You have a vision, a solution to a social problem. You want to change Ireland for the better, for society.

But if you want that vision to become reality, you'll need support. That's where we come in. At Socialentrepreneurs Ireland, we offer direct funding as well as advice and mentoring and other supports. That's how we've helped hundreds of initiatives realize their vision.

Apply today at socialentrepreneurs. Ie. 20 years changing Ireland. In the '90s, New York Detective Louis Scarsella locked up the worst criminals. Putting bad guys away. There's no feeling like it. Then Jailhouse Lawyers took aim, led by Derek Hamilton.

Scarsella took me to the precinct and died.

20 men eventually walked free. Now, in the Burden podcast, after a decade of silence, Louis Scarsella finally tells his story, and so does Derek Hamilton. Listen to The Burden on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Podcasts. All that sitting and swiping, our backs hurt, our eyeballs sting. That's our bodies adapting to our technology. But we can do something about it.

We saw amazing effects. I really felt like the cloud in my brain dissipated. There's no turning back from me.

Make 2024 the year you put your health before your inbox and take the Body Electric challenge. Listen to Body Electric from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Human beings are not conditioned to react to a gruesome homicide scene. Those who come across bodies during the normal course of life display a wide range of emotion: shock, disbelief, confusion, horror, fear, and of course, guilt. When I began to focus my career on missing people long ago. What unnerved me most was that a loved one had vanished and family members were left to wonder, to wait, to suffer, not knowing what happened or where they were. You would think, as I used to, that the discovery of a body resolves a small part of the emotional puzzle surrounding a missing person. But that's not always the reality. So you come upon the skull, you and your husband. Your husband sees the skull, you walk over to it. What is your first thought? What are you thinking?

We didn't know really what to think.

If you recall, at the end of the previous episode, Randy and Linda Grohler happened upon the skull and remains of a young woman just up the road from their Anderson, Missouri home.

I tell you what it looked like if somebody had set a skull off a museum shelf on the ground. It was just as shiny as could be, just as bleached out as it all could be.

Were there any clothes or were there any ligatures around the neck or head or body?

The skull was detached from the body and the rib cage was detached from the body. The only clothes that was on the body that we found was where the pelvis and legs were in tennis shoes. She had tennis shoes on. There was glass cable around her neck, but her hands, we didn't move anything until after the coroner got there, but the hands were tied with a rope. Looked like clothes lying rope.

How did this make the both of you feel when it settled into you that you had found a body?

Well, it was disturbing to me, but I had been in the mortuary business before, so I wasn't I'm too upset. My wife, Linda, she got real upset about it. Matter of fact, she had to go to the doctor and get medication to help her sleep at night.

Tell me about that, Linda. What was troubling you?

They thought that she was dumped there and we couldn't help her.

That here is somebody's daughter, sister, mother, and nobody knows she's there. She's missing.

The part that bothered me for years was why somebody didn't report her missing. If you got a child and you send them- As I listened to the Grohlers describe their experience, the bindings they mentioned jumped out at me.

Although it was a point of contention among law enforcement, one could argue that bindings could have been part of the Dana Stidham crime scene.

It was like a clothesline rope and stuff like that.

It was different types.

Finding the skull and remains of a young woman so close to their home had jogged a memory for the Groalers.

Then we got to think in this, Bones in our front yard. This is the part that really bothers me. Our dog, a Siberian Husky, had brought part of her home with him. We thought it was deer bones.

We didn't look at it closely, but I think it was what?

Part of her vertebrate backbone. Between the ribs and the bottom of her.

Is Is there anything else that you remember?

When the sheriff and the coroner were up there, the coroner happened to be Gail Duncan at the time, I remember Gail telling me that this is not going to be a problem identifying the body because of the extensive dental work.

That plausible offhand comment about Jane Doe's teeth and her eventual identity would turn out to be the understatement of this case and send law enforcement on a 30-year quest to identify her. Previously on, Paper Ghost.

He went down there and he took something from a little dead girl, and I didn't like it.

It seems to check all the boxes for a sexual predator. Going into the store with a hood on their face, standing behind the women, sneaking up behind them, in some cases, groping them.

But I went back there with him and we saw the skull. And then on further looking, we could see the rest of the body.

My name is M. William Phelps. I'm an investigative journalist and author of more than 40 true crime books. This is Season 4 of Pay for Ghosts: The Ozarks.

This road here that we just turned off of would have been US 71 Highway.

So this road here would have been so much busier.

It would have been just as busy as- Oscar Talley Road in Anderson, Missouri was a bit confusing for this New Englander trudging through the Ozarks in early 2023, searching for answers in two decades-old cold cases. I met Detective Laurie Howard and her partner, Detective Rhonda Wise, from the McDonald County Sheriff's office, out at the crime scene. Hi, how are you? Detective Laurie Howard. How's it going?

I might not be the best person to ask. I have no idea.

You've been busy, huh?

I have been so busy. So busy.

And the worst-Lauri Howard is one of the most dedicated investigators I have ever had the privilege of calling a friend. She's disciplined, resolute, and laser-focused focused on making sure murder victims have a voice. Detective Howard picked up the Oscar Talley Road Jane Doe case about 15 years ago. Do you think there's a possibility it can be solved?

I know it will. I'm not shooting my horn here, but I'm not apt to give up on it. I have reason to believe that it will be solved.

Oscar Talley is what I would call a backcountry road. There are a lot these throughout the Ozarks, unpaved named streets surrounded by vast forests, thickly settled on both sides. Laurie Howard and Rhonda Wies work under current McDonald County, Missouri elected Sheriff Rob Evenson. The grit and persistence they display to work a case and stick with it despite barriers is a skill not all law enforcement possesses. As the years passed after Jane Doe was found, the course of events surrounding this case can only be described as bizarre. After I pulled up to where Jane Doe's remains were found by the Groehlers, Detective Howard jumped in my vehicle and put me right into the mindset of the killer she is hunting.

All right, so the working theory is more than likely, It would have come from this direction, the direction that we came off of the main highway.

It was far off the main highway.

Oh, yeah. The whole road looked essentially really, really narrow. It's been widened since then. If you go with my theory, he would have come from that side and come out this way and gone out this way. Either way, whether you're a neighbor here or whether you're a neighbor here, this sits in an area that's echoey because there's a park with some water down here. So this truck would have been loud at the time. I mean, you hear birds. So I'm really loud mufflered truck would be heard by all of those people.

There's that mention of a truck again, which figures so prominently in Dana Stidham's case. As we chatted, a man came walking out of the woods toward us, Laurie knew exactly who he was, a guy whose name I have to bleep out. She shouted, calling him by his name. Making his way to the vehicle, he couldn't hear as we continued talking.

So This guy hates to have people come out here and look. We've been out here a lot of times, and he's just not crazy about it. We have people that think he did it.

There was a Mac truck without a trailer parked nearby.

I'm not one of them, but there's people that say that he's had something to do with it because he's a little hinky.

He's a trucker. Truckers are the largest number of serial killers in the country.

They are, but I'm not sold.

The man was just a few yards from my vehicle.

He's getting ready to probably show you. There was an old abandoned house, creepy as hell, and that's where they would play. But more importantly, what I'm going to show you is going to be this concrete pad, which was in front of that garage, which is where she was lying.

He stood now at the window on Laurie's side and demanded to know what we were doing.

Well, I'm Detective Howard, so it's nice to meet you.I'm.

Matthew.hi, Matthew. Okay, so I explained to him that we were just The guy was cautious and preoccupied with why we were out there.

But he also mentioned he might have some information. He said he knew Randy and Linda Grohler very well, that couple up the road who found Jane Doe. We stepped out of the vehicle and stood together. As Laurie and the guy started to discuss people in the area they both knew, I gave them the space to speak privately and pulled Detective Rhonda Weis aside for a little chat. What's it about the cold case work that attracts you to it?

I've been saying this a lot in the last couple of days. It doesn't matter who solves the cold case as long as it gets solved so that that family can have that closure.

Perfect. You know? As Rhonda and I talked, Laurie walked over with a surprised look on her face. The curious dude she was speaking to, apparently, had something. Laurie, we good here, you think? I want you to talk to this man.

Okay. I had no idea that he had something to offer, but he was here the night that he heard the scream. He was down the road where the party was taking place. He can validate there was a party. He can validate that the kids said there was a scream. He can validate what happened to them.

You have a vision, a solution to a social problem. You want to change Ireland for the better, for society.

But if you want that vision to become reality, you'll need support. That's where we come in. At Socialentrepreneurs Ireland, we offer direct funding as well as advice and mentoring and other supports. That's how we've helped hundreds of initiatives realize their vision.

Apply today at socialentrepreneurs. Ca. Raleigh, 20 years changing Ireland. In the 1980s and '90s, New York City needed a tough cop like Detective Louis Scarsella. Putting bad guys away. There's no feeling like it in the world. He was the guy who made sure the worst killers were brought to justice. That's one version.

This guy is a piece of Derrick Hamilton was put away for murder by Detective Scarsella.

In prison, Derek turned himself into the best jailhouse lawyer of his generation. My lawyer was my girlfriend.

This is my only way to freedom.

Derek and other convicted murderers. Started a law firm behind bars. We never knew we They had the same cop in the case. Scarsella. We got to show that he's a corrupt cop. They could go themselves.

I'm Steve Fishman. And I'm Dax Devlin Ross.

And this is The Burden. Listen to new episodes of The Burden on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive bonus content, subscribe to True Crime Clubhouse on Apple podcast. All that sitting and swiping, our backs hurt, our eyeballs sting, that's our bodies adapting to our technology. But we can do something about it.

We saw amazing effects. I really felt like the cloud in my brain dissipated. There's no turning back from me.

Make 2024 the year you put your health before your inbox and take the Body Electric challenge. Listen to Body Electric from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Back in 1990, three kids reported that they heard a female scream on Halloween night. And that's not exactly evidence of a murder, which was why law enforcement back then had not given much weight to the statements. But this new witness who had just appeared as as I was at the Jane Doe crime scene with Detectives Laurie Howard and Rhonda Wise, seemed to corroborate the information. I walked over to the man and asked him to start at the beginning. I won't use your name. Okay. Okay, so it's Halloween night. And what happens?

Bunch of us kids were just having a party at a house there, and one of the couples left and started up the hill, heard a scream, came back down, told us a couple of guys walked up here. We didn't hear nothing after that.

And did anybody hear a truck?

Just to see what was going on.

Okay. Okay. And nobody saw a vehicle leave, anything like that?

It had been several minutes, so the truck probably had already been gone. They heard a scream, and it freaked them out, and they went back down because it's dark up here.

A 10-year Old boy who lived on Oscar Talley Roadhead reported coming across Jane Doe's body on November third, about a month before she was found, closer to that Halloween night date. He told his parents, but they wrote it off as a Halloween prank. Then those three additional young witnesses, two boys and a girl at a Halloween party nearby, reported hearing a truck drive down Oscar Tally and stop before hearing a woman scream, and the truck then taking off in a hurry. For Laurie Howard, it all now made sense. So it was a terrifying scream. Yeah, it wasn't some... Like they're playing volleyball or something. It was a shriek. So that's the second person that has...

That didn't exist. And we know that it was around Halloween, which we suppositioned. But he can tell us for sure that it was a Halloween party going on.

According to the official report written on December second, 1990, Jane Doe was found in high grass, 20 feet off Oscar Talley Road, near an old rundown barn. Binder twine, electrical cord, nylon rope, and paracord were used to restrain her. She wore blue jeans and a denim jacket. She was thought to be between 20 and 30 years old. Her upper rib cage was found near the porch of the barn, dragged there, likely by wild animals. Those bindings were significant and appeared to be important to Jane Doe's killer. May maybe even his signature. Here's former Sheriff, Don Slesman, who investigated the case in the years after Jane Doe's body was discovered.

See, they had a towel wrapped around her head And they attached that with electrical wire, single-strand electrical wire with the insulation on it. That don't make sense. And power cord, just a bunch of stuff. Crazy.

And was she hog tired?

Hands and feet.

A towel around her head.

Yeah, they dropped a towel around her head.

Around her face as well or just her head?

Her face, so she couldn't finally see.

Yeah, that's interesting. With with electrical cord, the bendable electrical cord with the copper in it, right?

Yeah, it's solid copper center. And then it had the on the good black insulation like you'd wear a house with. But it looked like they'd just grab whatever they could and tied her up with it. Four or five different things. And the paracord, back in those days, paracord was something not everybody had.

Unless you You were in the military.

Yeah.

For investigators in the case, those very particular bindings at the Jane Doe crime scene brought to mind one particular serial killer of record, Dennis Rader, self-perclaimed to bind, torture, kill his victims. You might also know him as BT BTK. In early 2023, Detective Laurie Howard went out to speak with Rater, the first of many visits, specifically about Jane Doe. In fact, the night before I met with Rhonda and Laurie at Jane Doe's crime scene, they brought BTK's daughter, Kari Rosson, and interviewed him again. The Sheriff's office in Pauska, Oklahoma, had created a task force looking into the 47-year-old cold case murder of Cynthia Dawn Kinney and additional cold cases, including Detective Howard's Jane Doe. The Sheriff was stuck on linking BTK to Laurie's Oscar Tally Jane Doe. I sent some frustration from Laurie and Rhonda, not to mention disagreement with where Sheriff Eddie Verdon of Osage County was with BTK and Jane Doe. Rhonda and Laurie saw no evidence connecting BTK directly to their Jane Doe. And the more they spoke to Rader about it, the more they felt Osage County was only interested in closing cases, not solving murders. Btk seemed like as good a scapegoat as any.

Still, it didn't mean that Detective Howard wasn't looking at Rader as a serious suspect Jane Doe's case.

Early on, I would have been remiss if I had not said, I have to see Dennis Rader, a. K. A. Btk, because of the binding. They're massive, it's overkill, it's obviously something that's important to the crime.

How many different bindings are we talking about? How many different types of twine wire?

Between six and eight, and Essentially, you're going to have coax cable, you're going to have parachute cord, nylon cord, just like a camping type of cord, a braided rope. We call this yellow cord that we're looking at here. That would be like a tree trimmer type of cord. You also have what we refer to as baling twine. It's a type of cisal twine that you might see in hay bales.

All of that was used on her?

All of it was used on both her wrists and her feet, and then tied together with It was shoelace.

Well, that's pretty significant, I think.

It is significant. And BTK thought it was significant. He's meticulous.

That is not meticulous.

That is not meticulous.

That's very unorganized.

This would be indicative of somebody who, tighter, left her, came back, tighter, left her, came back, possibly for quite a while.

I wondered what BTK thought about all this new attention directed at him.

He was very anxious to see his name plastered all over the media again. He said, I don't have very much longer to live. And he said, I can see the headlines now. Btk gives last confession and all of this thing.

What I heard was BTK could not yet be ruled out of Oscar Tally Jane Doe's murder.

What I would say about that is I do believe wholeheartedly that there are other victims in Kansas and more than likely parts of Oklahoma that are close to Kansas. But really, that was his stomping grounds. I can put him in Missouri. I can put him in Southwest Missouri. But I don't think he was ever alone there. I believe that every time he came to Southwest Missouri, he was with his family, and it was as a fishing trip.

I had heard BTK was very ill. So I asked Laurie about it.

I mean, he was animated. And the person that I saw when they wheeled him in, because he's now in a wheelchair, he has scoliosis, he's doubled over, he doesn't walk well, he has cellulitis in both legs. He's got an ashen appearance. And by his own account, he said, I probably won't live that much longer.

The Oscar Tally Jane Doe murder felt somewhat disorganized, not to mention outside BTK Btk's comfort zone of a confined space, such as a house. Plus, if we're comparing Jane Doe's murder with Dana Stidham's as potentially being linked, BTK could mostly be excluded from Dana's case based on how she went missing, the multiple sightings of her after, and where she was found. So what did BTK have to say about Jane Doe's case, specifically?

And so when I would put his work in front of him, let's say it was a code, and I was asking him about his own code, he would become very animated and excited. He'd go, Oh, look at that. That's mine. We'd go over what the code meant and what he wrote and how he wrote it and how the codes were written out. He was very forthcoming on all of his work. And then I would slide over some of his journal entries that had projects, his different projects and things.

Btk was known to use the word project for his murders.

I would say, Hey, what about this? He'd tell me about it. He had no problems talking about the 10 that he had already killed. Even some of the journal entries that weren't victims that we know of, he would explain them. Every time I would put a piece of paper in front of him, he was overjoyed that I had his work. I had one project in particular that I had mentioned to him, and he was just a totally different person. He said, Nobody's ever asked me about that. He was very excited about it, which leads me to believe that's probably a potential victim.

Laurie then showed BTK a photo of the bindings used on Jane Doe.

No animation, nothing. He literally almost had a look of disgust on his face. It was what he said was, That's overkill. I don't know why anybody would do that. So it was almost like he had a lack of respect for the work that he was looking at.

I cannot undersell the incredible amount of bindings found at this crime scene, but it's the paracord and ropes that most interested me. Paracord, at that time, would have been very hard to find and purchase if you were not in the military. Jack Linnie, the new suspect in Dana's case I mentioned in the last episode, had done a long stint in the military. He also lived in between Bella Vista, Arkansas, and Anderson, Missouri, and was known to come up into Anderson at times. And he drove a truck. With the discovery of Jane Doe not far from the Dana Stidham crime scene in Bella Vista, the BCSO took notice. By then, the BCSO had latched on to the guy I'm calling Jack Linnie. Here's Lieutenant Hunter-Pattray, who begins by explaining why the BCSO's case against their chief suspect, Mike McMillan, went stagnant and the focus turned to Linnie.

Part of the problem is physical evidence, DNA, witnesses. You have to realize in law enforcement that sometimes you can arrest people and you think your case looks good, but you have to also think about the prosecutor's office. They have to be able to get a jury to convict somebody. So you don't just want to arrest somebody if you don't think the case is good and you don't think that the case is going to make it through prosecution. From everything, there's just not enough at this point in time to make an arrest. It's complicated because there are other people associated with this case that are good for it as well. When I say good for it, I mean as far as their history and their sexually harassing people.

I bleeped it out. But Hunter Petre mentioned Linnie by his real name and also made a valid point regarding Linnie's behaviors around women. Let's call him the Suspect because I'm not going to name him. I'm going to knock on his door Friday, but I'm not going to name him unless he talks to me. But, jeez, that fucker looks like...

We talked early on about a little bit of victimology But you also have to think about suspectology. Going back and looking at his history, he just made comments at Walmart, at other places of employment to females. I'm talking sexual advances and sexual harassment. He would come into Phillips there where Dana worked and other females that worked there and make those comments to them.

This type of misogynistic criminal treatment of women was common. And sadly, normalized back in the '80s and '90s. Sexual harassment, cat calling, demoralizing, and abusive as it was, was barely frowned upon back then. But what Hunter Pétray tells me next proves the sexual harassment Lynn had been allowed to get away with was next level.

There was also a female in Bentonville, and she was actually driving to work. He got in behind her and almost ran her off the road and followed her all the way up to the parking lot there at Phillips, where she ran inside and she pretty much pinned it as that was being. He made comments When he was interviewed as far as was it possible that he may have stopped Dana? Well, maybe she had a flat tire or something like that. Which, again, is circumstantial, but we know that Dana had a low tire. He also made comments of somebody had a seat belt or something that was hanging out the door or something. He would just stop people. And not that he just would, but that he had in the past stopped people for things. He's one of those guys that, by his own admission, would talk to anybody. He played it off as far as comments that they were harmless. I think he made one comment to a girl, had she ever been eight, which has sexual innuendos there, but he referred to it as, Well, she just took it wrong. I was talking about her age.

Comments like that.

Another thing we weren't aware of or knew much about in the '80s was gaslighting. Didn't he show up at a store once in a ski mask?

He showed up outside and made a comment, but he was wearing a ski mask, and they asked him about that. He says, Yeah, if it's cold outside, sometimes I wear a ski mask, but it's not like I was trying to rob anybody or anything like that.

Let's talk about what he drove at the time. He drove a station wagon and a truck, right?

A few different vehicles. He was looked at initially because he worked for The company Lieutenant Petre mentions here conducted work all over Bella Vista and up toward the Missouri border, where Jane Doe was discovered.

Linnie, in his 40s then, living alone, traveled all over those areas. And I should note, this was at a time when Dana Stidham worked at Phillips. You see, Linnie knew her from going into that store for breakfast and lunch nearly every day.

They did find some maps in his vehicle, but yeah, he would have known the area good because he worked there.

Those maps, I might add, were marked with a pen in areas where Dana was seen during the time she was missing. And he was an army guy, too, right?

A military guy. He was in the military, yeah. And in fact, I think even when he was doing some stuff, he would still do some weekend stuff with the military.

Sheriff Don told me the other day, he said, Yeah, he went down to Panama.

Yeah, that's right.

That Panama allegation included Linnie beating a sex worker. Do you think Dana's case is connected to Doe's case?

Well, I I can't rule it out. Here's why I say that is, so you have Dana in summer of '89. We had another case that we call a Bone Woman, which we've now identified. Oh, you have? Yeah. That was in February of '90. There was another individual, first part of '90, that was just a couple of miles away from where Dana was found off that same road. And then, of course, you had the one just across the line there in McDonald County. All of this stuff within a year, like four homicides within a one year period. Now, Bone Woman, we've been able to identify and we pretty much... We've closed it out. We have a suspect, but the suspect's dead. We're pretty sure that he did it. So we've closed that case out, and we don't think it's connected to the others. But when you get that many homicides in that short of a period and also within that condensed area, you can't rule it out.

I asked about any similarities the BCSC also found in Dana's and Jane Doe's cases, and if they considered the bindings important within that scope.

Yeah, she was bound for certain, for sure. We can't say that Dana was. We've got some red twine. That's all we got. Possibly, maybe. But the crime lab, the Emmie's office, couldn't get any connection that that stuff had been used as any type of ligature or anything. So maybe. I don't know. When you start talking about Dana's case, and when you start looking at victimology, Dana, you look at low, moderate, high risk. To me, when I look at this case and put everything together, Dana is or was high, low to moderate risk. I say that just because of the lifestyle. But the lifestyle was that of a teenager that runs around. Yeah, they party at times. They drink at times. But by no means was her risk what I would consider high risk. When you start talking about high risk, you start talking about prostitutes. So when you look at Dana, I don't see that same similarity Remember Brandon Howard, the journalist you've heard in previous episodes?

He had gotten a hold of some information about one of Linnie's ex-wives, and eventually wound up speaking to her. I remember her Bringing up the fact that they never found Dana's purse. That was brought up unprompted, which stood out to me because a year or so later, she mentions that this suspect might have had female purses at his mother's house. His ex-wife insinuated that he had a fetish for purses, and he collected them. If you recall, although the contents of Dana's purse were found, her large, unique denim bag was not. She also mentions that they met hitchhiking in the early '80s and that they struck up a relationship. That's pretty much it that she tells Benton County. Well, not only did they meet Hitchhiking, but he made sexual advances fairly quickly in the vehicle. Linnie's ex-wife went on to say she knows her ex-husband killed Dana, but doesn't think there is any way for law enforcement to prove it. She mentioned finding blood in a station wagon they owned and remembered him cleaning it and throwing his clothes away afterward. The way she put it, he covered his ass when it came to Dana. But get this, she was also there on the day Linnie flunked a polygraph.

When he came out of the room, he had a look on his face like he knew he was caught. Sorry, you wouldn't have a table, please? Oh, sorry. Do you want to sit down? Irish people can be very polite, but sometimes it pays to be direct. Come direct to Energia for our best rate on electricity and gas with Ireland's cheapest dual-fuel bundle, as well as real-time energy insights to help you manage your usage. It means you're getting a better deal. And we're They're not sorry. Switch today at energyia. Ie. Energia Smart Data Plan, EAB, €2,490. Standing charge, PSO levy, carbon tax, and discounted unit rates apply. Full details, including associated terms and conditions at energyia. Ie. In the 1980s and '90s, New York City needed a tough cop like Detective Louis Scarsella. Putting bad guys away. There's no feeling like it in the world. He was the guy who made sure the worst killers were brought to justice. That's one version.

This guy is a piece of Derrick Hamilton was put away for murder by Detective Scarsella.

In prison, Derrick turned himself into the best Jailhouse lawyer of his generation. My lawyer was my girlfriend.

This is my only way to freedom.

Derek and other convicted murderers. Started a law firm behind bars. We never knew we had the same cop in the case. Scarsella. We got to show that he's a corrupt cop. They could go themselves.

I'm Steve Fishman. And I'm Dax Devlin Ross.

And this is The Burden. Listen to new episodes of The Burden on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive bonus content, subscribe to True Crime Clubhouse on Apple Podcasts. All that sitting and swiping, our backs hurt, our eyeballs sting, that's our bodies adapting to our technology. But we can do something about it.

We saw amazing effects. I really felt like the cloud in my brain dissipated. There's no turning back from me.

Make 2024 the year you put your health before your inbox and take the Body Electric challenge. Listen to Body Electric from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. The Oscar Tali Jane Doe took on a different name not long after her remains were discovered. It was clear early on that identifying Jane Doe was going to take time and technology, if it was even possible. So clear, in fact, a detective said in passing one day, Only by the grace of God will you identify her. From that moment on, she became Grace Doe, which is an important moment in this case. The name Jane Doe is such a common reference that it fails to conjure emotion or personalize an unidentified murder victim. Jane Doe suggests a more societal need to help, but place another name in front of Doe, and suddenly, there's an emotional connection. Based on the state of decomposition, the only The option to identify her was to send dental X-rays in for comparison, considering there were several missing girls in the area, fitting her general description. In particular, 21-year-old Patricia Ann Smith from Glen Co, Oklahoma, and 34-year-old Treva Ann Castile from Springfield, Missouri.

Within two weeks, both tests came back negative. No match. Not knowing the identity of Grace Doe made finding her killer that much more difficult. And as Detective Laurie Howard explains, when she came aboard in 2007, she started literally from scratch, without a body.

Couldn't find her. I couldn't find the evidence. I couldn't find schilajol remains. I didn't have a report. So essentially, I still just had a story. Years later, driving people absolutely crazy. I called the Emmie's office. I called Columbia. I made various trips to North Carolina. I went all over the place. And then one day, I got a phone call from the Emmie's office in Columbia, and she said, Okay, I found her. So I immediately made a trip back up to Columbia, Missouri, and I retrieved her skeleton remains.

The first goal was to get a facial reconstruction done so they had some idea of what she might have looked like. This would also allow the Sheriff's Department to reach out publicly. While I was in Missouri, I met with Sheriff Rob Evenson from the McDonald County Sheriff's office. Grace Doe's murder is Evenson's case. And when she's found, what happens? What was the most difficult thing about it?

The The most difficult thing about it, this goes on for nearly 30 years, was to get an identification of who the remains belong or who she was.

So you have a young woman, her exact age, I guess, found off the side of a secluded backcountry road with houses and farms spread sporadically all over the place. Nobody knows who she is. There are no missing person reports linked to her. And she had been out in the elements for two months.

And so she went nearly 30 years without having a name to go with those remains.

So it's hard to work a case if you're an investigator when you don't have an ID.

And my previous employment, I'd been a detective for about nine years, so I've worked a fair number of homicides. And of course, that is the first thing. Besides your immediate crime scene, that's the first thing that you need to do is get your victim identified. Your victimology usually leads you to your suspects, and it leads you to the solution of the case.

Okay. So her case goes cold because they can't identify her. So there's really nothing you can do, right? I mean, you can send DNA out, but at the time, DNA is in its infancy.

That's correct. Of course, technology has changed so much over the most recent few years. So new opportunities, new tools, Every year, things get better and better with DNA technology. Of course, Laurie worked on this in her off time, in her downtime, when she wasn't working on something else, and just kept trying and kept trying and kept trying. And eventually, She was able to get with a laboratory that was able to extract that DNA.

Extracting DNA from advanced decomposed remains is not as simple as taking a hair or tissue sample and sending it off to lab for a profile. It's a complicated scientific process with many different variables involved. Chief among them, the funding to get the DNA to a place where it's scientifically possible to even create a profile. Here's Laurie Howard again.

I needed to get DNA in the system, and that was actually harder than it sounds. What I had was a fingernail, I had some hair. I was talking to the North Texas Health and Human Sciences in Texas. And I was pretty much begging them to take a thumbnail. And they said, I don't think. I don't think it's going to work. It doesn't mean our protocol, so to speak. They're funded, and how they're funded sometimes requires them to have a particular way of receiving evidence. But they eventually said, okay, let's just see if we can get some mitochondrial DNA. And I sent them part of a fingernail. The mitochondrial DNA went into the system, but wasn't very helpful, of course.

Mcdonald County's goal was to submit Grace Doe's DNA to all the ancestry genealogical forensic databases with the hope that someone with a connection to Grace was in one of those databases.

I kept saying, Can you please go back and look and see if you have a Jane Doe? They just repeatedly said, No, I don't think we have anything that meets what you're giving us. It was a It's a matter of figuring out what my best source of DNA might be. And ultimately, I took her mandible and I sat one evening and extracted her teeth because I knew the molars would probably be my best source.

Now, she had really good teeth, right? She did. And what did that tell you?

I spoke to the forensic orthodontist, and he basically said this woman was well cared for, but that was a dichotomy for people that aren't in the system, are not reported as a missing person. I had a hard time figuring out she was either loved and had a good life and was well taken care of, versus she's not in the system, nobody's reported her missing. Is she a runaway? So it tells you a lot about the care, generally speaking. But in her case, that wasn't the case because she actually grew up in foster care.

Another major hurdle. Grace Stowe had been bounced from home to home. None of these families would have a blood-DNA connection to her. That other possibility of an expensive facial reconstruction gnawed at Laurie. She needed to know what this woman might have looked like. Even more importantly, getting that image out onto social media and the Internet to see if anyone recognized her.

So So ultimately, what happened is I asked Victoria Lydwood, for a forensic reconstructionist out of Canada, to help me. And I was very upfront and said, I can't pay you. I'm asking you for a lot, and I really need it. And Victoria was gracious and the best person to work with. And she said, I'll do it. But then the problem became, you can't just ship a and little remains over the border. So I ran up against an, Okay, how am I going to do this? And so I called our local hospital in Neosha, Missouri, and I spoke with somebody on the board, and I said, I'm about to ask you something, and I don't want you to tell me no. And he said, Oh, dear. And he said, Okay. And I said, I really want to bring a skull and mandible into you of a deceased person, a homicide victim. And I'm asking you to take MRI and MRI photos of the skull and mandible and give me some images for free. And he said, Oh, Oh, okay. I see. And I said, Please, I have no funds. I'm working with very limited funds, but I have to do this.

And so he said, If you will bring her in the middle of the night, midnight to one o'clock in a box covered, I don't want any anybody to touch this. I don't want to know you're here. Essentially, just do what you have to do, and I'll set it up. And he did. And so what I didn't know at the time was that's never been done before.

They wound up choosing over 300 images out of what were hundreds of thousands.

And then I sent them, of course, digitally to Canada. And she had never worked that way either. So it took a long time. She said, What do you think the color of the eyes, the hair? We went back and forth for a really long time clothing. And to Victoria's credit, she said, This was the '80s. Tell me what this jean jacket looked like. She searched and found the identical clothing for the most part that she was wearing. And for, I want to say, probably two years, we went back and forth with this process. And true to form, one day I come in and I open up and I'm looking at my emails and it says, Laurie, meet Grace. And there she was. There's her face.

And so what What did she look like to you when you saw that image? Who was she?

She looked exactly like I thought she would look like. I didn't know her, but yet I knew her, and she looked exactly like what I thought she would look like, and I just knew this is really who she is. I was so comfortable with it that I immediately started calling media and said, Hey, I want her everywhere.

The Reconstruction by Victoria Lynwood, which is available online with a quick Google search, depicts a woman with brown hair, brown eyes, and olive skin. She appears to be in her late 20s, early 30s. Now, when does she get identified?

The answer to that is forensic genealogy.

Submitting Grace's DNA into the forensic genealogy databases and thus paying for it, fell on Sheriff Rob Evenson's office.

Well, we have to give credit to Mike Hall. Mike was the former Sheriff, and he was Sheriff until the end of 2020. While he was in office, he did keep Grace's case alive, and he was able to get hooked up with a lab where he was able to submit her DNA profile. This lab was able to do some of this forensic genealogy and came up with a possible familial match.

The company When he involved, Othram, was able to extract DNA from Grace Doe's remains and, more significantly, create a profile. That was September 2020. By January 2021, Othram called the McDonald County Sheriff's office. They had a match. Grace Doe is Shawna Garber. And yet, identifying Shawna produced an entire new set of difficulties because, though had a name, when Shawna was in her early teens, she disappeared from any public record. She simply had no history. What's more, the life Shana ran from and the one she ran toward, turned out to complicate Detective Laurie Howard's murder investigation even further.

I think it was KU Med Center. At first, she was in the hospital near to I think it was Topeka, and then she was transferred to the KU Med Center.

Was she sick?

No, she was burned.

How was she burned?

Our mother poured lighting fluid on her and lit a match.

If you're enjoying Paper Ghosts, check out my other podcasts, Crossing the Line with M. William Phelps and White Eagle, wherever you get your favorite shows. Coming up next on Paper Ghosts.

Well, first, he chose his own moniker, Finded Them, Torture Them, Kill Them, BTK.

She was removed from several foster homes because our mother would interfere to the point she even threatened to kill one foster family's kids. Our mother was an evil, vindictive spawn of hell.

I I just remember being in the basement of this individual's house, and there had to been over 100 spools of different cords. It just was pretty ominous. Paper Ghost Season 4 is written and executive by me, Em William Phelps. Scrip Consulting by Rose Bocce. Sound Design by Matt Russell. Executive Production by Katherine Law. And audio editing and mixing by Brandon Dickert. Taka Boom Productions. The Series theme, Number 442, is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Moon. You have a vision, a solution to a social problem. You want to change Ireland for the better, for society.

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Apply today at socialentrepreneurs. Ie. 20 years changing Ireland. In the '90s, New York Detective Louis Scarsella locked up the worst criminals. Putting bad guys away. There's no feeling like it. Then Jailhouse Lawyers took aim, led by Derek Hamilton.

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20 men eventually walked free. Now, in the Burden podcast, after a decade of silence, Louis Scarsella finally tells his story, and so does Derek Hamilton. Listen to the Burden on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All that sitting and swiping, our backs hurt, our eyeballs sting. That's our bodies adapting to our technology. But we can do something about it.

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