Hand Delivered

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In 1995, police in California received an anonymous letter which identified a pair of severed hands as those of a Navy pilot who had been murdered.

The letter described the murder in gruesome detail.

Investigators searched for some clue to the identity of the author and the killer.

San Diego, the second largest city in California, its bay is one of the finest natural harbors in the world and is home to one of the largest naval bases in the country.

In 1994, workers at the San Diego Fibers Corporation were sifting through some cardboard in a recycling bin.

They made a gruesome discovery.

Two human hands.

First, I wasn't sure that this was legitimate.

I thought, you know, a pair of human hands found in a dumpster seemed a little bit strange.

And we collected evidence as if it was a...

a normal homicide with a complete body.

This was a little bit different because all we had were hands.

X-ray showed degenerative damage of the joints consistent with an individual over age 60, and the size of the fingers and knuckles indicated they were men's hands.

The right hand had one distinctive feature.

The thumbnail was missing.

Detectives checked local hospitals and morgues to see if they had a body of an elderly man without hands.

on the other side of town, Mary Mead and Terry Holland were beginning to worry.

They hadn't seen their father, Don Harden, in more than a week.

And I called everybody that I could possibly get a hold of.

Have you seen him?

Have you heard from him?

Nobody had heard anything.

So

that's at the point where I really got scared because I thought, where would he have gone?

It's very hard to explain.

You go through scared

and then almost in anger

and then worry.

When police learned that Don Hardin was missing the thumbnail of his right hand, they knew immediately and the fingerprint analysis confirmed that the hands were those of 74-year-old retired Navy pilot, Don Harden.

It's a shock.

I mean, this doesn't happen in real life, and it just really threw us for a loop.

When homicide detectives searched Don Hardin's home, they found evidence of robbery.

The television, VCR, and microwave oven were all missing.

So was Hardin's pickup truck.

Small drops of blood were found in the kitchen, and it appeared that detergents and bleach had been used to wash the kitchen and bathroom floors.

Don Hardin was a widower who had moved to San Diego a few years earlier to be near his daughters.

Neighbors described Hardin as ornery and difficult, but his daughters remembered him as a loving father.

One of my cherished thoughts that I have of him is that every time I spoke to him on the telephone at the end of our conversation, I always said, I love you, Dad, and he'd say, I love you too, kiddo.

Harden had a history of helping those in need.

He often hired homeless men to do odd jobs around his property, and he often let them live in a camper in his backyard.

We were very comforted knowing that there was somebody there in case of an emergency.

He's kind of a companion to dad.

Gives him someone to talk to.

He helps him out.

You know, I felt good about it.

Police were on the lookout for the items stolen from Hardin's home.

We in fact did recover some of Mr.

Hardin's property.

It was, I believe it was a wallet and a driver's license and maybe some Army medals.

And we followed that up on that to find out if that would lead back to a suspect.

That was kind of a dead end.

It was found in a dumpster, and we really couldn't put that back to a viable suspect.

Investigators had no idea what happened to the rest of Don Hardin's body, but they suspected something terrible happened inside his home.

A pair of severed hands found at a San Diego recycling plant were identified as those of 74-year-old Don Hardin, a retired Navy pilot.

A search of Hardin's home revealed evidence of burglary and violence.

We were in the kitchen, and the kitchen floor had a fine white powdery substance unevenly applied over the whole floor.

It was pretty obvious that some cleanser had been used to clean the floor up.

We noticed that there were blood,

blood spots throughout the carpet which led from the kitchen

around through the living room and towards the bathroom.

Behind the hamper, detectives found a blood stain and some human tissue inside the heating grate.

To find out whether blood had been cleaned up, detectives administered luminol, a chemical which fluoresces when it comes into contact with the iron component of blood, even after it has been removed with water and detergents.

When you spray luminol, it doesn't really hurt the blood itself.

It helps you find it so it doesn't compromise the evidence.

After spraying the luminol, the lights are extinguished and the camera with high-speed film captures the images.

It was the largest glow of luminol I had ever seen in my life.

It glowed like a Christmas tree.

Police found a huge amount of blood on the kitchen floor, and a blood trail leading from the kitchen to the bathroom.

And in the bathroom, there was even more blood.

DNA tests revealed the blood was Don Hardin's.

The amount of blood led forensic pathologists to conclude that Hardin could not have survived such a devastating attack.

I go over to the couch and we sit down and he says, there's positive proof that your father was killed in the kitchen and he was dismembered in the bathroom

and he is dead.

It didn't sink in for quite some time.

But there's disbelief.

There's the question why.

What could have possibly provoked it?

Harden led a simple life in retirement, similar to other naval retirees in San Diego.

So who would want him dead?

And who would go to such lengths to conceal the murder?

The day before he disappeared, neighbors saw Don Hardin with one of the homeless men he allowed to live in his backyard camper.

His name was Dale Whitmer, a 41-year-old drifter who had a police record for vagrancy and intoxication, but no past history of violence.

Whitmer denied any knowledge of Don Hardin's whereabouts.

Whitmer said that Hardin had loaned him the pickup truck, but hadn't seen him since.

He said he worked for Hardin on and off for years and said he regarded the old man almost like a father.

But friends and neighbors disputed that.

Dale had told other people, neighbors, that the old man was bothering him and that he was really getting mad and that he was tired of the old man poking him and calling him names and belittling him.

I want you to take your time.

I want you to look at it closely.

During the police interrogation, Whitmer was shown a photograph of the severed hands.

They're Don Harden's hands.

I don't know Don.

And we asked him how he could know such a thing.

He just said he'd grown accustomed to seeing them over the year that they'd been together and

he just recognized them as being Mr.

Harden's hands.

But Whitmer would say no more.

When police asked him to take a lie detector test, he refused.

Whitmer's fingerprints were found inside Hardin's home.

But since he did odd jobs jobs for Hardin, this wasn't unusual.

Mr.

Whitmer was very nonchalant, had an answer for almost every question that we had,

and just told us that I don't know where he is.

He asked me to do a few things for him.

I was driving his truck because he let me.

He asked me to take some things from his house and give them to other people, and I did.

With no other leads, the case of Don Hardin's disappearance went unsolved for over a year.

Until police received an anonymous letter that contained details of Don Hardin's murder that hadn't been released to the public.

Forensic evidence indicated that Don Hardin had been murdered inside his home, but all investigators ever recovered were his severed hands.

More than a year after Don Harden's disappearance, police received a tip.

An anonymous letter arrived at police headquarters containing details about Don Hardin's murder.

When I read it, I realized that whoever wrote the letter or provided the information for the letter knew something about our crime.

There were things in the letter that only a suspect would know.

I got real excited about it.

The writer said that his friend, Bob, had identified Don Harden's killer.

He was murdered by Dale Whitmer.

Bale hated Mr.

Harden, who abused him by hitting him with a cane if he didn't work hard enough.

Bale's a heroin addict.

who lived behind Mr.

Harden's home for a year or so before the murder.

He put the body into the bathtub, dismembered his body, put it in garbage bags, and buried different bags all over the county and Mexico.

Hardin's dismemberment in the bathtub was the information that had not been released to the public.

The letter went on to say that Bob would not come forward to testify against Dale Whitner.

I asked him to contact you directly, but he didn't feel like he could do it.

Bob is convinced that Dale will know Bob as the source of the information and may try to silence him or hurt him in some way.

It was clear that the writer of the letter wanted to help, but did not want to get involved.

Good luck, Detective.

The Forensic Documents Office at the San Diego Police Department analyzed the letter and looked at the postmark for a clue to its origin.

The letter wasn't mailed with stamps, but had gone through a postal meter, the type businesses normally use.

Each postal meter prints a number on the envelope, which is the meter's registration number.

But the writer had covered the number with white ink in an effort to conceal the letter's origin.

We can look at letters for trace evidence, latent evidence, and in this case, obliterated evidence, and quite often find something that would allow us to source that document.

But we can't always.

Using what is known as a video spectral comparator, various light sources and filter combinations can often reveal what is hidden underneath ink and markers.

The first attempts to see the meter number were unsuccessful.

So Hugh Kirfman, the operator of the comparator, tried looking through the opposite side of the envelope by cutting it in half.

He then used a blue-green light to penetrate the white ink, and it worked.

Detective Lang looked at it and quickly said, well, there it is.

The number of the meter, 5197451.

The initials PB on the postmark indicated the manufacturer, Pitney Bowes.

The serial number revealed the state, city, street name, and office address of the postal meter.

It was located at Davis Capital Management in La Mesa, California.

The owner of the company was Mark Davis, who was also a bishop in the Mormon Church.

When confronted by police, Davis admitted that he wrote the anonymous letter.

The source of his information was a member of his church.

But Davis refused to identify the source further, citing the religious privilege that exists between the clergy and a church member.

Prosecutors took Mark Davis to court, and the judge ruled against him.

The religious privilege hurdle is not absolute in the sense that not every communication with a clergyman is protected.

In this instance, the judge found that there was actually a good argument that this was not protected by the priest penitent or clergyman penitent privilege.

The court ruled that the information might have been privileged at one time, but once Davis wrote the letter to police, the privilege was broken.

Mark Davis complied with the court ruling and identified the source of the information.

Bob was Dale Whitmer's own daughter, Andrea.

She was the trickiest, most difficult, most sensitive witness we had to deal with.

In that she loved her father,

even though he had murdered this man, and that's something that you would expect.

She also never expected to be found out, and yet she was, and she was dragged into this.

Dale Whitmer was arrested and charged with murder.

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My very last words to her were, I love you.

And not a lot of parents ever get to say that, you know.

In 2010, Aubrey Sacco vanished while hiking in the Himalayas.

Now, after 15 years of searching, her parents share what they've uncovered in a three-episode special of Status Untraced.

Dads are supposed to find their daughters when they're in trouble.

Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Sir, if you state your true name, please, Dale Calvin Whitmer.

On September 15th, 1997, Dale Whitmer went on trial for the murder of Don Hardin.

He pleaded not guilty.

The star witness against him, his daughter Andrea, found herself in a difficult position.

If she lies on the stand to protect her father, she betrays her God.

If she tells the truth on the stand, she is true to her religion, but she betrays her father.

Which one do you choose if you're Andrea Whitmer?

Andrea Whitmer chose to tell the truth, and she corroborated everything that Mark Davis had written in his letter.

The letter said Dale Whitmer was a heroin addict and desperately needed money.

Prosecutors believe that on March 28th, 1994, Dale Whitmer walked into Don Hardin's kitchen and killed him.

The motive was robbery and revenge for past abusive treatment.

The luminol evidence suggests that Hardin was bleeding profusely in the kitchen, and the body was dismembered in the bathtub.

Traces of blood and human tissue were found behind the hamper on the heating grate.

Whitmer later removed the blood evidence with water and detergents, but the iron component in the blood was easily detected by the luminol.

Whitmer stole Hardin's TV, VCR, and microwave oven and sold the items to buy drugs.

Over time, Whitmer disposed of Hardin's body parts in numerous dumpsters throughout San Diego and Mexico.

The hands were the only part of Don Hardin's body ever recovered.

The jury found Dale Whitmer guilty of second-degree murder.

Don Hardin's daughters asked for permission to address the court before sentencing, which wasn't an easy thing to do.

He almost got away with committing this hideous crime.

I am grateful he will be in prison and not able to inflict himself on another family.

This ordeal has renewed my faith in the criminal justice system.

Life without my father and Father's Day is the hardest for me.

We really miss him.

I find myself still wanting to pick up the telephone and call him.

This is a chilling murder.

Dale Whitmer was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

We would have been unable to prosecute him but for the Luminol work and of course a letter.

It would have been unsolved.

There was a probability that we would have known who did it, but we would have never been able to prove it.

I

hope that with all the forensic technology that they have,

that

anyone that's possibly even thinking of doing any kind of wrongdoing,

that they'll stop and think about it before they do it.

Because with all the forensic technology that's out there, they're going to be caught.

After the trial, Don Hardin's hands were cremated and his ashes were buried by the U.S.

Navy at sea off the coast of California.

After it was all over, we just felt so much better.

We felt like, okay, it's closed now.

Dad's had his proper burial at sea.

It's over.

Those were his final wishes, and we carried out those wishes.