Coyote Flat
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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, how are you? Hey, Kate. I'm doing great. How's it going? It's going well. It feels like it's been forever, but it really hasn't. No, you know, but I've got my drink here, and even though it's in a bourbon glass, do you have any idea what this drink might be? It looks like some sort of protein something or other. It's kava. Oh, my God.

This is your calming, right? You know, I have found that when I drink kava, I don't have the craving to drink the hard bourbon. So it's a way to help control the amount of alcohol intake I've started. Well, I know one of the things that you like to do is exercise, which I love that about you. I think it's...

so good that that's one of your big releases. And you told me that you do some hikes with your rock star dog, Cora, which I didn't know. I have. My wife does a lot of hikes with Cora. You know, Cora will hike, but she, you know, she's getting older. But,

what's amazing is her energy level and how high it goes up in the wintertime. She is a cold weather dog. In the summer, she drags, you know, so that's just what she likes. And, and that's, it's funny because you think, okay, she's, she's done going outside for walks. She's just getting too old. And then the temperatures drop and then she's out there pulling you. And,

rolling around in the snow and everything else. So that's the way her body is set up, I guess. And she's a good natured dog. I can't imagine. I see you with a pretty laid back, Cora, get in the Jeep kind of dog because I've been in your Jeep and there's dog hair. So I know Cora's in the Jeep sometimes. You know what? Cora doesn't fit in my Jeep with everything that I've got in it. Where's all that dog hair? See, now I'm going to CSI this. It's coming from my feet. This is what we call secondary and tertiary transfer.

Yeah.

And I use that as an example when I talk to like Citizens Academy in terms of, you know, who has, you know, pets at home. And then you see the dog hairs in your vehicle. Well, think about the number of those dog hairs that are now in the classroom where you're sitting. I, as a CSI, will be looking for that type of evidence, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I can place you in an environment when I find that type of evidence because it can be due to tertiary transfer.

I can't believe that you are turning our casual pet talk into a lesson on forensics. But I'm going to tell you this. My dog would stump you because she's part poodle and she doesn't shed one little bit. So what would you do in a situation where you have to rely on a canine or a feline hair and then you encounter Ruby Red Dawson? I don't know what you would do. It all depends on the circumstances. Yes.

She does have paws, so you could do... I wonder what paw prints would be like. Can you identify a dog or a cat based on the size of the prints? Well, in terms of the paw prints, you could most certainly take a look and kind of intercompare to see if, you know, let's say a suspect's pet falls within the range of the prints that are found or the impressions that are found.

I imagine that the pads on dogs have, there may be some uniqueness to them to where now if that kind of detail is recorded, I would be looking at that, see if there's any individualizing characteristics. But in no way would I ever want to go and say this dog and this dog alone. I would just say based on the evidence found at a scene, the suspect's pet.

falls within the range of characteristics. It's not a smaller dog. It's not a much larger dog. It's just within the range. But that's where you put that type of thing, the evidence photo, and then the exemplar, the standard from the pet, and you show it side by side and say, you know, look for yourself. You are killing our pet talk right now. Ha ha ha!

Cora seems really well behaved. My dog is not. Oh, really? No, Ruby is the worst. She is the best and the worst dog on the planet. She is, I mean, to say poorly trained would be to make the assumption that we trained her at all. We did not train her at all. Oh, okay. She,

is living in a democracy where I think most people have their pets live with a benevolent dictatorship. Ruby does what she wants to do and she's sweet and adorable, but she does really whatever the hell she wants to do. So you'll probably hear a lot about her in the coming months because we're getting a puppy, which is a bad decision, I think, because now we're going to have two really badly behaved dogs, not just one.

They jump and they goose people and it's terrible. How old is Ruby Red? She is almost three. Okay. But she looks like a teddy bear and she's adorable. Yeah. But I think we have lost her as far as training. I think we now have a problem child. Yeah.

Oh, you probably could get some training in her, but it sounds like she's a fun dog. She is a fun dog, and she's fun to exercise with. But I mean, unlike Cora, she's got these short little legs, so she poops out pretty quickly, especially in the Texas heat. Yeah. Well, that's a good transition because our story takes place in a hot rural area. And before we get into it, I just want to mention that this is a case that involves...

someone who is a person of color, and those are underrepresented stories in general. You know, something we strive for on this show is really to bring cases in that represent everybody. And I will say it's really difficult to find people of color in crime history because it was so underreported. The media and law enforcement didn't care many times in the 1800s, early 1900s, and certainly not the 1700s,

when someone was murdered. They cared if they did the murdering. So I'm working really hard to find us those kinds of stories because it's important. Oh, it is. And I can understand how hard it would be because if law enforcement's not generating case files, nobody's being brought to trial.

You're not getting the documents to be able to get the facts in order to understand what happened. But hopefully, as you uncover cases, we will cover them on this show. Exactly. So let's talk about this case. One of the things that I want you to think as you're hearing this story is the challenge...

that people have as investigators assessing a crime scene that is in the open, in the wild, in the wilderness, because I've heard it can be quite a challenge. And this is in your old stomping ground. So let's not talk any more about it because right now I just want to set the scene.

So, Paul, this is in your home state of California. This is Eureka. Okay. Eureka, California. I've never been to Eureka. Do you know much about Eureka now? No, you know, I've never been to Eureka. I've stayed in several of the towns up in the northern coast in California, such as Mendocino, Fort Bragg. Eureka is further north. You know, my understanding, it was a big fishing and leisure area.

Lumber community probably still is. But the northern coast of California is very different than the Southern California beaches. It's very rugged. The wave action is impressive. It is absolutely gorgeous. And this is an area that I think a lot of people now

and then, we're talking about 1925, were attracted to. They wanted to go to see the scenery that you're mentioning here. So this is the Roaring Twenties because, you know, I always have to talk about history. This is the Roaring Twenties. And the Roaring Twenties is smack in between the Great Depression, which was 2930, and

and prohibition, really the beginning of heavy, heavy crime, which was early 1920s. So in around 1925, I write about this a lot in my books, is the Roaring Twenties where Gatsby, you know, you're reading about Jay Gatsby and you're reading about all of the money and banks and businesses are giving away money left and right. And there's a lot of

affluence. If you have any kind of a harebrained scheme, you could probably get a loan for it. And this would eventually lead to the Great Depression. We also have flappers, the beautiful women. We have the Harlem Renaissance. There's a lot of culture happening. This part of California, Eureka, California, the economy is going really well. And there are a lot of people who are exploring these rural areas.

And the two people who were centering the story on are a 21-year-old man named Henry Sweet and his teen girlfriend, who is Carmen Wagner. There's discrepancy about how old she was, but it sounds like 17 or 18. And Henry was 21. On October 7th, 1925, they decided that they were going to go to the rugged hills of Coyote Flat.

And in a minute, I'm going to show you that because it's important as a crime scene. And one of the things that makes it more difficult is when you don't know a lot about the victim. So I'll just have a little spoiler alert. The victims are going to be Henry Sweet and Carmen Wagner. When I first started reading about this and I thought, oh, it's a couple and they're going off into the wilderness and somebody's not going to come back out. It's actually both of them. And this is a very, very cold case. And

something that is still up in the air. And this is less about who killed them and more about who was a suspect. So let's get to the story. They take their dog. We've been talking about dogs. They take their cute dog, who was a collie named Pronto, which I think is a great name.

I ever name another dog. I think Pronto would be the top of the list. I love it. Pronto came along and they were just going to go on a hunting trip. And again, not much known about these two. It looks like that Carmen worked at a beauty parlor and totally not surprising, the press in the 20s focused on her looks. She was apparently really beautiful. And Henry Sweet, like a lot of young men, dabbled in bootlegging.

So bootlegging was pretty dangerous business in the 20s, literally dangerous, like you could blow yourself up if you didn't know what you were doing, and dangerous with the kind of people that were attracted to bootlegging. So this is during the prohibition time. And of course, this alcohol is going to have value. And so whoever has a supply of alcohol, it's just like having a supply of cash.

they're going to be a target because they have something valuable with them that can be taken away from them. So now you have other criminals possibly take a life in order to gain this alcohol. But then you also have law enforcement that you're trying to avoid. So it really is a double-edged sword for somebody who is in that game. And oftentimes these bootleggers didn't have money to begin with and so they would have to

borrow money. I mean, this was not a cheap endeavor. You actually had to create alcohol and it involved a bunch of equipment. And so they would have to borrow money and then promise to repay it. And then sometimes they wouldn't. And there would be bootleg alcohol buried all over the beaches of California. Oh, interesting. Down the coast. Yeah. Oh, it's like buried treasure. I mean, they would bury alcohol. Oh, okay. So-

That adds a little bit of a layer of, oh boy, what's going to happen to these two people and what is the motive behind it? So I'm assuming anytime we're involving an illegal enterprise, it makes things more complicated for the investigator because your list of suspects has to be expanded out from the inner circle, the personal relationships. Yes. Now their activity brings in a suspect pool that can be potentially very large.

because now you have many individuals that could gain from the homicide. Now, this is something that I find so interesting about the time period, and you'll see a delay and a reaction that shocked me at first. And then I thought about, oh, this is 1925. So...

They leave on October 7th, nice cool night, 1925. They go out to Coyote Flat and they don't come back home. They're supposed to go back to Eureka, which is 50 miles southeast of where they were supposed to be. So they were gonna go back. They were just gonna go on a little hunting trip with Pronto together and then they were gonna return the next day and they didn't.

So the families are alarmed and they contact the police. And it takes about five days for search parties to go out to this area, Coyote Flat, to go search for them. And at first I thought, five days, that's a lot. And I know that they're 18 and 21 and they're adults.

But then I thought, boy, without cell phones and email and all of that, it must have taken investigators a long time. They have to travel to the person's home. They have to gather evidence. They have to organize a search party. And this is all encumbered by the fact that you don't have cell phones. This is land dialing and that's it. Yeah, there's a lot of legwork there. And

Chances are the local authorities didn't have a formal search and rescue team like we have today. So now they're having to take standard law enforcement officers as well as volunteers out of the community in order to gather the resources that would be needed to go out and look for this missing couple.

So the police are out and they have all these search parties and the searchers finally find, after four days, Henry Sweet. And Carmen Wagner is not with him. Okay. So Henry Sweet is on the property of an empty cabin on Coyote Flat. So let me take a moment and show you exactly where they're searching. Okay. I'm surprised looking at this because this is up, you know, in...

Northern coastal California, Humboldt County, which is very forested, you know, redwood trees and everything else. And I'm looking at something that looks like the middle of Nevada. Yeah. So yeah, no, I'm surprised at this location. And I have some questions about the actual location, but I'll let you keep going. And then maybe I'll start weighing in on some stuff. Okay.

Okay, so Henry Sweet is found and he is on the property. He's not in this cabin, this empty cabin. He's outside of it. He's on a road and he was sprawled out on the road near his car, which was a very sporty roadster. We talk a lot about cars from the 20s and the 30s on this show. So this was a little roadster and they examine him. And at first they see what they think is bloodstains on his mouth.

particularly also on his side, but without doing an examination. At first, they had wondered, because of the bloodstains on his mouth, this was a quote, they thought he had died from a violent hemorrhage caused by lifting a heavy deer.

So why would that have happened? They thought bleeding from the mouth meant that he had exerted himself is my understanding from that line. Almost as if the strain had caused maybe an aneurysm. Maybe, yeah. To a point that would cause oral bleeding, perhaps.

There's blood underneath him. The medical examiner took him back while they were continuing to search for Carmen. He took him back and he examined him, and the official cause of death was that he was shot in the back multiple times with a rifle. Oh. I know what a shotgun blast would do. Is a rifle going to give you tiny holes, or I guess it depends on the cartridge and the size of the gun, or what? Yeah.

There's so many factors that come into play in terms of the types of wounds, the wound ballistics from firearms. And part of it is going to be the distance between the gun and the body. A lot of it does come down to the velocity of the round.

Higher speed or higher velocity bullets, they can pass through the tissue inside the body at such a high rate of speed that they actually force the tissue violently outwards. And so now you have almost an inner explosive aspect.

as that tissue expands violently outward. And you see that in the Kennedy assassination, where now you have a rifle round going through Kennedy's head and you see the right side of his skull basically blown out. Well, that's the round, a higher velocity round that's passing into his brain tissue and that brain tissue expands outwards.

Rifles generally are going to be higher velocity rounds. The entry side can look relatively small, very clean looking. Internally, there could be a lot of damage due to the high velocity, this kinetic energy that is being passed on to the tissues internally. But I would also expect that with a rifle round, those exit wounds can be pretty significant.

It'll be interesting because they're going to locate Carmen really soon, and she has similar injuries. But they had an interesting note about the bullet. So Henry is with the medical examiner, and they continue to search for Carmen. And they haven't found her. And this is what's going to be interesting. I want your thoughts on profiling in this perpetrator. So I told you that Henry Sweet, her boyfriend, the 21-year-old young man, was found sprawled out, shot in the back with a rifle next to his car.

Carmen and her dog were missing. So they continue to look. The public interest grows and grows and grows. It was this big whodunit, of course, in the newspapers. And we know that newspapers in the 20s, the Hearst papers loved that. So they finally find her body.

Two weeks later. Oh. So this is what's interesting. She is buried in a shallow grave, and she is a few miles away from where Henry Sweet was. So you have one victim, the male, who is left sprawled out by his car, and then the female has been taken. And before you ask, her body was so decomposed that they couldn't do an examination for sexual assault.

which I'm sure you could assume is a problem because she's been buried for three weeks after she had first gone missing. Oh, so many questions. I know, I know. I hope I have at least some of the answers. So Carmen's in a shallow grave. Yep. Advanced state of decomposition. Was there any active insect infestation on her body at the time? No.

No, my notes just say a very advanced state of decomposition where I think they used her clothing to identify her. They found her on October 23rd buried in this shallow grave. She had gone missing October 7th. So that is more than two weeks.

If I'm looking at this case and I'm the one that is assessing this shallow grave and the state of her remains, I'm looking for evidence. Is this consistent with the length of time since she went missing as if she was killed the same day? And is there any indicators to indicate that she had been killed elsewhere, left on the surface or had been kept?

before her body was buried. Insects can possibly tell me that information. Depending on how advanced the decomposition is, there may still be indicators of body movement since the time of death. Even blood flows can possibly show movement after the bleeding had started.

And it's going to be dependent upon the circumstances. But right now, I'm going to take it that you're telling me that the authorities are saying that everything is consistent, that she was killed either on the day or shortly thereafter after she went missing.

That's what they believe. So she was buried. Her dog, Pronto, was shot and killed laying nearby. Carmen was shot and killed. And let me tell you about this autopsy. So Carmen was shot twice and they retrieved a bullet because it was in the grave with her. One of them was. And it was a through, two through and throughs, just like you had thought with a rifle. She was shot twice.

once near her left ear with the bullet exiting near her right ear. Okay. So is that the base? No. Where would that go through? Right through ear to ear almost, except below? Well, based on that description, without any measurements, because typically a pathologist will use the apex of the skull and...

measure from the top of the head, the entries, you know, five inches, the exit six inches. And then of course there's right and left deviations. You know, they take multiple measurements to accurately place the entry and exit wounds on the body.

just, you know, left ear to right ear, that could be above both ears. And now it's passing through the skull, passing through the brain. But imagine a shot that's beneath the left and right ears, let's say underneath the lobes of the ears. That is possible for that shot not to enter the inner part of the cranium at all. Really? Yes. So now the question is, would that shot be a fatal wound?

Well, and there's one more shot to account for. So the second bullet entered the left side of her neck, which sounds like below the first shot, below her jaw and exited again by her right ear. So it looks like he took two quick shots and she was probably moving the whole time, wouldn't you think? Maybe on the run? Well, now you're saying that one of the projectiles was recovered.

covered in the grave. Okay, so unless that bullet was trapped somehow on her body after she was shot and then it came off and was deposited into the grave, because sometimes bullets will exit and then be trapped in the clothing or in the hair masks.

I'm also wondering, was she placed in the grave and then shot twice? I messed up, Paul. So you're right. I messed up in my notes. So even though both of these bullets exited, the doctor who performed the autopsy retrieved a bullet from...

from her body. Okay. And I guess I assumed that that was out, but you're right. Now that you're saying the story, now that you're saying, well, was she shot in the grave? That doesn't make much sense to me. So what would that note mean? It got caught in her hair. He got it off her body, but that doesn't mean it was caught inside her body. Is that right?

So the pathologist said that she has two entries and two exits. Correct. But he recovered one bullet. Right. And so now it's really, where is he finding it? Because you can have a bullet that is starting to emerge out of the skin from the exit wound. But if the skin has clothing over it, if it has hair over it, if it's laying on a surface, you get what's called a short exit. It's kind of kept right there. And so the bullet has...

Basically, as it passes through the body, it's expended all of its energy. You know, it's slowing down, but it has just enough energy to start to push through the skin. But then the hair, the fabric, or another surface at that part of the body, and it's going to be her head on the right side, it doesn't have enough energy to get all the way out. Or it gets all the way out and it just gets strained.

trapped because now it's a slow moving object and it just can't continue to penetrate through whatever is preventing it from moving further on versus let's say she's upright and it passes completely through her skull exits out and it could go into it still has a lot of energy it could still go into never never land and that one would never have been recovered yeah but he only recovers one

He doesn't recover a second one. That's my understanding. Okay. So what does this still mean? If you've got two bullets, sounds like pretty close together, in her head and neck, what would one have hit? An artery? Is that what would have killed her? There's so many structures. Most certainly as a bullet passes through the skull, there's multiple different types of arteries. I mean, you have, let's say, the left neck wound. This bullet could have penetrated the jugular, the carotid. It

could have gone up into the brain itself and the arteries in the brain. It's penetrating through the brain tissue. Does it go through the vertebrae? Does it take out the spine at the base of the skull? You know, so it all depends on the trajectory. And this is what pathologists are tasked with. They're not just saying, oh, the bullet entered here and exited there. They're also in their reports detailing the inner structures that the bullet is passing through

And this helps them form the opinion, yes, this bullet hit a vital aspect of the body, and this could be a fatal shot in and of itself, versus you can be shot in many parts of your body, and just the damage that that bullet does is not going to be fatal just by the damage it does. So we don't have an answer based on those two.

wounds and the trajectory, whether this was a quick death or a slow, painful bleed out for her. Is there a likely scenario? The likely scenario based on where these two shots are is that she was incapacitated and died very quickly. I think that's the most likely scenario. Okay, so he kills her, he buries her, same gun. Now,

This is where the story changes because, in my opinion, the least interesting part of the story is the murder. What happens after is what's really, really interesting to me. So, the medical examiner, the pathologist, pulls the bullet and the only way he describes it as a lead pellet with strange and individual markings.

So he couldn't say what. It sounds like either strange striations he wasn't used to seeing or maybe customized bullets, but it wasn't something that he immediately looked at and said, oh, this is a .22 or whatever. He thought it was pretty unusual. And that is actually kind of key,

even though I know we have very vague information, that becomes key later on to law enforcement. Okay. So this case turns into a very racially charged case because...

the police say this bullet seems to be sort of ornamental, not a bullet that you would use, a hunter would go out and use. Sort of like what someone in, they would call Indian territory, but of course now we say Native American, would use and they begin to target a particular man who was Native American.

And I'll explain a little bit more about that. So the media is trying to gather information and the police come out there, police who are not very well-versed in a lot of things, including investigating other cultures. And they put forth a theory that the district attorney talks a little bit about that Carmen, the woman, had been offered as a blood sacrifice at what they perceived to be, her gravesite was a mystic shrine there.

that observers saw there were tree trunks nearby and there was some bark. And the way it was arranged is that it was arranged by quote-unquote Indians who wanted to sacrifice a beautiful white woman. And so one of the things was this bullet with the strange markings saying,

they're connecting to local Native Americans who would have been in California at that time, and they start looking at suspects and turn on one of them. What do you think about that? I'm looking at the injuries in terms of assessing the injuries mentally, and she's been shot twice in the head. For me, that sounds like an execution. Yeah. It doesn't sound like there's anything ritualistic about the manner of homicide. No. If there's a ritualistic aspect,

I would imagine that there would be something a little bit more significant that would stand out. I don't know anything about the Native Americans' culture. I've never heard of performing these types of ritualistic sacrifices, but I have no knowledge on it. It's just not something that I've ever heard of. The only thing that is

really perplexing right now where it's like, well, what are they seeing on this leaden pellet? What are the strange and individual markings? You know, my initial thought was, well, they're dealing with a rifled black powder weapon. Yeah. And maybe this was something that this pathologist, do we know, was it even a pathologist that did the autopsy?

It was a pathologist, but it could have been a Civil War relic that he had never seen before. You know, pathologists are not ballistics experts. So who knows? It could have been homemade. Can't you make your own bullets? You absolutely can. You can make your own guns. So this is where strange and individual markings. Okay, well, if I don't have a photo to say, oh, these are just landing groove impressions from inside a rifled barrel. This is what we typically see, but maybe it's on a round pellet from a black pellet.

powder weapon and that's throwing this pathologist off or questioning the competence of the pathologist. You know, it's like, well, maybe he doesn't handle homicides much. He doesn't know guns much. And now he's dealing with something where he goes, well, I've never seen this. And so he's just reverting to a descriptor

And investigators are now running with this as being, okay, this is something that is very unusual. So this is a clue as to who our offender is. And to conclude based on what you've told me so far, that there's a ritualistic aspect to it. I'm very skeptical about that at this moment in time.

I agree. I don't know much about whatever accusations were against Native Americans. I do know in the 1920s that racism and xenophobia were incredibly rampant. So this was something that the press in particular and local law enforcement latched on to.

So they start looking at not the inner circle, like who would have followed them 50 miles to kill them, jealous boyfriend, jealous girlfriend, any of that. They start looking at the people in the area closest to where their bodies were found. And there was a searcher who was Native American on his mother's side.

And they started saying something terrible in the press. They kept calling, his name was Jack Ryan, and they kept calling him a half-breed. So he was in the search party. And he also briefly knew Carmen Wagner in school. Okay. In Eureka. So he had been a ranch hand along with his brother, Walter David.

And these are two young men, Jack Ryan's 21, Walter's around that same age. So something starts to make sense to me in that this is someone who had a connection to at least one of the victims. And it sounds like the victim who was actually targeted because she was buried, right? Not shot and left willy-nilly. It sounds like maybe he encountered the killer, encountered the two of them, shot Henry Sweet, and then took Carmen for we don't know what reason. Yeah.

No, you know, we don't have that. But in all likelihood, based on this set of circumstances, the male's eliminated. Carmen is taken remotely. This is for a sexual assault homicide. That would be my presumption until proven otherwise based on this set of facts. I do have a question, though. Carmen and Henry went out there to hunt.

Did they have a gun with them? Doesn't sound like it. It sounds like it was supposed to be a hunting trip, but they never recovered a weapon and they never recovered this weapon. He didn't bring a rifle and the bullet wouldn't have matched. So it wasn't like the killer took their gun and used the gun against him. This was the killer's gun and

neither weapon had been recovered if Henry had a gun at all. So they are focused in on Jack Ryan and his brother, Walter David. And these are both kind of outdoor men. They worked on ranches. They were both part Native American.

And the suspicion continued to grow that they had done something to Carmen Wagner and Henry Sweet because who else would have done it? This was their best shot. The sacrifice part, I think, had been dismissed pretty quickly. But that was an interesting illustration of just how racist things were in the 1920s.

That was immediately the assumption is that a couple of trees and some bark was a altar for sacrifice for Native Americans. So Jack Ryan does have a very small connection. And I think the assumption was that they saw these two young people on the roadster. Jack Ryan recognized Carmen. They're in the middle of nowhere. Nobody else is out there. And it's kind of a crime of opportunity.

And when they arrest them, which is on pretty shaky evidence, when they arrest them, there is so much hatred toward these two men on virtually no evidence that the sheriff has to take them out of town because there's going to be a lynch mob pretty quickly. Oh, wow.

Okay. It is outrageous to people. These two young people out in the rugged hills are murdered brutally and buried, and it's so violent. And then who else would it be but these two Native American men? And it becomes a media circus, literally, in the middle of nowhere. You know, kind of going back a little bit, Henry's body is found near a cabin. I thought—

I thought that was interesting. Why not take her in the cabin? Why drive her several miles away? It's almost like two different motivations, but I'm not the expert. You know, my question is, well, whose cabin is it? Because if we start talking about, okay, who would be in this remote location at that point in time? Well, one of the persons or people that would be might be the property owner.

whether they lived at the cabin full time or visited the cabin. So I'm going, well, where they talk to. And I don't know that, but I do know that that's something that we're going to need to talk about near the end of this. Okay. So we have a new DA in town and the

The DA really wants to make a name for himself, and he wants these two guys locked up. The problem is, is Walter David, the brother, has a really, really good alibi. I know you're going to ask me what it is, but I don't know what it is. I just know the sheriff immediately released him. It was good enough for this white sheriff, and he just said, this guy was not there. So obviously, it was very, very solid. Jack Ryan, not so much, the brother, the 21-year-old. And that's where this piece of history becomes pretty important now.

So, Jack Ryan had been searched head to toe. Jack Ryan's house where he was staying, this ranch house, was searched. No, nothing. Nothing found connecting him to the murder. No gun. The murder scene had been searched looking for evidence. They couldn't tell if Carmen and Henry had been robbed. They really didn't bring anything with them. The gun was gone. But here's what then happens. They do another search.

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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. So Jack Ryan's house had already been searched by authorities and they hadn't found anything. So the second time they searched the house, they find Carmen's watch and they also find the shell casings from Jack Ryan's gun in the creek. So he did have a gun and...

And they were not able to definitively say that this was the gun that killed her, but it was a rifle and it was enough for them to really build a case against him. So the issue is, is that deputies admitted that these were things that were found on the second search, not the first search.

And of course, there's no photographic documentation to show that on the first search, you know, on the dining room table, there was nothing. On the second, they walk in and, oh my God, there's a watch there and it happens to be the victim's. If the evidence is planted, my expectation would be that that evidence would be in a location that would be very easy to find it because the planter of the evidence wants to make sure it's found.

So this is what's interesting. They have criminologists come in. Of course, there's the defense attorney when he goes on trial on February of 26. Jack Ryan's defense attorney is saying police planted all of this and the police are saying you have no proof of that. And

and criminologists looked at the different pieces of evidence, and they determined that Jack Ryan had some clothing that appeared to have bloodstains. It was inconclusive. Not only was it inconclusive whether this was human or animal bloodstains, it was inconclusive that this was even blood to begin with.

Back in 1925, this is a time frame in which chemical presumptive tests, just color tests, are what are being used to be able to say, yes, there's blood here or there isn't blood here. Some of those tests are in use today, but they're considered presumptive tests. They have the potential to cross-react with non-presumptive.

blood substances, but it is a good way to eliminate a stain as being blood. So there is very little evidence. There's the watch, which could convince a jury. There's the shell casings, which could convince a jury. There's that he knew them or he knew her at least, so that could convince a jury. And of course, we're talking about just the general racist tone in this part of California in the 1920s. This is an all-white jury,

unsurprisingly. This is an all-male jury, also unsurprisingly. Different states allowed women to serve on juries at different times, and I didn't see when California was, but it was not 1925. So the jury gets the case. They deliberate. This is March 12th of 1926, and they come back with a unanimous verdict. What do you think it was?

Based on the evidence that I see right now, what it should be is not guilty. But I'm guessing due to the dynamics of what's going on that they came back guilty. No. Oh, really? Not guilty. Not guilty. They believe not enough evidence, which was shocking to me also.

However, this was just the beginning of the ordeal for Jack Ryan. So Walter David, his brother, is never charged. Jack Ryan is acquitted. This is great. The press lets it go. Jack Ryan goes on with his life for not very long, though. So the DA who took over was a guy named Steven Metzler, which normally I would not call out a DA from the 1920s, but he's very important. He

was a prominent attorney when he became DA, and he was also a prominent bootlegger. So he ran on two platforms. One was that he would get rid of prohibition, and the other was that he would get another conviction out of Jack Ryan one way or the other. He would get him convicted.

So this was not good news for Jack Ryan. You might have to tell me this, but Double Jeopardy existed at the time. So if you have an acquittal, what is he going to go after Jack Ryan with? Well, I'll tell you how. He knew that he wasn't going to be able to get him for murdering Carmen Wagner.

but he had only gone on trial for Carmen Wagner. He had not gone on trial for Henry Sweet. Oh. But he was also going to get him for some other things. Okay. So Jack Ryan's character comes into question here pretty quickly. The first problem, though, that Jack has to deal with is something that involved his brother,

So in Halloween of 1927, Walter David, who as we know is Jack Ryan's half-brother, is found dead in his home. Not surprising. You know, this does happen, especially somebody who's living this rugged life as a ranch hand. He had been tortured to death and strangled with barbed wire. Wow.

Okay. So he's murdered. Yeah. Of course, I want to assess how big, strong of a man Walter was, but to have that type of homicide occur indicates that you either have a very robust offender or you have multiple offenders. I agree. And more broadly, it's the category of person who I think did this. So as soon as Jack Ryan had been given a not guilty verdict,

he and his brother began getting death threats. They had always been getting them, but these really escalated. And also it escalated with the election of this DA. So there are death threats, which essentially say you need to confess to the murder of Carmen Wagner and Henry Sweet, go back on trial, take responsibility for what you did. And it's to both the brothers, right?

And ultimately, the DA does not investigate at all Walter David's murder, not one little bit. It's a closed case. One piece of information that I think is interesting that is probably my theory is that when you have somebody like the Stephen Metzler who's in office, even though he wanted to get rid of prohibition, he also became someone who was supposed to enforce it. And in the 1920s, who they used...

The government used to enforce prohibition was the KKK. And they targeted Native Americans, Black people, Jewish people. They were just given the authority to enforce the Volstead Act, but they enforced so much more than that. And to me, this sounds like a KKK thing.

What happened with Walter David? Well, yeah, the torture kind of confuses me a little bit. Yeah. Was the torture done to try to extract information? They're not doing this to where this body is being displayed in public to send a message, at least directly where somebody is now seeing something. But, you know, I was thinking, you know, when you brought this up with Walter and I'm thinking, oh, multiple offenders, is this a form of a lynching? Yeah. Yeah.

Where they just went in and said, you know what? You're done. I do. You're going to suffer and you're dead. Yeah. I think that's right. I think it was either like a KKK or the local. I don't think this was their families. I don't think this was Carmen and Henry Sweet's families. I think this was local anger. The threats against them had been accelerating, both of them. And Walter David just got caught by himself. Yeah. And it happened. Yeah.

So Jack Ryan is, of course, devastated and, of course, doesn't expect any kind of justice because this man, this DA, has clearly a vendetta against him and his family. Jack Ryan tries to go back to a normal life. This does not happen. And this is where Jack Ryan's story takes a little bit of a turn. And just be patient because more information will come out. I know that...

I like to torture you sometimes by just drips and drabs, but you know, I like a good dramatic story. So Jack Ryan is arrested once again, and it is not for murder. It's July 12th, 1928. So it doesn't have anything to involve with the murder at Coyote Flat.

He is charged with statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. And then there are more young people coming forward. And the mothers are coming to the DA and saying, you know, you need to arrest this man. He is in jail for about two months until he ends up talking to the district attorney and to the police and

in a very prolonged interrogation where he confesses to these statutory rapes, to two of them out of the several ones that are happening. So now you have people who say, see this guy? I mean, this guy was a terrible guy. We're putting him in jail for rape. And this then becomes us looking at Jack Ryan as less of a sympathetic victim situation.

in all of this, which seems to be becoming a very complicated story. What do you think about that revelation of the statutory rape accusations against him? I haven't told you if they're real yet or not. Well, if I make the assumption that, uh,

He is actually committing these sexual assaults on younger girls. That's showing a level of criminality. Now, Carmen is 17, 18. Most certainly, an individual that is capable of sexually assaulting younger girls can and do crime.

sexually assault 17-year-olds, 25-year-olds, 35-year-olds. This is crossover offending. These offenders do not just typically stick within a very, very narrow range. Some do, many do not.

So this would tend to suggest that Jack has a propensity for the type of violence that I think happened to Carmen, that she was abducted, sexually assaulted, and killed. That is my theory in the double homicide.

So it elevates my suspicion of his role in Carmen. And this is where, even though at this point, three years later, he has been acquitted of that. The cartridge case is found in the river on his property. You know, none of that is, I put no weight on that whatsoever, unless it's tied to the weapon and ammunition that was used to kill Henry and or Carmen. It comes down to the watch. How do we know this is Carmen's watch?

Obviously, it wasn't on her body. So if they found a watch, did they go to the family and say, is this Carmen's watch? Did it have his insignia on it? I want to know more about the watch. And then ultimately, well, how did the watch get into Jack Ryan's possession and what documents, what testimony was given at trial and stuff in order to assess the veracity of

that item of evidence. Yeah. But it's just possessing a single item that you possibly could never say was on her body at the time that she was killed. Yeah. And there are those accusations that the police planted it. Yes. He and his defense attorney pretty much are the only ones making those accusations because everyone else is white. You know how it will go with local police and maybe a small town. They just want somebody caught. They want people to not be scared anymore. And this is

scary. For 1925, this part of rural California, a woman in a shallow grave and a guy sprawled out by his car from a different part of the state would be frightening. And they just wanted somebody behind bars. And now you have this man who is seemingly attacking young girls and people are coming forward and they're saying, do you see, do you see what you did? You acquitted this guy and look at the bad things that he's been doing. Yeah.

So now, for the rest of the story, were the statutory rape accusations actually substantiated? Well, here's what's interesting. At his court date, after talking to Metzler, the DA, who we think is a crooked DA at this point, the DA and the investigators, not only does he plead guilty to the statutory rape charges, he also admits...

to killing Carmen Wagner and Henry Sweet at Coyote Flat. And you're right, double jeopardy. He couldn't be charged with Carmen. And so they charge him with Henry Sweet. And he is immediately taken to San Quentin and he gets a life sentence. So no death penalty, but...

This is a quick turn of events and not something I would have expected. Nor I. Now comes into question, considering the DA, considering the racial culture, do you have a situation of coercion where this defendant basically his only out for whatever it is, is to admit

to something that he didn't do. If he's confessing at that point in time, then he needs to give me a complete rundown of every single thing that happened during the homicide of Henry and

and Carmen, as well as the killing of Pronto. Yeah. And tell me where the murder weapon's at. And this is why police withhold information. Well, most certainly during the investigative phase, but with Jack Ryan, this has gone to trial. Yeah. Their cards are on the table. They should be all on the table. You're trying to secure a conviction. Mm-hmm.

And the murder weapon is nowhere to be found. So that's going to be the one thing that I am going to be wanting him to lead me to if it still exists. If he says, you know, I melted it down and, you know, it's been scattered in the river, then it's unrecoverable. But if it still exists, give me the murder weapon.

Well, this is where it all unravels. Everything comes undone here. So Jack Ryan, of course, recants is what we would think would happen. He recants. He says, I didn't do any of this, including the statutory rapes. And he is in prison for 20 years.

Until 1947, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs gets pissed off and starts looking into this, finally. And they interrogate Metzler, the DA, who is now no longer the DA.

And they present him with all of this evidence. This doesn't make sense. You already searched. Where did the cartridges come from? Where did the watch come from? He didn't even really know these people. He wasn't even really in the area. I mean, you know, all of this is really bad evidence. And Metzler, proudly it sounds like, starts offering all kinds of things that he did to orchestrate...

a huge conspiracy against Jack Ryan. He paid women's mothers, girls' mothers to come and accuse this man of statutory rape. They all said, we got money for it. Wow. So they wanted him to get in jail. He admitted that he had tried to set up Ryan in other previous attempts. So the Los Angeles Times did a huge investigation into this, and they documented that Metzler arranged for a tripwire to be set up so it would fire a booby-trapped rapist

rifle at Ryan as he rode on the trail that he regularly traveled to just take this guy out. He hated him so much. And I think this comes into the racism part of it. He wrote threatening letters to Ryan saying, if you don't confess, you will be murdered the same way your brother was murdered, with the strangulation with a barbed wire.

So this is all coming out that he has really been trying to set this up. They planted evidence all to orchestrate to get this guy in prison, finally, all based on racism, from my understanding. Did Metzler coordinate the homicide of Walter? No. We'll get to the end of that. I know you want to get to the meat of it.

But you know how I like to drag things out dramatically. So all of this comes out and still it takes six years for Jack Ryan to be released. So he was in prison for 26 years for something he didn't do, for two murders that he didn't do.

So he gets out in 53 and he was paroled. Finally, he was paroled at 50 years old. He wasn't even pardoned. And finally, Ronald Reagan commuted in 69 when he was California's governor. He commuted Ryan's sentence to time served.

So he wasn't, I mean, this was not even a pardon. He was out. He was no longer a parolee. So he went back to Humboldt County and he was isolated because there was just no family left. He had missed all of those years. And in 1930, if we go back 30 something years, the DA that we're talking about, Metzler, was charged with conspiracy to violate national prohibition laws because he was a bootlegger. And he ultimately ended up in prison, but not because of this.

So this was incredible because he knew all along that Jack Ryan was innocent of this. And he continued to try to fabricate evidence and make threats against him for various reasons that I suspect had to do with politics, mostly had to do just with this hatred of someone who was Native American. It's tragic.

Here you have an innocent man. He's arrested in 1928. His reputation is smeared. He's coerced. He spends roughly 40 years in prison. Most of his life is from behind bars at this point. The very most sacred right that we have is freedom. Mm-hmm.

The government took it away from him, and it was due to this corrupt official and all the people that participated to do it. But on the other hand, you still have a double homicide of Henry and Carmen. I know. And that must still be unsolved today.

So here's the ending of this. There's an amazing person named Rachel Walton who was an investigator for the district attorney's office in the 80s. And she spent 10 years looking at Jack Ryan's case.

And she worked tirelessly. She interviewed more than 400 people to come to the conclusion definitively that this man had been set up, that he had been coerced into confessing. This was a false confession, which happens all the time. My father used to say, you know, you hear on shows all the time, innocent people don't call attorneys. Yes,

they do. Oh, yeah, they do. Smart and innocent people also call attorneys and it's okay to do that. Yes. But what ended up happening was you have all of these police officers who were there in the 1920s that she interviewed in the 80s who said, yes, he was coerced. He did not actually do this.

So he died in 78. He never had children. He never married. He lived a very quiet life. 20 years later, Pete Wilson, who was the governor of California at the time, finally issued a pardon and just said he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is overwhelming evidence of a conspiracy, and he deserves to be finally exonerated, which is just so long overdue. But we do have two unsolved murders.

And that nasty, horrible DA, Metzler, did give the name of somebody who he thought was responsible, but we can't verify it. Okay. This guy's been gone for decades. But remember I told you Henry Sweet dabbled in a little bit of bootlegging, like probably my grandparents or great-grandparents did. I mean, everybody did. Sure.

So the suspicion from what Metzler, the DA, thought and what I think this woman, Rachel Walton, also thinks is that this was a bad deal that happened, that really Sweet was killed over a debt. Right.

and that Carmen was a victim of circumstance. So she was not the initial target, but it was a crime of opportunity if this was indeed a sex assault. And I'm just not sure if she were not personally targeted, I can't imagine this would be anything but.

a sexual assault against her if she's buried. That's just the theory that it was a bad deal and that's why I was wondering about that cabin. Was he told to go to this cabin, you have to settle a debt, that's why they went, it wasn't for a hunting trip, maybe that's why they never found the gun. And this whole thing went down because it's weird it happened next to a cabin that had been empty. Now,

The luring of these victims out, isolating these victims out, mill nowhere by this cabin. This, from my perspective, shows a certain behavior by the offender. The offender is willing to leave the mail. Henry just laying out in plain view on the surface. Recognizable. Yep. Doesn't mutilate him. But to hide Carmen. Yeah. This for me is like, okay, this offender does not want to be known.

as a rapist. Maybe Henry is a message to others that Odette

But now I've got beautiful Carmen. I'm going to take advantage of having this beautiful young woman sexually. And then now I will eliminate her. Was the dog in the grave or the dog left on the surface? I think he was left on the surface. It's not easy to dig a grave, even a shallow grave. So you have to be motivated. There has to be a reason he did it. The dog on the surface, I speculate that the dog was killed first because it's barking, it's yapping. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

When I was looking at Coyote Flats, you know, when we start talking about roads up there, these aren't paved roads. These are the locations where I take my Jeep. Yeah. You know, and even though Henry had just a little roadster, my guess is that this offender...

has a vehicle to be able to go into these various locations up there off-road. And that vehicle is going to be equipped with the necessary implements in order to work with the land. My focus is going to be maybe back at that cabin. Who owns it? Yeah, the social circle, the people that own that cabin.

We see this, believe it or not, I've got a case, unsolved case, dealing with the Hells Angels. Back in the 50s, 60s, initiation, fights to the death supposedly out in Contra Costa County. And these were occurring not on Hells Angels property, but somebody associated with the Hells Angels. And so that's where I start looking at this going, okay, who owns the cabin? Who's out there all the time? But who's associated with the property owners?

Maybe this is somebody who's willing to have meetups in the bootlegging industry. Yeah. Who's to eliminate the DA who's also a bootlegger? Yeah. It was Henry doing business with the DA at one point. Might have been, you're right. And that's why the DA is so focused in on Ryan. That's the misdirection. Fascinating case.

It's a fascinating case, and it is 85 years and almost 90 years old. But the only thing for sure we know about this case is that Jack Ryan didn't have anything to do with it. Yeah. It really cost him his life. He got a death sentence back in 1928, essentially. He did. He did.

Well, this was a sad ending to another wonderful recording with you, though. Every time I think, I know exactly what Paul is going to say. You surprise me. Most of the time, I know what you're talking about. But you come up with a little kernel of something that makes me think of things differently, which is not easy for me because I think through crimes pretty well. I've been reporting on crime for so long. But

That's what's good about this collaboration is you really do pop up stuff in my head that wasn't there to begin with. So I think that's pretty great. You do a good job of keeping me in the dark. You keep me guessing. Thank you. Until next time.

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 for pre-order now. And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.