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Hey, Dark Down Easter's. Even though I'm a true crime podcaster myself, you might be surprised to hear that I only listen to a few other true crime shows. I always want to make sure I'm hearing from creators who do their research, who create ethical shows that focus on the victims and their surviving family members, and who bring attention to cases that don't get the coverage they need or deserve. The Fall Line is a podcast that hits all of that criteria. I've been listening to the show for years.
And I want to introduce you to The Fall Line 2. The Fall Line is a deep dive true crime podcast focused on missing people, unsolved homicides, and unidentified persons whose cases have gotten little, if any, media attention.
You'll learn about John and Jane Doe cases across the country and unsolved serial homicides like the Atlanta Lovers Lane murders and the unmatched confessions of Samuel Little. They also cover missing persons cases that never made the national news. You'll hear from the family members in cases like the unsolved homicides of 12-year-old Georgia Leah Moses from California and single mother and business owner Grace Chen, who was killed in Texas.
The Fall Line digs deep into cases, interviewing experts like forensic anthropologists, genealogists, DNA experts, and investigators closest to the crimes. Through narrative storytelling, primary and archival research, and expert and family interviews, The Fall Line introduces listeners to victims and survivors they've never heard of, and explores the reasons why their cases were ignored in the first place.
Look for new releases from The Fall Line on Wednesdays, wherever you listen to podcasts. Right now, I'm going to play you a clip from one of The Fall Line's recent episodes. They've worked in collaboration with Metro Nashville Police to raise the profile of a 1976 Jane Doe victim, often known as Cheryl or Sherry Jane Doe, who was discovered in a local river in 1976.
A picture she carried in her pocket led police to two possible witnesses who said they'd given the victim and a friend of hers a ride outside of Nashville. They said the young woman had been on the way to Florida. All they knew was that the victim had introduced herself as Sherry or Cheryl, and the two young women claimed...
They'd come from St. Paul, Minnesota, where they left a mental health care facility. Now, new forensic art, a possible family lead, and never-before-released information may help identify Sherry Jane Doe. But investigators need your help. So please, listen to this episode excerpt now, and continue with The Fall Line wherever you get your podcasts. This is The Fall Line.
This week, we take you back to Nashville, but in 1976. And then, it's a different city. And a different time, which seems to go without saying. Forty-plus years, and you have not only a different landscape, but three more generations. As a longtime executive told the Nashville Business Journal, quote, "'Nashville was a really small town then. We didn't have tall buildings, or as much traffic.'
Looking at old photos of the skyline, that's not quite true. But what amounts to a city for business and what it means for people are sometimes two different things. He didn't mean that Nashville was bereft of culture, of course. The country scene was long thriving. But Nashville wasn't the sprawling, spreading place it is today, built up, drawing in new residents from all over the South and farther afield.
In the Tennessean newspaper archives, you can see March of 1976 remembered in a series of mostly black and white pictures, a dozen or more of them. A young Albert and Tipper Gore, stumping for his U.S. House of Representatives run. High school cheerleaders in hot pant jumpsuits. Intense coaches and players frozen with a basketball in the air. A celebration of the Humane Society's new shelter.
where everyone is holding a dog or a cat.
One of the few color photos shows off Hendersonville police cruisers repainted with red, white, and blue detailing for the bicentennial. There's a Hilton in the stages of construction with the T-O-N cranked halfway up the building. There's Norval Feltz performing at the exit inn. The annual country radio music seminar is held at the airport Hilton. Minnie Pearl commands a crowd at the Grand Ole Opry.
Life happens, big and small. It's a picture, but it's not the whole one. It never can be. Underneath the city's drift are the other currents. People who were lost, people who come through, headed in all directions. And the 1970s were such a transitory time. Hitchhiking was still common. As Vox points out, laws banning the practice were just rolling into effect.
Cars were becoming more commonplace for Americans of every income bracket and lasting longer. Campaigns to warn of hitchhiking, highlighting its dangers, had begun to gear up among the highway patrols and state police. But it was still a common way to cross a city or state or even the country.
And in March of 1976, two women, maybe teenage girls, their stories were hard to pin down exactly, hitchhiked their way to Tennessee. Witnesses claimed this anyway, that there were two, and that they said they were going further south. That was the story. We don't know if this is an accurate account, but it's all the police had to go on. So, it began something like this.
On March 15th, 1976, two men from East Nashville, Charles Moore and Milton Collins, said they were on Interstate 24, heading southeast, when they picked up two hitchhikers. The men were in Milton Collins' truck at the time. Some people online have speculated that it could have been a big rig, but Detective Matthew Filter of the Metro Nashville PD says that, to his knowledge, it was a non-commercial vehicle, a pickup truck.
Charles Moore thought that it was around 1.30 p.m. when they pulled over to pick up the two women. The men reported the hitchhikers were maybe teenagers and maybe young adults. One of the hitchhikers was a thin, short, white female with sandy blonde hair. She wore glasses, jeans, and a black blouse.
The men said that she told them that her husband, quote, lived in Haines City, Florida, which was their destination. The other young woman had a medium brown complexion and long dark hair.
She was described as "Hispanic or Native American." The men did not describe her in further detail, but they did recognize her when police asked them about certain details. Per police files, she wore distinctive jewelry, a choker set with a white dove and beads, and a rawhide bracelet.
There was a small mole near her left eye, and she also wore blue jeans and a brown leather belt. And she was carrying a picture of a little boy, a toddler really, in her jeans pocket. It was said to be a picture of the other girl's son. That's what they told the men. The women were carrying a single suitcase, but no identification. That's what Charles Moore told police.
He recalled that the dark-haired young woman said that her name was Sherry or Cheryl. We're going to call her Sherry in this episode, but it could have been either. Neither man could recall a name given by the second girl, the one with the husband in Florida.
Charles and Milton weren't headed all the way to Florida, but they gave the young women a ride that got them, as CBS News reports, 85 miles closer to their destination. And on the way, they talked.
According to police files, Sherry told the men, "They had $20 between them and that they could take care of themselves." Both girls said that they were runaways from some type of institution. Sherry stated that she was there for alcoholism and the other girl was there for attempting to take her life. One thing they didn't find out was the two girls' ages.
The men told Metro Nashville police that they took the two young women as far as the I-24 exit at Winchester. There, Charles Moore gave them his phone number, in case they happened to come back through Nashville. But they didn't have any paper with them. So, Sherry pulled out the picture of the other girl's child from her pocket and he wrote across the back,
Little Charlie. His father, you see, was Big Charlie, and then he added his phone number. The men reported that, quote, the last time they saw the girls, they were hitchhiking at the exit, and a pickup truck stopped and picked the two girls up, and the truck headed south on the interstate. One of the men thought, quote, it was a light brown pickup truck, and the other thought it was a late model blue pickup truck.
So, the two young women should have been on their way to Florida. Maybe they were. How far they made it, we don't know. Perhaps the blonde woman was reunited with her son. Maybe Sherry was on her way back or headed somewhere else. Perhaps it had just been a story. Something to tell two men in a truck or another invention entirely. We can't know and we won't guess. What we do know is this.
Sherry, if that was her name, somehow came back to Nashville. If the witness's story was accurate, she traveled back north at least 85 miles, if not more, maybe all the way back from Haines City, across several states. How long had she been in Tennessee? There were no signs of her. Not until Wednesday, March 24th, 1976.
On that day, a fisherman discovered the body of a young woman caught up against a tree in the Harpeth River in Nashville, not far from a bridge on McCrory Lane. Per the Tennessean, the young woman was found face down in about three feet of water. She was dressed in jeans and a white bra.
Later, the Nashville Banner reported that a blue polka dot blouse was found, quote, about three miles upstream, caught on a small tree, end quote, but Metro Nashville police couldn't conclusively state that it belonged to her. At the time, then-Detective Pat Griffin told the Nashville Banner, "'We're not certain the blouse was hers, but it's a good possibility.'"
At first, authorities thought that she might be in her early 20s, but that was later amended. Sherry Jane Doe was probably somewhere between 14 and 17 years old, and according to police records, she died within the last 24 hours.
The scanned PDF of her autopsy that's in our possession is really difficult to read. It's because the original is so faded. Detective Filters' copy is just as hard to make out, particularly on the first page, but there are a few notes that are clear.
Sherry Jane Doe is noted as having burns on her upper left arm and shoulder area. In separate reports, these marks were described as, quote, "possible healed cigarette burns." She also had two surgical scars on her abdomen, but there's no notation regarding possible theories as to what surgery she might have had. They were not noted as recent.
In fact, there are very few details in the autopsy report. Because of that, there are a few things that we can't explain as well as we'd like. We're not certain precisely how she died. Drowning is most likely, but how she entered the water, whether she fell in or was thrown or dumped or entered on her own, isn't something that can be determined.
In newspapers, Sherry Jane Doe's cause of death was identified as drowning. The manner is marked as undetermined in the autopsy, at least in the spot we can make it out, though we've consistently seen it discussed as accidental in the media.
Most of the information is contained in a condensed list of handwritten notes on the second page of the autopsy, something Detective Filter believes was probably written by an investigator on the case versus the medical expert. It's as if the investigator was writing a summary of the information uncovered in the exam while listening to an oral explanation presented by the medical expert who just conducted it.
The notes read as follows: 1. No criminal activity. 2. Fell in the river and strangled on water. Did not drown. 3. Very drunk. 4. Bruise on arm, no indication of foul play. 5. Died of asphyxiation.
The notation that she fell in the water, that's not something that we can fully unpack, as there were no witness reports that can definitely tell us Sherry Jane Doe actually fell or whether she was pushed or thrown or tossed. It seems the medical expert was theorizing that she likely fell in. That's also what no criminal activity indicates. It's highlighted again when the bruise on her arm is specifically mentioned.
Sherry Jane Doe actually had a few bruises noted on her chart. We don't know why the bruise on her arm was ruled as no indication of foul play in this context.
Without more information concerning the effects of water, the medical-legal professional's thoughts on when the bruising may have occurred, and other context, we can't guess as to why this is listed as "no indication of foul play." Though the list doesn't specify, we do want to add another important detail. A more contemporary detective later noted that Sherry Jane Doe had sexual intercourse within a few days of her death.
There were not clear signs of trauma in that context, but as our audience knows, that does not rule out assault. As for the phrase "very drunk," the third page of her autopsy report contains the results of her tox screen, which was run for ethanol and barbiturates. She was negative for the latter, but her blood alcohol content, or BAC, was 0.28.
For perspective, that's about 3.5 times the legal limit. Sherry Jane Doe was about 5'2" and about 125 pounds, so a BAC of .28 is considered very dangerous for a person of that size. Certainly, if she entered the water voluntarily or by force, she could have been so impaired that she would have been unable to safely leave the river.
Finally, we took the most confusing aspects of the autopsy description, quote, fell on the river and strangled on water, did not drown, and, quote, died of asphyxiation to a forensic pathologist, but she was not able to guess precisely what this was meant to indicate.
Without notes on Sherry Jane Doe's lungs and more specifics, she simply could not interpret what the notes specified. For our part, we have wondered if the 1976 examiner was commenting on the lack of water in Sherry Jane Doe's lungs, but again, that's absolutely just a guess. When we spoke with Detective Matthew Filter about Sherry Jane Doe's case, he expanded on a number of the issues that had left us with questions.
So, on this particular case, there are a few aspects of the description of the decedent that seem to make it possible that she could have experienced some kind of assault prior to her drowning. In your opinion, is there enough information available now, 40 years later, to discuss her death as undetermined rather than accidental?
Yes. There's a couple different places in the case file that one lists the manner of death as accidental, and then there was another spot in there that listed it as undetermined. I have reservations just based on some of the circumstances surrounding her death that it would necessarily be accidental. I think they listed it as accidental death.
just because she didn't have any significant injuries or any other injuries that would have contributed to her death. And her BAC was extremely high at a 0.28. So drowning was probably the most likely cause of death. And that's what's listed by the medical examiner is death by drowning. But I would certainly say that
Listing it as undetermined at this point would be a better avenue just because of the general way she was found and circumstances surrounding her death and the location she was at. Look for new releases from The Fall Line on Wednesdays wherever you listen to podcasts.