I'm Kate Winkler Dawson.

I'm a journalist who's spent the last twenty five years writing about true crime.

And I'm Paul Holles, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.

Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes, and.

I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a twenty first century lens.

Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.

This is buried bones.

Ay, Kate, how are you?

I'm doing well?

How are you?

Because I hear there's a rumor floating around that there's some new hip stuff happening.

What's the update?

Oh?

Good god, you know I'm falling apart.

It's you had a little grunt right before you even I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh at your misfortune.

Okay, you're falling apart.

I think I talked about, you know, I had gone in to see the the orthopedic surgeon, and at least through X ray, it's obvious I have arthritis and my left hip, so ended up getting an MRI done to take a look at the soft tissue, and it's a mess.

It's the labrum, which is sort of the cartilage like a cup that surrounds the head of the femur.

Well, that's that's shredded.

I have a kind of this impingement called a can defect, which the docs that I could have been born with it, but most likely it developed during all the athletics I did during my you know, adolescent years, and every time I move my leg a certain direction, this hump gets pushed into the joint itself and that's probably what has just shredded my my laborum, and then I have other torn muscles.

You know, it's just a disaster.

So I'm what I'm I have to be mobile.

The writing's on the wall.

I'm gonna need my hip replaced at some point.

But I'm going to try this PRP injection just to see if I can slow down the arthritis, the progression of the arthritis as well as My hope is is that it would help, you know, the labrum a little bit, but you know, it's it's a long shot.

But I'm just I have too many things going on, case wise, project wise.

I have to I have to remain mobile.

I can't have my leg cut off just yet.

Just yeah, what is the doctor saying that you need to stop doing because you're super active?

Is are like hiking or mountain biking that you need to lay off of?

Well?

I have reduced my activities just because every time I do any of those, especially just walking, you know, with all the travel, like you know, skurrying around the Denver airport, my hip will just start to ache.

And I'm pretty sure that most of the pain is coming from the laborum because I can feel it like will catch and then if I push it past that catching point, it aches the rest of the day.

So this is where the PRP.

My hope is is I can resume normal activities and I need to, you know, It's it's not like you just want to stop moving.

Yeah, And so I'll see what he says after, you know, he sticks the needle and my my groin basically and pumps me full of plasma.

Oh, I'm so sorry, I was just you know, between I'm sure all the listeners realize this, but between the two of us, I review our episodes because Paul does not want to listen to himself anything at all, so I hear myself way too often.

And we in the episode that I was reviewing, we were talking about your hip before and talking about the tendency of men, not just men, but a lot of people to not want to go that step into you know, go to the doctor and certainly not pursue something like surgery.

But I'm proud of you for doing that, because nobody should live in pain and then it gets worse and worse until it's intolerable.

You know.

I do not want to get to a point to where I am not physically capable.

And I remember going into my shoulder surgery, my shoulder replacement.

I was so nervous, you know, because it's a pretty serious surgery and I had never been under general anesthesia for that length of time.

Now, having gone through the shoulder, I'm less resistant to the hip, you know, if and when I ultimately do it, because I'm pretty confident that the surgery will go fine now that I've been through it once before.

But now that my shoulder is fully healed and I see all the functionality come back so much better than what it was pre operation, that I'll do the surgeries.

I'll have all the joints replaced at some point, just so I have the functionality now.

I think I've talked to some of my friends about this.

When there's something clearly from your past that you've done that, maybe you know a parent or a girlfriend or somebody said, Paul, I don't know.

Like my stepfather did construction for forever and now he really really feels it.

You know, he's in his late seventies.

Do you think back, Oh, I wish I had.

I wish somebody had been a little more forceful about that.

Or were your glory day memories totally worth what's happening now?

No, you know, the sports side, I just participated in the sports, you know, I never was on any type of time, you know, to pursue it.

At post high school, I would say, probably what my biggest regret is that's causing me the issues is the the heavy weightlifting with poor technique and I'm just not I'm not this really robust guy, you know, with the big bones and everything.

And I remember when I was I think it was a teenage years, I was lifting on base and I had done a kind of an internship with the orthopedic unit at the Dava Grant Medical Center at Travis Air Force Base, and one of those surgeons was was working out at the gym and he saw me bench pressing and it was horrible for him.

It was heavy, heavy weight.

I'm bouncing it off my chest.

And he came up and he said, stop that, thank you.

Yeah, somebody has been reasonable.

I didn't stop it, you know, And that's just that's where Now that I'm older, a little bit wiser on that front, I've really modified what I do in the gym and I feel it it's easier on my joints, using a little lighter weight, you know, doing more repetitions, more sets.

So you know that, I think it really is my regret.

It's that ego lifting that guys do.

You're in the gym and you want to press as much weight and wow, everybody around you, Well, that's wear and tear on your body.

Yeah.

Well, I'll tell you something I haven't.

I don't really don't talk about very much.

You know.

I have a personal trainer who I love.

Shout out to Nate, and Nate specializes in people older than fifty.

It was forty eight.

I think maybe forty seven when I first went to him and I had to say, listen, you know, can you take me?

And he said yes.

And I've never gotten hurt with him.

I've gotten to a point where I could deadlift my own weight, which is a huge deal for me, and I haven't gotten hurt, and he always knows how to step back when I feel.

You know, I have eights that everybody else has.

Weightlifting, know for men, but especially for women as we get older, is so important, you know, building muscle and not losing your muscle and with bone density and everything.

So so I'm proud of myself for being able to do that, but it definitely is I've been hurt enough times with people who I don't think know what they're doing that I'm really happy to be with Nate because I feel protected.

He's not going to ask me to do anything that I don't want to do.

You know.

Sure, yeah, I know.

That's that's good.

I see, I've never used a personal trainer.

I've just done things myself, you know, and I'm better now than I was back in the day.

Well, that's good.

I think you would like a personal trainer if you're I mean, you know, it's a very privileged thing to be able to have that, but man, it really I just get scared of hurting myself permanently somehow because I you know, in TV news, I worked with a lot of camera guys who in my favorite was this guy named Lance.

He would use those huge beta cam cameras, the big ones, and I don't remember what, but he had a couple of discs that got crushed and he was going to have to have surgery.

Did have surgery, I think, And so that kind of growing up around these people getting hurt from all of this equipment that justared the frankly scared the shit out of me.

So I'm very chicken, but I'm trying to move forward in a way that's responsible for me.

So well, that's just said it.

And it takes so long to heal from injuries anymore, so I agree.

Okay, Well, enough about our our aches and pains, which I'm pretty sure the majority of.

Our listeners probably share with us.

We are going to talk about a story and it's a setting that we've really never talked about before.

So I'm pretty excited, you know, about what we're going to be dealing with today, just because Number one it's in the eighteen hundred.

Number two, it's in upstate, New York.

Love Love, and then you know, number three, we've got a murder scene that's going to be interesting.

So let's go ahead and set the scene.

So we are, as I said, in New York State.

This is summertime, eighteen ninety nine.

We're right at the turn of the century, so this is an interesting time to deal with.

And sometimes I think these stories are more interesting than the ones, you know, moving forward, because I feel like with these stories, because we don't have the photos, and you know that kind of the visual part of it.

Even though I know it's more difficult for you, I think we have to start leaning on a little bit more profiling and kind of being creative about the way that we approach these stories versus other stories that we do in the fifties of the sixties that have photos.

And of course you're going to say, screw all that, I want the photos.

I don't want to be creative, Kate.

No, you know, I work with what you can provide me.

I know, Okay, Well, we are in New York State.

It is Thursday, June eighth, as I said, eighteen ninety nine, and we are on dund A train and we've never dealt with a train before.

I don't think we've dealt with a train before.

Somebody will probably email me and say, oh, yeah, you have.

I don't remember, So this is kind of cool in Texas, I don't ride trains.

When I lived in New York, I took trains all the time between the states, and when I went to school in Boston, you know, I was all over trains.

Are there quite a few trains right in Colorado?

Are there passenger trains that you can do fun stuff on?

Or well?

The one that I can that comes to mind that I've been on is what's called the cog Railway, and it's a special type.

I'd call it a train that goes up the side of Pike's Peak.

I've done that, okay, yeah, So you go from Manitou Springs up the Pike's Peak.

And it had shut down when we first moved here.

It was it was done, and then they put in a brand new train, I believe, and new tracks or fixed up the tracks.

And so about three years ago, when my oldest son was out visiting, we took them up that train and it was very it was fascinating, very comfortable.

It's environmentally controlled, so if you're you know, in the winter time here, that's pro problem if you're just out exposed to the elements.

So that's the one that I can think of.

And you know, my train writing experience is very limited.

I took an Amtrak from Santa Barbara down to LA.

Actually it was after oh it's my favorite murder event in Santa Barbara and then go I had to go down to LA to do more.

I think it was TV stuff and that was That was a comfortable ride.

You know, it's just it's easy just to relax on a train.

I love trains.

When I lived in New York, I worked at Fordham University.

I was teaching.

I was full time faculty, and I was going I don't know if it's still there, but I was going to what was known as their Marymount Campus, which is in North Terrytown aka Sleepy Hollow.

So this was my dream.

You can imagine this is my dream.

I really, I really wanted to be there, and I loved it.

I mean, I got so much work done.

I found it relaxed, way more relaxing than be on a subway.

So this is not that kind of story.

We are not relaxing one little bit, and I don't think passengers are going to relax on this either.

Okay, So we are on a train that sounds like a load of fun.

Frankly, it's a theater run train, so it's really popular you.

Go with your spouse on date night.

And it's a forty five minute route between Lockport, New York, and it goes to Buffalo.

So people hop on and off the train and it takes you right to the theater in Buffalo and then you know, you see the show and you hop back on.

And so this train is running a lot, and I think there are several of them.

So with this train, So, like I said, June eighth, it's around midnight and people are coming back from the show in Buffalo, and it's heading towards Lockport.

About a quarter of a mile after it goes through a town called Shawnee, the engineer realizes that something's wrong.

The breaks aren't working properly.

Yikes, I mean petrifying.

He slows down the train to a halt and then he hops off and he inspects it and he sees that there's a small cap that has popped off one of the break pipes underneath the train, and it looks like it had hit something and been knocked loose.

It's a little terrifying that one little cap being popped off will make the brakes.

Feel like they're not working.

But welcome to eighteen ninety nine, you know, train, So it's not a big deal.

The guy, Roger Metcath, the engineer, he grabs an extra cap, he puts it on, and then they continue on the way.

The next day, so this would be Friday, June ninth, he inspects his train and Roger Metcathy, engineer says, he hops down and he looks, and he says that he thinks there is a small piece of human flesh on the front of the train.

Now, let me just tell you real quick.

There is an author who is fantastic.

Her name's Michelle Graff.

She wrote a book about it, which is what I looked at and the researchers looked at.

She described it as about the size of a hen's egg yolk.

And I don't know how you would identify human flesh.

Is it obvious?

I guess I've never really thought about it before.

Let's say it's something that has some skin remnant on it, and you can see let's let's say, skin off of a man's arm right where you You know, how the hair on a man's arm would be pretty obvious, going, Okay, that looks like it could be human tissue.

If it's just tissue, you know, from the internal aspects of the body, I think it would be pretty tough to come to a conclusion it's human.

You may say it looks like, you know, the train hit an animal, you know, during its route.

Well, Roger is alarmed, and he says, I might have hit somebody last night on my last run.

I have no idea, and if I hit someone, that's why the cap came off.

Even though it's not that unusual.

He didn't see anything on the tracks anywhere, so this was a big mystery.

So he files a report with the railroad agent, and there is an investigator who comes on the case, and his name is John Perhamis.

And I will say upfront, I'm fairly impressed with the investigators in eighteen ninety nine.

Sometimes they are better than our nineteen hundreds people.

He files a report.

We've got somebody who says, okay, I'm you know, an investigator who is going to go look for somebody or something on the track around where this cap fell off.

The next day, there's a farm hand named Charles Bliss, and he makes a terrible discovery.

He wakes up early in the morning that morning, probably around the same time that Roger is making this discovery of the flesh on the front of his train.

He says that he sees mangled human remains at the railroad crossing near Shawnee.

They went from Buffalo toward Lockport, and they went through Shawnee no problems.

But then after Shawne that's where we have an issue.

Keith thinks that it's a woman.

So when I say mangled, that's what I mean mangled because she appears to be wearing a dress, and the author, Michelle Graff, says it looked as though the train had dragged her for some distance.

The wheels had severed her legs, and one side of her face was badly crushed.

One of her hands still stretched across the rail.

So I mean, tough crime scene for whoever's going to be looking at this.

Tell me, just at first glance, before we talked specifically about this case, what would be the obvious challenges of dealing with somebody who's dead on the tracks, but they're trying to figure out is this accident is a suicide or is this to cover up a murder?

For sure.

In fact, we've had, of course multiple call them pedestrians run over by trains, and my jurisdiction during my career, I never worked a death scene.

None of them required, let's say, a homicide investigation to kick off.

I have seen a body in the Morgue that had been run over by a train, and then I have a very similar scenario where a man was dumped out on the freeway in the middle of the night when it was real foggy, and got run over by many cars and his body was torn apart and smeared across a quarter mile of the freeway.

But he was dead first, right.

Well, actually no, he was.

He had been rolled up in a carpet and then pushed off out of the bed of a pickup while he was still alive.

Oh my gosh, that case.

And that wasn't he wasn't hit by a train.

He was hit by vehicles on a road.

But it kind kind of the same type of scene because trains, when you say mangled human body, trains are not kind to the human body.

Basically are diced up and smeared over the course of you know, fifty hundred two hundred feet.

In that particular case that was interviews with the suspects got it in terms of trying to determine if the person was alive or not at the time they were struck with the train.

Of course there's going to be witnesses, potential witnesses, you know that can say she jumped out in front of the train.

Now, in terms of any physical diagnostic aspects, I think that would be tough.

That's where I would be asking the pathologist, is there any way you can tell was this person alive or not?

You know, were they dead, you know, laid on the tracks, you know, to cover up a crime or as a body disposal aspect, or you know, were they bound and left alive on the on the tracks like you see in the old movies.

Right, well, let me give you some more information.

We have this investigator, and then we also have a corner who to me is surprisingly involved.

I did not think corners, you know, kind of went into the field.

So he's the elected corner.

Or yeah, it looks like it.

He's a Niagara County corner, one corner for this whole area.

Okay, just from a coroner's perspective is you know, today they often have death investigators that go out in the field, but back probably during this time, you saw more of the pathologists or the corners themselves that were actually responding out.

Yeah, from American Sherlock.

I had a train explosion, and this was before the FBI, and so the Southern Union Pacific I think is the train.

They sent out their own investigators.

And because it was a US Postal worker who was killed in this blast, US Postal sent out there investigators.

So you've got all of this jurisdiction mess because you don't have this centralized agency.

So we have the first investigator I mentioned, who was with the railroad I believe, and then you've got our corner, whose name is Henry Cleveland.

He comes to the scene about the same time as Agent Paramus comes out.

They both reached the you know, the not surprising conclusion here that the woman who they thought was actually just a teenager was killed after being struck by the train.

And I do have more information on the body and the positioning and all of that.

They are trying to figure out if this is accidental of course, or suicide.

Murder does not seem to be on the table right now.

So the coroner says, the last train to come through these tracks was that Lockport bound train on the Theater run around midnight, and it would have been moving, according to the engineer, about thirty miles an hour.

And now doctor Cleveland is trying to figure out not only who this victim is, but the circumstances of her death.

He has been to I know you asked this a lot.

What is the experience of the investigators and the coroner and the pathologist.

So Cleveland has been to quite a lot of these lots of accidental deaths involving trains.

Actually, about a month before this incident, he worked a case where a sixteen year old was fatally struck while attempting to cross a set of tracks.

She had been thrown nearly twenty five feet, and this is where doctor Cleveland starts to bring in his own experience to kind of figure out what's going on here.

What Cleveland says is the key differences to him so far are that there's almost no blood at this scene, and apparently at the other scene that was not the case, there was blood everywhere.

So that's what he says so far.

So they're you know, trying to put together and murder is going to be on the table here pretty quickly.

So what do you think about that she's on the tracks but no blood And Cleveland says, that's weird.

Yeah, No, that's significant.

When somebody's run over by a train and you know, they all their blood is in their body and all these reservoirs, in the blood vessels and everywhere that's all opened up, you know, so you're going to have a significant amount of blood.

It's not going to be pooled in one location unless you know the primary you know, parts of the body come to rest one location.

But you will see that blood smeared all along the tracks, if you will, you know, along the part of the track that the body is being cut up on and smeared down.

So this is where if there is no blood from this woman's body, then that would tell me that she bled out somewhere else.

And now it's the autopsy is significant because it's a can the pathologist identify other bleeding injuries, let's say, stab wounds amongst this mangled mess that he's looking at.

Well, let me tell you, they first start tackling before they get to an autopsy.

They tackle the body positioning because they're still making notes about this.

So this is the best we could do with the description based on, you know, all the notes that we have.

The teenager's body was thought to be positioned before the train struck her.

As what they think.

Her upper body was off the tracks, on the planking, and her torso was laying across the easternmost rail, and her legs were actually on the track, which is why they were severed from the rest of her body.

So it's kind of like she's across the tracks, laying over different parts of the tracks.

Does that make sense to you?

That does make sense?

Okay, So now Agent Paramus is very alarmed.

They're trying to work out this theory, even though the death took place at the railroad crossing.

He says he's convinced that the girl hadn't been crossing the tracks, or even standing for that matter.

He says, if she were standing up, she would have been thrown off the tracks, just like what happened a month ago.

Is it really that, I mean, if this is a teenager who's five foot five, is that really the case.

Well, this is where when you get into vehicular accidents with pedestrians, there is a way to reconstruct the position of the pedestrian based on let's say, the front of the car, you know.

And so if you have a pedestrian that is standing up and is hit broadside by the front of a high, flat surface like the front of a pickup, that person is going to be thrown quite a distance depending on the speed of the pickup.

The mass of that pickup is so much well the mass of a train.

You know, a person is you're not even going to feel a bump in a train.

And so a train traveling at thirty miles an hour if this woman is standing up and you know, it's also what is the front of this train?

Is there one of those I guess you call it a cattle guard, you know, or is it a flat surface or you know what is that the front of the train.

But that's where this investigator and the corner are taking a look, going, Yeah, she was just let's say, walking down the tracks and then gets hit by the front of this train going at thirty miles an hour.

She would have been tossed, you know, you would see all that blunt force injury and she would have just been thrown.

Oftentimes, you'll see, like with pedestrians that commit suicide on the freeway, they may have like tennis shoes on that are completely tied up.

They are literally pulled out of the tennis shoes.

The shoes end up almost staying on the freeway while the body is thrown, you know, fifty feet down down the freeway.

So I imagine with a train traveling at a certain speed would have a similar type of force, and so they're going, uh, she was laying on the tracks.

And this is where it's from a sequence standpoint.

If she's laying on the tracks and the front of the train is designed in a certain way where it's low down, would she have been pushed away before kind of bawling up underneath it?

Or when the train stopped, was she placed in between let's say two cars and then the train starts up again.

That's awful, think about.

Okay, Well, agent Paramus feels like this is a suicide and he thinks that she came and laid on the tracks, and that's how you get it both ways.

Now, the coroner, to his credit, says, I don't think that's what happened.

And he's it's interesting because he's not thinking medically, he's thinking more common sense.

He said, we know when this happened because the cap fell off.

Trains were going back and forth here.

You know, we know when this happened.

And he said, what is a teenage girl doing out here by herself at midnight?

He said, it just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

And you know that she's out walking alone, and maybe she snuck out and did this, but he he is really thinking there has to be a much bigger investigation.

Well, sure, you know, the lack of blood is a red flag, and then you know, part of I think my thought is is that, Okay, one potential, let's say victim pool if you will, is like what you brought up.

You know, teenage girl out walking in a relatively remote location along the train tracks.

That does happen, you know, But you also have individuals on the train the train stopped.

Was she a passenger on the train?

Yep?

Good question.

So what the coroner does is he starts interviewing railroad workers.

I'm assuming that Agent Paramus is with him through all of this, But I'm just hearing this from doctor Cleveland's see what I mean.

I mean, I didn't think would he do that?

Would a corner normally do that?

He's investigating in the field.

Well, this is this is a death investigation.

That is his role.

And then the paramus is that his name.

Yeah, he's looking at this as okay, is this falling into where now you have homicide?

Because if it's if it's suicide or accidental, then basically it's all on the corner.

So that's now the coroner has to come to a decision and find evidence to suggest what is the manner of death with this teenage girl.

Well, let me tell you what the real workers say, Cleveland.

Doctor Cleveland talks to one in particular, he asks the worker, you know, you know these tracks, it's midnight, it's dark.

Would anybody have seen her?

And he said, from where the engineer was coming from.

And the engineer corroborates this from the way and the speed the engineer was coming from.

In the speed that he was at.

There's a huge poll that would have blocked the view.

If she were on the track already, he wouldn't have seen her.

And as you've already noted, nobody would have felt this, you know, a body on the tracks in that way, he said.

The worker's very astute worker.

He says, if anybody had wanted to put the body there to run it over, you couldn't have picked a better spot.

It looks to me like it was placed on the track with great care and after a little bit of study on the situation.

But he's not deducing that if this is murder and she was murdered somewhere else, that the killer is trying to ask her identity, because I think he thought to himself, why not put her face on the track, Why not put her head on the track, and then you'll it will be very difficult unless somebody's looking for her, it'll be very difficult to identify her.

And you know, you can see her face, so she'll be able to be identified soon.

Yeah, you know, in eighteen ninety nine, I mean this is really probably before this jurisdiction would have been using any type of fingerprint for identification, so you know, the facial identification or just you know, like her dress, there's a missing person's report, can you match up what the victim's wearing her physical description to a missing person's report?

But yeah, it would be difficult.

These remains are a mess.

Yeah, that's further complicating identifying this victim.

Well, what they're doing is canvassing the whole area, and they're starting with the towns, the areas, you know, the rural places that are closest to the tracks, and then trying to move outward.

They find out while they're interviewing these folks that there is a family called the Trips.

They are wealthy for.

That area, well known, and they had just reported a teenage girl missing.

Let me tell you about the family.

It's a very very big family.

But the patriarch who is you know, we've got a couple of key people who are important.

The patriarch is Henry.

His wife is Matilda, and they have an adult daughter whose name is Aya.

Aya still lives on the homestead and along with her brother whose name is Lauren, and he has a wife named Carrie.

There's a homestead and then Lauren and Carrie live across the street.

So very tight knit family.

They have a teenage daughter.

Her name is Sarah Mumford.

Sarah is the victim in this case.

So they are four miles from the crossing and the Trips have been knocking on all of their neighbor's doors since ten pm the night before, So this bad thing happens at midnight on the eighth.

They two hours before started looking for Sarah.

They say that Sarah, who had been living with them for you know, four to six years, has vanished.

She is sixteen.

She had left the house around nine o'clock and she said that she was going to go visit members of the family.

It could have been her adopted brother or her brother across the street and his wife.

They don't know, but you know, it's unclear.

They but she was supposed to leave and go visit some family members, and she didn't come home.

What I think is interesting is she leaves at nine, and then at ten o'clock, they immediately become worried and they start knocking on doors.

And the reason I say that's weird is, of course you've picked up by now about the lack of communication.

In the eighteen hundreds, we have often and in the early nineteen hundreds, we've had stories where people don't report family members missing for several days because it's not abnormal.

There's no phones, and people come home when they come home.

And so I was a little alarmed by the one hour thing that seems a little early to panic, but maybe.

Not suspiciously quick.

That's what I kind of going.

Why so quick?

You know she's leaving the house at nine o'clock to go visit family.

Has she been told, hey, you have to be back by nine point thirty.

Okay, I'm just going to tuck that little detail away and we'll see where this goes.

The corner decides that he needs to talk to friends and family of the Trips and specifically of Sarah.

In this inquesty.

He has a lot of people come and testify, including several laborers and farm hands who work on or near the trip homestead, and they tell the coroner's jury that Sarah was grossly mistreated by her adopted family.

In the form of a so a trigger warning for folks, just you know, we are going to be talking about abuse of different kinds coming up here on the story.

So, the witnesses say within the last year, Sarah became more and more isolated.

She stopped going to church in school, she was dressed in ripped up clothes all the.

Time, worn down shoes.

It felt to neighbors like she had been told to stop talking to them.

A lot of the testimony suggested that she had endured a lot of physical abuse and torture at the hands of the Trips.

The witnesses said that they had seen Sarah be tied up, whipped, hit, hung from a back shed by her wrists.

One report says that Sarah was sometimes locked in the corn crib as punishment for falling behind on her housework.

I forgot to look to see what a corn crib is.

I know you've never heard of that.

Well, I the reason I want to know is because I want to know how how small or big thiss is.

I mean, it looks like a barn to me.

So who's doing all of this abuse?

Is it Henry or or other family members also participating?

It sounds like several different kinds of people.

They're vague right now, but I think the adoptive father is the head of it.

Of course, none of this makes the trip family, who is a respectable family and they're you know, very well known and they're wealthy for the area.

Doesn't make them look any good at all.

But there's also no smoking gun in this case.

So if anything, what people who are defending the Trips say is isn't this just more evidence of why Sarah was willing to go and lay down on the railroad tracks and take her own life because she was miserable and she was abused.

Which you can go both ways on that, right.

Yeah.

No, That's what I was thinking is on one hand, you know, victimology would suggest that potentially she was just done with life and decided, you know, I can't take this anymore.

But on the other hand, you now have a family that's willing to commit a level of violence against her.

I suspect with the types of violence that's occurring to Sarah, I wouldn't also think that there's possibly sexual abuse going on by Henry or maybe one of the other men in this family.

But then, as you were talking, this isn't just the family that's on this property.

You have a whole other, suspect pool of farm hands and whoever else is flowing in and out of this homestead slash farm.

Yeah.

The other thing I was thinking about, Paul, if you put together this picture of this family, which seems controlling.

They said she's being isolated.

You know, I'm sure they're keeping an eye on her.

Would they really let her leave the homestead at nine o'clock at night to maybe run away or maybe call for help.

I don't know.

It just seems a little weird that they're are like, go ahead, Sarah, go have a good time.

We'll see you whenever, and then they freak out.

I think that's a very good point that you are making.

You know, they are showing a level of coursive control over Sarah.

You know, and this is this is part of what you see in abuse situations, you know, whether it be domestic abuse or its abuse against children.

You see, the offender gets more and more control over that victim to a point because that offender knows if the victim is able to get outside of my control, and that could be physically outside or electronically today or whatever else, that victim could divulge and the offender, of course now is at risk of being brought to the attention of authorities.

But also for an offender that wants to continuously abuse, they lose that access to the victim if the victim leaves.

And so in this particular case, the fact that she's only gone for an hour and now they're frantically looking for her, that that's like, oh, we lost control.

Uh oh, And doctor Cleveland is more and more suspicious.

I don't know about Agent Paramus at this point, but I'm impressed with the coroner here.

He is more and more suspicious.

This inquest goes on for weeks.

He it sounds like, calls everybody in the area to get their opinion.

So in the coming weeks there are more people who testify, and none of this helps the trips.

So here's what's interesting.

And while I'm going to have you look at the one photo slash drawing that you know I sent you because eighteen ninety nine, several witnesses say that around ten o'clock that night on June eighth, we know that people were answering their doors and the parents, Henry and his wife Matilda, are asking where our daughter is?

Have you seen her?

Where Sarah?

But there's several witnesses who say that same time, the brother who lives across the street with his wife Lauren, so this is an adult son, was driving the Fan family's distinctive canopy topped horse drawn wagon.

Is it rich It sounds like, and he was going, you know, door to door, telling neighbors that Sarah was missing.

But they started to see some weird things.

And remember this is very distinctive.

They said that Lauren's sister so a Yah, so this would be Sarah's half or Sarah's adoptive sister, was also with him in the carriage.

They said that the trips wagon passed by them with curtains drawn later that same night, which they thought was really unusual.

You know, I mean, you would do that for privacy.

But it is pitch black outside and you could see enough to see that they had drawn the curtains, and it was a you know, when we talk about that historical context, what alarms people?

The laundry hanging out in the middle of the rain, what is alarming?

This was alarming to people who saw the fancy carriage with the curtain drawn.

Well, and that's interesting from a just you know, a witness perspective.

You know, if we were thinking about this today, you know, if we saw a cargo by at night and towels hung up and you know, across all the windows, we'd go, that's weird.

So I'm putting a fair amount of stock into that detail, you know.

And this is where you know, I'm starting to forge ahead mentally on this going Okay, if I'm investigator, promise and I'm now putting two and two together.

I have no blood at at the death scene where the train ran over Sarah, and I now have an abusive family with a witness saying that they're doing something weird transporting this horse drawn wagon with the curtains drawn going.

Well, that sounds like they're moving a body.

So if Sarah killed on the property, now I want to get a warrant.

I want to take a look and see if I can find a major deposition of blood that would suggest, yes, this is a homicide scene.

Well let me tell you, but I think seems like in some ways the most definitive evidence they might have because they have this unusual Richie Rich wagon.

Someone spots it heading toward the railroad crossing at Shawnee at eleven thirty, thirty minutes before Sarah's body would be hit by that train, and that's where the map is.

If you want to look at that map that I sent you, it actually helps me to see this map, even though I realize it's a little pedestrian, but to see the distance.

Between what you're alluding to and what's the significance of this map is it?

It really is showing you know Sarah.

Of course, is a distance away from her home, which I believe you said was about four miles, and the witnesses are seeing the trip's wagon at eleven thirty at night, all the way out there by where Sarah's body was ultimately found.

So, yeah, that's suspicious.

But it's at night, So how much do we trust it if it's at night?

Trying to evaluate this witness is the details being provided related to this very distinctive canopy covered horse drawn wagon that sounds like it is going to be very rare.

Only very wealthy people would have this, and it just so happens that the Trips have that type of wagon.

I think that that's a pretty significant detail that they are providing, and so I put some weight on it.

Sure, it could be coincidental.

Maybe you have another wealthy family that just happened to be driving near where Sarah was hit by the train at that time of night.

But there's other circumstances that start to snowball, if you will, when you start thinking about everything that's now kind of coalescing and drawing suspicion to the family itself.

Speaking of the family, they are called to the Corners in quest.

They do a couple of things.

Number One, they all.

Sort of downplay any of the abuse, probably saying it's what everybody does around here.

You have to be tough on these girls, and blah blah blah.

They were saying that she's actually pretty happy.

And there are some witnesses who inexplicably get on the stand and say the same thing.

What would the corner do or the corner's jury do.

How are they supposed to tell the difference between the people who get on the stand and say she was abused and then the people who are countering that.

How do you know who to believe?

Well, it's taking a look at you know, what are the loyalties that the various witnesses have, their relationship to the family, How they would be impacted if they are providing statements.

So you think about the farm hands.

You know, they're coming forward and saying, well, she's being abused by the family.

They could lose their job, if you will, where the trip family could cut them loose by saying something like that.

But their willingness to say that suggests to me, Okay, this is something that they're they're they're putting their livelihood at risk to to tell this detail.

Why would they lie about that when they could lose their job from the trip family versus maybe family friends you know, who have relationships with the trips, maybe benefit from the trip's wealth, And they go, well, yeah, if they're found to be abusive to Sarah and come under suspicion and her death, we lose you know, sort of the if you want to use the term sugar daddy, I'm not sure if that's politically correct, but you know.

I think it makes us sound old, but that's.

Okay, yeah, you know, but that's so that's I think that's part of how And that's just even just interviewing witnesses.

You know, you have to understand and their perspective, where their loyalties lie, as well as you know, the specificity of the details, you know, and this is where're trying to, you know, tease out, you know, truth from lies.

If you still have the map up that page that I sent you scroll down.

You can see Sarah, and you know, you can see Lauren the man and his wife.

But look at Henry.

He's a lot older than I thought he was, and he's maybe On the third page there's.

Two images of Henry.

One appears to be an old style photo and I forget if that's what they call a lithograph or something like that, and then the others like a sketch.

But when I look at him, I'm now evaluating, you know, his his hairline.

I'm looking at his beard.

The beard looks light colored, like it's gray.

But he doesn't look like seventy.

He looks more my age.

He's got the you know, the gray beard growing out.

He's sixty nine.

Oh good god, really he looks he looks great.

Because he has all of these kids out there doing the work for it.

Probably, yeah, he said he's born.

I just found his find a grave.

Yeah, oh wow, okay, okay.

Henry gets on the stand and he has his own theory.

And what's interesting I think about all of this is if they leaned into just enough to say, listen, Sarah is a sensitive girl.

We probably come down on her a lot harder than we should, but we love her.

She knows that.

But she's not able to handle the pressure of working on our farm.

And I think she just snapped.

Then to me, if they admitted not the hard abuse, but then maybe they could say that this was you could see how this could be a suicide but he's saying, she's as happy as a clam, No big deal.

You know.

This is where, in essence, you have competing witnesses, you know, in terms of stances that they're taking as to you know, how is the inquest going to come to a conclusion about accident, suicide or death at the hands of another.

And this is where well what is the physical evidence?

Well here we go some more information.

Let me tell you more information first, So Henry says, hey, I have a theory of my own.

My theory is that she was kidnapped and then disposed of, is what he thinks.

He says that there are three young men living in the area, two brothers and another kid, and they're sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and you know that he suggests that that they had been cat calling Sarah and maybe they kidnapped her and sexually assaulted her and killed or put her on the tracks.

But these kids all have alibis, So he's just throwing these out there, so deflecting, I assume, is that what that would be?

Yeah, you know, that's that's a reasonable theory as to possible what could have happened, just like it could be one of the farm hands.

You know, Sarah's leaving the house.

I don't know where the farm hands would normally be at that time of night, but you know, maybe one of them took a fancy to Sarah and followed her and grabbed her, and you know it, sexually assaulted, killed her, and dumped her body on the tracks.

You know this is where it's now.

Okay, what's the most likely in terms of as you start investigating these various investigative pathways?

What pathway can you go down?

The furthest on m.

Well, let me tell you what we're going to do with an autopsy.

So doctor Cleveland, you know she's been buried and it's now been about five weeks.

I think.

Doctor Cleveland says, let's dig her back up and let's see what we can find.

He really is convinced this is murder.

So this is into the month, which is incredible.

This has been going on for a month.

So he has her exhumed for a full autopsy by a physician named doctor Loomis.

I guess Cleveland didn't do a full autopsy at the time, which surprises me.

In June, there was a doctor named Willis Petite who had done a cursory examination, though not a thorough one.

And at this point now Sarah had been done for five weeks.

Do you think that Cleveland didn't wasn't qualified to do the autopsy and that's why he had these other physicians around.

Why would he not do it himself.

Well, he may not be a pathologist, yeah, you know, because the elected corners, you know, you don't have to have any type of medical qualification to become an elected corner.

And oftentimes and still to this day, in many parts of the country, you know, you see people that are funeral home directors become the elected corner and they have to have a staff of your medical examiners or your pathologists underneath, you know, to do the autopsies.

With Cleveland, I don't know what his medical qualifications are, but it is a big miss not to do a thorough autopsy right away.

Well, and then I will just do a you know, going a mea culpla here, because I have been calling him doctor Cleveland, and I think he's a corner.

I don't think he's a doctor, going back and looking and so dismiss every time I call him doctor Cleveland.

Sorry, but so anyway, it sounds like in June, he had one doctor do a cursory examination of her.

The sexual assault accusation against these three teenagers has sparked the rumor that maybe Sarah was pregnant.

Not by one of these guys, because they have alibis, but now everybody's got that churning in her in their heads that maybe she was pregnant.

So that's another reason why Cleveland says, okay, let's bring in a doctor.

Let's do a full autopsy and find out some things.

Loomis, who is the guy who looks at her body.

Five weeks after she's been in the ground.

He and doctor Petite do an autopsy and they testify that she had several injuries, including a skull fracture that we're serious enough to cause her death.

But you know, Louis says, I don't know if one of them was the fatal wound, which one it was.

He said, I don't know if these injuries happened before Sarah was hit by the train or as she was being hit by the train.

But most importantly, and tell me what you think about this, I think we've kind of gone over this a little bit.

Doctor Loomis said that many of the injuries would have caused major external bleeding, and we talked about this before.

So because there was no blood on the tracks, he said, I think she was already dead beforehand.

And obviously it's foul play because there's so many injuries.

Kind of going back to, you know, my thought about trying to determine, you know, what injuries occurred prior to being run over by a train.

That's that would be so hard unless there's obvious you know, like stab wounds.

Even I was thinking about, you know, if her throat had been cut, but then you could see where, you know, something on the train possibly mimic that type of injury.

The most significant thing to me is that, you know, her body is all flayed open in essence, and he's drawing the conclusion she would be bleeding all over the place if she had blood in her body at the time the train ran over her.

So she was dead and had a bleeding injury where she basically bled out at some other location.

Well, I think that's a great theory.

And to add to that, just to dispel rumors, doctor Loomis says she wasn't pregnant.

He says that there are no I'll put in the word obvious signs of sexual assault, and he said that I don't know which came first, you know how the death happened, but it's clear that she was dead before she was on the tracks.

So now this is a weird kind of dovetail of a story that we have to get into.

Also, all of these statements end up colliding with a story from the family that doesn't seem to involve Sarah, but it might.

So Lauren, the son and his wife had a baby.

Her name was Susan, and she died when she was two months old, two years earlier, and they said shadowy circumstances.

At first, blush.

I thought shadowy circumstances for a two month old baby in the eighteen hundreds when there was all sorts of viral and bacteria and everything else you can think of.

But what happened was that Lauren said his daughter had died of an accidental smothering with blankets.

I'm assuming you know, all that kind of stuff that we're told not to do anymore.

But for some unknown reason, her birth and her death were both registered in a neighboring county, not the ones that the Trips lived in, and the coroner was never notified when she died, so Cleveland know about this.

Registering a child's death with a local clerk is required by law in eighteen ninety nine, as well as letting Cleveland know that this happened.

So with that information, the coroner says that he's in his head.

He's trying to show the jury that the Trip family had a habit of not following protocol when it comes to reporting deaths, which could be the same thing in Sarah's case.

So if the doctor's correct and Sarah was dead before you know she was on the railroad tracks, then it's because maybe the Trip family, for some unknown reason, wanted to avoid alerting the local authorities, to which I said, come on, you mean that they abused her and ended up murdering her and they don't want to alert the authorities.

I think he's just saying they're sketchy to begin with, and now we have another death we're dealing with.

I think one of the perplexing actions to say a member of the Trip family or multiple members of the Trip family are responsible for Sarah dying.

Let's say I'm the proper whether it be accidental, you know, through the abuse and they took it too far or you know, intentional homicide.

How the body is disposed is poor, because it's like, well, she's going to be found.

You have trains on the tracks all the time, so it's not like they're hiding her body to try to and then reporting her missing and she's just never found.

The only thing I can think of is the thought that the train would do so much damage to her body that any evidence of homicide would be covered up and they would hope that this would just quickly be ruled an accident.

Hopefully they get into the trip's homestead and they look for a homicide scene.

Well no, oh, doesn't sound like it.

Sorry.

I mean, we can count on the corner for a lot of stuff, and apparently Agent Paramus for nothing.

But he does not do that that I know of.

There are five weeks of testimony's forty witnesses, and finally they wrap up the jurorsay murder and there are four indictments for Henry the father, Matilda the mother, Lauren the son, and Iva, who is the sister, so it's the four family members.

This seems like the end of the case, and it technically is.

It's an unsolved case.

But Michelle Graff, who is the author who wrote this book, has a theory, and I want you to tell me what you think about this theory.

She did so much digging.

I have to give her a lot of credit for this.

The motive is what lingers for people, I think, and it did for Michelle.

So she is researching the case.

She's looking into upstate newspaper archives from upstate New York.

She finds a piece of reporting from nineteen hundred that jumps out.

It's not very detailed, but it notes that Lauren and his wife Carrie Tripp had lost an eleven month old baby named Clarence on March second of that year of nineteen hundred.

His cause of death is documented as measles and meningitis.

So, based on his age, Clarence would have been born in early April eighteen ninety nine.

And you remember Sarah died June.

So what, Michelle wonders.

She confirms this with the child Clarence's birth certificate, which she manages to track down, which lists the baby as named Raymond, not Clarence, which is odd already to begin with.

But Clarence's existence never seems to come up in any of the reporting on Sarah's case.

So what Michelle Graff is wondering is this is something that probably should have been investigated.

What if Clarence was Sarah's baby and the Trips didn't want the scandal.

They were hoping to cover up a sexual assault within the family, which would be Lauren the son, so they lied on the birth certificate and they claim that Carrie, who was the.

Wife, was actually this little boy's mother.

What she says is when residents insisted that Sarah had been pregnant, you know, did the corner seem like everybody else, that she had been pregnant when she died, so that rumor that went around when the autopsy proved otherwise, did he wrongly assume that this story had no merit?

So what Michelle is saying is that rumor that went around that was kind of connected to the sexual assault potential sexual assault from the teenagers.

Maybe that rumor was older than we think and that Sarah had been pregnant.

And she's actually it sounds like pretty convinced that both of these babies might have been Sarah's because they had little tombstones, and the tombstones are very very vague about who the child belongs to.

And so I think it's just a theory that she pops out if you're looking for motive.

It would not shock me at all that this is what is going on now.

Yeah, from trying to figure that out.

You know, for Clarence, you mean Sarah would have taken Clarence full term.

You know, do we have witness statements saying, you know, they saw Sarah during this nine month pregnancy to say, yeah, she looked like she was pregnant and with the other baby too.

Now you have two adult males on this homestead.

You have Henry and you have Lauren.

Either one of them could be in play as having fathered the babies.

And you think, if Henry is abusing Sarah, and let's say he's sexually abusing her, and she gets pregnant by Henry, who's sixty nine years old, it almost makes more sense for that baby to be passed off as Laurence because he is of the age in which him and his wife are going to be having kids.

Yeah, you know, and it's sort of like dirty family secret.

You know, Henry is impregnating the six toad on how old this teenage girl?

And we got to cover this up.

Well, we have Lauren and his wife and there of child bearing normal child bearing age for that time frame.

And it's interesting one of the little stones that they put down, they put one down for Clarence the boy, and it says infant son of Lauren Tripp, who's the father.

Yeah, so it.

Doesn't mention Carrie, the supposed biological mother, And of course it certainly doesn't mention Sarah.

Two points that I wanted to remind you of.

Number one, all of these workers who took the stand pretty much unanimously said that for the past year Sarah had been very isolated, which.

To me means we didn't see much of her.

Yeah.

Yeah, and that may have been to prevent people seeing that she was pregnant.

Yeah, And it could have been the case before.

I don't know, you know, with the other baby with Susan.

Well, this is where you know, I go back to doctor Loomis, who did the formal autopsy, if Sarah had given birth two months prior to Clarence.

I wonder if, because pathologists are able to determine if a woman has had been pregnant or has given birth in the past.

And I don't know what diagnostic features they use to do that.

So I'm wondering if doctor Loomis would have been able to determine that if that had been a question.

Yeah, And that's what I think Michelle's point is is she wished doctor Cleveland had followed that train a little bit what the point was, and maybe he was thinking it but didn't want to go there, because he really did question Lauren the father a lot about the death of that little girl, the two month old Susan from two years earlier.

And you know, the point was the Trips obviously are willing to break the law cover up a death, and we don't know how Susan died.

But Michelle says, I think this might have gone even further than that, and they're covering up some other pretty terrible things.

Sure, So you know, Michelle gets a lot of Michelle Graff gets a lot of credit for this, because really that is quite a story and to me makes the most sense out of everything, out of all of it, that makes the most.

Sense depending on the state of the remains, we could answer that question today.

I was thinking about that too.

I also think, Paul, tell me if you agree with this, I also think this could be a case of people know what happened, and it's passed through the family somehow.

It's like the dirty secret that whoever the relatives of the Trips are now might have known, or there were notes and they're in an attic somewhere.

Let me tell you a couple of other little tidbits.

So you know, after this, the Trips were kind of driven out of town.

They eventually had to leave.

They set up somewhere else, and later Carrie, the wife, divorces Lauren.

He was very abusive, is what she says.

She goes back to Michigan.

Now tell me if this means anything to you, So she goes back to Michigan.

She dies in eighteen seventy nine, so that is boy, she must have been really old.

It's eighty years past all of this happening.

The obituary that's printed for Carrie doesn't mention either of those two kids, but it does mention the other kids that she had with Lauren, but not Clarence and not Susan.

You know, there may be something to that.

I think talking to children of Carrie, they may have divulged some of these family secrets in family stories over the years.

Yeah, family secrets it's a big one, and we've had a decent amount of those cases.

But this is what I mean.

I find this so fascinating in the eighteen hundreds.

Why I love this century so much, because sometimes we have enough information to be able to tell what happened with cause of death.

Sometimes we have really smart investigators.

Sometimes we're both really surprised about what they were able to do.

And I think that coroner Cleveland did a really good job here, and maybe this would have been too much to wrap his head around, but he clearly had suspicions about Lauren to begin with.

It's a hard story for me because when we go back to the victim, like we always try to do, and you think about this young woman's life, which is a young woman that is alive today somewhere around where things are terrible, things are happening, you know, and she lives this really difficult life.

She works NonStop, she I'm sure feels like an outcast, she's abused, and then she dies in some way so tragically.

Just a bad, bad ending for someone who is a teenager who we have no idea what she could have done had she not been taken in by the wrong family.

No absolutely, you know, and and you know, from my perspective, I think it's it's pretty obvious she was killed by somebody within the Trip family, and she was killed in a way in which she bled out, and that could be a cutthroat that could be massive, you know, head injury.

This is where, yes, the coroner, you know, he really pursued things to determine the manner of death.

But he wasn't a homicide investigator, and there's probably some things that a bona fide homicide investigator would have been able to key in on very quickly in this case if they had done things sort of in the right time frame, do the proper autopsy right away, you know, get onto that homestead and do a search.

So I agree.

So for the next episode, I'm hoping for two things.

Photos for your sake, that'd be great us for your sake, and for both of us, good investigators who have some experience working whatever kind of case we're going to come across next awesome.

Well, once again, thank you, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

We'll see you next week.

Sounds good.

This has been an exactly right production for.

Our sources and show notes go to Exactlyrightmedia dot com slash Buried Bones sources.

Our senior producer is Alexis Emosi.

Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin, and Kate Winkler Dawson.

Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.

Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.

Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark and Danielle Kramer.

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Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decode the criminal mind, is available now

And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked My Life Solving a Marya Because Cold Cases is also available now