Exit 9 - The Long Game - Part 1 - TRUST

Another Flagged Down Episode! Listen to our Favorite Retired Detective share a story of a case he worked on and what it took to be the trailblazer in his region's first circumstantial homicide case. 

A woman disappears in 1987, just one year into her marriage, but the people who know her best refused to believe the story they were told. Her three adult daughters never stop searching for answers, and neither did one green Detective. 

In Part One of The Long Game, Our Favorite Detective takes us behind the scenes of a homicide investigation built not on quick breakthroughs, but on patience, trust, and years of methodical investigative work. It's a rare look at the relationships, leadership, and persistence that often unfold long before an arrest is ever made.

Join us as we explore the beginning of a case that proves justice doesn't always come quickly. Sometimes, it comes to those willing to play the long game.

Listener discretion is advised. This episode discusses homicide, domestic violence, and the disappearance of an adult woman. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is Corridor of Crime, and we're taking it with us. Every episode is an exit, and every exit is a story. So buckle up. And please remember to always check your blind spots. What makes a great homicide detective? Is it instinct, experience, patience, or is it something much harder to define? After spending time talking with retired homicide detective Terry, I keep coming back to one observation. He notices people, not just suspects, but victims' families, fellow detectives, and everyone who plays a role in an investigation. He knows the strengths of the people around him. He understands that what someone is carrying in their personal life can influence how they approach a case. And when he tells these stories, he almost always takes the time to recognize the people who have helped solve them. It makes me wonder, does knowing someone like Terry give us a better understanding of what really happens behind the scenes in homicide investigations? Or is he simply one of those rare people who raises the standard everywhere he goes? Today's story is about patience, about trust, about three daughters who refuse to stop asking questions, and about a detective who understood that sometimes the fastest way to the truth is playing the long game. Before we begin, we've got something fun to announce. Every month we're giving away a crime-inspired prize pack sponsored by Miss Congeniality LLC with over 5,000 five-star reviews. So one lucky passenger will win a 16-ounce candle and two room slash linen sprays, crime-inspired, of course, entering super easy and completely free. Subscribe to Corridor of Crime wherever you listen to your podcast, share the podcast or two of our posts, and then leave a comment with your social media username slash handle so we can reach you if you're selected. We'll announce the winner at the end of a future episode and contact you directly through the handle you provide. So no purchase necessary. Just a little thank you for riding along with us. This episode is sponsored by Whirly Board. I've been using one myself, and it's a super fun way to add some movement to the day while improving balance coordination and core strength. If you're looking to make standing at your desk a little more entertaining or squeezing in a quick workout, this is your answer. Check them out in our show notes on our website. This episode discusses homicide and domestic violence. Please take care while listening. Okay, today we are back with detective retired detective Terry. How are you today?

SPEAKER_02 2:44

I'm good, thank you. Yourself?

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Good, thanks. Um so I enjoyed so much having you here last time and asking you all the questions you were willing to share. Uh-huh. That um he was willing to come back and share another story, and it sounds like you have one that you brought with you today, and I'm really excited to hear about it. So tell us um the year the case you're sharing with us is uh occurred.

SPEAKER_02 3:10

This um was reported to the police department in January of 1987. It was originally reported to the police department as a missing person, and it it came in um delayed. So, in other words, our patrol division responded out to the station to meet with some family members who was reporting their mom had been missing for uh approximately a week. That they had been communicating with her by phone, and she uh abruptly hung up the conversation. Her husband had just returned home from work, and they had subsequently tried to reinitiate contact with her over the period of the next couple days and were uh not successful. And when they contacted him, he would make excuses for why they couldn't speak with their mother, which was unusual. And just to kind of set the story a little bit, she, the victim, her name is Dolores, she's a approximately 55-year-old woman, successful businesswoman. She's from uh the northern part of the state, uh, had three girls um that were all grown women, and they continue to live up there. She um had been through eight different marriages to five different men, but she was a successful businesswoman, and she was a very strong-willed person, a nice person, a great mom, great grandmother, um, a great businesswoman, and she was pretty successful. She had a hair salon that employed several hairdressers, so she had been in our area down here for about a year, recently married to a a gentleman who was about 10 years younger. Uh so he was about 45 at the time, and he was a he I would call him a a gold digger, frankly. I mean, he was just kind of he had been married previously, he too had two children that were in the northern part of the state, and he just kind of was a freeloader.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Did he work at all?

SPEAKER_02 5:18

Kind of. He was a salesman, he sold what they call fasteners, and he worked um for a company um that rented power tools, and then he would go out and talk to subcontractors and sell them nuts and bolts and screws and nails and rivets and washers, and that was his um occupation. But he was primarily a salesman and uh generally.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 5:49

So they had relocated down here, kind of in fresh new start. Delore uh Dolores had started a hair salon here locally, and it was doing well. She had several ladies working for her, and one in particular was kind of the lead hairdresser, her name was Cheryl, and Cheryl kind of ran the shop and handled a lot of the business when Dolores wasn't on trips or unavailable to do so. So that's kind of the background. And in January of 87, um Dolores was becoming concerned that her husband was a freeloader, taking advantage of her. They'd only been married a year or so, and uh he was uh uh spending money that he really couldn't justify, and she suspected that maybe he was seeing somebody. And it turns out he was, he was seeing the um lead hairdresser, Cheryl. Um so uh Dolores is speaking with one of her daughters on the phone, Cindy, and um sharing with Cindy that she's had it, and she's gonna confront this guy when he gets home from work, and she's gonna if it turns out her suspicions are true, she's told Cindy that he is going to leave with what he came with, which was a sack of his belongings.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

And Cindy says, Well, mom, when you finish uh talking with Arnie on the uh when he gets home, give me a give me a call and let me know how it goes. Right. So Cindy doesn't hear from her. Days go by, she tries calling her mom, no answer. She ends up calling, and Arnie picks up the phone and she says, Hey, where's mom? And she's he says, Well, the strangest thing is she left. She left with another man. And um Cindy said, Well, that's odd. She never mentioned anything like that. That's certainly out of character for her. She's a very strong-willed person. If she was gonna do that, she would have said, I'm leaving with so-and-so, but that isn't what happened. So this goes on for the better part of a week, and Cindy and her sisters become concerned that hey, this is not like mom. And Arnie's explanation isn't cutting water. So we're gonna go down there. So they drive down to our area, go to the house, they look around. Uh, a lot of her mom's stuff is gone. Uh, her clothing are is gone, a lot of the furniture is gone. They but they see that in the cabinets her Weight Watchers' foods are still there. And her mom was trying to lose weight and was doing well. And that would have been something her mom, if she would have taken, would have taken it with her. Uh, there apparently not only are there were their foods, dinners made up ready to eat, but there was also like vitamins and powders, powders and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

I vaguely remember that stuff. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:55

So that caused some concern. I thought this doesn't make sense. This is not like mom. She would have called us and let us know because and she shared those kind of things with her. So they wait for Arnie. He comes home from work, and then he tells them, Well, I met your mom. She called me yesterday and said she wanted to meet me down at a local restaurant in town, and I met her. She was in a specific pickup truck, and and uh there was this fella that was with her, and um she told me that she had had it with me, she was gonna file for divorce. She was done, she was moving in with this guy, and and they were over. But she said, he says, I don't know what this guy's name went, I'd never seen him before. So that was the straw that broke the camel's back. This made no sense at all. The all three girls called the Metford police and they came down to headquarters and reported the suspicious circumstances. Our patrol division responds out. They um go to the house, nothing of significance there. They get the same story from Arnie as they had gotten from the daughters, just a little bit more detail, but not much. The Arnie was very specific when he described the gentleman, very detailed when he described the pickup she was in, said their stay, their conversation was short-lived, and then she drove off into the sunset, never to be seen or heard from again.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

And just left everything she owns.

SPEAKER_02 10:25

Everything, business, etc. So the patrolman goes to the business, and there was a note found on the door the the hairdresser shared, and it was real cryptic and it was vague, and it was written as if it had come from Dolores, but it was not of her the way she communicates. And basically she said, Hey, look, you listen to Cheryl, she's in charge. I'm I'm uh got some other stuff going on, I'm done for a while. Continue on, basically. Exactly. Yes, exactly. And the other interesting thing was is she spoke in a tense that was past tense, and it wouldn't have been written in past tense if it was contemporaneous to her disappearance.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Right.

SPEAKER_02 11:14

So the patrolman sees the note, sharp patrolman, and um came back and the case was assigned to a detective, and the detective it was assigned to was Mike, uh super guy, and real aggressive, brand new in the detective division at that time. He um it was an interesting time because we we were transitioning from an older detective division who had been uh in place for quite a while and a little bit complacent. Uh a lot of senior guys that were uh had been around for a long time, and Mike was the new guy that came in, was real aggressive, really wanted to do a good job, and he took and ran with everything he got. And that kind of ruffled some of the older guys' feathers a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

And what does that mean? And what does that look like? Real aggressive and ran with what he got.

SPEAKER_02 12:05

Well, he would he would take everything he got and he would work as hard with it each and every case it as if it was the most important case. And he would carry it out to its its uh furthest conclusion. I see. And some some other people would take it and once they realize maybe this isn't a crime or maybe this isn't a significant crime, would pass it off maybe to a a more junior person or send it back to patrol or just close it out if it was um not a significant case of all lost, overdramatize everything to that degree. Okay, they would tend to minimize a lot.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

I understand. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 12:41

So Mike took the case, he interviewed the three daughters and thoroughly believed them. They were very credible, they uh were really upset. They painted a great portrait of their mom and how she would handle things. So um Mike started the investigation. The first thing they did was went out and and evaluated the house. We didn't have a crime scene that we knew of. We didn't know exactly if there was a crime scene where it happened, and um, but he started at the house. And they lived in a a pretty nice neighborhood. It was an older neighborhood here in in our area. He went out and interviewed neighbors, he went out and talked to everybody and anybody could. He talked to the girls at the uh hair salon and talked to Cheryl and basically came away with Dolores is still missing, don't have a clue where she would have gone. This makes no sense. Nobody knows who the mysterious man was, nobody knows the vehicle that was driven or anything else. As Mike continues to talk with Arnie, the husband of Our Missing, um, began to get some real bad vibes. He had a tendency to kind of be confrontational sometimes, so he was a little confrontational with Arnie, and Arnie kind of bit back and got to the point where they kind of uh rubbed each other. But yeah, they butted head, exactly. So this drags on. This is we're as we're going into several weeks now of just not much leads to follow. We're just talking with Arnie. Arnie has no explanations for any of this stuff. They start branching out, interviewing more distant relatives, some of Dolores's ex-husbands, some of her brothers and sisters. She came from a large family uh in another state, and they were all still pretty tight, and nobody had any information. So Mike is kind of leaning on Arnie a little bit, and he's basically confronted him and saying, Hey, what you're saying makes no sense. What I'm hearing from the other sources and witnesses and people involved is a completely different story than the picture you're painting here. Arnie was trying to portray her as being somewhat old, maybe virgin senile, maybe kind of out of her mind a little bit. He had done nothing wrong. He was very responsible, he was the breadwinner, etc. And she was just kind of taking advantage of Pim. So that's kind of the way it went for a while. Then all of a sudden, kind of took a bit of a twist. Um, we had one of the detectives in the um division was help, helping out assigned to work. There were several others assigned to work with Mike uh during the course of this investigation with interviews and and neighborhood canvases, evaluation, examination of the residents to see if there was any indications that something happened there, the yards, the perimeter, the curlage as they referred to it. And um didn't see anything. But this one particular detective, he was an older gentleman and really uh a good a good investigator, but at this particular time was really struggling with some of his um personal problems with his wife. He and his wife were going through a separation and ultimate divorce, and it was bitter, and he was real bitter, and um he felt that he was being taken advantage of. So when he was talking with Arnie, he was buying into everything Arnie was telling him because that was kind of the way he was feeling personally himself.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

Unbelieved.

SPEAKER_02 16:30

Yeah, like like he wasn't being uh believed and heard and felt. And so when Arnie said that she was uh a gold digger and then taking advantage of him and irresponsible and just ran off with another guy, this particular detective bought that hook line and sinker. So there became a little bit of a a battle between the older seasoned detective and and Mike, the newer, more aggressive detective.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

And um is really interesting when you have to understand that detectives are human too. And and he probably didn't realize that that was affecting him.

SPEAKER_02 17:09

No, yeah, and it it was it was uh earnest, it was honest, that was his uh feelings, but that's part of the problem. You don't want to let your feelings interfere with the investigations. Because the the longer and the that you can stay biased and impartial, um, the better, because you can see the both sides clearly, you can um read people a little better, you can tell when somebody is maybe not being truthful with you. And it's easier to confront them because you're not on that uh different plane. So it created a rub between that detective and Mike. And Mike would go out and confront Arnie, and and there would have been times when sometimes their contacts would be pretty heated. I mean, Mike would challenge him and say, hey, I don't believe what you're saying. What you're saying is not truthful. We can find uh you know find other people who disagree with what you're saying. We we want to know what happened to Dolores. And then we get a call that um his he's disappeared. Arnie has disappeared.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

They find his right did he run? Yes. He did, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:24

He he goes to um Lost Creek Lake, we're a favorite place they like to fish. Uh-huh. And um parked his truck, um, put his boat adrift in the lake, left a note indicating that he might be suicidal. He was a little despondent, he felt like nobody was out really looking for Dolores, so by golly, he was gonna go look for her himself. And um he was gone.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Now, because there have been some bodies that have gone missing in Lost Creek Lake, right? That have never been recovered.

SPEAKER_02 19:00

Some have been recovered. Okay. And oddly enough, within uh uh about a year of Dolores' disappearance, uh we get a call that um a woman was found floating uh beneath the surface of Lost Creek Lake, and law enforcement and the medical examiner's office went there. Uh two fishermen had looked over the edge of the boat and could see a uh human being floating um uh submerged under the water and called it in. So they recovered a lady, and it was a lady who had been missing for a while, that had um gone overboard from a fishing boat or a water ski boat and got hit accidentally by a passing motorboat at and it caused her death. And at the time they were unable to find her, but as time progressed and biology takes place, she uh managed to float somewhat up in the water and then was discovered by these fishermen and reported it was not Dolores. So I get involved. I'm a patrolman, and um Arnie's nowhere to be found. He's not at home. We we look for him in several different places, contact sources, no one's helpful. Um we don't find him. So they, of course, um look in the lake, they look around the lake, his boat is recovered, his pickup truck is recovered, and he's got uh we uh other forms of transportation, but we we don't know who he's with or where he's going.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

And what about Cheryl? Was it Cheryl he was having an affair with at the time? Correct. Does she kind of just fade into the background at the time?

SPEAKER_02 20:48

She kind of did as far as her involvement with him. Um she continued her uh association with the salon. She continued to to work for Dolores in Dolores' absence, and they tried to keep the salon as open as long as they could, but it eventually closed.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

And um I'll bet that was a toxic environment for a while. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 21:11

It it was one of those things where s the ladies suspected that maybe Cheryl was uh involved, but they didn't know for sure. And um it just kind of faded away, dried up and blew away. Philip Arnie looked all over for Arnie. Arnie couldn't find him. Um about six weeks go by and we get word that he's back in the area and that he's around. We make contact with him. We see that he has sold a great deal of the home furnishings, furniture and stuff, gotten rid of them. There's some indications that he's trying to sell a motor home. He sold or trying to sell her car, which was a Cadillac. Uh again, there's no explanation for. For any of this, because he claims that he hasn't spoken with her. She hasn't initiated the sale of any of this kind of stuff. She hasn't come back and gotten any of her home furnishings or um personal belongings. There was jewelry left uh in her jewelry boxes, etc.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

So was it even legal for him to sell it, other than marital assets are 50-50 in the state?

SPEAKER_02 22:24

Correct.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

But that's a gray area.

SPEAKER_02 22:26

It's a real gray area. Yeah. And that actually leads us into what happened next.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 22:32

We we um Mike gets a phone call that um Arnie's trying to sell the house. And it's not something he can do because he doesn't have total control over the house because of Dolores. So we have a detective at that time, Bob, who gets involved in the financial fraud aspect of it and learns that Arnie has forged a document or title in an attempt to sell the property. So they actually charge Arnie, and he ultimately gets convicted of felony for attempting to sell this property without the proper authority to do so. And they charge him, I believe it's a theft charge. During my involvement with Arnie, I start working with him in particular to talk to him and try and get him to try to develop a better relationship with him than the one he had with Mike. I was going to be a little bit more understanding, um, a little bit different relationship than he had with the detective who was going through the marital problems himself and tended to side with Arnie and believe everything he said. I was going to be that middle middleman. So I actually hit it off with Arnie really well. And uh we were talking one time, and I I explained to him that as close as he was to his wife, and from all the stories he had been telling about her, that um we don't believe that she's alive. We don't believe that she ran off with somebody. We believe that something bad happened. Now that can either be his fault, or it could have been something that maybe she took her own life or something of that fan. And that he bit on that. And he said that he had been having dreams that that she may have taken her life, and that if she didn't take her life, her son-in-law may have had something to do with taking her life or causing her to kill herself. And he started in that vein, and that actually took hold, and he uh started pushing that story really hard to the point where he and I made several trips around uh the southern end of our state, uh, day-long trips looking for Dolores, where she may have been to have gone to take her life, or where she may have gone and been discarded as a result of Tim's ill will of pushing her to suicide or or actually having a hand in her death.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Now, was he now this obviously isn't the indicator, but I'm just curious for a few reasons. Was he a drinker or any kind of drug user?

SPEAKER_02 25:27

Not that I know of. But the and we never uncovered anything that would indicate that, but he was a real He was a very confident person. He was very sure of himself, he was very strong-willed, and there would been times when I could get him to a point where he would start thinking about his wife and talking about her, and he would start crying and become real solemn. And I thought, we're right on the verge of maybe him telling me what may have happened to her, and then he would suddenly snap out of it. You would almost see him grow in confidence, and he would say, No, I I had nothing to do with her passing, or I had nothing to do with her disappearance. She is either took her life or it was her son-in-law had a hand in her death. And that's the way it went. He um was just a strong-willed I he I don't know how else to explain it.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

Do you feel like when you went on these trips in the southern part of the state, looking around, he was taking you on a trip, if you will, or do you feel like he really thought maybe he could remember, but of course, telling you he had these dreams? But do you think that he maybe just forgot? Because our state is obviously very dense with forest, and maybe I was thinking, okay, maybe he was intoxicated, or and if he's not from the area, you know, all of that I'm thinking, or was he just taking you on a trip?

SPEAKER_02 26:59

I think he was just taking me on a trip. I I think that he was trying to figure out a way of advancing our relationship a little bit further. I see. I I he was going to try and produce her, but I don't think he knew how he could do it and sell it.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

Buying time, taking developing the relationship. I see. He's he was selling you.

SPEAKER_02 27:20

Exactly. One particular trip we went, he didn't know it, but I was wired. I had a body wire on. Uh the vehicle we were taking, he insisted that we were going to go in his vehicle, which was a fairly new SUV, a Ford Bronco, a full-size one. And um there was a uh tracking device on that. We had gotten a court order and uh secretly hidden the tracking device on that vehicle. So Mike and some of our detective supervisors uh were listening to our conversation and following us wherever we went. We went clearing the Klamath County, we went up towards Chilliquin and that area, checking different lakes and what have you. And these were all under the guise of he would say, hey, they these are places that Dolores would feel um peace and she would love to go, and we would go fishing together, and she would become sentimental, and she would take her grandchildren there. So if if she would have taken her life, this may be some place she would have gone. And now we're well into this case. We're several months into this case, and you would think that if if she was gone there and taken her life, somebody would have discovered her. But nevertheless, those were his um plans, and so those were things we did. And one particular occasion, this one I was explaining was he even went as far as bake the cake for me. Surprised me. I showed up uh uh that morning to go uh on looking for Dolores, and he he goes, Hey, I I baked the cake for you. I hope you like it. And he said, I I brought along a sandwich for us during the daytime, and he says, I threw in a couple of beers, I thought, hoping on my maybe if we have a little downtime we and so that's the kind of the way the relationship it is real creepy. In fact, uh not a lot of people know this, but there was one day I gotten off work and gone home um unexpectedly early, and uh was cruising into my neighborhood, and as I'm cruising into my neighborhood, I see Arnie coming out of my neighborhood uh in the middle of the afternoon. And there would have been no reason for him to have been in that neighborhood. It was kind of a out-of-the-way place, it was different, completely different part of town, it was all residential area, no businesses, no nothing. And so I don't know, I never confronted him, but I uh I never knew if why he was in that neighborhood, if he was looking for me or see that what m that's what makes me incredibly nervous.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

I think that there are so many unstable people. I'm much more paranoid than my co-host about people knowing anything about us. And I think that being a detective or a police officer would make me so paranoid.

SPEAKER_02 30:02

It can. We we we uh certainly are aware of that and try to uh do what we can to protect our personal life and you know our our personal cars and our homes and our keep our families away from that stuff. But occasionally it it kind of overlaps.

SPEAKER_00 30:21

So that does not yeah, that does not surprise me at all. I would imagine it would have happened sooner, but just being a woman having experienced people, I've had a weak female stalker, I've had men just in my twenties b you know from bartending, or just someone harass me via text. So having someone really dislike me as either an officer or want to befriend me so they can whatever they think they can do, oh no, I would I would be very paranoid.

SPEAKER_02 30:50

Yeah, I I took it that way too, frankly, when I saw him in my neighborhood, because we were really uh in the throes of this investigation at the time, and there would have been no reason for him just to indiscriminately drive through my neighborhood.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

That just did you say anything or did you pretend like I never acknowledged that I even saw him.

SPEAKER_02 31:10

Uh I just filed it away, and it was real important for me to to keep an eye on that. But so I I tell you that to tell you that it was a weird relationship that we had. I had probably 40 or 50 contacts with him um over the next period of about four or five years.

SPEAKER_00 31:32

Do you think he believed you were on some level friends?

SPEAKER_02 31:35

I think so. I I think he I think he kind of thought that maybe he could manipulate me.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

Like he was smarter than the average person, and he was that guy.

SPEAKER_02 31:48

Yes. And uh he was just that kind of a personality when I was trying to explain him earlier. So controlling and so um manipulative. Um so the the case kind of progresses, it goes kind of stale for a a number of years. Arnie uh ends up meeting another woman and they end up getting married and move to the northern part of the state, creates problems for us because I we tried to keep the intensity on, keep things fresh with him with personal contacts or telephone calls. I would stop by his house just abruptly and visit with him. And I was always welcome. He would always invite me in. We never had a riff. Um I'd call him on the phone, we would speak on the phone. He would tell me stuff that he would receive um postcards from Dolores, or he received Christmas cards from Dolores, trying to make it sound like, well, maybe you know she's still alive out there somewhere. And um it turned out that the family members were sending those cards to him because they wanted him to remember their mom every single day. And they wanted to keep the pressure on, hoping that eventually he would say something or trip up and that we would get an advantage. But it was one of those things where she was still missing. We had absolutely no trace of her, none. We had no financial trail. We had um no one who had seen her or talked to her. So she was had dropped off the face of the earth, which tended to convince us even more than ever that she, something bad had happened to her. We knew that she was so close with her daughters and her grandchildren that she would never go this length of time without contact. There were birthdays she had missed, Christmases she had missed, uh, anniversaries, you know, all that kind of stuff that uh just completely out of character. And it was during this time that I started just by accident following a case uh in the news from uh up in the northern part of the state. It was a case Gerald Wesley Miller was a gentleman who was on trial for uh two counts of murder. He was accused of killing his first wife and his second wife and disposing of their bodies uh to the point they had never been found. So uh two different agencies were in the process of trying to prosecute and convict him of what we in the business refer to as a no-body homicide, which is is a real difficult thing to do. A lot of agencies don't um go that route. It's a difficult case to prove because you have to prove, A, beyond a reasonable doubt that this person that's missing is dead and why. And then you have to the second leg of that is to prove that this particular person, in this case Gerald Wesley Miller, had intentionally killed them. And there it comes with its own pitfalls because in the way our country works is you're uh you you get one trial. Once they are tried and a jury finds that they are not guilty, or they it's a hung trial and the prosecutor then is faced with this choice of whether they continue and prosecute again or or not choose to prosecute, they have those options available to them. But if you are tried and found not guilty, that is it. Get one bite at the apple. So a lot of uh agencies and prosecutors and stuff are really hesitant to take that that chance. They want to continue to to investigate those kinds of cases, hoping that A, you'll find the body, because typically when you find the body, it usually comes with um uh added evidence of some kind. Certainly with how did this person die? And in fact, that they are dead. This this subject, Miller, Gerald Wesley Miller, was being prosecuted in the northern part of the state for two cases uh that were very similar to our case. As I read the details in the news accounts, they were very similar. Umestic kind of cases. One, his first wife had been married for several years, a second wife, not not very long at all. Uh, one wife was killed in one jurisdiction or missing from one jurisdiction and found in another jurisdiction. Or uh, and his second wife was killed in a second jurisdiction. So there were some real similarities in ours, except we just had the one missing. So I continue to watch the case. Um, it progressed along, and he was ultimately convicted on both uh examples. The murder of his first wife, the murder of his second wife. And um when that happened, I thought, oh gosh, that that may be something we should look at and entertain. Met with the district attorney's office, and they were a little hesitant at first because of the stuff we've already talked about. Um we ended up talking with the prosecutors there. We ended up talking with the prosecutors where the convictions occurred of Miller, and we agreed that we were going to get together and meet and discuss the similarities with the cases and try and determine if maybe this is some avenue we could pursue. And so we did. And um there were two prosecutors from our jurisdiction assigned the case, two ladies, one uh more seasoned or senior than the other one, and spectacular attorneys. They were very aggressive. When when they said and heard this particular case, and then subsequently heard the cases that were presented in the northern part of the state on Gerald Miller, they felt confident that we could do that down here and that we had an opportunity to pursue this case and charge Arnie with the murder of Dolores Stralo without her body. So we agreed to meet with these prosecutors and their team again, a second time. And um, this time it was a couple of day process. Mike, the original detective, we went up there, met with a team of detectives, an analyst, the judge, a couple of attorneys uh on their prosecuting team, and the crime lab. Um we we took away or came away with some uh great information. We ended up getting some information where we could establish and prove that Dolores was probably deceased. This is done through a process they call uh life patterns at the time. The older the person, the better, because the more life you've experienced, the more established patterns, exactly. Um more difficult with younger people because they they don't have those established patterns yet. I have kids. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

They're all over. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:07

All those things that that Dolores had missed out on uh were likely things that if she was alive, she would not have missed out on, and that was the direction we went.

unknown 39:18

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 39:19

The other really important thing that we were able to uh pick up was an analyst. Um we picked up an analyst from Department of Justice. Uh his name was Ed, and he was amazing. He was so enthusiastic, he was such um a perfectionist and attentive to detail. We would send, we sent first thing we needed to do was send him every one of our police reports, all the evidence sheets, all the uh statements and interviews we'd taken from the witnesses, et cetera. He took and he uh digitized all those and entered those into a data bank. And he had programs set up so he could punch in keywords and pull up different aspects of our police reports. We had thousands of pages of reports over the six or seven years at that particular point in time, and um he could pull up specific statements that were made, and he took an interest in closely monitoring Arnie and all the times he had uh made statements to me. I told you earlier that we had had 30 or more different contacts and visits, and each one of those contacts and visits I documented in a police report, and there had been things he would say, and then times where he would maybe um say it a little differently, or maybe he would say something entirely different. And very subtle. Um, sometimes it was just tenses, maybe a past tense versus a future present tense. And Ed would pick up on those kinds of things, and he started printing those out and detailing and documenting those. And he he was able to put the the whole case in a little package when um we did the life patterns and we're would take pick up on that kind of stuff and build spreadsheets so that they were super easy for people to see and understand.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

Animalists are the unsung heroes, I think. And uh um I used to call them bean counters. Yeah. Because they're so good at those things that I think a lot of people I mean, you can be a pattern recognizer, but to really get those details, I think it's pretty special.

SPEAKER_02 41:32

It was funny because um the the investigation at this particular point in time became very intensive. I I was taken away from a general caseload investigation and assigned to do nothing but this case. And that our goal was to indict our sus suspect, Arnie, for the murder of his wife. And we had not found her body, we had no clue where she was. So we did the life pattern process. We also did a um a search from her, it was pretty complex. Edward again was instrumental in arranging this and putting this together, but uh uh again, pre-technology, it made it real difficult. But I had identified 2,000 um places of contact. And and when I when I say places of contact, she was a hairdresser, so I contacted every licensing outfit in the United States who licenses hairdressers. I contacted every tour company, every travel company, every cruise lines who licensed hairdressers to see if our Dolores had gone to someplace else and uh uh gotten her license established at a different site and was practicing her trade there. We were told that she was fond of this part of the country. She liked going and looking at the New England states during the fall and looking at the leaves. And there were she had supposedly talked about uh taking trips on cruise ships and thought about it would be nice to be a hairdresser on a cruise ship. And anytime anything was ever spoken to anyone along those lines, I needed to try and pursue that.

SPEAKER_00 43:23

Do a deep dive. And that's not you know, looking up on the internet, that is white pages, I imagine. And then, yeah, wow, that is man hours right there.

SPEAKER_02 43:34

And that's where Ed came into play. We could pull up uh different search engines that was helpful to s to steer us to licensing groups, right, but not specific locations and addresses and contacts. And so it was pretty it was pretty intricate, but but we managed to pull it off. We established a contact person, so not only did I I inquire about the licensing for hairdressers in the state of uh Vermont. But there was a particular person I could contact who had personally saw to that search and had sent me a result back. So not only did I had to inquire, I had to make sure that they followed up on their end and actually conducted a search and then responded to me personally because I I had to go up when the process was all finished. I had to be able to get up in court and swear that we searched the data bank or the licensing bureau in the state of Vermont, and I spoke with a Betty at that facility who assured me that she had led a search of their files and confirmed there was no one there licensed in the name of our victim to work on hair in their state.

SPEAKER_00 44:57

So that's impressive.

SPEAKER_02 44:59

That took a lot probably close to nine months, because a lot of times people would do this work and just send back a thing saying, We we were unable to find any information for you. But that wasn't good enough. I needed to know what they searched and who it was that I could call upon to address that. And so I managed to get that done. Um Edward was instrumental in doing that. He could help with that. We used him, we made flyers and distributed them to every law enforcement, sheriff, state police, and city police department. And um, I want to say 11 Western states, um every uh DMV and 50 states uh are just examples of some of the searches that we conducted. So it took the better part of a year of diligently tracking and maintaining.

SPEAKER_00 45:52

That was the only case you were working on at the time. That was it. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 45:55

And we would keep this, and Edward was good about actually uh building programs that could um retain all this information. And again, if it was uh um necessary to search, he could pull up a specific name, a specific location. If if we got to a point where somebody would say, I wonder if we searched uh US territories. Um I searched US territories for licensing bureaus for DMV and for hairdressers, odd oddly enough.

SPEAKER_00 46:32

Um Did that feel a little bit like spinning your wheel sometimes, even though it was it's valid work and you knew that it had to be done, but you knew, right? Because I would imagine it can be frustrating. It's like you want to get the guy, but you already know. I mean, I'm sitting here and I know, and I haven't done a year's worth of work. Tedious, time consuming work, and you just want to get the guy.

SPEAKER_02 46:56

Yeah, yeah. It was frustrating because but it was important. It was important to do, but here's where that team I mentioned to you earlier was so helpful because uh the the two prosecutors I described, the two ladies that we worked with, Mike and Ed from DOJ, were uh they were priceless. Because whenever I would get frustrated and discouraged, um, and some of the guys I worked with were a little frustrated with me because I I I was doing my little thing and they didn't know what it was or necessarily, and they were swamped and handling the the tedious day-to-day casing. Yeah, and they're going, hey, we need some help, you know. And um so there was I would get frustrated and down on the dumps, and these other people would so we all fed off of each other. But Edward was amazing. He would call me nine or ten o'clock at night and say, I was just reading over Arnie's statement to you on December 15th. And do you realize this is what he said to you at that time?

SPEAKER_00 47:58

And that would get you going little motivation.

SPEAKER_02 48:00

I would get excited.

SPEAKER_00 48:01

That's cool, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:02

And he go, we need to chase this down, or we need we can prove that that was um uh not truthful, or you know, with the it was his enthusiasm that was just contagious. So it was um it was priceless. Yeah, it was very helpful. We got to the point where we had gotten our finished package. We felt that the the attorneys we could go to the grand jury. They had impaneled a special grand jury that they could keep impaneled over a prolonged period of time and that would do nothing but hear specific facts of our case, with the end result being um ultimately a vote on whether this would be a true bill or not. They were impaneled for probably a couple of months. They helped us with grand jury subpoenas on a lot of stuff. But after we presented all this evidence of um life patterns and the due diligent search of her um employment history and vacation plans and travel history and all that uh work that we had done, we had a confident handle that we could present. Then we went to work, and Edward was pretty much doing it simultaneously, and pulling out all the statements that Arnie had made that were contradictory to one another, that were out and out lies, um, that were inconsistent. Inconsistent with each other, but amongst other statements he had made, um, and were just absolutely deceiving. He was misleading us. And um we we talked about the sale of property before there was any disposition on her, the attempt to sell the home and property without authorization to do so, resulting in his criminal charge, the business that had just dwindled away and dried up and blown away, et cetera. And uh ultimately what we were able to do was we um can presented this to the grand jury, they indicted him for the murder of Dolores Strelo. And this was kind of interesting. We timed it such. I was dealing with the behavioral science unit at the with the FBI in Quantico, Virginia. They were up to speed. I call them periodically and brief them up. A couple of um gentlemen in particular I would speak with there. And the their key is is whenever you're ready to go arrest him, you should do it on a date that's significant and important to this case.

SPEAKER_00 50:40

Oh, I love having that kind of information.

SPEAKER_02 50:43

Yeah. They said it is going to they guaranteed me they said he is aware of this case and he's aware of certain dates, and he's aware of those things change with him every single year that it goes. Um, they suggested that he may have been returned to wherever he had disposed of her on occasions. So they said it's going to be important to connect us to a time. And we knew uh from talking to um his current wife that every year on the anniversary, uh give or take a day or two, uh, which I think was January 21st, uh, he would have night sweats, he couldn't sleep at night, he would toss and turn. She would tell us this.

SPEAKER_01 51:30

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_02 51:31

She didn't realize the significance of it. But when when I asked her, I said, Do you do you ever see any changes in his behavior? Things that come up and that you notice that um cause you concern. And she would say, you know, it's interesting you say that because it's around this time of the year that I see he he has the issues involving night sweats and nightmares, and wakes up screaming and yelling, can't sleep, and it goes on for three or four days and then it'll pass. And then the following year they she notices he's experiencing it again. So these are things that the FBI considered when they said, hey, try and um time this so that you can contact him to execute this murder warrant on him that's timely to the case. And we chose um January 21st. So we had subsequently obtained the arrest warrant for his arrest. We had not entered it into the computer because we didn't want him to indiscriminately uh get a traffic stop and get arrested without us being available to contact him or and associate with his dates. We um we were monitoring him with undercover teams in the northern part of the state to find out where he goes and when, what time of the day are we likely to contact him and where, so that we wanted to get this down so that we could control things so precisely about what day he was gonna be arrested, what time of the day he was gonna be arrested, where he was going to be arrested, and we wanted a location where we could take him to and sit down with him to interview him about the disappearance of his wife this one final time. So that was done. And um myself and another detective traveled up to the um the northern part of the state up here. We um spent a couple of days up there working with the undercover team. They could tell us that he went to work. Uh he worked at a high school locally, he was a um custodian. Okay. He usually got to work at eight o'clock in the morning, and that um he travels from where his apartment was on the west side of town in this particular car, and that he would be there um at eight o'clock. So that's what we timed our contact to be. So they, the search team, the uh surveillance team picked him up at his residence. They traveled about uh 45 minutes from his home to his work. Um, myself and my new partner, we drove up and we were uh at the high school waiting for him to arrive. He uh went in and started his uh normal routine at 8 o'clock in the morning, about 8.05. I walked up behind him at his uh in his little shop there at the high school campus and said, Hey Arnie, I'm I'm here to talk to you. And he turned around and saw me and he dropped what it was in his hands. He was absolutely shocked. Um he immediately started sweating and said, So this is where we leave you today.

SPEAKER_00 54:39

At the beginning of this episode, we asked, What makes a great homicide detective? Because sometimes an investigation doesn't end with flashing lights or a dramatic arrest. Sometimes it ends with a detective walking into someone's workplace after a very long time of waiting and working diligently, quietly behind the scenes with a team walking in and then saying, Hey, I'm here to talk. But we'll let you know what happened next in part two of the long game with Detective Terry. Thanks so much for listening. All of our sources are in the show notes. Please find a full list in our affiliate links at Corridorofcrime.com. We'd love for you to follow us on social media at Corridor of Crime on the platform of your choice. We'd appreciate it if you'd consider liking, rating, and subscribing to allow us to keep putting content out. Corridor of Crime is hosted and produced by Sarah L and Eml Browning. Executive produced by Sarah L and music is composed by Matthew Langdon Music. We will see you at the next exit. Until then, don't forget to button like and remember to always check your blind spot.