Murder at the Bike Shop | Ep. 7 – In Cold Blood

started a shopping trip.

I'll tell you the first day of shopping.

And the platform makes me no problem. I have many problems, but the platform is not one of them. I have the feeling that shopping trip can only be obtained. Everything is super simple, integrative and convenient. And the time and the money that I can't invest in there.

For all of you, in Waksthum. Now the cost list is on shopping.de. Welcome to the "I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Bostre." If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the "I Can't Sleep Podcast." I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore to sleep

with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention. And then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcast. That's "I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Bostre."

Scott Baldwin had known since 2022 that we were interested in his case. That we wanted to see if maybe we could cover it on this podcast. His attorneys weren't comfortable with the idea, which is understandable. Working with media is a huge risk for any defendant. "The actor can be everything close to the best of some reason in the entertainment

since anybody else wants to look at space, thank you to extremely upset for your turn." "No, no." So for years. "I remained in touch with Scott, hearing updates about his case and his cancer.

We never got a chance to see the files for ourselves, but I wondered a lot about the

man Scott said had been seen with Earl O'Burn shortly before he was killed." "And again, 100% of this is any police reports of all herviles, not just me saying. The description that was for 13 years was a white male with blonde hair, white colored clothes, white colored vehicle with a rectangular headlight." "Who was the blonde man?

Why hadn't he been identified? Then last year, Scott found out his diagnosis was terminal. And around the same time, the lead attorney on his case unexpectedly left the group that was representing him. That's when Scott told me, "Fuck it, I can't wait any more.

Go ahead and investigate my case. Do whatever you can."

“"That's why I told James, I just sent out anything, I just sent it, FY whatever she”

can from whoever you get it for herself and have them do it." "So we got started.

We moved as fast as we could to get the case files and transcripts and could finally see

them for ourselves. There was a lot in those files, of course, about Alan Nutter, who has been pursued as an alternate suspect for over two decades now. And we could see why. There was a lot of potential evidence against him.

But the files also made it clear to us that there were other people in this case who should have been investigated. Not long after we got started, I got a text from Susan. There's someone else who should have been a suspect, right? Double-question mark.

I called her back right away. Who are you talking about? I asked.

“"They should have been looking at James' long, right?”

Be employee?" "Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking." James' long had worked for Earl O'Burn for 28 years off and on. He's the employee who testified at Scott's trial that Earl had a habit of walking around outside at night.

James' long had been 14 years old when Earl first hired him in 1960, and he was still working there in 1988. He should have been a suspect in this case. He should have been investigated, but he wasn't. Not really.

He did take a polygraph along with several other employees. He passed it and was cleared. That was the end of that. There's a good reason, though, that detective should have given James' long a closer look. This is a report from Sharon Waley, the polygrefer, and it's the only record we have of

Earl's own keys. There were drops of blood in the floor, which looked like the old guy went to the door

“to lock it, but there was no blood on his key ring and his hands were covered in cake”

with blood. She's talking about the blood of Thrump by the door, but she's saying there is no blood on his key ring, which means they found his keys. And it means there's no way he locked the door here. It's somewhat someone who had keys locked the door.

His hands were coated in blood.

Anything he handled would have had blood on it. But according to this report, there was no blood on his keys. That would mean Earl hadn't handled his keys that night. That would mean Earl hadn't locked the doors. And since Earl's keys were still there in the shop, that would mean no one else had

used them to lock up the shop either. And that would likely mean only someone else with their own set of keys could have committed this murder, since they were able to lock up after themselves when they left.

“Yeah, that detail that they found the keys is so important.”

There's a reference to finding trace blood on the blocks themselves, where that could have been transferred from the killer. Yeah. We have no crime scene photos of the keys, but if this report is accurate, if Earl's keys were really still there, which in this case is admittedly a big if, it would mean only

three people could have committed the murder, and that's the three employees who had their own keys and could have locked up after Earl was assaulted. Those employees were James Long, Lori Scott, and Karen Raymond. We had good reason to think neither Lori nor Karen had committed this crime, because Officer Harold West, who during by the bike shop on the night early burn was killed, had

seen a blonde man outside the shop with Earl, next to the tan car with four square headlights that was still running. Later, we spoke to Officer West for ourselves, and found out he had the same suspicions about this blonde man that we did. Maybe the guy you saw wasn't the killer, but who is he, and why is he not come for?

“Well, that's what I can't get over, like if it wasn't the killer, why didn't he say,”

"Oh, I saw Earl that night and he was fine, what I left after." And I agree with you, who I didn't need to come forward if he wasn't the killer. When we saw the case files for ourselves, we wondered, could the blonde man have been James Long, was he there that night? Because if he was, then he absolutely should have been a suspect in this murder, right?

We didn't want to get too far ahead of ourselves though, we knew almost nothing about James Long. Do you have any idea what he looks like? No. And do we have any idea what time car he was driving?

Not a clue. For all we knew, James Long was five foot two with black hair and drove a blue minivan,

“which would mean he was absolutely not the man, Officer West saw either.”

That would explain why no one had considered him to be a suspect before, but it would be good to at least make sure.

As Susan and I prepared for our first investigative trip to Kalamazoo, one thing we hoped

was that we could find someone who could answer a question for us. What did James Long look like? I am Susan Simpson, and I'm just in the Davis. I'm an attorney and investigator. And I'm a true crime TV producer.

And this is proof season three, murder at the bike shop. Proof is a red marble media production and association with glass box media. New episodes are released on Mondays, and on Thursdays you can catch our sidebar episodes where we talk about the case, talk to guests, and tell you more about what's going on behind the scenes.

This is episode seven, in Cold Blood. All right, back in Kalamazoo, not working your time this case, it's time this is out. Um, but it's sort of an offshoot, well not sort of, it is an offshoot. It's so weird driving around because it brings back all of his memories when we were here before.

Yeah, who is our first door not today?

Back during COVID, we had spent months in Kalamazoo working on Jeff's case. It gave us a real sense of deja vu to be back there talking to witnesses again. At the end of our first day, we called Kevin to update him on our progress. Well, as typical our day one was mostly a bust. I don't think that's true.

We thought that. We were worried about that at first. We actually had a pretty successful start I thought. Well, as long as you guys are consistent, we should be fine with some circles. We didn't record any interviews that first day, but one of the witnesses we'd found had

We'd spoken to him for a while about the bike shop, and some of the other cold cases that we'd started looking at.

Yeah, he knows a lot of people connected, and basically after we talked to him, he called

us back about 20 minutes later and said, "Are you girls armed?" Because if you're not, you shouldn't be doing this. But if you're armed, go for it. Wow. Hey, the witness told us, I just wanted to say, "Be careful doing whatever it is you're

doing out there." Because these people you're talking about, some of them are harmless, but some of them are very, very dangerous too, and some crazy shit could pop off. Yeah, and I mean, his advice we took to heart, because basically what he was trying to tell us is, like, you might be investigating this one murder, but the people you're talking to

are involved in other multiple murders. Right. And they're not going to necessarily believe or trust that you don't care about the other murders. Which is fair enough for them.

“We told Kevin that we'd also arrange to interview two key witnesses in the case.”

Look, who are these people? So Renee Padula was the girlfriend of Alan Nutter, who was, you know, a long time alternate suspect in the case, and was allegedly part of the myth, so this case, is that she was with Nutter on the night of the murders, and she drove the getaway cars, and surely.

The second interview we'd scheduled was with Karen Raymond, the manager of the bike shop.

We'd only spoken to her briefly on the phone, but she'd told us a few things and had already caught her attention. Basically what she said is, there is no way, or it'll open the door for that kid, meaning Scott. Well, she also made comments about how James Long has more of the story there, but then

cut herself off. Yeah, she said, "I don't want to get ahead of myself. I'm going to look through boxes and pull pictures for you guys, but she gave us a description of him skinny blonde hair." Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Which is what we've been wanting to know. Well, yeah, that's what we've wondered. James was blonde, like you could see from a distance he blonde.

So James was like blonde, like the blonde. He was blonde all the entire time, like no fake, no, he was blonde. That's Karen from when we met up with her in person. And yes, she told us, "James Long hadn't been very blonde." We asked her what he'd been like as a co-worker.

I got along with him fine, I mean, I did.

“I think there were some bad feelings on his part of how much Earl depended on me.”

He was a little bit of a loner. He'd go to the bar. He was a drinker. I was quite a drinker. I did remember his friend coming once in a while.

The friend Karen is talking about here is actually James Long's boyfriend, James Connell. Did you know he was gay? Yes. Although he didn't talk about it, well, somebody might have told me, I don't know.

This is something Karen had mentioned in one of her early police reports. It read. The recording officer asked Karen whom Earl O'Burn didn't get along with. She advises that he was often upset with employee James Long. She advises that when James Long's boyfriend came over, this would upset Earl.

But you think Earl had a problem with? Earl would have had a problem with James being gay. Oh, for sure. I mean, that's not something that he would have accepted. Karen said she didn't have any problems with James as a coworker, though she suspected

he might not have felt the same way about her. Especially after Earl chose her to essentially be the manager of the bike shop.

“I think towards him, I think James was very jealous maybe as a word or bitter.”

Yeah, about me. James Long was bitter because the reports talk about it. James's prize sheet here that, no. Back in 1988, James Long had been open with investigators about his disdain for Karen Raymond.

She is why he immediately quit his job after Earl was killed, he said.

James never ever returns to the shop again.

They asked him about that and he says, 'cause I knew Karen being charged. It's like, wasn't ever going to go back. Yeah, I mean, kind of surprises me a little bit how I knew he was a little upset and jealous I knew there were some bad feelings there but I didn't really think he hated me.

but after seeing your reports of his statements, Karen now had the same question we did. What kind of card did James have? That's what we'd like to know. On that trip to Kalamazoo, we also spoke to another bike shop employee, Laurie Scott.

Right away, she told us there was a lot about this case that had never made sense to her.

I was told that night, then after a police officer came back and saw him outside, for him to be outside, that was very unusual for him to go out of that building as if we couldn't understand either why was he outside, because he didn't go outside.

“Was there anyone he would have opened the door for?”

One thing I could think of being a blonde man, maybe he did called James at night and James came to check the building or something. Laurie started telling us about the day she'd found Earl's body. In her way to work that morning, she stopped at a nearby gas station and ran into James Long.

And I got there and I started to go in, I wanted to get something to drink and here there's a gas station right across the street, I walked across the street to get something to drink

and James and I walked or back over together.

James had unlocked the three locks to let them into the bike shop, but as they walked in, Laurie immediately noticed something was wrong. It's just weird because I saw the blood and I was like, "What?" And then James, it's just like, "Oh, we probably just got himself." Laurie ran to Earl's bedroom to make sure he was okay and found him there dead.

His arm was like up in the air, kind of like he was in regular mortars type thing and he wasn't moving. Yeah.

“She was sticking up in the air, I just screamed and I said, "James, I think he's dead."”

What was James's reaction to when he came out? He didn't really say anything. He didn't, he didn't act surprised. I mean, I was a wreck. He didn't act surprised.

So I'm not accusing anybody, I'm just saying he did not act surprised. Let's sit out to here back then, like you noticed that he wasn't... Yeah, he didn't really say much. Did you ever wonder if James long could have done this? Honestly, yes, I did, just my own thoughts and then he was like, "So he really had no reaction

that day." He was just nothing. We asked Laurie if she knew what kind of car James would have driven back in 1988. Yeah, I couldn't tell you. He didn't have a car, so I didn't get what the bus and stuff, or his partner would drop

him off. Laurie didn't think James and self had a car, but she did think his partner, James Connell, sometimes dropped him off at work. So he had a car of some sort, but she didn't remember what kind. Laurie doesn't think she ever told police explicitly that she thought James long could

have done it. She had no evidence he had. This is a bad gut feeling about how he'd acted that morning.

But yes, privately, she'd always wondered if James long had killed Earl Uburn.

I don't know why they never looked into it. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for talking to us. Oh, I appreciate you. I appreciate you.

I'm just still looking into this. When we met with Karen Raymond, we told her about our conversation with Laurie, her former co-worker. When we talked to Laurie, she said she always thought it could have been James that did this.

I guess I would place my name in the ad as well. Laurie had said that she'd kept her thoughts about James to herself back then, but Karen said she had spoken up. She'd told investigators that she thought James long should be a suspect.

“Did you ever tell Madison that I think James should be a suspect or could be a suspect?”

I told police officers in the beginning in the beginning, 13 years later, you don't think you told them. Well, I think I would assume that my thoughts were in the original police report. They're not. Then I thought that maybe James was a suspect.

That's not recorded anywhere. You saw the whole report that they had from you back then. If Earl really had opened the shop door that night, Karen said, then it meant that one

My personal feelings are the only people that he would have opened the door for. What have been the three of us? I mean, even if he did have bad feelings with James and even if he didn't approve of James all the time, he still trusted James. I mean, James was 25 years to work for him.

Karen told us that if James long had shown up at the bike shop in the middle of the night, he would have known how to get Earl to come out. Because Earl's bedroom in the attached house had been against one of the exterior walls, not far from the alley entrance to the bike shop. You could have pound it on the house.

I don't know if anybody would know this bedroom was right there, but James did. Would Earl have gotten up and opened the door for him? He probably would have come out and looked saw James and opened the door. He just had to be surprised it wasn't investigative further because if there was a blind man outside, and he was outside with that blind man, there's no other blind man I know of that.

Earl was close to other than James. We obviously needed to speak to James long, but no one we spoke to had heard from him since the late 1980s. He left Kalamazoo not long after the murder. James had left by then, he went somewhere I don't remember where. In hindsight, I realized now that it was around the time of this trip to Kalamazoo,

that Scott's health took a turn for the worse.

He began to climb that he'd never recover from.

“But at the time, I hadn't understood that's what was happening, in part because Scott kept”

up a brave face and tried to maintain his normal routine for as long as possible. Are they going to move you to a medical unit? I'm in general population, they want to move me to a medical unit, and I'm being very stubborn and refused. Okay.

I said, keep me warm up, let me be with my dogs, I have a partner next to me. I'm in a unit that has poli walls, so there's a little four foot poli wall in my partner to look over. Go, how you doing? You can see me asleep, but I see if I'm stupid and what's going on, and if you go get

the officers seated, but in my partner he keeps dying, I mean he's a good guy. When we're out walking the dog, I hold the leash, and he pushes me in the wheelchair out of the cement, and we walk the dog, come back in. From our earliest conversations with Scott, he had told us about Alan Nutter.

His attorneys and private investigators had never spoken to Nutter directly.

He was hoping that we finally would. Alan Nutter feels like, in every case, there's always someone we're looking for. We knew Alan Nutter was somewhere in Kalamazoo, and after realizing Nutter's connection to the house where the bloody wrench was found, and knowing that he'd never been questioned

“about it, it was more important than ever to find him.”

He'd served some time in prison for a bank robbery, but he was out now, and back in town. A lot of people we talked to had seen him around. He was in a wheelchair we were told, and usually out panhandling at a gas station on the north end of town. So we just went to this week, I'm about a coffee for myself on a promptly.

But let's be completely honest, we got coffee, a double pack of slim gyms, we needed to supply anyway. So we talked to the people working at the gas station. They told us that the man in the wheelchair did come around here or used to. I showed him a photo of that and it wasn't, but he hadn't seen him recently.

Yeah. So Alan Nutter has been hanging around here. This would be the start of a recurring pattern. We'd find out so one had seen Alan Nutter somewhere, but by the time we got there, he was always gone.

Hi, excuse me, sir. I'm looking for Alan Nutter. Give him a nowhere he is. Oh, really?

“Do you know where he might like where he's been hanging out lately?”

It was down town now, okay, thank you. So we have been looking for Alan Nutter. We're arriving all over Kalamazoo, asking every person, every unhaulsed individual in a wheelchair if they're Alan Nutter.

It feels like we're always a step behind him.

Always a step behind him. We have multiple people helping us, try to track him down. Even though Nutter remained elusive, we were able to find someone who known him back

How did you meet him at a bar?

What did he look like back then? He was tall, then he had blonde hair, like a yellow blonde, blinds weren't my type actually. That's Renee. She was Alan Nutter's girlfriend, sort of. How long did y'all date for?

We didn't really date. We kind of hooked up and then we started hanging out until he went to jail. And I was pregnant, so, and I didn't have nothing to do with him after that. Let's just say, I've evolved, I'm not as naive as I used to be. Renee and Alan Nutter had a brief relationship back in 1988.

And as a result, she spent the past four decades periodically being questioned by people

“who are certain she knows something important about a murder at a bike shop.”

They always came in a thing to make me very defensive.

The way they came at me every time, like, I was hiding something and it's like, look at my face. I'm naive. They were convinced you were hiding something. I've seen the files.

Like, they are dead convinced that you were giving him an alibi that you were covering for him. I wouldn't do that. I might do that for my children. I'm not saying, but I would not do that for him.

When they asked me, I told them he robbed John Deere. He did. I was like, oh my God, I didn't want to get in trouble. He went at night to a shop that sold John Deere equipment and I was in the car and he said he'd be right back and then when he came back, he had a bunch of stuff.

“The weedwackers and stuff was like, I was like, what the hell, what are you doing?”

Who wants to buy a weedwacker? This runs were not rich, they're not kind of people to say, yeah, I'll take one of those. I mean, I'm just saying that was stupid. Did you see how I got into the shop? No, I was in the car sitting in the car and it was your car.

I had a little ocean blue escort at the time. Silent Observer tips claimed Alan Nutter had been seen in a tan car that matched the one scene at the bike shop. If so, then he hadn't been in Renee's little blue car.

Renee has always admitted she was with Alan Nutter when he robbed the John Deere store.

And that means she really was hanging around with Alan Nutter around the time and the bike shop murder. So the robbery at John Deere, it's either the night of May 31st or the night of June 1st. When was the murder?

“The night of June 2nd going into the morning of the 3rd.”

The John Deere store was also on East Michigan Avenue. The same road that the bike shop was on. So two break-ins at two different shops on the same road, just a night or two apart. And Alan Nutter definitely did one of them. But Renee still doesn't think he did the other.

I just, the timeline in my head, I was with him and I just didn't think he did it. Otherwise I would have said something. I can't see him doing that. I just can't see him being that violent. Back in 2010, when Renee spoke to detectives from Kalamazoo, she told them another reason

she was convinced he couldn't have done the bike shop murder. And I'm not saying, yep, we start to do the other thing, but to get away with it. The long has repeated it. If Alan Nutter had done this Renee believed, he'd have been caught a long time ago. Back in 1988, Alan Nutter had initially claimed to be at a motel out of town on the

night of the murder. But motel record showed he was actually there the following week. Then Renee told police, Alan was actually with her when the murder occurred. But one of the silent observatips had claimed that this was a lie that Alan Nutter had asked her to lie for him.

Subject states that Alan Nutter has asked several people including his girlfriend Renee for an alibi. To protect him, no, no, that man was a human that was beaten to death. There's no way I would protect, no, they ended up going to you. And you give a statement, Renee was contacted.

It was noted that she was the girlfriend of Alan Nutter. Renee stated she had been with him every night and day for the past two, three weeks. She advised me that she thinks the night this incident, she and Alan spent the evening at the colds residents on Jackson Street. Oh, yeah, the colds.

They were not good people.

the bike shop. And as we mentioned last episode, it seems like it was this murder that Alan Nutter had once told his daughter broke a little bit about. Renee told us she's not exactly sure when the murder at the bike shop occurred. But she thinks either the night had happened or maybe the night after that she'd been

with Alan Nutter at a party at Mani Cole's house.

“I remember being at that party, maybe he could have laughed, what a feast, that's what I'm saying.”

So there's statements made that Ronnie Cole told people that the night of the murder at the bike shop, Alan Nutter came to his house with blood on him. I wasn't with him then, I don't, yeah, I don't know. In June of 1988, Renee was with Alan Nutter a lot, but Nutter had plenty of other girlfriends he was hanging around with, too.

Well, there was a red head and there's Trudy, or she was married, and there was a girl and mending. Alan Nutter having several girlfriends is significant because the reason Renee got caught up

in the bike shop case in the first place is that back in 1988, a bunch of silent observer

tips were called in about how Alan Nutter's girlfriend had either been his getaway driver or do something about the crime. Several of the tips talk about Alan's girlfriend, so suddenly you become the girlfriend that all the stories are about. I am wondering if there was another girlfriend, the stories were actually about.

“Well, the key to this, the main character who died Alan would have been Trudy.”

Most of Alan's other girlfriends were just side pieces Renee said, and then there was Trudy. The married woman he was having in a fair with, Renee had spoken to her once, she called her when she found out Alan was seeing her, too.

Because I was upset when I found out about her and she told me that he always goes back

to her. There was that Bonnie and Clyde connection there, but also he told me about what he did with the Metro bus, what's that? He pulled the knife at the Metro driver to get a ride and I think it was Trudy. The February 1988, Alan that her had in fact hijacked a driver at knife point, because

he'd been desperate to get a cross town to see his girlfriend Trudy. She lived not far from the bike shop, at the house where after she moved out, her landlord would later find an antique pipe wrench, covered with blood and what looked like human hair. When we told Renee about the bloody red and shut Trudy's house, she had a question for us.

I wonder where Trudy drove Chevy Celebrity? What color was it? Damn. Maybe that was the car that we're referring to. It was a tan car with four square headlights, same as the car, Officer West saw, outside

of the bike shop. I just seemed to not have very good luck with men. No, you don't. It's okay.

“The older you get the less important there, Alan was a bad person as far as being a liar”

and a thief, but I don't think you could have done it. We were hoping that Renee might know where to find Alan Nutter, but she told us she hadn't seen him in years. What is the call of you see him, not I'm going to be looking at any of the world's chair. As the days went on, we heard from a lot of people who said they had seen Alan Nutter

though. He was on this road yesterday, someone would tell us, and off would go to look for him. Kevin and I are once again driving around, looking for Alan Nutter. I don't remember the last time I've looked for anyone. This hard, maybe not since I was a kid looking for Santa Claus.

When we made our first trip to Kalamazoo for a logistical reasons, I'd had to bring along my then five-month-old baby, which meant in the evenings I was stuck at the hotel with her. I couldn't join just on Kevin as they searched the streets of Kalamazoo for Alan Nutter. Hey, is your name Alan?

No, man, all right, thanks.

Somehow they never seemed to find him.

They swore they were looking really hard, but after hearing the recorded audio from their

Looking for Alan Nutter again, this is the seventh day in a row, I think.

Well, it seems like it's about time he turns up then.

“I think Susan would be mad if he just went to the main street pub and told her we were”

looking for Alan. It might never know. We're leaving no stone on turn, you could be in there, you don't know. Two hours. We're guarding you guys.

It's the way you see if he comes down. We had much better luck finding many other witnesses who testified at Scott's trial. Including Virginia Bytes, the waitress who Scott had flirted with and had given a song he burned into a CD that she'd later given to detectives. I remember, I can almost catch you what he even looked like at the distance on the years

ago. He seemed harmless. You've heard in previous episodes what Virginia told us about Scott Baldwin. But when we met with her, she also told us about someone else she knows. And when else, with a connection to the Kalamazoo cold case team.

Richie Roy. He knows when I'm getting mad at him. Why? I usually just call him rich.

“If he pissed me off, I'll say Richard Roy, you knock it off.”

Virginia's brother is Richard Vinderville. Cold case team informant and triple homicide suspect. He needs you first here that your brother was a suspect not murder. When he got arrested for the burglary, which was his actual arrest. In April of 2002, Richard Vinderville was arrested for breaking into a garage and stealing

a purse. Shortly after that, he became the lead suspect in the Holderman case. A triple homicide where an elderly couple and their daughter were murdered in civilian township. What do you think about that?

No, I'm like no way, because he can never hurt an elderly person.

I never thought of him as a murderer or then. Now, then, no. But then again, if I sit back and look at it, as much into drugs as he was in, could have you possible? Yeah.

My brother's a little scary. You know, I will use scary. Vinderville was somehow eliminated as a suspect in the Holderman case. Instead, five other people got charged with that crime. So they eventually convict his girlfriend, your cousin, and these three guys.

Yep. But it does seem strange that that group would have done something together without Richard Vinderville being part of it. At the time of the Holderman murders, Richard Vinderville was 38 years old. His girlfriend, Brandy Miller, was just 19 and had found out just one week before that she

was pregnant with Vinderville's child. Vinderville's cousin, Angela McConnell, who was also charged, was only 17. The other three defendants were Brandy's brother, Andrew Miller, his roommate, Joe Williams, and their friend Benplatt. One thing I did to find out, was that five dumbass kids could do a crime like that without

leaving any evidence behind. No, Angela. Yes, I don't think she did it. You don't think Angela? She was so young, she was just a baby still.

I mean, and she couldn't live with it.

“She wasn't, she didn't want to live with us, we're like in prison, that's why I guess”

that's why she hung herself. Angela McConnell died in 2023. She'd been represented by the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the time of her death.

They never found any DNA though for any of them.

That's not what Mallory said, but he said they had all kinds of evidence. Oh, they got nothing. No DNA, no fingerprints. Mallory is Captain James Mallory at the Kalamazoo City Police, one of the investigators on this case.

Virginia remembered him telling her once that they had lots of physical evidence on the five defendants, but they didn't. DNA, fingerprints, and boot prints had all been found at the scene, but were never linked to those charged in the case. The only evidence against the five defendants came in the form of confessions.

The five of them had been interrogated or questioned by police while over a hundred times combined. Eventually four of the five confessed to police that they'd been inside the Polarman House when the murders occurred. Three of them quickly recanted, they had made it all up they said.

lied to the police as well, though when offered a plea deal that would let her go home

“one day if she agreed to testify against the others, she accepted.”

The case against the other four was largely based on her story. No physical evidence. If five kids like that broke into a house at noon, I mean, and got away with it that cleanly. What?

And that time of day, and I didn't even know it was at that time of day. Broad daylight. And they sold flowers out in their front yard. I did, you tell me how many people stopped our flowers and didn't see something. That's what I've wondered, too.

There had been sightings of strange vehicles and strange people at and around the Polarman House during the time period when the murders happened. But no one saw any of the five defendants, or any of the vehicles that allegedly parked in the Polarman's driveway while committing the crime.

“So yes, four of the five Polarman defendants did confess.”

And the confession should never be the end of an investigation.

Not without something that proves the confession is actually true. So what were the reasons then that the confessions in the Polarman case should be believed that was something we needed to find out? We also wanted to find out what exactly Richard Vendivill's role in all of this had been, because something strange happened here.

From what we can tell, Vendivill started off as an informant for Colke's team detective Mike Workhama. He provided information he claimed to possess about who had committed several of the Kalamazoo cold cases. But then he became the lead suspect in the Polarman and triple homicide.

Detective Mike Workhama was determined to charge him with the crime. Here's an excerpt from Workhama talking to one of the Polarman defendants. This case is going to be charged very quickly.

And we're not going to give Richard never write up to any good out person.

That's our ultimate goal. Because Richard's not going to play. Richard's going to fight right to the end, which was suspecting. Because of being pleased, he's going to die in prison and knows that. So he goes to that food now by fighting.

The case was quickly charged, but not against Vendivill. The Colke's team changed their mind about him. They concluded he was innocent. They believed instead that the five defendants who were ultimately charged had conspired together to frame Vendivill for the murders.

So Richard Vendivill was cleared as a suspect and became a cooperating witness instead. He did end up giving a statement against the others after he's given a immunity. Did he snitch on brand? Because I just don't see that happen. I mean, yeah, like he gave a statement like, he gave several statements and all of this.

That surprises me because he was still somehow in contact with Brandy.

Richard Vendivill was never charged with the Polarman murders, but he did serve time for stealing

a purse. I mean, he has done some stuff in his life obviously, but it isn't saying that he got 20 to 40 years for stealing a purse out of the garage. That's a very bitter. He's very bitter.

And last I knew he was after work, I'm a work of most dirty, it's all he kept saying. In April 2002, Vendivill got caught stealing a purse out of someone's garage. He was charged with breaking and entering and received a lengthy prison sentence. He served 20 years before his release in 2022. While in prison, Vendivill met Jeff Titus, the man who was convicted, then exonerated

of the murder of the two deer hunters in Fulton. Vendivill found out Titus was represented by the Michigan Innocence Clinic, and he began writing letters to his attorneys. Jeff Titus is innocent Vendivill told them, and there's more to the story than you know. Here's Kevin reading a portion from those letters.

In April 2002, I found myself in the same situation that Mr. Titus was in, and only by my dumb luck that I gained the upper hand to save myself three life sentences for a crime that I did not commit. In 2006, I caught detective Mike Workema, planting/tampering with evidence to frame me for a cold case homicide.

In 2007, his supervisor also found this evidence that showed Workema had planted/tampered with evidence. His supervisor approached me and committed some misconduct to keep me from coming forward and to keep this information from coming out.

“What Vendivill is claiming in that letter is important.”

If Mike Workema was really caught planting/tampering with evidence and it was somehow covered

Now that's a big if.

Vendivill's claims could just as easily be the ramblings of a bitter convict with a grudge against

the police that caught him. Vendivill has been making these claims for years, and almost no one has ever taken him seriously. Virginia did, though, her brother knows something important, she told us. "There's a lot of stuff going past people, and somebody's making that happen, and I want to know who's behind it."

Vendivill and some of his letters that I've seen before basically says just that, he's like pay attention, look what's going on behind the scenes. Vendivill's talk of a grand conspiracy had caught my attention.

“After all, who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory?”

But up until that point, I'd been less interested in Vendivill's conspiracies, and more interested in understanding the mystery of how he'd gone from cold-case informant to triple homicide suspect and back to informant once again. As the Kalamazoo cold-case team had apparently been all but certain that Vendivill killed the older man family.

But within a couple weeks, if not days, they had changed their minds entirely, for reasons

that never seemed to have been explained.

It was bizarre how had that happened. Maybe Vendivill could tell us, and maybe he could tell us about some of the other cold cases he claimed to know about, too. Where do you think we could find him? Retch?

I don't know. She's got his number. That's the same number. Give me a call. Tell him who you are.

“Do you think he's dangerous if we were to roll up on him?”

No, you wouldn't hurt you. He thinks he's got the truth, and he wants people to know him. Okay. [music playing] Me too, Ernst.

She's already dead on the ground.

Not on the ground. [music playing] Virginia gave us the contact info. She had for her brother, but the number she gave us had all been disconnected. And we weren't sure where to look next.

But while Alan Kalamazoo, we took Kevin to the house where the older men's were murdered. So he could start to get an idea for himself. Why Susan and I were so bothered by this case? All right. I'm recording.

Okay, so you guys are taking me to the famous older men out of the sea. From the looks of it, the older men's house is the last place you'd expect to crime like that to happen. A tiny two-bedroom house set on 80 acres of quiet farmland. And the older men themselves were the last people you might expect this kind of crime to happen to.

Dutch immigrants in their 90s, they were described in the case file as very frugal people.

“Who would have chosen this house and those people to target for a crime like this?”

That house feels so stuck in time. It still feels like murdering half America almost like the Truman Capotee in cold blood house or something. Yeah, hasn't changed. If we knock them on door, think they let us in and look at it. Guessing they're immodeled.

I'm guessing you've ever bought the house. At some point, somebody probably looked around for the money. They might have found something. Right. After the murders, the older men's next door neighbors told police about rumors they'd heard

about the couple keeping cash in their basement. Turns out those rumors were true. While searching the house, police found thousands of dollars in cash hidden about the house. From the pictures we saw earlier today, though, it doesn't look like the money was actually hit in really great places. Like it was under a cushion.

Well, they had the fake floor in one place. So that one was pretty good. They had a fake floor. Yeah. Yeah.

So we don't know that anyone found anybody. There are a few boxes that are put out that could have been boxes that held money hidden in the rafters. So potentially yes. They say put out. You mean like out on the floor?

Yeah. And supposedly there was a metal box in one of the bedrooms. But I couldn't see it in the photo today. But like they sounded like a cash box kinda. Crime scene photo show a house that had not been ransacked.

There was a considerable amount of blood everywhere, but upstairs at least, the only signs of a struggle with that the wires for the kitchen phone had been yanked out of the wall. Some items in a back bedroom had been knocked off a desk. And the bath mats in a bathroom hallway had been bunched up and pulled out of place.

But everything else seemed to still be in place.

“Both the kitchen chairs were tucked into the tiny kitchen table.”

Cabinet doors were all shut. If someone had opened the kitchen drawers, they would have found Mr. Polterman's wallet and piles of loose dollar bills, likely collected from the Polterman's roadside flower stand. There was even a drawer full of watches in jewelry.

But the drawers hadn't been touched. Oh, so there was also a sliced open milk jug found in the basement. After seeing it, it looks very much to me like someone tried to defend themselves with a milk jug.

And it was sliced like someone had a knife, was going at Anna.

And sliced as the milk jug opened, and suddenly she's defenseless. Like a gallon of milk.

“Anna is Anna Lewis, the Polterman's 63-year-old daughter.”

Although the Poltermans in their 90s were still able to live independently, they had some mobility issues, and Mrs. Polterman was mostly deaf. So their daughter Anna Lewis often stopped by to help them out. On the day of the murders, she had gone shopping at Myers, and then stopped by her parents' house to drop off some groceries.

The state's theory is that the Poltermans were like in the process of being killed or whatever, and their daughter comes and kind of accidentally comes into this happening. She becomes a victim because she's unlucky. Yeah, but when you walk in the photos, there are two bags of grocery sitting on the table. And in the sink is Chuck Rose, and it's like sitting in the sink.

Like someone had either put it in there to fall for dinner that night or it was leaking. So maybe she brought it in. But if she sees all this blood and everything, she takes the time to throw this in the sink. Exactly. Around 6pm, Anna's husband and son drove past the Poltermans house on their way to their weekly bowling league.

They saw Anna's van parked out front and figured she was there visiting her parents, so they decided to stop in to say hi. But everything at the house was eerily quiet. The blinds had been drawn, all the lights turned off, the doors locked.

“The only thing out of place was the kitchen window which had been swung open.”

Concern, they forced open the garage door to get inside. And the first thing they noticed is all the blood in the garage, and they freak out and call 911. We just saw the photos for the first time, and that's so clear that anyone walking that garage knows immediately something really scary has happened. The blood in the garage all belonged to Mr. Polterman.

It appeared as if the attack had begun right there.

His hat, which he always wore when outdoors, had been set or dropped on the trunk of his car.

And one of his slippers laid just outside the garage entrance. The other slipper would later be found inside the house in a blood soaked bedroom. It might as he go outside the house, so Anna has groceries, maybe Mom takes the potatoes downstairs, and does someone pull in the driveway and he goes out to say hi. And that's where the confrontation does he go out to, kind of seems like the groceries. When Anna's son and husband finally made it into the house, they found the bodies of Anna Lewis and Mr. and Mrs. Polterman in the basement.

They'd all been bludgeoned and had their throats hacked open. Anna Lewis had been stabbed twice in the chest, blood was pulling everywhere. It was a horrific triple homicide in broad daylight on a quiet country road. Someone did not rummage, like if it was a total barklory, you'd think someone would have like open drawers, rums drowned for money. The original detectives hired sort of a forensic psychologist person who said they thought, "Yeah."

They thought that the attacker was one. A family, because it was so personally a friend. What? Why didn't they dispatch with that theory? Oh yeah. The theory that the cold case team settled on was that the five defendants had all come into this murder together.

Though there was no physical evidence, really, that more than one person had done the crime. A single unknown male's DNA was found, as was a single set of unknown fingerprints. And a single set of boot prints was found throughout the property. Tracked through the dirt floor of the pole barn outside, and tracked through the blood inside in the bedroom and basement. The crime lab concluded that the prints came from a caterpillar brand work boot, size 10 and a half.

And then there's the weirds on the steps to the basement. There's exactly one set of footprints. If the cold case team is right, then five people were in the polar rinse house that day. Five people were in that blood-soaked basement.

And yet only one of the five, whichever one it was, that must have been wearing those size 10 and a half caterpillar brand boots.

“Ever stepped in blood, or left prints in the dirt.”

Somehow, the other four avoided leaving any physical trace that they'd ever been there. If it wasn't for their confessions, there'd be no reason to think that more than one person had done the crime at all. This is another thing, too, that the Polterman case hasn't common with scrap bald ones case.

At the bike shop, there were footprints that were never identified, found in the dirt beside and behind the bike shop,

in the same place in direction that officer West had seen the blonde man walking. Those unknown friends were coincidentally, also a size 10 and a half, and definitely not Scott Baldwin's. You wore a size 13. At the end of this trip to Kalamazoo, it seemed like the list of people we wanted to speak to was only growing longer, not shorter. James Long, Richard Bendable, Alan Nutter, we needed to find all of them.

As our trip came to a close, Jacinda and Kevin made one last attempt to find Alan Nutter. This attempt failed, too, though, for a good reason. Okay, Kevin and I went to do one last drive by looking for Alan Nutter, and we got distracted because we got a call from someone. We got a call from Richard Bendable.

“We never found him in person, but we did get message to him, and he called us back.”

Richard Bendable had not wanted to meet with us, and he wasn't sure if he wanted to talk to us just yet either. But he did confirm, yes, he knew in tech of work.

Their first meeting had been in 1988.

He wouldn't go into detail, but he made the comment. My story got to do with a lot of terrible shit. A lot of bad lawyers, a lot of bad cops, a lot of bad prosecutors. Call me again the next time you're in town. Bendable told us, "We would be back, and we'd call again.

But first, we needed to make another trip to Alabama to see Stacey. Scott's ex-girlfriend, once again." And to see James Long, who, by chance, had moved to Alabama, too, not far from Stacey. With any luck, we'd be able to speak to both of them. Next time, on proof.

And he just came and gave me a check.

“It's the way we pulled us together and thought you could use it.”

And I was like, "Okay." Work 'em up, starts talking to Bendable and gets info. Not whole cases. Do you think he was giving good info? We're just going to want to go.

Just curious, how do you know what? Bendable seems to have been involved in several of the cold cases giving info, and I don't trust the info he was giving. You've been listening to proof, a podcast by Red Marwill Media, in association with Glassbox Media. We'll be back next week with episode 8.

Send us your questions and comments at [email protected]. We'll respond during our bonus episodes, proof, sidebar, on Thursdays. Kevin Fitzpatrick is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Ramiro Marquez. Audio production for this episode is by Michael Utaski,

Michael Alfano, and Hesus, or Bias. Our social media manager is Leanne Cook. And thank you to our sponsors who make this podcast possible. Follow us everywhere with the handle @proofcrimepod and on our website proofcrimepod.com.

That's all for this week. Thanks so much for listening. But what I want to tell you is that you don't want to get your whole studio. You're a master of laptop, soft, handy, Internet. You're a master of me.

I can tell you that you're back. Yes, you're a master of me, right? But you don't trust me. You're not. You're a master of me. You're a master of me. And if you work, you'll be able to do it.

- That's right. - Save. You're a master of me. Now, let's go. And there's a lot of stuff you can do. But you're just a master of me.

Now, let's go.