Dear Doug — Sandy Beal E2

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There are things I know about Sandy that I only know because she wrote them down herself more than four decades ago.

She was a planner, a checkbook balancer, and the type of teen who kept detailed notes about her life.

Among the things that Kim, her cousin, gave me to look through is a date book that Sandy used to track the last two years of her life, 1976 and 1977.

On the front of the datebook is a picturesque winter scene, and on the inside of the cover is a poem.

The final lines read, As you close your eyes in slumber, do you think that God will say, you have earned one more tomorrow by the work you did today?

The first entry in Sandy's calendar is in March of 1976 when Sandy was still a senior in high school.

Her entries are sparse in the beginning, but by August, the pages are filled with her soft cursive handwriting.

August, I think, is when Sandy met her boyfriend.

She wrote in her calendar, met Doug the fourth, went out the 11th, and the 23rd, he got his new police car.

He was 28 to her 18 years of age.

She marked down his birthday in both years of her calendar, but she wouldn't live long enough to see him turn 29.

Doug had been married for a few years by the time he met Sandy.

In her calendar, Sandy marked down the days they met together, as well as his absences, like when he was going to be out of town hunting.

She described him as six foot, 165 pounds, blue eyes and brown hair.

There's a photo she kept where he's wearing his Maryland State Trooper uniform.

He's holding his car door open, parked in front of a McDonald's.

The picture is blurry, but he's smiling and making eye contact with someone out of frame.

By December of 1976, the tone of Sandy's calendar changed.

Went to doctor, she wrote.

And then the next week.

Set aside money.

By January, numbers start appearing.

60 days.

80 days.

Sandy drew a square around the date January 13th and wrote 8 a.m.

I'd seen that date before.

It's on a receipt from the Women's Medical Center of Washington, D.C.

that was found in her purse on the morning of her death.

The receipt was for $125.70.

The payment was for an abortion.

I think the running tab of numbers in her calendar was her attempt to estimate how far along in her pregnancy she was.

The following week, she scrawled, forget it, in capital letters across one of the pages of her calendar.

Within a month of having the abortion, she was dead.

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

Chapter 2, Dear Doug.

After a couple days, when I tried to get my mind together, I called the doctor.

He said,

I cannot give you any answers.

And I said, Dr.

Boyle, I said, she's dead.

I said, she's gone.

Can't you give me the answers that I need to have?

And what did he tell you?

He told me that she had come to him, that she had had the abortion,

that she was bleeding.

This was all new information to Joanne.

Sandy had kept her pregnancy and her abortion a secret from her family.

Her mom learned about this for the first time at the police precinct after Sandy's death.

But Sandy did confide in someone.

her family physician, Dr.

Boyle.

She went to him in December when she would have been a few months pregnant, and then again after the abortion.

Sandy was experiencing some residual bleeding and wanted to make sure she was okay.

And he said, I want you to go into the hospital and I will take care of you.

She didn't want to.

She was scared to because she would have to tell us.

She would have, you know, everybody would have known.

And she was embarrassed.

I've thought a lot about how stressful this unexpected pregnancy must have been for Sandy.

She was already in a hidden relationship with a married police officer.

If they were discovered, it could be catastrophic.

Now, at 18, she believed she was pregnant with his child.

Sandy was living with secrets upon secrets upon secrets.

We don't know how Sandy came to the decision to have an abortion, or how long she considered her options, or if she was influenced by anyone else.

But ultimately, she ended up at a clinic in downtown DC.

When I first learned about this, I had so many questions.

What would it have been like to terminate a pregnancy in 1977, only four years after Roe v.

Wade made access to abortion a constitutional right?

How did Sandy pay for it?

How did she get home?

A lot of these answers are lost to time, and the Women's Medical Center of DC is closed now.

But I was able to track down a former employee who worked at the clinic at the time Sandy would have visited.

That's how I met Kathy.

I will share my story.

When I was 17, I was abducted and assaulted and held for a number of days.

It was horrific.

Well, I was abducted midday from a city street in blue jeans and a peacoat.

So straight up abduction assault.

It was not questionable.

I am well aware that police do not always do the detective work they should be doing because they sure didn't.

Kathy was abducted and raped in St.

Louis in 1969.

She was able to escape, but it was understandably a life-altering experience.

And my grandmother, who was completely uneducated, but escaped from the Warsaw ghetto

and she said in a very dear Eastern European voice darling you have a choice

you can hide

you can get very sad or you can speak your truth and teach

something

about this

those words stayed with me

a very long time

they're with me still

Kathy chose to speak her truth.

She became an activist involved in the women's reproductive rights movement.

She received her PhD in counseling and in the mid-1970s began working at the Women's Medical Center of DC.

She started as a mental health counselor working with patients and later became the director of the counseling center there.

So we were in a large office building.

It was very spacious.

It was very comfortable.

One could come in for birth control counseling

or

abortion counseling or rape crisis counseling, incest counseling, wide array.

Kathy reminded me that this was all pre-internet and pre-cell phones.

She said Sandy likely would have heard of the clinic through word of mouth or been referred by her doctor.

It was also before at-home pregnancy tests became widely available in the U.S.

So to confirm that she was pregnant, Sandy would have had to have visited a doctor.

If it was determined she was pregnant and she was in a reasonable time frame for our work, she would be sent to a counseling room where she'd meet with a counselor

who would have asked many,

many

questions to see if this sounded okay,

like someone who had thought this through,

was likely, as best as we could determine, to handle the procedure in the aftermath.

After speaking with Kathy, I was left with the impression that Sandy could have received really good care at Women's Medical Center.

She would have been evaluated by counselors before the abortion, and they would have followed up with her afterwards to make sure she was doing okay.

If any of us

had

any inkling that this would be

extremely dysregulating emotionally, extremely destabilizing, she wouldn't have had the abortion at Women's Medical Center.

I told Kathy about Sandy's story to get her take.

Sandy died just one month after her abortion.

I wanted to know, had Kathy ever heard of any of the clinic's patients dying by suicide?

I wondered if it might have gotten back to them.

I can't remember a single case like that.

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To the family, the revelation that Sandy had had an abortion provided a motive for Doug.

Sandy was a complication in his life.

The Beals didn't necessarily imagine that Doug had an elaborate plan to get rid of Sandy.

Instead, they thought that maybe there had been an altercation of some kind.

Kim's theory as to why Sandy had the gun with her that night is that maybe she was trying to scare Doug, and maybe things just got out of control.

And their fears that Sandy was murdered by an intimate partner aren't outlandish.

In the US, four women a day are killed by their boyfriends and husbands and exes.

While it's uncomfortable to talk about, Women are at greater risk of violence at the hands of someone they know than by a stranger.

Here's what the Beale family knew.

Sandy had been in a secretive relationship with a married man.

She'd gotten pregnant and had an abortion, and then ended up dead one mile away from her boyfriend's place of work.

And found with her body was a letter she'd made out specifically to him.

I'm going to read it now.

Keep in mind, this is all coming from her perspective, and we don't know if everything in it is true.

But it gives us a great deal of insight into how she felt around the time she died.

Doug,

I know now it's over and it has been all along.

I guess I'm going crazy and nobody can see it.

You know, you're right.

I am trouble.

I lost my baby I wanted so much.

I thought it would bring some kind of love because I was looking for love and never found it from you.

But you didn't care.

You never came when I was sick.

I only wish I could start all over again.

Then you wouldn't have used me like you did.

You didn't care, and I guess you never will.

I never want another man to ever want me.

I just want to leave and forget the pain.

You see, I'll have to one day pay for the loss of my baby.

And when that day comes, Douglas will pay for what he did to me and his baby.

I love you, and I'm sorry for all of this I've caused you.

So this letter was interpreted by police as a suicide note.

Right.

What do you see in this letter?

She wasn't committing suicide.

I just don't believe it.

That's Sandy's cousin Kim.

Did you believe she wanted to get away from it and she was going to have to go through a grieving process?

I see that she was in a lot of pain and she was a kid.

She's about to be 19 and she sees the way the world is and she's recognizing that she loved him and she couldn't have any more than that.

But at the same time, this is where her fire comes out.

And

I just want to leave and forget all the pain.

How do you hear that one?

No, that's when she wanted to go to Maine.

In the last few months of Sandy's life, she had started talking about moving.

She wrote to her grandmother in Maine and asked if she could live with her.

These plans are a major reason why the Beale family so vehemently rejected the theory of suicide.

Sandy was hopeful about the future.

Here's her mom, Joanne.

She wouldn't have gone to the length of calling her grandmother and talking with her.

And she loved her grandmother Beale.

She didn't like my mother, but

she liked her grandmother Beale.

And

that's why I don't think she committed the suicide.

When I first read Sandy's letter, It didn't seem to me like a suicide note.

Instead, I recognized it as a certain type of writing specific to teenage girls who'd had their hearts broken for the very first time.

Girls who learned too early how men could use and take advantage of them.

Take their hearts and bodies and time and then just discard them like trash.

I recognized the letter because I'd written ones just like it.

The note could be interpreted many ways though, depending on the lens you read it through.

Heartbroken teen, or as the cops read it, girl on the brink of suicide.

If she hadn't written that damn note to

shithead,

I wish she'd have mailed that son of a bitch instead of leaving it in the car.

Joanne believes the police closed the case so quickly because of the letter Sandy wrote to Doug.

Without it, she thinks, Sandy's death would have been investigated as a murder and that those closest to her, including her boyfriend Doug, would have faced questioning.

If you was going with a girl and you got her pregnant and you was married and you told her to go get an abortion and she did,

and then she still was hanging on to you,

what do you think you would do?

You're, you know, 28 years old, you got a nice career with the state police, and you've gotten a girl pregnant.

If Doug was responsible, the Beals believed that he would be uniquely adept at covering up the crime due to his training as a law enforcement officer.

Here's Kim again.

He's in the ideal situation.

He's in the position of authority.

He has the skill set.

He has the trust within his department.

They're going to believe him over us.

So he's going to be able to cover up.

He just has all the resources available to him.

Kim's suspicions of Doug kind of make sense given her line of work.

She's She's a therapist for domestic violence victims and as a result, all too familiar with the ways that men harm the women they claim to love.

Her passion to help survivors and her desire to solve Sandy's case are sort of interwoven at this stage, feeding off of each other.

And honestly, it's really impressive just how much energy she continues to commit to Sandy.

For the last year, we've texted almost every single day to compare notes and talk about the case.

And you have to remember, she's been working on this for decades now.

Her efforts over the years to track down documents and navigate the maze of state agencies and local police is Herculean.

I'm kind of like gum on people's shoes and I ask a lot of questions.

Tenacious, that's the word that I've been told before.

And it's really stubbornness.

And the people that I had to keep trying to reach over and over again were the law enforcement that they were really just trying to cover their ass and be cautious about what they gave me and what they didn't kim had been researching sandy's case in some form or another since 1977 but the investigation took on a new urgency in 2006 after kim traveled to maine to see sandy's parents

ronald sandy's dad was nearing the end of his life And as Kim talked to him, she learned that he was still preoccupied with what happened to Sandy and all the unanswered questions around her death.

I hate that Ronnie died not knowing.

Just.

It's just not fair that he would go to his grave and not know.

That's just not fair.

We need to get those answers.

And I don't want Joanne to leave this earth and not have them too.

She was overcome with a deep sense of injustice, she told me.

Oh my gosh, you know, there's not enough time to get to find out these answers and we know nothing.

And it's 06, that's a lot of time.

That's what, 29 years later?

Kim decided to track down the official police report on Sandy's death, thinking it would be simple to get.

Not so.

She started by calling the Prince George's County Police Department, where she was connected to a detective in the cold case unit, Bernie Nelson.

He quickly referred her to someone else, another detective.

who had a strange story to share.

He started ho,

ho, humming along and you know, I'm not sure.

sure that's a long time ago.

I don't think I can get those records and so probably three or four calls and

then he told me, well, the building's burned down.

I'm like, what?

So he said, well, probably the only thing I'm going to be able to get is a tickler file.

Well, I've been in marketing before.

I know that's just an index card and it's.

jumped from one month to another to follow up on people.

I'm like, I don't care what you have.

Just get me what you have.

Okay, I'll work on it.

Well, that was the last communication I had with him because he would never return my calls anymore.

So I gave up on the police report.

Actually,

instead, she focused on getting Sandy's autopsy, which she eventually was able to acquire.

It added one very important detail: Sandy had sperm inside her body, suggesting that she'd recently had sex, though it's hard to know exactly when.

I think what happened, and maybe I'm wrong,

I think

that

he met her, they had sex,

and

she probably was thinking, well, I've had the abortion, everything's fine, we're going to stick together.

And I think he said,

no, I'm going back to my wife.

The family had already believed Sandy wasn't alone in the polyard that night.

Maybe the letter to Doug was supposed to have been given to him in person.

Fast forward to 2017 or 2018, and it wasn't until my niece introduced me to her new boyfriend, and he was a Prince George County cop.

And I said, I've been looking for this police report for decades, and

they said the building burned down.

And he goes, the building never burned down.

I'm work out of it, and it's about a 75-year-old building.

That building never burned down.

And so that got my, you know, blood boiling.

So Kim picked up the phone once again and dialed the PG County Police.

This time though, she connected with a sympathetic clerk who passed her request along to Cold Case Detective Bernie Nelson, the same detective she first spoke to in 2006.

All of a sudden, I got that email stating, Bernie Nelson has found the police report.

He didn't tell me where he found it.

He just said he found it and that here it is attached.

I was like, oh my gosh.

I like, was nervous and I was driving as fast as I could to get to my computer so I could comprint it out because I thought it was just going to go away.

And I couldn't believe that it was 12 pages, which was just amazing, but because they assured me that

there was no way that this was going to be available.

The entire time that Kim had been looking for it, the police file had been safe and sound in the home of the cop who investigated the case in 1977.

retired detective Ed Sheschelsky.

When he left the force, he took his files home with him.

In 2019, a full 13 years after Kim's initial request, Cold Case detective Bernie Nelson went to Shyschelsky's house and physically retrieved the file from his boxes of papers.

And even Bernie said, I don't even know why he saved it, but for whatever reason, he saved it and they found it in his house.

Bernie went up with him and went through the boxes to get this report for me.

But they probably wanted me off their butt.

And I said that when I emailed him, I'm like, I'm not going away.

Let's be real.

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Are there two sides to every story?

Academy Award nominee Robin Wright stars in the girlfriend on Prime, a psychological thriller that will make you question everything you think you know.

Laura has the dream job, the perfect husband, and a son she'd die for.

But when her beloved Daniel brings home his new girlfriend Cherry, played by Olivia Cook, something feels off.

Is Cherry the sweet, innocent girl she appears to be?

Or is there something more manipulative beneath the surface?

And how far will a mother go to protect her son?

Also starring Lori Davidson, The Girlfriend is a twisted game of cat and mouse where nothing is what it seems, and everyone has something to hide.

Don't miss the girlfriend, streaming now exclusively on Prime.

Sometimes the truth is just a a matter of perspective.

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The full police report is actually a 17-page digital file filled with details about what detectives found when they arrived on the scene.

Sandy was sitting on a gold blanket in the driver's seat.

Her white coat sat on the seat next to her, and on top of it was a gun, a 357 Ruger revolver.

The police report also includes a series of photocopies.

There's a copy of the letter Sandy wrote to Doug, along with what looks like a rough draft and an envelope addressed to his work.

The last page of the report is another photocopy of something that was found in her car, but it's really blurry, so I can't read what's on it.

All I can make out are a few faint lines of Sandy's handwriting.

For months I assumed it was another note Sandy had written, the contents lost to time.

But then one day I found the original in the stack of documents that Kim gave me.

Turns out it's it's not a letter, it's a photograph.

The police report only includes a copy of the back, but what's on the front is far more revealing.

It's Sandy's photograph of Doug standing in front of the McDonald's in his state trooper uniform.

I don't buy any of that shit.

There was a lot of things that they said and did that I didn't, that I argued with them about.

But they looked at us, I think,

as, well, they're nobody.

They're low class.

According to the police report, there were empty pill bottles in Sandy's car and loose pills scattered on her seat.

Although this description might give the impression that Sandy was trying to overdose, the autopsy did not find any drugs or alcohol in her system at the time of her death.

It just looks staged to me, like, oh, we found, you know, pills underneath her legs.

Well, they were they were allergy pills.

And so they made it look like she committed suicide.

But I don't think they did a thorough investigation.

They didn't do their due diligence.

I don't think they investigated anything.

It was more than 40 years after Sandy's death before her family would get a copy of the police report and be able to read it.

They had hoped that there would be some kind of incontrovertible proof in the report that could settle their questions.

The family felt that with more information, they'd have a clearer picture of how and why Sandy died.

But the new information just muddled the story.

The police report provided a detailed account of this scene and reminded the family of the cardboard shoved under the wheels of her car and the tire tracks that seemed to indicate she was trying to get her car out of the mud.

The report also noted that the gun had been collected and dusted for prints.

It had none.

If Sandy had used the gun on herself, wouldn't they find her prints?

And crucially, why was there no mention of Doug in the written police report?

Even though his name, his work address, and a photo of him were found in her car?

Certainly they, as far as we know, they didn't investigate Doug, because there's no mention of that in the police report either.

Here's Sandy's brother, Stephen.

Well, what I'll say is if she committed suicide,

somebody's going to have to do some hellacious proven to me.

Yeah.

Some hellacious proving to me, Helsie today.

That's what they say.

Fucking prove it.

Hey!

Hi, is this Ed?

Hey!

Hi, it's Melissa.

Can you hear me okay?

That's retired Detective Ed Shyzelski.

He's the one who wrote the police report and investigated Sandy's death all those years ago.

The one who stored the police report at his house.

I tracked him down on Facebook.

He was somewhat surprised to learn Sandy's family was still uncertain about the events surrounding her death.

He was willing to answer their questions and mine in order to put the issue to rest.

At the time that I worked homicide, it was kind of a sought-after job to prestige on my homicide dick.

You know what I mean?

But let me tell you, it had to be the worst job on the police department.

We were handling well over 100 murders a year.

I mean, they parked us like dogs.

Sheshelski speaks with the brash confidence of a lifelong police officer, and he's an experienced storyteller.

A few years ago, he wrote a novel that touches on his time working homicide called In Cheap's Clothing.

The book is dedicated to the, quote, finest group of police officers found anywhere, the past and present members of the Prince George's County Police Department.

So I got the call.

I was in my office in Forestville, which is only a few miles away from where her body was.

Arriving on scene, he recalled what he noticed.

A young woman slumped over in a car seat, alone with a gun close to her right hand.

Her hands were coated in gunpowder, which indicated to Shyshelsky that her hands were on or very close to the gun when it was fired.

Upon further inspection, he saw that the gunshot in her abdomen was a contact wound, meaning that the gun had been touching her body when it fired.

She looked made up, you know, like she thought she was gonna go out somewhere.

She had makeup on, she looked very attractive.

I asked Shyzelski what he made of some of the more unusual details of Sandy's case, like the location of the gunshot.

He told me something a lot of people have said to me as I've reported the story, that women, especially young, attractive women, don't like to shoot themselves in the face because of vanity.

I tried to fact-check this claim and there's not much research, but I did track down one study from 2011 that found that men were almost twice as likely as women to use a method of suicide that disfigured their head or face.

But researchers dismissed the theory that women were driven by vanity, calling it an empirically unsupported explanation that characterizes the suicidal behavior of women as motivated by selfish or trivial concerns.

While Sheshelsky had a fairly good memory of Sandy's case, he didn't remember one of the details that the family latched onto, the cardboard under Sandy's tires.

He insisted that I was mistaken until I showed him his own police report where he noted it.

This detail?

It doesn't fit neatly into the police narrative of suicide.

If Sandy went to the poll yard to end her life, why did it seem like she was trying repeatedly to leave?

You don't rule anything out.

That's what I said.

You don't want to be tunneled vision.

You want to go in there with an open mind.

Homicide, suicide, natural, whatever.

But I mean, I got a gun on the front seat, on a boat, on the back seat, or wherever it was.

It's not a natural.

Bingo, I can eliminate that.

It's not an accident.

Bingo, I can eliminate that.

So pretty much what's left is a homicide or a suicide.

And then there was the letter to Doug.

What I interpreted as a suicide note?

Yes,

yes.

I mean, but again, it doesn't say goodbye, cruel world, either.

It sounds to me like she's kind of talking to God a little bit.

She's rejected.

There's nothing to live for.

She's lost her baby.

She's lost her lover.

He probably told her thousands of times he was going to leave his wife.

You know what I mean?

She didn't get that.

She loses her baby.

What is there to live for?

That's what I can see in that letter.

I could think of a lot of reasons Sandy had to live.

She was 18 years old to start.

She had family, a job, friends, ambitions.

I have no doubt that Sandy was despondent over what sounds like the breakup of her very first love.

But the jump to having nothing to live for, it seemed quite far.

And I wondered if these intimate details about Sandy's personal life, which were on display in her writings, colored the police's interpretation of her death.

What if there had been no letter?

What if there was no receipt from the clinic?

Back then, much like now, there were a lot of myths around abortion.

One is that women who obtain them are more likely to be depressed or suicidal afterwards.

We now know this to be untrue.

The most comprehensive research project on the effects of unintended pregnancy on women's lives, called the Turnaway Study, has found that abortion does not increase the risk of having suicidal thoughts or the chance of developing depression or anxiety.

In fact, women who are able to get an abortion when they want one are more likely to have a positive outlook on the future.

It hit me as a suicide right off the bat.

I did what I was supposed to do, and it is, it was a suicide.

I'm not even going to say, in my opinion, it was a suicide.

It was a suicide, period.

Not so simple, maybe, but it was a suicide.

I don't think any suicide is simple, but Sandy's case did have an added layer of complication for police, the fact that her boyfriend was a state trooper.

Doug's name was all over the scene.

The autopsy revealed that Sandy had sex before her death.

I thought her boyfriend would be high on the list of people to interview.

And in fact, it's standard procedure in cases like this.

The Department of Justice recommends that death investigators should try to, quote, document when, where, how, and by whom the decedent was last known to be alive.

I asked Detective Shyzelski if he ever considered Doug a person of interest, or if he thought to speak to him to learn more about Sandy's mental health or to help recreate the last 48 hours of her life.

Not as far as I was concerned.

He was not a suspect in anything.

Shyschelsky told me that he didn't have any qualms going after a fellow officer if it was warranted.

It's worth noting that Shyschelsky didn't know Doug.

State and county police are different entities and operate independently.

And while Shyschelski didn't interview Doug, he did do something.

He notified the state police that the trooper may have had an inappropriate relationship with an 18-year-old girl.

I filed a public information request with the Maryland State Police to see if I could find records of an internal investigation into Doug after Sandy was found dead, but I was too late.

Internal affairs records are maintained for only 30 years.

There was no indication of anything in that car than a suicide.

Again, the biggies, gunsat residue on her, no signs of a struggle.

Her father's gun is the biggest one.

So

I'm not going to drag somebody over to Coles, another police officer or everyday guy or person.

Detective Shyschelski didn't think it was worth talking to Doug, but I did.

Since I began this podcast, I've tried repeatedly to make contact with him, sending him emails and messages on LinkedIn.

I've also mailed handwritten letters to his home, and in one, I included a photo of Sandy.

To this day, I've yet to speak with him.

Doug, if you're listening, I still want to talk.

Over the years, Doug has turned into somewhat of a mythic figure for the Beale family.

He's an enigma, a mystery man who played a pivotal role in Sandy's life and then just disappeared.

After Sandy's death, Joanne tried to track him down.

She told me that she called the Maryland State Police in hopes of speaking with him.

When I called the state police barracks, the man was not very friendly.

He said, well, you don't have to worry about that, ma'am.

He's been transferred.

Well, he's been wanting to go to Baltimore for a long time.

We finally got an an opening and we sent him along.

And I'm thinking, hmm, yeah, right.

So

I didn't get anywhere with the state police.

Maryland State Police informed Joanne that Doug had been transferred.

I wasn't able to verify this with the state police.

However, they did confirm that he was assigned to a barracks in the Baltimore area by 1985.

To get that cop transferred right away, They covered everything up.

I thought at the time, I thought

they're just telling me that shit because they know.

And I still think that.

Up until now, I've held back a single detail in Sandy's case.

I wanted you to get to know Sandy in the way her family knew her.

as a daughter, a sister, and as a civilian.

But one of the major reasons why I held on to Joanne's letter for so many years was because Sandy wasn't just a regular teenage girl who worked at the mall.

Sandy, she wanted to be a cop, and not just in some idle daydreaming kind of way.

In the last year of her life, she was training to become a police officer, going on ride-alongs with PG County Police, and even taking the written test for the academy.

So Sandy wasn't a stranger to PG County Police.

She was actively trying to become one of them.

Well, I'm old enough and worked in organizations long enough to know that you're going to want to protect the people that you work with or the reputation of the agency.

Sandra could have been retired by now.

She's doing a life six feet underground.

Do I give a shit about these people?

I hope they rotten out.

Well, it's just, you know, there was dirty cops back then, just like there's dirty cops now.

You just never know where they're at and who they are, you know.

On our next episode, we learn more about Sandy's goal to become a police officer.

Yeah, I know she really talked about wanting to become a cop.

At first, I was a little surprised, like, really?

Yeah.

So, she was talking about these ride-alongs.

and how she enjoyed them.

But I do recall she saying, yeah, man, these guys get away with shit, you know.

I'm Melissa Jeltson, and this is what happened to Sandy Beale.

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

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

The podcast is edited by Abu Safar.

Sound design by Aaron Kaufman.

Jason English is our executive producer.

Research and production assistants by Marissa Brown.

To find out more about my investigation, follow me on Twitter at Quasimato.

That's Q-U-A-S-I-M-A-D-O.

Thanks so much for listening.

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