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No.
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Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder Express. Yay! Choo-choo! Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petrogallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today, all aboard the murder train, pulling away from the station with some real weird stuff today. Oh. Oh, fun. One of those with a clue. I love a... Yeah? Yeah, when you have, like, an old-timey murder almost, like, with a clue in it.
that you find. I love that sort of thing. It makes me feel like I'm playing a board game. So I'm going to solve this thing. I have the clue. Here it is. Fun stuff. We'll get to all of that. First, though, before we get into everything, just want to say head to shut up and give me murder dot com right now. Virtual live show still available. You can still get that. Pick that up.
Also, you can pick up tickets to regular live shows, May 31st, Durham, North Carolina. Yes, sir. Tickets still available. Still a few tickets there. Almost gone, actually. But the next night, Nashville sold out. So get your tickets there. Also, other shows over the course of the year. We have...
Minneapolis. That is going to be our biggest show ever. If you guys sell that bad boy out, it will be our biggest show ever. You will beat Chicago. Can you beat Chicago? Try. Can you do it? Can you do it? Maybe you can. You guys are nice up there. Let's see. Check those out. Also, end of the year, Boston and New York are going pretty fast, so you want to get those too. So just a little heads up there. Shut up and give me Murder Duck.
Patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get all the bonus stuff. $5 a month or above will get you hundreds of back episodes immediately. New episodes every other week. Right. It's the best bargain you're going to have here. A cup of coffee or all of this stuff.
Yeah. You're not going to find better. And this week, what you're going to get for crime and sports, which you'll have access to, that bonus, we're going to talk about the Otani gambling scandal and the basketball gambling scandal and some old gambling scandals that the NFL just swept under the rug like they never happened. So those are a lot of fun. Then for small town murder, it is conspiracy theory rabbit hole time, baby.
Let's do it. Let's go down a rabbit hole. A guy wrote a book. He spent decades and pretty much ruined his whole career writing this book. Let's find out. Was Charles Manson really a CIA asset that was put up to all of this stuff by the government? We'll find out.
And, well, obviously we won't know the answer, but we'll talk about it for sure. We'll try, yeah. And some other CIA murdery things also. Patreon.com slash crime and sports is where you get all of that. And that said, I think it's time, everybody. Oh, yeah. It's time to take a deep breath here. Let's get into the story because it's wild. Here we go. Arms to the sky and let's all shout. Shut up and give me.
murder let's do this everybody shall we let's go on a trip here we go and uh again if you listened earlier in the regular show this week or small town murder you know that we're both ill so yes if you hear it it's it's there obviously our voices don't sound quite as crisp as they might because we are very sick but in our minds we're healthy so we can do this just our our voices and our respiratory systems aren't terrific at the moment
So let's go to Utah. What do you say? Okay. Oh, boy. I've been having too much fun lately. Let's go to Utah.
I need some alone time. Yeah, I need some quiet reflection here. We're going to Price, Utah. Price. It is about two hours to Salt Lake City and about two hours and 35 minutes to Fillmore, Utah, which is our last episode in Utah. Episode 441, Bashed, Slashed, and Scattered, that was called. Oh, my God. That was a brutal one. Yeah, that was Utah. Utah.
I'm telling you one thing. They might be nice. They might knock on your door with a smile on their face. But man, when murders happen there, they let it all out. Is that where the Bloodsickles was at too? I think it was. That's the Bloodsickles. Yeah. The Bloodsickles with the dad half dead riding the snowmobile. That was the guy with the lion back
in the day. Oh, my God. Remember that guy with the explosives and the lion? What in Christ's name is happening? It's wild. It's all happening in Christ's name. That we do know if it's happening in Utah. But other than that, who knows? Somebody's name. Somebody's name. Population here, 8,192. Okay. It's a pretty small town, actually. Median household income here, much lower than the national average. It's 45,429. Okay. Wow.
About $25,000 under the national average. Median home price here, $251,900. Also below the national average. Because it's not really commutable to anything. You've got to be in price. You're living in price. So that's when you see houses' prices really drop when they get out of the commuting range of a big city. Is it south of Salt Lake? I think it's north of Salt Lake. It's got to be.
I thought it was north of Salt Lake, but I could be wrong. No, no, it is south of Salt Lake. It's got to be, because Salt Lake's already almost to fucking Idaho. Well, yeah, you'd have to be in a mountain to be north of it, like sitting atop a mountain, really. So a little bit of history. They think it was named after the LDS Bishop William Price of Goshen, Utah. It probably was. I assume it is. More than likely. Any town name you go, is that named after that LDS Bishop? They'll say, yes, okay, that's what I thought.
You're probably right. It's a pretty good guess. Any town name. Is there a bishop or somebody high up in the church with this last name? Yes, then probably. Probably thought so. He explored this area in about 1869. Price County is the seat of, or Price, Utah is this county seat of Carbon County.
Is that right? They hold all the records, as we know here. Here's a little story from back in the day that I found pretty amusing. Caleb Baldwin Rhodes and Abraham Powell, they were trappers from Salem, Utah. They were the first recorded settlers in the Price River Valley.
Okay. They got here in 1867 in October. They built a cabin in the northwest corner of what is now Price, but was then nothing. They returned to Salem when the trapping season was over. They said, oh, man, this place is great. And people were like, oh, wow, really? Wow. So a whole group, you know, he convinced a group to join them in relocating to the valley. Let's live there permanently. And then they
They said, okay, but Abraham Powell couldn't get back there because he was killed by a bear instead on the way there. Oh, my. He was like, yeah, let's move back. And on the way, he was just mauled by a bear, and he never made it back. Whoops. Whoops. So one of the guys got back. Reviews of this town. We'll do a couple. Here we go. Four stars. Price is a great place to live. There's so many Christmas lights during Christmas. If you want to, you can walk to places.
If you want to. If you want to. I mean, you don't have to. It's not part of the rules or anything. Big Christmassy vibe around here. Yeah. There's a lot of small towns. It's like a Hallmark. One of those Hallmark rom-coms that they make where it's Christmas town fucking love fest. And everybody tries. That sounds like an orgy. That doesn't sound like one of the movies. But you know what I mean. A lot of red velvet and snowball puffs. Yeah.
There's amazingly eight attractive women who all own cupcake shops in the one town, which is really weird. Four stars here. This is one sentence. They are always quick to get to the scene.
Who? Yeah, who? The police? Firemen? Fucking newspaper? What are we talking about? Scene of what? Yeah, that's terrifying. And then finally, three stars, the restaurants in our area are pretty good. However, our town can use some improvements on the nightlife part.
It's a small town in rural Utah. Do you expect hedonism at the nightclub? What nightlife is there in that proximity to Salt Lake City? He says, coming from Phoenix, Arizona, there were nightclubs. Yeah, that's a completely different place. That's a metropolis. That is a hellscape. Yeah, it's a metropolis. Of sin.
There's four million strip clubs in Phoenix and Scottsdale and Glendale and all these different towns. What are you talking about? There were nightclubs available to kids who are 18 and over. Non-alcoholic places that have those. If Price had something like that, it would liven up the weekends to a lot of teenagers. But how many teenagers can there be? There's only 8,000 people.
And then you've got to convince the fucking, all the older people that nightlife for a child is a necessity. Yeah, that's what we need. We need the kiddie night. We need the non-alcoholic nightclub. We need the night, you know, open up Shirley Temples for me, please. We need that.
Ridiculous. So then she goes on to say, or he, my favorite dishes in the area are from the smaller restaurants who have unique dishes. For example, Winger's has their personal, quote, creamy amazing sauce. Oh, my God.
Fucking wingers. Creamy amazing sauce does sound unique. Like DNA unique, probably. Yeah, it's one in a billion, man. Wow, which is unique and delicious. Grog's creates their own personal sandwiches, and you cannot find any other sandwiches like that. But if nightlife could improve, then people would have better reviews on food places and nightlife. Yeah.
Why? Because you're I don't know what the hell they're talking about. There's great sandwiches and you and wing jizz. I want more. I want wing jizz and sandwiches. It's all I have here. Really? I want to have those late at night. Is that possible? It seems like that's what they're looking for. A Denny's, I think, would satisfy this person. So things to do in this town. The Price Greek Festival.
Okay. There's more Greek. 8,000 people. But somehow. Greek Fest. Yes, there's more Greek people here than anybody, any other ethnicity for some reason. So they say to come out and eat, drink, and dance at the Greek Festival. Oh, boy. It's an extraordinary event, of course, that will take place at the historic Assumption Greek Orthodox Church.
Yeah, bring your hairy shoulders. Let's party. Wow. Bring your hairy shoulders and your penchant for anal sex and cheese that doesn't melt because we're coming through.
Let's do it. Non-melting cheese. Non-melting cheese. We had a whole long thing about that on your stupid opinions. So many folks will enjoy the endless Greek food and pastries that have been prepared by the church's parishioners. One person says, it's just the same as it always has been. We have wonderful people running it and the community volunteering to work the food line. So if you come through, choose your food, and then at the end, you pay for it. You know, like a cafeteria. Yeah.
You know, like normal places. Like high school. Like a high school cafeteria. You just have a tray and some lady goes, $4. And then there is an annual Greek Fest 5K. And they charge $20 for you to do that. So...
If you'd like some exercise, it costs $20. It's $20 to run? $20 to enter it. Yeah, not to watch it or to participate or sponsor. Nope, $20 just to put in. So that said, let's talk about some murder, shall we? Okay, let's do this. We got to go back in time. We're going. This is fun because we're going back in time farther than we normally go. Yeah. We are. We've been in the 80s a little bit lately. We've had a lot of really modern cases lately. We're going back. This is fun because it's going to mix everything.
Modern technology and modern things with also old-timey story here. So it's kind of interesting. Tell me how. 1970 we're going to start in. Okay? Okay, yeah. Which is farther back, like I said, than we usually go. Now, it is a wild weekend at the area of 400 south and 700 east block of Price. Okay?
Okay. Okay. Wild area here. We're wild times this night. There's a 10-year-old girl named Lori here, and she's riding her bike in the street right around dusk. It's July, middle of the summer. Kid riding their bike in their small town. Yeah. There might as well be a flag waving behind her and, like, bottle rockets going up in the air and a little yellow dog running next to her. 400 South, 700 East is like...
it's almost dead center of downtown. It's seven blocks and four blocks. Yeah, there's not much of a downtown really though here in Price. It's a main street. Center street, yeah. Yeah, it's close around there. So she's riding her bike when out of nowhere she's grabbed from behind. Shit. Somebody grabs her. I mean, this is the ultimate nightmare here. This person clamps his hand over her mouth. Now she had a big, giant wad of bubble gum.
Yeah. In her mouth. And for some reason, when he did this, her immediate instinct was to like spit the gum out is what she wanted to do. She spit the gum out on against his hand and he like it like freaked him out for some reason. What is that? Yeah. Like he didn't know if it was her tongue or something. I guess it like it like went against his hand and then dropped on the ground. And so, like I said, I don't know if she thought if he thought she like bit her tongue off and spit it out or something. Yeah. Yeah.
He freaked out and let go for half a second, so she took off. Oh. She was like, well, don't fail me now, and took the fuck off. She ran toward a basement apartment that she lived in, and as that happened, he stood there for half a second and then went, oh, fuck, I should probably run away. She's probably running toward someone who's going to kick the shit out of me now. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This guy starts running away. Yeah.
So her brother, a friend of the family's, and her stepfather were home at the time. Hell yes. Which is exactly the people you want home at this time. Yeah. And they had seen the bike fall, but they didn't see the attack at first. I guess it was over. They just heard a bike fall and looked over and saw the bike, but they didn't see what was going on there. So they ran outside, and as that happened, they come up just as she's coming in, and
And she's like, a guy just grabbed me and I, you know, spit my gum out and he, you know, ran away. So they started chasing him, all the guys. So now it's just a run through town, which is pretty exciting. They're going to beat the shit out of some child molester. This sounds awesome. As a stepdad, like you're earning that little girl's trust forever. Oh, yeah. You're getting a blowjob tonight for mom, too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You chased down a molester and beat the shit out of him. And you're about to be a better dad than her dad. Yeah. Even her dad's going to shake your hand. Yeah. You know what? You are a hell of a man, sir. You know what, Keith? I'm going to tell you something. At first, we just didn't see eye to eye. You know what I mean? You're a Ford guy. I'm a Chevy guy. You know how it is. Yeah.
After you've done this, I think we agree on one thing. We both want what's best for that little girl. And then you shake hands. I sure hope my pain in the ass ex-wife sucks your dick. I hope she really... She's not, by the way. Spoiler alert. Probably not.
Bet you didn't even get a blowjob on her. I wouldn't expect much out of that, really, probably. I wouldn't go holding my breath that she'll hold hers. I'll hold my breath because, yeah, she never holds hers. Not even for like one second. She don't give it no effort. No, it's a quick tease and then
Right in there. She makes a face like she's eating something bad, too, like a spoiled piece of turkey or something while she's doing it. So you've got to contend with that, too. It's like a baloney face, I call it. I washed it. Don't worry. Bitter baloney face. She just doesn't want to be there. So they chase him. He's obviously running away at full speed. And I guess it's getting dark. And he ran south, and they lost him.
So they end up not being, yeah, this guy made a turn somewhere. It's getting dark and they lose the guy. Now, the guy has like a multicolored hat on, everybody says. Okay. Like a tie-dye hat or just like? Nobody has a good description of it other than a multicolored hat. So I don't know if it's one of those like a silly hat with a little propeller on top. A little spin-off hat.
Panels of red, blue, and green. Yeah, what the fuck is this? What's going on? Or is it some other kind of hat? Because it is 1970, so it's like a hippie-ish type of hat, like a puffy, one of those hats that kids wore sometimes. Or is it a tie-dye fucking Rastafarian hat? Yeah, who knows? It could be anything. But that's what everybody sees, a multicolored hat. So the same...
Later this evening, that was about 9 o'clock-ish, 8.30-ish, something like that. Later on this evening, we'll talk about Loretta Jones. Loretta Jones is 23 years old here. She's born September 14, 1946 here, and she's 23. She's from Utah here. Her parents are...
Like known people. Her parents, her dad's name is Parley. Parley Jones. And he's a well-known contractor in the area. So he lives in Price, too. She's a Price born and bred kind of a girl here. And she is living in a house only a few blocks from her parents in town. She's a single mom who's living with her three-year-old daughter, Heidi, at the time. Sure, sure. Almost four years old. She comes from a big LDS family, too. She appears to have, from what I can...
count about seven or eight siblings. There you go. Yeah, quite a few of them here. She's a member of the LDS Church. She went to Carbon High School. She attended LDS Business College for a while as well. What is that? I don't know. Pepsi accounting? Yeah. They show you how to really spike the mountain due profits, I believe is how it works.
I think that's what it is. I'm not sure. Okay. So she's right now taking correspondence courses for accounting also, which back then was a big deal because they didn't have online, so you'd do correspondence. And something like accounting, you can teach someone accounting. Yeah, it's just numbers. Yeah. So July 31st, 1970, this is that same night because that was the night of the 30th, the morning of the 31st past midnight. Okay.
Um, she's seen about 9 PM. Loretta is outside a woman, a neighbor stopped and they talk on her front porch for a little while. And then she walks away, this other woman and, um, Heidi remembers going for ice cream that night with Loretta. This is the daughter, the three-year-old almost four, uh, got in the car with her. And then also she remembers from that night standing next to her mom while her mom did some ironing.
So when you're that age, three, almost four, you do have memories, but this is exactly how they are. They're kind of little like pockets of memories, flashes. Yeah, snapshots. Yeah, I remember this from this day doing that. You remember two seconds in time. It's like a vine memory. Yeah, yeah. It goes real quick, eight seconds. Yeah, yeah.
Absolutely. Only there are no celebrities. No, it's just like fine. Yeah. So it works out perfect. It's actually right. So that's what she remembers. She also remembers getting up there. Then she remembers she was.
at some point went to bed and then she remembers looking through a peephole or the keyhole in her bedroom, you know, like an old time fashion with the keyhole. She looks through the keyhole in her bedroom, which she can see out into the front room and she could see something lying on the floor the next day or not that next day that, you know, next morning, I guess. Um, no, I guess I think it was the next morning is when she saw that.
And she opened the door and went into the front room and saw that there was blood everywhere, all over the house. Just blood spread. Now, she's like three, almost four, so I don't think...
She would even know what that was. She'd probably think it was paint before she would think it was blood, I would imagine, at that age. Yeah, yeah. You'd probably see more paint than blood at four, you know? Yeah. But if there's that much of it, the smells in the air, she might think. A four-year-old comes out, I smell death. What is she? She smells bloodthirsty. Is she in Vietnam? I don't think. Yeah, you got a point. Apocalypse Now girl. She knows what that shit smells like. Yeah, now she knows.
She said, quote, when I opened the door, it was my mom's body. There was blood. There was a lot of blood. There was blood everywhere. She was lying in a pool of blood. Jesus. She said, at that point, I knew she was dead, and I went outside to go get help.
She knew. That's pretty remarkable for a kid who's not even four yet to know what dead is, number one. Right. Right, to know the concept of dead. Right, that idea exists. Yeah, and that mom could die. Not like mom's hurt and she won't wake up or dead, a dead person. And she does because she walks outside and finds a neighbor boy who's digging up worms to go fishing, and he's 10 years old.
And she walked up to him and said, I think my mommy's dead.
Yeah. And the kid went, holy shit. You know what I mean? The little girl with blood on her feet going, I think my mommy's dead. That kid's going to have nightmares for the rest of his life. You'd think The Shining was terrifying. Yeah, fuck that. Have a little four-year-old. And she's a cute little blonde girl, too, coming outside with blood on her feet going, I think my mommy's dead. Ah! Blood footsteps all the way up to you. Oh, dude, you'd run so fast if you saw that. Get on your bike and pedal. So...
He ran next door and got his mom, and her name is Sue Ann Horvath, which sounds like Horvath, which is pretty funny. And she goes, and the woman goes up to Heidi and says, what happened? And she says, I think my mommy's dead. She goes, well, let's go on and take a look-see, shall we? So she looks inside the home through the door, looks in there, and sees Loretta's body on the living room floor.
Oh, no. And there's blood everywhere. She's lying face down between the couch and the coffee table. You can picture any living room where a coffee table is. She's there. She's naked from the waist down with just a bra on top. So this woman, holy shit, freaks out, calls the police, obviously. And the Price City police chief, Art Poloni, responds to the scene, of course. Here comes these guys. They're going to come in. Well, we'll solve this. This is...
This is under my jurisdiction here. I'm the chief. I'm going to investigate personally. Trust me that this is not going to go unanswered in my town. So he gets there. He observed that the house, other than being covered in blood, is clean and orderly. The windows and the back door were...
you know, nothing's been broken. Nothing's been jarred. Crow crowbarred appears to be no forced entry. And he said, quote, nothing had been turned over. So it didn't look like anybody was looking for jewelry or jewelry. It didn't look like it was tossed like a burglar either. So none of that stuff. Um, we'll get into the medical stuff to see if there's a struggle, but, um, fairly large bloodstain on the living room couch that she was right next to. Uh,
I guess they have him, then the sheriff shows up also. Let's get all the people here. Then the county attorney shows up too. Oh, yeah. We got to have that.
What's that guy got to be there for? Because he's got to be here. That's why. This is important stuff. The mayor's going to show, like, this is one of those cases. It's a small town, and a 23-year-old mother's been butchered in her fucking living room. Let's campaign. She's got no pants on also, which in Utah is going to be even bigger. You know, all hands on deck here, obviously. So they figure out here, the medical examiner identifies two stab wounds in Loretta's chest.
14 stab wounds in her back. Wow. And her throat's been cut. This is killed three times over. Rage. Rageful and absolutely horrifying also. I mean, this is bad shit. So her shorts and her underwear are lying next to her, and her underwear appeared to have been cut with a knife. Someone cut her underwear off with a knife, which is...
Horrifying. It's a horror movie shit that someone would do. That's terrifying. Really cutting any clothes off of somebody is pretty fucked up. It's scary. Yeah. It's psychologically, it'll scar you. Yeah. But the unmentionables, the like under part, you know what I mean? Yeah.
Those are so, so personal. That's something you do in a horror movie to really amp up. That's the next one. Then what's he going to do next? Oh, my God. You know, there's a knife down in that area, which you don't want right away. Right.
That's a child tearing the wrapper off the Christmas gift. Man, fuck, man. Too fast. Yeah. Unwrap it nicely, you know? Right, gentle. This is horrifying. That took me a lot of work to put that on there. Fuck. So they said that she died by, obviously, internal bleeding caused by stab wounds in the pulmonary artery, lungs, and heart. Fuck. They testify also later on in the preliminary deal with the evidence findings that semen is discovered in the vaginal cavity as well.
Sure. And they say they estimate that it took between five and 20 minutes for her to die like this, which is terrible. Fucking terrible. This is a bad, a bad way to die.
Now, the daughter never heard any kind of anything. There's no screams, no struggles, no anything like that. Nobody, none of the neighbors heard anything. Nobody heard anything. But it definitely happened there. It definitely happened there. And they placed the time of death between about 10 and 1 a.m. Now, they have no fucking idea, obviously. Even now, they're like, I mean, it's sort of probably in this to there.
So they still give you three hours. Last time she saw, yeah. Between the last time she was seen alive and the time that her child found her. That's when she was murdered. That's exactly what it was. Yeah, about 10 o'clock, and that's what they do. Well, yeah, they go by that evidence, then they go by temperature and stuff like that. And these things can vary wildly depending on a lot of factors. So...
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Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash smalltownmurder to get free shipping and 365-day returns. quince.com slash smalltownmurder. Now back to the show. They said that the wounds indicate that the murder weapon was a thin blade at least two inches long.
So not a big knife, a small, like a pocket-type knife. You know what I mean? So they said that it had to be sharp, though. The murder weapon, they cannot find it, even though they search all throughout the house, surrounding properties. They basically block off this neighborhood and say, nobody's fucking in or out. Everybody's getting talked to. Go find tooth comb, all the bushes and the grass, and we're finding this shit. Because, I mean, this is a big deal. Yeah.
So they said the weird thing is, is Loretta Jones had barely any defensive wounds, which for this type of attack is extremely strange because they said the throat cutting came last. They said that would make sense if the throat cutting came first. But based on the way the wounds bled, it's not how it happened. So they said no one heard any screaming, anything like that. So no defensive wounds and no screaming, which is very strange.
Yeah, especially when nothing, the screams, the scream function was not affected when stabbed in the chest and the back. No, well, I mean, once the lungs are punctured, it wouldn't, it would be very difficult. There'd be some gurgles. It'd be hard to scream at that point. But when she's first being attacked, I would assume there'd be a scream. Yeah, there's that. As soon as you see the knife. Yeah. When someone maybe would cut your underwear off, you'd probably scream. You know what I mean? That'd be terrifying. Yeah.
So one of the police officers says this much later, quote, I believe Loretta stayed quiet to protect her child because she was afraid her daughter would run out and get hurt as well. Which that's some shit that a mother would do too. A mother would go, I'll get stabbed quietly so my kid doesn't get fucked up. Whereas a dad would be like, come out here. Hide in here. Come save me. Bring a knife. Bring a bigger knife. Yeah.
And get your brother and everybody you know. Big weapons. Come on now, daddy. Buy ice cream. Let's go. We don't care at all. So the theory is, obviously, that they think that possibly the person who accosted this 10-year-old girl might be the same person who would be a home-invading rapist murderer.
Yeah, I mean, they're generally good for it. And they're like, it happened within a couple blocks of each other, within an hour of each other more than likely, or two hours of each other. It'd be too much of a coincidence that we have a molester pervert and this guy. They almost would have bumped into each other. What are you doing? I'm going to molest a girl. Oh, I'm going to go kill a lady and rape her. Okay, well, best of luck to you. I'm into molestation. Oh, I'm a little, I'm a step higher. Meet you in the morning for breakfast. We'll compare notes on how our nights went. Okay.
So they said a search for that man failed to turn up any suspects. And then this happens. So now there's an all points bulletin about a murdering would be molester.
Yeah. Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous, basically. Fucking watch out. And that little girl is so lucky. Oh, Lori's lucky as fuck. Yeah, she's really lucky she had gum in her mouth. Her parents better get her a lifetime supply of bubble tape. I was going to say, that'd be great if she had like a sponsorship deal after that. Keep your kids safe with Juicy Fruit. Yeah.
If only Big League Chew was invented yet, that would have been great. Fucking amazing. For the biggest wad you could get in there. Yeah, just really pop it in there. You're not getting that with Dentine. Not going to say. Dentine. Bubblicious, I think, should have sponsored her. Hubba Bubba. One of them was fucking around back then, right? Found a lot of kids dead with Dentine. Yeah. Try it at your kid will die. Very dangerous. Hubba Bubba walking around doing fine. They're coming home for the dinner. They're going to be home by curfew.
So the suspects here, they interrogate multiple people here in the area. They round up the perverts, let's be honest here. Yeah.
Because that's, anytime there's a sexual crime, the first thing the police do, if there's not an obvious suspect that they know of, is round up the local perverts. Who likes doing creepy shit? Yeah, that's it. Oh, him? Oh, man. One time, back when we was in junior high, I went to junior high with him. Oh, man, is he weird. Oh, let's round him up and talk to him. Run down the DMV list of everybody with vans that doesn't have a business written on the side of it. Who isn't selling ice cream actively out of the side of it.
So they interrogate four people, and all of these people had alibis between both before the 10 p.m., both for the attempted molestation and the alibi for later on in the night, past 10 p.m. They only got four weirdos? It's a small town. They only had four weirdos that they knew of. Back then, too, weirdos were much harder to catch.
Yeah. They couldn't catch him like doing weird shit on a computer and bust them that way. They'd have to actually catch him in the act of doing something. You know, it was different. So that led police to concentrate on that guys she would have known because the lack of forced entry...
means they're saying, well, she wouldn't have probably let some stranger into her house past 10 p.m. That's just not normal. With a baby in the house. With a baby in the house, yeah. So it had to be someone she knew probably. There's also an anonymous phone call tip they get. They get a bunch of them. They lead police to a guy here. A guy, he's 30 years old, and he admits to knowing Loretta
And he was said he was in price that night and was even in the area where the 10 year old had been accosted as well, sir. But, um, after they asked him a bunch of questions about that, he asked for an attorney and that's that. So they can't nothing more they can do. Uh,
Okay. Put himself in two crime scenes. They try to talk to him again the next day. He says, I don't think so. I'd like a lawyer. Then they go, well, how about you just take a lie detector test and clear yourself? And he goes, I'm not going to do that. No, thanks. No. Did you miss when I said lawyer?
So they're trying to figure this out here. And they said they because the guy who tried to cost that girl was seen. That's the best bet to concentrate on because someone might have seen this person. So and also they're going to talk to Heidi a lot, too, because she seems to be pretty sharp and lucid for a kid her age. Wow. Yeah. So they bring her in and they said.
what do you remember? And she said, I remember vividly looking at it. Not later, she says vividly, not as a three-year-old. Well, she got to put a pipe up to her mouth. Well...
It was a pink dusk, I'll say that much. The sky was afire with oranges and reds and purples, and it was very lovely. I remember vividly coming down the hall. Exquisite evening. Exquisite evening. Wonderful, wonderful. Then she told police, they go, well, you know, do you know anybody that was around? And she said, quote, Tom did it.
Oh, well, that's easy. Well, that's helpful. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty good. I like that. Got a social on that guy, babe? Wow, that's pretty good. You know his address? And they said, well, who's Tom? And she goes, it's a guy my mom knows, a man named Tom. When you find him, I'll tell you. Yeah, I mean, I'll say if that's Tom or not. Then they look over the crime scene a lot more because they have a lot of pictures here. Yeah. They have some weird pictures, by the way. There's pictures later on that they'll have of Loretta. For some reason, they took cops, cops took pictures of like
Heidi standing in the crime scene. Yeah. Like amongst the blood. It's really weird. There's pictures. Yeah. Put that in an expose or something and sell it. I don't know what it is. Like there was a little girl here to put, I guess it's like inventory. There's one TV, one radio, a fridge, this, that a three-year-old, a fucking dead lady. Yeah. One tiny female child.
Age indeterminate. Covered in blood. There's the inventory. Okay, you can take the kid out now. So in the pictures and in the scene, they find what appears to be right at the end of Loretta's hand in the carpet appears to be letters written in blood.
Letters? Letters. She's trying to write something in blood. With a slit? What? With her fucking fingers, with her last drop of... It took five to 20 minutes to die, they said, so she had a little time here to do this. They find a T, and then overlapping the T a little is an O, and that's all they find. That's all she had. Yeah, so...
That's close to Tom. She was trying to get to Tonga, maybe, and she said, I had a vacation planned. Cancel my plane tickets to Tonga. She's 66% of the way to Tom. Or halfway to Toby. We have no idea. Yeah.
No clue. That's what I mean. So that you don't know. So two is what they find. T.O. Then they say, OK, they have her diary also. So they scour her diary for any mentions of a Tom. Maybe she knows a Tom and she kept her diary meticulously every day. So if she really she knew a Tom, she's going to put a fucking Tom in there. And they find a mention of a Tom, a man she dated for about two months, a few months back.
His name is Tom Egli, E-G-L-E-Y, and they had dated. He's kind of a local shitbag, basically. He's from Helper, Utah, is the name of the place. I guess Heidi said later on he was set up on a date by some friends with my mom. So he got, it was like a setup. Mom picked him. No, some of mom's friends set mom up with him.
It was one of those. She didn't just meet him randomly. This was a setup by both mutual friends. Heidi said that. She said, my mom did not care for him, though. They never really hit it off. I guess, you know, she said that as a child, Heidi had met Tom.
That's how she knew Tom did it. But she said he wasn't there all the time. He just came a few times and she knew who he was and that sort of thing. She said Tom was an acquaintance of my mom. My mom knew him. He was somebody that my mom knew and that I knew. So he is Thomas Edward Edgley or Eggly. He's 30 years old. We'll say Eggly because it sounds worse. He's 30. And at the time when they want to go talk to him, they find out he is living at a motel with his pregnant girlfriend.
Atta boy. Real nice. Yeah. And very pregnant too. She's like eight months fucking pregnant. Oh my. So we're like, okay, this is a, an interesting one here. And, uh, he's the guy they talked to that said I was in price. Uh,
And didn't want the – and lawyered? That guy? They had already talked to him because there was an anonymous tip about him, and now they find out of a Tom. So they're like, we're talking to you again. And he goes, lawyer. I'd like a lawyer and no lie detector actually. But what he does admit to is he said, listen, that day I was in town. I had some drinks. I ate a hamburger, and I went window shopping. You know how one does. Yeah.
Big window shopper. Big window shopper. They said, well, do you have any alibi? I mean, you must have seen people if you were out and about. He said, no, there's no one that I know of. There was people that I saw that I didn't, I don't know them, so I couldn't tell you who they were. I don't like my friends to go with me window shopping. It's very distracting. I go to a town by myself. I get a hamburger and I just shop the windows. That's what I do. That's normal. Everyone does that. Wedding dresses and shit. You know, while my eight-month pregnant girlfriend is in a fucking motel back there. That's how everyone does it. Okay.
So, like I said, he asks for a lawyer. They let him go. So a little while later, they ask him again, and he denies any involvement. And he says, look, this is the last I'm going to talk to you guys. I'm tired of that. I asked for a lawyer, but I will give you, here's a hat of mine and a set of clothes. This is the clothes I wore that night. And also, here's three knives that I own. And the cops go, okay. Okay.
Like, you know, he couldn't have had a fourth knife in a different set of clothes. Yeah. This is self-reported, the clothes he's wearing. Yeah. He could have just given him anything. So they do talk to a bar owner that confirms that she did see him in the bar that night. Okay. So the drinks alibi holds, but...
She said one weird thing about that thing. He was there that night. Very strange. He had red spots all over his shirt. Red spots all over his shirt. That's worse than if he had no alibi, I would say. How are you going to go there but covered in blood? How are you going to go somewhere and be bloody when you're there? How do you go to a bar and go, well, I mean...
Maybe they'll think it's the style. I just need them to see me. That is fucking wild. Turn it inside out. I guess the blood would seep through. I don't know. It might have been inside out. Maybe. Well, he showed up. It was the Highway Rendezvous Club. That was the name of the bar, by the way. South of Helper. And she said pinkish red spots all over his shirt is what the...
woman there, the bar owner said. She said he was adamant that he needed to find someone who was driving in to help her to get a ride from them. I have to go back to help her. I have to go right now. That's adamant. However, they said that it was strange because the place he was staying in town, the motel, was about three blocks away.
So they were like, why does he need a ride? I don't understand why he needs a ride. Just somewhere so far. And then he left sometime before midnight with another man. So he lived at the new house, which was the name of the motel with his pregnant girlfriend. And so they go to the pregnant girlfriend. What's up with that? When did he come home? How was he? She said, well, he didn't come home until about 3 or 4 a.m. that night, which was very unusual, by the way, because he never stays out that late.
So that's weird. She said she yelled at him for being home so late when he got home. You asshole. Yeah. Inconsiderate shithead. I could have gone into labor at any time. You don't have a cell phone. What are you doing? She said that he went into the bathroom and took a bath in his clothes while wearing his clothes. He just, well, I'm going to get out in the bath and just soaked on in at four o'clock in the morning after being yelled at. Hilarious. She was like, what the fuck are you doing?
I'm taking a bath, bitch. What do you think I'm doing? This is how I wash my clothes now. Jesus. Yeah, it's a good idea I just had. Balls and clothes at the same time. It's perfect. He then took his clothes off, the wet clothes that he bathed in, and put them in a bag by the door. Okay. Just those clothes. The next morning, he got up early, slept for a couple hours, and told her he's going to wash his clothes.
that he just bathed in what the fuck is happening he asked her you don't you have any laundry you need me to do i'll do yours now too at 4 a.m watts darks whatever i'm doing low to h and she said quote this was even more unusual than him not coming home till four o'clock in the morning because she said quote he never did the laundry ever he's never done it never it's 1970 he's not doing the fucking laundry yeah
So he left and went to the laundromat, she said, I thought. That's what he said he was doing. So the thing is, in those days, much of the town had coal furnaces still. Yeah. So there were burn barrels scattered all around town used to dispose of shit like that, the ash and stuff like that. So all the leftover furnace ash and the rock and stuff like that. So even though it was summer...
The barrels always have smoldering fires in them from people burning trash in them because people just burn trash and the burn barrels all over town. So that morning across the street from the laundromat, there's a bar and the bar owner saw Thomas Eggly standing by a barrel with smoke coming from it, staring at it, watching something burn. Yeah. I will talk about that. She asked him like, what are you doing? And he said, fucking, I'm just burning my clothes from last night.
Yeah. Okay. But that's what she, that's what he said. That was his answer. So the, the guy who drove him from Egli, uh, drove Egli from helper to price the night of the murder there, he remembered, uh, Egli was wearing a colorful hat and a white t-shirt and jeans. Oh, colorful hat. Not good. Cause that's exactly the outfit that was reported by the little girl and her family.
The owner of the rendezvous bar said that he visited twice on the day of the murder. When he visited the second time, it was around 1130. Red spots on his shirt and he was acting very nervous. So now the problem is the little girls kidnapping the police in Provo just pick somebody up for it.
They grab somebody, okay, who fit the description of this guy. They bring the little girl down, and she says, that's not him. It's not Thomas Eggly, just some other guy they picked up. So the little girl's description of the man began to resemble Eggly even more after she says, no, he's more like this and like that. And they were like, oh, more like this fucking idiot? So August 6, 1970, they do a lineup here.
And a guy named Kulo Fennel is his name, which is a very fun name. Butthole Funnel? Butthole Fennel. Which is even worse, fennel that comes from your butthole. I harvest the fennel from my Kulo once a year. It's Kulo harvesting time. Ah, the fennel. I like Butthole Funnel. Butthole Funnel.
Yeah. If only your name was funneled. So this guy I picked, this is one of the relatives of the little girl. They pick out Thomas Eggly as the guy who tried to kidnap the girl. Really? They said, is this the guy? And the guy said, I felt like I was about to throw up.
So he is booked for the assault of the girl, Eggly, grabbing Lori, the little girl. So he's considered a suspect in the murder, but they say they don't have enough evidence to book him because they can't find the clothes he was wearing and all that kind of shit because he burned them. They don't have a murder weapon or anything like that. So still they have a lot of circumstantial evidence. This is a lot. Yeah.
So very, very strange. So they do some more interviews with him and they get some FBI reports on some evidence and stuff. And they decide they're going to go ahead and charge him with this murder. OK. OK. September 19th, by the way, he and his girlfriend have a little girl.
Oh, boy. A baby's born. So, by the way, these kind of sexual attacks and murders and assaults, if you read Mindhunter and read how FBI profilers do this. They always happen near this. There's always, number one, the pressure thing. There's a big pressure buildup. And there's also, a lot of time, a lack of able to have sexual release, too, at this time. So they just go out and fucking turn into. There's a lack of sexual release. And they know that there's none on the horizon. Yep.
And there's a lot of pressure on the horizon. It's stressors as well, too, causes us just a pressure cooker and no coming. Yep. And they apparently have a lot of jizz to give. And Jesus, he does. A guy named Charles, well, Nelson Kirkwood. He's he testifies. He gave him a ride later on in the preliminary here. I'm hearing about the colorful hat and the jeans. And so November 5th here.
They've arrested him. He's got a new little girl. By the way, he marries the girlfriend right away. They have the kid. They get married. This is all before he gets arrested. This is very important because now she does not have to testify against him.
That's why he did it. That's exactly why. And she didn't want to testify either because this is the father of their brand new newborn baby. So now her saying he took a bath in his clothes, came home late and took the club. None of that's all out. Went to the laundromat. It's just he left. He had red spots on his shirt. And the next day he was burning his clothes. That's all we know. Got to take all of that out of the timeline for what the cops are allowed to charge. Yes. She's not going to testify.
So he admits to trying to snatch Laurie off the street. He admits it. He admits to that. He admits, yeah, tried to kidnap this girl. So he tried to kidnap...
It's almost like he realized, ooh, that's a hard target. That's not a soft target. That's a hard one. People notice when a 10-year-old girl goes missing, and then every guy in town chases me down the street like fucking Frankenstein. That's bad. She didn't even get captured, and three guys tried to get me. Yeah, so he said, oh, in a house where I can have control of the scenario, it's a little bit better. But he's not admitting to the murder. He says, I don't know what you're talking about. Didn't have anything to do with the murder. Wow.
So they have a preliminary hearing, and the police chief says that he got there, collected the evidence, blah, blah, blah. They talk about the photographs of the scene. They also talk about information they got from the girlfriend that she gave beforehand. His now wife was her past girlfriend. And that was the only thing that she told the cops was that he told his girlfriend he was going to see Loretta Jones.
Really? Yes. But he said that that's all that they had out of the thing. But now she can't testify to it. So they have a statement of that that she can't testify to in court.
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We get support from Dove. Hey y'all, it's your girl Kiki Palmer, host of the Wondery Podcast. Baby, this is Kiki Palmer. Let me cut to the chase. Did you know that in many states across the U.S., it's still not illegal to discriminate against people based on the way their hair grows out of their head? To deny
of black folks from jobs and opportunities because they have braids, locks, twists, or bantu knots? That's messed up. And today's sponsor, Dove, agrees. That's why Dove co-founded the Crown Coalition in 2019 to advocate for the passage of the Crown Act.
Crown stands for creating a respectful and open world for natural hair. And the Crown Act is legislation which prohibits race-based hair discrimination in workplaces and schools in the U.S. Dove is driving awareness by advocating for petition signatures and supporting the Crown movement to create a society where black hair is not only accepted, but respected and celebrated in all of its beauty.
Join Dove in taking action to help end race-based hair discrimination by signing the Crown Act petition at dove.com slash crown. That's dove.com slash crown. So the day of this hearing, Judge, this is County Attorney Dan Keller, asked the judge to postpone the hearing for three reasons. Said there's some persons of interest who knew both the suspect and the victim who were recently located in Kansas. We'd like to talk to them.
Police have not yet had a chance to speak with them. And second, some anticipated FBI reports had not been completed. And they said also Poloni, the chief who found the body and did all this, he's unavailable to testify because he's attending law enforcement school in New York. So he's at school. He's at a conference at the moment. Yeah.
So the defense attorney protested the continuance, saying that his client's civil rights were violated due to a long incarceration with not even a preliminary hearing. This isn't we're not waiting trial. Yeah. He said the police went on fishing expeditions concerning the guilt or innocence of his client and that these expeditions have not succeeded. He says the state had not prepared its case by now. You should release my client.
Now, they grant the continuance on the condition that the prosecution file an affidavit detailing its reasons for it. They said yes, his bail was denied, and they set a new hearing date for November 5th.
On that day, the prosecution says, we're ready to charge him. Hand down the thing. And the judge should say that there's enough evidence to hold you for trial. That's the preliminary hearing. And the judge says, not enough evidence to hold him for trial. Get gone. Orders him released. Oh, my God. Because for kidnapping the girl, attempted kidnapping of a 10-year-old girl for obvious sexual purposes, he serves 90 days for that. Wow.
Hold on. 90 days. They give him a month and a half in jail for that. 1970 was a wild time to be alive. You could just try to grab a kid and it was like, well, don't try that again, Mr.
You're going to sit down for a little bit. Wow. So the chief commented, this is Art Piloni. He said that the judge just called it as he saw it and we'll just have to start again from scratch. Holy. Just, oh well. The next, right after he gets out in January, Thomas Eggly moves to Colorado and just takes off. Yeah, he wants out. So Heidi...
is adopted by her grandparents because it has to be, has to be. Um, he said, she said with all my aunts and uncles becoming my brothers and sisters at that point, they just integrated her into the family. I mean, they told, she knew her that they weren't, but that was how it was treated. Yeah. Her, her, her, she's just as broken as it gets now. Yep. She said that we stopped talking about the murder because it was so hard on my grandparents and then said her grandpa died of a heart attack in 1974. Oh,
So I guess they tried to – the parents tried to keep the cops on the case. But once Grandpa died, they kind of – she said, quote, once my grandpa died, it was too much for my grandma to even pursue. She was mourning the loss of her daughter, then her husband. It was easier for her to just tuck those memories away. So Heidi tries to get her mother's case reopened in 1989. Right.
Because she saw Unsolved Mysteries and was like... 19 years later. That's when it came out, Unsolved Mysteries. She's like, maybe fucking Robert Stack will help me. I have no idea. Let's find out. So she said, I had this binder of newspaper clippings, things I got on my own. I was writing to the authorities that I had worked on my mom's case, that had worked on my mom's case, trying to get some answers. But I kept hitting a brick wall and another brick wall. So...
She moved to Utah or from Utah to California in 1986 and spent 20 years working as a San Jose real estate agent, uh,
Uh-huh. And then came back to Utah in 2006 to be closer to her family, especially her grandmother who's getting old. So she said moving back stirred up some shit. Now she wanted to start thinking about it again. And she said she had nightmares as a child but never flashbacks. And she said she wished she did have flashbacks because then she'd know what the fuck happened. She said, I want to remember more. I want to remember what I can't remember.
She wants to see it because she said, I might have seen it and blocked it out. Yeah, I could fix this. Yeah, because one minute she knew he was there, so she had to have looked out the peephole and seen that.
Or maybe they even might have had interaction in the living room. And then she might have blocked it out until she looked out the next morning and saw her mom's body. Kids do that. Your brain will do that. So she said, maybe there was something that was buried in my brain that if it came out could help solve the case quicker. Maybe there was something I needed to remember. So, yeah, 2009, her car is stolen.
And she posted about it on Facebook and said one of the people who commented was a now Carbon County Sheriff's Office deputy named David Brewer, who was an old classmate of hers. He was a friend from high school. And so she decided she'd go find him and ask him to look into her mother's murder. Maybe he can do it.
So she does. Don't find my car. Find this. Yeah, find my mom's murder. I bet the guy who killed her took my car, too. So she said that she thought of her mom as a hero for not screaming or making noises that might have woke her up. She says she believes that her mother closed the bedroom door to protect her so she wouldn't come out with him still there, which is probably true.
2010 Brewer here, the deputy travels to Colorado to interview Thomas Egli. He's still alive and he denies all involvement. And although he asked when asked a particular question, check this out. The deputy says, I asked him if we did find the person who murdered Loretta after 40 years of looking for them, what should happen to them? His answer was that that would depend on whether the person had committed any more murder since Loretta.
I mean, everybody gets one, right? You know what I mean? Then from there, it could be a little more complicated, probably. What's the severity of this? Yeah. I mean, is he an asshole? Is he a nice guy? Is he like a guy who likes to wear colorful hats? Maybe. So this guy is intrigued, but, you know, doesn't have any evidence here. All he had to go off of was recollection of people and past media coverage. The same shit I have to go on old newspaper clippings.
But there's a strange photograph of Heidi taken at the crime scene of the blood soaked carpet there. Yeah. And she's he said that picture kind of set me back a little because why are they taking a picture of her where her mom died? She's literally in a bloody crime scene of a fucking three year old.
But he said this picture is the only crime scene photo we have that still remains because that's the family took that. That picture ended up in the family archives, not the police shit. So the police, probably that shit's been long gone for 40 years, but they still have it and it's in color, which is helpful. Yeah. So they said that Eggly had lived in many places before and after the murder and that he's never had a stable home life. He lives with Bob.
He's lived with tons of women on and off, married three times, had five kids all spread out all over the place and mostly kept to himself the last, you know, bunch of years or so. He's kind of just he's been called a drifter on and off. So they track down his former girlfriend, then wife that was pregnant, the one he lived with at the time.
She said, yeah, he did. He took a bath with all his clothes on. Next day, he went to the laundromat. And when he came back, it was obvious that several items of clothing that he normally has were missing. Missing. Missing. So they said, okay, that's very fucking interesting. Her name's Marcia Hidalgo. And they also find Barbara Battison, who's the owner of a bar now. And also, at the time, they talked to her again. And also, Thomas's former boss, because he worked for her for a while. Uh-oh.
So they said, by the way, he wasn't drunk when he came home. And his girlfriend said she asked she asked him where he'd been when he got home before he took a bath. And he said that he had brought hamburgers to a woman and her daughter. So he knew the daughter was there.
He knew because he brought that. That's how the daughter knew, too, because I bet he brought hamburgers for him. That's the thing. So I guess that's when he took the clothes and did all that kind of shit. She said that was really weird. And, you know, the Barbara Battison said that he was using the burn barrel by the laundromat to burn shit. When she asked, what are you burning? He said, burning clothes from the night before.
And also said that he gave police a different set of clothes when they came and searched his hotel room. Why are you telling people this?
That's crazy. I mean, I can tell you why. He's dumb. Holy shit. So then they talked to the girl and her family who was abducted by him or attempted to be abducted. And she told him that the guy wore an odd multicolored hat that he dropped as he attacked her but then ran back and retrieved it. And then the family started to chase him. So he almost left his hat behind. His favorite hat. Wow. His favorite hat. He had a multicolored welder's cap.
that he wore. Okay. So, and he is like, I wore it all the time. People said, and they said, okay. Um, and a witness reported seeing a similar hat hanging on a hook by Egli's door at the hotel. Yeah.
Also before an incident, before the incident, the brother and the friend of the girl that was attacked noticed a man who accosted her sitting on the curb near the Arctic Circle, which was some bar or something, eating a hamburger. They live just a few doors down from that restaurant. And they the brother identified Eggly as the attacker that he saw wearing the cap. So later on as well.
Then they find out that one of the cops who was there, Price Police Officer Barry Briner, he said that he told Brewer now, because he's still alive, that before she died, she scrawled letters in blood, the T and the O. Have you looked into that? And this guy said, what the fuck are you talking about? He'd never heard that before, this Brewer guy. He didn't know that. So...
They said that it was crazy. So they said, holy shit, the letters are clearly legible, but it's hard to reach a collaboration on the point 40 years later as all the crime scene photos and statements for that time are gone. But they found a family member who had photographed the blood on the floor when they took a picture of Heidi. So for a long time, they were in the family picture album at the grandmother's house. Crime scene photos. Yeah. Yeah.
She said, over the years, I would look through the family album. Among these happy photos were pictures of this crime scene. I asked my grandmother to take them out, and she finally did. Then, years later, I realized that we needed them, and she found them again. So that's it. You can see the picture of her standing there. You can see very clearly the TNO drawn on the carpet behind. That's the only evidence of that that they have, is this family photo. So they talk to Tom. He's living in Rocky Ford, Colorado.
And they go, yeah, you know, what's up with that? And he goes, oh, yeah, Price, I remember that. One of my old girlfriends was murdered. I don't remember her name. They were like, okay. They said, well, do you remember what you did on July 30th, 1970? And he said, oh, yeah, yeah, I remember I ate a hamburger. He doesn't remember his girlfriend's name, but he remembers eating a hamburger on July 30th.
How do you remember that? Unless it's very, I mean, you can eat a hamburger if you brought hamburgers to a murder victim and her kid. That's it. So that's 2010. Six years go by. They need to exhume Loretta to see if there's any DNA. That's the big thing here. But they can't because they don't want to do it because the grandmother, Loretta's mother is like 90 and she can't handle an exhumation. So they wait until she dies.
Smart, I guess. Once she dies, they exhume Loretta. Okay. So the cop here, Brewer, said if there was just a 1% chance that we could find physical evidence, it would be worth the effort.
But the body and coffin suffered extensive water damage. Oh, no. So they could recover zero physical evidence from it whatsoever. But they hoped what they did was on purpose publicize the exhumation like they're going to have all this evidence. Oh, this is what we need. So they didn't say it's a bust. They were like, oh, it's a treasure trove of evidence. Right. They were doing this to try to stir up Eggly to say something to somebody. And he does.
He does. A woman named Linda Carter, who knows them here, the police, she was the one who originally told the police about the written in blood thing. And they were like, for real? Holy shit. And then they went and found the photos and they were like, okay, yeah. So she's his current neighbor. And she used to know Loretta Jones, too. But now in Rocky Ford, they live near each other. Okay. Weird. Weird.
So, okay, this is fucking crazy. She's been chatting with him and hinting that the police found some good information to try to get something out of him. The police, she offers to wear a wire and talk to him about this. She is ballsy. Oh, she's super ballsy. He's an old discrepant man at this point, too. So during this, he said, oh, that's interesting. They're exhuming her and all that. He said, do you know how long DNA evidence and semen lasts? Yeah.
Seamans forever, my friend. Yeah. Until you swallow it. I don't know. Not diamonds. Seamans forever. So then the neighbor convinced him that he should confess to the police. Yeah. If you've got those questions, those are incriminating questions. He said he used to date her and he stabbed her because he was angry at her for refusing sex with him. That's what he told Linda Carter. He said it gets worse, man.
He said after he stabbed her, she fell on the floor and then he had sex with her and then he slit her throat. He stabbed her 16 fucking times and then had sex with her. Then fucking raped a dying woman. That's disgusting. He then said he tossed the knife that he used in the river behind the Price Hotel and burned all of his clothes. So she said, you got to tell the cops. You got to tell the cops. There's, you know, the family, blah, blah, blah. He does it. He goes in and confesses.
Yep. He said he slit her throat. He said, quote, I was there for sex. He went out looking for sex that night. I'll go to the bar, look for sex. I'll kidnap a kid and have sex with her. I'll fucking do it. Go see my ex. Go see my ex. See if I can get it there. That's what he was doing. He said, I was turned down for sex. It made me feel like shit. She went to the kitchen or something after that. And when she came back, I stabbed her in the living room. She fell in front of the couch. And he said, she was still alive when I had sex with her.
He said, then he cut her throat and he fucking left. That was the end of it. Then he went and did all those things that everybody said he did. So they agree to, if he pleads guilty to murder, that they'll drop the rape charge on him. Ugh.
Okay. So they asked Heidi, what was it like to see him finally in court? This, the boogeyman of all these fucking years. And she said, he just looked like an old man, an old frail man. It's not the same. Nope. She said, I remember, she said, I remember standing out in the hallway and I told Brewer that he wasn't, it wasn't the boogeyman that I thought he was. And Brewer said, quote, even the boogeyman gets old.
And it's been 40 years. It's been 40 years. And all he's he was 30 then. He's 69 years old now. Jesus. So Heidi, during sentencing, says in court, I was in shock, terrified and all alone. That day changed my life forever. Tom Eggly is a poor excuse for a human being. And I hope his life will be lonely and a living hell.
She said, my mom was my hero that terrible night. She never screamed or made a sound. She did everything she had to to prevent me from coming out of my room. How does that make you feel, Tom Egli, knowing that you left a four-year-old little girl all alone in the next room to find her mother's bloody and lifeless body?
My hope for Tom Egli is for him to be sentenced for the rest of his life in prison. I hope that he will take his last and final breath behind prison bars all alone, not holding the hand of a loved one. If Tom is ever eligible for parole, I'll be at the parole hearing to make sure he never walks as a free man again. From this day forward, this will be a happy day for getting justice for my mom. So, yeah. They said, what about you, Tom? You got anything to say for yourself? Yeah.
He doesn't speak himself, but has his lawyer read a statement. Read this, please. And it says, I didn't know that the daughter was there. I'm sorry she had to find her mother like that. I'm terribly sorry. And the lawyer also says that Tom says he doesn't now remember many of the details of the crime, even though he just confessed to them six months ago. Yeah. So the judge says, you, sir, may fuck off at least 10 years in prison and up to life. He's 69, so...
Yeah. He's pissed off about it. Tom says. They asked him. He said, quote, I'm not really satisfied because he wants to be. He wants a closer prison to his family so people can visit him. Tough shit. Yeah. The guy said, well, you can appeal it. Other than that, go fuck yourself. The daughter, Heidi, was upset. She said, I was really hoping that he would have turned and told me he was sorry for killing my mommy. That's what I was really hoping for. But he didn't. He never did. Yeah.
Yep. He said that he wasn't mad.
She or she said she wasn't mad at the cops. They did what they could do at the time. And that was just kind of how things were at the time. If there was DNA, it would have been a lot easier. She said, I want I want to be in his face as much as possible to remind him of what he did to my mom and why he's sitting where he's sitting. It's to remind him I was a four year old little girl when he did what he did to my mom. And she was a human being. So, yeah, pretty impressive. He tries to appeal this thing.
By the way, he tries to appeal this thing on the case of entrapment, saying that there was entrapment for that woman to get the that out of him. And also saying that his his confession wasn't taken correctly. So, you know, they said, get the fuck out of here. You're listening, old man. Yeah. 2017, they come to his house with a bloodhound team to sniff. Why? This case is closed. It's not about this.
Oh.
Oh, no. Yeah. So they said they declined to say anything further, but they're searching his house for forensic evidence. Yeah. Wow. That's not good at all. So these were a 15-year-old and a 14-year-old were...
kidnapped right by his fucking house. So they're like, let's talk about that. Probably him. Probably him. So possibly an even bigger scumbag than we thought. My God. Written out in blood. That's what did it. It was the blood that got him to confess. He was like, oh shit, the blood and all that. It made it freak him out. She got T and O. Yeah. T and O, baby. Not bad. So there you go. That's Price, Utah, everybody. Unbelievable. Fucking crazy case that took 40 something years to solve. 46 years to get him to confess to it.
which is amazing, but that's what I mean. It was an old-timey crime that kind of mixed new school shit where he was afraid of DNA evidence that he didn't know existed back then. So it's wild stuff. He had to have done much, much more, right? Oh, in one night, if he was going to kidnap and rape and kill a fucking 10-year-old and then did this in someone's house...
He's capable of anything. He has five kids. I'd look every fucking time one of his kids were born, look anywhere around him for dead men. Wherever he was at, yeah. Every single fucking one of those times, I would do. So anyway, I'm not...
I don't know. Someone can check that out, I'm sure, that has more resources than us for it. Yeah, get on that Utah law enforcement. Utah and Colorado. I can't be the only one to think of that. I'm sure I'm not. I'm sure they thought of it. I hope so, anyway. So if you like that, leave a review, a nice one. Say something good about us on whatever app you're listening on. Also, tell your friends.
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Check these shows out. Keep hanging out with us and doing that. I think that's about it, right, everybody? Yeah, you want to follow us on social media, do it. Come see us. Oh, shutupandgivememurder.com. Tickets to the live shows, May 31st, Durham, North Carolina. Virtual live show still available. Still time to get in there and see some crazy shit. Thank you so much, everybody. And until next week, it's been our pleasure. Bye. ♪♪♪
If you like Small Town Murder, you can listen early and ad-free now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like...
I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling, and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, well, yeah.
Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, Hysterical.
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