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hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast i'm peyton morland before we jump into it please if you are watching on youtube give this video a thumbs up and subscribe it helps out so much and if you are listening to the podcast and are able to leave a five star review please go do that i mean
If you're not going to leave a five star, then maybe don't leave a review. But if you're going to leave a five star, then do it because five stars are cooler. And yes, my shirt does say this is the skin of a killer fella. So this week and next week, I'll be diving into some under the radar unsolved serial murder cases.
These are some ice cold cases that have been largely forgotten about and haven't received a lot of coverage or discussion. So trigger warning for those of you who hate when these stories don't have proper endings.
These are unsolved cases. These are crimes that remain without justice, mysteries that have gone unresolved, questions unanswered. But I hope that by shining a light on cases like these, cases that have been neglected, lost to the cobwebby dark corners of true crime, we can bring some renewed attention to them and make them a few degrees warmer and ideally a step closer to being solved.
Today's story also warrants a few additional trigger warnings because it's the kind of story a word like "grizzly" can't even begin to do justice.
During the research phase for today's episode, we found a letter to the editor responding to the language used in a news article related to one of the cases we're discussing today, and I want to read it to you. Dear Editor, I was sickened by the front page headline in Friday's paper.
Man shocked and castrated. Why was it necessary to go into such detail? And if that wasn't bad enough, Saturday and Sunday's paper both carried a reference to the fact that the poor man was castrated. If any details were necessary, and I for one don't know why they would be, saying that he suffered knife wounds should have been sufficient.
That was the letter.
So if you're at all like this, you may at least want to finish your breakfast and let it settle before listening. Otherwise, here we go. Very little is known about the life of Wayne Lee Reifendiffer. I can tell you he was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on August 3rd, 1951. The second child of Harold and Lucid Reifendiffer.
I can tell you his family moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut when he was a young boy. I can tell you that when he was 22, he survived being thrown from a vehicle in a car accident that claimed the life of another motorist. I can tell you he was involved in another car accident in 1978 when he and a friend led police on a high-speed chase after stealing gasoline and beer from a filling station.
And I can tell you that on August 19th, 1981, two weeks after his 30th birthday, Wayne Reifendiffer's lifeless body was found nude, beaten, shot in the back of the head, and castrated, dumped in the woods in rural Pennsylvania and found by an employee of the State Forestry Bureau.
I can tell you that Wayne was described in the newspapers after his death as a drifter with a rap sheet, a transient who was known to hitchhike. But if Wayne had never been arrested, it's likely that his body would have remained unidentified far longer than a week, which was how long it took for the FBI's fingerprint database to return a match. The investigation into Wayne's murder was at a disadvantage from the very beginning.
For one, Wayne had been dead for several days before he was found. And aside from the 38 caliber slug recovered from his skull, evidence at the scene was kind of non-existent. Whoever killed him, they apparently had killed him somewhere else,
cut off his genitals, and then dumped him at the spot where he was found, probably from a vehicle. And that's all we know about Wayne Reifendiffer. I can't even show you a picture of him. On his Find a Grave webpage, there's only one photo, and it's of a simple funeral marker engraved with his name the year he was born and the year he died. And the Find a Grave bio written by a cousin reads very simply, "Murdered by a coward."
The investigation went cold pretty much right out of the gate, mostly forgotten about. And then several years later in 1988, Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Steve Tobos was reviewing crimes newly uploaded to VICAP, the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which had been founded only five years earlier.
And one recently added case caught his attention because of how similar it seemed to the unsolved murder of Wayne Reifendiffer eight years earlier.
The entry in question had been entered into VICAP by Detective Steve Ridge from the Wasatch County Sheriff's Department in Utah, clear across the country. And it was a murder that Ridge had been investigating since it happened back in the summer of 82, 10 months after Wayne Reifendiffer's murder.
It was June 14th, 1982, the peak of summer, and it was around seven in the evening. A man named Lee Valdez was out fishing in a Creek that rang alongside route 40 in Daniels Canyon, about 12 miles south of Heber city, Utah. The sun was fast approaching the horizon and daylight was fading. And as Lee was getting ready to turn in for the night, he suddenly came upon something horrific.
the dead body of a young man, completely nude except for a pair of white socks. He was lying on his back with his knees slightly raised. The ground beneath the dead man's head was soaked with blood, but more gruesome than anything else, the victim had been castrated.
Authorities were called out to the area and they began photographing and processing the scene as the medical examiner prepared to take the body away. It appeared the killer had murdered the victim somewhere else and then drove through this location, pulled over to the side of the highway and dragged the body from their vehicle to the cluster of willow trees where it was found. Sound familiar?
The body was lying at what was described as an odd angle, as though all of this had been done in a hurry, like the killer wanted to dump the body as quickly as possible and get out of there without being seen. Although the body had only been there for about a day, it had rained in the area the previous night, washing away any tire tracks and footprints.
At autopsy, it was determined that the victim's cause of death was a single .38 caliber bullet fired at close range into the victim's head just behind his left ear. The castration was then done post-mortem with a long blade weapon, possibly a skinning or hunting type knife.
The body also showed signs that the victim had been beaten. Police had no idea who the young man was. He appeared to be between 22 and 25 years old, 5'4", and about 130 pounds. His description and a photo of his face were provided to the media, but they generated very few leads.
One lead came in from a woman who claimed she had spent the night with the victim, but when she was brought down to the morgue to look at the body, she was unable to make a positive identification. Multiple calls came in from four different groups of people that identified the victim as a man from Duchene County that had hung out with them a week before the body was discovered.
Deputies traveled to that county and after an exhaustive investigation, they located the man those informants believed to be the victim. He was alive and well. Another few tips came in suggesting that the dead man may have been stationed at Hill Air Force Base outside of Salt Lake City, but when police provided the victim's fingerprints to the military, nothing came back.
Investigators began to suspect the man may have just been a transient, possibly a hitchhiker and not local to Utah. The Wasatch County Sheriff's Department sent the fingerprints to the FBI master file in Washington, D.C., but they didn't have his prints on file either. Whoever the victim from Utah was, he had never been fingerprinted.
and identifying him was proving to be a challenge. Investigators then turned their attention to the victim's tattoos, the nature of which led investigators to theorize that the dead man may have been a member of a motorcycle gang. They traveled out to several places in Utah known to have a significant motorcycle gang presence, and they began making contact with gang experts and with the motorcycle gangs themselves.
But this too led nowhere and failed to produce any further insight into who the man could be. And then they learned through a teletype that not long after their victim had been found, a severed penis was discovered at a rest stop in Kansas.
The body part was sent over from Kansas for Wasatch County to analyze, but they couldn't be sure if it was a match to their victim. So they placed the severed member from Kansas into cold storage for future analysis.
Meanwhile, Wasatch County deputies tracked down and interviewed truck drivers on Route 40 who had passed through the stretch where the body was found. And the deputies learned that a young blonde woman had been seen in the vicinity of the body during that period. Police had a composite sketch drawn up and distributed in the area with the hope of locating this mystery woman. They got several leads, but none of the women they interviewed were the blonde woman in question.
By the end of the first month of this investigation in Utah, authorities had received over 200 leads and they had to create a special task force to make sure each of those leads was properly run down. They began looking for other similar crimes that had occurred in the region and almost immediately they found one.
On May 13th, almost exactly a month before their unidentified victim was found in Casper, Wyoming at five in the morning, two men on their way to work were driving on Interstate 25 when they were confronted by a startling sight. It was a man in his mid-20s walking alongside the highway, completely nude, shivering with his hands tied behind his back and his body bathed in blood.
Please help me, the man begged. I've been shot. I've got to get warm. If you haven't caught on, we're working backwards here. The man was rushed to the Natrona County Memorial Hospital where it was learned that he had been shot in the back with a shotgun and castrated.
Through heavy sedation, the man recalled that he had met two guys the night before at a local after-hours bar called Redman's Club. He left the bar with the two men, accepting a ride with them in a semi-tractor trailer. And then, not long into the ride, the two men robbed him, stripped him of his clothes, and then tied his hands behind his back with a length of hemp rope.
He was yanked out of the truck and one of the man produced a knife and proceeded to cut off his genitals after which the man fired a shotgun into the castrated victim's back before fleeing and leaving the man to bleed out and die. And he certainly would have had he not been found and helped by those two passerby.
In the initial description that the man gave of his attackers, both were white males. One was husky and in his 30s with a bushy mustache and wavy type hair that resembled an afro. And he wore glasses, denim pants, and a checkered shirt.
The other man was about 26 or 27 years old and had a medium build with blonde to light brown hair, shoulder length and clean shaven aside from what he described as a small mustache. They were last seen driving south on I-25 in a white cab over semi tractor, holding an empty flatbed trailer.
These composite sketches will be on our social media as well as on the YouTube video. Composite sketches of the two men were released to the local media along with the offer of a $1,000 reward pledged by friends of the victim, friends who wished to remain anonymous.
so as to protect the victim's anonymity. Those same donors also set up a fund at a bank in town to help pay for the man's medical expenses because he hadn't been working at his current job long enough for the employer's health insurance company to pay. How nice of the health insurance company. I mean, you get castrated, get blasted in the back by a shotgun. Don't worry, we'll find a way to avoid covering you. But bless his friends and others in the community for helping him out.
A local rock band even held a benefit dance to further assist in raising money. The John Doe benefit dance, they called it. The victim, unfortunately, didn't have a lot of money and neither did his family. The same friends who established the benefit fund also helped pay for the victim's parents to travel to Casper, Wyoming to be with their son as he recovered from his brutal attack.
A recovery that would take a long time. The man's injuries were so extensive that doctors had to call in surgeons and specialists from outside the area to assist with his treatment. All the while, the man remained sedated and on painkillers.
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or so investigators thought it was such a solid lead that it was brought before a grand jury in an attempt to obtain an indictment however that alibi the suspect provided ultimately checked out it was airtight and investigators were actually able to confirm their number one suspect was over 300 miles away at the time the attack took place
So they let the man go, leaving them right back at square one. As the investigation into the savage assault continued, city commissioners forced after hours clubs to close at 2 a.m. the same time as area bars due to this and other crimes they blamed on after hours clubs staying open until 4 a.m. and inviting unsavory clientele. Meanwhile, the victim remained in the hospital, trying his best to provide accurate and updated information about what happened.
but cops grew impatient with him frustrated that his story kept changing he'd been drinking that night he said and he was having a difficult time remembering things clearly
In their statements to the media, cops complained that the man kept changing his description of the two attackers. In the latest revised description, the guy with the Afro style hair was now said to be 28 to 30 years old, 5 foot 8 to 5 foot 10 and around 170 pounds with curly sandy blonde or reddish blonde hair and a ruddy but clear complexion. He was clean shaven and wearing prescription type glasses.
In the revised description of the younger assailant, he was now described as 20 to 23 years old, 5'6" to 5'8" and around 130 to 140 pounds with light brown collar length hair and a light colored mustache. He had a narrow chin, drawn cheeks, medium dark complexion and dark colored eyes.
He spoke with a slight southern accent. You know, honestly, despite the insensitive grumbling of the cops investigating this, I don't think the description changed all that much. I suspect that as this guy was recovering and gaining more of his wits about him, he was able to recall and articulate better. Anyway, the case dead ended until investigators in Wyoming were contacted by authorities over in Utah about their murder victim.
And the two agencies compared notes. They agreed on what they believed were some significant differences between the two crimes.
For one, the Wyoming victim who survived had had his hands tied, whereas the Utah murder victim did not. Also, the Wyoming victim was fired upon with a shotgun while the Utah victim was shot with a 38 caliber handgun, believed to have possibly been a charter arms revolver. And the Utah victim was castrated after death while the surviving Wyoming victim had been castrated first and then shot.
But looking at the bigger picture, both victims were found castrated alongside well-traveled roads and authorities in Wyoming believed the two crimes were virtually identical. It certainly is interesting to have two castration incidents occur one month apart, 430 miles apart, both in the Rocky Mountain region.
But as the months wore on, neither investigators in Utah nor police in Wyoming developed any solid leads in their two cases.
In the Utah murder case, the working theory was that the dead man had been a member of a motorcycle gang because of his tattoos. They believed he had been picked up while hitchhiking by the two men responsible for the Wyoming castration and that the mysterious blonde woman was somehow involved and helped them dispose of the body. But it was only a theory.
There were also rumors circulating that the two Wyoming suspects were Colorado residents and the bar staff at Redmond's, the after hours club, could identify them, but nothing ever came of that. It was also reported that those two men may have been seen in Vernal, Utah, two days before the body was found. This was also never substantiated.
Meanwhile, a worried mother in Truckee, California, went to the local sheriff's department to file a missing persons report on her 21-year-old son, Marty James Shook. She had last seen her son on June 12, 1982, leaving her house to embark on a trip to Colorado.
Marty had told his mother and his uncle that he was off to Colorado to look for work. He didn't have a car, nor a lot of money, so he planned to hitchhike his way there, which he had done many times before he was a seasoned hitchhiker. But this time, he simply vanished. He never reached his destination, never returned home, and never contacted his family again.
The missing persons investigator assigned to the case was Mike Kelly. And when he entered the information into his computer, he noticed a match between the tattoos on the unidentified murder victim in Utah and Marty Shook's tattoos. On October 11th, 1983, investigator Kelly called the Wasatch County Sheriff's Department and connected with Steve Ridge, the lead detective on the Daniels Canyon John Doe case.
Ridge arranged for dental records, fingerprints, and scar reports to be sent back to Nevada County, California for comparison with Marty Shooks. So essentially, this young boy went missing from California saying he was hitchhiking to Colorado, and now they're wondering if he's the unidentified Utah victim.
Nearly 18 months after the body was discovered, the results were a match. The man who had been shot in the back of the head, castrated and dumped like trash alongside Route 40 in Utah was 21-year-old Marty James Shook.
So...
Marty's parents, after learning this devastating news, made the sorrowful drive from Truckee to visit their son's unmarked grave in Heber City, Utah, where he remains buried to this day. Tragically, they lost their other son, Michael, in 1994, who died from an undisclosed illness in Santa Rosa, California at the age of 32.
In May 1983, there was a potential break in the case. Around one in the morning on May 14th, 1983, two California Highway Patrol officers noticed a Toyota sedan driving erratically on I-5, leading them to suspect the driver was driving under the influence. When they pulled the Toyota over, the driver immediately dumped a bottle of beer onto the highway and walked toward the police cruiser with his jeans unbuttoned.
They asked the man to perform a field sobriety test, which he failed with flying colors. He was then placed under arrest. When one of the officers approached the man's vehicle, he noticed there was someone in the passenger seat, a young man who appeared to be unconscious, partially covered by a jacket.
The officer shook the man and tried to wake him, but the man was cold to the touch and didn't respond. When he lifted the jacket that was covering the man's lap, it revealed that the man's genitals were exposed and his hands were bound with a shoelace. It was later learned that the victim, a Marine from the nearby El Toro airbase, had been strangled to death.
The driver of that vehicle was 38 year old Randy Steven Kraft. And when police searched his car, they found a piece of paper in his trunk that contained a list of cryptic phrases, 61 and all, that they believed was a scorecard listing all of his victims in code. Phrases like hike out LB boots and peer two and teen trucker and parking lot and diabetic.
These were believed to each refer to a victim. And after gathering evidence, authorities charged Kraft with 15 murders and they suspected him of many more. And to date, they've been able to identify most of the victims referred to on his scorecard, but about a dozen remain unidentified. But it's the fact that Randy Kraft had castrated several of his victims that made him a potential suspect in the murder of Marty Shook.
However, Kraft was never known to have used a gun in any of his confirmed and suspected murders. His method of murder was to strangle his victims. And as far as we know, he couldn't be placed in Utah at the time of Shook's murder and was cleared of involvement. And so for years, the investigation into the depraved killing of Marty Shook stalled in a deep breeze.
But in 1988, it was taken out to thaw when Wasatch County Sheriff's Detective Steve Ridge entered the case into the relatively new VICAP system. VICAP, or the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, went live in 1985. Created by the FBI, VICAP was designed as a national database of violent crime, specifically serial type stranger crimes.
Law enforcement agencies from around the country could now enter information on cases both solved and unsolved into a system that was accessible to every other law enforcement agency. This was with the objective of finding connections between previously unlinked crimes. I mean, it's...
Completely groundbreaking in the true crime community. And this is exactly what happened here. After Marty Shook's murder was uploaded to VICAP, Pennsylvania State Trooper Steve Tobos noticed similarities between Shook's murder and the still unsolved murder of Wayne Reifendiffer in 1981, the case we started out this episode with.
Both victims were believed to have been hitchhiking before they were killed. Both were beaten. Both were shot with a 38 caliber bullet. Both were castrated after death, their entire genitalia, and both were then stripped of their clothing and their belongings and dumped from a vehicle. The two agencies in Utah and in Pennsylvania arranged to have the 38 caliber slugs recovered from their victims sent to the FBI forensic laboratory for ballistic analysis.
and on may 13th 1988 the results came back the bullet that killed wayne reiffendiffer in 1981 and the bullet that killed marty shook in utah a year later were both fired from the same gun wayne and marty were killed by the same individual a previously undetected serial killer
And while this didn't tell investigators who that individual was, it opened up a new avenue of possibilities to explore. Both victims had been hitchhiking. Both were dumped from vehicles nearly 2,000 miles apart. In fact, the places where the victims were last seen, Wayne in Bridgeport, Connecticut and Marty in Truckee, California, were about 2,500 miles apart. So was the killer a long haul truck driver, a traveling salesman?
These were theories police were now considering. Meanwhile, the mysterious blonde whom police in Utah believed might have information about Marty's death
remained unidentified. And so did an equally mysterious anonymous tipster in the Reifendiffer case. On September 30th, 1981, the Center Daily Times had published a brief report that state police in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania had received an anonymous tip from an unknown man who claimed he had known Wayne Reifendiffer and was in possession of a notebook belonging to him.
The caller refused to give his name and told police he would contact them again in two or three weeks, but he never did. And the identity of that caller was never determined. But here's what's really interesting. The newspaper report says that the anonymous call was received on August 27th, 1981, which was three days before the first news articles were published revealing the identity of the murder victim as Wayne.
so this raises several questions the most obvious of which is is august 27th a misprint
If not, then how did the caller know that Wayne Reifendiffer had been murdered when the victim's identity hadn't even yet hit the papers? The wording of the article is, quote, "Lock Haven State Police revealed they had received an anonymous telephone call about the death on August 27th. The unknown caller said he had known the victim and had a notebook belonging to the victim but didn't want to reveal his identity to police.
So when I said earlier that the caller said he had known Rain, that was admittedly an extrapolation on my part because the article doesn't make it clear if the man mentioned Wayne by name or if he simply was referring to the dead body they'd found.
Like, did he use the words, I knew the victim, without ever mentioning Wayne Reifendiffer by name? Because the fact that a body was found, that was reported on the news. But no one knew the victim's identity at that point. So in that case, how would the caller know he had the victim's notebook? Unless he knew before anyone else that Wayne Reifendiffer was the murder victim. And the only way to know that is if you were the killer or knew the killer.
So this leaves only a few possibilities. Possibility number one, the family was notified of Wayne's death on or before August 27th when the call was placed and the caller knew the family and learned about the death through them. Possibility number two is the caller knew the dead man was Wayne Reifendiffer before anyone else did, which would mean the caller had to have been the killer or possibility number three, the caller never mentioned Wayne by name and had no idea who the victim was and was simply a crank making stuff up.
Seems unlikely, but it happens. I mean, it's possible that the 1981 caller read in the paper that a body was discovered and he called in with the bogus claim that he knew the guy and had his notebook. It really all comes down to whether the caller referred to the victim by name or not. But it doesn't bring us any closer to that killer's identity. It maybe suggests that the killer lived in the area at the time because Wayne Reifendiffer lived a transient lifestyle and was sort of off the grid.
It's not clear where he met his killer, but sources seem to suggest he was living in the town of Plymouth, Pennsylvania around the time he was murdered. Plymouth, Pennsylvania is about 70 miles east of where his body was found. So he may have been hitchhiking around the area or maybe may have been hitchhiking from Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he grew up and where his father still lived.
It's hard to determine then if the killer may have been just passing through the area or if he was a local. But whatever the case, the same killer encountered Marty Shook 10 months later somewhere between Truckee, California and Heber City, Utah, where he was found. So could the killer have been local to the Lock Haven, Pennsylvania area and then moved to the Heber City area?
It's possible because we have only these two cases that are concretely linked. So that's only two data sets we can draw from.
But one common link between the two cases appears to be the I-80 corridor. Sometimes after a particularly long day, I love to play games on my phone to get my mind off things, and one game I have been loving is June's Journey. June's Journey is a hidden object mystery mobile game that puts your detective skills to the test. You play as June Parker and investigate beautifully detailed scenes of the 1920s while uncovering the mystery of her sister's
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Interstate 80 is less than four miles from where Wayne's body was found in the Pennsylvania woods and about 27 miles from where Marty was dumped in rural Utah. I-80 also passes directly through Truckee where Marty was last known to have been hitchhiking from.
So if this killer was a long haul trucker or had some other job that kept him on the road, it appears that job kept him traveling largely along I-80. And so in looking at other crimes that potentially fit this pattern, another murder in Wyoming in August of 1980 caught investigators attention.
On August 10th, 1980, the body of a man later identified as 27-year-old Willard Edward Judd was found shot to death on the banks of the North Platte River and just a few hundred feet from a highway rest stop along Route 220. Judd was an oil field worker from Louisiana, last known to be working near Casper, Wyoming, about 20 miles from where his body was found.
Judd was also known to hitchhike and Judd was also shot with a .38 caliber revolver. But that gun has never been matched to the Reifendiffer and Schuch cases as far as we know. Those bullets were sent for ballistic analysis, but the results have never been made public. But also, Judd was not known to have been castrated. He wasn't nude when he was found. He did have some identifying materials on him and he was shot 10 times in the head, chest, and stomach.
Because of the number of bullets recovered, the killer would have had to reload the gun, which suggests a level of anger that was personal. This type of overkill was not seen in the Reifendiffer and Shook murders. Those victims were shot only once. Also, those victims were killed elsewhere from where they were dumped, while Judd was likely killed where he was found. As shell casings were recovered from the scene and bullets were located directly underneath the body.
During the original investigation in 1980, police learned that Judd had last been seen at a bar in Wyoming in the company of a white man in his 20s, around six feet tall, with a slim build and short blonde hair. That man was last observed early in the morning on the day Judd's body was found about five miles from that location, wearing a red and white plaid shirt and jeans. He was never identified.
but in november 1982 a south dakota prison inmate serving a life term for murder claimed he had information about the judd murder that inmate was 26 year old dirk pace who with his wife as his accomplice had killed a man with a shotgun in 1981.
In the Judd murder, Pace alleged that he had witnessed two acquaintances, Roger Lee Smith and James Alfred Birch, shoot and kill Judd back in 1980. He claimed all four men were partners in a drug ring, and when it was discovered that Judd was skimming drugs from their operation, the other two men proceeded to murder him as punishment.
After receiving this information from Dirk, authorities tracked those two men to Westminster, Colorado, where they were living and arrested them on suspicion of murder. According to reports, those men took polygraph tests and passed, and as a result, were cleared. But Pace provided details of the Judd murder that would have only been known to someone present at the scene. So authorities were satisfied that Pace had something to do with Judd's murder. The other two men didn't, but they couldn't prove it.
And so if Dirk Pace killed Willard Judd, that would rule out Judd's murder as being connected to Marty Shooks and Wayne Reifendiffers. Because Pace was already in custody for the 1981 shotgun murder before Shook was killed. And you guys, when I tell you there are so many potential unsolved cases that could be linked, like so many to the point where it's devastating.
But there are a few that stand out that I just want to briefly mention. One is the murder of 18-year-old David Arthur Stack in June 1976. Stack was last seen at his parents' house in Broomfield, Colorado, getting ready to visit his siblings in Northern California. And he didn't have a car, so he was going to hitchhike, first to Truckee and maybe then to Berkeley.
but he never made it to either city. Nine days later, David Stack's body was found at a water treatment plant off of I-80 in rural Tooele County, Utah. He had been shot twice in the head, his shoes were missing, and he had no identifying items on him. So police at the time in this place, 500 miles from his home, had no idea who he was.
David's body would remain unidentified for another 39 years, during which time his family would never stop searching for him, and never stopped wondering where he'd gone. They remembered him as an outgoing kid who loved to travel and meet new people, and unbeknownst to his family, he had met the wrong one not long after they last saw him. It wasn't until 2015 that dental records and DNA reconciled David's disappearance with the dead body found in Utah.
By the time David's fate was known, his parents had passed away without ever learning what had happened to him. And some of the reasons we're looking at Stack as potentially connected might be obvious, but let's go through them all. Number one, he was last known to have been hitchhiking, leaving home in circumstances eerily similar to Marty Shook six years later.
In fact, he was headed to Truckee from Colorado while Shook was headed from Truckee to Colorado. Number two, David Stack looked a lot like Marty Shook, who according to investigator Steve Ridge closely resembled Wayne Reifendiffer, but we can't confirm as no one on our team has been able to find a single image of Wayne. But Shook and Stack looked a lot alike, both slender young men in early adulthood with long sandy hair.
Number two, David Stack was shot in the head just like Reifendiffer and Shook, though the caliber of the bullet has never been publicly released. Three, Stack's remains were found alongside the I-80 corridor just a mile and a half from the nearest I-80 on-ramp. Number four, he was found dead in Utah just like Shook.
So my view is there are enough similarities here to consider that David Arthur Stack may have been killed by the same person who killed Shook and Reifendiffer. Amadeo Vigil, a 24-year-old university student who went missing in Colorado Springs in July 1980 after he was last seen hitchhiking near I-25 on his way to see a friend in Fort Garland, he hasn't been seen or heard from since.
And in August 1985, a 19-year-old man named David Vernon Lovely was moving across the country from California to Massachusetts. He wasn't traveling alone. His mother and sister were traveling alongside him in a bright yellow Ryder truck with all their belongings while Lovely rode separately on his Yamaha motorcycle. It was like a family caravan, but David wasn't tethered to them.
Every 30 miles, they touched base with each other just to make sure everything was okay. But when they stopped for a break in Evanston, Wyoming, Lovely told them he was having some issues with his motorcycle and he would continue on with the hope of finding a gas station with an on-duty mechanic.
So they said, okay, you go ahead and go. We'll keep an eye out for you. But when they failed to reconnect with him at the next rest stop, they pulled over in the Ryder truck and spent the night hoping Lovely would find them. No one would ever see or hear from David Lovely again. They did end up finding his motorcycle, but no significant clues came from it. And it's worth noting that David Lovely's disappearance, as well as the location his motorcycle was found, were a stone's throw away from Interstate 80.
So the grisly murders of Wayne Lee Reifendiffer and Marty James Shook, although connected, remain unsolved. Well, my friends, that's going to do it for this week. Next week, I'll be back with yet another series of murders that's been forgotten to time, although one with at least a little bit of resolution. Unsolved, but with an asterisk. Can you guess which one? I'll see you then.
