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Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and the story I have for you today takes place in Platte National Park near the town of Sulphur, Oklahoma. Today, the park is known as Chickasaw National Recreational Area because, according to NPR, its national park status was dissolved in 1976.
In 1975, though, when this crime happened, it was called Platte National Park. And at the time, it was the smallest existing national park in the United States. What the area lacks in size, it makes up for with charm. It has more than 20 miles of trails that connect swimming holes and streams. Key features include protected freshwater and mineral springs, and it's known for having babbling brooks instead of raging rivers, as well as rolling hills in lieu of rugged mountains.
The mild landscape makes it accessible to a lot of different kinds of visitors: experienced hikers, walkers, joggers, etc. In the 1970s, because it was so accessible and pretty tranquil, it drew local teenagers who often used it to take the long way home from a local grocery store or school. In June 1975, that's what two young women were doing. They were walking together on a trail inside the park. When they arrived at a fork, one went to the left and one went to the right.
As they waved goodbye, there was no way they could have known that only one of them would make it home alive. It didn't take long for authorities to learn the gruesome outcome of one girl's fate. But pinpointing a suspect took a bit more time. The pool of strangers law enforcement had to interview was vast, thanks to the carnival being in town. This is Park Predators. ♪
At 5.45 p.m. on Monday, June 2nd, 1975, a man named Terry Johnson, who worked as a reverend, was out for an early evening hike in Platte National Park. Terry was visiting with a group of young men from his congregation, and as they were walking, he noticed a small bag at the edge of the gravel trail they were walking on.
Now, ordinarily this bag wouldn't be that strange to see because all too often random items of trash would just show up on the park's trails. Likely because people just didn't have a conscience about littering. But for some reason, this bag caught Terry's eye. It was sitting off to the side of the trail in the direction towards a popular natural spring called Pavilion Springs, which was in the west central part of the park, really close to where you would exit the park and enter into the town of Sulphur.
Terry's eyes scanned around the bag to see if there was anything else nearby it or to see if anyone who may have been walking ahead of them had dropped it. But he didn't see anyone right away. Like I said, it was about 5:45 in the evening, and based on later accounts, it seems as though the park had already begun to empty out at this point. Just as he was about to forget about the bag and move on, Terry noticed a man on a bike kind of booking it out of the area.
He couldn't put his finger on why this cyclist seemed so out of place, but just the way the guy was riding off in such a hurry caused Terry to notice him. When Terry bent down to pick up the bag, he opened it and noticed a new, unused tube of toothpaste inside of it. Which again, wasn't super odd by itself, but this, coupled with it being brand new and completely abandoned on the trail, was weird.
Like, Terry thought, what was the point in someone buying it if they were just gonna toss it and never use it? It just really didn't make sense to him. Anyway, as he's mulling this over, he takes a second look at the ground where he picked up the bag and notices that the gravel path looks like it's been disturbed. There was dirt, grass, and debris all pushed around here and there, which prompted Terry to investigate a little more.
He followed the path a couple of paces when suddenly something else strange caught his eye about 15 yards off the trail. According to Kay Evers reporting for the Ardmore Daily Ardmorite, Terry initially thought that he was staring at a tree trunk with its bark stripped off. But as he inched closer and closer to the object, reality started to sink in. He was not looking at a piece of bare wood. He was looking at the discarded body of a young woman.
Within minutes of making the gruesome discovery, Terry hightailed it to the nearby Platte Ranger station and reported what he'd found. The ranger there must have determined the woman wasn't alive because he then roped off the area and called for backup from the FBI field office in Oklahoma City. That office was about an hour and a half away, and because Platte National Park was in federal land, the case went to the feds automatically.
The agents arrived not long after being called and were in the park processing the crime scene by nightfall. The young woman's general features led them to determine that she was white, roughly 20 to 25 years old, slender, around 5 foot 7 inches tall, and had straight brown hair that went to her shoulders. The position in which she was found had all the telltale signs of a vicious attack.
Articles from the Ardmore Daily Ardmoreite and the Lubbock Avalanche Journal state that the woman was either nude or mostly nude with her bra and yellow tank top pushed up around her neck. Her cut-off jean shorts were around one ankle, and she was missing one of her white sandals, and the other was barely hanging around her foot. Her underwear were laid near her body and appeared to have been torn or ripped. Her neck was severely bruised and her face was bloody with some blood also smeared on parts of her chest.
There was a large stick laying across her neck and another nine-inch long stick poking out of her mouth, almost as if her attacker had tried to silence her. The agents treated the scene as a homicide and blocked off a mile of the trail to preserve the area. The focus from the jump was figuring out who their victim was and who had done this to her.
According to reporting by Tat Cornelius, by 10 o'clock at night, the victim was transferred to the Oklahoma City Medical Examiner's Office for an autopsy. While they waited for the results, investigators pleaded with the public, asking residents to come forward if they knew any missing persons who might match the young woman's description. Teams also fanned out across the park, searching for anything that might be a clue.
Park rangers from NPS, deputies from Murray County Sheriff's Office, and local police officers scoured dense brush looking for anything that might point them in the direction of their killer. That same article by Tack Cornelius also stated that by the following day, FBI agents had tracked down at least 19 people who used the trail on Monday afternoon, and they began interviewing them to see if they saw or heard anything suspicious.
No source material specifically says this, but I have to assume that Terry Johnson and his troop of boys were among that group of people being questioned. Meanwhile, the autopsy was performed that morning, Tuesday, June 3rd, and the cause of death was determined to be strangulation. The prevailing theory for law enforcement at that point was that whoever had killed the young woman likely used the stick found near her body to press down on her throat until she died.
The medical examiner also noted that there was no vaginal trauma or sperm present. One of the most disturbing details to come from the ME's report, though, was that after the doctor had removed the larger tree limb from the victim's mouth, they found smaller sticks and debris shoved further down behind that.
That extra stuff indicated to the FBI that the attacker they were looking for had likely tried to keep the victim quiet during the murder, which in turn suggested that the crime wasn't well thought out. Everything pointed to a very disorganized offender or offenders who seemed to have taken the victim completely by surprise. Investigators began to speculate that maybe whoever had attacked this young woman had seen her walking on the trail and decided in an instant to strike.
And I mean, I really have to just pause for just a second because I don't want to dwell on the depravity of it, but because I think it takes a terrible kind of evil to force dirt and sticks down someone's throat in order to stop them from pleading for their life. I mean, the cold-bloodedness of this crime is really chilling. Anyway, this idea that the murder was a crime of opportunity gave police at least a place to start.
They knew just based on where the body had been found and the fact that it was in kind of a remote area off the trail, they were more than likely looking for a person who'd been on the trail before or at least was familiar with it. Most of the source material I read states that authorities believe the young woman had been killed shortly before Terry found her. So it's not like it was one of those cases where she'd been out in the open for days or anything like that.
When she was found, the murder had literally just happened within a half hour to maybe an hour timeframe tops. FBI agents felt confident that whoever had committed this crime had been in Platt National Park sometime between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. on that Monday afternoon.
But canvassing for clues near the crime scene turned out to be more challenging than the investigators initially realized. You see, that area of the park was known to be heavily trafficked, and a handful of people had been on the gravel trail in the time frame the FBI believed the murder had occurred. So even though the feds had that fairly narrow window of time and those 19 or so witnesses they could speak with, they also knew there were probably even more people they hadn't located yet who might have seen something useful.
But until they could track those people down, they were at a standstill. On Wednesday, June 4th, two days after the murder, the FBI announced that agents tentatively determined the victim was a resident of Sulphur, but the Bureau didn't confirm the young woman's name to the public yet. According to reporting by the Ada Evening News, they said they needed more information to officially confirm her ID and then notify her family.
Sulphur residents came forward, though, and told authorities that the clothing FBI agents had described the victim wearing sounded a lot like what 16-year-old Marina Rose Howeth wore. At the time, Marina was living in Sulphur with her aunt and uncle, not with her parents in Concord, California.
Investigators felt like this information was a pretty solid lead. However, they didn't want to jump to any conclusions too soon. They wanted to be certain. So they contacted Marina's parents in California within a few hours, and the couple was on a plane to Oklahoma. After touching down, Annie and Aaron Howarth met with the FBI agents working the case, and shortly after that, positively identified the murdered young woman as their daughter.
One source also said that the FBI used dental records to sure up the ID, but I have to imagine that agents had to obtain those dental records from an immediate family member. Anyway, after finally getting a name for their Jane Doe, the FBI called in additional agents to help work the case. Fear was already building in the community about who could have committed such a vicious crime.
The public's concerns ratcheted up the pressure on law enforcement, and the FBI realized they were up against the clock. Like, really up against the clock. Their suspect pool was large. They had no concrete leads to follow. And to make matters worse, there was a traveling carnival in town days away from packing up and leaving. And with its departure, the FBI felt like potential suspects could disappear right along with it.
Bocas del Toro, Panama. Scott Makeda's tropical haven becomes his personal hell. A serial killer pretending to be a therapist. A gringo mafia. A slaughtered family. Everybody knows I'm a monster. The law of the jungle is simple.
I'm Candace DeLong. This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill, available now wherever you get your podcasts. To investigators, Marina Rose Howeth, who sometimes went by the nickname Rina, seemed like a typical 16-year-old girl. She played basketball and sang in the chorus at Sulphur High School. By all accounts, she was a happy young woman.
There isn't a ton of information out there that goes into her early life. The only article I could find that explained why she moved from California to Oklahoma came from an interview with a resident who claimed to know her, who spoke with the Ardmore Daily Ardmorite and said she left to get away from the crowds in high-crime areas of California. Based on a short snippet I read in her obituary published by the 8 O' Evening News, Marina had been living on and off in Oklahoma with her relatives for almost a year and a half before her murder.
An article by Tat Cornelius mentioned that, all in all, Marina seemed to be doing well in Sulphur and made friends easily. One article noted that she habitually walked through Platte National Park to enjoy the tranquility it offered. A friend she often traveled with was a local girl named Tammy Bristol. According to Kay Evers' reporting, Tammy and Marina were walking together on the fateful Monday afternoon Marina was killed.
When FBI agents connected with Tammy, Tammy told them that she and Marina had walked around town and stopped at a local grocery store early Monday afternoon. At the time, Marina had said she needed a new tube of toothpaste, so the pair went to the store to pick some up. When they left, they started walking on a trail inside the park that would take them in the direction toward their homes. Around 4 p.m., they came to a fork in the road and parted ways.
Tammy said she never could have imagined her friend would be brutally attacked and killed just minutes after that. Unfortunately for the FBI, Tammy didn't see anything relevant to the crime, but her account did help them narrow down the time frame of when Marina had been killed. Investigators knew that whoever had attacked her had to have struck sometime shortly after 4 p.m., but before Terry Johnson discovered Marina's body at 5.45 p.m.,
So that's like an hour and 45-minute window, which to me seems like a pretty tight window in the grand scheme of things. So thanks to Tammy's story about where she'd last seen Marina alive, authorities were able to determine exactly what stretch of trail to focus their efforts on, and they used that information while interviewing visitors of the park.
And one by one, police tracked down the people who were on the gravel trail in question during the hour and 45-minute time frame. And one by one, the FBI crossed names off their suspect list. But during all these interviews, one interesting detail kept emerging. Several people mentioned seeing a guy on a bike near where Marina had been left.
This information about a guy on a bike piqued the agent's interest because they knew Terry Johnson had also mentioned seeing a guy on a bike hurriedly riding off. Each of the people who mentioned this man all noted the reason they'd remembered him was because he was wearing a shirt that had the word beer printed on the back of it. Investigators quickly followed up on this lead and visited a bike rental shop in Sulphur.
They learned after speaking with the owner of that shop that a guy matching the witness's description had rented a bike and taken off near the trail around 4:25 p.m. on Monday afternoon. The owner said the man had been one of two men who had come into the store at the same time. He identified those men as Donnie and Roy Shoemaker. Donnie and Roy were brothers who'd been in town working for the Traveling Carnival, a show called the Joplin Amusement Show.
According to several news reports, FBI agents had questioned Donnie and Roy earlier in the week as part of that larger group of people who'd been inside the park late Monday. However, I guess during the FBI agents' first interviews with Donnie and Roy, nothing the men said seemed like a red flag. They both admitted to being in the park riding rental bikes when Marina was murdered, but they denied knowing anything about her murder or being on the same trail where she was killed.
The brothers went as far as saying they noticed her in the park, but they said they didn't speak to her or approach her. After agents spoke with the other witnesses, though, who could place the pair on the gravel trail where Marina had been, the feds decided they needed to speak with the brothers a second time. So on Friday, June 6th, four days after Marina's murder, that's what investigators did.
They visited the traveling carnival on the outskirts of town to re-interview Donnie and Roy again. But this time, they split the duo up and questioned them separately. That same afternoon, Marina's friends and family held her funeral service in Sulphur. Dozens of people attended, including students from her high school chorus group and basketball team.
From 5:30 Friday night until the early hours of Saturday morning, FBI agents grilled 22-year-old Roy Shoemaker. According to Kay Evers' reporting, his brother Donnie was released during that time, and shortly thereafter, the FBI announced he was not a suspect or believed to be involved in the murder at all. It was Roy who was their main person of interest.
What was or wasn't admitted during Roy's interrogation wasn't revealed to the public right away. But whatever happened behind those closed doors, authorities appeared to have gathered enough seriously damning information from Roy because by Saturday morning, federal agents arrested and charged him. A few hours later, during his first appearance, a judge set his bail at $100,000. The government had argued that Roy was a significant flight risk due to his job with the Carnival, and the judge agreed.
The FBI remained tight-lipped about what Roy had said during his interrogation that gave them grounds for his arrest, and a spokesman for the Bureau only said it came as a result of things said during those long hours that proved to be incriminating. The feds also doubled down on the fact that Roy had been seen in the park during the timeframe of Marina's murder.
An FBI agent heading up the case told the Ardmore Daily Ardmoreite, quote, "We measured distances, nailed the time of death down as close as we could, then we tried to find everybody on that trail or in the vicinity during that time. He was on the trail. He was there at the time of the killing. We knew he had to be our man." End quote. In a bizarre twist that many people speculated pointed to Roy being guilty, hours after his arrest, he attempted to take his own life.
Guards nearby were able to stop him, then they stripped him down to just his boxers and placed him in a maximum security cell. He was then transferred to another cell where armed guards watched him around the clock. His hefty $100,000 bond was not the kind of money a carnival worker could cough up, so Roy remained in jail waiting to see if a grand jury would indict him.
And that was exactly what FBI agents working the case were banking on. They needed Roy behind bars for the time being while they continued to work the case. They did not want him back out on the road with the traveling carnival. Fortunately for the FBI, Roy didn't make bail, and that was a win in their book, because the carnival he'd been working for packed up and left the Sulphur area Saturday night.
Investigators felt relieved that they hadn't wasted precious time because otherwise Roy might have left town, never to be seen again. The 8 evening news reported that the U.S. Attorney's Office in Oklahoma felt they had a strong case against Roy. For one, sometime during his interrogation, he had signed a written confession. And two, he had no high-powered attorney fighting in his corner.
The only thing holding up an indictment was Roy's noticeably fragile mental state. Several newspapers that had reporters at Roy's arraignment and bond hearing reported that Roy appeared to be completely bewildered by his arrest.
Several articles state that when the judge asked him questions, he wouldn't look up from his lap. But there are some articles that state he maintained eye contact with the judge the whole time, so I'm not really sure which is true. But most of the source material states that Roy indicated several times that he didn't know how to read or write because he stopped attending high school in the 10th grade.
The U.S. attorney at the time, a man named Richard Pyle, told the press that his office knew it was possible that Roy's court-appointed defense attorney would use Roy's mental well-being to bring his competency into question. To get ahead of this, Prosecutor Pyle requested Roy undergo a maximum 30-day psychiatric evaluation at a federal hospital in Springfield, Missouri.
He was admitted to that facility in early June, and when he returned over a month later, he was supposed to have a preliminary hearing, but the U.S. Attorney's Office decided to forego that hearing and instead requested the case go straight to a grand jury. On July 29th, that panel reviewed the facts of the case and indicted Roy for Marina's murder.
Back and forth between both sides about whether Roy was competent to stand trial dragged on through the month of August. Four different mental health professionals testified at preliminary hearings, and each one of them had varying opinions about whether Roy was living with a mental illness. An independent psychiatrist who observed Roy for three days while he was at the hospital in Missouri stated he felt the 22-year-old was living with schizophrenia and was not competent to aid in his own defense.
But two federal psychiatrists who testified to the contrary said they felt Roy was competent enough to stand trial. Ultimately, the decision came down to the judge, and he ruled in favor of the two federal doctors. Several times leading up to that decision, Roy's lawyers had also filed motions to get his signed confession thrown out, but the judge overruled those requests.
The defense claimed the statements Roy had made during his second interview with the FBI were inadmissible because they'd been made while he was under duress. So basically coerced. But the court didn't agree. One week later, on September 17th, the high-profile murder trial began. Kay Evers reported that right out of the gate, the prosecution kicked things off by aggressively painting Roy as a sadistic killer.
They said he specifically targeted Marina with the intent of sexually assaulting her, but had been interrupted and forced to hurriedly kill her and then flee. The government called 13 federal investigators to the witness stand and laid out physical evidence from the crime scene on the defense's table and in front of the jury. The items that were displayed included Marina's ripped underwear, bloody clothing, and the vegetation debris that had been in her mouth.
After recapping Terry Johnson's testimony of when and where he found Marina's body, the prosecution called a new witness to testify, a guy named Aaron Angel. Aaron was a young man from Texas who'd been in Platte National Park around 5 o'clock on the day of the murder. He testified that he saw Roy on the gravel trail at 5.15 p.m., just a few hundred yards from where the murder was believed to have taken place.
Aaron's testimony was damning because even though there were many witnesses on the trail that day, no one put Roy as close to Marina's body as Aaron did. Tammy Bristol, Marina's friend, also testified and positively identified the torn jean shorts collected as evidence as having belonged to Marina. The prosecution closed out day one of the trial by detailing the significance of all the sticks and vegetation that had been found inside Marina's mouth.
I'll spare you the gruesome details, but basically it was determined that stuffing the debris down Marina's throat had not killed her. The government argued that Roy had been forced to use the large stick found near her body to choke her by compression. He was also one of the investigators who'd interviewed Roy and Donnie.
The 8 Evening News reported that this agent said when he pressed Donnie for details during his second sit-down interview, Donnie said that when he and his brother had seen Marina and Tammy walking on June 2nd, Roy turned to him and said, quote, let's go after them, end quote. But jurors wouldn't have to take this agent's word for it. They would hear the story for themselves from Donnie.
You see, the other Shoemaker brother was scheduled to take the witness stand, but not in his brother's defense. Donnie was the star witness for the prosecution. Bocas del Toro, Panama. Scott Makeda's tropical haven becomes his personal hell. A serial killer pretending to be a therapist. A gringo mafia. A slaughtered family. Everybody knows I'm a monster. The law of the jungle is simple.
Survive. I'm Candice DeLong. This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill, available now wherever you get your podcasts.
When Donnie testified for the government, he explained how around 4 p.m. on June 2nd, he and Roy had rented bicycles in Sulphur, then gone into Platt National Park. An FBI agent then expanded on this and testified that not long after starting their ride, Donnie and Roy spotted two teenage girls on a trail, and Roy made the comment about going after them.
During his testimony, Donnie explained that he rode up next to one of the girls and asked her if she and her friend were planning on going to the carnival. One of the girls, a brunette, had said no. When prosecutors pressed Donnie on the stand about which girl he'd spoken with, he confirmed that the brown-haired girl matched Marina's description, despite him never asking her name.
Donnie said that after speaking with the girls, he rode off and left his brother behind. He didn't see Roy again until a while later when they were both back at the carnival. Roy chose not to testify in his own defense, but the FBI agent who interviewed him did take the stand, and he said that Roy told him he'd spoken with Marina on the trail.
The agent said Roy stated to investigators that before going to, quote, "get the girls," he and Donnie had stopped at the ranger station inside the park and Donnie bought a drink. When they left that location, Donnie had ridden up ahead of him, and as he was trying to catch up with his brother, he bumped into Marina on the trail alone. Roy said that he didn't see Donnie or Tammy anywhere, just Marina.
According to the FBI agent's testimony, Roy had said during one of his interviews that when he approached Marina, she'd been nice to him and asked him about his parents. According to investigators, Roy said Marina bringing up his parents made him upset, and in his frustration, he crashed his bike and it landed on her. Roy said Marina didn't like that and took a swing at him, to which Roy then retaliated and hit her in the face.
According to the agent's testimony about what Roy had confessed to, that's when a struggle ensued and Marina got up and ran away, but Roy chased after her and tackled her to the ground. The agent testified that Roy told him Marina was making a sound that reminded him of his late father, so he asked her to stop. When she didn't, Roy said he put a stick in her mouth to keep her quiet.
The Ardmore Daily Ardmoreite specified that the breathing Roy described to agents reminded him of his father who died two years prior from a gunshot wound. So yeah, that seems like a pretty specific detail for FBI agents to just make up if they were lying or trying to railroad Roy. Which, full disclosure, I don't think they were.
But if that wasn't damning enough, the prosecution called a co-worker of Roy's, a guy named Stan Whitworth. And Stan spoke about Roy's demeanor after Marina's murder. Stan testified that when Roy got back to the carnival about 6 p.m. on June 2nd, he seemed nervous and off. According to an Ada Sunday News article, when it was the defense's turn, the only witness they called was the independent psychiatrist who'd interviewed and observed Roy after his arrest.
This psychiatrist testified that Roy was living with at least one mental illness that may have caused him to have seizures that affected the temporal lobe in his brain. The doctor said those seizures could affect a person's behaviors, emotions, and motor function without them realizing it. The problem with this testimony, though, was that no one had ever run tests on Roy to determine if he truly suffered from these alleged seizures.
The independent psychiatrist admitted under cross-examination that he only spent about three and a half hours with Roy at the hospital. So there was no real way for him to know if Roy had been unable to account for his physical actions during the crime, or if he was even aware that he could have been responsible for killing Marina. Basically, prosecutors completely dismissed the defense's arguments and continued to hammer away that Roy knew full well what he'd done.
U.S. Attorney Richard Pyle argued that the evidence and testimony against Roy was overwhelming. Not to mention, he'd fled the scene, cleaned himself up, and returned to work where a co-worker noticed him acting nervously. According to Jim Etter's reporting for the Daily Oklahoman, Pyle ended his closing argument by stating, quote,
The jury deliberated for two and a half hours before the foreman announced the verdict. They found Roy guilty of first-degree murder.
On November 13th, 1975, a judge sentenced him to life in prison. A few months later, in 1976, Roy appealed his conviction, citing that his confession should not have been admitted at trial because of the way it had been obtained. During his appeal proceedings, details of what he'd said and done behind closed doors with the FBI during his second interrogation were finally revealed.
According to Tack Cornelius' reporting for the Ardmore Daily Ardmorite, when FBI agents had gone to question him at the carnival, Roy voluntarily waived his right to have an attorney with him during their chat. For two hours, agents escorted Roy along the path in the park where Marina's body had been found, and he identified several objects along the way as being familiar to him.
Around 8 p.m. that evening, he and the agents went to dinner, and by 10 p.m., the interrogation started up again at the park's headquarters. During that questioning, Roy refused to take a lie detector test, but did verbally admit to the county sheriff that he, quote, may have killed Marina, but just forgot, end quote. Roy also argued in his post-conviction appeal that the crime scene photos of Marina's body and injuries should never have been shown at his trial.
Which, I find this claim kind of astonishing. Basically, the defense's argument was that the photos sensationalized how heinous Marina's injuries were, which in turn prejudiced the jury against Roy. But seriously, can you guys feel my eyes rolling? Photos like this are totally admissible. Anyway, Roy's appeal didn't really go anywhere, and was truly just a last-ditch effort to get his conviction overturned.
The justices who reviewed the appeal didn't agree, and Roy went on to spend 29 years of his life sentence in prison. According to the United States Bureau of Prisons website, he was paroled on March 4th, 2005, at the age of 52. The thing about this case that really sticks out to me is how violent and brazen this attack was. I mean, think back to when you were a teenager for just a second.
"I know I was just like Marina and enjoyed spending my summers outside with friends, appreciating nature." She was not in some remote wilderness area with no one around. She was in the smallest national park in the country, a spot that had a lot of people in and out of it on a daily basis. She truly was a completely innocent victim who did not deserve what happened to her.
Roy Shoemaker, on the other hand, served nearly three decades for his crime, but he still got out early. He was given a second chance, unlike Marina. She never got to live her life. She never made it to her junior year of high school. Roy took that from her. Whether or not he actually lived with a mental illness was never fully explored.
The Ada Sunday News reported that he had an older brother who lived in a psychiatric hospital most of his life, and he also had a younger sister who had mental health struggles. I'm also bothered by some of Donnie's testimony in all of this too, but in the end, we'll never truly know if what Roy did to Marina was preventable if he'd gotten some help. All I know is that I haven't been able to shake the thought from my mind that Marina might not have been his only victim.
Full disclosure, there is zero evidence out there to support he was responsible for any other murders. But honestly, due to the vicious nature of Marina's killing, I have to wonder if he ever targeted any other young women. I only raise the point because of the nature of his job at the time.
Based on all the reporting I read, Roy joined Joplin's Traveling Carnival in late January or early February of 1975. And between then and Marina's murder, that show toured all over southern Oklahoma. That's either four or five months of traveling from city to city, spending a few days in one spot and then moving on to the next. Again, there are no articles that I could find that suggest Roy had other victims.
But just the sheer level of violence that Marina suffered was enough to pique my curiosity and make me ask the question: Was she his only violent crime? But it's a question I don't think I'll ever get the answer to. If Roy is still alive today, he would be 70 years old. Despite scouring the internet, I can't find any mention of him after he was paroled in 2005.
Just a year after Marina was murdered, Platte National Park was renamed Chickasaw National Recreation Area. While I don't think the name change and rebrand was intended to erase her grisly murder from the park's history, it almost feels like it did have that effect though. No matter how hard I searched, I could only find one grainy black and white picture of Marina on the internet. But the one place she will exist is in the hearts of those who loved her.
and Forever Frozen in the Summer of 1975. Park Predators is an AudioChuck original show. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Boca Stel Toro, Panama.
Scott Makeda's tropical haven becomes his personal hell. A serial killer pretending to be a therapist. A gringo mafia. A slaughtered family. Everybody knows I'm a monster. The law of the jungle is simple. Survive. I'm Candace DeLong. This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.