Pod Insights Crime Junkie MYSTERIOUS DEATHS OF: Steven Altman & Mary Ann Hayes About this episode In 1984, when Robin Altman was just 22 years old, her brother Steven was found hanging by his neck in an apparent suicide. 12 years later, tragedy struck this family again when Robin's mother Mary Ann took her own life by self-strangulation. But Robin had a nagging feeling that something wasn't right. There was one question she could not get out of her head: what if these deaths weren't suicides at all? What if her brother Steven and her mother Mary Ann were murdered? Robin embarks on a journey to find the truth.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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3:20 Ashley Flowers? Hi, Crime Junkies, I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. And today's story is about two deaths in one family, a mother and her son. And on paper, both died by suicide. But their daughter and sister, Robin Altman, had this nagging feeling for decades that something just didn't add up. And that feeling builds when an old friend of her brother's tells her some things that Robin has never heard before. And it leads her on an investigation of her own. Because what if these weren't suicides at all, but murders staged to look like suicides? And if that's true, who would want both her brother and her mother dead?
4:02 Ashley Flowers? This is the story of Steven Altman and Mary Ann Hayes.
4:38 Ashley Flowers? In 2013, 51-year-old Robin Altman is recovering from surgery at her home in Charleston, South Carolina. Laid up in bed and kind of going a little stir crazy, she starts poking around on ancestry.com just to like pass the time. And she's curious because there is a lot about her family's history that has never sat right with her. Her brother, Steven, took his own life unexpectedly back in 1984, when he was just 21. And then her mom, Mary Ann, died by suicide 12 years later in 1996. And both deaths just never made sense to her. I mean, few suicides do make sense to those closest to the people who are left behind, but little things made her suspicious that maybe one or both of them could have been murdered.
5:22 Ashley Flowers? But she'd never known what to do with those suspicions. I mean, honestly, she still didn't know what to even do now as she's poking around the internet because like, truthfully, she doesn't know what she's looking for on ancestry.com.
5:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was gonna say, what would be there?
5:36 Ashley Flowers? Yeah, not the place that I would think to go for like the whys or the clues to a murder. But whatever it was that pulled her there, whatever little voice was in the back of her head, it knew something. Because when she starts typing in her family members' names to the search bar, what comes up surprises her. It's an entry for her brother and her mom. But they're in a family tree made by a woman named Rachel Cunin. Now, Robin actually knows this woman. Rachel went to high school with her brother Steven, but she also knows that they're not related. So, curious why she would have made this thing, she reaches out to Rachel, like, "Hey, long time no talk. Why'd you do this weird thing?"
6:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:19 Ashley Flowers? And Rachel responds pretty quickly, and she tells Robin that she was really close to Steven. She actually had a big crush on him when he was a teenager. And so she put his name on her tree because she wanted to make sure there was some kind of record of him online. And then she just added Mary Ann to the tree, too. Which is, it's a little odd and Robin was a bit confused, but like nothing about this seems malicious or sinister. I don't know, maybe the same little nagging thing that brought Robin to this site brought Rachel there as well. Because it turns out that these two women needed to find each other. And I don't know if there would have been any other way.
6:58 Ashley Flowers? Now, the two of them end up connecting. And when they get to chatting, the conversation is circling a lot around her brother and his death. Really how Robin was blindsided by it because he didn't seem to be experiencing suicidal thoughts from what she knew. He'd been making plans for the future. He was excited about a date that he had the very next day after he died. And that is when Rachel begins to unload. She, her sister and her mom, who Stephen was close with, all thought his death was suspicious too. Rachel actually tells her the night before Stephen died, he drove past her house. A bunch of their friends were like together hanging out and he told them that he was just gonna run this errand for his stepdad and then he was gonna come back in an hour. But then he just never returned.
7:42 Ashley Flowers? Next thing she heard, he was found dead. And that detail stops Robin in her tracks. Because that would have been one of the last times someone saw her brother before he died. And she never knew that he was gonna run an errand for their stepdad. She just knew that at 7:15 the next morning, her brother was found hanging by his neck from a crane hoist at their stepdad's workshop in Chicago. Now, their stepdad, Don, hadn't been there when Stephen was found. So everyone just assumed that Stephen had picked that place. I don't know, maybe so his family wouldn't have to find him? I mean, Stephen like worked at the shop from time to time, so it wasn't odd for him to be there, anything like that?
8:23 Ashley Flowers? But Don had never said anything in all those years about Stephen running an errand for him the night before.
8:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, so that would make this like brand new information that never came out for like decades?
8:34 Ashley Flowers? Yes. And listen, him running an errand for Don might not even have really been what he was like doing. Like who knows what he's telling his friends or what he was like really going to do? I mean, I think the part that really sticks out to Robin is just the fact that the very night that Stephen, like right before he dies, he's telling someone he's gonna be right back. He's giving every indication in the hours leading up to his death that he wasn't planning to kill himself. He was planning on coming back. Now Rachel went on to tell Robin that her mom had such a weird feeling about this whole thing that she actually called the Chicago Police Department urging them to investigate. She'd been a sheriff's deputy before, so she hoped that they would maybe give a little weight to her suggestion.
9:18 Ashley Flowers? But according to Rachel's sister Becky, their response, like the Chicago Police's response, was something to the effect of like, "Please stop calling us." Now, this obviously isn't proof of anything, but whatever tiny suspicions she had planted deep inside of her, being Robin, it grew larger that day. And this gave her the push she needed. Because that same year, 2013, she filed a FOIA request with Chicago PD for her brother's records. And you know what? While she's at it, she submits one with Norfield PD for her mom's case, too. Now, when the response comes back for Stephen's case, she's a little shocked. All Robin receives is this short letter from Chicago PD saying, "They searched for the records and they don't have anything."
10:03 Ashley Flowers? Which doesn't seem right. Like, she knows that they didn't do a big investigation? I mean, police never so much as called her or her mom for an interview? I mean, they never asked, like, any questions? And they basically ruled it a suicide without talking to anyone in the family. That's weird, right? Well, I mean, they talked to Don because he ended up showing up that morning to work, and then he found police over at his workshop. But it seems like that is the only person that police talked to, apart from maybe like a couple of employees there. And we have no idea what those employees said either, because, like I said... No documents. No documents, right. But even suicides, though, should have some sort of record. Yeah, but there's just nothing? There is nothing in Stephen's case, the one that she was getting the most suspicious of.
10:48 Ashley Flowers? But it turns out, it was actually her mother's death that was really gonna unlock the mystery. Because in this same year, 2013, her FOIA from Mary Ann's file is approved. And it is the total opposite of Stephen's case. There is a treasure trove of documents that paint a picture of her mother's death that is completely different from the story she has been living with for the last 17 years.
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14:19 Ashley Flowers? The police reports Robin had in front of her included a handwritten statement from her stepdad, Don, explaining how he'd found his wife dead in their bedroom on September 25, 1996. Don told police that he had tried calling his wife from work that day, but no one picked up. And when he got home at his usual time, he found her laying on the floor in just her underwear and a shirt with an extension cord wrapped around her neck like three or four times. Now, by the time police arrived at the scene, Don had already removed the cord from her neck and placed a towel over her legs. There's no note, and strangely, it looks like Mary Ann was in the middle of trimming her nails when she died, because they found and collected some nail clippers, fingernail clippings,
15:03 Ashley Flowers? and one of Mary Ann's broken fingernails, which had blood on it. That doesn't read suicide to me. No, not at all. Especially because it's not like the extension cord was tied to anything. It was just like wrapped around her neck like a ligature someone would have held and then tightened around her neck. And someone must have seen the obviousness of what this really looked like, because Northfield Police at least started an investigation. The reports detail that they collected all of the stuff that I just mentioned, along with the cord, which had stains on it. And they took vaginal swabs at Mary Ann's autopsy. Now, those swabs turned up an unknown male profile, and the crime lab recommended performing an analysis
15:48 Ashley Flowers? if DNA from any suspects were collected. Which, no surprise, based on the later ruling of suicide, it never was. Now, police also questioned Robin alongside her younger half-brother and sister, who are Mary Ann's children with Dawn. And the reports from police were counting those interviews were in the file. And this is when Robin realized that she was really on to something big. Because she said most of what the report about her interview says wasn't true. It says that Robin told them three major things that I assume is what like helped shape their suicide theory.
16:28 Ashley Flowers? One, that her mom had struggled with mental health issues and had been refusing to go get treatment on a regular basis. Number two, that her mom had threatened suicide before. When it specifically mentions one time when Dawn threatened to divorce her, and it says that she had even been hospitalized for attempting suicide a couple of years earlier. And the third thing, that two weeks before her mom's death, Dawn took her and her half-siblings to dinner without her mom to tell them that their mom was suicidal. And Robin couldn't believe what she was reading because none of that is what she said. Or like, part of it is what she said, but it is all taken so out of context, and then some stuff is just like downright made up.
17:10 Ashley Flowers? So like, yes, her mom had struggled after her brother's suicide. She felt deep guilt and sadness after Steven's death, and that took a toll on her mental health over the following 12 years.
17:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would imagine, naturally.
17:24 Ashley Flowers? But she says not only did she tell the police that her mom had been regularly going to mental health treatments for years, she says she told them in no uncertain terms that her mother was not suicidal. And yes, that dinner where Dawn took her and her younger siblings out did happen, but there was a key piece from her interview that was missing from the report. She told us that when Dawn said at dinner that Mary Ann was suicidal, Robin pushed back. She did not buy it when Dawn was saying all of this, and she didn't believe it after her mother's death when she was talking to police either. Now, as for the past attempts at suicide, this is the one that totally blows her away.
18:06 Ashley Flowers? Because according to Robin, her mom had not tried to take her own life ever. There was this one time, 10 years after Steven died, this would have been 1994, where Mary Ann's younger son, Brian, walked in on his mom with this bathrobe tie around her neck as if she was choking herself, which, to be fair, could be construed as a suicide attempt. But Robin says that's not really what was going on because she shared a letter with us that Mary Ann wrote to Brian after this incident, where she explains that she wasn't trying to harm herself, she would never leave her children. She wrote that she just wanted to feel what Steven was feeling. And we did reach out to Brian to ask about this, but we haven't heard back as of this recording.
18:50 Speaker 01 It feels to me like police were just cherry picking facts from interviews to fit their narrative.
18:56 Ashley Flowers? From her, definitely, yeah.
18:58 Speaker 01 But I don't even get where the suicide narrative is coming from. Like, she's telling police her mom wasn't suicidal. The scene isn't reading a suicide. Did they just pull this out of thin air?
19:09 Ashley Flowers? Not exactly. I don't know what conclusions they came to on their own, but there was someone pushing a suicide narrative. And that was Dawn. In his own written police statement, he said that the couple had been talking about divorce, but Mary Ann didn't want one. He's the one who told them about her threatening suicide over it. And that seems to have bled into Robin's statement, even though she never said that. And in a later conversation with police, when they asked him if he had had sex with his wife recently, he said he didn't recall 100%, but more than likely they did, which could explain away anything they may have found when testing the vaginal swabs. So I believe everything they learned from him
19:54 Ashley Flowers? played a huge role in how this case shook out. Maybe they assumed that if they found any DNA, it just would have been her husband's. And he's saying she was suicidal because he was gonna leave her. She's been a mess since after her son committed suicide. What a dark, sad family. So they never ended up testing the evidence that they collected. And the ME ruled Mary Ann's death suicide by self strangulation. And with that, the case closed. But according to Robin, Dawn, who seems to be the basis for their ruling, should not be considered the most reliable narrator when it comes to their relationship.
20:35 Ashley Flowers? The couple had been together for 28 years, but it sounds like their marriage was always pretty rocky. Robin says that Dawn was controlling and verbally and emotionally abusive. And she said that, yeah, they had talked about divorce, like Dawn said, but her mom was actually happy about it. According to a letter that Mary Ann had written her son Brian, Dawn offered to buy her out of their house in Northfield and then give her a condo that they had in Florida. And in the year leading up to her death, she spent months fixing that condo up. She was jazzed and ready for a new chapter. But just a few months before she died, something happened. Mary Ann moved back into their Northfield home where Dawn was.
21:18 Ashley Flowers? But according to Robin, it's not like they were back together. They were still separated. They slept in different bedrooms. And Robin says that Dawn took back the condo offer. But listen, put all the divorce stuff aside. It could be considered like a he said, she said, right? And people might argue that a mother might not share the realities of her marriage with her daughter, even if her daughter was grown and in her 30s at that time. Fine, whatever. There was something else that always bothered Robin about the idea of ruling her mother's death self strangulation, something she even told police back in 1996. Robin says that sometime in the eight weeks before Mary Ann's death,
22:00 Ashley Flowers? her mom had tripped and shattered both of her wrists so badly that one wrist required bone grafts. And she was still healing from that. That is just eight weeks before.
22:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:11 Ashley Flowers? Shattered. So in her mind, she always felt like it would have been super hard for her mom to even pull the cords tight enough around her neck on her own.
22:21 Speaker 01 Was that even mentioned in the report or did they leave that out too?
22:25 Ashley Flowers? Oh, it was in there, but officers framed that as just another bad thing in Mary Ann's life that could have contributed to her suicide. Like, it's so odd. But listen, by the time Robin is done reading everything, she's no longer just suspicious about her mom's death. She is convinced that her mom's suicide was actually a murder. So Robin reaches out to Northfield PD in 2018. And luckily, she finds someone at least willing to listen. And she lays out everything that doesn't add up. And she requests that they reopen her mom's case. I mean, at minimum, they should still have the physical evidence that they could test and see what comes of that. And it seems like, at first, Northfield PD actually does take her seriously.
23:10 Ashley Flowers? Nearly 22 years after Mary Ann's death, they decide to reexamine the evidence. The vaginal swabs, the broken fingernail, and the stains from the cord. It's all resubmitted to the Northeastern Illinois Regional Crime Lab.
23:22 Speaker 01 Like, I've been doing this long enough. I'm honestly kind of still surprised that they had the evidence.
23:27 Ashley Flowers? Oh, yeah, same. Now, it takes a little bit of time. But when the results come back, there's not like much that's new. Because even though they tested a lot of things, the cord didn't yield anything. Now, they did get a DNA sample from underneath Mary Ann's broken fingernail, which would have been great. But there wasn't enough DNA for profiling on that one. And then her vaginal swab, they just got the same unknown male profile like they did the first time. They tested it back in like the 90s.
23:55 Speaker 01 And if it's Don's, he's just gonna say they had sex before she died, even though he's not, what was it, 100% sure?
24:01 Ashley Flowers? Yeah, I assume that he is the first one that they're gonna wanna at least test so they can say if he's in or out.
24:07 Speaker 01 Right.
24:07 Ashley Flowers? Because if he's in, complicated, right? If he's out, very black and white.
24:12 Speaker 01 Cut and dry, yeah.
24:13 Ashley Flowers? Now, is he the person that they go to first? I don't know. We have the files that show after they get these results, they bring someone in for questioning. And they ask them, that person, to provide a DNA sample. This person initially said yes, but then they asked to speak with a lawyer. And when that happened, they end up refusing to give a sample.
24:34 Speaker 01 Okay, so...
24:35 Ashley Flowers? Problem is, I can't tell you who the person is because the name is redacted.
24:40 Speaker 01 Does Robin know who it is?
24:42 Ashley Flowers? I mean, so she's seen the redacted file. She believes she knows who it is. I'm told by our lawyers I shouldn't say who she thinks because it's not proof. It's just her opinion.
24:52 Speaker 01 I've also got an opinion.
24:54 Ashley Flowers? I...
24:55 Speaker 01 There's only so many people it could be, right?
24:56 Ashley Flowers? Yeah. I cannot speculate. But when this person refuses to cooperate, police don't go looking for anyone else. I mean, I know that much because the very next sentence in the report is that the case will remain closed.
25:11 Speaker 01 So are subpoenas not a thing anymore? Like, what are we doing here?
25:15 Ashley Flowers? Yeah, right?
25:15 Speaker 01 Because clearly, they saw it was suspicious. They reopen, they test again. All their tests, like, pretty much confirm it's suspicious. But they run into, like, one little roadblock and it's like, sorry, we tried everything.
25:27 Ashley Flowers? I know.
25:28 Speaker 01 We'll just keep it a suicide, I guess.
25:30 Ashley Flowers? It...
25:30 Speaker 01 Like...
25:31 Ashley Flowers? It stinks to high heaven. And Robin is not about to give up. Every corner she turns, every rock she flips over, she just keeps finding stuff that's telling her she's on the right track. So she decides after this to hire an organization called Alliance for Hope International. That was started by two former prosecutors who are experts in what they call hidden homicides, or homicides staged to look like suicides.
25:57 Speaker 01 I mean, this one was barely even staged.
26:00 Ashley Flowers? Yeah, which is why they're quick to take this case on. And as they interview Robin about her mom's story and they start reviewing the evidence, the inconsistencies just keep piling up. So they call in not one, but two different forensic pathologists to do a review. One of them is Dr. Megan Quinn, and it is so black and white to her that she calls the investigation into Mary Ann's death a cataclysmic failure. She says, quote, "The cause of this woman's death is ligature strangulation, and the manner of death is homicide," end quote. And they're gonna prove it.
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28:55 Ashley Flowers? Guys, I'm doing a bit of a kitchen clean out. I have been getting schooled lately on the effects of microplastics, so I am determined to eliminate as much plastic from my home as possible. And I am especially focused on the stuff that I cook with. So I turned to Wayfair, where I have been getting so many pieces for my home. And I just got all new wood and stainless steel cooking utensils that look beautiful, feel great, and I have already put them to use. And these things are a zillion times better than the gross plastic things that I had in the drawer for a decade. And I'm honestly ashamed that I kept them as long as I did. I also replaced any plastic storage containers I had with glass ones. And I did all of that for 250 bucks. Bougie on a budget.
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30:08 Ashley Flowers? Alliance for Hope brings in another expert, Dr. William Smock, whose name probably sounds familiar for some crime junkies. He's come up in a number of episodes, in a number of different series even. But in this case, he was asked to review Mary Ann's autopsy. He combs through the crime lab reports, the Emmy's findings, the photos, and he finds a lot of problems. He points out that self-strangulation is extremely rare. And in the cases that do exist, the ligature has to have some kind of locking mechanism to keep pressure on the neck. Without that, as the person begins to lose consciousness, their hands fall away, blood returns, and they wake up.
30:50 Ashley Flowers? The cord in Mary Ann's death did not have any kind of locking device. The second thing that Dr. Smock finds is that there are two different ligature marks on her neck. What does that indicate? Well, it means, it just means that the cord was placed around her neck tightly enough to choke her two times. Now, someone who's gonna try and say, oh, this is a suicide, would probably just argue his first thing, right? Oh, yeah, she lost consciousness, woke up, rewrapped it, and like, did it again.
31:20 Speaker 01 But by that same like logic, she probably would have woken up again.
31:25 Ashley Flowers? Right. It seems more likely to me that someone else wrapped it around her neck twice. Either because they had to get their grip again, or maybe she wasn't dead when they thought she was the first time. Or Mary Ann could have been strangled and then the cord was just wrapped around her neck a second time to stage the suicide. The two prosecutors who run Alliance for Hope also uncover a bunch of other wild stuff. Mostly stuff that shows if anyone had motive to kill Mary Ann, it was her husband Don. Apparently, Alliance for Hope reviewed a police report, which we have as well, that after Mary Ann died, a friend of hers, Donna Heller, told a detective that over two months before her death,
32:07 Ashley Flowers? Mary Ann said that she thought Don had been following her and was going to kill her.
32:14 Speaker 01 Wait, she told this to them early on?
32:16 Ashley Flowers? Yeah, but this just shows up once in the police report. It doesn't look like anyone followed up on it. And we reached out to Northfield Police about Mary Ann's case, but they wouldn't comment. Now, when Alliance for Hope dug in on Don, they found that he stood to gain financially when Mary Ann was out of the picture. Don got the Northfield home. He retained partial ownership of the condo. And Robin claims that because Mary Ann didn't have a will, Don pressured the kids into signing away their portion of their property inheritance from the Northfield home. And we have documentation of that quit claim that Robin signed. Now, Robin says she's not sure if there was any life insurance that he got, but she knows that she didn't see any insurance money after her mom's death.
32:58 Speaker 01 And no matter whose idea it was, we know that they might have been separating.
33:03 Ashley Flowers? Right.
33:04 Speaker 01 Which is always a super dangerous time for spouses.
33:08 Ashley Flowers? In the end, Alliance for Hope thinks that there was a lot of good reasons to look closely at Don. He had means, motive, opportunity. But here's the twist. They think police should look hard at Don, not just for Mary Ann's death, but Stephen's as well. Because they couldn't just ignore Stephen's case when they got into things. And they identify some weird similarities between his and Mary Ann's deaths. First, just like Mary Ann was telling her friends she thought someone was following her before her death, Rachel's sister Becky, remember her? She says that right before the time of his death, Stephen was paranoid and he thought that someone was out to get him.
33:52 Ashley Flowers? But he didn't say who. And apparently, he told his friends that he was fleeing to Kentucky or even the Caribbean. And get this, Stephen also had two ligature marks, one high up on his neck and another below where the rope was found.
34:08 Speaker 01 Wait, how do they know? I thought there were no files on Stephen's case.
34:13 Ashley Flowers? Well, it took years, but Robin was eventually able to get her hands on a medical report from Stephen's death. It was obtained by WGN, this like local TV station. And we have it as well. The report includes photos that show that Stephen's face is actually covered in bruises as well. And we know that a person's face can show signs of bruising during hanging. But this was different. I mean, when I look at these photos, he looks like he was beaten up beforehand.
34:43 Speaker 01 And I assume he looked fine when Rachel saw him and he said he was gonna be right back.
34:47 Ashley Flowers? Correct, no bruises. So Rachel alleges that he's gonna go run this errand for Don, right? So if that's real, what is the errand? Well, when you dig into Stephen's life, there is a bunch of weird stuff happening around this time. Becky told us that right before Stephen's death, he was going around with this big bag of cocaine and was just like giving it away to friends for free. Stephen's neighbor told us that he and Stephen used to party together a lot. And to this day, that was some of, he says, the purest cocaine that he's ever had.
35:20 Speaker 01 So he was dealing drugs?
35:22 Ashley Flowers? Well, this is the thing. Becky says she's not sure. Like, he wasn't known to be a dealer or anything. His friends say that he was, like, crashing on couches. But somehow, he has, like, thousands of dollars' worth of cocaine and is just, like, giving it away.
35:37 Speaker 01 Okay, so that's one piece of a very confusing puzzle.
35:41 Ashley Flowers? But there's something else interesting that Mary Ann wrote to Brian in that letter after the bathrobe incident. She mentions that Steven wrote bad checks from the business to buy coke.
35:54 Speaker 01 Don's business?
35:55 Ashley Flowers? Robin thinks that she has to mean Don's business. It's the only business that they would be talking about. But she's not 100% convinced that even the bad checks thing is real. Like, she doesn't know. But if you combine those two little pieces with the facts that we know from when he died, Steven goes to run an errand. It said that he was last seen by coworkers at Don's business alive and well at 5:45 a.m. And that person told Steven, you know, since it's so late, or technically, early in the morning, Steven may as well just stay there at the business till morning. But an hour and a half later, around 7:15 a.m., another employee found him dead, hanging by his neck.
36:36 Ashley Flowers? That employee cut him down, and when police arrived, Steven was laying on his back with a nylon rope around his neck. Don is interviewed by police for both cases. And you know what he told them about Mary Ann, but he also said some similar stuff to police about Steven. He told them that Steven had an incident when he was a teenager where he crashed his car into a lamppost in what Don called "an attempt at self-destruction." But Steven's friend told us that Steven was drunk and fell asleep at the wheel.
37:04 Speaker 01 So it sounds to me like police, again, are just taking Don's word.
37:07 Ashley Flowers? Right. Now, the circumstances around Steven's death don't feel as black and white as Mary Ann's seem to be. So all in all, when all is said and done, it's her case that the Alliance for Hope really focuses on. Dr. Smock writes a letter to the original medical examiner, Dr. Kogan, with copies of the original autopsy photos, explaining that this is not consistent with self strangulation. He also mentions that he spoke to Mary Ann's psychiatrist. And by the way, she told him that she saw Mary Ann the day before her death, and that she didn't mention suicidal ideation. But he gets no response. Dr. Smock says Dr. Kogan simply returned his materials to him without a single word or comment on the matter.
37:51 Speaker 01 Excuse me?
37:52 Ashley Flowers? Yeah, now, he does eventually get a chance to speak with him on the matter. And Dr. Smock said it was obvious that he hadn't even reviewed the photographs, and he was unable to explain the second ligature mark. And we'd love to ask Dr. Kogan about this, but he hasn't returned our request for comment.
38:09 Speaker 01 So what now if the original ME won't do anything?
38:13 Ashley Flowers? Well, so now, Alliance for Hope puts together this whole 26-page report, saying all of the above. And in 2021, they submit all of this to the Cook County State's Attorney's Cold Case Unit. And during a meeting with Northfield Police around that time, the Cold Case Unit expressed concern about the original ME's findings. And then they meet with the chief medical examiner for Cook County to elevate said concerns. Now, this is someone new. She wasn't involved in Mary Ann's case when it first happened in 96. Whatever meeting they have, it lasts exactly 25 minutes, according to the police file. And she tells them, you know, she has reviewed the original ME's findings, and she will not be changing the manner of death. And she also claims that after doing her own research,
38:58 Ashley Flowers? she found a case of documented self strangulation, but she doesn't actually cite whatever specific case she's talking about, or cases. Now, we reached out to both the current chief ME and the Cold Case Unit for comment, but again, we have not heard back. And so that was it.
39:13 Speaker 01 What do you mean that's it?
39:15 Ashley Flowers? That's it? I mean, it's shocking. In spite of all of the evidence Robin pieced together, all of the efforts of Alliance for Hope, all of the phone calls and meetings with Northfield PD and Cook County and the Cold Case Unit and the Chief Medical Examiner, in spite of everything Robin has done.
39:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:30 Ashley Flowers? And in spite of her really dedicating her life to this at this point, to this day, both Mary Ann Hayes and Steven Altman's cases remain closed. Dawn Hayes has never been charged or convicted with a crime in association with either Steven or Mary Ann's death, and he has been described as cooperative by the police. Robin is continuing to press for these cases to be reopened. Stevens is tough because there was no investigation, but Mary Ann's is a different story. Robin believes that there is more than enough evidence to change the manner of death to homicide, and she is hoping that the DNA under her mom's fingernail can maybe be retested.
40:15 Ashley Flowers? To this day, Alliance for Hope uses the case of Mary Ann Hayes to train law enforcement officials on identifying hidden homicides. They also helped Robin get a bill submitted, Mary Ann's Law, that would provide training to law enforcement so that they could be better equipped to identify deaths that have been staged as suicides, especially in cases involving domestic violence. It's currently pending at the State Senate in Illinois. Robin's journey to get justice for her mom and her brother has felt like pushing a boulder up a mountain. But she also says that there has been hope along the way. I mean, she is grateful to the Alliance for Hope for everything that they've done, reanalyzing the evidence in these cases. And through that organization, she's been able to connect with other families
40:59 Ashley Flowers? who may have loved ones who are victims of hidden homicides too, which is making her feel less alone. So if you have any information about Mary Ann Hayes's death, you can contact the Northfield Police Department at 847-446-2131. Or if you know anything about Steven Altman's death, you can call the Chicago Police Department at 312-744-2422. And if there's anything you want to share with us, email [email protected] .
42:08 Ashley Flowers? Crime Junkie is an AudioChuck production. I think Chuck would approve.
42:17 Speaker 02 When the nights grow longer, the shadows start to stir, and that can only mean one thing. Full Body Chills is back. This season, Step Inside: Original Tales, where every doorway leads somewhere darker, every stranger carries a secret, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. Each story takes you somewhere new, but be careful. You never know what might follow you home. So gather around, listen close, and stream Full Body Chills wherever you get your podcasts.
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