Pod Insights Park Predators The Afterlife (Part 1) About this episode When a beautiful co-ed is brutally murdered on a popular hiking trail in Prescott National Forest in the summer of 1987, authorities are stumped on who the killer could be. The investigation drags on for decades until finally something breaks. This is the first of two episodes covering the murder of Cathy Sposito.
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1:02 Speaker 02 Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia Deambra. And the story I'm going to tell you about today was just so powerful and complex that I decided to bring it to you in two parts. I literally received more than 250 pages and documents from the investigating agency that worked this case in order to put these episodes together. And I guarantee you, it's a story you won't be able to stop thinking about for a long, long time. It happened in Prescott National Forest in Arizona, which bears the moniker "where the desert meets the pines." It's more than a million acres in size and is a go-to destination for hikers and campers because it sits in central Arizona and has a typically mild climate. According to the US Department of Agriculture's website,
1:45 Speaker 02 it became a national forest in 1907 and in the years after that, kept expanding its boundaries to include Verde and Tesea National Forests. It's known for having an abundance of archaeological sites that house art and artifacts that different people groups left behind hundreds and even thousands of years ago, as far back as the Pueblo Period. There's a rich history of generational human activity in the forest, which is one feature that attracts a lot of visitors and researchers. But in the spring of 1987, there was one person who came to the forest and left a mark so memorable and so disturbing that he would become the obsession of local authorities for more than three decades.
2:26 Speaker 02 This is the story of Kathy Spizito and her ability to serve her killer justice even from the afterlife. This is Park Predators.
3:16 Speaker 02 Around 8:10 in the morning on Saturday, June 13, 1987, a husband and wife named Roger and Opal were walking up the east trail of Thumbbutte in Prescott National Forest when they came across the bloody body of a young woman just lying on the trail. Roger reached out his hand to check for a pulse on the woman's neck, but didn't find one. He and Opal then quickly hiked back down to a nearby campground and flagged down a passing motorist who helped them report what they'd found to the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office. While the couple waited for authorities to arrive, they didn't sit idle. They returned to where the woman's body was so they could cover her with a wool blanket. But on their way, they encountered another hiker who said she'd stumbled across the body too.
3:59 Speaker 02 This woman had been walking down the trail back toward the parking lot when she noticed the victim. She stopped to check for a pulse, but just like Roger, discovered the woman didn't have one. Because this other hiker had been coming from the opposite direction of Roger and Opal, she'd covered ground that they hadn't. And about 130 yards or so further up the trail from the dead woman's body, she'd found a Craftsman brand ratchet wrench laying on the ground. Now, I imagine a metal wrench just laying out on a nature trail like that seemed out of place to this woman, which is probably why she picked it up. So when she had her encounter with Roger and Opal, they had their wool blanket in their hands and she had the ratchet wrench. Roger and Opal returned to the parking lot area and the female hiker went back to the
4:41 Speaker 02 body and laid the wrench down a few feet away from the deceased woman, so that responding deputies would find it, and I imagine so that she wouldn't be implicated in whatever had gone down. Thumbbuter Trailhead is about a 10-minute drive from downtown Prescott, so it didn't take too long before the sheriff's office got on scene about 9:00, 9:30 a.m. According to police reports, the initial witnesses had all left the scene by the time the homicide investigator arrived, so instead of interviewing them face-to-face, the main detective collected the wrench and wool blanket as evidence, then gathered the witnesses' written statements from Forest Service employees to follow up on later. After that, he began examining the victim and the crime scene. One of the first things he observed about her was that she was lying face-up with a
5:25 Speaker 02 blue canvas backpack still on, and it was tucked beneath her. Inside, authorities found a wallet with an ID that belonged to 23-year-old Catherine Anne Spizito, who's referred to throughout the source material as Kathy. Her chest, arms, face, and legs, pretty much her entire body, were covered in blood. Her long, dark hair was pulled up in a ponytail, and she was wearing red shorts, a pink and blue bikini top, white leather tennis shoes, and gray socks. She also had a bright yellow bicycle helmet fastened to her backpack. She didn't have any jewelry on, just a purple-colored ribbon tied around her neck. And just to clarify this detail a little more, because I initially had some questions about it, the source material doesn't indicate that this ribbon was a ligature or anything.
6:09 Speaker 02 I think it was just assumed it was being worn as some kind of accessory, like you'd wear a necklace. Anyway, in addition to all that stuff, a detective noticed that some of the blood on Kathy's body was dry, and there were a lot of intersecting and overlapping spatters and drops on her legs and arms, which suggested she might have been moved after being attacked. He also noticed blood had begun to settle in parts of her body that, based on her position, shouldn't have been there. This is what's known as lividity. The detective's suspicion was confirmed when he found a visible blood trail leading up the hiking path about 130 feet away from Kathy's body. This would have been headed toward where that female hiker found the ratchet wrench. The investigator theorized that Kathy had either been carried or perhaps dragged
6:54 Speaker 02 to her final resting place, or she'd managed to get there on her own before collapsing. He continued processing the crime scene and found several large and small spots of blood near her body, which only made him more certain that her assault had started somewhere else further up the trail and then ended at her final resting place. Unfortunately, the area where the crime happened was rocky and hard to navigate. And to make matters worse, the detective learned that several people, including first responding deputies, Forest Service employees, and visitors, had all walked on the trail above and below where Kathy was located. So it was difficult for him to know for sure whose shoe prints were whose and whether or not any footwear evidence on the trail might have belonged to a potential suspect.
7:37 Speaker 02 Despite this setback, the sheriff's office combed the area for additional clues, searching for anything that might be a lead. They didn't have to go too far to find something crucial. Sitting on the ground about six feet away from Kathy's body was a 22 caliber cartridge case that appeared to belong to a rifle. They also located two rocks further up the trail that had hair and blood on them. Shortly after 11:00 a.m., Kathy's body was removed from the crime scene and sent to the county morgue for an autopsy. While detectives waited for that examination to wrap up, they began interviewing people who'd been in the forest earlier that morning and walked the roughly two-mile trail along Thumb Butte. They spoke to an unhoused man who said he'd been reserving a picnic table for a family
8:20 Speaker 02 and friends of a woman he just met between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. He said he'd seen a woman matching Kathy's description ride her bike to the trailhead, chain it to a Forest Service sign, and start walking up the trail at approximately 7:00 a.m. He said they'd briefly chatted right before she took off, and about 15 to 30 minutes later, he heard a scream and what sounded like a firecracker going off. The noises didn't really alarm him, though, because, he said, he usually heard kids or people screaming while using the trail. A few minutes after hearing the scream, he saw a couple head up the trail, but shortly after that, they returned to the parking lot area where the picnic tables were and said they'd found a woman's body. Authorities also spoke with another couple who'd been on their way out of the area around
9:03 Speaker 02 7:00 a.m., and they confirmed a young woman riding a bike had passed them. Another witness also came forward and said she'd been finishing a run around that same time and remembered seeing a young woman go up the east trail. So by noon on the 13th, the homicide investigation was in full swing thanks to these witness statements and the physical evidence the detective had located on the trail. Authorities went to Kathy's address in Prescott to see if she had any next of kin in the area, but when they knocked on the door, no one answered. They spoke with one of her neighbors named Paula, who informed them that Kathy had a roommate named Christine, but she was at work and might not be home for a day or so. Around 1:30 PM, investigators got ahold of staff at Prescott College, who were able
9:46 Speaker 02 to provide them with contact information for Kathy's next of kin. Not long after that, detectives got in touch with her family members in New York. She was originally from Brooklyn but had moved to Prescott in 1985 to attend the local college there. She was scheduled to continue taking classes in the fall of 1987, and was interested in wilderness studies, rock climbing, and landscape exploration. During school, she'd started dating a guy named David, but after classes let out in mid-May, he'd moved to Alaska for a summer job. David moving away had apparently made Kathy feel a bit down, and according to police reports, at the start of June, she told her friends that she wanted to get away from Prescott for the summer, too.
10:28 Speaker 02 Based on what I read in the source material, it's clear that Kathy loved the outdoors and spending time in nature. She enjoyed camping, hiking, and riding her bike whenever she got the chance. And according to police reports, right before she was killed, she'd just returned from a road trip to Zion National Park with a friend. The pair had stayed in Utah from June 7th until the afternoon of Friday, June 12th, the day before the murder. While she'd been living in Prescott, she'd waitressed at a few different restaurants and eventually bought a car to get herself around town. At some point before she was killed, though, that car had started giving her problems, so she'd taken it to a local repair shop to get it worked on. According to what her friends told the sheriff's office, she'd resorted to using her bike as her main means of transportation until her car was operational again.
11:15 Speaker 02 A few hours after her body was found, the county's medical examiner performed her autopsy. He determined that she'd suffered multiple blunt force wounds to the top, sides, and back of her head, and a gunshot wound in her left eye. He believed the perpetrator or perpetrators had used rocks, or perhaps the ratchet wrench found at the crime scene, to beat Kathy to death. And towards the end of the assault, had chosen to shoot her. He also found cuts on her hands, head, and right ear that he believed had come from a sharp instrument like a knife. He suspected Kathy's body had been moved, but he wasn't sure exactly how, because he didn't find any evidence that she'd been dragged. So I think the conclusion there was that she most likely ran from her attacker after sustaining some initial injuries to her head.
12:00 Speaker 02 And she'd made it down the trail about 100 yards or so before the suspect or suspects caught up to her and delivered some final blows, before shooting her. And speaking of the gunshot wound, the ME's findings about that were pretty interesting, too. He determined that the bullet had traveled downward through her left eye while it was open, and it had lodged in the muscles of her neck, right below her skull. Small burns were around the entry wound, which the ME said meant the firearm had likely been held less than a foot from her face when it was fired. The examiner's final conclusion was that the gunshot wound alone probably wouldn't have killed her. It was the combination of blood loss and trauma to the brain that had caused her to die.
12:41 Speaker 02 There were no obvious signs of sexual assault, but the ME took vaginal samples from her body anyway, just to be sure. He also collected several hairs, fingernail clippings, and the 22 caliber bullet from her neck, and turned those over to investigators. He told law enforcement that he felt confident Kathy had been attacked while in a seated position, and that the suspect or suspects had stood over her while hitting her in the head. Because the trajectory of the bullet wound was slightly downward, he believed that whoever killed her had been standing over her when they fired.
13:13 Speaker 02 He estimated her body had only been laying on the trail for about 15 or 30 minutes before she was found. Which, to me, is sort of wild to think about, because that would mean whoever killed her had to have made a very, very quick covert getaway to be able to do everything they did and go undetected. I mean, especially because we know there were other visitors and witnesses in the area not long after Kathy was murdered. The next day, Sunday, June 14th, a detective interviewed Christine, Kathy's roommate. She explained that she'd been sharing a place with Kathy since September of 1986. And I imagine investigators figured Christine would probably know the most about Kathy's normal routine, you know, stuff like who her friends were and so on. But Christine told police that in early June, she'd been in the middle of moving in with
13:58 Speaker 02 her boyfriend Bob, so she hadn't actually been staying at her and Kathy's place very much. She'd also been working at a local girls' support shelter, which was a job that required her to sometimes spend the night and work back-to-back days before being able to come home. Christine told investigators that the last time she'd seen Kathy was on June 6th, roughly a week before the murder. They'd been at a barbecue together at a mutual friend's house. Even though her last sighting of Kathy wasn't super helpful to detectives, Christine was able to give them access to her roommate's personal effects, which included some papers. When investigators went through those documents, they found a letter that Kathy's boyfriend, David, had written to her earlier in the summer that explained he wanted to get involved
14:40 Speaker 02 in a pyramid scheme called "The Golden Circle" and maybe start a variation of it in Prescott. Christine clarified in her interview that there were several folks in town, including Kathy, herself, and her boyfriend Bob, who were all a part of this Golden Circle venture. The barbecue she and Kathy had attended the previous week was a gathering for everyone who was interested in doing it. According to police reports, investigators spoke with a few other people from the Golden Circle barbecue gathering, but nothing they said appeared to have moved the investigation forward. Paula, the woman who lived next door to Christine and Kathy, told detectives that on the morning of the crime, she'd been outside with her dog around 5 o'clock and noticed that Kathy's bicycle wasn't propped up against the side door of Kathy and Christine's house, which
15:23 Speaker 02 was unusual because that's where Paula said Kathy normally left it. This detail caused detectives to wonder where Kathy had been so early in the morning on Saturday. If her bike was gone at 5:00 a.m., two hours before witnesses saw her riding it into the Thumbute Trailhead area, did that mean she'd stayed somewhere else Friday night? And if so, had anyone seen her?
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17:31 Speaker 02 To find out more about Kathy's whereabouts, on Friday night, June 12, Detective spoke with the manager of a Mexican restaurant in Prescott that she worked at. And he told investigators that he'd spoken to her on the phone around 4:00 PM on Friday. She'd called to make sure she was on the schedule to start waitressing at 5:00 PM that night. But apparently their wires had gotten crossed and Kathy was actually supposed to have worked during the day on June 12, which meant by the time she called and spoke with her manager, she'd already missed her shift. So her boss ended up telling her not to worry about it. They'd gotten someone else to cover for her, and she didn't need to come in. Later that night, Kathy had also spoken on the phone with the friend she went to Zion National Park with earlier that week, and they talked about the issues with her car and her possibly buying a new one.
18:15 Speaker 02 During that conversation, Kathy didn't mention anything about going to Thumbute the following day. But the friend told police that he'd heard dishes and stuff clanging in the background and assumed Kathy was at her house doing chores since she'd been out all week with him. And just to clear up any questions here, Kathy and this guy who went to Zion National Park with her were just friends. He knew her roommate Christine and Christine's boyfriend Bob, which is how he got connected with Kathy. There's no indication from the source material there was anything more than a friendship between them. But the information he provided police about Kathy possibly doing her dishes at home was corroborated by Christine because she later told authorities that prior to Kathy going to Utah on the 7th, she'd left dirty dishes in their sink.
18:57 Speaker 02 But when Christine got home on the afternoon of June 13th, the day of the murder, she'd noticed that someone had done all the dishes. And because detectives knew Kathy had only been in Prescott for a matter of hours after her road trip to Zion, I think it's safe to say they assumed she was home Friday evening at some point. But when exactly she'd left to go out on her bike to Thumbute, or if she'd stopped anywhere before that, was what investigators needed to pin down. They ended up speaking with two men who reported seeing Kathy riding her bike in town between 5:00 PM and 5:30 PM on Friday. One of those witnesses had been at a gas station, and the other had been in a pizza shop and seen Kathy buy food and talk with the clerk of that store. Authorities continued to find and interview people who'd interacted with her Friday night,
19:42 Speaker 02 and they ended up speaking with a bartender at a restaurant called Murphy's, who said she'd seen Kathy having a beer and hanging out with a 29-year-old man named Jim on the night of June 12. This bartender told police that Jim and Kathy appeared to be on a date, and they'd stayed at Murphy's from roughly 9 to 10 o'clock that night. Another restaurant employee remembered the same thing. Over the course of more interviews with some of Kathy and Jim's friends, police discovered that she may have gone home with him on the night of June 12 after leaving Murphy's, but there were some discrepancies about that.
20:15 Speaker 02 For one thing, the bartender who remembered seeing Jim and Kathy on their so-called date was sure that it happened on the night before she was killed. But when detectives spoke with Jim, he explained that he and Kathy had hung out at Murphy's on June 5th, a little over a week before the crime. He said she'd called him that evening and asked to hang out. While they were together at Murphy's, she mentioned she didn't want to be alone. So they'd gone back to his place and eventually had sex, but the next day, he drove her home. They'd hung out inside her house for a short time, but then he left. He swore that was the last time he'd seen her. Jim and his roommate told investigators that in the weeks leading up to the crime, Kathy had seemed down, like something or someone was bothering her.
20:58 Speaker 02 He and his roommate said they thought she might have even been fearful someone was after her. When investigators questioned Jim, though, about what he was doing on the morning of Saturday, June 13th, he said he'd woken up and worked on a car in his driveway, and then around noon, had driven his motorcycle to Thumbbutte to see if anyone he knew was hanging out there. He claimed when he arrived, police were already there and crime scene tape was up. Something that kind of supported Jim's account of not being with Kathy on the night of June 12th was that authorities had spoken with a group of campers who remembered bumping into her inside a store near the National Forest between 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM. The same timeframe she was supposedly with Jim at Murphy's. So that timeline conflicted with the bartender's statements, for sure.
21:41 Speaker 02 Anyway, a guy in the group of campers who'd spotted Kathy said she was alone. He'd asked her if she wanted to come hang out with him and his friends for the night in a clearing known as Wolf Creek, but Kathy said, "No, thanks." She'd mentioned she wanted to visit the Thumbbutte Trail the following day. Based on what I read in the police record for this case, this Jim guy was someone investigators focused on initially, and I mean, they kind of had good reason to. Because he made a couple of very odd statements that had gotten law enforcement's hackles up.
22:12 Speaker 02 For one thing, one of the witnesses who'd been leaving the Thumbute Trail area the morning of the crime and saw Kathy ride up on her bike, told police that they'd also seen a guy driving a late 60s Chevy sedan in the same direction as her. When authorities showed this witness a photo lineup, he picked out Jim's photo as the person who'd been behind the wheel of that car. Adding fuel to detectives' suspicions about Jim was the fact that the year, make, and model of the Chevy in question matched the kind of vehicle his roommate owned at the time. On top of that, his landlords told police that two days after Kathy's murder, he'd mentioned that he'd been allowed into the county morgue and viewed her body. Oh, and when he'd admitted to hooking up with Kathy, Jim reportedly had a steady girlfriend.
22:56 Speaker 02 Naturally, investigators tried speaking with his girlfriend, but they never got ahold of her. Additionally, two other people who'd had conversations with Jim after the murder said he declared that he was probably the last person to see Kathy. Yeah, I know what many of you are probably thinking. This guy is a red, red, red flag. And trust me, I get it. But Jim wasn't the only man in Prescott that authorities had to consider as a possible person of interest, not by a long shot. People who knew Kathy said she was friendly, well-liked, and easily drew people to her. Authorities interviewed a lot of men in town, including Jim's roommate Gary and Kathy's boyfriend David, but he could prove he was in Alaska when the murder happened. Law enforcement also considered the unhoused man who lived in the national forest as a
23:40 Speaker 02 person of interest, but ultimately didn't find anything that pointed to him being involved. According to police reports, one of Kathy's friends from college told detectives that she and Kathy had both done some modeling for a local painter, and she thought Kathy had even posed nude a few times. When detectives interviewed that artist, he was cooperative and confirmed that, yes, he'd photographed Kathy twice, but had never produced any paintings from the pictures he took. However, he later told reporter Jennifer Arp with the Prescott Courier that he was attracted to Kathy's face, and he had actually painted several portraits of her, some of which he later hung in his home and personal gallery after the crime. There was another local man who confided in a female friend of his
24:22 Speaker 02 that he enjoyed sitting and watching young women at Prescott College and fantasizing about them. He told his friend that he knew who Kathy was and referred to her by some sexual nicknames that I don't even want to mention here because they're just too much. But this guy was actually an old friend of Christine's, Kathy's roommate, and he told the person he confided in that he was glad she'd moved in with Christine so that he could be closer to her. I know, absolute creep. But detectives spoke with this man, and he was open about his familiarity with Kathy. He said he'd asked her out once, but she turned him down. He was a member of the Golden Circle Pyramid Scheme group that Kathy was a part of, and over time, he'd developed a crush on her. He clarified that the sexualized comments he'd made about her were just his way of describing her as beautiful.
25:06 Speaker 02 He swore to detectives that he would never have hurt her. But as disturbing as all that was, though, it didn't even come close to a strange encounter one of Kathy's acquaintances had with an unknown man on Thumbbut Trail about three weeks before the murder. That story and several other witness accounts from the day of the crime were what would really get law enforcement's attention and refocus the investigation.
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26:40 Speaker 02 Two days after the crime, the sheriff's office got a call from a woman named Jean who told detectives that she'd been hiking with her dog on Thumbbut Trail on the morning of Saturday, June 13, and heard something concerning. She said around 8:00 a.m., towards the end of her walk, she'd stopped at a water faucet to give her dog a drink, and she'd heard what sounded like a woman's voice cry out, "Help me." Those words were immediately followed by utterances of someone in pain and noises that Jean described as sounding like "twack, twack, twack", followed by silence. Jean said that what she'd heard concerned her so much that she actually called out towards the trail to see if everything was all right, but no one replied. She then asked a guy sitting at a picnic table in the campground to go up the trail with her
27:24 Speaker 02 so that they could investigate the source of the sounds, but he refused. The guy at the picnic table, by the way, was the unhoused man who lived in the forest that police got a statement from earlier. After taking down Jean's information, detectives then spoke with the woman who'd been hiking alone and picked up the ratchet wrench on the trail. She'd given a brief statement on the first day of the investigation, but then left the national forest. Her full account wasn't taken down by the sheriff's office until days after the crime. During this longer interview, she told police that while walking the trail, she'd heard some strange sounds, but her account was a little bit different than Jean's because she'd been further up the trail. This witness said she'd heard what sounded like an argument between a man and a woman, followed by a gunshot.
28:08 Speaker 02 She initially suspected something was wrong, but after thinking about it, she decided to write it off as a couple quarreling or maybe kids hunting squirrels. She wasn't sure if the sounds were even connected to one another, but she had managed to catch two words the female voice had said: "Help me." Clearly, this witness wanted to believe the best in the situation. Someone who didn't take that same posture, though, and was much more suspicious like me, was an acquaintance of Kathy's named Janet. She told investigators that about three weeks before the murder, she'd been hiking the Thumbbute Trail alone between 7 and 8 o'clock in the morning, when she encountered a guy that made her feel unsettled. She told detectives that the man was large, tall, had straight blond hair, and wore glasses.
28:53 Speaker 02 He was carrying a two-foot-long leather case with a shoulder strap, and just something about him scared her. She said she'd passed by him on her way up the trail, and when she'd come back down, she said she felt so frightened that she actually picked up two rocks in each hand just in case the guy came toward her. But thankfully, he didn't try anything, and she made it out safe and sound.
29:14 Speaker 02 After gathering those interviews, authorities were about two weeks or so into their investigation, and the Arizona Department of Public Safety's crime lab had new information for them. DPS staff had determined that the bullet pulled from Kathy's body was consistent with having been fired from a 22-caliber Marlin brand lever-action rifle. The sheriff's office had also sent in several hairs and fibers collected from her body, and those results indicated that the items were not associated with Kathy, which meant theoretically, they could have belonged to her killer or killers. While the sheriff's office continued their efforts, Kathy's parents and two brothers in New York mourned her death. They'd held a funeral on June 20 and buried her in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. As news of the crime spread,
29:58 Speaker 02 it rocked people who were living in Prescott, because the Thumbbute Trailhead was popular and had very little crime. According to a broadcast by AZ Family that aired after the crime, people who were walking in the recreation area said they were afraid to hike alone in light of what had happened. The terrain around the trail Kathy had been killed on was full of thick brush and trees, which made it difficult to see someone who might only be a few feet away. One visitor told the news outlet that whoever committed the crime probably used the landscape to hide in. Months passed, though, and then years, and no new updates in the case came. Police reports indicate that Jim and his roommate Gary stayed on investigators’ radar as possible suspects throughout the 1990s and all the way through the year 2000.
30:43 Speaker 02 They’re even still mentioned regularly in investigators’ reports from 2014. And that’s because the cold case detective who was reviewing the case at that time saw that in 1987, the ME had noticed that one of Kathy’s teeth had been punched out. The examiner surmised that perhaps her attacker’s fist had made contact with her teeth and possibly been cut in the process. So he’d taken oral swabs of her mouth before releasing her body for burial. And so, the detective in 2014 wondered if maybe the killer’s DNA might still be on some of those oral swabs. Turns out, he was on to something. Because additional forensic testing in 2014 identified an unknown male DNA profile from blood left in Kathy’s mouth.
31:27 Speaker 02 But when it was compared to Jim, who voluntarily provided a DNA sample, it wasn’t a match. And so, it seems like at that point, he was cleared. His roommate from 1987, Gary, wasn’t as cooperative, and he ultimately refused to give the sheriff’s office his DNA. But they eventually pulled a piece of his discarded floss from somewhere and had it tested. The results also excluded him as being involved. I imagine investigators were a bit down at that point, because those were two guys they had focused on. But they remained dedicated, and when I say dedicated, I mean the sheriff’s office left no stone unturned. They even revisited that local artist who’d taken nude photos of Kathy as a potential suspect.
32:09 Speaker 02 But that guy had died in 1992, so instead of getting a DNA sample from him, detectives swabbed his brother, who was living in Hawaii. However, familial comparison eventually ruled the artist out as well.
32:23 Speaker 02 Around this same timeframe, so the 20 teens, the detectives also had Kathy's bike helmet reviewed for latent prints. The crime lab found one, but it didn't belong to anyone in Arizona's automated fingerprint identification system. So that evidence was basically a dead end. A few years later, in 2016, Kathy's brother Sal and a detective from the sheriff's office traveled to Thumbute Trailhead together and walked the path Kathy had been killed on. Sal later told 12 News's Erica Stapleton that despite how beautiful the area was, it only brought him pain. In that same interview, he said that whoever murdered his sister must have had a lot of rage and anger to do what they did to her. And he just hoped that one day, the mystery would finally be solved.
33:06 Speaker 02 By that point, he was really the only person left speaking publicly about his sister's case. Their dad had passed away in 2010, and their mom died a few years after that. Sal told Erica Stapleton that Kathy's death had impacted their mom the most, and he believed she died of a broken heart from never knowing who killed her daughter. Unfortunately, after that, Kathy's story just faded from mainstream news outlets. The case itself, though, never left the hearts of people living in Prescott, who were around in 1987, or folks who'd known Kathy as a teenager and young woman. According to reporting by A and E, one of Kathy's high school classmates visited Prescott years after the murder and saw a poster of her in a store window.
33:48 Speaker 02 Just seeing that reminder that the case was still unsolved prompted this former classmate to write an email to Kathy's high school alumni group, asking them to keep her soul and case in their prayers. As part of the cold case investigation, detectives even interviewed one of Kathy's former boyfriends from before she even moved to Arizona. And he said that for the most part, Kathy lived a good lifestyle. She didn't do hard drugs that he knew of and only drank on occasion. He believed she'd moved to Prescott to enjoy more of the outdoors and escape city life. In 2017, around the 30th anniversary of the crime, the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office tried to renew interest in the case by partnering with Yavapai Silent Witness and offering a $10,000 reward for information.
34:32 Speaker 02 Detectives specifically said they wanted to locate a small caliber firearm they believed had been used in the murder and might have been discarded afterwards in the forest around the Thumbute and Castle Canyon area. They wanted anyone who might have found a gun matching that description to come forward. But it doesn't appear that anyone did, because more time passed without answers. However, the sheriff's office didn't give up hope that somehow, a new clue would surface. In the background, things were happening. A volunteer crew of cold case investigators had been assembled, and they were meticulously rereading the old case reports and doing an inventory of what original evidence could be retested for DNA.
35:13 Speaker 02 Between 2017 and 2018, new forensic testing results came in and revealed there was an unknown male DNA profile beneath one of Kathy's fingernails that didn't match anyone in Arizona's CODIS database. Test results for one of the rocks believed to be a murder weapon also had unknown male DNA on it. But it was a mixture of two profiles, one of which couldn't exclude Kathy as a possible contributor. DNA results from the bike helmet and ratchet wrench were unfortunately inconclusive due to insufficient DNA. But that would change in just a matter of years, as new technology came into the picture. Waiting right around the corner was the big break authorities needed.
35:54 Speaker 02 A break that would cause them to rethink everything they'd ever known about this case. And make them look at crimes exactly like it, as well as several new suspects. I'm unpacking all of that in Part Two.
36:12 Speaker 02 Park Predators is an AudioChuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, @parkpredators.
36:30 Speaker 04 So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?
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37:06 Speaker 04 One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.
37:27 Speaker 06 It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory. A baby factory.
37:34 Speaker 04 Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.
37:42 Speaker 02 Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp. That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun. I started crying.
37:50 Speaker 04 I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into? I'm Ava Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.
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