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Hey there, we've got a sneak peek bonus episode this week for the new true crime series 22 hours and American nightmare Washington DC news station WTOP and their award-winning journalists have teamed up with podcast one on this awesome investigative series that will take you on a ride through the shock and mysteries of
of the infamous mansion murders of a Washington, D.C. family. It's the frightening story of a D.C. power couple, their 10-year-old son and housekeeper who were held hostage, tortured and brutally murdered inside their burning D.C. mansion. You won't believe what happened during those last 22 hours alive and the shocking trail of evidence that led police to the killer. Did he have help?
18911, what is your emergency? I think there's a house fire at 3201 Woodland Drive.
It's 124 on May 14th, 2015. It was pure chance that Donald Spence found himself at the front door of a burning house in northwest Washington, D.C. that afternoon. He'd just finished a job installing wallpaper at a house in the neighborhood.
It was the kind of neighborhood you might want to walk around in, full of beautiful old houses, some might consider them mansions, each with its own ornate style and manicured green lawn.
The neighborhood is tucked away behind D.C.'s famed Embassy Row. The home of the Australian ambassador is right there across the street and the vice president's official residence just a few blocks away. I just drove up to a building and it's pouring out of the overhang. Okay, from which floor is the fire coming from? It's coming from, it looks like initially from a bedroom, but it's going sweeping across the whole overhang on the front of the house. Is this a private house, single house? It's a private...
Spence had just finished eating his lunch in his truck, and he was about to head home. Bored by taking the same turns on the same streets for weeks, he decided on a whim to take a new way out of the neighborhood. That decision took him right past the house with smoke pouring out of its eaves. Yes, top of the hill.
I don't think anybody's in the house, but I can't tell. I knocked on the door, and I could hear the alarm going off. And there's a fire. Yeah, and the house is like crackling. No flames yet, but the smoke is just pouring out. It's pretty quick. D.C. firefighters arrive in a matter of minutes. One of the first trucks to arrive is from Engine Company 28. It's a fire station right near the National Zoo, about a five-minute drive from the massive brick home on Woodland Drive.
Let's get out.
Firefighters are trained to fight fires from the inside out, to go right to the source of the fire. He starts to climb the staircase. Navigating up the stairs in the dark, Hershey pushes open a bedroom door. He's found it. The whole room is lit up orange. The flames are rolling up the walls. We got a room off where the fire could go. We're getting a lot of all that.
These are the fire department radio transmissions from that day. A line means that Hershey has a hose on the fire and he's trying to put it out. There are other recordings from this day, too. They're filled with firefighter jargon. But they help illustrate the chaos at the scene as firefighters discovered this was not a normal fire. More firefighters start to pull up on Woodland Drive and pour into the house, looking for anyone who might be inside, overcome by the smoke.
Private Michael Ader is one of them. He's not here to fight the fire. He doesn't even have a hose, just his tank of oxygen and a mask over his face. Facing the thick black smoke, he heads to the second floor to look for victims. And right away, Ader knows he's on a deadline. His oxygen will only last him about 25 minutes. And it's a very big house, so he knows he needs to work quickly. Ader goes to a different bedroom from the one Lieutenant Hershey is in, working to extinguish the roaring flames.
Ader heads across the hall to another bedroom filled with thick smoke. There's no fire here, but he knows there could be a person who couldn't find their way out. So Ader starts what's called a right-hand search. He gets down close to the ground and orients himself by keeping one hand anchored to the wall on his right. Starting at the door, he runs his hand along the wall until he covers the entire room's perimeter. But Ader can barely see.
Ader goes to lift the person out of the chair, but he can't get a good grip.
Something's wrong. They keep slipping out of his grasp, and he doesn't know why. He doesn't know if the person is alive, but they feel like dead weight. He goes to lay them on the floor so he can try and lift them in a different way. As he lowers the person onto the floor, he realizes he's laying them on top of another body.
Ader manages to carry the first person out to the hall and hands them to another firefighter to bring to the medics outside. He turns back and finding the doorway to that same smoke-filled bedroom. He sees his lieutenant has just arrived to help. Ader goes to the spot where he found the second victim on the ground and begins to lift them off the floor. But across the room, his lieutenant says, help me lift this person.
I am, Ader insists, with his hands under the arms of the second body. That's when they both realize they're holding different people. There's a third victim in the room. There are a total of three victims. I copy, truck two. Truck two, what side are you on?
The recordings are a little hard to understand. We'll need medic units. That's what the firefighter says. Outside 3201 Woodland Drive, three victims lay in a row on the front lawn. They're covered in blood. The firefighters can't really figure it out. There's not usually that much blood at the scene of a fire.
They wonder if there had been an explosion of some kind. The medics work frantically, and one of the victims is lifted on a stretcher and rushed to the ambulance nearby. It's been a surprising 25 minutes, and not in a good way. Ader takes a seat on the curb and starts to process what just happened. He removes his mask and draws a breath of fresh air. Up until now, the smoke had clouded his vision. He was using his hands to get around and navigate his way through the room, through the house.
This is the first time he's seeing what's on his gear. He looks down and sees something red. It's definitely blood, and it's on his mask. It's covering his turnout gear. It's on his boots. It's on his gloves. After he suits up to go back inside, Ader finds that thick smoke upstairs is starting to clear, and he finally gets a good look at the bedroom where he found those three people. There's only one way to describe it. It's a bloodbath.
The police are now on the way. It's clear to everyone on the scene the bloodied victims pulled from the upstairs bedroom weren't simply overcome by smoke. And there's still another gruesome discovery for firefighters inside the other bedroom, across the hall where Lieutenant Hershey and other firefighters are working to put out the fire.
Lieutenant Corey Goetz is working back up. He's crawling toward a window when he kind of falls into a hole in the floor. The heat from the fire had burned so intensely, it melted the bed. The floorboards had given way, creating almost a crater in the middle of the bedroom, filled with blackened bed springs and something else. When Goetz trips into that hole, he brushes against something, part of a body. He reaches up to confirm his suspicions and feels what might be a small knee, but it's not.
He reaches farther to feel another leg, and then his gloves land on what feels like a head. It's the charred body of a child.
It is being called a major crime scene as homicide investigators examine a house that caught fire in northwest D.C. The room is a crime scene. They found four people, including a child, dead inside on the second floor. Right now it does not appear that this was just a random crime. I said, but what happened? They said, we don't know. They killed the whole family.
Police have said they believe more than one person is responsible for the crime. A wide-reaching manhunt for Darren Wintz stretching all the way to New York City. We had the DNA on a piece of grass. How did his DNA get into that house? Got a package that I'm going to need you to bring down to me. To do what he did to four people, including a 10-year-old boy, is just beyond words. They were brutalized, and we saw the evidence of that.
The jury has just reached a verdict in the murder trial of Darren Wint. He was going to strike the American dream just by committing murder in Mayhem. I'm Megan Clowerty. Thanks for listening to 22 Hours, An American Nightmare, a new true crime podcast from WTOP in Washington, D.C.
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