Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode. If you are watching on YouTube, you probably noticed that my set looks a little bit different and I'm just slowly trying to figure out what I even want this show to be. I really appreciate your guys' feedback. Please let me know if you want me to be more personal, if you like how it's going so far. I feel like this set is just a little bit more
Me and I'm just trying to get there. So thank you guys for following along and thank you for listening So with that being said, let's jump into the episode now some of the most beautiful places in America are also some of its most dangerous the Grand Canyon Yellowstone Mount Rainier the Great Smoky Mountains the
It may not surprise you to know these destinations average between four and eight deaths each year. For all their natural beauty, these are places where visitors are entirely responsible for their own safety. There are no guardrails at the rim of the Grand Canyon. One wrong step can mean permanent lights out as you fall to your death.
The rugged cliffs of Big Sur alongside the California coastline are no different. Big Sur is the longest continuous undeveloped segment of coastline in the United States. It stretches across 90 miles of California's coast from where Hearst Castle overlooks the town of San Simeon all the way up to Carmel and Monterey.
Many spots along the way offer ideal backdrops for selfies and tourist photos, and many people will take great risks just to get the perfect shot. There's even a dedicated page on Wikipedia that lists selfie-related injuries and deaths that have occurred since 2008. And there are hundreds of them. So this isn't some new phenomenon. And today's story explores one such case.
A tragic fall during a photo op overlooking the Pacific from a cliff with a steep drop. But was it just an accident? Or was it something more sinister? April 2nd, 1987 was a beautiful day ideal for a visit to Big Sur.
At least that's what Deanna Hubbard Wild thought when she accompanied her two older friends, BJ and Virginia McGinnis, on a sightseeing trip up Highway 1 to take in the spectacular views alongside the California coastline. Along the way, they stopped at the Seal Beach Overlook to get some cliffside photos with the majestic Pacific Ocean in the background,
But not long after, employees at a nearby art gallery were startled by BJ and Virginia as they burst inside and begged for them to call for help. Their young friend, they said, had just fallen off a cliff where there was a 500-foot drop down to the rocky beach below.
As the gallery employee picked up the phone to dial 911, she felt a lump in the back of her throat. She knew that a drop that deep wasn't survivable. It would take a miracle for Deanna to have survived it.
Deanna Hubbard Wilde was a young woman whom everyone could only describe as sweet, gentle, and giving. She was fun to be around, and although she was determined to have a mild intellectual disability, she didn't allow this to hold her back. When she was 17, she got married to a guy named Jay Wilde, a Navy man, and she moved with him from her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky to San Diego, where he was stationed.
But he was away at sea much of the time and this strained their marriage. Three years into it in 1987, they separated. And as her husband was going away once again, setting sail on the USS Kitty Hawk, he left his 20 year old now estranged wife Deanna to her own devices and honestly in a very tight spot. And it was around this time that she befriended BJ and Virginia McGinnis.
BJ and Virginia, like I said, were both middle-aged. They had a few things in common. Virginia, like Deanna, was from Louisville, and there was a sort of parental warmth that the older couple gave off that made Deanna,
at age 20, at this also vulnerable time in her life, feel comforted. It was a vulnerable time also because Deanna had been clashing with her mother who lived back home in Louisville and may have needed the care and attention of a surrogate parent figure.
And recognizing Deanna was all alone and in a jam, Virginia invited the young woman to move in with her and BJ. They had an empty space in their Chula Vista home because Virginia's son, James, was serving time in prison. And honestly, they could use the company just as Deanna could use the financial relief while she looked for a job and an apartment. So this was back in December of 1986 when Deanna moves in with the McGinnises.
And during the time she lived with them, her mother back in Louisville had trouble reaching her daughter. Virginia McGinnis, the older woman, seemed to be making it difficult for Deanna and her mother to communicate. And when Deanna did return home for a visit, she and her mother clashed and she returned to Chula Vista on less than ideal terms with her mom. And then within just months of moving in with the McGinnises, Deanna was dead, having fallen off that cliff.
When authorities arrived at the Seal Beach overlook, the McGinnises explained that they had stopped to take in the scenery and snapped some photos in the process. And when they were done, they returned to their car while Deanna stayed behind to absorb the view just a little bit longer. And then when they returned, Deanna was gone and only her high heel shoes remained just at the edge of the cliff where the young woman had apparently lost her footing and tumbled over the side.
They never even heard her scream or cry out. This is what they told the officers. She just vanished.
After rescue workers worked their way to the bottom of the cliff, they found Deanna's bruised, broken, and lifeless body face down on the beach. Blood caked her face and wounds covered her hands and fingers. Helicopters were called in to airlift the body to the medical examiner's office where the cause of death would be determined to be the massive head trauma that resulted from Deanna's 500-foot fall. Seemingly a tragic accident.
Before police left the McGinnis's alone, they had one final question for the pair. Are you aware of any wills or life insurance policies connected with your friend, the victim? And the McGinnis's answered emphatically, absolutely not. They said, no way. And that was that. Back in Louisville, Deanna's mother, Bobbie Jo Roberts, mourned the untimely death of her sweet young daughter, whose body was flown back to Kentucky for the funeral.
But Bobbi was having trouble getting her insurance company to release a $2,500 check that would cover her daughter's funeral and burial expenses. So she needed help, and she thought of her friend from church, Steve Kinney, who was a tax attorney and might be able to offer at least some pointers on how to resolve what seemed like your typical insurance company red tape.
When she explained her situation to Steve, he agreed to help her pro bono at no cost, thinking it would be an easy fix. No big deal. Steve thought it would be as simple as sending an attorney's letter to the insurance company to nudge them into paying out.
But when the insurance company got back to him, they told him they would need to see Deanna's death certificate before releasing the funds. Okay, that shouldn't be too hard to obtain. He rang up the deputy coroner's office in Monterey County, California, the county where Deanna died, and he was met with an unsettling surprise when he spoke to Glenn Brown, the deputy coroner, whose responses sounded clipped and evasive.
as he made references to some sort of active investigation. What kind of investigation, Steve wondered. This was somewhat alarming. And when he received the death certificate, he saw that the cause of death was still pending and that the pathologist's conclusion was that an accident, quote, is not the most likely cause of death, which was kind of shocking because the only alternative then would be murder.
And until a ruling could be made showing that Deanna's death was accidental, the insurance company would not release any funds to her mother. At that point, Steve then telephoned Barbara Weekly Jones, the pathologist who documented this conclusion, hoping to get to the bottom of it all. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out.
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The pathologist explained that looking at the autopsy photos, she saw inconsistencies between the condition of Deanna's body and the story that the McGinnises had told.
Deanna had bruises on the backs of her hands and her fingernails had broken off. The McGinnises had claimed that Deanna hadn't made a sound as she fell off the cliff, yet the condition of her hands and fingernails suggested she had been frantically trying to hold on to something, clawing perhaps at the rocky edge and walls of the cliff.
and the bruises on her hands made it look like they'd been beaten or stepped on possibly as she clung on for dear life so for steve kinney what he thought would be a short simple investigation led to a creepy crawly can of worms that i'm sure the mcginnis's wishes had remained tightly sealed because what steve also learned was that the mcginnis's had opened a 35 000 life insurance policy on deanna their young friend
just one day before her death and then immediately filed a claim to collect on it just after her death, which is bold because I guess the amount was small enough. And even in 1987, $35,000 was a pretty modest payout amount.
that it wouldn't arouse any suspicion. But it did, immediately. When the McGinnis's had waltzed into the state farm where they opened the policy to collect on it immediately after Deanna's death, the insurance agent was shocked that the insured died just one day after the policy was open. Steve Kinney discovered that the primary beneficiary on the policy was James Coates. This is Virginia's adult son who was in prison, whom
whom the policy identified as Deanna's fiancé-to-be, which was strange since both Deanna and James were married to other people. Remember, Deanna was only separated from her husband. And the secondary beneficiaries were listed as BJ and Virginia McGinnis. In his phone calls to investigators in California, Keeney learned all he could about Deanna's relationship with the McGinnises, which...
wasn't very much. He wasn't even able to determine how they first met Deanna. But what he did learn, however, was that James, Virginia's son, Deanna's supposed fiance to be, wasn't even living at the McGinnis home at the time Deanna died. He'd been in prison for several months on a burglary charge. So it wasn't clear whether he and Deanna even knew each other.
And even though Deanna had separated from her husband, neither of them had initiated divorce proceedings. At the time when investigators in Monterey County, California asked the McGinnis's about the life insurance policies, they denied that they were aware of any, even though they had just filed to collect. And the insurance agent at State Farm remembered Deanna had accompanied the couple to the office when the policy was opened.
And she seemed disinterested and not fully comprehending of what was going on. So these people were obviously exploiting her intellectual disability as someone who was less naive would have recognized how odd it was that these friends of hers who she just met months earlier were opening a life insurance policy on her. In fact, when she was opening the policy, Virginia had asked two questions that in hindsight seemed suspicious.
She asked if the policy was in force when she signed the check and then asked if the policy paid out in the case of accidental death, which it did.
But Virginia at the time had explained to the insurance agent that Deanna would be traveling to Mexico, and so it didn't seem suspicious at the time because traveling to Mexico from California is not without its risks. Steve Keeney was in contact with Michael Hatch, who was the chief of life claims at State Farm and who had also been thoroughly looking into Deanna's policy.
On the phone, Hatch wasn't able to divulge a whole lot, other than that the case was still being evaluated by field investigators and they weren't even close to paying out on the claim. Steve asked Hatch if he could at least explain why State Farm was still evaluating the case. What were they looking into?
And after some beating around the bush, Hatch explained what the red flag was for State Farm. The very same day that Virginia had opened the life insurance policy on Deanna, BJ also applied to one for himself. And that application was quickly denied. And according to Hatch, never stood a chance of being approved. Why? Steve asked. Hatch couldn't get into specifics other than to say that BJ was seriously ill.
But the fact that BJ had filed for a policy that was denied and was also listed as the beneficiary on Deanna's policy, that compelled State Farm to investigate. The next step for Steve Kinney was obtaining the photos that the McGinnis's had taken that day, which were on a photo disc, which was a type of film cartridge that Kodak first introduced in the 80s.
And when Steve received the disc, what he saw alarmed him. The first photos on the roll looked normal. The earliest photo taken that day was taken from the passenger seat of a vehicle, probably snapped by Deanna of the scenery as they were driving through it. The next couple of photos showed Deanna looking happy and alert. But then the photos that followed showed Deanna in a very different state. She looked
Drowsy, far away, like she was intoxicated or drugged. And then the last photo of Deanna shows her right on the edge of the cliff.
her body rigid and obscured by BJ McGinnis, who's standing behind her with his arm around her and knees bent, seemingly bracing himself to push her over as he looks over his shoulder toward the highway, probably to make sure no one was coming. But then, strangest of all, after Deanna had apparently fallen, more pictures were taken. So the McGinnises didn't go to seek help right away.
Instead, they just continued snapping pictures, one of the edge of the cliff and others of the surrounding area. Steve Keeney believed they were doing surveillance through their camera lens to make sure that no one was around to have witnessed anything.
Six months then went by from the time of Deanna's death. By this point, the death had been ruled accidental. She accidentally fell off the cliff, even though those close to the case suspected otherwise. Like for example, Jefferson County Police Sergeant R.D. Jones in Louisville, Kentucky, who felt that the investigation or lack thereof that had been conducted in California was pure amateur hour and
And he had remembered the death of Virginia's daughter some 15 years earlier. It too was suspicious. Sergeant Jones had investigated it back when he was working as a homicide detective in the 1970s. At the time, the death had been ruled accidental, but the conclusion never sat right with him. The little girl was only three years old when she was allegedly found hanging by her neck inside a barn on the family's property.
Virginia told him at the time that she had been preparing a pony for the little girl to ride, leaving her unsupervised for just a moment when the little girl had apparently slipped off of a tractor on which she was playing, got tangled in some bailing twine and asphyxiated. And of course, Virginia collected an insurance payout as a result of her little girl's death.
Now learning about the suspicious death of Deanna Wilde, Sergeant Jones had the little girl's body exhumed for reexamination. I mean, this is two people who seemingly died in weird accidental ways around Virginia. But that wasn't the end of it. There was the death of Virginia's former husband, Sylvester Reardon, in 1974. The official cause of his death was...
But Virginia was Reardon's caretaker and was responsible for administering all of his meds. And in that case, Virginia had just opened a life insurance policy on him before he died. A policy in the amount of $35,000. And she had listed herself as a nurse. But it goes on.
Another person who died under Virginia's care was her mother, Mary, who died in 1986 in a home the two shared. And again, Virginia collected $35,000 on a recently opened life insurance policy on her mother.
The assumption at this point was that Virginia was a serial killer and these life insurance policies that she opened were for relatively small payout amounts because insurance companies usually won't bother investigating cases where the benefits are below a certain threshold.
And Virginia had also received benefits payouts for a number of suspicious fires that had destroyed some of the homes in which Virginia lived. It seemed like insurance fraud was largely how Virginia had made her living. So all of this is being discovered. And then one day in October of 1987, Bobby Roberts, this Deanna's mother, got a surprise phone call. It was from Virginia McGinnis herself.
She was a calling to express her sympathies. I know about loss, Virginia told her as she went on to talk about losing her own daughter nearly two decades earlier.
Bobby got off the phone feeling both chilled to the bone and absolutely appalled. She wasn't about to let this drop. In May 1988, Bobby Roberts and Steve Keeney were convinced that the McGinnises were responsible for Deanna's death. I mean, multiple deaths, but specifically Deanna's. And in the absence of criminal charges, they wanted justice. So they filed a civil suit.
and the McGinnis's never responded. So the judge in the case awarded them a default judgment of $285,000, which Bobbi had little faith the McGinnis's would ever make payouts on. Okay, most beauty brands don't understand fine color treated hair, but Proz does. They have a formula that can address my specific type of hair needs, which makes sense because it's based on me.
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So they continued to press authorities in Monterey Park who began taking a closer look at the death.
And although the autopsy had not been as thorough as it would have been had Deanna's death been investigated as a homicide from the outset, the medical examiner had the foresight to save a vial of Deanna's blood. Now, more than a year after her death, the blood was sent to a lab for analysis. And the results that came back showed that her blood contained a medication called Elavil, which was an antidepressant known to cause drowsiness.
which Deanna was not prescribed. But who did have a prescription for Elleville? B.J. McGinnis. And he'd gotten that prescription not long before Deanna died. They also took a closer look at the state farm life insurance policy documents, which had Deanna's signature on them, as well as the signature of a witness, Alice Kissane, who was a neighbor of the McGinnises.
Detectives knocked on Alice's door and showed her a copy of the policy with her signature on it. Only Alice didn't recognize it. She knew nothing about it. Apparently her signature had been forged. And it was just as investigators suspected because the signature had a backhand slant that usually indicates unnatural handwriting, which is to say an attempt by the writer to disguise their handwriting.
Investigators sat down with Virginia at this point with a court order in hand and made her duplicate the signature, had her sign Alice Kissane's name. She signed it in what appeared to be her own natural handwriting. A document examiner who was present then asked Virginia to repeat the signature, but this time using a backhand slant. She demonstrated to Virginia what she meant just so there'd be no room for mistake.
Virginia then signed Alice's name using the backhand slant, and when that signature was compared to the forged signature on the life insurance policy, it was identical. But now, when confronted with this, Virginia was claiming something completely different. She said she wasn't even at the Seal Beach overlook that day when Deanna plummeted to her death. It was BJ.
This was a woman who had no shame about telling some big whoppers because both she and BJ had talked to authorities the day of Deanna's death. So there were witnesses who placed her there. But Virginia insisted she wasn't there and pointed to the fact that she wasn't visible in any of the photographs. Only BJ and Deanna were.
But then who took those photographs? In one of the photos, the shadow of the photographer was clearly visible on the ground. So experts analyzing the photo used the position of the sun around the time they were taken, which investigators were able to determine based on the time the 911 call came in. And with that, it was concluded that the height of the photographer was around 5 feet 6 inches, which was exactly the height of Virginia McGinnis.
It took a while longer for investigators to build their case against BJ and Virginia, who by 1989 had divorced and Virginia had reverted to her previous married name, Virginia Reardon, which she had taken from Sylvester Reardon, one of her previous husbands, whose death netted her a $35,000 payout.
And finally, in September of 1989, BJ and Virginia were placed under arrest and charged with murder and conspiracy. But it would take another two years for the case to go to trial. And BJ McGinnis had been battling AIDS during this period. And on the eve of the trial, his health suddenly took a nosedive.
And just before jury selection was scheduled to take place, BJ McGinnis died from AIDS-related pneumonia. He would never face true justice in the death of Deanna Wilde, but Virginia would. The trial began on January 6th, 1992, and in a way that was unprecedented in American law. Rather than having the trial in a courtroom, it took place on the very cliffside where Deanna tumbled to her death.
This would give jurors a firsthand look at the location and allow prosecutors to recreate aspects of the events so they could more dramatically prove their cases against Virginia Reardon. Virginia was represented by a defense attorney named Albert Tamayo, who tried to place the blame entirely on Deanna, whose high heel shoes he suggested was the reason for her fall along with her drugged state.
which he appallingly tried to blame on Deanna by suggesting she was a pill-popping drug addict who helped herself to BJ's medication, which the prosecution contended BJ and Virginia had slipped into her food and or drink during lunch before they stopped at the Overlook.
That was around 3 p.m., and Deanna had ordered a hamburger and a soft drink, either of which the McGinnises could have easily drugged while the naive young woman wasn't looking. And when each side was finished delivering its closing statements, the jury went into deliberation. And when they emerged with a verdict three days later, that verdict was guilty on all three counts. Forgery, insurance fraud, and first-degree murder.
If you're up to no good to that level long enough, it eventually catches up with you. As it finally did with Virginia McGinnis, or Virginia Reardon, or Virginia Hoffman, which was her maiden name. Whatever name you want to call her. And she was sentenced to spend the remainder of her life in prison, which ended up being the next 19 years. Virginia died while serving out her sentence on June 25th, 2011.
When all was said and done, Steve Keeney had invested over $250,000 of his time and money into investigating Deanna's death and bringing to light what really happened. And he did all of this pro bono without ever billing his friend, Bobby Joe Roberts.
I mean, that's mad respect for Steve Keeney for his dogged determination and the level of financial sacrifice he took on to make sure his friend and her daughter got justice. Because without Steve's efforts, Virginia may very well have gotten away with murder for possibly the fourth time in her life.
It makes my heart hurt so much diving into a case like this with a naive and vulnerable person like Deanna, who may have had some mild developmental impairments and who by all accounts was a sweet, trusting, go-with-the-flow kind of person who was in a difficult spot in life and whose vulnerabilities were completely exploited by two evil, heartless people.
And it really makes you wonder how many deaths that are ruled accidental are really murders that remain undetected. I mean, just most recently in the Daybell trial, we learned that Tammy Daybell, Chad's wife, her death was ruled accidental originally, and then they exhumed her body, and now he's being charged with her death.
On next week's episode, we'll look at another case where the motives may have been different, but the bones of it are similar. A deadly fall that at first appeared to be an accident, but the closer investigators looked, the more it began to look like something far more sinister. I hope you'll join me then. Bye for now.