Pod Insights Criminology Aeileen Conway About this episode In 1986, Aeileen Conway apparently died in a fiery car accident in Okalahoma. Police ruled it an accident, but very quickly, Aeileen's husband Pat began to question his wife's death, and the official findings. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss the mysterious death of Aeileen Conway. She was found inside her burning car on a stretch of road out of the way that her husband said they'd never been on. Inside their home, it appeared as though Aeileen left suddenly. But what were the circumstances around it, and was she forced out by an individual or individuals and then murdered? You can help support the show at patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital production
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Moms and Mysteries is the podcast where two Florida friends uncover chilling cases with humor and heart. Hey guys, I'm Mandy.
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0:30 Speaker 02 Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised.
1:07 Speaker 03 Hello everyone and welcome to episode 349 of the Criminology Podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson.
1:13 Speaker 04 And this is Mike Morford.
1:15 Speaker 03 Mr. Morford, how you doing, buddy?
1:17 Speaker 04 I'm doing good. How you doing?
1:19 Speaker 03 I'm, I'm hanging in there, you know. My biggest problem right now is the weather. I know I talk about the weather a lot, but you know, we're having like 60 days, some days, and then it's like 28. And that seems like a big swing and it really messes with me.
1:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, I don't miss that about the northern weather, but I'm sure the basketball tournament's gonna keep you pretty warm with all the excitement you're gonna have over that.
1:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, I do love March Madness. It's one of my favorite times of year. So I'm looking forward to that. Let's go ahead and give our Patreon shout outs. We had Ron and Kench and Brian Middleton. So a lot of great new support. We really appreciate it.
2:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, thank you to everyone that takes the time to support the show. It really helps us out. For anyone else that would like to, you can head over to patreon.com/criminology to get started.
2:20 Speaker 03 All right, we're diving right into this week's case. And you know, every once in a while, we dig into a case that really kind of leaves us scratching our head due to the bizarre circumstances and clues in the case. And I think for many listeners, this may be one of those cases. We're talking about the case of Aileen Conway, who apparently died in a fiery car accident in Oklahoma in 1986. Police ruled it an accident. But very quickly, Aileen's husband, Pat, began to question his wife's death and the official findings.
2:59 Speaker 04 Aileen Conway was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, as Aileen Anderson on June 15, 1935, to parents Pat and Frida Anderson. We don't know a lot about her life, but in her college age years, she attended the St. Joseph's Academy, a Catholic college in Guthrie, Oklahoma. While attending the school, she was active in pep club, senior scouts, and she worked on the newspaper. At some point in the early 1950s, she met Patrick Conway. Patrick, or Pat as he went by, was about four years older than Aileen. He had lost his parents early in life. His father Timothy Conway died when Pat was just four, and his mom Clara Conway died a year later when he was five. We don't know much in the way of those circumstances, but we do know that Pat was
3:44 Speaker 04 adopted by his godparents, Joseph and Ann Brown, and he grew up close to Aileen.
3:50 Speaker 03 Patrick went to Our Lady Catholic High School, and almost right away out of school, Patrick ran his own business, Conway and Hale, a flooring company. After dating a short while, Aileen and Pat were married on October 17, 1953, and they made their home in Lawton, Oklahoma, on the 6200 block of Northwest Cheyenne Drive. Pat and Aileen would go on to have seven kids, four daughters and three sons. Frustratingly, there's very little out there that we could find about Aileen's life after her and Pat were married. But Pat was very active with his kids and scouting, where he was a scoutmaster. He was also active in the Lawton School Board.
4:36 Speaker 03 He coached softball. From what we can gather, the Conway family seemed to be a happy one, living their lives in Lawton, but that would all change in April of 1986.
4:49 Speaker 04 On Tuesday, April 29th, 1986, around 10:40 a.m., a farmer in Lawton noticed a large column of smoke rising from a dirt road not far from his property. He called the fire department. Lieutenant Larry Sally from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol arrived 20 minutes after the farmer alerted authorities. The source of the smoke was a car on fire. The car had apparently crashed into the guardrail of an old bridge and somehow caught fire. And the fire was intense. The flames grew so hot, the metal guardrail on the car had melted together where they met. As he looked inside the car, the officer was horrified to see at least one person, but the car was completely engulfed in flames and there was nothing he could do to try and get them out. The only
5:32 Speaker 04 thing he could do was wait for backup. By the time the fire was put out, the body inside the car had been burned so badly that a visual identification couldn't be made, and it was unrecognizable.
5:43 Speaker 03 And Morpheus and I talk about it a lot. You know, people out on their everyday lives, right? Stumbling upon a dead body. And, and that would be life altering. It would be just a major event in someone's life. Now, you know, when you're dealing with the highway patrol, they probably see a lot more than the average person, obviously, any law enforcement would. But I would think this would be the type of incident that would stick with an officer. They probably see a lot of cars on fire. But when you pull up, a car is on
6:24 Speaker 03 fire, and you notice that there is at least one person inside, and there's nothing you can do about it. That has to be, you know, number one, a helpless feeling, but also, I would think that's going to stick with you.
6:40 Speaker 04 As an officer, first responder, you're trained to help someone if you can. But I think it's, we all know that as much as you might want to help, when you get around fire, you just can't do anything. It's so overpowering. And I don't know, we don't have details if this guy had a. Some kind of small fire extinguisher in his car, but from the sounds of this fire, it wouldn't have done much good because this thing was really engulfed.
7:08 Speaker 03 The burned out car was registered to Patrick Conway, whose listed address was just 15 minutes away from the scene of the crash. It wasn't Pat who was in the car, though. While investigators were trying to make sense of the scene and pin down the identity of the deceased driver, Pat Conway was trying to find his wife, Aileen. When he arrived home from work around noon, he noticed that her car was gone. That wasn't weird to him, but things inside the home indicated that she had not intended to leave. Aileen's purse, which had her eyeglasses and her driver's license inside, was still on the floor in the living room next to an armchair.
7:51 Speaker 03 The tub in the upstairs bathroom was full of water as if someone had drawn or just finished a bath. The phone in the bathroom resting on the edge of the bathtub was off the hook. The receiver had been placed directly in front of the bath. An iron was plugged in and still on, sitting atop an ironing board. The back patio door was wide open and in the backyard, the garden hose was still on flowing into the family's pool.
8:21 Speaker 04 It's safe to assume that most people wouldn't leave in the middle of any of those chores, let alone all of them. Sure, we all from time to time may forget something, usually not multiple things that seem to be all going on at the same time. But to just walk out of the house with your phone off the hook, your bathtub full of water, a hose on that could potentially flood your backyard and a hot iron on that could start a fire, that would take a lot of forgetting. It was unusual and to Pat, it didn't add up. They had been married for 33 years and this just didn't feel right. He knew something was wrong and that his wife would never leave the house like this. Patrick had no idea where Aileen went.
9:00 Speaker 03 Now, I don't know about you, Morph, but if I got home to this scene that we just described, I would be really worried myself. Now, granted, this is 1986. Pat can't just pull up his cellphone and track his wife, or, you know, use a locator or anything like that, which is what we would do today. But, you know, you'd still be worried. The scene is so odd that someone couldn't help but think it's possibly something bad has happened.
9:39 Speaker 04 And they'd been married for 30 odd years. So he would know her habits and patterns, and you just know when something's off. And, you know, he got that gut feeling right away that something wasn't right.
9:54 Speaker 03 When he was informed early the next day that it was Aileen who had died in the car accident, he didn't believe it. He was devastated by the news, but despite his grief, he kept thinking back to the condition of the house. But it wasn't just the way the home had been left. It was also the location of the wreck. The scene was 15 miles away. And to his knowledge, neither of them had ever driven over that bridge or had ever even been to that area, even if she had decided to leave the home the way it was. With so many things unfinished or out of place, it still doesn't explain what she was doing in that area in the first place. Pat was sure this was not an accident.
10:39 Speaker 03 He would later tell the television show Unsolved Mysteries, there's no doubt in my mind, it was murder. Now, some people might quickly assume that, you know, this is a grief-stricken husband and father that didn't want to accept that his wife had been killed in a tragic accident. But even if that were the case, it still doesn't explain everything that led up to the accident.
11:03 Speaker 04 All of this uncertainty led Pat to contact District Attorney's Office Investigator, Ray Anderson, who was skeptical at first, thinking that Pat was just a grieving loved one in denial, looking for someone to blame. But he was willing to approach the case with an open mind. Anderson told Unsolved Mysteries, "The first impression that I had of this case, when I met with Mr. Conway, was that of a spouse that was left alone, not expecting the tragedy that happened, and looking for some reason why this happened, other than it just being an accident." The investigator also said he quickly realized that when you start looking at the extenuating and surrounding circumstances, the way that she left her house, it leads you to believe that there's a possibility that there could have been foul play.
11:49 Speaker 03 And I get that. I mean, I think I would be, at the very least, entertaining some of those thoughts if I was in Pat's shoes. I mean, it would be one thing if there was nothing amiss at the house. Everything was normal, and there was a car accident, and your wife died. But, you know, everything going on at this house just kind of screams out that Aileen wasn't planning on leaving. She left in a hurry, and maybe not by her own free will.
12:29 Speaker 04 Yeah, this wasn't a case of his wife having to travel for business, and she takes all her stuff with her, and it's planned out. And then he gets a call from the Highway Patrol that unfortunately she got into an accident someplace. This just seemed like an unscheduled event, and the accident happened in a spot where he wasn't familiar with, and as far as he knew, his wife wasn't familiar with.
12:53 Speaker 03 After a few days, Pat and investigator Anderson decided to revisit the scene. About 200 feet away from the car, Anderson found a flyer in the grass with information from a local church, which Pat said had been on Aileen's dashboard the last time he saw her in the car. Together, they came to the conclusion that the car must have stopped near the spot where he found the church flyer because it was so far away from the scene of the wreck. And according to Pat, Aileen never drove with her windows down. If it was hot, she turned on the air conditioning, but kept the windows up. So since the flyer couldn't have flown out of the car while she was driving, it must have
13:38 Speaker 03 fallen out while she stopped and someone, maybe her, maybe not, got out of the car or at the very least opened the door. Now, some might say it fell out of the car when first responders were working the scene, but if that's the case, the flyer likely would have been burned up.
13:56 Speaker 04 This flyer made investigator Anderson believe that Pat was on to something and that Aileen may have been a victim of foul play and that the crime scene could have been staged by her killer. Anderson thought that someone else may have been with her, opened the door, set the accelerator and slammed it in the drive, hoping to run Aileen off into the creek next to the bridge and to make it appear like it was an accident. But there were skid marks from braking behind her car, which investigators estimated had been going 50 to 60 miles per hour when it smashed into the guardrail. If these skid marks were from Aileen's vehicle, which investigators do seem to believe, then someone was alive in the car just before the crash and they hit the brakes hard.
14:38 Speaker 04 One possibility is that Anderson's theory could have happened and Aileen may have been unconscious when she was put into the car, but came to and tried to stop the car, but it was too late.
14:49 Speaker 03 And I think there's one thing more that we have to point out. Where this accident occurred, it was kind of a out of the way dirt road with a bridge, right, that crossed the creek. Now, I said earlier that Pat said he didn't think he and his wife had ever traveled this road, gone across this bridge. And a lot of people were probably thinking, well, that's strange. They've lived there a long time. It's what 15 minutes from their home? Little chance that you wouldn't cross a bridge that that's that close to your home in many, many years of living there.
15:32 Speaker 03 So it is important to kind of describe this road and, and the scene.
15:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's definitely not like a major thoroughfare or a bridge that's used by a lot of vehicles. This was mainly, you know, a side off the beaten path type of bridge. And I think everybody listening probably has something in their town that is not well used, but people know about it. Just they may not have driven down it, but it's, they know that it's there.
16:02 Speaker 03 But doesn't that add to the mystery? You know, why is Aileen on this road? Where's she going? And maybe puts it into the category of being a little more suspicious. You know, there's probably a goal weight in your head and getting there on your own is the hard part. Weight loss by Hers offers access to a range of FDA approved GLP-1 medications, including the Wegovy pill and the Wegovy pen, plus support along the way. With Wegovy, you can lose up to 20% of your body weight. People lost an average of 14% body weight in 64 weeks in a clinical trial of Wegovy alongside diet and exercise.
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17:28 Speaker 03 Wegovy clinical study information and restrictions, visit forhers.com. It didn't take long for officials to change their determination that Aileen had perished in a tragic car accident. Now, her cause of death was listed as unexplained. Thanks to investigator Anderson's investigation, looking deeper into the case, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and the Fire Marshal performed evaluations and tests to try to figure out exactly what happened to Aileen. They found a few suspicious things. Sonny Sansom of the Oklahoma State Fire Marshal's Office told Unsolved Mysteries,
18:09 Speaker 03 "What made me suspicious at first was looking at the photographs and seeing how much burn was in the vehicle. This thing was completely burnt and destroyed. The gas cap from Aileen's car was missing, which is, according to Sansom, a common finding in arson involving vehicles because the suspect hopes the flames will ignite the tank and cause more damage to the car."
18:37 Speaker 04 Investigators obtained parts of a car similar to Aileen's for testing. They wanted to see how the dashboard and carpet burned under normal circumstances. When the sections of dashboard and carpet were lit with a blowtorch, the fire simply went out. It didn't spread and there was no potential for a raging inferno capable of melting car and guardrail. But when the investigators lit the same parts on fire with accelerants like gas, the fire burned intensely. Investigators determined that the fire had not been caused solely by the crash. According to Sansom, "Without some type of accelerant like gasoline, the fire would not burn that badly."
19:15 Speaker 03 So investigators were at least open to the idea that someone may have killed Aileen, but they were left with the questions. Who would want to kill the 51-year-old wife and mother and why? According to Paul Renfro from the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation, at the time of the Unsolved Mysteries interview, authorities didn't even have one solid motive that they all agreed on, saying, "We don't really have an answer, but there are a lot of theories floating around." One idea that seems to come up in this case is that Aileen somehow interrupted a burglary in her home. Rather than fleeing or just killing Aileen and leaving her there, her killer or killers
20:00 Speaker 03 put her in the car and drove 15 miles before crashing the car, dousing it with an accelerant and lighting it on fire. Investigator Renfro told Unsolved Mysteries, "We backtracked a little bit into the neighborhood, and apparently, there had been reports of burglaries in the weeks and months preceding this situation. So, the possibility of an interrupted burglary is there."
20:26 Speaker 04 To many people, it seems far-fetched that a burglar would go to such great lengths to kill Aileen and make it look like an accident, especially without taking much. According to the Unsolved Mysteries webpage, there's one news article from May 1986 that mentions missing jewelry, but it doesn't specify what was unaccounted for, and there's no mention of missing jewelry in the Unsolved Mysteries episode about the case. It could be the jewelry Aileen wore daily, or it could have been a valuable heirloom kept tucked away in a safe. We just don't know. But it certainly has a potential to be a big clue. The same article also notes that the water in the bathtub was used as if someone had taken a bath and failed to drain the water. Though it's not clear how they would determine that.
21:11 Speaker 04 With no clear motives for anyone wanting to harm Aileen, and nobody having any grudges against her or her husband, a burglary gone wrong seems feasible. Perhaps Aileen recognized the burglar, or burglars if there was one or more, and they panicked and harmed her to keep her from turning them in. As we've mentioned, there were some burglaries in the area preceding Aileen's death, and perhaps the person that broke into her home was responsible for the other burglaries and feared that they would get in a lot of trouble.
21:39 Speaker 03 It would be helpful to know where Aileen kept her keys. If they were in her purse, it makes it extremely strange that the purse and her eyeglasses were still at home. It would have taken longer to get only her keys than it would have to grab the whole purse and run to the car. But if she kept her house keys on a hook or in a dish on a table near the door, then it would be easier to run past the purse. And grabbed the keys on the way out. There was no mention of whether Aileen kept any cash in her purse. But if a burglar went through the trouble of taking her keys from her purse, it seems like they would simply take the purse.
22:18 Speaker 03 If it was Aileen that went out willingly for some unknown reason, it seems that she too would likely take her purse. So either way, it's odd that it was left in the house.
22:29 Speaker 04 I don't know about you, Mike, but my wife doesn't go anywhere without her purse. And she does have a, like a wallet with a driver's license and some other stuff in it. But she keeps that in the purse. So again, you still have the issue of if she was running out to run an errand, whatever she was doing, it seems like it would just simply be easy to grab the purse.
22:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'm with you. I would say for the most part, my wife always has her purse with her. I mean, inside is like a MacGyver kit. That, you know, she could either construct a deadly weapon or, you know, defuse a bomb. I don't know what she carries in there, but there seems to be a lot.
23:15 Speaker 04 And I think most women, we could probably poll our listeners. A lot of them probably carry their purse or some kind of credentials, especially if you're going out driving. You'd think that most times you want to carry your driver's license at least.
23:29 Speaker 03 Well, and I think it's just one of the, the big mysteries in this case. Right? Under what circumstances did Aileen leave the house? And, you know, why did she not grab her purse when she left?
23:44 Speaker 04 It seems like a case where if you could answer one question, it might help you answer other questions.
23:52 Speaker 03 Almost as if the dominoes would start to fall at that point, right? Because if you knew for sure the answer to, to one or, you know, two of these questions, things might start to line up.
24:07 Speaker 04 As for what could cause Aileen to be in such a rush, one theory that some people think may have weight to it is that the phone was off the hook because she had just received the call that lured her out of the house for some kind of fake emergency, only to be run off the road. That may explain her leaving her purse and only taking her keys. This would also point to someone who knew her because they would need to have information about her enough to make up a story about whoever might be in trouble or in danger. What really makes this case even more mysterious is that none of Aileen's neighbors reported seeing her leave the house that day. We don't know what the street looked like back in 1986, but you can clearly see on Google Maps that today Conway's old home is surrounded by several
24:50 Speaker 04 other homes pretty close to each other. If Aileen left the house screaming in a panic or was forced to leave by someone, it seems likely that some neighbor might have seen or heard that.
25:01 Speaker 03 And I think there are a couple of things to consider around that point. One is the time of day. I mean, this wasn't the middle of the night when she left. It was mid morning. It obviously would have been, you know, light out. The visibility likely would have been really good. Now, we don't know how many people in the neighborhood were home. Maybe a lot of people were working. We don't know all of that stuff. But the idea that you armed intruders forced Aileen out of the house and into her car, it's not out of the realm of
25:42 Speaker 03 possibility, but you would think it would be a lot harder to do at that time of day in that type of neighborhood setting.
25:51 Speaker 04 And that's the puzzling piece for me about this case is the proximity of the homes because there, there's not a lot of space between the homes on either side of the Conway's house or across the street from it. It's sort of a development and it's not, we've covered cases where somebody lives out in the middle of nowhere off a highway and they don't have a neighbor for a mile away and something could happen. You never hear or see anything, but these homes are right on top of each other. So the, anyone trying to do alien harm would be taking a big chance that they're going to be seen or heard. And it just adds to the confusion of this case.
26:29 Speaker 03 So if someone had lured Aileen out of the house, it had to be someone she trusted. And since everyone that knew her would have come forward if they had info. This has led some people online to believe that perhaps Aileen was having an affair. Unfortunately, no one solved case is complete without salacious rumors. Other people think that perhaps she was involved with something seedy like drugs. Most of those theories have Aileen leaving the house for a quick meetup, fully intending to return home in a few minutes. In this line of thinking, Aileen could have left the phone off the hook so
27:11 Speaker 03 that it seemed like she was still at home and just talking on the phone if her husband called. Back then, anyone calling would have just gotten a busy signal. From the other end of the phone, there was no way to tell whether the person you were calling was actively on the phone or if their phone was just off the hook. The issues with these theories from online sleuths is that no theory really seems to fit with everything we know about Aileen and her life. As we mentioned early on, we don't know a lot about her life because there's very little out there. But we know she was a church going mom. And there was never any mention of her being involved in anything shady.
27:54 Speaker 03 So a lot of the theories online are definitely not based on any known facts. And people have affairs morph. I mean, it happens all the time. It's not out of the realm of possibility. It's also not impossible that Aileen was into some type of drug or something like that. But you know, a 51 year old mother and wife, you would have to say. She's in a less risky category for for some of these things. Not that it couldn't happen, but is it less likely?
28:30 Speaker 04 And I think it's only natural for people in a case like this. They start grasping at straws or throwing forward any kind of theory that, you know, could possibly explain the situation because it's just so unusual.
28:46 Speaker 03 But here's the thing, you know, if if you're going to meet someone for a quick hookup, or you're going to to go buy drugs. Does that explain in any way the situation going on at the home? Why everything was left the way it was?
29:05 Speaker 04 Other theories some people put forward include Aileen having suffered a medical emergency, which caused all of her odd behavior. In this theory, the phone is off the hook because she tried to call for help, but realized she couldn't speak or was unable to dial for some reason. She would have dropped everything to run outside for help. The open door, the hose and the iron would all become unimportant during a life or death emergency. And it would be easy to forget her purse if she was in a panic. But why would she get into the car and drive during a medical emergency? Especially if she was experiencing cognitive symptoms like loss of speech, memory or movement. If she was going to run outside anyway, why not try to run to a neighbor's house? You could knock and then even if you couldn't talk, you could make motions and you could,
29:49 Speaker 04 and it would probably be quite obvious that something was going wrong. Other people raised questions about the possibility of Aileen suffering some kind of mental emergency or a breakdown trying to explain her actions that day. This line of thinking has led some to consider the possibility that Aileen Conway took her own life. But again, just like with every other theory, there isn't enough known about Aileen to come to any conclusions.
30:13 Speaker 03 There is one theory that's out there online and perhaps this one may be the hardest one to believe is possible, that being that Aileen faked her own death. Her remains were identified, but it isn't clear how they were. As we mentioned, her body was burned beyond recognition. So it's not clear if dental records were used to ID her, but hopefully they didn't just assume it was her body. In this last theory, some people put forth that Aileen hatched this plan, arranged to use a body to put in the car so people would think it was her that perished and then she snuck off to start a new life. This almost sounds like something out of a movie.
30:55 Speaker 03 And we know that in some cases, really strange things do happen, but you know, this is one of those scenarios that just seems, you know, kind of hard to accept. And for me more, the running off to start a new life is always one of the hardest scenarios for me to accept. It can happen, it has happened, but when you talk about disappearances and unsolved deaths and mysteries, I think percentage wise, this has to be at the bottom of the, the list of things that normally occur, right?
31:38 Speaker 03 People faking their own death or, you know, just leaving to start a new life.
31:44 Speaker 04 And in this situation, there's, you know, it's one thing if she had left her car someplace and just disappeared, then you could almost say, okay, sure, it's possible she left and started a new life, but for this situation, in this theory, it would require her to get another body from someplace that somehow passes for her. So that's for, for me, it just kind of loses any kind of traction.
32:11 Speaker 03 And that's assuming that they didn't use dental records to conclusively identify her body. My assumption is they did, but we weren't able to find it in the research. So we can't say with certainty that they did, but you would think in 1986, they would have been able to conclusively ID her. They wouldn't just have made the assumption that because she was in, you know, the family car, it had to be her.
32:43 Speaker 04 Finally, of course, as in most unsolved cases, some people think that the victim's husband had something to do with it. In most cases, murder victims are killed by someone closest to them. And there are no shortages of cases where the husband did do it. In this case, if Pat murdered his wife or had her murdered, it literally went perfectly. The official determination was that she died in a car accident. Killing someone and having authorities not even realize it's a murder is extremely rare. And it makes absolutely no sense for Pat Conway to advocate for Aileen and insist that her death was a murder if he was the one responsible. So we don't know where Pat was that day. We're assuming that
33:24 Speaker 04 he was at work and it would be an easy alibi for the police to check. But one way or another, it doesn't seem like they ever considered him to be a suspect. But we just don't know what his alibi was specifically.
33:37 Speaker 03 But assuming he was at work and you know, he was on his way home for lunch when he discovered how the house was, you would think that would be a pretty easy alibi to nail down, right? People either saw him at work, his boss saw him at work, or they didn't.
33:58 Speaker 04 And it's, it just doesn't make sense that if he was somehow involved in his wife's death, why he would be screaming from the rooftops, this is foul play. This isn't a regular car accident. So to me, that just doesn't make any sense.
34:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. I mean, there have been people who have tried to throw off the authorities by acting a certain way. But in this scenario, there would be no reason to need to try to throw the authorities off because they're not looking for a murderer. In the beginning, early on, Pat Conway even offered a $10,000 reward for information in the case. That's over 25,000. Today, he did eventually get remarried, but he never fully moved on. He told Unsolved Mysteries, even though you're discouraged, you keep pushing it every day, it's on your mind all the time. But somehow, it needs to be solved. I'll never
34:59 Speaker 03 quit as far as trying to solve the case. He was clear that he would never stop trying to figure out the truth, saying, if I live to be 100 years old, I'll still be pushing to try to find the individual, or possibly two individuals, whoever was involved. Sadly, Pat never found the answers he was seeking, and he didn't quite make it to 100. On August 20th, 2013, Pat passed away at the age of 81. According to his obituary, he was at home and surrounded by his family.
35:34 Speaker 04 Well, Pat never got to see the case solved, and while odds may be against it happening after nearly 40 years, perhaps it's not too late to investigate it using the most recent technology. There have been advances in the understanding of arson and fire behavior since Aileen's death. There may have been improvements in methods or knowledge in the field of tire track identification and measurement. So it would be interesting to see if a different conclusion could be reached, like an additional sort of tracks, or the realization that there had never been any breaking at all at the accident scene. Reevaluation of the accident scene and evidence might be in order. And of course, who knows what clues as far as DNA or fingerprints might have been found in the Conway's house. The issue there is
36:17 Speaker 04 that since they didn't consider foul play initially, investigators likely didn't treat the home as a crime scene and collect evidence. And any evidence that was in the car likely was destroyed by the fire.
36:27 Speaker 03 And I think this goes back directly to, to something that we've talked about before, but it's, you know, not treating a, a scene as a crime scene, thinking that there's no foul play. So, you know, the police don't do some of the things that they would normally do, right? Collect evidence, dust for fingerprints, all of that kind of stuff. Well, then when you go back and you start to think, well, maybe there was something that happened, you're left with a lot less to work with, essentially nothing to work with because you didn't do much at the crime scene.
37:07 Speaker 04 Yeah. And I think once you've made a conclusion that there's no foul play involved and you fail to tape off that scene and go in and looking for evidence, it allows the family to come home, to move around in the house. You know, the kids were in there most likely. So valuable clues could be lost if it turns out that it was a crime. So maybe the, they should err on the side of caution and treat it as a suspicious death first until they can say conclusively that it was just an accident.
37:40 Speaker 03 Yeah. And I always think that's the case, but I get it. You know, not everything at, at the onset is suspicious to everyone. For me, when it comes to this case, there was just so much going on at the house that made it look as though she left so abruptly that to me it would, it was suspicious. If investigators using today's technology reopen the case, maybe they would want to consider cases with similarities. And there are some cases that do share some similarities, although it's extremely likely that these other cases
38:23 Speaker 03 are not connected to aliens, they are worth at least considering. The first case with striking similarities is that of 48-year-old Mary Lou Morris. We covered her case in our episode about the Mary Morris murders. In that case, Mary Lou Morris and Mary McGinnis Morris were killed in the Houston, Texas area within 72 hours of each other back in 2000. It's Mary Lou Morris's murder that's most like that of Aileen Conway's. Her car was found burning on a secluded road. She was found to be inside and like Aileen, her body was burned beyond recognition. Again, the similarities in the cases are probably just that similarities.
39:08 Speaker 03 There's nothing to link the cases and they're separated by 400 miles and 14 years.
39:14 Speaker 04 The next case with similarities to Aileen's happened 30 years before Aileen died and 180 miles away, but the similarities are pretty striking. This investigation also began when a farmer noticed smoke. It was just after 1:00 PM in the afternoon on March 13th, 1956 in Hope, in Oklahoma. He didn't call anyone about the smoke because it was common for people in that area to burn brush and he figured that's what it was. It wasn't until almost 2 o'clock that another local farmer was driving with his family down a dirt road that Mildred Newland's burning car was discovered. Just as when Aileen Conway's vehicle was burning and the first responder could do nothing to get her out of the car, farmer Lauren Goucher could see a body inside the car surrounded by flames.
39:58 Speaker 04 It was obvious that even if he could get the door open and remove the victim, it wouldn't help them.
40:03 Speaker 03 Also, just as in Aileen Conway's case, highway patrol officers used the tire tracks made in the dirt to piece together a sequence of events. According to the Enid News and Eagle, it appeared that Mildred's car had crossed into the wrong lane and stopped before zigzagging backward in reverse. Then back in drive, the car crossed the road again and hit a tree in a ditch on the side of the road. The car was backed up a second time and once again, it was driven across the road, ramming into the fence next to the tree it had already hit. For the third time, the car reversed back onto the road.
40:48 Speaker 03 Investigators believe that it was at this point, stopped on the road, that a fire started. There was evidence that the car drifted forward about 14 feet before coming to its final stop.
41:02 Speaker 04 The movements of this case are just as puzzling, if not more, than the car movements in Aileen's death. While her car, at first glance, appeared to have crashed at a high speed and burst into flames after striking a guardrail, Mildred's car had crossed the road three times, hit something twice, and only caught fire after being reversed back onto the road. Those seem like very intentional actions. You have to switch gears multiple times for that situation to have happened, and it's not at all an accident that could happen during a normal drive. Where Aileen's crash, even with the skid marks, could have been a freak accident. Maybe she was driving too fast for the dirt road, or maybe there's a pothole or an animal that made her swerve, and then even though she tried, it was too late to stop the car.
41:48 Speaker 03 The scene here in Mildred's case strongly indicated the presence of at least one other person. One of her shoes was burned near the left rear fender of the car, but the other one was near the fence across the road. A red stain on it would later be identified as human blood. There were also drops of blood near the shoe in a patch of grass that was visibly flatter than the rest. Authorities couldn't tell whether someone had fallen down in the grass or whether two people had struggled. According to the Enid News and Eagle, four burnt buttons, possibly from a blouse, were found less than 60 feet from
42:30 Speaker 03 the point at which investigators believe the fire began. Metal bases from two 12-gauge shotgun shells were found inside the car, but it couldn't be determined whether or not they had been fired. 75 feet west of where the fire started, there were three 9mm shell casings found. A local man admitted days later that the casings were his, but clarified that he had been shooting there in that spot days before Mildred's death.
43:00 Speaker 04 Even the way Mildred's body was positioned in the car when it was found was incredibly odd. She was sitting in the driver's seat as you would expect. She was laying down across the front seats with her feet in the driver's seat, near the steering wheel, and her head in the passenger seat. She was on her back with her arms crossed over her chest. Just like the fire in Aileen's car had burned incredibly hot, the fire in Mildred's car seemed impossible to have been a normal fire, one set without accelerants. Her body was very badly damaged. She was completely unrecognizable and most of her body wasn't even attached anymore. The windshield actually melted from the heat of the flames. The melting point of glass is well above what is normally seen in a car fire, so investigators looked
43:43 Speaker 04 into different possible accelerants. Even using gasoline, they couldn't recreate such a hot and destructive fire. When they used a quart of brake fluid, investigators got exactly what they were looking for. In just two minutes, the brake fluid created an explosion, and the fire grew hotter than the melting point of glass. Police later learned that Mildred had purchased a quart of brake fluid just before starting her drive.
44:07 Speaker 03 We know the fire in Mildred's case burned for a long time, since the first farmer noticed the smoke around 1:00 p.m., and the second farmer discovered the car still on fire closer to 2:00. If the fire reached the container of brake fluid, eventually it would have burst or leaked and then quickly caused the fire to grow incredibly hot, which ended up melting the windshield. Ultimately, Mildred's death was determined to be accidental. But like the other two cases we discussed, there are those who have doubts. Kenny Cole, the former chief of the Alva Police Department, told the Enid News and Eagle, "I've thought about this case many a night, laying in my bed. That girl was fighting for her life,
44:52 Speaker 03 all the way up the hill and back down."
44:56 Speaker 04 As strange as Aileen's death may seem, the deaths of Mary Lou Morris and Mildred Newland show that deaths involving car fires are not that uncommon. It's interesting that all three deaths have different determinations. Aileen's remains unexplained, Mildred's was reclassified as an accident, and Mary Lou Morris was clearly murdered. And if anyone wants to destroy evidence that may link them to a murder, sometimes fire is the best way. Did that happen in Aileen's case? We may never know the answer.
45:25 Speaker 03 If you have information about the death of Aileen Conway, you can send the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation your tip by emailing cold case at OSBI dot OK dot gov. So Morph, as we wrap this one up, you know, we did talk about several different cases involving women being burned in car fires. There are some similarities, there are some differences. I think, you know, going back to the situation with Aileen, the one thing that I can't stop thinking about is the way that the house was left.
46:09 Speaker 03 You know, if she took a bath and didn't even let the water out, as some investigators have theorized, you have the phone that's off the hook and the phone is on the bathtub. And then you have what appears to be her filling up the pool in the backyard with the hose still running and of course, a hot iron on an ironing board. These are just things that normally people would not leave the house before turning off, putting up. I mean, there's there are real hazards to occur from leaving some of this stuff unattended.
46:54 Speaker 04 Yeah, and you know, maybe it was just one of those things. You could say, okay, she simply forgot it. But we have all that together, then you have the fact she didn't take her purse with her or her eyeglasses.
47:07 Speaker 03 The, the whole mystery of what happened in that house and why it was left like that is, is one of the biggest questions here. And I think the other one is, why did she wind up on that dirt road out in the middle of nowhere and get into that accident? It, it just seems like a spot she wasn't familiar with as far as her husband knew, sort of out in the middle of nowhere. So those two things for me are the biggest questions in this case. So then if we kind of take the, the road that this was a murder, you know, however it happened, whether somebody came into the house and they were able to get Eileen
47:51 Speaker 03 out into her car without being seen in this neighborhood, or it was a phone call that kind of lured her out of the house and then somebody got to her and killed her and made this look like a, a car crash, then you kind of have to delve into the motive. Why would someone want to kill this 51 year old wife and mother? And obviously a lot of times, if you can answer the question of motive, it goes a long way in helping law enforcement solve the case.
48:24 Speaker 04 And unfortunately, I think after all this time, the evidence is, is, you know, evidence in that car was destroyed. We touched on they probably didn't collect any evidence from the house. I don't hold out much hope that the case can even be solved. You know, Pat's not alive anymore. He can't be questioned again to see if he remembers anything. Um, so unfortunately, I think this is one of those cases that barring something extraordinary happening or a tip coming in, I don't know that we'll ever have answers.
48:56 Speaker 03 But the one thing you would have to say is that it's incredibly mysterious. The set of circumstances that we laid out.
49:05 Speaker 03 It's just mystery after mystery with the, with the biggest being, you know, what exactly happened? Who did it and why? But that's it for our episode on Aileen Conway. If you love the show, but haven't done so yet, take a minute, go out, give us a five star rating, leave a review. Also, keep telling your friends. Word of mouth about the podcast really goes a long way.
49:28 Speaker 04 If you want to find us on social media, we're on X with the handle at CriminologyPod. You can also find us on Facebook at Facebook.com/criminologypodcast. And you can join our Facebook discussion group, Criminology Podcast Discussion and Fans.
49:42 Speaker 03 So that's it for another episode of Criminology, but Morph and I will be back with all of you next Saturday night with a brand new episode. So until then, for Mike.
49:51 Speaker 04 And Morph.
49:52 Speaker 03 We'll talk to you next week.
49:53 Speaker 04 Take care, everyone.
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