Pod Insights Park Predators The Neighbor About this episode When a 38-year-old waitress vanished on a weekend trip to Mount Rushmore in August 2013, red flags went up right away for her friends and family. But the road to justice for her case would take many winding turns until finally it ended with a long-awaited conviction.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hi, park enthusiasts. It's Delia. If you listen to Park Predators, you already know that sometimes the most beautiful places can hide the darkest secrets. But what happens when the danger isn't miles from civilization? It's in your community, and sometimes even in your own backyard. On Crime Junkie, hosts Ashley and Britt dive into real cases every week, from missing persons to unsolved murders, breaking down what we know, what we don't, and the details that still don't sit right. If you care about the stories behind the headlines and the victims at the center of them, you'll want to check out Crime Junkie. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:40 Speaker 00 Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And the case I'm going to tell you about today takes place near Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills National Forest. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's website, Black Hills is 1.2 million acres in size and covers parts of northeast Wyoming and western South Dakota. When you look across this landscape, the hills and mountains appear very dark, thus the name "Black Hills." To soak in the scenery, most people travel on Iron Mountain Road, which is known for having one-lane tunnels and what are referred to as "the pigtail bridges." For those of you who don't know what that is, basically, it's a uniquely engineered wooden bridge that allows the roadway to curve or circle around on itself in order
1:23 Speaker 00 for drivers to easily ascend or descend in elevation. There's a picture of what the pigtail bridges look like on the blog post for this episode, if you want a point of reference. I'm not going to spend too much time geeking out over bridge architecture with you, even though I do find it fascinating. But in a way, the design of these iconic bridges mirrors some of the realities of the criminal investigation that took place in today's story. The phrase "what goes around comes back around" comes to mind when I think about how this case played out. It may have taken a while, but in the end, the violent path this story's perpetrator was blazing for himself caught back up with him. And no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't outmaneuver or evade the truth about himself any longer.
2:08 Speaker 00 This is Park Predators.
2:51 Speaker 00 On Thursday, August 22nd, 2013, a woman named Nancy Herman, who lived in Custer, South Dakota, was in her car when she came across her friend, 38-year-old Michelle Will. Nancy had met Michelle about six months earlier, when Michelle came into a women's shelter that Nancy used to work for, called Women Escaping a Violent Environment. Michelle regularly volunteered at the facility, and over time, she and Nancy had grown close. When Nancy spotted her friend on that Thursday, she offered her a ride, because she knew Michelle didn't have a driver's license or own a car. A short time later, when the two women parted ways, Nancy didn't give much more thought to their interaction, because it was seemingly just like every other time they'd hung out.
3:34 Speaker 00 According to what Nancy would later write online, it seems like some of the stuff they talked about was how excited Michelle was for an upcoming weekend trip she had planned to Mount Rushmore with a guy she'd been seeing. She was really looking forward to shopping at specialty stores in that area, dining at some of the local restaurants, and even riding a train to nearby Hill City. After the weekend passed, Michelle's coworkers at a place called Wrangler Restaurant expected to see her for her shift on Tuesday, August 27th. But according to police reports, she never showed up. One of her colleagues, named Carrie, felt that Michelle missing work was so out of character, she decided to call the Custer County Sheriff's Office, and asked them to go by Michelle's apartment in Custer to do a welfare check.
4:17 Speaker 00 When a deputy arrived at Michelle's unit in the Valley High Apartments and was shown inside by the building manager, he didn't see signs of a disturbance or anything that pointed to a potential crime, so he left. A couple more days passed and nothing really happened. Michelle's whereabouts remained unknown, and unfortunately, because she was an adult and no one had filed a missing persons report for her, there wasn't much law enforcement could do to investigate her absence. According to reporting by Hill City Provincial News, Michelle had come to South Dakota to get away from her past and personal issues she dealt with in Texas. Her sister Amanda Dillon told the Custer County Chronicle, quote, "She has always been a really wild, free spirit.
4:59 Speaker 00 She was very independent and did what she wanted to do when she wanted to do it." End quote. At the time of her disappearance, Michelle had two young sons who she'd left with relatives to care for. About a week after she vanished, investigators' attention got pulled to a new mystery. Around 4 o'clock in the afternoon on Saturday, August 31st, a man who was visiting Black Hills National Forest, taking pictures along mile marker 54 on Iron Mountain Road near Mount Rushmore, noticed that there was something unusual lying in the distance. The object he saw appeared to just be sitting out in the open next to one of the pigtail bridges. As he, I imagine, slowly processed what he was seeing, he realized it was exactly what
5:43 Speaker 00 it looked like: a decomposing body. So this guy reported what he'd found to local authorities, and within about an hour, units from Custer County State Park and Pennington County Sheriff's Office arrived on the scene. A quick look at the remains showed they were partially skeletonized from the waist up, but was indeed a person who was wearing only Capri-style sweatpants and a t-shirt. Investigators cordoned off the scene, took pictures, and searched for any other evidence that might be of value. After that, the body was transported out of the national forest and sent off for an autopsy. Meanwhile, back in Custer, Michelle Will's coworker Carrie had grown increasingly concerned about her friend. I'm not sure if she'd seen or read the news about a body being discovered in Black Hills
6:28 Speaker 00 or what, but either way, she decided on September 4th to officially report Michelle missing. The Custer County Sheriff's Office took that report, and Carrie told deputies that the last time she laid eyes on Michelle was around 1:00 or 1:30 PM on Saturday, August 24th. Carrie said she dropped Michelle off at her apartment after work, fully expecting to see her again three days later on the 27th. Carrie explained to authorities that something else that made her feel Michelle's absence was very suspicious was that she'd failed to pick up a paycheck that was waiting for her at Wrangler Restaurant. On top of that, Carrie had checked in with Michelle's sister Amanda, who lived in Custer, and Amanda told Carrie that the last time she'd communicated with Michelle was also on August 24th.
7:12 Speaker 00 Michelle had texted her to let her know that she was on her way to the nearby town of Keystone and would touch base later. The day after Michelle's missing persons report was filed, a doctor at Rapid City Regional Hospital conducted an autopsy on the body that had been found in the National Forest. According to court records and investigative reports, the doctor determined that the person was a female and had been out in the elements for several days. He didn't see any obvious signs of trauma on the remains, but did note that the woman's hyoid bone and soft tissue in her neck and upper body were gone. From the waist down, there was still some soft tissue and skin that he could examine, which is what I think allowed him to draw samples for toxicology.
7:53 Speaker 00 Results from the tox screen indicated the woman had a BAC of .086, but besides that, no other substances were found in her system. A closer look at her remains showed that a section of her left collar bone had been damaged by some type of sharp item, but even with that peculiar discovery, the victim was in such an advanced state of decomposition that the doctor doing the autopsy couldn't say for sure if she'd been murdered, had fallen accidentally, or died from some other cause. So he unfortunately had to label both her manner and cause of death as undetermined. The next day, September 6th, investigators with Custer County Sheriff's Office got in touch with Pennington County Sheriff's Office, since that's the jurisdiction where the remains were found.
8:38 Speaker 00 The two agencies discussed the fact that Michelle Will was a missing person from Custer, and when the Pennington County folks learned a bit more information, they felt confident that Michelle's general characteristics were similar to the body that they'd yet to identify. So, a few days later, to see if their hunch was correct, authorities compared known impressions of Michelle's fingerprints to the human remains, and discovered they were a match. It was official: the woman who'd been found dead along Iron Mountain Road was for sure Michelle Will. The same day she was ID'd, investigators with the South Dakota Department of Criminal Investigation and Custer County Sheriff's Office started looking into a man named Richard Smits. Turns out, he was the guy who Michelle had recently been dating.
9:22 Speaker 00 Richard had a long criminal record in Custer County and Pennington County dating back to 1988, for crimes including forgery, multiple burglaries, domestic violence, aggravated battery, fraud, embezzlement, and disorderly conduct. According to investigative reports, several women who knew Michelle, including Nancy Herman and Carrie, told deputies that Michelle and Richard had a history of domestic violence. Nancy said that in the spring of 2013, Michelle had arrived in South Dakota after moving from Colleen, Texas, and before that had lived in Wisconsin. But after only a few weeks of staying at her sister's place in Custer, she'd gotten kicked out. So, she'd moved into a women's shelter.
10:03 Speaker 00 In May, she left the shelter and moved to the Valley High Apartment Complex. Not long after that, Nancy said she noticed that whenever she saw Michelle, she'd have bruises around her eyes. Nancy immediately suspected that Richard, the guy Michelle often hung out with, had caused the injuries. But, Michelle always denied it. She would say things like she'd fallen, or provide some other explanation.
10:28 Speaker 00 Another one of Michelle's friends told authorities that she'd also seen Michelle with a black eye and bruises in the past. There was even one instance where Michelle had lamented about her entire body hurting. But when this friend asked what happened, Michelle told her that she'd injured herself while drinking and taking sleeping pills. Like Nancy, though, this friend always suspected that Richard was to blame for Michelle's pain. The last interaction this friend had with Michelle was fairly positive, though. According to what she told investigators, on the afternoon of Friday, August 23rd, she'd been hanging out with Michelle and Michelle was in really good spirits. She said that she'd just paid her rent early for the next few months and was going on and on about her two beloved cats, Abby and Miss Snicketty. And these cats are kind of an important detail, because according to Michelle's friend,
11:13 Speaker 00 who was interviewed by investigators, Michelle specifically told her that she would never leave her animals for a long period of time without making arrangements for someone to care for them. Michelle also informed this friend during their last conversation that she would never move back to Wisconsin or Texas. When Michelle's coworker Carrie gave another interview to investigators, she said similar things as Michelle's other friends. Richard was definitely Michelle's boyfriend, and it was obvious to everyone around them that he was likely the source of Michelle's mysterious injuries from time to time. Carrie told investigators that on September 7th, so two weeks after Michelle had last been seen, but before she was publicly identified as deceased, Richard had come into Wrangler
11:55 Speaker 00 Restaurant and shown her a text message that he claimed Michelle had sent him on Sunday, August 25th. According to Carrie, the message said something to the effect that Michelle had left South Dakota for Texas. But Carrie had doubts about that, because she knew Michelle very well and knew that she would not just up and leave her cats to fend for themselves. Plus, Michelle needed money to make a big trip like that, and Carrie knew she didn't have much money. Plus, she'd left a paycheck behind, so nothing about Michelle going to Texas made sense to Carrie. I mean, there was one conversation the two friends had where Michelle had told her she might travel out of state around Christmas time to visit her children, but it doesn't seem like any concrete plans were made to do that, at least not that Carrie was aware of.
12:41 Speaker 00 Other acquaintances of Michelle and Richard's told investigators that they felt Richard's behavior after Michelle disappeared was unusually obsessive. He would constantly ask if people knew what happened to her, and it got to the point where one friend told him that if he was so concerned about her, he should just contact law enforcement. But Richard never did. Another person told authorities that prior to Michelle's disappearance, they'd personally witnessed Richard behave stalkish toward Michelle, and said he'd met her the way he met a lot of other women in his life: by acting as a designated driver and hanging around local bars and casinos. He would often keep Michelle's money from her, like, in his possession, and whenever she wanted a drink or cigarettes, he would dole it out to her and ration how much she could spend. So after learning all this information,
13:26 Speaker 00 authorities felt it was definitely time to speak with Richard. And boy, did he have a lot to say.
13:38 Speaker 01 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.
13:58 Speaker 02 It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.
14:05 Speaker 01 Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.
14:13 Speaker 03 Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.
14:16 Speaker 04 That's the one time that we called the cops, because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun. I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?
14:26 Speaker 01 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.
14:42 Speaker 00 On Tuesday, September 10th, about three weeks after Michelle was reported missing, but a few days before authorities publicly announced her remains had been identified, investigators sat down with Richard at his apartment, which was right across the hall from Michelle's. He told authorities that he'd been really worried about Michelle ever since she went missing. He quickly presented them with the text message he claimed she'd sent him during the early morning hours of Sunday, August 25th. You know, the one that informed him she was going to Texas. He said that on the evening of Saturday, August 24th, they'd been hanging out together in her apartment while she used his laptop to surf the internet, but then she got a phone call from someone in Texas that made her upset. Afterwards, they ran an errand together, and then around 9:00 PM, he walked back to his
15:26 Speaker 00 place and went to bed. A few hours later, he woke up around 1:00 AM because he said he got a text from Michelle stating that she was leaving for Texas. Richard told investigators that he believed Michelle had $800 or so that she was going to take with her on her trip. Interestingly, on the day that Custer County had previously sent a deputy to do a welfare check for Michelle, Richard had been home during that time, and actually gone into her apartment with the apartment building's manager and the deputy. He said he looked around and saw that a duffel bag and purse which belonged to Michelle were gone, but her cellphone charger was still there. After several more days passed without seeing her, he said that's when he started to grow more concerned. According to investigative reports, Richard told authorities that Michelle frequently
16:10 Speaker 00 drank alcohol in large quantities and had lost her driver's license after getting a DUI. He claimed that she also had an up-and-down relationship with her sister Amanda, but as of late, he'd gotten the impression that the sisters had started to mend things between them. When investigators asked him about his relationship with Michelle, Richard told them that they'd had a sexual relationship for a little while, but then that had ended towards the latter part of July. "Really," Richard said, "he just tried to take care of Michelle and make sure she got home safe at night." The day before she disappeared, he said Michelle had actually asked him to marry her, but he turned her down. He denied ever harming her or being involved in domestic violence incidents while they were together. He did admit, however, that he was likely the last person to see her on August 24th.
16:55 Speaker 00 He said about a week after she vanished, he learned that a body had been found in Black Hills National Forest off of Iron Mountain Road, and he really hoped it wasn't Michelle.
17:05 Speaker 00 When investigators inquired about his laptop, which he said Michelle had used on the evening of August 24th, Richard claimed that he didn't have it anymore. He said he'd spilled soda on it a few days after Michelle used it, and it broke, so he tossed it in the trash. Towards the end of the interview, an investigator informed Richard that law enforcement was going to obtain cellphone tower data to look into the alibi that he'd provided, which was that he was home all night on August 24th, after 9:00 PM, and not someplace else. According to investigative reports, Richard's response to being told that was to get up, walk to his kitchen, and get some water. Then, he began lamenting that medication he took for his heart was beginning to affect him. Authorities didn't have enough to arrest him, but they were definitely suspicious of him.
17:50 Speaker 00 So they executed a search warrant on Michelle's apartment, Richard's apartment, his cellphone, and his Jeep. The apartments and Jeep were processed with luminol, but only a blanket in Michelle's place lit up indicating the presence of blood. Investigators seized that item as evidence and kept going. Inside Richard's place, they found two women's necklaces in his trash can, but not a whole lot else. On his cellphone, there was an outgoing call dated for the afternoon of August 24th that had been placed to a motel in Keystone, called the Brookside Motel. But investigators just made note of that and planned to follow up later. A few hours after his first interview, investigators took another run at him and confronted him with the fact that multiple people claimed he'd been abusive toward Michelle,
18:33 Speaker 00 but Richard continued to deny the allegations. So authorities tried a different tactic. They revealed that Michelle was dead and was the person who'd been discovered off of Iron Mountain Road. Reports don't say what kind of reaction Richard had when he learned that information, but nevertheless, he denied being involved and told investigators that he hadn't visited Iron Mountain Road in years. He came clean a little more, though, regarding his relationship with Michelle. He admitted that he may have been mentally abusive to her by calling her derogatory names, but stopped short of confessing to ever physically harming her. Still, investigators weren't buying it.
19:13 Speaker 00 According to court documents, Richard had been a married man for about six years, but divorced his wife in 2002, not long after she came forward with an allegation against him for trying to kill her while holding her head between a toilet and a bathtub and attempting to break her neck. The same year as his divorce, he was charged with violently assaulting another woman, and ultimately pleaded guilty to that act of domestic violence a few months later in 2003. Court records from that case show he wasn't required to spend any time behind bars or pay fines or victims' compensation. Court records and Custer County Sheriff's Office reports from January 2013, just months before Michelle vanished and was found dead. Richard had dated a woman named Bonnie, who quickly moved in with him.
19:57 Speaker 00 After a few months of sharing a place, though, Bonnie had tried to break things off with Richard, and told him she was seeing another guy. Toward the end of that conversation, as Bonnie was grabbing her backpack to leave, she said Richard jumped off his couch, grabbed her by the neck, shoved her onto a bed, and tried to break her neck by violently twisting it. Somehow, though, she managed to push him off her, get out of his apartment, and run to a friend's unit in the same building for help. Folks inside that apartment then called police to report the assault. Richard was quickly arrested for that crime, but ended up getting his charges reduced to disorderly conduct. He eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 days in jail, which were all suspended. He was also ordered to pay a few hundred dollars in fines and be on his best behavior,
20:40 Speaker 00 as well as attend and complete a domestic abuse program or anger management course. Whether he did that, though, is not information that was available in the court records I obtained. What is in the documents, though, is that Bonnie told deputies that the day after Richard tried to kill her, his mom came to visit her and told her all about Richard's past violent history with women. Richard's mom apologized to Bonnie for the way her son was, but by that point, it was a little too late, in my opinion.
21:09 Speaker 00 Just like Michelle, Bonnie was also a new transplant from Wisconsin when she met Richard. She'd come to South Dakota to spread the ashes of her late husband, and because of circumstances in her life, chose to leave her teenage daughter with relatives back home. Not long after arriving in Custer County, she'd met Richard and their relationship had moved quickly from boyfriend and girlfriend to sharing an apartment together. Another interesting crossover between Bonnie and Michelle's lives, aside from their connection to Richard, is that after Richard was arrested for assaulting Bonnie in January 2013, Custer County deputies gave her an informational pamphlet for a women's shelter in town. And that shelter was none other than Women Escaping a Violent Environment, also known
21:51 Speaker 00 by the acronym WEAVE, which was the same women's shelter Michelle had stayed for a period of time and volunteered at. So with all this background information and documented incidents of Richard abusing other women, investigators who suspected he might be involved in Michelle's death were not willing to back down. They wanted to know why, if he was so concerned for Michelle's well-being after she disappeared, Richard hadn't contacted police. They suggested that perhaps he was the person who'd used Michelle's cellphone to text himself that message about her leaving for Texas. But one of Richard's responses to this line of questioning was, "How would I get her out of the apartment and into my open-top Jeep and drive her to Iron Mountain Road?"
22:35 Speaker 00 Which to me is a rather telling statement, because it was almost like Richard was suggesting that whatever had happened to Michelle had occurred in her apartment, or maybe even his apartment. But with no physical evidence to support that, authorities just had to make a note of it and move on. To prove he was telling the truth, though, Richard agreed to take a polygraph, because he claimed he had nothing to hide. That test was administered the next day, and the results indicated he had answered deceptively when he responded with the answer "no" to the following questions: "Did you cause Michelle's death?" and "Concerning Michelle, did you cause her death?" After he failed the polygraph, investigators interviewed him a third time, but Richard denied leaving his apartment on the evening of August 24th,
23:18 Speaker 00 and maintained that he had nothing to do with Michelle’s death. Authorities confronted him about the fact that his internet activity showed he was on Facebook at 2:30 a.m. on August 25th, which was the time he’d previously said he was sound asleep after taking sleeping pills. They also confronted him about the fact that it seemed sort of convenient that the laptop he said Michelle had used the night she disappeared was no longer around to back up his version of events. But Richard would not break. He maintained his innocence and ended the interview. On September 12th, the day after authorities had their third interview with Richard, investigators followed up on the call his cellphone records indicated he’d placed to Brookside Motel in Keystone on the day Michelle vanished.
24:02 Speaker 00 An employee at that establishment recognized a photo of Richard and handed authorities copies of a room reservation slip and a credit card receipt that had been signed by Michelle. This employee said that Richard had called the motel on the 24th and made a reservation earlier that day. When he and Michelle arrived, she had paid with a prepaid credit card. The motel employee told investigators that Richard and Michelle, who she believed was his girlfriend, had checked in around 5:30 p.m. and stayed the night, but at some point they complained the power had gone out and were moved to a different room. On Sunday, August 25th, the motel employee never saw Richard or Michelle pass back through the lobby. But the hotel’s owner did interact with Richard. The owner told investigators that she had gone to Richard and Michelle’s new room
24:46 Speaker 00 on Sunday morning to apologize for the power going out the night before. While speaking with Richard in the doorway, she never saw Michelle because she said the conversation she had with Richard was very brief. In addition to these witnesses, there were even more people who positively identified Richard and Michelle as guests of the motel on the night of the 24th and had seen them at a nearby bar. They also interviewed Richard’s prior girlfriend, Bonnie, who told them that at 1:30 in the morning on Sunday, the 25th, Richard had called her and informed her that he was in Wyoming and was sleeping in his Jeep. I know, it was odd to me, too, to learn that Richard and Bonnie were still in contact with one another after their past history of domestic violence. But be that as it may, Bonnie said she thought it was super strange, too, that Richard had
25:30 Speaker 00 rang her in the middle of the night just to let her know where he was. Despite that, though, the next day at 10 a.m., Bonnie agreed to join Richard to run errands in Rapid City. She said they stopped at an auto parts store, a Hardee's and a Walmart, where she thought he bought a new phone card and antifreeze. Bonnie told investigators that during their trips to all these different places, she was very uncomfortable. She said Richard had an unusually large amount of cash with him and was playing weird music and wasn't acting like his normal self. At one point, he touched her leg, which she didn't like, and then after a few hours of driving around, he just dropped her off at a casino. The next day, investigators interviewed Richard again, and this time, his story changed.
26:13 Speaker 00 When confronted with the fact that witnesses had seen him and Michelle at Brookside Motel on the night of August 24th, Richard came clean. He told authorities that he had gone to the motel with Michelle to spend time together after she proposed to him and he turned her down. But once they got there, Michelle had decided to go out drinking, and he stayed in their room. He now claimed that the last time he saw her, she was drunk and headed toward a bar seemingly not far from their motel. But investigators were not convinced. They came at him with everything they had, but Richard wouldn't admit to anything and eventually lawyered up. A little over two weeks later, Richard's mom contacted authorities with new information that gave their investigation a bit of a boost.
26:58 Speaker 00 She told a state special agent that she'd been storing some of Richard's stuff at her property, and while putting tarps over a pile of his things, had noticed a gray duffel bag that had medications in it that were prescribed to Michelle Will. She'd also found a suitcase hidden on her property that she felt law enforcement might want to look into. Investigators quickly went over to Richard's mom's house and collected the bags, but when they opened the suitcase, it was empty. The gray duffel, on the other hand, contained several personal hygiene bottles, hair accessories, makeup, prescriptions, and a metallic watch with pink stones in it. It was clear from the information on the prescription bottles that the duffel bag and likely all of its contents belonged to Michelle. For the next few weeks, authorities kept working the case and even received the
27:42 Speaker 00 analysis from Richard's cellphone, which confirmed some of the information he'd already told investigators. There were texts between him and Michelle on the afternoon of August 24th, which stopped at 3:14 PM. Then the next message between their phones came from Michelle's device at 12:58 AM on the 25th, which read, "I'm going back to Texas." Richard's phone then responded to that text about 20 minutes later at 1:17 AM with the text, "Why?" He texted her again at 2:10 AM and 2:58 AM, asking if she was okay and for her to call him. He never actually dialed her number, though. Instead, he called Bonnie at 1:23 AM, and then the three-digit number *86 a few minutes after that.
28:27 Speaker 00 There was no more activity on his device for several hours until 8:39 AM and 9:45 AM, when he phoned a woman in Custer. Other information retrieved from his cellphone data showed that at the time he'd texted Michelle around 2 AM, his device had pinged near a tower close to Horse Thief Lake, which wasn't super far from the mile marker on Iron Mountain Road where Michelle's remains were eventually found. Even more bizarre was the fact that Michelle's cellphone had been active and pinged off a tower near Custer on September 10th, almost two weeks after she was found dead, which proved that someone who either lived in or was visiting Custer had it in their possession after her death. But still, even with all of that circumstantial evidence pointing toward Richard as the prime
29:12 Speaker 00 suspect, authorities didn't have enough to arrest him for murder. And unfortunately after that, days turned into weeks, and then months, and nothing happened. In October 2014, more than a year after Michelle died, investigators asked Richard to speak with them again, and he agreed to. But his story hadn't changed much from the last version he'd shared, which was that he and Michelle had gone to Keystone together for a little getaway. But then after going to dinner and doing a little bit of shopping, she'd gone out and he'd stayed in their motel room. He suggested that maybe someone she'd encountered while out in Keystone had done something to her. But once again, investigators were not convinced Richard was being truthful. So they confronted him with the fact that Michelle's things had been found on his mom's
29:56 Speaker 00 property. Richard's response to that was that he knew lots of folks who left things at his mom's place. He denied putting Michelle's stuff there or trying to conceal it from his mom. Eventually, that interview ended with authorities unable to make an arrest or elicit a confession from Richard. After that, the case slowly went cold. Years crept by with no new updates, and it looked like it would never be solved. But there was one person who wasn't willing to let Michelle become a faded memory so easily.
30:33 Speaker 01 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.
30:53 Speaker 02 It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.
31:00 Speaker 01 Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.
31:08 Speaker 03 Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.
31:11 Speaker 05 That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.
31:15 Speaker 04 I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?
31:21 Speaker 01 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.
31:37 Speaker 00 According to reporting by Tiffany Tan for the Rapid City Journal, in the years after Michelle's death, her friend Nancy Herman took it upon herself to be a voice for justice. In 2017, the 67-year-old had become a vocal advocate for Michelle, who at that point had been dead for four years. Nancy had made countless reward posters about the case, created a Facebook page titled "Help Find Michelle's Murderer," which had the amazing handle @GrannyGonnaGetJustice. And she was speaking with reporters to keep Michelle's case in the public eye. In the Rapid City Journal article I just mentioned, Nancy said that she'd even raised $1,100 of her own money in addition to the $5,000 reward that law enforcement eventually put in place.
32:20 Speaker 00 Investigative records show that Nancy regularly followed up with investigators to see what leads they were pursuing, and to make sure Michelle's case file wasn't just sitting untouched on someone's desk somewhere. In the years since her friend's death, Nancy had adopted both of Michelle's cats and stayed in touch with her two sons. Nancy also wasn't shy about sharing her thoughts on who she felt was responsible for killing Michelle. She shared her suspicions about Richard with the Rapid City Journal and Hill City Prevailor News, and even went as far as providing photos of some of Michelle's injuries prior to her death, which Nancy alleged Richard had inflicted. Unfortunately, by 2017, Nancy was really the only person left in South Dakota who'd been close with Michelle who was still around to fight for her case.
33:04 Speaker 00 Amanda, Michelle's sister, had died the year prior, so really, it was kind of up to Nancy to keep pushing for answers from police. For years, she spent time investigating leads on her own, and working with some of Michelle's distant relatives in Wisconsin, to get the Pennington County Sheriff's Office to contact a special cold case law enforcement review group in Philadelphia, known as the VDOC Society. Pennington County investigators told the press in 2017 and 2018 that they were open to whatever would help bring resolution to the case, and that included possibly getting the VDOC Society involved. They emphasized that everything about Michelle's death seemed suspicious, but they just didn't have enough evidence to be able to call it a homicide, or put all the pieces together yet.
33:46 Speaker 00 One lead investigator said that in the department's eyes, Michelle's case was very much active, and the different personnel who'd been assigned to it over the years had pursued lots of leads, including DNA testing and interviews with some of the same people. They just needed that one thing that would break the case wide open.
34:05 Speaker 00 Meanwhile, Nancy went full send mode on the Facebook page she'd created for Michelle's case. She was naming names and putting people from Custer on blast if she even suspected that they knew something about what had happened to Michelle. As of this recording, that Facebook page is still active, and I scrolled through all of the posts. It's aggressive, to say the least, but hey, friends gotta do what friends gotta do. And even Nancy knew that a lot of the stuff she was putting out there was a mix of the truth, rumor, and her own opinion. She told the press that she felt like the justice system had failed Michelle by allowing Richard so many opportunities to harm women and seemingly get away with it. She expressed to the Hill City Prevailer News that if Richard had been held accountable
34:47 Speaker 00 for his prior incidents of domestic violence, he would likely have never met Michelle. And honestly, I see her point. But law enforcement needed to make sure that if they were going to arrest Richard for killing Michelle, they had to have their case locked down. And they lacked physical evidence tying him to whatever happened to her. For example, in 2018, they'd followed up on a tip about Richard storing a hammer, a broken knife, and some tarps and a blanket in a storage shed behind an apartment he lived in. But when investigators searched that shed and tested the items, none of the stuff had blood on it. That same year, they interviewed Richard again, and his story hadn't really changed much. He was asked more questions about his background, upbringing, past relationships, and his relationship
35:31 Speaker 00 with Michelle at the time of her death, but his answers were the same old, same old. When that interview ended, investigators were no closer to getting him to crack or finding out how Michelle had died. And that piece of info was the most important detail authorities still hadn't pinned down. No one knew what had killed Michelle. On paper, her death was still labeled as undetermined. So unless law enforcement could get that change to homicide, they were stuck. So at the beginning of 2021, they decided to enlist the assistance of a third-party independent pathologist to review Michelle's autopsy. That guy's name was Dr. Thomas Bennett. And when he wrapped up his review in March 2021, he concluded that Michelle had not
36:15 Speaker 00 died as a result of a natural death, suicide, or an accident. He wrote that homicide was a possibility. Bennett explained in his findings that the evidence supported Michelle had died rather quickly after departing for her weekend trip with Richard, and then was disposed of off of Iron Mountain Road within hours of her death. According to court documents and investigative reports, Bennett pointed to lividity, or skin discoloration, as a result of blood pooling in certain parts of the body after Michelle's heart stopped beating, and her advanced state of decomposition as the two main reasons why he was convinced she'd been discarded rather quickly after dying, but several days before ultimately being found. A second expert who specialized in the field of forensic anthropology agreed with Dr. Bennett's
37:00 Speaker 00 review, and that's all the sheriff's office needed to have Michelle's manner of death changed from undetermined to homicide. It's also what immediately gave them probable cause to move in on their prime suspect. On Friday, July 16, 2021, almost eight years after Michelle was killed, authorities arrested Richard for second-degree murder. By then, he was 53 years old and living in Hill City, South Dakota, which is about 20 minutes north of Custer. And his arraignment the following Monday, a judge set his bond at $1 million, and prosecutors argued that he was a danger to the community because of his past criminal history related to domestic violence. After Richard's arrest, the sheriff of Pennington County stated, quote, "We never gave up on
37:44 Speaker 00 the Michelle Will case. After eight years of hard work, we're pleased to finally arrest the person we believe is responsible for the crime. We never stopped conducting interviews, examining evidence, and reviewing forensic material." End quote. Nancy Herman was elated by the news as well, telling the Rapid City Journal, quote, "I started to shake and cry. I was so happy. It has been almost eight years since she was murdered. I stayed at it the whole time. I had shared tips and leads with investigators so much that I probably made them mad. But I just wanted justice for Michelle. I am so happy that they kept working on the case." End quote. The road to justice, though, was gonna be a long one, because Richard's defense argued
38:27 Speaker 00 a lot of things in pre-trial motions, primarily that Dr. Thomas Bennett's conclusions were wrong. They also argued that his testimony about Michelle's manner of death likely being a homicide should not be allowed in as expert testimony. They also wanted the other forensic expert who'd consulted on the case and agreed with Dr. Bennett's findings to be barred from testifying too. The defense argued that the prosecution's use of the word "dumped" to describe how Michelle had been found was not supported by the evidence in the case, and they disagreed with both forensic experts' determinations that the damage to Michelle's left collarbone, which appeared to have been made by a sharp instrument, was related to her cause of death. The defense wrote in their motions that Michelle's collarbone injury
39:10 Speaker 00 could have just as easily been unrelated to her death. Richard's defense team also did not want prosecutors to introduce witnesses associated with Richard's prior criminal convictions for domestic violence. His attorneys claimed that women like Richard's ex-wife, his former girlfriend Bonnie, and other women who he'd been convicted of harming should not be allowed to testify because they'd been influenced by law enforcement over the years, and jurors could unfairly draw conclusions about Richard's relationship with Michelle if they heard those women's testimony about his character. His lawyer wrote in a pre-trial motion that there was no evidence Richard had ever abused Michelle, no police reports that proved she'd ever contacted authorities about him, and
39:52 Speaker 00 no witnesses who'd come forward claiming that Michelle had told them she was being abused. The only thing the defense conceded was that Richard had called Michelle derogatory names in the presence of others. They even asked the court to ban the use of the term "victim" when parties referred to Michelle in court proceedings. Prosecutors were unshaken by these requests, though, and maintained that the crux of the state's case came down to proving Richard's overwhelming need for power and control in his relationships. They argued he had murdered Michelle because he'd wanted to control her.
40:26 Speaker 00 For most of 2021, 2022, and 2023, and the first few weeks of 2024, the case dragged on like this. There was a lot of back and forth in court, objections, delays, requests for continuances, more motions, and more delays. But then, on January 30th, 2024, in a twist few people saw coming, Pennington County prosecutors amended the criminal complaint against Richard to manslaughter in the second degree. A Class IV felony in South Dakota, which was a substantially lesser charge than second-degree murder. A second-degree murder conviction could have landed him with a sentence of life in prison, but second-degree manslaughter only carried a maximum of 10 years.
41:09 Speaker 00 Richard quickly accepted what's known as an Alfred plea, which, for those of you who don't know what that means, it's when someone admits there's enough evidence to find them guilty of the charge against them, while also simultaneously expressing their innocence. It's different from a no contest plea, because with a no contest plea, you don't assert either guilt or innocence. Nearly two months later, a judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison, but he was credited roughly 2 and 1/2 years for time served. So, in the end, he got at most 7 and 1/2 years behind bars for killing Michelle. At his sentencing hearing, the judge told Richard, quote, "You have a significant challenge dealing with romantic relationships in your life.
41:51 Speaker 00 I think you continue to remain a danger," end quote. And that's something everyone should keep in mind, because Richard will likely get out and be back on the streets at some point if he lives long enough. If that isn't worrisome enough, another detail I learned while researching this case is that according to an interview his ex-wife gave to law enforcement in 2018, his mother told the ex-wife at some point during the time she was married to Richard that Richard had killed his 3-year-old sister when he was a boy. And get this: her name also happened to be Michelle. Richard's mom told his ex-wife, and later told investigators, that she believed Richard had intentionally knocked down a large frame on their back porch,
42:34 Speaker 00 which landed on his sister and killed her. There's no mention of this allegation outside of law enforcement's reports, and his sister's death, as far as I could find, was not investigated as an intentional killing. So, as far as that goes, that's all we know.
42:51 Speaker 00 What I'd rather spend more time on is remembering who Michelle was as a person. Nancy Herman told Hill City Prevailor News that despite her troubles in life, Michelle really was a magnetic person. Nancy said there was just something about her that made you want to smile whenever you saw her. She described Michelle as a sweet person who just wanted a fresh start in life and desired to repair bridges that she burned. Unfortunately, her best opportunity to do that was ripped away from her by a person who has never provided a reason for his actions. If you're someone struggling to get away from a person perpetrating domestic violence, please visit the links in the show notes and on the blog post for this episode.
43:32 Speaker 00 Those resources are available to help. 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. I think Chuck would approve. (dog barking) In the dark, even the most familiar trail can feel like it leads somewhere else. Every rustle becomes a warning, every shadow, a doorway.
44:13 Speaker 00 In Full Body Chills, those doorways open into worlds pulled straight from your nightmares. This spooky season classic returns with chilling new tales, immersive sound, and no promise that you'll find your way back. So step off the familiar path if you dare. Listen to new episodes of Full Body Chills every week, wherever you get your podcasts.
Previous The Seashore Next The Crash Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated