School of Humans.
On the morning of Friday, October seventeenth, nineteen eighty, a man was on his way to work. He was driving his truck down Highway sixteen, the East West highway that runs between Salom Springs, Arkansas, near the Oklahoma border, through Ozark National Forest and Enns in Sercey.
He was driving through the woods near.
An area called Lake Weddington when he saw something out of the corner of his eye down a small dirt road. It looked like a person lying in the road, so the driver doubled back and looked again and saw to his horror that it was a body, the body of a young woman lying rolled over on her right side. Her head and shoulders were face down. Her right hand was extended out, her left hand was near her face.
The woman was very tall. She had a flannel shirt on and a blue Michelin jacket that had been her face. Her legs were slightly open. She was naked from the waist down except for a pair of torn and filthy white sox. The victim started out being a Jane Doe, but soon police had idd her as twenty one year old Gail Vaut. Gail lived nearby and worked on a road crew as a great operator.
She worked building Highway seventy one.
Friends said that everyone loved Gail. She was six foot two, one hundred and fifty five pounds, lean fit, and a very attractive and outgoing young woman. Even though she was beautiful on the outside. She was one of those people who could act like one of the guys when she was on the job, and she could also deal with what was considered back then and even today as being a man's job. Forensic testing showed that Gail had been
run over by a car. There was a condom and condom wrapper nearby, so investigators believed that she had been raped. Sometimes people, well meaning people say, well, at least she felt no pain. But I'm an investigator and I have to face what are sometimes brutal realities. I promise to always tell people the truth. Investigators saw that her left foot had moved back and forth in the mud, creating a ridge. So, according to the evidence, whatever happened to
Gail Vaught in those woods, she suffered. But there are a lot of questions about this case, like was she actually raped, was she sexually assaulted? Or could that condom have been staged? Could her death have connections to drug dealing, or domestic violence or something else. What really happened to Gail Vauught. I'm Catherine Townsend. Over the past five years of making my true crime podcast, Helling Gone, I have received hundreds of messages from people asking for help with
an unsolved murder that's affected them and their community. Despite the numerous people who need help out there on each season of Helen Gone, I've only been able to focus on one case at a time.
But now that's going to change.
If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four or five. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. I first learned about this case when I got a call from a private investigator in Arkansas named Marty. Even though Marty has a day job, he does investigations, including a lot of pro bono work on the side. A few years ago, he was contacted
by Gail's sister, Teresa. He started working on Gail's case. It's been over forty years since Gaile's death. It's been so long that the police, who do not always want to share evidence, have turned over the case file making it public. This means they have gotten to what they believe is the end of their investigation. Marty told me, and I've discovered working on this case, that crucial physical evidence has been lost. And yet Marty did not want
to give up on Gail's case. He believed and I believe too, there may be something, even decades later that the police have missed. One of the people Marty interviewed was the driver who found Gail's body. Now, this guy says that he was driving by when he happened to glance out his truck. He looked down an old road on the side of the highway. He said, and this is a quote from Marty's interview, that he looked in his rear view mirror and saw quote, there was a
truck behind me. It was a small red truck. There were two people in the truck, and they seemed to be looking down the road also end quote. So it seemed like there was something weird down that road, and people were noticing. The driver doubled back and pulled off, and that's when he saw Gaial Vault. He said that her jacket was over her head. He lifted the jacket up to see if the person was still alive, and he said he could tell by the color of her face that she was already dead. So he went back
to his truck where he had a radio. Side note back then, I asked Marty, well, how did he call? Was this a car phone? I mean this this was nineteen eighty and he told me that after the dukes of Hazard, a lot of people had cbe radios in their car. That was a big thing in Arkansas at the time and around the country. Anyway, he picked up his radio, called his office and asked them to call the Sheriff's department. After Gail's body was found and she was idd, her remains were sent to the state crime
Lab for an autopsy. We did a freedom of information request and Marty also shared some of the case fall information he acquired over the years. From that, we were able to view Gailee's autopsy report and also see some of the notes that the investigators had made at the scene. So we're trying to figure out what actually killed gailvaut. The initial report said there was no sign of stabbing or other traumas and there were no visible gunshot wounds.
But once investigators got the body to the next location, they realized something that they had missed at the original scene. There was a gunshot wound in Gail's head, hidden behind her shoulder length brown hair. Gail had been shot with a twenty two caliber weapon. It was a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, but the bullet had fragmented and not penetrated her brain. This sounds strange, but it actually happens more often than you would think.
These are sometimes the kind of stories you hear where someone was shot in the head and they ended up surviving. Because when this happens, when someone is shot in the head and the bullet does not penetrate the grain, sometimes people are able to survive. In Gail's case, her killer obviously wanted to make sure that did not happen, because the report stated Gail was shot and run over by
a car. The immediate cause of death was listed as gunshot wound of the right rear of the head, accompanied with blunt trauma of the pelvis and in parentheses, run over by a car. The report did not state which one had come first. Was she shot in the head first or run over by the car. The autops then listed the manner of death as homicide.
As we said before, Gail was athletic.
This was a woman who had played volleyball in high school competitively. She worked on a road crew every day. She knew how to handle herself, and there appeared to be no defensive wounds anywhere on her body. Investigators were trying to piece together what happened. They went to the home that Gail shared with her boyfriend Ray. They found food sitting out on the stove, and to police, it appeared as though Gail had been in the process of cooking a meal. Police formed an early theory that Gail
could have been kidnapped, possibly at gunpoint. As I mentioned before, police did find some other evidence at the crime scene, including a used condom and a condom box. The brand was called Tickled Fancy. This is a brand I've never heard of, but I did a lot of research and apparently this was a brand that was popular in the Midwest in Arkansas, Missouri during this time. The front of the condom box is unlike any other one I've ever seen. It has an illustration of a man and woman looking
like they're about to kiss on the front. I am doing some investigating. I'm trying to figure out where those condoms were sold. So if anyone out there was alive in nineteen eighty and sexually active and happens to remember buying this brand of condoms, were they available in vending machines? That kind of thing I would love to hear from you. Investigators also found a roll of gray duct tape near the body, which could have been another piece of evidence
potentially tied to their kidnapping theory. There was also an empty gun box at the crime scene near Gale's body that had held a twenty two caliber weapon. According to the investigator's notes, this gun box was meant for a rom RG ten, which is a twenty two caliber revolver, but police did not find the murder weapon. There were also some fresh tire tracks in the mud near Gail's body.
Investigators took picture of the tire tracks, and while they were working to process the crime scene, they started looking into Gail's personal life, and it didn't take long for them to come up with a person of interest, Gail's boyfriend, Ray Foreman. Gail and Ray lived together in a basement apartment that was owned by a friend of theirs named Barry Frizell.
Ray had a history.
A history of violence, and a history with the police. Ray had split up with his wife Lynn a few months before he met Gail. There were accusations of domestic violence in that relationship, and as we said, Ray was well known to police as a drug dealer.
According to Gail's friends, she didn't.
Really talk about where she lived, and she didn't seem to want to give people directions to her house. Apparently this was because of the fact that Ray dealt drugs. Gail's body was on Friday, October seventeenth, and Gail had apparently been making weekend plans on that Friday. At first, police believed Gail may have been hanging out with a friend of hers named Sheila. Gail and Sheila did drugs together and partied sometimes. Sheila later told police that occasionally
they would smoke some pot or drop acid together. Gail had told Sheila to come up to see her that weekend, and Gail had said not to worry about anything. She specifically told Sheila that she would pay for everything, meaning the drugs they were going to buy. While police were working to locate Sheila, and also trying to find anyone else who Gail may have been planning to meet with, and trying to figure out what was going on at home between her and Ray. They were trying to process
the physical evidence. As we said before, police believed that Gail had been raped, so they sent this used condom off for some forensic testing. Now, remember this was back in nineteen eighty This was before there was such a thing as DNA testing at all. All police could do at the time with some much simpler testing, which apparently they did. According to Gale's autopsy report, there were traces of semen found inside her vagina and there was sperm
found inside that condom. The autopsy report clarified that cells that came from Gale's vagina tested negative for sperm cells, but positive for the possible presence of semen. I looked into this discrepancy to see if we could explain it, and it turns out that there is a reasonable explanation for this because one of the tests they had at the time was a simple test called an acid phosphate test. Now, this test is a way to screen for possible semen,
but it's not exact. Apparently the investigators did that test first and it came up positive. Then they took some swabs from Gale's vagina and her anus and also her mouth and sent those in for testing. So after that, when they got the swap back, all of the swabs tested negative for sperm cells. The report also clarified that the condom was the only thing that tested positive on both of those tests, the acid phosphate test and the test for sperm cells. There are a couple of possibilities
that could explain this. Why Gail would have a trace of what would appear to be semen in her vagina but test negative for sperm cells. The seminal fluid, if it was present, could have come from her perpetrator, but it also could have been a trace from consensual sex she had earlier. Ray, Gail's boyfriend, told police that they did have sexual intercourse on Wednesday night. I wondered if we could recover that condom and maybe find out for sure, because that could be a key.
In this case.
Again, DNA testing was not a reality in nineteen eighty, but it is today. Maybe there is testing that could be done. Unfortunately, I found out this would not be a possibility because the crime lab lost the condom. Marty went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what happened to this crucial physical evidence. The truth is, in the eighties, there were no laws on the books about
preserving physical evidence the way there are now. Soil samples from Gail's body and the condom and other evidence were sent off to the crime lab. But in November of nineteen eighty a message was sent to Berwin Monroe, who was running the test on the physical evidence, and in that message he was told that the state was experiencing an extreme backlog in testing. He asked him to limit testing to test that involve things like hair comparison and
gunshot residue tests. Things got worse in nineteen eighty three. According to an email Marty got years later, in nineteen eighty three, some of the evidence related to Gail's case was destroyed. This is not super surprising to me because at that time news articles were talking about the fact that the Arkansas State Crime Lab building and its testing methods were super outdated and drastically needed investment.
And this is sad to say.
It seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same. Because this issue continues in Arkansas. Over forty years later, I will say things have improved now as of twenty twenty four, waiting periods for things like rape kits are reportedly down to around ninety.
Days and they used to take years.
But that crime lab continues to have issues. So back to Gail's case, the condom was a dead end. But what about the other forensic tests that were performed. Gail was tested for drugs. She tested negative for marijuana, alcohol, and LSD. Again, that's not hugely helpful because LSD and POTT leave.
The blood after around twelve hours.
It's not exact because it would depend on what the exact dosage she took was, if any. But if we know that the author topsy was conducted at around eleven thirty am on Friday, we're not exactly sure of the time of death, but it really doesn't even tell us if she took any drugs through all of Friday. We can't even rule out the possibility she might have taken drugs on Friday night, So those tests were not super helpful. Police started talking to people who Gail had talked to recently.
They went through her phone records, which back then in nineteen eighty was her home land line. One of the people she'd been in contact with recently was a guy named William Craigdean. He said that he had been friendly with Gail, and he shed some light on Gail's relationship with a guy she had dated recently named Randall Wyman, who everyone called Randy. Randy's name kept coming up in
this investigation. He was friends with Gail after they stopped seeing each other, and they worked together on the same road crew. William the friend, said that he had seen Gail and smoke some pot with her and Randy in March or April. Police needed to figure out out where Gail was on Thursday night, so they started taking a look at the days leading up to the weekend. They talked to another one of Gaile's coworkers, a supervisor named Joe Jones. He said he got a call from Gail
on Thursday night around eight pm. So she was at home on Thursday night at eight pm and she was behaving normally, Joe said. During that conversation, Gail asked to see if they would be working the next morning, which would have been Friday, October seventeen.
Now, it had been raining.
Extremely heavily off and on for the twenty four hours before Gail went missing. So Joe said he told Gail they probably would not be working on Friday due to the heavy rains, but he said she could come by and pick up her paycheck because Friday would be payday.
Gail said she would.
Come by the next morning to pick up her check. During their interview with Joe, police obviously were trying to figure out if he could have had anything to do with this, like they were with everyone else. He said he didn't own a gun when they asked him if he owned any weapons. They asked him if he had changed his tires recently.
He said no.
He said he did have a red pickup truck it was park there and he had been driving one of his other bosses trucks. They talked to Mary Jones, Joe's wife, and she said on Thursday evening, she and Joe ate dinner together. She said after dinner he went out to work on one of the cars, but she said that she couldn't quite remember. He may have run to the store for ten or fifteen minutes, but other than that
he had been home all night. He went to work the next morning at around six am, which he normally did. Joe Jones, like a lot of men on that crew had apparently made some comments about Gail about her being attractive, but it seemed like that was just work talk, especially back then, a lot of the guys made comments like that.
Police also wanted to talk to Sheila Gail's friend, the friend that police thought Gail was going to be hanging out with, but it turned out this was another dead end because Sheila told police she wasn't even around that weekend. She told law enforcement she had known Gail for years. She said they had been friends since nineteen seventy seven and they were actually roommates in Fort Smith, but Gail said she had moved away from Fort Smith to Van
Buren in April. Then she'd gone to Colorado for a few months on a job, so she said she hadn't actually seen Gail in months. She said that she was only in Arkansas because her mother called her and told her Gail had been murdered. She was shocked, and she came back immediately, and in what's kind of a strange twist, when Sheila went into her apartment in Van Buren, she actually found a letter from Gail. She took the letter to the police, and we've seen it. It's in the
case file. She didn't see this letter from Gail until after Gail was dead. In that letter, Gail said she wanted Sheila to come to Fayetteville for the weekend. She said she wanted to see her. And it's weird because Gail was telling everyone that she was going to see Shila that weekend when they really.
Had no confirmed plans.
In the letter, Gail was basically trying to get Shila to come see her. She said she was going to get some acid, she was going to.
Pay for everything. They should hang out.
Sheila really couldn't give police any information about what Gail had been doing that weekend because she wasn't there, but she gave officers some more insight into Gail. She said Gail did take drugs occasionally. Mainly she smoked pot recreationally. Sometimes she liked to take acid, preferably a type of acid called purple micro dot. Sheila also said something else that I think is pretty important. She said Gail loved her jeep.
She said that Gail.
Quote would not go anywhere without her vehicle and always said that.
If anyone walked, it would not be her. End quote.
So Gail did not like being without her vehicle. She did not like being stuck anywhere, and she always stayed with her car.
And this will become important in a minute.
Sheila told police that in her opinion, this was one of the reasons why she believed Gail could have been abducted, because she said she believed that Gail would have put up a fight. She wouldn't have gone with anyone willingly. Police asked Sheila if Gail had any issues with anyone. She said not really, everyone like Gail, like a lot of people. Sheila said that Ray had a reputation for violence. She said she believed that Gail was somewhat afraid of Ray.
She said that once there was an incident where she and Randy and Gail were hanging out. Sheila said that Randy kind of made a joke and said he was going to call Ray and tell him that Gail was there at the time, and at that point, Sheila said that Gail said.
She was afraid of Ray.
She was acting like she was really scared that Randy might do that, even though Randy was kind of only kidding around. Police talked to Randy and he told investigators that he had worked with Gail for the past few months. They were building the highway Highway seventy one in the Fayeteval area together. Randy said that Ray, Gail's boyfriend, didn't
have a job, at least not doing anything legal. Randy said that after Ray was laid off and after he broke up with his wife that year, he and these are Randy's words, violently beat her and accused her of being unfaithful. So a lot of people believe that Randy had violently beat his ex wife and might have been
threatening Gail. A few months after that breakup, Gail moved in with Ray, so it seemed like there was some beef between Ray and Randy because even though Randy was the person who introduced Ray to Gail, they didn't seem to be getting along. Randy told police this was over money. He said Ray had borrowed one hundred dollars from him and he was supposed to get it back. So he was talking to Gail about this, and Randy said Gail
told him where Ray lived. Randy said he went there and he made Ray give him forty dollars right then and made him promise to pay back the rest and Randy said after that that Ray was extremely annoyed that Gail had given him that information about where he lived. Police interviewed another friend of Gaile's name Don. She talked about Gail and partying. She said that they had gone to a party at Randy's house on Tuesday, October fourteenth. Don said Gail showed up at that party by herself
and was looking for some pot. But Don said that Gail couldn't find the type of pot she wanted, so at that point, she.
Said, Gail left.
According to Don, Gail appeared to be acting normally at that party. She said in general, Gail wasn't a partier. She would show up and get her drug of choice, whether that was LSD or pot or whatever, and then leave and go home or to a close friends and do it there. She said that Gail did not talk much about her personal life again, because her boyfriend was
pretty heavy into drug dealing. Don did remember that on Wednesday, Gail made a comment to her about the weekend about she and her friend Sheila going to get some acid. She told Don that she should come to Gaile's house to party with them. Don said the last time she saw Gail was on Thursday, She said, Gail was driving her jeep on the way to talk to one of their bosses at that work site. Don and Gail talked briefly, and then Gail got back into her jeep and left.
Don said she has not seen Gail since. Dawn also had some more insight into this altercation between Ray and Randy. She said Randy had showed Ray some marijuana plants, which, according to Dawn, Ray had stolen from Randy.
A picture was starting to emerge of Ray.
People said that he had a habit of getting violent when something set him off. We know that Gail was at home on Thursday night because she called Joe from there. So what happened when Ray got home that night? Did something set him off?
Police talked to Ray.
He told them that on Thursday night he was out all night selling drugs and hooking up with a woman, a woman who was not Gail. So what really happened on Thursday night? What happened on the night that led up to Gail being killed. We've said before that Ray
dealt drugs. According to the case file, he dealt a lot of different kinds, including caffeine pills, and a lot of times he would do these deals with a guy named Jody, who was a friend of his side note here much later, one of the theories about Gail's murder involved Gail owing a lot of money for drugs, or about Ray being this big time drug dealer. But honestly, other than a patch of marijuana that Ray grew that the sheriff said he knew about, the only other drugs
we hear about him dealing are caffeine pills. So in my opinion, this does not appear to go with the image of Ray being this big time drug dealer.
We'll get back to that later.
For now, Ray claimed that on Thursday night, he was at home getting ready to eat dinner. He said his friend Jody called him and said he had some buyers for pills he was selling, so needed him Ray to go pick Jody up and take him to make this drug deal. But Ray was having car trouble. He told police that he could not get his truck started, so Ray told police he waited for Gail to come home. He told them that he said to Gail he was
going with Jody to do a deal. He said they tried jumping the car with jumper cables off Gail's jeep, but that didn't work, so he told police that he asked Gail if he could use her jeep. Now, Ray says that Gail told him yes, that was fine. I have questions about this because this is contrary to what we've heard about Gail, that she always was the one to drive her car. Honestly, it seems pretty odd to me that she would just be fine with lending it to Ray so that he could go out and make
this drug deal. And as we will see, she and Ray had a pretty volatile relationship. Also, we know that Gail needed her car because she was planning to go to work the next day to pick up her paycheck. She had also told her friend Sheila, they would go buy this acid and that she would pay for stuff, so presumably she would need to go get her paycheck
for all that to happen. And finally, we know, from what Sheila said to investigators, Gail did not like Ray's friend Jody, So again I have doubts about this story. That Ray told that Gail just handed him the car keys and said, go on out and do whatever, do your drug deal. But let's get back to Ray into where the night took him. Ray said that once he had Gail's jeep, he drove the car to Jody's house, which was near the Fayettlee Country Club at the time. He said he got there and picked Jody up at
around nine thirty or ten pm. After that, Ray said, they went to get some beer at the Chuck Wagon liquor store and then they delivered their pills. After doing that, they went to Springdale, which was a few miles away, to buy some pot. But when they got there, Ray said, apparently their contact wasn't able to get what they wanted, so they started heading back down Highway seventy one south toward Fayetville. En route, they stopped at another liquor store,
the wy Liquor Store. They bought some more beer, then drove the guys who they were doing the deal with back to their place and dropped them off. Now they've gone from a car full of guys to just Ray and Jody. Ray and Jody went back to Tammy's house. Now Tammy was this other woman, the woman who Ray was seeing on the side. After they got to Tammy's, Jody made a phone call and then Ray and Jody took the jeep again. They were looking for a guy
they knew. They went looking for him a few minutes later. Now it's between eleven and eleven thirty. They're trying to buy some more drugs and they're successful this time. They bought some quay lutes. Then Jamie, Jody, and Ray all went back to Tammy's house. There were a few other people partying there already, a girl named Sherry, another girl, and another guy. So this group sat around partying, smoked some pot, and then Ray and Tammy went to bed together.
Ray clarified they did up. They did have sex that night. He admitted he was there all night. Jody slept on the couch. The next morning, Friday, October seventeenth, Ray said that he and Jody left the house at around six or six thirty am. Ray said that he got home to the apartment that he shared with Gail just after seven am. This part of the story gets a little
weird now. According to the case file documents, Ray said that he remembered this time because when he pulled up to the house in Gail's jeep, he saw that the door to his pickup truck was open. Apparently, the clock on the dash said seven to ten am. But he makes another comment later about this being an alarm clock, so I don't know whether he means the clock in the vehicle or another alarm clock that was sitting in there,
which seems very strange. I don't know if he was trying to say that Gail had done that as some kind of a message about him not being home. Unfortunately, we only have Harshaal transcripts of these interviews. We have no audio, so we can't go back and ask him, and we don't know the context of those comments. We're gonna have to ask some more questions about that because it's a strange detail. It was just another unanswered question
in a case that is already full of them. Anyway, after that, after he got home, Ray said he parked Gail's jeep, climbed into his own vehicle, his truck, and basically fell asleep. He said he passed out there for a few hours. This is also weird, the fact that he would go and sleep in his truck when his house was right there. So the officer asked him why
he didn't go to sleep in the house. He said something about Gail, and Gail would have been more pissed off at him if she saw his vehicle and her jeep and he wasn't there, which doesn't seem to make any sense either. My theory is if Ray was telling the truth that when he got home he just didn't feel like facing her right at that moment, he had taken her car. He's been out all night with another woman. Now he's super hungover and he does not want to knock on that door. Maybe she locked him.
Out, so Ray goes to sleep in the car. He said that he woke up.
Around nine or nine thirty and had a headache, had a bad hangover. He said he noticed that the jeep was still there, and that's when he went inside the apartment and went to sleep. Ray said that he crashed, He slept for a while, and he woke up around twelve thirty or one. He saw Gail was still not there and the jeep was in the same spot.
So what does Ray do?
Does he call the police, start looking for his girlfriend, who was very responsible, or go to her work site. No, he doesn't do any of that. He called his other girlfriend, Tammy again. He said that by two or two thirty that afternoon, he had gone back to her house. Ray had some speed pills that he gave Tammy and for him that afternoon consisted of having some friends over to his house. They tried to get his truck started and
weren't able to. Then he got his check cashed so he got paid, and then stayed that night at Tammy's house again, and now it's Saturday. Ray said that the first he heard about Gail being missing or something happening to her was when someone showed him a newspaper. He said he saw an item about a woman's body being found and the unidentified body wearing a Michelin jacket.
Because remember, Gail was a Jane Doe.
Before the police idd her, he said, when he saw that the body had been wearing a Michelin jacket, he said, right then he knew they had to be talking about Gail. He said he went home, and by the time he got there, the sheriff's police cruiser was parked outside his place, so the police took Ray in for questioning. He insisted he had nothing to do with Gail's disappearance. He seemed genuinely shocked. He told police the same thing that others
had told them. He said she was well liked, she was a hard worker, He said she was one of the few women who could work in that man's atmosphere and deal with it. He said that men liked her and she got asked out a lot, but she was able to deflect that, and that people respected her. He mentioned Ray and who, as we said before, Gail dated
in the past. He also said there was someone else, a superintendent at work, who had apparently made some sexual comments toward Gail, but really there was nothing at work that was alarming. Police zeroed in on Ray.
As their suspect.
They executed a search warrant for his apartment, the one he shared with Gail. They didn't really find anything of evidendiary worth. They found a roll of gray duct tape similar to the tape that was found at the crime scene, but that's also the same kind of tape that pretty much everybody has at home in a drawer.
Again, nothing conclusive.
The search warrant also showed they took a pair of Tony Rama brand Western brown cowboy boots size ten E from Ray's residence, from the gun box that was found at the crime scene, and the autopsy from the bullet from Gail's head wound. They knew that Gail had been killed with a twenty two caliber weapon, but police never found that murder weapon, and police ruled Ray out pretty
quickly because he had this airtight alibi. According to law enforcement, there were lots of people who said Ray was out all night on Thursday and he didn't go home until Friday morning. Years later, Marty the private investigator talked to Tammy, Ray's other women at the time. Tammy said, yes, Ray did stay at her place that night. She admitted they were all into drugs and they were doing them and
partying that night. Several people, including Tammy, confirmed that Ray was driving Gayle's cheap that night, and they said when he left Tammy's in the morning, he left in that jeep. Tammy said Ray was there all night. He may have left for ten or fifteen minutes to run an errand, but that was it. Tammy said she would love to see justice for Gail. She said police had forced her to look at the autopsy photos of Gail. She talked
about how hard they were to see. Police did foul charges against Ray for possession of a controlled substance meeting marijuana, but in nineteen eighty three those charges were dropped without prejudice, meaning that charges could be refiled if new evidence ever emerged, but that never happened. The case went cold, and in nineteen ninety nine, Ray Foreman died. Randy Wyman has also passed away. In twenty twenty one, the Washington County Sheriff's Office closed out their case file.
They said this was because of a lack of evidence.
And they noted, quote, this case file has been microfeached and is very hard to read. Some of the pages on some of the interviews are missing. It is the recommendation of this reviewer that the case be classified as a cold case homicide until such time as new evidence is presented.
End quote. In April of twenty twenty.
Two, someone named David rose Grant reviewed the case file again and stated that the medical examiner said the victim had been shot behind the ear with a twenty two caliber weapon, but said the case file did not contain an autopsy report and pretty much left it at that. I'm not sure why he was unable to get the
autopsy report, because I was unable to get it. But the reviewer's notes went on to state the victim was also run over by a vehicle, that there were a couple of suspects named in the case file, but not enough physical evidence to charge anyone. And that has been the story for the last forty years. So is there any way to figure out what happened to Gaile? And
if so, what can we do next? A few years back, Marty reached out to former Washington County Sheriff Herb Marshall, who told Marty that he was always troubled by the fact that quote, it happened to my county on my watch end quote, And it's clear that it's a case that has always haunted the former sheriff, even though he left office shortly after Gale's body was found. The sheriff said, quote, I figured in my mind that she owed somebody money
for drugs she wasn't paying for. My theory was Jody and Ray needed a ride that night, so they called her to come and get them, but he was out running around. That's why she didn't have any shoes on. She went and got into the jeep and went up and picked him and Jody up. They got into it because he wanted to drive her jeep. She would not let nobody drive her jeep.
That's where I.
Thought that he took her out there and killed her because she went and picked him up in quote, So the sheriff seemed to touch on one of the biggest mysteries of the case. There the fact that Gail was found wearing white socks, which by the way, were very dirty and torn on the bottom, but she had no shoes on, and her shoes, by the way, were never found. But the sheriff's theory does not seem to make sense because we know that Ray was driving Gail's jeep on
Thursday night. Multiple people saw him driving her vehicle. He already had her vehicle, so Gail could not have gone and picked him up.
She had no working.
Vehicle and he already had her car, so the kidnapping theory makes less sense. And by the way, even in another scenario, if Ray had called her and asked for a ride, even if she raced to her car, this was a raining, muddy night, I don't believe she would have gone out and just socks with no shoes, So let's recap Basically, there are a few theories that are the main ones being talked about about what might have happened to gal Vatt.
One was that her murder could have been.
Connected to drug dealing, possibly the drug dealing of her boyfriend at the time, ray that Gail was kidnapped and killed to send a message, or that she owed people money for drugs.
When Marty interviewed.
Sheila years later, Sheila told him about a mutual acquaintance of theirs who said he heard Gail was unconscious when she was run over and that apparently her killer needed to run her over more than once. We're going to get a lot more into this in next week's episode. In part two, we need to figure out whether these informants, these people who were talking about rumors, are actually being truthful, if they're actually providing any information that wasn't given to
the general public. Did they have information that on only the killer would know, or could they have just been spreading rumors, or could they have made up a story for their own reasons, maybe to get a better deal in exchange for a lighter sentence, or in.
Some cases I've seen on many cases.
People who want to appear to be really tough will imply they've had something to do with an unsolved murder. And the way to figure out these truthful confessions from the fake ones is to ask again, do they have any information that only the killer would know and to really get into that, which we will next week. The second possibility police seemed to have considered is that it was some sort of a domestic violence incident gone wrong. We know Ray had a history of domestic violence. We
know he abused his former wife. This is just a supposition on my part, but I feel like Gail wanted to be seen as this strong, resilient woman you could take care of herself. So she seemed like the type of person who would perhaps be hesitant about reaching out and admitting that they're was something going on at home that.
She was being abused.
Unfortunately, we know that even the strongest women can be abused, and often people are hiding things at home and we only find that out afterwards. The third possibility is that it was someone else, someone not connected to drug dealing, not connected to an intimate relationship with Gail. Maybe someone the police have spoken to, looked at and even interviewed but it has never been arrested. Maybe someone who has overlooked early on in the investigation.
So I went back. I looked at every.
Single document that we could get our hands on, and everything that we could get connected to this case. In a lot of these interviews, the pages have been lost. We know the condom evidence has been lost, forensics are gone. So I'm doing the best I can. I'm looking at forty four year old, faded documents, trying to make out the missing letters in these bleached out words. But among all of them, I found something that I think is
super interesting. I found an interview police did with a potential witness in nineteen eighty, someone who said that he saw Gail hitchhiking. So on October seventeenth, nineteen eighty, hours after Gail's body was found, police interviewed a twenty nine year old man named laith Lane. He said that he saw a woman matching Gail's description hitchhiking on Highway seventeen
on Thursday morning. The report said that on Thursday morning, just after seven am, laith Lane was driving south on Highway seventy one near the Ramada Inn when he saw a white female with brown shoulder lenked hair in her early twenties. He said that she was around maybe five foot seven to five foot ten, with a medium build, wearing a blue jacket with a light colored stripe on the sleeve.
He got a good look at her, and after.
Police showed him pictures of Gail, he said that he was pretty positive that it was Gaile Vauught and he described her outfit perfectly Laithe said that he didn't pick Gail up because he was traveling in the opposite direction and thought it would be inappropriate to pick her up. He told police he had never seen Gail before that day or since. He said he saw her just that one time when she was hitchhiking.
On that morning.
He said that he was on the road at around six fifteen am. He and his wife were in the car driving her to work in Springdale, which is about nine miles around twenty minutes away from where they lived. He said that he did not see this mystery woman when he and his wife were driving. He only saw her on the way back. A couple of things strike me as odd about this story. First, he could not
have seen Gail on Thursday morning. Remember, we know from what Don said that on Thursday morning Gail was driving her jeep. Don saw Gail driving to talk to one of their bosses and then getting back into her jeep and driving away from the job site. Don remembers that very well because it was the last time that she ever saw Gail, so I started thinking, what if the
time of death is wrong. Police first said they thought Gail was killed on Thursday night, but the autopsy report explains that rigor mortis was just beginning in Gail's face. So the medical examiner estimated the time of death between eight and ten hours prior to when he examined her, which, because he did the autopsyed around eleven thirty, would have been in the early morning hours. Parts of Gail's body were still warm to the touch. It takes about twelve
hours before a body cools completely. And finally, there was the rain. It had been raining torrentially starting at around two am that morning. The rain ended in the early morning hours of October seventeenth, but the autopsy report specifically mentions Gail's clothes and hair were wet but not saturated with water, so it's very likely that she was killed after that torrential rain stopped. Also, finally, the tire tracks are fresh and they have a lot of detail in them.
If Gail had been killed prior to two am, they.
Would have been washed away in that soaking rental rain.
I think, based on what I've seen So far, the evidence points to the fact that the police's time of death was wrong, but we need to do more investigating to be sure. We need to ask more questions about the time of death and about the guy who said he saw Gail on the side of the road, especially since I noticed something else. Laith Lane was questioned on
October seventeenth, hours after Gail's body was found. How was he able to describe exactly what she was wearing on the day she was found dead, down to the Michelin blue jacket. We also have to look back at Ray because one of the reasons why the case against Ray didn't go forward was reportedly because Ray had this airtight
alibi for Thursday night. We know that Gail was pissed off at Ray if he stayed out all night with her jeep, Imagine how angry Gail must have been by Friday morning, and that would mean Ray's alibi for Thursday night, that supposedly airtight albi, would not clear him. If Gail died later, we have to ask ourselves, could he and Gail have gotten into a fight after he showed up
on Friday morning, or what if something else happened? What if Gail who woke up on Friday morning with no vehicle, decided she was going to go and get her paycheck from the work site.
If Gail did decide to.
Hitchhike that morning, she might have just missed Ray coming home. So we have to ask could someone else have picked her up along that wooded road. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Heleng Gong Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts. Music contributed by Ben sale And this episode
was scored and mixed by Jesse Niswanger. Executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Elsie Crowley.
If you have a.
Case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five at six seven eight seven four four six one four five
School of Humans