind of those weird anomalous aspects to help determine what they can What does this mean in terms of the radioisotopic analysis, You know, part of it is let's say, yeah, human remains that are recovered in Florida, but they do radio isotopic analysis and they note that, oh, hold on, you know, the radioisotopes don't match what we expect for somebody who lived their entire life in Florida. It's more consistent with somebody from the Seattle area something like that, and so now investigators can focus on missing persons out of Seattle to see if any of them match up with this the set of unidentified human remains found in Florida. It's something that it's a really cool tool, but it really isn't utilized that frequently.
Well, we cannot identify whether these bones belong to Judy as of right now.
So they only find the lower arm bones and handbones. They don't find the rest of her remains at this time.
That's right. Right now, they have just found a fore arm, wrist in a hand with skin, a little bit skin on the hand and that's it. So I'm assuming what scavengers animals have taken care of the rest.
You know potentially or the you know, the arm was drug away by a you know, carnivorous animal of decent size, like you know, a coyote in the Hollywood Hills, and so the rest of this these remains could be a distance away, possibly buried. There is the possibility of, let's say, especially like somebody Judy size, where you could have certain types of animals, notably like wild hog that will consume bone and all and they eat carry on or you know, dead remains, that's just you know. I have, you know, one case, Zona Fairchild in which only her skull was found, and that was in the Los Gatos Hills. She was a young girl that was murdered, and I became very very close with her mom. But part of my early thrust into Sianna's case was to find the rest of her. But then when I saw that, you know, you had the wild boar you know in this area. It's like if she was a surface deposit and her killer, Kurtistine Anderson said, yes, she was a surface deposit. Chances are she was consumed except for her skull.
Ah, well that's all I think we end up having from whoever that victim is. But we're now looking at let's see August so Soti murderers and Regina Firmark seven months you heard me do math seven months later. So this is, as I said before, a serial killer case. And now we're on victim number two, who is Shirley Bridgeford. She is going through a lonely hearts club and it's a social club where it's not like a bunch of people meet and they're mingling around. They actually set you up with a date it's a blind date. So this man she's never met shows up at her mom's house it sounds like, and picks her up. They're going, you know, out to dinner, and he introduces him himself as George Williams and he says he lives in Pasadena, and then Shirley never comes home.
Wow, you know, in some ways, it's sort of like the dating apps today. Now, what I'm keying in on is he's picking Shirley up at her house. You know, does he come to the door, does the mom see him, does mom see his car, do neighbors see him? You know, at there's a level of risk that he's taking. If this George Williams is Shirley's killer, you know, he's not being very careful right as opposed to today oftentimes predators are going to you know, I always say lore and isolate and the more sophisticated, intelligent offenders are going to think enough ahead of time to minimize you know, them being identified and wouldn't be going to the victim's house and being seen in her neighborhood with their own car and their own you know, license plate, you know, on So that's that's interesting that if this George Williams is this killer that he has put a higher level of risk with how he is physically connecting with Shirley.
And I think, you know, Shirley's mother calls the police, and the police respond and they start getting descriptions. And what's fascinating about the descriptions are they're pretty different. So we have to kind of do some comparisons. Number One, compare the description of the man who picked up Judy the photographer, because we know that this is a serial killer case, and we know these cases are connected. I spoiled all that earlier. Then we've got Shirley's mom and sister are both and they meet George Williams. They give a description, George Williams, Paul has gone on a date before through this Lonely Hearts club, didn't kill the woman. She gave a description. So these are varying descriptions, and I have the sketches, and the sketches are you can tell me what you think about that. So now I kind of circle right back to the accuracy because you know, I can I can give you the description of what Shirley's mom and sisters say George Williams look like. So let me tell you the description, so I'll remind you. And this is the benefit of knowing that this is indeed the same man. Let me remind you of the description from Betty of the man who picked up her friend Judy. So Betty says that the guy was five nine, all of complexion, he had horned room glasses, and he was about one hundred and fifty pounds. Yes, so Shirley's mom says that this guy was between twenty five and thirty five years old. He was six feet tall and had brown hair and a mustache and blue eyes. She said he wore glasses. So the Lonely Hearts Club says, this guy actually was a lot shorter. He was between five seven and five nine, clean shaven, but no glasses. So we have three different descriptions for someone who we eventually know is the same man.
And none of this is concerning to me in terms of the variants between these descriptions from these different witnesses. You know, estimation of height, you know, that's sometimes is dependent upon the witness's own stature and how close they actually got to the person they are describing. And even if they're close to somebody, you know, let's say you take a five foot woman and asks them to estimate the height of a man that's taller than them by ten inches or more, you're going to see a pretty wide variance. You know, they're looking up at this guy, and it's you know, it just all depends on that particular witness's own personal abilities, age range, you know, that's that's not of concern, you know, in terms of you know how he's obviously not an older guy, you know, but twenty five to thirty five, maybe he's twenty two to forty, you know, just but then things like clean shaven versus mustache. I mean, he utilized Lonely Hearts Club before to date this woman, and then time has passed, you know, Facial hair can come and go, you know. So you have that temporal aspect in which somebody's a physical appearance is changing, as is you know, their complexion, you know, winter versus summer, does this sky tan doesn't tan? You know, fundamentally, sort of the three descriptions they all fall within. I would say just a normal parameter that one person could be described as by three different witnesses. You don't have somebody saying this guy six foot ten or he's four foot nine. He's just right in the middle of the average Caucasian male here in the United States.
Let me show you the sketches real quick. So here are the sketches, and someone does mention a mustache, but I mean a mustache could easily be shaved off. Obviously. He went on the date with the woman who he didn't kill two weeks beforehand. So I don't know what happened with that. I don't know if he intended to kill her and decided he didn't want to or what. But the woman said he was a perfect gentleman. And here are the two sketches, which of course look incredibly similar.
Yeah, so, I you know, first thing I'm noticing is that this was the sketches appeared in a local newspaper March fifteenth, nineteen fifty eight. That's ten years before my actual birth date. Ah right, the IDEs of March a decade before. No, but I see these two sketches and the sketch on the left. Actually, you know, I would say I am surprised at how remarkably similar these two sketches are. From it appears that this man has sort of a narrow face with a you know, somewhat prominent nose, high forehead, you know, the hairline, and both sketches is roughly the same. Proportions of the height of the face with the face, even the way that the ears protrude are consistent. You know, there are some visual differences, but at first glance, you know, structurally, morphologically, I guess would be the term i'd use. These look very similar. The sketch on the right shows the man with the glasses on. But I guess I was expecting to see something that was between these two sketches that would be completely different. And I'm at least to my eyes, you know, and everybody perceives things differently, but to my eyes, I'm going, wow, you know, this could be the same person.
And I had wondered, I we've never talked about sketch artists before, but I had wondered, well, what if it's the same sketch artist and he or she is hearing these details again? And it's sort of sort of falling into not a rut, but you know, they're kind of they have like a playbook. But this to me does not look like the same artist doing the one on the left versus the one. It's a totally different aesthetic. I think, you know, the one on the right doesn't look very finished, and you could tell that it's just to me, it looks like a different style. And if that's the case, they are very similar and very accurate as witnesses.
Yeah, you know, and sketch artists. You know, there's a wide variety of skill sets, and some of the sketches from the Golden State Killer series, you could see some of them look like you know, kids drawing the sketches with crayon basically versus you know, bona fide artists. But it takes more than just being able to draw good You have to be able to interpret somebody's description. And this is such a hard thing to you know, sit down and describe a face. You know, that is very hard to do. And the best sketch artists are ones that are able to really work with the witness and refine their sketches until that witness is like, yes, that's the person that I saw. But there is concern that if you're utilizing the same sketch artists, let's say, in a series sort of what you're talking about is that are you going to have somebody who's biased from a previous sketch and a previous witness going, oh, this sounds like the same person and alters subconsciously their sketch. And I agree with you. These two sketches look like two different artists. And the fact that they overlap so much in these gross features of this man's face, I think gives greater veracity that this is really within the you know, the spectrum, as close as it can be as to what the actual person looks like.
The city council is really ticked off, and there's a councilman who wants to investigate the Lone Hearts Club because they find out that the address that George Williams gave in Pasadena is not an accurate address. They say he does not live here. We have no idea who that is. As I said, he went on a date a couple of weeks beforehand, and the date said that everything went really well and it was no big deal and he was a total gentleman. You know. Now we've got these two women who have gone missing. They are it seems like very similar. There's similar the women are similar heights, and they are similar weights. And I know that you said that that is not a thing and that that is a little bit more overblown than it should be. Right that serial killers have a real specific type.
Killers may have an idealized victim in their fantasy. However, in reality, in terms of getting access to victims, it's very hard to just find one victim after another that meets this idealized image, and so they often will take whatever victim that they can get, you know, and that's where you do see this huge variance in terms of the physical characteristics of the victims or the age characteristics of the victims, et cetera, from the same offender. Now, it's interesting the utilization of this Lonely Hearts club because he does go out on a prior.
Date and doesn't do anything.
Yeah, I would venture this was a trial run. He hadn't utilized the Lonely Hearts club before, so he had to gain familiarity with the actual process of how he would be able to, you know, utilize the club, see if he could get away by anonymizing using a you know, a fake name, fake address, and then how the connection with the victim actually went and everything else. So I think he's just he's gaining familiarity, and so he goes through maybe this this first date that victim wasn't you know, somebody that satisfied what his idealized, you know, victim for his fantasy, what he required. Maybe there was you know, circumstances that caused him to move off of actually victimizing her. Maybe too many people saw them together, et cetera. And he's going, oh, no, I'll get caught if I do anything to this gal. But I think he's doing a trial run. You know. It's I like in this, you think about a predator who has never gone into a stroll area to pick up a sex worker before. They're not going to pick up a victim the first time they do that. They have to kind of learn that culture and see how to navigate that type of area. And so they'll do trial runs and they interact with lots of these women on the streets that they never kill as they get comfortable. I think that that is possibly what is going on with this offender with the Lonely Hearts Club thing. He's doing a trial run, and then two weeks later he picks Shirley up because now he knows he can go ahead and get away with how he set things up.
Well, they find out that Shirley had told her mother We're going to a dance. George Williams comes and picks her up and they leave. She is missing. The police check with the folks at the dance who were throwing this dance. They never showed up. Nobody matched, which we figured would happen. The trail unfortunately goes cold. They have not identified Judy as the bones that were found by the two little boys. They have not found Shirley's body, and everything is cold until four months later, and then we have another victim. This is almost exactly a year to when Judy went missing, so this will be three victims within one year, and we have officially a serial killer on our hands. And the rest of the story will have to wait until next week.
No, I know, you know serial predators or Mike Wheelhouse. I know I'm gobbling all of this up. So I'm looking forward to hearing you know the rest of the story, so to speak.
Okay, I will see you next week and hopefully, you know, we can get some more answers because this is such an incredible case.
YEP, looking forward to it.
This has been an exactly right production for our.
Sources and show notes go to Exactlyrightmedia dot com slash Buried Bones sources.
Our senior producer is Alexis Emrosi.
Research by Maren mcclashan, ali Elkin, Kate Winkler Dawson.
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark and Daniel Kramer.
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Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decote the criminal mind, is available now, and
Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life Solving America's Cold Cases is also available now
