Andrew Moore (6 of Clubs, California)

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Our card this week is Andrew Moore, the six of clubs from California.

The details of Andy's case are bizarre.

I mean, it's easy to get lost in them.

You almost have to get lost in them if you're ever going to stand a chance of solving this case.

I mean, at this very moment, my office floor is covered with hand-drawn maps of how Andy's apartment building was laid out because the exact location of his bathroom window and what was found in there and who had access to what and how might narrow in on the one person who brutally murdered Andy in his sleep exactly 25 years ago to this very day, depending on when you're hearing this.

There are already some very good suspects, and time is running out for one of them.

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

26-year-old Andy Moore was a social guy.

The chance to live in a big city with things to do and more diversity is what drew him to leave his childhood home and adoptive family in Pennsylvania and move to San Diego, California.

And he loved it out there.

He was going to college, working at a restaurant with still plenty of time for fun.

And he was known to have lots of social gatherings in his small studio apartment that he rented on 8th Avenue.

The best part was, even though he lived alone and got all the benefits of independence, he had actually chosen San Diego because he had an uncle there who he was close with.

Uncle Paul was a steady rock in a place far from home.

And so for the past two years, Andy had been living there, and he and Andy talked and hung out often.

But come Tuesday, September 12th, 2000, it had been a few days since Uncle Paul had seen or heard from his nephew.

And Andy's absence wasn't top of mind for him, but a call from one of Andy's friends made Paul go back and count the days and hours since he last talked to him.

This friend, Andy's best friend, Annie, was calling because she said she hadn't been able to get in touch with Andy since noon on Friday.

And weirdly, she hadn't even been able to leave messages on his answering machine like she normally did.

The phone just rang and rang and rang.

Of course, Andy wasn't with Paul and Paul had no idea where he was, but he was immediately concerned.

So just before 8 p.m.

on September 12th, Paul drove over to Andy's apartment to check on him.

Paul didn't feel any more at ease when he got to Andy's ground floor apartment.

He couldn't get in.

Not when he twisted the knob, not when he used his spare key on the bottom lock.

He didn't have one for the deadbolted top.

And his incessant knocking didn't bring Andy or anyone else to the door.

And none of this was right.

I mean, the reason Andy never gave him a key to the deadbolt was because Andy never even really used the deadbolt.

He rarely even locked his doors at all.

Just to the left of the door was a barred window, so Uncle Paul went to peer inside.

Unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago, and so he can't describe what it was that he saw.

But his husband, Ed Cruz, remembers vividly what Paul told him about that evening.

It was close to dusk.

He couldn't really see in the apartment.

So one of the tenants offered him a flashlight.

And when he flashed it in through the window, that was when he saw Andy.

That's when he, I guess, called 911.

And then I recall things just happened so quickly.

Paul calls me and he told me that he found Andy and Andy was stabbed.

And so I immediately said, I'll be there.

I'll drive down to the apartment.

I felt like Paul really needed me next to him, beside him for comfort, but I couldn't get to where Paul was because the police had put tape up.

When first responders broke down the door, they found Andy lying naked on his bed.

His body was cold and there was evidence of extreme violence about his body and a lot of blood.

It was obvious there was some kind of bludgeoning, there was incised wounds, there was trauma to his body.

That was Lori Adams, a retired detective from the San Diego Police Department.

She took over Andy's case in 2012 and worked it until she retired this January.

She said it was clear to everyone that Andy had been dead for some time, probably for about as long as he'd been unreachable, which meant the only thing they could do was secure the scene and try to begin to answer some critical questions.

So what I'm looking for is a variety of things.

What fits, what doesn't fit.

Taking the case in its totality, when you're looking at the crime scene, you're trying to understand, you know, the why, right?

So we know the who.

Andy is our victim, and we are trying to understand the why, because the why is a really critical piece to getting to the who did it.

What the first set of homicide detectives uncovered as Andy was covered up and carted away on a stretcher was perplexing.

First responding officers filled them in on how the door had been deadbolted and the bars on the window were secure.

There was no sign of a break-in and Andy was alone in the apartment.

In fact, they don't think he ever even knew the attack was coming.

It looks pretty clear that he was sleeping at the time he was attacked.

And so consulting with the medical examiner's office, they believe based on the reports that they were reading that likely Andy was bludgeoned in the head, causing such a severe and significant injury that he was essentially incapacitated immediately.

He did not know what was happening.

And that is consistent with what we see of Andy laying in the bed.

There's no signs of struggle.

After he'd been knocked unconscious, someone had taken a sharp instrument and stabbed him in the neck.

But even that fact stands out to Detective Adams and to me and to our reporter, Annie.

So I think based on the medical examiner's opinion that the knives would not have incapacitated.

The wounds he received were significant, but they would not have incapacitated.

It's the bludgeoning burst that crushed his skull and lacerated his brain.

That beating is what knocked him completely out.

So then ask yourself, why do you even need a knife?

You don't need the knife.

It felt personal.

Was he hit, like punched in the head, or was it an object that was used?

Some object, some instrument was used.

Unknown, because there's nothing was left behind, but it caused a significant amount of damage to Andy's left side.

Without knowing what Andy was stabbed with, it's almost impossible to say if that item came from Andy's apartment or if his killer brought it with them.

But investigators are pretty sure that the knife used on Andy was one of his own.

You see, Andy had been working as a cook at a local restaurant called Mahoney's, and he had his own set of chef's knives.

But those knives were nowhere to be found in his small apartment.

Aside from that, though, it didn't seem like much else was taken from inside the apartment.

I mean, most of Andy's things were undisturbed, including his wallet that still had 60 bucks inside.

There were some papers strewn about, which was odd for Andy, who was pretty tidy.

Now, even though Andy was naked, at his autopsy, they found no indication that he had any sexual activity around the time of his death.

He probably just liked to sleep naked.

And a toxicology screening showed no signs of drugs or alcohol in his system, which suggests there's no other reason for him to be incapacitated and not fight back.

So Andy's sleeping.

Someone comes into his small studio apartment somehow without waking him.

uses one or more weapons, maybe even from inside Andy's own home, and then they viciously attack him like it was their plan all along.

Then they leave with just the weapons they used and one other thing, Andy's keys.

Uncle Paul was the only other known person besides Andy himself who had a key to his apartment.

And even then, Uncle Paul didn't have a key to the Deadbolt, remember?

That was just Andy.

So the only way it would work for Andy to be locked inside his own house would be for someone to have taken his keys when they left and then locked the door behind them.

His apartment keys being gone meant that the key to his motorcycle was also gone.

And guess what they found missing from outside his apartment?

He loved his motorcycle.

That was his baby.

It defined Andy, I think.

It was part of that free spirit that he seemed to be.

The bike was Andy's only vehicle, and he was incredibly respectful when it came to using it.

I mean, if you know anything about bikes, especially the kind he had, which some people describe as like a crotch rocket, they can be loud.

But Andy was the kind of guy who would wheel his bike from the back of the building where his front door was around the side and out to the street before starting it so he didn't bother his neighbors.

The current detective on his case, Tracy Barr, said that they never heard his loud bike ever, except for once.

There were witnesses that were obviously interviewed and they did mention hearing a motorcycle leave at a high rate of speed a couple days before Andrew's body was actually discovered.

She recalled hearing the motorcycle probably around 2 a.m.

And I think the interesting thing that kind of stands out is that just prior to the motorcycle taking off at that high rate of speed, she heard a female scream.

Both Detective Barr and former Detective Adams were quick to point out that there was a huge music festival happening during the weekend of Andy's death called Street Scene.

So there would have been a ton of extra people downtown near his apartment.

And therefore, the scream, maybe even the sound of the motorcycle, might not be as meaningful as one might think.

Though, to be clear, Andy's motorcycle was missing.

But there was another sound that the neighbor heard that Detective Adams thinks is far more important.

She says that she heard like some kind of a loud bang or some kind of wood cracking, something along those lines, which could be, it could be the assault.

And then she heard what she thought was something being thrown in the trash, like the big trash receptacle outside.

Detective Adams believes that could have been the sound of the killer throwing away the weapon or weapons that they used to kill Andy.

Problem is, when they went looking for that trash, it was too late.

Unfortunately, by the time Andy was found, the trash was already picked up and dumped.

They had less and less hope of ever recovering the murder weapons but they were finally feeling like they could wrap their heads around a timeline because if you can narrow down a timeline of when it happened then you could start exploring truly who would have had the opportunity in this time frame to commit this murder because the medical examiner's office when they show up the death certificate's not going to state that they believe that this person was killed 36 and a half hours earlier.

It's going to list the date and time that the body was discovered because that's a definitive fact that they can state.

So through witness statements from friends and family and neighbors, the goal is to identify who saw what and when was the last time they saw or spoke to Andy and narrow down that time frame.

So one of his closest friends is Andy

and she was the one that called Uncle Paul and said, hey, I have not heard from Andy.

They were very close, platonic friends, very close.

And she frequently would spend the night at Andy's.

And that Wednesday, so Andy was found on Tuesday, the previous Wednesday, which was the sixth, she did spend the night.

And she woke up Thursday morning and they went and got his check.

And then she left and initially intended to return Thursday night, but decided not to.

And he left about 2 p.m.

in the afternoon.

So we have Andy alive at least Thursday at 2 p.m.

Another resident in that apartment complex saw Andy.

Andy gave her some money.

I guess he caused a little bit of damage to her car.

So he paid paid her for that damage also on Thursday.

I don't have a time associated with that.

And then another friend of his in the sister apartment also saw Andy on Thursday before he made a trip up to Orange County.

So we have him for the most part probably about dinner time on Thursday at least being alive.

Uncle Paul believes he saw Andy on Friday, September 8th.

They exchanged keys or something to that effect.

I don't know if it was to Andy's apartment or Paul's, but Paul drove drove down there and he saw Andy and Andy was bragging to me and he had just bought a new refrigerator.

So he just was kind of bragging about his refrigerator.

So Uncle Paul saw him and then another neighbor also saw Andy about 1030 in the morning.

So we have daylight hours Friday.

And he also tried calling.

She tried getting a hold of Andy and she could not get a hold of him and his answering machine wasn't working and she thought, well, that's weird.

And poor Annie, he didn't show up to school that day.

And I don't know how she knows that information, but he didn't show up to school.

And then one of his co-workers said Andy didn't show up to work on Saturday.

And he said, I was trying all weekend to get a hold of Andy, and I didn't get a response and no answering machine.

And we do have one person in the apartment complex who believes he saw Andy on Saturday, but that's the only person.

And so when I kind of see what really concerns me is the answering machine, every person said, that is very unusual.

His answering machine held like 100 calls.

He never reached capacity.

It always picked up.

Andy's phone and answering machine were found in his apartment, though not where Andy normally kept it.

Both detectives remember this being one of the old cordless phones that were common in the early 2000s, the kind where the phone cradle was also an answering machine.

But this is where things really get strange.

This system was unplugged and sitting in this little enclosed alcove off his bathroom window, along with some other items like movies, magazines, and papers.

And for you to fully appreciate the weirdness of what I'm about to tell you, I need to explain the layout of Andy's building.

This is where all those papers covering my office floor come in.

And listen, it's a weird setup, but I'm going to do my best to explain.

And I'm actually going to provide pictures as well on our Instagram at the Deck Podcast.

So Andy's apartment isn't the high-rise that you might be picturing.

It was this old three-story building constructed in 1924 and renovated to accommodate six units.

If you're facing the front of the building, the front half of the first floor, I don't know what they were, but they weren't units.

The back half of the first floor was split down the middle into two studio apartments.

Andy's is on the left, and then you have another one on the right.

Now, at the time that Andy was murdered, the one on the right was vacant.

And then the entire second floor was just split down the middle into two one-bedroom apartments with two more apartments on the third floor, just like that.

Now at the center of this building, running vertically from top to bottom was this square opening.

Some people call it a vent, some call it an air shaft or a crawl space.

Detective Adams even calls it a dumb waiter because she thought the building may have been a hotel at one point, though we've never been able to confirm this.

Now in 2000, all the apartment units were oriented in a way that the bathrooms were at the center of the building with a window that opened up to this dumb waiter, shaft, air vent, whatever.

A woman named Beth Story, who lived on the second floor at the same time Andy did, told our reporter Annie Roderick Jones that you couldn't see into any of the apartments if you looked out yours, but you could tell if someone's light was on.

And this is actually part of the building that Beth's live-in boyfriend, turned husband, turned ex-husband, Don Sullivan, says that he remembers well too.

Each one of the bathrooms had a window that would open up inside.

So if everybody had their windows open, you could have a conversation with with everybody in the building.

And so if we wanted to, we could say hi to the neighbor upstairs.

We could say hi to the neighbor downstairs.

And you could do it directly across as well.

Okay.

Could a person presumably fit inside of that?

Yeah, easily.

And if you were on Andy's floor, the lowest floor, would there be a way to get to the third floor from the shaft?

Yes.

And how would someone do that?

You could shimmy up from window.

And this is, you know, obviously 20 years ago.

And I think you'd have to be really skilled in Spider-Man to go from the third floor down or up.

But you could shimmy from window to window if you were really good.

I don't remember there being any handholds going up the shaft, but I think, you know, it's possible.

Beth said she would often peek her head out of her own window when she was brushing her teeth.

Nothing was ever there.

I think it was a dirt floor, what you could see.

Until the day or so before Andy's body was discovered.

Notebooks started showing up and the phone recorder was there, the answering machine, and everything was so meticulously stacked and so neatly.

And the cord was wrapped around the phone.

And I was wondering, why is that?

What's going on?

And for some reason, the way that they were stacked also intrigued me and creeped me out a bit.

Just perfectly stacked.

So if it was a rectangular notebook and then there was a book on top of it, all the edges were the same.

They spent time neatly packing those items for some reason.

And he never did that before.

It was only during those hours before he was found that that has ever occurred.

And why would his voice recorder be there was odd to me too.

It's just not something he would have have done, ever did.

They're sad.

That's never happened before.

He's never put one thing in that cross face.

Which to me begs the question, was it Andy who put that stuff there?

There's every indication as far as physical evidence goes that Andy was the one to place those items in that air shaft.

There was no blood on the items or anywhere in the air shaft when police processed it.

And the only fingerprints that they found on any of the items there were Andy's.

I mean, most everything in the apartment tied back to Andy, in fact.

So there are two possibilities.

One, Andy put the machine in the air shaft on his own, or two, someone else did.

Both of these are equally confusing.

What would motivate a murderer not just to unplug a phone, but to move it?

And if Beth's memory is reliable, neatly wrap up the cord around it.

And actually, it's the timing of this that really bothers me.

Admittedly, no one knows what day Andy died, but based on the level of decomp and the last confirmed sightings of him and the inability for anyone to reach him, it had to have been sometime Friday or Saturday.

But if Beth's memory is correct, these items aren't being placed into the air shaft until Sunday or Monday.

So if all of that is correct, it would have had to have been someone else.

Did they come back to Andy's apartment just to do that?

Why?

Or if somehow the dates and memories are wrong and it was Andy who put it there, or at least it was him who unplugged his phone machine and phone, why do that?

Well, you do that if you want to stop getting calls and messages from someone.

And we know for a fact that there were a few someones blowing up Andy's phone.

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Police heard one name.

over and over again in the early days of the investigation when they talked to people around Andy's apartment complex.

Vanessa.

That's actually a pseudonym that Detective Barr used with us, although we have confirmed her identity ourselves.

She had just recently been evicted, and there was mention that Andy probably was in a relationship with her at some point, but had ended things, and she wasn't too thrilled about that.

Vanessa was about 28 years old at the time of Andy's murder.

And before she was evicted, she had been living in the unit across from Andy on the first floor.

When Andy died, the unit Vanessa had been living in was vacant, which was a relief to a number of the other tenants, including Beth and her then-live-in boyfriend Don.

They lived in the unit right above Vanessa.

And during a phone call, Beth said she remembered Vanessa's exit was a relief.

We wanted her gone.

We wanted something done.

I remember one night she took a broom and started knocking on the ceiling at like 12 or 2 o'clock in in the morning, something terribly late, and said, I'm fing your boyfriend.

I'm laying in bed looking at him, just going, I knew it wasn't true, but just always like crazy stuff.

Beth said she would often come home to notes from Vanessa on her door.

Sometimes the notes were friendly, saying to call her if the radio was too loud.

Sometimes they were more confrontational, saying that calling 911 was a waste of taxpayers' money.

You know, just sort of odd things, but nothing egregious.

That said, Vanessa's behavior was enough of a red flag that Beth still, to this day, has a detailed folder dedicated to Vanessa.

It includes some of the strange notes she left, along with details of Beth's phone calls to police when Vanessa was disturbing folks in the complex, which were corroborated by police reports.

Overall, Vanessa just seemed to sort of cause chaos.

Another time, she left a note on my door, but she used peanut butter and jelly because she didn't have tape.

And she pinned it to the door that way.

It was just always very, very strange.

I didn't like bumping into her anymore.

None of us did.

A reporter spoke to Beth's ex, Dawn, about Andy's death too.

Don said that he distinctly remembered when he had found out that Andy had been sleeping with Vanessa.

I didn't know that they had a relationship until like, you know, we all met downstairs one time.

And I think after she got pulled away by cops, and he's like, yeah, that was a bad mistake.

You know.

Vanessa's erratic behavior, her routine disturbances in the complex, and the history with Andy was enough that police looked into her almost immediately.

Detective Adams said that what investigators were told about Vanessa just raised more concerns.

She would leave messages on his answering machine that were really nasty and negative.

She was eventually evicted out of that apartment and then took up residency in a car in the parking lot with some other people that were homeless.

And she would be there.

And Andy and other neighbors called police about her repeatedly.

I think the last report I read, there was probably eight or nine calls for service where she was harassing him.

So the investigation really did focus initially on her.

And she was interviewed multiple times by initial investigators.

She was even polygraphed.

She passed a polygraph.

So she was really explored extensively.

And again, it's an open case.

It's unsolved.

Anything is possible.

But you also have to marry the significance of the injuries to Andy.

You know, she's very slight and small.

Is she capable of causing those types of injuries?

Maybe.

I don't know.

Possibly.

It's worth noting that when Detective Adams talks about harassment, she is specifically talking about a number of police reports that document Andy describing Vanessa playing loud music, banging on the doors, and screaming threats.

Also,

when she lived there, she would crawl through that crawl space into Andy's apartment and kind of mess with him a little bit, move his things around.

Well, that's interesting.

Our reporter, Annie, tried reaching out to Vanessa, but as of this recording, she has not heard back from her.

Here's the thing, though.

It is easy to get stuck on Vanessa.

Tumultuous relationship history, check.

Familiarity with the building, Check.

I don't know the state of her relationship with Andy when he died, but even if he wouldn't have willingly let her in, maybe she had a key to her old place and went through the air event like she was known to do.

But oh, by the way, she wouldn't have needed to enter the air event through her old apartment.

Because during our reporting, we learned that anyone could have entered that air event.

even from outside the building.

Here's Beth again recalling something that she learned about her building after living there for a while.

She heard this from the neighbors on the same floor, who she affectionately calls the girls.

I had already lived there for months and months when I believe it was the girls told me they had complained to the realty company about the access point that was unsecure outside of the building on the north side.

I said, what access point?

And that's when I went downstairs and out the front door and I went around the building to look at it.

And there was trees next to it.

So I had never noticed it.

And I had never had a reason to walk over there.

It was in between two apartments, ours and another, and they were quite close together.

And that's when I saw it was a crawl space that was unsecure at our building.

And that bothered me.

But I was glad that they had reported it.

I was glad that they told me.

And I I assumed the realty company was going to take care of that right away.

And shortly thereafter, when Andy got murdered,

Don found out about these access points, too.

He remembered the crawl space clearly with a metal grate that closed off the opening.

Except the grate wasn't secured and could be easily removed and voila.

easy access to the complex and therefore to the apartments.

And to be precise, there were two of these entryways to the building, one on the south side and one on the north side of the building.

Don said they were around two square feet.

So this introduces a ton of additional potential suspects.

Someone could have very well just walked right off the street and into Andy's apartment.

Here's Don again.

It was downtown San Diego, and it's right by an off-ramp from Highway 163, where there was lots of cop action.

There was lots of homeless people.

There was lots of drugs.

Don went on to say that because of all that, he personally never felt like Vanessa was the only or even the best suspect.

I mean, she has always denied involvement in Andy's murder to police, and she has never been charged.

So it's likely that even police recognized there were too many other variables that could have allowed anyone off the street to access Andy's apartment.

And there were a lot of random people passing through.

His first floor apartment door opened up to the building's main parking lot where Andy kept his motorcycle.

That parking lot was also something of a pedestrian shortcut.

The apartment complex is in a place that most tenants described, that people would use that parking lot as kind of a thoroughfare to kind of cut corners and get around downtown a little faster.

So it was not unusual to have pedestrian traffic, and it would not be unusual to have people who don't live there in that lot.

I'll be the first to admit, though, I mean, this crime doesn't give random assailant off the street.

The attack on Andy and the circumstances around it scream personal.

But say for a second that it wasn't personal.

They were coming to take something.

Well, then it seems like the only thing the killer was after was Andy's motorcycle.

When you continue that thought of, well, if you're going to steal a motorcycle, you're going to part it out.

You're going to sell it.

The purpose is to get something from it, money, or something from it.

Most people don't murder someone and keep the vehicle and just keep it for the rest of their lives.

There has to be something driving that desire.

But fast forward one month, and guess what police end up finding not far away?

His motorcycle was simply parked a mile away and the cover put back on it.

And it was seen a couple of days after Andy was murdered and it stayed there for about a month.

So Does it make sense to think that he was killed for the motorcycle specifically?

Or was the motorcycle a getaway vehicle?

But for who?

Detectives couldn't connect Andy or anyone in his life to the Golden Hill neighborhood where the motorcycle was found.

And even though neighbors said that they saw people actually riding the motorcycle, even tinkering with it from time to time, no one was able to identify those people.

Now, police did impound the bike.

They processed it for evidence, including dusting it for prints.

But very little was found except for a few prints from the gas tank cover that didn't belong to Andy.

And despite uploading those prints to APHIS, they didn't get a match to anyone.

It seemed like maybe where the bike was found wasn't gonna be a defining part of Andy's case.

Maybe the killer fled on it and just dumped it nearby once they felt like they had enough distance from the crime scene.

But all that changed on April 30th, 2001, when a man named Gary Booth was found naked, murdered in his home with no signs of forced entry.

And guess where that home was?

In the same apartment complex of the Golden Hill neighborhood, where Andy's bike was found.

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according to investigators gary was discovered after he didn't show up for work tied up in his apartment with a vaseline smeared rag stuffed in his mouth And again, this is the very exact apartment complex where Andy's motorcycle was found, which, of course was very interesting to Detective Adams.

So the two cases had similarities in it was a victim's apartment.

The victims were found nude.

The victim's personal items were potentially stolen, and their vehicles were stolen.

And I thought, wow, well, that's interesting.

So the suspect in that case was arrested up in L.A.

driving that victim's vehicle.

and arrested and then brought down to San Diego for questioning.

And during that questioning, they learned that actually this man had killed several people up in LA and dumped their bodies.

And so I thought, well, he certainly has a comfort level of committing murder.

This suspect, Samuel Dixon, who went on to confess to four murders in total, is a seriously messed up man.

He has cited Jeffrey Dahmer as an influence.

So there's that.

Now he's serving a life sentence for each of those murders, including Gary Booths.

All killings that took place around the same time that Andy was murdered, within a year of each other.

Vixen pled guilty to all of them.

So Detective Adams thought that there was a solid chance that he would admit to Andy's.

So I speak with him.

I get his mouth swabbed.

He says, I don't know, Andy.

I'd tell you if I did it, I didn't do it.

I've never seen that apartment complex before.

No, I didn't do it.

And so we compare his DNA to anything that we have in the crime scene, and nothing's matching.

They tried comparing his prints to the ones on the bike's gas tank cover as well.

Nothing matched.

In fact, his MO didn't even really match either.

Samuel Dixon was a violent sexual sadist.

All his victim encounters started as consensual, both men and women, but he would turn violent and bind them before assaulting them, even after they were dead.

We know Andy's body showed none of the same hallmarks as Dixon's other victims.

And by all accounts, Andy was known to be straight and and likely wouldn't have engaged in anything with Samuel Dixon willingly.

But I do know that Andy caught the eye of another man, someone I'm going to call Sam, not like Samuel Dixon, Sam like Sam Goody, the now defunct music retailer.

There was a Sam Goody store downtown San Diego, Horton Plaza Mall.

And so Andy went to go pick up a couple of CDs.

And this man, Sam, approached him and engaged him in conversation.

They talked about Andy's bike, and so they chatted a little bit.

And the guy said, Hey, you want to go bowling?

And Andy thought, sure, great way to meet people.

And so Andy picked him up on his motorcycle and they went bowling.

And then Andy realized real quick that this gentleman's intentions were different than Andy's and that Andy wasn't interested in him romantically, but this gentleman was.

And so Andy dropped him off back at home and completely stopped engaging with him at all.

Andy's friends call Andy non-confrontational.

So he's probably being very polite and nice and just not answering the guy.

His friends called it being non-confrontational in 2000.

In 2025, we'd call it ghosting.

But Sam did not take the hint.

Uncle Paul and many of Andy's friends talked about this guy who kept calling and inviting him to go with him, to go do things, inviting him to go places, inviting him to Lager games, and Andy always blew him off.

The problem was early on, no one seemed to be able to identify this guy.

I mean, that's how little Andy hung out with him.

No one bothered to know his name.

It was actually Uncle Paul who finally learned it.

So Uncle Paul gave me the information I needed to identify him.

And so it was a very, very interesting couple of days.

I spent a lot of time with him interviewing him.

And now, remember, he only met Andy twice, once at the Sam Goody store and once bowling.

And this gentleman talked about his passion and love for Andy excessively and how he's been traumatized by Andy's murder and that I better get the person who killed Andy before he does and just making some statements that were very indicative of somebody who was emotionally, exceedingly attached to Andy for someone who didn't really even know him.

He barely knew him.

A couple hours he spent with him in his life.

During the interview, his statements were very concerning, even to myself.

So I thought, oh, this is a really good potential lead, especially after this gentleman was blowing me up on

and just really very radical, angry, aggressive messages on Facebook about whoever killed Andy.

Really kind of an overreaction.

You know, I didn't even get that reaction from Uncle Paul or some of his closest friends.

This is a real angry reaction.

And so definitely felt that he was someone that I was very interested in getting to know.

He answered some questions very unusually that indicated to me that perhaps he was anticipating at some point in his life he'd be interviewed.

And we did give him a polygraph and he did pass the polygraph.

But certainly I felt strongly enough about him that I even asked a different investigator to look at it.

I said, I want you to look at these interviews.

You tell me what you think.

And he felt strongly to me that that's a really good avenue to explore.

And so I spent a lot of time trying to explore this person and no DNA, no hair, no fingerprints come up in Andy's apartment.

There's nothing that forensically ties him to my scene.

There's nothing and no one that puts him at the scene, which means I could be wrong, right?

It could be wrong.

My gut and my hunch only has value because it leads me down a road.

So, you know, when we talk about all these different opportunities, you know, these theories that we have, there's so many that we need to explore because one of them is going to be right, but most of them are going to be wrong.

And until the case is solved, no one's off the list.

But certainly he's piqued my interest above most people people because I think with extreme passion could be extreme anger.

And then that's going back to the crime scene.

When we go back to the crime scene, a lot of what I see in there feels like passion, feels like anger, not opportunity.

Now, when Detective Adams interviewed Sam, it was 12, 13 years after the murder.

And she kept reiterating to us how angry he was.

Not at Andy, but at the situation.

And she found that there were other things going on in his life right before Andy's murder that could have made him angry too.

When he'd just gotten evicted from his apartment, she actually found that his old landlord still had those records more than a decade later.

And then right after the murder, he went back home to the Midwest.

Now, was he going home because he was trying to get out of Dodge?

Or was he going home because he had just gotten evicted and had no place to stay?

Now, Sam has never been charged with any crimes related to Andy's death and he denied involvement.

We actually tried reaching out to him via email, phone calls, all of it, but as of this recording, we haven't heard back.

When Detective Adams retired, this is one of the cases she left behind.

And it's up to Detective Barr to finish the job now.

It seems like there's plenty to work with.

Detective Adams told us that in her time, they have revisited the physical evidence over and over again.

And not long after she took the case on, they were able to take some cutting samples from Andy's bedspread and pull a mixed DNA profile from at least one of them.

Now, the sample she got back was mixed, one major and one minor, all mixed up together.

The minor one is so small that they can't tell anything about it.

I mean, they can't even say if it's male or female.

They can't even rule it out as not being Andy.

But the major profile was very interesting.

It's not Andy, but it was male, though she is quick to note that the sample was non-sperm fraction.

So it came from something else, but they didn't tell us what.

Now the profile they were able to pull was good enough to be entered into CODIS, but there have been no hits.

That sample was also good enough to compare to the known people in this case.

Obviously, it wasn't Vanessa's, though they tested her just to be on the safe side, and it wasn't a match.

They also tested a boyfriend of hers and they tested Sam.

Neither of them were a match either.

Investigative genetic genealogy still can't work with mixed profiles, but the labs tell Detective Barr that the science is getting better every day and it won't be long now till they can do something with what she's got.

So in the meantime, Detective Barr is gonna do some old-fashioned boots on the ground work, starting with revisiting as many people connected to this case as possible, like Vanessa.

and Sam and Samuel Dixon, who is in prison, and even a new person of interest who was initially ruled out.

This person, their prints were found in the vacant apartment across from Andy's.

Now, back in the early days, they were ruled out because they had a reason for those prints to be there, be in the bathroom specifically where they found them.

But in the 25 years since, this person has racked up a criminal record that made Barr want to rule him in or out herself, especially now that she's got DNA to do that.

So who knows?

Perhaps putting this out in the world, the first in-depth story of Andy's murder on the 25th anniversary of it, will lead to a solve before his unsolved case gets older than he ever got to be.

Andy was just 26 years old at the time of his murder and everything in his life was just starting to click.

I mean, that's one of the many things that still leaves his mom Rita heartbroken about losing him.

She shared photos with us of Andy growing up throughout the years.

Andy fishing, Andy playing baseball, his gloves outstretched, and Andy at the airport the day that his family brought him home after his adoption.

Andy's room at his parents' home is still just the way it was when Andy left it.

It's become this like time capsule.

His twin bed is neatly made with a blue plaid blanket.

Shelves are lined with his trophies and trucks and toy animals, that baseball glove, and many curious George dolls.

I know you haven't heard from Andy's mom Rita directly yet in this episode, but don't take that to mean that she isn't still fighting hard for her only son.

Rita's now in her 80s, and she sat down with her daughter, Suzanne, to share with you a few memories that they have of Andy.

He always loved Curious George when he was little.

Curious George books.

Oh my gosh, right?

Yeah.

So when I see Curious George books, and we have tons of Christmas ornaments now of Curious George that we hang on our trees at their house, at my house, that are all in honor of Andy.

Rita was a teacher and even even taught Andy in kindergarten.

And one of her favorite memories with Andy was their walk to school together and this really sweet thing that the two of them did.

Do you know what?

When we would go to kindergarten and we went down the main street of town, we had this saying

that we would say,

I love you

because.

And then he would say, I love you because.

And I remember that so well because we had these sayings, I love you because, I love you because,

because, you know, I loved him so much

that I just couldn't, I just couldn't put a piece on it because there were so many reasons why I loved him.

Do you know anything about the murder of Andrew Andy Moore in San Diego, California, shortly before September 12, 2000, it's time to come forward.

There's a $56,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible.

So you can remain anonymous by calling San Diego County Crime Stoppers at 888-580-8477.

And you can also call Detective Barr's desk phone at 619-430-0134.

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.

I think Chuck would approve.

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