THE MORGAN PETERS MURDER: 9 STORIES IN A BIKER MAGAZINE

THE MORGAN PETERS MURDER: 9 STORIES IN A BIKER MAGAZINE AND A 47-YEAR COLD CASE

 In 1972, 29-year-old wrestler and gym equipment installer Morgan Peters Jr. vanished along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in rural Franklin County, Pennsylvania. What began as the cold case murder of a husband and father from Bay Shore, New York, eventually unraveled into something far darker: a roadside robbery crew, a second young victim named Jane Maguire, a surviving witness named Harvey Hoffman, and a killer who may have been confessing in biker magazines for years.

In this episode of Crimery, Tim Novotney digs into the Morgan Peters murder, the twisted highway ruse used by Larry “Jody” Via and Charmaine Phillips, and the shocking way investigators finally connected the case nearly five decades later. But this story goes beyond one murder. If three published biker magazine stories match real crimes, what about the other six?

This is a haunting true crime story about the Pennsylvania Turnpike, unsolved murder, cold case investigation, hidden confessions, and the chilling possibility that Morgan Peters was not the only victim.

For more episodes, merch, and updates, visit crimery.show.

 Morgan Peters Jr, Morgan Peters murder, Jody Via, Larry Via, Charmaine Phillips, Pennsylvania Turnpike murder, Pennsylvania cold case, Franklin County murder, Metal Township, 1972 murder case, Jane Maguire, Harvey Hoffman, biker magazine confession, Outlaw Biker magazine, Easyriders magazine, unsolved murder solved, cold case solved after 47 years, true crime podcast, Crimery

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey guys, what's going on? It's Tim Novani, three-time Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. Welcome back to another episode of Crimary, and man, do I have a story for you today? Real quick, before we jump in, if you haven't gone to Crimary.show, go there. That's where we have all of our merch, guys, and it's the best way to support this show. Grab something. Patreon is coming soon, as soon as I figure out all the dynamics of that. And Jennifer is heads down working on her next series. So this week I got one for you. And oh man, wait until you hear this. This is one of those cases that you're digging through the archives, the cold case files, court documents, newspaper clippings, and you come across something that just stops you when you go, wait, what? And that's what happened here. I came across this case out of Pennsylvania from 1972. And at first I thought, okay, guy found dead on the side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, unsolved. That's sad, but it's not unusual for the 1970s. Cases go cold and it happens. But then I kept reading. And the deeper I got, the crazier this thing became. Because it took 47 years to solve this case. 47 years. And the way they finally cracked it, guys, in all the cases I've researched, I have never seen anything like how this all came together. And I can't tell you yet. You gotta hear the whole story first. But when we get there, you're gonna lose your mind. So I'm gonna walk you through the whole thing the town, the victim, the people who did this, and how it finally fell apart almost a half a century later. And at the end, I'm gonna tell you what I think, and I'm going to ask you a question that nobody else is asking about this case, that I think changes everything. So stick around, and when we're done, head on over to Crimary.show, tell me what you think, and let's build a community around this episode. Alright, let's go. Metal Township, population of 1,768 people. 1,768 people. That's it. A Taylor Swift's concert has more people waiting in the line for the bathroom than Metal Township has total. That's the whole township. Every person, every farm, every house, every kid in school. And the name? I had to look this up because I thought Metal Township, that sounds tough. That sounds like a factory town or where a heavy metal band came from. Nope. They named it Metal Township because somebody found metal ore deposits in the dirt in the 1800s. There's some metal in the ground, so that's the name. The most Pennsylvania thing I think I've ever heard. In fact, the only thing on the National Register of Historic Places out there are old iron furnaces, Ketterick Furnace and the Mount Pleasant Ironworks House, from back when they started smelting iron ore out of the hills. That's it. That's the history. The biggest community in the township is a place called Fanetzburg. And I use that word community loosely because Fanetzburg has a population of 637. It's not even a borough. It is unincorporated. But if it was incorporated, I don't even know what that means, but I just read that it wasn't incorporated, so it's unincorporated. It's got a post office, a volunteer fire company, a cemetery, and that's about it. It was plated in 1790, and it's basically just houses along Pennsylvania Route 75 running through a valley between two mountains. The valley is called Path Valley, and the name goes way back. The Native Americans used it as a trail through the mountains. The Tuscarora Indians. This was their path, and that's how old we're talking. Settlers didn't even show up until the 1750s. And when they did, the Indians burned their barns and took prisoners in 1762. This has always been wild country. And then I decided I would look up reviews on this place from the people who actually lived here. And one person wrote, quote, small town, not a place to grow. End quote. The Township Municipal Building is only open three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about this place. Now the Pennsylvania Turnpike cuts right through the northern edge of Metal Township. And this is the key to the whole story, because the Tuscarora Mountain Tunnel, which is 1.1 miles of solid rock, is right there. You come out the other side of that tunnel and you're in this valley. Trees, farmland, guardrails, and nothing. And the Pennsylvania Turnpike itself, in case you guys don't know anything about this, I gotta tell you about this road because it's not a normal highway. And this thing was built in the 1940s, and it was the first super highway in America before interstates even existed. And they called it the Tunnel Highway because when they opened it, it went through seven mountain tunnels, seven of them bored straight through the Appalachian Mountains. When it opened, people drove out here just to experience it. Why? Because there was no speed limits at first. Four lanes, no cross streets, no traffic lights, and there was nothing like it in the country. Over two million cars use it in this first year alone. Think about that. No speed limit, everyone's gonna show up and give it a test. Back in 1972, some of those tunnels were still two lanes, one each way, and there was no divider. Just you and whoever's coming at you in the tube carved through the mountain. I looked up the toll and it was a dollar fifty to drive the whole thing in 1972. A buck fifty. I don't even think I can go like five exits and not pay$10 now. So it was a much cheaper price back then, and you didn't even have to worry about a speed limit. I would have loved traveling on this road back in the 1970s. In 1972, there were no cell phones, no cameras, no easy pass tracking your movements. And if you pulled over on the shoulder between those tunnels at 2 in the morning, nobody on earth knew you were there. Now let me tell you about Morgan Peters Jr. because this is where it gets personal. The more I dug into this guy's life, the harder this hit me. Morgan Walter Peters Jr., 29 years old from Bayshore, Long Island, New York, and Bayshore is a working class hamlet on the South Shore of Long Island, about 42 miles from Manhattan, right on the Great South Bay. It's where you can catch the ferry out to Fire Island in the summer. After World War II, the population there exploded. Developers threw up housing on old farmlands, working class guys came home from war, got married, bought houses. It's a blue-collar town with some history. Harvey Milk grew up there, and if you're not familiar who that is, I wasn't either, but apparently Sean Penn played him in a movie called Milk, so I guess he was pretty popular. LL Cool Jay, Joe Namath, real place, real people came out of this area. And Morgan Peters was a wrestler. Not a weekend at the gym wrestler. I'm talking competitive, nationally ranked. I found him in the AAU National Freestyle Championship records, placed third in his weight class, wrestling for the New York Athletics Club. Some people call it the Knack, which is one of the most prestigious athletic clubs in the country. They don't just let anybody in. You get recruited to this club. Some reports put him in the Olympic conversation, and I couldn't confirm that he ever made the team, but he was at that level. AAU Nationals, Knack, this was an elite athlete. So picture this man, 29, strong, disciplined, the kind of athlete who trains like a monk. And if you ever tried to wrestle a competitive wrestler, you know what I'm talking about. These guys aren't always the biggest, but pound by pound, they're probably the toughest athletes walking on the earth. And he was married. He had kids back home in Bayshore. And here's what he did for a living. This part almost writes itself. He sold and installed wrestling mats and gym equipment. A wrestler selling wrestling mats. He found a way to make a living doing the thing he loved and how many people actually pull that off. And that's why he was here in Pennsylvania on the Turnpike in 1972. It was a business trip. He was driving west across the state to install gym equipment somewhere near Latrobe. Not sure if you guys are familiar with the beer Rolling Rock, but that's originally where Rolling Rock came from, was Latrobe, Pennsylvania, out here in western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. He was driving a red Ford pickup truck and F series, Big Chrome bumper, square front end, the workhorse truck of the early 1970s, and if you ever driven through the farm country, you've seen hundreds of them rusting in barns. Now his truck would have his equipment in the back, wrestling mats, installation tools, everything he needed for the job. On September 18th, 1972, Morgan was last seen going through a toll booth on the turnpike at the Carlisle Interchange, heading west towards the mountains, into the tunnels, into the dark. Just a man in a Redford truck with wrestling mats in the back, driving to his next job so he can come home to his family by the weekend. Could you imagine being his wife back in Bayshore? He was supposed to be home in a few days. Friday comes, nothing. Saturday comes, nothing. You start making calls. You call the company he was going to install for. Did he ever show up? No. We never saw him. You call the Pennsylvania State Police, you file a missing persons report, and you wait by the phone. And you don't know that somewhere along the turnpike, in the tall grass besides the road, in the middle of nowhere, your husband is already gone. Now let me introduce you to the two people responsible for all this. Larry Joseph Vi, 28 years old, Cleveland, Ohio, everybody called him Jody. I don't know why they called him Jody, but that was his nickname. And here's what jumped out at me when I was researching him, because it doesn't match at all. His wife Sharon gave an interview to the Akron Beacon Journal after his arrest, and she described Jody as, quote, a quiet person, he loved to read travel books and Hemingway, end quote. She said her first husband was the exact opposite, drinking and fighting. She said you'd expect something like that from her first husband, but not Jody. She married him because he was the safe one, the bookworm, the quiet guy. Day by day, Jodi worked at a molding company, factory work, punched in, punched out. It was Cleveland. But what he really wanted to be was a writer, a poet, a musician. He'd been hanging around the bars in Cleveland that spring, trying to sell his amateur poetry as song lyrics to rock bands coming through town. And that's where he met Charmaine. Charmaine Bouvar. Later, Charmaine Phillips. She was a go-go dancer at a place called Guys and Dolls Club. Long blonde hair, down past her shoulders, and she drove a 1968 Cadillac de Ville, a big, dark, roomy boat of a car. And on May 11, 1972, Jody left Sharon in the middle of the night, left a note saying he needed time to clear his head, got into Charmaine's Cadillac and disappeared. Sharon told the Acron Beacon Journal later, quote, I guess that's where he met Charmaine, end quote. She knew exactly what it was. And here's where it all starts. Jody and Charmaine on their way through Kentucky, they stop at a bar in Bowling Green. And Charmaine bought a gun, a 25 caliber pistol, a tiny little thing that fits in a purse.$50. That gun, that$50 bar bought pistol, would kill two people and nearly kill a third over the next four months. Now here's the thing that made these two so dangerous. Both of them, Jody and Charmaine, had long blonde hair, both of them. Past their shoulders, 1972 hippie hair. And from a distance, especially at night, especially from a car going 60 miles an hour, they looked like two women, two stranded women on the side of the road. They figured out how to use that. They'd pull the Cadillac onto the shoulder of a dark highway, pop the hood, or maybe just stand by the road with their thumbs out like hitchhikers, and they'd wait. It's 1972. There's no AAA app on your phone, there's no roadside assistance, and if you see what looks like two women broken down on the highway in the middle of the night, you stop. And that's what people did. You pulled over, you get out, you asked if they needed help. And that's exactly what they were counting on. Some drivers got close enough to see one of them was a man, and they'd hit the gas and took off. Those were the smart ones, the lucky ones, and the ones who didn't notice, robbed, and sometimes worse. They did this from May through September of 1972, through Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania for four months, highway after highway, state after state. Charmaine later told investigators she couldn't even remember how many times they pulled this rouse that summer. She lost count. Now before we get into what happened on the turnpike, I need to tell you about Harvey Hoffman. Because Harvey is how we know what these two are capable of. And Harvey is alive to tell the story because he's one tough human being. On September 4th, 1972, in Giangwa County, Ohio, just east of Cleveland, a man named Harvey Hoffman is driving at night. He sees two people on the side of the highway, blonde hair, big Cadillac, he pulls over to help. Jody tells them that they ran out of gas. And Harvey Hoffman says something I will never forget reading. He said, You stop the right guy. I own a gas station. How crazy is that? Harvey tells him to get in his car and he drives them to a station. I'll fill up a can. No problem. He unlocks the station and lets them inside. And I need that to sit with you for a second. This is a man who is about to get robbed and shot in the head, and at first he makes them coffee because he's a good man, because that's what you do for people who need help. And that's Harvey Hoffman. Now while they're drinking the coffee, Jody pulls out the gun and takes$62 from the register and he tells Harvey he has to tie him up. But Charmaine does the tying, and then Jody tells Harvey to lie down and turn his head to the wall. And Harvey said later, quote, I wasn't worried until he told me to turn my head to the wall. He said, so long, and I said goodbye. There was a long pause and then he shot me. End quote. So long, goodbye, and then a bullet. But Harvey survived and took a bullet in the brain and lived and remembered both of their faces. They stole his car, abandoned it, fled to Virginia Beach for about a week, and then they started heading back towards Ohio. And then their route took them right through the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Now on September 18th, 1972, Charmaine is driving the Cadillac. Jody is in the passenger seat. Somewhere in Metal Township, near the mile marker 189, Jody tells her to pull over. She pulls over to the shoulder in the middle of the night, mountains pressing in, the Tuscarora tunnel about a mile behind them, nothing ahead but dark. They sit there waiting on the shoulder on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the pitch black. And eventually, headlights coming up behind them and slowing down. A red Ford pickup truck pulling over behind the Cadillac. Morgan Peters Jr., 29 years old from Bayshore, Long Island, a wrestler, a husband, a father on his way to install some wrestling mats. He saw what he thought were two people stranded on the highway and he pulled over because that's the kind of man he was. He got out of his truck, he walked over towards the Cadillac, and Charmaine said later that she didn't see what happened next. She said she didn't hear a gunshot, but we know because we have the autopsy and we have the ballistics, Morgan Peters was shot once in the back. 25 caliber, the same gun, the$50 pistol from Bowling Green, a single shot in the back, and that means he was walking away or walking towards something he thought was safe. He was a competitive wrestler. He could have handled any fist fight on the planet, but you can't wrestle a bullet in the back. Jody ran back to the Cadillac, quote, we gotta go, end quote. Charmain drove off. Jody tried to drive the red Ford. And here's a detail from an eyewitness. A passing motorist that night saw both vehicles pulled over, and he later told investigators that the truck's backup taillights kept flashing off and on. Like whoever was driving it couldn't figure out the gears. That quiet bookworm from Cleveland didn't know how to drive a stick shift, so he couldn't handle Morgan Peters' Ford truck. He only got about 18 miles down the turnpike to mile marker 171, which was about 16 minutes at 65 miles an hour. Pulled over, smashed the windows, and ditched it. He took Morgan's wallet. It was a black wallet with a business card inside for the Heisman's Texaco service in New Kingstown, right near the Carlisle Interchange. He took Morgan's black AMFM portable Panasonic radio, little trophies, I guess, and then he got back into the Cadillac with Charmaine and they drove west, out of Pennsylvania. But here's what happened next, and this matters, they didn't stay together. Charmaine told investigators years later that after the turnpike, she drove the Cadillac back to Cleveland on her own. She and Jody separated before she even got there. She went home, he went wherever he went. Which means from that point on, Jody was alone, no Cadillac, no partner, just a man on foot. Morgan lied in the grass face down 10 feet from the guardrails for two days. On September 20th, 1972, late afternoon, two college kids are driving west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, headed to the University of Cincinnati. One of them pulls over at mile marker 189, hops out to pee, he walks past the guardrail and into the tall grass and finds Morgan Peters Jr. face down, single bullet wound to his back, hidden in the brush, 10 feet from the busiest highway in Pennsylvania. The kid runs back to the car, they drive to the next exit, and they call the state police. Pennsylvania State Police roll out to the scene, they process the body, they search the area, and they found Morgan's red Ford truck several miles west near mile marker 171. The windows are smashed. They contact his family back in Bayshore, and his wife confirms what was missing, and his black AMFM portable Panasonic radio. Those were the only two things taken. So here's what the cops had: a 29-year-old man from New York shot once in the back on the shoulder of the turnpike. No witnesses, no suspect, no murder weapon at the scene, and a truck dumped miles away with the windows busted out, a missing wallet and a missing radio. That's it, that's all they had. No leads, no motive they could identify, just a dead man on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. And the case went cold almost immediately. And while Pennsylvania State Police were standing over Morgan's body on September 20th, trying to figure out what happened, the man who killed him was already in another state about to do it again. The same day on September 20th, a 19-year-old named Jane McGuire left her home in Washington, Pennsylvania. She was driving to visit her sister in Willing, West Virginia. A short drive, 40 minutes, straight shot across the border. But somewhere along the way, she saw a man on the side of the road, thumbs out, long blonde hair, by himself. Jane stopped. She was a 19-year-old. She stopped to help a stranger, and Jodie got in the car. Her body was found two days later, September 22nd, but not near Wheel, West Virginia. Not anywhere near where she was supposed to be. She was found in the woods behind a rest stop in Summit County, Ohio, near Akron, over a hundred miles from where she started. He had taken her completely off her route, bound her with her own bootlaces, raped her, and shot her three times. She was 19. FBI matched the shell casings to Harvey Hoffman's gas station. Same gun, same 25 caliber, and Harvey was still alive, still talking, still describing the two people who robbed him. Two crimes in Ohio connected. A manhunt was building. But Morgan Peters, Pennsylvania, different state, different cops, nobody connected his case to any of this. So now the FBI's involved. They got ballistics linking the Hoffman shooting to the McGuire murder. They've got Harvey Hoffman's descriptions, and they got a Geaga County detective named Lieutenant Bruce Greathouse running the Hoffman case. Now this guy accumulated what would later be called 20 pounds of paperwork on this investigation. 20 pounds. Now that is a dedicated cop. They also tracked down the passing motorists who had been on the turnpike the night Morgan was killed. And this guy told police he saw both vehicles on the shoulder, the Cadillac and the red pickup truck behind it, and he said he saw what looked like two women, long blonde hair standing outside the vehicles. Two women, because that's what Jody and Charmaine looked like from a distance. Because that is how the roofs worked. Now Charmaine was back in the Cleveland area, Broad Heights, a suburb. She was a go-go dancer. She was a local. She was findable. And with Hoffman alive and talking and the FBI cases connecting, the walls were closing in. She surrendered and turned herself in to the Giaga County Sheriff Office in September 1972. And once she was in custody, she talked. She gave them everything Jody's full name, where they've been, how the roos has worked, and what happened at the gas station. That's how they found Jody. Charmaine gave him up. And something super interesting. Harvey was told before he was shot by Jody exactly where he was going to park the car after he robbed him in a cornfield near a Yamaha dealership west of the station. He actually told Harvey where he had parked it, and he did it. And that's how calm this guy was during the robbery. Now they had a name, they had Charmaine's testimony, and they had the ballistics, and they now had a manhunt. Jody Vaia went on the run for weeks, but where does a quiet bookworm from Cleveland run to? Back to his wife's Sharon's house. And in November of 1972, they find him. There and arrest him. And then they brought Harvey Hoffman in to the Summit County Jail, put Jody in a police lineup, and Harvey picked him out, pointed right at him, no hesitation. The man who made them coffee confirmed his shooter with the bullet still lodged in his head. That was it. Case closed. Both were convicted, and here's what each of them got. Jody Vaya, convicted of rape and murder of Jane McGuire. Convicted in an attempted murder and robbery of Harvey Hoffman. Sentenced to life in prison. Sent to the Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio. He is still there today. Charmaine Phillips, convicted of aiding and abetting in the Hoffman robbery and shooting. She cooperated, she testified, she got a lighter sentence. The exact number of years I couldn't find in any records, but here's what I do know. She is out because when investigators came knocking decades later about the Morgan Peters case, she was a free woman, living her life. They interviewed her in 2009 and again in 2015. And again in 2017. She had done her time and moved on. Jody never got out. He's been sitting in that Ohio prison since 1972. Over 50 years now. Now here's the part that should make you angry. When they arrested Jodi, they searched his suitcase. They found two wallets. One was his and the other one was black, with a business card for the Texaco station near the Pennsylvania Turnpike's Carlisle Interchange, and a black Panasonic radio. Morgan's wallet, Morgan's radio in the suitcase of a man just arrested for murder, and nobody connected it to the dead man on the turnpike two months earlier. The Ohio cops had these items in evidence, and the Pennsylvania State Police had an open homicide, a victim missing his wallet and his radio. 50 miles from the gas station on that business card. Nobody even made the call, nobody even checked. So that is a major drop in all of this. Morgan Peters' case went cold for 47 years. Now this is where the case becomes something I've never seen before. Jody of Doing Life starts writing because he's the bookworm. He's the Hemingway reader. He's the guy who has always wanted to be a published author. And from his prison cell, he started submitting stories to Outlaw Biker magazine and Easy Rider magazine. These are the bottom shelf pulp biker magazines from the 80s. Covers promising bikes, broads, and boogie, the kind of thing you'd find on the gas station bathroom floor. Between 1985 and 1989, under the pen name Jody Vi, he published nine stories, nine separate pieces in nationally distributed magazines and on newsstands and gas station racks across the country for almost five years, and they weren't fiction. September 1985, Outlaw Biker, a story called Dangerous Dave, and in Dangerous Dave, Jody wrote about a hitchhiker cutie with pigtails who lures a passing motorist into pulling over. As the man walks towards her, a cold voice from behind a tree, don't move a muscle. The man steps out, pulls out a gun, and he's ready to shoot. I mean, come on, that's not fiction, that's what happened to Morgan Peters on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in September of 1972. Now there's also more stories that I found. Another story called Pay It Back Fool, a woman tying up a victim, just like Charmaine did to Harvey Hoffman at the gas station. And another story, Moonlight Ride, and the subtitle describes it as quote, a peaceful putt that turns Rowdy and Ray in a rest area, end quote. A rest area in the woods, just like where Jay McGuire was found? I mean, this man sitting at a prison cell in Ohio was writing about his real crimes, changing just enough details to call it fiction, and publishing them in magazines you could buy for a few bucks at any truck stop in America. Under his own nickname, for almost five years. Could you imagine some trucker in 1986 picking up a copy of Outlaw Biker at a rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, reading Dangerous Dave while he eats his ham sandwich 50 miles from where it actually happened, having no idea? That story sat on a newsstand for 34 years before a cop finally read it. Now, I mean the magazine probably didn't sit there for 34 years, but it took 34 years before a cop actually read it. And he wanted to be Hemingway so bad he couldn't help himself. So he had to write about the most interesting things that ever happened to him, even though that thing was killing people. And here's what really gets me. He was already in prison. He was already doing life. He had nothing to lose. But he also had nothing to gain by writing about the crimes nobody even knew he had committed. The Jane McGuire case was closed. He was convicted. But the Morgan Peters? Nobody knew about that one. Nobody connected him to the Turnpike. He was in a clear for that murder. And he wrote about it anyway, published it under his own nickname because he needed people to read it. He needed the spotlight. And here's where the big break comes in the Morgan Peters case, because we haven't gotten there yet. In 2009, Pennsylvania State Police reopened the Morgan Peters case because it was still cold. And they connected it to Jody via as a person of interest. And then in 2010, Charmaine finally confirmed she and Jodi pulled their rouse on the turnpike in September 1972, and she remembered the truck. She remembered Jody saying they had to go. Then a state trooper named Jeffrey Bainey did something nobody had done for 30 years. He read the biker magazines. Jody's ex-wife had tipped investigators that her ex-husband published stories under a pen name. Trooper Bainey tracked down all nine stories, and when he read Dangerous Dave, he knew it wasn't fiction. It was a confession that had been sitting on a newsstand for 34 years. On September 6, 2019, 47 years after Morgan Peters Jr. was found on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the Franklin County investigating grand jury had spent months reviewing the evidence. Charmaine's statement, the biker magazine's stories, the wallet, the radio, the ballistics, and the timeline, all of it. And they issued a presentment recommending criminal charges. Franklin County District Attorney Matthew Fogel approved the filing of a criminal complaint against Larry Joseph Faya, first degree murder, robbery. Vaya was 75 years old then, still sitting in prison in Ohio, still doing life for Jane McGuire. He didn't even have an attorney listed in the court records. Morgan's surviving family members were notified. 47 years, guys, almost a half a century for someone to finally say out loud what his family already knew. Alright, everyone, here's where it stands. As of my research, Jodi Vaia has not been brought to trial on the Morgan Peters charges. The DA said in 2019 that the extradition from Ohio would take time. Jody was in his 80s now, still in Ohio, still charged in Pennsylvania. The Morgan family is still waiting. So here's where I tell you what I think. Jody Vaia killed Morgan Peters. There's no question. He had the wallet, he had the radio, the timeline, Charmaine's statement, the biker magazine confession, he did it. But that's not what the verdict is about. The verdict is about the six stories nobody is talking about. Let me break this down for you because the math here is terrifying. Jodi Vaia published nine stories in those biker magazines between 1985 and 1989. Nine separate pieces. And investigators match three of them to real crimes. Dangerous Dave, that's the Turnpike, The Morgan Peters, Payback and Fool, Harvey Hoffman tied up in the back of the gas station, Moonlight Ride, that's a rest stop in the woods, that's Jane McGuire. Three stories, three real crimes, three for three. So what about the other six? Because here is the thing. This guy didn't write fiction. He couldn't. He didn't have the imagination. Every story investigators matched to his real life was accurate. The details, the setting, the method, he wasn't making this stuff up. He was writing what he knew. And what he knew was what he did. Charmaine told investigators she couldn't even remember how many times they pulled this roost that summer. From May through September of 1972, four months, multiple states Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, she lost count. She lost count, guys. Nine stories, three confirmed crimes, and a woman who was there for most of them saying she can't even remember how many times they actually did this. So I think those other six stories are about real people, real victims. And I think there are cold cases sitting in filing cabinets right now in Kentucky, in Virginia, in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, maybe other states we don't even know about. Unsolved murders from the summer of 1972, highway killings, Good Samaritans pulling over to help, and they never came home. And I think the answers are sitting right there in those six stories, in cheap ink, in those trashy biker magazines from the 1980s. Has anyone gone through all nine stories? Has anyone cross-referenced the details in each one of these unsolved cases from 1972? The locations, the descriptions, the methods? Because Jody Vaia basically left a roadmap. He published it, he put his name on it, and three out of the three matched real crimes. So what are the odds that the other six are made up? I'm gonna tell you what I think. I think the odds are zero. This story is not over, not even close. Morgan Peters got his name spoken out loud after 47 years, but I think there are other families, other names, other people who disappeared on dark highways in the summer of 1972, who have been waiting even longer. And the answers might already be published in a magazine nobody reads anymore, written by a killer who couldn't stop talking about it. Somebody needs to read those other six stories, and somebody needs to start matching them to cold cases, because I think Morgan Peters was just the one we found. So that's it guys, that's this one for today. If you're still here, thank you. This one hits different. Head on over to Crimary.show, find us on Instagram, and I want to know what you think. Should investigators go through the other six stories? And are there more victims out there? And if you know anything about unsolved highway cases from 1972 in Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, or Pennsylvania, I want to hear from you. Merch is on our website, Patreon is coming soon, and if you see anybody pulled over on the side of the road at 2 in the morning, maybe call 911. It's a sad thing to say, but it might just save your life. I'm Tim Novotny, and this is Crimery.