Just The Tip-sters

When you're a veteran cop in a small town, with a deep knowledge of your community and the bad guys in it - and you're smart and everyone knows it...well...you'd think that when a serial killer is loose in your backyard and your years of experience with, and detailed documentation about, one bad guy in particular points as clearly to that bad guy as being said serial killer - you'd think the eggheads and profilers and federal law enforcement hoo-hahs in charge of the case would pay attention to your evidence and perhaps look into that bad guy to maybe, you know, prevent new murders from happening.  Think again.  David McDavid is one  of those folks in law enforcement you want to be around when trouble starts.  A veteran plainclothesman, detective and now Chief of Police in the small Baton Rouge suburb of Zachary Louisiana, Chief McDavid noticed a pattern of behavior in the murders committed by  the notorious Baton Rouge Serial Killer, who terrorized South Louisiana from as early as 1992 to 2003, and a miscrea

The string of murders that eventually led to the realization that a serial killer was on the loose in Baton Rouge Louisiana began  on when the body of 41 year-old Gina Wilson Green was found murdered in her home near the LSU campus on September 24, 2001.  But by the time Derrick Todd Lee was finally unveiled as the terror known as the "Baton Rouge Serial Killer," it became clear that his trail of rape, torture and murder almost certainly began much earlier - perhaps a decade beforehand.  In Part Two of her exploration of this most fascinating serial killer, Melissa details the discovery of each of Lee's victims, going backward and forward in time to reveal a maddening series of misunderstandings and misreadings of the killer's basic identity until DNA technology -  Lee's sole survivor and her son - and an outside-the-box-thinking Chief of Police in a nearby town finally spun a web around him and brought him down.  Equally fascinating is how the varied methods of murder used by Lee confounded behavioral scient

Beginning in 1993 and continuing for a full decade thereafter, dark haired women were being murdered in and around the river town of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  The means and methods of the murders were not consistent, leaving law enforcement baffled as to who their unknown suspect might be.  It turns out that the man the cops were looking for was one Derek Todd Lee, who the press came to call the Baton Rouge Serial Killer.  A lifelong jailbird with a rap sheet as long as the Mississippi River and - it turned out - a history of behavior in committing his crimes that should have tipped off law enforcement long before it finally did, Lee had the habit of stealing his victims' car keys - which is why some (including us) prefer to refer to him as "The Key Collector."  As if his crimes weren't bad enough, a lax judicial system and statutes of limitation that just don't make sense made it possible for Lee to continue his killing spree when he should have been in prison.  But the weirdest part of this story is the pres

Sometimes there's just too much to talk about at the top of a podcast without getting in the way of the episode's main subject matter.  And so far this June, there are three separate cases that Melissa would have mentioned at the top of JUST THE TIP-STERS if they had happened at different times - but they all converged at once!  All three are cases that Melissa isn't planning on doing an episode on - not just yet anyway - two of them are new and one of them is a well-known existing case with stirring new developments.  So instead of trying to jam them all in at the top of next week's podcast, Melissa decided to covert them all in a special first-weekend-of-the-summer MURDERTIZER (an appetizer of murder)!  So enjoy your Sunday stroll, Tip-Ster - and get caught up on some very interesting cases in the news!

Carolyn Rose was a driven, successful real estate agent working in suburban Pensacola Florida when one day, after she didn't return from a mid-day home showing, her colleagues drove over to the empty house to find her car still parked in the driveway.  Inside the empty, brand new home they found Carolyn's crumpled nude body, hands bound - and dead.  She had been raped before being strangled.  The 47 year-old Rose had left no notes behind indicating who she was to meet at the showing, which had obviously been a setup by the murderer.  After chasing down and eliminating their one and only solid lead, police had nowhere to go.  But here's where solid police work and determination prove once again to be the key in solving hard cases, especially ones like this.  It turns out that even in 1978, the Escambia County Florida Sheriff's Homicide Squad collected every single piece of evidence at the crime scene and preserved it with intensive care.  And then, every single year - every year - on the anniversary of Carolyn

When Tracy Trudgett got the news in late 2018, she passed out. Tracy hadn't seen her brother Shane Snellman, since she visited him in prison nearly a decade before. Tracy and Shane had been separated from their father when they were just children - raised in a convent and then foster parents  when the New South Wales authorities refused to let dad have the kids back due to his single parent status. Shane had not had an easy life - falling in with the wrong crowd and resorting to breaking and entering and other petty crimes, he had been released from prison in mid-2012 and then, after just a few months, seemingly fell off the face of the earth. But then Bruce Roberts died. Roberts was, according to his neighbors in the Sydney suburb of Greenwich - an oddball - a bit of a hermit and, it turned out, a rabid hoarder - as bad or worse as the kind of hoarder you see on those reality shows about hoarders.   When Roberts stopped being seen in his neighborhood in 2017, police entered the home to find him dead on the f

So hold on just a minute.  Let's get this straight:  Guy was murdered in his home.  All the doors were locked. No broken or open windows.  All the locks had been recently changed except the French doors in the bedroom.  The only person known to have a second key for those French doors is guy's soon-to-be ex-wife, whose new live-in boyfriend hates guy's guts and - in more than one written email and more than one recorded voice mail message - has threatened to kill him.  And 15 years later, there have been no arrests.  Waitwut?  So goes the story of Edward Berber, a solid working dude living in Hacienda Heights, an L.A. bedroom community, just trying to better his life, take care of his kids and maybe even get back together with his wife. - and whose 27 year-old life was cut short in a way that SEEMS pretty cut and dried.  But as we've learned, Tip-Sters, the fact is that sometimes "cut and dried" is more like "gnawed and moldy" when it comes to solving a murder.  And when the initial investigators drop the bal

Since 1980, more than a quarter of a million unsolved homicides have occurred in the United States - which is more than all U.S. military deaths since the end of WWII.  And here's the maddening truth about those unsolved cases - there is no centralized agency in the United States dedicated to keeping track of cold or inadequately investigated murders.  Unbelievably, the statistics we read about murders in America are only estimates.  Projections.  This is because local police and sheriff's departments only provide data that they want to provide - there is no federal standard for such reporting, and no single place to hold the data even if such a standard existed.  Enter Thomas Hargrove, the retired reporter-turned-justice warrior,who in 2015 founded the Murder Accountability Project ("MAP"), a nonprofit organization dedicated to tracking and accounting for unsolved U.S. homicides. Gathering data provided by multiple federal, state and local governments, MAP publishes it all, enabling anyone - even YOU - to in

In one of the most rage-inducing cases she's covered so far, Melissa investigates the outrageous circumstances surrounding the official suicide of U.S. Army PFC LaVena Johnson while stationed at the Balad Air Base in Iraq in July 2005, just eight days shy of here 20th birthday.  And we put the emphasis on "official" because the "official" position of the Army is...well..."suspect" is the kindest word we can think of.  It took LaVena's family a lot of time, effort and connections to even see photos of the scene where the military insists the beautiful native Missourian set her hand on fire, bit herself on the shoulder, bashed in her own face in so hard that an eyeball came loose, poured lye into her own genitals, then shot herself with a rifle - with her toe - while she was wearing her fully-tied shoes.  No way, says the Army, that she could have been beaten, raped, mutilated and then shot by one or more brutal killers.  And oh, the multiple additional "suicides" of female soldiers at Balad in recent years is

18 year- old Abdi Sharif lived with his family in Des Moines, Iowa.  He and his sister both worked at a local Target store to help support the struggling household.  By all accounts a happy, friendly kid, Abdi intended to spend some time with his friends on a snowy night at the mall where the Target Store is located on a snowy January 17, 2020.  He was last seen walking on a road near the mall, and then - nothing.  Nothing for  three-and-a-half months, until Saturday May 2, when Abdi Sharif's remains were found near the north bank of the Des Moines River, some four miles away from where he was last seen.  Melissa is joined on the phone this episode by Private Investigator Stephanie Kinney, who was brought into the case by Abdi's family when it became clear that police were treating the case, more or less, as an instance of someone simply walking away from his life - this despite the fact that Abdi was happy, showed no signs of depression, desperation or even frustration, and had never indicated to anyone that

Bryce Laspisa was having problems.  What sort of problems, he wouldn't say.  But at the end of August 2013 it was pretty clear to his friends - and his girlfriend - up in the far-Northern California town of Chico, where Bryce was attending a local community college, that something was not right.  The young redhead had started giving some of his prized possessions away.  He told his mother - who lived 500 miles away in Southern California, that he had some big problems that he needed to talk to her about...but he wouldn't go any farther than that.  So his mom  told Bryce to get in his SUV and drive home so they could figure out how to solve Bryce's problems.  Hence begins one of the strangest, most disturbing road drip ever documented - and it was, in fact, documented - right up until the part of the story where Bryce Laspisa's traile disappeared into the warm early morning California air.  Join Melissa as she traces the bizarre trek of a confused and likely deeply disturbed young man on a deeply disturbing ro

In October 1998 15 year-old Crystal Marler disappeared from her home in McCreary County Kentucky after being out with friends and - evidence suggests - briefly returning to the house. Where she went, and with whom, remains a mystery.  As too often happens when a teenager vanishes, the authorities did not take Crystal's disappearance as anything much more than a case of a runaway.  That perception only got stronger when no trace of the young woman could be found...until eleven years later,when Crystal's remains were found by local hunters, and the autopsy revealed that she had been brutally bludgeoned and then shot.  And yet, though the case is still classified as an unsolved homicide, Crystal's extended family appears to have done far more investigative work than the police - and no suspect has ever been arrested.  Leading the charge on behalf of Crystal's family is her grandmother, Lorella Wood.  Now 85 years old and afraid she'll never know the truth about her granddaughter's killer(s), Lorella is hoping th

This time around we focus not just on another missing persons case where we KNOW that SOMEONE knows something that could close it - but also a look into an amazing organization working hard to solve that case and dozens of others around the United States.  The case: 41 year-old Jeffrey Combs from Wilkesboro North Carolina, a sweet and caring fellow who, after a hard-knocks youth filled with tragedy, death, jail time and even partial paralysis, had begun to pull his life together in October 2008.  By then, Jeff was living back in Wilkesboro with his mother Lucy.  After befriending a homeless couple - after opening his mom's home to that couple - and after that couple was ejected for bad behavior, Jeff found unwanted trouble.  His moped - which he needed to get around - was stolen, and when he was sure he'd found it down at the homeless encampment where his former friends lived, by all appearances he headed there to retrieve it - and was never seen again.  There is near certainty as to who the (now deceased) ki

25 year-old Jennifer Morey had just moved into her Houston,Texas-area apartment - her very first - on April 14, 1995.  She went out to dinner with friends to celebrate her move-in, then had a  friend drive her home, where she went to bed in her brand-new place...and then around 4 am on April 15, Jennifer was awakened to the terrifying realization that she was being straddled by a stranger with a knife to her throat - and who was about to rape her.  As she struggled and screamed, she was horrified to hear this complete stranger call her by name - "calm down Jennifer - stop screaming Jennifer" - and when she wouldn't, he slashed her throat.  Then he threw her into the bathroom and left her there to bleed out.  But  Jennifer Morey is a survivor.  And she was determined to live.  And so she did, with the aid of a small set of what can only be described as miracles.  And she is alive today after experiencing one of the most horrific events any woman could ever imagine.  Listen in as Melissa retells Jennifer's stor

It was sometime after midnight in February 1974, not long after the Valentine's Day Dance at Western Hills High School had ended in the Fort Worth suburb of Benbrook, Texas.  17 year-old Carla Walker and her boyfriend, high school football star Rodney McCoy, were in the front seat of Rodney's mom's 1969 LTD doing what teenage couples in love tend to do in cars on a Saturday night.  Suddenly,the passenger side front door flung open, Rodney was repeatedly pistol-whipped and Carla, who was dragged out from underneath him,told the man - or was it men? - to stop hitting her boyfriend - that she would go with him/them.  "Go get Daddy" were the last words Rodney heard Carla shout as she was taken away - and just before he passed out.  Just three days later, Carla's body was found in a culvert in a remote area near Benbrook Lake.  She had been tortured, raped and strangled to death.  Rodney, who had bruises and cuts from his attack, could barely describe the assailant(s).  To this day, Rodney can't say for certain wh

In 1999, the remains of a young boy, probably no older than five or six, were found in a cemetery in DeKalb County Georgia - just outside of Atlanta.  The remains were compelling - and heartbreaking.  The boy had obviously been well taken car of - obviously loved.  The attire was impeccable - his clothing was new, clean and not inexpensive.  He had clearly been dressed by a caring parent - probably his mother.  His boots were a special type found only in the Atlanta area at the time.  So one would think the police had a lot to go on.  But no.  Not only has it been impossible over the past nearly 21 years to determine the identity of this beautiful child - named "Dennis Doe" by the police because they could not be so cold as to identify him as simply another John Doe - there was absolutely no evidence within the remains to indicate how he died.  Was he murdered and left at the cemetery by the killer?  Did he get sick and die suddenly, leaving his parents panicked?  Had he been kidnapped?  No one knows.  Becaus

Here's a major change of pace to bring a little springtime to your soul in this weird winter of our discontent - a stirring story of human redemption through the beauty of giving to, and caring for, other living beings -  which, in turn, redeems and restores  the lives of humans who find in themselves in the most dire of circumstances.  Jon Grobman, in his own estimation, was not a good person in 2005 when he was sentenced to six separate 25 years-to-life terms plus 40 years in prison (that's a total of 190 years-to-life if you're counting), all for repeat non-violent offenses.  Faced at a still-young age with the inevitability of dying in prison, Jon looked at the totality of what his life had been up to that point and decided that no matter what, he was going to spend the rest of his life in service to others.  This decision eventually led him on a path that brought him to Alex Tonner, a passionate advocate of canine rescue - and with the support of prison authorities, helped Jon start a prison program to s

Hal Arthur was pretty much what anybody would want from a high school teacher.  One of the most respected and beloved instructors at Grant High School in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, Mr. Arthur was a real hero - something every teacher should strive for.  A true advocate and helper of his students, Hal Arthur gave his own time and resources to make sure all kids in his charge had every opportunity to succeed.  He even set up a travel agency to make it easier to take his Jewish (and non-Jewish) students on educational trips to the Holy Land.  But just shy of his 61st birthday, on March 24, 1989, Mr. Arthur was getting ready to go to work in the dark at 6:00 am - when he was shot four times outside his car, killed instantly by an assassin whom to this day the police say they can't be sure of.  Oh, but they have an idea.  And the primary - almost certain - culprit is one of the nastiest characters anyone ever dreamed of running across.  Just 16 years old when Hal Arthur was executed, he went on t

You may recall, dear Tip-Ster, way back in Episode 8, when Melissa recalled the tragic-yet-amazing story of "Tent Girl," a young woman whose body was  found wrapped in a canvas designed to wrap circus tents, on the side of a road near Georgetown Kentucky in May 1968.  Tent Girl's story is remarkable for two reasons.  The first remarkable fact is that after a couple of years of trying everything that could be tried to learn Tent Girl's identity to no avail, the tiny town of Georgetown essentially adopted her as its own - even paying for her burial and a stunningly beautiful headstone at the local cemetery.  But the most stunning part of Tent Girl's story is how her true identity - Barbara Ann Hackman - was finally revealed by a complete stranger living in a completely different state.  The man who had discovered the young woman's body, it turns out, had moved his family  from Georgetown Kentucky - to Tennessee - kand there his daughter, Lori, found a high school sweetheart - a young 17 year-old boy named Todd

On a warm summer Oklahoma day in 2008, two best friends - 13 year-old Taylor Paschal-Placker and 11 year-old Skyla Whitaker - went for a walk along a desolate dirt road near Taylor's home in the small town of Weleetka, on their way to a local creek, where they were going to hunt for pebbles and shells.  When they didn't return after darkness fell, Taylor's grandfather went looking for the girls - and came upon a scene no grandparent, parent or decent human being - ever should see.  The girls had been shot in the head and chest a total of 13 times with two different guns, their bodies left along the side of the dirt road.  Evidence later indicated that at least one of them had been sexually violated.  Despite the best efforts of law enforcement, the case went cold with absolutely no clues as to the identity of the monster who took the lives of these two beautiful girls...until three years later - in 2011 - when the monster revealed himself by killing Ashley Taylor - his fiancee - and setting her corpse ablaze