Mason Worthington (Wild Card, Virginia)

And every week on my podcast park predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most

“stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings.”

From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of cases that will leave you knowing, sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets. Listen to park predators now wherever you listen to podcasts. Our card this week is Mason Worthington, a wild card from Virginia. A 2018 shooting in Virginia has totally mystified investigators.

They managed to confirm so many details from that night, down to how many people were in the

room where shots were fired and who was sitting where. The problem is, one of the people who

was in that room, who investigators believe may have answers. He's been on the move for the last seven years, with one investigator trailing closely behind, just never able to catch him in time. But maybe our deck listeners can be one step ahead. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. [Music] It was right before midnight about to be December 30th in 2018.

When the phone rang for a dispatcher near Williamsburg, Virginia. I just heard a several gun shots in my car speeding off, and I just wanted to report that. Okay, it wasn't at our location, but we heard it very close. Did you see the vehicle? No, we didn't see anything when we were in the backyard, but we did definitely hear it,

and definitely found my gun shots. It sounded like four gun shots. Unfortunately, dispatchers across the country get vague calls like this all the time. It could be serious, or it could turn out to be nothing, like fireworks. So, Lieutenant Donald Micket and some other patrol units didn't know what they were in for, when they were dispatched to respond to Wilkins' drive in Williamsburg.

So, the first two patrol deputies respond to the area. They drive down the street.

It's kind of a little bit longer street, but it is a more of an older neighborhood, older like the houses, the actual subdivisions, a little bit older, and deputies are patrol deputies responded out. We're checking the neighborhood, things. They ended up talking to a homeowner down the street, who thought it was fireworks as well. They stayed in the neighborhood for a few more minutes until, essentially, about 10 minutes after midnight, making it the 30th.

And then, that's when we went from there where another 911 call came in.

“911, let's see, I'd just be a emergency. I think it's Wilkins, I think it's Wilkins' drive,”

I'm over up at 143. That's Tyler Johns, who lived on Wilkins' drive. Oh, the solo gas station, I just went to my buddy's house to get my dog because he was watching it from me and he did, and it's hallway. I think he got shot at him. He's dead, and it's hallway. They're with him now. I walked right back out of the house. I don't know what to do. I don't know what I'm going to see if I can find the mailbox.

It's 10, 10, 95, get over here, get over here. It's 10, 95, Wilkins' drive. I'm not sure, I'm not sure about that. Tyler, Tyler, Tyler, I just flagged a cop down, a cop just drove past my house. Is it a York County cop? Yes, sir, please help! Please help!

“All right, I think he's stopping, is he coming to you?”

Yes, ma'am. All right, honey.

The second officer pulled up within a couple seconds of together. They were responding rapidly, obviously.

They got to the front of the house and he said that the back door was wide open. That's what Tyler told them. So they actually went around the back of the house. It's a smaller residence, and went into the back of the house and came in to find the deceased inside the residence. They actually tried to look for any signs of life when they got there, and it was actually verified

by a York County fire fighter that responded as well, that he was deceased when they made contact with them. His full name is William Mason. We're thinking, but he went just by Mason, all of his friends knew him by Mason. No one else was in the house. It was just Mason. Even the dog that Tyler had shown up to get was in the car parked outside.

Although the property started failing up as more first responders arrived at the scene,

I've been doing this job a long time.

“Unfortunately, he looks like a young man that lost his life way too early.”

He'd been struck by gunfire several times. There's full of shell casings everywhere. There's some damage to the door from bullet strikes. There are other spots when you're standing in the living room. You can see where the other bullets strikes have struck the couch and the walls and things like that. Despite the damage to the front door from bullet strikes, there didn't appear to be any signs of

forced entry, which told them something significant. It was not like a random act of, let me just pick this house. This appeared to be very much targeted towards Mason.

All told Lieutenant Micket and his team gathered more than 50 items of evidence from the scene.

Things like shell casings, some drugs they found, three fire arms, and a bunch of random items like beer bottles. But it was hard to tell what was from that night specifically after learning that Mason lived in that house with two other roommates. And the house was the kind of messy that you would expect from most 20 something guys. Anything they thought they had a good chance of getting DNA off of was sent to the lab.

But as Lieutenant Micket pointed out, that is often a bit of a longing. DNA takes a very long time at the lab. It's not like in the movies where we can say, "Oh, we're in the next four yet hours. I'm going to know exactly who touched this or anything like that DNA is eight to ten months out." So if I send them something, it's going to be eight to ten months before they say, "Oh, there's multiple contributors and you thought that was great,

but you're not going to get what you thought out of it."

“That's why Lieutenant Micket didn't want to just sit back and wait for DNA to swoop in and save”

the day. He got right to work, pounding the pavement. And spoiler alert, good thing he did,

because when results did finally come back, they didn't get anything substantial to give them any

leads. So, for the first 12 hours, we had people inside the residence, several hours of collecting items, pulling bullets out of walls, checking trajectory to find out about where the, basically the path of the bullet, the shell casing's inside, the shell casing's outside, and then we had other units and show units that were chemisting the neighborhood. This is before the time of everybody having a ring doorbell, camera or anything. So we wanted to see

if anybody had heard anything, seen anything, had any possible video footage of a car down the street or anything that would be helpful of that. There was a third investigative path happening in parallel, too. They needed to talk to the people closest to Mason, starting with his roommate Tyler Johns, who called 911. And investigators also identified a friend, Omar Gonzalez, who was known to hang out there at the house all the time. Investigators separated Omar and Tyler

in separate patrol cars, trying to piece together what they knew. They were both very, very upset about it. They had known Mason for a very long time. Omar was extremely hysterical, essentially

“talking, and then he'd get really upset, started to cry very, very upset about it. I think Tyler”

was more in shock. He would kind of give you a sentence and then just be quiet for a minute. Tyler told a pretty straightforward story. He had gone out with a woman, but was on his way home when he got a call from Omar saying that there had been a shooting. He rushed back to the house, and when he got there, he saw Omar out front waving him down. That's when he immediately called 911 and flagged down officers. It's normally, hey, it's suspect necessarily wouldn't be flagging down

standing there yelling for police in the middle of road. Which is why Tyler's story seemed genuine, and they dismissed him as a potential suspect early on. Omar, on the other hand, they had some questions about. This is the time when kids benefit from reviewing key concepts and strengthening skills before tests and assessments. IXL helps reinforce what they're learning right now, so they feel

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town on the Jersey Shore. Someone reports an abandoned car on a bridge. A search gets underway for the missing driver. 19-year-old Sarah Stern. Is it a missing person? Is it a suicide? At this point, nobody knows. Old friendships, buried cash, and a sinister plot that was once pitched as a movie plays out in real life. I'm Judiu Chang from 2020 and ABC audio. Listen now to bridge of lies wherever you get your podcasts. From the night of Mason's death, Omar's account left investigators with

a lot of questions. And those questions have never quite gone away. Sheriff's deputies interviewed

him at Mason's home and then again another four or five times according to Lieutenant Micket. And over the course of all of these conversations, Omar's story would change slightly. It seems so some of that Omar was leaving some space gaps in his story. That was a little

“that made us question it. That's why when we talk about the number of times that Omar's been”

interviewed about it, some of his story seemed to be a little funny, didn't quite add up to some things. So, doing interviews, if you asked someone to tell them about their day or where they started until they got to this point, if someone's being 100% truthful with you, they can give you every nook and craning that they did in the last 10 hours, 12 hours, 15 hours, whatever. It seems if people leave big time gaps out that there's things that they don't want the cops to know.

So, it did seem like there was, there was a lot of things either left out either omitted or which could also be from shock of something traumatic happening, but it can also be where there people are purposely leaving things out because they don't want to police to know.

“Omar was clear about a few things. He was at the house in the hours leading up to the shooting.”

In fact, he said he and Mason had been hanging out all day and had even gone on a little road trip.

He had actually gone on a trip to DC earlier that day with Omar that they basically, I mean,

they were taking pictures around DC and things like that and then they came back to Williamsburg that evening. Investigators didn't need to take Omar's word. There were actually photos of him and Mason hanging out at the monuments. Omar said when the two guys got back, it was just then hanging out at the house because Tyler was out on a date and the third roommate saying was out of town. Omar says that they were there hanging out watching TV playing video games and they invited

a gentleman over that gentleman for this purpose. We're going to use his name as Victor and they had invited Victor over to the residents. Now Omar wouldn't come out and say this directly, but investigators have pieced together that there was some sort of drug deal going on here.

“Omar Porter-Kate Michigan asked about this. Are you able to tell me if Mason was selling drugs?”

It appears that he was selling narcotics, yes. Do you know, Omar was selling narcotics? I know he was often there when narcotics were sold if he was the actual seller of, I don't know. Omar said that within minutes of sitting down, two people came to the door. They were had masks covering their face and Omar had left the door unlocked, they pushed their way into the front door and that's when the gun fire began.

In some versions of Omar's story, he had locked the door after letting Victor in. In other versions, Victor had forgotten and left the door unlocked. Omar tried to tell them what he could about the two masked shooters, but all he knew was that they were roughly as tall as the door frame, but that's as descriptive as he got. Lieutenant Micket says that they know so little he's

even hesitant to call them men because the reality is we just don't know. Even with the vague

description and the inconsistencies, Omar was cooperating with law enforcement, and that ultimately ruled him out as a suspect, which left Victor. The fact that he showed up right before the masked assailants, that seemed significant, but it turns out Victor was kind of a hard due to find. Lieutenant Micket wondered though if maybe just maybe he could run into Victor at the visual Mason's friends and family held for him four days after he was killed. I actually attended it

to try and see if there was anybody possibly suspect or anybody that I guess more if

a person to start looking at? So that was a bust. The visual was filled with people who loved Mason,

“friends and family members who missed and remembered him. Honestly, a lot of people really”

liked him. He had a lot of friends in the neighborhood. He had a lot of friends in the area. People even die school with a lot of people spoke very highly of him. Mason had gone to high school nearby and stayed local even after his family moved out of state. He was kind of an average 20-year-old guy, liked cars, he loved dogs so much that his family asked for donations to the local humane society after he died. And he'd been working as a mechanic at a dealership in Williamsburg, Virginia.

As far as everyone knew, things seemed to be going okay, but somewhere down the line, Mason began selling drugs on the side. The sheriff's office doesn't know when Mason started dealing. I mean, he hadn't been on their radar for it and based on what his family told police, it doesn't seem like that's something he shared with them either. They didn't want to be interviewed for this episode so we couldn't ask them directly about that, or if they knew

that he kept guns. But I imagine that something that he didn't flaunt to too many people because in Virginia you aren't allowed to own or carry a gun unless you're 21. Mason was only 20. People who were around Mason daily though, or in his house when deals were happening, they likely knew, because we know from witness statements and case evidence that Mason had a gun on him when the two shooters came in. And in the barrage of gunfire, Mason was able to fire

back one shot. This was helpful information because it actually confirmed Omar's story of their being two shooters. You see about this time they had gotten the bullets from the crime scene analyzed and they were informed that there were three different types at the scene. Now knowing one of them was Mason's that left two other types of bullets from two different nine millimeter guns, two shooters. The guns themselves though were nowhere to be found.

But then something happened that almost never happens in cases like this. Normally homicide guns don't

come up. They don't normally like either people dismantle them or you actually do find a person responsible and then you search their house, search their storage lockers or something and then it finding the gun and that's ends up coming back to being the correct one. Normally it's not that the guns are recovered miraculously within two weeks and then four weeks of the homicide,

“but yet I don't have them in someone's hand that I can essentially say, "Oh, you know what?”

They're probably the one that did it." I was amazed it was recovered that quick. It's the middle of the night in a small town on the Jersey Shore. Someone reports an abandoned car on a bridge. A search gets underway for the missing driver, 19-year-old Sarah Stern. Is it a missing person? Is it a suicide? At this point nobody knows. Old friendships, buried cash, and a sinister plot that was once pitched as a movie plays out

in real life. I'm Juju Chang, from 2020 and ABC Audio. Listen now to Bridge of Lives, wherever you get your podcasts. Two weeks after Mason was found dead in his home, police in nearby Newport News, pulled a car over. When the driver got up so that police could search the vehicle, a gun came tumbling out. And when that gun was sent to the lab, low and behold, it matched some of the

shell casings found at Mason's murder scene. Then, roughly two weeks after that, the same thing happened

again. So, the second firearm was recovered. Police were called to a time share, up in Williamsburg,

and they were trying to get a hold of the occupants trying to figure out who was rented to things of that nature and then they ended up executing a search warrant at the residents or at the at the time share for the specific unit. And the firearm was recovered from that unit.

“But here's the thing about Virginia gun laws. Sales only had to be logged once, when the gun was”

sold for the very first time. After that, any private sales didn't need to be trapped. Now this is changed since 2018. But at the time, that meant that investigators could only find the first buyer. And of course, when they did, they learned that these guns had been out of their possession for some time. So, they tried to work backwards as make it told our reporter Kate. So, the person that was pulled over in an important news said they got the gun from someone else. That someone else

a criminal record or whatever, yes, they do have a criminal record, yes, they are known by several

local jurisdictions in the area to be around narcotics. And how do you know it's not the person who fired the weapon? I don't know that. They couldn't necessarily put this gun in that person's hands

“on the night of December 29, 2018. But that's what Lieutenant Micket is trying to do now.”

Not with this person specifically, but he needs to put these guns in someone's hands that night. He suspects that identifying one of those gunmen would be easier with the help of Victor. I would like him to tell me all about that night. What happened? What brought him there? What happened with the whole thing? And essentially, how it went down? There's a lot of questions for Victor, yes.

I could, I could feel a book full of him. But he's never been able to go through that book of

questions with Victor because to this day, no one's ever been able to pin him down and interview him about Mason. Lieutenant Micket has come close though. Victor didn't have a permanent address in 2019. Lieutenant Micket figured out that he'd basically been couch surfing, staying with friends. But he was able to figure out where Victor was working at this business outside of Williamsburg. So Micket spent a week surveilling the business trying to track Victor's movements.

He was able to ID him from a distance and saw him coming to and leaving work. But then, one day, Micket just stopped seeing Victor's car in the parking lot. So he called the business and got ahold of HR. Apparently, they turned around and tipped Victor off. And after that, Victor was gone for good. Didn't even show up for his last paycheck. And then Victor fled town all together. Micket couldn't figure out what happened to the guy. Even trying to track his driver's

license and other identifying information didn't work for years. I mean, this dude was just a ghost. But it's hard to live like that, not using your real name or your social security number. Most people can't go forever. So every so often, Micket would run it again. And again, and one day, out in nowhere, there was his guy in Georgia. Now he couldn't go out of his date just to talk to him and he didn't have enough for an arrest. But he was back on the radar.

“So Micket's been watching and waiting. And guess who's back in Virginia?”

Micket is actively trying to get in front of Victor and he's looking for any other leads that our listeners can throw his way. I would say anybody that hurt anything saw anything that night, whether it be a car or vehicle description of partial license plate. Anything from that night,

you never know if it was something really small, but it could end up being that piece of the puzzle

that fits us all together. I would ask for them to call and let somebody know. Also, offenders were kind of hush hush when this whole thing first happens. But we're several years from when this occurred back in 2018. So sometimes offenders get a little sloppy and start talking about, hey, or remember this, or start bringing up details of things. If anybody hears any of these details, or it can be a story amongst friends or anything, I would ask for someone to call

in about that because you might think it's very insignificant or something very minor or small, but it might be my piece that that puts this all together. They can call the non-emergency number for the Sheriff's Office, which is 757-890-3621, and they can say that they have information or a tip for the Mason-Wirthington homicide. It will likely be me that we'll be calling them back. Since 2018, Lieutenant Mick is stayed in touch with Mason's family, normally around the holidays

when Mason was killed. He's hoping that the next call he makes to them could be a different one. This case, I would love to get solved. I would love to say I've put this person in jail and call Mason's mother and say, hey, guess what? I got your present. Here it is. The deck is an audio truck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the

“deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. I think Chuck would approve.”

Hi everyone, Ashley Flowers here. If you're like me, diving into true crime is about more

the lives behind the headlines, and this is what host Kylie Lowe does each week on her podcast,

“Dark Down East. Every Thursday, Kylie dives into New England's most gripping mysteries, uncovering”

stories in a way you won't hear anywhere else. And she digs through archives, connects with families

and shines a light on the voices that deserve to be heard. From cold cases, to moments of long-awaited

“justice, Dark Down East is the perfect blend of investigations and honoring the stories behind them.”

You can find "Dark Downies Now" wherever you're listening.