Murder HomesIn a modest ranch home on Pine Valley Road, a young woman named Melinda Snyder has packed up almost all of her belongings in boxes and is getting ready to move out, looking forward to a bright future. The only thing standing in the way is a man who has become slowly obsessed with her: a real estate agent named Ed Cronell. He has the key to the home’s lockbox and on the night of January 23rd, 1990, he'll use it to commit a crime that the residents of Rock Hill still remember to this day.
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I mean, this is just finished college, had her whole life ahead of her, and this individual goes and sneaks in the house in the nighttime using his key, gets in bed with her and rapes her and puts the gun to her head. Instead of leaving a witness, he kills her.
There's an invisible curtain we can't see that separates us from the normal and tragic every day of our lives. Sometimes for no apparent reason at all, It's ripped open, and someone terrible is waiting for us on the other side, someone we have merely crossed paths with, but who hasn't forgotten us, someone who's been watching us, someone who might even have the key to our house. This is Murder Holmes. I'm Metrinovitch. You may remember the small town of rock Hill, South Carolina, as the place where Jimmy Robertson brutally murdered his parents on Westminster Drive on Thanksgiving Day in nineteen ninety seven, But seven years earlier, it was also the scene of another horrific crime, the murder of Melinda Snyder, a twenty two year old teacher's assistant with wavy brown hair and brown eyes. A former beauty queen, Melinda was a favorite of the students, but was ready for more challenging work. She didn't mind rock Hill either. She lived on a quiet street where everyone seemed friendly enough. In the summer, she loved strolling through Fountain Park or walking down to the old Amphitheater, But the truth was that she missed the big city and her old high school friends. A recent breakup with her boyfriend and occasional tension with her two roommates convinced her that the time was right to say goodbye to the town and returned to Cincinnati. Melinda, in her meticulous way, had begun packing all our belongings. A small bedroom at nineteen eighty one Pine Valley Road, growing increasingly bare as the cold month wore on. There was a little friction with the roommate, Felicia and her boyfriend, because with Melinda leaving, the whole home was being put up for rent again. A real estate agent had recently swung by to take a look at the place, annoyingly flirting with Melinda in her roommate as he took a cursory look at the house. When they didn't show any interest. His mood started to change a little bit, and he cut the visit short. He told him to make sure to leave the key in the lock box, and then he asked for the code. He was a busy man, and he went in to waste as little time as possible, showing a crappy ranch home on Pine Valley Road, not exactly the most upscale of rock Hill's neighborhoods. He walked back to the driveway, his frozen breath briefly curling around his shoulder, climbed into his white sedan and drove away. A few nights later, on January twenty third, nineteen ninety, Ed Cronell, the real estate agent, was eyelid drooping drunk watching a stripper perform at a bachelor party. It's unclear exactly what transpired as he watched the stripper perform, but it wouldn't have been a stretch of the imagination to say it went something like this. The stripper made it clear before she hurriedly took off her coat and boots in a spare room that she wasn't in the mood for any bs. If anybody touched her, she was gone. So when Ed reached out and tried to grab her. He didn't sit well with the other guys in the room. What happened next was shared by Ed Crenell when he was brought in for questioning. He tried to use the bachelor party as an alibi, like many criminals, sniffing around half trus knowing he didn't have the imagination to come up with a complete lie. Cronell was forcibly dragged out of the party by several of the men, hauled outside, lifted up in the air, and dumped, just to add a little extra humiliation in a trash can. He fell backwards and stumbled to his feet, and then he tried to take a swing at the men, but it was greeted by a punch to his face that left him on his knees. They left him there in the cold, greeted by high fives as they entered the home again, slamming the door behind them. Picture Cronel at that moment, dragging himself off the ground and standing outside the home he'd just been exiled from the skin on his face, burning with shame, listening to the laughter and music, catching a glimpse of the stripper as she wiggled in front of one of the men who just hit him. Maybe she even smiles and gives him the finger. He was only there because he knew a friend of a friend, and even though he'd been able to blend in with the guys, there was something off about him from the beginning that made them look at him twice Now, on a cold Tuesday night, he could still feel the bloody scrape where the punch had landed and touched it with his two fingers. He had a twenty two caliber gun in the white sedan he driven to the party, and he crossed the street to get it, But as soon as he opened the glovebox had Cornell to change his mind about what kind of revenge he wanted for his humiliation. He watched the strippers through the window, again, taunted by the sight of her lightly rolling her tongue along her gleaming lips, rolling her shoulders to the thumping base of a song. How could you feel like a fraud and a wimp and a reject all at the same time and still feel pent up? Tommy Pope, whose voice you heard at the beginning of this episode, and who you may remember from her earlier episode on Jimmy and Chip Robertson is the one who first told me about the Cronell case. Back then, Tommy was the young DA of York County and he ended up prosecuting Cronell, And like any good prosecutor, Tommy knew he to have to get inside the mind of the killer and try to understand what made him snap that night.
So he actually had been at a party earlier that night.
Some of the witness had indicated he did get into some type of altercation and maybe even gotten in some scuffle or got indubbed into a trash can. So from a psychology standpoint, you know, he's leaving this party, he's been drinking, he's been sexually aroused, he's been humiliated by you know whoever. He had fault, and sexual assaulid is a crime of violence, you know, in domination in addition to sexual release. And so he chose that opportunity to perpetuate that on Linda Sneiner.
It was nearly two in the morning, January twenty third, nineteen ninety when Ed Crenell jammed the twenty two in his coat pocket, entered the key, and e nition still eyeing the bachelor party in his rearview mirror. Then he caught sight of his own narrow and blue eyes. This fucking loser staring back at him is nobody who only really knew the friends of friends wherever he went, and in the end, they always sniffed him out. It seemed like they glanced at him sideways when he tried to make a funny joke that didn't seem to fit the same way that those cute roommates said one ninety one Pine Valley Road had rolled their eyes when he tried to flirt with them. He spoke English to me and didn't look half bad. What the hell was their issue? It was like the world around him had been tipped off. There was a moment he could have turned right or left, or even circle back and shot up the whole bachelor party. But Ed Cornell drove drunk toward Pine Valley Road and stopped a little after two in the morning outside Melinda Snyder's home. This was the one home besides his lonely apartment, that he was always invited to as far as he was concerned, any time of day or night. He had already stood in her bedroom alone one day when there was no one there, opening a drawer lightly tracing his fingertips over our underwear, imagining her sleeping on the bed, the thin little cover pulled up to her soft shoulders. And now he was here. Had simply punched in the code, taken the key, and unlocked the door of this little home, the kind of place students rent and leave and rent again and probably never think of again, with its peeling leno and faint yellow walls and stained brown carpet. In a week, they'd all be gone, and so would any trace of Melinda Snyder. But tonight ed Crenell was going to stop time like some kind of sadistic magician. He felt his power as he walked down the short hallway past the roommate's bedroom. He was so confident in his own superpowers now had He even stepped inside the bathroom and took a leak in the sink, catching sight of his own dim reflection in the bathroom mirror, the blood still glistening on his gray cheek. There was a creak or two, nothing more as he walked down the end of the hallway and gently gripped the cheap brass knob. We'll be back after a short break. We're back with murder Homes. Ed Crenell pushed open the door to Melinda's room just enough to see her in the growing v of light, then closed it again behind him so that they were both in darkness. He could hear her steady breathing. She was still asleep, So far, so good. He got on one knee on the bed before she even woke up, both hands on her neck. Before she could even scream. He released his grip just enough to hear her gasp for breath, as if she had just surfaced from the depths of some nightmare ocean. The reality was even worse. A silhouette crouched over her, pinning her arms down. She recognized the gravelly voice, but couldn't place it. Her wrists twisting in his clenched hands. She could smell the alcohol wash over her as he leaned forward and whispered in her ear. If she made one sound, he'd have to kill her. The rape was over in just a few minutes. Eedkronelle's hand was still pressed hard against Melina's mouth, her eyes wide open. He kept it there as he reached for the twenty two, pressed it against her temple, and shot her. Milinna's roommate, Felicia is woken up by the noise, but is disoriented. She thought something might have fallen in Melina's bedroom and called out, asking if Melinda was okay. Meanwhile, Ed Crenell was already back in his car by the time Felicia gets out of bed. Through her window, she could see a white sedan pulling into reverse, then speeding down Pine Valley Road. She flipped on the light in Melinda's room to see the blood on the pillow and bed sheets. Horrified, she immediately called her boyfriend, then Melinda's boyfriend, then finally nine to one one. It should have been an open and shutcase. Detectives immediately determined that ed Crenell was their main suspect. He was the only one with knowledge of the lock box pass code other than Melinda's roommate, Milinda's ex boyfriend, and the roommate's boyfriend. The ex boyfriend was ruled out and Felicia was ruled out, but then ed Crenell cut a brake, the roommate's boyfriend got cold feet before providing a blood sample, and suddenly detectives couldn't discard him as a suspect, especially since his footprints had been found in the house. If today's level of DNA testing were available, Cronell would have been arrested at the real estate office, where he went right back to work. All it would have taken was the DNA from a single fingerprint, and he'd be implicated and thrown in jail. But in January nineteen ninety, when Melina Snyder was murdered, the only lab doing DNA testing was the FBIS. South Carolina law enforcement didn't even have the right to forcibly extract DNA from an unarrested subject. I asked Tommy Pope to walk me through the crime scene at Pine Valley Road and what happened.
The prime itself took place in the middle of the night.
There was no breaking and entering that could be determined, no four s entry that could be determined. Miss Snyder's roommate was actually present in her room during the time and heard some noise. I think she even said she felt something was wrong. Milinda was having trouble sleep and it was moving her bed or something. Ultimately, the roommate gets here's a vehicle, goes out and sees a white car leaving the scene. That night.
What the evidence indicated.
Was that Edward Crenell had used the lock box key to gain access to the house. He apparently had a small caliber weapon, went in, used it to hold her and sexually assault her. Ultimately, at that point, I guess he determined there wouldn't be witnesses and he shot her and fled the scene.
And Crenell was brought in for questioning and offered an alibi for the night Melinda was killed. He told detectives that he was getting stitches in an emergency room after getting in a fight at a bachelor party. Half of it was true, the fight, that is, but there's no record of Crenell visiting any emergency room, and his alibi quickly fell apart. The problem was, even though detectives immediately consider him a suspect, there was no direct evidence connecting him to Melinda's murder. Eventually, the roommate's boyfriend, the young man who got coold feet about cooperating, would provide a blood sample that would rule him out as a suspect, but that wouldn't happen for months. Until then, ed Crenell continued to live free in rock Hill, unbelievably continued to work as a real estate agent. There was no police car park by his home or place of work. There were no alerts provided to the community because South Carolina detectives were still not able to legally obtain his DNA. He had nothing to worry about. And if you think ed Crenell had suddenly stopped being a predator, consider this. At work, the rock Hill Realty Association asked all its realtors to update their three litter passcode and password so that they could continue to access the multiple listing system. Ed Crenell was happy to oblige to a point. He kept his pass code the same DOA or dead on arrival, but he did change his password from good Sex sixty nine to flowers too. Remember the flowers because we'll come back to that in a bit. One of the administrators in ed Cronell's real estate office thought his password good Sex sixty nine was creepy enough and the light of the murder of Melinda Snyder to alert the authorities. But even so, at Crenell still wasn't brought in by law enforcement. Would you have been comfortable being shown around a home by a rapist and murderer whose passcode at the office was DOA. The renters and buyers that Crenell worked with, had no clue who was taking them on a tour of prospective homes. Sellers weren't aware that they're given the killer a code to the lock boxes that guarded the keys to their homes. I asked Tommy Pope if this was highly unusual, a suspected killer who continued to hang around the relatively small community of Rock Hill. This wasn't some major city after all. Were they keeping tabs on him in the in the gap between when he was interrogated at some point in nineteen ninety, right, and then they would have been a gap when they were waiting before the DNA decision came in.
Obviously that's more a direct law enforcement question.
But to my recollection, he was still you know, realtor or doing you know, had his job, you know, because you think at that point, not only you're not even arrested for it, you know, just being a suspect. And I think there may be as macab as this sounds we were talking about in the psychology of different folks, you know, some small pleasure in getting away with some of it. If I thought I got away with it, perhaps I stay here to gloat because you think the flip side. The average person would think I'd be living in Idaho or somewhere, you know, I would move, you know, so.
But he stayed. He stayed in rock Hill, right, And you're saying was probably working as a realtor to.
My reflection, But I'm not one hundred percent sure.
I mean, that's that's the creepiest part of it to me, that he was still would be active.
Having keys to lock boxes, exactly correct.
Yeah, there's no record, of course of how close ed Quannell comes to striking again. But it took two years for the South Carolina Supreme Court to finally allow police to obtain an unarrested suspects of DNA. As soon as that landmark decision came down on July twenty fourth, nineteen ninety two, at Crenell was the first person, the prosecutor, Tommy Pope, when they brought in and tested. After the decision, they were able to force Crenell to give them a blood sample to perform the DNA testing. But keep in mind this was nineteen ninety two and DNA testing was still in its infancy. The database of criminals to draw from is also a fraction of what it is today I talked to Tommy Pope about RFLP DNA testing and what it looked like back then. Back then was.
The early stages. Again, not that DNA had been used in.
Medical field for years, you know, but law enforcement and forensics was just starting to use it. And so back then slid Our State Lease didn't even have a lab. They tested up at the FBI lab.
But I remember meeting with them and the old form.
Of DNA, it was called RFLP DNA, and it was very simplistic.
The numbers were fairly low, of.
DNA wise, you know, now we hear one in a trillion, you know, ward one or whatever.
You know, Well, those numbers were fairly low.
I think it was like two hundred and twenty thousand or something, which is good for me, you know, as a prosecutor, because I'd say, if there's a million people here, you're down to four if two of those are females, So it's either this guy or somebody who had just the same car, just the same opportunity, you know. So it lends itself to it. But the bottom line, I remember sitting there and those folks said, we can't call this number, and we can't call this number, but I'm telling you this is the guy.
I was fascinated by how DNA testing changed over the years. So I start to expert Dan Crane, co founder of a consulting company, Forensic Bioinformatics. He has testified in hundreds of DNA cases. He told me that Tommy Pope would give me a good primer on what the old testing looked like. But each DNA test in reality, was an incredibly labor intensive, multiple step process. I wanted to read something from the prosecutor because I'm so fascinated just physically how it looked back in the day. He said it was very simplistic, and that it was basically how long certain strands of DNA were. And in simplest terms, they put electricity a positive and negative on the end of a gel, and the DNA is somehow energized and migrates away from the negative it or toward the positive. Is that correct? I'm just trying to visualize the way it actually looked in the lab in this earliest form.
There have been essentially three different technologies or methodologies that have been used to generate DNA profiles. The first and the earliest is the one that you mentioned, which was used in this case. The r FLP. RFLP is an abbreviation molecular biologist to use abbreviations an awful lot. It's short for restriction fragment length polymorphism. And again it's the first generation of DNA profiling tests that were used US. It revolutionized forensic science in many respects. It was able to generate very probative results from at the time, what was considered to be extremely small quantities of material. So a blood stain the size of a dime, certainly a bloodstain the size of a quarter was enough to provide sufficient DNA to give you statistics that were often in the hundreds of thousands for the chance of a coincidental match, and that was just absolutely unprecedented. The other games in town, so to speak, at that time, would be things like ABO blood typing, where you'd get statistics like one in five. Other markers that were being used would give similar statistics. So when we could start talking about statistics in the tens or hundreds of thousands, that was a real game change mature.
So now I understood something about the first method that was used to analyze DNA in criminal cases. But what did the actual technology look like. Back in nineteen ninety two, when Ed Crenell was finally apprehended on a quiet street in rock Hill and forced to give blood for an RFLP DNA test, they now have a vial of his blood. I was curious what physically happened next. I'd pictured cool looking centrifuges spinning in a high tech lab, but DN Crane told me that wasn't what it looked like at all. But it turns out that technicians who worked in a state DNA crime lab were more akin to highly skilled artisans.
You would get a piece of X ray film eight and a half by eleven, that kind of size of an X ray film, would be put next to a filter, a piece of paper essentially that had been put in contact with the gel. After the DNA molecules had moved through. What happened was the liquid in the cel, the DNA and the gel be pulled up through that membrane through that filter. The DNA sticks to that membrane, the liquid keeps moving through, and so you'd have a piece of paper effectively. Again, technically we would call it a membrane, but you'd have a piece of paper that had DNA molecules stuck to it, depending on where it is they had been pulled through the gel. That piece of papers then would get washed with some radioactive probes, some small pieces of DNA that had a radioactive tag attached to them that would stick to the fragments that you wanted to take a closer look at. And so you'd wash that membrane on the with the radioactive probe. You'd rents off the radioactive probes that hadn't stuck to the membrane fragments of DNA you were interested in, and then you'd put a piece of X ray film on that and where the radioactivity was taking place, that the radioactive decays were taking place, that would expose the X ray film and you would end up then with a piece of X ray film that had those dark bands that corresponded to where it is the fragments of DNA had moved.
That's fascinating to me that there's so many steps and it's so item was like being in a dark room or something. How has that changed? So if you fast forward to today, how is that process being simplistic terms different?
Well, dark rooms definitely were involved with that process, and you're quite right and understanding that it would take some time to get all of that accomplished. If you do the math. A typical test result for an evidence sample and a reference sample that you wanted to compare it to, that could take many weeks, if not several months to get the result. With RFLP, you could get a DNA test result from a bloodstain the size of a quarter without much difficulty. It would take weeks two months to get that result, and you'd get numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
We'll be back after a short break. We're back with murder homes. Tommy Pope now has his DNA sample from the crime scene and a reference sample from Ed Crenell, and there was a match. There was a five and two hundred and twenty thousand chance that the murderer was Ed Crenell. Tommy Pope had to boil down the intricacies of DNA testing for a jury that had never heard of a murderer being caught this way. He finds himself rehearsing closing arguments in the shower until the hot water grows cold. He needs to tie together all the evidence. The white sedan seen leaving the residents the night of the murder, and Cronell's knowledge of the lock box code, but most of all the DNA match. But he does tie it all together, and it illustrates for the jury using the same basic language he did with me, how the DNA match meant the murderer was sitting right in front of them. Crenell was found guilty in all counts of Melenna Steiner's murder and given a life sentence under a technicality of South Carolina law since amended. He was first eligible for parole in twenty fourteen. Remember when Ed Cronell changed his password from good Sex sixty nine to flowers Too. My first thought was that the flowers were twisted reference to Melinda Snyder, some kind of sick joke about their respects. He would never pay. But it turns out that Ed Cronell really wants to be a gardener when he gets out of prison.
Oh, initially to have a job for a parole. I'm going to be willing to take any type of job, but I don't want to get into doing what I've.
Learned to do here in the last.
Twenty years, growing plants and flower that.
Type of work. You can see his stony face briefly light up as he answers the parole boards question. You can almost hear him saying to himself, this is plausible. It sounds almost normal. And then one of the parole board members pipes up and asks him, if you'd like to say anything to the family of Melinda Snyder.
I won't apologize that they have to go through this parole hearing.
After all this time on shore spread for Nagville, and I know this has been awful, not only for them, but for my entire family and many people.
I don't even know the answer already seems to be going off the rails. It's the way he too quickly mentions his own family, just a few seconds after considering the utter misery the Snyder family suffered. He's unraveling in small ways, but he keeps his chin up, hands clasped together as the parole board ask him one more question.
What led you to do what you did?
I could not tell you, sir. You've bed twenty I tell you've bed twenty years to think.
About it, and you know a lot I could do another twenty years, And there's I could not explain to you.
I have no idea why.
Well, if you don't know, why, how can we allow you to both free and not see your sappen again?
If you don't know what, I understand your point, and I understand your position. He can't answer it, He can't acknowledge it. Is it a fact buried so deep in his mind that it's irretrievable? Is he lying to our faces? Is he so fearful of teasing out the horror of it that he knows he will finally sound like the alien he was feared? He was, what was out of sink with the world around him. He's had three parole hearings since then, and each time he's been rejected. It sounds as if you'd rather do another two years in prison again and again than reflect for a few seconds on whether he has any remorse at all. It's as if he was circling the fluorescently lit desk, his chained hands rest on taking a good look at himself again and again and coming up blank. Next year he'll get another chance to explain himself at another parole board hearing. But I'll bet the house that he clams up again. I'm sure of how to respond to the most humanive questions. Crenell had no prison record before the murderer. His time at the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia, South Carolina has been marked by the occasional write up, but mostly just as continued pursuit of learning how to plant flowers and trees. His most exceptional moment in life, a premeditated fit of lust and rage, lasted only a few minutes, destroying a life and a family forever in a modest, three bedroom ranch home with beige vinyl siding that a bright, beautiful woman was just passing through on a way to bigger things. As the days through her departure grew shorter and her room grew emptier as she packed up her possessions, she had no idea that at Cronell was never going to let her leave the home, all thirteen hundred square feet of it. A ceiling fan still installed above the empty space her bed once stood as the current market value of two hundred and eighty nine thousand dollars. The lock box has been moved. This is Murder Holmes. I'm Matt Merinovitch. Murder Holmes is created by an executive producer by Matt Marinovic. Story editor and executive producer Taylor Shakoin. Supervising producer is Carl katl. Producer is Evan Tyre. Sound designed by Taylor Shakoin, Evan Tyre and Carl Katle. Special thanks to Ali Perry and Nikiyatore. Murder Holmes is the production of iHeart Podcasts. For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
