My Life As A Cop Freak — Sandy Beal E3

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Before we begin, please note, this series includes talk of suicide and sexual violence.

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I have dreams about Sandy.

For an entire year, she's been in the back of my brain, never far from my waking thoughts.

The white coat she was wearing on the last night of her life, it hangs in my closet.

I see it every time I get dressed.

Her things, her checkbook, her calendar, notes she wrote, are laying across my desk.

Her handwriting is familiar to me now.

There's a note Sandy wrote to herself that I've almost memorized.

I've read it so many times.

It helps explain where her interest in policing came from and where her career ambitions might have first begun.

It's called My Life as a Cop Freak.

This is a real story of my life as a cop freak.

It goes back to when I used to walk past the police department to catch my bus for school.

I was only 15 and policemen would wave, smile, and say hi.

They looked so good in that white county car and blue uniform.

I've always wanted a job where I could be looked at with respect.

They always seemed to have that sort of ego with them.

Then one day I got a job at the local drugstore and at nights we had county policemen in there.

I met three that were really nice guys.

First night I met Ray, a real nut.

He was short and looked a lot like John Denver.

He asked if I wouldn't mind a cold beer after work until I told him I was only 17.

Then he kind of said, we'll wait until you get older.

After work, my dad was there to pick me up.

The next night, a real young, great-looking guy came up to me and asked who I was.

I could hardly believe what he asked.

He stayed by my counter all night talking about bullshit.

I'm pretty sure Sandy was still in high school when she wrote this note.

The infatuation, the excitement, the giddiness about attracting male attention, it reminded me of how I felt about boys at that age.

I'm not sure exactly what Sandy meant by cop freak, but by her own admission, she was one.

She simultaneously wanted to be liked by them and wanted to be like them.

She wanted to enter their world, wear their uniforms, try on their egos.

And at some point in her senior year of high school, she did.

Sandy's family told me that's when she set her sights on becoming a cop and began training in earnest, going on ride-alongs with local police.

And according to her brother, Michael, it all started out okay.

She had her heart set on becoming a police officer from the time she first mentioned it all the way up through.

You know, she had nothing bad to say.

Probably

a good year and a half that she did the ride-alongs.

Whenever they got a call, they went from speeding tickets to traffic accidents.

Nothing major.

If something major came up, I think that she had to get dropped off.

Ride-alongs are exactly what they sound like.

A civilian rides with an officer in their patrol car as they go about their duties.

The earliest record of one that Sandy attended is marked in her calendar on March 27th, 1976.

Sandy would have just just turned 18 and been in high school still

based on my reporting she would have accompanied one other police officer on a shift that typically lasted from 3 to 11 p.m

i actually you know the way she talked i actually had kind of wanted to do one you know two myself just to just to see you know hey what goes on here you know what do you do when you pull somebody what do you do when you're um

you know, you're in a bad situation.

How do things go here?

You know, I wasn't as enthused about that as she was but i i did think it was kind of neat but sandy's sudden interest in policing was a bit confusing to her family who had no ties to the profession at first i was a little surprised like really yeah so she was talking about these ride-alongs and how she enjoyed them some of the ride-alongs she was saying that you know they know it wasn't 100 above board But I do recall she's saying, yeah, man, geez, these guys get away with shit.

Sandy didn't go into detail about what kind of shit they got away with, but the PG County Police Department was notorious for its use of excessive force, especially against the county's growing black population.

Once a predominantly white working-class county, the area saw a radical demographic shift in the 70s as Black families moved there from DC.

But as the racial makeup of the community changed, the police department remained overwhelmingly white, the results of which were often brutal for people of color.

As one veteran cop told the Washington Post at the time, quote, it was a known fact that if you came into Peachee County and made trouble, the police would kick your head in.

Simple as that.

Here's a story from around the same time Sandy would have been going on ride-alongs.

In 1975, Thomas Pete, a black man, was pushing a stalled car in a 7-Eleven parking lot when several PG County police officers arrived.

Witnesses reported that, unprovoked, the officers began beating Pete to the ground, cracking his head open.

This incident triggered a public conversation about police brutality, but ultimately, the police faced no real consequences.

Like Sandy said, they got away with shit.

From iHeartRadio, I'm Melissa Jeltson, and this is What Happened to Sandy Beale, an iHeart original podcast.

Chapter 3, My Life as a Cop Freak

Growing up, she wasn't any different than us getting in trouble.

We had all three kind of seemed to get in the same kind of trouble.

After a while, Sandy kind of went her own way.

Michael is in his early 60s now.

and moves with a quiet and deliberate air.

He's warm, but also a little bit guarded, which makes sense when you learn his backstory.

He has lived through the excruciating pain of losing two daughters, one to congestive heart failure and another in a car accident.

But Sandy was the first loss of Michael's life, and it came early when he was a senior in high school.

The two siblings were close, both in age, only a year apart, and in the intensity of their relationship.

With most of her family, Sandy was tight-lipped about her time with police.

But Michael was granted a rare glimpse of her world.

She graduated a year before me, and while she was out of school, most of her time was spent with work and with

hanging out with the police department and the ride-alongs and stuff like that.

And then going to these FOP lodges.

and hanging out with them and

drinking and stuff like that.

She said they all just let the hair down when they're in that FOP lodge.

FOP stands for Fraternal Order of Police.

It's the largest professional police organization in the country.

State-level outposts are called FOP Lodges, and some, like the FOP Lodge in Prince George's County, have a bar where officers can socialize.

That lodge, number 89, is where Sandy would go to grab drinks with cops, Michael said.

The drinking age was only 18 back then.

She talked about just going to the club and hanging out and having a good time and the cops would bring her home and half the time they'd been half drunk when you're bringing her home in a cop car.

So like, well, there you go.

The FOP Lodge Sandy visited is still open today.

I haven't been there, but I looked at pictures online.

On the inside, it looks a bit like your average sports bar.

with carpeted floors, bare walls, and blinds pulled down over the windows.

It has eight flat screen televisions, two pool tables, and a jukebox.

The bar stays open until 2 a.m.

Monday through Saturday, and on Tuesdays, domestic bears are a dollar.

As long as you are in law and enforcement, you can go to this place.

They just go there and hang out and swap stupid stories and cheat on their wives and doing silly things like that.

It's about pretty much what I got out of it.

But she was trying to learn as much as she possibly could by going on these ride-alongs and hanging out with the police and, you know, just taking things in,

seeing just what goes on, how things are done, you know, so that when she was able to get into the academy, she would have some, she would know what to expect, what was coming down the line.

At the time Sandy was trying to become a cop, women accounted for only 2% of sworn officers, and many of them worked desk jobs.

It was only in 1972 that Prince George's County started admitting women into the police academy.

Yet Sandy envisioned a place for herself there, even when there was little indication that she would be welcomed.

I wanted to understand the climate she was operating within.

And without being able to talk to Sandy, I found the next best thing, another woman who began policing around the exact same time, Dottie Davis.

It wasn't like it was my lifelong goal to be a police officer.

I literally was looking for an occupation that paid well and that was satisfying to me.

And so I started as a dispatcher, which then led to me applying to a neighboring agency.

Literally, I was watching the officers, the troopers that I was dispatching the calls for service, and I was thinking, I could do that.

First of all, I'm an avid runner and my father was a gunsmith, so I've been shooting since I was was eight and reloading ammunition since I was nine.

I grew up in what I believe to be kind of a paramilitary household where the only way you responded to my parents was yes, sir and no, ma'am.

So if you can put everything that I just said together and think about what a recruit class is like and the academy, man, I loved it.

Dottie has retired from policing, but she spent over 30 years with the Fort Wayne Police Department in Indiana.

She started as a patrol officer, moved up to sergeant, then lieutenant, captain, and finally deputy chief.

My very first,

very first training officer told me to get in the car, don't touch anything, and shut up.

If I need anything from you, I'll tell you.

And I was like,

this is going to be a really long eight hours.

It wasn't a very welcoming environment for females, but I learned early on, you're probably not going to be heard.

If Dottie had been attempting this journey just a few years earlier, it's likely she would have been shut out.

But in 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employers from discriminating workers on the basis of sex.

In 1972, Congress extended the law to local and state governments.

In practice, that meant women could no longer be excluded from important jobs like policing and firefighting.

Still, local police departments continued to deny women jobs by issuing height and weight requirements that many couldn't meet.

In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of height and weight as a screening mechanism was unlawful discrimination.

And so we were still test tube babies, if you will.

We were still being looked at as pilot projects to see whether or not we were going to be able to be be successful and hold our own.

While removing these barriers made it easier for women to become police officers, they still had to face workplace environments that were indifferent to their ambitions or even outright hostile.

A detective and I were riding the elevator back up to the Detective Bureau, which was on the second floor.

and he pinned me against the elevator wall and tried to kiss me.

And I shoved him off of me and started started yelling at him.

And then I went into the detective bureau, went to the captain and said, I'm not riding with him anymore.

He just pinned me against the elevator, tried to kiss me, and I'm not putting up with that.

And what happened?

He got nothing other than told, leave her alone.

Some of the behaviors Dottie described were obviously predatory.

Others seemed designed to simply undermine women and keep them from getting too comfortable in their positions.

So as much as I love to shoot, I had a firearms instructor that would stand over my shoulder.

I mean, I could like next to my body.

And he would tell me to squeeze the trigger like you were squeezing a nipple.

And I know I'm looking at your face.

I wanted to bark

because it was just so ridiculous that he would even say that.

And of course, it threw me off my game horribly, which I don't know if that's what he wanted because he didn't want a female to be the top gun.

Dottie emphasized how isolating it was to be one of the 2%,

a woman in a sea of male cops.

And honestly, it's not that much different today.

Currently, around 13% of sworn law enforcement officers are women.

That means in many precincts across the country, it's not uncommon to be the only woman on a shift, the only woman in a division.

That isolation can have a corrosive effect.

It is very easy for you to lose your identity and try to fit in and become one of the boys.

And I learned that no matter how much rank you have or time and grade, you are never going to be one of the boys and you have to continue to maintain your identity and be sure of who you are because they will eat you up.

When Sandy's body was found, there were two small books in her possession, address books that she used to keep track of the people she met.

I have them now and I've spent the last year poring over them trying to see what they can teach me.

I've cataloged each of the names and researched their identities.

Alongside her classmates at Bladensburg High, her neighbors in Seat Pleasant, and her colleagues from the department store are another category of acquaintances, police officers.

Every few pages, the name of a cop appears, either a PG County police officer or a Maryland state trooper, along with their phone number.

Examining her handwriting, it's hard to tell if these cops were her friends or professional contacts.

Some entries include official titles and others are written more casually.

The number for the FOP lodge is also in there.

And then there's the list in the back of the book, 13 names long.

In black ink, Sandy wrote down a series of three-digit numbers, each one adjacent to a last name.

As far as I can tell, they're all PG County police officers, and the numbers identify their police cars.

When I first flipped through Sandy's address books, it wasn't clear to me how a high school student would know so many police officers.

That changed once I connected with one of the PG County cops from Sandy's books, Ray.

That's Ray from the drugstore.

Ray, the John Denver lookalike from Sandy's note, My Life as a Cop Freak.

Ray's name appears in her books a few times, along with a phone number, an address, and what appears to be his police car number.

Ray told me that he doesn't remember Sandy, but he did have an idea why she was able to go on so many ride-alongs as a teen.

As he explained, Sandy was likely part of the Police Explorer program in Prince George's County, which launched in 1976.

The program allowed teens to shadow police officers at work and try out or explore the job to see if they might want to pursue a career in law enforcement.

I hadn't heard of Police Explorer programs, so I did some research.

Turns out they now exist all over the country.

They began in the 1950s as part of the Boy Scouts of America.

Although, side note, they're now run by a subsidiary called Learning for Life.

Girls weren't allowed to join until 1971.

In 1976, the Boy Scouts received a grant from the federal government to promote the program.

And it worked.

A lot of new posts, as they're called, cropped up all around the country, including one in Prince George's County.

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Based on my reporting, I believe that Sandy joined the Prince George's County Explorer program in its very first year when she was a senior in high school.

Sandy would have been one of the first generation of trainees.

Though I wasn't able to confirm this as a spokesperson for PG County Police said they were unable to locate a record of participants from that year.

The program is still active today, open to those aged 14 to 20.

When I checked recently, there were about 90 current members.

There's an established set of rules around who can join and what requirements you need to meet.

But back in its early days, it wasn't such an official program.

Ray didn't want to be recorded for the podcast, but he did offer some helpful context.

He told me that he was part of the PG County Explorer program when it first began, and as he described it, the program was pretty loose and disorganized.

Officers didn't receive any specialized training before being placed with teens, and there were very few rules.

He recalled chaperoning a ski trip to Pennsylvania with a bunch of teenagers in the Explorer program.

When he went to check on a group of girls in a hotel room, knocking on their door, he discovered they were smoking pot.

That was his cue to quit the program.

I understood from Ray that the point of his story was to illustrate that he saw the Explorer program as a risk to his career.

The potential for things to go wrong was just too high, and so he left.

He was looking out for himself.

But it made me wonder, who was looking out for explorers like Sandy?

Over the past year, I've tried to connect with every cop in Sandy's address books that I could track down.

I've sent emails, letters, and messages on social media.

Few responded to me, but I did manage to talk to a couple of police officers whose names corresponded with Sandy's records.

There was one PG County police officer in particular, though, who I really wanted to speak with, Bob.

Sandy listed him as her emergency contact.

She also noted his birthday, and his name pops up on occasion in her calendar too.

I thought, if any of these cops were Sandy's friend, if anyone could provide some insight into her life, it would be Bob.

Bob didn't want to be recorded for the podcast, but he confirmed that he worked in the Explorer program at the time that Sandy would have been in it.

He recalled taking students on ride-alongs, but he couldn't explain why his birthday and phone number were written in Sandy's books or why she would deem him important enough to list him as her emergency contact.

He, like Ray, said he didn't remember her.

This became a recurring theme in my reporting.

To my surprise, none of the cops I spoke to remembered Sandy.

At least they said they didn't.

They didn't even remember that a police trainee had died by suicide, something I thought would leave an impact.

Sandy, it seemed, had been invisible to them.

I wondered what that said about how she was treated when she was alive.

I'm going to play the second part of my interview with Detective Shyselski now, the PG County police officer who handled Sandy's case, because I think it speaks to this question of how police interacted with Sandy.

Shyselski told me about something unusual that occurred right after her death.

Let me say this, Melissa.

Let me say this.

My phone rang off the hook with other police officers asking me if their names were in the book.

Sheshelski is referring to Sandy's address books, which were discovered in the car with her.

Were these just Prince George's County Police or were these state troopers?

Yes.

Prince George's police officer.

Why were they calling?

He wanted to know if she had listed them as one of her

friends.

What was their motivation, though, for calling?

Like, Like, were they trying not to get in trouble professionally,

personally?

Or like

personally, mostly.

And you estimated about 10 people called you.

Did they admit to having relationships with her?

Pretty much.

It was pretty clear it wasn't really a part of my investigation.

But when they heard that she had killed herself,

bingo.

What was their end goal to calling you?

They wanted to see if she had made any mention of them.

In case it came out in some way, they wanted to have it.

Right.

So, like, you know, not necessarily, well, I don't know.

Well, no, it had to be that,

you know, they were sexually involved with her.

Did any of the police that called you express sadness about her death?

No.

No remorse.

All personal

stress.

There was perhaps something written with their name for the obvious reason.

What did you make of her spending all this time and having sexual relationships with police officers?

I knew it was going to be a stink.

I didn't imagine it'd be 40, 40 years later,

but I knew some stink was going to come off it.

I want to slow down here because this is really important and the audio is not great.

Detective Sheshelski is a little blasé in his delivery, but what he told me is that while he was investigating Sandy's death, 10 PG County police officers called him to find out if their names had been linked to Sandy.

And this wasn't an offhanded comment either.

Sheselski told me this detail in two different phone interviews.

He wouldn't tell me the names of the men who called, which made this claim hard to fact-check.

But I believed him.

The way he divulged this information, though, it was like a gossipy aside, not something that he thought should warrant any further investigation.

But it sounded like a big fucking deal to me.

In my line of work, reporting on domestic violence and sexual assault, This scenario of a teenager having intimate relationships with upwards of 10 adult men, let alone police officers who were supposed to be training her, it rang every alarm bell in my body.

I started this project wanting to find out what happened the night Sandy died, but as I got deeper into the reporting, I had more and more questions about exactly what happened when she was alive, specifically when she was hanging out with cops on these unsupervised ride-alongs.

I knew I had to tell the Beals what Shyselski said because it confirmed their their gut instinct that the cops were hiding something.

It just wasn't what they had thought.

The family was heartbroken to learn about these PG County police officers who Shyschelsky said spoke so callously after her death.

Here's Kim, her cousin.

Well, until you guys uncovered all of that,

I think that I had a sense of naivete where I just really believed that all of these people that she had the names of were just nice people and were her friends.

And that snapped me out of my believing in the kindness of these people that they're really just trying to cover their butts.

Like me, Kim hadn't known exactly what to think about Sandy's address books and the list of cops she was collecting.

She had settled on the generous interpretation.

that the officers in the books were Sandy's mentors who helped her as she tried to pursue pursue a career in law enforcement now she had to contemplate something more nefarious now i don't know what her thinking might have been then i do know that she was very

um happy-go-lucky and maybe she thought that

you know with sex came power So she was probably pretty enamored that any of them would be interested in her.

And she probably saw it as, wow, these people that have some authority and power are interested in me.

And she probably hoped hoped that there was more to it than it was, but she was a kid and she was naive, even though she thought she knew more than she did.

But when 10 of them are asking, is my name in there?

There's some fishy stuff going on.

I don't know.

It feels disgusting to me, really.

I don't know how they live with themselves.

Kim had believed the police swept Sandy's case under the rug because of her involvement with Doug, the state trooper.

She suspected that Doug Doug was in the pole yard that night, that Doug held all the answers the family desperately yearned to hear.

But now there were other possibilities.

And then, you know, it could have been any of those other guys, too.

But men with that kind of power and that kind of ability to manipulate and be charming and grooming her.

How overwhelming for an 18-year-old girl to try to sort all that out.

The immense pressure and shame she must have been under at the time.

It's really sad.

It's sad.

It's just sad.

So I do believe they have equal responsibility in hurting her.

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I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Kennedy was killed.

Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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What happens when Delta Airlines sends four creators around the world to find out what is the true power of travel?

I think it helped me sort of like get grounded.

I think I unlocked some like childhood dream.

Turn my stress into excitement.

Take that gratitude from those experiences into your daily life.

That's why Jimma Speg, host of the Psychology of Your 20s, sat down with Dr.

Henry Ting, Delta's chief health and wellness officer, an instrumental voice behind this travel experiment.

I love the dream trip versus, you know, the around-the-corner trip both have very similar mental and social perks and benefits.

Oh, yeah, very much so.

On both trips, their emotional well-being and social well-being went through the roof.

Find out more about how travel can support well-being on this special episode of the Psychology of Your 20s, presented by Delta.

Fly and live better.

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There have been few times in my career where my perspective on a story has changed so quickly.

Kim initially asked me to investigate Sandy's case because of my experience reporting on domestic violence, specifically domestic violence homicides.

Sandy's family was worried that she had been killed by her boyfriend.

But my conversation with Sheshelsky opened up a whole new line of reporting as I tried to make sense of the calls that flooded in after her death.

On the one hand, it provided some evidence that Sandy might have been struggling emotionally, keeping secrets that would have been profoundly isolating for the teen.

And on the other, it hinted at a larger conspiracy involving many cops with a lot to lose.

It all reminded me of a story Joanne told me the first time I met her in the summer of 2021.

It's about one of Sandy's friends.

Her name is also Sandy.

Sandy Sheridan.

According to Joanne, Sandy Beale and Sandy Sheridan spent a lot of time together in the months before Sandy died.

Despite my best efforts, I've never been able to find her.

But Joanne told me she called shortly after Sandy died.

She called me right up.

She said, what happened to all those cards that we collected of different cops?

Sandy Sheridan explained that she and Sandy Beale had been collecting business cards of all the cops they met.

But when Joanne looked through her daughter's belongings, there was only two cards and her belongings that they laid out on the table for us to see.

Sandy Sheridan told Joanne one more thing, that local police had been told to stay away from the funeral.

And as far as Joanne could tell, they did.

I wasn't sure what to make of these claims at first.

They felt a little conspiratorial.

But after learning about those calls to Shyschelsky, it seemed a lot more likely that the stories were true.

I ain't got no reason to really not trust the cops, but there's, you know, shit ain't adding up.

You know, I've always had that, well, shit just ain't adding up.

That's one thing I did tell the detective and that other guy.

I told him, I said, you know what really burns my ass?

She wanted to be just like one of you.

She wanted to be liked by them and she wanted to be like them.

And at some point between her innocent flirtations with cops at the drugstore and her body being discovered on a cold February morning, something went horribly wrong.

Whatever happened to her while she was in the Explorer program,

I think it's unlikely she was the only one.

I asked PG County for any records related to complaints of inappropriate sexual behavior within the Explorer program from 1976 to now.

They told me that a search of the current internal affairs system uncovered no complaints and that to search an older system, I would need to give them the officer's name in question.

I've passed along a list of names in Sandy's books and I'll let you know what we hear.

But here's what I found when I searched for old news articles about the PG County Explorer program.

In 1982, just five years after Sandy died, a veteran Prince George's County police officer took a 16-year-old on a ride-along.

The girl ended up attending the police academy and becoming a police officer, fulfilling the dream that Sandy had.

But 13 years later, after she joined the sex crimes unit, She reported that she had been raped by her mentor on one of the many ride-alongs she attended.

The officer was later convicted of child abuse.

I I think Sandy was a victim too.

I think her desire to be a cop, her teenage infatuations, and her inexperience, they all coincided to leave her open to exploitation.

That's next week.

Well, this is the thing about

predation.

It works better for the predator if your victim is vulnerable.

And what more vulnerable place than a desperate young person trying to start a career in law enforcement?

I'm not done digging into this story, and I have more questions about what happens in police explorer programs.

If you have ever been part of a police youth program or participated in a ride-along where you witnessed or experienced some sort of inappropriate sexual conduct, please email me at whathappenedtosandybeal at gmail.com.

What happened to Sandy Beale is hosted by me, Melissa Jeltson.

It's written and produced by me and Katrina Norvell.

It's edited by Abu Safar, Josh Fisher, and Mary Dew.

Sound design by Erin Kaufman.

Jason English is our executive producer.

And Marissa Brown is our associate producer.

To find out more about the investigation, follow me on Twitter at QUASIMADO.

Thanks so much for listening.

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I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Kennedy was killed.

Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Featuring new new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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