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I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson.

I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime.

And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved 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 21st-century lens.

Some are solved, and some are cold.

Very cold.

This is Buried Bones.

Hey, Paul.

Hey, Kate.

How are you?

I'm doing well.

How about you?

I'm doing good.

It's getting warm here, so it gets a little warm in this office.

It does.

Yeah,

I think we've all heard about that.

The man cave slash.

I'm glad you're calling it an office now.

I think it was usually just your man cave, but for video, it's a little different, right?

Nope.

That's absolutely it.

I'm hoping not to start sweating.

I know, me too.

I had to turn my little air conditioner off in the cottage.

It's going to be steamy in here pretty soon, but I'll just talk faster.

No big deal.

All right.

I'll try to keep up.

So I've been working on some stress relief stuff.

And I know you do a lot of outdoor stuff, and I do too.

My mom is a huge gardener.

And so I sort of started picking up gardening.

And And I'll enjoy it.

Do you do any planting, or you and your wife do any kind of vegetables or anything out there?

Well, living in California, I did a lot of, not so much gardening, but a lot of landscaping.

I installed, you know, multiple backyards from the sprinkler system to grading to building retaining walls and planting all the various, you know, types of trees and shrubs and stuff.

I did try at one point to have a little vegetable garden where I lived.

I mean, it gets so hot, you know, it just, it just didn't didn't really work out very well.

And then now here in Colorado, you really can't, where I live, you know, if you plant anything, you're going to attract the deer or you're going to attract the bears.

And so it's just like, nope, I'll just keep the natural, you know, plants and stuff around the house.

Yeah, I understand that.

We have tons and tons of loads of deer in our neighborhood, and people try everything, including my mom.

They put the little tents over them to try to get them to stop eating.

But we don't really have them over in our joint.

So a friend of mine had built me a raised bed a long time ago, and I could not handle a raised vegetable bed.

And so I bought myself just a small little vegetable box and killed everything

last year.

except, well, the heat did.

I'm going to blame Texas heat.

The heat did, except, I'll tell you what survived.

Strawberries were awesome.

Tomatoes were great, except the stupid squirrels.

I love squirrels, but they're stupid in this case.

And then jalapenos did really well.

So guess what I bought this year?

Because I want my self-esteem to continue to go up.

You're going to be redoing jalapenos, tomatoes, and strawberries.

Yeah, I was a big failure with cucumbers, but I bought a peach tree this year.

And so I'm really excited about those.

But now I have a whole bird netting that goes over it because the squirrels and the birds love these peaches that are green little peaches now.

So I get what my mom, my mom has just been so into plants for so long.

And I get what she likes about it.

It's really relaxing.

And you go out every morning and kind of check on everything.

Yeah, you know, I think I travel so much, I would not be able to give it the attention that it probably would, something like that would need.

Well, I really took an interest when I got the cottage because it's sort of, I've put pictures on Instagram of it.

We have a forested area in the back, even though, you know, we have a fenced in backyard.

And when we bought it from the original owners, it had just been so overgrown.

I didn't even know what was back there and we eventually cleared it out kept all the trees we have cedar and we have some cedar elm and and a lot of different kinds of trees and i was sitting in here in the fall last year and the cedar elm was this beautiful color when it turned it was like a mustard color a wind came through and it like rained cedar elm leaves all over the place and i think that's what convinced me to go ahead and um start trying with trees and vegetables and everything else so it's satisfying to me yeah i find it relaxed boy both of us need anything that can can relax us besides, I know, whiskey and cider for me.

No, you'll have to have to send me some photos of some success.

I will.

I'm going to try to post more photos.

I posted, starting a couple of months ago, I started posting on Sundays just some cute photo of something that's going on in my life.

Usually it's like the dogs.

People love Ruby and Bailey.

Or I have a hummingbird feeder.

My kids love the hummingbird feeder.

And so I did post some cottage stuff, but I'm going to try to do some trees and vegetables.

It makes me happy.

Yeah.

And, you know, not everything that, you know, I post, of course, has to do with these shows or the death or anything else.

And so I'm trying to look really more positively, you know, these days, especially.

Well, you have to have something that distracts you.

And that's where like me taking my Jeep out or mountain biking, you know, it just gets the mind away from sort of the drudgery of the cases, you know, because I get involved in so many different cases now.

Yeah.

Speaking of getting dragged into the drudgery of cases, that's what we're doing now.

I'm going to drag you into the drudgery of the case.

I wonder if you're going to know this case.

It's from 1970 Sacramento.

Oh, yeah.

Well, you know, of course, I wasn't living in California back in 1970.

And Sacramento, you know, my focus was the unsolved cases in the Bay Area.

So very, very familiar

down in the Bay Area.

But there's a chance I could have heard something up in Sacramento.

When I was in San Francisco working for a network, we were in Sacramento all the time.

And I really liked to go.

I loved visiting there.

One of my favorite places to go visit, going back and forth.

So let's go ahead and set the scene.

This is autumn of 1970 in Sacramento.

And this is the story of a woman named Nancy Benelak.

And she's 28 years old.

And she is a native of Grass Valley, California, which is nearby.

But she's in Sacramento.

Is Grass Valley, are Are you familiar with that?

I hadn't been there before, I don't think.

Yep.

You know, that's just kind of in the foothills, past Sacramento, Folsom area.

It's a beautiful place.

A lot of law enforcement relocates there when they retire.

Okay.

Well, this sounds like a really, really, really nice area.

This October, we're doing something very different.

We'll be recording Buried Bones live at sea.

That's right.

Kate and I will both be part of the first ever True Crime Podcast Voyage, hosted by Virgin Voyages and iHeart Podcasts.

This is five nights of mystery, luxury, and Halloween fun, sailing to the Dominican Republic, Ambimini, Bahamas, adults only.

No kids, no stress.

Expect a live podcast recording of buried bones, crime-themed trivia, behind-the-scenes sessions with iHeart hosts, and yes, plenty of surprises.

And it's all wrapped in the full Virgin Voyages experience.

20-plus eateries, Michelin star chef-curated menus, lux staterooms, Wi-Fi and entertainment included.

It's not just a cruise, it's a celebration of thoughtful true crime storytelling, and we want you to join us.

Book your cabin now at virginvoyages.com/slash true crime.

That's virginvoyages.com/slash true crime.

We'll see you on board.

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Nancy is someone who has been well liked by her peers.

She was a cheerleader in high school.

Doesn't always mean you were well liked, but it's a point.

She was in high school.

Everybody, you know, when she was in high school, people seemed to really like her.

She made good grades.

She had a lot of friends.

And she graduated in 1960.

So she went to school for stenography.

And then she became a court reporter at the Sacramento County Juvenile Court in 1966.

I am beyond fascinated with court reporters and what they do.

And I know it's changed.

And I don't, you know, I've had to write about it several times just because I have, you know, of course, these old cases.

I think my 1952 case, we had to touch on whatever the court reporter was doing and the device they were using at the time.

I don't know very very much about it.

I know you've been there with them, but do you know a lot about court reporting?

No, you know, of course, I've testified a ton.

You know, I've testified close to 200 times over the course of my career.

And I was the court reporter's worst nightmare because when I'm testifying, I'm a very fast talker.

And literally, these gals throw up their hands and say, slow down.

So I'd have to kind of remind myself I need to talk, you know, very very purposefully.

And of course, with the scientific side, you know, there's sometimes there's some of the, some of the technical terms that have to be spelled out for them.

But how they are able to keep track in real time with that device, because there's many times where, you know, the judge or an attorney needs something read back that was just stated.

And that she's able to take a look at, you know, what at the time was printed.

I think I'm sure they're electronic today and go back and say, okay, defense attorney asked this question, the witness, you know, responded this way.

The prosecutor kind of, you know, and so how they keep track of all that is just amazing.

I guess attention to detail and definitely keeping attention in general.

And Nancy seemed to do that very well.

So she is 28.

She's a court reporter in Sacramento.

She has a very full personal life.

There are quite a few people in this story.

Luckily, you know, we'll have a lot of clarity later on, but I'll just start introducing them to you.

She's engaged to a guy named Ferris Salami,

and he is the chief public defender for the county.

What does that person do?

Is that, I don't know why, I feel like I've not heard that phrase very often, chief public defender for the county.

Yeah, you know, the various public defender's offices and DA's office have different rank structures.

So I'm interpreting chief public defender as he is, in essence,

the top administrator for the public defender's office.

Probably has had a very significant legal career and then promoted up through the ranks.

So I'm somewhat surprised.

She's at the time 28 and she's dating the chief public defender.

You know, in court, they would be bumping into each all the time.

So you could see where they would be getting to know each other just because of the court.

I would expect him to be older.

How old is he?

So what I'm reading about Ferris is that he represented some of the Capitol's most notorious killers.

He died in 2018 at 84.

So he was born in 1930.

So he was 40.

Okay.

But I mean, is that a conflict of interest?

Would you think that would be a conflict of interest or no?

No, you know, because the court reporter really is a part of that neutral party of the court, you know, so I don't see where there would be any issues there at all.

Okay.

So this is an exciting time in her life.

She's planning her wedding.

She's trying on dresses, looking forward to the future.

And, you know, as I sometimes do, I wanted you to see what she looks like.

So open up your document that I sent you and look on page one, but don't go past page one.

And then you'll see a photo of Nancy.

I see a photo of Nancy.

It's a cropped photo.

There appears to be maybe a man's arm around, you know, around her shoulder, like he was standing next to her, holding her.

But he's been cropped out.

So taking a look at the photo of Nancy, it's, I mean, she's attractive woman.

She's got the old style hair.

I'm not sure what you'd call that, like a buffant or something.

I love it.

That's a big, that's a big head of hair.

I love it.

Yeah, I love it.

She was stylish.

Yeah.

You know, and it's, that's like when I do the cases from this era, you know, that's part of the, the interesting aspect is looking at, you know, the victims in terms of in life, you know, the family photos or whatever.

You know, it was a different era.

Okay.

so we are in wedding planning phase, right?

And she's supposed to quit around November 30th.

So now we go back a couple of more weeks, probably about two and a half weeks, and we're on Monday, October 26th, 1970.

And this is where people start becoming alarmed about the story.

She doesn't come to work that day.

So this is her last few weeks of work, essentially.

And she doesn't show up.

Nobody can reach her by phone.

She has a phone at home, of course, no cell phone because it's 1970, but you know, she has has a phone at home and nobody can get a hold of her.

They think that this is odd, of course, and out of character because she's a very reliable person.

Somebody reaches out to Nancy's sister, whose name is Linda, and they want to know if she has any information.

So her sister does some brainstorming, and then about 10 o'clock, she calls a family friend who's a guy named Jack Moncrieff.

He lives in the same apartment building as Nancy.

So she's on the second floor and Jack is on the first floor just beneath her.

And over over the phone, Jack, who is looking out his window toward the building's parking lot, he says to Linda, your sister's car is here.

She's in the parking lot.

And he said, you know, I'll go upstairs and make sure she's okay.

But when Jack knocks on Nancy's door, she doesn't answer and the door's locked.

So let's pause here so that you can kind of gather your thoughts on what we have.

I know it's pretty vague right now.

Nobody's seen her since it sounds like Sunday.

And her car is in the parking lot.

She was expected to be at home anyway.

She was in for the night, and her door is locked.

And Jack will say in a minute, he doesn't see anybody jimmying anything open.

There doesn't look like any violence that's happened on the exterior of that door.

You know, this sounds like the, you know, prototypical, we need to do a welfare check.

You know, Nancy is a very responsible woman, has a stable job, has not had this type of absence.

And the fact that her car is in the parking lot and her apartment is locked, it's like, well, is she in the apartment?

Has she suffered some sort of health issue?

You know, like say she had a stroke or has foul play happened?

Again, was she a victim inside the apartment or was she a victim that has been abducted away from this location, taken, let's say, in the offender's vehicle?

If you are Jack, do you, if we have three doors, do you try to find another way in because you're worried about your friend?

Do you contact the apartment manager to try to get a key or you just flat out call the police because you're worried at this point?

Well, I think, you know, at this point, I'm not sure what, you know, how much concern Linda is expressing, just like, hey, this is unusual.

So I imagine Jack is just kind of, you know, walking around the perimeter of what he can of this apartment.

Are there any open, you know, are there any windows where he can have, you know, visibility inside?

And then eventually that's where it's like, well, let's get the apartment manager and have that

person go in.

That's typically what ends up happening.

And then if something's discovered, if something bad is discovered, now you're getting law enforcement rolling out.

Okay, but what if they open the door and she's sleeping with another guy or something else is happening?

I mean, you're running that risk of a manager using the key when all this woman wanted was privacy and locked her door.

Right.

You know, and so that sometimes happens.

You know, sometimes, you know, law enforcement does a welfare check and sees something where they have to force themselves in.

And it turns turns out, well, the person was just living their life and didn't want to be disturbed.

But some private party on the outside, whether it be a family member or somebody else, has called law enforcement to say, hey, can you check?

Because

this is not right.

That's why we're looking for patterns, right?

She didn't show up to work.

That was weird.

Yeah.

And her car is in the parking lot.

Okay.

So Jack does what you say.

He finds the apartment manager.

It's a guy named Victor Anderson.

And see, now we've already come up with three or four male names, and then we've got Linda.

So this is kind of a big cast.

So Victor is the apartment manager.

They go up this second floor to Nancy's apartment.

He uses his master key.

They get inside and they look around the apartment.

Nothing's happening.

Nothing seems touched.

And then they get into the bedroom and that's where they find Nancy.

And she is deceased and she's laying down in a pool of blood in her bedroom.

And I actually have a photo that Maren was able to grab off of a TV show.

She sometimes has to do this when we can't figure out where photos are.

She'll just take her camera and take a photo of it so that we can at least show you some stuff.

She has a photo that this show cut out that shows the position of her body.

And then, of course, you know, we'll have medical examiner stuff.

And then there's how everybody reacts to this.

So what do you want to do first?

Well, just describe what they see.

Okay.

So he rushes back down to the apartment and he tells Linda that, you know, this is what's happened.

She's dead.

I don't know anything about it.

She's face down and she has blood everywhere.

The police arrive, and here's what the scene is.

She is naked except for a pair of underwear.

She has more than 30 stab wounds.

Many of these are on the front of her body, but investigators also think that Nancy's attacker rolled her over, so onto her stomach, before he tried to or she tried to decapitate her.

She has defensive wounds on her hands and arms, and there is a large slash on her leg, suggesting that she might have put up a fight.

And I have a photo of the position of the body, but it's been cut out just for, you know, privacy's sake, I guess.

And then there are some other clues at the scene, but that's where we are.

30 stab wounds, and there is evidence of sexual assault.

Yeah, so I'm looking at a photo, and this is a photo that shows on the left-hand side of the photo appears to be the bed.

And then you have this white, almost like a mannequin, laying face down on the floor.

So somehow,

you know, with computer graphics, they were able to very precisely remove the visual aspect of Nancy, but maintain the proportions of her body, the arms being folded up, the legs kind of sticking straight out.

And then it appears that

her head might be on what looks like a pillow with some blood staining on the pillow.

I don't know if they remove, so let's say the blood pool or any other of the blood patterns that may have been present, if they digitally remove those from this photo, because that's what I'd be interested in taking a look at.

Plus, I'd want to see the stab wounds.

I want to see the types of blood flows out of the stab wounds to indicate the motion.

You know, you imagine that the offender is probably initially attacking her and they're face-to-face.

That's why she has a lot of the stab wounds to the front of her.

Plus, the defensive injuries,

And a lot of the blood in stabbing scenes often come from cuts to the hands, cut to the arms.

And now

during the commotion, during the battle, you're now getting blood being flung off from the limbs.

Is that blood on the pillow, do you think?

Is that, I mean, I know it looks kind of weird with this photo, and they've obviously altered some stuff, but is that a big blood pooling on the pillow that her head's face down in?

You know, well, it's hard to say how big that blood pool is.

What ends up happening is you get the fabric, the blood flows through capillary action, spreads as the blood feeds that fabric.

So oftentimes, you know, it looks a lot larger than the amount of blood that was probably deposited.

But

if he tried to decapitate her.

And if she may have already been dead at this point, her heart isn't pumping, but there could be a significant amount of blood from what I'm assuming is going to be a cut neck, a cut throat, and that would all be underneath her.

Okay, so this is something unusual, I think.

And you could tell me what you think about the police theory.

Near Nancy's body, and now I don't think you can see that in the photo, but I have a separate photo.

Near her body, police find a bloody piece of masking tape, which has been curled into a circle shape, kind of like a band-aid that you would put on the tip of your finger, I think.

Okay.

They theorize that the murderer had wrapped tape around each of his fingers to hide his prints.

I don't know know why you wouldn't just wear gloves, but that's what they think.

And one of these popped off.

That, of course, suggests to them that there is pre-planning involved here, which I think probably is the case anyway.

What do you think about that theory, number one?

And number two, if you look on, I think it's page three, you'll see what they're talking about.

Yeah, I was, when you initially described it, I was like, that doesn't sound right.

But this does look like, you know, in essence, it looks like a band-aid that was over the end of a finger.

Yeah.

And it appears to be quite bloody.

You know, why would the offender wear something like that?

You know, it's possible.

Maybe he had, you know, some pre-existing cut, and that was all he had available to put on his finger.

And it just is coincidental that it drops off

during the attack on Nancy.

Now, back during this era in the 1970s, fingerprints is the primary concern of the offenders because that's how law enforcement could actually identify you.

And so these offenders will try a variety of different things to hide their fingerprints from being, from leaving their fingerprints behind.

You know, most commonly, it's wearing gloves, you know, but you do have some offenders that will, you know, they've tried to use sandpaper to file down, you know, their, the ends of their fingers.

They'll try, you know, put glue, you know, on the ends of their fingers.

You know, and it's just sometimes some of

these alterations just make their fingerprints more unique, particularly when it's scars.

So I'm not sure what's what's going on here just yet, but yeah, that is odd, but it also is potentially a great source of offender DNA.

And it looks like they've saved that, which is good.

And there's more DNA floating around that I can tell you about.

So, we've got that, that finger covering.

They say investigators don't think that the killer intentionally took, of course, this piece of tape off and left it behind.

They think it slipped off in the struggle.

And there's a knife, which we know gets really bloody, and people get cut when they stab people.

So, it looks like because of the defensive wounds, she was fighting back to begin with.

Right.

There's no murder weapon found at the scene, but a pathologist will later guess that it was a very sharp knife with a three or four inch long blade that was used to kill Nancy.

Is that because he found a pattern of depth that showed kind of a consistency?

Is that where he would have come up with that?

Right.

So, and this is where sometimes

the size of the knife can be exaggerated because they will misinterpret the wounds.

So you think about aspects on your body, let's say a stabbing to your abdomen where there's no bony structure underneath.

So a very short blade, you can push much deeper into the abdomen.

And so the stab wound is much deeper than the actual length of the blade.

So for the pathologist to kind of conclude this was a three to four inch long blade, I'm assuming he's looking at a stab wound in, let's say, the chest area, where now you have the ribs, you're not getting that compression, and probably found a stab wound that wasn't significantly distorted.

When a stabbing is occurring and the victim is moving, oftentimes the stab wounds, the knife cuts.

You stab in, but then the victim kind of moves.

And now the stab wound is much larger looking than what the actual width of the blade is.

And so that's where a pathologist has to evaluate.

the stab wounds and find a stab wound in which it would be, okay, this is not a compressible area on the body.

And it doesn't appear that the knife cut sideways, if you will, while it was in the body.

So that's where he can take a look and go, okay, it's a single-edged blade or it's a double-edged blade.

It's so long, it's, you know, it has a certain width and starts forming opinions in terms of the type of knife.

Is it a pocket knife?

Is this something you know that that's like a bowie knife, a big, you know, big like hunting type of knife?

If this turns out to be a stranger versus, you know, somebody in her social circle, do you think that

what I hear a lot is that term overkill, 30 stab wounds, trying to decapitate her?

I hear that assumption a lot that this must be something personal.

And I think you've said before, absolutely doesn't have to be personal at all.

It could be pure anger or control or whatever it is.

So why don't we talk a little bit about dispelling that myth, too?

Well, I think, you know, it is not uncommon to have this number of stab wounds.

Stabbings occur, they can be very quick.

And I've previously talked about,

I'm not sure if it was with you or in a different setting, but just watch prison shankings.

You know, they'll release the videos of some guy walking across the yard and another guy comes up and all of a sudden he's stabbing him with a shank.

And within seconds, there's 10, 20 stab wounds on the victim in those situations.

Here with Nancy, you you know, she is being attacked.

And who knows what type of interactions occurred between the offender and Nancy prior to the stabbing starting.

But once that stabbing starts, they often can go very quick in terms of the number of wounds.

And it's not like the offender is sitting there counting one, two, three.

It's just boom, boom, boom, boom.

She's still moving, you know, and the offender is just trying to get control.

And ultimately, you know, in something like with Nancy, you know, it's when is she going to die?

When is she going to stop moving?

I would be looking more if there is something really significant about the location of the stab wounds.

I mean, this could be tough, but like I have some, you know, some of these women victim cases, you know, there's some significant mutilation and you can see a focus, let's say,

you know, a stabbing to the left eye.

You know, why did the offender do that?

When I see that in multiple cases, like it's a serial killer, it's not just the number of stab wounds, but also how is the offender utilizing that knife?

And there's so many different ways.

It all, you know, each case can be different.

So right now, I'm going to assume that there isn't anything that I'm going, oh, there's a significant behavior with how the offender stabbed the victim.

This was more a matter of

getting control over the victim and killing the victim during the dynamics of this, you know, offender-victim interaction.

The cutting of the throat, and I would want to know why they thought he was trying to decapitate.

Did it appear that the knife was being used to try to saw through the vertebrae, like significant, like to literally remove her head?

Or are they just assuming because homicidal throat cuts, I mean, typically go all the way through the neck with a sharp knife?

So they just maybe make an assumption he tried to cut her head off.

I would say what he's doing is he's ensuring she's dead.

You know, and this is part of what people don't recognize.

You know, and I saw this with Golden State killer, Joseph D'Angelo.

Just because they're a serial killer doesn't mean that they're an expert on how to kill somebody.

Right.

And I saw it D'Angelo.

He would, he would check.

And some of his homicide victims, even though they're bludgeoned, he's checking.

He's poking them.

Are you alive?

With this case, that throat cut could just be merely that offender is making sure Nancy is dead when he or she walks out of of that apartment.

It's just like an offender maybe strangles a victim and then puts a ties a ligature on the victim to ensure that that victim is not going to come back to life.

And it sounds like she's really fighting because as I said before, she has several defensive wounds on her hands and her arms.

She's got the slash on her leg.

It sounds like she was really fighting.

But let's go outside the bedroom for a moment because the police are trying to figure out what else happened in the apartment, if anything, to just get some clues on who this might have been.

The bedroom is obviously where the scene of the action has been, but there's nothing touched in the rest of the apartment, which I'm assuming is not particularly big.

There wasn't forced entry, as I had mentioned, on her front door.

And

I think robbery was pretty quickly ruled out as a motive.

I think her sister came in and identified what was there and what wasn't, or another family member.

It definitely seems like it was sexually motivated.

They found evidence of semen in the apartment, but they were very vague about it.

We don't know who this belongs to.

And it doesn't seem like they collected it.

They collected a lot of blood evidence, including, of course, that masking tape.

But I don't think they collected the semen.

And even though they don't say explicitly that she was raped, they're saying that there's obviously been sexual violence that's happened here.

So that's where they settle on that this is, you know, a sexually motivated attack.

And I'm assuming you would agree with that.

You have a nude female that's been stabbed to death in her apartment.

I would say in all likelihood, it's sexually motivated.

You know,

now, could there have been, let's say, consensual sex between Nancy and the offender, whoever that is?

And then an argument ensues and now the offender kills Nancy.

You know, so it's the sex.

aspect is not related to the violence.

You had mentioned early on in the description that she's nude, except her underwear is still on.

Is it like completely on her, like she's normal, like she's just wearing it?

Yes.

You know, and there's different ways to interpret that.

You know, that's part of taking a look at blood patterns and everything else.

Did she have that on

prior to the stabbing start?

You know, is there, again, was there consensual interaction and she starts to redress and then things go sideways?

Did the offender redress her?

Because offenders do redress their victims for whatever reason.

And then, of course, with the semen evidence, you know, it sounds like they're finding a semen stain on the bedding or on a pillow.

Near the body.

We don't know.

Yeah.

Until DNA technology came along, you know, it's really hard to say, well, is that something from a prior consensual encounter or is this something that the offender left behind?

I'm surprised that they must just be looking at, oh, here's a crusty stain.

They could see it, but they don't collect it.

And it typically requires the lab.

to verify that, yes, that's a semen stain.

But 1970, you could do very, very little in terms of all basically you could say, yeah, that's semen, there's a sexual aspect here, but you can't, you couldn't really type it back to a particular person.

And of course, they didn't know about the DNA that that semen stain would have contained.

Well, that's what my question was going to be.

In the 70s or earlier, what would be the motivation to collect a semen stain and preserve it as evidence if the only thing we could really use biologically, actually in the 70s, was blood typing and that was it?

Would they just think, well, we're just going to collect this for some future thing or what?

It's evidence of a crime.

You know, we have statutes for

different sex-based crimes.

And so that semen is evidence that a sexual crime had been committed, depending on where it's deposited and everything else.

So that's just part of normal, proper crime scene investigative processes.

You collect this evidence, even though at that point,

in the 1970s, you couldn't do much.

In Nancy's case,

right now I don't know enough about the semen stain, but that is a significant item of evidence.

And it may just come back to

her fiancé from a prior sexual encounter,

or it could be the offender,

and that could be what could have been used to solve the case if it had been collected.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Now, this question might seem a little odd, but would you be able to tell within a certain time period if the man who contributed to the semen, if he was sterile or not compared to, you know, a different man, and would that be in some case be somewhat helpful, at least like exonerate the husband or something, if there's clearly a sample where the semen is not normal?

Well, the forensic testing does not address fertility per se.

What we look at is we look at, are there sperm present?

You know, so if we have a stain

and are able to, through testing, determine this is a semen stain, but it's a sperm, there's no sperm present.

Well, that could be due to a genetic condition, but often it's due to a vasectomy.

And so now that could be, you know, expressed where now during an interview, you know, let's say, you know, the fiancé Ferris was like, have you had a vasectomy?

You know, and so even back in 1970, you could say, okay, so that possibly is Ferris' semen there from a prior consensual encounter because it's a it doesn't have the sperm present.

Okay.

in part.

I mean, there's, I could go into a, you know, much deeper dive in terms of how we interpret

what we're seeing underneath the microscope when it comes to semen, when it comes to sperm, when the sperm was deposited, et cetera.

So let's talk about now blood, one of my favorite things.

So let's talk about the exit and what they think happened.

So no front door that's been locked, no violence outside of the bedroom, no robbery outside of the bedroom.

And then how does this person get out?

so police look and there's a bloody trail and i'm going to put trail in quotes because it sounds more like droplets but okay you can see where this person went there's a bloody trail leading through the sliding glass door so she's got a door in her bedroom there's a balcony on the other side of her bedroom and then there's you know a staircase that goes down they see this bloody trail going from the sliding glass door that opens to her balcony, looks out onto the back of the apartment building.

And on the the balcony, they find another piece of that bloody tape that I showed you before.

It seems like they're right.

He must have put it on several of his fingers, all of his fingers, which, I mean, just as a side note, just seems a little laborious or inefficient or something.

I don't think I've ever heard that before, somebody doing something like that.

Yeah, no, it's odd.

You know, it's almost as if you remember those true detective magazines?

Yeah.

You know, it's possible this guy was just reading a story and, you know, in that story, you know, the offender offender

in the story had done something like that.

So he thought, well, that's a way to possibly do it.

Seems odd, but it appears that, you know, masking tape is not very sticky to begin with.

But also, if it's now truly getting saturated with blood, it's now coming off, right?

And that appears to be what's happening here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's great evidence, thank goodness.

So, you know, they collect that tape.

Also, when you were talking about that, it reminds me of all of the bad, botched kidnappings that we've dealt with on this show, where it's clear people have watched bad, hard-boiled detective movies or read the books, and they think that you're supposed to make things as complicated as possible.

And then, you know, it all goes awry.

The bloody trail drops down about 13 feet onto the ground below, where the killer appears to have left some shoe prints.

So I don't think, let me look real quick.

So he's on the balcony.

There's the bloody tape.

And then the bloody trail drops off about 13 feet.

Okay, so I'm going to go back and say I was not right.

There was not a staircase.

So he would have had to have dropped down 13 feet onto the ground.

And that's where the drops commence.

And they said that.

The killer appeared to have left shoe prints in the dirt.

Another good thing.

They said that they were made by a, quote, casual boating shoe.

I almost looked that up because I don't know what that is.

It seems kind of speculative, but maybe not.

I mean, would you, you would have now be able to identify kind of a combat boot versus, you know, a lady's shoe.

So I don't, maybe this isn't speculative.

Oh, we use outsole, the, you know, the tread patterns all the time to determine, make, and model the shoe, and even possibly the size range of the shoe that the offender was wearing.

So I'm not sure what the tread pattern for this would look like.

I'm envisioning like a deck shoe, almost like a topsider type shoe.

And so maybe there was sufficient detail that indicated this is the type of shoe that they're looking for.

You know, in this day and age, there are, you know, tread databases that we can,

we would end up like back when I was doing this in the 90s, we would take a photo of the bottom of your shoe impression that we got from the, you know, cast at the crime scene, and that could go to the FBI and then they could search their database and give us a list of possible makes and models of shoes.

And then now I'm at a shoe store flipping shoes trying to find, you know, know, what match.

So I'm imagining they probably went through that type of process.

So because I am a crack researcher and know how to type into Google, it's a moccasin.

I would not call this a boat shoe these days, but I mean, that's what they were.

So this is, would you think this is distinct?

Well, you know, that's exactly like when I said top cider, that's exactly what I was envisioning is that style of shoe.

You know, in terms of what's unique or not, it's that tread pattern.

You know, what did they recover at the crime scene?

You know, is there something unique about the tread pattern from a particular brand of this topsider boat shoe where now they go, okay, it's this type of shoe.

Well,

how rare is this shoe?

You know, most shoes are not very rare.

So oftentimes you don't get investigative leads, but you have to at least consider there's a chance that this is an unusual shoe.

You know, where is it sold?

Is there a customer, you know, database that you can get from the store?

Like, they use credit cards and, you know, start checking the box.

Well, I don't know how helpful that shoe was, but I thought the boat shoe part of it was interesting.

Okay, the trail of blood goes from the shoe print

over to,

it wraps around the apartment building on the sidewalk

and ends in the parking lot.

So then, of course, the police say because it ends in the parking lot and goes nowhere else, that suggests that the person hopped in a car and left.

Does that make sense to you?

It does.

And

the extent of this trail is telling me the offender is bleeding.

So you think about, okay, let's say you have a bloody knife.

Well, there's only so much of the victim's blood on this knife.

So as you are walking away, there may be a few

drips coming off of it, but it's not like there's a source of blood that's constantly feeding it.

So that trail diminishes over time.

Here, you have a trail that's going out of the victim's apartment down onto the ground and around the apartment complex to the parking lot.

That's not coming just off the knife.

To me, that tells me he possibly got cut on his hand and is now, as he's fleeing the victim's apartment, leaving his own blood behind.

That is obviously key evidence.

Yeah, I think he's regretting putting those little finger coverings on the tops of his.

I mean, that just does not seem smart.

Okay.

So what they think happened is that the offender climbed onto a fence, which is just outside of Nancy's apartment, pulled himself over over the railing of her balcony and then entered her bedroom through the sliding glass door I'll explain the sliding glass door and why they think that and it's not simply nobody in the 70s locked their doors because people did lock their doors so given the trail of blood this is also how they think he exited now I don't know how helpful this photo is I feel like I say that all the time but if you look on page four of your nifty photo package, you'll see the back of her building trying to figure out privacy.

I'm assuming we might be looking.

I don't know where the parking lot would be, but you tell people what you see here.

Yeah, so this, you know, I'm looking at its black and white photo, two-story apartment complex.

Appears that the upper story,

there's windows and balconies.

And so this sounds, you know, like the description of the sliding door.

for Nancy's apartment.

There appears to be this fence that's in the foreground a little bit.

And then past that fence, which is very much in the foreground, there's a lot of vegetation,

like viney type of vegetation growing up onto scaffolding of some sort.

So

if the offender is leaving through this,

he's possibly getting some of this

vegetable matter.

you know, on his clothing, caught up in his shoes, et cetera.

So that would be something from a trace evidence standpoint, I would be paying attention to.

I love forensic botany.

I'm so fascinated by forensic botany.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so now you kind of know, and also you can see there's privacy.

So much of it is overgrown.

It's not front and center.

It seems like there's, especially because if this happens late at night, he probably is able to slip over being unseen.

And we don't have witnesses right now who say they've seen anything that the police have spoken to.

Okay.

So they collect the pieces of rolled-up tape and they say they can't pull any prints off of these pieces of rolled-up tape and they can't produce any prints from the scene.

So does that make sense?

Would that be tough from what you saw, those kind of band-aid looking things?

Plus, they're not finding any prints at the scene that they can use.

Yeah, I would say, you know, it's possible that if he had that tape on all his fingers, it would prevent the fingertips from leaving.

prints, you know, but we use all the ridge patterns.

So the palms, you know, the interdigital area,

all of that surface area of your hands can also leave latent prints behind that can be used to identify you.

Just covering the fingertips is not necessarily going to be as effective as what this offender might think.

Now, if they're saying that they're not developing or finding prints,

you can go into any residence.

You're going to find prints.

It's just that are they from?

the offender.

And in this case, I would be looking to see, do I have any ridge detail in the victim's blood?

Because now that tells me that's a focus area for me versus some random print that was deposited, you know, by Ferris, you know, coming over to Nancy's place three weeks ago.

Do me a favor and go back to your photos because I forgot to ask you something.

Go to page two, the body positioning one.

I wanted to ask you about blood spatter and the patterns that you and I had talked about.

So this is on a carpet, a carpet versus linoleum versus wood.

What makes life easier for for investigators when they're trying to look at these patterns with blood?

Is it the carpet?

Because once blood's in there, even stomping over it might not drag it out.

I would think wood floors would be terrible.

Well, the easiest is typically your non-porous surfaces.

So when you start talking, let's say your vinyl or linoleum floor, you know, there the blood isn't necessarily getting disturbed.

Imagine a blood drop hitting a vinyl floor.

It makes a nice circular

drop pattern.

You know, that tells me it hit that vinyl floor perpendicularly versus something that's oblong tells me it struck that floor at an angle.

And so I can start interpreting.

movements based off of that type of pattern, off of that surface, versus a drip onto carpet.

It just gets absorbed into the texture of the carpet.

And if you do have a textured surface, like a very heavily grained wood floor, that can also disrupt some of the interpretive aspects of the blood patterns.

So the smooth, non-porous surfaces are usually the best.

Good to know.

I had been wondering about that, and I was waiting for kind of a carpety type case.

I knew that would jog my memory.

Okay, so, you know, as I said, they collect the blood and they collect all of the little finger coverings that he made.

And, you know, they're hoping that if they find an offender, obviously they're going to be able to compare the blood type, which I know is not always always helpful.

It was helpful with the Jeffrey McDonald case this time period, actually, it could have been this year, with four different people in the house with four different types of blood.

But generally, I mean, was blood typing something that would break a case, do you think, before DNA came along, or was it really fingerprints?

It's fingerprints back in the day now.

You know, the ABO typing, every now and then you'd have somebody who's, you know, a type B, you know, which is, you know, 4% of the population roughly.

But most of the time, you are dealing with A or O,

and that's most of the population.

And then there was other things as the 1970s progressed.

There's other types of typing that we would do, enzyme typing, protein typing.

And so if you had sufficient evidence, blood evidence behind, you could generate a better, more discriminating profile.

But it was nothing like, you know, what we can do with DNA,

never even approached that.

But you could at least say, okay, this blood trail that's leading out to the parking lot, well, that's different than the victim's blood.

And so now you're excited, and we go, okay, so we've got offender blood.

And what type is it?

And then now you start talking to potential suspects.

And part of what you could do,

back in the day, you could either get a direct blood sample or you could determine secreter status and through their saliva determine their blood type if they're a secreter.

So there's ways to more rapidly screen

the suspects using that blood type.

Most of the time, it really didn't.

You could eliminate, you could exclude, but the inclusion was so weak, it didn't make a big difference in the cases.

Well, let's see what you think about this next pieces of evidence here.

We have earwitnesses.

Okay.

They're trying to establish a timeline.

They have interviewed in the one month.

So the month of October and then into when she was supposed to be married, end of November, they speak to more than 500 people.

And this includes a neighbor who says that she thought she heard a baby's cry on the night that she was murdered, followed by hurried footsteps.

And then there's another neighbor who heard a car pulling out of the complex.

If these reports have anything to do with Nancy at all, this puts her murder, the attack and the murder, somewhere between 1 a.m.

and 2.30 a.m.

Monday morning.

And then she's found some like seven or eight hours later.

Okay.

So what do you think about that?

Well, that's probably as good as what you're going to get.

You know, in terms of this baby's cry, of course, could be Nancy's, you know, screaming as she's being attacked in the hurried footsteps.

I mean, this ear witness, of course, is not necessarily going to know what law enforcement knows.

And so if it's a proper interview of the witness, she is relaying sounds that are lining up with the physical evidence, with the crime scene.

So it kind of gives a level of veracity to what she's hearing as being related to

Nancy being killed and the offender getting out of there.

There is a report of an unfamiliar prowler in the area around this time.

They're not saying this night, but around this time.

So this is one of the more vague descriptions.

Five foot nine, 170 pounds, having a Glenn Campbell-style haircut.

Okay.

Right, because you had that look on your face.

I got you a photo of Glenn Campbell so you could see his haircut.

That's on page five.

Well, I can actually, you know what?

I actually can, I can remember what he looked like.

You did.

I think I know what you're talking about.

It's a smart cut.

Oh, yeah, no.

Absolutely.

That's exactly what I was thinking of.

Now, this is a fairly popular hairstyle for guys in the 1970s.

So it really isn't something that is all that useful, but that's interesting.

I mean, you know, I think it's making a comeback because I feel like half of the boys at my kids' school have this sort of haircut.

Now, if you go right below that, but don't go past page six, you'll see a sketch.

Okay.

So this is what somebody said the prowler looked like, who may or may not have anything to do with this case.

But we like looking at sketches and from sketch artists.

And, you know, tell me on a scale of one to 10 compared to the other ones we've had, what do you think about this sketch?

I'm having a hard time seeing how they generated this.

If this was through a,

what did we call them?

It was, you had these identist sketches, these kits that had sort of standardized eyes and nose, and you could kind of piece like a jigsaw puzzle.

Like a Mr.

Potato head for offenders?

Sort of, yeah.

You know, and so the, you know, the witness would sit there and say, no, the eyes are bigger or smaller, and they would just swap out those pieces.

Here, you know, because it almost looks like that's what it is.

I just can't see because you could normally see the

kind of the lines between the different parts.

But he doesn't look very generic.

You know, there appears to be some facial details, you know, sort of this large round chin and, you know, the bigger eyes.

And of course, that hairstyle to where I could see where that, that might be a decent enough sketch for somebody to go, oh, I think I know who that is.

Well, we'll see if it's helpful at all.

So where we are now is police in Sacramento are trying to find this woman.

Clearly, they're working hard at it.

They've interviewed 500 people, and they are going to now start looking at her inner circle.

So her fiancé, her friends, they look at her own father.

They're really digging around here.

So

we are also going to need to talk a little bit about another murder that happens that is very close and is very familiar.

And it makes police wonder if there's a serial killer at work in 1970 Sacramento.

But this is all stuff we have to talk about next week.

Of course.

I know you like this case.

You really, you perk up with it.

So I know this is kind of your thing.

I find it so interesting, you know, how cases were investigated, especially in the 1970s, when we were sort of on the edge of really being able to figure out some pretty cool stuff.

But just please collect all your evidence, even if you think, Lord knows what people are not collecting right now, which could be incredibly helpful in 40 years with technology.

So I think that to me so far is the lesson.

Please collect the semen sample.

Yes, please.

So, okay, so it sounds like we have another case that I'm going to listen to, and we'll see if it's related or not.

You got it.

Okay, see you next week.

All right, sounds good.

This has been an Exactly Right Production.

For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com/slash buried bones sources.

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Research by Marin McClashin, Allie Elkin, and Kate Winkler-Dawson.

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Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

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