Forensic Files Archives - Forensic Files Now

Calvin and Michele Harris: Collision Course

A wealthy car dealer’s wife disappears
‘Auto Motive,’ Forensic Files

Michele Harris

While the world was watching news of the terror attacks on Manhattan’s twin towers, a smaller-scale tragedy was playing out in rural Tioga County, New York.

Michele Harris, a 35-year-old mother of four with a rich husband, never came home after her waitressing shift on September 11, 2001. With local police helping out at the World Trade Center site, they couldn’t devote much time to an investigation right away.

And once they opened the case, their efforts to find a body or a murder weapon yielded nothing. They would have to wait years to go to trial, with only scant forensic and circumstantial evidence.

Funds equal freedom. The episode, produced in 2011, left some questions. As Forensic Files noted, despite that Michele and Calvin “Cal” Harris were getting divorced, she lived in the family home to prevent his side from making charges of child abandonment. But why was Michele working as a waitress when Cal’s car dealerships were so profitable?

And a bigger question: What is Cal’s incarceration status today? He was convicted in 2007, but murderers with resources often pole-vault their way out of prison early (Suzy Mowbray, Michael Peterson, Glen Wolsieffer).

So let’s get going on the recap of “Auto-Motive” along with extra information from online research.

Estate owners. Michele Anne Taylor grew up in Spencer, New York, and got an associate’s degree in business from SUNY Morrisville. She was petite with blond hair, brown eyes, and a beautiful smile.

Calvin “Cal” Harris was a former high school Lacrosse star who eventually took over the auto-sales empire started by his father. He and Michele met while she was working as a secretary at one of the dealerships. They were both in their 20s, with a Cal a couple of years older. He already had thinning hair, but he was tall and slim with big blues eyes that probably charmed Michele.

Wedding photo of Cal and Michele Harris — *Cal and Michele Harris*

The two married in 1990 and soon began living large. They built a house to their specifications on 250 acres. Michele and Cal had all-terrain vehicles, a canoe, and a larger boat.

Flitting toward a love nest. The Harrises had a nice social life together, often spending time with Thomas and Cindy Turner, who were originally Michele’s friends. As a teenager, she had babysat the Turners’s kids, and she stayed close to the couple throughout her adulthood.

At some point, or possibly at many points, Michele found out that Cal was cheating on her. He once took a girlfriend to Daytona Beach, Florida. In 2000, Michele began sleeping on the couch. Still, when she first told Cal she wanted a divorce, he refused. She filed in January 2001.

Michele needed spending money, and Cal apparently wasn’t sharing his wealth. She and 23-year-old boyfriend Brian Early, a Philadelphia land surveyor, were both raising funds to buy a home to share. Michele planned to sell her jewelry.

One after another and another. But why did she choose waitressing as an occupation — and not at a country club but rather at Lefty’s, a rollicking joint patronized by some rough customers in Waverly, New York?

Cal would later acknowledge that it had been hard for Michele to have so many pregnancies so close together. Their two sons and two daughters were all under the age of 8. My guess is that, for Michele, Lefty’s was a little escape from her demanding home life and the unfun mechanics of dissolving her marriage. And it probably made her feel young again. She liked going out with colleagues for a drink or two after her shift.

But she had never stayed out all night until September 11, 2001.

Casting a dragnet. When Michele’s 2000 Ford Windstar minivan turned up empty with the keys in the ignition at the end of her and Cal’s driveway, the family called authorities. Her cell phone was in the vehicle and she hadn’t answered it all day.

On September 12, she didn’t show up for an appointment with her divorce lawyer.

Once police could turn their attention away from 9/11, they went full force on Michele’s disappearance. The authorities dispatched dogs, human divers, and helicopters to search for her.

Private lake on the Harris estate — *The couple’s property had its own private lake*

Co-worker’s secret past. Early on, investigators zeroed in on two suspects. Michele’s colleagues remembered that when she left the restaurant around 9 p.m. on September 11, she walked to the parking lot with Michael Hakes, a cook. His girlfriend provided only a partial alibi for him, acknowledging that there was an unaccounted-for 30 minutes between the time he left the restaurant and showed up at her house.

And Michael Hakes had a past hitherto unknown to his colleagues; he had served prison time for rape and attempted murder.

Then there was Michele’s boyfriend, whom Michele had seen on the night she disappeared. He said they parted at 11 p.m. On the driver’s side door of her vehicle, police found his fingerprints. Brian said he placed his hand there when he kissed Michele goodnight through the window.

In-depth accounting. But Brian, who told police he wanted to marry Michele, and Michael both passed polygraph exams. And neither of them had motives for murdering Michele.

Cal Harris had millions of them. Michele had rejected his offer of $750,000 to $800,000 to be paid out over 10 years after the divorce, and her side was forcing him to spend $30,000 for a full accounting of his assets.

Divorce records gave Cal’s net worth at $5.4 million, according to the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin. And he wanted to stay in the house. Michele had asked a judge to remove him from it.

Cal refused to take a police-administered lie detector test.

‘You little hick.’ Investigators found out that Cal didn’t like giving up control over Michele. And he demeaned her to her face, according to the couple’s nanny-housekeeper.

“Cal had told her that she was born in Tioga Center, raised in Tioga Center, and she’d die in Tioga Center. Like, ‘You’re small town. You’re beneath me. You’re never going to be up to my level,'” Barbara Thayer told 48 Hours Mystery: A Time to Kill.

And the forensics were starting to look promising. Despite someone’s attempt to wash it away, Michele’s blood splatter turned up in the kitchen, hallway, and garage of the house — evidence that someone had beaten her.

Close friends not informed. When Cal heard that police had found what might be a body on the Harris property, he reportedly said that was impossible, suggesting that he knew Michele’s remains were somewhere else. (It’s not clear whether there really was a body on the property.)

It came out in court that Cal had driven past the Turners when they were taking a walk on September 12, and he didn’t stop to tell them Michele was missing or ask if they knew her whereabouts. The Turners only found out about her disappearance in the newspaper.

Cal and Michele Harris sitting in fall leaves with their four young children — *The younger two children were just babies when their mother vanished*

As for Cal, he was having no trouble getting on with this life. He put Michele’s van and clothes up for sale and continued to see his girlfriend, inviting her to the house. He allegedly told her not to worry that Michele might come home; she was gone for good. And Cal started in on typical smear-the-victim tactics (Jack Boyle) pretty much right away. He claimed that Michele “was no good” and used drugs and drank alcohol to excess. Cal told his in-laws that Michele kept a dirty house and that’s why he cheated on her, according to subsequent testimony from Gary Taylor, Michele’s father.

Staged scene. Authorities arrested Cal, but it took them years to build a case because they lacked a body or a murder weapon. In the meantime, they let Cal go free. Michele’s father, Gary Taylor, said he noticed that Cal could no longer look him in the eye.

When prosecutors finally put Cal on trial in 2007, they alleged that Cal beat Michele to death at the house, placed her in a plastic bag, carried it away somehow (no blood was found in Cal’s Ford 150 pickup truck), and buried her at an unknown location. Next, he drove her vehicle to the end of the driveway to make it look as though she either met someone or was abducted there. Cal couldn’t afford to abandon the vehicle far away from the property for fear of witnesses seeing him walking back.

Next, investigators believe, Cal tried to clean up the blood. Michele’s phone records proved that Cal hadn’t called her to ask where she was on September 11 or 12.

Cal testified in his own defense during the trial. He said that all of the witnesses for the prosecution were liars.

Gary Taylor, Michele's father — *Gary Taylor referred to Cal as ‘the man who killed my daughter with his bare hands.’*

Satisfaction for Dad. The jury disagreed and convicted Cal of second-degree murder. Upon hearing the verdict, Cal wept, cried out “no no no,” and clutched a photo of his kids.

Michele’s relatives weren’t feeling too sympathetic toward Cal. According to the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin:

“Two courtroom rows behind Harris, Gary Taylor — Michele Harris’ father — had his arms folded on his chest, his face expressionless, as he watched Harris disintegrate. ‘Arrogant bastard,’ said Taylor in a quiet voice. ‘Thought his rich daddy was going to buy his way out of this one.‘”

Slammer city. Jurors would later tell 48 Hours they voted guilty in part because of the blood evidence and the fact that Cal didn’t join the search effort when Michele disappeared.

Cal received 25 years to life and served at least part of his sentence in the Auburn Correctional Facility.

But as mentioned regarding killers, where there is money, there is hope. Over the years, he won the right to three more trials and a change of venue, to Schoharie County.

More to the story. Today, he’s out of prison — but is still making headlines and not for particularly wonderful reasons.

For the next post, I’ll look into Cal’s years-long legal maneuvering, how his children feel about him, and what he has percolating today.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

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Cover of the book Forensic Files Now — *Buy the book in store or online*

James Brown: Tomato Surprise

Debbie Timlock’s Killer Leaves Juicy Forensic Evidence
(‘Quite a Spectacle,’ Forensic Files)

Debbie Timlock with her hair done up in waves — *Debbie Timlock*

In school, star athletes always seemed to have a passport to a stable life — early socialization and problem-solving skills plus friendships that can be networking opportunities later.

But Forensic Files teaches us that even the most promising among them can fall.

Handsome Brian Vaughn, for one, was on track for a basketball scholarship until the Texas teen shot his own father over a dispute about a car. Then there was chiseled football player Bart Corbin, who became a successful dentist in Atlanta but killed his girlfriend and later his wife because he couldn’t stand for women to break up with him.

Northern exposure. The subject of this post, James Douglas Brown, was a popular football player and wrestler with Olympic ambitions. Somewhere between the ages of 18 and 23, however, things went awry for the Canadian. He ended up not as a medalist or a sports commentator but rather as a murderer notable only for leaving his shoe print on a tomato.

For this post, I searched for a hint about why James took such a violent turn and also looked for more details about his innocent victim’s life. So let’s get going on the recap of “Quite a Spectacle” along with extra information from internet research:

Debbie Timlock was Canadian through and through, having been born on July 31, 1956 in Simcoe County, Ontario. Her mother, Laverne J. McKean McArthur, came from the same province, and her father, Mervyn A. McArthur, worked in the Collingwood Shipyards.

Girls night out. By 1989, Debbie had been divorced for several years and lived with her 6-year-old daughter, Lacey, in Collingwood. The town of 12,000 was near Georgian Bay, a beautiful arm of Lake Huron. Collingwood had a troubled economy, though. Shipyard closings had contributed to unemployment, giving locals more time to congregate at bars, pool halls, and a strip club in town.

But the 32-year-old single mother was improving her life. She had recently obtained a job as a secretary and was in school. Her mild-mannered brother, Michael McArthur, who Forensic Files watchers will remember from his interview on the show, described Debbie as vivacious and loving to sail.

On June 19, 1989, during a thunderstorm in Collingwood, Debbie met some friends for drinks at Kelseys Original Roadhouse.

Debbie left the bar alone. Later that night, she called 911 from her apartment.

With pulp. She said she’d been raped and stabbed and punched and didn’t know her attacker. Paramedics found her deceased and naked on the floor. A bloody corded telephone receiver lay next to her. Police saw blood on her waterbed and elsewhere.

Exterior view of Debbie Timlock's garden apartment building — *Debbie Timlock’s apartment was described as either basement or ground floor*

It looked as though someone had entered through a kitchen window. On the ground lay a flattened tomato with tread marks. Debbie had set it on the sill to ripen.

Nothing was missing from the house. Fortunately, Debbie’s little daughter was spared the chaos and horror as she was spending the night with relatives.

Neighborhood tragedy. Someone had raped Debbie, struck her on the head, and stabbed her to death, probably making her paralyzed from the waist down when she crawled to the phone and called for help. Her last words were the “thank you” she said to the 911 operator.

Neighbors gathered near the residence, which was cordoned off with police tape. “It’s terrible,” Jean Elyea, the manager of the apartment block, told the Toronto Star. “Debbie was a great tenant.”

Neighbor Pam Rentner told The Sun Times that Debbie was a friendly and “super-nice” girl.

Thirty local law enforcement officers searched the area for a murder weapon. Collingwood hadn’t seen a homicide since 1977.

Bad-news boyfriend. Authorities sent Debbie’s body to Toronto for an autopsy, which determined she died of a single stab wound to the heart.

Police turned their attention to Ronald Osborne, whom Forensic Files called a former live-in boyfriend. The Toronto Star, however, said Debbie had only dated him for two months in 1985.

Whatever the case, he sounded like bad news, and he had reason to carry a grudge against Debbie. Ronald had been involved in a $5 million hash-oil smuggling operation. He used a cabin cruiser to transport the drugs from Jamaica to Florida. The DEA and Canadian police later found the boat, named the Dan Bar II, in a Florida marina and discovered suspicious hidden compartments under the floor of the vessel.

Rejected suitor. Debbie testified against Ronald at his 1988 trial, which didn’t go well for him: Ronald, 34, reversed his not guilty plea to guilty.

But Ronald was in prison at the time of Debbie’s murder. Debbie’s former husband, Randy Timlock, also had a solid alibi.

Closeup of james Brown's face showing faint scratches — *James Brown denied that his scratches came from Debbie*

Her former neighbor James Douglas Brown, 23, made a much better suspect. James’s mother reportedly lived in the apartment next to Debbie’s — and he had made advances toward Debbie; she refused him. He was also said to be obsessed with Debbie (which makes it strange that she didn’t identify him on her 911 call — perhaps because it was too dark or the trauma confused her).

Intimidating prospect. James had breaking-and-entering convictions in his past and had spent some time incarcerated. He reportedly tried unsuccessfully to enter Debbie’s apartment through a window on one other occasion.

Little came up on the internet about James’s early history. He was born circa 1966. According to a Medium post by writer Sai Ezra, who lived in Collingwood, James had grown up with a father, but there didn’t appear to be a mother prominent in his life.

As previously mentioned, James was a well-liked star athlete. He had competed in wrestling in Japan. He also took part in martial arts, but he was so physically imposing that most prospective opponents forfeited Judo matches rather than fight him, Ezra said.

Quite a tale. Still, James was a nice guy until a gig as a bouncer at a strip club led to drug and alcohol use, according to Ezra.

As for Debbie’s murder, James said he had an alibi, that he was at a hotel where a stranger robbed him, assaulted him until he lost consciousness, and drove him hundreds of miles from Collingwood. James said he woke up on the side of a road. Scratches on James’s face came from the male attacker, claimed the 6-foot-3-inch-tall James, who weighed north of 300 pounds.

A tomato with a shoe impression — *The most famous tomato in law enforcement*

Here’s where the tomato came under scrutiny. In James’s car, police found a pair of Czechoslovakian-made blue and white shoes the Canadian government purchased for inmates to wear. The size 13 shoes had a herringbone tread pattern that matched the impression left on the tomato from Debbie’s kitchen.

How it happened. There was also the matter of a pair of glasses, not Debbie’s, found at the scene. Jim Brown wore glasses — and he didn’t have them on during police questioning; he said he lost them. At first, a discrepancy between the color of the frames in a photo of James wearing similar glasses cast doubt on whether the ones from the crime scene really came from him. But lab tests and a study by a University of Waterloo School of Optometry professor soon led investigators to conclude that they were indeed the same ones.

Investigators believe Debbie opened her window before going to sleep on the night of the murder. According to a Canadian Press account, James ripped through the window screen, knocking the tomato to the ground, where he accidentally stepped on it. He grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen, found Debbie in the bedroom, and sexually assaulted and stabbed her. While rushing away from the apartment, James accidentally dropped his glasses.

Then Debbie telephoned for help and died.

SODDI defense. Five police officers escorted James into a provincial courtroom where he was charged with murder on July 27, 1989. The trial didn’t kick off until January 1992.

Authorities said that James had “led a lifestyle of interpersonal intrusiveness” marked by anger and lack of impulse control, according to Simcoe.com.

James’s lawyer, Jim Fleming, claimed that the murder resulted from a drug conspiracy owing to Debbie’s testimony at Ronald Osborne’s trial.

The jury didn’t buy it, and convicted James of first-degree murder, meaning a mandatory sentence of life with no parole consideration for 25 years.

“I didn’t do it,” he said as he left the courtroom.

A smiling Debbie in an evening gown at an event with Randall Timlock during their marriage — *Randy and Debbie Timlock in happier times. After the murder, their daughter lived with Randy*

It’s not clear whether this happened before, during, or after the trial, but James kneed a corrections officer in the stomach.

Those problems didn’t stop him from snagging a wife while serving his sentence in 1994.

During a parole hearing in 2010, James admitted to murdering Debbie and to being intoxicated that night. “At first, I wanted to scare the hell out of her,” he told the parole board. But, he said, as he walked toward her bedroom with the knife, “I decided, by then, I would kill her.”

Motherless child. The confession apparently counted in his favor. Starting in 2015, Jim was allowed unescorted temporary absence, or UTA, to take counseling, see his family, and attend to other matters. He did some type of community volunteer work, according to BradfordToday. It looked good on his record.

Debbie’s daughter, Lacey, who by that time was in her early 30s, was not happy about the leniency shown toward James Brown. “I wish I could remember what it was like to have a mom,” she said in a statement. “When people ask me how my mother died, how do I tell them she was murdered?”

In 2019, the Parole Board of Canada granted James full parole under the condition that he stay away from drugs and alcohol.

According to parole documents addressing James:

“You attributed your progress to your strong work ethic. This is to your credit as it speaks to your commitment to be a productive person while also minimizing financial stress in your reintegration process.…Overall, you attribute most of your successful reintegration to the support of your wife. The board finds your wife to be an important protective factor in your reintegration.”

Freedom too intoxicating. In 2023, the parole board permitted him to go into bars as long as he didn’t drink alcohol there.

James Brown with messy tousled hair and a Walrus-style mustache. — *James Brown in a police photo.*

But life behind razor wire hadn’t changed James Brown quite enough. He accrued a number of new violent offenses, including a road rage incident, a brawl with three men, and shoving a woman, according to Canadian news source OrilliaMatters.com.

Before he had a chance to commit murder again, authorities revoked James’s parole and sent him back to prison where, let’s hope, stepping on tomatoes is the most damage he will do to any fellow life-forms.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

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Oliver O’Quinn: Nursing a Grudge

Michelle Herndon’s Kindness Isn’t Rewarded
(‘Needle in a Haystack,’ Forensic Files)

In the land of Forensic Files, Michelle Herndon’s death falls into the drawer marked “No good deed goes unpunished.” Like Diane Tilly and Jack Lynch, Michelle wanted to connect with people who were struggling.

Michelle, out of the goodness of her heart, befriended the socially awkward roommate of one of her close pals.

Oliver O’Quinn refused to accept the platonic status of his relationship with Michelle. It ended in a horrible tragedy and an international manhunt.

Full of energy. For this week, I looked for information about the time Oliver spent abroad after fleeing U.S. authorities. Also, because no one in Michelle’s family appeared on Forensic Files, I checked to see whether any of them talked to other media.

So let’s get going on the recap of “Needle in a Haystack” along with extra information from internet research:

Michelle Ann Herndon was born on July 15, 1981 and grew up in Live Oak, Florida, where she belonged to Friendship Baptist Church. “She had the bluest eyes,” her mother, Belinda Herndon, told NBC News. “She just reminded me of a butterfly the way she would just kind of float around.”

Liked all beings. By age 24, Michelle was entering her senior year at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She worked her way through school via a full-time job as a personal trainer, and she wanted to join the Peace Corp.

It would have been a good career choice, according to her mother. Michelle, she said, was a custodian of the planet and its occupants. She volunteered at a facility for homeless people. She confronted litterers wherever she saw them.

A fan of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Michelle worked at an ape sanctuary and gave money to animal charities.

One November day in 2005, Michelle didn’t show up for her classes or her job at Gainesville Health & Fitness.

Bad sign. Michelle didn’t answer phone calls from her fiancé, whom Forensic Files calls Jason Doyle but other sources identify as Jason Dearing. On November 10, 2005, he drove from his home in Miami to Gainesville to look for her.

Jason, who had been dating Michelle for four years, heard her dog, Duke, barking inside her house at 115 SE 10th Street, but Michelle didn’t answer the bell or her cell phone. The doors and all the windows were locked.

Belinda arrived to the sight of yellow police tape. Jason was crying as was Michelle’s friend Jessica Seipel.

Police had found Michelle face down in her bed. She had been dead for several days.

Wee mark. Although her friends and family said that Michelle loved life, investigators considered the possibility that she somehow committed suicide. Or perhaps an aneurism had taken her life during sleep.

Oliver O'Quinn as a toddler in 1979 in a clipping from the Elizabethton Star newspaper, which listed birthdays of local children — *A 1979 Elizabethton Star newspaper clipping saluting Oliver’s birthday*

The medical examiner couldn’t find a cause of death. An autopsy revealed that Michelle was in great physical shape and had no disease or other health problems.

Eventually, a tiny needle mark on Michelle’s left arm was spotted. Belinda told investigators that Michelle was afraid of needles, so it didn’t come from donating blood or selling plasma.

Roomie of a friend. The needle mark hadn’t caused bruising or bleeding, leading investigators to believe it came from a medical professional.

Near a garbage can outside Michelle’s home, the police found a Publix shopping bag with two empty bottles of propofol, syringes, and a pediatric butterfly IV. It also had vials of midazolam and etomidate, according to Oxygen. Medical professionals use propofol as a strong anesthetic and sometimes mix it with other medications.

The lab found a lethal dose of propofol in Michelle’s system.

Peddling falsehoods. Michelle suffered from migraines and police wondered whether she went outside normal channels for medication. She knew Oliver O’Quinn, an intensive care nurse at Shands Hospital at the University of Florida, because he was Jessica Seipel’s roommate. Oliver specialized in anesthesia.

Little about Oliver O’Quinn’s early life turned up on the internet. He was born on August 18, 1978, to Beecher O’Quinn and the former Phyllis Donnells and spent at least some of his early life in Tennessee.

By November 2005, he was 27, divorced, and not much of charmer socially. Oliver tried to impress others with tall tales about being a firefighter and a first responder during the 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center, according to Jessica. (False self-aggrandizing stories, another Forensic Files staple, Jack Boyle and David Davis).

Not living in reality. Oliver sometimes joined Michelle and her friends for dinners at home. She let him tag along for activities like attending concerts with her and her other friends. Jessica thought Oliver had a crush on Michelle. “He was shy. A bit awkward around women,” Jessica told NBC News. “But Michelle always did all she could to make him feel at home.”

Michelle had reportedly said that she felt sorry for Oliver. Her friends began referring to Oliver as “stalker boy.”

“He had no relationship with Michelle other than a friend, but in his own mind he thought he had a relationship,” Michelle’s cousin Wayne Edwards told the Gainesville Sun.

The sign for William A. Shands Hospital — Shands Hospital was Oliver O’Quinn’s principal place of employment in Florida

Machine yields evidence. Oliver once borrowed someone’s dog so he could have a play date with Michelle and Duke. He began dropping by Michelle’s place and calling her frequently.

Phone records showed he had barraged Michelle with phone calls in the days before her death, dialing her 43 times in less than a month. But he stopped calling on the day that she died — before it was public information that she was deceased.

Via the FDA’s National Drug Control number as well as a lot number, police traced the propofol bottles from Michelle’s garbage to Shands Hospital. They came from an Omnicell automated dispensing machine in the intensive care unit, and the employee number used to obtain the propofol belonged to Oliver O’Quinn. On a needle cap from the discarded drug bag at Michelle’s place, investigators found male DNA.

O’boy O’boy. Meanwhile, Oliver abruptly left his job at Shands Hospital; sources vary as to whether he was fired or quit.

But a detective located him at his part-time gig at Nature Coast Regional Hospital in Williston. Oliver told him he would give a police interview at a later time.

Instead of following through, he fled to Dublin, Ireland, on November 29, 2005. It’s not clear whether he had any friends or relatives there, but he told his U.S. family that he was taking a vacation in the land of his ancestors, according to IrishCentral.com. He had previously visited the country.

Finds a haunt. If Oliver was heartbroken over Michelle’s death or consumed with worry about a police investigation, it didn’t stop him from trying to live it up on the Emerald Isle.

A teen-aged Michelle Herndon petting a cow — A teen-aged Michelle Herndon with a friend

“We noticed him first at the New Year’s Eve party, but afterward also, because he was always asking girls out for the whole time he was here,” an employee of the hostel where Oliver stayed told the British newspaper the Sunday Times. “It was funny because he wasn’t all that good-looking, but he kept trying.”

At some point during his four-month stay, Oliver became a regular at a Dublin cafe, where he sent emails to his family in Tennessee as well as to his ex-wife, according to the Irish Times.

Out of reach. As police were starting the lengthy process of having him extradited, Michelle’s family worried that he would slip through authorities’ fingers. “What scares me is, if he did this to her, what’s stopping him from doing this to someone else?” Belinda Herndon said.

Other attempts at bringing suspects back to the U.S. from Ireland were burdensome and ineffective. According to the Sunday Times, between 1999 and April 2005, all 12 of the extradition requests the U.S. made to Ireland failed.

The Irish state police, however, truly wanted to arrest Oliver — they just had to wait for the extradition paperwork to go through.

African tour. Oliver applied for a job in Ireland, but when he attempted to register with the Irish Nurses Organisation, its chief executive saw that U.S. authorities had flagged his name as an alleged criminal.

In April 2006, when Oliver discovered that the Irish Times had run a story about his extradition case, he packed up. Although Forensic Files said he flew directly from Ireland to Senegal, other sources say he went to Mauritania first — and one says that he stopped in Morocco before that.

He attempted to receive a money order at the American embassy in Mauritania, but officials there noted that his passport number had been designated as belonging to someone under investigation.

Again, Oliver slipped away, crossing the border into Senegal. Authorities there quickly turned him over to the U.S. He was taken away from Dakar in handcuffs.

Toxic words. A lab confirmed that the male DNA on the syringe cap in Michelle’s garbage came from Oliver.

Investigators finally uncovered a motive: Oliver had recently overheard a telephone call during which Michelle referred to him as an annoying little man. Another theory said that Oliver was upset when Michelle told him she was going to marry someone else, according to the Sunday Times.

Oliver O'Quinn in his 20s — Oliver O’Quinn as a young adult

It came out that, while in custody, Oliver told another inmate that Michelle deserved a long sleep. And Oliver said that Michelle had put him down so he was going to”put her down.”

Rx for murder. On a visit to his hometown in Tennessee after the murder, Oliver had told his father, Beecher O’Quinn, that he was depressed because a girlfriend had died of a drug overdose — incriminating words because police had not released Michelle’s cause of death to the public. (Beecher would later recant his statement about that conversation and tell Oliver’s half-sister to clam up about it too.)

Assistant State Attorney Tim Browning made a case that, under the pretense of giving Michelle hard-to-obtain medication for one of her migraines, Oliver went to her apartment and injected her with an overdose of propofol. He left his DNA on the cap after pulling it off with his teeth, as medical professionals sometimes do.

Michelle had four times the lethal dose of propofol in her system; it would have killed her in just seconds. The injection might have also included midazolam and estomidate.

Can’t ‘stand’ it. At the trial in May 2008, Jessica Seipel testified that Oliver told her that he had never met anyone like Michelle.

But when he found out that Jason Dearing was planning to move to the Gainesville area to make their relationship closer, Oliver snapped and decided to kill, the prosecution alleged.

Oliver didn’t testify on his own behalf.

The public defender, who called no witnesses, denied that his client was obsessed with Michelle Herndon. Drew McGill told the court that if Oliver clung to Michelle a bit too tightly, it was only the normal behavior of a shy person.

Father can’t stomach it. Oliver’s story was that his intentions toward Michelle were good, that he injected her to relieve her headache pain, but accidentally used too big a dose of propofol.

After three hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Oliver of first-degree murder.

A recent prison photo of Oliver O'Quinn wearing a gray uniform — Oliver O’Quinn in a recent prison photo

After the verdict, Belinda called Oliver a “small, small man” and said she hoped he never felt as devastated as she and her husband were. Donald Herndon didn’t attend the trial because he didn’t want to be in the same room with Oliver, according to the Gainesville Sun.

“It is beyond my comprehension how an intelligent mind could conceive of what we’ve heard about this week,” Judge Peter Seig said, addressing Oliver directly. “You executed Michelle Herndon.” The judge also said he would sleep well knowing that Oliver would be in prison for life without the possibility of parole, the Gainesville Sun reported.

Today, Oliver is housed in Florida’s Zephyrhills Correctional Institution.

Once a hero. It’s still a mystery why Oliver, who was high-functioning enough to have a successful career and get married (and stay on good terms with his wife after their divorce) committed murder because of overhearing a small insult and being friend-zoned.

I found an Atlanta Journal story from 1994, when Oliver was a 16-year-old Civil Air Patrol Cadet Captain, that noted he came to the aid of a citizen suffering from heat exhaustion. He also presumably saved some lives during his career as a nurse.

Not that those deeds make up for causing the death of Michelle Herndon. But they give Oliver something positive to think about while he spends the rest of his life behind razor wire for punishing someone who was trying to be good to him.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube.

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Michele Wallace: A Free Spirit Taken

Roy Melanson Commits His Last Felony
(‘No Corpus Delicti,’ Forensic Files)

Michele Wallace as a young woman — Michele Wallace

The episodes of Forensic Files featuring old black & white home movies remind us that depravity existed in so-called innocent times.

On the bright side, however, they give us hope that even vintage cold cases (Gerald Mason) can be solved.

Such is the story of Michele Wallace’s disappearance in the Colorado mountains in 1974. Investigators identified a suspect early on and found traces of Michele’s presence, but not her body. Without that, they couldn’t prove a murder had happened.

Style and substance. For this week, I looked for more details on the lives of Michele and her family and how investigators solved the case 18 years after she vanished. Along the way, I learned that Michele’s father, who viewers will remember from his appearance on Forensic Files, suffered another, final nightmare after the episode first aired in 2004.

So let’s get going on the recap of “No Corpus Delicti” along with extra information from internet research.

Michele Cecile Wallace was born on April 13, 1949, and grew up in the Chicago area. Although she became a rugged outdoorswoman, black-and-white home movies show her as a teenager with a simple elegance like Audrey Hepburn.

Sharing the thrill. Her father, George, worked in the food service business and eventually opened his own pizzeria. Michele was close to her father and even closer to her mother.

Maggie Wallace grew up during the depression and always wanted to travel but couldn’t afford it. When Michele turned into an adventurer, Maggie would help her plan her trips and enjoyed experiencing them vicariously, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Michele went skiing and skydiving and took solo backpacking trips. But wherever she traveled, she found a way to call her parents nearly every day. Michele and her mother ran up huge phone bills, according to the Evening Press.

In 1974, Michele was a 25-year-old college graduate, 5-foot-6 inches tall and slender with thick dark hair and a sweet face.

Missing ‘ring.’ She did some freelance photography and hoped to make it her full-time profession. Michele enjoyed using children as her subjects and also had begun branching out into landscape and nature photography. She funded her interests by working as a flag-woman for Colorado highway projects while she lived in the town of Gunnison.

The Gunnison River runs through the mountains near the town of Gunnison — A river runs through Gunnison, Colorado

In August of 1974, Michele headed for the mountains near Crested Butte in Colorado for a three-day hike on her own.

When she failed to check in with her parents, they alerted authorities.

A search effort mobilized to comb the mountain land “on foot, by truck, on horseback, and from the air,” according to the Copley News Service.

Dangerous cargo. No signs of Michele or her red Mazda station wagon turned up, but a ranch owner recalled seeing her dog. Okie had come down from the mountain and started chasing some of his cattle.

The rancher shot Okie, which is the first unforgivable crime to take place on this episode. What harm is a German shepherd to a 1,200-pound animal with horns? (On the bright side, this happened 50 years ago, so the dog killer is probably long gone.)

Next up, a ranch hand named Chuck Matthews told investigators that Michele gave him and a friend a ride on a country road near Gunnison. Chuck got out at the Columbine Bar. The friend, named Roy, asked Michele to drive him a little farther, to his pickup truck.

Hot tickets. The police managed to find a man who matched Roy’s description in Pueblo, Colorado. Roy Allan Melanson, born in Louisiana on February 13, 1937, was a drifter who had already served prison time for rape in Texas.

Michele Wallace with her hair in braids — Michele Wallace moved to Colorado shortly before her death

And yikes, Roy had Michele’s backpack, her driver’s license, and a pawn ticket for her Canon camera. He also pawned her sleeping bag, according to the Herald Scotland, and possibly other pieces of her camping gear.

All in all, Michele’s possessions brought him $73.75.

Sure you didn’t. Investigators developed film in Roy’s possession. It had pictures that Michele had taken of Okie wearing his dog hiking backpack. It also had a shot of Roy relaxing with a woman, not Michele, that he apparently had someone else take before selling the camera.

Roy, who was working for a sheep rancher, claimed that he and Michele had stopped for coffee. He sneaked away from the cafe and stole Michele’s car, he said, and then abandoned it in Amarillo, Texas — but he didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance (Diane Tilly).

Police tracked down Michele’s car but found no signs of violence inside.

They did, however, discover that Roy once had a missing landlady whose car disappeared in Texas.

As highly suspect as Roy was, police hadn’t located any sign of Michele Wallace’s body, so they couldn’t move forward.

Irish eye. Meanwhile, Michele’s father had another horrible tragedy on his hands. He awoke one morning to find that his wife — lying next to him — had killed herself by taking almost an entire bottle filled with assorted barbiturates.

Maggie, 54, couldn’t stand to live without her daughter. Her suicide note requested that Michele be buried next to her whenever her remains turned up.

A few years later, a hiker found a clump of braided hair in an isolated spot in the same mountain area where Michele had gone camping. Michele’s stolen camera held a photo of her with braided hair.

Although the investigation into Michele’s disappearance had been sporadic, people in Gunnison always “wondered out loud about the woman with the braids who went backpacking in the Watergate years and was still missing through the Carter years and Reaganomics and the Persian Gulf war,” reporter John Wilkens of the Copley News Service wrote.

Gratis help. In 1989, police investigator Kathy Ireland reopened the case. “The more I dug into it, the more I thought it was solvable,” Ireland told the Associated Press. She sent hair from Michele’s hairbrush to be compared to the clump of braided hair; they were similar.

Roy Melanson was 6-feet-1-inches of bad news

In 1992, Ireland enlisted the help of NecroSearch international, a group of archaeologists and other scientists skilled in finding bodies and willing to work pro bono.

Signs of a struggle. Vegetation found in the clump of Michele’s hair suggested she had been on a stretch of land on the north slope of the mountain, 9,980 feet in the air. The Necro Search volunteers scoured the area. One of them, a geologist named Celia Armbrust who stepped away to relieve herself, caught sight of a glint of light. It came from a gold tooth attached to part of a skull.

Michele had a gold tooth.

The Necro Search crew also discovered remnants of her clothing, including jeans with a zipper that looked as though it had been “pulled apart violently.”

Already behind bars. Investigators believed that once Roy had Michele alone in the car, he forced her to stop and let the dog out. He attacked her — no one could tell exactly what he did to her — and killed her and threw her body down the mountain. With Michele dead, there was no one to report her car missing, so Roy used it as his own without worry.

Finding Roy was easy. He was serving time at a Kentucky prison for burglary. The authorities allowed his extradition to Colorado for a trial.

Roy told police that, when he stole Michele’s car, he left Okie tied up outside.

Accused a no-show. A former cellmate, John Paul Steele, told authorities that Roy had admitted that he once hid a body in the mountains. Other former inmates told Ireland that Roy bragged about killing an “unwilling woman.”

At the trial, the hair and bone evidence was displayed in glass cases. Melanson refused to attend because he didn’t want to wear a stun belt, which would prevent him from escaping

In 1993, a jury found Roy guilty of first-degree murder.

Run-on sentence. Roy appeared in person for sentencing by the judge. “I don’t know what you expected your attorneys to do — work miracles?” District Court Judge Richard Brown said. “You’re a waste of humanity.”

Michele’s father agreed. “These bastards, the devastation that they leave behind, nobody knows,” George Wallace told Forensic Files. “They think they killed an individual but they kill dozens of people.”

Roy received a life sentence to be served once he finished his 20 years of prison time for the Kentucky burglary.

A widower again. Michele was buried on her birthday, April 13, next to Maggie Wallace, in Woodlawn Cemetery in 1994.

George had retired to St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1977 and remarried. His second wife died in the early 2000s.

Mug shots of Stephen Sterling and Eugene Wesley — Stephen Sterling, Eugene Wesley

Sadly, on January 13, 2006, a new tragedy would befall the Wallace family, when two burglars broke into George’s house. Eugene Wesley, 17, threw a blanket over George, who was then 85 years old, frail, and using a wheel chair. Then, Stephen M. Sterling, 21, beat him severely with a heavy object. The pair stole George’s car but not much else, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Son left alone. George Wallace died of his injuries in the hospital. The police quickly took Wesley and Sterling into custody.

“We are an unlucky family,” George’s his son, also named George, told the Tampa Bay Times. “Two murders so far apart and a suicide. It’s really hard to fathom. The arrest helps, at least a little bit.”

Michele Wallace as a small girl with George and Maggie Wallace — George, Maggie, and Michele Wallace

Sterling got a sentence of life without the possibility of parole and today resides at the Suwannee Correctional Institution Annex. Eugene Wesley, who cooperated with authorities and turned against Sterling, got 25 years and is in Liberty Correctional Institution in Bristol, Florida for second-degree murder and dangerous act.

Roy Melanson died in prison on May 22, 2020 in Cañon City, Colorado. He had also been found guilty of the murder of Anita Andrews. He stabbed the 51-year-old mother of two repeatedly with a screw driver while sexually assaulting her in back of Fagiani’s Cocktail Lounge in 1974, just a month before he killed Michele.

The conviction for Anita Andrews’ homicide came in 2010, thanks to 36-year-old DNA evidence — another testament to the power of forensics in solving crimes that took place way back in innocent times that never really were.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube.

John Maloney: Cop Botches an Arson

Sandy Maloney’s Troubled Life Ends at Her Husband’s Hand
(‘Burning Desire,’ Forensic Files)

While watching Burning Desire, I was waiting for Peter Thomas to remind us that “fire doesn’t destroy evidence, it creates new evidence.” But maybe that rule isn’t so important in Sandy Maloney’s murder case.

Her husband, John Maloney, killed her in a fit of anger and tried to burn the house down to cover up his crime. But the evidence didn’t consist of newly created clues — the fire left enough pre-existing things partially intact to reveal what happened at the Green Bay, Wisconsin house.

Investigators found, for example, remnants of tissues stuffed into the cracks of the sofa, presumably to help spread the flames. The biggest smoking gun was what they found on Sandy’s body.

Loyal progeny. Marks on her back and neck and a blunt-force wound definitely didn’t come from the fire.

Prosecutors connected the dots persuasively at the subsequent murder trial, where a jury convicted John.

But the case was never strong enough for three observers: Sandy and John’s sons. One of them, Matt Maloney, appeared on the Forensic Files episode in 2004.

Horrifying discovery. For this post, I looked for the reasons Matt and his younger brothers defended their father and whether John has attracted any other supporters over the years. I also checked on John’s incarceration status.

So let’s get going on the recap of “Burning Desire” along with extra information from internet research:

On February 10, 1998, Lola Cator went to visit her 40-year-old daughter, Sandy Maloney. She found Sandy’s living room filled with soot from a fire and Sandy dead on a couch. “My daughter is all burned up,” Lola told the 911 operator.

A good start. Sandy’s oldest son, Matt Maloney, learned about the tragedy when he came home from school and heard his father, age 41, crying.

It was a sad end to what had begun as a solid relationship. John and Sandy met and dated in Preble High School and then married when they were around 21. John started in the police cadet program in 1979 and later became an arson investigator for the Green Bay police.

It’s not clear whether Sandy worked outside the home, but she and John had three sons to occupy her bandwidth.

Desperate game. By the 1990s, Sandy had developed psychiatric problems and had become addicted to painkillers after a back injury, according to Forensic Files, although 48 Hours said that it was neck pain that drove her to abuse pills.

Matt, Sean, and Aaron Maloney in their early teens — *Matt Maloney with younger brothers Sean and Aaron*

The depth of Sandy’s addiction wasn’t a secret. After she could no longer obtain medication legally, she would ask her sons to supply her when they were sick — but the pharmacist insisted on supervising the kids while they swallowed the pills.

Nonetheless, Sandy persuaded Matt to hide the pills under his tongue and give them to her later, according to to his interview on the 48 Hours episode “A Question of Murder.”

At some point, Sandy started drinking heavily too. She liked vodka.

Disapproving mother-in-law. Matt told Forensic Files that her substance abuse was eating up the family’s budget and that Sandy cut herself off socially. In 1997, she totaled the family car. That’s when John moved out and took Matt, Aaron, and Sean with him.

Lola Cator, however, pointed to John’s temper as at least part of the problem in the marriage. She said that John hated Sandy.

At the time of the fire, Sandy was living alone at the family’s former house on Huth Street.

Medical examiner Greg Schmunk determined that someone who died in a fire would have a higher carbon monoxide level and more soot in her lungs than Sandy did.

Not highly intoxicating. The bruising on her back and neck suggested someone had been applying pressure there. The bruise on the back of her head could have come from an ashtray that was found broken at the crime scene.

Investigators believed Sandy was dead before the fire. And it wasn’t drinking-related. Tests revealed that Sandy had a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit but not high enough to cause fatal alcohol poisoning.

Houses in the Huth Street neighborhood where the Maloneys lived — *The Maloneys and their sons lived on Huth Street in Green Bay*

A bloodstained shirt belonging to her was found under some other clothes in the laundry room, a good clue because Sandy had only a bra on when her mother found her body. There were no signs of a break-in, and the only two keys to the house belonged to Sandy and John, investigators said. John, however, said he didn’t have a key.

Problematic household. But he did have a motive. The divorce would have meant $450 a month in alimony plus half of all monetary assets for Sandy. Special prosecutor Joe Paulus would later allege that John was tired of paying Sandy’s mortgage and other bills and he was deeply in debt.

Aside from John’s three sons, not many people were feeling particularly protective of him.

“Everyone in the community just turned against my dad,” Matt Maloney told 48 Hours.

According to the Green Bay Press-Gazette, some neighbors found the Maloneys’ household troublesome well before Sandy’s death. Officers were called to the house 16 times over the years, sometimes because Sandy phoned them about a domestic row or a prowler. Other times, folks who lived on Huth Street summoned police because of concerns about what was happening inside the Maloney household.

Co-workers distance themselves. Still, they didn’t expect anything like a homicide. “We thought we had a decent neighborhood, a safe neighborhood because we had the police living just a couple doors away,” one resident told the Press-Gazette.

John’s colleagues at the Green Bay police had to conduct the investigation, and they seemed more concerned about the harm to their reputation than about their co-worker’s predicament.

“The acts of one person shouldn’t be reflective of the other 250 who work down there,” Steve Darm, president of the local police officers’ union, would later tell the Press-Gazette.

*Sandy Cator and John Maloney in happier days*

‘It’s all bunk.’ John was sometimes uncooperative with police investigating Sandy Maloney’s murder. The department deemed him insubordinate and put him on paid suspension.

State authorities came in to help with the investigation.

John claimed he wasn’t inside Sandy’s house the night of the fire. His sons Sean and Aaron would tell 48 Hours that their father was with them, putting together bunk beds for their room at their new home on Menlo Park Road.

Secret tapes. John’s girlfriend, Tracy Hellenbrand, a 28-year-old IRS agent, at first provided an alibi for John, but once police started talking about her as an accessory, she said she was asleep on the night of Sandy’s death, and she didn’t know where John was then.

She agreed to record her conversations with John. At first, he denied involvement in Sandy’s death. Later, when police put video recording equipment in Tracy and John’s room at the Lady Luck Hotel in Las Vegas, John admitted he was in the apartment the night of the fire; he had entered via a side door around 3 a.m.

The video from the hotel shows John repeatedly calling Tracy a bitch and looming over her in a menacing way. His ugly side was on full display.

In July 1998, after prosecutors reviewed the tapes, they called for John Maloney’s arrest. When John opened the door to his room at the Continental Hotel in Las Vegas and saw cops, he appeared ready to make a run for it. They sprayed him with mace and then arrested him without further incident.

Completely overpowered. Led by prosecutor Joe Paulus, the authorities laid out a case that the night Sandy died, she and John argued about the terms of their split — and specifically the fact that Sandy was delaying the divorce by not showing up for court dates.

John hit her over the head with an object — possibly the broken ashtray found in the living room — in anger and then panicked. The 6-foot-1-inch-tall John strangled or otherwise suffocated her by pressing on her back and neck face down on the couch and set the fire to hide the evidence, the prosecution contended. John stuffed tissues in the seams of the sofa and staged the scene to look as though a cigarette dropped by accident caused the flames; he might have used vodka as an accelerant.

Matt Maloney defended his father, saying that Sandy often had bruises from falling when she was drunk. Sean said that if anyone was violent in the relationship, it was Sandy, who would sometimes strike out at John in anger.

Sons distraught. Defense lawyer Gerald Boyle contended that Tracy Hillenbrand killed Sandy to eliminate her as a rival. Retired investigator Randy Winkler testified that the fire was the work of an amateur. The flames did, afterall, burn themselves out before they destroyed the evidence.

In his closing argument, Boyle referred to Tracy as a liar, fraud, and scum bag.

It was a daring ploy that didn’t work.

A jury found John guilty of first-degree intentional homicide, arson, and mutilation of a corpse, and he received a life sentence. Courtroom footage showed his two younger sons crying when they heard the verdict.

Shifting story. Gin Maloney, John’s sister, cared for Matt, Sean, and Aaron after John went away, according to Cinemaholic, which reports that the boys are keeping a low profile but have continued to believe in their father’s innocence.

John’s own legal salvos over the years have included the ever-popular ineffective counsel; he said his lawyers should have done more to block the showing of the hotel video.

In 2007, he tried switching up the narrative presented at the trial; he claimed Sandy’s death was an accident rather than a murder.

*Sandy Maloney toward the end of her life*

Bullied into talking? He nabbed the help of innocence advocate Sheila Berry — who also advocated for Steven Avery of Making a Murderer fame and founded the Truth in Justice organization. Berry had worked with the flamboyant Joe Paulus earlier in her career and believed that he enjoyed sensationalizing the Maloney case. (Reporters called Paulus “Hollywood Joe.” It was thought that he was aiming to become a U.S. Attorney with all his theatrics.)

As for the videotaped footage, John would later tell 48 Hours that Tracy browbeat him into saying that he was at Sandy’s house the night of the her death, and it wasn’t true. At some point, John’s supporters claimed that Paulus had manipulated the tapes to make it sound as though John confessed to being in the house.

Truth in Justice also put forth a theory that Sandy was trying to commit suicide the night she died. Sandy, the group suggested, tried to hang herself with a cord found hung up like a noose in the house. After that effort failed, she died from an accidental fire caused by her smoking, Truth in Justice contended.

Staying put. By 2020, John had scored another advocate — his new wife, Kimberly Bostwick. She defended him via a Change.org petition, which reads in part: “A corrupt prosecutor, Joseph Paulus, transformed the sad death of a suicidal alcoholic/addict into media-driven murder and an arson case which turned the justice system upside down.”

So far, Kimberly’s efforts haven’t hit pay dirt. And John won’t be receiving more help from Sheila Berry. She died at the age of 74 in 2021. Truth in Justice no longer maintains a website.

John was turned down for parole 2024.

Today, he resides in the OshKosh Correctional Institution in Waupun, Wisconsin. All three of his sons still live in the state.

A little satisfaction. The Department of Corrections says that John is eligible for parole consideration on February 10, 2027.

Although it didn’t ultimately do anything to help John’s case, John did get to see prosecutor Joe Paulus go down in flames, when Paulus pleaded guilty to accepting bribes for fixing cases after an FBI investigation in 2004. Paulus had to serve jail time.

Sandy’s mother, Lola Cator, is 93 years old today. Sadly, she lost another child, Brad Cator, in 2014. Lola has a presence on social media and posted a tribute to her late daughter on Facebook two years ago.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon

Who Committed the Rape That Sent Ed Honaker to Prison?

Theories Lead to One Man
(‘Crime Seen,’ Forensic Files)

Before launching into Part 2 of the Ed Honaker story, I want to ask subscribers whether they’ve liked receiving links to new posts via MailChimp — or whether they preferred the old way, directly from me. Please leave a comment below or email forensicfilesnow@gmail.com. Now, on to Part 2 of ‘Crime Seen’:

When Ed Honaker walked out of prison in 1994 after serving a decade for a sexual assault he didn’t commit, he received favorable media coverage and sympathy from the general public around Nelson County, Virginia. He eventually got a settlement of half a million dollars, too.

Photos of Michael Nicholaou and Ed Honaker next to each other — Michael Nicholaou, Ed Honaker

But what about the real rapist? On June 3, 1984, the unidentified attacker had ordered a 19-year-old woman and her fiancé out of their vehicle near the Blue Ridge Parkway. He sexually assaulted her repeatedly for two hours.

Still open. Unfortunately, after Honaker’s exoneration, the authorities lacked the resources to leave no stone unturned in the case. “The big outfits can put somebody on cold cases,” said commonwealth attorney Phil Payne. “We can barely handle our hot cases.”

But they never officially closed the Blue Ridge rape case and, along with a crusading private eye, they eventually arrived at an intriguing theory. Here’s the story on the investigation after Ed Honaker’s release:

As of 2005, Nelson County authorities had followed up on several leads on the Blue Ridge case, but they never amounted to anything.

Knifing terror. Two years later, however, Nelson County authorities began looking into Michael Nicholaou. Private investigator Lynn-Marie Carty believed that Nicholaou was responsible for the abductions of six women in New England in the 1980s as well as the Blue Ridge rape.

In the New England attacks, a killer stabbed the women to death, except for one, Jane Boroski, who survived. She had been drinking a soda while sitting in her car in a parking lot in Keene, New Hampshire in 1988. The attacker forced Jane, who was six months pregnant, out of the vehicle, stabbed her 27 times, and left her for dead.

She sustained a severed jugular vein and a collapsed lung, but medical attention saved her life. Her baby was born with cerebral palsy.

Checkered past. Jane later told a local Fox TV news station that the attacker resembled photos of Michael Nicholaou.

So who was this guy?

Michael Andrew Nicholaou was born circa 1949 and, according to information available on Murderpedia, his father was a sex offender.

Nicholaou served in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot with the 335th Aviation Company during his stint in the army from 1968 to 1971. He won 15 medals, including two Purple Hearts, for his bravery, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Fellow soldiers later recalled that Nicholaou would go off on his own, armed with a knife, to seek out hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. There were allegations that he tried to kill Vietnamese civilians by strafing, but he never faced charges.

Adult entertainment. After the army, Nicholaou worked restaurant and construction jobs. He would later say that he had post-traumatic stress disorder.

In 1983, he opened a pornography store called the Pleasure Chest in a shopping center in Charlottesville, Virginia. It had its share of police raids. At the same time, Nicholaou reportedly did some undercover work for the police.

Nicholaou’s wife Michelle Ashley, with whom he shared a son and daughter, went missing in 1988. Carty got involved in the case when Michelle’s family hired her to search for Michelle. Nicholaou claimed that Michelle abused drugs and ran off with a Cuban drug dealer.

Around 1998, Michael Nicholaou married a woman named Aileen after meeting her via a personal ad.

Florida Murder-Suicide. At their home in Georgia, Nicholaou attacked Aileen, breaking her shoulder. She fled to her sister’s house in West Tampa, Florida, but he followed her there and shot Aileen and himself on December 31, 2005.

Aileen and Michael, 56, died at the scene. One of the bullets had hit Aileen’s 22-year-old daughter, Taryn Bowman. (Sources differ on the spelling of her first name — at least one newspaper called her “Terrin”). She lived long enough to be taken to Tampa General Hospital, but succumbed to her wounds the next day.

Many aspects of Nicholaou’s history suggested he was not only responsible for the Florida murder-suicide and the New England serial killing spree but also the Blue Ridge rape.

Victim sees a resemblance. First off, the Blue Ridge attacker initially impersonated a law officer. Nicholaou at one time wanted to become a police officer but failed the background check.

And the Blue Ridge victim said that the rapist intermittently ranted about the Vietnam War. As noted, Nicholaou served as a combat soldier in Vietnam; Honaker was never there.

What’s more, Nicholaou reportedly looked like Ed Honaker and was living in Virginia at the time of the Blue Ridge rape — and he sometimes would go camping in the woods near where the victim and her fiancé were sleeping in their car.

Nicholaou smoked marijuana as did the Blue Ridge attacker.

‘Phil’ us in. Aileen’s brother-in-law told the Richmond-Times Dispatch that Nicholaou admitted to him that he had killed before. Nicholaou also claimed to be in the Mafia.

But by the time investigators weighed Nicholaou as a suspect, he had already been dead for nearly two years.

At some point, Dr. Phil got into act, orchestrating a meeting between Michael Nicholaou’s son and New England victim Jane Boroski for an episode titled “Sins of the Father.” They embraced and she assured him that he took after his mother and not his father.

So 20 years after Michael Nicholaou’s death and 40 years after the Blue Ridge rape, is there any chance of proving in court that he committed it?

Shared pain. According to Carty, DNA is the last hope. When ForensicFilesNow.com contacted her via social media, Carty said that she had identified a living Nicholaou relative who was willing to contribute a specimen of DNA for comparison. Carty fought for a DNA test, but it never happened and she had to move on to other cases.

After his exoneration, Ed Honaker told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the sexual-assault victim remained convinced that he was the Blue Ridge rapist. He would later express compassion for her, saying that they both ultimately endured a horrible ordeal. Honaker died in 2015.

Let’s hope that his and Nicholaou’s deaths brought the victim the consolation of knowing that her rapist would never prey on her or any other woman again.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Peacock

Ed Honaker: Life After Exoneration

A Sex Crime Ends With a Wrongful Convicted
(‘Crime Seen,’ Forensic Files)

Ed Honaker at approximately 34 years of age with dark hair and a white T-shirt — Ed Honaker

In 1984, Ed Honaker was in his early 30s and at a low point. His wife had recently packed up their three children and left. He was suffering from depression. And he already had a few scrapes with the law on his record.

No one could have imagined how much worse things were about to become.

Ed had the misfortune of looking like a police sketch made from a rape victim’s memory. And he had a vehicle, jewelry, and clothing that resembled those described by the teenager, who had been sexually assaulted for two hours.

Bad luck. Soon, Ed would hear himself referred to as the “Blue Ridge rapist” and go to prison for nearly a decade for a crime he didn’t commit.

Ed, who gave an on-camera interview to Forensic Files, talked about the harshness of life behind razor wire and the joy he felt when the governor of Virginia called to say he was free.

The episode about Ed first aired in 1998. Ed next made national headlines in 2015, when he died two weeks after receiving a cancer diagnosis at the age of just 65. It was another rough break.

But Ed did have 20 years of freedom in between his release and his untimely passing. For this week, I looked for news coverage about his life during that time.

So, let’s get going on the recap of “Crime Seen” along with extra information from internet research.

Nightmarish ordeal. In 1984, an engaged couple on a camping trip to Crabtree Falls got lost and decided to sleep in their car off the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. They awoke to a man, who they assumed was a law officer, aiming a flashlight at them.

He pointed a gun at the man, 22, and told him to run into the woods. He abducted the woman, 19, and raped her repeatedly at a campsite.

Then, he let her go.

The woman, who lived in Newport News, described the attacker as a white male wearing camouflage pants and a necklace with a cross and having a scar on his chest. During the attack, he chain-smoked, drank whiskey, and ranted about the Vietnam War. She said he drove a yellow truck.

Meanwhile, in Roanoke, another sexual assault took place, and the victim implicated her neighbor Ed Honaker.

Flawed past. So who was this fellow? Edward William Honaker was born on February 20, 1950 in West Virginia to Anna Mae Ripley and Virgil Honaker, a police officer. He grew up in White Sulphur Springs.

His previous legal trouble included a “breaking and entering conviction, drinking, and some fights,” according to the Roanoke Times. He received a dishonorable discharge from the military. A newspaper account gave his occupation as laborer; Forensic Files said welder.

Fortunately, he had a solid alibi for the time when his neighbor’s attack took place. But the accusation turned investigators’ attention toward Ed because the composite drawing of the Blue Ridge rapist looked like him.

Visual evidence. His vehicle had rust damage and no backseat, like the one driven by the Blue Ridge rapist. In a photo lineup, the Blue Ridge victim and her fiancé pointed to Ed, then 34. At his residence, police found a necklace and fatigues like the ones the attacker had been wearing. His hair samples supposedly matched the ones found on the victim’s shorts.

His truck, however, was blue, not yellow as the victim described. Ed was 5-foot-11, whereas she had estimated 6-foot-4. But the fact that it was dark and she was subjected to trauma could explain the discrepancies.

When first asked about the Blue Ridge rape, Ed didn’t immediately provide an alibi. Later, he said he was sleeping at his mother’s home in Montvale that night.

Roanoke's 100-foot-tall star structure and scenic overhook — *Roanoke, former home to Ed Honaker, is known for its 100-foot-tall star, top, and scenic overlook.* Credit: Star City Skycams

Convincing testimony. At the trial, it came out that Ed had a vasectomy, which meant he couldn’t have been the source of the sperm specimens from the rape, but they could have come from the victim’s fiancé.

A juror who gave an on-camera interview to Forensic Files, recalled how sure the victim sounded when she pointed to Ed Honaker as the attacker. The fiancé also identified Ed in the courtroom.

After deliberating for two hours, the jury found Ed guilty of rape, sodomy, aggravated sexual battery, and use of a firearm in the commission of an abduction and rape.

Ed later said that he wanted to scream out in the courtroom that he was innocent and not a horrible monster.

He received a sentence of three life terms plus 34 years.

Life in lockup. Hence his life as an inmate began. “It was a sad day when he went in,” his brother Wayne Honaker would later tell the Times of Roanoke. “I cried.”

To avoid appearing weak in front of other prisoners, Ed acted tough during the day, then cried himself to sleep, he later told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He saw a man stabbed in the cafeteria line and heard the screams of an 18-year-old inmate who was being raped.

Ed’s family stayed faithful, writing him letters, visiting, and helping him financially.

He spent years writing to anyone who might help prove his innocence, but he had no luck.

By 1994, Ed’s seniority at the Nottoway Correctional Center had earned him better living conditions. As the Washington Post reported:

He enjoys a choice corner cell on the first floor of the model-prisoners wing. His living area is what you’d imagine officers’ quarters are like on a submarine: tiny platform bed, hot plate, portable TV, just enough maneuvering room to change clothes without bloodying an elbow.

But it was prison just the same. Fortunately, some good luck was coming his way.

Back to the drawing board. Ed got a positive response to one of his letters, from Centurion Ministries, a prisoner-advocacy organization founded by a former theological school student in Princeton, New Jersey.

Kate Germond, an investigator for Centurion, spoke of the flawed nature of the type of eyewitness testimony that helped convict Ed. She noted that eyewitness accounts aren’t like videotape. “Also mixed into that are memories, dreams, some little distractions,” Germond said. “It’s just a huge variety pack.”

She also disputed the hair evidence. “There is no such thing as a hair match,” Kate Germond wrote. The most you can say is that it’s similar or dissimilar, she told Forensic Files.

Forensic Files pointed out that, of the six photos in the lineup, Ed’s was the only one with a plain white background rather than a height chart. Research has suggested that an eyewitness is more likely to pick out a photo that has a conspicuously distinguishing trait.

Germond, whom Ed would later call his earthly angel, deemed it an especially tainted lineup.

Kate Germond in a recent phto — *Kate Germond continues to work for Centurion Ministries*

And the victim, who initially said she didn’t see her assailant well during the attack, had undergone hypnotism, reportedly to get help remembering the attacker’s face.

Hypnotism-influenced testimony has dubious integrity (Jim Barton).

From Simpson to Honaker. DNA testing paid for by Centurion found that some semen retrieved from the victim didn’t match the DNA of Ed, the fiancé, or a boyfriend the victim had. That meant it came from the real rapist.

At some point during Centurion’s investigation, Barry Scheck, the O.J. Simpson defense lawyer who created the Innocence Project, offered help, which was accepted.

“Scheck is fast-talking quick-stepped and can subtly introduce his own spin on an issue into the conversation,” the Roanoke Times wrote about the lawyer, who had offices in Lower Manhattan. Scheck emphasized that then-new DNA technology could expose the flaws in a well-meaning justice system.

In Virginia, prisoners have to appeal for clemency via the governor rather than courts. Gov. George Allen could either pardon Ed, which would wipe the rape conviction from his record, or grant clemency, which would reduce his sentence. Or he could choose to do neither.

Ed’s family waited for word from the governor. “My nerves are so bad I can hardly write my son a letter,” Anna Honaker said.

Fabulous phoning. At 10:28 a.m. on October 21, 1994, Gov. George Allen called Honaker in prison.

“He said, ‘As of this moment you are a free man,'” Ed, then 44, recalled. “What he said after that, I have no idea.”

Ed told the News & Advance that it was the greatest feeling in the world, and likened it to a resurrection.

The former Virginia governor, who appeared on Forensic Files, later said that the jurors weren’t at fault for the guilty verdict in the trial; DNA testing didn’t exist then and they didn’t know about the hypnosis.

So how did life go for Ed after the initial exuberance of freedom?

Mostly well, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

His first order of business was buying a tan sports jacket at a department store. He said he was enjoying the little things in life—like riding an escalator — and was looking forward to eating pizza again.

Ed Honaker is greeted by a supporter upon his release — Friends and relatives were waiting for Ed Honaker when he emerged from prison

Strangers who knew about his wrongful conviction would recognize him on the street and offer words of support. At Kmart, an elderly couple he had never met insisted on paying for his purchases.

Ed got a job doing ductwork for an HVAC service and also started a business of his own. In May 1996, he married Rosalie Opalka, a Roanoke Symphony Orchestra violinist he’d met at a prison dance.

He admitted it was awkward getting to know his children again after missing so much time with them; they were in grade school when he went to prison and in their teens when he got out. His 19-year-old daughter, Michele, told the Roanoke Times that, at first, she didn’t know what to say to him, but they soon began talking every three weeks or so. They spent her birthday together playing pool and going shopping at the Crossroads Mall.

In a pleasant surprise, another daughter — who he didn’t know existed — from a relationship in the early 1970s sought him out after seeing media coverage.

Sympathy from the press. And speaking of surprises, Ed and his lawyer asked the state government for relatively modest compensation, just $750,000, to compensate for his wrongful conviction.

They made a case that the deputy sheriff and commonwealth prosecutor had been overzealous because of pressure to find a culprit quickly. The Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial board published an opinion piece titled “Pay Ed Honaker.” It read in part:

It’s a miracle Honaker kept resentment from consuming him. And anyone who has squirmed through a two-hour committee meeting can only imagine what it would be like to be locked up not for another two hours but for another 10 years…with evil men who would casually kill for a pack of cigarettes.

In 1996, Virginia’s general assembly agreed to give Ed $150,000 immediately followed by $350,000 as an annuity.

The jurors who convicted Ed seemed amenable to his exoneration.”If the governor liked the new evidence enough to pardon him,” said Roy Bivens, “it must be right because Governor Allen doesn’t believe in parole.”

Hazel Hight, described as a housewife at the time she served on the Honaker jury, echoed that thought. “If he’s innocent, I don’t want to see him serving more time,” Hight told the Roanoke Times. “But we really thought he was guilty.”

As of 2005, Ed and Rosalie were living in Bedford County on a small farm.

“I won’t say there haven’t been emotional problems,” Ed told a reporter. “Not a day goes by I don’t think about prison.” The story notes that Ed largely beat the odds because many exonerees end up mired in dysfunction, often with drug problems.

Fortunately, Ed’s pastimes — fishing, riding his ATV, and writing a children’s book and a novel — were legal and safe. In a way, prison made him kinder, he told the Roanoke Times. His urge to shoot squirrels disappeared; he wanted to watch them play instead.

A gray-haired Ed Honaker in his 60s — *Ed Honaker*

Last chapter. Ed died on June 12, 2015. His obituary mentioned that he and Rosalie lived with two beloved German shepherd dogs, and suggested that mourners make donations to Centurion Ministries.

Thanks to DNA technology, innocence advocates, and a governor with a conscience, the headline of Ed Honaker’s obituary refers to him as an exoneree, not an ex-convict.

That’s all for this time. In a future post, I’ll look into what efforts law enforcement has made to find the real attacker in the Blue Ridge rape case.

Until then, cheers. — R.R.

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Peacock or Amazon

Forensic Files Now book covere — *Book in stores or online*

Janice Trahan and Dr. Richard Schmidt: An Epilogue

A Physician Deliberately Gives His Ex-Lover HIV
(‘Shot of Vengeance,’ Forensic Files)

Note: Updated on October 24, 2024

Forensic Files usually allows viewers to extract at least a bit of levity from crime stories: “My name’s Ed Post and I’m going for a jog,” Jason Funk’s signing his own name to a stolen credit card receipt, and “Let’s go after that bitch,” to name a few.

The attempted murder of Janice Trahan, however, is just plain grim all around. She had a turbulent relationship with a charming physician who deliberately infected her with HIV and hepatitis C.

Richard Schmidt, M.D., was jealous when Janice moved on with her life, and he wanted to ruin it — and end it.

Nagging problems. I’ve been putting off writing about “A Shot of Vengeance” because the episode is so sad. But after sucking it up and doing some research, I found that, while there’s still nothing amusing about the case, there was ultimately some justice and gratification for the victim.

So let’s get going on the recap of “Shot of Vengeance” along with extra information from internet research:

In 1994, Janice Trahan was a 30ish divorced nurse living in Lafayette, Louisiana, with two young sons. She sought medical attention for some persistent ills including eye pain, body aches, and swollen lymph nodes. Her gynecologist, Wayne Daigle, discovered she was pregnant.

And HIV positive.

Trash talk. Janice worked at Lafayette General Hospital, so perhaps she contracted HIV from a patient there.

Married doctor Richard Schmidt, who had a decade-long, off-and-on affair with Janice, told colleagues that she probably picked up the virus from some random guy. She was a barfly who slept around, he said.

In what must have been mortifying for Janice and frightening for them, the hospital asked her seven former boyfriends since 1984 to take AIDS tests.

They all came out negative.

Descriptions of Richard Schmidt’s head covering have included ‘toupee’

Mr. Wonderful. Janice told police she suspected that Richard Schmidt had intentionally injected her with HIV. It seemed farfetched to them, especially because of the gastroenterologist’s highly esteemed reputation.

Richard certainly seemed like a great guy to Janice when they first met, right after the attractive 20-year-old Louisiana native finished nursing school and got a job as a licensed practical nurse at Lafayette General.

Janice admired Richard, then 35, for his intelligence and kind treatment of his patients. His colleagues appreciated him too and vice versa. He kept a closet full of wine that he gave as holiday gifts to other physicians, according to author Stephen Michaud’s book The Vengeful Heart and Other Stories: A True Crime Casebook, excerpted on the Crime Library.

Serial rescinder. The charismatic doctor instigated the affair with Janice after he began hanging around the section of the hospital where she worked. One night, Richard, who had three children with wife Barbara, invited Janice to his office for a beverage. He kissed her, saying he’d wanted to do that for a long time.

Toward the beginning of their relationship, they decided they would leave their spouses and marry each other. She divorced her husband, but Richard stayed with his wife.

As if things weren’t complicated enough, Richard impregnated Janice. She had stopped taking oral contraceptives because of migraines, and Richard didn’t like to use condoms. She wasn’t sure what to do, but Richard went rogue and called Janice’s mother to tell her about the pregnancy. He persuaded Janice to have the baby, promising again to leave his wife.

More slander. But Richard reneged again, and obliged Janice to remove the surname “Schmidt” from their baby son’s birth certificate. Richard ended up paying $300 to $500 a month in child support.

Janice tried to break up with Richard, but he threatened to derail her career and annihilate her reputation. By this time, Janice had risen up the hospital ladder, becoming director of the medicine intensive care unit. Richard said he would put nude photos of her on the hospital’s bulletin board. At some point, he began saying that Janice cheated on a nursing exam at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

When Janice started seeing other men, Richard stalked them. He threatened to kill at least one, and was physically abusive to Janice, she told the Daily Advertiser. She said that Richard told her that he would fix things so that no other man would want her.

Odd visit. Janice was finally able to leave Richard for good after dropping him as her physician.

Nonetheless, on the night of August 4, 1994, Richard called to ask if he could stop by. He gave Janice, who had been sleeping and was groggy, what he said was a shot of Vitamin B-12. It was something he had regularly administered to her in the past; she would later testify that he suggested the shots to combat fatigue so that she would have more time to devote to him.

Lafayette General Hospital served as the backdrop to Janice Trahan and Richard Schmidt’s relationship

This shot, however, was different from the others. It “radiated down my arm,” Janice told the Daily Advertiser. “It never hurt like that before.” After the injection, Richard hurried away, saying the hospital needed him.

Months later, Janice’s health began declining.

Surprise guests. The police started looking into her case. Phone records attested to Janice’s claim of the late-night call.

Richard’s wife, Barbara Schmidt, would later recall coming home one day to find plainclothes police officers inside her husband’s study. They said they were looking for “evidence of B-12.”

When police showed up at Richard’s office at work, he told them that Janice was his girlfriend, not his patient, and that their romance took place over a couple of years and he’d thrown away any mementos of it, according to The Vengeful Heart.

Denials disproven. But police found photocopies of sexually revealing pictures of Janice in an old pocket calendar belonging to Richard.

And when they looked under “T” in his file drawer, they discovered a thick medical file on Janice Trahan. Police Captain Richard Craft reminded Richard that he and Janice had a child together.

Contrary to Richard’s portrayal of it, his relationship with Janice was a highly consequential matter.

Potent parcel. Then, investigators hit more pay dirt in a hidden box of medical records. A list of blood samples drawn from patients on the day before the late-night injection showed that all of the dozen or so blood vials from that day were sent for lab analysis except for two, from patients Donald McClelland and Leslie Louviere.

Police went to see McClelland, a junior high teacher, to ask whether he had HIV.

“HIV positive?” McClelland said. “Hell, I’ve got full-blown AIDS.” They also found out that Richard Schmidt had specifically asked McClelland to take an unplanned blood test that day. Likewise with hepatitis C patient Leslie Louviere, who usually had her blood drawn at a different hospital for insurance reasons, according to The Vengeful Heart; Richard told her he wanted to use her blood for research.

Loyal love. It appeared that Richard had somehow combined the two patients’ blood in one syringe and injected it into Janice on that fateful night.

“Richard made a lot of promises to me that he did not keep,” Janice told Forensic Files. “But he did keep one, and that would be that he would kill me. And I feel like that’s a death sentence that I have.”

Fortunately, Janice’s boyfriend, Jerry Allen, stuck by her and they married in 1996. (It was his baby she was pregnant with at the time of her AIDS diagnosis. She had an abortion because she feared passing along the illness.)

Janice Trahan, about 18 years old, with a girlfriend — A young Janice Trahan, left. Little information came up about her early life, except that she was a columnist for her school newspaper and a majorette

Global sensation. Police charged Richard with attempted second-degree murder.

Media outlets from the U.S. and beyond trumpeted the story of the doctor who deliberately gave his lover HIV. London’s Evening Standard called it the ultimate fatal attraction. Many headlines referred to Richard as “AIDS Doctor.” Ranker would judge “Shot of Vengeance” as one of the 12 most WTF episodes of Forensic Files.

Still, it would be a hard case to prove. Prosecutor Keith Stutes told the Daily Advertiser that he probably lost 15 pounds while working at it.

Funny follicles. Janice would later say that she was terrified about exposing her personal life but that she hoped her story would help someone else.

As far as the court of hospital-employee opinion, most of the doctors sided with Richard.

The nurses were faithful to Janice. “Some were openly derisive about Dr. Schmidt’s comb-over haircut,” according to The Vengeful Heart. “Others used ‘creep’ to describe Schmidt to reporters.”

New tech. Meanwhile, Barbara Schmidt defended her husband. “He is not capable of doing this,” she said. “People won’t know all of the good he has done, and now this. He is ruined.” She said that on the night of the alleged injection, Richard was in the house with her when she started taking a bath and was right there in the bedroom when she finished it.

The prosecutors forged ahead, building a case that Richard — as he claimed — had spent the evening with his wife. But Barbara’s bath gave him a 20-minute window in which to stop by Janice’s place and inject her.

Phylogenetic testing, a new forensic technology, showed a relationship between the type of HIV found in Janice Trahan’s and Donald McClelland’s blood.

Janice Trahan wears a dark red suit to court accompanied by husband Jerry Allen in a tan suit — Husband Jerry Allen accompanies Janice Trahan to court

Subpoena snag. Furthermore, when Janice’s gynecologist told Richard about the HIV diagnosis, Richard didn’t seem worried for his own health or mention anything about getting a test.

The Associated Press described the trial as “played out as a soap opera-style drama.”

The defense implied that Janice dated other men to make Richard jealous. His lawyers won a small victory when, despite that Janice contracted hepatitis C, the judge would not allow related evidence in court, because the subpoena for Leslie Louviere’s medical records was improper, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Good kind of shock. Nonetheless, on October 23, 1998, Richard Schmidt was convicted of attempted second-degree murder and sentenced to 50 years of hard labor.

After hearing the guilty verdict, he showed no emotion and embraced his wife, who “collapsed in tears.” Barbara somehow stayed loyal to her husband despite his admission during his testimony that he had another extramarital affair after Janice ended theirs.

Overwhelmed by the drama in the courtroom, Janice clasped her husband’s hand, cried, and then fainted, according to the Daily Advertiser. Concerned courtgoers gathered around Janice and began fanning her. She left in a wheelchair.

How are you? District Attorney Michael Harson said that if Janice died, he would pursue a murder charge against Richard Schmidt.

The two patients whose blood Richard used to infect Janice filed civil suits against him. Don McClelland based his complaint on having been outed for having AIDS and also for the defense’s implication that he gave Janice hepatitis C. He had indeed had hepatitis, but it was a different form and he had recovered from it before the doctor drew his blood, the Dallas Morning News reported.

After the 1998 trial, Janice opened up to the Daily Advertiser about her life:

Everybody wants to know how I feel, how’s my health. HIV positive and hepatitis C is a deadly combination. I take 15 pills daily, which helps to keep the HIV under control. I have continuing problems with the hepatitis and particularly with the side effects of the medication.

She also thanked the DA’s office for believing in her.

Not in my vision. After taking a break from Lafayette General amid the trial, Janice returned to work but switched to an administrative role.

In 1999, the TV news-magazine series 20/20 made an episode about the case with journalist Cynthia McFadden reporting. Janice declined the ABC network show’s invitation to appear, noting that the trial was over and her family desired privacy. “There is no room in my heart or life for hatred or bitterness,” she wrote in a letter to 20/20. She called her current husband, Jerry Allen, a gift from God.

Barbara Schmidt accompanies her husband to court — Barbara and Richard Schmidt head to court in 1998. As recently as 2019, she told the media he was innocent

Richard Schmidt chose to appear on the 20/20 episode. He admitted to an affair with Janice but denied trying to kill her. McFadden skewered Richard by asking why, if Janice got HIV from someone other than him, he never got an HIV test himself. She also needled him about the test-cheating accusation he made against Janice; he couldn’t provide any basis for it. Richard, who cried during his interview, said he didn’t remember confronting one of Janice’s former boyfriends.

Denied in duplicate. Janice would later sue Richard as well as media outlets when they reported his claim that she stalked him. The circumstances and outcome of the lawsuit aren’t clear from the circuitously written court papers.

Meanwhile, Leslie Louviere recovered from hepatitis and became an executive who works with healthcare organizations.

Donald McClelland died at age 54 in 2010.

After Janice testified at a 2015 parole hearing, the board rejected Richard’s application. In 2022, federal Judge Robert R Summerhays denied a petition for a second federal review of his case.

Plan backfired. While Richard sat in prison, Janice went on to have a full life with Jerry, her sons, and many friends. On a social media account, she noted Richard Schmidt’s death, on February 12, 2023. He passed away while serving his sentence at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center at the time.

“The target of his germ warfare attack outlived him,” the NY Daily News wrote.

Even if it was only figuratively, Janice got the last laugh.

Update: Sad to report that a news story dated October 23, 2024 says that Janice Trahan Allen has died. In addition to her other health problems, she was suffering from dementia. (Thanks to reader Janice B. for writing in with the tip.)

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon

Karla Brown: Murdered at 22

What Happened to John Prante?
(‘Body of Evidence,’ Forensic Files)

Karla Brown in a frilly pink dress — *Karla Brown*

The popular kids seemed like gods and goddesses back when I was in school, and their lives fascinated me. So the episode about Karla Brown, a former cheerleader with Farrah Fawcett hair, drew me in.

Forensic Files portrays Karla’s homicide as happening after an old classmate, someone who wasn’t in her social circle, tried to chat her up on the street and she gave a less than enthusiastic response.

For this post, I looked for more information on Karla, the trial and whether a mild snub was really what motivated John Prante to prey upon her. So let’s get going on the recap of “Body of Evidence” along with extra information from internet research:

Seventies sweetheart. Karla Lou Brown was born to Floyd and Jo Ellen Brown on February 28, 1956, in Lima, Ohio. Her father was in the military and died young in an accident.

Definitely one of the cool kids at Roxana High School, Karla participated in not only cheerleading but also pep club, gymnastics, chorus, intramurals, fine arts council, you name it.

In addition to blond hair, she had a lovely smile and the thin arched eyebrows in style in the disco era. When she wore a bikini, her sister Donna Johnson said, “she was a knockout.”

It’s easy to imagine countless boys having crushes on her. There were probably some girl crushes (even before that term existed) on her, too.

Ups and downs. By 1978, Karla was finishing up her studies at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville while waitressing at an International House of Pancakes. Her boyfriend, who Forensic Files calls Mark Hart but other sources identify as Mark Fair, was an electrician who had served in the military. His job was described as apprentice construction worker by “Killer in the New Neighborhood,” an episode of A Body in the Basement.

She and Mark had a five-year relationship that was difficult at times, but they ultimately got engaged and decided to live together in a small house they bought at 979 Acton Avenue in Wood River, Illinois. The neighborhood was considered safe.

“She was happier than she’d ever been,” Donna told A Body in the Basement. “She was thrilled. She wanted to get married and she wanted to marry Mark. Things were finally falling into place.”

Karla Brown and Mark Fair's house — *The two-bedroom house that should have been Karla and Mark’s love nest sold for $102,000 most recently, according to Zillow*

Ringing off the hook. On June 21, 1978, Karla took the day off work so she could get things settled at the house. Media accounts vary as to whether the couple had moved in the previous day or they were just preparing to move in after they married.

A friend of Karla’s would later recall that they chatted on the phone that day and the last thing Karla said was that someone was at her door, according to Forensic Files. Karla actually spoke to two friends, Jamie Hale and Debra Davis, that morning, but she was talking to her boyfriend’s mother, Helen Fair, when someone came to the door, according to Circuit Court of Madison County papers.

At least one girlfriend stopped by the house that day, but no one answered the door.

Horror house. At around 5:30 p.m., Mark brought his buddy Thomas Feigenbaum over to show him the new place. After searching for Karla upstairs, the young men found her lifeless body in the basement, with her head in a bucket of water, her hands tied with an electrical cord, and Mark’s socks wrapped around her neck so tightly that police had to cut them off. She was dressed in only a sweater.

Donna remembers the phone call she got from her sister Connie Dykstra. “She said, ‘Donna, it’s worse than you could imagine. Get home.'”

Karla had linear bruises on her face and neck. Someone had bitten her shoulder and broken her jaw. Blood stained the nearby sofa cushions, according to court papers.

Double helix not handy. The killer had stowed the carafe from the couple’s Mr. Coffee in the rafters. It looked as though he poured water into the vessel and then used it in an attempt to clean the blood. The New Detectives, however, suggests that the murderer used the water in an attempt to revive Karla.

Then, the attacker moved her to the laundry area.

The killer spent a lot of time at the house arranging the scene in a perverted manner. The cause of death was strangulation or drowning. A blow to her neck came from a TV table in the house, it was later determined. Police found no foreign fingerprints at the scene. Forensic DNA testing didn’t exist yet, so investigators had no way of analyzing bodily fluids at the scene.

No concrete leads. Mark Fair was inconsolable with grief, according to The New Detectives. He cried and screamed. As the boyfriend, however, he was the chief suspect. During her appearance on Forensic Files, Connie said that she didn’t know Mark well.

But Mark’s colleagues confirmed his alibi, that he was at work when the murder happened.

“No one was a suspect and everyone was a suspect,” prosecutor Don Weber would later tell the Belleville News-Democrat. “I even looked into where Ted Bundy was at that time.”

There was also Karla’s mean, creepy ex-stepfather — he reportedly made a pass at one of her friends — but no evidence linked him to the crime.

Beers and blunts. The police found out that two men were sitting outside the house next door to Karla’s while she was movings things into her place.

John Prante and a friend Forensic Files calls Duane Conway but court papers identify as Paul Main were drinking beer and smoking marijuana at Main’s place.

Forensic Files suggests that John Prante called out to Karla, saying that they knew each other from school, and she answered him coldly. But John was six years older, so it seems unlikely they were high school classmates.

College in common. Court papers describe the encounter this way:

John Scroggins, who knew both the victim and the defendant, testified that on the afternoon before the murder, he and the defendant [John Prante] had been at Paul Main’s, at which time he introduced the victim and the defendant, who afterward on that same day expressed considerable sexual interest in the victim.

That description makes more sense. Prante told friends he knew Karla from Southern Illinois University. It might hurt someone’s feelings to not be recognized by a classmate from a small-town high school like Roxana — but it was entirely forgivable for Karla, who was attending a college with nearly 10,000 students, to not remember John Prante from there.

Above their pay grade. So who was this face in the crowd? John Prante was born around 1950 and lived in East Alton, Illinois. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch gave his occupation as unemployed barge worker. He had attended Lewis and Clark Community College as well as SIU. Prante said that he was looking for a job during the summer of 1978 and turned in an application at Shell Oil Company in St. Louis on the day of the homicide.

Police had nothing incriminating on him. The investigation stalled for two years.

Donna would later tell A Body in the Basement that she was frustrated that the police didn’t summon outside help. They were good at rescuing cats from trees, she said, but didn’t have enough experience for a murder case of this nature.

County gets in gear. Then, in 1980, Don Weber won an election for Madison County state’s attorney. On his first day, he summoned everything the office had on the Karla Brown homicide. “I put it on my desk and I said, ‘We’re going to solve this case,'” he told A Body in the Basement. Karla looked like a girl he’d gone to high school with, and the unsolved murder haunted him.

Downtown Wood River, Illinois, busy with traffic — *Downtown Wood River, Illinois*

Investigators turned their attention back to John Prante and Paul Main. Prante, it turned out, once told friends at a party that he saw Karla’s body while looking over the shoulders of police officers, and he spotted a bite mark. But police said Prante was never in the basement with them. And the public didn’t know about the bite mark; the authorities withheld that information.

In 1982, Karla’s mother agreed to let authorities exhume her daughter’s body for another autopsy. Dr. Mary Case found that the attacker broke Karla’s jaw in two places. But she believed Karla was still alive when the killer put her face in the water, and she drowned. She also believed that Karla had been sexually assaulted. There was a used tampon on the coffee table at the murder scene.

Got ’em. Weber brought in FBI profiler John Douglas, who thought the killer would be a single, young, and slovenly unemployed white male, a loser with women, and his car was a Volkswagen.

Sure enough, Prante drove a VW — a blue Beetle and possibly also a red VW station wagon belonging to his father.

Prante was working as a house painter by the time police charged him with murder and put him in the county jail in Edwardsville.

“I believe Karla Brown can rest in peace now,” said Wood River police chief Don Greer.

Attracted to wedded gals. Main told police that on the day of the homicide, Prante turned up at his house and looked flushed and out of breath. His T-shirt was wet.

He also said that Prante liked flirting with married women and would make inappropriate advances toward them. In other words, it was who Karla was — not how she acted — that spurred Prante to prey on her.

John Prante in a three-piece — *John Prante cleaned up nicely for court*

Investigators believe that Prante knocked on Karla’s door and, once inside the house, made an unwanted sexual advance. There was a struggle, and he overpowered Karla, who was 4 foot 11 inches tall and weighed 100 pounds, according to court papers. Prante then killed her and arranged the scene in a bizarre way for reasons never explained.

Couldn’t shut up about it. During the trial, the prosecution, led by Don Weber, heavily emphasized John Douglas’s predictions, including that the killer would contact the police to learn more about the investigation. Prante had called them to say that he was a witness but didn’t want to be considered a suspect.

Far more damaging was the testimony of Prante’s former friends, who said that Prante seemed to have inside information about the case and made incriminating remarks.

One witness, Vickie White, said that just days after the murder, Prante said that he had to get his story straight and leave town because the police were looking for him. Paul Main’s wife, Judy Main, said that Prante mentioned that Karla’s murder was a capital offense and that he or Paul could go to the gas chamber.

Old accounts. Susan Lutz, who once dated Prante, said he had bitten her during their relationship. She also testified that he told her that he had once killed someone, but he couldn’t talk about it because he could lose his freedom. Another witness recalled Prante’s having said that “a nice looking blond chick had moved in next door and that he wouldn’t mind getting some pussy off her.”

Karla Brown's senior yearbook portrait and list of activities — *Karla Brown*‘*s yearbook photo*

Prante’s lawyer, Neil Hawkins, countered that the friends’ memories were mixed in with later media reports; they were testifying four years after the crime. He also contended that police should have looked more closely at Main as a suspect.

A defense witness said that, while he was serving time in Madison County Jail, cellmate Joseph Milazzo admitted that he had killed Karla Brown by strangling her.

Cue up the violin. The defense trotted out a more respectable witness in Dr. Edward Pavlec. The orthodontist testified that the “bite” marks were useless because it wasn’t even certain that they came from teeth. Even if they had, someone could have pulled on the victim’s skin, which would make it appear that the teeth had extra space between them. He had a point — bite marks in general have since been widely discredited as forensic evidence (Ray Krone).

John Prante took the stand in his own defense. He calmly denied ever biting Susan Lutz or saying that he had killed someone.

Prante also played the victim card (Thomas Jabin Berry), saying that he had suffered abuse at the hands of Marine Corps Guards when he served in the military. He was handcuffed to a bunk and beaten and had his head bashed into a wall, he testified.

Relief, finally. In July 1983, after deliberating for four and half hours, the jurors returned to the courtroom — and none of them looked at Prante. He was convicted of first-degree murder.

Karla’s family members cried and hugged prosecutors and police, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Karla Brown cheerleading in her early teens — Karla Brown’s gravestone says, ‘So lovely, so loving, so loved’

Prante, who showed little reaction to the verdict, was led away in handcuffs and leg shackles.

He’s out?! He got 75 years in state penitentiary.

Prante’s attempts to appeal the conviction over the years failed but—horror of horrors — he won parole in 2019.

He had earned days off on his sentence for good behavior.

Judges unmoved. Prante is still trying to clear his name, based on faulty bite wound evidence. The Innocence Project and the Exoneration Project have taken up his post-conviction cause.

In response to Prante’s petitions in 2020 and 2021, judges agreed about the bite wound evidence — acknowledging that the scientific community no longer deemed it as credible as fingerprints — but ruled that there was enough other evidence pointing to his guilt.

In 2022, Prante made the news again, when he was charged with DUI and going through a Stop sign while driving his 2005 Saturn in Bethalto, Illinois. He fell down several times during a field sobriety test.

Forensics in back pocket. Prante said that he hadn’t been “this drunk or high for 37 years,” according to local paper The Telegraph.

As for the town of Wood River, it has healed over the decades since the murder. “It’s a relatively peaceful community now where people don’t even know that that’s the house where it happened,” Weber said.

The field of forensic science, however, has changed forever and law enforcement now has ever-advancing DNA testing on its side should anyone — young or old, popular or not — fall prey to a killer in Madison County again.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Peacock or Amazon

The New Detectives episode including a vignette about Karla Brown’s murder is on YouTube. The A Body in the Basement episode is available on Amazon but there’s a fee to watch it, even if you have Prime

Guy Sileo and Jim Webb: Entrée to Murder

The General Wayne Inn Houses a Homicide
‘Murder on the Menu,’ Forensic Files

Most new restaurants fail within a few years, and when you throw an unrenovated historic building into the mix, the venture barely has a ghost of a chance.

Guy Sileo and Jim Webb smoking cigars together — Guy Sileo and Jim Webb were buddies, but they fought

But not even the spirits who reportedly haunted the General Wayne Inn — built near Philadelphia in 1704 — could have imagined the horrible outcome when young entrepreneurs Jim Webb and Guy Sileo bought the place and made it into a fine-dining establishment in the 1990s.

When the venture faltered, Guy decided he’d rather collect the life insurance payout on his business partner than simply cut his losses on the restaurant and move on.

For this post, I searched for an update on Guy Sileo as well as more history on the General Wayne Inn and details about the murder trial. So let’s get going on the recap of “Murder on the Menu” along with extra information from internet research:

Specter center. The General Wayne Inn in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, had an esteemed, if fabled, history. Benjamin Franklin supposedly visited the inn, and George Washington is said to have spent the night there. Edgar Allan Poe wrote part of The Raven there in 1836.

The building was not only historic but also otherworldly. In modern times, a waitress said she encountered the ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier on the staircase. A deceased Hessian soldier allegedly showed up too.

Former innkeeper Barton Johnson told Unsolved Mysteries that some minor supernatural shenanigans also happened on the property. For no discernible reason, a Cadillac parked out front started up by itself, TVs and adding machines would become possessed, and women at the bar would feel unseen entities blowing on their necks.

A long wooden dining room table — The General Wayne Inn played host to weddings and parties in its heyday

Stove unplugged. The restaurant also attracted the area’s well-to-do earthly eaters, who enjoyed old favorites like prime rib and sautéed flounder.

But palates changed over the years, with young professionals moving to the area and looking for more sophisticated cuisine. And at 291 years of age, the building needed a lot of work.

The General Wayne Inn went out of business in 1994.

Chefs Jim Webb and Guy Sileo, who had previously worked together at the American Bistro in Morton, bought the General Wayne Inn in 1995 for $1.2 million with the intention of restoring the building. Guy’s father gave them $100,000 to invest in the business.

Don’t wine so much. Guy and Jim, a rising chef who specialized in seafood, offered updated dishes, like lobster meat wrapped in chicken with a pistachio crust.

The amount of work the business needed was overwhelming and the partners often clashed. “They had their good days and their bad days,” Jim’s mother, Theresa Webb, told City Confidential.

Jim felt that Guy wasn’t pulling his weight. Guy, who was married, reportedly spent a lot of time drinking and flirting with women at the bar. He was having an affair with an assistant chef named Felicia Moyse who was barely 20 years old. Jim worried that Guy’s behavior would lead to sexual harassment lawsuits against the restaurant.

Exterior shot of the General Wayne Inn — The General Wayne Inn at 625 Montgomery Street

Grave injury. But Guy wasn’t the only employee to meet Jim’s disapproval. Many of the workers found Jim too demanding and hard to work with in general.

Still, it was shocking when Jim, a 31-year-old married father of two, turned up dead on the floor of his office at the restaurant on December 27, 1996.

Co-workers who saw the executive chef’s body thought he had somehow hit his head. There was a large knot on his forehead. It turned out, however, that someone had shot him in the back of the head and the bullet traveled to, but didn’t exit, his forehead.

Not a robbery. No one had stolen the gold chain from Jim’s neck or the cash in his pocket.

Police delivered the news of Jim’s death to his wife, Robin, who was a waitress at the restaurant.

“I cried. I screamed. I fell to the ground, I thought I was going to be sick,” she would later recall, as reported by the Times Herald. She and Jim had been together since high school.

Good policy. Still, investigators initially considered Robin a suspect because she couldn’t remember whether or not Jim came home that night.

But Robin wasn’t the beneficiary of any insurance policy on her husband, according to the Oxygen Network, and she had no other motive. Police also looked at a disgruntled waiter recently fired over a credit card scam, but he was in jail when the murder took place.

Then there was partner Guy Sileo, age 29. He and Jim had $650,000 insurance policies on each other to guard the business against hardship in case one of them died.

Jim Webb worked nonstop and expected perfection from others

Guy had recently bought a pistol.

Tragedy strikes again. But Felicia Moyse could, truthfully, tell investigators that on the night of the murder, Jim was still alive when she left the restaurant with Guy. She and Guy were together the whole evening, except for a short window when they took separate cars to Mulligan’s, a bar in Upper Darby.

Two months after the murder, Felicia committed suicide.

Felicia used her father’s gun and left no note. According to City Confidential, she had been hoping that Guy would marry her, and recently found out that he was planning to stay with his wife. Police didn’t know what to make of Felicia’s death.

Quite a slip-up. Solid evidence about Jim’s murder was also hard to come by. A .25-caliber bullet turned up outside the General Wayne Inn, but it didn’t match Guy’s Phoenix Arms .25-caliber handgun. Neither did the bullet that killed Jim.

A better lead came along when Robin Webb remembered that, right after Jim’s murder, Guy had said, “Who would have wanted to shoot Jim?” At the time, no one except the authorities and the killer knew Jim had died from a bullet wound; police withheld that information.

Investigators found out that Guy actually had two pistols. A leather gun case Guy owned contained impressions from his secret second gun, a Beretta Model 20.

Theory congeals. And Jim’s insurance policy was the only chance for Guy to enrich himself — or at least make himself whole — via the General Wayne Inn. The restaurant attracted plenty of diners, but it was losing money because of all the necessary repairs. Jim planned to close down, offload the inn, and end his partnership with Guy.

Meanwhile, Guy’s father was demanding the return of the $100,000.

Investigators believed that Guy took advantage of the window of time before he and Felicia met at Mulligan’s. He drove back to the restaurant, accidentally fired a bullet outside while checking his Beretta, and then climbed up the creaky steps to the third floor and shot Jim.

Mulligan stew. District Attorney Bruce Castor charged Guy with first-degree murder, announcing that he would aim for a sentence of life without parole. “There’s no legally recognizable aggravating circumstance that we could pursue the death penalty on,” Castor told the Associated Press. “If we could make it a death penalty case, we would.”

A photo of the General Wayne Inn taken in 1880 — The establishment opened as the Wayside Inn but changed its name to honor Revolutionary War figure General Anthony ‘Mad Anthony’ Wayne

The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that the most dramatic testimony in the trial —which featured more than a dozen witnesses for the prosecution — came from Mulligan’s bartender Chris Shuster. About a month before the murder, Guy asked him, “Chris, do you know any countries we [don’t] have extradition treaties with, where you could hide out if you wanted to kill somebody?”

Defense lawyer Richard Winters put Guy Sileo on the stand. Guy “gave answers and explanations that seemed plausible enough to cast doubt on his guilt,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Freedom lost. But he was no match for Castor’s three-hour cross-examination, during which he hammered into Sileo over his lies, including denying that he owned a Beretta. The prosecution also pointed out that the bullet’s trajectory, from the base of the back of Jim’s head to his forehead, suggested that Guy, who was around 5-foot-5, stood behind Jim, who was more than 6 feet tall, and fired the gun in an upward position.

In August 2001, after seven hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Guy. He received life without the possibility of parole.

Today, Guy Angelo Sileo Jr., 57, is incarcerated at the State Correctional Institution at Laurel Highlands in Somerset, Pennsylvania. The fact that he’s in a minimum security facility suggests that he has behaved himself while behind bars.

No respect. Guy has, however, continued to make work for the justice system. From his prison cell, he sought an appeal based on his claim that Felicia murdered Jim. Guy said that Felicia told him that she did it because Jim disapproved of her relationship with Guy.

Guy Sileo in a prison mug shot — Guy Sileo in a 2024 prison photo

“If this is the truth, why not say it from the beginning?” prosecutor Wendy Demchick-Alloy told the press. “How convenient. Now he’s blaming the dead woman.”

Jim’s mother, Theresa Webb, told City Confidential that it was a typical self-centered ploy on Guy’s part. “When he blamed Felicia, he was just ruining another family,” she said.

Not much appeal. Even Guy’s defense lawyer Richard Winters turned against him, after Guy accused him of giving ineffective counsel. Winters noted that Guy told him that he had no idea who killed Jim; he didn’t mention any suspicions relating to Felicia until he was locked away.

Judges shot down Guy’s contention about Felicia as well as his other legal salvos over the years. Police thought that guilt over being Guy’s alibi might have driven Felicia to take her own life. Some online Forensic Files commenters have suggested that Felicia’s death merits a murder investigation — maybe she knew about Guy’s Beretta and he wanted to silence her forever.

The reason for Felicia’s demise remains unknown.

Changing hands. So what happened to the General Wayne Inn after the scandal?

A restaurateur named Frank Cacciuti bought the place in 2001 but closed it after less than a year because it didn’t bring enough revenue. Another buyer came along and opened a restaurant there in 2004, but it didn’t last long either.

The building as it looks now with a sign for the Chabad Jewish spiritual group — The building as it looks today

Today, the General Wayne Inn’s tradition of wining and dining is over. The building belongs to a Jewish spiritual group, Chabad of the Main Line, which remodeled the exterior except for one outside wall with the original name and “1704.”

And speaking of things spiritual, in the end, it wasn’t paranormal activity that doomed the General Wayne Inn. It was a combination of high overhead costs and personal animosity, very much of this world and more threatening than any ghost.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — R.R.

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Peacock or Amazon

You can see the Unsolved Mysteries and City Confidential episodes on YouTube

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