0:03 [SPEAKER_01]: On the afternoon of December 13, 1989, two young men were taking a shortcut through a wooded lot in Volusha County, Florida. 0:12 [SPEAKER_01]: When one of them noticed what looked like a piece of carpet, mying in the underbrush, the carpet was old and dirty. 0:19 [SPEAKER_01]: A remnant somebody might have rolled up and dumped from a truck. 0:23 [SPEAKER_01]: The wooded lot. 0:24 [SPEAKER_01]: ran alongside interstate 95. 0:27 [SPEAKER_01]: The same stretch of highway that carried tourists down from Daytona Beach towards the cave and that, on most nights, hummed with the low sound of long haul trucks. 0:38 [SPEAKER_01]: The lot itself was a green margin between exits. 0:42 [SPEAKER_01]: A place nobody walks through unless they have a reason. 0:45 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a normal December in Volusha County, low 70s in the early afternoon. 0:50 [SPEAKER_01]: The humid weight that sits over the central part of the state, from May to October, is finally backed off, leaving the air still humid by anywhere else's standards, but dry by Florida's. 1:03 [SPEAKER_01]: The light at the hour is long and flat, coming in at a low angle off the Atlantic. 1:08 [SPEAKER_01]: Catching the Saul Paul Meadows and slash pines, entering the whole roadside scrub, a pale gold for a few hours, a breeze off the ocean, the trade went along the Florida East Coast does not stop for the season, but it does slow down a little. 1:24 [SPEAKER_01]: The wooden lot itself was mixed scrub of the sort that grows in the disturbed soil, along an interstate quarter in central Florida, pine, Paul Meadow, a few scrub oaks, 1:38 [SPEAKER_01]: the understory of vines and dead palm fronds that turns any walk off the shoulder into a careful one. 1:45 [SPEAKER_01]: The wall was bordered on one side by the inner state, on another by a service road, and on the other two by more of the same scrub. 1:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Had the anonymity of land nobody owns, in any way they bothered to enforce. 1:59 [SPEAKER_01]: People jump things in there, refrigerators, mattresses, 2:06 [SPEAKER_01]: The carpet was covering something. 2:09 [SPEAKER_01]: Underneath was a body. 2:10 [SPEAKER_01]: He was male, middle aged, fully nude. 2:14 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been dead for somewhere between 10 days and two weeks. 2:18 [SPEAKER_01]: The Florida heat in early December is forgiving compared to the Florida heat in August. 2:23 [SPEAKER_01]: But it is not forgiving enough that a body left exposed in a wooded bond. 2:27 [SPEAKER_01]: For that long, it's going to be in any presentable state. 2:31 [SPEAKER_01]: Decomposition had set in. 2:33 [SPEAKER_01]: The skin had begun to slip. 2:35 [SPEAKER_01]: The abdomen had bloated and then partially collapsed as the gas is a future vacation. 2:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Work their way through the soft tissue. 2:43 [SPEAKER_01]: Blow flies had laid eggs in the open wounds and in the natural openings of the body. 2:48 [SPEAKER_01]: And the larvae had cycled through their feeding stages and moved on. 2:52 [SPEAKER_01]: The face, the hands, the soft tissue of the abdomen. 2:56 [SPEAKER_01]: All of it was already past the point where a casual observer was going to do anything that resembled a normal identification. 3:04 [SPEAKER_01]: Now uncovered, the smell was unreal, and by the time the first cruiser pulled out of the shoulder of the service road, the smell reached out 50 feet. 3:13 [SPEAKER_01]: One of the deputies was sick in the brush behind the cruiser. 3:16 [SPEAKER_01]: The other was not. 3:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Both would carry this particular memory of that afternoon for years. 3:22 [SPEAKER_01]: The skin on the body had begun to come away from the underlying tissue at the points of contact with the ground. 3:29 [SPEAKER_01]: The fluids of decomposition had darkened the soil in a ring around him. 3:33 [SPEAKER_01]: There was no good preparation for what waited under the carpet remnant. 3:38 [SPEAKER_01]: What the medical examiner could read through the decomposition was the cause of death. 3:43 [SPEAKER_01]: Even shot multiple times. 3:51 [SPEAKER_01]: The medical examiner found one of them lodged in soft tissue when he opened the chest. 3:56 [SPEAKER_01]: The track of the bullets through the chest cavity told the story. 3:59 [SPEAKER_01]: Each round had punched through the chest wall, opened a channel through pulmonary tissue, and stopped somewhere inside him. 4:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Air had leaked out of the lung into the plural space. 4:10 [SPEAKER_01]: What had flooded in alongside it. 4:13 [SPEAKER_01]: The collapse of the lung against the chest wall had been progressive. 4:17 [SPEAKER_01]: Not instantaneous. 4:19 [SPEAKER_01]: It not died on impact, listener. 4:21 [SPEAKER_01]: It drowned in his own chest cavity over the course of minutes. 4:25 [SPEAKER_01]: While his other one had tried and failed to compensate, those two rounds in the left one were the ones that had done it. 4:33 [SPEAKER_01]: His name, when investigators eventually worked out who he was, 4:37 [SPEAKER_01]: would turn out to be Richard Charles Mallory, his abandoned catalyk had been found, don't near Orman Beach on December 1st, with his wallet still inside, along with some condoms in an empty vodka bottle, until December 13th, he had been a missing person with a strange set of items in an abandoned car. 4:56 [SPEAKER_01]: After December 13th, he was the first Bonnie, and mold become one of the most closely-watched serial murder cases in Florida history. 5:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Nobody knew that yet. 5:06 [SPEAKER_01]: Not the Vluxia County deputies, and not the medical examiner, not the two young men who backed out of the brush called the police. 5:14 [SPEAKER_01]: As the day progressed, the light slowed, the pines warmed, the wind off the Atlantic, move through the pulmetos. 5:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Somewhere along the interstate 95, a long-haul truck shifted down a curve. 5:27 [SPEAKER_01]: The body of what had been a man, what would eventually be returned to a name, laying the disturbs soil under the carpet that covered it for two weeks. 5:37 [SPEAKER_01]: An island Carol Warnos was just getting started. 5:42 [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome, listener. 5:44 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm glad you're here. 5:46 [SPEAKER_01]: Take a seat. 5:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Next to the fire. 5:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Obscura, where we shine a light on the dark. 6:19 [SPEAKER_03]: 3 million other women do it too. 6:21 [SPEAKER_03]: It's an everything thing. 6:22 [SPEAKER_03]: It goes for going on for centuries. 6:25 [SPEAKER_03]: That wasn't doing anything out there wrong or mean to anybody. 6:29 [SPEAKER_03]: What they did was mean to me. 6:30 [SPEAKER_03]: I was very calm. 6:31 [SPEAKER_03]: Very nice. 6:33 [SPEAKER_03]: I really like attitude. 6:34 [SPEAKER_03]: I didn't do anything wrong to my didn't even heard me swear. 6:37 [SPEAKER_03]: I talked about religion and politics. 6:40 [SPEAKER_03]: And even talked about trying to save the Lord with someone on my mean side. 6:44 [SPEAKER_03]: Talk to about Jesus coming soon. 6:49 [SPEAKER_04]: We're here on Richard Mallory. 6:54 [SPEAKER_03]: I'm talking about Richard Mallory right now. 7:00 [SPEAKER_03]: You said today. 7:02 [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not going to be further in. 7:08 [SPEAKER_01]: Chapter one, Richard Mallory. 7:11 [SPEAKER_01]: Richard Mallory's last day on this Earth was a Thursday. 7:15 [SPEAKER_01]: He owed an electronic repair shop in Clearwater, on the West Coast of Florida. 7:19 [SPEAKER_01]: He was 51 years old. 7:21 [SPEAKER_01]: He had a history. 7:23 [SPEAKER_01]: In 1958 in Maryland, he'd been charged with assault with intent to rape. 7:28 [SPEAKER_01]: He had spent the years between 1958 and 1962, committed to a maximum security correctional facility. 7:35 [SPEAKER_01]: for treatment as a sex offender, the facility's records, which would be uncovered years after his death, including a 1961 evaluation noting that Mr. Mallory possessed strong, sociopathic trends. 7:49 [SPEAKER_01]: None of this was on his record in Florida by 1989. 7:52 [SPEAKER_01]: None of it had been entered into any database that afford a deputy could pull up. 7:57 [SPEAKER_01]: He was on paper and a electronic shop owner with a clean 8:02 [SPEAKER_01]: Mallory had a long pattern of disappearances from his shop. 8:06 [SPEAKER_01]: He would leave for days at a stretch, drink heavily, visit sex workers, and eventually surface and go back to running the business. 8:14 [SPEAKER_01]: By the standards of his behavior in the years before his death, the morning of November 30, 1989, was nothing unusual. 8:22 [SPEAKER_01]: He closed his shop in the late morning and started drinking. 8:26 [SPEAKER_01]: He drove at a 1977 Cadillac that Cadillac put him on interstate 75 and interstate 75 brought him into the geographic territory where his killer was working. 8:39 [SPEAKER_01]: She was 33 years old. 8:40 [SPEAKER_01]: She had a 22 caliber pistol in her bag. 8:43 [SPEAKER_01]: She had a partner waiting for in her motel room. 8:46 [SPEAKER_01]: She had whatever amount of alcohol she had in her bloodstream that night, which was, by Tyramor's later account, a considerable amount. 8:54 [SPEAKER_01]: They met, he picked her up, they drove her to a remote area, for what was supposed to be a paid sexual encounter. 9:01 [SPEAKER_01]: The exact mechanics of what happened in the woods that night are noble only to the two of them. 9:07 [SPEAKER_01]: and Mallory has been dead for the better part of 40 years. 9:10 [SPEAKER_01]: The version that became the public record is the one island herself eventually gave during her trial in 1992, and during her various interviews on death row, which is to say an evolving and inconsistent version. 9:24 [SPEAKER_01]: In the early version, she said Mallory had been her, raped her, and solemnized her. 9:30 [SPEAKER_01]: She said he had used rubbing alcohol on his own genitals 9:34 [SPEAKER_01]: She said she had fired in self-defense. 9:37 [SPEAKER_01]: And later versions, she said the killing was something closer to retribution. 9:41 [SPEAKER_01]: As she had started shooting a men who reminded her of every other man who would hurt her. 9:46 [SPEAKER_01]: By the very end on death row, she would tell some interviewer she had been a rage killer, and that the self-defense narrative had been tragic. 9:55 [SPEAKER_01]: Not to jump too far ahead, but I think this is important to touch on listener. 10:00 [SPEAKER_01]: is that by then, Eileen Warnos' mental health had been suffering. 10:06 [SPEAKER_02]: They had the inner calm on in the room, and they kept lying that it wasn't on, and they were using sonic pressure on my head since 1997. 10:18 [SPEAKER_02]: We're trying to write something, and I think they had some kind of eye in the cell, I'm not sure, but every time I started writing something, it went up higher. 10:27 [SPEAKER_02]: So I'm thinking that probably had the TV rigged. 10:31 [SPEAKER_02]: The TV or the mirror or something was rigged. 10:33 [SPEAKER_02]: They got a huge satellite on the compound. 10:36 [SPEAKER_02]: After they put the huge satellite on the compound, it could have been either rigged to the TV set or the mirror or something, because the electrician when he put the mirror on the wall, he said, doesn't that look like a computer? 10:46 [SPEAKER_02]: The back of it, and he stuck to the wall. 10:49 [SPEAKER_02]: It was crushing my head in, they were using sonic pressure. 10:53 [SPEAKER_01]: I want to point out some things. 10:55 [SPEAKER_01]: I lean more noses version of the story. 10:57 [SPEAKER_01]: At least with Mallory seems consistent. 11:00 [SPEAKER_01]: Richard Mallory had a history of attempted rape. 11:04 [SPEAKER_01]: In my experience, men that commit these type of crimes and are given such a slap on the wrist. 11:10 [SPEAKER_01]: tend to repeat themselves, it's very uncommon for them to fully recover. 11:14 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not telling you what to believe, listener. 11:18 [SPEAKER_01]: But I will say that there is a great argument for self-defense, at least in this first killing. 11:23 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, let's get to the physical evidence. 11:26 [SPEAKER_01]: What the physical evidence said was this, Richard Mallory was shot multiple times with a 22 caliber pistol. 11:32 [SPEAKER_01]: The autopsy initially noted three rounds. 11:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Later analysis suggests that he had been shot more times than that. 11:38 [SPEAKER_01]: Two of the bullets perforated his left lung, he was shot at relatively close range while seated. 11:44 [SPEAKER_01]: In a position consistent with being inside or near his vehicle, the rounds entered the front of his torso, an angled downward and inward, an angle a shooter produces when seated next to or slightly above the victim, and firing across at an upward angle. 12:00 [SPEAKER_01]: E-22 is a small round, it does not have the stopping power of a larger caliber. 12:06 [SPEAKER_01]: What it does to the chest is slip through the ribs and soft tissue and continues traveling inside the body. 12:13 [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes Rick is shaying off bone and resetting itself in tissue, several inches from the original wound track. 12:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Two of Mallory's rounds opened his left lung. 12:23 [SPEAKER_01]: The lung began to collapse almost immediately. 12:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Air vented into the plural space, blood pulled into the same cavity through the torn pulmonary vessels. 12:33 [SPEAKER_01]: His good-long, the right one, would have tried to compensate. 12:37 [SPEAKER_01]: But the pressure shift in his chest would have begun fighting it. 12:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Richard Mallory was awake for some portion of this. 12:44 [SPEAKER_01]: The chest cavity does not stop a brain from working. 12:47 [SPEAKER_01]: He would have understood that he was bleeding internally. 12:49 [SPEAKER_01]: He would have felt the sudden inability to draw a fool breath. 12:53 [SPEAKER_01]: The burning compression of a chest cavity filling with the wrong fluid. 12:57 [SPEAKER_01]: The rising panic of a body trying to inhale through a one that was no longer doing its job. 13:02 [SPEAKER_01]: His pulse raised, his vision narrowed. 13:05 [SPEAKER_01]: The peripheral world began to gray out at the edges by the time enough blood had accumulated in his chest to stop his heart, he had been dying for a measurable stretch of time. 13:15 [SPEAKER_01]: The medical examiner working backward from the wound tracks estimated the lethal sequence at somewhere between two and seven minutes. 13:23 [SPEAKER_01]: The shooter then dragged or moved the body into the wooded mop beside Interstate 95. 13:28 [SPEAKER_01]: took the carpet remnant from the back of the Cadillac and laid it over the body, then drove the Cadillac as far as Orman Beach, parked it, and walked away. 13:37 [SPEAKER_01]: I leaned back to the Motel sometime after the killing. 13:41 [SPEAKER_01]: She told Tyremor that she had killed a man that day. 13:44 [SPEAKER_01]: The Cadillac was found on December 1st. 13:47 [SPEAKER_01]: The body was not found until December 13. 13:50 [SPEAKER_01]: The Voucha County investigation began the next day. 13:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Detectives had a name, an empty vodka bottle, 13:56 [SPEAKER_01]: a missing wallet and a body in the woods, they did not have a suspect, a witness, or a clear motive that did not also fit a hundred other plausible scenarios involving a middle-aged man who had picked up a sex worker on the wrong night. 14:11 [SPEAKER_01]: For six months after Richard Mallory's body came out of the woods, the case set on a desk in Volusha County, going nowhere in particular. 14:25 [SPEAKER_01]: David Andrew Spears was 47 years old. 14:28 [SPEAKER_01]: A heavy machinery construction worker out of winter garden, Florida, he drove a pickup truck, a man who left for jobs at sunrise and came home covered and dirt. 14:37 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been declared missing as of May 19th, 1990. 14:41 [SPEAKER_01]: On June 1st, 1990, his body was found alongside U.S. Highway 19, in Citrus County, Florida. 14:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Citrus County in early June is a different country from 14:53 [SPEAKER_01]: The Florida Summers come on hard by late May, and stays hard through October. 14:58 [SPEAKER_01]: The temperature and central Florida in the first week of June runs in the low 90s during the day, and the humidity sets in the 70s and 80s, which means the actual experience of walking outside is something like the experience of walking into a hot wet wall listener. 15:14 [SPEAKER_01]: The clouds build through the afternoon and break on most days into either a hard rain or even a thunderstorm that anyone who has lived in Central Florida, any length of time knows about on an intimate level. 15:27 [SPEAKER_01]: The land off US-19 on the Gulf Coast side of the peninsula is flatter than the east coast scrub, slash pine plantation, cabbage palm hammock, 15:36 [SPEAKER_01]: Scrub Jay Habitat, country where a body left in a wooded clearing in early June is, within a day, going to begin to undergo decomposition at a rate of temperate and warmth does not produce. 15:48 [SPEAKER_01]: He was nude, lying in a wooded area off the highway. 15:52 [SPEAKER_01]: The same general geography where Richard Mallory had been left six months earlier. 15:57 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been shot six times with a 22 caliber pistol. 16:00 [SPEAKER_01]: The rounds a spread across his torso, his pickup truck was eventually located in Mary and County with a license plates removed and a number of his personal items missing. 16:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Tools he had been carrying in the truck were also gone, so was a portion of his cash. 16:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Six rounds in the torso is a different conversation than two. 16:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Two is what stops a man. 16:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Six is what a shooter fires when they want to be sure, or when they've already lost the cold calculation that turns a killing into a clean job. 16:29 [SPEAKER_01]: The rounds in David's fierce torso were spread across his chest and abdomen. 16:33 [SPEAKER_01]: The autopsy tracks suggested some of them had been delivered, after he was already on the ground, fired downward into a body that was no longer presenting as a frontal target. 16:44 [SPEAKER_01]: The Florida heat had been working on him for the better part of two weeks, by the time his body was found, the skin had blackened along the lines where it had been in contact with the ground. 16:54 [SPEAKER_01]: The eyes were gone, the lower abdomen had been ruptured, the smell by every account from the deputies who responded to the scene. 17:02 [SPEAKER_01]: was a smell you'd remember for the rest of your life. 17:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Animals had visited the Bonnie. 17:06 [SPEAKER_01]: The medical examiner had to work around what was left to figure out what had killed him. 17:11 [SPEAKER_01]: And he was eventually able to recover four of the six rounds from the body cavity, with the other two having either passed through or been worked out by decomposition. 17:20 [SPEAKER_01]: The missing tools mattered, because the tools that came out of David Spears truck ended up. 17:26 [SPEAKER_01]: weeks later on a pawn shop counter in Daytona Beach, Eileen needed cash. 17:31 [SPEAKER_01]: She had taken what she could carry. 17:33 [SPEAKER_01]: She had pawned the tools under one of her aliases. 17:36 [SPEAKER_01]: The pawn ticket with a thumbprint in a signature was sitting in a four-to-pon shop intake binder waiting to be matched. 17:44 [SPEAKER_01]: None of the investigators knew it was waiting there. 17:47 [SPEAKER_01]: David Spears was a quiet, decent working class man. 17:50 [SPEAKER_01]: He had a family. 17:51 [SPEAKER_01]: He had co-workers who had been expecting him at a job site, the weeks that follow a missing person's case, in a working class American family when the missing person is the breadwinner, our weeks of grief that does not show up on the news. 18:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Bills do not stop arriving in the mailbox when a body wroughts in the woods. 18:09 [SPEAKER_01]: But whites have to stay on. 18:11 [SPEAKER_01]: The mortgage payment is due on the first. 18:14 [SPEAKER_01]: Somebody has to call the boss and explain that he is not coming in. 18:18 [SPEAKER_01]: By the time David Spears was identified, his family had been doing that work for almost two weeks. 18:24 [SPEAKER_01]: The Citrus County deputy is working the case. 18:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Did not yet know about the Mallory case in Vluxia County. 18:30 [SPEAKER_01]: The two crime scenes separated by six months in a few hundred miles of central Florida road. 18:36 [SPEAKER_01]: We're sitting in two different file cabinets, in two different sheriff's departments, with no investigators yet looking at them side by side. 18:44 [SPEAKER_01]: The 22 caliber bullets and David Spear's body would eventually, in a ballistic comparison, match the ones in Richard Mallory's, the match was still weeks away. 18:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Meanwhile, a third body had already been left. 18:57 [SPEAKER_01]: Chapter three, Charles Carsketin. 19:01 [SPEAKER_01]: On May 31, 1990, the day before David Spears' body was discovered, Charles Edmund Carsketin was killed somewhere along the central Florida road system. 19:11 [SPEAKER_01]: He was 40 years old, a part-time rodeo worker out of Missouri, traveling at the time of his death. 19:17 [SPEAKER_01]: A man whose absence might not be noticed for days, his body was found on June 6, 1990, in Pascal County, Florida. 19:26 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been shot nine times with the small caliber weapon. 19:29 [SPEAKER_01]: The body had been wrapped in an electric blanket and was, by the time it was found, in advanced decomposition, the wrapping stuck out to investigators. 19:38 [SPEAKER_01]: It suggested somebody who would take in time with the body. 19:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Somebody who had made a decision after the killing about how to leave the scene, the nine rounds in Charles Carsquet in were distributed across this torso, his arms, and his head. 19:51 [SPEAKER_01]: The medical examiner opening the electric blanket in a Pascal County morgue. 19:56 [SPEAKER_01]: Found a body that had been emptying itself into the wool of that blanket for days. 20:00 [SPEAKER_01]: The fluid of decomposition had soaked through the fibers and pulled at the bottom of the wrapping. 20:06 [SPEAKER_01]: The flesh underneath the blanket had partially liquified in the summer heat. 20:11 [SPEAKER_01]: When the medical examiner peeled back the corner of the blanket, the underlying tissue did not hold its shape against the open air, skin came away with the wool. 20:20 [SPEAKER_01]: The face, wet been a face, had become something the human eye does not have a clean reference for. 20:26 [SPEAKER_01]: And the technician assisting with the unwrapping did not look at it directly for the rest of the morning. 20:31 [SPEAKER_01]: Some of the rounds had passed through the body, several had not. 20:35 [SPEAKER_01]: The 22 again entered, timpled, fragmented, and stayed. 20:40 [SPEAKER_01]: One of the rounds had clipped a major vessel. 20:43 [SPEAKER_01]: and dumped a substantial volume of blood into his abdominal cavity, another had entered through his upper arm and worked its way into the chest, along in unpredictable path. 20:54 [SPEAKER_01]: A third had taken him in the head after he was likely already on the ground and lodged behind the orbital bone. 21:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Charles Carsket and did not get a fast death. 21:04 [SPEAKER_01]: He went into shock from bloodboss while he was still conscious. 21:07 [SPEAKER_01]: By the time the ninth round went into him, he had been dying in stages for an extended stretch of time. 21:13 [SPEAKER_01]: While the shooter stood over him and kept firing, a witness had seen Eileen Warner's impossession of car-skidden's car. 21:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Eileen had also ponded a gun identified as belonging to him, neither fact was yet connected to the file. 21:26 [SPEAKER_01]: They would be eventually, they were not yet. 21:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Three bodies, main to June, three different counties, three different 21:35 [SPEAKER_01]: None of the investigators were yet looking at the killings as a series, the fourth man on the list was the one whose body would never be found. 21:43 [SPEAKER_01]: Chapter 4 Peter Simes In June of 1990, a 65-year-old retired merchant Seaman named Peter Abraham Simes left his home in Jupiter, Florida, and started driving towards Arkansas to visit family. 21:59 [SPEAKER_01]: Peter Simes of all the men whose paths crossed 22:04 [SPEAKER_01]: was considered the journalist. 22:06 [SPEAKER_01]: He had retired from the merchant marine and spent the bulk of his retirement working with a Christian outreach ministry distributing bibles doing low key religious volunteer work on his way north out of Florida somewhere along the way. 22:21 [SPEAKER_01]: He picked up two women. 22:22 [SPEAKER_01]: His body would never be recovered. 22:25 [SPEAKER_01]: His car, a 1988 Pontiac sunbird, was found on July 4th, 1990, in Orange Springs, Florida. 22:33 [SPEAKER_01]: The car had not just been abandoned, it had been wrecked, run off a road, and into a wooden area. 22:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Two women had been seen abandoning the vehicle at the scene. 22:43 [SPEAKER_01]: One was described as a heavy set blonde. 22:45 [SPEAKER_01]: The other as taller and thinner, they had argued, pulled bags out of the vehicle, and walked off into the woods. 22:52 [SPEAKER_01]: By the time deputies arrived, the women were gone. 22:56 [SPEAKER_01]: What the deputies were covered from the sunburn turned out to be the most important piece of physical evidence in the entire case to that point. 23:03 [SPEAKER_01]: A public print on the interior door handle. 23:06 [SPEAKER_01]: Other prints on the trunk, the print did not match anybody yet in the final, but they were preserved, photographed, and entered into the National Crime Database. 23:15 [SPEAKER_01]: The accident in July of 1990 was the moment the Florida investigation finally got its first real handhole. 23:23 [SPEAKER_01]: up until then, the cases had been three bodies, three counties, three separate detectives, and no central threat. 23:31 [SPEAKER_01]: The Sime's car crash gave investigators two suspects with Prince and two photo composite sketches based on eyewitness accounts of two women seen walking away from a wrecked car that belonged to a missing minister. 23:44 [SPEAKER_01]: Peter Sime's in the meantime was somewhere. 23:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Florida is full of places a body can be made to disappear. 23:52 [SPEAKER_01]: Cyprus slew's, whose tan and dark water swallows things without remark, sandy backroats that run from miles between citrus groves, coastal mangroves whose roots hold a person under in a few feet of water. 24:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Whatever happened to him, on whatever afternoon in June of 1990, did not happen in front of any witnesses who came forward. 24:13 [SPEAKER_01]: His family would not get a body. 24:14 [SPEAKER_01]: His family would not get a grave. 24:16 [SPEAKER_01]: His family would get a 1988 Pontiac sunbird and a missing person whose file has been open ever since. 24:23 [SPEAKER_01]: The composite sketches went to the floor to media that fall. 24:27 [SPEAKER_01]: By the time they did, two more men were already dead. 24:30 [SPEAKER_01]: Chapter 5. 24:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Troy Buress. 24:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Troy Eugene Buress was 50 years old. 24:37 [SPEAKER_01]: A sausage salesman from Ocalla Florida, working for a meat company driving deliveries up and down the central Florida route. 24:44 [SPEAKER_01]: Yet a wife, kids, the normal middle-life most of us recognize. 24:49 [SPEAKER_01]: He was reported missing on July 31st in 1990. 24:53 [SPEAKER_01]: On August 4th, his body was found in a wooded area along state road 19 in Marion County. 24:59 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been shot twice. 25:01 [SPEAKER_01]: The body was an advanced decomposition because of the Florida summer. 25:05 [SPEAKER_01]: An empty cash bag from a bank near his delivery route was found near the scene. 25:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Whoever had killed him had taken the days receipts. 25:13 [SPEAKER_01]: By the time deputies got to him, 25:19 [SPEAKER_01]: The temperature in that part of the state in late July and early August runs in the mid-90s to the early 100s, and barely drops out of the 70s at night. 25:30 [SPEAKER_01]: A body left exposed in those conditions undergoes accelerated decomposition. 25:35 [SPEAKER_01]: The bloating phase had peaked and given away. 25:38 [SPEAKER_01]: The flesh had darkened and split along pressure lines, insect activity was severe. 25:43 [SPEAKER_01]: Both rounds had been delivered to his torso. 25:45 [SPEAKER_01]: The medical examiner, working with what was left, was able to confirm the caliber, the entry angles, and the rough sequence of the shooting. 25:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Perez had blood out into the leaf litter of a Marion County woods over the same slow window. 25:59 [SPEAKER_01]: The others had. 26:00 [SPEAKER_01]: The two rounds had not killed him quickly. 26:02 [SPEAKER_01]: They had killed him by progressive blood loss. 26:05 [SPEAKER_01]: While he was conscious enough to know it, state road 19 where the body was found runs north through Marion County into the rural Florida interior. 26:15 [SPEAKER_01]: The land along that road is the land of cattle ranchers, citrus groves that have been repainted three times after as many killing freezes, slash fine, homeado scrub, and the occasional 26:30 [SPEAKER_01]: the part of Florida that many visitors don't usually see. 26:34 [SPEAKER_01]: In August, the cicadas in that country are loud enough at midday to drown out the sound of a passing truck. 26:41 [SPEAKER_01]: The afternoon storms come up out of the gulf and roll east across the peninsula on a schedule you could set by watch. 26:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Country where a man's body dragged a few yards off the shoulder into the leaf litter under a stand of pines is going to stay invisible to the passing traffic. 26:57 [SPEAKER_01]: For as long as the wind does not ship the wrong way, and the scavenger stays out of sight, his wife's name was Wethabras. 27:05 [SPEAKER_01]: She would, in the years to come, become one of the most public faces of the family members of Eileen Moreno's victims. 27:12 [SPEAKER_01]: She attended hearings, she attended the eventual execution. 27:16 [SPEAKER_01]: She spoke on the record about what it was like to have a husband who would simply not come home from a sales route one afternoon. 27:23 [SPEAKER_01]: Netha is a figure who carries the long, quiet way of this case. 27:27 [SPEAKER_01]: By the end of August 1990, four men had been killed along Central Florida Highways, inside three months, all middle-aged white men, all traveling alone in vehicles, all shot at close range with a small caliber weapon, all found nude or partially nude in the wooded areas, off state roads or interstates. 27:47 [SPEAKER_01]: The pattern was now visible to investigators, comparing notes between counties and the bulletins were going out across multiple jurisdictions. 27:55 [SPEAKER_01]: They had a serial offender on their hands. 27:58 [SPEAKER_01]: What they did not yet know was that the offender was not a man. 28:02 [SPEAKER_01]: Chapter 6, Charles Humphreys, Charles Richard Humphreys was 56, a retired major in the United States Air Force. 28:12 [SPEAKER_01]: After his military career, he had worked in two roles, he had been a state child abuse investigator in Florida. 28:18 [SPEAKER_01]: He had served in a different period of his life as chief of police. 28:22 [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, whose entire adult professional wife had been spent investigating people who hurt people, particularly people who hurt children. 28:30 [SPEAKER_01]: He was killed on September 11th, 1990. 28:33 [SPEAKER_01]: His body was found on September 12th in Marion County. 28:37 [SPEAKER_01]: He was fully clothed. 28:38 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been shot six times in the head in torso. 28:41 [SPEAKER_01]: His pockets had been turned inside out. 28:43 [SPEAKER_01]: Whoever had killed him had stripped his pockets 28:48 [SPEAKER_01]: And not bother to undress him, six rounds head and torso. 28:53 [SPEAKER_01]: The autopsy detail on Charles Humphries is the detail that closes the self-defense argument, the moment a juror reads it, the shots to the head were grouped. 29:03 [SPEAKER_01]: They were not a single panicked round followed by chaotic other shots. 29:07 [SPEAKER_01]: They were placed, two of the rounds in the head, had clustered on the same side of the skull, on a tight pattern that suggested the shooter had not been moving while firing, powder stippling on the skin around those entry wounds, confirm the close range. 29:22 [SPEAKER_01]: The shooter had been standing within an arms length of him at the moment of those rounds. 29:27 [SPEAKER_01]: A third round had taken him from the back of the head, 29:30 [SPEAKER_01]: lodged in the soft tissue at the base of the brain. 29:33 [SPEAKER_01]: The rounds in the torso were also a tight pattern, whoever shot Charles Humphrey's had taken the time to aim. 29:40 [SPEAKER_01]: The brain stem damage from the headshots would have ended consciousness almost immediately, which is, in the dark math of this case, a small mercy Charles Humphrey's received that several other victims did. 29:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Not, he did not get the wrong bleedout and a wooded clearing. 29:56 [SPEAKER_01]: He got something faster. 29:58 [SPEAKER_01]: The rounds in his torso were surplus. 30:01 [SPEAKER_01]: The shooter had kept firing after the threat had stopped existing. 30:05 [SPEAKER_01]: His car was found a week later in Suani County. 30:08 [SPEAKER_01]: The license plates had been removed. 30:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Items were inside the car had been taken. 30:13 [SPEAKER_01]: The Humphrey's killing complicated the moral architecture of the case more than any of the others. 30:18 [SPEAKER_01]: I leaned with later claim in the video tape confession she gave, that all seven of the men had begun some form of sexual aggression towards her, and that her killings were therefore self-defense. 30:30 [SPEAKER_03]: And then never worked when I had weapons of other weapons. 30:34 [SPEAKER_03]: I never could defend myself, so I only got a gun for it would be defense. 30:42 [SPEAKER_04]: how many times you're reading four and a half years you live with a time awarding you can have to think yourself. 30:49 [SPEAKER_03]: I was reading three times, and there was two of the rest of this right again that I didn't use it. 30:56 [SPEAKER_03]: They just took their own three young times a second. 31:01 [SPEAKER_03]: Need to hurt him because they didn't use any weapons on me or anything. 31:05 [SPEAKER_03]: And the other three, I had two gas guns and both fighters. 31:08 [SPEAKER_03]: That raped me, beat up four on those. 31:12 [SPEAKER_04]: So you say there are five lines in and think you're so full with where it's why you're being bring a foot and you're seeing it. 31:22 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the two guys that look like about 22 and the 27, that's when I have to go and just be familiar. 31:30 [SPEAKER_01]: Asked about Charles Humphrey specifically, she would tell investigators that he had attempted to assault her, Richard Mallory's last night, given his Maryland record, makes the self-defense framing very plausible, but the geometry of this killing was not the geometry of a fight. 31:46 [SPEAKER_01]: It was of an execution. 31:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Chapter 7, Walter and Tonyo. 31:52 [SPEAKER_01]: Walter and Tonyo was the last man, 62 years old, a trucker, also in another part of his life, a part-time security guard, in a police reserveist for Bernard County, Florida, like Humphrey's before him, the seventh and final victim had given part of his life to law enforcement. 32:09 [SPEAKER_01]: The irony does not skirt by this podcaster that many of the victims who picked up island warnos were cops in some form or another, perhaps the same law enforcement officers involved in sex workers' things across the country. 32:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Walter disappeared on November 18, 1990. 32:28 [SPEAKER_01]: His body was found on November 19, in a remote area, near a logging road in Dixie County, Florida. 32:34 [SPEAKER_01]: He was nearly nude, wearing only socks. 32:38 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been shot four times in the back and head. 32:41 [SPEAKER_01]: His car was found five days later in Bernard County. 32:44 [SPEAKER_01]: The license plate had been removed. 32:46 [SPEAKER_01]: Dixie County sits up against the golf in the big bend. 32:55 [SPEAKER_01]: It is some of the least populated country in the state, the land flat, the drainage's poor, most of its timberland, working pine plantation, and slow brown rivers that carry tanned and out of the swamps. 33:08 [SPEAKER_01]: The logging road where Walter Antonio's body was found ran through one of those timber tracks, and mid-November the temperature in that part of the state runs in the 33:24 [SPEAKER_01]: The afternoon storms taper off, the air takes on the dry clear quality that the Florida winters wears for a few months before the spring humidity rolls back in. 33:35 [SPEAKER_01]: It is by Florida standards the gentlest part of the year, and is also the part of the year when a body left in a pine plantation on a logging road in country where the nearest house is miles away is going to why undisturbed until somebody happens to drive past on the right kind 33:54 [SPEAKER_01]: The geometry of those wounds, when investigators reconstructed the full story of a man who had been turning to run, or who had already turned when the shooting started, the first round by the autopsy track had entered through the upper back and traveled through the right thoracic cavity, opening the right lung. 34:13 [SPEAKER_01]: The second had entered the lower back, enlarged in the abdominal soft tissue, severing a kidney along the way. 34:20 [SPEAKER_01]: The third and fourth had been to the head, and they had been delivered after he was already on the ground or going down. 34:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Walter and Tonyo had not been facing his shooter when she opened fire on him. 34:32 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been trying to get away, the blood pattern, the body's position, when found, and the angle of the rounds confirmed it. 34:39 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been killed running. 34:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Walter Antonio's killing came almost exactly 12 months after the killing of Richard Mallory. 34:46 [SPEAKER_01]: 12 months, seven men, the arithmetic when investigators eventually lead the dates outside by side, told the story almost on its own. 34:55 [SPEAKER_01]: This was not a series of opportunistic encounters. 34:58 [SPEAKER_01]: This was a person operating at a sustained pace, accelerating slightly toward the end, who had killed roughly one man every two months for a calendar year, with the gap between Mallory and Spears, as the only meaningful pause. 35:13 [SPEAKER_01]: That pause in the larger outlook of the case looks like the time it took her to convince herself the first one had been justified. 35:21 [SPEAKER_01]: that she could do another, and then nobody was coming for her. 35:24 [SPEAKER_01]: By the time Walter and Tonya was found, the investigation had finally started to come together. 35:31 [SPEAKER_01]: Chapter 8, The Composite. 35:33 [SPEAKER_01]: By the fall of 1990, several Florida law enforcement agencies were comparing notes, Volusha County Head Mallory, Citrus County Head Spears, Pascal County Head Carskiden, Marion County Head Breast, and Humphrey's Dixie County Head Antonio, the case filed on Peter's Signs with no body but with two suspects and two home prints. 35:55 [SPEAKER_01]: was sitting open in another department. 35:58 [SPEAKER_01]: The breakthrough that finally tied them together started in late summer. 36:02 [SPEAKER_01]: Winballistic analysts and different counties began running the 22 rounds recovered from each victim. 36:08 [SPEAKER_01]: Again, see each other, the match was conclusive, the same weapon, or the same kind of weapon, had been used in all of them. 36:15 [SPEAKER_01]: A single 22 caliber pistol, central four to wide, was leaving rounds in middle-aged men, picked up off the sign of the road. 36:24 [SPEAKER_01]: This kind of finding ends a case being 7 separate files and 7 separate counties and starts it being one investigation. 36:32 [SPEAKER_01]: A Florida Department of Law Enforcement Officer named Bruce Munster had begun pulling the threads together. 36:38 [SPEAKER_01]: He would eventually be on the receiving end of Eileen's video tape confession a few months later. 36:44 [SPEAKER_01]: In the meantime, his job was to get the various pieces of physical evidence in the various counties to start telling a coherent story. 36:51 [SPEAKER_01]: The composite sketches from the science car crash hit the wires that fall. 36:56 [SPEAKER_01]: Florida newspapers ran them. 36:58 [SPEAKER_01]: Television stations ran them. 37:00 [SPEAKER_01]: Tips came in for people who recognized one are both of the women. 37:04 [SPEAKER_01]: In the sketches, and on a particular afternoon in the last weeks of 1990, or perhaps the first days of 1991, Eileen Warner sat outside her motel, along the central fort of coast, and watched the sun go down. 37:18 [SPEAKER_01]: She was alone. 37:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Tyra had decamped to Pennsylvania. 37:22 [SPEAKER_01]: She had been moving between sheet motels and roadside bars along the i95 corridor for weeks. 37:29 [SPEAKER_01]: She was drinking, she was broke, she was running on the fumes she had been running on for 34 years, and the people around her, by then, were no longer in any position to do anything about it. 37:40 [SPEAKER_01]: The motel was a place she had stayed at a thousand times in her adult life. 37:45 [SPEAKER_01]: Single story, hated some pastel that baked a chalk under the Florida Sun, a row of doors, a row of windows, a row of metal chairs out front where the residents could smoke, a parking lot whose asphalt held the heat of the day long after the day was over, a motel that took weekly rates and did not ask questions. 38:06 [SPEAKER_01]: She sat in one of those metal chairs. 38:09 [SPEAKER_01]: In late December, along that coastline, the sun sets low. 38:13 [SPEAKER_01]: By 530 in the afternoon, it has come down towards the inland edge of the peninsula. 38:18 [SPEAKER_01]: The light it throws back at the Atlantic at that hour is a long-flat gold that turns as the minute passes into orange and then into a deeper orange. 38:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And then into the particular Florida violent, that only happens when there are clouds in the western sky to catch the last of the wave lengths the sun is still able to send up. 38:38 [SPEAKER_01]: The water on the eastern horizon goes black before the sky does. 38:42 [SPEAKER_01]: The height tumulus catches the color and holds it. 38:45 [SPEAKER_01]: The whole production lasts maybe 20 minutes, and then it is done, and the dark moves in fast from the east. 38:52 [SPEAKER_01]: She had a cigarette, she had a drink in a plastic cup, the motel office handed out for free. 38:58 [SPEAKER_01]: She had whatever weight she was carrying inside herself that afternoon, which by then was the way of seven dead men, plus the long accumulated weight of everything else she had been carrying since 1962. 39:10 [SPEAKER_01]: To the west, inland, building over the interior of the peninsula, there was a storm cloud, late season clouds, dark at the base, why did the top, where they enveloped flying down against the upper atmosphere, the kind of cloud at the locals along the coast learned to read. 39:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Because the clouds at that distance on that bearing on that schedule, is the cloud that is going to be over your house in about two hours, bringing rain and wind in the particular feeling of pressure, the human nervous system registers before the storm actually arrives. 39:43 [SPEAKER_01]: She was watching the sky. 39:44 [SPEAKER_01]: She did not know what was already in motion behind her. 39:47 [SPEAKER_01]: The composite sketches from the science car crash were already in the Florida newspapers. 39:53 [SPEAKER_01]: The thumb prints on the pawn shop slips had already been pulled, somewhere in an office in Daytona Beach. 39:59 [SPEAKER_01]: A file on Richard Mallory was being walked across a room to a desk where a file on Peter Simes was waiting for it. 40:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Somewhere in a different county, a sergeant named Bruce Munster was looking at a court board with pins on a map of central Florida, and the pins were beginning to take shape. 40:16 [SPEAKER_01]: The investigation was no longer seven separate files and seven separate counties, 40:21 [SPEAKER_01]: The investigation was one thing, and the thing it was had a name attached to it now, and that name was hers. 40:28 [SPEAKER_01]: The storm cloud to the west of our kept building. 40:30 [SPEAKER_01]: She finished her cigarette. 40:32 [SPEAKER_01]: She put it out on the arm of the metal chair. 40:34 [SPEAKER_01]: She watched the violet goat gray. 40:36 [SPEAKER_01]: She watched the gray goat to dark. 40:38 [SPEAKER_01]: She got up, eventually, and went back inside her room.
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