School of Humans.
On October seventeenth, nineteen eighty, just after ten am, the body of Gael Vault was found in Washington County, Arkansas, near an area called Blake Weddington.
Gail was just twenty one years old.
She worked with mostly male colleagues on a road crew building Highway seventy one in Fayetbule. Gail was wearing a flannel shirt and a blue Michelin jacket. I know I mentioned this last week, and I'm mentioning it again because what Gail was wearing and the order that everything happened in will become crucial in this murder investigation. Gail's legs were open. She was naked from the waist down except for a pair of torn and filthy white socks. Last week,
we explored three main theories. One that Gail's murder could have been connected to drug dealing, to some kind of Ozark mafia, or possibly to a drug dealer who was trying to send a message to her boyfriend Ray Foreman by targeting Gail. The second theory was that Gail was the victim of domestic violence that on Thursday night, something happened between Gail's boyfriend Ray and Gail something that spiraled
out of control and ended with her dead. The third was that someone else, someone the police overlooked, maybe even a stranger, raped and killed Gail.
One of the main.
Questions we talked about last week was the condom, the brand Tickled Fancy, that was found near Gail's body. A lot of people have wondered if Gail was actually sexually assaulted, or if that condom was a red herring, if it could have come from someone else, maybe some teenagers who used that area for parking. This week, we're going to do a deep dive into the Gail Vault case and see if we can answer the question of what really happened to her in those woods on October seventeenth, nineteen
eighty I'm Catherine Townsend. For the past five years of working on my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned that there is no such thing as a small town where murder never happens. If you have a case you'd like me 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 five. This is Helen Gone Murder line. We've been looking at the
Gael Vaux case file. We filed a Foyer request. We wanted to understand more about each of these three theories, so our research assistant Amy reached out to Gail's sister, Teresa. As we said last week, Teresa has been working with a private investigator named Marty for the past few years, and Marty was the person who first talked to me about this case. Teresa and her sister Gail both came
from the small town of mountain Berg. Even though Gail's parents have passed away, Teresa has still not given up hope she might be able to find answers and one day to understand what happened to her sister.
She went to two year college and played basketball. Who is really big into sports. She didn't have a lot of boyfriends, but she had a lot of guy friends.
You know.
She hung out more with me guys at friends than she did girls. And I think it was Coachy was so tall, you know, she was like six foot one that. She had a very outgoing personality, made friends easily. She was a free spirit. She was kind, you know. She lived in Sayedville and I lived between Van Buren and own Cropper County, and she used to be at our house all the time that you know, she had just kind of once she moved it up here to Saydville,
she found a different circle of friends. I always felt like her friends were the friends that if Gail wasn't their friends, that they wouldn't have any friends. He was just kind of everybody better. You know, most of her friends were not the most outstanding people that you know, they needed a friend and that was her.
Like pretty much everyone who talked to us about Gail, Teresa told us about what a nice and wonderful person her sister was. However, she did say that because Gail was so nice, sometimes Gail would befriend people who, it seems like Teresa believed might not have been the best influences on Gail. Teresa said she didn't know Ray Forman, Gail's boyfriend, that well.
She was dating a guy by the name of Ray Forman at the time. He had been at the house a couple of times, and the last time was probably about two weeks before he was murdered, and they had picked up my son, which he was three at the time, and took him to the Fort Smith's Fair. It was kind of late when they got home, and I offered them to the Saturday night you know, where he had spend the night and then go back the next morning. And it was like, oh, my race got to work,
you know, this kind of stuff. But he was a nice looking man. But he was very quiet, you know, and that just made been his personality. I don't know, never any mention of any kind of issues or problems, but we didn't speak very often, you know that then we had had a seal zone.
We talked last week about the fact that there have been allegations of domestic violence with Ray and his ex wife Lynn. Ray split up with Lynn a few months before he started dating Gail. Teresa said that to her knowledge, Gail and Ray were very happy and she was not aware of any problems in their relationship or any domestic violence.
Teresa talked about her frustration with the police investigation, and I really sympathize with us, by the way, because listeners of this podcast know that so many of the cases that we cover, we see the same pattern. The story of what happened to Gail has changed over the years. It seemed like to Teresa there was information that was being added and being taken away After a while, she said she really wasn't sure what to believe.
The story changus was to please them. What time as the time serio as you're talking about.
As an example of what Teresa defined as this changing story, she said that early in the investigation, one of the deputies who was at the crime scene told her they found white chipped paint near Gail's body, but there's nothing in the record about that. There's nothing about white paint ships. Later there was a rumor about orange paint ships being found near the body. That's nowhere in the official record either. Teresa also talked about Ray Foreman's alibi.
The police tell us that Ray had gone to a party with about thirty people and that he had a lot of alibis that as time has gone passed from the police, who has changed to where he was out running around doing kind of dope deel.
Teresa also discussed something that I mentioned in last week's episode. She talked about Ray's alibi and about that weird alarm clock story. Remember, Ray said he was out all night with his friend Jody, someone who we know Gail did not like. He claimed that he borrowed her jeep and that she just allowed him to do that. And as I said last week, I do find that unbelievable. Everyone who knew Gail said she never gave her car to anyone. She didn't want to walk. She was always the one
to drive her vehicle. So the idea that she would give her vehicle to her boyfriend to allow him to go out and make drug deals and just be fine with that, knowing she had to go pick her paycheck up the next morning seems very unlikely, but that is his story. The next morning, he drove Jody home and then he drove back to the apartment that he shared with Gail, and he still had her jeep. Ray claimed that he parked the jeep, and he said that he got into his own truck. He got into his vehicle
and slept there. This was very odd, and he said something else that was odd. He said that he saw an alarm clock on the dashboard of his truck and that the truck door was a little bit ajar. Teresa called out the weirdness of this story.
There's something in there about an alarm clock that he decided gale up maddenning and put it in his truck. But the bottom line is, you know, on a Thursday night where all of this SAT's happened, I can't feel like that was a coincidence.
Again, this is another question we need to answer. We need to figure out exactly what Ray was talking about. We need to know if he meant that it was a some kind of a clock that was in the truck or it was an actual alarm clock that got put out.
There, because that was bizarre.
What if Ray slept in the truck, not just because he was hungover, but because he did not want to go in that house and face Gail. What if while he was sleeping, she walked out of the house and that's why she had no shoes on, she approached him in the truck, and they got into a knockdown, drag out argument right there. I'm going to come back to that later. For now, let's go through the rest of Ray's albi Amy and I discussed the fact that right
before Gail left home, she was preparing dinner. According to Teresa, Gail was cooking beans and cornbread.
He had started cooking beans and corn bread and stuff, and then somebody turned the stoves off and there weren't com points to Cook.
We looked at the autopsy report and there weren't any stomach contents listed. I don't know if that's because of Gail's injuries or if it was something that just wasn't noted, but it would have been great to know if any food was in her stomach at that time. Teresa said that she believed Ray had something to do with Gail's murder.
She said that she believed that something started that night before Ray left the house, something that potentially set him off, Which brings us to another mystery in the case, because remember, Gail was found wearing only a pair of socks. The socks were dirty on the bottom and they had holes in them, and police.
Said they never did find Gail's shoes.
Now, Teresa believes that that means Gail was kidnapped from her apartment, possibly at gunpoint.
You know, I'm just surmising from every little bit of piece of God. I can't say for sure that I feel like it he right killed her, that I feel in my heart that he knew that it was going to happen and that he didn't do anything to stop it. But you know, he may have been part of it. I don't know, but I do know I do have that feeling that he knew what was going on and he tracked her in her apartment. You know, if he didn't do it, then he helped set her up and
where it happened. I'm sorry, I know there has to be difficult to hear. Well, you know, I lived with it for you know, decades, and you know it's kind of like you get numbed and stuff. That's right. Criminals can be so evil is because they're so used to seeing it. And I was the nurse, so you know, I've kind of hardened to a lot of that. So it's fine. You know, if this is going to find closure, it's not a big deal.
One of the theories work exploring is the idea this could have been connected to drug dealing. So we need to know how big, how serious a drug user was Gail and how big a drug dealer was her boyfriend Ray. Teresa clarified that she said her sister did smoke pot quite a bit. She said she did marijuana and did ask it occasionally. This was pretty much the same thing that we heard from Gail's friends. Gail was not involved
in heavy drugs or heavy drug dealing. The sheriff of Washington County at the time of Gail's murder was a man named Herb Marshall. Even though Herb left office shortly after Gail's body was found, he has always said this is a case that has stayed with him and that he wishes he could have gotten justice for Gail and for her family. A few years ago, Sheriff Marshall told Marty, the private investigator who first brought us the case, that he Herb believed that Gail was kidnapped from her home.
I wanted to know if he still felt that way. Herb is now in his eighties. He admits that his memory is not what it once was, and on top of that, he's been having some serious health issues. But he's still wants to help us in any way that he can. He wants to figure out what happened to Gayle Vaught. It's clear that the idea of this unsolved murder in his county has tormented him over the years.
I just got out of a pill a week ago, and mainly I'm not in that great in shape, but I'll do what I can for you.
Herb said he believed in his gut that Ray had something to do with Gail's death. He also said he believed she had been forced out of her home, possibly at gunpoint. Herb said he believed this based on the fact there was the food on the stove that Theresa mentioned and that there was food in the oven. This made police believe that Gayle's time of death happened sometime late on Thursday night. The former sheriff, Herb Marshall explained what actually killed Gail and we weren't wrong.
Her death was horrific.
They made it try to look like from which she wasn't at the grime and saying had actually what killed her. And she had a bullet hole right behind her right at ere. I believe it's a twenty two caliper which she hid, that bullingncked her unconscious, but whoever shot herself that killer.
Gail had been shot in the head with a twenty two caliber bullet, but the bullet fragmented in her skull and so it did not penetrate her brain, so this was not a fatal wound. Sometime during all this, Gail's killer took off her jeans and underwear. We know based on the fecal matter that was in her underwear that she was dead or dying when this was done. And then at some point during this horrific sexual assault, her killer realized that Gail was not dead.
She apparently was a fading in the back behind the cheek. When the cheap backed over her, said Kilder was a She bled to death and eternally from her splain the splain or some portion in her she actually bled to death internally.
So the killer got in his vehicle and backed over her. When the vehicle backed over her, it caused catastrophic injuries to her pelvis, a lot of her internal organs. Basically, the car tore apart the bottom half of her body and led to her bleeding to.
Death in the woods alone.
It's one of the most horrific murders I've ever read about herb said he was focused on Ray because mainly of the drug dealing and the bad associations he had with him. He said he believed that when he talked to Ray, Ray was on the cusp of confessing to something.
In my mind, I had him at one time.
He couldn't answer the question of what the motive would have been.
I'm not sure of picking event I have a dozen things. He could have been drugs because he had her on some drugs. He's Rudi him sale.
I know that smoking pot was a much bigger deal, especially in Arkansas in nineteen eighty, but so far I haven't seen anything other than some bragging that happened years later by a couple of guys who were in jail and might have had their own reasons for wanting to seem like dangerous drug dealers. I haven't seen any evidence of any type of drug dealing connected to Gale's death, but police did think the murder might have something to do with drugs, so let's explore that again. Was Ray
really this big time drug dealer. Amy did some research into pills because we were wondering why were there seventeen thousand pills being confiscated from these guys. It turns out that back in the day, these pills, these very strong caffeine pills, were kind of the equivalent of selling adderall and sometimes dealers would come up with more creative ways to get people high, including sometimes melting the pills down
into liquid and injecting them into the bloodstream. I don't actually know if injecting speed with an IV would make it hit your bloodstream faster. I don't know what kind of effects that would have, but I can imagine those caffeine pills and those quantities would.
Make people act crazy.
But at the same time, even in those quantities, this doesn't point to Ray or his cohorts being these big time drug dealers. Caffeine pills in marijuana are both legal today, and even though this was a long time ago. Again, I'm not really buying into the drug dealer theory, at least not with the evidence that we've seen so far. We asked her if there was anyone left alive since Ray and Randy have both passed away. He said, we should talk to Joy Ray's friend.
I'll tell you there's one to living and hers and that knows for sure, and that person won't tell it to hey 'all. Jardy is still alive. He should be in the late seventies. For the last time I heard he was still alive.
We need to find Jody.
So, if Ray did kill Gail, why did he do it. We were trying to find out if there had been anyone else in Gail's life who might have seen signs of domestic violence. Let's go back to the evidence, even though a lot of the caseball pages are missing.
We know where Gail's worksite was.
We know where she lived in the trailer court in the basement apartment she shared with Ray that was owned by Ray's friend Barry Frizell. We know that at eight pm on October seventeenth, Gail talked to one of her supervisors at work. We know that she confirmed that they were not going to work the next day because of all the heavy rain they'd been having, but she told Joe she planned on coming up to pick up her
paycheck on Friday morning. That conversation with Joe was the last known conversation that Gail ever had with anyone except her killer. Amy talked to Barry Frizell's brother. His name is Ted, and he said he knew Gail well. He said he hung around Gail and Ray during their relationship, and he insists there was no violence in their relationship.
He said that Ray adored Gail.
Ted said he didn't mind sharing information, but he said he prefers not to be on the podcast, which obviously is fine, but he did want to share his theory about what may have happened to Gail Vaught. He said he has a suspect in mine. He believes Ray's ex wife, Lynn, may have played a role in Gail's death. Gail never told anyone that Ray abused her, but we do know from the case file that Gail did make a comment at one point about being afraid of Ray because of
what Ray had allegedly done to his ex wife. And to figure out what happened to her, we need to figure out the actual time of death. So again we come back to the crime scene and back to the evidence, and it strikes me that this case, more than anyone I've seen in a long time, has so much evidence that appears to be contradictory. So we really have to
zero in and look at Gail's pattern of life. One of what I consider the biggest breakthroughs of this case is when we looked at the autopsy report and we figured out that the time of death is almost certainly wrong. Doctor Fawmi Malak, the medical examiner, did his forensic testing at eleven thirty am on October seventeenth, nineteen eighty. Now, initially, he said he believed that based on the forensics, that
Gail had been dead between six and ten hours. That would put the time of death sometime between one thirty and five thirty am, But elsewhere in the autopsy report, doctor Malik indicated the time of death had been before midnight.
This more closely aligns to what the police believed. They believed that Gail was killed that night, that she had been making dinner at home, and that she was either kidnapped from her home or something bad happened to her, something started in the home and went out to the woods.
But the evidence contradicts this because first there's the fact that, according to the autopsy report, rigor mortis had just started in Gaile's face, it had not yet moved down her body, which would indicate that she had only been dead for a few hours. Let's go back to the tire tracks. Remember it rained really hard the night before. It was actually pouring torrentially at two am. But according to the autopsy report, Gail's hair and her clothes were described as
wet but not saturated. And then there were the fresh tire tracks. They had a lot of detail in them. If Gail had been killed prior to this torrential rain, the tire tracks would have been obliterated in all that mud. Every single factor we look at points to the fact that Gail's time of death was much later than the police believe.
I believe that it was.
On Friday morning. Then we go back again to the condom. One of the biggest questions we've had in this case was was the condom a red herring? Was it left over from another couple hooking up in the woods, or could Gail's killer have planted it there? Did they want to make it look like this was a rape and
murder and that that had been the motive. As we said last week, forensic testing on Gail's body revealed the possible presence of seamen in Gaal's vagina, but when swabs from Gayale's vagina were tested, they tested negative for sperm.
We explained the discrepancy.
We said that the semen could have been from consensual sex she had with Ray on Wednesday night. The fact that Gayle's genes and underwear were removed make it, in my opinion, less likely that the condom was completely irrelevant.
That seems like a big coincidence.
However, tragically, somewhere between the Arkansas State Crime Lab in Washington County, the condom was lost years ago, so there's no way to test it for DNA. Now, so did gailes killer stage a crime scene? Did he try to frame someone? I think the framing theory is becoming more and more unlikely. People who are discussing that and making comments online about it are for the most part, looking at this case with a modern day CSI Dick Wolf savvy lens. And we have to remember that this was
nineteen eighty. CSI did not exist. People were not watching Dick Wolf shows. DNA was not even a remote possibility. No one had ever heard of it. And we have to also ask ourselves who was using condoms in the Arkansas Ozarks Back then? This was also pre AIDS, so men who were past their teenage years, in their mid and late twenties. In that age group, those guys who were in relationships tended not to use condoms that much.
There were some exceptions. There are a few groups of people who, in my investigative experience on cold cases, and as a PI who's done a lot of marital surveillance, men who cheat carry condoms. Those are the guys who carry boxes of condoms in their car, often in the glove compartment. So now we need to take a look at the third theory. We've talked about domestic violence, We've
talked about drug dealing. What about the possibility that a stranger sexually assaulted and murdered Gale, Which brings us back to the man who said that he saw Gail hitchhiking. Laith Lane, a twenty nine year old who was driving his wife to work at around six fifteen am on
the morning of a Osober seventeenth. The officer who interviewed laith Lane noted that he was acting strangely during the interview, acting nervous and in fact, the officer wrote that Laith's behavior was so unusual that he said he wanted to check the FBI background details on this person. Remember that laith said that on the morning of October seventeenth, he was on the road driving his wife to work by six fifteen am. Later, though in another interview, he told
a slightly different story. He said that he dropped his children off at daycare. He said he saw Gail on the hill by the Fayetteville Mall. And then when we talked to Teresa, she dropped another bombshell. She said that around midnight or a little after in the early morning hours of October seventeenth, that someone else had supposedly seen Gail hitchhiking. This person was a police officer.
He was seen now on one of the highways by some Farmington police officer, but about midnight. But and it was raining, and he should have sought and he didn't. I have been talking to different like state police, different deputies from Zaydville, you know, whoever Marty could find me to talk to, and nobody ever told me that case was closed until about maybe a year ago. And I've been talking to him since twenty thirteen, and then all of a sudden the case closed. They said if new
evidence came, then they reopened it. Well, what they have said is that they believe Brakforman did it, and there's just no way to prove it. So in their minds, they've already solved it, you know, with no evidence.
There are so many more questions we still need answered. We need to know more about who was involved in the drug scene in that friend group, need to know more about the relationship between Ray and Gail. We need to figure out what happened on the morning of October seventeenth,
nineteen eighty, because that's the crucial time period. What happened at Gale and Ray's apartment after he came home that morning, And what if anything set her out on that path walking along the highway, and who might have picked her up along that dark highway. To get the answers, I may have to go back into those woods.
I'm Catherine Townsend.
This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone 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. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Elsie Curley. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line six seven eight seven four four six one four five.
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