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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.
Hi park enthusiasts, I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. The story I have for you today is about two girls who disappeared one summer day from their small Montana town near the boundary of Glacier National Park. The case unfolds in northwestern Montana, around the town of Marion, which is located about an hour southwest of Glacier, in an area that shares very similar terrain with the park.
It's rural, mountainous, and filled with dense forests. According to the Montana Standard, Marion's population in 1973, when this story takes place, hovered around 150 people, so we're talking really, really small. It's the kind of town where everybody knew everybody, and families felt safe letting their children ride their bikes a lot of places, including Bitterroot Lake.
On July 31st, two best friends spent the day swimming and having fun at the lake, and then they stopped at a local store to buy some candy before they headed home. But they never made it. Their disappearance remained a total mystery for years until a woman who narrowly escaped the clutches of a ruthless predator helped authorities catch a break and put a sadistic killer behind bars. This is Park Predators.
On July 31st, 1973, Ben Westfall got home around 3:30 p.m. after a typical summer day swimming at Bitterroot Lake, which was right by his hometown of Marion, Montana. Cheryl Sable reported that not even a few steps into the house, Ben's mother realized his nine-year-old little sister Jessica wasn't with him. So she sent him right back out the front door to go and tell her it was time to come home.
Ben did as he was told and rode his bike back to where he knew his sister last was, which was the Marion General Store less than a mile from the lake. When Ben had seen Jessica there, she'd been with her best friend, 11-year-old Karen Tyler. When Ben got to the store, though, Jessica told her brother that she and Karen were not ready to come home yet.
and they wanted to get some candy and continue hanging out. When Ben came back home without his sister for a second time and told his mom what Jessica had told him, their mom once again sent him back out and essentially was like, "I don't care what she wants to do. I said it's time to come home."
It's not clear from the research material that's out there exactly how far the West Falls house was from the convenience store and the lake, but the town of Marion was really small. And the lake literally sat right next to it on US Highway 2. So even though I don't have the exact mileage, I think it's safe to say it was a short enough distance from the house to the store in order for Ben to go back and forth on his bike.
When Ben arrived at the store for the second time to convince his sister it was time to come home, it was just after 4 p.m. in the afternoon. When he stopped his bike and looked around the shop's parking lot, he didn't find Jessica or Karen anywhere. Knowing he couldn't go home for a third time without his sister, Ben walked along the side of the road to look for them, thinking it would only be a matter of minutes before he would run into the duo and tell them it was really time to go home now.
But after walking a half a mile away from the store along the highway, Ben still hadn't bumped into the girls. Then, just as he was about to give up, he noticed something strange. In a ditch near the side of the road, Ben spotted Jessica and Karen's bicycles tossed to the side. Immediately, he knew that was a sign something wasn't right. Neither of the girls would just leave their bikes abandoned like that.
Ben hurried back home to tell his mom what he'd seen and what was going on. The Westfalls didn't panic right away, though, when Ben returned and told them that the bikes were abandoned. They were worried, but they chose not to call police. Instead, the family sent Ben and his older brother, Creed, to go back out and search for the girls. That was around 6 p.m., but after
After roaming all around the general store and the popular swimming spots on the lake for a few hours, the brothers still couldn't find any sign of Jessica or Karen. It was at that point that both girls' families knew they had to alert the authorities. According to the Missoulians, sometime between 9.30 and 10 p.m. on July 31st, Jessica and Karen's families officially reported them missing to the Flathead County Sheriff's Office.
It's not clear from my research material when Karen's family was notified, but since the girls are repeatedly described as being best friends, I tend to think that as soon as Jessica's mom knew Jessica and Karen were missing, she would have quickly contacted Karen's mom to let her know what was going on.
Whatever the sequence of events was, I know that Karen's mom Vivian was somehow alerted and both girls were reported missing at the same time to the same law enforcement agency. When they were last seen, Jessica was described as having long brown hair, hazel eyes, and was wearing distinctive pink striped pants. Karen was described as having medium-length blonde hair, blue eyes, and was last seen wearing the eyeglasses she always wore—
as well as equally distinctive purple striped pants. Authorities quickly learned from speaking with Ben and other family members that Jessica and Karen had spent July 31st, just like every other kid in Marion, swimming at Bitterroot Lake. Both girls swam with their siblings and friends and soaked in the sun until it was time to head home around 3 o'clock in the afternoon. When police interviewed Ben, he told officers that the last time he saw the girls, they'd stopped off to get a snack at the general store.
before promising to come home, but then after that, it was like they just vanished. The next morning, August 1st, Flathead County authorities began an extensive grid search for Jessica and Karen, beginning at where their bikes had been found in the ditch, not far from the convenience store. From there, deputies fanned out and canvassed the entire area looking for more clues.
Detectives who were initially assigned the case didn't automatically leap to any conclusions like a stranger abduction or foul play, but according to the independent record, the initial police report filed by department staff lists the girls' disappearances as, quote, a possible abduction, end quote.
I think authorities gave the case that classification for two reasons. One, no one seemed to believe the girls were runaways, and even if they were, that wouldn't explain why they left their bikes behind in the ditch. And two, an eyewitness came forward within 24 hours of the girls being missing and told authorities he'd spotted them on the side of Highway 2 just before they went missing.
This eyewitness was a local minister from the area who said he'd seen the girls close to 4 o'clock and when he'd spotted them, they weren't alone. He said Jessica and Karen were on their bikes talking with a white guy who looked to be in his early 20s and was around 5 feet 10 inches tall. The minister told police that the mystery man probably weighed around 150 to 160 pounds
and had light-colored hair tied in a ponytail. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and driving an older model red Chevy or GMC pickup truck. The minister said he noticed the girl speaking to the man and thought about the sighting again when he drove back through the area a little while later because he saw the girl's bikes in the same spot
but no sign of the girls. Police knew they needed to speak to whoever that mystery man was, because at the very least, he seemed to be the last person to interact with the girls before they vanished. So authorities told the public to be on the lookout for the guy and his pickup truck.
But while they waited for leads to come in, they couldn't just sit on their hands and do nothing. The Flathead County Sheriff's Office contacted agencies across the Pacific Coast and in the Canadian provinces to make sure staff with those agencies kept an eye out for the girls and the potential suspect vehicle. Detectives and volunteers spent the rest of August 1st searching all around Marion for Karen and Jessica, but unfortunately, nothing of any value turned up.
And it wasn't for lack of trying. The Daily Inner Lake reported that specially trained bloodhounds were flown in from Idaho to help track down the girls' scents. The hope was that the dogs would lead investigators to an area of woods or the lake where the girls had gotten lost or maybe just wandered off. But the results of running the dogs confirmed authorities' growing suspicions that they were more than likely looking at an abduction.
The bloodhounds had been able to pick up the girls' scents at their bikes and then followed the odor trail a short ways onto the side of the road, but then it abruptly disappeared. That made authorities believe the girls got into or were forced into a vehicle and then driven off. By the time Thursday, August 2nd rolled around, detectives with the Flathead County Sheriff's Office had made little to no progress in the case, and they were facing increasing public pressure.
so they decided to call in the FBI for assistance. More search parties alongside federal agents continued doing ground searches for Jessica and Karen, but the big challenge they faced was that the terrain around where the girls disappeared was vast and hilly. There were also several small bodies of water and a lot of wetlands, so ensuring no clues were overlooked proved to be a daunting task that took a lot more time than police expected.
Police also went door to door canvassing nearby neighborhoods, asking local residents if they'd seen anything unusual or heard any kind of sounds that were out of the ordinary. But nothing came from that effort. According to several news reports, by August 3rd, hundreds of phone calls from local residents trying to give authorities something to go on had flooded the tip lines. But not one of those calls gave police a solid lead to follow.
No one living near the lake or the general store had reported seeing the girls or the mysterious man with the red truck. No one had reported hearing any screams or seeing the girls being ripped from their bikes. According to the Missoulian, the only lead authorities had to go on was that strange young man in the red pickup truck, and until they could definitively rule him out, they had to assume he was involved.
The sheriff at the time told the Missoulian, quote, End quote.
Detectives once again turned to the public for help. They handed out the girl's information and the description of the mystery man and his truck to every service station and media publication in the area. They also put a lot of effort into getting that information into the hands of loggers, long-haul truckers, and U.S. Forest Service officers. The hope was that one of them, working in one of their professions, had seen something or would keep their eyes open for the red pickup truck.
It's not explicitly stated in the source material, but I think investigators' reason for giving that information to Forest Service personnel and game wardens and truckers and loggers was because those people worked in the backcountry of Montana. Investigators knew just based on the geography of the area that if the girls had been abducted on Highway 2, that meant they could have been taken into one of several vast forests in a matter of minutes.
So people like loggers and game wardens and rangers needed to be aware of anything that seemed out of place in those areas. The shock of Karen and Jessica's abduction really started to sink in by the end of the first week because a lot of time had passed since anyone had seen them. The prognosis that they were still alive was looking bleaker and bleaker every day. Everything about the sequence of events surrounding their disappearance was highly suspicious.
Even more worrisome to Karen and Jessica's families and the general public was that they were not the first little girls to go missing in this part of Montana in the summer of 1973. There was another case that investigators felt creep up in the back of their minds. Hi there. I'm a PBM. I'm also an insurance company. We middlemen are often owned by the same company, so hard to tell apart.
We control what medicines you get and what you pay at the pharmacy. That's why today, more than half of every dollar spent on medicines goes to middlemen like us. Middlemen are driving medicine costs, and you don't know the half of it. Get the whole story at phrma.org slash middlemen. Paid for by Pharma.
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The Montana Standard reported that on June 25, 1973, just a month before Jessica and Karen vanished, a seven-year-old girl named Susie Yeager had been kidnapped while on a family trip about four hours away from Marion in Three Forks, Montana.
According to an article by Strange Outdoors, Susie was camping with her family at Missouri Headwater State Park when her kidnapper sliced through her tent and snatched her while she slept just feet from her brothers and sisters. Unfortunately, no one woke up and saw the abduction, and Susie had not been seen or heard from since.
Although Karen and Jessica and Susie were all similar in age and appearance, the Flathead County Sheriff's Office told reporters that their detectives and the FBI did not believe the three disappearances were linked. I'm not really sure what information investigators had to support this statement, but maybe it had something to do with the distance between the two abductions. Missouri Headwaters State Park is roughly 300 miles away from Marion, so maybe they just felt like it was too far to really be connected.
Either way, by the end of the first week of the investigation into Jessica and Karen's case, authorities were taking all the help they could from search and rescue units from as far away as Washington State and Idaho. Up until that point, police and the FBI had put in over 10,000 man hours into finding Karen and Jessica. An Army Reserve company drained a ditch near where the girls' bikes were found, but nothing was recovered. No clothing, nothing.
Searchers also made sure to check cabins that were off of unpaid back roads, frequently used in the logging industry. A lot of times drivers for logging companies created these makeshift rugged trails, and they were wide enough for trucks and other cars to get through. Investigators made it a high priority to check these logging roads in the hopes of finding something. But again, nothing surfaced that got them any closer to figuring out what direction the girl's abductor could have taken them,
or if they'd remained in Flathead County at all. According to the Missoulian, divers joined the search and checked the swimming area at Bitterroot Lake, as well as a bunch of other shallow bodies of water in town. The police also asked local ranchers to keep an eye out on private property for any sign of the girls. They wanted them to look in their fields or their buildings, but just like every other effort so far, nothing turned up.
On August 8th, about a week after the girls vanished, the FBI announced both Karen and Jessica's families were offering a $5,000 reward in exchange for information that could help authorities find the missing girls. But even the promise of a monetary reward didn't move the needle in the case. Authorities were essentially at the same place they were on July 31st. They had a confirmed last sighting, they had the girls' bikes abandoned like an ominous breadcrumb, and they also had a strong suspicion that their abductor,
was driving a red pickup truck. But beyond that, they had nothing to go on. The sheriff at the time told the Daily Interlake, "...we've fanned every square foot in that vicinity, and now we're expanding it still further. Most of the search has been along the roads. Now we're covering the brush and terrain away from the roads, looking for one small sign that could break the stalemate in which we find ourselves."
According to another article by that publication, Jessica's 10th birthday came and went with no update in the investigation. She was the only girl in her family with five brothers, and her mom told reporters they didn't always have much, but they always made the most out of birthdays.
Miss Westfall told the newspaper that the family had big plans for Jessica's birthday. Karen was scheduled to come over and celebrate. There was a tradition in the Westfall household that if little Jessica couldn't quite blow out all of her birthday candles in one breath, that one of her brothers would help her so that her wish would come true. Her mom told the reporter that until Jessica came home, the family would not have a party for her.
What's really heartbreaking is that all of this talk of birthday parties and candles really shows you how much Jessica's mom sincerely believed her daughter was alive and would eventually be found safe and sound.
Unfortunately, as is common with a lot of cases, things started to slow down in the investigation after the first week or so. Days turned into weeks, and despite search efforts continuing in full force, credible leads dwindled. And to be honest with you, I don't think the lack of traction was law enforcement's fault.
According to several news reports, the Flathead County Sheriff's Office was so dedicated to finding answers in this case that they canceled all vacation and time off requests for deputies until they caught a break. It's just the problem was they weren't catching any breaks. In September, two months after the girls vanished, authorities put out a plea to hunters who were going to be in the wilderness for the upcoming big game season.
which was scheduled to open in mid-October. The sheriff's office asked hunters to please look for any sign of the missing girls and report anything that looked suspicious. On October 7th, a tangible lead came in that shook up the investigation for the first time in months.
A man came forward and told police that he'd abducted the girls, killed them, and buried them somewhere near Marion. However, police quickly realized this guy's confession was completely bogus because authorities concluded he was not even in the area at the time of the girls' disappearance. News reports state that for this guy's interference with the investigation, he was sent to Warm Springs State Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. Sadly, the time it took detectives to investigate this guy
rule out his false confession, and move on with the case was one of the last breaks that surfaced. After October of 1973, the investigation came to a screeching halt and pretty much dead-ended. I think something big that contributed to this was that investigators and search crews could only do so much canvassing during the brutal winter months.
Between fall of 1973 and spring of 1974, the land surrounding the abduction site was covered in snow. Everything froze over and made it nearly impossible to do any kind of extensive field searches. Once the winter was behind them, crews renewed searches, and according to an article published in early April of 1974 by the Daily Interlake, the Flathead County Sheriff's Office told reporters, quote,
End quote.
Even though police and the families never gave up hope, it must have been devastating when July 31st, 1974 rolled around and everyone was reminded that a full year had passed without so much as a clue as to where Jessica and Karen were. According to reporting by Joanne Spielman for the Missoulian, around the one-year anniversary of the girls' disappearance, both of their mothers expressed their belief that the girls were still alive somewhere.
One comment from Vivian Tyler, Karen's mom, that really stuck out to me was when she told the reporter that she and Karen's other two siblings were fully convinced that Karen was going to return home safely. Vivian even went as far as saying that she was worried because she knew at the time Karen disappeared, she was desperately in need of new eyeglasses and needed to have dental work done. Vivian told the newspaper that she wanted her daughter to be able to see and get her dental work completed.
Vivian also indicated that she felt like both girls would probably have fought against their captor by now if they were still being held somewhere against their will. And she kind of had a point. I mean, it's not like Jessica and Karen were too young to know they'd been abducted. Vivian told the newspaper, "...I don't know how one could handle two girls that old in such a short time without anyone noticing. They are old enough to create a commotion and would be tough for one person to handle alone."
Sadly, despite the revived interest in the press and the family's interviews, the one-year anniversary came and went with no new updates about what happened to Jessica or Karen, and things once again went quiet. Then, in October of 1974, a strange twist came across investigators' desks.
A self-professed murderer who'd voluntarily confessed to four child murders in neighboring Gallatin County, Montana, caused everyone to pause and consider whether or not he could be the man who kidnapped Karen and Jessica.
According to a Great Falls Tribune article, 25-year-old David Meyerhofer, who was from Manhattan, Montana, straight up confessed to authorities that he was responsible for four horrific murders that took place in the late 1960s and stopped in 1974.
David said his first victim was 13-year-old Bernard Pullman, who he'd shot in 1967. Then there was 12-year-old Michael Rainey, who was a Boy Scout he stabbed to death inside his troop's camping tent in 1968 near a campground in Three Forks, Montana.
David's third known victim was seven-year-old Susie Yeager, who David claimed he'd strangled to death and then dismembered at an isolated ranch in the northwest part of the state. He said he ultimately hid Susie's head in an outhouse and burned the rest of her remains, and then scattered them on the isolated property.
If Susie's name sounds familiar to you, that's because she was the little girl who'd been ripped from her family's campground tent in June of 1973 at Missouri Headwaters State Park. And if you'll remember, she was taken a month before Karen and Jessica vanished.
Lastly, David confessed to abducting and killing 19-year-old Sandra Smalligan in February of 1974. Sandra lived in the same neighborhood as David, and he confessed to breaking into her apartment one night and attacking her. He said he later dismembered her body just like he'd done to Susie. Now, all of the murders David claimed to have committed took place within four or five hours of one another and his hometown of Manhattan, Montana, which was only about five hours driving distance from Marion.
Like I said earlier, the authorities didn't initially think that Susie Yeager and Karen and Jessica's cases were connected, but now that they had David spilling the beans about all his crimes against children, some detectives in Flathead County wondered if he was their man.
The whole reason investigators with the FBI and in Gallatin County even came across David was because after Sandra Smolikin disappeared, they quickly identified David as a potential suspect. When they got a search warrant for his home and went inside, they found gruesome evidence that confirmed the young handyman was in fact a serial killer.
Thomas Beam reported for the Great Falls Tribune that while authorities were searching David's house, they found a human hand and several fingers that belonged to Sandra. They also discovered several pairs of boots and pieces of clothing that were soaked in blood. Officials never said whether or not those items were linked to the other murders David confessed to, but I guess it didn't really matter since he'd already taken credit for those crimes.
According to several news reports, Flathead County authorities learned that David was close to Marion for sure on July 26th, 1973, just six days before Jessica and Karen vanished. He delivered a large piece of farm equipment to a business just outside the town of Kalispell, which is about 20 miles east of Marion. Unfortunately, before Flathead County detectives could interview David for themselves, he chose to take his own life in his jail cell.
The Associated Press reported that David gave full confessions to the four murders he was suspected of, but he did not admit to being involved in Jessica and Karen's abductions. During his confession, he'd spent four hours with FBI agents detailing how he killed Michael, Bernard, Susie, and Sandra. But nowhere in that transcript did he mention the Marion girls.
When David died, Flathead County authorities were in the middle of looking into his whereabouts in the days after he delivered that piece of farm equipment. They specifically wanted to find out where he was on July 31st and if he drove a red pickup truck.
What's a little confusing for me at this point in the story, though, is that according to some of the source material, the Flathead County Sheriff was quoted in two separate news stories published on the same day talking about David, and the sheriff gave some conflicting statements. According to the Great Falls Tribune, the sheriff told reporters that his agency had been actively looking into David as a possible suspect in Jessica and Karen's case for several weeks leading up to his eventual arrest and subsequent death.
But when the sheriff spoke to the Missoulian, he told reporters with that publication that his detectives didn't have any reason to suspect David was involved or visited the Marion area. Unfortunately, despite how good David looked for the crime, investigators in Flathead County and with the FBI ended up eliminating him as a viable suspect and moved on.
I think one reason investigators believed he wasn't their man was because once he'd been caught for his other crimes, David had been so forthcoming about all the murders he was linked to. If he had done something to Karen and Jessica, many of the FBI agents working the case said they felt he would have admitted to those murders as well and taken credit, but he didn't.
Something else that didn't quite fit into the investigator's timeline about David was the fact that his bank records showed that after he delivered that piece of farm equipment near Kalispell on the 26th, he'd been paid with a check. And receipts from his bank in Manhattan, some five hours away from Marion, indicated that he deposited the check on July 27th.
So if he had done something to Jessica and Karen, that meant he would have had to have driven back to Marion on July 31st in order to abduct them, and authorities felt that just wasn't likely. The last thing that convinced FBI agents David was not the suspect in Karen and Jessica's case was because his victims were either kids or young adults that he knew personally or randomly abducted from isolated campgrounds.
They were not children on their bikes on the side of the road. So Karen and Jessica just weren't David's typical victim preference. After eliminating him, the investigation into Karen and Jessica's disappearance grew ice cold for investigators. Again.
The only attention the case got after that was in July 1975 and 76, which marked the two and three year anniversaries of the girl's disappearance. By that time, a new man had taken over as Flathead County Sheriff, and the one before him was long gone. In November of 1976, just three months after the three year anniversary,
A hunter walking in the woods just two miles from where the girls were last seen stumbled across what looked like human bones. And that discovery blew the case wide open. Hi there. I'm a PBM. I'm also an insurance company. We middlemen are often owned by the same company. So, hard to tell apart.
We control what medicines you get and what you pay at the pharmacy. That's why today, more than half of every dollar spent on medicines goes to middlemen like us. Middlemen are driving medicine costs, and you don't know the half of it. Get the whole story at phrma.org slash middlemen. Paid for by Pharma.
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According to reporting by Kyle Johnson for the Daily Interlake, a hunter walking in the woods not far from the Marion convenience store where Ben Westfall had last seen Jessica and Karen stumbled upon what looked like human remains and clothing. He immediately alerted law enforcement and within minutes, Flathead County Sheriff's deputies arrived on scene.
Johnson's article notes that pieces of jawbone and human teeth were found along with two pairs of girls' pants and two pairs of small shoes. The items weren't all discovered together in like a little pile, though. They were scattered in the same general vicinity, and there were clear signs that animal activity had disturbed their original resting place.
Deputies with the sheriff's office collected all of the bones and articles of clothing and sent them to a criminal pathologist in Great Falls. That doctor's preliminary exam indicated both victims appeared to be young girls who'd suffered multiple gunshot wounds. Though the pathologist couldn't immediately confirm the remains were Jessica and Karen, both girls' families confirmed that the clothing and shoes that had been found belonged to their daughters.
Jessica had been wearing distinctive pink and brown striped pants, and Karen had been wearing equally distinctive green and purple striped pants. Just finding those items all but solidified everyone's fears that Karen and Jessica were gone forever. Within a day or two, dental records officially confirmed the remains were that of the missing girls. What stands out to me is how searchers missed these remains during all of those extensive search efforts they did for three years.
According to Kyle Johnson's reporting, authorities confirmed they did search the area where the remains were found several times, but yet no one ever came across what the hunter had found. What's really mind-blowing to me is that one of those intense ground searches reportedly took place less than two months prior to the discovery of the remains. And to make matters even more puzzling, neither of the girls' remains or clothing had signs of being buried. Their remains were just out in the open.
I guess somehow they were just tragically overlooked. I don't know, I still can't understand that detail. From my research, it seems like Flathead County Sheriff's Office and the FBI did their best to find Karen and Jessica. So I'm not suggesting they didn't, but it just blows my mind that the girls' bodies were two miles from where they'd last been seen all that time and no one found them.
According to the Missoulian, authorities launched a quote, "inch-by-inch search of the area where the remains were found," hoping to uncover more evidence that might point them to whoever killed Karen and Jessica. Even though detectives now had the girls' bodies, they still weren't any closer to finding out who killed them and put them in the woods. Officials used metal detectors hoping to find shell casings, the murder weapon,
Karen's eyeglasses, anything that could help point them in the right direction. And thankfully, their hard work paid off because according to several news reports, detectives did find what they referred to as, quote, articles of new evidence, end quote. But exactly what that new evidence was has never been made public.
By mid-November of 1976, Jessica and Karen's families were finally able to lay them to rest in a proper joint memorial service. In the spring of '77, the Missoulian reported that to be extra sure of both Karen and Jessica's causes of death, a coroner's jury was called together to review the girls' remains.
After a few days of examining the forensic reports and pathology findings, the entity definitively ruled that there was no doubt both Jessica and Karen had been shot at least six times each, and their manner of death was most certainly homicide. At that point, authorities urged anyone with information to come forward and told the public that they would be hunting down every lead and rechecking all the information they'd gathered so far.
But despite their dogged determination and promises, months passed by, and still, Flathead County could not get any traction in the case. But then, just as hope was fading fast, a completely separate attack in the summer of 1977 led authorities to a new suspect,
and an arrest in Jessica and Karen's case that shocked the Marion community. According to the Daily Interlake, a 19-year-old Glacier National Park employee named Janet Miller was hitchhiking to work in late July of 1977. At the time, Janet lived in Kalispell, which is pretty close to the entrance of Glacier National Park. As she was walking down Highway 2, a clean-cut looking guy in a green pickup truck stopped and offered her a ride.
She accepted, but as soon as she jumped inside the cab, the man swerved off the main road and drove Janet down a back trail towards a lake. When they parked, he threatened her with a gun and forced her down on the floorboard of his car and sexually molested her. According to reports, Janet said her attacker then got nervous and began second-guessing himself. At that point, Janet somehow had the presence of mind to reason with the guy and get him to agree to calm down and just talk to her.
Once his guard was down, Janet said she jumped out of the truck and ran for her life. She eventually made it back to Highway 2 where she was able to get help. Thankfully, her attacker just turned his truck around and took off.
Before seeing him speed away, Janet had also done one of the smartest things she could have, which was take down the license plate number. Once she eventually got to the sheriff's office and reported the incident, she provided authorities with the plate number, and it was only a matter of hours before police had the guy's name and information in front of them.
His name was Carl Randall Backman, and he was 26 years old, living in Kalispell. Right before Carl had been officially ID'd, Janet had been describing him to a Flathead County Sheriff's Office deputy named Larry Maracle. As Janet had described her attacker as being 5'9", with a slim build, brown hair, dark-rimmed glasses, and fair complexion, Larry called him a
couldn't help but think that the man she was describing sounded an awful lot like an acquaintance of his. Larry immediately made a connection in his mind that the guy Janet was describing was someone he knew as Randy. And although the thought sickened him because not only did Larry know Randy fairly well, Randy had actually been hanging out in Larry's patrol car 20 minutes before he was alleged to have assaulted Janet.
Larry eventually drove over to his friend Randy's house to see if his license plate number matched up with the numerics Janet had reported. And wouldn't you know it, when Larry drove past Randy's house, the plate number Janet gave him was just one number off from the digits on the plate of Randy's green pickup truck.
Larry was obviously shocked by this discovery because to him, the guy he knew as Randy seemed like such a good dude. But as it turned out, not everyone who worked in law enforcement in Flathead County was as surprised as Larry about Carl "Randy" Backman. News reports state that Carl was questioned by authorities in the early days of Karen and Jessica's abduction.
In fact, the article reports that he wasn't just a random citizen who had to be cleared. Carl was actually one of the prime suspects from the very beginning. Turns out that shortly after the girls vanished, Carl had come forward to Flathead County officials and reported seeing both Karen and Jessica on the day they disappeared. Because of that, he'd gotten on police's radar early on.
According to the Missoulian, Carl being considered a suspect was never reported on because nobody but police knew about him. Apparently, at some point in 1973, investigators had Carl take five polygraph tests, three of which he passed, and they really pressed him for an alibi. The pressure got so overwhelming between '73 and '74 that Carl actually hired an attorney
and filed a restraining order to keep the authorities from repeatedly questioning him. Because of the restraining order and complete lack of physical evidence tying Carl to Karen and Jessica, authorities had to back off until they had reason to question him further. Unfortunately, they didn't get the chance to corner him again until he had
On July 22nd, 1977, Carl was arrested for Janet's attempted rape, and just three days later, while still in custody for that charge, he was charged with the murders of Karen and Jessica. According to several news reports, Carl was transported to Warm Springs Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, and then ultimately returned to Flathead County to await his official arraignment.
There was some back and forth for a while on which charges should be filed against him because of new criminal codes that had been adopted in Montana after 1974, but that essentially just boiled down to a lot of courtroom back and forth on how to charge him properly. After all of that was settled, in early October of 1977, prosecutors officially charged Carl with two counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of Jessica and Karen. Now, second-degree murder surprised me when I first read it too, but according to a report
The head prosecutor on the case told reporters that based on a lot of evidence they'd gathered circumstantially against Carl and the results of his psychological evaluation, they felt the only charges they could file against him to ensure he would be convicted were second degree and not first degree. The lead lawyer told the newspaper that the state was going to have a very hard time proving premeditation and malice if they charged Carl with first degree murder.
They didn't want to run the risk of trying to get him for first degree and he beat the charges or get acquitted. Thankfully though, about a week later, Carl spared everyone the ordeal of going through a trial and took a plea deal for both murders. His attorneys asked for leniency from the court when it came to sentencing, but ultimately the judge in the case sentenced Carl to two life sentences that he was required
According to Joanne Spielman's reporting, the details of how Carl committed the crime did not come out until after he entered his plea and was sentenced. During several interviews with investigators and in some written statements, Carl confessed to a wildly bizarre story of how he abducted and killed the girls and why he was in Marion in the first place on July 31st, 1973.
He told authorities that he was doing some concrete work at his parents' cabin, and at one point he became overcome by a very bad headache. He claimed his entire life he'd suffered from these debilitating migraines and was prescribed medication. To help soothe his pain, he said he stopped his work and decided to go home and shoot some gophers with his .22 pistol to relax.
But on his way back to Kalispell, he'd seen Jessica and Karen walking their bikes on the side of Highway 2. He said he pulled over and started talking to them about fishing because they were obviously locals and he, quote, never fished Bitterroot Lake before, end quote.
Carl went on to tell authorities that as he and the girls were chatting about fishing, his mind and memory suddenly went blank, and he didn't know what happened after that. He said he had no clear memories of what he'd done while he blacked out, but when he got home later that day, it was like nothing even happened.
He explained that for a long time during the evening of July 31st and into the first few days of August, he didn't have any memories of how he'd spent the previous afternoon, but said slow flashes of images started coming back to him. He said he remembered that he'd come into a wooded area and he remembered in bits and pieces of seeing the girls laying in front of him dead. He told investigators, "'I don't know how I knew. It was just a feeling, just kind of a gut feeling. I just knew they were dead.'"
He said after he came out of his blackout, he remembered running, leaning against a tree, and hearing the sound of his own feet shuffling through the woods. He then admitted to tossing the .22 caliber pistol he used to shoot the girls into the Flathead River. To this day,
To this day, that firearm has never been recovered. Here's the thing with Carl's story. Despite admitting guilt and taking full responsibility for brutally murdering two girls, he did not provide any reason for why he did what he did.
He also never explained how he got Karen and Jessica into his truck. Authorities really didn't buy his whole "I blacked out and can't remember anything" story. They felt deep down that Carl was a sadistic predator who specifically targeted Karen and Jessica because they were young and vulnerable. None of the source material specifically says whether either of the girls was sexually assaulted prior to their deaths, likely because the state of their remains made it impossible to prove that.
But some investigators strongly suspected that Carl's motive had always been sexual, just like it had been in Janet Miller's case. What's really interesting to me, though, is that around the time Carl took his plea deal and the public learned the details of his crimes, authorities announced that Carl did not match the description of the young man with the light-colored hair and red pickup truck that the Marion minister had spotted talking to the girls around 4 p.m. on the day they vanished.
In fact, law enforcement said that in the years since Jessica and Karen had disappeared, they'd actually tracked down that young man and his red pickup and eliminated him as a suspect. They just never told the public that, which I kind of find annoying, but either way, that's how it happened. So not only did that guy talk to Jessica and Karen on the side of Highway 2 on the day of their deaths, but so did their real killer, Carl Backman.
The thing that plagues me most about this case is that Karen and Jessica's families were left with so many unanswered questions. Carl never expressed remorse or provided the family with any sort of tangible closure. Today, he remains incarcerated at Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge, Montana.
In the years since his arrest and conviction, Jessica's brothers, aunt, and Karen's friends have all been very vocal at every single one of his parole hearings, the first of which rolled around in 1991. Family members and the community fought tooth and nail in '91, 2005, 2013, and most recently in 2019 to make sure that Montana legislators and the parole board denies Carl the option of early release.
The next time he's up for parole will be in October of 2025. He'll be 75 years old. I'm willing to bet at that next hearing, the same determined advocates for Jessica and Karen will be front and center. They'll always be the voices for two girls who never got to grow up and become the people they were supposed to be. Two girls whose lives were stolen from them by a predator who roamed freely around Glacier National Park without remorse for what he was and what he did.
Park Predators is an audio Chuck production. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?
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