The Carnival

Speaker 1 20th Century Studios presents the upcoming comedy, Ella McKay, from Academy Award-winning writer-director James L. Brooks.

Speaker 1 Emma Mackey plays Ella McKay, an idealistic young woman who juggles her family and work life in a story about the people you love and how to survive them.

Speaker 1 Featuring an all-star cast, including Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Louden, Kumale Ninjani, Iowa Deborey, Julie Kavner, with Albert Brooks and Woody Harrelson.

Speaker 1 Ella McKay in theaters December 12th.

Speaker 3 Tis the season of

Speaker 5 And the Who's and Who Louville were in love with new tech.

Speaker 6 Where can we find Sonos and Samsung and Nintendo?

Speaker 7 They shouted. Would they find it in one place? This they questioned and doubted.

Speaker 9 When suddenly a who yelled, Walmart's the place to start.

Speaker 10 And these who added headphones, TVs, and games to their carts.

Speaker 11 With Walmart, their shopping was done in a flurry.

Speaker 5 They cried out, who knew?

Speaker 7 and ordered their gifts in a hurry.

Speaker 4 Shop the latest tech gifts in the Walmart app.

Speaker 2 Planning a trip this year? Travel smarter and connect deeper by learning the local language with Rosetta Stone.

Speaker 2 With over 30 years of experience, Rosetta Stone's immersive intuitive method helps you live the language, not just memorize it.

Speaker 2 Choose from over 25 languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, and more. Their true accent speech recognition technology gives real-time feedback to help perfect your pronunciation.

Speaker 2 No translations, just natural learning that builds from words to phrases to full conversations. Whether you have five minutes or an hour, you can learn anytime on desktop or mobile.

Speaker 2 Get a lifetime membership and unlock all 25 languages. Learn as much as you want, whenever you want.
Rosetta Stone, learn confidently, connect authentically. Don't wait.

Speaker 2 Unlock your language learning potential now. Listeners can grab Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off.
That's unlimited access to 25 language courses for life.

Speaker 2 Visit RosettaStone.com/slash pod50 to get started and claim your 50% off today. Don't miss out.
Go to RosettaStotcom/slash Pod50 and start learning today.

Speaker 12 Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia Diambra.

Speaker 13 And the story I have for you today takes place in Platte National Park near the town of Sulphur, Oklahoma.

Speaker 13 Today, the park is known as Chickasaw National Recreational Area because, according to NPR, its national park status was dissolved in 1976.

Speaker 13 In 1975, though, when this crime happened, it was called Platte National Park. And at the time, it was the smallest existing national park in the United States.

Speaker 13 What the area lacks in size, it makes up for with charm. It has more than 20 miles of trails that connect swimming holes and streams.

Speaker 13 Key features include protected freshwater and mineral springs, and it's known for having babbling brooks instead of raging rivers, as well as rolling hills in lieu of rugged mountains.

Speaker 13 The mild landscape makes it accessible to a lot of different kinds of visitors, experienced hikers, walkers, joggers, etc.

Speaker 13 In the 1970s, because it was so accessible and pretty tranquil, it drew local teenagers who often used it to take the long way home from a local grocery store or school.

Speaker 13 In June 1975, that's what two young women were doing. They were walking together on a trail inside the park.
When they arrived at a fork, one went to the left and one went to the right.

Speaker 13 As they waved goodbye, there was no way they could have known that only one of them would make it home alive.

Speaker 13 It didn't take long for authorities to learn the gruesome outcome of one girl's fate, but pinpointing a suspect took a bit more time.

Speaker 13 The pool of strangers law enforcement had to interview was vast, thanks to the carnival being in town.

Speaker 12 This is Park Predators.

Speaker 13 At 5.45 p.m. on Monday, June 2nd, 1975, a man named Terry Johnson, who worked as a Reverend, was out for an early evening hike in Platte National Park.

Speaker 13 Terry was visiting with a group of young men from his congregation, and as they were walking, he noticed a small bag at the edge of the gravel trail they were walking on.

Speaker 13 Now, ordinarily, this bag wouldn't be that strange to see because all too often random items of trash would just show up on the park's trails.

Speaker 13 Likely because people just didn't have a conscience about littering. But for some reason, this bag caught Terry's eye.

Speaker 13 It was sitting off to the side of the trail in the direction towards a popular natural spring called Pavilion Springs, which was in the west central part of the park, really close to where you would exit the park and enter into the town of Sulphur.

Speaker 13 Terry's eyes scanned around the bag to see if there was anything else nearby it or to see if anyone who may have been walking ahead of them had dropped it. But he didn't see anyone right away.

Speaker 13 Like I said, it was about 5.45 in the evening, and based on later accounts, it seems as though the park had already begun to empty out at this point.

Speaker 13 Just as he was about to forget about the bag and move on, Terry noticed a man on a bike kind of booking it out of the area.

Speaker 13 He couldn't put his finger on why this cyclist seemed so out of place, but just the way the guy was riding off in such a hurry caused Terry to notice him.

Speaker 13 When Terry bent down to pick up the bag, he opened it and noticed a new unused tube of toothpaste inside of it, which again, wasn't super odd by itself, but this, coupled with it being brand new and completely abandoned on the trail, was weird.

Speaker 13 Like Terry thought, what was the point in someone buying it if they were just going to toss it and never use it? It just really didn't make sense to him.

Speaker 13 Anyway, as he's mulling this over, he takes a second look at the ground where he picked up the bag and notices that the gravel path looks like it's been disturbed.

Speaker 13 There was dirt, grass, and debris all pushed around here and there, which prompted Terry to investigate a little more.

Speaker 13 He followed the path a couple of paces when suddenly something else strange caught his eye, about 15 yards off the trail.

Speaker 13 According to Kay Evers reporting for the Ardmore Daily Ardmorite, Terry initially thought that he was staring at a tree trunk with its bark stripped off.

Speaker 13 But as he inched closer and closer to the object, reality started to sink in. He was not looking at a piece of bare wood.
He was looking at the discarded body of a young woman.

Speaker 13 Within minutes of making the gruesome discovery, Terry hightailed it to the nearby Platte Ranger Station and reported what he'd found.

Speaker 13 The ranger there must have determined the woman wasn't alive because he then roped off the area and called for backup from the FBI field office in Oklahoma City.

Speaker 12 That office was about an hour and a half away, and because Platte National Park was in federal land, the case went to the feds automatically.

Speaker 12 The agents arrived not long after being called and were in the park processing the crime scene by nightfall.

Speaker 12 The young woman's general features led them to determine that she was white, roughly 20 to 25 years old, slender, around 5'7 inches tall, and had straight brown hair that went to her shoulders.

Speaker 12 The position in which she was found had all the telltale signs of a vicious attack.

Speaker 12 Articles from the Ardmore Daily Ardmorite and the Lubbock Avalanche Journal state that the woman was either nude or mostly nude with her bra and yellow tank top pushed up around her neck.

Speaker 12 Her cut-off jean shorts were around one ankle and she was missing one of her white sandals and the other was barely hanging around her foot.

Speaker 12 Her underwear were laid near her body and appeared to have been torn or ripped. Her neck was severely bruised and her face was bloody with some blood also smeared on parts of her chest.

Speaker 12 There was a large stick laying across her neck and another nine inch long stick poking out of her mouth, almost as if her attacker had tried to silence her.

Speaker 12 The agents treated the scene as a homicide and blocked off a mile of the trail to preserve the area. The focus from the jump was figuring out who their victim was and who had done this to her.

Speaker 13 According to reporting by Tat Cornelius, by 10 o'clock at night, the victim was transferred to the Oklahoma City Medical Examiner's Office for an autopsy.

Speaker 12 While they waited for the results, investigators pleaded with the public, asking residents to come forward if they knew any missing persons who might match the young woman's description.

Speaker 12 Teams also fanned out across the park searching for anything that might be a clue.

Speaker 12 Park rangers from NPS, deputies from Murray County Sheriff's Office, and local police officers scoured dense brush looking for anything that might point them in the direction of their killer.

Speaker 12 That same article by Tat Cornelius also stated that by the following day, FBI agents had tracked down at least 19 people who used the trail on Monday afternoon, and they began interviewing them to see if they saw or heard anything suspicious.

Speaker 12 No source material specifically says this, but I have to assume that Terry Johnson and his troop of boys were among that group of people being questioned.

Speaker 12 Meanwhile, the autopsy was performed that morning, Tuesday, June 3rd, and the cause of death was determined to be strangulation.

Speaker 12 The prevailing theory for law enforcement at that point was that whoever had killed the young woman likely used the stick found near her body to press down on her throat until she died.

Speaker 12 The medical examiner also noted that there was no vaginal trauma or sperm present.

Speaker 12 One of the most disturbing details to come from the Emmy's report, though, was that after the doctor had removed the larger tree limb from the victim's mouth, they found smaller sticks and debris shoved further down behind that.

Speaker 12 That extra stuff indicated to the FBI that the attacker they were looking for had likely tried to keep the victim quiet during the murder, which in turn suggested that the crime wasn't well thought out.

Speaker 12 Everything pointed to a very disorganized offender or offenders who seemed to have taken the victim completely by surprise.

Speaker 12 Investigators began to speculate that maybe whoever had attacked this young woman had seen her walking on the trail and decided in an instant to strike.

Speaker 12 And I mean, I really have to just pause for just a second because I don't want to dwell on the depravity of it, but because I think it takes a terrible kind of evil to force dirt and sticks down someone's throat in order to stop them from pleading for their life.

Speaker 12 I mean, the cold-bloodedness of this crime is really chilling.

Speaker 12 Anyway, this idea that the murder was a crime of opportunity gave police at least a place to start.

Speaker 12 They knew, just based on where the body had been found, and the fact that it was in kind of a remote area off the trail, they were more than likely looking for a person who'd been on the trail before or at least was familiar with it.

Speaker 12 Most of the source material I read states that authorities believed the young woman had been killed shortly before Terry found her, so it's not like it was one of those cases where she'd been out in the open for days or anything like that.

Speaker 12 When she was found, the murder had literally just happened within a half hour to maybe an hour timeframe, TOPS.

Speaker 12 FBI agents felt confident that whoever had committed this crime had been in Platte National Park sometime between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.
on that Monday afternoon.

Speaker 12 But canvassing for clues near the crime scene turned out to be more challenging than the investigators initially realized.

Speaker 12 You see, that area of the park was known to be heavily trafficked, and a handful of people had been on the gravel trail in the timeframe the FBI believed the murder had occurred.

Speaker 12 So even though the feds had that fairly narrow window of time and those 19 or so witnesses they could speak with, they also knew there were probably even more people they hadn't located yet who might have seen something useful.

Speaker 12 But until they could track those people down, they were at a standstill.

Speaker 12 On Wednesday, June 4th, two days after the murder, The FBI announced that agents tentatively determined the victim was a resident of Sulphur, but the Bureau didn't confirm the young woman's name to the public yet.

Speaker 12 According to reporting by the Ada Evening News, they said they needed more information to officially confirm her ID and then notify her family.

Speaker 12 Sulphur residents came forward, though, and told authorities that the clothing FBI agents had described the victim wearing sounded a lot like what 16-year-old Marina Rose Howeth wore.

Speaker 12 At the time, Marina was living in Sulphur with her aunt and uncle, not with her parents in Concord, California. Investigators felt like this information was a pretty solid lead.

Speaker 12 However, they didn't want to jump to any conclusions too soon. They wanted to be certain.

Speaker 12 So they contacted Marina's parents in California within a few hours, and the couple was on a plane to Oklahoma.

Speaker 12 After touching down, Annie and Erin Howith met with the FBI agents working the case and shortly after that positively identified the murdered young woman as their daughter.

Speaker 12 One source also said that the FBI used dental records to shore up the ID, but I have have to imagine that agents had to obtain those dental records from an immediate family member.

Speaker 12 Anyway, after finally getting a name for their Jane Doe, the FBI called in additional agents to help work the case.

Speaker 12 Fear was already building in the community about who could have committed such a vicious crime.

Speaker 12 The public's concerns ratcheted up the pressure on law enforcement, and the FBI realized they were up against the clock, like really up against the clock. Their suspect pool pool was large.

Speaker 12 They had no concrete leads to follow. And to make matters worse, there was a traveling carnival in town days away from packing up and leaving.

Speaker 12 And with its departure, the FBI felt like potential suspects could disappear right along with it.

Speaker 15 The 2026 Chevy Equinox is more than an SUV.

Speaker 16 It's your Sunday tailgate and your parking lot snack bar.

Speaker 14 Your lucky jersey, your chairs, and your big cooler fit perfectly in your even bigger cargo space.

Speaker 14 And when it's go time, your 11.3-inch diagonal touchscreen's got the playbook, the playlist, and the tech to stay a step ahead. It's more than an SUV.
It's your Equinox.

Speaker 14 Chevrolet, together let's drive.

Speaker 3 Tis the season of gifting and holes to deck.

Speaker 5 And the Who's and Huluville were in love with new tech.

Speaker 6 Where can we find Sonos and Samsung and Nintendo?

Speaker 7 They shouted.

Speaker 8 Would they find it in one place?

Speaker 7 This they questioned and doubted.

Speaker 9 When suddenly a who yelled, Walmart's the place to start.

Speaker 10 And these who added headphones, TVs, and games to their carts.

Speaker 11 With Walmart, their shopping was done in a flurry.

Speaker 5 They cried out, who knew?

Speaker 7 And ordered their gifts in a hurry.

Speaker 4 Shop the latest tech gifts in the Walmart app.

Speaker 12 To investigators, Marina Rose Howeth, who sometimes went by the nickname Rina, seemed like a typical 16-year-old girl. She played basketball and sang in the chorus at Sulphur High School.

Speaker 12 By all accounts, she was a happy young woman. There isn't a ton of information out there that goes into her early life.

Speaker 12 The only article I could find that explained why she moved from California to Oklahoma came from an interview with a resident who claimed to know her, who spoke with the Ardmore Daily Ardmorite and said, she left to get away from the crowds and high crime areas of California.

Speaker 12 Based on a short snippet I read in her obituary published by the Ada Evening News, Marina had been living on and off in Oklahoma with her relatives for almost a year and a half before her murder.

Speaker 12 An article by Tat Cornelius mentioned that all in all, Marina seemed to be doing well in sulphur and made friends easily.

Speaker 12 One article noted that she habitually walked through Platte National Park to enjoy the tranquility it offered.

Speaker 12 A friend she often traveled with was a local girl named Tammy Bristol. According to Kay Evers reporting, Tammy and Marina were walking together on the fateful Monday afternoon Marina was killed.

Speaker 12 When FBI agents connected with Tammy, Tammy told them that she and Marina had walked around town and stopped at a local grocery store early Monday afternoon.

Speaker 12 At the time, Marina had said she needed a new tube of toothpaste, so the pair went to the store to pick some up.

Speaker 12 When they left, they started walking on a trail inside the park that would take them in the direction toward their homes. Around 4 p.m., they came to a fork in the road and parted ways.

Speaker 12 Tammy said she never could have imagined her friend would be brutally attacked and killed just minutes after that.

Speaker 12 Unfortunately, for the FBI, Tammy didn't see anything relevant to the crime, but her account did help them narrow down the timeframe of when Marina had been killed.

Speaker 12 Investigators knew that whoever had attacked her had to have struck sometime shortly after 4 p.m., but before Terry Johnson discovered Marina's body at 5.45 p.m.

Speaker 12 So that's like an hour and 45 minute window, which to me seems like a pretty tight window in the grand scheme of things.

Speaker 12 So thanks to Tammy's story about where she'd last seen Marina alive, authorities were able to determine exactly what stretch of trail to focus their efforts on.

Speaker 12 and they used that information while interviewing visitors of the park.

Speaker 12 And one by one, police tracked tracked down the people who were on the gravel trail in question during the hour and 45-minute timeframe. And one by one, the FBI crossed names off their suspect list.

Speaker 12 But during all these interviews, one interesting detail kept emerging. Several people mentioned seeing a guy on a bike near where Marina had been left.

Speaker 12 This information about a guy on a bike piqued the agents' interest because they knew Terry Johnson had also mentioned seeing a guy on a bike hurriedly riding off.

Speaker 12 Each of the people who mentioned this man all noted the reason they'd remembered him was because he was wearing a shirt that had the word beer printed on the back of it.

Speaker 12 Investigators quickly followed up on this lead and visited a bike rental shop in Sulphur.

Speaker 12 They learned after speaking with the owner of that shop that a guy matching the witness's description had rented a bike and taken off near the trail around 4.25 p.m. on Monday afternoon.

Speaker 12 The owner said the man had been one of two men who had come into the store at the same time. He identified those men as Donnie and Roy Shoemaker.

Speaker 12 Donnie and Roy were brothers who'd been in town working for the Traveling Carnival, a show called The Joplin Amusement Show.

Speaker 12 According to several news reports, FBI agents had questioned Donnie and Roy earlier in the week as part of that larger group of people who'd been inside the park late Monday.

Speaker 12 However, I guess during the FBI agents' agents' first interviews with Donnie and Roy, nothing the men said seemed like a red flag.

Speaker 12 They both admitted to being in the park riding rental bikes when Marina was murdered, but they denied knowing anything about her murder or being on the same trail where she was killed.

Speaker 12 The brothers went as far as saying they noticed her in the park, but they said they didn't speak to her or approach her.

Speaker 12 After agents spoke with the other witnesses, though, who could place the pair on the gravel trail where Marina had been, the feds decided they needed to speak with the brothers a second time.

Speaker 12 So on Friday, June 6th, four days after Marina's murder, that's what investigators did.

Speaker 12 They visited the traveling carnival on the outskirts of town to re-interview Donnie and Roy again, but this time they split the duo up and questioned them separately.

Speaker 12 That same afternoon, Marina's friends and family held her funeral service in Sulphur. Dozens of people attended, including students from her high school chorus group and basketball team.

Speaker 12 From 5.30 Friday night until the early hours of Saturday morning, FBI agents grilled 22-year-old Roy Shoemaker.

Speaker 12 According to Kay Evers reporting, his brother Donnie was released during that time, and shortly thereafter, the FBI announced he was not a suspect or believed to be involved in the murder at all.

Speaker 12 It was Roy who was their main person of interest.

Speaker 12 What was or wasn't admitted during Roy's interrogation wasn't revealed to the public right away, but whatever happened behind those closed doors, authorities appeared to have gathered enough seriously damning information from Roy because by Saturday morning, federal agents arrested and charged him.

Speaker 12 A few hours later, during his first appearance, a judge set his bail at $100,000.

Speaker 12 The government had argued that Roy was a significant flight risk due to his job with the carnival, and the judge agreed.

Speaker 12 The FBI remained tight-lipped about what Roy had said during his interrogation that gave them grounds for his arrest, and a spokesman for the Bureau only said it came as a result of things said during those long hours that proved to be incriminating.

Speaker 12 The feds also doubled down on the fact that Roy had been seen in the park during the timeframe of Marina's murder.

Speaker 12 An FBI agent heading up the case told the Ardmore Daily Ardmore, quote, We measured distances, nailed the time of death down as close as we could, then we tried to find everybody on that trail or in the vicinity during that time.

Speaker 12 He was on the trail. He was there at the time of the killing.
We knew he had to be our man. End quote.

Speaker 12 In a bizarre twist that many people speculated pointed to Roy being guilty, hours after his arrest, he attempted to take his own life.

Speaker 12 Guards nearby were able to stop him, then they stripped him down to just his boxers and placed him in a maximum security cell.

Speaker 12 He was then transferred to another cell where armed guards watched him around the clock.

Speaker 12 His hefty $100,000 bond was not the kind of money a carnival worker could cough up, so Roy remained in jail waiting to see if a grand jury would indict him.

Speaker 12 And that was exactly what FBI agents working the case were banking on. They needed Roy behind bars for the time being while they continued to work the case.

Speaker 12 They did not want him back out on the road with the traveling carnival.

Speaker 12 Fortunately for the FBI, Roy didn't make bail, and that was a win in their book because the carnival he'd been working for packed up and left the sulphur area Saturday night.

Speaker 12 Investigators felt relieved that they hadn't wasted precious time because otherwise, Roy might have left town, never to be seen again.

Speaker 12 The Ada Evening News reported that the U.S. Attorney's Office in Oklahoma felt they had a strong case against Roy.
For one, sometime during his interrogation, he had signed a written confession.

Speaker 12 And two, he had no high-powered attorney fighting in his corner. The only thing holding up an indictment was Roy's noticeably fragile mental state.

Speaker 12 Several newspapers that had reporters at Roy's arraignment and bond hearing reported that Roy appeared to be completely bewildered by his arrest.

Speaker 12 Several articles state that when the judge asked him questions, he wouldn't look up from his lap.

Speaker 12 But there are some articles that state he maintained eye contact with the judge the whole time, so I'm not really sure which is true.

Speaker 12 But most of the source material states that Roy indicated several times that he didn't know how to read or write because he stopped attending high school in the 10th grade.

Speaker 12 The U.S.

Speaker 12 attorney at the time, a man named Richard Pyle, told the press that his office knew it was possible that Roy's court-appointed defense attorney would use Roy's mental well-being to bring his competency into question.

Speaker 12 To get ahead of this, Prosecutor Pyle requested Roy undergo a maximum 30-day psychiatric evaluation at a federal hospital in Springfield, Missouri.

Speaker 12 He was admitted to that facility in early June, and when he returned over a month later, he was supposed to have a preliminary hearing, but the U.S.

Speaker 12 Attorney's Office decided to forego that hearing and instead requested the case go straight to a grand jury.

Speaker 12 On July 29th, that panel reviewed the facts of the case and indicted Roy for Marina's murder.

Speaker 12 Back and forth between both sides about whether Roy was competent to stand trial dragged on through the month of August.

Speaker 12 Four different mental health professionals testified at preliminary hearings, and each one of them had varying opinions about whether Roy was living with a mental illness.

Speaker 12 An independent psychiatrist who observed Roy for three days while he was at the hospital in Missouri stated he felt the 22-year-old was living with schizophrenia and was not competent to aid in his own defense.

Speaker 12 But two federal psychiatrists who testified to the contrary said they they felt Roy was competent enough to stand trial.

Speaker 12 Ultimately, the decision came down to the judge, and he ruled in favor of the two federal doctors.

Speaker 12 Several times leading up to that decision, Roy's lawyers had also filed motions to get his signed confession thrown out, but the judge overruled those requests.

Speaker 12 The defense claimed the statements Roy had made during his second interview with the FBI were inadmissible because they'd been made while he was under duress, so basically coerced.

Speaker 12 But the court didn't agree.

Speaker 12 One week later, on September 17th, the high-profile murder trial began.

Speaker 12 Kay Evers reported that right out of the gate, the prosecution kicked things off by aggressively painting Roy as a sadistic killer.

Speaker 12 They said he specifically targeted Marina with the intent of sexually assaulting her, but had been interrupted and forced to hurriedly kill her and then flee.

Speaker 12 The government called 13 federal investigators to the witness stand and laid out physical evidence from the crime scene on the defense's table and in front of the jury.

Speaker 12 The items that were displayed included Marina's ripped underwear, bloody clothing, and the vegetation debris that had been in her mouth.

Speaker 12 After recapping Terry Johnson's testimony of when and where he found Marina's body, the prosecution called a new witness to testify, a guy named Aaron Angel.

Speaker 12 Aaron was a young man from Texas who'd been in Platte National Park around 5 o'clock on the day of the murder. He testified that he saw Roy on the graveled trail at 5.15 p.m.

Speaker 12 just a few hundred yards from where the murder was believed to have taken place.

Speaker 12 Aaron's testimony was damning because even though there were many witnesses on the trail that day, no one put Roy as close to Marina's body as Aaron did.

Speaker 12 Tammy Bristol, Marina's friend, also testified and positively identified the torn jean shorts collected as evidence as having belonged to Marina.

Speaker 12 The prosecution closed out day one of the trial by detailing the significance of all the sticks and vegetation that had been found inside Marina's mouth.

Speaker 12 I'll spare you the gruesome details, but basically it was determined that stuffing the debris down Marina's throat had not killed her.

Speaker 12 The government argued that Roy had been forced to use the large stick found near her body to choke her by compression. He was also one of the investigators who'd interviewed Roy and Donnie.

Speaker 12 The Ada Evening News reported that this agent said when he pressed Donnie for details during his second sit-down interview, Donnie said that when he and his brother had seen Marina and Tammy walking on June 2nd, Roy turned to him and said, quote, let's go after them, end quote.

Speaker 12 But jurors wouldn't have to take this agent's word for it. They would hear the story for themselves, from Donnie.

Speaker 12 You see, the other shoemaker brother was scheduled to take the witness stand, but not in his brother's defense.

Speaker 12 Donnie was the star witness for the prosecution.

Speaker 15 The 2026 Chevy Equinox is more than an SUV.

Speaker 16 It's your Sunday tailgate and your parking lot snack bar.

Speaker 14 Your lucky jersey, your chairs, and your big cooler fit perfectly in your even bigger cargo space.

Speaker 14 And when it's go time, your 11.3-inch diagonal touchscreen's got the playbook, the playlist, and the tech to stay a step ahead. It's more than an SUV, it's your Equinox.

Speaker 14 Chevrolet, together let's drive.

Speaker 5 The Who's Down and Who Newville were making their list, but some didn't know Walmart has the best brands for their gifts.

Speaker 6 What about toys?

Speaker 13 Do they have brands kids have been wanting all year? Yep, Barbie, Tony's, and Lego. Gifts that will make them all cheer.

Speaker 9 Do you mean they have all the brands I adore?

Speaker 13 They have Nintendo, Espresso, Apple, and more.

Speaker 5 What about?

Speaker 11 So they're who answered questions from friends till they were blue.

Speaker 7 Each one listened and shouted, from Walmart?

Speaker 5 Who knew?

Speaker 10 Shop kissed from top brands for everyone on your list in the Walmart app.

Speaker 12 When Donnie testified for the government, he explained how around 4 p.m. on June 2nd, he and Roy had rented bicycles in sulfur, then gone into Platte National Park.

Speaker 12 An FBI agent then expanded on this and testified that not long after starting their ride, Donnie and Roy spotted two teenage girls on a trail, and Roy made the comment about going after them.

Speaker 12 During his testimony, Donnie explained that he rode up next to one of the girls and asked her if she and her friend were planning on going to the carnival. One of the girls, a brunette, had said no.

Speaker 12 When prosecutors pressed Donnie on the stand about which girl he'd spoken with, he confirmed that the brown-haired girl matched Marina's description, despite him never asking her name.

Speaker 12 Donnie said that after speaking with the girls, he rode off and left his brother behind. He didn't see Roy again until a while later when they were both back at the carnival.

Speaker 12 Roy chose not to testify in his own defense, but the FBI agent who interviewed him did take the stand, and he said that Roy told him he'd spoken with Marina on the trail.

Speaker 12 The agent said Roy stated to investigators that before going to, quote, get the girls, he and Donnie had stopped at the ranger station inside the park and Donnie bought a drink.

Speaker 12 When they left that location, Donnie had ridden up ahead of him and as he was trying to catch up with his brother, he bumped into Marina on the trail alone.

Speaker 12 Roy said that he didn't see Donnie or Tammy anywhere, just Marina.

Speaker 12 According to the FBI agent's testimony, Roy had said during one of his interviews that when he approached Marina, she'd been nice to him and asked him about his parents.

Speaker 12 According to investigators, Roy said Marina bringing up his parents made him upset, and in his frustration, he crashed his bike and it landed on her.

Speaker 12 Roy said Marina didn't like that and took a swing at him, to which Roy then retaliated and hit her in the face.

Speaker 12 According to the agent's testimony about what Roy had confessed to, That's when a struggle ensued, and Marina got up and ran away, but Roy chased after her and tackled her to the ground.

Speaker 12 The agent testified that Roy told him Marina was making a sound that reminded him of his late father, so he asked her to stop. When she didn't, Roy said he put a stick in her mouth to keep her quiet.

Speaker 12 The Ardmore Daily Ardmorite specified that the breathing Roy described to agents reminded him of his father who died two years prior from a gunshot wound.

Speaker 12 So yeah, that seems like a pretty specific detail for FBI agents to just make up if they were lying or trying to railroad Roy, which, full disclosure, I don't think they were.

Speaker 12 But if that wasn't damning enough, the prosecution called a co-worker of Roy's, a guy named Stan Whitworth. And Stan spoke about Roy's demeanor after Marina's murder.

Speaker 12 Stan testified that when Roy got back to the carnival about 6 p.m. on June 2nd, he seemed nervous and off.

Speaker 12 According to an Ada Sunday News article, when it was the defense's turn, the only witness they called was the independent psychiatrist who'd interviewed and observed Roy after his arrest.

Speaker 12 This psychiatrist testified that Roy was living with at least one mental illness that may have caused him to have seizures that affected the temporal lobe in his brain.

Speaker 12 The doctor said those seizures could affect a person's behaviors, emotions, and motor function without them realizing it.

Speaker 12 The problem with this testimony, though, was that no one had ever run tests on Roy to determine if he truly suffered from these alleged seizures.

Speaker 12 The independent psychiatrist admitted under cross-examination that he only spent about three and a half hours with Roy at the hospital.

Speaker 12 So there was no real way for him to know if Roy had been unable to account for his physical actions during the crime, or if he was even aware that he could have been responsible for killing Marina.

Speaker 12 Basically, prosecutors completely dismissed the defense's arguments and continued to hammer away that Roy knew full well what he'd done. U.S.

Speaker 12 Attorney Richard Pyle argued that the evidence and testimony against Roy was overwhelming.

Speaker 12 Not to mention, he'd fled the scene, cleaned himself up, and returned to work where a coworker noticed him acting nervously.

Speaker 12 According to Jim Eders reporting for the Daily Oklahoman, Pyle ended his closing argument by stating, quote, A 16-year-old girl was going home to her family, looking forward to her next day of school.

Speaker 12 She met death. Instead, she met Roy Lee's shoemaker.
Death walked behind her, and death is sitting here in this courtroom. Death is Roy Lee's Shoemaker.
⁇ End quote.

Speaker 12 The jury deliberated for two and a half hours before the foreman announced the verdict. They found Roy guilty of first-degree murder.
On November 13th, 1975, a judge sentenced him to life in prison.

Speaker 12 A few months later, in 1976, Roy appealed his conviction, citing that his confession should not have been admitted at trial because of the way it had been obtained.

Speaker 12 During his appeal proceedings, details of what he'd said and done behind closed doors with the FBI during his second interrogation were finally revealed.

Speaker 12 According to Tack Cornelius' reporting for the Ardmore Daily Ardmorite, when FBI agents had gone to question him at the carnival, Roy voluntarily waived his right to have an attorney with him during their chat.

Speaker 12 For two hours, agents escorted Roy along the path in the park where Marina's body had been found, and he identified several objects along the way as being familiar to him. Around 8 p.m.

Speaker 12 that evening, he and the agents went to dinner, and by 10 p.m., the interrogation started up again at the park's headquarters.

Speaker 12 During that questioning, Roy refused to take a lie detector test, but did verbally admit to the county sheriff that he, quote, may have killed Marina, but just forgot, end quote.

Speaker 12 Roy also argued in his post-conviction appeal that the crime scene photos of Marina's body and injuries should never have been shown at his trial. Which, I find this claim kind of astonishing.

Speaker 12 Basically, the defense's argument was that the photos sensationalized how heinous Marina's injuries were, which in turn prejudiced the jury against Roy.

Speaker 12 But seriously, can you guys feel my eyes rolling? Photos like this are totally admissible.

Speaker 12 Anyway, Roy's appeal didn't really go anywhere and was truly just a last-ditch effort to get his conviction overturned.

Speaker 12 The justices who reviewed the appeal didn't agree, and Roy went on to spend 29 years of his life sentence in prison.

Speaker 12 According to the United States Bureau of Prisons website, he was paroled on March 4th, 2005, at the age of 52.

Speaker 12 The thing about this case that really sticks out to me is how violent and brazen this attack was. I mean, think back to when you were a teenager for just a second.

Speaker 12 I know I was just like Marina and enjoyed spending my summers outside with friends, appreciating nature. She was not in some remote wilderness area with no one around.

Speaker 12 She was in the smallest national park in the country. A spot that had a lot of people in and out of it on a daily basis.

Speaker 12 She truly was a completely innocent victim who did not deserve what happened to her. Roy Shoemaker, on the other hand, served nearly three decades for his crime, but he still got out early.

Speaker 12 He was given a second chance, unlike Marina.

Speaker 12 She never got to live her life. She never made it to her junior year of high school.
Roy took that from her.

Speaker 12 Whether or not he actually lived with a mental illness was never fully explored.

Speaker 12 The Ada Sunday News reported that he had an older brother who lived in a psychiatric hospital most of his life, and he also had a younger sister who had mental health struggles.

Speaker 12 I'm also bothered by some of Donnie's testimony and all of this too. But in the end, we'll never truly know if what Roy did to Marina was preventable if he'd gotten some help.

Speaker 12 All I know is that I haven't been able to shake the thought from my mind that Marina might not have been his only victim.

Speaker 12 Full disclosure, there is zero evidence out there to support he was responsible for any other murders.

Speaker 12 But honestly, due to the vicious nature of Marina's killing, I have to wonder if he ever targeted any other young women. I only raise the point because of the nature of his job at the time.

Speaker 12 Based on all the reporting I read, Roy joined Joplin's traveling carnival in late January or early February of 1975. And between then and Marina's murder, that show toured all over southern Oklahoma.

Speaker 12 That's either four or five months of traveling from city to city, spending a few days in one spot and then moving on to the next.

Speaker 12 Again, there are no articles that I could find that suggest Roy had other victims, but just the sheer level of violence that Marina suffered was enough to pique my curiosity and make me ask the question, was she his only violent crime?

Speaker 12 But it's a question I don't think I'll ever get the answer to. If Roy is still alive today, he would be 70 years old.

Speaker 12 Despite scouring the internet, I can't find any mention of him after he was paroled in 2005.

Speaker 12 Just a year after Marina was murdered, Platte National Park was renamed Chickasaw National Recreation Area.

Speaker 12 While I don't think the name change and rebrand was intended to erase her grisly murder from the park's history, it almost feels like it did have that effect, though.

Speaker 12 No matter how hard I searched, I could only find one grainy black and white picture of Marina on the internet.

Speaker 12 But the one place she will exist is in the hearts of those who loved her and forever frozen in the summer of 1975.

Speaker 12 Park Predators is an Audio Chuck original show. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

Speaker 3 Tis the season of gifting and holes to deck.

Speaker 5 And the Who's in Houdinville were in love with new tech.

Speaker 6 Where can we find Sonos and Samsung and Nintendo?

Speaker 7 They shouted. Would they find it in one place? This they questioned and doubted.

Speaker 9 When suddenly a who yelled, Walmart's the place to start.

Speaker 10 And these who added headphones, TVs, and games to their carts.

Speaker 5 With walmart their shopping was done in a flurry they cried out who knew and ordered their gifts in a hurry shop the latest tech gifts in the walmart app

Speaker 18 behind every homicide case is a process an investigation and people seeking answers and it takes more than reading the headlines to get to the true heart of these stories i'm anna sega nicolasi a former new york city homicide prosecutor and i'm scott weinberger investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff each week on our podcast anatomy of Murder, we dissect real homicide cases from the perspective of those who have lived them: investigators, prosecutors, and the people impacted most.

Speaker 17 We dive into not just what happened, but why it happened, focusing on the facts, process, the decisions that shaped each case, and the pursuit of justice.

Speaker 18 Giving you a deeper understanding of how each case unfolds.

Speaker 17 Listen to Anatomy of Murder available wherever you get your podcasts.