School of Humans.

Helen Got Murder Line actively investigates cold case murders in an effort to raise public awareness invite witnesses to come forward and present evidence that could potentially be further investigated by law enforcement.

While we value insights from family and community members, their statements should not be considered evidence and point to the challenges of verifying facts inherent in cold cases.

We remind listeners that everyone has presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Nothing in the podcast is intended to state or imply that anyone who has not been convicted of a crime is guilty of any wrongdoing.

Thanks for listening.

At one forty am on Saturday, September twenty eighth, nineteen seventy four, police got a call about a traffic accident on State Highway seventy seven in Crittenden County, Arkansas, three miles north of the Late David Overpass.

When they got there, they found a nineteen sixty four Chevrolet which was stopped in the southbound lane of the highway.

Near the abandoned car in a ditch, they found the body of thirty five year old Fred Knew Junior, a married father of three, who worked the night shift at a local trucking company.

Fred had been shot three times at very close range with a shotgun.

He had been shot in the neck, the side, and the elbow.

His shoes and socks had been removed, and he had no identification on him.

Fred's pockets were turned out and the money he had on him, which according to his wife was around two hundred dollars, had been stolen.

Police later said they believed that whoever killed Fred also took his wallet in keys.

There was blood in the front of the car and Fred was lying in a pool of blood near the back of the vehicle outside the car, so it seems like either his killer or killers threw him out of the car or he stumbled out after being shot and his killer could have fired the final shot or shots outside.

Police got the call about Fred's car after another driver crashed into it as it was stalled on the highway, but that other driver fled the scene.

They later found the driver, and they dragged the hit and run driver out from under a bed at a local motel.

But that was just the beginning because near where Fred's body was found, police learned that a local gas station had been robbed.

So now police had a robbery, a hit and run, and a brutal execution style murder, all in the same night in the same small town.

I'm Catherine Townsend.

Over the past seven years of making my true crime podcast, Telling Gone, I've learned that there's no such thing as a small town where murder never happens.

I've received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities.

If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five.

That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five, or you can send us a message on Instagram at Helen gonepod.

This is Helen Gone Murder Line.

From the beginning, this seemed to be a confusing crime scene.

Police had a possible car accident, a possible hit and run, a convenience store robbery, and a murder.

Now law enforcement had to figure out how and if any of them were connected.

This murder happened more than fifty years ago, but Fred New's family are still trying to figure out what really happened to him that night.

According to Frednw's son, Jason, he doesn't remember much about the day his dad died.

He was only three years old at the time, but over the years he has talked to his mom about his father and learned that Fred was a loner and that his family still doesn't know exactly what he was doing on the day he was shot.

Fred New was born on September thirtieth, nineteen thirty eight.

After graduating from high school, he served in the military.

He worked for a trucking company in Memphis called Bowman Truck Lines and had had that job for about five years at the time he was fatally shot.

Fred was just days away from his thirty sixth birthday.

He was married.

His wife worked as a respiratory therapist, and they had three children, three year old Jason, one six year old daughter, and another daughter, Kim, who was nine at the time.

We spoke to Kim.

She remembered a bit more about the day that her father was killed.

I just remember mother saying, there's been a horrible accident and your daddy's been taken from us, is what she said.

And she didn't go into a lot of detail at that point.

You know, she just reassuring us how much, how much she loved us, and that she would want us.

The kidntinued to be good little girls named Jason be the little boy, and he wasn't coming home, and and Jason said when willman and daddy be back?

And she of course said, baby, your daddy's not coming back.

Police interviewed Buster Wyrick, the cashier at the gas station who was working the night of September twenty seventh and witnessed the robbery.

Buster told police that two men came into the gas station.

He described the first one as a white male, approximately twenty five years old, about six foot two weighing around one hundred and eighty to one hundred and ninety pounds, with brown shoulder length hair with alongside burns.

He described the second man as a smaller, white male, about twenty one to twenty two years of age, around five foot four inches tall, with brown, medium length hair.

Buster said that the two men waited for the other customers to leave, and then one of them asked for change for a dollar.

Said the larger suspect pulled out a twenty two caliber pistol a gun, which is sometimes referred to as a Saturday Night special, and told him to give him all his money.

Buster said that the second man came around behind the counter at that point, took the money he had on him and shoved him down into a chair.

That's when the second suspect saw the twelve gage pump shotgun that they kept hidden behind the counter with some shotgun shells.

The two men ended up stealing one hundred and seventy five dollars, which would be a little over eleven hundred dollars in today's money.

Buster told police that the two men took the money, the shotgun, and the box of shotgun shells, and then fled.

He said that he saw them running through a field located behind the service station.

At this point, he said he saw a car, which he described as a light colored nineteen sixty four Chevrolet.

Buster said that the Chevy was parked on the service road near the Interstate Highway.

He told police he believed that this was the car used by the robbers.

After the robbers fled the scene, Buster ran next door to the Penis service station.

He told the operator there to call the Sheriff's office to report the robbery.

When he went back to the scene of the crime, he found out that the phone lines at his service station had been cut.

One of the things that's not immediately clear is the timing of the robbery and the homicide, which one happened first.

There's no exact time on the police reports.

One of the only clues to timing is the statement from Buster's nineteen year old son, Terry, who worked at another nearby Fhena gas station.

On the night Fred was killed.

Terry told police he was out with some friends.

The girls he was with had to be home by midnight, and on the way to drive them home, he said they stopped by his dad's gas station at around eleven fifteen so that one of the girls could use the bathroom.

Before they left, he and his friends noticed a white car sitting outside the gas station.

He described it as a sixty three or sixty four Chevrolet White, but he didn't think anything more about it at the time.

After dropping the girls home, Terry said that he passed by the station again, but his dad wasn't at his gas station.

He was at the Phenis station next door.

That's when Buster told Terry to get down that he had been robbed and that the men had guns.

Given the distances driven and the timings, that should have put the robbery sometime around midnight.

Police got the call about the body by the road at one forty am.

So it seems like the robbery did happen before Fred was murdered, But since no one had cell phones back then, the people in the accident had to be driven to a phone to report this, there was a delay before police were called.

These two events, the robbery and the shooting, happened very close together time wise.

According to police documents, the robbery happened about forty five minutes before the discovery of Fred Knew body.

But here's where it got complicated.

Buster and his son both said they saw light colored nineteen sixty three or nineteen sixty four Chevy, and that's the same description as Fred Newscar So was Fred involved in the robbery?

Were Fred's shooting and the convenience store robbery related?

Early on in the investigation, there was a lot of confusion and misinformation was spread.

For example, Roy Akers, the Deputy sheriff of Crittenden County, told a reporter that Fred had been shot in the side with a shotgun and in the neck with a pistol, but according to his autopsy report, that wasn't true.

Only one weapon was used, a four to ten gage shotgun, And then police made statements to local newspapers that indicated they thought that Fred news homicide in the gas station robbery were related.

This happened because police were following a lead.

They had a detailed description of the car at the scene of the service station during the robbery.

Police told local media the description of that car matched the description of Fred newscr.

So at first police believed Fred had been one of the people who robbed the service station.

According to police reports, Buster was shown a picture of Fred on September twenty ninth, and he identified Fred as one of the men who robbed him.

In fact, he said that Fred was the man who held a gun on him, but it turned out that it was more complicated than that.

A later police report dated October twenty eighth, nineteen seventy four, stated no identification could be made by Buster when it came to Fred being one of the people inside the stoor who robbed him that night.

The report stated Fred knew had good character and a steady job, and at some point it's not clear whether this was a misidentification by Buster or what happened next, but police apparently determined Fred Knew was not involved in the robbery.

Crittenden County Sheriff David Doyle told the Son newspaper that their investigation had determined that Fred Knew was not one of the two men who had robbed the service station, and over the years, Fred's son Jason told us the detectives have told him his father was not involved in the robbery.

So how did they figure that out?

And what was police's working theory?

There is a lot we just don't know.

According to the article, police assumed that the robbery and Fred's homicide were connected just because they happened in close proximity to one another, and potentially because of Fred's vehicle having a similar description to the one used in the robbery.

The sheriff also said at the time that police were doing quote a full scale investigation into Fred's murder.

After Fred was killed and left in the ditch, his car was abandoned and one crashed into that park car and fled the scene.

Police tracked down the man who hit Fred's car.

His name was Billy Joe Smith.

They interviewed Billy on October fifteenth, nineteen seventy four.

Billy said that on September twenty seventh, he got off work at around five pm.

In the afternoon, he said, he went back to his place with his girlfriend.

Then they went with a friend of his named Charles, to the Town and Country liquor store and bought two six packs of beer.

The group went over to another friend's house while Charles's date and Billy's date got ready, Then they stopped for more beer.

Billy said that at this point, Charles was driving, and that as they were turning on to the service road of the I fifty five, they saw a man beside a white car waving them down to stop, which he said they did.

Billy said that Charles asked the man what was wrong, and that the man said he was out of gas.

The man asked if they had any and Charles told him no.

He told the stranger there wasn't any place open at that point, so Charles told the man sorry, they couldn't help him.

Billy also said that Charles asked the man where he was from, and the man said Caraway.

Now Fred knew was from an area north of Caraway.

But there's nothing in the police report to indicate that they exchanged names.

After that, Billy said that he, Charles, and the two women went on to a local nightclub, the Starlight Club, at around nine thirty or ten pm.

He said that he and his friends were dancing and drinking there for a while.

He said they left around midnight, though Billy said he wasn't sure at the exact time.

While they were driving home, Billy said his car broke.

He said the shifting rod fell off and the vehicle jumped out of gear.

He stopped to try and fix it or to slide it into fourth gear.

Eventually, he said, he was able to drive away.

They made their way toward home, and that's when they saw the glimpse of a car.

It's not clear from the police reports that this was fred Knew car.

There are indications in the notes that seemed to say that it might have been, but there's nothing in Billy's interview that confirms it, so it is a little bit confusing.

Billy said that his car was out of control at that point and traveling around fifty miles an hour.

He said he tried to miss the car that was on the side of the road, but his right front fender hit the left front fender of the stalled vehicle.

He said that when they hit, he instinctively grabbed his girlfriend's head, but she had already hit the windshield and she was screaming about being in pain, so Billy said he jumped out of the car to make sure everyone was okay.

Charles went to look at the car they hit, and when Charles walked back to their vehicle, Billy said that Charles told him you just killed a man.

At some point, Billy said, two black men stopped and gave them a ride to be a nearby service station.

Billy said once he got to the service station, he asked an employee there to call the police.

Then at some point he walked to town and learned that the police had arrested Charles.

Billy said he got scared, so somehow he ended up back at the motel where he had been staying.

He said that's when someone came in and told him he was wanted, so he crawled under a bed to hide.

The police found him, but after questioning Billy, they released him.

Fred Knude didn't die from injuries from a car crash.

He died from three gunshot.

Winds police interviewed another man named Oscar Woods.

Now Oscar Woods also stopped at the scene of the accident that night, but he was not one of the two men who gave Billy and Charles a ride.

In fact, he told police when he stopped, they didn't seem concerned about getting a ride.

They told him to get out of there.

Oscar said.

This would have been around one am.

And it's interesting because Oscar said that when he stopped, he saw two or three white males.

There's no mention of any women.

And when he asked if everyone was okay, one of the men told him not really, someone was, and then he said the man said something odd and that the men were laughing.

At this point, Oscar asked if they had called the police, and they said yes.

After one of the men told him there was a dead man there, they asked Oscar if he had a flashlight.

He said he always kept a pocket flashlight with him, so he got out his pocket flashlight and saw Fred lying there on the side of the road in a pool of blood.

Oscar said, they reiterated that they had already called the police and suggested that quote the best thing that he could do is drive away from here end quote, and Oscar said that's what he did.

He seemed to realize he might have walked into a very bad situation, and he got out of there fast.

Now, this is a weird sequence of events.

Billy hiding from the police seems a bit suspect, but then again, he could have been driving while intoxicated, and also he may have believed that he killed a man in that accident.

This could explain why he hid from police.

But if that's the case, why was he allegedly laughing.

Police attempted to verify Billy and Charles's stories.

One of the owners at the Starlight nightclub, who said she was collecting cover charges on September twenty seven, remembered that Charles Bardino and Billy Joe Smith came in at around ten pm with two women.

This person told police that the four of them sat at a table and left at around eleven pm, and they did not return that night.

So police seemed to be solving the mystery of the hidden run, but when it came to Fred's murder and the robbery, the police were stumped.

There's no evidence in this case, Faule.

The police ever tracked down the two women who were with Charles and Billy to get their stories.

I would have had a lot of questions for them, what time the women went home, and also if Charles or Billy noticed the blood in the front seat of the car or the burnmarks on the driver's seat.

Police also stated publicly after that that they did not believe that Fred was involved in the robbery, but that his vehicle may have been.

So did Fred know the men involved in the robbery or was the shooting just a total coincidence.

I wonder if they were related, but maybe not in the way police think, because we learned something else from Fred's son, Jason.

Fred worked the night shift at the trucking company and he normally came home in the mornings.

But on the morning of September twenty seventh, Fred Knew never came home.

So where was he that day?

According to police notes, Fred's father, Fred new Senior, believed that his son got off work at around eight fifteen am on the morning of September twenty seventh.

Now, normally Fred would have come home after that, but on that Friday he did.

Fred's father told police that other than a single DWI, Fred Junior had never had any problems with the law and had no criminal record.

But Fred's son, Jason, said he's always wondered if his mother hid things from him, things about his father and what she believed his father may have been doing that day, possibly drinking or hanging out with other people or other women.

That's stuff that as I got older, you know, I had more quizkis.

I always thought she might have been hiding something till mean she was till I got opened with I remember when my grandmother on my mother's side died.

You know, my grandpa was like Jason, if he would have been home, that wouldn't happen me.

After the time when Fred would have gotten off work.

On September twenty seventh, It's not clear what happened that day, but police did discover that at some point Fred was hanging out at Maudet's Diner and Joiner.

Arkansas interviewed a waitress named Charlene Dixon.

She said that around six pm, Fred came in and sat by himself in a corner booth.

Police showed her a picture of Fred and she positively identified him.

She said she knew the man is Fred, she didn't know his last name.

She said that Fred didn't talk much and that quote he was pretty well drunk when he came in.

She said that he drank about four cans of beer, played the jukebox a couple of times, and that at some point he hit on her.

That he asked her to go out with him, and that she refused.

Charlene said that Fred was wearing a check shirt with faded Levi jeans and that around eight thirty or nine pm, Fred left the diner and that he did not come back.

One of her co workers also said she saw Fred at the dinner alone.

Where did Fred go after he left the dinner?

Nothing in the case fall indicates that police ever found out.

Jason is still trying to figure out what his father did that day.

He was supposed to have gotten off work Friday mornings, and he didn't come home.

I think he'd been out drinking.

There might even been maybe other women, you know, but a thief, a robber, you know, he was not.

My dad was a loner, you know, he didn't run with many people.

Jason said that even though his father's car matched the description of the vehicle seen near the scene of the robbery, he did not believe that his father would have ever purposely been involved in a robbery.

He wondered if maybe something else happened, If maybe his father was the person who ran out of gas, who Charles and Billy had encountered, and then maybe the men who robbed the convenience store also saw him there and decided to rob him too.

You know, I ex played it out in my head that somebody robbed the gas station and seen him and robbed him too.

Maybe Fred New's car had a breakdown, maybe his kill flagged him down.

Or could it be possible that Fred knew was in his vehicle with the men who robbed the service station.

Did he hang out with those men or meet up with them and then somehow unwittingly get dragged into the robbery, or could he have been kidnapped or just stopped randomly to give them a lift.

All of these were scenarios that the police probably considered.

Then there was the state of Fred's vehicle.

Investigator's notes indicated the driver's seat had been burned, that the car was completely out of gas, and that a line leading to the battery had been cut.

This was never really explained because after an initial flurry of interviews, there were no more newspaper clippings, the case disappeared from headlines, and no one was arrested or charged.

In December of nineteen seventy four, according to police records, the case was declared officially closed due to all leads being exhausted.

And then one year later there was another, this time at the Penis service station.

Another attendant was attacked and this time the robbery ended in murder.

Terry Wyrick, the nineteen year old son of Buster Wyreck, the cashier on duty at the gas station that was robbed the same night Fred Knew was murdered, was working at the FeNiS service station when two men came in to rob that store.

This robbery was brutal.

After stealing the money, one of the men attacked Terry with a sledgehammer, the other one shot him.

Terry survived the initial attack.

He was rushed to the hospital but later died.

In that case, police caught the perpetrators quickly.

They questioned two men, Willie Fowler and Clarence Alexander.

Clarence admitted to police that he and Willie planned the robbery in front of a friend of theirs named Edward Fowler.

Edward Fowler confirmed that story.

He told police Willy and Clarence told him they were planning to rob the David Exon station, but then they decided to rob the Phenis station instead.

Edward told police he told his friends he did not want to participate in the robbery, so he asked Clarence and Willie to take him home.

Clarence told police Willie hit Terry with a sledgehammer and Clarence shot him.

He said that Terry tried to grab his arm and that he shot him again because Terry wouldn't turn him loose.

Clarence and Willie ended up stealing around fifty dollars.

Willie and Clarence were both arrested in charge with capital murder, and both were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The fact that another robbery, this time with a murder, and the fact that the victim was the son of the robbery victim from one year earlier, made headlines.

Some people wondered if the two cases could be connected somehow, but a very cursory examination of the case file shows that that could not be true, mainly because the men who robbed the store did not match the description of the men who robbed the mobile station in nineteen seventy four.

For one thing, Both men who robbed the Phenis station and killed Terry were black, while his suspects of the nineteen seventy four robbery were both white.

Over the years, police followed multiple leads.

At one point, they interviewed another potential suspect named Billy Woodard.

Billy Woodard was arrested for another homicide in Craigshead County.

The victim was also shot with a shotgun multiple times near Billy's vehicle, so there were some similarities to this murder and fred News murder.

Billy admitted to police that he committed the murder.

He told police he was driving the victim in his Volkswagen.

Billy and his victim were driving down a secluded road when the Volkswagen ran out of gas.

Billy told police he was pouring gas into a tank from a portable gas can.

The victim said he was going to walk up the road to get some shade underneath a tree.

At that point, Billy said he pulled a twelve game pump Revelation shotgun from the car and shot the victim in the back of the shoulder.

Then Billy said he shot him in the head multiple times.

Billy then drug the victim's body off and dumped it in the woods.

Then he picked up the shell casings.

Now, Billy admitted all this to law enforcement, but he also completely denied having any involvement in the homicide of Fred Knew.

He said he was only in the area where Fred was shot once in his life, and it was long after the homicide.

It seems as though this lead was dropped because despite the circumstantial similarities, there was no evidence that Billy Woodard was in any way involved in Fred's death.

Kim said that over the years, her mother never gave up on getting answers about what truly happened to her husband.

This included her mother revisiting the scene of the gas station robbery and going to the sheriff's office to talk to detectives about the investigation.

Oh my goodness, my mother.

Her best friend even said, I'm worried to death that your mother is going to get her stuff killed because she was relentless on trying to find out what happened and who was responsible for it.

I know there were multiple times that she went to the sheriff's office I know there were multiple times that she went out on her own to question people.

I remember her going to that gas station time and time again, and probably not the smartest thing that she could do, that she was desperate to know.

It tormented her, the fact of not knowing who was responsible, how it happened, and you know, like took his wallet so they knew who he was and where we lived, and as we were older.

She said, it just petrified her to think that they might come to our house.

She did not have a long high and she never got over.

The Kim said, they've gotten very little information from detectives over the years, and there's very little physical evidence after all this time, but she does believe that there is some evidence that detectives could follow up on.

There's the fingerprint.

Police found a single latent fingerprint on the rear view mirror of Fred's vehicle.

At first, it was identified as being possibly a match for Billy Joe Smith, the man who ran into Fred's car and fled the scene, which begged the question what would Billy Smith have been doing inside Fred's vehicle touching the rear view mirror.

This seemed like a promising lead, but later more Advanced testing revealed Billy could not be a match for that print, so who else could have been in the vehicle.

Kim also said police found other unidentified fingerprints that were move from the car, and that over the years, she heard that a woman who is now in a nursing home may have information about the murder.

I mean, yes, I was like closure.

I was loved for my mother to have that before she passed way, But wow, I would I just give anything for Jason as a closure.

Jason said that he was grateful that we filed the Foyer request and got information that he said his family has not been able to access for decades.

I would like to do more, and I know it's been fifty years, but I'm hoping that in such a small town, there may be someone out there who knows something, Someone who was at Maudet's diner that day, or driving along the highway that night, or in the Starlight club that night, someone who may have seen Fred New on September twenty seventh, nineteen seventy four.

Someone who can help fill in those missing hours for his family.

The worst part of losing somebody and not knowing what really happens.

They left my dad on the side of the road like a piece of trash.

That's the worst part of it.

You can edit this habit, you need to, But for somebody to do that to my dad and have any chance of getting into heaven, I can't live with this that somebody on their deathbed should ask for forgiveness and and get that done.

It is terrible.

Somebody knows something whereas they're scared to say it.

But I would like a little bit of closer, you know, That's what I would hope for.

I'm Catherine Townsend.

This is Helen Gone Murder Line.

Helen Gone Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.

It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts.

Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance and James Wheaton for legal review.

Noah Kamer mixed and scored this episode.

Our theme song is by Ben Sale.

Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and L.

C.

Crowley.

Listen to Helen Gone ad free by subscribing to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel on Apple Podcasts.

If you were interested in seeing documents and materials from the case.

You can follow the show on Instagram at Helen Gonepod.

If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five.

That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five

Goal of Humans