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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. Listen up. I'm Liza Traeger. And I'm Cara Clank, and we're the hosts of the true crime comedy podcast, That's Messed Up, an SVU podcast. Every Tuesday, we break down an episode of Law & Order SVU, the true crime it's based on, and we chat with an actor from the episode.

Over the past few years, we've chatted with series icons like BD Wong, Kelly Giddish, Danny Pino, and guest stars like Padgett Brewster and Matthew Lillard. And just like an SVU marathon, you can jump in anywhere. Don't miss new episodes every Tuesday. Follow That's Messed Up, an SVU podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. Dun-dun!

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? I'm doing well. How about you? I am doing very good. Well, listen, I have a farm story. My kids are not farm kids. I grew up on a farm most of the time and then in the city in Austin part of the time. And we now have, you know, my family's farm and the farmhouse from, you know, we've talked about the Undertaker's house from the 1800s.

And so we go out to the farm a lot. The kids love it. And we decided to venture into the river with a flat bottom boat and a trolling motor. Now, I grew up doing this. Did you ever do stuff like that? Did you ever pop a boat in the lake and put a little motor on it and do any fishing or anything like that growing up?

No, you know, my dad wasn't into fishing. You know, his brothers were. You know, they were, in fact, his oldest brother was a big ice fisher up in Minnesota. I've only fished a couple of times, you know, been out on a boat a handful of times, really, you know, and it's something I probably would enjoy for sure. I'm not sure you would enjoy what we did. Oh. This was...

This was rough because my kids like to hike. They're very outdoorsy. They climb on stuff and have no problem getting hurt. They've never done this before. And like I said, this is how I grew up. Very like Mark Twain, you know, the Huckleberry Finn thing. So we hopped in this flat bottom boat and put the trolling motor in and went under, I mean, more brush than I've ever gone under before. We couldn't even clear it. And we get up from the creek and

onto the river, and we go down, and my kids love to swim in any kind of water. So they hop out and get, of course, promptly incredibly muddy, very, very cold, but they're out there flopping around in the river the way I used to, which was so much fun to see. But this is...

This is what happened. I swung around the boat by myself, left them down there. My dad was watching them and left them down there. And I went up to go get my mom in this little boat. And I see a scorpion, which I have to be honest, I'm not sure I've ever really seen a scorpion outside of some sort of zoo-like situation. And I could not.

remember whether they, can they kill you or does it depend on the scorpion? This was not a black one. It was like kind of gray, pink, but he looked mad. I don't know if, you know, if their venom is something that is that toxic, you know, that would be, that'd be interesting. I know you want to avoid them for sure. But,

My mom said, what did you do? And I said, oh, I flicked him. But what I really did was whacked him with my oar. I had my hand on the trolling motor at the same time, and then I picked up my oar and whacked him off. But I just thought, wow, I know that they can have a pretty wicked effect.

But those are the perils my kids freaked out when I told them about it. And I said, this is when you are in the country, like how I grew up, which I loved, loved it, was you can expect to get scraped up. You can expect to potentially get bitten by some kind of bug or stung. You can expect to get cold and wet or hot and sweaty. And they managed to do all four of those things.

When we were down there, but I just thought, oh my gosh, the scorpion. I have been stung and bitten by just about everything under the sun, but I don't think that's ever happened before. And I just had thought this would be something that would not be a great experience. Well, you know, I used to live in San Antonio, Texas, like from fifth through seventh grade, you know, and I remember the critters in Texas are no joke. And, you know, of course, the fire ants, you know, sitting on a fire ant, you know,

Pio is not a good thing. I remember going into a creek, because I would go off by myself as a boy, and just, I would never let my kids do what I did growing up. There was this creek where I lived in San Antonio, and I remember just kind of playing around by the water, and there was a snake in the water. Oh.

And I was like, oh, I'm going to catch that snake. And so I grabbed the snake by the tail and I pull up out of the water and it was maybe 12 inches, 18 inches long. It wasn't very big, but all of a sudden it's opening its mouth at me. And I was just like, what is this? And then probably thinking back, it was probably something akin to like a water moccasin.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We have them all over our property, water moccasin. You have to be so careful. I'm scared about the dogs being out there. When I was a kid, I would run through all the little trails and stuff. And I jumped over in one of our trails. I jumped over. I don't know if it's like a divot or what it is in the ground. And I turned around to go back and there was a water moccasin curled up in a ball, alive, laying there. And I thought, shut up.

Yeah. Here are the kids, and the kids are like, we don't want to go back on the water again. And I said, listen, most of the time, nobody is going to hurt you if you don't hurt them, but they've never experienced this before. So...

Yeah, you have to be careful. It's just like here in Colorado, you know, we've got real big creatures that can hurt you. In Texas, you got the insects everywhere that can hurt you. Well, this, to me, the creatures on the farm can be a little bit of a mystery. And this kind of brings us into this story. This is a different kind of story that we're going to talk about. It is a medical mystery. And I think you and I have to try to figure out, is it a medical mystery?

Is this a true crime story or just a horrible tragedy? So when we get started on this, I'm going to want to know about medical mysteries or challenges that you've had. Does that sound good? It sounds good. I'll do my best. Okay. Let's set the scene.

This story takes place in 1974, the year I was born, 1974, 4th of July, in Dix Hills, New York. And it's on Long Island, just over the border that divides the island into Nassau County, closer to New York City, and then, you know, eastern Long Island. And in the 70s, this area, Dix Hills, is a new suburb that's full of all of these new housing developments. And it's a place where you can find a lot of

And I think this is going to be important. This is actually a story where I'm not quite sure what is and what isn't important. It's so interesting. Most of these have sprung up in the 60s, but, you know, now there's a lot of new developments. And we're centering this story on a young family. There are two kids here. There's a

little girl named Angelina, who's seven, and another little girl named Deborah, who is four years old, and they are part of the Logue family. They're swimming at their aunt and uncle's pool with six other kids. And again, Fourth of July, they're having a good time.

They have an aunt and uncle named Harry and Lucy Knudsen. And the Logue family lives in Lake Grove, which is about 15 miles away. You know, so this story really kind of the center of it is in Dix Hills. It's not even where the Logue family is located. It's at this pool. So...

The dad's name is Frank. He has gone to work, so he's not there yet. We'll start with what we know about these two kids. Who will become victims? So, Amy...

Angie and Debbie are both described in the contemporary articles as intellectually disabled. Actually, that's not the way they're described, but that's the way I'm describing them. You can imagine the phrasing that they would have used in the 70s. But it sounds like intellectually disabled, again, might be important, might not be.

We don't know what the extent is, but they're swimming and having fun with six other kids. They stop and have lunch. They have like bologna sandwiches and grape juice from a concentrated syrup. I mean, I hate to feel stupid here, but what does that mean? Because I'm not used to that. Is that the stuff that comes frozen in a can and you defrost it and add water? Is that what that means?

Well, I don't know if it came frozen in a can, but it sounds just like, you know, when you're working in a fast food place and you have the soda machines, you know, you have the syrup that's in a, like a keg-like container that you hook into the machine and then the syrup...

And the rest of the drink is mixed by the soda machine. So I imagine, I don't recall this. These girls are my age. I would have been six years old in 1974, you know, but I don't ever recall my mom having some sort of syrup that she would mix to make a drink. You know, there was powders. You remember Tang? I do, vividly. I actually did mind Tang. Maybe I'm the only person besides the astronauts. I liked Tang. Yeah.

I like saying okay. It had a very strong flavor, but I digress. Yes. So, yeah, but I'm assuming that, yeah, that's exactly what it is. You know, you could buy the syrup and then you just mix it with water or maybe a seltzer of some sort and you've got the drink.

So the important points to take away from this are Angie and Debbie are about to get very sick. And everything seems to be shared, like across the board. They're in the same swimming pool. They're eating the same thing that everybody else is eating, bologna sandwiches, grape juice. So far, we can't see why these two kids would get sick, but nobody else does. But let's move along the day. They're swimming. They're having a good time.

They had lunch, and then it sounds like three or four hours later, the kids get out of the pool and they get changed, all the kids, so I think there's eight of them. They've been swimming for hours. They say they're exhausted. But Angie and Debbie are reportedly especially tired. Angie's complaining that she feels cold. She's exhausted. She wants to rest. She walks over, and Angie is the seven-year-old.

She walks over and she lays down on the concrete next to the pool. Her mother picks her up and puts her on a lounge chair and covers her up with a blanket. And then soon her sister lies down on a lounge chair across the pool from Angie. I don't know. My kids get exhausted all the time. This does not seem particularly alarming yet.

But so far, you've got kind of two kids who almost seem like they can't move from exhaustion. At this point, I know you're not going to be able to say what's suspicious or not. But just from what you know so far and me telling you that something is going to happen to both of these kids, what are the circumstances that you could see that could be potentially problematic for them at this point? Well, it's not unusual, right?

You know, kids playing out in the pool. I mean, there's a lot of physical exertion. Of course, even though the water is generally going to be relatively warm, it's still cooler than body temperature. You know, so there is a drain on these kids' bodies. You know, I used to lifeguard.

I didn't know that. Yeah, every hour, you know, we would have the 15-minute break and get all the kids out, and then there would be adult swim. Only the adults were allowed to go in. And part of that was so the adults had the convenience of having the pool without all the kids, you know, splashing around. But it was also kids don't monitor themselves and don't realize how much sun exposure they're getting, how much exertion, how tired they're getting. So it is to give the kids a break.

So, Angie and Debbie being seven and four, right now, from my experience, I go, it sounds like, yeah, they just overexerted themselves. This is not something that would be overly concerning. I know you're going to tell me that their condition is going to worsen.

And now it's like, okay, why just those two kids versus the others? Yep. And so that's going to be the big thing I'm going to key in on. And whatever their condition turns out to be, is it something that occurred while at the pool or was it something that occurred prior to them joining this group? So that's what I'm going to be listening for. Okay. Okay.

So they are laying down sometime between 4 and 6 o'clock. They're exhausted. They lay down. The dad comes home. So whether or not this is important, we'll see. Frank is married to Nancy. Nancy is the girl's stepmother or adopted mother. We're not really clear based on the sources, but she is their mother figure. They have a blended family. Frank is a widower, and he and Nancy together have seven kids, and then there's an eighth kid who's

who the Logues ended up bringing into the family. So there are a lot of kids around, and the pool is full of kids. Frank comes home from work around 7 o'clock. So the girls are not feeling well. Sometime between 4 and 6, they're laying down. He gets in. Nancy says, they're wiped. Go out to the pool and check on them. He grabs a glass of iced tea. He goes out there. They are asleep.

And then Nancy, the mom, comes out not long afterwards and she looks down at Angie and she said, "This is not right." She describes her as looking ashen. And I feel like I've asked you this a million times, but tell me what ashen means when somebody says that. You know, now you're dealing with when somebody gets ill, their circulation is not as good as what it is, you know, so you have the body's natural response

is, of course, it's just like what I experience when I get really cold is, you know, the circulation gets kind of shut down. So the vital organs are receiving most of the supply. And so the face, you know, what you can typically see on a person ends up becoming kind of hollowed

white-ish, but she's not described, it's ashes. She's not saying that she has a blue. Nope. Oh, hue. Okay. Okay. But we have some more description coming up that'll be probably helpful for you too. There's a 16-year-old girl named Jane who is one of the Knudsen's, you know, family members. She's there. She's had nurses training in high school,

which, thank goodness, somebody there has some knowledge because now we have this description. So Jane, the 16-year-old, opens up Angie's eyes, and she sees that one pupil is dilated and one is constricted. And she says to Nancy, the mom, and Frank, the dad, this could be multiple things, but none of them are good.

What does that mean when one pupil is dilated and the other one isn't? I didn't even know that was possible. Well, you know, the differences between the two pupils, at least with what I know, that is typically seen like with head injuries or there's some sort of brain affliction, if you will. And so now when you're seeing these differences in the pupils, you're very concerned about

okay, what's going on inside that person's brain? Is there some bleeding going on? Did they hit their head? And now in terms of under the circumstances right now with the two girls being very lethargic, it sounds like this is more they were exposed to something. And I'm not sure if there would be

A substance that would cause the pupils to be different. That I just don't know. That's where I would be turning to a medical expert and say, hey, what could potentially cause this? Experience the glamour and danger of the roaring 20s from the palm of your hand and

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 Nancy, when she hears that Jane, the student who has some nursing background, is alarmed, she picks up Angie to see what's going on, the seven-year-old. And she says that Angie's body stiffens and then goes limp. And there is a orange-red foam at her mouth and traces of blood in her nostrils. And I will tell you, Paul, later on, there is a substance in both of these girls. So knowing that, what is this?

So a foam, you know, I can think of an overdose, like with cough syrup. You know, you see this foam from just the overdose and the death process, you know, the lack of the breathing, the edema in the lungs that ends up kind of forming, you know, around the mouth. Now the color, the orangish color. Is that vomit? Maybe vomit, yeah.

dilute blood, you know, color is subjective. You know, now blood in the nose, you know, that of course is very concerning in terms of what's happening internally and what is that source of the blood? Is that coming into the lungs and is now being breathed up into the oral and nasal cavities? Was there any type of injury that is causing some internal bleeding? We'll see like significant injuries to the skull,

can cause blood to end up forming in the nasal cavity just because of the internal bleeding that's occurring. But as of right now, there's no, nobody's observing any type of trauma to either girl's heads. Nope. Okay.

Not a bit, but let's continue on. Now everyone's alarmed. They call emergency services and they get the Knudsen aunt. Her name's Lucy. She was a surgical technician with the Army Medical Corps and she began mouth-to-mouth.

as the emergency services folks were going to respond. They show up, they take Angie to Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip, New York. And right after Angie is driven away, the family, I'm sure, had been looking at Debbie, but now Debbie looks bad too.

They put her in the police car and they take her to the hospital. Now, unlike Angie, Debbie, the four-year-old, is conscious in the police car. And she actually, the police remember, she said that the siren was way too loud. But back in the ambulance, Angie, the seven-year-old, is rapidly deteriorating. And her heart and her breathing stop before they even get to the hospital. And Debbie's not getting any better either.

So heart and breathing stopped. Does that make sense to you based on everything that we've heard so far? She's spiraling. Physically, she's spiraling. So, you know, it's what is causing the breathing to stop. And this is a three-hour period at the most. They were fine up until about three and a half, maybe, maybe hours ago. It could have been even less. Yeah, you know, some sort of poison, some sort of toxin, where now it's interrupting the nervous system, right?

There's different things that are going through my head. Was this something that the girls ingested, you know, that was separate from what the other kids were taking into their body? You know, as we talked about at the beginning, you know, the scorpion.

You know, did these two girls, you know, were they bit by, you know, some sort of spider like a brown recluse? You know, they just happened to both get bit. You know, right now, I don't know. It's just they're going through, I mean, with Angie, you know, the fact that her respiration and her heart are both stopping, that's very concerning. This is not a good situation.

No, and they had just been swimming for hours, had lunch. I mean, the way that this is devolved is horrible. Okay, well, they're both at the hospital now, the seven-year-old and the four-year-old. They both are immediately put on ventilators in the ICU because now I'm assuming Debbie has stopped breathing too shortly after Angie dies.

And they try to now save Debbie, and she is in a coma. And the doctors think what you think, that they must have ingested something or come into contact with...

with some kind of toxic substance, but the doctors have no idea what. So they call a toxicologist from the medical examiner's office. Thank goodness we have them. We haven't always had them in our stories, these toxicologists. The toxicologist comes in and he looks at their blood, their urine, the stomach washings from both girls.

They said that he stayed up all night analyzing the samples using a thin-layer chromatography and ultraviolet spectrophotometry. Nothing. I mean, does that mean anything? Are those just two tests? Yeah, you know, they're very limited tests relative to what can be done today with instrumental analysis. In that short period of time with that type of testing, it would be very...

very narrow range of compounds that the toxicologist would be able to detect and not at a very sensitive level. Let's continue on because we'll also have an autopsy that could be helpful.

So the toxicologist and his boss and the county medical examiner come to the conclusion, which we've already said, is that the girls have been poisoned either by something so unusual they can't figure out what to test for or something so obvious that they're missing it. Does that make sense?

to you the way they're saying it? I mean, I guess that's the problem with toxicology. Yeah, because, you know, even today, the way that the testing process goes, you know, you can screen for classes of drugs. You know, you do these presumptive tests. Okay, I'm looking for opiates. I'm looking for amphetamines. I'm looking for this. But then if you don't pick the right test, you

you can completely miss a substance. And so this is where getting the pathologist to weigh in in terms of what the observations are from within the body, what kind of symptoms are there, that can give a clue as to what compounds potentially could be present for the toxicologist to go, "Okay, these are the types of tests I need to run to see if these compounds which give these physical symptoms are present in these girls' bodies."

Part of what's kind of going through my head is, okay, we have these two girls that were with a group of kids at a pool for a substantial period of time. They're rushing these tests overnight, which is unusual. And I got to think that they're looking at this from a public health standpoint. Was there something that these two girls were exposed to? Maybe they're more...

susceptible to whatever they were exposed to and are the other kids that were with them at risk and they just haven't developed the symptoms yet. There's also a concern is, okay, what is in that pool environment that the girls could have been exposed to? Any chemicals? Maybe they went around the maintenance shed and there were some chemicals that were laying out that they could have been exposed to.

But then also, well, what's happening at the house, you know, inside the house? What could they have gotten to, whether it be in the house or outside the house? Or is it accidental? Is it intentional? You know, this is where now the investigative side, both from a health standpoint as well as a potential criminal standpoint, needs to start kicking in.

Well, they bring in someone who's very promising, I think. His name is Dr. Sidney Weinberg, Suffolk County Medical Examiner. He is the county's first medical examiner. Up until then, Suffolk County had used the coroner system, you know, which meant that the causes of death were determined by a network of municipal appointees. Mm-hmm.

Some who didn't have a lot of training. And Dr. Weinberg had been mentored by New York City's best doctors, including a medical examiner named Dr. Milton Halpern, who I have also read a lot about. I know oftentimes you'll say, we need to know kind of what this guy's background is. How much would he know? For 1974, it sounds like Dr. Weinberg is the best we're going to be able to get

And he takes this mystery on because he is legitimately scared. Just like you said, will this affect the other six kids or will this affect other people? What is this or do we have a killer? Have you had a lot of these kind of medical mysteries before or no? I wouldn't necessarily get involved with this type of case case.

There would be the times when I'd be getting called out to a crime scene because there is a question, do we have a crime?

And sometimes I've gone out and it turns out, no, you know, it's a suicide versus homicide or was an accidental versus homicide. I do recall one thing that happened, I mean, many decades ago in our coroner's office, and this was happening in a different medical examiner's office down south where there was concern that the coroner or medical examiner's staff were being exposed to

to something that the deceased bodies were bringing in to the morgue. And, you know, so now there was a medical mystery as to, "Uh-oh, what's going on?" And then there was also a concern that there was a, like, a form of hysteria

where people were now thinking they were exposed and they were developing certain symptoms, but it was all just more in their mind out of the fear, you know, that they had been exposed to something. What were the symptoms? I mean, what were people coming up with that made people so scared? I don't even remember, you know, that this was where there was just something going on

that seemed to be afflicting multiple coroner's offices back in the day. And I know they were digging into it, and I don't think they ever got to the bottom of it outside of maybe this mass hysteria type of situation. Well, that's frightening. That's awful.

Well, let's get back to this story, which is a big medical mystery. And the reason I gave you all that background, you know, about Dr. Weinberg is because it does sound like he was really legitimately an excellent medical examiner. And this is one of the very few cases that had stumped him.

So Debbie is still in a coma the next day, July 5th. And Dr. Weinberg and his deputy do an autopsy on Angie. And they look, they collect samples, they examine her, I'm sure just spending an incredible amount of time. And he said they couldn't find a thing, Paul. Nothing was wrong with her organs. We talk about blackening, corrosion, all this stuff with poisons. And he said perfectly healthy looking girl, seven-year-old girl. Wow.

Wow. You know, part of the autopsy process, of course, there's the gross anatomy side where now they're doing the dissection, they're taking a look and seeing, you know, do the organs look healthy? There's no obvious physical abnormalities. You know, the color is right. There's no tumor, you know, everything that they do in an autopsy from a gross anatomy standpoint.

But then they also do a microscopic analysis on the tissues. So each organ, you know, they will take sections and then using a microtome, they're able to slice the tissue and put it under a microscope, put it on a microscope slide and look at it under a microscope to see, you know, do I have any cellular level issues going on? And I'm assuming that he has done that as part of this process and is still coming up completely stumped.

Let me tell you about the thoroughness of this investigation, especially for 1974. Let me take you through everything that they analyzed. So, you know, they have Angie's autopsy. They've sent out all these samples. They're trying to figure out. They haven't found anything so far, but he's continuing to do tests. They're really brainstorming about what kind of tests they need to run specifically on Angie's samples. They then go to what could be the source, which I'm sure you would ask me about.

They test the swimming pool water, nothing. They look at the other four children, nothing. They have no symptoms. The other kids that were in the pool, no symptoms at all.

They look at the soil. They take samples of plants and berries. They collect all the chemicals in the house and the cleaning agents. They grab some mushrooms that the girls could have eaten, seven and four. My kids would have eaten random mushrooms probably at that age. Nothing. Toads. I don't know if that's a licking situation, but toads.

Nothing. They have not found anything. And so he says, we need to go bigger. We need to go to better labs than what we have. So they send samples out to Florida and California, which I guess at the time had better labs than what they had in Long Island. Nothing. And in the meantime, Debbie dies. So now you have two little girls who are dead. It takes her a week.

She's in a coma for a week, and then she dies. Awful. Well, yeah. I mean, imagine, you know, these two girls have lost their lives. The parents have just lost their daughters. Why? You know, it's like, what has happened here? It is a very concerning medical mystery. It almost seems like it's too fast to be something, like, viral, right? Yeah. It's just really interesting. Okay. Yeah.

Dr. Weinberg, even though now Debbie has died, they of course want to continue on because this, you're right, could become some sort of public health crisis. And of course, it could be an intentional poisoning. We don't know. So he starts looking at what they could have been exposed to that was not something they had tested, as in, does the city or the state put out some type of poison, you know, that could have done something to them? So

The girls could have been exposed to something called chlordane, which is a pesticide. They had been playing the day before in their yard at Lake Grove while their neighbor's house was being sprayed with chlordane for termite removal. It says exposure, whether ingested, inhaled, or through the skin, causes fatigue, confusion, dizziness, loss of coordination, convulsions, unconsciousness, or death. Ugh.

Well, my understanding, many of the pesticides are focused specifically to try to disrupt like the nervous systems of insects, but avoid disrupting such things in humans. You know, you don't want to be spraying such a toxic chemical that a human could be exposed to and all of a sudden now, you know, they are being killed.

It appears that exposure to chlordane in and of itself isn't going to cause anything necessarily very acute, you know, unless you have direct ingestion. And in terms of, you know, treating for termites, of course, it's in a gaseous form. And that appears to be the number one route of ingestion is through breathing this gaseous form of chlordane. So now it's like, well, could Angie and Debbie have been exposed

in such an environment, you know, and did they get such a high level of this that it's now truly an overdose situation of this pesticide? And that's what Dr. Weinberg is thinking, too. He talks to some neighbors, and neighbors say that there have been some birds dying in the area, and they had suspected that it was connected to the chlordane. So Dr. Weinberg sends those dead birds out

And then he also sends the girls' tissue samples, both of them now, out to see if there are any traces of chlordane. Nothing. No chlordane. I mean, what the hell is this? It just keeps going and going, and there's more tests.

Well, you know, I like what the pathologist is doing. I remember back in the day, and I don't know if they still do this, and they may be doing this. In fact, I think they were doing this when we were recording one time before near your house where you have these trucks driving through emanating these big clouds to kill off the mosquitoes. Right.

You know, and that's something that the city or the state is doing. And of course, it's like, well, what is that compound that I am being exposed to? You know, what's not only the short term effects, but what's the long term risks to my health? Something like that. I like his thinking. But why just Angie and Debbie? Yeah.

Right. So Dr. Weinberg is so upset over this. He thought he had found the answer, and he didn't because the two-year-old daughter of the family who had this spraying happened

got briefly ill after the spring, but totally recovered. And then, of course, it comes back negative. And he said, well, I have to move on. He says to the newspaper, I'm sure you'll like this quote. He says to the newspaper, we just keep going back and back over and over everything we had. But still, it's so frustrating. I can only say that I don't know at this point.

I'm sure this was just for somebody who's used to solving cases must have been maddening for him and scaring for, you know, not just this family, but just anybody in the area. What is going on? No, for sure. And that that can be very frustrating, you know, especially when you're used to being able to solve the puzzle.

And when you can't solve the puzzle, you know, that's frustrating. I've been there multiple times, you know, both in the lab environment as well as when I got involved investigatively, you know, and you just get so frustrated. And it's such a blow. In many ways, it's a blow to your ego because you think I should be able to get this answer and I can't.

Because both girls are intellectually disabled, the investigators wonder if there is something with their metabolism that would put them uniquely at risk. I'm not sure if that's the case, but I know that he's really grasping at straws, I think, at this point. What do you think about that?

There, of course, we are individuals, and we do have some differences from one individual to another in terms of how we metabolize. Even something like alcohol, you know, that can be metabolized differently in terms of more quickly in some individuals, in some ethnicities than others.

So there is that variability. And then there could be genetic conditions that could have faulty metabolic processes, you know, and I don't know these girls' actual genetic condition, you know, is this a trisomy situation where they, you know, have...

multiple, I think, what is it, the 21st chromosome? And what does that do from certain metabolic pathways with certain compounds? So for me, that makes sense, that there could be something that they are more susceptible to, either due to a genetic condition or just due to their own inherited metabolic pathways, but still...

You got to figure out, is there a compound they were exposed to? Or is there something else going on here? Let's eliminate one more thing. The neighbors and a relative of the Logues, so this is back at Angie and Debbie's house, not at the Fourth of July party. They say that there had been a smell in the air around their house. They don't really describe it, but they just say it was a strong smell. I mean, I would assume it's gas is probably what they think it is.

A relative who had been there said the smell was incredible. It made your throat dry. You could smell it in the yard and within a two or three house radius either way. But the girls had been away from the house all day. They were at the Knudsen's house for hours before the symptoms began. So does that make any sense? Is that like carbon monoxide or something?

Well, carbon monoxide is odorless. Do they have more of a description of the smell? Did it smell like rotten eggs? No, they didn't. It just said that there was a very strong smell. And that's why I was thinking, unless it was that specific, it probably was that sort of like gas smell, I guess. I don't know. But nobody had an explanation for it, and it didn't last very long. Would it have been delayed if it was something in the air like that? Would they really have been able to go swimming underwater?

all day long after being exposed to whatever this was in the air? I don't know. You know, that's... I think that's going to be dependent upon what it potentially could have been that they're exposed to. I mean, had they been exposed earlier in the day, and of course it takes a while for...

whatever they're exposed to for the symptoms to manifest. So by the time that it gets towards the end of the pool party, now they're really feeling it. When you have this strong fleeting smell, immediately my head goes to drug labs.

Somebody's cooking dope, you know, and now you have an odor for a period of time. And then when they're done with the cooking process and everything's, you know, is vented, then it's gone. You know, was there something like that going on in a neighbor's house? That would be part of...

what I would be looking at. Well, Dr. Weinberg spends six months trying to figure this out, and he is still stumped. He cannot figure it out. A reporter asks him about foul play, and he says, quote, "'I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't think that in the back of my mind.'" But he also said, "'It's a very hairy thing to make those kinds of accusations.'"

So he's stumped. And even if he thinks really that this is foul play, we're so far away from even figuring this out that I'm sure he's very judicious about the way he approaches this with reporters at all. That would be not good to accuse a parent of something. Right. But this is where, you know, I think this is such an unusual situation. And it's being approached by the medical examiner and there's a public health concern that

He's trying to determine cause of death, but also eventually he has to be able to put out manner of death. So most certainly the death investigators that work for the medical examiner's office, from my perspective, they should be conducting an investigation, interviewing the parents, and

separately and getting, you know, getting statements in terms of, okay, what was going on inside the house? What did each of you do? Where were the girls, blah, blah, blah. And at least locking that in right now, I don't see where law enforcement investigators would necessarily be coming in. You know, you're not pulling in a homicide. They're, they're,

These two girls, unless there was like, yeah, they're really a strong suspicion of intentional poisoning, that's when you'd be bringing in the local, whether it be a sheriff's jurisdiction or local PD investigators,

to interview the parents, interview everybody at the pool, et cetera, in order to be able to figure out, okay, is there potential criminal intent going on here? Right now, it really is cause of death, manner of death investigation. And six months later, and he still doesn't have an answer.

Now he actually does, thanks to a lab in that glorious state of California that solves at least part of this mystery. So this is what they say. They found a very heavy presence in the girls, both girls' tissue of hydrocarbons.

Now, this is broad. I did not know this. So what my notes say is in the 70s, hydrocarbon poisoning is rare. But today, some small children are poisoned by ingesting hydrocarbons about 55,000 times a year. Weinberg says he believes the girls died from ingesting something like...

gasoline or kerosene, but hydrocarbons are found in all sorts of things, beeswax, cosmetics, but it is there. That is what is in their tissue is hydrocarbons. And for it to show up, Weinberg says there has to have been a lot in there. What is that? Well, you know,

hydrocarbon is such a generic compound. There's so many different versions of hydrocarbon. Some of them are volatile. So when you initially said hydrocarbons, I'm thinking, you know, how you sniff markers. I have not done that, but okay. Have you have? You've

I wouldn't say abusively, but when you're a kid, you know, you smell that marker smell, you know, and so now you have that volatile chemical. And then, of course, there's intentionally inhaling the gaseous force. But, of course, hydrocarbons, as you get into the larger molecules of hydrocarbons, they are in a liquid form at room temperature.

and you can definitely ingest them that way. When he's saying kerosene or gasoline, you have that. Now I'm immediately going to this grape syrup.

Did the other kids also have that drink? They did. Everybody did. Even the adults had it. Everybody did. That's the problem. Weinberg says, look for anything that is a hydrocarbon, kerosene, gasoline, anything. And the Knudsen's say there's a charcoal lighter and a can of oil. But Weinberg ruled these out. There was a can of gasoline, but it was in a locked shed. It had been there all day long.

And, you know, Weinberg keeps going back to, for it to show up, a fair amount of the substance had to be ingested by these kids. And he thinks that it would have been ingested about two hours before the symptoms show up, which is in the middle of swimming. I'm sure they interviewed people and said, were they ever out of sight? Six kids, probably one of them got out to use the restroom. They did something. It sounds like to me, they must have done something. But

they're not able to locate whatever that source is of hydrocarbons. And I would think if it was something like gasoline, there would be such a strong odor that, you know, the parents, you know, when the girls are kind of getting lethargic,

you know, there would be a strong smell. And then, you know, if they're ingesting so much of it, I would think that the, you know, the inside the mouth, the esophagus, the stomach would possibly be showing some damage from that type of exposure. And at autopsy, they didn't see that, right? You know, I'm going back to the foam around Angie's mouth, you know, an orangish tinged foam around

you know, was this orangish color from whatever Angie ingested. But she was given mouth-to-mouth. Wouldn't that taste come up with,

with Lucy Knudson, who was the surgical technician who gave her mouth-to-mouth? Well, that's where it's like, if it's one of these combustible substances, gasoline has a very strong smell because, of course, it's very volatile. Something like kerosene isn't as volatile, but they have a strong smell. And so...

So, yes, mouth to mouth, I would imagine, you know, this adult is putting her nose, her mouth right up against Angie, that she would be noticing that smell and possibly tasting something. But there may be other sources of hydrocarbons that don't have such a strong smell or taste. Yeah.

Well, let me ask you this. I don't know if this makes sense or not, but if it's something like beeswax or anything like that, chewable, it would have shown up in their stomachs, right? They would have found it at the autopsy. Yes. So it's not chewable. And if it was drinking gasoline or kerosene, that just doesn't seem right. It would have corroded the stomach pretty quickly. They would have thrown up. There's no way you could do that, right? Right.

Yeah, I have a hard time thinking that it's drinking something like gasoline or kerosene. Yeah, so it's inhaling. I'm leaning that direction for sure.

So, two little girls, how much would you have to inhale of gasoline or kerosene or whatever to cause death? It just depends. And then we're back to the metabolism. What kind of effect did their metabolism have on all this? Again, that's where you have to rely on these medical professionals. Whether it be the pathologist, the toxicologist, it's reaching out sometimes to your academics, your PhDs at universities, maybe some toxicology specialists.

Finding the right people who can say, yeah, the symptoms, how they onset, the autopsy findings, everything, this is the type of compound and this is the source of the compounds that these girls could have been exposed to. And now you have a direction. Okay, where would they have been exposed to that?

within their world that particular day. Well, this is a 14-month investigation, and Dr. Weinberg says it is one of the most bizarre cases I've ever seen. And finally, in September of 1975, which is a year and some change after this happened, he gives up, and he says the cause of death was coma of undetermined circumstances, and it's unsolvable as far as he's concerned.

How horrible. I don't know how much there was suspicion around the parents. I bet there was. But at least he was able to figure out what substance it was. And it wasn't arsenic or cyanide or anything else where traditionally somebody would use flypaper, you know, somebody would use to poison kids. This does seem like an accident, right? Yeah.

That's the way it seems. He at least has a cause of death. You know, he's indicating this presence of hydrocarbons.

is causing this coma and the shutdown of their bodies, but the manner of death is undetermined. Yep. You know, it's most definitely not suicide. Mm-mm. It could be accidental. Mm-hmm. It could be at the hands of another, but he did the right thing and said it was undetermined. You know, but I'm now like, I'm curious as to, well, what exactly did these girls get into? I know. Or what were given to them? You know, it's...

I mean, to lose your two young daughters that quickly and you don't have a clue as to what happened. I hate unsolved mysteries. It drives me crazy. I can't stand it. And I am not a huge fan of medical mysteries, but this was really interesting. You know, I wasn't sure about this case because it's not your traditional true crime story. And I talked to our producer, Alexis, about it. And she said, this is a good case for you guys. You should do it.

So I feel like I'm closer to answers after talking to you about it. But boy, this poor family, my goodness.

Well, I always, you know, this is a 1974 case and, you know, this is the era of cases that I worked from the criminal side. You know, going back to these unsolved homicides and having 50 years of advances in terms of technology, in terms of just better knowledge of case circumstances,

I kind of wonder, like with this medical mystery, you get now a toxicologist, another medical examiner, and they would, in essence, open this up as a cold case. And is there something that, whether it be within the documentation or whether there's still preservation of these girls' tissues, that could be done today in order to get an actual answer? So that's what I'm kind of curious about because I would want to know.

Well, this was an interesting case. Maybe I'll start looking at medical mysteries in the future. I feel like the last few cases we've had have been pretty heavy with toxicology. So I look forward to continuing down that road with you. I think the more that we do these cases, the real weird ones like this, too.

not necessarily the criminal profiling, but the really getting into forensics and the tools available and eliminating things and causes of death and all of that. It helps me with my job, and I know it helps you too. So this has been a good one for me, Paul Holes. Thank you. Oh, well, you know, it sounds like I'm going to have to have a toxicologist on speed dial as we're talking about these types of cases. You need to have your hand on that 1890 toxicology book or whatever you have.

Herbs and remedies. That's right. Okay. Well, I'll see you next week. All right. Sounds good, Kate. 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 McClashan, Allie Elkin, and Kate Winkler-Dawson.

Our mixing engineer is Ben Talladay. 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 now. And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.