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This is exactly right. 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.
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, Paul. Hey, Kate. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Second episode. I know. I didn't scare you off. I'm still here. You are still accepting of me and my babble. I was crossing my fingers and here you are. Thank goodness. Yes. Nope. This is a good, good thing we're doing. I'm loving it. So, you know, one of the things that I think you and I bond over is our love of books and love of writing books. And I think that's one of the things that we're doing.
even though I think it is painful for both of us in really different ways. And one thing I want to celebrate right now is your status as a New York Times bestselling author, which if you were even remotely a jerk, I would say I'm so jealous of, but I'm so proud of you for that success. It's really remarkable.
Well, thank you very much. You know, when I was first notified of that, I truly didn't know what to make of it, you know, because I don't pay much attention. It's just like, well, I know that's a good thing, but my agents are like screaming up and down saying, hey, you got this. So, no, I'm very thankful that the book has been well accepted by the readers.
and that the message within the book is getting out there. I do love how unaware you are of these types of things because when I saw your name on the list, I think it was the second week and I texted you and I said, Paul, you're on the list. And you said, yes. And you said, I have no idea what that means. You said, that's a good thing. And I said, yes, that's a good thing. That is a good thing. Well, and you've got a book as well.
I have a book coming out in just a few weeks that I'm really excited about. It's called All That Is Wicked. And it's based on the first season of Tenfold More Wicked, which is my baby. It was the first show that I did. And it's been a labor of love for me. I don't know how you feel about books.
But for me, when a book of mine comes out, this is my third book. It's like the amount of time you spend on them. It's like having a child and then inviting the world to judge your child on a scale of one to five. I don't know if it's based on attractiveness or intelligence, but it's really, really difficult. Did you have any?
insecurities when your book came out? Oh, I was so nervous, you know, because with my book, like you said, it is a long, hard process from beginning to finally getting the book published. First, it's are people going to like the material that's contained within the book, but that I really expose myself as a person in the book. And, you know, I'm private. That was what I was really uncomfortable with.
But then I accepted, you know what, in order to really get that message of working these cases and how it impacts me as a person and other professionals as individuals, it was worth it. And everybody that I've talked to have been very gracious in saying, hey, really appreciate you opening up.
So that has been surprising. You know, I thought, oh God, you know, everybody would have had a perception of me before reading the book. And then after reading the book, it's like, oh God, I don't really like this Paul Holes guy, you know, so. Impossible.
No, please. Well, I think you and I tackle these projects from opposite ends of the spectrum because, you know, your book, Unmasked, it's you on a page. It is everything about you. It feels really unedited. It feels like you've just been willing to spill everything out. And
I struggle in my books because I can't insert my personality very much in a book about history, which is why I love podcasts. And that's why I love chatting with you is I really like people to know who I am. And my life is frankly, just not that interesting enough to write a memoir.
So I am a little jealous. I didn't think I was jealous. I am a little jealous of you then. Well, but I think, you know, with what you're doing, it's like I've tried to write creative fiction before. And then I'm nervous to give that to somebody else out of fear of they're going to judge me. So I imagine that's what you experience with your books. Creative fiction. I love that. I will say the case that we're going to talk about in just a bit is a case from my second book.
book. It never made it into the book, but it's from the forensic scientist, Oscar Heinrich. You and I have talked about him. And I'm not saying this is you, Paul Holes, but Oscar Heinrich knew everything about all forensics, everything. And he tried his hand at writing fiction. And it was possibly the worst fiction I've read. Mine probably would be on that level as well. No, no. I now have very, very low standards for what I consider to be
Decent fiction from a forensic guy because it was a very low bar for him. It was not good. Well, like I would say in reflecting upon my writing experience, most of my career has been writing analytical reports and case supplements. And then to get into something that is more in the creative world,
You know, it's not so factually driven, but there is a use of words and painting a picture and doing things that I've never done in the past. I think there's an aptitude, an innate aptitude that many writers have, but it is also a learned skill set. So I'm at the very beginning of learning that skill set. Well, you're brave. It's a brave new world. So my book is out October 4th, and it's terrifying to think about that coming up. But I'm so proud.
of Tenfold More Wicked and of course Wicked Words in this show too but that first season people ask me what my favorite season is because we're now going into like season seven and that first season you never forget your first and that was my first season I love that season and this book is Edward Ruloff chained to the floor of a jail and all of these men coming in and being able to
hopefully figure out why this man was brilliant and a killer at the same time. And what it tells us now, you know, we thought the real mind hunters were from the 1970s with the FBI's behavioral science unit. And it really was these men 100 years earlier. So it's exciting. I love talking about the criminal mind from the 1800s. And I certainly love talking about it with you. That's part of the fun of what we're doing together is showing that
Where we are at today with criminal investigations and forensic science, well, it's based on the foundations that were laid by those that came before me, before us 200 years ago. Well, this story is an Oscar Heinrich mystery. So let's go ahead and set the scene.
So this case really haunted Oscar Heinrich. It was sort of at the height of his career in 1930, and it's the hallmarks of everything that he really enjoyed as a forensic scientist. It's sort of a glamorous person at the center of it, many, many suspects, a lot of wacky, weird forensics, and he loved a good mystery. So as we unfold this, maybe you'll enjoy trying to help me out with this mystery too.
I'm here with bated breath. Let me hear it. Okay, so Oscar Heinrich loved keeping all sorts of evidence that was probably pretty inappropriate for him to keep. It probably should have been in a police locker room somewhere. Did you ever do that? You hear about these old detectives and who really killed Jack the Ripper is in somebody's basement. Did you ever squirrel away evidence on a particular case that maybe you weren't allowed to do that? No, you don't.
My generation, the chain of custody was much more rigid. It would be very tough to squirrel away evidence without somebody noticing that there's been a break in the chain. I actually repatriated some evidence back to our property room from a 1970 homicide that I found tucked away. A previous criminalist had squirreled away a box of evidence and he ended up becoming sick and passing away before he ever got around to returning it.
And then when I start digging back into that 1970 homicide years later, that evidence that I had sent to property had been destroyed. So in some ways, if I had just sat on it, it would have been available. Would have been safer, yeah. So Oscar Heinrich had the most random stuff in his archive and they found...
all sorts of things from the Fatty Arbuckle case, the supposed victim, Virginia Rappe. There was a chunk of her hair. There were all sorts of things, including three fully loaded guns. And the UC Berkeley police had to come and remove the firing pin.
So I want to show you a piece of evidence that I find to be interesting because I like seeing things from the victims. For me, that's a good way to set the scene. So this is something that I found in his archive about this case. So this is the murder of Dorothy Moormeister. And this was a locket that he found around her neck. And it was a very violent locket.
scene when he went to the scene. And this was a locket with somebody's hair. We don't know who. But Dorothy Moormeister has a very complicated life. And I think that she had some complicated relationships. So I wanted to just start with that locket to show that she clearly cared about somebody other than herself. Because much of this story is that she had some issues with relationships. And so
I think it's important to frame the story that this is someone who was caring of other people. For me, it's always neat to see in these old cases evidence or items that reflect the time period. So now looking at the container obviously has a rustic look to it. Yeah. But what struck me was the
hair inside of it. The individual strands of hair look like they have some thickness to them. This does not look like hair that has come from an infant, like sometimes what happens the first haircut. There's length to it. It's hard to say how long because I can't tell the size of this container. But this
hair, this is at least a, I would say a child who's got a more mature set of hair. And it could be from an adult. Yeah. From an investigative standpoint, I'm looking at that going, okay, was this a boyfriend? Yeah. Is somebody we don't know about that
could have had motive or somebody close to him, maybe a wife or girlfriend that could have had motive. So this is evidence in the case. Also, what strikes me is this is a color photograph. This is not black and white. This was a photograph indicating that this item of evidence had been kept and then photoed decades later.
Well, actually, Paul, this was available to me. I took this photo. So this was something that he kept. I picked this thing up. It's about the size of your thumb. So this was sizable for her to wear around her neck. So this was somebody who meant something. She didn't have any biological children. She had a stepdaughter who was probably too old for her to be too sentimental about. But I agree with you, this could easily be a child's hair. But my big point is for sure that
this was someone who wasn't always thinking about herself. Although as we get into the story, it sort of feels like she was thinking about herself a lot. So let me tell you a little bit about Dorothy. So Dorothy Mooremeister was 32 years old. So she's young. And her husband, Frank, was a very prominent,
and wealthy physician in Salt Lake City, Utah. And on the surface, seemed like a happy couple, like a lot of people present, right? But let's talk about the time period. So this is Salt Lake City during Prohibition in 1930 and also the Great Depression. It was a big double whammy. I write an awful lot about this time period, the intersection between Prohibition and the Great Depression. It was a rise in crime. It was a rise in organized crime, certainly. Utah, a
was one of the hardest hit states. The unemployment in Utah was at almost 40%. Oh, wow. 40% unemployment. Can you imagine? That's crazy. Dan, you're saying Salt Lake City and prohibition
Back then, I imagine it still was a very Mormon-dominated city. So how big was the loss of alcohol to this community? I think probably not big. And what ended up happening was even though it was 40% unemployment, they were still doing better than much of the country. And so there were people coming to Utah looking for jobs.
And they were generating crime in the process because they weren't finding those jobs to a point where the state actually began kicking them out later that year, ejecting non-residents because crime was really becoming out of control. And that sort of plays a part in this case when we're trying to figure out who did what. Yeah, so this is literally like in the first Rambo movie where the deputy gets Rambo and drives him to the edge of the town and says, don't come back.
It took you two episodes to pull a Rambo reference. I was waiting for that. Okay, so here's the story. So just after midnight on February 22nd, 1930, Dorothy Moormeister, her body was found on the western edge of the city in a rural area. So she was on a lonely road, no car, no nothing around her. The car was found several miles away, but...
Once Heinrich and other people came to do an accident reconstruction, I think a lot of this becomes clear. Police just responding because a witness happened to see her on the road. When they found her and they sort of lit up the area, it was a terrible scene. She was face down and...
And even without a car there, you could tell that she had been run over with a car. So my first thought, which I think is where a lot of people might go, is this takes gender out of it because anybody can get behind the wheel of a car. It's an interesting choice of weapon.
I don't feel like we see that that often, do we? Typically, when we have pedestrians that have been run over, it's often in the hit and run environment where the driver is DUI or is not paying attention, hits the pedestrian and then runs off. So there is no malintent from the driver whatsoever.
to purposely kill the victim. Of course, I've got questions about Dorothy, her body at this location. Could they tell that she had been run over at this spot where her body's found? Or had she been run over somewhere else and then dumped here? Or has she been drugged by a vehicle from a location? Because oftentimes when a vehicle hits a pedestrian, a pedestrian can be caught up in the undercarriage.
and then carried a distance away. Well, the forensics here are pretty complicated. So this will be torture for you because I'm going to unravel them slowly. So as a police officer, detective on the scene, the first thing you see is this woman face down. They said every bone in her body had been broken. And what they determined just based on the tire marks
And the amount of dragging, she had been dragged, but it looked like she had been dragged one time and that she had not been moving when the car ran over her five times. Okay. That's a lot, isn't it? It is. If you have the driver who hits a pedestrian, runs over the body, and then circles back around, comes back, or backs up. Now, this is showing intent.
that there's not the, oh, I just hit something and I didn't know what I hit type of defense. This now puts it into that realm of this is purposeful. So this is where proving that it's a single vehicle versus multiple vehicles would be part of the type of question that I would be looking at. Maybe some of the components of the vehicle break off due to the impact with the victim, or you see the same tire type
marks, whether they're impressions and or prints that are present on her clothing or on the surface that her body's on or on the sides of the roads. So there's ways to show that it was a single vehicle versus multiple vehicles.
So one set of tire tracks is what they're reporting. Is that accurate? How far can we go with tire tracks, impressions in the dirt? And let's just say clean dirt, it's very clear impressions. Is this an accurate tool of forensics?
Well, obviously, different makes and models of tires have different tread patterns. They have different sizes, different widths. Then you also have the vehicular characteristics. The axle width that these tires are on vary from vehicle to vehicle. Now, we're talking 1930s. So it's probably a very limited number of vehicles that are present. And what I don't know is how standardized, let's say, the undercarriages of all these vehicles are. Is it the same width? Are they using the same tires?
Or is there enough variability to be able to start narrowing down what makes vehicles and or tires could have been involved in the case based on the tire impressions? There's ways to look at these impressions and start getting a sense of, okay, I can now reconstruct what the driver is doing. They're in a singular vehicle. They're driving forward, stopping, turning, driving back.
doing a three-point turn, provided that the surface the car is on is a recording medium. Asphalt typically doesn't afford you that luxury. Now, if we set the scene, a woman, well-dressed, married to a wealthy doctor, she's laying face down in the road, there's no car around her, there's a set of tire tracks. Would we think that there's a good chance that she rode up
there with the killer, something happened, and he runs her down. So that's option A. Option B is she's out there by herself at midnight walking around in a rural area, maybe with somebody else, who knows. And then a driver comes and hits her accidentally or on purpose. Or super secret, option number three, which I have no idea, but you might come up with.
This is where victimology really plays in. First, I would be looking at the geography of this crime scene. Is it a very isolated location? And then is this a location that she would frequent or not? If she would frequent there, why would she be going out there? Or is there a prime location?
arterial road nearby, like maybe somebody dropped her off and now she's just out there on the side of the road. You know, I think all of those possibilities with the set of circumstances that you've laid out are in play at this point. It's really getting to know Dorothy better and
Once the investigation proceeds, it's now talking to people who said, oh, yeah, Dorothy would go out there all the time or Dorothy was planning on taking a ride. You said this is the west end of the city. Was she heading someplace out west with somebody? You know, and obviously she ends up outside the vehicle. And then who was that person that she was heading out west with?
So digging into who she is, what her patterns of life are, and then the investigation into at least the people that investigators are able to determine knew her and saw her last becomes critical information to start assessing, okay, what happened next?
at this location in the west part of the city. So investigators move up the road. This was a one-lane road. So they can tell, as you had said, where the car came in from. And they could see that it was a real jig-jaggedy motion, as if someone had been struggling inside the car, potentially. So they theorized that she rode up or was taken up by the killer or at least one of the killers.
Does that change anything for you? That we know that it looks like there's a motion where she was maybe struggling with the steering wheel to try to get control? Well, that becomes interesting. Was this a scenario where she is inside a vehicle and at a certain point, she realizes the driver's not taking her to where she wants to go? You know, maybe she's saying, I want to go home or she gets picked up by somebody and she's expecting to be taken to a different part of the city. And once the vehicle turns onto this wayside
one-way road, she's recognizing this is not good. And that's when the struggle inside the vehicle occurs. That's one possibility for sure. I have to say right now there's an assumption that Dorothy is not the driver when the car is zigzagging. Dorothy could be the driver and then the person that's, let's say, in the front passenger seat, not necessarily just front passenger seat, but I don't know what kind of vehicle we're dealing with. You're about to find out. Yeah.
I'm going to show you a picture of it. I'm just thinking it's possible where now you have somebody inside a vehicle that Dorothy's driving and is now trying to take over control of the vehicle. And that's why it's doing this jagged motion. Yeah, and I had thought maybe she was drugged and then woke up and went, what?
This is not happening. Another possibility. Now, let me tell you what Heinrich found. So he goes out and he examines the body. And here are the details from what he finds at the body. He looks at her close-fitting hat, which in the 30s, women sort of wore. I'm not going to say a bonnet, but a really kind of tight hat, almost covering her whole head. And he looks at the back of her head, and there is a slit, like a hole, almost at the back of her neck and a clot of blood.
beneath it, okay? That might or might not have been fatal. He doesn't know yet. He's just looking at the information. There are injuries to her skull, which could have been caused by blunt force trauma. It could have been caused by the car or both. We don't know cause of death yet. And we don't know if it was the car that killed her yet. So hole in the back of the base of her skull, right? The base of where her neck is. And then definitely some injuries to her skull.
And I will say that when pedestrians have been hit by vehicles, that really complicates any interpretation of what may have happened prior to the injuries and damage the vehicle has inflicted. If you have somebody that had blunt force trauma from, let's say, a beating, and now they've been run over five times...
it can be difficult, but not impossible to determine whether or not there had been violence inflicted on that person before the injuries and damage from the vehicle. So that's where it gets into, okay, what else is found? And then that's when the autopsy becomes absolutely critical.
I think what's interesting about this, too, is, you know, they said she had not been moving. She was not fighting back or trying to get out of the way when this car was running over here because they found drag marks, but kind of like an initial drag mark. And then it just kept hitting her over and over again. So Heinrich's first thought was that she was either totally incapacitated or already dead when the car ran her over.
five times. And his thought was she would at least be moving around a little bit and causing different sort of marks in the ground. Does that make sense to you? Not really. Are you contradicting Oscar Heinrich, my investigator? Okay. I am more thinking to try to determine whether or not she's
She was alive at the time of the first impact. I would be more paying attention to, are there any impact injuries to her that would indicate she was upright? So a pedestrian who's standing up when a car hits them, and again, not knowing what damage is on the car and the make and model of the car, but there is often something
severe injuries that say to the lower legs or the thighs that would indicate that you have an impact from the bumper or other feature of the car on the front of the car. So that's, again, we need to assess the injuries to her body, the damage to the vehicle, as well as even taking a look at her clothing and the types of marks that are on her clothing and where different types of evidence are found on the vehicle to start reconstructing
Okay, we have an impact with an upright pedestrian. And then the vehicle starts running over a pedestrian that is severely injured and likely unconscious or dead. But Heinrich coming and saying, well, he's not seeing evidence of her moving prior to being struck by the vehicle. I would need to see more before I had any confidence in that kind of opinion. Luckily, they find the car. They find her car several miles away. Her car?
Uh-huh, her car, which was used to run her over. Okay. So this is what the damage was done to the car. There was blood and a dent in the car's rear bumper, and there was hair stuck also in the rear bumper, and they found little to no blood
at the scene underneath her. So that's why the theory, I think, that she was killed or I guess incapacitated before she was on the ground or run over by this car, that's where that came from. But it is certain that she was hit by her own car. So somebody or Dorothy drove her car up to this area and then something happened after that.
They're not finding much blood at the scene? No, not tons of blood, no. Heinrich believed this happened someplace different. He did not think the death itself did not happen at this rural area. What do you think about just the idea that she was hit by her own car?
This is where now I start asking, well, who has access to the vehicle? Who would she give access to the vehicle? Who would she ride in the vehicle with? This is interesting that somebody would use her vehicle to run her over multiple times.
So, Heinrich, when he examines on the inside of this car, and here's the photo of the car I promised you, it's a big car. I can now see the car. It's a huge car. It is. This isn't some little Model T. It's large. It's going to be heavy. It doesn't show a photo of the rear bumper, but I can see where there's a feature of the wheel well that goes behind the driver's rear wheel that actually is relatively low.
If that bumper on the back is that low, then that becomes interesting from reconstruction. If we have blood that's low down in the vehicle like that with hair, that indicates that maybe she was in a position at the time that that contact occurred where her head is being hit by the rear bumper.
This is not a small vehicle, so to be run over five times? Yep. I do wonder how they determined the number five, but this vehicle would do a lot of damage to the human body. What would make a car go back and forth? Is it possible on a dirt road with all of the variations of rocks and sticks and everything, can a car go back and forth systematically in its own tracks? Or I wonder if a car this age, 1930, this heavy...
If they almost could count, like the rings on a tree, the different impressions, just slight impressions that each tire moving forward and backward made. Yes, that would be the one way that they would be able to do it. Okay. No matter how carefully you move the car back and forth, there's always a deviation. So if they were trying to rely on her injuries to save five times, then I would have concerns on that determination. Okay.
So this is a huge car. People often, when you read about it, call it a limo. I didn't really understand that because it's also called a sedan. But if you look at this thing, it's long. It does look like a limo now. And I think she had a driver who drove this regularly. Do you see below the doors? Don't you think those are step-ups where you lower the step and the person can step up and get into the car? If that is, then that's an element of fanciness that I didn't expect.
This is a car where just somebody who sees it goes, oh, there's a level of wealth associated with this person. So there is a scenario that you could see her coming to an intersection and somebody who's interested in committing a crime for financial gain all of a sudden has a victim of opportunity involved.
Yep. Well, and if we're taking an inventory of the crime scene, she was wearing some very expensive jewelry, including a pendant and thousands of dollars worth of jewelry, and it was gone. So I don't know if robbery had been a motive, but certainly it was there and it was taken by whoever killed her.
Okay, so now that puts more weight on a financial gain crime, possibly. Still could be somebody who knew her, could be a stranger. But also, was this jewelry so unique that that could be used to help identify her? Now, are they trying to hide her identification? Just like you have cases where hands are cut off.
heads are cut off to prevent identification, maybe this jewelry would be rapidly traced back as this crumpled mass on the middle of the road is Dorothy. So this is part of what I would be assessing as to why is this jewelry taken? But now I'm starting to go, I think there might be a financial motive here. And I will say that I think you'll be surprised that it could be both. Oh, yeah.
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.
So, you know the basics of the forensics. There's no huge revelations after that. Now we need to talk about the inner circle because this is where things become pretty interesting. So I mentioned she was married and you had an excellent query, which was who has access to her car? Because obviously if she's killed by her own car, she has access. And then the people in her inner circle potentially have access to the car.
So she was married to Frank Moormeister, who was quite a bit older, and he was a widower who had a young daughter, and he and Dorothy married two years earlier before her death. So they both had affairs, and they apparently had a pretty unhappy marriage, but
But they were still married. So it could have been a marriage of convenience. She was very attractive. He was very wealthy. Who knows why they were staying together, but they were together when all of this happened. How old is Frank's daughter? Young, just, you know, a young girl. Okay. Under 15. And I don't get the impression that she was particularly attached to Dorothy and vice versa, but I don't know. This could have been the hair and the locket, but I don't know. Okay. Okay.
So we'll start with Dorothy. Dorothy had several affairs. And as I said, the doctor had several affairs. They appeared to be living these parallel lives. When she was found dead, the doctor was taken up there and he identified the body.
and he looked at the crime scene and he, of course, immediately identified her. Later on, there will be a lot of speculation about Dr. Mooremeister. How could he identify her when she really was tattered? The car had run her over. As I said, every bone was broken. She was completely disfigured. And I don't think it's going to be that surprising that he could look at her clothing and probably look at a couple of key things. I think the press was really just trying to dig up
some dirt on him. What do you think about that? I mean, are you shocked that the press was trying to dig up dirt on anybody? Yeah.
For me, it's always shocking to think back to the days of having to get loved ones in to take a look at a victim and to identify them. Because like in this case, my expectation is, you know, what I've seen is many of these victims of violent crime, they're horribly mutilated. This is not the last image you want to see of your victim. But back in 1930, you know, they relied so heavily on
a loved one making that in-person identification. But was there enough features present for the husband to be able to truly say, yes, this is my wife, Dorothy. Yeah. Or was it relying upon the clothes? You know, he might be familiar with the clothes she had on. Right now, don't know. But yeah, that,
That, I think, is one of those things where I just think back going, oh, God, I would not want to be pulled in to identify one of my family members if they had suffered a traffic accident or were victims of homicide. And this is just terrible because to me, it seems like overkill, really trying to determine that this woman was killed illegally.
Now, if we're looking at suspects and doing a positive and negative list of the suspects, and Dr. Mooremeister's positive is he was the one who hired Oscar Heinrich. So in the 30s, Heinrich was usually hired either by defense attorneys or prosecutors, and then sometimes he would be hired by family members.
And Moormeister tracked him down and said, can you work on my wife's case? I don't trust the police around here to investigate this correctly. So that's how Oscar got on with this case. And Oscar started doing what you would do, which is he starts digging into the inner circle, the personal life, putting together a victimology. And he starts looking at who are the men involved
who Dorothy is involved with in these extramarital affairs. One of them is a man named Charles Peter. He was pretty much immediately a prime suspect in the death. He had urged Dorothy to divorce her husband and to take all of his money and they would run away together. It's unclear
clear how intense this relationship was. I think I get the sense that this man was sort of a way for her to bide a little bit of time and he gave her attention. I will say that she constantly rejected him. So if they had a true affair, it was very short-lived. And she actually called him to a friend of hers, a lop-eared fool, which is, I'm pretty sure, an insult in the 1930s. Like a lop-
I guess that seems like a bad thing to say to someone. But in addition to this affair, the fact that he is pushing her to divorce the husband and take all his money. Now, this is starting to overlap with what we're seeing the offender having done with stealing the valuables at the scene. It's sort of an extension of that request to Dorothy, where now it's like, well, you're not going to get rid of your husband anymore.
I'm going to take you out, but I'm going to take some of his money with me. It's consistent with Charles' mentality in that relationship. Just a theory at this point, but I'm keying in on that. That's a strong theory because Charles Peter knew her husband well.
They didn't have really business relations, but Charles approached Dr. Moormeister and asked for a loan, to which Dr. Moormeister, not knowing that this man was courting his wife, or maybe he did, we don't know, but Dr. Moormeister said, sure, I'll loan you the money, but as collateral, I would like a diamond pendant that I know you have. This is the diamond pendant that Dorothy was wearing the night that she was found in that rural area, and that diamond pendant was...
was gone when the police got there. And Dr. Mooremeister said, where is it? What happened? So does that bolster your theory? I think it does a little bit about Charles Peter. It most certainly could. That diamond pendant would be something that somebody who had no relationship to it prior would be attracted to and want to steal. So it's hard to discern that.
it really would rely on other aspects of the investigation. If that diamond pendant is found in Charles' possession after the homicide, then that shows, yeah, he wanted that particular item back plus the other items. But right now, I can't say. Well, and I'd lied. There are a couple little forensic things I need to bring up to you that the police discovered. I know, I'm sneaky like that. So we
have another much more serious suitor who was a Persian prince. I mean, if I could write a book on a Persian prince true crime story, I would love that kind of book. She was having an affair with a Persian prince who seemed like a really nice guy and they seemed to really love each other. And she wanted to leave Dr. Mooremeister and
live with this man in Paris. And it sounds like they were making plans for this to happen. And she was squirreling away money that Oscar Heinrich found out about. She had $6,000, which was an awful lot of money in 1930. Dr. Mooremeister was very confused because he only gave her an allowance of $200 a month. So he wants to know what the hell, where did she get all this money from?
And there were letters that Heinrich found, investigators also found, between the Persian prince and Dorothy professing love and true affection and making plans to leave. Now, the Persian prince was in Salt Lake City when she was killed. So does he become a strong suspect now?
Or does he become a strong motive? And now we're coming back to Frank Moormeister. Well, the Persian prince, I'm assuming just because of his royalty, has money himself. He doesn't need a diamond pendant. So yeah, the need to kill Dorothy from his perspective would be probably a few trinkets, right?
That doesn't wash with me. At least at the time of the homicide, it sounds like he and Dorothy had a positive relationship. And so this is where potentially if husband finds out about the Persian prince, does husband kill Dorothy out of rage and then stage a robbery by taking the jewelry out?
So that is a theory that for me is back on the table in terms of, yes, considering this dynamic. But I'm also curious, in addition to these suitors, I'm assuming that Dorothy was the beneficiary of the husband's estate if he were to die. Yes.
And she had changed her will shortly before, but I don't think she really had anything significantly. Are there any individuals on the husband's side of the family that if Dorothy was out of the picture, they would be the natural beneficiaries of his wealth?
but again, I think she was really young. It doesn't sound like it. It doesn't sound like the ex-wife was in the picture. So none of that really seems significant, at least not to Heinrich. But as we know, detectives from every era make mistakes.
So, you know, it might have been something that they missed. But what they were really focusing on is the quite a few kind of sketchy characters. I'm not saying a Persian prince is sketchy, but she was friends with racketeers. She was friends with people who were in the underbelly of Salt Lake City. But it doesn't sound like mobsters. It doesn't sound like she was living necessarily a lifestyle on the edge. It just sounded like she really liked to go out and have a good time.
Okay, now you're telling me about her suitors, Charles and the Persian prince. And of course, the assumption is, is that who she's having dalliances with, they're the ones likely going to be committing a homicide. Right. But I'm going to step back from that. You said husband was having affairs. Yep. He's got women in his life.
When I'm evaluating, let's say, a victim of a homicide and it's been an offender physically attacking the victim, I'm also trying to discern, is there significant physical differences in terms of size and strength that would indicate I'm dealing with, let's say, a very robust male versus a very petite woman? And there sometimes is evidence that that can be done. Here, we don't have that type of difference.
evidence because a vehicle was used. So now it's like, well, who was the husband having affairs with? And could they have motive to get rid of Dorothy because they want the husband for themselves? They want to become the beneficiary of his estate and live the high life. And this is now a woman who
in a planned attack, taking out Dorothy and then grabbing the jewelry again, possibly to stage a robbery. That would be a side of this investigation that needs to be dug into, not just the men in Dorothy's life. I agree based on season four,
of Tenfold More Wicked, which was about Clara Phillips in LA, a woman who thought her husband was having an affair with a woman named Alberta Meadows. And she lured Alberta and another person up to the top of a remote area and
beat Alberta to death. And people didn't believe that a woman was capable of doing that. However, when I was thinking about this case, you and I have come back to who would have access to her car and who would she get in a car with? So if he were having an affair, perhaps with one of her close friends,
That I could see, unless she's drugged, which was another theory that we had. You know, she's drugged and she doesn't really have much of a choice. But I was just thinking through that, like, who would she go up willingly with? And I'm not sure it would be with a woman that he's sleeping with. But we don't know who he was sleeping with because the press really never pursued them. And this starts going back to...
where was she killed or incapacitated at? If Heinrich is saying, well, it doesn't look like she's killed here. There's a lack of blood. And if her injuries are such, and I imagine they were, there's typically a lot of blood in vehicular accident or vehicular homicide scenes. And he's saying, hold on, where's the blood?
Right. Then he may be correct that she had been transported there. Now, if she had been killed elsewhere, is it possible that it was an act of homicide that did not result in bloodshed? Let's say it's strangulation. And then she's put into her vehicle and then the offender drives out there. Now, the jagged driving indicating maybe a struggle...
might suggest that she hadn't actually died, but reanimated and then now the fight is on inside the vehicle. But then there'd be a lot of blood at this scene after her being run over five times. I'm a little bit concerned about the lack of blood at the scene. A dead body is still a reservoir of blood.
You know, you don't have the active pumping of the heart if they're truly dead. But when a body is crushed open, you can still have leakage that would be significant. You know, you have reservoirs of blood within your large blood vessels, organs and stuff.
So depending on what injuries her body had, I would want to see that to assess, well, is the blood that is present at the scene consistent? You know, vehicles can just decimate a body, tear bodies apart. If these are just closed crushing injuries, maybe some avulsion, you know, you see avulsion where tissue is torn off of bone and stuff.
maybe the amount of blood at the scene is consistent with her being killed there. So this is, again, this is where the autopsy is so critical. And in this day and age, when I go into a case, first thing I always look at is the autopsy. I need to know what happened to the victim, what the offender did to the victim, and then the victim's injuries and how that would influence evidence at the scene. Was she killed right there by the vehicle or was she possibly incapacitated and or killed elsewhere?
bled elsewhere and then transported to this location where now she's run over multiple times. I think it is the latter because there's no struggle. Heinrich finds no struggle inside the car, like none. And not only that, he finds no fingerprints.
and the press finds out, and they say it's a hitman. Who else would be able to do that? It's not some dumb jilted lover like the lot beard Charles Peter. It's not a Persian prince. This is somebody who knew what he was doing. Let's talk about the no fingerprints. This vehicle is obviously a vehicle that multiple people have been in and out of. Fingerprints, they are deposited, of course, when people touch various surfaces, but the surfaces have to be amenable to
to holding on to those fingerprints in a way that they ultimately can be recovered and identified. Back in 1930, Heinrich is probably using, or the CSI was probably just using a very crude black powder technique
on surfaces that may not be amenable. There could be texture to these surfaces. There could be a lot of fabric surfaces inside this vehicle. The windows and stuff possibly are never touched by people who get in and out of this vehicle. People use driving gloves in the 30s. Well, this is where in modern day, you know, I've had to review cases where let's say you have a robbery at a fast food restaurant, very greasy.
They're at the front counter, the gun's pointed at them, cash register, the money's taken out. Deputy responds, and some agencies, they don't have trained CSIs for this type of crime. It's just a deputy. And then I read the deputy's report. He says, I dusted with black powder, found no fingerprints. And I say, BS.
because you will find fingerprints in a fast food restaurant. That tells me this deputy didn't do a thorough job. This is what we call PR dust. He's making a show, he's being lazy and goes, oh, no fingerprints. I've got a vehicle where multiple people have been inside and out of. How come no fingerprints are found? There's likely going to be some smudges and potentially ridge patterns found
from prior occasions on surfaces. This is where I call into question the veracity of the fingerprint processing that was done, possibly just due to the lack of modern technologies with different types of newer powders or magnetic powder or even super glue cars. If this was a homicide, that would be something we would step up to out in the field.
So to conclude that the person was a professional hitman because they didn't leave any latent prints behind, that doesn't wash with me at all. Well, Heinrich was really good at pulling prints. He had done that in the Fatty Arbuckle case in 1921, and he used a couple of different methods to pull prints. That is possible, though. But also, this is not
an error. There's no CSI New York or CSI Miami. People don't know enough in the 1930s about forensics to know that they can get caught really using fingerprints. So it's an interesting theory. And because of the lack of blood that she had not been killed at
the scene that she had been killed somewhere else. And so they really started looking at alibis and suspects. And Charles Peter actually had a really solid alibi with several people who knew where he was that night. And then the prince had an alibi and nobody really suspected the prince. Frank Mooremeister is a different story. He had one really bad alibi and one shaky alibi. He was alone the whole night.
Which, you know, many of us are. I mean, half the time in my life, if I were accused of committing a crime, I would have a lousy alibi too. So he was out driving alone for half the night. And the other part of the night, he was alone at the movies. He's saying he's out driving around alone? By himself. And he couldn't really say where. But by himself.
And he also had a nurse who saw him at home. So he was sort of out and about. People said they saw him at the movie, but they weren't 100% sure. He was saying, I was driving on the road. It was all very sketchy. This is where it does come into establishing the veracity of the alibi. And that's what's so important. If an individual's alibi is being established by a close person to the suspect,
always have to consider that that witness is lying just because of their relationship with the suspect. So this really becomes a low bar type alibi where I don't put any weight on it. You mentioned Charles was alibied out by
multiple witnesses. Well, who are those witnesses? Are they friends of his or did he show up at a public location and these people independently who don't know him say, yeah, that guy was here? Well, that establishes a little bit better of an alibi. For me, good alibis like today, of course, is you've got video surveillance at a location and there's no question that the suspect is at this location at the time the homicide occurred. And this is a high bar type alibi. So Frank,
is out driving alone when Dorothy is out in her vehicle being killed by her vehicle. To me, this is where I'm hearing that. I'm going, okay, is he weaving some truth into a lie? He might be. And so then you have to think, what is the motive? And I know what you're going to say. Well, his wife is having an affair and she's running away. But...
According to Dorothy's sister, Dorothy did not believe that Frank knew anything about the prints. And he seemed genuinely pretty shocked when the police presented him with the letters and the fact that she had saved $6,000 and he didn't know it. However, Dorothy's sister said that, and I'm going to read this quote because I think it's interesting. Dorothy told her,
I have something on the doctor he knows nothing about. So something incriminating. He would give me $80,000 just to avoid the publicity. And just so you know, that's about $1.3 million right now. So she's telling her sister that she has information on her husband that she can use to blackmail him for almost a million and a half dollars.
That seems like a bigger motive than a Persian prince or any number of affairs that he probably knew she was having. Yeah. Now, this really does become a big deal. Okay, now you start stacking up the clues. This extortion that Dorothy was going to do for her own personal gain at the expense of
I'm not sure what she was going to extort him on, but his public reputation, potentially he could suffer business losses. Who knows what exactly it was, but obviously it was going to be a very negative thing for her husband. And
Dorothy almost sounds like, I mean, how could she, if she's extorting him for his money, you know, the equivalent of $1.3 million today, that tells me, well, she wasn't planning on staying with him. She's planning on taking that money and going to one of her suitors. And it sounds like it's going to be the prince. So obviously, if the husband was truly in love with her at some point, he's now going, well, I can't have this happen. I can't possibly do
let her walk away with my money or divulge that information. So now it's like she needs to be eliminated so I can hold on to my wealth and I can hold on to my reputation, whatever was going to be hurt by the details that she was willing to go public with. Well, you're right about all that because what it sounds like she was going to go public with is that the well-respected doctor was performing illegal abortions. In Salt Lake City.
Yeah. In the 1930s during prohibition. Yes. Yes. And obviously the religious philosophy in that area is not going to be too accepting of what he's doing. Yeah. He would have lost his license. It would have been very, very damaging. So this becomes awkward for our forensic scientists because do we remember who hired him? That is an interesting little twist there. Okay.
And that's where did the husband have so much confidence that he covered his tracks that there's no way Heinrich would ever discover the sordid details that would basically point fingers back at the husband. Yeah. And getting back to this professional hit, did the husband have a connection to somebody where now he's at least one step removed from the actual act
to violence. So he has further confidence that it wouldn't come back to him. But anytime you bring somebody else into a homicide, you always have to worry about that other person coming forward. Yeah. So now that other person gets eliminated to be able to
prevent that person from coming forward. And that would be part of the inquiry I would now be making in terms of who's this other person, if that exists, if I can alibi out the husband, but I think he is truly the reason why Dorothy is killed, but he's not the killer. Who is he reaching out to in order to be able to get her killed, in order to preserve his reputation and his wealth?
Well, this is what Heinrich concluded, and then I'll just see what you think. What he believed happened was that the man who hired him, Frank Mooremeister, he himself killed Dorothy. He went back and he looked at the back of her head and the puncture and the hole through her hat, and Dorothy had had a bit of absence in her system. Hmm.
How would you describe absinthe? I've never had it before, frankly. Well, I've only had absinthe. I should have known you had it. Yeah, I, you know, I sipped a bottle of absinthe over the course of a week or so. Wow. And, you know, it's predominantly alcohol. And then it also has
Wormwood, you know, it's got this chemical compound, this Thujone, which I'm not sure that's the way to pronounce it. It's a spirit, just like anything else. Alcohol is the predominant drug that is present and absent. Sounds like she was kind of doped a little bit. I mean, just a little buzzed, maybe. Yeah. Well, now, is this circular wound on the back of her neck, is this something that has any size to it that Heinrich describes?
He thinks it was a small, and I remember this guy's a doctor, he thinks it was a puncture wound, as in he came up behind her. She was a little loopy from the absence. She went to a hotel with some friends and they dropped her off. Okay. And he shoved what I imagine would be sort of like a hat pin, but I don't know the best...
Right at the point in her neck where it would have just killed her and there would have been a minimal amount of blood. Does that make sense? Well, almost as if you have an ice pick going into her brainstem, right? Yep. Which obviously would be very serious to the victim, if not cause death.
If he knows what he's doing and he's a medical doctor, so he probably knows how to inflict that type of injury. I would imagine if she's looped up on alcohol to where she's a little less aware of the doctor coming up. And then if he just does the ice pick to the brainstem, yeah, very little blood.
that now she could be transported in her own vehicle without any blood being found in the vehicle and then put on the road and then run over multiple times to make it look like a vehicular accident. She was a pedestrian. And, you know, it's interesting, the doctor taking the jewelry back.
Well, and what Heinrich believes is he does not believe that Moormeister actually deposited her. He thinks he hired somebody. Okay. And he believes that Moormeister was in and about, you know, he was at the movies and a couple of people said, yeah, we saw him at the movies and...
that his alibi wasn't so tight that he could get away with killing her because he was at home and she came home, but that it was around that the alibi was structured enough so that he would have wanted somebody to take her out. There were lots of people available. The kind of kicker with this case is that nobody was convicted. They couldn't get a conviction out of anybody. Somebody confessed in 64 to be the person who took her out and ran her over.
But it turns out he read all of the details from a true detective magazine. And it turns out he wanted to be transferred from Texas to Utah because he thought he was going to get sort of better treatment at a Utah jail. So this remains officially a cold case, an unsolved case. But Heinrich believed that the man who hired him was absolutely responsible. He pulled it off. He did the murder based on that puncture wound.
That would have counted for the lack of blood, but also just the lack of fight. She had no defensive wounds, nothing. So that seemed reasonable to me, but who knows? This is interesting from the husband killing his wife. I mean, she may have been dead from this wound. She may not have been. And then if somebody's hired to dispose of her body and run over the body, she may have technically still been alive. And then that person has culpability in her death. Yep.
Under Heinrich's scenario, and I wouldn't disagree with it with the information that you've told me, in this day and age, I think, yes, two people potentially could be charged with her homicide. It comes back to when did she die? And probably at this point in time, there's no way to be able to determine that.
I love a good mystery, Paul Holes. Thank you for taking this trip to the 1930s Utah with me. No, this was another good little twist. The Persian prince was really catching my attention there for a second. At least he caught Dorothy's attention, right? Yeah.
Well, I wish you the best of luck as you continue on with your book journey. And I'm continuing on with my book journey. And our paths are going to cross with yet another episode next week. And I'm really excited about that. All right. I'm looking forward to it. Go pump some iron, Paul.
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 artwork is by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at BuriedBonesPod. 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. ♪