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Just after 1.30 in the morning on May 12th, 1994, a young girl ran out the front door of her home in rural Maine out into the rainy night.

Barefoot and terrified, the girl went door to door screaming for help, but no one heard her.

Finally, after running nearly two miles in the dead of night, She arrived in her little downtown and managed to flag down a restaurant owner.

The owner would help the girl call 911, and within minutes, the police would arrive at that young girl's home.

And what they would discover there was one of the most horrific crimes ever committed in that small town.

Not only because of its sheer brutality, but also because of who committed it and why.

We tried to make this story make sense.

But sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

But before we get into that story, if you're a fan fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.

So if that's of interest to you, please delete all the music off of the Amazon Music Follow Buttons phone and replace it with every episode of the brand new Ballin Studios podcast, Bedtime Stories.

Just search for Ballin Studios and then look for bedtime stories on Amazon Music.

Okay, let's get into today's story.

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On the morning of August 23rd, 1993, Crystal Perry got ready for work in the bedroom of her small white wooden house in Bridgeton, Maine.

And she was excited because it was her 30th birthday.

Crystal was very attractive with pale freckled skin, light blue eyes, and thick bright red hair.

Her hair actually was so bright that it made her almost immediately recognizable wherever she went in her small town.

And on the rare occasions when Crystal went out to a bar or went dancing with her friends, her looks made her the center of attention.

Or they made her an object of desire for men watching her from a distance who couldn't get the nerve up to go talk to her.

In her bedroom, Crystal finished getting dressed for work, and then she called out to her 11-year-old daughter, Sarah, to let her know it was time to go.

But Sarah was already standing behind her mom, and she shouted, Happy birthday!

Crystal was startled, but she turned around and gave Sarah a big hug.

Crystal had only been 18 years old when Sarah was born, and she had actually only been 15 years old when she married Sarah's father.

At such a young age, Crystal's parents had to give their legal permission for the marriage to take place.

But the marriage didn't last, and Crystal had gotten divorced when Sarah was a little girl.

Since then, Crystal and Sarah had pretty much been on their own, and they were as close as a mother and daughter could get.

They spent almost every night together watching movies, reading books, and talking and laughing in their house.

Even as Sarah got older, Crystal still made it a point to tuck her in before bed, and sometimes she would even sing to her until she fell asleep.

And on that morning of her 30th birthday, Crystal was heading out to her job at a local shoe factory that she had only taken just so she could make enough money to afford the little house where she and her daughter lived.

The work Crystal did, sewing parts of shoes by hand, was totally backbreaking, and she would come home from work at night feeling totally tired and smelling of chemicals from the factory.

But Crystal thought the long hours and hard work was all worth it because Sarah had a home and a room of her own.

Crystal and Sarah walked outside, they got into Crystal's car in the driveway, and drove down the road through Brighton.

Their house was secluded and surrounded by woods, and there were only a few houses nearby.

But after a short drive, they pulled up to the house of a family friend where Sarah was going to spend the day.

Crystal gave her daughter a kiss, told her she loved her, and then waved goodbye as Sarah walked up to the house.

Then Crystal drove off and headed to work.

When Crystal was a few minutes away from the shoe factory, she slowed down and stared out the windshield.

There were these black balloons tied to a telephone pole.

It was a weird sight, and Crystal didn't know what the balloons were for.

And then things got even weirder when she saw more black balloons tied to telephone poles at regular intervals along the road.

Then when she was just outside of work, she saw even more black balloons, but this time they were attached to a huge sign that said, Happy 30th, Crystal.

Crystal nearly slammed on her brakes and she almost started crying out of happiness.

She couldn't believe her friends and co-workers had taken the time to set all this up just to make her feel special on her birthday.

Then she started laughing when she she realized they'd chosen black balloons because she was 30 years old now.

Crystal parked her car and walked into work and there were even more balloons and signs waiting for her.

And that day they had a huge party for her at the factory, but that was just the beginning of Crystal's birthday celebration.

That night at the house, Crystal made dinner and Sarah set the table.

Crystal's boyfriend, Dennis Butler, was on his way over to join them for Crystal's birthday dinner, and Sarah was very excited.

She liked Dennis because he was funny and nice to her, and he didn't talk to her like she was a little kid.

Crystal was happy that Dennis was good with Sarah and that Sarah liked him, but Crystal still wasn't sure about her own relationship with Dennis.

Dennis was about to turn 20 years old, but he worked full-time and he'd actually already been married before, so he seemed older than he was.

But Crystal still just felt totally strange about the 10-year age gap between them.

Still, Crystal and Dennis always had a good time together, and she knew finding the right guy in a small town wasn't always easy.

The tourists who came to Bridgeton, Maine from all across New England, saw it as a quaint little city with stunning natural beauty and charming shops and restaurants.

But the people who lived there knew there was actually a side of the town that the tourists did not see.

Drug use and drug dealing had been a problem in the area for years.

In fact, one of Dennis' old high school classmates who lived not too far from Crystal, a guy named Michael Hutchinson, was known to show up to bars in town or just to walk around the streets, totally high on cocaine.

So, as Crystal put the finishing touches on dinner, she told herself that at least Dennis had not fallen into that kind of lifestyle.

And it was her birthday, so she just wanted to be happy and have a good time and not spend the night worrying about her future with Dennis.

A few minutes later, there was a knock on the front door.

And so Sarah walked across the linoleum kitchen floor, went through the small living room, and opened the the door, and there was Dennis.

Dennis said hello to Sarah and gave her a big hug, and then he shouted, happy birthday to Crystal.

Dennis was tall and thin with dark hair and a square jaw, and he wore a gold earring in one of his ears.

He went into the kitchen, gave Crystal a kiss, and then handed her a birthday card and a present.

And a few minutes later, Crystal, Sarah, and Dennis sat down at the kitchen table and had dinner, and then they ate the birthday cake.

After dinner and cake, Sarah helped her mom clear the dishes and put them in the sink.

Then she handed her mom a small box with a bow on it.

Crystal opened the present and right away she got choked up.

Sarah had gotten her this little pewter figurine of a warrior woman holding a sword, a perfect symbol of a single mother who fought as hard as she could to take care of her daughter.

The three of them went into the living room and talked for a while.

Then at some point Sarah felt tired, so she got up, said goodnight to her mom and Dennis, and headed up to her bedroom.

Crystal didn't tuck Sarah in that night because she stayed on the couch talking to Dennis.

And so Sarah lay in bed thinking that Dennis and her mom might get married soon, and the thought of that made her happy.

But as Sarah began to drift off to sleep, she began hearing yelling from the living room.

And not long after that, Sarah heard the front door slam shut, and then she heard Dennis' car screeching out of the driveway.

Sarah had no idea what had happened, but it obviously sounded bad, but she just stayed there in bed and tried to go to sleep.

Crystal sat in the living room, crying on the couch.

Her perfect birthday had fallen apart because Dennis had flown off the handle and gotten totally upset with her.

She didn't actually know why he had gotten upset.

Maybe it was because she mentioned that she was not sure about their future, or maybe it was something Crystal wasn't even aware of.

But the reason for the outburst didn't really matter to Crystal.

Because when Dennis had gotten angry, he got loud and scary.

And she decided that was not the kind of guy she wanted around her daughter anymore.

And so, before Dennis had stormed out of the house, Crystal had made it clear to him that their relationship was over.

Crystal wiped the tears from her eyes, went to her room, and got ready for bed.

Then she climbed under the covers and stared up at the ceiling.

She knew the black balloons her friends and co-workers had gotten her for her birthday had been a joke, but for the first time, Crystal really did feel old.

However, she hoped, now that she was 30, that her life life would get a little calmer and easier, and that she wouldn't have any more nights that ended in shouting matches.

But not long after Crystal's 30th birthday, for reasons even Crystal couldn't totally figure out, Crystal let Dennis right back into her life.

Dennis spent the next several months trying to convince Crystal to put their past arguments behind them.

He worked hard to prove that she could trust him, and he did everything he could to win her back.

And Sarah found herself hoping that her mom and Dennis Dennis would make things work and stay together for good this time.

And eventually, Dennis proposed to Crystal, and Crystal said yes.

And for a time after the proposal, Crystal and Sarah thought their lives were about to change for good.

And along with Dennis, they would become this happy, loving family.

On the night of May 11th, 1994, So nine months after Crystal's 30th birthday, Crystal sat at the foot of Sarah's bed.

Sarah was 12 years old now, but she still still liked talking to her mom every night before she went to sleep.

And for the past few weeks, Sarah had felt like she was comforting Crystal more than Crystal was comforting her when they talked at night.

Because even though Crystal and Dennis were still engaged, their relationship had taken a bad turn again.

They had started getting on each other's nerves again, and there were lots of nights that Sarah fell asleep listening to the sound of them screaming at each other in the living room.

And there were other nights when Dennis was not at the house that the phone would ring, Crystal would answer, and she would hear screaming on the other line, and so she would just hang up.

Sarah knew her mom was worried about the arguments and the angry phone calls, but whenever the mother and daughter were together, Crystal never let on that she was upset.

She was always very positive and upbeat around her daughter.

Crystal thought that no matter what happened with her and Dennis, that she and Sarah would be just fine.

In the bedroom, Crystal said goodnight to Sarah, kissed her on the forehead, turned off the light, and walked out of the room.

She went to her own bedroom, got undressed, and slipped on a blue terry cloth robe.

Then she went to the living room, picked up a book, sat down on the couch, and started to read.

Crystal could hear the rain falling on the roof.

She loved that sound.

It made her feel relaxed and safe somehow, like the rain would let her hide away from the rest of the world.

But after midnight on May 12th, There was a sudden knock at the front door.

Crystal put her book down and quickly walked across the living room.

She didn't know who was there, but she didn't want their knocking to wake up her daughter.

Crystal opened up the door just a little bit, and then she and the person standing outside talked briefly.

Then Crystal smiled, opened the door wide, and let the visitor into the house.

Just before 1 a.m., so less than an hour after this visitor had knocked on the door and come inside, Sarah woke up in her bed.

She heard shouting coming from the kitchen, and so she figured her mom must be in another fight with Dennis.

So Sarah closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep.

But then Sarah heard her mom scream, no, over and over and over.

Sarah got scared and yelled to her mom, but Crystal just kept screaming, no, no, from the kitchen.

Sarah immediately got out of bed and grabbed her white terrycloth robe that was similar to her mom's, put it on over her pajamas, and crept across her room to the door as quietly as possible.

She wanted to help her mom, but she didn't know what to do, so she just crouched there by the door and listened.

Then she heard something like boots stomping in the kitchen, and she heard a loud crash like something had fallen onto the floor.

Sarah stayed in her room, too terrified to move.

Then the house fell silent, and she thought about running out of her room, but suddenly she heard footsteps in the kitchen again, so she kept waiting inside of her bedroom by the door.

Minutes later, Sarah heard the sound of the front door opening and shutting, and then there was no more sound coming from the living room or the kitchen.

So Sarah stood up, flung her door open, and ran from her bedroom to the front of the house.

She looked into the kitchen and she screamed.

Sarah saw her mother lying on the kitchen floor.

There was blood on her robe and her legs, and near her was the phone that was off the hook.

Sarah began yelling for her mother, but Crystal didn't respond.

So Sarah grabbed the phone and tried 911, but the phone wasn't working.

It just kept on beeping.

So Sarah dropped the phone, ran out of the kitchen, and out the front door into the rain.

She felt wet grass and mud on her bare feet as she turned up the road and ran towards her closest neighbor's house.

When she got there, Sarah rushed up to her neighbor's door and started knocking and screaming, but there was no movement inside and nobody answered the door.

So Sarah turned and ran to the house across the street.

She was cold, her robe was soaked, and her feet were caked in mud.

She banged on the door as hard as she could and she waited, waited, but again nobody answered the door.

So Sarah turned again up the road and started running into town.

By this point her legs were burning and she was totally out of breath.

Sometime after about 1.30 in the morning, after Sarah had run for about a mile and a half in the rain, she made it into town.

She saw a light on inside a small Italian restaurant, so she ran to the restaurant door and started pounding on it.

Then she noticed a light go on in the small apartment above the restaurant where the owners lived.

And a few seconds later, a man and a woman, the restaurant owners, opened the door.

The woman looked totally shocked when she saw Sarah standing there in the rain covered in mud.

The woman wrapped her arms around Sarah and brought her into the restaurant.

The owners asked what was going on, and Sarah said her mother had just been attacked at their home.

The man took Sarah's hand and led her to the phone while the woman went back upstairs to get Sarah a blanket and dry clothes.

The man dialed 911 and told the operator that he needed police assistance immediately and then handed the phone to Sarah.

And then Sarah spoke as clearly as she could and told the operator that her mom was at her house and that she was hurt and that there was blood everywhere.

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A few minutes after the 911 call, Detective Dick Pickett of the Maine State Police drove down a dark, rural stretch of road toward Crystal and Sarah's home.

The rain was still falling, and even with the moon shining, visibility wasn't great.

But Pickett saw the flashing lights of an ambulance, so he was able to find his way to the small white wooden house nestled in the trees.

Pickett parked his car and stepped outside onto the wet, muddy ground.

He was about average height, his brown hair was starting to thin, and he wore glasses.

He walked into the house and he saw paramedics in the kitchen, but they had already pronounced Crystal Perry, the victim, dead at the scene.

So, Pickett walked over to Crystal's body.

Pickett knew that small main towns might not be as picture-perfect as the tourists thought, but he was still shocked at what he saw, and he knew immediately that the news of this crime would cause fear and panic throughout Bridgeton.

Pickett couldn't get over the amount of violence that had obviously taken place in this kitchen.

His first thought was that this had to have been a crime of passion, carried out by someone who knew Crystal intimately, and whoever had done this had left a huge mess behind.

There were bloody bootprints leading from the kitchen to the front door, and there was blood spatter all over the walls and kitchen counters.

Soon after Pickett arrived, he was joined by several other state and local police officers and a state forensics team.

Pickett led a few of the other officers on a sweep of the house, and they found their way into Sarah's bedroom, where they found the room was totally undisturbed, and there were even a few stuffed animals perfectly placed around the room where Sarah liked to keep them.

After the 911 call, an ambulance had been dispatched to the Italian restaurant, and Sarah had been taken to the hospital.

Pickett knew he would have to talk to her, but he couldn't imagine what that little girl was feeling at this moment.

Pickett and the others checked Crystal's room next, but it also looked like it hadn't been disturbed.

So Pickett believed whatever had happened to Crystal only took place in the living room and the kitchen.

He walked back towards the kitchen and saw a photographer taking pictures of the scene and forensics officers studying the bloody boot prints on the floors.

They hadn't found a murder weapon yet, but they still had plenty of evidence to work with, and Pickett saw a forensics officer crouched over Crystal's body and she was fixated on one of Crystal's legs.

She called Pickett and other forensics officers over and she pointed to a small drop of blood on Crystal's leg that was almost a perfect circle.

Pickett asked why that particular drop of blood was any different than the rest of the blood on Crystal's legs.

The forensics officer looked up at him, pointed at the drop of blood again, and said they needed to take a sample of it.

Because she knew a drop like that had to be what was known as a passive blood drop.

That meant it did not come from Crystal.

And in this particular case, the forensics officer said the blood could have only dripped off of someone who was standing right over Crystal and fallen onto her body after she was already dead.

So the forensics officer was pretty confident that that drop of blood belonged to Crystal's killer.

The forensics team took the blood sample and gathered other blood samples from around the room.

But Pickett knew testing them would take time, and having DNA from a blood sample didn't mean authorities would necessarily be able to match it to anyone.

So, Pickett called his investigative team together.

He said he knew it was late, but he wanted to work fast and he wanted to work smart.

He sent members of the team out in the middle of the night to see if they could track down and interview Crystal's neighbors, friends, and family.

And within a couple of hours, Pickett got news that set the investigation in motion.

One of Crystal's friends had told police that two weeks earlier, Crystal's fiancé, Dennis, had shown up to Crystal's house waving a knife around and threatening to to kill her.

At 4 a.m., two and a half hours after police arrived at Crystal's house, Detective Pickett and three other officers knocked on the door of Dennis' parents' house where Dennis was staying.

It took a few minutes, but Dennis finally answered and let the police inside.

Pickett asked Dennis if he had seen Crystal that night.

And then, Dennis did something that kind of stunned all of the officers.

Instead of answering the question, Dennis started pacing the room and he turned to the cops and asked, is Crystal dead?

And as soon as that happened, the police decided they really needed to bring Dennis in right away for questioning.

A little later that morning, Dennis sat across from Pickett and the other members of the investigative team in a small, cramped police interrogation room.

Pickett didn't waste any time with pleasantries.

He told Dennis that in the few hours since they had found Crystal's body, they had already learned that she and Dennis had a pretty rough relationship and that Dennis was known to have a temper and to get aggressive.

Dennis admitted that things were bad between him and Crystal, but that didn't mean he was a killer.

He said a lot of couples yell and scream at each other when they argue.

Then, in a calm voice, Pickett asked if Dennis was at all responsible for Crystal's death, and Dennis said no.

But then, Dennis started shaking, almost like he was having convulsions.

Every cop in the room had seen suspects get nervous and have trouble staying still during interrogations, but none of them had seen anything like this before.

They got Dennis calmed down and made sure he was physically okay, then they asked him if he'd be willing to submit samples for DNA testing.

Then Dennis steadied himself and said he would.

After hours with the police, Dennis left the station, and Pickett thought there was a good chance that once the test results came in, Dennis's DNA would match the DNA from the drop of blood the forensics team had taken from Crystal's leg and from other similar drops they had found in the kitchen.

So, Pickett thought there was a pretty good good chance he'd be able to close this case quickly.

On the afternoon of May 12th, so a few hours after police had questioned Dennis, Detective Pickett and another officer walked into a small bedroom inside of Sarah's grandmother's house, so Crystal's mother's house.

There, they saw Crystal's 12-year-old daughter, Sarah, sitting almost motionless on the bed, staring at the sunlight that was coming in through the window.

After Sarah had been released from the hospital, she had been sent to stay with her grandmother.

Pickett approached Sarah and introduced himself.

Then, Pickett, very calmly and gently, asked Sarah to please tell them what had happened at her house the night before.

Sarah took a deep breath and then told the officers that she had been asleep and then heard her mom screaming in the other room.

She said she had stayed in her own room until everything went quiet.

Then she told the officers about how she found her mom in the kitchen, how she tried to call the police, and then how she ended up running outside and all the way into town to get help.

Pickett smiled at Sarah, and then asked her if she had maybe caught a glimpse of the person who was with her mother, or if maybe she had recognized this person's voice.

Sarah stared at Pickett.

She didn't like how he was talking to her, like she was just a little kid.

Sarah said she didn't see the other person because she stayed in her room the whole time.

and all she had heard was shouting, so she couldn't make out the other person's voice.

Pickett smiled again, then he asked her if she liked her mother's boyfriend, Dennis, and was it maybe possible that Sarah knew Dennis had been in their house, but she just didn't want to say that because she wanted to protect him.

Sarah glared at Pickett.

She was young, but she was smart and observant, and she thought the police wanted her to be an eyewitness who had seen the man who they already believed had killed her mom.

But Sarah said she really didn't know who else had been in the house.

Pickett thanked Sarah for talking to them, and he and the other officer walked out of the room and headed outside.

Pickett did believe Dennis was the most likely culprit, but police would have to wait weeks on DNA test results, and Pickett had no intention of excluding any other leads that might come up between now and those results coming in.

Later that day, the investigative team met with more of Crystal's friends and co-workers, and most of them pointed the finger at Dennis II.

They knew about his and Crystal's history, and they knew about Dennis' temper.

But a few of her friends said there was another man police should look into, Crystal's ex-husband ex-husband and Sarah's father, Tom Perry.

So Pickett began digging into Tom's background right away.

He discovered that Crystal had been after Tom to pay the monthly child support that he owed her because he was not giving her the money that the court had ordered him to pay after he and Crystal got divorced.

Pickett figured if Crystal had been after Tom for money, that might have been a motive for Tom to attack her.

But as Pickett learned about Tom, he started to think there might actually be an even more likely suspect than him.

Because Pickett found out that Crystal had once filed a restraining order against one of Tom's girlfriends, Joanne Stager.

And after speaking to one of Crystal's friends, Pickett learned that in the past few weeks, Joanne had been harassing Crystal.

And it turned out that those angry, disturbing phone calls Crystal had been getting at the house were not coming from Dennis like Sarah thought.

They had been coming from Joanne, and she had been threatening Crystal.

Two days after Crystal's murder, Detective Pickett and members of his team sat in the living room across from Crystal's ex-husband Tom and his girlfriend Joanne at the house the couple shared.

The investigative team still considered Crystal's boyfriend Dennis their primary suspect, but with new information about Tom, and especially about his girlfriend Joanne, they had another promising lead.

Pickett looked at the couple sitting on the couch.

They were both in their 30s and they were both tall and had dark hair, and Joanne couldn't seem to stay still for more than a few seconds at a time.

Pickett asked Tom about his relationship with Crystal, and when he did, Pickett immediately saw a look of anger come across Joanne's face.

But Tom would answer, and he would say that he barely ever talked to Crystal anymore, and he said he totally regretted this, but he didn't really play any meaningful role in his daughter, Sarah's life.

After that, Pickett turned to Joanne and asked her about the restraining order Crystal had filed against her.

Joanne kind of laughed, and then she told Pickett a story like she was performing on a stage.

She said a couple years earlier, she had seen Crystal's red hair from across the dance floor at a club, and she had seen men watching Crystal from all over the place like they always did.

But she wasn't angry about that.

She was angry because she believed Crystal still had a thing for Tom, and she was tired of Crystal calling the house.

So she had marched across the dance floor and confronted Crystal about it.

She said Crystal had gotten angry and looked like she was about to start a fight, and so preemptively, Joanne punched her in the face.

As Pickett listened to this story, he had trouble believing that anybody other than Joanne had been the cause of that fight.

After she was done, Pickett asked her about the angry phone calls, and Joanne said she was just telling Crystal to back off and to leave Tom alone.

But Joanne said she would never kill anyone.

Finally, Pickett asked where each of them had been at the time of Crystal's murder, and they said they had been together at the house.

Pickett knew they could be telling the truth, but each of them being the other's alibi wasn't nearly enough for Pickett to accept their story, so he asked if they would submit DNA samples for testing.

Tom and Joanne looked at each other, and then they both looked back at Pickett and said they would be willing to do that.

Later that day, Pickett returned to the station.

As he looked over his notes from the interviews police had already conducted, he still thought Dennis made the most sense as the suspect.

But after meeting with Tom and Joanne, he definitely thought there were other viable suspects.

Then on May 15th, three days after Crystal's murder, her friends and family held a small funeral service at a church before Crystal was to be cremated.

Sarah stood in the church quietly and she listened to friends and family talk about her mother and about how much her mom had loved her.

And then at some point, Sarah's mother's siblings got up and they said they would get justice for Crystal whatever it took.

And then after the funeral, members of the investigative team heard from one of Crystal's friends that Joanne had been seen popping open champagne and toasting to Crystal's death.

And after that, at least some members of the state police started to believe Joanne was just as likely to have killed Crystal as Dennis.

In early summer of 1994, weeks after Crystal's murder, Results from DNA testing conducted during the investigation started to trickle in.

And those results left Detective Pickett and the investigative team in complete shock.

The DNA sample from the drop of blood taken from Crystal's leg and other samples taken from her body and around the crime scene did not match the DNA samples provided by Dennis, Tom, or Joanne.

Investigators had become so convinced that one of those three people had killed Crystal that they had trouble accepting these DNA results.

So they asked for the lab to run the tests again.

But when they did, the results results were the same.

There was no match to any of the main suspects in the case.

After that, the authorities ran the DNA test results through something called CODIS, which is a massive FBI database with DNA results from convicted offenders of violent crimes from across the country.

And in 1994, the FBI had just started using CODIS to assist police investigations nationwide.

So Pickett had high hopes that this new technology would help keep his investigation on track.

But the DNA samples taken from Crystal and her house did not match anyone in this massive FBI database.

So all of a sudden, this case that had three strong suspects who all had clear motives completely fell apart, and Pickett and his team found themselves having to start all over.

But after reassessing the crime scene and conducting a new round of interviews, all of the investigators' theories just felt like pure conjecture.

Police followed leads that could possibly connect Crystal's murder to a serial killer who had been caught in the region, but DNA evidence also quickly ruled that out as well.

Then, investigators started to look at the possibility that Crystal's murder could have been a robbery gone wrong.

Maybe some drug user had broken into her house to steal valuables, to sell for drug money, and then of course something had gone wrong and Crystal had wound up dead.

After all, drugs were a real issue in Bridgeton, Maine.

But a drug addict breaking in, or any robber for that matter, didn't really make sense to Pickett.

He and members of the forensics team had always believed the level of violence that had taken place in Crystal's murder indicated it must have been a crime of passion, not some random robbery that just got interrupted.

So, Pickett soon came to terms with the fact that his investigation had almost nothing to go on.

And by the summer of 1995, a year after Crystal's murder, her case was just not a top priority anymore, and it started to go cold.

And in May of 1996, two years after Crystal's murder, there was still no new information coming in.

Crystal's siblings posted a $10,000 reward for anyone who could provide information that would lead to the arrest of the person who had killed their sister.

But none of the people who then came forward were able to provide any useful evidence.

So another year went by with almost nothing new on the case.

Then, not long after that, Detective Pickett retired from the Maine State Police, and people in Bridgeton figured they would never know who had killed Crystal.

By that time, Sarah had moved to Texas to live with family members there, and she was doing her best to try to live her life.

She thought about her mother constantly, but she had started to distance herself from her friends and family in Maine, as well as the police she had met during the investigation.

Years went by without Sarah ever hearing anything new about her mother's murder case, and she grew up, graduated high school, went to college, and then got a job.

The little 12-year-old girl who had found her mother murdered in the kitchen and who had run across town in the rain in the middle of the night to get help had now become an adult.

And like almost everybody else, Sarah had eventually given up on ever knowing who had killed her mom.

In April of 2006, almost 12 years after Crystal's murder, Detective Walter Gerzib of the Maine State Police was sitting in his office.

Gerzib had been involved in the investigation into Crystal's murder when he was a young officer, and after Pickett retired, Gerzib had moved up the ranks, and he had remained one of the few investigators who continued to try to find new leads in Crystal's murder case.

But that case had remained cold for over a decade, so Gerzib was not hopeful that he or anyone else would ever solve it.

Gerzib's phone rang at his desk, so he answered it, and an FBI agent introduced themselves on the other line.

And after the two had talked for a few minutes, Gerzib couldn't believe what he was hearing.

The FBI agent told him a kidnapper had been caught and convicted in Maine.

That kidnapper had submitted a DNA sample, and that sample had been run through the FBI database.

and it had matched the blood samples that had been found on Crystal and in her house 12 years earlier.

Gerzib hung up the phone in total shock.

Soon after the call, Gerzib, other members of the Maine State Police and FBI agents, met with this kidnapper who was in custody.

And after that meeting, Gerzib would make a phone call he had been waiting to make for years.

He would call Crystal's daughter, Sarah, who was 24 years old at the time, and he would tell her that the police finally knew who had killed her mother.

Based on the meeting with the convicted convicted kidnapper, interviews conducted during the investigation, and evidence and DNA samples collected from the crime scene, here is a reconstruction of what police believe happened the night somebody murdered Crystal Perry on May 12, 1994.

A little before 1 a.m., the killer listened to the sound of their windshield wipers going back and forth while they drove in the rain down a tree-lined road towards Crystal's house.

The killer felt their hands tingling.

They figured that feeling was the feeling of anticipation because they'd finally gotten up the guts to do something they had wanted to do for a long time.

The killer pulled off the road into Crystal's driveway and parked their car behind hers.

They turned off the engine, took the keys out of the ignition, and then sat there just listening to the rain and staring at the house for a couple of minutes.

Then the killer got out of the car, walked up the driveway, and knocked on the front door.

Crystal opened the door just enough to see who was there, and then moments later, she smiled and let the killer in.

The killer walked into the house and made their way towards the kitchen, with Crystal following a couple of feet behind.

Once the killer reached the kitchen, they stopped, turned around, and looked Crystal in the eye.

The killer took a breath and then walked right up to Crystal and put their arms on her arms and then moved in to give her a kiss.

But Crystal immediately pushed the killer off and told them to get out of the house.

Without thinking, the killer lunged at Crystal, grabbed her, and pulled her onto the ground.

Crystal kicked and thrashed, but she could not get free.

And so with Crystal pinned down, the killer began to sexually assault her.

After it was over, the killer got up off the floor and quickly walked over to a drawer, opened it up, and pulled out a sharp kitchen knife.

Crystal saw it and screamed, no, no, over and over and over again, pulling herself up off the floor and running for the phone.

Crystal managed to grab it, but the killer had wheeled around by this point and wrapped their arms around her, and the phone fell to the floor.

The killer then threw Crystal back on the floor and pinned her to the ground again.

Then the killer raised the knife and immediately Crystal threw her fists and kicked wildly at the killer.

and the killer suddenly felt the knife slice into their own hand and they saw blood dripping from it.

But the killer kept Crystal pinned to the ground, they raised the knife and slammed it into her chest.

After that, Crystal stopped fighting and her body went limp.

But the killer just kept on raising that knife and dropping it over and over and over again.

In total, the killer would stab Crystal over 50 times.

Finally, the killer stopped stabbing and looked around the room.

There was blood everywhere, and their boots had left bloody prints on the floor.

And the blood from the cut on the killer's hand kept dripping on Crystal's leg.

The killer stood up, pocketed the knife, and walked over to the kitchen counter.

They grabbed paper towels, knelt down, and started wiping away some of the blood on the floor.

But there was just too much, and they had already been in the house for so long, So the killer just held on to the bloody paper towels.

They walked back through the house, went outside, and got into their car.

They threw the car in reverse, pulled out onto the road, and drove not far down the road to where they lived in town.

Michael Hutchinson, the young man with the drug problem who walked around town all the time high on cocaine, who had gone to high school with Dennis, had murdered Crystal.

Michael had never even come up in the investigation.

because there was really no connection between him and Crystal.

It turned out that when Michael came to Crystal's house on the night of the murder, police believe he asked to use her phone because he said he was having car trouble.

And Crystal most likely let Michael in because she recognized him as a local and because she was just a nice person.

But some members of the police believe Michael was a bit more calculated, that he had probably been one of those men who checked out Crystal from a distance when she was in town or at a bar or on a dance floor.

And Michael had wanted her.

And so he had shown up to her house, possibly under the influence of alcohol and drugs, and tried to get her to sleep with him.

And when Crystal rejected him, Michael went into a blind rage, and he sexually assaulted her and ultimately killed her.

And Michael had basically gotten away with it and never even been suspected for years.

But then, Michael got busted for something totally separate, kidnapping.

and he submitted DNA samples and the FBI database got a hit.

Michael's new DNA samples matched the passive blood drops taken from Crystal's leg and from her house.

Further tests also showed that Michael's semen matched the semen samples taken from Crystal's body.

And finally, when investigators met with Michael, they saw a large scar on his hand from a cut that matched the type of knife that was used to kill Crystal.

Michael was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

As of 2023, Sarah, Crystal's daughter, is a very successful author.

She wrote a memoir about her life with her mother before the murder and her life after the murder.

The book's dedication page simply reads, for her.

Thank you for listening to the Mr.

Ballin podcast.

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Ballin, where we have hundreds more stories just like this one, but many of those stories are only available on YouTube, not on this podcast.

Again, the YouTube channel is just called Mr.

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