Richard Chadek III (3 of Clubs Nebraska)

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Speaker 1 Our card this week is Richard Chadduck III, the three of clubs from Nebraska. In a case where nothing is definitive and everything is suggestive, detectives are facing the challenge of a lifetime.

Speaker 1 Because after 38 years of no answers, they're still hoping for anything that could get them even just a little bit closer to figuring out what happened to Ricky Chadduck.

Speaker 1 I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck.

Speaker 1 When Teresa Chatted Grooms first closed her eyes for a quick Sunday cat nap at 5 p.m., she expected the sound of her 11-year-old son Ricky would wake her up.

Speaker 1 He just called saying that he was having so much fun with his friend Tony that he was going to be a little bit after his curfew. But don't worry, I'll be home soon, he said.

Speaker 1 Except, when she did start to wake up about 30 minutes later, to her surprise, the home around her was eerily quiet. Now, the first feeling that hit her wasn't panic.

Speaker 1 In March of 1986, constant tabs on your kids just wasn't a thing. What was a thing, what's still a thing today, is kids losing track of time.

Speaker 1 Or it's even possible Ricky had come home right after he called, but when he got there and found his mom asleep, maybe he thought, well, what's the rush?

Speaker 1 And went back out for another ride around the block on his bike, or maybe even went back to Tony's, who only lived about a mile away.

Speaker 1 It would have only taken him about 10 minutes to get from one place to another. Boys will be boys and all of that.

Speaker 1 So without an Apple Watch to ping him, Teresa decided to head out to see if she could track Ricky down herself.

Speaker 1 There was no sign of him or his bike anywhere on their immediate block, so she got in her car and followed the route that she knew he took between their house and Tony's, which included a shortcut through the Omaha National Bank parking lot.

Speaker 1 Teresa remembers Ricky liked stopping there for fun sometimes because it had this money mark or ATM machine as we'd call it today.

Speaker 4 He liked to collect those.

Speaker 4 At the time, they were little cardstock receipts that people would get when they did a transaction at the ATM. And it was an inside ATM.

Speaker 4 And he liked to collect those and he put them in his wallet as if it was money, I guess. In his mind, it was, you know, money.

Speaker 4 Somebody did a transaction to see what their bank balance was and print it on the receipt, then he could say, oh, I've got $75 in my account.

Speaker 1 When she reached the bank parking lot in search of her son, something troubling caught Teresa's eye as she passed the dumpsters in the parking lot.

Speaker 1 Lodged between the dumpster and its wooden enclosure was Ricky's bike, almost like it was meant to be out of sight.

Speaker 4 And I backed up and I went,

Speaker 4 that's Ricky's bike.

Speaker 4 Oh my God, that's Ricky's bike.

Speaker 4 So I opened the dumpster lid and I'm looking and I'm going, Ricky, are you in there? Hey, wake up. Come on.
Let's go. I'll help you out.
Let's go.

Speaker 4 There was no response. And

Speaker 4 I'm a cops kid and I know you don't touch the evidence. And I looked at how that bike was parked and I went, something's not right.
That bike is parked, absolutely not touching anything.

Speaker 1 It wasn't just that her son's bike was there without its rider. Teresa knew Ricky wouldn't ever leave his bike behind.

Speaker 1 And if he did, if he was maybe surprised or forced to, it's the way it was there that felt so wrong.

Speaker 1 She knew her son, her little boy, he'd throw his bike to the side, prop it up against the nearest large object, which if he'd been going to the ATM, probably would have been near the front door of the building, not by the dumpster at the back of the building.

Speaker 1 And we actually have an aerial shot of the bank from back in 1986 that you can check out on the blog post linked out in our show notes for reference.

Speaker 4 By this point, I've got alarm bells going off in my head, and I'm going, oh dear, I don't like this. I don't like this at all.
And I started screaming at the top of my lungs. Richard Frank

Speaker 4 III, you get your b out here now.

Speaker 4 You know, the old use all three names on a kid.

Speaker 4 They know they're in trouble, so they usually listen.

Speaker 1 When Ricky didn't answer to his full given name, Teresa got back in her car, drove home, and called her dad, Sergeant Bob Chamberlain, who'd recently retired from the Omaha Police Department's homicide unit.

Speaker 1 And the minute her dad heard what was happening, he told his daughter to hang up the phone and call 911.

Speaker 1 Now.

Speaker 1 An officer arrived at her house to take the report shortly after getting the call. And Teresa had prepared herself to hear what she knew was so often the response when someone goes missing.

Speaker 1 You got to wait 24 hours before anything can be done.

Speaker 1 But whether it was because Ricky was so young, the way his bike was left behind, or maybe because law enforcement knew Teresa's dad, they didn't say what Teresa thought they were gonna say.

Speaker 1 The officer agreed something was up here. And right away, they were thinking foul play.

Speaker 1 When we spoke with Deputy Mike DeCellis over at the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, he told us that while he wasn't working Ricky's case way back then, investigators probably acknowledged pretty quickly that they would need more resources than they had accessible to them locally.

Speaker 5 I mean, I think that it had not so immediately been determined that it was an abduction.

Speaker 5 I'm sure that search teams would have been out looking at ponds and lakes, you know, drainage features in the area, sewers, all that, but it was pretty apparent.

Speaker 5 Really, you have it right there, day one, eight hours after the initial missing person's report. Well, sure sounds like an abduction.

Speaker 1 About 24 hours after Ricky's disappearance, investigators released a statewide broadcast.

Speaker 1 And not long after that, FBI and state patrol had joined local law enforcement to create a task force entirely dedicated to finding Ricky.

Speaker 1 But you want to know what's maybe more powerful than a missing persons case with three investigating agencies?

Speaker 1 A missing person's case with three investigating agencies, plus a grandfather who is a retired homicide sergeant hitting the streets, knocking on every door himself.

Speaker 1 As Bob Chamberlain was door knocking away, he made sure to deliver anything even sort of worth following up on over to the active authorities.

Speaker 5 Obviously, he's not going to sit around and wait for somebody to approve over time for someone to go and start knocking on doors. It's his grandson.
He's doing that himself.

Speaker 5 So he notifies Omaha police that he had talked with

Speaker 5 an individual at 41st and Valley. He explains to these police officers that this witness who he's identified lives at a house that has direct line of sight more or less to the bank.

Speaker 1 Detectives went and talked to this witness, a woman named Dawn, who did in fact have pretty good visibility of the bank from her house.

Speaker 1 And Dawn told detectives that she had seen something yesterday that didn't originally clock as suspicious, but now it was super concerning.

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Speaker 1 What Dawn saw was a young boy ride into the bank parking lot on his bike sometime around 5.30 p.m. And not long after, she noticed a pickup truck pull in behind him.

Speaker 1 When the truck stopped, the boy wheeled his bike over.

Speaker 1 And while Dawn couldn't be 100% sure of the timing of everything because she was also paying attention to her own kids play out front, she thought the truck was there for maybe like five minutes.

Speaker 1 And during that time, she didn't see the boy actually get into the truck, which she said was a light to medium blue, maybe a Ford with wood sideboards.

Speaker 1 But she said when the truck drove away, she got a glimpse of the driver and she described him as a quote, large-built white male in his 40s with dark hair, end quote.

Speaker 1 And this truck, Dawn wasn't the only one to mention this blue truck to investigators. Pretty much all of the key witnesses they spoke to claimed that they saw a pickup truck that afternoon.

Speaker 1 Now, the truck was varying in age and make, but everyone agreed that it was some shade of blue.

Speaker 1 Some witnesses even claimed that they saw the truck hanging around the area looking suspicious beforehand. Now, Deputy DeCellis chalked some of these statements up to confirmation bias.

Speaker 1 Because when you start looking for something or you even just become aware of it, you start finding it everywhere.

Speaker 1 So ultimately, while it all seemed promising, there was really no way for investigators to tell if these sightings were linked to the same blue truck that Don saw at the bank.

Speaker 1 But then a local firefighter who'd been on duty at a station across the street from the bank came forward and said that he saw who he thought could have been Ricky and a blue truck in the bank parking lot sometime around 5.30 p.m.

Speaker 1 on the afternoon of the 23rd, which would have been right around the same time that Dawn said she saw this too.

Speaker 1 And by this point, investigators were pretty used to hearing similar versions of this same event from other witnesses, so they started to ask him more and more questions to see if there was anything unique about his story.

Speaker 1 And something he said piqued their interest.

Speaker 5 He said the boy was wearing glasses and his clothes reminded him of Rambo.

Speaker 1 Before Ricky went missing, he was last seen wearing a blue vest and a camo shirt and pants. Not unusual for Ricky, camo was a large part of the G.I.
Joe loving 80s boys' wardrobe.

Speaker 1 So there was actually a really strong chance that this guy could have seen Ricky in the parking lot shortly before he went missing.

Speaker 1 But more than what he saw, it's what this firefighter heard that became important. He told investigators that he heard what sounded like a little girl yelling help.

Speaker 1 But at the time, he knew there were kids playing nearby, so he figured it was just one of them kind of horsing around. Now though, everything had taken on a more ominous tone.

Speaker 1 It was entirely feasible that this voice the firefighter overheard could have been that of an 11-year-old boy, an actual cry for help.

Speaker 1 By the end of that first day, even though none of the witnesses they spoke to could actually 100% confirm that they saw Ricky getting into a blue truck in that bank parking lot, detectives felt pretty confident that Ricky had most likely been abducted.

Speaker 1 So investigators reviewed the ATM machine's surveillance footage in hopes of getting a better look at things.

Speaker 1 But keep in mind, this was the 80s, so the best they got was this super grainy VHS footage from the money mark. And as you can expect, it wasn't very helpful.

Speaker 1 But there was one clip time stamped at 5.23 p.m. that stood out to them.
The video showed what appeared to be a kid on a bike.

Speaker 1 And I'm using the word appeared super loosely because if you were to look at it now, you'd probably describe it more like a dark, shadowy image with no real defining features.

Speaker 1 However, based on everything we know that likely went down, you could make an educated guess that it's maybe the shadow of a kid that they presumed could have possibly been Ricky.

Speaker 1 Detectives also went and checked the activity from the ATM machine itself.

Speaker 5 The investigation included contacting everyone who used that ATM several hours time span, investigating any other video that was available from the bank.

Speaker 5 Was this someone who comes to the bank frequently? Does staff know him? These were all things that were investigated and produced nothing.

Speaker 1 Investigators kept asking themselves, how was it possible that someone could just grab Ricky in broad daylight in a parking lot of a frequented bank off a busy road without anyone seeing or hearing it at all?

Speaker 1 The only way this made sense would be if someone coaxed Ricky to get into their truck willingly.

Speaker 1 So law enforcement turned their investigation to those who may have been within the Chadduck's inner circle at one point or another.

Speaker 5 You know, mother and father weren't together, but by all accounts, it was

Speaker 5 a good family. Dad's in the Army station at Fort Polk in Louisiana.
Just a standard question, is there custody dispute? Would he have come here and kidnapped him? She said, basically, no way.

Speaker 4 I obviously gave them every guy that I'd ever dated. And now, mind you, My husband was the second guy I had ever dated.
And I think I'd had four or five boyfriends since then.

Speaker 1 But there was one guy in particular that Teresa remembered because of some really weird stuff he'd said.

Speaker 4 You know, he actually said to me one night, well,

Speaker 4 can't you put your son back where he came from? And I went, what? Back in my stomach?

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 4 And he goes, well, yeah,

Speaker 4 this is the guy I dated.

Speaker 4 That was the last night we discussed anything. I said, I think it's time for you to leave.

Speaker 1 Major ick.

Speaker 1 And while we know investigators interviewed at least one of Teresa's male acquaintances, we actually can't be sure if it was the same guy that Teresa remembers being odd.

Speaker 1 Maybe something to follow up on these days, but back then, they were moving on.

Speaker 1 Eight days later, and about 20 miles away, police's investigation caught one of their biggest leads they were hoping wouldn't come.

Speaker 1 On March 31st, 1986, just a half hour from the Omaha National Bank, a farmer was out plowing his field in Douglas County when he found Ricky.

Speaker 1 He was laying face down in a ditch about 20 to 30 feet from the paved rural road.

Speaker 4 I had, you know, five big burly guys all of a sudden in the house, and I already had an FBI agent in the corner of my dining room, and he would just sit there all day just taking quiet notes.

Speaker 4 My dad said, we need to talk to you.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I looked at him and I said, this is the seriff's department. Oh, so you're bringing in a new department.
Yay, thank you.

Speaker 4 I'm so appreciative that you're, I'm still thinking that we're still in the mode of looking and that everything's

Speaker 4 progressing and we're bringing in more departments to help look.

Speaker 4 And my dad says, I need you to sit down. I need you to sit down now.
And it dawned on me. And I knew.

Speaker 4 And I started for the back door. I said, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 4 And I collapsed in a chair about halfway to the back door. I was going to run.
I just wanted to go.

Speaker 4 And they sat me down in the chair and they made me listen. And I don't remember a whole lot after that.
After that, it was kind of me screaming screaming in my head, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 4 But it was real.

Speaker 1 Ricky was found in the same clothes Teresa reported him missing in. A long-sleeved camo button-up, camo pants, a blue vest, and maroon Velcro strapped shoes.

Speaker 1 Everything appeared to be buttoned up and in its proper place. He didn't look disheveled or anything.
And actually, it was more than just not looking disheveled. Ricky looked damn near pristine.

Speaker 1 At the time his body was found, Ricky had been missing for eight days. So detectives were expecting to find his body and clothes in a certain state.

Speaker 5 Everything that I've read in these reports just really indicates clothes were freshly laundered. You know, he was probably showered.

Speaker 1 Like, literally all of Ricky's clothes appeared to have been washed, underwear included. And maybe this was done a little out of self-preservation to clean any any forensic evidence off of him.

Speaker 1 But detectives wondered if there wasn't more to it. If the person who took Ricky tried to do whatever sick version they considered to be taking care of him during the time they held him captive.

Speaker 1 And this theory gained more traction when they did Ricky's autopsy.

Speaker 5 He was fed something that would be consistent with like a healthy meal, you know, something you would have on like Easter or something like that.

Speaker 1 This was important because detectives wondered if Ricky could have been killed on Easter Sunday, exactly one week after he was taken on Palm Sunday.

Speaker 1 Detectives didn't know if these religious dates held some kind of deeper meaning or if Easter was even the exact day he died. But it's something worth noting.

Speaker 1 Now, I say that they wondered because even though they had Ricky's body, they couldn't get an exact time of death.

Speaker 1 While it was clear to detectives that Ricky couldn't have been killed right after he was abducted, they still couldn't quite tell how long he'd been deceased.

Speaker 1 According to the autopsy report, the examiner estimated that Ricky was only dead for a day or so before he'd been found. Definitely less than three, but that's about as exact as they could get.

Speaker 1 They said his body didn't show any signs of obvious trauma, like any gunshot or stab wounds, or even defensive wounds. And curiously, there were no marks indicating that he'd been restrained either.

Speaker 1 But there were visible ligature marks around Ricky's neck, though the hyoid bone that's typically broken in a violent strangulation was not broken in his case.

Speaker 1 And this mattered to the ME because it seemed like, and it doesn't even feel like I should be saying this in the same sentence, but to them, it seemed like the killer was quote unquote gentle.

Speaker 1 The report claimed, quote, the ligature used to strangle Ricky was not applied with any degree of force, end quote.

Speaker 1 So all of this still left detectives with a lot of unknowns. Unknowns about the murder weapon and unknowns about hard things to talk about.

Speaker 5 I don't know that there's enough evidence to ever establish whether it was rope, wire, anything along those lines, but something of a similar size and shape.

Speaker 5 Body was in the early processes of decomposition. I don't know a swab to war standard part of the process at that day and age.

Speaker 5 All I know is that there was never any definitive evidence of a sexual assault.

Speaker 1 Investigators at the scene had taken time to carefully wrap Ricky's hands and feet in brown paper, though during the autopsy, nothing substantial was found.

Speaker 1 Except a single dark hair on Ricky's finger that did not look like it belonged to him.

Speaker 1 Police were hoping more physical evidence would come from the scene itself. Either where Ricky had been found or his bike that had been left at the bank.
But the bike was a quick bust.

Speaker 1 They tried to pull prints, but Deputy DoCella says they weren't able to pull a single suspect print off of it. We can't even be sure the killer actually touched the bike or not.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, Douglas County Sheriff's deputies, along with the FBI, were collecting a bunch of stuff around the scene where Ricky's body was found.

Speaker 1 Specifically, they were hoping to find whatever was used to strangle Ricky.

Speaker 5 Going through the property sheets, you know, it's a rural road.

Speaker 5 Farmers driving past with hay bales, I'm sure all the time, an extensive search of all of the surrounding roadways was done.

Speaker 5 Every piece of string or rope that ever fell off of somebody's truck or car was collected. There's no way to identify whether or not any of it had evidentiary value.

Speaker 1 They pretty much grabbed all the litter around just to be safe.

Speaker 1 That included some cigarette butts nearby, hoping they could get something from them if it was possible that they may have belonged to the killer.

Speaker 1 Investigators also collected samples of grass and dirt for reference for maybe potential forensic analysis.

Speaker 1 Plus, they got a plaster cast of a tire track nearby, even though it was partially off the road and not very good quality.

Speaker 1 During their search, they also found the backpack that Ricky had on him the day he went missing. It was located about seven to eight feet away from his body near a tree.

Speaker 1 And while most everything that should have been inside was there and accounted for, there was one thing that was missing. Something Ricky's killer might still have today.

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Speaker 5 The only thing

Speaker 5 that was never recovered was a wooden box with a latch on it. There's a very detailed description.
It's something that everyone's always kept in the back of their mind.

Speaker 5 Well, if we could find somebody who kept this.

Speaker 1 Detectives were a week or so in, and they didn't have a whole lot to show for it in the way of evidence. A single hair and a missing box.
And Teresa had far less.

Speaker 1 As she prepared for her only child's funeral, she made sure they focused on remembering Ricky for the fun-loving life he lived, not the way he died.

Speaker 4 You know, he just, he was a very loving kid. And if he heard somebody like something,

Speaker 4 he would go out of his way and spend his own money to get it for them as he could and just bring them smiles. So it's always gratifying to know that you're raised a good kid.

Speaker 1 Ricky was into dinosaurs and transformers and especially Legos. He even kept some in his backpack for when he was ready to build, specifically in that little wooden box.

Speaker 1 But what Ricky really loved was G.I. Joe, thus inspiring his signature camo attire.
Ricky would even record himself singing the G.I. Joe song alongside the TV.

Speaker 1 And Teresa was actually willing to share one of those tape recordings that she found in the basement with us from a long time ago.

Speaker 1 Hoping to get answers for Teresa and justice for Ricky, detectives turned to DMV records, looking for that mysterious blue truck while at the same time scoping out the Chaddock's neighborhood.

Speaker 5 Those include known or suspected child molesters. Obviously, I don't know how long the task force was up and running.

Speaker 5 It's not something that can run indefinitely when there's no longer anything to be gained from it.

Speaker 1 There was a child molester in Council Bluffs across the Missouri River. He had the motive, but not necessarily the means.
Then there was a priest at a boys school nearby.

Speaker 1 He didn't seem to have any convictions, but he did have some predatory allegations made against him by a former employee.

Speaker 1 The boys' school owned a truck that looked similar to the blue truck that keeps popping up in this story. And the priest would have had access to it.

Speaker 1 Now, this connection wasn't just made because this school was nearby either. Apparently, Ricky had actually attended summer camp at this boys' school at some point in the past.

Speaker 1 And before you ask, what allegations, Ashley? Well, I wish I knew. But unfortunately, those details aren't available to us.

Speaker 1 And Deputy DeCellis couldn't give us the priest's name since he was never officially labeled a suspect.

Speaker 1 I do know that detectives got search warrants for the boys' school, but no evidence was ever found that tied this priest to Ricky's case. Very few leads trickled in after that one.

Speaker 1 In December 1987, about a year and a half after his murder, the FBI came up with a profile of Ricky's killer.

Speaker 1 A profile is always a best guess, not something that should be written in stone and used at the exclusion of all other sussy suspects. But in my opinion, they tend tend to be pretty insightful.

Speaker 1 And here were some of the big key takeaways in this one.

Speaker 1 The FBI said this was probably a white man in his late 20s to early 30s who was above average intelligence, maybe even sought out higher education.

Speaker 1 His job would likely be white collar, one that got him some respect. And while he was probably a loner, he's someone who presents as kind and genuine.

Speaker 1 The kind of guy that if and when people ever found out he did this, they would be shocked and say that they could have never imagined it.

Speaker 1 That same kindness and genuineness would have come across to police who the FBI theorized had likely already interviewed him, maybe as a witness.

Speaker 1 They said that he'll be cooperative and show affection for Ricky because he probably was familiar with him in some way. And it's very possible that Ricky was familiar with this person in return.

Speaker 1 It would explain why he would have gone with him, why the assailant didn't have to use restraints to keep him close to a whole week.

Speaker 1 But at a minimum, this person had the ability to watch Ricky, even if Ricky didn't know them. They had to know where he played, his routine.

Speaker 1 So, no matter what, this person was a local, specifically someone who lived or worked near the area where Ricky was taken from.

Speaker 1 They said he didn't want to kill Ricky, but because of his roots within the community, because of the way people see him, he felt he had to.

Speaker 1 But make no mistake, they said he wasn't someone who actually felt real love for Ricky, and that's evidence they said by the way he dumped him. Once Ricky was dead, the fantasy was over.

Speaker 1 Once this case went cold and the task force was disbanded, individual agencies continued to follow up on any leads that came their way.

Speaker 1 Sometimes in coordination with each other, sometimes individually.

Speaker 5 Basically, Omaha washed their hands of it because somebody had to take over and it was us. And we're talking like in the 2000s that this happened.

Speaker 5 You know, it was 2010 that they went and got all the physical evidence so that it could all be maintained in one spot.

Speaker 1 When Ricky's case was passed off to the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, there was an individual noted in the reports that stood out.

Speaker 1 According to the Omaha World Herald, this guy had actually come onto Omaha detectives' radars back in the early days of the investigation, seemingly around the same time that the FBI profile was done.

Speaker 1 And these suspicions were all surrounding a man named Charles Miller.

Speaker 1 Certain things about Charles Miller really aligned with the FBI profile.

Speaker 1 Job, familiarity with the neighborhood, lived in proximity to the abduction site, check, check, check, at least until the mid-70s. You see, Charles was a Douglas County Sheriff's Reserve deputy.

Speaker 1 And in the mid-70s, he was released from that position. When reporting by Terry Highland and Nick Schinker says he was arrested for, quote, contributing to the delinquency of boys, end quote.

Speaker 1 Basically, he gave these minors marijuana and let them watch adult films. And in 1986, the same year Ricky was murdered, he'd sexually assaulted two teen boys in a rural area.

Speaker 1 And that area was just less than an hour away from Omaha.

Speaker 5 He had a home in South Omaha, not particularly close to the bank.

Speaker 5 And again, he also had this family farm property that did have a structure on it with an alleged history of sexual offenses having occurred at both locations.

Speaker 5 And that farm was significantly west of Omaha.

Speaker 1 Even with all of these things, plus the fact that Charles failed a polygraph when detectives at the time interviewed him, there were so many things that didn't make Charles the perfect suspect.

Speaker 1 Like, did he have access to a blue truck? Deputy DoCellis doesn't know.

Speaker 5 What stood out to me about him was the fact that he was a confirmed pedophile preying on males and that he had a rural property with a structure in which a child could have been detained for an extended period of time.

Speaker 1 Sometime around 2020, detectives looked to see if Miller's DNA had been uploaded to COTIS, and it had been back in 2006.

Speaker 1 Now, at some point in the years following Ricky's murder, a DNA profile was able to be pulled from that hair found on his body. And that had also been uploaded to COTIS in 2010.

Speaker 1 So they were able to confirm that it was not a match to Miller.

Speaker 1 Besides Miller, there was also another guy that caught DeCellis's attention as he was going through Ricky's case files for himself starting around 2020-ish.

Speaker 5 The long and short of what got recorded in the report is that this individual was just sitting at a bar and a guy just happened to come in, sit down next to him.

Speaker 5 Start talking to him about child pornography and then makes reference to

Speaker 5 won't commit to saying he said he killed Ricky Chattick but made statements that I interpreted in that light. I don't think that he ever got any attention.

Speaker 5 I think he got missed by the people who were in a position to recognize it because they were focused on other things.

Speaker 5 But that being said, it's an imperfect world and something like this is a lot to manage. So blue sky, that's what I wish I could do is go back and talk to that guy.

Speaker 1 But he can't because unfortunately the guy who came forward only partially identified this man. So detectives don't have a name to go off of.

Speaker 1 Ultimately, detectives were just in a holding pattern for the next couple of years.

Speaker 1 Deputy DiCella said scientific standards have changed so much that current policies don't even allow for their hair to be run against the CODIS database anymore because there isn't a strong enough profile for it to be uniquely identified.

Speaker 5 That is very partial. That is

Speaker 5 maybe 50% of what you would need to upload this as a suspect DNA sample into the relevant federal systems that do that. It is useful for the purpose of comparison to a particular known suspect.

Speaker 5 You cannot rule somebody completely in with five loci. You could rule them out, assuming that we are considering it as suspect DNA.

Speaker 5 Because with those few points of comparison, you may have a perfect match to those five. And then the other ones that we don't know about might be completely wrong.
So you can't say 100% yes.

Speaker 5 You could say 100% no if a match is definitively not made.

Speaker 1 At least to DeCellis's understanding of things, there was likely some amount of root on that hair since there was enough to get a partial profile to upload Dakotas back in the day.

Speaker 1 Investigators held on to hope with that hair for some time. But unfortunately, the entire sample was exhausted during testing and nothing remains of it.

Speaker 1 So they can't go back to see if they can get a better profile with newer technology. And the truth is, we can't even be sure it belonged to Ricky's killer, though.

Speaker 1 It's totally possible the crime scene had been contaminated. Maybe that hair came from someone in law enforcement or even a random person not involved in the case at all.

Speaker 1 Honestly, with DNA technology being in its infancy at the time, we're lucky investigators back then even thought to take the steps they did to preserve what they'd found.

Speaker 1 So without the hair, they continued to test evidence that they found at the scene, like Ricky's backpack. Mostly they were hoping for some kind of touch DNA.

Speaker 5 We sent the backpack, which had less biological contamination than the clothes he was wearing, to a partner agency for an MPAC.

Speaker 1 As of around 2023, no genetic profile has been identified from that testing. Over the years, Teresa has heard so many different theories.
Some she puts stock into, others not so much.

Speaker 1 There's just so many unknowns, but nonetheless, she brings every potential lead to detectives. But time and time again, they tell her all of those theories have been ruled out.

Speaker 1 But while writing this episode, I brought one to Decellis myself. It's funny how sometimes you don't see something till you like get it all down on paper.

Speaker 1 And listen, it is a long shot, but it felt too weirdly coincidental to at least not mention.

Speaker 1 And let me know if this sounds familiar to you. It might if you listen to Crime Junkie.
A man's driving around in the mid to late 80s in a blue truck, abducting children around Easter time.

Speaker 1 Then that child is found in a ditch days later near farmland.

Speaker 1 Immediately, April Tinsley came to mind. For those of you who don't know, April was abducted and killed two years after Ricky in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Speaker 1 Her case went unsolved until 2018 when genealogy helped identify her killer as a local man, John D. Miller.

Speaker 1 I had our reporter connect with Detective Martin, who's the Fort Wayne detective that helped put John Miller away for April's murder.

Speaker 1 The only public reports I can pull from Miller don't start until 2002, so I have no idea if he had any ties to Nebraska back in the 80s. Could he have lived there? I don't know.

Speaker 1 What did he do for work? Almost nothing about this guy was reported on after his arrest. When we pinged Martin, we got a simple answer back from him.
He said Miller was in Indiana in 86.

Speaker 1 A little more detail might have scratched the itch for me, but DeCellis still seemed interested.

Speaker 1 Although even I'll admit, if you look at the FBI profile and that ends up being right, there's a lot that doesn't work about John Miller. Or at least, I don't think so.

Speaker 1 I don't know enough about him to really say.

Speaker 1 The one other thing the Douglas County Sheriff's Office did fairly recently was try try to pull literally anything useful from the surveillance footage from back in the day.

Speaker 1 Maybe they could enhance, enhance, enhance like they do on episodes of Criminal Minds. But this isn't TV.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, the tape wasn't viable after all this time, and all they got was static. So they only have that grainy, shadowy picture from the 80s to work with.

Speaker 1 That doesn't mean that leads have completely dried up.

Speaker 5 We continue to follow up on whatever leads we get from the public.

Speaker 5 Just a couple weeks ago, I got an unsigned letter that had initially gone to FBI naming somebody who, I don't know, I'm continuing to look into it.

Speaker 1 Ricky's mom, Teresa, deputy to Chellis, and the entire Omaha community just want to know why.

Speaker 1 Why Ricky?

Speaker 1 Teresa needs to know why. And she struggled all these years not knowing what happened to him.

Speaker 4 I had to go to one of my friends and ask her, am I still a mom? Do I still get to celebrate Mother's Day?

Speaker 4 And she,

Speaker 4 God love her.

Speaker 4 She grabbed me up and she said, absolutely, you are going to be a mother until the end of your days. You are always a mother.

Speaker 4 Because I felt like

Speaker 4 I was no longer a mom. I was no longer entitled to that because I had lost my son.

Speaker 4 It was awful.

Speaker 4 But she was so strong and she absolutely, she still to this day sends me Mother's Day card and reassures me I really am a mom.

Speaker 1 Teresa says she has this message for whoever may have done this or for anyone who knows who murdered her only child.

Speaker 4 At this point in time, there is probably nothing that's really going to make me happy about this case.

Speaker 4 It would make me be able to sleep a little better to know that

Speaker 4 whoever did this never went on and hurt another child in their life

Speaker 4 and be sure that they never slip up and from this point forward hurt another child and never plunge another family into heartache and trauma like this person did to my family.

Speaker 4 I'd like to know they're off the street. That, I guess, would be the most comfort I could take at this point in time.
At least they're off the street, and they can't do it to somebody else's child.

Speaker 1 There are very few paths forward in this case if someone doesn't decide to finally tell the truth. The tiniest bit of information could blow this thing wide open.

Speaker 1 So, if you know anything, please contact the Douglas County Sheriff's Office tip line at 402-444-6000.

Speaker 1 The deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

Speaker 1 So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

Speaker 1 Have you ever experienced something truly unexplainable?

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Speaker 1 Perhaps it was a fleeting glimpse of something extraordinary, a chilling whisper in the dead of night, or an undeniable premonition that comes to life.

Speaker 1 I'm Yvette Gentile, and I'm her sister, Rasha Pecarrero.

Speaker 1 Each week on our podcast, So Supernatural, we partner with the one and only Ashley Flowers, host of the number one true crime crime podcast, Crime Junkie, to take you on a journey of the world's most mystical mysteries.

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