The Girl In The Pole Yard — Sandy Beal E1

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

Please take care while listening.

Do you remember this ledger?

I think I do.

Where do you want me to start?

I'm writing to you to request the following information in regards to the untimely, violent, and unwitnessed death of my daughter, Sandra Ann Beal.

There's not a day that goes by that I don't think of her.

This marks 41 years without her with no answers.

A few years ago, Joanne Beale sent this letter to the Maryland State Police.

It was later given to me by her distant cousin, who I've since gotten to know very well.

I'm a reporter who covers violence against women, and I get a lot of tips about stories.

Emails from people who are desperate for a journalist to dig into what they believe to be the greatest injustice of their lives.

When this letter came into my possession, I knew there was something important about it.

It's kind of weird in retrospect, but I immediately began storing it next to my passport alongside all my most important documents.

This letter is the reason why I found myself sitting beside Joanne in her living room a year into the pandemic.

talking about Sandy.

And I haven't gone over any of this because I figured we're starting new here.

So we'll just go ahead and throw out the questions and I'll give you what I can for the answers.

Joanne is 82 and lives in rural Maine now, near the coast, in a tidy house surrounded by wild blueberry fields.

She's short and sturdy, with thick white hair cropped around her ears and shiny blue, almost mischievous eyes.

I come from a long line of short, sturdy women, and I was immediately at ease talking to her.

These days, Joanne goes to church, shops for clothes, visits with her family.

Maine is where she grew up, the place her family is from.

But back in the 70s, she lived in Seat Pleasant, Maryland, in Prince George's County, with her husband Ronald and their four kids, Sandy, Michael, Stephen, and Ronnie.

I kept Ronnie home from school that day because he had a sore throat and he didn't, you know, and that's when the

detective came to the door and told me what

happened.

He said, I've got some

news that I don't think the little fella should know.

He said, could you send him to your neighbors?

And so

he proceeded to tell me

where they found her in this poll yard.

On the morning of February 11th, 11th, 1977, Frank Middleton arrived at a utility pole yard about 20 minutes away from Joanne's home.

To give you some context, pole yards are where energy companies store those tall wooden poles that are used to support power lines.

This yard was in a somewhat secluded spot off the highway and surrounded by woods, which is why it was odd that there was a car parked in the lot when Frank arrived around 9 a.m.

And this this fella had gone to work and found her and he thought she was asleep until he walked up to the car and noticed that her glasses were up here and she was disarrayed and he knew that she was gone.

Sandy's car, a 1971 Blue Ford Pinto, appeared to be stuck in the mud.

Cardboard had been shoved under all four tires and there were tire tracks all around her car.

like she had been trying to drive away.

Sandy was in the driver's seat, with her keys still in the ignition.

She had been shot in the right side of her abdomen with an exit wound on the left side of her back.

She was 18 years old, just a month shy of her 19th birthday.

You know, I asked that detective,

I said, why wasn't Ronald and I called to identify her.

He said, but there was three policemen there that knew who she was.

And I said, well, isn't that lovely?

I'd like to know who the three cops were at

the scene.

Because

when that detective told me that,

I was furious

that

we were not called

immediately.

to claim her in any way, shape, or form.

We didn't get a chance to see her until she was in the

funeral parlor.

I've never gotten over that and I was really ripped shit about that.

Just a few hours after Sandy's body was discovered, Joanne got a knock at the door.

A detective told her that Sandy was dead and that it appeared she had taken her own life.

In the short time between finding Sandy's body and notifying her family, the cops had already developed a working theory.

Sandy had died by suicide.

I didn't take any of their crap because I could tell that they were hiding something.

I said, you know something?

You can put any damn thing you want down.

That doesn't mean that happened that way.

And I said, you'll never make me and my family and my friends believe that.

So I said, get the hell out of my house.

And I wasn't very nice to them because I think they were skunking us all the way around.

From iHeartRadio, I'm Melissa Jeltson.

And this is What Happened to Sandy Beale, an iHeart original podcast.

Chapter 1, The Girl in the Pole Yard.

This is Michael.

Yes.

Hi, Michael.

This is Stephen.

Hi, Stephen.

Hey, you want a hug?

Sure.

All right.

I wanted to meet with the Beale family as a whole to learn more about Sandy.

When we first sat down, I didn't really know anything about Sandy's case, except for what was in Joanne's letter.

But I soon learned that the entire Beale family shared Joanne's suspicions.

None of them believed Sandy had died by suicide.

Not back then, and not now.

I met them at Michael's house in the summer of 2021.

To give you a quick sketch of the family tree, Sandy was born first, then a year later Michael, then Stephen a year and a half after that.

Bang, bang, bang as Joanne described it.

Six years later, baby Ronnie was born.

Joanne later asked her husband Ronald to get a vasectomy.

All three of Sandy's brothers live in Maine within a 30-minute drive of Joanne.

Still, it's rare for them to get together to talk about Sandy.

What

do we hope to gain from all of this?

I mean I think that is a question everyone might have.

I'd love to hear your own answers for it.

Well personally I have no expectations.

These are people that's waiting on the sands of time to run out on us.

I don't expect anybody's going to serve a day in jail, not even five minutes.

That's Sandy's youngest brother, Ronnie.

He was only nine when Sandy died.

With almost a decade between them in age, they had a special relationship.

Sandy doted on Ronnie, buying him presents and indulging him in games.

In turn, he idolized her.

Now Ronnie is in his early 50s, and he told me his recollections of her were beginning to fade.

She was wicked smart.

I mean, you know, she can do anything she wanted.

Mars knows, she always got good grades, too, didn't she?

Yeah.

That's Stephen, Sandy's middle brother.

He's 60 and runs a printing press for the local newspaper.

In his spare time, he plays the drums, though he's had a hard time finding bandmates who want to play heavy metal.

When he thinks back to his time with Sandy, he remembers himself as a typical, annoying younger brother, always butting heads with her.

It's something that pains him now, that wasted time spent fighting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Always look at her as, you know,

the big sister is, you know,

which is kind of weird.

I mean, because Sandy, she was no, she was no, what, five, five, something like that?

Five, yeah, she wasn't very tall.

Yeah, but

the mental image is larger than life.

Yeah, Sandy seemed to get along okay.

I mean, she, for whatever reason, you know, she, I don't recall of her getting picked on or whatever during that time frame.

But then again, she

regularly kicked my ass anyway.

So

lots of people I spoke to about Sandy mentioned this element element of her personality.

She was plucky, tough.

And Sandy's toughness was an asset in her community.

Prince George's County, where the Beals lived, is located just outside of Washington, D.C.

If you're in downtown D.C., all you have to do is drive east along Pennsylvania Avenue and you'll eventually cross into PG County.

Keep driving for about 20 minutes and you'll find yourself at the Beals' former house in Seattle Pleasant.

A white, lower-middle-class family, the Beals lived in a modest home in a less than desirable part of town.

The family described the neighborhood as sometimes chaotic.

Crime and poverty were concerns for residents of Seat Pleasant, and you had to keep your wits about you, they explained.

Joanne stayed home with the four kids, and Ronald supported the family, working as a long-haul trucker and doing construction.

He was often away from home, and money was pretty tight.

He had two jobs.

Sometimes he went out of he had to long haul and the other job was construction.

So he was pretty busy and so

he did the

work,

he paid the bills.

I was to go grocery shopping.

I was to take care of the kids in the home and that was it.

Sandy, an outgoing girl with a knack for making friends, navigated the streets of Seat Pleasant with relative ease.

But make no mistakes.

She would not suffer somebody being wrong to her, you know, or messing with her.

She was, you know, very smart, very pristine in her own way, but you know, she was very fierce, I guess was the best way to put it.

She didn't like me trying to braid her hair.

She hated that, even when I was a little girl.

And I was so happy because I had a little girl I could braid, you know.

And she'd take it out and I'd take it back.

And I,

so after a while, I just let it be straggly.

She was the queen.

She was the oldest, and she let you know about it.

She was the boss.

We all shared one room, but Sandy had her own room, and

no one was allowed in her room, but her, unless you had special permission to get in there.

That's Michael, Sandy's oldest brother, and the sibling who was closest to her.

He's in his early 60s now and lives near the coast with his wife, Becky.

When you get to know Michael, he has a really gentle demeanor, but from the outside, he looks tough, like the kind of guy whose foot you wouldn't want to accidentally step on in a bar i do remember she we had like an easy bake oven and we used to make a bunch of junk and eat it and she had a makeup mirror and you know different things as a

you know as a young girl stuff like that we really seldom ever thought about anything i mean we were just really connected and actually when we were i think I was 15 or so, and she might have been 16 is when we found out she was actually adopted

joanne got pregnant with sandy young around her 18th birthday sandy's biological father wasn't interested in becoming a dad but ronald a suitor of joanne's who she'd written letters to while he was deployed overseas was up for the task he married joanne when she was eight months pregnant and raised sandy as his own child When my mom told us that, I was like,

at first I didn't believe it.

I was like, what?

Are you kidding me all this time?

my dad treated everybody equal and then after that i when i found that out i was just even more in love with her basically you know as a sister type you know it's like you know wow

um she she asked a lot of questions like what happened why and and different things like that but the answers she got were it was um enough to satisfy her is like okay well i mean you know i'm never going to stop loving my dad and you know whether or not he's my real dad or not, he's always been my dad and he always will be my dad.

So I think we kind of got tighter, if anything.

We've been through an awful lot in this family.

I say the good Lord was good to me to give me a life to live this long.

We know what we've been through, and it's been hell.

I hope they

find out something.

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Because giving back doesn't cost you extra.

From September 1st to October 31st, participating Shell stations will donate a minimum of one cent per gallon of the fuel pump from the giving pump or a minimum donation of $300.

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For over 40 years, the Beale family has believed that Sandy was a victim of a violent crime.

A belief fueled by the suspicion that her death was covered up.

Here's Steven.

The guilt you carry around.

Over time, that shit turns to fucking anger.

You get pissed.

You son of a bitch, you stole from me.

You stole my family.

That's

put that category unforgivable shit.

Sandy's sudden death was disorienting to her family.

She lived at home and her family saw her every day.

They were intimately familiar with her behaviors, her moods, and her values.

The Sandy they knew was optimistic and ambitious and like many teen girls her age, eager for her real life, her adult life, to begin.

She was popular.

She worked part-time at the mall.

She didn't appear depressed or withdrawn or hopeless.

Suicide, it didn't align with her personality.

And again,

being, you know, as passionate as she was and fierce as she was,

I just would not have thought that she would want to do something like that.

You know, I just never got it.

Could not wrap my fucking head around her doing that.

Suicide seemed completely out of character for Sandy.

And the crime scene, instead of bringing closure, just raised more questions.

Police said Sandy had shot herself in the right side of her abdomen, but the teen was left-handed.

The family told me how they tried to put themselves in Sandy's shoes.

imagining how she would have shot herself sitting in the front seat of her subcompact Ford Pinto with a steering wheel in front of her chest.

The gun would have been too heavy for Sandy to hold and fire with her non-dominant right hand.

Instead, she would have had to reach across her body with her left hand to aim the gun at her right side.

It seemed like a clumsy way to shoot oneself.

When I was told what was happening, what had happened,

I was like, there's no way,

it's just no way that this could be.

I couldn't believe it.

Michael was familiar with the gun found in Sandy's car.

In fact, all the kids in the Beale family knew about the gun.

It was owned by Sandy's father.

It was an eight-inch long barrel, chrome black handle, black hawk model.

Very nice looking gun.

And like I said, it was long and it was always loaded with hollow point bullets.

It was actually

quite something to shoot.

It was so powerful that when I first shot it, I had to hold it with both hands because I didn't know what to expect out of it.

It was because of their strong familiarity with the gun and its large, cumbersome quality that the Beals were convinced Sandy could not have used it on herself.

It's got a lot, those 357s, 44s,

you know, they have a lot of recoil.

Some of the largest handguns you're going to get.

Yeah, think

Dirty Harry, Magnum, you know, the old movies like how he pulls out that it's about that length gun.

Yeah.

Recoil would have sent it flying.

Yeah.

Again, it's just physics.

And her left hand would have never gone over that far to be able to do that.

And

the unbelievable part about her committing suicide was just too far out.

The family also thought the location of the wound was strange.

Why would someone intent on suicide shoot themselves off-center in the stomach?

And as small as she was and the size of that gun on her non-dominant hand

would have been really hard.

I mean, if that's what you were planning on doing was killing yourself, that was certainly, you know, why don't you just slowly walk through a fire and see if you'll eventually, you know, burn to death?

We don't know why Sandy had her father's gun with her that evening, but her family is convinced that whatever she was doing, she wasn't alone.

When the Beals got her clothes back from police, they noticed that she dressed up nicely, wearing brown gaucho slacks, a white blouse, and calf high black suede boots that her mom had given her for Christmas.

Sandy's nails were recently manicured, painted with pale, pearlized nail polish.

To the family, her choice of outfit suggested she was meeting someone that night.

Who else, they wanted to know, could have been in the pole yard with Sandy?

Here's what they think happened.

Sandy was shot by someone else sitting beside her in the passenger seat.

This would explain the location of the gunshot and the trajectory of the bullet.

from the right side of Sandy's abdomen to the left side of her back.

It was the cardboard found under the wheels of Sandy's car that solidified their doubts.

The cardboard told a story of a girl who was trying to leave the poll yard that night, not one intent on suicide.

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Download the Shell app to find your nearest giving pump, less than two miles away.

Because giving back doesn't cost you extra.

From September 1st to October 31st, participating Shell stations will donate a minimum of one cent per gallon of the fuel pump from the giving pump or a minimum donation of $300.

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My name is Kim Parmer.

I am a second cousin of Sandy Beale, and we are in the home of where the origin of all of our family began in Jonesport, Maine.

I met Kim at a hotel just up the street from Joanne's house.

Kim is a licensed therapist and it comes through in the way she communicates.

She makes good eye contact and speaks carefully with kindness and warmth.

She's the type of person who makes you feel like you could tell her anything and she'd never judge you.

These days, days, Kim, now 64, lives in Texas and she's got a solid tan to show for it.

But she comes to Maine, the place of her birth, whenever she can to see the Beals.

Sandy has a grave marker here too, and she visits it when she can.

So this is a map of

just Prince George's County and the area where she lived.

And based on all the

information that I have of her date books or letters or anything that had an address on it or that I could identify, I plotted it onto the map.

Where she lived, where she went to school, where she died, where she worked.

This was just her little world.

Kim showed me the material she's gathered over the years.

Medical records, court documents, Freedom of Information Act requests, spreading them out on a hotel bed for me to look through.

She's the detective of the family, inquisitive, diligent, and fixated on this idea of justice.

Joanne and I just stayed in touch intermittently over the years, and they started sending me stuff.

I was asking so many questions.

They're like, here, just take it.

And so that's, you know, these files of stuff that I have now.

Kim is the entire reason why I started looking into the story, why I learned the name of Sandy Beale in the first place.

She's the one who gave me Joanne's letter.

And I just learned to keep Sandy's summary with me.

I carried it with me all the time.

So if I ever met anyone, an investigator or whatever, I just passed them out.

I first met Kim at a domestic violence conference in Texas.

I was there to moderate a panel with Lorena Bobbitt, whose experience of domestic abuse and marital rape had been badly overshadowed by the act that had made her infamous.

If you don't know her story, I encourage you to look it up.

Something I said that night must have resonated with Kim because immediately after the panel, she approached me.

I remember going up to you afterwards and almost running up there and trying to get there before other people because I knew you were going to get bombarded with people asking questions.

And I thought, well,

who knows?

Maybe, maybe she would find this intriguing.

I did.

As a reporter, I've written more stories than I can count about women who have died violent deaths.

And I've spent time with their families as they've begun the grieving process.

But usually, those cases had answers, however unsatisfying they might feel.

This was a true mystery, one that had persisted for over four decades.

The Beale family was stuck in the unknown.

I kept finding myself looking at a photo of Sandy that Kim gave me along with Joanne's letter.

It's a black and white portrait, Sandy's high school graduation photo.

She has long blonde feathered hair with a middle part that makes you think of Farah Fawcett.

Her mouth is poised into a half-smile and she stares off-camera like something in the background amuses her.

Almost everyone I spoke to about Sandy mentioned how pretty she was, especially her long blonde hair.

And while she got attention for her looks, it didn't seem to give her a big head.

She was just genuinely nice and friendly to those around her.

That's the Sandy Kim remembers.

We didn't meet until we were 14.

The two girls were only six months apart, and their friendship was a defining one.

And we headed off and went back to her bedroom like teenagers do, and we sat on her bed and we just started talking and

just loved her from the start.

Kim and Sandy met for the first time shortly after Kim moved to Maryland, to a neighborhood about an hour from the Beals.

The two girls spent their early teenage years going back and forth to each other's houses and trading worlds.

Living in Maryland was, you know, you would think that it's this preppy kind of wonderful place with Annapolis and preppy clothes and everything, but I look back now and those are some of the most traumatic, scariest times of my life.

The things I got exposed to it at that age

while Kim was technically older by a few months Sandy often played the role of protector I'm like trying to avoid it right now because I don't want to cry

but I'm going to

okay um

so at 14

I'm in this new school and it was exciting and everything and that

my mom had to come pick me up one night because I was at a friend's house at a playground in the middle of a cul-de-sac.

And I'm just like waiting for my mom.

And this guy walks up and I recognize him because he's on the football team.

He's the senior on the football team.

And I, to this date, don't know how it unfolded, but before I knew it, he had his hands down my pants.

And I just remember it freezing.

I mean, I hadn't even been kissed yet by a boy at all.

And I'm thinking, all these people, they're looking out their windows watching this guy do this to me.

And I just dissociated.

And so that weekend I went to go see Sandy and I was telling her about it and I was really upset about it.

And she got pissed.

And she's like, I'm going to take care of this for you.

Kim told me that a few days later, Sandy appeared out of the blue.

She had driven an hour to Kim's neighborhood to confront the football player who sexually assaulted Kim.

Sandy was ready for a fight, but he was nowhere to be found.

It didn't matter to Kim, though.

The fact that Sandy showed up for her, it was enough.

That's the part that I remember the most.

And

I'm just, I've never had been around anybody like that that protected me like that.

She, I knew she was going to take care of me.

It was a very short relationship because she lost her life a few years later.

Kim left Maryland to go to college in Illinois while Sandy was still in high school.

The distance led the two girls to fall out of frequent contact.

Still, after police found Sandy's body, Kim was one of the first people that Joanne called to let her know what had happened.

I just remember getting that call from Joanne that Sandy had died, and I just remember being shocked and like, what do you mean?

You know, 18 year olds don't die from a gunshot wound.

Kim tried desperately to get back to Maryland for the funeral but couldn't afford the journey.

I remember looking into the flights and they were way too expensive so I looked into the train but it was $90 from Chicago to Washington DC and it should have it it could have just been $10,000.

I didn't have it.

She missed the funeral, but kept in regular contact with Joanne.

She died on the 11th on a Friday,

very early in the morning, but she had gone out the 10th Thursday night.

So something happened like right at midnight.

She was probably alone for eight or nine hours, hurting and shot and dark.

She had to be scared to death.

That should not happen to anybody.

Joanne was notified of Sandy's death when a detective came to her house.

He asked if she and her husband Ronald could come to the precinct later that day.

See, when he came to tell us, tell me what happened,

he said, when your husband gets home, will you guys come over to the barracks?

And everything was laid out on the table.

Sandy's personal belongings, items collected from her car, were spread out like evidence for her parents to see.

And among her things was a letter.

It was written to a man named Doug and addressed to his place of work, the Maryland State Police Department.

He had a uniform on, he gave her a sweet talk, and there it went.

To the surprise of her family, Sandy was in a relationship.

Doug was 10 years older than her and married with a young child.

This discovery agitated Sandy's grieving parents and left them with a a slew of questions.

But at the precinct, Joanne and Ronald were left with the impression that the investigation was basically complete.

No more answers would be forthcoming.

It's common for police to speak with a boyfriend in unnatural deaths such as this.

When women are murdered, it's far more likely to be at the hands of a husband or boyfriend than anyone else.

But as far as Joanne knew, Doug, the state trooper, was never interviewed in the course of the investigation, which seemed particularly odd when you considered the location of Sandy's death.

The Pepco utility yard was only a mile down the road from the state police barracks where Doug worked.

And as the family soon learned, the pole yard was a popular state trooper hangout.

And then the place where she died,

that was the most revealing to see that literally they're across the street from each other.

The Maryland State Police barracks of the man that she was dating.

And then the place that she died that was a well-known place where police gathered to, you know, I guess

have privacy for whatever reason.

How police do their jobs in the aftermath of an unexpected death can have a profound and lasting impact on the families of victims.

Sandy's death was a defining moment for the Beale family.

But what came next, what they feel was an absence of a proper investigation, compounded their trauma.

Without confidence in the police, the Beale family suspected a conspiracy.

A guide for investigators published by the Department of Justice in 1999 explains how essential it is to ensure that the proper steps and procedures are taken at the scene of a death.

Quote, few things in our democracy are as important as ensuring that citizens have confidence in their institutions in a crisis.

For many individuals, the death of a loved one is just such a crisis.

I wanted to understand how the Beale family and the police could have such starkly different interpretations of the same events.

This chasm, I felt, deserved scrutiny.

One thing I was sure of, The Beale family, even after 45 years, was adamant that there was something suspicious about Sandy's death.

And because of that, they had endured decades of uncertainty.

And to be honest, I sensed it too.

I thought it was strange that Sandy was shot in the stomach, and I questioned whether she would have been able to kill herself the way cops said she did.

It seemed like there was more to Sandy's story than her family knew.

After so many years, I didn't know what kind of answers I'd find.

But tucked away in the tattered stack of papers Kim collected were clues to Sandy's past.

Clues that offered me a rare glimpse into Sandy's private life.

Clues written by Sandy herself.

If she hadn't written that damn note to

shithead.

On our next episode, we learn about Doug and his relationship relationship with Sandy, and I speak to the detective in charge of Sandy's case.

I would compare my skills as a homicide detective against anybody in the world.

Scotland Yard, New York City, anywhere, Philadelphia, Atlanta, where they're loaded with them.

Anywhere you go, there's nobody,

there's nobody any better.

It turns out he had a lot to say.

say.

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 Quasimado.

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

Thanks so much for listening.

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