Coincidence or Connection?
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while uncovering the mystery of her sister's murder. There are twists, turns, and catchy tunes, all leading you deeper into the thrilling storyline. This is your chance to test your detective skills. And if you play well enough, you could make it to the detective club. There, you'll chat with other players and compete with or against them. June needs your help, but watch out.

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Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. That's June's Journey. Download the game for free on iOS and Android.

I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime. And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them. Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes. And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens. Some are solved and some are cold, very cold. This is Buried Bones. ♪♪

Hey, Kate. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you. How was your break? It was nice, you know, but I understand a belated happy birthday is in order for you. The big 4-8. 4-8. You're a young one. I know.

It's all about perspective. That's not what my kids say. They think I'm old as dirt, but I feel not a bit older than 47. You know, my birthday is December 28th and it is just such a crap dappy time to have a birthday. Yeah. I mean, how do you navigate that? Do you get like birthday presents and Christmas presents at

the same time. How does it work? I do. I do. And, you know, frequently people are unavailable to hang out. When I was younger, I didn't get a lot of birthday presents or anything from my friends, even though we would get presents for each other throughout the year. Everybody was saving money for New Year's or they were broke from the holidays before. So it's a complicated birthday, but I've learned how to embrace it because sometimes people get the post-holiday blues, you know, there's nothing to look forward to. And here I am, I have my birthday coming up, but it's usually pretty quiet.

Sure. It's kind of anticlimactic, right? It is. It's like, oh, yeah, Christmas, and the next thing you know, well, here's the birthday. Yeah, but it's always nice, and I always end up spending it with my family. So that's what I did this year. You know, around my birthday, it's usually really chilly, 60, 55 degrees, 60 degrees. I mean, it is jacket weather for me. So I was struggling, really struggling to keep warm. Yeah.

Oh, geez. Yeah, that's balmy weather in the wintertime here in Colorado Springs. You wear shorts, right? At that temperatures, yeah, absolutely. Well, it was a very nice break, but I will say it was odd to not see you during those couple of weeks. And I almost felt like turning to one of my 12-year-olds and saying, let's talk about this story. Let me set the scene. And they stopped me. When I get the podcast voice, they both say, please be quiet. Yeah.

This is not the right audience. No, that's hilarious. So I'm really excited to jump into this next story. So let me set the scene.

So we are in 1960s Nashville, Tennessee. I've been through Nashville, and I think I might have spent a day in Nashville, but I know not very much about Nashville. Have you ever worked any cases in Nashville before? I haven't worked a case. Shortly after I retired, shortly after D'Angelo, the Golden State Killer, was caught, I was at the second crime con ever, and that was held in Nashville.

So that was the first time I'd ever been there. And what I saw of Nashville was pretty cool. I really liked it. Of course, it's known for its music scene. And this time period in the 60s was no exception. This is the Nashville is really entrenched in country music.

It's not as big of a city as it is now. It's got a little bit more of a small town feel about it. There are civil rights sit-ins happening. Again, this is the 60s, so you have a lot of shifting in culture. So Nashville was a city that was growing, but it still had a little bit of an intimate feeling, not out of control crime. So what happened there?

with these young women in this crime spree was pretty dramatic for the city. So I'll be interested to see if you think we had a serial killer working in Nashville in this area in the 60s, or if these are unconnected. And this is new territory for me. I have never tried to connect

different murders to one person. But I think you might have some experience with that. So maybe you can help me out. I've done a little bit of that over the decades. So let's hear it. Okay.

So this is the first victim. And let's just operate right now with the assumption that these are all connected. So when I say first victim, I mean in a series that we think is a real series. So this first thing happens July 15th of 1965. And it's an 11-year-old girl. Her name is Wanda June Anderson. And I'll just start calling her Wanda. And she was babysitting for her six nieces and nephews at her sister's two-room apartment.

Six, babysitting. I mean, I can't even hardly trust my kids right now and they're 12. Sorry, Ella and Quinn. I know they listen to this podcast, but...

I don't trust you alone, barely, let alone babysitting that many kids. This seems like something that people feel like they have to do, but a little bit of a risky thing. No, for sure. Wanda's 11 years old, you said? 11 years old, and she's in charge of six nieces and nephews while the family's gone. And is the family living in an apartment? They are. It's a two-room apartment. It's a little bit—we had to do some pretty big research to understand this. It's a boarding house.

And within the boarding house is an apartment where you walk down the stairs and there's a main door. So it's a ground level apartment with a little window and it's just two rooms and she doesn't live there. She is visiting and she's babysitting. Okay. So that's seven kids in essence inside this ground level two bedroom apartment.

And a boarding house, which you would assume means you've got boarders there, you've got people coming in and out. There's a door inside the boarding house that is locked that, you know, somebody presumably only has one key to access this apartment, but it is ground level. So it seems to be the two entry areas are a window that you can access from the ground floor to get in and then this door inside the boarding house.

And then there is a back door, but it's unclear if it's a back door to the entire boarding house or one to the apartment. Whatever the story is, there are multiple entryways that you can use. And there is no door from Wanda's apartment out to the yard or the street. It's all in, the doors are only inside the boarding house that go into the apartments.

It sounds like it, yes. Okay. It's a little confusing, and, you know, I've looked at the photos, and Maren, our researcher, has looked through everything, and I think really what it boils down to is that if you are a boarder, you have obviously pretty easy access if you can manage to get into the apartment area.

If you are not a boarder and just want to get in, you can pop the window or find a way through. We're not on the fourth floor or anything. So the access is there for someone. And is there any information in terms of how full this boarding house is this evening? No, we don't know about this evening. Now, there are boarders, but not that I could find about how many boarders there are. Okay.

Continuing on, we've got this two-bedroom apartment on the lower floor, multi-story boarding house. This is Wanda's older sister's apartment. So she's babysitting her nieces and nephews. So she goes into the bed where her sister normally would be sleeping, but her sister's out. So she climbs into the bed and goes to sleep.

And she is attacked in the apartment by an intruder. And her sister and her sister's husband, Kay and Howard, told police that the door leading down to the apartment was wide open.

So the one that is inside the boarding house is wide open. And when they got home, the back door was wide open as well. So I think that when they say back door, they must mean the back door to the entire boarding house. With boarding houses, I will say that in the 60s, it's unlikely they locked it. I know that you're thinking in your head, there's a suspect within the boarding house, which could be the case. But I don't think anybody's going to have a problem getting into any of these apartments.

Right. And, you know, it's very informative that there is a window that can be seen from the outside. So a prowler could be going around the boarding house and possibly looking into this apartment and seeing that it's full of young kids.

Doesn't necessarily have to be inside the boarding house to know, hey, there's kids in this apartment and there's no adults present. Could possibly determine that from the outside. Correct. So let me show you a photo. This will be helpful. Let me show you a photo of the outside of the

house. And I'm pointing down to Wanda's sister. You can see her barely down at the bottom is standing where the apartment is. And you see that little window there. Yeah. That's where the apartment is. For perspective, she's probably my height, 5'5", 5'4", something like that. So anybody any taller, do you see a problem getting in or out? It actually doesn't even sound like they use the window. I think they use the door.

Well, in terms of, yeah, getting into this apartment, going through the door, that seems obvious. Yeah. And police said, we think the access is through the front door. And my point in showing you this photo is that there's no security here. Anybody could have walked in, it looks like, and gone downstairs. And that's what the police say happened. They believe that the intruder came in through the front door, went down, accessed the apartment, and then went out the back. Now, let me show you the back.

This is the back porch. And I don't know if you could see perspective. It looks like ground level. So maybe this is the back porch, quote unquote, which is very tiny, of this ground floor apartment. Either way, it just doesn't sound like it would be a problem for somebody to get in and get out of this. No, especially if these doors are unlocked. And the rear of this boarding house, it looks like it's open space behind it. At least it's a fairly sizable backyard space.

What time? This is happening in the middle of the night, right? Right. It's happening in the middle of the night. So the chances of anybody being out and seeing somebody emerge from the back of this boarding house is probably limited.

And we don't know the exact time it happened. We do know that Wanda's sister and her husband came home at 1230 a.m. And so this is when they discovered everything. So sometime when they left in the early evening and came home, this is what happened. Let me tell you what happens with Wanda, and then I'll show you the scene. So police believe the intruder first beat her while she was in the bed, hitting her on the head with an object like a pipe or a hammer that he took with him.

So I don't know if he brought it with him. There is no mention that anything was missing from the husband. So we're presuming that he brought this weapon with him. So the investigator said that she had been hit at least four times with a great amount of force with hits so severe that any one of the four would have killed her. That's how severe this was.

He raped her in the bed and then carried her outside, raped her again, choked her with a piece of her own pajamas, and then left her to die. Very violent. I mean, one of the most violent things I've heard is,

And this is all for an 11-year-old who's in an apartment where I think you would have to be watching and knowing what's happening based on the way this apartment looks to me. Yeah, we don't have a photo of the front of this boarding house, the street side. No, this is all we have for this photo. Okay. And then for perspective, this is the bed where it happened. Looks like a little full-size bed.

Low ceilings. I mean, this is almost like a basement apartment that's not in a basement. Low ceilings and a pretty small window. So, I'm looking at the bedroom where Wanda was attacked, and I'm seeing a window right next to the bed. So, there's another window that's providing view into this apartment. And at least at the time this photo is taken, it looks like that window is open. Yeah.

It could be. And as you know, the investigators might have opened it. I still think they're pretty convinced that someone came in and came out through the door, the easiest passage. But this is such a violent scene. So let me tell you some of these details. I know I already told you a little bit, but the forensics that they found, there were bloodstains on the bedsheets, of course, where Wanda had been sleeping. There was blood splatter on the nearby wall and the ceiling. And then

they found some of Wanda's bone fragments embedded in the bedroom wall. I mean, that's force. Embedded in the bedroom wall. I would suspect that these bone fragments are adhering to the bedroom wall just from the tissue, the blood drying. Was there any impact on

to the wall by the weapon itself. Not that's noted here, no. Okay. You know, I do not see bone fragments flying off from, let's say, cast off off of a pipe or whatever the murder weapon was with such force that they would embed into the wall. I think they adhered to the wall just due to the tissue and blood and maybe brain matter that the bone fragments had. Yeah. All the blows are to Wanda's head. Yeah.

It sounds like it. I mean, it says four to her head, and she didn't die immediately. They found her on the weeded area where I showed you her sister standing, which is down here. They found her on the side of the apartment outside. She died two days later at the hospital. So I can't believe she sustained four potentially fatal blows immediately.

and died two days later. It is interesting, though, that the attacker goes in, inflicts the four blows in the bed, and you said she was sexually assaulted in that bed. Yeah, inside and outside. And then at risk to himself, you know, has to carry her outside. And so what is causing the offender to move her out of a room in which they are isolated?

You know, I would imagine there's nobody else in that room. He's feeling comfortable in that room. He attacks her. He sexually assaults her. But now he's pulling her out and attacking her again, sexually assaulting her again. Something caused him to do that. You know, did he hear some of the other kids start to stir? And then that spooked him and he wasn't done with what he wanted to do with Wanda?

Did somebody in the boarding house happen to come home and he heard them walking down the hallway? To me, this sounds like there's an interruption to this attack. So I think you're probably right. The neighbors and whoever was in neighbors next door in the boarding house said they did hear something that might have been a struggle around midnight. But.

but nobody did anything. Nobody called the police. Nobody investigated. The six children who were sleeping in the other room didn't hear a thing. Never heard a thing. I find that hard to believe. I guess if with a couple of strong blows, you've completely incapacitated someone and they're not going to make a noise, but

In a case that we're getting ready to talk to, someone was killed in bed next to someone, and the witness didn't hear a thing either. So I guess I am thinking that when you're killing someone, it's louder than it potentially has to be. Well, he may be purposefully choosing to use the bludgeoning. On a young girl like this, there isn't any threat to himself whatsoever.

about a struggle, the biggest threat that he has is her getting loud and screaming. And so by choosing bludgeoning, these blows sound from the very beginning that these are homicidal level blows that he's choosing to start out. He's not just trying to gain control of Wanda.

He is trying to completely incapacitate her, whether it is to render her unconscious right away or to kill her right away. He does not want her to get loud because if he has six other kids, if he's aware there are six other kids in this apartment and they all start getting loud, then he's in trouble. And he's going to have to abandon the attack and not get out of this attack what he wants.

He's going into this apartment with intention. He is going in there to sexually assault this 11-year-old girl. And he is taking the weapon and utilizing it in a way that he feels is best employed to accomplish this attack in this particular crime scene.

Intention was where I was heading next because the police investigators, after speaking to the neighbors, after speaking to the sister, the sister and the sister's husband said, I think this is someone who knew the boarding house, who knew the apartment. How could somebody come in and no one had seen this person? They believed it was someone within the boarding house, but they didn't have a specific suspect in mind.

The police were split over whether or not this was a spontaneous act, you know, a crime of convenience. Someone just saw her maybe going into the apartment, grabbed a weapon and decided that this was something they could take advantage of. Or if this was planned out, someone was stalking. You know, there's trees, there's all kinds of places for someone to hide into the night and had been watching the family and saw the adults leave and took advantage of that. So what do you think? You're saying you think that this was planned.

Well, at the moment that the offender enters this apartment, it is planned. Now, what I don't know is when the offender chose Wanda as a victim. This is now getting into, it's so critical that the 72 hours ahead of a homicide like this is to get a timeline.

And even that evening, was Wanda, did she have the six kids outside and they're all playing together? And the offender could have seen that and watched them go in. So establishing that timeline is critical to start figuring out, well, when did the offender likely decide that Wanda was going to become a victim?

It could be the prowler that night who happens to look in a window and sees an 11-year-old girl, maybe by herself in her own bedroom, since there is a window to that bedroom, and makes the decision. Or he's been watching this boarding house, lives nearby, is inside the boarding house.

And sees Wanda, ends up basically surveying the grounds, what's happening with the family, what's happening in the neighborhood, and then makes a decision to go in that night. Right. And what gets complicated is the police start surveying the area and figure out that there are a couple of viable suspects there.

No one who they can definitively place at the scene with witnesses, but just sort of skeezy men who they think fit the profile for this person. One is a man named Henry Daniel Wilson, who in 1966 was charged and later convicted for rape and assault and the attempted murder of two women. They couldn't place him there, but he seemed like a good suspect because

He did live in the area, and there was a convicted child molester named Ronald Robertson who admitted to police at one point that he killed Wanda, but when they put him on a lie detector test, he failed.

We can have the polygraph talk now or later, whatever you want. I mean, there's a reason why they're inadmissible to court. I've said that before. But is it helpful in this situation to know that this guy, Ronald Robertson, was asked, did you kill Wanda? He said yes, and then he failed. I want to know more about that interview. You know, was this a properly conducted interview? Was he able to provide the details about the attack, what he did to Wanda that had not been released to the public?

I put so much more weight on those types of statements than I would about what this polygraph is possibly showing, that he's not being truthful. He's lying about killing Wanda. Obviously, he's a child molester. He's a pedophile. So he's going to be in play just from a behavioral standpoint.

But that interview is what's really going to be critical to assess whether or not he's somebody that is viable. You know, what was the word you used? Something sketchy? Sketchy men? That's the scientific term. You know, you do have these sketchy men everywhere, and that's part of the complication of the investigation. And you have to look at them just because they exhibit the behavioral characteristics of somebody who could commit this crime.

Even the first guy, Wilson, who was convicted, you said, of two rapes of adult women. Yeah. Yeah. You know, even though his known victims are adults, and Wanda's an 11-year-old girl, we see these crossover offenders. You have rapists that prefer to rape adult women. You have rapists that prefer to go after kids. But

But many of these guys don't care what the age is. We've got Ronald Robertson, who has said he's done it several times. We don't know if it was under police pressure. He failed this polygraph. He has pointed to a friend of his,

named John Donald Farrell, who he said actually was the one who killed Wanda. I changed my mind. I didn't do it. It was this other guy. I heard this man, Farrell, confessing to the crime. I actually saw him looking through the window in Wanda's direction. We were both there, but I didn't do anything. So there's a lot of unreliable underscored three times evidence

in this man's confession. And of course, for his part, John Donald Farrell denied everything. And ultimately, Robertson denied everything. So the police are back to square one, and they said there's just not enough of anything to point to any of these three men being there at the time. Okay. So this case kind of starts going cold, is my guess. It does. Okay. It does. And then

Something happens about six months later, and we should at some point talk about geographic profiling because I don't know very much about it.

And I don't know if that's going to come into play. You can tell me if it's going to come into play in this case. So this case goes cold. Wanda's family is in mourning. And something happens six months later within miles of the house. And I mean, all of these crimes we're talking about, they are in a less than 10 mile radius. They're in not the same neighborhoods, but if this is a serial killer, he's not going from one end of the city to the other. We're talking about not so much of a far area.

So six months later, after Wanda was killed, about 4 a.m. on Sunday, January 9th, this is now 1966, a 14-year-old girl named Reba K. Green was stabbed to death while she was sleeping in the bed that she was sharing with her twin sister Rita. And Rita didn't hear anything. Okay. So stabbed to death.

Same kind of age range. Wanda was 11. Reba was 14. Attacked where she was sleeping, but stabbed. And I think what you're going to say is we have Wanda who was bludgeoned and strangled. Now we have someone who's stabbed. My immediate response was, well, this is a different weapon. Must not be the same guy. And I'm going to assume you're going to say that's incorrect. Well, that is incorrect. I knew it.

You know, some offenders have a very specific way that they want to kill. They fantasize about how they want to kill. But at the same time, it's going to be based on what the circumstances of the situation permit them to do. In Wanda's case, you know, the offender may have only had access to a pipe or a similar bludgeoning tool, whether he brought it with him or whether he happened to just pick it up off the ground and went inside with it.

So in Reba's case, you know, one of the things I'd want to know is did it appear the offender, you know, went into the kitchen drawer and grabbed the owner's knives, you know, something that was present inside the house, or did the offender bring the knife with? Is the offender typically equipped with a knife? You know, some guys carry knives all the time just to do various tasks throughout the day that, you know, the knife is convenient to have with you.

What I think is a very important characteristic between these two crimes is that the presence of other children inside a residence is not scaring off the offenders in either case.

So that is a characteristic that I feel starts to suggest to me that these two cases could be related. There are children that are being attacked while they sleep, while they are inside the residence, and there are other kids present in both cases. And not just kids in this case, 10 other people, including children,

She's sleeping next to her twin sister. Now, here are a couple of things that I want you to think about. Number one, I guess these girls always slept together and they had their normal sides of the bed, like you might with your wife. They switched that night. So if someone were in fact familiar with the layout, familiar enough with these girls, like a relative, and had been targeting Rita, they were identical twins, they actually might have gotten...

Reba unintentionally. The other adults included Rita had a boyfriend who was 20. She was 14. He was 20. He was a soldier. He was staying in the house. His name was Frederick Bishop. Before you ask, police investigated him, came up with nothing, said, we don't think this guy is the guy who did it.

But coming back to that, there are other people in the house. So that's a check mark in this is a serial killer. One more thing, and then I'll leave it to you. And I've given you too many details probably to begin with. No sexual assault. Okay.

So first, Reba versus Rita. What are the things that I would be taking a look at? They're identical twins. They look very similar. It sounds like it, yes. In terms of where Reba was sleeping in the bed, was this a bed that was, let's say, pushed up against a wall? And so Reba was the one that was more accessible to the killer. Right.

You know, the killer's just not caring who it is. He's just, oh, here's my victim right here versus I want her that's further removed from the side of the bed he has access to. Or is this a bed that's in the middle of the room and the offender could easily have gotten to either side? With them being identical twins, you know, in the middle of the night, you know, even if he had chosen, let's say Rita versus Reba, could he really differentiate them in the darkness?

I, at this point, I wouldn't put too much weight on, did he go in and was focused on a particular victim? For me, he is going into a residence with 10 people inside of it. Including adults, an adult man. Yeah. So what this tells me, when I talk about serial predators, and I would

talk to law enforcement in training classes about sort of how to recognize that you're dealing with a serial predator. What I emphasize is that they, just like us, have what I call barriers to offense. And let me just give you an example or a series of examples is that if you're walking in a neighborhood and let's say you walk up onto a lawn of somebody's house that you're not familiar with, you are uncomfortable.

You're afraid that that person is going to yell at you, right? That's the old man yelling at the kid. It's part of our culture. We respect that privacy. So imagine a peeping Tom who's not only going up onto a stranger's property, but is actually looking into the window of a house. Could you imagine doing that yourself?

That offender has crossed that social barrier. He's now comfortable. He's so compelled to do that act. He is now crossing that barrier to go look into that window. Now, imagine going into a house that you shouldn't be in, committing a burglary.

And then take it another step up. Imagine going into a house and there's people inside. These predators are crossing each of these social barriers to commit the offenses. So the fact that this offender in Reba's case is going into a house that has 10 people inside tells me this offender is

has done this many times before, not necessarily attacking anybody, but has gone into houses and is comfortable being inside somebody's house while people are sleeping, has realized he can move around inside these houses without waking them up, probably standing at their bedside and watching these people sleep.

So this is where now this offender starts to sound much more like a true predator that has evolved past these social barriers that prevent most people from doing this type of crime. Experience the glamour and danger of the roaring 20s from the palm of your hand in

In June's Journey, you have the chance to solve a captivating murder mystery and reveal deep-seated family secrets. Use your keen eye and detective skills to guide June Parker through this thrilling hidden object mystery game. June's Journey is a mobile game that follows June Parker, a New York socialite living in London. Play as June Parker and investigate beautifully detailed scenes of the 1920s

while uncovering the mystery of her sister's murder. There are twists, turns, and catchy tunes, all leading you deeper into the thrilling storyline. This is your chance to test your detective skills. And if you play well enough, you could make it to the detective club

There, you'll chat with other players and compete with or against them. June needs your help, but watch out. You never know which character might be a villain. Shocking family secrets will be revealed, but will you crack this case? Find out as you escape this world and dive into June's world of mystery, murder, and romance. Can you crack the case? Download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android.

Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. That's June's Journey. Download the game for free on iOS and Android.

What about the lack of a sexual assault, which seemed to be the main motivation in Wanda's case? He's interrupted maybe? Yeah, that's entirely possible. Now, when you start assessing, is it a sexually motivated crime? Here you have a girl that is being stabbed in her bed. The offender probably had all these ideations about how he would accomplish maybe a sexual act

with Reba or with this particular victim. But something inside the house prevents them from doing that. Maybe Rita stirred or hears something else. It could be an interrupted case. However, when you start talking about stabbing, I don't know if you've ever heard the term picarism. No. So picarism is a, it's a paraphilia in which the weapon, such as a knife, is used to

Sort of as penile substitution. Oh, my. Okay. So, the offender, by the use of a stabbing weapon, in many ways, is getting sexual gratification. So, this is one of those things where I would be evaluating, okay, I want to see, you know, Reba's autopsy photos. How many times was she stabbed? Is she stabbed in particular areas of her body that would indicate a sexual component?

There's no question in my mind this is sexually motivated. This isn't revenge. This isn't, you know, a vindictive type act. There is a sexual component to this. He just didn't accomplish the traditional sexual acts that we associate with sexual assault.

So here's what's interesting. And I want to now know when I give you this information, if you've changed your mind. Once the medical examiner looks at her body, it's not multiple stab wounds. It is one large thrust through her chest. And it says it's one and a half inches wide, something sharp, about one and a half inches wide. Sister sleeping right next to her and didn't hear a thing.

So what does that mean? Yeah, where is she stabbed? Where does he say? Sounds like in the chest is what it says. So a single stab wound. Does he note any type of damage to her mouth, like there had been some sort of smothering, some sort of preventing somebody from crying out? No, it doesn't note that. Let me tell you a couple of more details because her brother was the one who found her.

He says, his name is Neil. He's 19 years old. He said he was not sleeping soundly at all that entire night. He woke up. He doesn't know why. He woke up in the middle of the night, and he was the first one to find Reba because Rita was still asleep next to her. She was dying in the pool of blood. And the sister, there's a nine-year-old sister whose name is Diana.

And Diana says she woke up and she saw someone standing over the bed. She got so freaked out that she ran off and hid in her room and didn't tell anybody about it.

So when Neil finds his sister, she's in the process of dying. The person is gone. However, this is what Neil says, and I'm just going to assume that he's telling the truth here. He said that he saw someone walking past Reba and Rita's window outside.

And that person, he didn't know if it was a man or woman, appeared to be laughing. We don't know if this is someone connected to the case. It is 4 a.m. And there had been a rash of burglaries, no sexual assaults, but kind of burglaries in this area during this time period.

So, all of these are very, very vague details, but a house full of people and a young woman sleeping next to her sister who is murdered with one thrust of a knife, and the knife has been taken. So, this does not sound like bickerism like I was talking about before. I'm glad we talked about that. I had never heard of that, and I'm 99% sure that this is going to come up again in other

cases we talk about, so it's good to get it out of the way. So where do you stand right now? If we're just taking these two cases six months apart, same age demographic, I know you said that doesn't matter all the time, but it seems like more of a coincidence, house full of people, both kids murdered, one sexually assaulted, one not,

very brazen. Do you think that on the face of it right now, these seem like these could be connected? Yes. I don't even lean towards them being connected. I would be pursuing these cases as connected until I prove otherwise. When you have an active serial killer and cases are coming in and you're evaluating, are these cases related or not? You're always considering the

both possibilities and you investigate leads based on both possibilities. But considering the circumstances between these cases, the characteristics, the MO aspects of this offender, and possibly the signature aspects of this offender, right now, these are connected cases. You have a serial predator that is now preying on younger-aged girls and

And his preference is to go into houses and attack them and possibly enjoys the idea that he's able to do this type of attack while other people are asleep inside that residence. Well, one thing we didn't talk about, if we assume

that Neil, the older brother who's 19, is correct. And he did actually see someone at 4 a.m. walk by the outside of the building where his sister's window was. And it was, let's say, a man who he believes was laughing. Does this indicate someone with...

some psychosis or something that's happening. And that would be also in play here with whomever has killed both of these two girls. Just because this person walking by the window is laughing, I wouldn't necessarily label that this person is exhibiting a level of psychosis. The laughing is going to be just something that if this kind of laughing is after the attack, after he's accomplished this, he's kind of basking in what he's done. He succeeds.

Or if it's prior to the attack, then he is kind of chuckling to himself about what he's going to do. And he knows he's got the confidence he can get away with it. When you have a truly psychotic offender, this is your disorganized offender.

And in this case, I do not see a truly psychotic offender having the wherewithal to get inside a house, stay silent, accomplish this homicide, and leave. I would expect the psychotic offender would have made a lot of noise, possibly would have attacked both victims in the bed, if not other people inside that, and it would be in a very disorganized type of manner.

So I don't believe right now that this is an offender that is a disorganized or psychotic offender. This is an offender that is organized and has developed the skills in order to pull off this type of crime. Okay. So we've got a third case that I want to talk to you about, which might be an outlier. We'll see what you think about Kathy Jones.

This is a good place to note that there's a woman named Michelle Willard who did a tremendous job analyzing these cases. She is sort of an online sleuth who pulled this together in an article called Davidson County did a serial killer stalk Nashville in the 60s. She really did a nice job distilling down the different points of this case. So one of the things that I want to talk about is nationality.

when we think we have a serial killer and we're sort of tacking on cases, what happens if the location totally changes and we're outside of what seems to be this person's comfort zone of breaking in and getting a glee out of attacking someone with other people in the house and

And that is potentially what happened in Kathy Jones' case. So why don't we kind of front load this and say, is it unusual for somebody who seems to be really trying to fit in, regulated with what he believes is the fantasy in his head to then go pretty far outside that fantasy?

It could be, but offenders do many different things. Are we saying outside of his comfort zone and that it's a geographic location that's far removed from where Wanda and Reba's attacks occurred? Or is this a completely different type of attack? Let me explain it to you and you could tell me. And I think we need to go step by step because...

You know, Wanda was attacked in 65. Six months later, Reba is attacked in early 66. This is three years later. Okay. So three years later, around 7.45 p.m. on Saturday, November 29th, 1969, there's a 12-year-old girl named Kathy Jones who

She left her house and she headed towards the Rollerdrome skating rink in South Nashville. Now, this is around six miles away from where Wanda was and around nine miles away from where Reba was. So that's why I was saying all of these are under 10 miles away from each other. Kathy's prized possession was a pair of white roller skates.

And, you know, there was a 20-minute walk for her to take from her house to this roller rink, and she wasn't supposed to walk by herself. Her family said, you can't ever do that. So she was supposed to go with her brothers, but her brothers sort of turned their backs, and she slipped away because she wanted to go faster than they wanted to go.

We don't know if she ever made it to the roller rink because she was reported missing that same night. And just a few days later, on December 2nd, her body was found in a weed-filled lot behind a Krispy Kreme that neighboring the skating rink. So this is someone who was potentially snatched

and attacked and dumped somewhere. Don't you think? Totally different MO. And the police think that they are trying to connect these three cases when this third case seems a little different. Do you have information as to what was done to Kathy in terms of how she was killed, what type of sexual assault?

Yeah, and this is pretty brutal. There were signs that she had been brutally raped and her clothes had been used to restrain and then gag her, which is similar to what happened with Wanda. She was strangled with her own pajamas as well as bludgeoned to death.

And a funeral attendant who was preparing her body found that one of her socks had been stuffed down her throat. Very violent. Okay, so obviously this is a sexually motivated homicide of a young girl. How was she killed? You said she had been strangled with her own clothes? Yep, brutally raped and then strangled. And Wanda, our first victim, had been strangled with her pajamas. Yes.

But also what likely killed her was being bludgeoned to death. So it was both, yes. Sure, sure. You know, but the application of the victim's own clothes as a ligature, that is significant in terms of what the offender is doing. Because you imagine a man abducting a young girl off the street.

If at the time that he chooses to kill this child, he can use his hands. He can just manually strangle. But to purposefully choose to use the child's clothing as ligature, that suggests that that is something that is going into his head. Now, there is an MO aspect. What I have seen offenders do is they will manually strangle, probably to the point of death, a victim.

But then they apply a ligature afterwards to ensure that the victim is dead. So when they walk away, the ligature is still on. But there's enough there to where even though the first two cases are attacks inside a house, I think the victimology, what is being done, sexually motivated crime, possibly fantasy occurring for sure, that

It could be related. It's just that particularly back in the 60s, there's so many of these types of predators. I know. And with Kathy being out there, she's an absolute victim of opportunity. Anybody could have been driving by and seen this girl who's isolated and taken a look around and pounced.

And that's what I think is the difficult thing about the profiling that we're talking about is that there are a lot of, as you said, sicko people who would have done terrible things. Well, let me tell you a couple of other details. One is that there was a thought at first for investigators that she had been kept alive for several days because they had searched for her throughout this area and hadn't found her. And then her body was discovered. Someone just ran across it.

The original investigator debunked this and said, listen, these were really high weeds. These were not, I haven't mowed for a couple of weeks weeds. These were weeds that would have been something that would have been probably pretty easily missed. He believed that she had been raped or killed either at that location or had been dumped there and had not been kept alive. However, this is what's interesting to me. The coroner said she died from strangulation or suffocation, but he found shallow cuts

on her neck and abdomen that police believed were caused by a dull knife or a razor blade. Number one, does that mean these are hesitation cuts? And number two, could something else like weeds have caused this and the investigators just don't know? If we're talking multiple shallow cuts to her neck and where? Abdomen, neck and abdomen.

Now we go back to what I was talking about before. Are we dealing with picarism? Are we dealing with a sexual sadist who is using a knife or other sharp instrument in order to repeatedly cut the victim because he enjoys the torture aspect of

Or are these something, because I've seen those types of where you have a body that's been drugged during the disposal and the weeds and the branches do abrade or leave cuts.

cuts but not incisive wounds at a knife that is, you know, being used in a violent manner. There's no confusion there. You know, there's just no way a pathologist would confuse that. I agree. But this idea that now she has multiple cuts and I'm going to assume that they were by a sharp weapon on her neck but they're not fatal as the abdomen, you're dealing with a sadistic act. You are dealing with a sexual sadist at this point. So the case does not go cold immediately. They do have a viable suspect.

Over the years, it takes nine years for them to finally sort of nail this guy down. His name was Edward Warner Adcox, and he was a convicted rapist. And this, I think, of these three cases seems like the most likely suspect of the three because he was a bus driver for the skating rink that Kathy was heading to to go skate. So she might have made it all the way to the skating rink.

She encounters Edward, and then he takes her. So he at least could be in the area, and he was working that night. Before we talk about that, let me tell you what Edward says. So he denies it at first. They put him in jail. He had been serving time for sexually assaulting an 8-year-old boy, and then he had been released.

When he was in jail, they had a jailhouse informant there who said that he confessed. But what I think is a little more interesting is that, you know, when he was finally charged with her murder, the case fell apart because the only people and the only like real connection were several now jailhouse informants.

who were unreliable. So the prosecutor was really leaning on these people to testify, and they all recanted or they were wishy-washy or they had been promised things. So there was no strong case against him, except that he was a skeezy guy in the area, but there was no connection otherwise. Oh, there's that term again, skeezy. That's what you had used earlier, skeezy guy. Yeah.

So prosecutors, the DA's office just dropped charges. What happens? They interrogated him over and over again. And finally, they just said, yes, he had confessed to these jailhouse informants, but he had really just been bragging. And they finally just said, this is not our guy. He doesn't know anything about the case.

The case went cold. Okay. The case went cold. So now you've got three cold cases that investigators in Nashville feel like are connected between 65 and 69, but they were just never able to make that connection. Right. So from my perspective, relative to cases that we are typically talking about, these three cases from the mid-60s is really falling into the domain of the types of cases that I would work.

You know, this is obviously an old case. So now I want to know, do they have evidence on this case? Did they ever arrest somebody for any of these cases over the last, you know, 50 years? Nope. Couldn't make a case against anybody. They had a lot of bad guys on their radar, but there just wasn't enough evidence.

So what I want to know from you, what are the options? It's obviously DNA, and I know you're going to ask if they've preserved any of the evidence. And I have not read that they've preserved any of the evidence anywhere. It hasn't popped up. And there have been people who have been very interested in whether they could run DNA analysis to figure this out. And it doesn't sound like they have that type of evidence.

Is it a family member who knows something, who is still alive? What are the options at this point, 70 years later? Well, a lot of the options are going to rely on the physical evidence in these types of cases. And the physical evidence, if they kept anything, there's a good chance

especially in Wanda's case with the sexual assault, the fact that the offender took her outside the boarding house and continued to sexually assault her, I bet you've got semen in that case somewhere on or in her body if it was collected. Unfortunately, what was happening back in the day is that pathologists might collect a swab so they could determine whether or not there's sperm present. And once they noted that,

and confirmed, yes, sexual assault, they would throw the swab out because you couldn't do anything more with it back then. And it's so frustrating today. You had the evidence that could solve the case today. But if there's any evidence across any of these cases, then absolutely it needs to be looked at.

And if DNA could be found in any of the cases, then you identify who the source of that DNA is. The DNA can also be used to conclusively link the cases together. Going back and taking a look at who was active in the area, what other predators were present within the region is another possibility. I've rarely seen that happen.

work. Because I can think of in the Bay Area, one guy, this Eugene Hedlund, any time there was a homicide involving a female, he was always a suspect just because he was notorious in the area. And so his name appears in the case file, but he was never linked to anything more than what he had previously been convicted of. And it turns out back

during this time frame. There's so many of these guys committing predatory crimes. None of these cases, particularly as a series, suggest to me that a family member from any of the victims is involved. I don't think so. These have the hallmarks of the offender being in all likelihood a stranger to the victim.

So that, even though you can go back and talk to any living family members and see if there's any dark secrets that the family has been holding on to, it's worth doing. It's just that the likelihood that that's going to be successful is low. I would be doing everything possible.

to track down the evidence in any of these cases. And it just takes one. You know, if you find evidence in one of the cases, you know, you could have all three cases fall like dominoes based on whatever, you know, forensic testing occurred in that one case. Well, one of the things that makes me sad is that I don't feel good about the DNA analysis, at least in the first two cases, because

I don't see a record of any autopsies being done on either of those girls, which is bad news, don't you think? Well, it is, but you work with what you've got. We saw in the photograph of Wanda's bed, I saw one of the investigators dusting four fingerprints. Was anything recovered from that? Did they collect the sheets? Did they collect her clothing? She was strangled with an article of her clothing. Was that collected?

So, it really is getting down into a what do we have and then going after that. And we can't, I mean, as much as I will lament, oh, if they only had done body swabs, you know, if they had only done orifice swabs and held onto it, we could solve the case. Well, we don't have it. So, we just have to work with what we've got. So, what is your final verdict, Paul Hulls? Three cases seem similar. One is fairly different, but not that different. Do you think that's the case?

Do we think that all three of these cases are connected to one killer? Well, I think Wanda and Reba's case, I'm fairly confident, are the same offender. Kathy's case, I would consider as possibly being connected, just with some of the overlap in terms of the victimology, the use of her own clothing to strangle her, the sexually motivated crime. It's maybe, I'd put that confidence level at 50%. I think there is about a 50% chance that, again, you had a predator that was going through who's a sadist,

sees a young girl who's by herself and takes advantage of a victim of opportunity and is completely unrelated to the other two. Well, it's a very, very difficult set of cases to think about. Young girls who had bright futures and families that just mourn them, mourn them. And, you know, this happens and it scared the city. So talking about these cases, it's just as another reminder for me of how vulnerable young kids can be. These are the kind of cases that are the most difficult for me.

especially ones involving sexual assault and murder of young kids. But I think it's important for me as a reminder of why we talk about this. And it's just that we see the same themes repeating over and over again and the same cautions and the same need for really good detective work to track these people down and to preserve evidence. We say that over and over again, preserve the evidence as much as we can. So,

Boy, I mean, don't you appreciate the technology we have now when I talk to you about these stories? Yeah, well, you know, over the course of my career, you know, I started out during the era when we didn't have a lot of the technology that we have today. And then being able to go back and revisit cases that were stymied because of the lack of technology and to see them being solved with the advances in technology, that's absolutely huge. And it really is...

When you have cases like this, you know, the people say there's no such thing as monsters. Well, yes, there are. And the guys that do this type of crime, these are true monsters. And we have to do everything to find them, whether they're active today or, you know, they've stopped, but we need to find them.

to figure out who they were, if they're still alive. Can we get family's answers even if this monster has died? And in this case, I mean, I literally would talk to, is this Nashville PD? Are all three Nashville PD cases? Yes. I'd love to, you know, talk with them offline and see, hey, you know, what has been done? Is there anything remaining? Let's see what we can do to identify who was responsible.

And with that, this case was so stressful, I need to go for a drive, I think. Yeah. This was a very difficult story to tell. But thank you for your analysis. And I had suspected that these three all were connected. And we've had some great sources to work with. So thank you for confirming that for me. And I look forward to our next episode together so I can be illuminated even more. All right, Kate. Thanks for bringing those cases to me.

This has been an Exactly Right production. For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com slash buriedbones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Amorosi. Research by Maren McClashen and Kate Winkler-Dawson. Our mixing engineer is Ryo Baum. Our theme song is by Tom Breifogle. Our art

work is by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer. You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod. Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decode the criminal mind, is available now. And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.