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True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski, Good Evening.

Twenty five Frozen One Thought, Murder and Mayhem in the Midwest takes readers deep into the heart of unsolved mysteries and chilling crimes that have haunted communities across the Midwest, from small towns shattered by sudden disappearances to cities rock by violent acts.

Each chapter brings a different story twenty five cases left frozen in time, still waiting for justice.

The book explores murders that stun neighborhoods, kidnappings that tore families apart, and mysteries that investigators chased for years.

In these pages, the quiet streets of Missouri, Illinois and beyond become the backdrop for secrets, heartbreak, and unanswered questions.

But not every case remains locked in ice.

One story breaks free, the Thowd case, where persistence and detail uncover the truth and shows that even the coldest mysteries can sometimes find resolution with a journalist's eye for fact and as storytellers gift for detail.

Cypher's presents the lives lost, the families still searching for answers, and the investigators who refused to give up.

Rather than sensationalizing tragedy, the book restores humanity to the victims while revealing the lasting impact of crime on entire communities.

Twenty five Frozen One Thought is a testament to memory, resilience, and the hope that justice may yet be found, even decades later.

The book that we're featuring this evening is twenty five Frozen One thowd Murder and Mayhem in the Midwest with my special guest, journalist and author Bob Ciphers.

Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.

Bob Ciphers, Thank you, Dan.

Let's start with how you became involved in this book project, twenty five Frozen One Thought.

What's the origin of this book project?

Well, I work my whole life as a journalist radio, TV, newspapers, small market, middle market, large market.

My last thirty five years were it cam OVTV to CBS affiliate in Saint Louis, and my last year there I spent working with police departments the FBI travel in the country chasing down the I seventy serial killer.

They formed a task force.

It was a case still unsolved, and when I retired, I wrote the book on that and I really figured that was done.

It was my first really effort at a book of bet sorts.

You know, I didn't know what the expectation was.

I had no writing background or anything for writing a book.

But the book did really well.

And true crime is, as you well know, out there in the in the marketplace right now.

And my publisher got back to me and said, you know, what else do you have?

But it was like, well, what else do I have?

I covered stories for thirty five years, and so I put together a list of a lot of stories I covered that were interesting cold cases talk about.

But my mind kept going back to the one case that was not a cold case, but was thought that was a cold case that was solved.

And so thus twenty five frozen one thought.

If you like them cold or if you like them thought, I think the book has.

Both yes and very remarkable stories we won't be able to cover and even discuss at any kind of length the twenty five frozen cold cases that you have featured in this book.

But let's start with the very first one you called the Never Ending Story nineteen eighty three, and again the television station that you mentioned that you worked at, KMOVTV, Saint Louis and the case of Larry and Denise Wolfe.

Tell us a little bit about this TV broadcast of their nuptials and what happened after.

The television station was covering a different news story at City Hall, but while they were there, there was a wedding taken place, and it was like, hey, let's shoot a few pictures of the wedding.

It might be a nice kicker or a way to end the newscast, you know, you give the viewers a half an hour of gory details and try to leave them with a smile on their face.

And the wedding happened to be Larry wolf and his bride, Denise.

They ran home and told everybody how they were going to be on TV, and that's how their TV world began.

Well, of course, later it did not end quite as well, as Denise was murdered and Larry became a suspect, and the case never got solved because it had so many crazy twists and turns in between that it just the police department wound up just throwing their hands up in the air and saying, we have no chance here.

This is so crazy, this is so goofy beyond the pale, and you've got a woman laying dead in her driveway and a husband standing right next door.

Basically, but it never got.

Well, let's go into this just a little bit because it's such a fascinating story.

There was this as you write this, Dennis Rabbit, the south Side rapist, was on the loose in the area.

And so you talk about Denise and Larry getting married, but this was the fourth marriage for Denise, and this marriage didn't work out either.

But they had a sort of a strange relationship.

They decided to separate.

Larry bought a house nearby, about one hundred yards away, and so they had this sort of strange relationship where they weren't together, but they were often seen together and did things with their daughter, so they were seen together.

They were known by the family at least that they had this amicable split and that they still remain friends.

But because of this Dennis Rabbit, this notorious south Side rapist.

It was on the loose.

Denise was very careful and installed some measures with her garage so that she would go directly from the driveway into the garage and then I guess into the home because of the South Side rapist.

So tell us what happens one morning despite these precautions.

Well, she worked at a casino and worked the late night shift, and at that point in time it appears she may have had a relationship with a worker there.

Larry may have been known of that.

Larry, as you said, a strange relationship, living right a couple houses down the street.

He bought from her, but he seemed to know everything she was doing, and at almost all times he was really watching over her, if you will.

And she came home that night and at four point thirty in the morning from work, and as soon as she went through her front yard, within seconds the gun fire rang out.

I think she was She arrived home a little bit around four thirty or so, and by four thirty five neighbors had already called the police.

Houses riddled with bullets.

The niece is lying face down on the sidewalk, and within minutes ems has arrived and the quiet block that was asleep a minute ago is now going crazy.

Larry lived just literally like one hundred yards away.

Police went to his house and he answered the door as he was asleep and boxer shorts.

While the other neighbors all said they heard stuff, Larry said he didn't hear a thing.

The niece died at the hospital within the hour, and by the time the sun rose, that whole neighborhood was just swamp with police officers going door to door.

With the security system that I mentioned, police realized that she did not do what she had that security system for.

She didn't drive directly into that drive way.

She did something other that indicated something else, at least to the police.

Yeah, it indicated that she had a conversation with somebody or something happened in that five minutes between four thirty and four thirty five four thirty six that paused her.

Otherwise, she'd have pulled into that garage at four thirty four thirty one.

So there had to be a second element in play, and obviously there was.

She was shot, but she did not pull right in.

She paused.

What would she pause for?

What would anybody pause for?

In your driveway at four thirty in the morning.

You're not going to pause for a complete stranger to have a conversation.

She was either apprehended immediately or she paused because she knew somebody and that allowed her to believe she was able to have a safe conversation at that hour.

Very interesting too, is that when the ambulance took his wife and he didn't know that condition, she was still alive.

He did not go with her in that ambulance to the hospital.

And he went back to bed.

He said, Now you introduce a homicide detective which is featured or is often appears in these stories, and that's detective Chris Poppas he said that you quote him as saying that they had no idea.

Police really had no idea really what happened until Laurie Lynn Cherko turned the case upside down.

Can you explain what she had to say to police?

Well, she became the eyewitness, but her story changed half a dozen times, and once the police started investigating, it was like, wait a minute, you sent us down this path, and now you've changed your mind.

We're going down the second path, third path, fourth path.

And she became the star attraction because every week it was a new story out of her mouth, and pretty soon Larry the Husband was no where to be in there, and then Larry the Husband is right there.

It's like, you know, it's just police had a hard time taking her seriously.

And then she started going on the radio stations on her own and talking about the case.

She started feuding with attorneys.

It became really but she may have been one of the most bizarre witnesses that police have ever encountered in any investigation that I ever dealt with.

And it just got to the point as the police were ready to go and make charges on the case against Larry the Husband, that the defense attorney made it obvious.

You put her on the we're gonna put around the witness stand.

We're gonna say her story has changed to half a dozen times.

What's the jury gonna believe?

Is that a b CD e F And once police realized that she had no credibility, and yet she was the focal interest in the entire investigation, the case went south.

Very interesting.

If we go back, there was a witness that said that there was a gray van or similar color with the stripe on it seen leaving the scene, and also that there was reports of by a neighbor that he had heard shots at four thirty seven am.

And so very interesting when again police look into Lynn Cherko's story that she happens to have a husband, that they have very similar living arrangements as Larry and Denise had in that they don't live together.

But his name is Marcello Cherko, and he just happened to own a gray van with a stripe on it, and he also owned a high power rifle similar to the murder weapon police theorize was used.

And keep in mind, Dan, these were elements or new twists in the tail that kept coming out over time.

Oh, by the way, Cherko has a husband living in the same relationship as you mentioned.

Oh by the way, remember the van I told you about.

Guess what, my husband has that same band.

But she's not telling police this.

Originally this is month's end or her fifth story.

It was new clues being dropped, almost like you know, Ansel and Gretel dropping little brugg crumbs along the path, and each breadcrumb she would drop seemed to become bigger than the last one, and it was like police saying, how can this come out?

Now where's this bend?

And it just it just became you know, do we go meet with her again for the eighth time, because who knows what the story is going to be then, and it just became a puzzle that the piece is just you could never fit together.

And they got to the point where she agreed to write a formal statement and then at the last minute said she refused.

Correct.

Now, despite that, the police figure that they at least have enough to make an indictment.

So what do the police do with that?

Well, they're ready to go forward.

I mean, Larry Wolf sat in jail for a year and a half.

Even his attorney at Richard Sindel, he says, you know, he told me, Bob, I don't know if he's guilty or not.

He's the only guy that had a motive, so I can understand why the police were looking at him.

But you know, the state still has a burden of proof and they weren't going to do that with Cherko on the witness stand.

So where would they go from there?

In the meantime, you know, Larry Wolf since then has passed away and the police department has just basically closed the case because they issued warrants on him for the arrest.

But once the case went sizzled and once he died, there was no second back.

There was no second person with motive.

There was no random person they thought was roaming the streets at four point thirty in the morning, hiding behind a bush, waiting to kill Denise.

And so this case is really not closed.

This case is frozen.

But Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.

Let's move on to the next story.

And you write, this is called where is Gina?

And this is Fredericktown, Missouri.

You say a population of three thousand in August fifth, nineteen eighty nine, and you introduce a lieutenant, Keith de Spain.

So tell us about Gina don Brooks and when she said goodbye to her mother Cindy Box and told her she was going on a bike ride around ten thirty pm.

Yeah, this was really heartbreaking.

This story really happened.

As soon as I arrived at camb Movie in Saint Louis.

Little girl just disappears on a bike and she became perhaps in our area.

There the original milk carton girl missing with no explanation.

She's riding a bicycle after a baseball games at ten o'clock at night or so.

And it's a small safe town in the middle of nowhere.

It's not a crime infested area.

And the next thing you know, her bike is in the middle of the street and she's gone and she's never been seen since.

And for the parents, the heartbreak, the search, the years have gone by.

For a Chief di Stain who worked the case, just gnaws at him every day.

They have suspects, they have leads in pacted.

Just in the last six months.

They took a prisoner out of jail, handcuffed and went to a scene in rural Missouri where he may have told them to start digging, and they dug and they found nothing.

Really really said, you know, you cover all these stories and these are heart They're all heartbreaking stories for me, But the ones that always stick with me are the ones with children and the devastating effect they have on the parents that are left behind, and in Gina's case, because of the elements of her being so young in a small safe town, and then suspects that they couldn't quite nail, and the story developing over time with new leads and good leads and hard leads and perhaps confessions and still not being able to get the closure.

Just very frustrating.

Let's go back to this horror you talk about that that she went on a bike ride and was a station wagon behind her.

Notice the station wagon again, and station wagon sped away with Gina as inside.

Obviously this is all assumed, and the bike was found lying on the street just five blocks from her home.

Now two am, Cindy awoke and found her daughter not at home and panicked and so went to lieutenant to Spain, and he put two and two together because there was a report of a girl missing on a bicycle.

So he becomes involved in this investigation.

He knew right away, you know in a small town, that's not what you usually see.

You got a missing girl, you got a bicycle on a street, you got a reports of a car street, you know, streaking away they went, They went out quickly.

By daybreak that town was crawling with everybody.

So Keith did a really good job of getting people in their city, county, state.

I know, the Feds were there.

They had hundreds of people that were searching various counties.

I mean, they brought in horror on the ground.

They had airplanes, they had helicopters.

I remember being down there and seeing all the people and the yellow ribbons that were on all the trees.

It was a The city was out looking for Gina.

I mean, they they came out in mass house people, you know, everybody went out there to the streets looking for her.

And there was nothing.

There was just literally no clues for them.

It was just a girl who disappeared off the face of the ears.

You say, years went by without a solid lead, and then a letter from Connecticut having nothing to do with Gina changed the game completely.

Laura Michelle Dinwittie had been ordered in Saint Louis in nineteen seventy five, you write, and the case went cold.

Now near twenty years later, Saint Louis homicide commander David Heath found a letter from Laura's mom in Connecticut asking him to never forget her daughter.

Laura case.

Tell us how these two cases get connected by police?

Yeah, really interesting and in fact, Laura Dinwittie's case is also one of the twenty five frozen cases.

Later in the book.

She was a social worker from Connecticut who was well off financially and came to Saint Louis to work with the Vista program just to basically one step above volunteer for hardly any money, and wound up getting murdered in Saint Louis.

But her family writes the letter, and David Heath was the homicide commander at the time.

The family kept writing the letter on Laura's behalf, you know, every year, and ten or so years later, twenty years later, the letter gets a response.

He says, let's look at this case of Dinwittie.

And as he's looking at the case for Dinwittie, he gives the letter over to Detective Pappus, who also worked a never ending story case, and as they're investigating Dinwittie, they see the suspect.

There was a fourteen year old team named Danny Williams.

He was later admitted being at the scene of the murder, although said he didn't do it well.

Pappus is now investigating the letter in the Dimwitty case, looking into Williams' background, and then he sees that Williams has been sentenced for raping girls, sodomizing girls, little girls.

He's a constant person that's been in jail, and so now he starts looking at him as a possible connection for Gina Dawn Brooks, and they start putting two and two together, and before they know it, Williams's brother had a close friend who lived in Fredericktown, right near Gina, and Williams was a frequent visitor to the area.

So now they've gone from trying to help this dinwitty family from a twenty year old homicide in Connecticut to suddenly trying to track down a killer for a case happening right now with Gina don Brooks.

They brought Willialliams in for a polygraph and he failed it and that's when he became suspect number one and still is in the GENA case.

What of the cellmate that says he has some information?

What of that?

Yeah?

There were two other people that police alleged were involved with Williams with the Gina disappearance, Bryant Squires and Timothy Blue.

They were both friends of his.

They'd both be implicated in the police investigation, but as time came along Squires in Blue they wound up in the same prison with Williams for different crimes.

And Ss was Williams's best friend.

He was the person that tied Williams to Gina all along.

And he was dying of cancer in nineteen ninety six, so this is what seven years after Gina has disappeared.

But before he died, he made a deathbed confession to two different nurses implicating Williams in the case, and even it put himself in there.

He says he was the driver of the station wagon that night that abducted Gina, and he said Williams held her by knife in the back seat and killed her.

But he died.

And in the case of lag you're now bringing nurses in to quote hearsay evidence.

It's a question of whether or not how well that would hold up in a court case.

You say that it was Papa's who walked into Williams prison cell and personally served him with the murder warrant, and he said he wasn't surprised.

Oh I remember Chris told me.

He said, Bob, he says to me, he goes, what took you so long to get here?

And then when he Pappus is giving him all the information he's got on the case, Williams was like, wow, you did your work.

How'd you get all this?

But they charged him.

They charged him in two thousand and three for murder.

He pled not guilty.

But then when the state realized they didn't have quite enough, you know, you've got no body and now squires who talk to the nurses is dead.

They were not certain of their case and they dropped the charges because they feared if he got off innocent and something came up later, they couldn't charge him again for double jeopardy.

So Williams was tucked in jail for a long long time, and it's like, let's let's let him sit there.

If we get more evidence later on, we can go for murder.

But for right now, he's sitting there and we're going to keep looking at this case.

And they still are.

You say that detectives are still looking at this case, but they also believe he could be connected to up to a dozen murders across the country.

Well, when you've got a rap sheet starting as a thirteen or fourteen year old for attacking other young female girls, and it continues into your adulthood and it's a long list, the police are going to look at every single case out there and see was Williams in the area of these cases at this time?

Did he have any connection to any of those victims.

And so yeah, he's he's got the rap sheet, he's got the background, he's got Squire's pinpointing him.

You know, he clearly is suspect number one, and that has never changed.

Absolutely.

Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.

Now you take us to Frozen three.

And this is a story you title was it Rodney or Dale and the case of Audrey Cardinis.

You say she got her diploma from Texas A and M in May nineteen eighty eight, now heading across the country to Belleville, Illinois, where she would spend the summer interning at the Belleville News Democrat, and a career in journalism was on the horizon.

She arrived on June eighth, the Shadow journalists and she was excited, but she missed home.

On June eighteenth, she called her mom, Billy, tell us about what this conversation was and this story.

Well, I think the conversation was she missed home.

You know, she grew up her whole life in Texas and now she's a young person to start in a business that's traveling across the country.

It's the same thing I did a long, long time ago.

You work and then you get a job offer somewhere and you pack your bags and you go.

You have to you have to step up and get to bigger markets to make more money.

And so for her first job, this was Belleville, which I'm sure was different from her, and she was homesick and her mother knew it.

And ironically, because this happened in Belleville, that's where I wound up living.

So this was right down the street she was.

You know, her body was found at Belleville Least High School, where my kids and every other kid had to walk into class every day.

And her body was found in the shrubbery by the steps leaving right up into the school.

You know, it's been a haunting scene for all the years since.

But I think, you know, she was excited about the work from what I could find out, But she was also homesick, and Belleville wasn't Texas.

You write that she police tracked her down, tracked her movements.

That she went to the bank at eight thirty am for some transaction and then she left from there.

She was supposed to show up at work for ten am.

When she didn't show up at work, the newspaper, I guess called and by two or three days they realized that there was something wrong, but they attributed to her maybe just going back to Texas again because that was where she was from, and maybe she was homesick.

She was just interning, She was just starting out.

She didn't know anybody in town.

It wasn't like she'd made friends, and it's like they had plans or anything.

The only time.

The only people she knew remotely were the employees at work, but she only knew them at work, and probably not even yet on a daily on a first name basis, have only been there a couple of days, those veteran professional workers doing their nine to five every day.

If the intern didn't show up that day, who probably notices?

Probably nobody.

So it took a few days before people to realize, you know, where was that girl was?

Her name was Audrey?

Is she coming in?

It took a couple of days before they realized.

I think that she was missing.

Right away police found a suspect, Rodney Woidke, twenty five year old homeless drifter.

He wandered inside the roped off crime scene, so he was asked to if they could search his backpack, and they found letters about sex fantasies and bystanders had said that they had seen Rodney in the area acting strangely.

So they had this person and was questioned by police.

What happens as a result of this questioning.

He was just too easy of a suspect.

I mean, if you're the homicide detectives, you've got a body laying in a creek bed, and all of a sudden, a man walks into the crime scene area, and you know, he can't explain what he's doing there.

He's got some cuts on his face.

He's carrying around though, like you said, the information about the sex fantasies.

It was just like, boy, they've delivered our murder suspect right into our laps.

He's a homeless drifter and evidence started piling up on him.

It just it was almost too good to be true.

Police, for like, you know, usually we have to go out and find the killers, and here he is just standing here waiting for us.

He told them that he lived at the Salvation Army.

Police went there and said they'd never heard of him.

It's just everything started looking bad for him.

Then he said he lived in the woods by the school right where the body was found.

It was like too good to be true, and he started then he started confessing.

He said he hid argue with a pipe, then he changed his mind.

Then he said he left her when she was alive, and then he said he came back and hit her again three or four more times.

There was no physical evidence to connecting, and some of his stuff because he appeared to be mentally challenged, did not match.

But for police, they thought they had their killer.

But they also realized he was a mental patient.

Basically it gave them pause.

But still it just seemed overwhelming that everything that he was there for pointed to him being her killer.

Well, he was found guilty and sentenced to forty five years, So they thought they had their men, but then you take us too.

In the days before Cardinas arrived in Belleville Dale, Anderson had called again the Belleville News Democrat with a juicy tip.

He just filed charges against three of his supervisors at the Illinois Department of Public Aid, accusing them of theft and assault, and the paper ran with the story.

On June twenty third, with Audrey Cardinas still listed as missing, Anderson called the paper again.

This time he disguised his voice and said his supervisors had kidnapped Audrey Cardinas, and he provided the paper with the supervisor's home addresses.

Tell us what happens as a result of.

This, Well, I think in probably most towns, or most television or newspapers, there's somebody who calls quite a bit that has a crazy story.

And that was Dale Anderson with the Belleville Paper.

He'd called them numerous times before.

He'd obviously been fired from these three workers with the Department of Aid.

And he's calling the newspaper accusing him of theft first, then assault, and now basically calling saying theylled, they kidnapped and killed Audrey.

It got more bizarre and bizarre and bizarre.

When she died.

There was a memorial service, and standing up there right by the police officers, was Dale Anderson.

He'd been arrested for impersonating police officers.

He'd been fired from that job earlier.

And right before WYKEI was sent there was another murder that happened in town.

There was a pregnant woman named Jolaine Landman.

Her and her three year old son, Kenneth, were stabbed to death in their home.

And that was happening right with the Cardenas story, So you had two big things happening at the same time.

And then there's a handwritten note found at the scene that says both Layman and Cardenas were murdered by Dale Anderson's three supervisors, the same thing Anderson had said to the newspaper.

And now you had a crazy story going on.

This was almost going back to like the first story we talked about with the Cherco testimony.

It's like, where does this stuff come from?

Which story is true?

But the newspaper and the media could not ignore it.

You've got a second homicide scene in a small town with a note saying that the killer is the same person on both and it's these three people at the Apartment of Public Aid.

I mean, what could really be more ridiculous.

But now police knew they had to start going back and talking to Dale Anderson because he he'd made the phone calls, he made the accusations, and he obviously wrote the letter and left it at the house.

And how's he getting into the house?

He said.

Police also find numerous briefcases filled with knives, rope, surgical gloves, and blunt instruments.

Found multiple weapons and ammunition.

Yeah, he he was just a strange duck in that neighborhood.

And when police finally went to his house and walked him out in handcuffs, the neighborhood people were out there watching and they all start clapping.

It was like good riddance, you know.

Like I said, every newspaper might get some calls, every neighborhood might have a guy.

Dale Anderson was the guy in Belleville, but that doesn't that doesn't mean he killed anybody, But it doesn't mean he didn't know what was going on either.

And as that story evolves, it takes even more twists in turns.

Yes, he forces a fourteen year old to write him a letter saying he was there when Audrey was interviewed when he was interviewed by Audrey for the newspaper.

And then of course that story falls apardon and the fourteen year old denies it.

So there there's numerous stories that work out to be false via Dale Anderson coming from Dale Anderson.

Well, then then when he is charged and he has to go to court, Unlike Whitekey, who wouldn't testify, boy Anderson, of course he couldn't wait to talk, and he says he met Audrey Cardenis twice before she disappeared, and then he says he also met Rodney Waitkey.

And now the jury is like they've been in this court case now for a month.

They didn't know what to do.

I mean, what are we talking about here?

Well, they found Anderson guilty eleven to one.

They voted for a death penalty for him, but the single one means you're not going to get a death penalty.

But then later on the appellate court gets involved.

They see Anderson's found guilty, woide Key's found guilty.

You got two people found guilty here for the same murder.

Yes, so they throw off they throw out the white Key conviction.

They get him a new trial.

A mistrials declared they're going to try it again for a third time.

Again.

The state had no physical evidence with Woidkey, but now they also had new DNA evidence coming in that may have tied Witkey to Cardenas it was really a mess between two possible suspects.

Thus the title was it Rotten near Dale.

One more fascinating twist to make of this.

You say that Audrey Cardenis never knew her real father, but her real father was found his name is Orge Jorgae Cardenas in Mexico.

So tell us about this finding the ID of her father in Dale Anderson's safe.

Yeah, well, she finally tracked down her father, she had his ID card and her possessions.

Well, she had the ID card at some point, but it winds up in Dale Anderson's safe.

So Dale Anderson as Audrey Cardenis's father's ID at home and is safe.

Who keeps such a thing?

How would he have got it?

You know, it just didn't make any sense.

The father said he didn't even know it was missing.

He barely remembered Audrey.

He said he'd never met Dale Anderson, He'd never been to Belleville.

How does he get in this safe?

The Dale Anderson thing was just again, the guy was just hard to explain.

But he was that guy that had his finger and everything going on in town.

He had a bridge to burn with the three supervisors who fired him, and he somehow got his nose stuck right in the middle of the biggest homicide case the city had seen in years.

And then he's arrested for his own homicide case days later.

Hard to believe.

Incredible.

Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.

Now, let's talk about the one case that doesn't end up cold, and that is one you title one thought, and this is Harold Meyer and the Nash Supermarkets in North Saint Louis.

And there's a phone call to the police at eleven fifteen, and this is Harold Meyer inside National Supermarkets.

Take us to that bank at eleven fifteen, and that phone call and Harold Meyer trying to get the attention of nine to one one operators while he's in that bank, tell us what's happening.

Really an unbelievable, heartwarming, but devastating story, maybe the biggest news story Saint Louis had ever had up until that time.

You know, now we see a mass shooting in the public and it's like we haven't had one for a week.

But back in the eighties they weren't so common, and this one was the first really big one in Saint Louis.

It was Labor Day weekend on a Friday night.

The National Supermarket was closing at ten o'clock and seven managers stayed to help get the proceeds in for the day and get the store ready to clean up and open.

Up the next morning.

They'd stay for about an hour.

Well in that time, between ten and eleven, as the store is supposedly locked and they're cleaning up, a couple of bad guys got in and they took the seven employees and lined them up on the floor, made them lay down, and then shot them all on the back of the head.

And to make sure they got the job done, they came back and shot them all on the back of the head a second time.

And then Harold Meyer, one of the seven, realized, remarkably he was still alive.

He was still alive.

Everybody around him is dead, and he is alive.

He crawled to a telephone and he dialed nine to one one.

He had to be quiet because he didn't know if the murderers were still in the store.

He wasn't sure, so he's calling nine to one one.

A woman answers the phone for the police department, and Harold says, She says, you know, what's your name?

What's your emergency?

He goes and he's whispering, my name's Harold Meyer.

I'm calling from the National Grocery Supermarket on Natural Bridge.

I've been shot multiple times.

All of our other employees have been shot.

I think people are dead.

Please send help, And the woman on the other end of the nine one one says, I can't understand you.

Can you speak louder?

And Harold says, I can't speak louder.

There might still be in the store.

I've been shot.

I can barely breathe.

I'm dying.

Everybody's been shot.

They might be dead.

Send help, please to the store on Natural Bridge Road, and the nine one one caller says, I'm sorry, sir, I can't understand you.

I have other calls to take.

Call back when you can speak louder, and the nine to one on one collar hung up.

Harold Moore or Harold Meyer just you know, he could not believe it.

He didn't know what to do next.

He thinks he's dying.

His friends are dead, He's not sure if the bad guys are in the store.

He makes another call back again, and this time the nine to one one operator just hangs up on him.

Well, he doesn't even talk to him, and now he doesn't know what to do, so he thinks he's he thinks he's dying.

He calls his wife and he says, I've been shot.

I might be okay, if not, I love you, can you try to call nine to one one and tell him to get an ambulance here as soon as possible.

And she did, but even that didn't work because she calls nine to one one and she tells him to send the ambulance to the National Grocery store in Bridgeton, and they do, but there's two stores there, and they sent the ambulances to the wrong store, and when they got to the wrong store, they saw that it was closed and quiet for the night.

So they figured, again, multiple calls about this, the store is closed.

They just chalked it up to prank phone calls.

Wow, it's very interesting just to go back a second, because again he feels like he's dying.

You were able to speak to him, and he spoke of the shots that were fired into his friend's bodies, their heads right beside him, and he said, miraculously, he just slightly turned his head so that the bullet didn't hit his head but hit his hand.

And he said, the thing that he knew instinctively to do the only thing to do was to play dead.

And then he said he heard eight shots.

So he said, oh, they've ran out of AMMO.

So he looked.

He was able to see.

He saw the gunmen go into the security guard's pocket and get more bullets, reload and then come back to shoot him again, realizing he's going to get shot again, and is shot three more times and again remains conscious incredibly enough to make that phone call.

So back to him dying in this National supermarket.

Finally police do arrive while actually people that are still in the building alert people realize hear the shots, see the gunmen.

There's three people that are in the building and night supervisor they're working overnight, and so that leads to the police finally being alerted to the real actual National Supermarket that's involved, and police arrive.

Yeah, I mean you think about Harold, you know, surviving the first shot and then knowing there's a second one.

As you mentioned Dan, what that must have been like for him.

But as the police got there, you know, it was in finally got to the right store and they do see all the bodies and they bring in the homicide people who to this day they have told me it's the worst they've ever seen in Saint Louis.

And an investigation that was gonna take a long time, and you had a person and Harold who was still alive.

You had an eyewitness to the massacre, so there's your lead for the homicide case.

But you know, just like you know, remember in the Dead End with Vicky Webb and the I seventy case, we're shooing into hiding, you know, Harold.

Now, Harold now knows boy words out that there's somebody alive, and he's worried that.

You know, he's not looking to be out front of the public either, because you know, it's it's like that scene in The Godfather when Michael's guarding the hospital.

You know, the bad guys are going to come and get you at some point, and Harold was fearful that they maybe coming after him again.

There was a person that was shot, Richard Forston, that had seen something just before these gunmen entered the supermarket, and that the David Spahn was escorting again in a very tragic story, this young person named Michael nickname Mickey, was allowed by Harold understandably to go to this party that he was invited to, so he left the building with David Spahn.

David spawn was asked to escort him to his car and they were confronted outside by the gunman.

Richard Forston saw those people from afar.

It seemed like it looked like somebody pulled the gun from their back and approached David.

So also the police had get to speak to Richard Forston as well as awaiting to get a really good description came from Harold Meyers.

Yeah, and Richard Forston would later die of his injuries, not right away but down the line, but he was a second person who survived it miraculously.

Shows you the skill of the shooters.

Shooting guys point blank in the head twice, wasn't that great.

But yeah, Mickey wanted to get off, and Spawn helped walk him out and Forest and watch that, and he saw, you know, he saw what he said was a man wearing a shirt approach Spawn and pulls the gun, talks Spawn into coming over.

But Forston didn't think it was bad guys coming in.

He thought it was one of the workers from the overnight cleaning crew that had to come in once they once the managers left, that needed to maybe needed Spawn for something to help him get in, or the needed something to help them clean up.

So Forreston didn't think twice about it at that time.

You right of the police car surrounding the store, hundreds of onlookers, and the media was there, of course, and so were you.

And someone told you right there that they saw an arrival of someone and they said, oh, the case is about to be closed, and they said, why is that and you said, well, it's Joseph Burgoon.

So you introduce again, Joseph Burgoon.

Yeah, that was funny.

That was actually at a different homicide scene the first time I'd met Joe.

It was a nighttime winter, rainy, misty, freezing cold.

I had an umbrella and we're out there for half an hour at a homicide scene, and it's like, man, hurry it up again.

You know, nothing's going to happen till we get information.

We're not going to get information till the homicide detective, the main guy, the commander, comes and looks it over, because only that person could talk to the media.

And I'm with a veteran reporter from the newspaper, a much older guy, and then we see this old Plymouth car pull up, and the other reporter says to me, Okay, this case is about to be closed.

And I knew nothing about the old car, and I said, why is that?

And he said, Joe Bragoon is here, That's all they need on this one.

And sure enough I look and getting out of that plymouth in the rain with his trench coat and his umbrella was Joe Burragoon.

And that was the first time we met.

Joe became was the lead homicide detective for the city of Saint Louis for forty years.

Unbelievable.

And when you consider Saint Louis has a couple one hundred homicides a year, you multiply that times forty.

Boy, Dan, I'm bad at algebra, but I think it's like ten thousand or so homicides, and Joe Bragoon's got his finger on most of them.

And this is the one he says was the worst he'd ever covered.

This is the one he said he wanted to solve as much as any other.

And the story here between him teaming up with Harold Meyer to solve this case is I just think it's fascinating for people who want to get the book and do nothing else but record to the end.

I wouldn't have a problem with that.

You're missing twenty five good cold cases.

But this thought case is really just heartwarming, heartbreaking, but fascinating.

You called Joe Borgoon or he has been called the Blue Knight and the godfather of homicide, and you say, as you're right, he's presided over thousands of homicide cases in the St.

Louis area.

Back to Burgoon, he speaks to Harold, as I mentioned, he gives him a full description, a very detailed description of the first gunman that he saw.

He said he was a black male, mid twenties, under six foot, one hundred and seventy five pounds.

But he said, I'd be able to recognize absolutely his voice.

I'll never forget his voice.

Yeah, And you know at that point in time, it all happens so quickly with Harold and they're on the floor and the suspect is a twenty year old black guy.

I mean, it's difficult to narrow that down in a large city, and it's just such a generic description that was never going to fly.

But then Harold had the caveat.

I'm not sure about the face I'm laying down, but I'll never ever ever forget that voice.

And when they had to bring in suspects for a police lineup and they would ask Carol to identify, he didn't want to make a mistake.

He didn't want to charge somebody with murder and a possible death punt unless he was certain.

And he would pause on those lineups and he would tell Joe, Joe, I'm not sure about the face.

If I could hear them speak, if I could hear them speak, I'll find your guy.

So they they have a police informant comes forward as nineteen year old Ricky Williams, and he names three people, including his brother and his cousin.

But again just very much like all of these stories, or many of these stories, his story drastically changes, and there's four interviews.

But they round up those suspects, and like you alluded to, they take these people to Harold to see if he can recognize any of them, and he says absolutely not.

But the police were still going forward.

They were under incredible intense media and public pressure to solve this case.

The city seemed nothing like it.

They were looking for suspects, and Ricky Williams was a police informant for them.

They'd known him, they'd dealt with him, he'd helped them before.

But now you're bringing him four guys.

They're going forward.

They're going to charge him with murder, and Joe Burgoon comes in to see Harold and shows him the pictures, and Harold's like, I don't know again if I could hear the voice, but he goes Joe, that does not look like them.

That does not look like them at all.

So Harold's balking.

The state's Attorney's office is going for murder one on these four guys, which could be the death penalty, and the city is relieved to have suspects in a case.

They're giving the police some credit for an investigation.

It's taken months, but we've got the bad guys here and we're going forward for murder charges.

And in the meantime, Harold Moore is telling Joe Bragoon, I don't think so, Joe, I don't think.

So, And Bragoon wants to believe Harold Meyer, doesn't he.

Yes.

In fact, the story that the police were laying out as to what happened inside the store.

Police were saying how they'd rushed in to kill the killers, and Burgoon says, Joe, that's not what happened.

That's not the way it went down.

So Bragoon's now going to the state's Attorney's office and his bosses, and he's telling them, hey, this is not what Harold said.

Well, the police had their case and they didn't want it sidetracked, but Harold Myers stood strong.

Harold Myers's belief was those were not the killers.

Well, now police kept working at a little bit, and as you mentioned, Dan Ricky Williams's story kept changing, and now police started having cracks in their cases.

And before you know it, they're going to have to drop the chargers against the four.

You're right that everyone's disappointed.

But then you write, then fate arrived November eighth in the neighboring Saint Louis County Police where they were conducting a traffic a routine traffic stop and in nearby Brentwood when a blue nineteen seventy two Ford sped by at a high rate of speed.

Police pulled this guy over, asked him for his registration, said it was in his car.

They asked him to open up the trunk, and inside the trunk they found a gun.

What's the significance of this gun, Well.

They had to track it, and as they did track it, they found it was a spawn's gun.

The security guard at the store, right, and it's like this gun was used to kill people.

Remember, the second round of firing came from when they stole the security guard's gun when their own gun ran out of bullets.

So the bad guys go into the store to shoot people, but don't bring enough guns and bullets.

Dumb they stealed the security guard's gun after they've shot him and sprayed the people again with his bullets.

But then the gun winds up in the trunk of someone's car.

Are they the killer, well, they say they're not.

Well where'd you get the gun?

Because wherever you got the gun, maybe that's the killer.

And of course it turns out now that everybody's got a cousin and everybody's got a friend, and the gun's been passed down five times.

But eventually police are tracing this gun or at least getting names of some people in the process who handled this gun.

Yes, and they come to a name.

This Jimmy Kennedy gives them the name of Donnie Blankenship, so police investigate and question him.

What do they find.

Well, the incredible story here is again we talk about dumb criminals.

They stole money from the store that night, although not that much dollsand is not an incredible amount.

But they also took one other stupid thing, and again, this was Labor Day.

They took a bus pass, one individual ticket, a bus pass for free bus rides for one week in September after Labor Day.

A bus ticket that was good for one week in September after Labor Day.

A bus ticket that might have cost five bucks.

I don't know.

Yeah, So Joe Burgoon knocking on every door of every suspect, getting search warrants wherever he can, gets a search warrant for Donnie Blankenship's home, and Burgoon goes there and knocks on the door, and Blankenship's mother is there, and he wants to see if Donnie's there, who he wasn't, but he wanted to get inside.

He had a search warrant to get inside the house.

And Burgoon goes inside the house and it's just normal things in there.

There was nothing that would help the case.

And then as Joe's getting ready to leave, he looks over and what does he see on Donnie Blankenship's little table in the corner.

He sees a bus ticket.

Wow, And Joe at first things well, that's odd, but Joe's not making the connection yet it's the missing bus ticket with the date on it.

He just sees a bus ticket.

He could have easily thought it was nothing and walked on by.

But Joe Burgoon doesn't walk on by anything.

He takes the bus ticket.

He takes the serial number on the bus ticket.

He calls into the homicide office.

They begin tracing the bus ticket and sure enough, they get the number on the bus ticket.

It was bus ticket number forty three hundred for the pass.

That was the number forty three hundred that was stolen from the store.

This is months after the homicide.

Why is a worthless expired bus ticket sitting on the killer's desk in his house?

Why is the gun from the dead security guard sitting in the trunk of a family member.

Sometimes they say it's easy to get away with murder.

You're going to make every mistake in the book.

Joe Bragoon's going to track you down.

Yeah, And that stupid five dollars bus pass from the murder scene that had expired months ago is what's going to solve this case.

That and as soon as Harold Meyer heard somebody talk and recognize the voice, this case was going to be thawed.

Yeah.

When they went from the man hunt.

Forty eight hours after that traffic stop, they found him and also along with his again, would you be eventual cohort Marvin Jennings.

So they found Blankenship and Marvin Jennings together along with a couple of women when they did track him down.

Yes, And the thought was that Jennings was the ringleader and that Blankenship was the second man and blending Jennings was the one doing the bossing, doing most of the shooting, although Blankenship joined in.

Jennings would eventually get a death penalty and be executed.

Blankenship would get a life in prison with the possibility of parole.

But you stop and think, Dan, go back to the car that was stopped for speeding in the county, not even in the city, but in the neighboring area.

What if the police didn't have a car, a police rodeblock car sitting up at that exact time, at that exact place.

What if the car wasn't speeding at that exact time.

What if?

What if?

What if the police officer was busy pulling over a different car earlier, or was on the phone and missed the cargoing by.

It took that one moment of time for the county police to have the traffic stop that led to the gun, that led to the names of the family members, that led the blanket ship, that led to the bus ticket, that led to him connecting to Marvin Jennings, that led to Harold Meyer listening to the voice of Jennings.

All those things happened because of that random traffic stop at that one place in time.

Yes, it's incredible.

In this case, thankfully, fate intervened and this fluke again, fate fluke occurred and these people were brought to justice, unlike the other twenty five cool cases that you call frozen.

Before I let you go, what are some of the themes that you recognize and wrote about in these twenty five frozen cases.

What is some of the similar themes running through or problems encountered by law enforcement that made these cases be frozen.

Yeah, I was looking for cases that all had You know, you work at a major market TV station for thirty five years.

You're going to cover a lot of bad crimes, and I've been on the scene for a lot of those.

But you're looking for cases that really tug at your heart.

Like I mentioned, Gina don Brooks being a child.

There's another story in the book of Dalton Masarchik, a five year old little boy who was abducted off his bicycle in front of his front yard waiting for a church bus, never to be seen again, found murdered with a hammer.

It just breaks your heart.

So you're looking at the ones that are heartbreaking, or I'm also looking at cases that are a twist of fate.

Like we talked here about the thought case.

If the didn't stop that car that led to all these other avenues opening up, this doesn't happen.

We've had cases of the twist of fate and those other twenty five stories where a woman's car breaks down on the highway and she's abducted.

What if that car doesn't break down there.

We've had twists of fate where you know, our realtor is asked to go show a house the next day, and while she's showing a house, she's murdered.

What if it was a different realtor that might have showed up, or somebody else from the office instead of the young lady.

I think the wrong place, wrong time, randomness of fate is what interests me of It's not just a killer looking to go kill a certain person on these evinch Key's eventually going to succeed.

It's like, this could have been me, this could have been my wife, this could have been my child.

The randomness of horrific news is out there, and in those twenty five cases, most of them are that type.

Are just wow, this is not the normal.

Well he killed her for the money, or he killed her for a marriage argument, or the bad guy came to robber.

No, this was These are not those.

These are stories of heartbreak and faith.

There's also many cases that police had good suspects or what looked like good suspects when you or I would read the details from police reports, and yet no one had justice served in those cases.

Yeah, well, as you mentioned, and Gina don Brooks, we've got the suspect and the never ending story.

Police had the suspect, and in Audri Cardenis they had two suspects.

Sure, so you know.

And Joe Bragoon, the godfather of homicide.

You listen to him talk about these cases and his relentless pursuit of them, he will often tell you that it is not what it seems.

And he will often say to you that you go down one road, but you've got to be prepared to make that U turn and go down that second road.

And I think that's what we see in a lot of these cases, that what looks to be obvious originally is not the way it appears at the end.

Absolutely, I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about your new book twenty five Frozen One Thowd Murder and Mayhem in the Midwest.

For those people that might want to find out more about this book and your other work, could you tell us about a website or any social media you do?

Sure well on the social media, Dan, I'm pushing seventy years old.

I'm just afraid that that world has passed me by.

My daughter in law has put me on TikTok.

Now, I have no idea what it is.

I could not find it, but I guess somebody went to TikTok and searched my name.

Maybe it's up there.

But I'm just too old to start with the social media.

I understand it affects the sales.

I've explained and apologized that to my publisher.

You know, when I first started looking to publish the I seventy serial Killer book and I sent information out the publishers.

There'd be a form to fill out, and the first thing that would say is how old are you?

Well, I'm pushing seventy.

They're not that interested in the first time writer.

You have no name recognition.

But the second thing is tell us about your social media profile.

Well, now I'm pushing seventy and I have none.

So even getting my foot in the door was pretty much, very very difficult for me.

Luckily, I got my foot in the door and the first book was a success, so you know, I'm hoping it builds from there.

My goal really isn't selling books.

I think that's great.

The publisher wants to sell books.

We can all make money.

I can get my eighteen cents or whatever.

I don't care.

My real goal is like I'm a seventy case or I'm the twenty five frozen.

Some day, somewhere, somehow, somebody reads this and it triggers a memory in their mind and they pick up the phone and make a phone call and one of these cases get solved.

That would be the thrill of my life.

If I had something to do with that, much more than selling any book.

Well, it could happen it has happened before.

I want to thank you so much, Bob Zeiphers for twenty five frozen one Thowd murder in Mayhem in the Midwest.

Thank you very much for this interview, and you have a great evening and good night.

Thank you.

Dan