The After Show: Cold Cases - Baby Holly and Yogurt Shop Murders

Police put a man behind bars, but as the years pass, doubts emerge, about whether the real killer was ever caught. That's when Angie's own mother, embarks on a decades-long mission to uncover the truth. Listen to the snare, a new series from ABC Audio. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app, and add free on Amazon Music.

Hi there, everybody. Welcome to 2020 The After Show.

I'm Deborah Roberts, and as always, it is a pleasure to have you here with us.

As you know, we often dig deeply into some of the episodes we've covered on 2020, and many times, somebody's surfaces from those episodes who just really leaves us thinking and wanting to know more. I mean, if you've ever wondered what it takes to solve some of the country's most notorious cold cases, what today we're going to tell you a little bit more about that, because we've

got one of the keenest minds here with us. Mindy Montfort, who has dedicated her career to delivering justice to crime victims and their families, and she's here to tell us a little bit about her work, she found that the cold case and missing persons unit in the Texas Attorney General's office and has been a big part of some of the most talked about 2020 stories over the years, including baby

“Holly, that investigation you may remember, most recently, the yogurt shop murders.”

She's going to talk to us a little bit about how she's zeroes in on all of those cases in which she's learned along the way. So Mindy, I don't want to hear any of that all-shocks kind of Southern thing, and we're both Southern Gals, but honey, you guys just say go on, go on, go on, go on, go on some more. I want some more.

Why not? Well, clearly, clearly you find satisfaction as difficult as it can be. You find great satisfaction in your work and you're one of, you know, few women around the country who does what you do. Give me a sense first of all, as a woman, and you've been on both sides of the aisle,

you've been a prosecutor, you've been a defense lawyer, you've seen sort of, you know, the court system from every angle, and also detective work from every angle, what is it that just motivates you to keep going when you are sometimes dealing with very gruesome brutal situations?

“You know, I think I got into the area of prosecution, because I always felt that there”

were people who needed someone to represent them, and to walk them through this very scary system, and to be their voice, especially in a sexual assault case or a murder case, where the victim just has a hard time or can't speak for themselves, and I wanted to be that voice that I wanted to be able to make sure that we're safe. I think I just had that in, and still to me, when I got into the cold case work, it was

more about injustice, that wait a minute, somebody got away with this, and they were never

a held accountable, and these families deserve answers, and I would want those answers. Yeah. That's kind of what led me to really have a passion for the cold case work. And to kind of motivate you, well as I said, you have worked with us on some of the cold cases that we've covered, as I said, the case of Holly Marie, who was called the

baby Holly story, because the case goes back to when she was a child, and she had been missing for about 40 years. It was suspected, tell me, and take us back to that case, because it was suspected that her parents Dean and Tina Klaus were murdered, and it was just a very intense story. My colleague David Mira covered the story, and people were talking about it for very,

very long time, what still sticks with you from that particular story in case? Being able to be there when we gave Holly her identity in person, you know, right there

at that moment, that's just, you can never relive that, and that was just an amazing moment,

“and I think that's why you keep doing the work you do.”

You mentioned, well, so hey, the crime scenes, they weigh on you and the trials, yes, but then you have those moments, and then, you know, going and talking to the families in yogurt shop and delivering the information they've wanted and waited on for so long, and bringing that, you know, maybe not justice, but it's answers, maybe it's peace, they'll tell you it's not closure, but it's something, it's an answer, and you know, the other

thing is I think that people just want to know you haven't forgotten them, that you're working the case. So that, that was, what was amazing about Holly, is she didn't even know we were working on the case, didn't she? Yeah, she had this, right, this story that was a question in her mind, and when we showed her the photo of her parents, because she asked to see it, that, that moment was amazing, that the look on her face, and that's when she's

teared up and got emotional. Yeah, remember that, you raise a very good point, though, and I'm reluctant to say closure in our stories because every family member has said to me, they never have closure. Maybe they're able to sort of move forward a little bit because they do

about cold cases, I mean, there's so many out there. What leads you to sort of pick and

choose cases and what draws you to them? There's no place to just throw in a dart and start

“right. I think the case is sort of find you. These families come to you, especially in the”

Attorney General's Office, they would come and say, look, we know that this police department has done a great job, but they're just sort of in a holding pattern. Do you all think there's something else you can do with that? We definitely don't come in and try to grade papers, the detective that we're there before, because a lot of them have done incredible police work. It's just they're at a dead end. And so, you know, I think what we can do is offer

resources. A lot of these departments don't have full-time, cold case investigators. They definitely don't have the money to do DNA testing. And so when you have a bigger agency that has access to state funding and then also grant funding, we're able to pass that on and help these agencies with their case. Yeah, yeah, because you can bring in so much more and sometimes when you think about modern technology, those things are very pricey, you're

right. And you're talking small towns oftentimes, right? And small police departments, well, do you typically start off where they left off or do you often just sort of start from scratch? Like, let's go back to the beginning or I'm assuming that it depends on

what case you're looking at. It does, but I've always been, and again, I'm not an investigator.

I'm, you know, an attorney, but in dealing with the investigators, I think the good ones take it from page one. And we actually tell our investigators to not really go and have in-depth conversations with the previous investigators, because we want them to come in with the question of the tunnel vision. That's right. And start from page one, and they usually start and they go through the entire report before they make any conclusions, and then they'll

do an evidence chart, an evidence log, which is painful. They hate doing them, but they're so important because you've got to figure out what do you have left, you know, that you can test in today's world that you couldn't back then. And that's another great point.

“I think you've got to remember that a lot of these cases, you know, we'll say, well, catch”

ourselves saying, well, I mean, why do they just call somebody for cell phone? Right, right, right,

you know, and that wasn't part of the technology deal. Right, right, you're going to need a

pay phone or you're going to need a lay in line. And so you have to really pitch yourself into the year, and remember what that year was like when you start reviewing a case. Yeah, when we're working on our stories for 2020, as you know, we often have to go back and sort of, you know, visualize that for people and remind you that there was a pay phone involved, or the conveniences that we look at now just were not possible in the 1990s and so forth. So you have to transport yourself

in some ways. Mindy, don't go anywhere because I want to talk more about that. We'll be right back. Right, I'm going to tell you a story, total. Steuja, how do you feel about the story? Yeah, I have a lot of time to get over 1000 euros. Have you ever known or read or read? No, just like the story. Wow, and that's just a question. Yeah, the most common thing is automatic. I feel like I'm so relaxed.

Hold your money, so you're going to get up and get 30 years old. What? Have you ever been relaxed with the story? Oh, yeah. 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 1, 4. Oh, yeah. Shluse with the evigen abtippen von Kartenhummann.

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Met Visa Click to pay. einfach beim nächsten checkout auswehren. Welcome back to 2020, The After Show. I am joined today by Mindy Montfort, who founded the Cold Case in Missing Persons Unit in the Texas Attorney General's Office.

And she's giving us a lot of detail about how they do their work. I'm really curious about what it would kind of a toll that takes because, you know, when you think about immersing yourself in these cases. And as I said, you know, they're difficult cases. Sometimes you work on them for many, many years.

You're dealing with family members who are also heartbroken, and maybe sometimes skeptical of the system. I know it takes a toll on them,

“but what about on you when you're working these cases?”

You know, Deborah, I do not think I slept a full night without thinking about yoga shop until we got the news about Robert Muffins. Really since you took the case on. Yeah, I think there's all, and if it maybe it wouldn't be about yoga, but I'd go to bed and think, what are we missing on this one?

Or, you know, there'd be a case that I had just been reviewing, and I'm thinking at night, there's got to be something we need to be testing,

You know, because you just live and breathe these cases.

You really, they do become, people say, what do you read for pleasure? I don't, you know, I'm reading police reports. Yeah, what do you have time? How do you know what's 2020?

Yeah. Well, we know you watch 2020. That is the one thing you do make time for. Well, you mentioned the yoga shop murders. You had worked exclusively with us on this story.

It was a heartbreaking story of four teenage girls who were viciously horrendously murdered, and then their bodies set on fire as somebody tried to cover their tracks here. It was a case that stretched on for more than 30 years. It seemed to be unsolvable. Police had done a lot of work, but tell me a little bit about that case.

And when you're looking at cold cases,

“what was that moment that finally sort of helped crack the case?”

What I have to give complete props to Dan Jackson with the Austin Police Department, because really, it was his great detective work. I mean, obviously, over the years, we all work as a team and everybody contributes. And I don't think we would be here where we are today. It, you know, there hadn't been one piece of the puzzle that somebody put together and contributed.

But Dan is the one who said, "We're going to re-enter our 380 shell casing because technology has improved. Let's re-enter this in the national database system and see if we might get a hit." And he had it with an hours. He uploaded that.

And then within hours, we had this hit to this Kentucky case. It was unbelievable.

So I was the first big moment, and then it just sort of snowballed from there.

Because it was all hands on deck at that point. It was, we want to test everything. We had been holding back a lot of the evidence waiting for technology to improve. Or, you know, knowing that that might be our last ditch effort. But once we finally had the word that brochures actually matched to our infamous unknown male profile that we had had for years.

We had that piece of evidence. Then it was Dan's call to say, "Let's go from broke. Let's send everything out to the private lab. Get it tested, and let's do it on a rush." Yeah.

And so within a few days, we had even more DNA from Robert Bush years under the fingernails of Amy airs. And it paid off. What did you learn from that case that you've been able to apply to other cases? I'm sure you build on different things that you learn that you can maybe take to something else. Absolutely.

You know, I think every time we do one of these cases, we learn something more about DNA. It's so confusing. It's mind-boggling, but the labs are so patient with you because they'll say, "No, there's no such thing as a stupid question. Ask it again."

“So I think you do that enough times. You realize what questions you need to be asking.”

And then you also know which labs you can use and that are going to have good results and they're accredited and you build those relationships. Relationships with other agencies. And we couldn't have put all these pieces together without talking to all these police departments and working together to figure out different crimes. I mean, I can say that about any of our cases. Yeah, you talk about that a lot that is not obviously just you alone.

You work with others to try to put all of this together. In fact, you could elaborate with forensic genealogists sometimes. And even psychics, is that right? Somebody, I'm a little birdie told me. I made the comment that we will take what when you read a dead end, you will listen to anybody.

If it sounds somewhat credible, you'll listen. I've heard that in other stories that I covered, oftentimes psychists will weigh in and call police departments. And sometimes they do have an idea about something that actually turned lead you in a direction that might help you get you someplace. Mindy, I want to dig a little bit more. I want you to just stay with us. We're going to have to take a quick break, so don't go anywhere.

You know when you're locked in, focus and fearless. Welcome to the WMBA.

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All of it, right here. Lock in is the WMBA on ESPN. All season long! Welcome back to 2020 The After Show. I'm talking with Mindy Monford, who is a former assistant Texas attorney general.

She found that the missing persons in cold case unit, and she's been at work with our team here at 2020 on a lot of our most talked about investigations. When you're talking about finding justice for the family's Mindy,

and justice isn't always neat and tidy.

As you said, in the case of the yogurt shop murders, the killer was eventually dead by the time you actually were able to find him. Justice is kind of different for everybody.

Do you feel like you're finding justice or are there times where you feel like it's solved? And there's an answer, but it's not really justice. You know, justice, at least the families I've talked to, say, look, at least you haven't forgotten our family member. The fact that you are not collecting dust on a shelf that you're actually looking in 2026 at new things to do on this case, they do feel that that's some justice.

“I think justice to me is trying to find the answer.”

Again, yes, you're right.

You may never prosecute that person, and you may never get 50 years,

or life-sensor, anything like that or restitution, but you're going to at least know maybe what happened to your loved one. I can't even imagine losing a loved one to a horrible violent crime, and then not having any extra punch in the gut that you don't even know who did it. You just have to write it off over the years.

Before I let you go, so many of these cases that we cover involve young women. It's never lost on me that it impacts young women in a big way when they hear about these stories. Any lessons you might impart or any thoughts when you've looked at violent crime and things that have happened around the country. Oftentimes, it is women who are the victims here. Any advice for young women who might be targeted in these cases?

I don't know, any thoughts for women who might be listening to this.

“I think we do, as women, we have to be observant of our surroundings.”

Someone said this to me the other day on a case. It tells you to trust your gut, and I think if your gut is telling you something's not right, don't be afraid to call the police or to call a friend or to turn the light on or to get the heck out of there. Whatever situation you're in, but I think we've got to trust our intuition and our gut, but to mainly be observant of your surroundings.

We just sort of take it for granted sometimes that people aren't watching. And it's scary, I think we have to live like that.

And when you see the shows and the stories and the cases we do, it's very, my son always makes fun of me.

Mom, you know, you've just gone to the store. Yeah, I did the same thing. You know, you have the, you just see these backpatters. I feel like I'm living in a police report sometimes. So, you know, it doesn't happen as often as we think it does.

And that, you know, it really doesn't. And you can still trust people, of course, but just to be vigilant and to know your surroundings.

“And I think to travel in pairs, I think that's always a good.”

Yeah, a good piece of advice and I think to your point, just like really trusting if something doesn't feel right. You know, chances are it's not and to speak up and to speak out. Well, hopefully this will be helpful to folks out there.

And also to just thank you so much for the work that you do, Mindy.

It is such a pleasure to get a chance to talk to you and learn more about how you've been able to help families around this country. And also find some satisfaction yourself in doing work that makes the difference. Well, thank you, Deborah, and thanks again for the show and for putting that word out there to everybody. Absolutely. We'll be talking.

I'm sure I'll be talking to you sooner than later because we'll be teaming up on something. Mindy, thank you for being with us. And thank you for joining us for this podcast episode. And of course, you can find 2020 on Friday nights on ABC and stream episodes like this one any time on Disney. And who little?

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