Message In A Bottle

What up, y'all?

It's Joe Button here to talk about Prize Picks.

PrizePicks is the best place to win real money while watching football.

You can get up to 100 times your money.

PrizePicks will give you $50 instantly when you play your first $5 lineup.

You don't even need to win to receive the $50 bonus.

It's guaranteed.

Just download the PrizePicks app and use code Spotify.

That's code Spotify on PrizePicks to get $50 instantly when you play a $5 lineup.

PrizePicks, run your game.

Must be present in certain states.

Visit PrizePicks.com for restrictions and details.

This podcast is supported by Progressive, a leader in RV Insurance.

RVs are for sharing adventures with family, friends, and even your pets.

So if you bring your cats and dogs along for the ride, you'll want Progressive RV Insurance.

They protect your cats and dogs like family by offering up to $1,000 in optional coverage for vet bills in case of an RV accident, making it a great companion for the responsible pet owner who loves to travel.

See Progressive's other benefits and more when you quote RV Insurance at Progressive.com today.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, Pet Injuries, and Additional Coverage and subject to policy terms.

For 12 long years, the murder of a young hospital worker went unsolved.

Police had their suspicions, but little proof.

But an old used tissue told a story far better than any eyewitness.

From the moment she was born, Laura Wynne was fighting the odds.

She weighed one pound and 14 ounces, three months premature.

But she was so determined to live that she made it, and they took her home, and she was blind in one eye from the incubator at that time.

And she also had a paralysis on her right side.

As Laura grew up in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, she slowly overcame these physical challenges and emerged as a gifted student.

She worked that paralysis nearly completely out and she never let that disability blindness ever hold her back from her desires of what she wanted to be and what she wanted to do.

Laura's dream was to work in health care, to help others as she had been helped.

And she achieved that by becoming a hospital pharmacy technician.

Oh, she's a sweetheart.

The people that she associated with there were pretty much her friends and as well as her co-workers.

Nice girl.

Nice girl.

Laura's friends looked out for her professionally and personally.

And when she didn't show up for work one morning, they called her mother.

So her her mother said, well, I'll go down and check and see, you know.

So the landlady opened the door and let her in.

And when she went in, she found Laura.

Laura had been murdered on her bed, strangled with her stocking.

Laura's eyeglasses were on the living room couch.

Without them, she was literally blind.

It appeared she'd been attacked in her living room and murdered in her bedroom.

This was a crime of power and control, and she was hit in the head on her blind side.

At first, the motive appeared to be robbery.

We discovered that there were several items missing from the apartment.

Her purse,

some of her underwear, some shoes, some clothing.

But there was no sign of forced entry.

Did that mean Laura knew her killer and let him in the apartment?

In retracing Laura's steps on the night of her murder, investigators discovered that she left her job at the hospital around 6.30, then went to her usual hangout, a local bar, where she had a few drinks and talked with friends.

Laura's neighbor recalled seeing her get out of her car and walk into her apartment around 11.15.

And Laura's neighbor remembered something else.

He said that a man walked up to Laura as she unlocked her apartment door and walked in with her.

Well, he told me that the reason why he didn't call the police is because he thought that maybe she was just sneaking a boyfriend in her apartment.

But according to Laura's friends, she had no current boyfriend.

The neighbor described the man as white, medium height, around 160 pounds, but he didn't see the man's face.

Unfortunately, the description matched about half the population of Poplar Bluff, Missouri.

Laura Wynne's autopsy yielded several surprises.

A two and a half inch contusion over Laura's right ear indicated she'd been hit hard enough to incapacitate her.

What would have caused it?

It was blunt trauma, something that didn't lacerate the skin, so it was probably a smooth, surfaced, hard object.

But the cause of death was strangulation, and the amount of force was excessive.

The ligature itself would have done the job over a period of a few minutes,

if that was the intent.

But that wasn't good enough.

The emotions got high enough that he had to lay his hands on her neck and squeeze and crush two cartilages.

She had also been sexually assaulted.

Investigators found no foreign fingerprints in Laura's apartment.

But underneath Laura's body was a clue, a used paper tissue.

There looked to be be biological evidence on the tissue.

Unfortunately, at the time, the sample was too small for DNA testing.

Investigators also found two foreign hairs in Laura's living room.

These were sent to the lab and found to be pubic hairs of an African American.

But this didn't match the description given by the eyewitness, who said a Caucasian followed Laura into her apartment.

If you know anything about hairs, hairs fall off of people all over their body every day.

She also had a friend who was an African-American who'd been in her apartment and had helped her ready her apartment when she moved in.

Police interviewed Laura's African-American friend, and he had an airtight alibi.

He was with friends on the night of the murder.

With no solid leads, Police turned their attention to the bar Laura visited before she returned home.

When investigators questioned patrons of the bar, they learned that Laura got into an argument with Sam Freeman, a 26-year-old veteran of the U.S.

Army.

Laura had accused him of hustling these two young men playing pool.

Whatever happened wasn't something that came to blows, but there was a disagreement over a pool game, and Laura had confronted him.

Candace Shipman was working the bar that night.

She said the altercation was minor.

Just got a little loud, then they quit, and it seemed okay.

You know, normal stuff that would happen in a bar.

Several bar patrons said Freeman left the bar about 20 minutes before Laura did.

And his parents said he came home a short time later and stayed there the rest of the night.

Investigators also discovered there was another man in the bar that night, Laura's ex-boyfriend, Robert McSwain.

She loved him.

She was head over heels in love with him.

She was just spitting.

He could do no wrong.

You know, and it was an on-again, off-again relationship.

Friends said Laura hoped to marry Robert, but he wasn't interested.

McSwain said he went directly home from the bar on the night of the murder, and family members backed up his alibi.

He stayed there at the house the rest of the night, never left.

And his mother and sister were there also at that time.

Police now were at a dead end.

No one else at the bar that night matched the general description of the man presumed to be the killer.

It was a hurt that

there was just no closure to it because we just kept thinking

Someone's out there and we just don't know who it is.

And not only that, but it was the hurt of losing her and giving her up

when she was such a worthwhile person and she was so good to everybody.

And we just couldn't see any sense in it.

Months passed, then years,

and Laura's family lost hope that her killer would ever be brought to justice.

When Clifford Morris turned in his badge after a 35-year career, one case haunted him: the brutal murder of Laura Wynne that had gone unsolved for 12 years.

On his last day on the job, he handed the case file to one of his most trusted colleagues, Detective Tim Davis.

I asked him to look into it again.

I know he's a good forensic man

and told him to go ahead and reinvestigate that and see if he couldn't come up with something.

And Davis did just that, looking for anything that could be reinvestigated.

It was never a closed case.

Up to that point, all the proper things that needed to be done were done.

Detective Davis decided to go back.

and reinterview everyone who was in the bar with Laura Wynne on the night she was murdered.

And his interview with Candace Shipman, who was bartending that night, provided an important lead.

She informed me some things then that she thought was pertinent to the case that she wanted to share.

Shipman said there was more going on between Laura and Sam Freeman that night than just an argument about the pool game.

Sam flirted with Laura.

He tried for her affections.

She just didn't seem interested at all in Sam.

So I think there was a little jealousy.

She just put him in his place.

And Shipman recalled something else that night that she never forgot.

She remembered that Sam Freeman was drinking an Italian liqueur, Galliano.

He collected bottles, odd-shaped bottles.

When she poured the last shot of Galliano, he asked her for the bottle because it's a very unusually odd-shaped bottle.

And she gave it to him.

Witnesses recalled seeing Freeman leave the bar that night with the Galiano bottle.

This was significant because of the wounds on Laura's head.

Just a pattern that was consistent with the size and shape of that bottle.

And that wasn't all.

Eight years after Laura's murder, There was another incident at the same bar involving Sam Freeman and a Galeano bottle.

Candace Shipman was again the bartender.

And Sam Freeman came in, ordered some Galeano, and chose a song from the jukebox.

He was sitting at the bar

and staring me right in the eyes, singing, Only You Know and I Know.

Hair stood up on my, you know, all over my body.

Only you know and I know.

I was convinced.

I was convinced that he had gotten away with murder and was flaunting it in front of me.

Now, 12 years later, Freeman was married with two children and worked as a supply sergeant for the National Guard.

He was even attempting to run for city council.

I thought that all was a bit brazen.

with the way I felt and the things I knew.

With a warrant, warrant, investigators found the Galliano bottle in Freeman's home.

Freeman said this bottle was a recent addition to his collection, not the one given to him by the bartender on the night Laura was murdered.

But police confiscated it anyway.

Apparently, Freeman filled the bottle with colored water for display purposes.

But he didn't fill it to the very top.

A lab technician swabbed the entire bottle, and on the inside, near the top, was a microscopic stain.

A phenol phthaline test indicated this was human blood.

But after 12 years, it had degraded.

There was not enough to do a DNA profile on.

But why was human blood inside the bottle?

Investigators were determined to find out.

Say hello to the next generation of Zendesk AI agents.

Built to deliver resolutions for everyone.

Zendesk AI agents easily deploy in minutes, not months, to resolve 30% of customer and employee interactions on day one.

quickly turning monotonous tasks into autonomous solutions.

Loved by over 10,000 companies, Zendesk AI makes service teams more efficient, businesses run better, and your customers happier.

That's the Zendesk AI effect.

Find out more at Zendesk.com.

When human blood was discovered inside the Galiano bottle in Sam Freeman's apartment, investigators suspected he was responsible for Laura Wynne's murder.

According to witnesses, Sam Freeman and Laura Wynne argued on the night of her murder.

Laura accused Sam of hustling some young boys in a game of pool.

Afterwards, Freeman had a few more drinks and asked the bartender if he could have the empty Galiano bottle for his collection.

At 10.45, the bartender announced that it was the last call for drinks because the bar was closing at 11 p.m.

According to witnesses, that's when Sam Freeman left the bar with the Galeano bottle since he knew Laura would have to leave at closing time.

Laura lived only a short distance from the bar, and when she got home around 11.15, prosecutors believe that it was Freeman who forced her inside and struck her in the head with the Galeano bottle.

He then took her into the bedroom, assaulted her, then strangled her to death with her own stocking.

The evidence suggests he used a tissue to blow his nose, but left it near Laura's body.

He then stole some items and fled.

That was the prosecution theory, anyway.

The problem was they had little in the way of forensic evidence.

I'm a worrier.

Everybody that knows me will tell you I worry about every single case.

I never am a prosecutor who walks in and says this is a sure thing, slam dunk.

So investigators wanted to know whether any of the evidence contained DNA that was too small to be tested when the crime occurred 12 years earlier.

There has to be some type of skin cells embedded in these nylons, unless the suspect wore gloves.

The knot was chosen as part of the DNA analysis because I thought that there could be a chance that he could have touched the knot while he was tying the knot.

DNA specialist Jason Wyckoff swabbed the stocking looking for any of those skin cells.

The swabs were treated with a solvent to free possible DNA and then replicated so the sample was large enough for DNA testing.

Just as they suspected, they found a DNA sample.

I noticed that the profile was characteristic of a mixture of at least two individuals, and the mixture had male and female gender characteristics.

The female DNA was that of Laura Wynne.

The source of the male's DNA was not yet known.

Wyckoff analyzed the paper tissue found underneath Laura's body with an alternative light source, which revealed a bodily fluid, possibly mucus.

He then cut a tiny piece of tissue and put it into a detergent that dissolved everything but the complex molecules.

A PCR DNA analysis once again provided useful information.

The majority of the DNA appeared to have male gender characteristics.

The last step was to collect a DNA sample from Sam Freeman.

When we first informed Mr.

Freeman of why we were there and who we were, it was like at that instance he had just went into shock.

His demeanor totally changed.

That I couldn't describe, only other as maybe the face of fear.

Before taking his DNA sample, investigators asked Freeman if he had ever been inside Laura Wynne's apartment.

Did you ever date her?

Had you ever had sex with her?

Had you ever kissed her?

Did you know where she lived?

He stated no, no, no, to all these questions.

But the DNA from Sam Freeman's saliva sample matched the skin cells on the ligature and the mucus on the tissue.

The only way possible that Sam Freeman's DNA could have been at the scene in the home was the fact that Sam Freeman was there and was the killer.

After 12 long years, in September of 2005, Sam Freeman was arrested and charged with Laura Wynn's murder.

Prosecutors believed the motive was clear.

Here she is, this woman, small woman, dressing him down in front of all these guys.

And here he is, Mr.

Military, Mr.

Macho Mann.

He wasn't going to put up with it.

I think he was embarrassed, rejected, spurned, and he got the ultimate last say before a win with this crime.

During the trial, Freeman's defense attorney pointed to the two foreign hairs in Laura's apartment as proof that someone else killed Laura, and also reminded the jury that the eyewitness's description didn't match Freeman either.

I mean, they argued reasonable doubt, which was a smart argument to make.

But prosecutors maintained that the DNA evidence was concrete proof.

I think what happened here was that Sam Freeman didn't realize in 1992 he could leave a piece of himself at the scene other than semen blood or fingerprints, but he did.

In September of 2006, The jury found Sam Freeman guilty of first-degree murder.

He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

I want people to have hope and never give up, never give up on justice, that someday it'll come about.

If it had not been for the proper collection and preservation, it doesn't matter how much someone does 13, 14 years later in an investigation, if you don't have the evidence, you don't have a case.

For quality window treatments, trust Rebart's Blinds Shades and Shutters.

Specializing in Hunter Douglas custom blinds and smart shades, Rebarts combines style, comfort, and automation to enhance any space.

The blinds and shades solution for your home is just a free consultation away.

Visit REBARTS.com to schedule your free in-home consultation today.

Mention Spotify for 25% off.

That's 25% off mentioning Spotify at Rebart's.