The Woman on the Tracks

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With all your strength, you jam the long steel rod straight downward, deep into the grassy soil.

There's a muffled thud.

The rod has hit something hard, something six feet below the surface.

You glance over at the sheriff.

He gives you a nod.

Dig it up.

It takes hours to get there, but eventually, that familiar thud rings out again.

The blade of your shovel has made contact.

You brush away the dirt with your hands, uncovering the lid.

This could definitely be the one.

It's the exact style of coffin she was buried in.

But then again, it's the style a lot of people around here get buried in.

The sheriff is peering down at you from the edge of the hole.

You receive another nod.

Pry it open.

There's a palpable energy in the air as you take up the crowbar.

The mystery that has plagued this town for so long is, at last, on the cusp of being answered.

But as the lid comes off, your face falls.

You know it right away.

There are no answers for you here, only more questions.

Because Mary Grimes is not in this coffin, and at this point, you have to wonder if she's even dead at all.

January 10th, 1954.

The sun hasn't yet risen on the rural outskirts of Xenia, Ohio.

In these last few moments before daybreak, all is perfectly silent and still.

But now a train approaches from the east.

The locomotive's engineer rubs his eyes as he gazes warily out the windshield.

He's driven these tracks from Columbus to Xena dozens, maybe hundreds of times over the years.

It's a remarkably uninteresting route.

So when he notices something unusual up ahead, a flash of fabric near the tracks, he's immediately on alert.

As the train pushes through the morning haze, the scene comes into view.

The fabric is a man's pantleg.

He's walking briskly away from the tracks, as though he'd been loitering there until the train appeared.

The man keeps his head turned away so that the engineer can't make out his face.

Now, this could be because the train's headlights are so blindingly bright, or maybe it's because the man doesn't want to be identified.

Out of an abundance of caution, the engineer prepares to pull on the cord that'll sound the train's whistle just to make absolutely sure that this man hears and sees the locomotive, even though he's no longer right next to the tracks.

But before he can sound it, something else catches his eye.

More fabric, a pile of it even, lying across the eastbound train tracks, which run directly parallel to the westbound tracks the engineer's train is currently traveling.

As he draws closer, the engineer finally realizes it's not a pile of fabric at all.

It's the body of a black woman, and her head, or rather, what's left of her head, is positioned squarely across one of the track's metal rails.

Evidently, an eastbound train has already passed through this morning.

The engineer quickly initiates the brakes, and the deafening squeal of metal on metal echoes amongst the bare trees.

As the train comes to a stop, the engineer jumps from the locomotive to the ground outside.

Shivering, he rushes over to the body.

He abruptly stops in his tracks once he gets near.

A strange, animalistic sound he's never made before inadvertently escapes his lips.

The scene is unthinkably gruesome.

The woman's head is almost entirely decapitated from her body.

The engineer turns to look for the man that was here just a few moments ago, but there's no one.

He listens for footsteps, but he hears only trees creaking in the breeze and the guttural growl of the train engine.

The man is gone.

Later that same morning, 60-year-old Ollie Grimes is in the kitchen of his small home in Xinya taking in the morning paper.

The phone rings and somehow deep down, Ollie knows it's about Mary before he even answers it.

And calls about Mary are rarely good news.

He's been worried about his 32-year-old daughter for some time.

Life has been rough on Mary for these past few years.

First, her husband deserted her and their two children.

Last time Ollie heard, the deadbeat was living in Oklahoma.

Then, unable to secure welfare and earning a meager weekly salary, Mary was forced to give up her two small boys and place them in children's homes.

Mary works the late shift at a supper club.

And that's another thing Ollie worries about.

The Alpha Supper Club is situated in a rough part of town, near the Lone Pine, a seedy roadside tavern where illegal gambling, knife fights, and allegedly prostitution take place.

Out in the back of Lone Pine, a woman was murdered some years back.

And more recently, a man who worked at the tavern was beaten to death in a separate incident.

Nothing good happens in that part of town.

Ollie's convinced.

Not that Mary's home life is any better.

She's currently living with her boyfriend, a man named William Bird, who is 13 years her senior.

Bird has a wicked temper and once threatened Mary with a shotgun.

Ollie's always told Mary that her boyfriend was trouble.

Well, tried to, anyway.

The phone lets out another ring.

And bracing himself for the worst, Ollie picks up the receiver.

The voice on the other end asks for George Oliver Grimes.

No one has called Ollie by his given name in years.

This is going to be bad news, all right.

The voice goes on.

They're calling from the Greene County Sheriff's Office.

They believe that Ollie's daughter, Mary, was the one found earlier that morning on the train tracks just outside city limits.

Xenia is a small town.

So it wasn't difficult to put together an educated guess.

Still, though, Ollie's presence is requested at the coroner's office to identify the body.

Minutes later, Ollie Grimes is there, looking down at the mutilated corpse on the slab.

Fighting through tears and grief, he positively identifies the body as his daughter, Mary Grimes Wallace.

The sight is so ghastly that he quickly looks away.

It's all too much.

He feels like he's going to be sick.

The coroner takes his cue and covers the body back up.

Once Ollie regains his composure, he turns to face the other two men in the room, the coroner and Sheriff Clarence Stewart.

Ollie asks the men how it happened.

How did his daughter wind up with her head on those tracks?

The men take a moment, as though formulating the right way to put it.

Finally, the coroner explains that based on his examination, they're considering it a possible homicide.

Ollie knows what the possible is meant to mean.

They think Mary committed suicide by laying her head on the railroad tracks just outside of town.

And Ollie can't bring himself to disagree with their theory.

His daughter had not been in a good mental state for quite some time.

Ollie nods sadly and informs the sheriff of an incident from nine days prior, when Mary witnessed a murder.

It happened in an apartment in Dayton.

A lover's quarrel gone horribly wrong.

The sheriff knows all too well the kind of effect that sort of trauma can have on a person.

He asks if Ollie could describe Mary's mental state as of late, to which Ollie admits that she's been depressed.

He tells the sheriff about how her husband left her and how she was forced to give up her kids, both of whom she rarely saw anymore.

Ollie's prepared to accept this as an open and shut case, but what the sheriff says next turns Ollie's entire world upside down.

He mentions the eyewitness report from the train engineer that a mysterious man was seen walking away from the train tracks the moment Mary's body was discovered.

When the police arrived on scene and scoured the area for any sign of him, he was gone.

Ollie interrupts the sheriff, his eyes lit up with rage.

As calmly as he can, he explains that he knows exactly where they can find this man because there's no doubt in Ollie's mind who it is.

It's Mary's boyfriend, the one with the bad temper and the loaded shotgun.

Sheriff Stewart takes out his notepad and jots down the name.

William Bird.

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The image of Ollie Grimes' rage-filled face is all that Sheriff Stewart can think of as he makes his way to Mary's house.

He knocks on the front door and, as expected, her boyfriend, William Bird, answers.

Bird seems shocked by the news of Mary's death.

He's even more shocked when the sheriff informs him that he's under arrest.

Bird insists that he's innocent.

He says that Mary came home from work at around 3 in the morning, and which time he went to sleep.

Sheriff Stewart isn't buying it, though.

He's heard every excuse before.

Besides, the picture Mary's father paints of Bird is one of a man capable of great violence.

So, Bird is placed in a holding cell

and he waits.

Weeks go by.

The sheriff finds no concrete evidence linking Bird to Mary's death.

In fact, the sheriff finds no evidence at all.

The case has him bewildered and frustrated.

He effectively has no other choice but to set Bird free.

Two months later, Sheriff Stewart is no closer to solving the mystery of Mary's death than he was on day one.

He's failed to generate any leads.

He knows he looks like a bumbling fool.

Half the town thinks he let the murderer go, and the other half thinks he's incompetent.

But unbeknownst to everyone, he's recently received a tip, and that very tip has led the sheriff to develop a strange theory.

He's keeping the details of this theory to himself, but he does let one detail slip out to the community.

He now believes that there's a car submerged in the muddy water at the bottom of the quarry just outside Xinhua.

And inside that car is evidence that'll help him solve the Mary Grimes-Wallace mystery.

It's March 26th, 1954.

Sheriff Stewart watches a professional diver suit up.

One of the sheriff's deputies rows the diver out to the middle of the quarry.

The rowboat stops.

The diver jumps into the frigid water and begins his descent to the murky depths below.

Sheriff Stewart is not alone on the shore.

A crowd has gathered.

Hundreds of spectators are on site.

People from Xenia and surrounding towns.

Mary's decapitated body is all anyone's talked about for these last two months.

And so they all stand riveted, waiting for the diver.

to surface.

Perhaps no one's more anxious in this moment than Sheriff Stewart.

He's desperate to score a win, to avoid humiliation.

He spots a reporter making his way through the crowd.

The last thing he needs is some newspaper man distracting him while he's focusing on what's happening out in the quarry.

The reporter approaches and asks for a statement.

The sheriff directs the reporter to a deputy standing close by.

The deputy's already been briefed by Sheriff Stewart.

He knows that Stewart's strange theory must remain a secret, at least until they find more evidence.

But there are some details he can offer up on the record.

The deputy explains that they believe that there's an old Plymouth sedan at the bottom of the quarry.

The sedan once belonged to a man named Robert Betts, another local African-American who was brutally murdered in 1951.

After Betts was killed, His Plymouth disappeared and was never seen again.

Well, until today.

At least, that's the hope of the Greene County Sheriff's Department.

The reporter wants to know what the connection is between Robert Betts and Mary Grimes Wallace.

Yet, all the deputy can disclose is that Betz worked as a janitor at the Lone Pine, the seedy tavern next to the supper club where Mary worked as a cook.

He has to keep any other information under wraps.

But if they find what they think they're going to find in that Plymouth, Mary's case will break wide open.

We're talking explosive revelations, perhaps multiple arrests, and there will be many people, perhaps even people standing in this crown today, who will have to answer for why they didn't come forward earlier and volunteer information.

The reporter's scribbling fast on his small notepad.

He's completely buying this secret theory angle.

But Sheriff Stewart isn't so sure anymore.

As he listens to the deputy talk, he begins to doubt the legitimacy of the tip he received.

He squeezes his eyes closed and prays that the diver comes back with something good.

Bubbles break on the surface of the quarry near where the diver went in.

The sheriff, the deputy, and the reporter all crane their necks in anticipation.

A hush.

falls over the crowd.

At last, the diver emerges from the water, and in his hands, he has nothing.

There's no car in the quarry at all.

The dive, the search, it's all a bust.

Inside, Sheriff Stewart is seething.

He's irritated at himself for revealing anything to the public before they had actual proof.

He was just so hopeful.

and so determined for the people of his county to not think of him as a joke.

And now he looks like an even bigger fool than ever.

What was it about this case that makes it so hard to solve?

He wonders.

It's as though the harder he tries to find answers, the further from the truth he gets.

1959, five years after William Byrd's girlfriend, Mary Grimes Wallace, was found dead on the train tracks.

her head nearly severed from her body.

Byrd sits at the bar inside the Lone Pine Tavern, nursing a beer.

The tavern's lights are dim and the music is loud.

The place is packed.

Some are here looking for action, others looking for trouble.

William, though, just wants to have a drink alone.

But he's never really alone.

Not in and around Xinya, at least.

A woman sits down next to Bern.

She casts a glance in his direction, and immediately a look of disgust comes over her face.

Bird knows the expression well by this point.

She recognizes him.

Everyone here does.

The woman immediately leaves to find another place to sit.

Bird was never formally charged in connection with Mary's death, but he was held in county jail for a month.

That alone ruined his reputation.

Every day since, he's had to endure the whispers of passersby.

He knows what they all think of him.

But now, a man sits down on the empty stool next to Byrne.

He doesn't give the typical disapproving side eye, and he doesn't glance around for a new seat.

Instead, he turns to Byrne and asks him if he heard the rumor going around town.

Bird has no idea what the man is talking about.

And so, the man proceeds to tell him.

that Mary was recently seen by someone in Cincinnati alive.

Unable to believe what he's hearing, Bird asks the man to repeat what he just said.

The man obliges, people are saying that Mary Grimes might not be dead after all.

Bird takes another swing of his spear.

His mind starts to race.

This rumor is the opportunity that he desperately needs to seize.

The next morning, Bird shows up unannounced at the Greene County Sheriff's Department.

He inquires on speaking with Sheriff Russell Bradley, who replaced Sheriff Stewart two years prior.

Bradley's familiar with Mary's case, and so too with William Bird.

Bird manically tells the sheriff what he heard about Mary being alive and living in Cincinnati.

At first, Bradley's suspicious of Bird's story.

After all, this man is driven by a motive.

to clear his name once and for all.

But after Bird leaves, Sheriff Bradley Bradley does some digging, and it's here where he learns that Mary's family has also caught wind of this rumor and is seriously looking into it.

Because unlike Bird, who heard the rumor through the grapevine, Mary's family got it directly from the source.

One of Mary's old friends told them that she did indeed run into Mary at a bar in Cincinnati.

The friend was stunned.

It was like she saw a ghost.

But according to her, Mary was very much alive.

Most haunting of all, though, is that Mary allegedly told this friend to never speak of their encounter.

Remember, Mary said as the two parted ways, you never saw me.

Bradley decides to entertain this lead, just to see if it goes anywhere.

He leans back in his chair and lets his mind wander for a moment.

He's intoxicated by the idea that he could be a local hero by solving a mystery that no one in Xinha has been able to crack for five agonizing years.

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Sheriff Bradley wastes no time in reopening the investigation into Mary Grimes Wallace.

He goes to see her siblings and father at her sister's house, where they all sit snug together around a small kitchen table.

Bradley's laid out some of the original post-mortem photographs.

With difficulty, Mary's brother brother and sister look carefully through the grisly photos, but they can't say with any certainty that it's actually her.

Sheriff Bradley then asks Mary's father, Ollie Grimes, about the day he positively identified her body back in 1954.

Ollie remembers that though he did identify her, he only took a quick glance.

If he was slightly unsure then, he's even more so now.

That evening, the sheriff goes back through the case file and rereads his predecessor's notes.

The murder that Mary had witnessed just nine days before her death seems like an awfully big coincidence.

He begins to wonder, could Mary have fled town fearing for her life?

Could her entire death on the tracks somehow have been staged so that no one would go looking for her?

Sheriff Bradley is becoming more convinced with every passing moment that Mary's somehow alive and living 60 miles away.

Driven by his desire to crack the case and become the hero, he clears his calendar later that week and takes a day trip to Cincinnati.

He visits the bar where Mary was supposedly spotted.

The place is quiet.

Not yet happy hour.

The bartender's cleaning mugs with a rag when Bradley steps up to the counter with his badge and a photograph of Mary.

The bartender takes a good look and shakes his head.

She's definitely not a regular.

In fact, the image of Mary isn't ringing any bells.

He waits around for his meeting with Mary's friend, the one that supposedly saw her here in this very bar.

When she arrives, Bradley questions her.

The friend tells him precisely what she told the Grimes family.

Mary was here.

She even points to the exact spot where they briefly spoke.

But when Sheriff Bradley presses the friend for a way to get in touch with Mary, the friend can't help him.

She has no phone number, no address for Mary, and she hasn't seen or heard from her since that night.

Bradley sighs.

Cincinnati, as it turns out, is looking like a dead end.

But then the sheriff has another idea.

He remembers from the case file that Mary once worked at the nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

This means that her fingerprints are on file with the FBI.

He can exhume the grave that they believe to be Mary's, get a scent of the body's prints, and send them to Washington.

If they're a match, then he can be sure that Mary Grimes-Wallace is truly dead and gone.

In June of 1960, Sheriff Bradley obtains a court order to dig up Mary's grave.

Along with the Undertaker and a few cemetery workers, he walks into Silver Creek Township Cemetery in nearby Jamestown.

Although it's summer, there's an unseasonably crisp chill in the air.

They approach a plot marked with the name Grimes.

Bradley gives the go-ahead.

The cemetery workers plunge their shovels into the earth, and they uncover two coffins.

Mary's corpse is not inside either one.

After they hear the news, Mary's siblings tell Sheriff Bradley that they thought Mary was buried in a different part of the cemetery, and so they lead the sheriff to the spot where they believe she is.

The grave site is unmarked, so the cemetery workers must use long steel rods to locate the coffin.

One of the workers jabs a rod into the earth.

Nothing.

He pulls it out and jabs it again, just a few inches to the right.

This time, it hits something beneath the ground.

He gives the sheriff and the undertaker a nod.

This is where the body is.

They start digging.

Once the coffin comes into view, the undertaker notes that this is the exact type of coffin Mary was buried in.

The sheriff has a good feeling about this.

One of those tried and true policeman hunches.

The cemetery workers pry open the coffin's lid with crowbars.

The smell of death and decay wafts from inside the small wooden box.

Sheriff Bradley looks inside and he's stunned into silence.

It's not Mary's body at all.

It's the decomposing body of a man.

Three coffins, three corpses, none of them Mary Grimes Wallace.

Sheriff Bradley knows he can't continue digging up bodies based on a rumor.

He finds himself at an impasse.

He can't explain why Mary's body is not in the plots marked Grimes, nor is she in the spots where her siblings believe she was laid to rest, or even how it now seems like her body has up and vanished.

He's now arriving at the same realization the previous sheriff did, that the case of Mary Grimes just might drive him mad until the day he dies.

The mystery of Mary Grimes is one of the deepest rabbit holes that I have ever been down.

It's so haunting, so baffling that people still talk about it to this day.

What separates it from your typical mystery is that this isn't a case of too little evidence.

It's rather a case of conflicting evidence.

There are multiple answers to the question of what happened that make perfect sense.

It makes sense that her boyfriend killed her.

He had a bad temper and a gun.

And there's that mysterious man seen walking away from the train tracks when the body was found.

It also makes sense that Mary took her own life.

Life had dealt her a bad hand.

And besides, is it even possible to kill someone against their own will on train tracks without tying them down?

It makes sense that she was killed due to her proximity to the Lone Pine Tavern, where multiple murders took place around that time period.

And like Mary, Those victims were also African-American.

And it makes sense that she went into hiding.

She witnessed a murder only nine days prior.

But on the other hand, the rebuttal to any and all of these answers feels just as obviously true.

If Mary was alive in Cincinnati, then who was the woman on the train tracks?

And why did no one come looking for her?

And what about the timing here?

If Mary Grimes actually did escape Xenia with her life, it means a laundry list of happy accidents would have had to occur at the exact right time.

First, a woman matching Mary's description just so happened to die the exact night Mary left town forever.

Even if we allow ourselves to believe that it's no coincidence at all and that Mary somehow knew about the woman's death and used it as a cover for her own disappearance.

Even then, We still have to believe that Mary got extraordinarily lucky again when the burial records for this unidentified woman turned out to be shoddy and the location of her grave couldn't be found.

When approached from this direction, the situation begins to take the form of an unbelievable conspiracy.

And yet, we still can't rule out that Mary might have fled to Cincinnati.

A person who knew her personally not only saw Mary alive, but spoke with her.

And the questions don't end there either.

Why did Sheriff Stewart claim to be so confident that a submerged Plymouth would link her case to another murder?

Was he simply trying to save face?

Or had he really developed a theory that hinged on something hidden inside that car?

And why was he so certain that a car existed when it was never actually found, neither in the quarry or anywhere else?

If Mary did commit suicide, Why wasn't there a note left behind?

Why didn't that man at the train tracks hang around to talk to the police like the innocent bystander he supposedly was?

And if Mary actually is dead, then where in the world is her body?

Today, more than 70 years later, the story of Mary Grimes still taunts us with the impossible question it poses.

How does a woman vanish from her own death?

This case defies resolution.

Each clue contradicts the next.

Each answer opens a new door.

Yet somewhere in that tangled web of fact and fiction, of memory and myth, must lie the truth.

But until we unearth more answers, it looks like the mystery of the woman on the tracks just might never be put to rest.

Late Nights with Nexpo is created and hosted by me, Nexpo.

Executive produced by me, Mr.

Bollin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt.

Our head of writing is Evan Allen.

This episode was written by Zeth Lundy.

Copy editing by Luke Baratz.

Audio editing and sound design by Alistair Sherman.

Mixed and mastered by Schultz Media.

Research by Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Evan Beamer, and Stacey Wood.

Fact-checking by Abigail Shumway.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone and Cole Ocasio.

Production coordination by Samantha Collins and Avery Siegel.

Artwork by Jessica Kloxton Kiner and Robin Fane.

Theme song by Ross Bugden.

Thank you all so much for listening to Late Nights with Nexpo.

I love you all, and good night.

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