The views and opinions expressed in Cold and Missing are exclusively those of the hosts. All parties mentioned are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Cold and Missing also contains adult themes and languages. Listener discretion is advised. I'm your host, Ali McLaughlin-Sulkowski. And I'm your co-host, Eli Sulkowski. And this is Cold and Missing, where we cover cold cases and missing person cases. Hello everyone and welcome back to Cold and Missing.
I'm your host, Ali. And I'm flying solo again this week, as Eli's tied up in some work projects currently. So it'll just be me bringing you this podcast. We're slowly creeping up on a year of Cold and Missing, which is kind of incredible just from a personal standpoint of starting something and sticking to it. I don't know if anybody else out there can relate, but I sometimes start projects and I don't necessarily always finish them or follow through with them.
So I'll save this speech maybe for our official year. But it's really cool, the community that we're building through this podcast. So again, thank you for being here. Thank you for joining us. And let's just get into the case. We're covering a cold case this week. And today I have for you the cold case of Sarah Greenhalgh. And this takes place in July of 2012 in Upperville, Virginia. But first, a little bit about Sarah. Sarah is 48 years old in 2012.
She was born March 21, 1964, and she would be 59 years old today. Sarah lived in Upperville, Virginia, which is about an hour outside of Washington, D.C. She rented a farm cottage on Dunvegan Drive, where she had lived for about a year by herself. Sarah worked as a reporter at the Winchester Star covering Frederick County government. Her managing editor, Maria Heilman, said she was a fair reporter. Quote, she really had a sort of effervescent personality.
When she came into the room, you knew Sarah was in the room. She was very friendly and very lively. End quote. Sarah was a risk taker, an adventurer, and a fiercely loyal friend. She did not mince words and she would be very direct with you. She was also an accomplished horseback rider, and she would often write for equestrian magazines and photograph equine events.
The editor of The Chronicle of the Horse, Beth Raisin, said, quote, she was a super, super nice, happy, upbeat, outgoing, friendly person. She had a lot of friends and she was a very loyal friend. I can't imagine anyone would have a bad word to say about her. End quote. Sarah had once posted a 25 Things About Herself to the Equierry, like the equine inquiry. And this was published on June 16, 2009, so this would be about three years before her murder.
And on the list of 25 things, I won't read all of them to you, but these are the ones that popped out to me. Number three, as a child, I wanted to be a herpetologist, which is the study of reptiles and amphibians. Number five, I traveled unescorted to South Africa when I was 13 to visit a British childhood friend. Number nine, I have crossed the Atlantic many times on ocean liners, not cruise ships, and the North Atlantic is not fun. Number 18, I tend to date danger junkies.
Number 21, I once jumped a three foot high, four foot wide concrete water trough on a horse bareback and at night and without a helmet. Number 22, I would rather travel alone than with family, friends, or boyfriends. And number 25, as a journalist, I have had to cover some amazing and tragic events and many haunt me to this day. And now the timeline of events. On Sunday, July 8, 2012, Sarah is in an upbeat mood in the morning while talking on the phone with her sister.
Her sister, Kate Langton, said that Sarah was chatting away happily and didn't seem to worry about anything. In the evening hours, Sarah goes to visit her boyfriend, John Kearns, who lives in Gainesville, which is about 30 minutes away from her home in Upperville. At around 7.30 p.m., neighbors heard Sarah and John yelling and swearing at each other.
According to John, Sarah and him were just platonic friends and he wanted Sarah to leave since his other girlfriend was going to come over and Sarah would get him into trouble. Sarah will leave and return home. When she gets home, she'll fire off an email to John at around 9.48 p.m. In it, she'll say that she'd always been there for him and listened to his problems.
And based off of everything that John had told Sarah, she feared she could, quote, go away for 25 to life as an accessory, end quote, due to knowledge of John's wrongdoings. At around 11 p.m. that night, Sarah posted a Facebook update that said, quote, going to be sleeping with the windows wide open and an emoticon smiley face. Now if that batshit crazy boy would just leave me alone, we'll get some much needed rest because tomorrow is Monday and I got a ton of work to do, end quote.
Sarah's friends, family and coworkers all knew that batshit crazy boy was John Kearns, a nickname she used for him often. On Monday, July 9th, 2012, at around 8.08 a.m., an off-duty Fairfax firefighter sees smoke rising while driving down the John Mosey Highway. At 8.10, the call is dispatched, but Upperville only had a volunteer fire department and no one was on duty at the time.
The first truck to respond is the Middleburg Volunteer Fire Department at 8.22 a.m., followed by the Marshall Fire Company at 8.34 a.m. Firefighters find smoke pouring from the home and one room set ablaze. They're able to extinguish the fire in about 20 minutes. Since the home was built out of cinder blocks, it was still standing after the fire was extinguished. Once the fires put out, they find a woman's body in the back bedroom.
Her body had been covered with debris from the torso upwards, so her head was also covered. Police are called and the scene is quickly ruled a homicide. Investigators found 12 used bullet casings in the home, with at least one being found underneath Sarah. The handgun was also found next to her. Ultimately, Sarah was killed by a gunshot wound in the neck. She did not die because of the fire.
Fire investigators will determine that a pore pattern was found, meaning someone poured something flammable to start or accelerate the fire. According to Sarah's landlord, Anne MacLand, investigators found Sarah's cell phone and her laptop in her car, almost as if she was getting ready to leave for work. So the next day, Tuesday, July 10, 2012, police announced to the public that they are conducting a homicide investigation and six detectives are assigned to the case.
Police are also spending time going through articles that Sarah had recently published, as well as stories she was working on for the Winchester Star. Sarah also had been meeting men through an online dating site, specifically Match.com, so police also probed this area of her life for possible suspects. Police are also seen at her home, flagging down people driving by and asking if they had seen anything unusual in the area lately.
The Fauquier County police will also ask for assistance from the state police and the FBI, both of whom will join the investigation that day. Police also obtain a search warrant for John Kearn's apartment, and from that, police sees a cell phone, shredder waist, and a t-shirt. John, after the fact, says that he also submitted a DNA sample and underwent gunshot residue tests and took three polygraph tests shortly after the killing.
Police tell John that he failed the polygraph tests, but they never show him the results. On Thursday, July 19, 2012, so this is 10 days since Sarah's murder, police arrest John Kearns on a probation violation. John was serving probation at this time for getting into a fight with a motorcyclist. John had pulled the guy off of his bike and beat him up. Because of this, a term of his probation was to attend counseling appointments.
John couldn't show proof that he had been attending, so they violated him and arrested him. The next day, Friday, July 20, so this is now 11 days since Sarah's murder, Sarah's memorial is held and over 300 people are in attendance. At her memorial service, Sarah's sister, Kate, asks that Sarah's fellow reporters keep on the case and keep it in the media. A lot of reporters in the room felt personally called to remain covering the case.
Police at the time are talking to several persons of interest, one of whom we know is John and the other is John's other girlfriend, Joanne. Joanne was dating John at the same time that Sarah believed that she was also dating John. John's 2012 Jeep was actually in Joanne's name. She had bought it since he had terrible credit. To date, police have not ID'd any other person of interest in this case.
Police are very specific though in that they are not calling John or Joanne a suspect and are waiting on more forensic results. Now this case really felt like it had a lot of steam in the beginning and they had six detectives assigned to it. The county police, the state police, the FBI, everybody was jumping in to work on this case, so it really felt like it had steam in the beginning and it was moving quickly, but then the case goes really cold.
There's some newspaper reports covering it, but there's no new information released. So on December 12, 2014, that's just about two and a half years since Sarah's murder, police obtain a search warrant for John Kearns and in the search warrant he is named as a suspect. Police get the warrant to get another copy of John's fingerprints. He had already been fingerprinted prior, but this specifically was asking for the tip of his fingerprints. John claims his innocence at this time.
And then again, no real big updates from police, no arrests are made, the next big update comes from June 29 of 2017. John continues to claim his innocence. He says he met Sarah in the summer of 2011 on Match.com. John says quote, right from the first week or two we knew it was just going to be a friendship. We had goofy fun times. We just had fun. End quote. John tells the Winchester Star, that's the newspaper that Sarah had worked for at the time of her murder.
He tells the newspaper his side of events from June 8 until June 9. John says that he told Sarah to not come to his apartment because Joanne was supposed to stop by and Sarah's presence would get him into trouble. Joanne never actually ends up coming by that evening according to John. John says that Sarah called him an asshole and left, that there was never a fight and the neighbors blew it out of proportion. John claims he stayed inside the rest of the evening.
He wasn't friendly with any of his neighbors so none of them could vouch for him. He says quote, I kept to myself. Nobody really knew me and I didn't know anybody else. So nobody knew whether I was there or whether I really wasn't. End quote. The next morning John says he arrived at work at 8.02. He remembered it because he looked at the dash and thought he was two minutes late to work. He also claims that he was on the phone with Joanne the whole time he was driving to work.
And he says his cell phone should be able to vouch for this. John's work was about 30 miles away from Sarah's home. Police at this time wouldn't comment on John's claim that he was driving to work when the cottage was set ablaze. However, speaking hypothetically, police said it was possible for someone to have driven from Gainesville to Upperville, commit the murder, set the fire, and drive to Leesburg, where John worked, by 8 a.m.
They noted Sarah's cinderblock cottage, which was still standing after the fire, took a long time to burn. The Fauquier County Sheriff's spokesperson, Sergeant James Hartman, says quote, it could have started several hours before. End quote. And then that's really the last big update we get with new information, this kind of interview from John. Everything else year over year just recaps the information that I just laid out. To date, police have never made an arrest in Sarah's case.
Again, spokesman Sergeant James Hartman says quote, the last thing anybody here wants to do is put an innocent person in jail. We're here to investigate a homicide, not save or ruin people's reputations. End quote. So with that, if you know anything about the murder of Sarah Greenhall in July of 2012, please call the Fauquier County Sheriff's Office at 504-422-8650.
And the sources for the timeline today come from the Winchester Star, again, that's the newspaper that Sarah worked for and they have covered the story very extensively, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Daily Press, the Daily News Leader, WJLA, Piedmont Media, Inside Nova, Fauquier Times, London Times, Northern Virginia Daily, The Washington Post, The Equierry, and Prince William Times. So that is the cold case of Sarah Greenhalgh.
And when I first saw this case and saw that she was a reporter, I'll admit that my first thought was, well, was she working on something? Almost like the Hollywood plot line of it all of, was she working on something? Did she uncover something? You know, some big corruption story in the government. But according to police and according to her editors, from everything that I could find, there wasn't anything that she had recently published or that she was working on to support that theory at all.
And police did come and speak to her coworkers, they went through her desk at the newspaper. So I think that road of investigation has been thoroughly investigated and it is not tied to her work as a reporter. But it's sad when you're researching her because you find so many articles by her. I mean, they just pop up as you're searching newspaper archives because she was a reporter. So it's very haunting in a way whenever you research this case.
I also think it's very easy to look at John in this case. And you know, there is a lot of evidence against him, you know, that the police lay out in their search warrant of, you know, why they wanted to go into his home originally. Just the email correspondences, the neighbors saying they were fighting, like, totally, that's a place that they absolutely should look. But my question is now is, well, if it isn't John, why hasn't he been publicly cleared or why hasn't he been arrested?
It feels like at this point, one of those two things should have happened. You know, they did that second search warrant in 2014 where they were looking specifically at the tips of his fingerprints, which I don't think it's far off to assume that that means that they have fingerprint evidence at the scene, specifically the tips of somebody's fingerprints. It was a fire scene, so a lot of physical evidence can get destroyed in that, but not all of it.
So the fact that they do seem to have a fingerprint or at least a partial print is really promising. And I just wonder, was John a match at all? Could he, was it one of those things where it's like they couldn't 100% say that this is his fingerprint, but they also couldn't rule him out and say that there's no way this is his fingerprint? Like, is it that kind of situation?
You know, just like if I, if I was able to sit down with the police today and just ask them anything I wanted, I think that's like where I would start is like, what are you missing if you can't arrest him? Like what's the piece that you need to be able to like bring charges forward or to let this man go free? Because you know, it's a long time to have your name be tied to a murder case.
And you know, just reading in the 2017 article, John talked about, you know, how this has ruined his name and a lot of his relationships in his life and how he's just trying to get his life on track and just have a normal life. And I think the quote by the police at the end is actually like really honorable. It's like they don't want to put an innocent person in jail.
So if John didn't do this, then I do think the police need to come out and say that because it's really hard not to just focus on him whenever you look at the evidence, because that's all that's really been presented is, you know, this boyfriend, ex boyfriend, platonic friends like that relationships really seems to be murky on both ends. I'm saying it's platonic, but Sarah felt like it was more. So it's very easy to, you know, kind of like tunnel vision right down there.
Another thing if I was able to like sit down with police and just ask them any questions I would want is I would be really curious to know the time of death. Like when do they think that the actual act took place? Because we know that she's alive at around 11pm. You know, she posts to her Facebook and by all accounts, everyone seems to believe that that is her posting. You know, it's her writing. It sounds like her.
There's no whispering about could she have posted, could she have not like from everything I've seen. Everyone is very certain that she did post that at 11pm. So we know that's when she's lost alive. But then the landlord says that her laptop and her cell phone were found in her car almost as if she was leaving for work. And I'm thinking 2012. Most people at that point probably just have a laptop.
I mean, maybe they have a home computer and a laptop, but I would think that she made that post from her laptop that was found in the car. But maybe that's a question I would ask police. Was there another computer where she could have posted or was that her only computer? Because if that's the case, I don't see why she would post something at 11pm, go put her laptop and her cell phone in the car and then come back in and go to sleep. That doesn't make sense.
To me, it makes sense that she was getting ready for work, took her things out, somebody interrupts it. I would just be really curious as to what the police theory of how everything happened. What was she caught in the middle? Was she asleep when this possibly could? You know, what what do they think happened? Sarah just seems like such a wonderful person. And I, you know, it just she just sounded like somebody that I would really want to be friends with. I love horses. I love horseback riding.
I love learning about it. I don't know much about equestrian sports or equine. I know some basics, but you know, I always love learning more about that. And you know, she was a reporter, a photographer. Somebody said, you know, not only could she give you a great story, she'd give you great pictures with it. So it seems like she was just so talented at telling stories about telling people stories, her community stories.
This breaks my heart that so many of her colleagues whom you know, she loved and who loved her had to really dig into this and cover this. But again, I know for a lot of them, they felt like it was a personal call. And you know, they felt a responsibility to her as a fellow reporter to keep her name out there to keep it in the media. And I will say there has been a lot of media coverage on this case. I don't always see that happen in all of the cases we cover.
But with Sarah's her local media really rallied around her, which I think is really beautiful. But again, if you know anything about the murder of Sarah Greenhalgh in July of 2012, please call the Fauquier County Sheriff's Office at 504-422-8650. And just like every week, we're going to be posting pictures of Sarah on our Instagram. So you can follow us there if you're not already at Cold and Missing. You can find us on our website. We also have pictures there. You can review us there.
You can donate there. If you want to learn more about either one of us, you can go to the website. It's all there. And there's some pictures of us as well. If you're curious as to who's chatting in your ear before you head to your next show, if you could leave us a review it like truly if you want to make your favorite podcasters day or even maybe not even your favorite. If you want to just make a podcasters day in your life, just leave them a written review.
And the smaller the show is like ours, we're still a pretty tiny show compared to some of the other juggernauts out there. Oh my God, you become a celebrity in my home, in my life. I think about you. I meditate on you. I pray for you. All of that. I just send good vibes your way. So if you could leave us a review in Apple podcasts or go to our website to leave us a written review, coldandmissing.com, that would be so great. I appreciate it so much.
But I understand there's a lot of content out there and some people are already onto the next one before they can even write a review. But if you got the time, I got nothing but appreciation and love for you. But with that, have a good week and stay safe, y'all.