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This is Andrea Gunning from Betrayal.

Are there two sides to every story?

Academy Award nominee Robin Wright stars in the girlfriend on Prime, a psychological thriller that will make you question everything.

Laura has the perfect life and a son she'd she'd die for.

But when he brings home his new girlfriend Cherry, played by Olivia Cook, something feels off.

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Don't miss the girlfriend, streaming now exclusively on Prime.

Sometimes the truth is just a matter of perspective.

I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson.

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

And 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.

Hi, Kate.

What is going on here?

I can see your eyes.

What?

You can?

Are you impersonating Kate?

Who are you, really?

I don't know if you've ever seen my eyes without glasses because I always wear glasses and this is brand new for me.

Maybe in London.

Or no, you know, didn't you take some photos in Denver without your glasses?

Yeah, no, okay.

But that was it.

But you were concentrating on you and your poses, your model poses.

I don't think you were paying attention to

my face at all.

He was really working it.

I could tell you've done it before.

Strike a pose, right?

Yep.

So I'm in the contacts.

Still pretty weird.

I will say if I get anything wrong, we're going to blame the contacts.

We're not going to blame me because I'm getting used to them still, but I do like them.

So, and I know you prefer them.

Well, you know, I prefer them just for convenience, but I don't see as well because I've got that monovision set up where one eye is set for distance and one eye is set for kind of computer, you know, length, not reading length.

And when I'm looking at my computer screen, even things are a little fuzzy.

Now, is your prescription similar or are you for just like close-up?

So I have kind of a mix.

It's a little fuzzy looking at it right now.

My eyes, I think, are still adjusting to it, but it's been really cool to actually wear sunglasses.

We have all of these super smart audience members, and they email me with all kinds of advice, people who work at Costco and, you know, who have experience with fitting people with glasses.

And so everybody's been giving me different advice.

So I'm adjusting.

I'm wearing sunglasses, which is great.

I never got prescription sunglasses.

I never got the like snap-on things.

I've just been sort of dealing with it.

So yeah, this is new.

This has been good for me.

Now, are you okay with getting the contacts in and out?

No, I am not.

Ever since you told me that you don't like to poke at corpses with eye issues,

I've had a slight nightmare about my eyes.

So first of all, I went to YouTube and YouTube was sort of helpful.

There are a couple of folks on YouTube who have giant eye models, so you can see kind of like they have a giant lens that looks like it's about two feet long, so you can see the curve of the lens.

And then they have like a giant eye, and they'll kind of demonstrate how to do it.

I think I'm going with the tip-in method, where I kind of go in the lower eyelid and then sort of pull up my upper eyelid.

I don't know, I'm just happy I can get them in.

That's it.

Yeah, getting them in for me now has become routine.

Sometimes I can struggle getting them out.

Yeah.

You know, and it's, I vary.

I'll try to keep like a thumbnail a little bit longer so I can kind of catch an edge as I try to swipe them out.

But then I've also caused my eyes to bleed.

Oh, gosh.

So, you know, just I need to be a little more gentle with my eyeballs.

Yeah, you're making it worse.

I've been looking YouTube.

YouTube told me to kind of get them out.

You kind of pull them down and getting them out is getting better and better.

I know I just need more practice, but in the summers, when I'm not teaching, that's when I have time to concentrate on like this kind of stuff where I just need to get used to something or, you know, landscaping or anything that I need to get done.

So, this is my summer project: trying to get used to no glasses.

So, we'll see.

I can see, I can read.

I think it's going to be fine.

Hopefully, you know, I can keep up with everything.

So, we'll see how it goes.

Well, you look great.

So,

thank thank you.

And that really, that's what counts.

You know, you could be blind as a bat, but you look great.

You know, that's putting priority there.

That's it.

That's it.

Well, speaking about our listeners, I get a lot of emails, which is nice from folks with recommendations.

And I have one from someone named Haley.

And it's a story from her area, which is in Pennsylvania, that she thought was important.

She sent a pretty lengthy email with a lot of great details that we used, and she signed it, Justice for Edith.

So this is a story that's almost a hundred years old.

And this is what I mean, that when we have family members and then just people from the community a hundred years later who feel really passionately about these historic stories, that's why we do the show.

Is you know, you get to know by reading the backgrounds of these people who have been murdered.

We get to know them and we feel like we know them by the end of these episodes, hopefully.

That's my goal.

And so she felt like she really wanted to know more details about this story.

And stories are important.

And so throughout this, I'm going to want to talk a little bit about why prosecutors work hard to try to put together some kind of a narrative for a jury to understand because that's how we kind of get through life is through these kind of stories, right?

Well, you know, for sure.

And when it does come to, you know, prosecuting a case, the jury needs to understand, of course, what happened happened in the case, as well as the veracity of the information they're hearing during the trial process.

But they also have to make a decision of guilt or not.

You know, so it's, you know, it's important that the DA, the prosecutors are able to convey things appropriately.

And then, in our system, of course, that the defense gets their adequate representation.

So, you know, now the jury is having to balance

the information that is more geared towards incrimination and the information that's more geared towards exculpatory.

But what if you, as a prosecutor or as an investigator pitching to a prosecutor a case, what if you don't have a good story?

What if it's like, I don't know why he or she did it.

I can't explain it.

We have some good circumstantial evidence.

We can run the DNA, but we cannot find, no matter what we do, an affair, money hidden, anger, anything.

They were the perfect couple.

What if there's there's no story to sell a jury and not as much evidence as you would like?

Aaron Ross Powell, having motive is ideal,

you know, and that really helps as part of understanding why the crime occurred, but it's not necessary to prove who did the crime.

So that's part of, you know, moving forward is sometimes there are cases that get prosecuted.

We have no idea why,

but the facts are there.

You know, the the beyond a reasonable doubt is there.

You know, the information that supports that legal criteria is present.

Don't have to answer the question as to what was the motive.

Okay.

Well, we've talked about all of this.

Let's go ahead and get into the story.

We are in 1935, Pennsylvania, which I love, love, love Pennsylvania.

Let's go ahead and set the scene.

We are going to start with the discovery.

A lot of times I want to get into who the victim was first or who the killer was or leave it all a mystery.

But what I want to do is get into

how the victim was found and then we'll proceed from there, if that works for you.

That works for me.

Okay.

Saturday, June 15th, 1935.

We're in Bangor, Pennsylvania.

This is about 40 miles north of Allentown, very close to the edge of the Poconos.

Have you been to the Poconos?

I have.

Love it.

Love it.

Love it.

I have not.

Oh, gosh, Paul.

I know.

I am sorry.

Road trip.

You know, when I lived in Maryland,

and I'm talking now, like,

geez, second to the fourth grade.

I know with my parents, we went up to Pennsylvania and then saw some of the sites up there, but I don't think we ever even got up to Philadelphia.

So Bangor, Pennsylvania is, I have no idea what that's about.

Well, we'll learn a little bit about it.

Mostly, we're going to concentrate on the victim.

So again, 1935, American Sherlock was set 1921 to 1933, but I had to go kind of before and after to cover my forensic scientist Oscar Heinrich's life.

So I feel pretty comfortable with the forensics that were happening at this time period.

You know, some blood stain pattern analysis, not with this case necessarily, but that was around.

Fingerprinting was around, ballistics were around, a little bit of profiling, blood typing, not yet, I don't think.

So yeah, so we're kind of in the nascent nascent time of forensics here, but there's some, I think, some pretty good things that we can pick up on here.

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.

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

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okay there is an 18 year old woman who is not our victim she is going to be someone who makes the discovery her name is Olga de Thomas and she's watering her garden with her mom And again, this is June 1935.

Really dry couple of weeks.

It's the summer.

So she goes to the family's outdoor cistern.

This is probably the fourth time we've talked about a cistern.

And had you ever heard of it?

Before you met me, had you been familiar with a cistern?

Yes.

You know, just from the kind of the general concept, I never had a case.

in which a body was recovered in a cistern.

But, you know, on the West Coast, you generally don't see those.

Now, we had wells,

you know, out there in California.

But in terms of this, concept of a cistern that was in all these farming communities and everything else, no, I mean, it's that would be a new experience for me for sure.

Yeah, I mean, and cisterns kind of come in all shapes and sizes and locations.

I had a story set in Austin on Tenfold that was a cistern in a basement, which basements are kind of unusual here, a cistern in a basement where they would retrieve water and it was lined.

So, you know, it's a container that can be underground and it's lined in some way.

We on my family farm had a giant concrete cistern that was lined, but it was above ground.

So it's all over the place.

Okay.

So we have Olga and she is pulling the cover off of the family's outdoor cistern where she's going to get some water.

And this is a cistern that is very deep, 17 feet deep in her parents' backyard.

And there's not a lot of people who know it's actually there because it's covered and not above ground.

And it's filled with 11 feet of water.

So when she gets the lid off, she sees something white floating in the water.

She doesn't think much of it.

Animals would get into the water sometimes, which just sounds disgusting, but I've seen that pop up in a lot of stories.

Cats drowning, the lid comes off like they would in a will.

So a few hours later, she mentions it in passing to her fiancé is a guy named Joseph.

And Joseph goes and pulls the cover off the cistern and he sees that the white thing is a body.

He calls the police and this is a technical question for you.

The police struggle for hours to pull this weighted down body.

So if you're doing the math, there is 17 feet of cistern and it is filled with 11 feet of water.

So we're talking about six feet before she hits water.

It's a woman.

The coroner is trying to help get her out.

It's so difficult that he breaks one of his ribs.

How would you remove a body now from this type of situation?

Do you have any idea what kind of mechanism they would use so that it doesn't damage evidence?

With the depth of this well, we are talking, this is a difficult body recovery, generally speaking.

This is where now, if I'm responding out today, you know, I'm not equipped to remove a body from this type of cistern, from this type of depth.

This is where I'd probably be calling fire out, or I would be calling out different aspects of, let's say, our public works department.

And so they've got all sorts of equipment.

So, I'd rely on these experts in terms of, okay, what kind of mechanism do you have that would allow us to be able to get this body up?

And also assess, do I even need to get a person, a sort of a rescuer, to go down there in order to be able to maybe get some sort of platform that this body could be moved on and strapped on before the mechanism could haul the body up?

The big concern is you can't really do any type of true forensic processing with the body down at this depth inside the cistern.

So, all this removal needs to be done in a way to protect the body and anything that might be adhering to the body, the clothing or any other types of evidence within the water.

I don't want the body hitting against the walls of the cistern coming up.

So, it needs to be, it's not just a yank the body up.

It needs to be a very controlled process.

And then, after the body is out of the cistern and is documented and assessed on the surface, of course, I want to see what is down in the cistern.

And my question would be, can I drain the cistern, right?

You know, or is this something where we might have to get the dive team out and you get somebody down in there?

Maybe there's a gun at the bottom of the cistern or a knife, you know, so that is important.

And then, of course, the surface around the cistern has to, you have to pay attention to it in terms of, you know there's activity with the discovery of the body and this is a form of contaminating the crime scene because now there could be shoe impressions the cover has been moved but is there anything that the offender who whoever deposited this body there has left behind you know so that is all part of the crime scene and it is should be done in a very stepwise and methodical way you think about oga being able to see something white floating down in the cistern.

Well, you know, before the top of the water, it's six feet down.

If this was a very narrow cistern, the light getting down there for Olga to see anything probably wouldn't happen.

So I imagine that the opening of the cistern is, I'm going to just speculate.

Let's say three feet wide at least.

Something like that, which allows the water to get down six feet into this hole and lights up.

what's present within the water.

So this is the cistern, and this is a detective bending over, and you see there's a big, I mean, I think you are about right.

Maybe this is even bigger than three feet.

You know, taking a look at this photo that you're showing of the top of the cistern, what I'm seeing is that I'm surprised it's actually a square opening and that the cover

appears to be a wood cover that's possibly hinged and it's opened up.

I'm estimating that this square opening is roughly three feet by three feet, which again, I think would allow the light to get down the six feet into this hole.

so Olga could have seen this body.

Now that opening is completely flush with the ground.

So this is where now the offender isn't having to lift the stone and the body up over some sort of wall structure.

Literally could slide the stone and Edith's body into this well.

And look at the background.

This looks rural to me.

There's brush.

Maybe it's even up against a hill.

This is supposed to be somebody's backyard, but this looks pretty maybe isolated based on this photo.

At least with, yeah, the backdrop behind the cistern, there's a fair amount of dense vegetation.

You know, that would be interesting.

Is this cistern completely surrounded by this type of vegetation?

And maybe there's a trail that leads to it.

Because part of assessing, okay,

how well known is this cistern?

Is this something that somebody driving by, you know, in a neighborhood road or on a, let's say, a trail would see?

Or is this something where somebody had to have prior knowledge that this cistern existed in order to decide, yes, this is where I'm going to take this body?

I think investigators say I don't think anybody except a member of this family or a neighbor would have known about this.

And also, look, this is dirt.

This is, you're right, flush against the ground.

I think the lid is wood.

So it would have just

melded right into the dirt.

It's the same color, basically.

Right now, in my experience, I've had cases that are kind of what appear to be similarly isolated.

So you think it's only select individuals.

What you don't know is

people who have kind of walked through here, played in this location as a kid, creepers that are out there pushing through the vegetation to peep into houses.

You know, so you can have somebody that has no connection to the family or to the property that has knowledge that the cistern exists.

So that's just always going to be a factor, no matter how isolated this location is.

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 and Bimini 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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This is Andrea Gunning from Betrayal.

Are there two sides to every story?

Academy Award nominee Robin Wright stars in the girlfriend on Prime, a psychological thriller that will make you question everything you think you know.

Laura has the dream job, the perfect husband, and a son she'd die for.

But when her beloved Daniel brings home his new girlfriend Cherry, played by Olivia Cook, something feels off.

Is Cherry the sweet, innocent girl she appears to be?

Or is there something more manipulative beneath the surface?

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Also starring Lori Davidson, the girlfriend is a twisted game of cat and mouse where nothing is what it seems and everyone has something to hide.

Don't miss the girlfriend, streaming now exclusively on Prime.

Sometimes the truth is just a matter of perspective.

So things we know so far, it's a woman who's found naked, and I'll give you some more details about how she died, damage, all that kind of stuff.

But we do know that very few people knew this cistern even existed.

So we can look at Olga's family just initially.

We can look at Joseph and her mom.

And as of right now, those are the only people that we know know anything about this cistern.

It doesn't seem like it would be obvious to anybody but someone in the family or a neighbor.

So

when they are pulling her out and they lay her on the ground, they note several things.

One, she has no clothes on except for a single dark glove on one hand.

The reason the body was so difficult to remove is that a large rock had been tied with a quarter-inch 11-strand clothesline wire.

The wire was wrapped around her neck and throat, under both armpits, and over one thigh before wrapping around her back.

Two additional links were made into loops, which were then tied about the rock.

And the rock was 125.

So the combined weight was 275.

So she weighed about 150 and the rock was about 125 is what they're saying.

Now I found a photo of the wire.

So thick metal wire and there's the rock.

Look at that rock.

Wow.

Okay, so I'm looking at, I'm assuming this is one of the investigators that is holding up this wire.

And it truly is a metal wire.

The wire itself, I can see, has been, you know, shaped.

You know, they obviously at this point have removed this wire from around the victim's body, but it is still kinked, and the wire has some significant girth to it.

Now,

I can't tell if there's a shadow that looks thinner or if there's thinner wire that was utilized and then they cut that off, like if there's thinner wire that had been used as binding, but the wire that appears to, I can't tell if it's still connected to the rock, and I'll talk about the rock in a second.

This isn't going to be an easy wire to wrap around a body or that rock for that matter.

I think it's something that a man would be able to bend and shape, but it's, in my opinion, it's a poor choice.

It's basically the offender could have chosen a better material.

Now, this rock.

That is a significant rock.

This thing is, I would say, this is a boulder.

It's at the left foot of this detective.

This detective, I'm just going to assume, is

average male size.

But this rock is extending up to.

Almost his knee.

Almost his knee.

And

it's got a base to it.

Now, I don't know what kind of rock this is.

Obviously,

depending on the stone.

It's limestone.

Sorry to interrupt you.

It's limestone.

Well, limestone is not as heavy as granite, as example.

So

it's not going to be, you know, if it was granite, it'd be, holy smokes, how did this person move this?

But at the same time, you know, this is a massive object for the offender to have to be able to move while this stone is connected to a 150-pound-ish woman, you know?

So I see this and I start thinking, are there multiple individuals involved in disposing of the victim's body?

I start leaning that way.

I wouldn't say it's impossible for a single offender to accomplish this, but that's a much bigger stone than I was envisioning.

So to me, there seems to be several different possibilities.

And before you know anything even about the victim, because you don't even know anything about her or anything about the potential killers we have here, to me, there seem to be a couple of different possibilities for premeditation.

One is it's not premeditated at all.

She's either killed there, or let's say she's killed there, there's an argument, and there happens to be wire that is laying around because this does look pretty dense and rural to me, and this rock, and they panic and drag her over and figure out how to dispose of the body.

Two, somebody carries this wire, which doesn't look very easy to do to the scene, but not the rock.

And then three, they carry both to the scene with the intention of disposing of a body.

None of them sound good to me.

This just seems so hard, but it would have concealed the body well, I guess, except somebody looked into the cistern.

Right.

You know, and that's really, you know, getting answers to that question.

Was this material present right there by the cistern?

And that's, of course, interviewing Oga.

her family, other people who interact with the cistern.

Is that something that they say, oh, yeah, that rock used to be over here and that wire, you know, was over on this side.

And so the offender just utilized materials at hand.

If this stone and if this wire is foreign to the scene, then where did it come from?

And how did it get to this location?

And this also would suggest that possibly the victim had been killed at a separate location and then brought to this location along with the material to weigh her down in the cistern.

That's indicating, at least for body disposal, the offender or offenders developed a plan and chose the sister because they had prior knowledge of that cistern.

Well, let's move along and get to who this is and what her injuries are.

So I mentioned that ultimately the coroner was the one who helped remove her and he broke a couple of his ribs, one of his ribs, trying to get her out.

She's naked.

She's got this single dark glove on.

It is alarming.

to everybody there.

There's a researcher who I'm going to refer to a lot named Brian Carroll who did tons of, I mean, pulled all kinds of newspaper articles and really put some great stuff together.

And he said that a single dark glove had been a hint during this time period of a secret criminal society of extortionists known as the Black Hand Organization.

And so immediately that's what everybody thought, but it was always a black glove placed on a victim if they were murdered, not a blue glove.

And this was a blue glove.

So, you know, already I think investigators are trying to figure out how did this woman end up at the bottom of a well, strangled, it sounds like, with the same wire.

Now, will you also talk to me about that?

Would that have been easy with this wire that you're looking at to strangle somebody with it?

Is it malleable enough, you think?

Well, I think if the wire is something that the offender could manipulate and cinch around the victim's neck, then

it's entirely possible.

Right now, you know, I need to know more about, you know, the, you know, if they have autopsy results, does she have any other injuries?

You know, was she completely bound prior to possibly being strangled?

Is it possible she has other injuries to indicate that she

had lost consciousness?

So just don't know right now.

But the wire itself, I'm almost got the sensation in my hands in terms of how hard this wire would be, is that once this wire is bent and it's bent enough to where it's cutting off circulation to the victim's brain, at least, you know, closing off the jugular veins.

And then all you have to do is just kind of bent, you don't have to tie it in a knot, you just have to kind of bend it and it's going to stay in place.

This is a stiff wire.

You know, there's no way it's going to be tied into a, you know, a bow knot.

You know, it's, it literally, all you have to do is just kind of cinch the two ends around each other and leave it in place So yes, I think it's I mean it is entirely possible the victim could have been killed using this wire, but I definitely want to know more Okay, well, let me give you more so the autopsy finds that there's a wound to her head which is a large bruise above her eyebrow extending to the side of her head.

They think that she was hit with a blunt object before she was strangled with the wire and that her right wrist is broken.

And we don't know if this is the same wrist that the glove was on.

Is it possible, though, that all of these injuries are the result of the haphazard way they were forced to get her out of the cistern, or would this have been obvious?

I think the strangulation would have been obvious, but what about this kind of bruise that they're talking about?

Aaron Powell, well, the fact, you know, a bruise is, you know, hemorrhaging of blood, you know, through the lower layers of the skin and, of course, into the muscles.

That would indicate to me that if a bruise had formed, that her heart is still pumping.

The assumption right now is that she's dead when she goes into the cistern because of the metal wire around her neck.

But did they just put that on at the last minute while she was still alive and then throw her down in the cistern?

And of course, now you have at least an impact.

Don't have an answer to that question.

But, you know, a theory could be developed that she had received a blow to her head prior to being strangled.

That blow could have dazed her, maybe render her unconscious, just depending on

how hard that blow would have been.

And then there really is little resistance from her to the strangulation.

Now, her right wrist is broken.

So is that, you know, it's like, well, where is that broken at?

Is it just dislocated through the wrist bones?

Or was her, you you know, the forearm bones, the radius, the, you know, ulna, were those broken down towards the wrist?

That indicates at least a level, significant amount of force, you know, and did the offenders do that, or is that a transport injury?

I often see bodies that have been, they're dead, but now they're being put into vehicles, removed from vehicles, drug across, you know, surfaces like the ground.

Those bodies will have a lot of abrasive injuries and all sorts of surfaces, and oftentimes with weird directionalities, you know, so I call those transport injuries because, especially, like with this body, again, 150-pound woman, this body is going to be hard to move

around because of the sheer weight, especially if it's just a single offender.

And now you have that, she's nude, all this exposed skin that's going to be drug across rough surfaces.

And so, you see that, you know, so that's again part of why I like to look at photographs so I can start accurately kind of reconstructing, you know, the sequence of events, fatal injuries versus transport injuries, and start forming opinions as to what I think happened.

Let's talk real quick about time of death.

The coroner looked at her and said, I think she's been in a cistern between four and eight weeks.

I will tell you, Paul, we know that she went missing once we find out who this is in January.

And we're in June.

How can you be that far off unless she was held for however long?

But I will tell you there were no obvious signs of sexual assault and she wasn't pregnant.

Determining time of death is a very approximate science, if you will.

There's a lot of factors at play in this case.

She's floating in water.

I'm assuming, I mean, she's underground.

I'm assuming that this water is fairly stable in terms of its temperature, but is going to be cold relative to the surface temperatures.

Being underwater, she's not exposed during that time to insect activity in all likelihood, nor is there any marine life in the cistern.

So in essence, she's refrigerated, not frozen, unless the cistern would freeze at the wintertime in northern Pennsylvania, and that would be part of assessing what's going on.

But all of...

you know, that aspect is a huge variable that can really throw off, you know, let's say how much decomposition and other factors that a pathologist could potentially use to estimate time of death.

If she's in the water for six months, she's not in good shape, you know?

So that's going to, you know, complicate assessing, you know, some of the aspects to what, you know, what kinds of injuries she may have.

So I didn't realize that she had been in the water that long.

About five months, January, mid-January to mid-to-late June.

Yeah, so I do think that the big question, obviously, it's kind of gross to think that the family could be drinking the water as his body is sort of, you know, decomposing in that cistern.

Yeah.

But she goes missing back in January, this victim.

It's when does she go into the cistern?

That's going to be the big question.

And so that's where now assessing the body.

If the pathologist is saying, what was it, four to eight weeks

for time of death?

Well, maybe he's looking at

the condition of the body isn't as bad as what you would expect it if it had been floating in the cistern since January.

Is it possible that she had been held alive for a period of time and then placed, killed, and then placed in the cistern?

Don't know at this point in time, but maybe the difference of what the pathologist is saying and why he's so far off is because she had been held alive.

So more information in terms of the circumstance, you know, who the victim is, when she goes missing, all of that has to be kind of assessed within that context and within that possibility.

Well, the victim is complicated.

First of all, just to get this out of the way, you know, they couldn't identify her.

There's nothing else in the well.

It's just her with one glove on, nothing else.

They drain the cistern.

So they bring in some local dentists and they use dental records to discover that it is a woman named Edith Ford.

She is 37 years old and she has been missing since January 12th, so five months earlier.

She was last seen leaving her mom's house.

She had dinner there.

Her mom is a widow, and she was very elderly.

Edith was one of 14 kids, but you know, five of them had died.

Her family was in poverty.

She was never reported missing.

She would work in Atlantic City as a waitress.

There were rumors, unfounded rumors, that she was a sex worker when she would go to Atlantic City.

She also worked at a silk mill in Redding, Pennsylvania.

And, you know, Bangor is about 70 miles from Reading and about 150 miles from Atlantic City.

She was going very long periods of time away from her family.

And I guess they just didn't hear from her.

So this is why this has taken so long just to discover her, but also, you know, for her family to essentially say, well, this is the last time we saw her once they identify her.

Okay.

And where did she live relative to where her body was found?

Edith lived in Bangor, in the town of Bangor, and so everything is pretty centralized here.

So I don't think very far.

All right, so that's that gives me some optimism.

You know, part of this investigation, Edith has been missing since January.

Now it's a matter of basically doing a canvas of the town, and that could be done through flyers.

Of course, that's going out and contacting people.

It's utilizing the newspaper to try to determine if anybody saw Edith in town, you know, after the family is saying, well, she left, you know, and she would be gone for long periods of time.

Are we able to narrow down, you know, this window from the time that Edith was last seen alive to the time that, you know, her body was found?

Do you have any information along those lines?

Do.

So once the police find out who Edith is, they talk to the mom.

They find out that Edith had been to her mother's house.

Her sister had made dinner, and they point her towards where Edith lives.

They go and they find love letters from a local man in his 50s who is married.

And a lot of people know that he has been secretly dating, I guess not so secretly, Edith.

He is an Italian immigrant.

His name is Giuseppe Cimo.

Married.

He has a stepchild.

And on June 17th, he's brought in for questioning.

So he's part of her tight circle, and they're looking first at him.

So he is a cheesemaker.

And as I said, people know that this is a horribly kept secret.

Sounds like he has a pretty good business.

He's described as having a substantial dairy operation.

And Edith worked for him at some point.

That's how they know each other.

He's described as wealthy.

Italian immigrants were in Pennsylvania at this time and accepted, it sounds like.

So this is a prominent member of the community.

His best friend lives next door to the DeThomas family where the cistern is.

And he lived there at one point also.

Yeah, so he has at least a geographic connection, roughly a geographic connection to where Edith's body is found.

During the interview, does he indicate when he last saw Edith?

Yep.

So she has dinner that her sister made at her mother's house on the night of January 12th.

She met him at a tavern that night, and they talked for a while.

He says, we had some drinks.

He said, I've got to go check on some cheese, which I don't know why I think that's funny, but he did.

He was a cheesemaker.

He leaves.

When he comes back to see if Edith is still there, she has left to the movies with another man.

And that is it.

That's his story.

She left.

I have no idea what happened after that.

But she's at a tavern.

Do the other patrons at the tavern, are they able to track them down and say, yeah, they saw Edith with this other man?

Aaron Ross Powell, we don't have witnesses who say she left with another man.

So the problem for the investigators is, you know, Giuseppe has some inconsistencies with this story.

There are apparently no witnesses who see her leave with either Giuseppe or a mystery man.

So there is sort of nobody is paying attention to Edith.

She just at some point vanishes.

We don't know with who.

And he just says, I have no idea what happened.

And Giuseppe's best friend also has a geographic connection to Olga's family and where the cistern is found.

Was this best friend interviewed?

He was, and he was the guy who owned the tavern where they were.

He was eventually arrested on a gambling charge a few weeks after Edith's body was found, but they never had enough evidence against him.

And he had not, you know, been somebody who she had been kind of consistently involved with.

There was another man that she had dated, but he was in jail.

Great alibi.

So that was it for suspects.

These three guys, they kind of dismissed the tavern owner and really focused in on Giuseppe because, let me tell you this little story.

There's a local newspaper who reported on a fight between two women that everybody knows was Edith and Giuseppe's wife, whose name was Esther.

They don't name the women, but everybody knows who it was in the newspaper.

I don't know why they just didn't print their names, but they weren't arrested.

There was a physical fight between these two people, and they called it

a fight between a man's wife and his mistress.

The wronged wife hit the other woman with a milk bottle and threatened, quote, additional harm.

So we don't know much more about that information, except that we are connecting it to these two women.

So now you have a scorned wife to throw into the mix, holing a 150-pound woman and a 100-pound stone and tossing it into a cistern.

First, you know, when did this fight occur relative to Edith going missing?

And second, what did Esther say during her interview?

Okay.

It looks like this fight happened the year before her murder, but there were a lot of rumors that the wife Esther

and her son, who was Giuseppe's stepson, had confessed to the murder.

There was newspapers reporting it and people around town because of this fight that was reported.

And the police interviewed Esther and the stepson, and nothing came of it.

They just said, we don't think that they were involved at all.

The only thing I could say is that the police didn't take it seriously.

They dismissed it.

It doesn't mean it didn't happen.

It just means they didn't see any kind of evidence and they focused on the husband.

So this is, as we discussed at the top of this episode, one of the primary motives of why people get killed is this lover's triangle.

Just because Esser and Edith got into a physical fight prior to Edith going missing, that does not necessarily mean that Esser would be the one that would have physically harmed Edith.

But the dynamics of this

relationship between Edith and Giuseppe and Esser after that physical fight probably changed significantly.

Giuseppe's, you know, his marriage is

probably

not good.

And there may have been a deterioration in the relationship between Giuseppe and Edith, where now he's thinking, I've got to end this relationship.

He places himself with Edith.

He's the last one to see her alive before she goes missing.

He has general knowledge of the location.

where Edith's body was found.

He also has a friend who is at the tavern, owns the tavern where Edith was, per him, last seen alive.

Of course, you've got this mystery man that he's saying that Edith went to the movies with.

However, there's several factors that

seem to be pointing at Giuseppe.

And this is where start taking a look at Edith and the stone and the wire and how she's being disposed.

Are we dealing with more than one offender?

I think from an investigative aspect, is taking a look at the best friend.

Is he an accomplice?

He gets arrested two weeks after Edith's body is found.

Now, it's an unrelated charge, but that's something that investigators can leverage in order to get information.

You put jeopardy on somebody like that.

We're going to charge you with the maximum for this criminal charge.

Plus, if we find out that you helped either in the homicide of Edith and or the disposal of the body, we're going to charge you with this unless you cooperate with us.

You make him nervous.

You make him go, oh, now, even though Giuseppe's my friend, I don't want to go to prison.

It doesn't sound like the investigators did that in this case.

Yeah, I think they really dropped the ball here.

It doesn't sound like the tavern owner, whose name was Al Shook, was ever interrogated about this.

Let me give you a little bit more information about Giuseppe's night, what he says happened.

He said that

he went to go check on his cheese, and when he came back, she was gone to the movies is what he had been told.

He said that when the movie was over, he went over to the movie house.

It was probably the only one.

And he said that he watched her come out with another man and they got into a car with New Jersey plates and they took off.

Giuseppe went back to the tavern and he stayed until about midnight.

And that was about it.

He said that they went, you know, and drank some more beer somewhere else.

But I will say this: this is an interesting little note.

You and I talked about whether or not she had been held because this time of death was so different, five months versus four to six weeks.

This is where the nice thing about stomach contents comes in.

The police said to her sister, Hey, what did you cook for her that night?

And she said that she had made pickles and some liver and some potatoes, and that's what they found in her stomach.

So all that time, she had been dead.

So it sounds like that's when she died, was that night that she went missing.

No, that last meal is pretty gross.

Don't be judgy.

Pickles and liver.

Hold on, let me give you a better idea of it.

I love learning about food.

Liver sausage, fried potatoes, pickles, bread, and butter.

And that's what shows up in her stomach contents.

So that's how we know she wasn't held.

Okay.

But, you know, this is an interesting addition to Giuseppe's story.

You know, so he comes back to the tavern.

Edith and

other man have left and gone to the movies.

He tracks down, you know, where they went to the movies and sees Edith leave with another man per his statement.

Now, here's another factor in terms of motive.

You think that there would be jealousy.

He's been having an affair with Edith.

He went out to the tavern to have drinks with Edith.

Maybe he thought that that night was going to go differently.

And when he bails to go check on his cheese, Edith gets bored and she finds another man to spend the evening with.

So, you know, now,

again, this is where aspects of him just keeps adding up.

I'm kind of curious as a cheesemaker, you know, this cheese factory, was this metal wire that was found around Edith's body, was there a source of it?

at his cheese factory.

It doesn't sound like investigators found that.

Doesn't mean there wasn't, because now I kind of mistrust investigators here.

That is it.

They are at a dead end.

They cannot figure out anything else.

I know this is very frustrating.

I'm not sure we've encountered investigators who have ever done less than this.

I mean, this is not seemed like a lot.

Giuseppe, he is brought in for questioning and he says, listen, I'm a cheater, but I'm not a murderer.

And that's it.

Yeah.

You know, and I most certainly can't pin Eda's homicide on Giuseppe with the information we have.

Right.

But he's in in play as a suspect.

This man that Giuseppe claims he saw with Edith and get in the car after the movie theater would be in play if they would have been able to identify the man.

You know, part of assessing this case is the condition of Edith's body.

She's found completely nude.

I'm assuming they never found her clothes.

And the placement of this glove on one of her hands.

Even though they say there's no signs of sexual assault, and we've discussed this before, doesn't mean that sexual sexual assault did not occur.

So, you know, anytime a woman's body is found nude, that generally is going to suggest that maybe there had been some sort of sexual motive to the crime.

Secondly, the placement of the glove on the hand, that's very unusual.

I'm assuming this is not Edith's glove.

This is not something that she wore that the offender just never took off.

You brought up this research that this other, was it an author had done on this case?

Yes.

Yeah, about this culture of, you know, victims who were killed by this black glove society or whatever you called them.

They would put a single glove on the killer's hand.

I'm assuming that this was something that was known to the general public at some level, and not just within law enforcement.

Right.

So there's two interpretations I have about the glove on Ida's hands.

One, let's say this is a predatory crime and that the placement of the glove on the hand was maybe like a taunt or it was something that was significant to the fantasy of the predator.

But this very unusual black glove society that's operating in the area suggests to me the more likely scenario is that whoever killed Edith knew about this group and was trying to stage Edith's death to make it look like this group had killed her.

If this is the case and you have that type of staging, that's because the offender knows that the investigation is going to look at him.

And now he's misdirecting the investigation by utilizing this glove and trying to throw it over onto this black glove society.

He just happens to use a blue glove.

He doesn't have access to a black glove or whatever it is.

You know, that...

That staging aspect is behaviorally hugely significant.

And you take a look at who likely would be focused in on the investigation.

It's somebody close to Edith.

And Giuseppe checks that box, too.

So the totality of the circumstances right now, I think Giuseppe is what I would consider a prime suspect.

Sounds like the original investigators thought that as well.

They just didn't, from an investigative standpoint, from witnesses, from forensics, just did not have enough to generate a level of probable cause where now now there is confidence that he was truly the killer.

I don't have confidence.

I just go, I'm eyeballing Giuseppe and Edith's homicide.

Well, one really weird note that I just read about was that there were a couple of letters that went out before her body was discovered, but after she was murdered.

And they were purported to be from Edith.

One went to her brother that I went to Florida.

I'll see you later.

Everything is fine.

That's why nobody thought anything of this because she was kind of a roamer.

So it turns out that Giuseppe admitted that he asked a woman to write this in her best woman handwriting as if she's Edith, addressed to Giuseppe, her boyfriend, who's married.

Dear sweetheart, I'm very sorry for what I have done and can't write so well.

I'm going away to Florida and we'll stay there.

And then she says, I signed the name Edith.

This woman, I don't know what she was thinking by doing this, and then finding out later this woman went missing.

And the police, of course, said, What the hell?

And he said, Well, the guys at the tavern were going to rib me for Edith taking off and leaving.

So I had this woman write these letters when I was drunk to try to explain that she wasn't dumping me for the guy at the movies.

Instead, she, you know, was going off to start a new life.

It still wasn't enough for the police.

So, yeah, just separate.

I mean, come on, this guy, but he gets away scot-free.

I'm interpreting, I can't write so well.

Well, her handwriting is different than Edith's, and so there's that built-in excuse that her handwriting probably, if mom were to take a look at these letters, she'd go, that doesn't look like Edith's handwriting.

Yeah, as I said,

Giuseppe, who knows exactly why was this jealousy because he truly saw Edith with this other man, or was he trying to preserve his marriage or trying to preserve his reputation?

Was Edith going to

threaten?

Is this a time in which she could have sued him over the, what did you call it?

You've talked about that in the past.

Oh, the heart, the heart bomb.

Yes, I think so.

Yeah.

You know, so there's, I think there's several different motives that Giuseppe had, and then everything else is adding up.

It's just too bad that they couldn't make a case on him at that time.

I bet there would have been a prosecutor that would have filed this case and prosecuted.

I think there's enough potentially there.

It all is dependent upon that timeframe and what

prosecutors felt comfortable with that they, whether or not they could prove the case to a 12-member jury.

But right now,

just with what I know, if I'm sitting on the jury, I'd go, it's him.

So really the conclusion of this is nothing happens with Giuseppe.

His wife dies in 1941.

This is six years after the murder of Edith.

He remarries, and then he ends up living until 1968.

Oh, wow.

For a very long time, nothing is reportedly happening with him that we know of.

So there you go.

I think somebody you and I are both pretty certain was responsible for her murder has gotten away with it and probably has gone on and lived just a fine life.

I mean, unreal.

So

this is one of the frustrating things about the time period.

We have investigators in the 1800s that nail the right people and, regardless of what you think about their punishments, are punished.

The right people are punished.

And then there are times in 1935 where I think, wow, this probably could have advanced differently with just a different investigator or something.

I'm disappointed in this case because I think that there were some things that were missing, but there you go.

I mean, he was not that smart, but he did do some stuff that it sounds like got him out of this.

Aaron Powell, you know, part of the aspect of law enforcement here in the United States is, you know, there's, I believe it's over 14,000 different law enforcement agencies, and there's so many, that's such a spread of experience and expertise.

You know, Banger is a town today that has a population base of, you know, it looks like over roughly 5,200 people.

What was the experience and the expertise of the investigators that looked into this case?

I bet there was probably a chance that they had never looked, worked a homicide case before.

You know, so this, if this case had occurred in 1935 in maybe a larger jurisdiction that had experienced investigators, knew how to interview, knew how to do the follow-up on at the time the type of physical evidence they needed to look for, like going to the cheese factory and looking for the metal wire, source of metal wire there, I think that a case would have been made against Giuseppe and probably relatively easily.

Well, my eyes need a rest.

Now they're tired.

They're tired from all of this reading through.

This was an interesting, very frustrating case, but there are some things that we covered that I'm always interested in: recovering bodies from water, time of death.

I'm always fascinated by how weather accelerates decomposition or slows it down.

How do we figure this out?

How did they figure things out in the 1930s?

So, this was a good case for you.

I enjoyed it.

There is actually a lot to work with in terms of, okay, because of the

circumstantial evidence, coupled with some of the aspects with how Edith's body was disposed of, gives great insight into how the investigation can be conducted and proceed.

And then information that you ultimately told me about Giuseppe, you know, that was, it was just kind of great to be able to put two and two together.

And at least I feel confident in my conclusion in this particular case.

There's been other cases I haven't, but this one, even though they didn't make an arrest and get a conviction,

I am confident that as we discuss this, that we came to the right conclusion.

I agree.

And we will have another probably more ambiguous, less conclusively drawn.

I don't even know what the right phrase is.

I don't know if we're going to have a case closed next week, but we'll try.

So I will see you very soon.

All right.

I'm looking forward to it.

Thank you, Paul.

Thank you, Kate.

This has been an Exactly Right Production.

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

Our senior producer is Alexis Emerosi.

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

Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.

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Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

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

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