Still On The Hunt | Ep 10 | Three Southern Serial Killers Who Were Never Brought to Justice

The South doesn't forget easily, but some secrets it keeps buried deep. In this episode we uncover three chilling cold cases where predators vanished without a trace, leaving investigators haunted decades later.

First, follow the trail of the so-called Flat-Tire Killer, whose hunting ground stretched from California to the canals of South Florida, perhaps claiming more than 30 lives. Even today, DNA evidence only muddies the waters. Then head to the swamp and scrubs of Charlotte County, where Dan Conahan, the convicted Hog Trail Killer, sits on death row. But a mass grave of eight more victims raises a terrifying question: was he working alone, or is a second killer still out there? Finally, travel to Richmond, Virginia, where the Golden Years Killer targeted elderly women in their own homes for six brutal years, leaving behind a confession so unreliable it may have obscured the truth forever.

Three killers, dozens of victims and zero convictions that fully close the books. Are these predators dead, imprisoned for other crimes, or still walking among us?

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South is the podcast for anyone who yearns for stories of haunted plantations, of deals made at midnight crossroads, of creatures lurking in moss-draped cemeteries. But where did these tales actually start? Turns out, the real history behind Southern folklore is wilder, stranger, and a whole lot darker than the stories themselves. With each episode, mystery author Liam Ashe uncovers the true tales hiding underneath the myths of the Gothic South.

Subscribe now and never miss a tale. And whatever you do tonight, be sure to lower the lights, lock the doors, and pull up a rocking chair. . . things are about to get interesting.

Transcript

The South has a very long memory, but sometimes, well, it's just easier to forget. As the twentieth century drew to a close, shadows moved across the towns and highways of old Dixie. They were quiet, ruthless, and above all, deadly. And when they were done, they may have simply moved on. In time they drifted from our collective memory. And life went back to some semblance of normal, whatever that might be.
The victims these shadows left, however, are the ones that keep retired investigators up at night. These bodies were found buried in the scrub or submerged in canals or even lifeless in their own beds. Their families were left to grieve. And the killers? They simply vanished like smoke. Even decades later, the detectives who worked these cases have never forgotten, no matter how hard they may have tried.
Welcome to Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South. I'm your host, mystery author Liam Ashe. In this episode, I'll be taking a look at three serial killers from the Gothic South. Their prey, their habits, and their hunting grounds may have all been different, but they all share one critical factor: they were never caught. So now, some thirty, forty, or perhaps fifty years later, we have to ask the question: are these predators still on the hunt?
This episode of Haunts & Hollows is sponsored by my friends at Arca Noctis. They invite you to unlock your curiosity with their collection of the odd, the unusual, and the obscure.
Now, the 1970s have been called the Dawn of the Serial Killer Golden Age. It was the decade that birthed Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, the Son of Sam, Henry Lee Lucas, the Torso Killer, and literally hundreds of others. According to a study by Radford University, in the first half of the twentieth century, there were 50 to 60 active serial killers in each decade. By 1970, that number had exploded to more than 600, then 768 during the 1980s and 669 in the 1990s. Fortunately, from there, the number has plummeted to only 117 active serial killers in the 2010s and down from there.
Experts have debated the socio-political and other factors that may have fostered this surge in the number of killers, but the numbers themselves don't lie. Those numbers all seem to point to two critical factors that kept these predators one step ahead of authorities. First, investigators had limited forensic resources beyond what they had at the scene. Evidence like hairs, fingerprints or shoe prints were useful, but only when compared against an existing data set or database. New techniques like DNA analysis only gained real traction at the beginning of the 1990s. That was one of the reasons that the FBI launched the Behavioral Science Unit, now known as the Behavioral Analysis Unit or BAU, in 1992. Agents conducted interviews with more than 30 of the most notorious serial killers known at that time. They hoped to find threads to help them identify links that could make the leap from the physical evidence to the potential suspects.
Second, the sharing of information between different state and local agencies was sporadic at best. After several successful kills in one location, a predator could move to another state or region for a fresh start. Think Ted Bundy, Marvin Gray, and Rodney Alcala, also known as the Dating Game Killer. Without access to centralized information like CODIS, it was a significant challenge to trace a killer's M.O. from one jurisdiction to the next.
Now, that was the case of an anonymous killer whose reign of terror may have ended in South Florida some three to four years after it began. His trail ? and all signs point to it being a "Him" ? began in California in early 1973. There were a cluster of murders that all fit a similar pattern. The victims were in their late teens or early twenties and shared a fairly similar look with long hair and pierced ears. They were sexually assaulted and then killed. Their bodies were left naked, either in a canal near a large body of water or down a steep embankment. Then, in December of that year, the killings just stopped.
Well, unbeknownst to California authorities, a new wave of near copycat deaths was troubling Washington State Police in the early months of 1974. When those stopped in September, they started again in nearby Idaho up until about February of '75. That same month, the killer may have moved on to a new hunting ground: South Florida.
On February 3rd, the body of 19-year-old massage therapist Judith Ann Osterling was found in a canal that lay on the Dade County line. She had been reported missing two days earlier. Nine days later, 23-year-old Barbara Davis Stephens was reported missing. Her 1973 Chevrolet Camaro was found in a parking lot near downtown Miami. On February 20th her body was discovered in a nearby wooded lot, although unlike some of the other victims, she was still partially dressed. On the early afternoon of April 9th, 1975, 17-year-old Arietta Marie Tinker was dropped at work by her husband, and then she simply disappeared. On April 12th, her body was found floating in the Snake Creek Canal near Miramar. The cause of death was ruled a drowning and there were no signs of foul play. Detectives, however, still considered her death to be a murder.
In June, three more victims went missing. First, 19-year-old Nancy Lee Fox vanished while walking to the local laundromat. Two days later, her body was found floating in the canal off Highway 27 in Broward County. The coroner determined that she had suffered blunt force trauma to the head and was strangled before she went in the water. Between Nancy's disappearance and the discovery of her body, two other girls, Barbara Susan Schreiber and Belinda Darlene Zetterower, disappeared from their Hollywood, Florida, neighborhood while on their way to a sleepover. The next day, their bodies were found near a canal along Highway 27. Unlike some of the other murders in this series, the pair had been shot and were still fully clothed.
Two weeks later, 14-year-old Robin Leslie Losch was found dead in the same Highway 27 canal and only half a mile from where Barbara and Belinda were found. She, like the other two girls, was still fully clothed. However, she had been drowned, not shot.
In July, the bodies of two missing women were found, and their cases shared some striking similarities. On the 23rd, 27-year-old Ronnie Sue Gorlin was found naked and dead in the Graham Canal. There were clear signs that she had been sexually assaulted and then stabbed to death. One very important clue: her rented car was found in a nearby parking lot with one of its tires slashed. Eight days later, the naked body of 21-year-old Elyse Rapp was found in the same canal as Ronnie's had just a few days earlier. She, too, had been sexually assaulted, although the coroner noted that she had been drowned, not stabbed. As in Ronnie's case, however, Elise's Chevrolet Vega was found at a nearby parking lot with a deflated tire.
By now, the local media had sounded the alarm of a serial killer on the hunt in South Florida. The man that they dubbed the Flat-Tire Killer seemed to be targeting young women across the region. While Dade County Police had nine bodies and several crime scenes to work with, they didn't have any suspects on which to focus their investigation.
They did, however, have an unexpected ally in their hunt for the killer. Sergeant E O Carlstedt of Sonoma County, California, had been working on the series of deaths that began in early 1973. Through hard work and endless networking, he had a shocking theory: this wasn't the Flat-Tire Killer's first time on the hunt. Instead of just nine deaths, Sergeant Carlstedt had identified more than 30 potential victims across five western states. Each murder shared several critical features, things like victim profile, manner of death, and the body dumping grounds that could indicate a single mobile killer hard at work.
On August 28th, 1975, a national press wire carried an interview with Sergeant Carlstedt and Dade County Homicide Detective Charles Mussoline. They laid out a broad outline of their shared theory without giving away certain critical details of each crime. They hoped the broad press coverage might help investigators connect with other witnesses, perhaps in other jurisdictions, who may have new information to move the case forward.
While the intensified spotlight on the killer only gave them a pause for a few weeks, on October 17th, 1975, 15-year-old Mary Coppola and 27-year-old Marlene Annibale disappeared from their rented room at the Lauderdale Beach Club. Over a week later, their bodies were discovered in a dump just outside the city. Both had been strangled. And on January 11th of the following year, the body of 17-year-old Michele Winters was found floating in the Snapper Creek near Pembroke Pines. She had been strangled with a purse strap, which was still wrapped around her neck 12 times.
Then the killings simply stopped. Well, this left investigators with a series of difficult and unanswered questions. First, had the predator died or perhaps been jailed on an entirely different offense? Second, had he changed hunting grounds yet again? His track record suggested that he preferred to move every year or two.
Now, for their part, investigators had developed a profile of the predator. He was thought to be a white male, likely in his early twenties. He was probably attractive, intelligent and well-spoken. He likely had a charming, unthreatening nature, which would help to put his potential victims at ease.
The profile was a step forward, but even that potential clue didn't answer that last nagging question. Was the Flat-Tire Killer a single perpetrator? Now, this is a critical factor that plagues every unsolved serial killer case. While the murders ? and just even focusing on the deaths in South Florida ? shared several common threads, there were also striking differences. Some were sexually assaulted, some weren't. Some were naked when found, some weren't. Some were shot, some stabbed and some strangled. Perhaps the connections the police were grasping at were nothing more than coincidence.
Well, these questions would remain unanswered even 50 years later. Now, during the initial investigation, police had collected and stored DNA found at several of the crime scenes. And in August of 2023, the Broward County Sheriff's Office announced a match. Samples collected on or near the bodies of Barbara Schreiber and Darlene Zetterower were positively identified as matching a known felon, Robert Clark Keebler. Unfortunately, he had died four years earlier. An accomplice, a felon named Lawrence Stein, was matched in May of 2025. Lawrence, however, had died in 2005.
Now, some investigators have been quick to point out that these two deaths were likely outliers in the suspected string of Flat-Tire Murders. Both girls had been shot, not stabbed or strangled, and both were fully clothed. In another but minor deviation, both girls were left near a body of water not submerged like so many of the other victims. With matches to only two of the more than 30 potential murders across seven states, the odds aren't that great.
According to Cold Case Homicide Detective Andrew Gianino with the Broward Sheriff's Office, he personally believes that the deaths of these two victims are unrelated to the other cases. That suggests that the real Flat-Tire Killer ? or group of killers ? was never brought to justice. Although it's half a century later, some may still be on the hunt.
Nearly 20 years after the death of Michele Winters, another serial killer or perhaps pair of killers was hard at work just a few counties over. On the morning of February 1st, 1994, two hunters stumbled over a mutilated corpse near Biscayne Boulevard in the Gulf town of Port Charlotte. Medical examiners determined that the body had been outside for approximately a month. They also noted two disturbing observations. There was evidence of rope burns on the skin around the corpse's pelvic region, and even more disturbing, the unidentified man's genitalia had been removed and discarded.
Then, on New Year's Day 1996, a North Port family's dog returned to their Fernandina Street home, carrying a human skull in its mouth. Now, oddly, the family wasn't as alarmed as one would think, and they claimed that their dog had for several months been coming home with bones from around the neighborhood. Now, even if it didn't cause them much concern, the police certainly took notice. They conducted a thorough search of the area. Teams recovered bones from a man's chest and hip just half a mile from the house. A second search turned up one hand and part of the chest that was still covered in flesh. Despite the damage to the body and the loss of several limbs, the medical examiners thought that they found a connection to the January body like that one. This one had been severely mutilated around the time of death, particularly near the genitals.
These two gruesome discoveries were soon followed by several more around the Port Charlotte area. In March of that same year, a man discovered another unidentified male body just off Laramie Circle. The corpse was positioned on the ground in the shape of a cross, and this will sound familiar, the body had severe rope marks and the genitals had been mutilated. As this victim was thought to have died less than two weeks before he was discovered, experts were able to determine that he had suffered four fatal stab wounds. Additional cuts and scrapes suggested he had tried to run away from his captor shortly before his death.
In April, two more bodies were discovered in one location. While one had already begun to decompose., the second was thought to be less than 24 hours postmortem. That man was quickly identified as 21-year-old Richard Allen Montgomery. This finally gave investigators some thread to follow, and soon they came up with two names. The first was the Hog Trail Killer, a moniker the news media had drummed up in reference to the wooded areas where the victims' bodies had been found. The second was a little more specific: 42-year-old Punta Gorda local Dan Conahan. According to Richard Montgomery's mother, her son had talked about this new friend named Dan just before he disappeared.
When police dove into Dan's past, they hit the mother lode. Born in North Carolina in 1954, he had done a stint in the Navy before moving to Chicago for 13 years. He relocated to Punta Gorda to be near his parents, eventually taking a job as a licensed practical nurse with Charlotte Regional Medical Center. Colleagues police spoke to suggested that Dan spent a great deal of his free time hanging out at the local gay bars.
The more locals they spoke to, the more certain they were that they had the right man in their sights. One witness was found in a surprising place: the Charlotte County Prison. An inmate named David Payton was currently serving time for Grand Theft Auto. Now, the story he had always stuck to, however, made far more sense in the context of the discovered bodies. David recounted that a man he knew only as Dan had picked him up in a blue Mercury Capri and driven him into the woods. When the car got stuck in the mud, Dan got out and tried to push the car free. Eventually, a four wheel drive truck appeared and the driver helped Dan to push the vehicle.
David claimed that while looking back to check their progress, he noticed a bag tucked behind the front seat. The bag held a length of rope, a tarp, a pair of gloves and several knives. As his host spoke to the driver of the truck, David hopped into the driver's seat and sped off. In what Fort Myers investigator Richard Harrison called "a ballsy move," Dan Carnahan actually reported the car as stolen. Despite David's claims that he had fled fearing for his life, he was arrested and sentenced for the theft. The task force knew that the story was a key piece of evidence, and they requested that David take a lie detector test. He agreed and passed that test on May 9th, 1996.
On June 7th, investigators received information about a report that had been filed nearly two years prior. In that account, 26-year-old Stanley Burden claimed that he had been taken to a wooded area off Rockville Road, where a white man he knew only as Dan had assaulted him. He stated that his assailant had tied him to a tree, sexually assaulted him, and then attempted to strangle him with a rope. After trying for several minutes, the man grew frustrated and fled in his car, a grey Plymouth station wagon. Hospital records backed up Stanley's account, and in 1996, he still had scars both around his neck and his wrists from that attack. When provided with a photo array lineup, he was able to successfully pick out Dan Conahan as the man who had tried to kill him.
Leveraging a charge of attempted murder, police arrested Dan in June of 1996. By early 1997, they had dropped that charge to focus on the case of the kidnapping and murder of Richard Montgomery. Although he waived his right to a trial, Dan was still tried with what's called a bench trial, which is simply a trial before a judge. On August 17th, 1999, presiding Judge William Blackwell found him guilty of both counts. A jury in the sentencing hearing recommended death by execution, which Judge Blackwell agreed to.
Even with Dan behind bars, new victims were still being discovered. In 1997, a county construction worker uncovered a partial skeleton near Quesada Avenue. In 2000 and 2001, remains were found first just west of Toledo Blade Boulevard and then second near US 41 in Charlotte Harbor. And in 2002, a man's skeleton was unearthed near a landfill site off Zemel Road.
Now, police had one additional challenge in front of them: identifying these uncovered remains. Through DNA testing and assistance from family members, investigators were able to give names to some of the deceased, and they included 27-year-old Gerald Lombard, 35-year-old William John Melaragno, 25-year-old Kenneth Lee Smith, 24-year-old William Charles Patton, and 44-year-old Alejandro Narciso Lago. Three of these victims are still unidentified.
While Dan Conahan has always been considered the only suspect in a total of 12murders in and around Charlotte County, one later discovery has left investigators with an unanswered question, and it's a big one. In March of 2007, a property surveyor stumbled across two human skulls in a wooded area near Arcadia and Rockville Streets. The police brought in search teams with cadaver dogs, and they unearthed an unimaginable find: a mass grave hidden beneath the pine trees and Florida scrub. The pit contained eight human skulls and an assortment of other skeletal remains. Investigators initially tried to find a link between these bodies and a nearby and recently closed funeral home. This tip, however, went nowhere as the pit contained no traces of things like clothing, body bags, caskets, or anything else you would find with human remains that came from a funeral home.
After excavating the pit and the surrounding areas, officials determined that, in fact, eight unidentified men had been interred in the mass grave and all eight had been murdered. Over the next 15 years, investigators and experts undertook the painstaking task of identifying these victims, now known as the Fort Myers Eight. Using DNA and missing person databases, police were able to name four: 38-year-old John Blevins, 21-year-old Eric David Collier, 24-year-old Jonathan James Tihay, and 30-year-old Robert Ronald Soden. Like several of the earlier victims, many of these men were considered drifters or just transient members of the Charlotte County community. To date, four of the eight men remain unidentified.
Every clue in this grim discovery pointed to Dan Conahan, as the spot was less than a mile from where he had attacked witness Stanley Burden. Already sitting on Florida's Death Row at Union Correctional Institute in Raiford, Dan has denied any involvement with the new victims. If he was telling the truth, police faced a daunting reality: a second, completely unknown serial killer was actively hunting in the same area at the same time.
According to experts, there were several factors, including proximity and the target population, that suggested that Dan was acting alone. Others pointed to the likelihood of a second suspect. Proponents of this theory point to a distinct change from Dan's usual M.O. He had proven, thus far, to be far less organized in his disposal of bodies. While previous victims were often found in the same general area, he had never shown a predilection for burying such a large number of bodies in a single place.
Now, this all has been further complicated by Dan's claims that he is, in fact innocent of all the earlier crimes as well. He is currently petitioning the courts to re-examine five critical pieces of DNA evidence from the crime scenes, and these include hair, fingernail clippings, and two cigarette butts. New technology, he insists, will exonerate him from any involvement in these deaths, and that would leave authorities with two different predators who were never brought to justice.
For the last case, let's move north to Richmond, Virginia, which is one of the spots actually my family hails from. As the serial killer heyday of the 1970s and 1980s was coming to a close, Richmond was a virtual playground for those with murder on their minds. By the early '90s, the city had just survived the Briley Brothers, the Southside Strangler, Corey Johnson, and several others.
Now, the first challenge when hunting a serial killer is knowing that their earliest successes typically don't raise any alarms. What is an obvious pattern at five, ten, or even twenty deaths may just be simple coincidence when you only have two or three bodies to consider. And then what if there is a shift in their modes, means, or intended victims? Does that indicate a killer who is adapting? Or perhaps another predator now at work in the same hunting ground?
The string of deaths that was to become known as the Golden Years Murders started with a single homicide. On July 1st, 1990, Mabel Venable, age 89, was attacked and killed in her Richmond home. In October, another woman, Eva Jones, aged 80, was stabbed to death in her home. At first, these two murders didn't raise any alarms. Richmond had a reputation as a high crime center in the '80s and '90s. In 1990 alone, there were more than 110 homicides in the city, spiking to more than 160, almost one every other day, in 1994. With no other context, these two deaths were just part of that Richmond background noise of violence.
Police first took notice two days after Eva's death when Mary Coffey, age 61, was found dead in her home. Investigators now had a pattern. All three women were Black, all three were older, and all three had been stabbed to death. Still, police were slow to act. But there was no denying that a serial killer was on the hunt in Richmond when three more Black women ? Robinette McLeary, age 61, Pearl Gash, aged 85, and Martha Bolden, aged 81 ?  were stabbed to death in their homes over the next seven months. Despite evidence from six different and likely connected crime scenes, police claimed to have very little to go on.
With Richmond's reputation for violence in the 1990s, there were already calls for the city's female citizens to protect themselves. Stores reported a surge in sales for personal protection essentials. ? think things like guns, deadbolts and watch dogs. Neighborhoods organized their own citizen patrols, and these efforts actually seemed to work ? at first, and through the end of 1993, police reported no other deaths that fit this clear pattern. But despite that respite, investigators made virtually no headway in identifying or apprehending the killer.
The specter of a serial killer preying on Richmond's seniors returned on August 16th, 1994, more than two years after the death of Martha Bolton. The body of Phyllis Harris, aged 59, was found in her home. At first, it looked like the same killer was once again on the hunt. But Phyllis's death was different now. Yes, she was older, but she was white and she had been strangled, not stabbed. Because of this fundamental shift in demographics and weapon of choice, police didn't initially link her death to the previous six.
Then, less than a month later, the body of Inez Childress, aged 82, was found in a water-filled bathtub in the home where she lived alone in the Highland Springs neighborhood. Like Phyllis, Inez was also white, and she had also been strangled. So, had this first killer involved expanding his target demographic and perhaps found a new hunting ground? Or was there a second killer picking up where his predecessor had left off?
Police were convinced that they were looking for only one individual. According to investigators, the crimes shared a series of distinct hallmarks aside from the ages of each victim. First, each crime scene showed signs of forced entry. Second, the victims were often subjected to violent beatings that prolonged their suffering. The violence was almost exclusively focused on the head and neck of each victim. Now, despite this violence, there were no signs of sexual assault, and that was unusual. In many cases, the bodies were staged after death, including several who were positioned in bathtubs to simulate a drowning. The bathtubs, however, were often topped off with cleaning chemicals to help destroy forensic evidence. Police noted that valuables like cash or jewelry were sometimes missing, but the violence suggested a motive of rage or sadism over simple financial gain.
Regardless of that motive, the deaths continued. Sixteen months after the murder of Inez Childress, Lucille Boyd, age 75, was drowned or strangled in her bathtub on New Year's Day, 1996. The following month, the body of Gertrude Gardner, aged 77, was found on the kitchen floor of her South Richmond home and on March 28th, 1996, Mamie Harris Verlander, who was no relation to earlier victim Phyllis Harris, was found dead in her home, a victim of strangulation.
These last five deaths, which were called "high profile attacks" by the Richmond News, saw more official response from the police force, but still little talk of a serial killer. In fact, City Attorney David M. Hicks was quoted that police were looking for possible patterns and connections between all these crimes. In his words, "Serial killer is a term that I am reluctant to go to that has a whole different connotation to what we may have."
Despite his reluctance to draw conclusions, on October 24, 1996, Richmond Police Chief Jerry Oliver formed Operation Golden Years. It was a dedicated team comprising local detectives and experts charged with finding actionable links between the 11 known deaths. For four months, the force spent over $300,000 before disbanding without an arrest or a qualified lead.
During those four months, the Golden Years Killer gave authorities two more deaths to ponder. On April 23rd, 1996, Elizabeth Seibert, aged 69, was found strangled on the third floor apartment where she lived alone and just a few blocks from the home of previous victim Lucille Boyd. And the next evening, the body of Jane Foster, age 55, was found in her Monument Avenue home. Now, complicating police efforts were several other deaths that were similar to these 13, but which might not have been perfect matches. The murders of four elderly women during the same six year period were initially considered, but ultimately rejected when other culprits were identified.
Some four years after the death of Jane Foster, police focused their attention on a potential suspect. Fifty one-year-old Leslie Leon Burchart, a mentally ill homeless man, had been arrested in July of '96 for trespassing. During an interview with the arresting officers, he confessed to killing three other homeless men in Richmond. First, there was the 1994 strangulation death of 35-year-old Montague DeWitt Winston, then the murder of 46-year-old Gary Wayne Shelton, whose skull had been crushed, and the beating and strangulation death of 42-year-old carpenter John Wade Pleasants two weeks after the second murder. And for these crimes, he did receive life in prison.
It turns out that Leslie might not have been done. To the shock of investigators, in 2000 he confessed to killing four of the Golden Years Killer's victims: Lucille Boyd, Mamie Verlander, Elizabeth Seibert, and Jane Foster. In his confession, he allegedly described in exacting detail many of the circumstances under which the murders took place, including several unreleased facts that police felt only the killer would know.
Police thought that they were finally on the right track to solve the series of murders that had started more than ten years ago. But it wouldn't be that simple. Now, after his initial conviction, Leslie served his sentence at the new Wallens Ridge State Prison, which was a level five supermax facility in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. His health, though, quickly deteriorated, mostly due to his advanced heart conditions. In mid-2002, he died at nearby Lonesome Pine Hospital, just two days shy of his 53rd birthday. As a parting gift to officials just before his death, he recanted his confession to killing the four women. Given that Leslie suffered from schizophrenia and that there was no physical evidence linking him to any of these crimes, the confession must be considered dubious at the very best. As a classic serial killer, he lacked a clear methodology, and he didn't seem capable of the painstaking efforts following some of the murders to eliminate forensic evidence.
So where did that leave investigators? It left them back at square one.
Now, there was very little news on the Golden Years Killer until late 2013, when a retired police detective named Ron Reed made a series of shocking claims. He had been involved in Leslie Burchart's arrest and had conducted several interviews with the suspect. His first claim he firmly believed that Leslie had actually killed far more people than originally thought. He identified two of these victims by name Rachel Henshaw and William R. Merrill. In the death of 81-year-old Rachel, Detective Reed claims that Leslie saw her lying in a bed at a now closed adult care facility. He thought that she was suffering needlessly, and in Leslie's own words, "I removed the oxygen mask and I watched her suffocate. And then I left the room." Detective Reid claims that he showed a photo of the suspect to a nurse who had seen a man leaving Rachel Henshaw's room, and that she had positively identified that man as Leslie Burchart. With 47-year-old William, the accused allegedly said, "The guy was just like me. He was suffering. I took my shirt off. I put it around his neck and I choked him."
So why weren't these two deaths officially attached to Leslie? According to the detective, it was all politics. Richmond had earned the unenviable nickname as America's Murder Capital, and two more deaths just reinforced that idea. According to Reed, he was ordered to cover it up. Officials told him that he would be fired and lose his pension. In his own words, he was told, "We do not need to change them to a homicide because it would raise the homicide rate. Don't tell the family. Don't change anything."
Well, after 13 years of guilt and sleepless nights, Detective Reed felt he needed to come clean, if only for those families. Current police officials still claim that he is mistaken. Rachel Henshaw, they say, died of natural causes while William Merrill died from acute alcohol poisoning.
Regardless of Lesley's guilt in those or any additional murders, that leaves the city of Richmond with one very uncomfortable truth: the Golden Years Killer was likely never caught. And to compound this concern, were the deaths the result of one killer's work or two? Was one culprit responsible for the 13 known deaths, with a significant shift in methodology halfway through? Or was it a pair of suspects, each with a different M.O. and a different urge to kill? Save another breakthrough or a suspect with better traction than Leslie Leon Burchart, Richmond will likely never know.
Well, next up on Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South, we'll turn back the clock to 1996 and the bizarre death of Robert Dennis Blair Adams. He left his home in British Columbia and drove nearly three thousand miles, only to die in Knoxville, Tennessee, in one of the most head scratching crime scenes I've ever researched.
If you're looking for more folk legends and true tales from the Gothic South, I invite you to subscribe to this podcast. You'll get a new episode every other week. In each, we will uncover the places, the people, the customs, and the stories that lurk in the shadowed histories of the South. You can also check out my latest book, Florida Coast, for a guided road trip to more than eighty of the darkest, most shadowed spots in the Sunshine State. If you'd like to see me in person, visit me online at hauntsandhollows.com for a list of my latest releases and a schedule of cons and events that I attend all around the South.
Until then, safe travels.