What Happened To Sandy Beal — TRAILER

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 Beale.

This marks 41 years without her with no answers.

Joanne Beale sent this letter to law enforcement a few years ago, asking them to reopen the investigation into the death of her teenage daughter, Sandy Beale.

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

My name is Melissa Jeltson.

I'm a reporter who covers violence against women, and over the years, I've gotten a lot of tips about stories.

People asking me to look into the greatest injustice of their lives.

For Joanne and her family, that's Sandy's mysterious death.

In 1977, Sandy was found shot to death in her car.

I was like, there's no way,

it's just no way that this could be.

I couldn't believe it.

Her death was ruled a suicide, but the Beale family didn't buy the official story.

Instead, they suspected a cover-up.

I said, you know something?

You can put any damn thing you want

down.

That doesn't mean that happened that way.

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

To this day, the Beale family remains convinced that there's more to Sandy's story than the police let on.

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.

And to be honest, I sensed it too.

Because when Sandy was found dead, it suddenly made a lot of people very nervous.

This is the thing about predation.

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

And what more vulnerable place than, you know, a desperate young person.

I wasn't sure what I'd find, but I knew where I'd start with Sandy's own words.

Because Sandy, well, she kept meticulous records, writing down the names and numbers of the people she met and the places she went.

Sandra could have been retired by now.

She's doing a life six feet underground.

In my new podcast, What Happened to Sandy Beale, I follow the clues Sandy left behind and I discover a secretive world that Sandy was trying to join.

A world not so friendly to women.

She had a lot going for her.

I can't imagine in one year

things going that tragically wrong.

Listen to What happened to Sandy Beale starting March 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.