Episode 8 - What Was In The Drawer

In December of 1974, Patricia “Annie” Ross was preparing for a night out with friends in the quiet Orange County, California suburb of La Palma. But when she never arrived with the pizza she promised to bring, concern quickly turned into horror.

Inside Annie’s apartment, investigators discovered a brutal crime scene, a terrified little dog locked inside a dresser drawer, and a mystery that would haunt detectives for more than four decades.

As the years passed, leads faded, evidence aged, and the case slowly drifted into cold case history. But investigators refused to let Annie Ross be forgotten.

And somewhere inside the story of her murder was a small black-and-brown dog named Jodie.

Sources

• Los Angeles Times — Matt Hamilton, “40 years later, Northern California man charged in O.C. woman’s killing” (June 2, 2015) 
• Orange County Register — coverage of the investigation, trial, conviction, and sentencing of Larry Stephens 
• KTLA 5 News — “Man Convicted in 1974 Strangling Murder of Woman at Her La Palma Apartment” by Marissa Wenzke 
• True Crime News — interviews and reporting featuring Captain Jim Engen and Detective Paul Bracciodieta 
• The Cinemaholic — “Patricia Ann ‘Annie’ Ross Murder: Is Larry Stephens Dead or Alive?” 
• Detective Diaries — “The Phantom of La Palma” 
•  Court reporting and archived newspaper coverage regarding the 2018 trial and conviction of Larry Stephens 
•  Public records and memorial information related to Patricia “Annie” Ross and Larry Stephens 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

What are you looking for, Ryan? Hey, don't eat anything. What's in that shrub? Oh, be careful. Oh, what is that? Oh no, something bit you. Is it a bee sting? No, it doesn't look that big. Doesn't even seem to hurt. All right, we better head home and get the first aid kit. My poor pooch. Sometimes animals find what humans leave behind. And sometimes they leave things behind that we never expect. This is Dog Days of Murder, where your love of animals meets your fascination with true crime. Hi everyone. Thank you for tuning in for this episode. This is definitely a story of patience. Right, Ayn? I'm your host, Paula. This is my co-host, Ayn. We love that you're here. Today's episode is What Was in the Drawer? It's an incredible story of investigators who would not let time dictate the end of the story. And it's also a story of the holder of specific evidence that eventually brought this case to a conclusion. Before we begin, a quick note to the listeners. This podcast covers real crimes involving real people and may include themes of violence and loss. Listener discretion is advised. It may also include barking at the UPS delivery guy, mad dogging the squirrel in the tree, and intense scrutiny while you're eating your dinner. You have been warned. Pizza, a party in Seal Beach, a double date between friends, the kind of plans people made in Southern California suburbs every weekend without thinking much about them. In December of 1974, La Palma was the sort of place where Ordinary felt dependable. The tiny Orange County city, whose name means the palm in Spanish, had only recently transformed from dairy farmland into neat rows of tracked homes and quiet apartment complexes. It was suburban California in the middle of reinvention. Young families, fresh landscaping, wide streets, porch lights glowing by dinner time. And on the evening of December 11th, Patricia Annie Ross was getting ready to go out. But as the night moved on, something began to feel wrong. Phone calls went unanswered. Minutes stretched longer than they should have. What had started as casual concern slowly became something heavier, harder to explain. Eventually, one of the friends stopped waiting and drove to Annie's apartment to check on her. He had a key, so there was nothing unusual about it at first. Just a quick stop before the evening could finally begin. He knocked. He waited. Then he let himself inside. And almost immediately he realized this was no missed dinner plan. Something terrible had happened inside the apartment. Her name was Patricia Ann Ross, though most people knew her as Annie. By 1974, Annie was trying to build a new life in Southern California. She had come to Orange County from Arizona after the end of her marriage, settling into La Palma at a moment when both she and the city itself were in transition. Just a few years earlier, La Palma had still been called Dairyland, a small farming community surrounded by open fields and dairies. But by the early 70s, Orange County suburbia was moving outward fast. Tract homes replaced farmland. Apartment complexes appeared where agriculture land had once stretched across the horizon. Families arrived looking for quiet neighborhoods and a little more space. Annie seemed to be doing the same thing. Friends described her as warm and social, someone who connected easily with people. Her ex-husband, attorney Frank Ross, would later say she was a light in a lot of lives. She co-owned a small plant boutique in town and had built a circle of friends around her new life in California. But financially, the business had begun to struggle, and Annie eventually sold her share of the store. Still, the future didn't appear uncertain. If anything, it seemed to be opening up. She had accepted a new job with Hughes Aircraft and was preparing to move to Los Angeles within days. She had also started dating again. Not dramatically, not recklessly, just quietly stepping back into life after divorce, in the way many people do when they finally begin feeling like themselves again. By December of 1974, Annie was 31 years old, living alone with her dog Jody, in a ground floor apartment on Orangethorpe Avenue, in a city small enough that people tended to recognize familiar faces around the complex. And on the evening of December 11th, she was getting ready to go out with friends. December 11, 1974 began like any other Wednesday in La Palma. That evening, Annie Ross had plans in Seal Beach with friends. She was meeting her date, Bob Johnson, her friend Sherry Rosen, and Sherry's boyfriend Rod Walthers. Annie was supposed to bring the pizza with her. At some point around 5 o'clock, Annie returned to her apartment on Orangethorpe Avenue to get ready for the evening. Not long after that, neighbors began hearing Jody bark. Witnesses described the little dog barking violently for nearly half an hour. Then, according to investigators, the sound changed. The barking became muffled, and eventually it stopped altogether. At the time, nobody understood what they were hearing. Meanwhile, Annie never arrived in Seal Beach. At first, no one panicked. People run late. Planned shift. Southern California traffic had a way of swallowing time without explanation. But as the evening stretched on, concern slowly replaced patience. Calls to Annie went unanswered. Then someone called the pizza place. Annie had never picked up the order. Curiosity suddenly gave way to worry. Sherry Rose and asked her boyfriend Rod Walters to drive over to Annie's apartment and check on her. Rod was a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy, and Sherry handed him a key in case Annie didn't answer the door. When Rod arrived at the apartment complex on Orangethorpe Avenue, nothing outside appeared unusual. He knocked first. No answer. So he unlocked the door and stepped inside. Almost immediately, he realized something was wrong. Inside the bedroom, Patricia Annie Ross was lying naked and face down. She'd been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. Realizing Annie was dead, Rod immediately went to the phone. Within a short time, police were arriving at the apartment, and the quiet suburban evening on Orangethorpe Avenue had turned into a homicide investigation. Investigators found signs of a violent struggle throughout the apartment. Material was recovered from beneath Annie's fingernails, evidence that she had fought desperately for her life. But there were also frustrating limitations from the very beginning. No semen was recovered from the scene. There were no signs of forced entry or burglary. And while investigators collected several small spots of blood from the apartment, the technology to fully understand what they had found just didn't exist yet. Then there was Annie's dog Jody. The small black and brown mixed breed, with folded ears trimmed in long fringe, was discovered, alive and unharmed, inside one of the bedroom dresser drawers. Investigators believed the killer placed Jodi in the drawer to silence her. At the time, though, no one yet understood just how important the little dog would become to the case. This was not the kind of crime people associated with the small Orange County suburb. La Palma was quiet, residential, barely two square miles, a place where neighbors noticed unfamiliar cars, and children still rode bicycles through apartment parking lots after school. And yet, inside a ground floor apartment on Orangethorpe Avenue, detectives were now processing an extraordinarily violent scene. Investigators interviewed everyone they could think of. Friends, neighbors, Annie's ex-husband Frank Ross, her boyfriend, Bob Johnson, her business associates, the new owners of the plant shop she had recently sold. In total, police would eventually speak with more than 50 people trying to piece together Annie's final hours. Some neighbors recalled hearing a knock on Annie's door sometime that evening. Others remembered Jody barking violently around that same time. Captain Jim Engen later described the investigator's theory this way. According to the witnesses, the dog was violently barking for a period of about a half an hour, went to muffled barking, and eventually no barking. Investigators believed that was the point when the killer forced the little dog into the dresser drawer to silence her. But despite the violence of the crime scene, detectives struggled to identify a suspect. There were no signs of forced entry. No witness who reported seeing anyone fleeing the apartment. And while investigators carefully collected small spots of blood from the bedspread and windowsill, forensic technology in 1974 simply could not do what detectives needed it to do. The blood did not belong to Annie. But they had no way to know whose it was. And somewhere inside the growing case file was the name Larry Stevens. At the time, Stevens was a friend of a man named Paul Williams, who lived only a few doors away from Annie's apartment. Stevens stayed there from time to time, making him a familiar presence around the complex, rather than a stranger passing through. Yet there was no evidence that Annie and Larry Stevens knew one another. In the chaos of the early investigation, his name was misspelled in police paperwork. Stevens had been entered with a V instead of a PH. A small mistake. One letter. And for years, that error quietly buried him in the case file, while Annie Ross's murder drifted further and further into the background of Orange County's history. For years, the case sat where so many cold cases eventually end up, preserved in boxes, revisited occasionally but moving nowhere. The evidence was still there. The blood collected from Annie's apartment, the material recovered beneath her fingernails. Investigators had never stopped believing the answers existed in the case files somewhere. What they lacked was a way to connect those answers to a person. In 1996, the investigation was reopened as DNA technology was beginning to change criminal investigations across the country. The blood recovered from the crime scene was finally tested, and investigators developed an unknown male DNA profile. But when the profile was entered into CODIS, the national DNA database, there was no match. The case stalled again. By then, decades had passed since Annie's murder. But the investigators working the case believed something important had been missed the first time around, and eventually they found it. Buried inside the original paperwork was the misspelled name. Stevens had been written with a V instead of a Ph, a tiny clerical error that had quietly separated Larry Stevens from parts of his own history for years. Once investigators corrected it, the picture around him began to sharpen. They located one of Stevens' former wives, Frances Jackson, and what she told investigators immediately caught their attention. She described Stevens as violent, especially when he had been drinking. According to Frances, there were times he would grab her by the neck and choke her to the point where she could not breathe. For investigators who had spent years studying Annie Ross's strangulation murder, the similarities were impossible to ignore. And there were other troubling details. When Stevens learned police wanted to speak with him back in the immediate aftermath of Annie's murder, his response had been immediate. I'm not going to talk to the cops, he told his friend Paul Williams. Not long after that, he left town. But even with growing suspicions, investigators still could not physically place Stevens inside Annie's apartment on the night of the murder. He had no fingerprint, no eyewitnesses, no confession, only a growing belief that after decades of searching, they were finally looking in the right direction. For years, investigators waited for the technology to catch up to the evidence. In 2004, California voters had passed Proposition 69, a law requiring DNA collection for certain felony arrests. For cold case investigators, it changed the landscape completely. Captain Jim Engen understood exactly what that meant for the Ross investigation. We knew that Proposition 69 was in effect, he said, so we knew if he was picked up for a felony, that his DNA would be collected. So it was all about patience at this point. And eventually, patience paid off. In March of 2015, Larry Stevens was arrested in Northern California in connection with a domestic violence incident involving his current wife. As part of that arrest, he was required to submit a DNA sample. It was then submitted to CODIS. Two months later, the call finally came. Engen later recalled getting a notification from the crime lab that there had been a hit connected to the 1974 homicide. His response was immediate. Is it Larry Stevens? He asked. It was. After more than 40 years, the blood recovered from Annie Ross's apartment finally had a name attached to it. Investigators later confirmed that the DNA from the crime scene matched Stevens. Additional testing also connected him to genetic material recovered from beneath Annie's fingernails, reinforcing investigators' belief that Annie had fought desperately against her attacker. And as detectives continued building the case, they returned once again to Jody. There had never been a clear explanation for why the killer left blood behind at the scene, but investigators believed the answer had been there all along, locked inside a dresser drawer on the night Annie died. It was Jody, the small black and brown dog who had barked violently during the attack before suddenly going silent. Investigators believed she had tried to protect Annie. It's my belief, prosecutor Larry Yellen said, that in trying to protect her, the dog probably bit Stevens and punctured, and that's where we get our drops of blood that 40 years later solved the case. The little dog investigators once viewed as a tragic detail had quietly become the key witness in a murder investigation spanning four decades. By the time Larry Stevens was arrested in 2015, Patricia Annie Ross had been dead for more than 40 years. For investigators who had spent decades chasing Annie's killer, the arrest felt surreal. The case had survived changing detectives, changing technology, and years where it seemed entirely possible the murder would never be solved. Two months after his domestic violence arrest triggered the DNA match, investigators arrived at Stevens' home in the Sequoia Gardens Mobile Home Park in Santa Rosa, California, and arrested him for Annie Ross's murder. Stevens was eventually extradited to Orange County and charged with her murder. Prosecutors argued that the physical evidence preserved from Annie's apartment had finally caught up to him. Not every part of the case was perfect, though. Some evidence had degraded over time. Memories had faded. Witnesses had grown older. During trial, defense attorneys pointed toward inconsistencies and alternate possibilities, even attempting to cast suspicion toward Annie's boyfriend Bob Johnson. But prosecutors argued that the DNA evidence told a clearer story than speculation ever would. The blood found on Annie's bedspread and windowsill matched Larry Stevens. So did the genetic material recovered beneath Annie's fingernails. And then there were the letters. After his arrest, Stevens wrote to his wife from jail. In one of them he admitted, I know I'm a monster, and that in some ways this may be for the best. For investigators who had spent years trying to understand Annie's murder, the statement carried weight. So did another revelation. After Stevens' arrest became public, his ex wife saw Annie's photograph in the newspaper and immediately felt something deeply unsettling. Oh my God, she said, he murdered me. She believed Annie physically resembled her. The last time she had seen Stevens was in May of 1974, only months before Annie's murder. In her mind, the violence had been building inside him for months. Because he could not get to me, she said, and he saw this girl who was much like me. He took her as me and he killed her. Despite this revelation, the motivation behind the killing remains a factual mystery. In March of 2018, after deliberating for less than a day, a jury found Larry Stevens guilty of first degree murder. He was 68 years old at the time of his conviction. He was later sentenced to life in prison. He remains incarcerated in San Quintin State Prison in Marin County, California. And after more than four decades, La Palma's only unsolved mystery was finally closed. Years earlier, Captain Jim Engine admitted the case haunted detectives because for so long there had been simply nothing to move it forward. But they never let it go. Not the original investigators, not the cold case detectives, not the prosecutors. And in the end, Detective Brocky Odetta believed one of the most important witnesses in the entire case had been there from the beginning. Really, he said, the unsung hero in this whole saga could be this little dog, Jody, who was the lone survivor. The small black and brown dog with the folded ears had spent decades sitting quietly inside the story of Annie Ross's murder. And without ever meaning to, she carried a piece of the truth forward long enough for science to finally catch up to it. For 40 years, investigators searched for the person who killed Annie Ross. In the end, the answer had been there all along, waiting in the blood left behind by a man who underestimated a little dog named Jody. What a story. Little Jodi held the key for all those years. And what a brave little dog trying to save her person. Once again, I I mean we would like to thank you all so much for the support of our show. It's been amazing, you guys, really. If you haven't yet, please rate and review. We love five stars and glowing reviews, but we promise to read it all. Honestly, rating and reviewing is the easiest way to support us. It really helps so much. If you hit that follow button on the show homepage, you'll get the episodes as soon as they come out. Dog Days of Murder is a listener supported podcast. If you'd like to, you can buy me a coffee. Or you can buy Ayn her favorite chew toy. Swimsuit season is coming, so she's trying. Cut down on her sugar. We would love to hear from you. You can DM us on Instagram or email us at dogdaysofmurder at gmail.com. Links for the Instagram, the Buy Me a Coffee, and sources for this episode can be found in the show notes. Dog Days of Murder is an angry hamster production, hosted and produced by me, Paula Quintana, and as always, Ayn. A great big thank you to everyone here. Tune in next Monday for The Woods Gave Him Back. Nature will not be silenced. Until then, Ayn, grab your leash.