School of Humans. Helen got Murder Line actively investigates cold case murders in an effort to raise public awareness invite witnesses to come forward and present evidence that could potentially be further investigated by law enforcement. While we value insights from family and community members, their statements should not be considered evidence and point to the challenges of verifying facts
inherent in cold cases. We remind listeners that everyone has presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing in the podcast is intended to state or imply that anyone who has not been convicted of a crime is guilty of any wrongdoing. Thanks for listening.
It was April twelfth, nineteen seventy one. A twenty seven year old woman named Pauline Stormant was walking down South Duncan Avenue in Fayetteville, Arkansas, just a few blocks from her apartment. She didn't know that someone was following her in the darkness. Pauline worked two part time jobs. One is a cashier at the Malco Theater and another as a secretary at the ROTC Center on the University of Arkansas campus. Pauline had recently started going back to school
as a mature student. She enrolled as a sophomore at the University of Arkansas at Fayetble, where she was a social welfare major. Pauline had a roommate, Alice pat Murphy. Pat later told the authorities that Pauline wasn't dating anyone. Actually, Pauline spent most of her free time hitting the books. She was very focused on school work, which meant that she was often pulling late nights at the library. On that night, on April twelfth, Pauline did a shift at
the ROTC. While she was there, she mentioned to a coworker that she might go to a gospel concert later, but she ended up going to the library to study. Now, according to her roommate, Pauline's regular routine would have had her coming home at around ten thirty or eleven PM.
Something made her lead the library a little earlier that night, around nine thirty PM, and then while she was walking, when she was just a few blocks from her apartment, someone came out of that darkness and attacked Pauline, stabbing her over and over eight times in all, in a frenzied attack that lasted several minutes. It was a hot night, a lot of people had their windows open, and at
nine forty five pm when Pauline started screaming. A lot of people in the area heard her screaming, and there were several witnesses who saw a man come up behind her. But despite that, Pauline's killer escaped into the night. And even though the police have questioned tons of people, lots of theories have been explored over the years, and there was one arrest, Pauline's killer has never been found. I'm
Catherine Townsend. Over the past five years of making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned there's no such thing as a small town where murder never happens. I've received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities.
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 or five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Police got to the scene really quickly. They rushed Pauline to Washington Regional Hospital, but they couldn't do anything to save her, and she was pronounced dead just after eleven PM, so the assault had very quickly turned into a murder case.
Pauline's body was sent for an autopsy. Forensic testing revealed that Pauline had died of the stab wounds. She had been stabbed in the arm, the chest, and the stomach. Investigators said the murder weapon was a knife like a butcher knife, around six to eight inches long, and they
believed serrated on both sides. Police did not find the murder weapon at the scene, but several days later, the sheriff did find a butcher knife that was stabbed into the ground behind an apartment complex that was across the street from where Pauline lived. They sent that knife in for testing, but I haven't been able to figure out what, if anything, happened with that weapon. A lot of people doubted that that butcher knife had been the weapon in
the place because it wasn't serrated. But as far as I know, and there is a lot of information missing in this case, there was nothing conclusive, ever proven one way or the other. Sadly, that knife, along with a ton of other evidence, has been lost.
We'll get to that later.
Side note, While I was working on Gail Vaught's case, which we covered a couple of weeks back, as part of that, we started looking around for other unsolved murders in the same area of Arkansas. Even though Pauline's murder happened nine years earlier than Gail's murder in nineteen eighty, I couldn't help but be struck by Pauline's case because
even though them was completely different. For Pauline and Gail, Gail was shot in the head and appeared to have been sexually assaulted, while Pauline was stabbed in a semi public area. Both women were tall, with shoulder linked brown hair, and both cases were unsolved.
I want to be cleared. Nothing in the evidence.
I've seen indicates these cases are connected in any way. The mos were completely different. Gail was shot in the head and appeared to have been sexually assaulted. Pauline was stabbed in a semi public area. Amy reached out to a member of Pauline's family named Lance Gosnell. His great grandmother is Pauline's aunt, so he's her cousin and he's been hearing about Pauline's story about this famous unsolved murder in his family for a long time, since he was
very young. A few years ago, he decided to try and find answers. He started writing about the case. The website is at who Murdered Pauline dot WordPress dot com, and he's compiled a tremendous amount of evidence over the years that he's collected a lot of it through Foyer requests. Pauline Stormant was born on April third, nineteen forty four, in Ozark, Arkansas, and her family her mom and dad were still living in Ozark when she died from a young age. Her family described her as someone who was
very serious, pretty quiet, and liked to study. She was not a drinker or a partier in high school, and it seemed to be pretty much the same story in college. After she graduated from high school, she attended Arkansas Tech University in Russellville. She finished her freshman year there and after that she left school and started doing some secretarial work. So one thing about Pauline's Stormant, her studies and her
work life are pretty well documented. Her personal life is much more of a mystery.
There are some years.
Between when she was twenty one and twenty seven where we don't know a lot about her personal relationships. When she was twenty one years old, in nineteen sixty five, Pauline got married to a man named Charles Joseph Pate. A lot of their relationship, as we said, is a mystery, but we do know that whatever happened between them apparently did not end very well. Charles and Pauline lived in Memphis for a while. While Pauline was in Memphis, she taught first aid for the Red Cross, as well as
doing some secretarial work. Again, a lot of the history about Pauline in this case was provided by her cousin Lance.
One other thing that jumps out in my mind is the records show that she was married to a man named Charles Pate. The marriage didn't last long. I can't find a door divorced certificate, but she had mentioned to a roommate who she had lived with when she was either in Memphis or Atlanta, that she was deathly afraid of her ex husband.
So Pauline and Charles were estranged, but according to her family and to court records, they may not have been officially divorced. So in nineteen seventy one, Pauline was at the University of Arkansas. She had put her studies on hold while she was married to Charles, but once Pauline got the chance to complete her education, she seemed to
really throw herself into it. Information from a foyer request from an old police report shows that Pauline's former roommate, the one who Lance was referring to, who she had lived with in Memphis. That woman's name was Iris Fletcher. She was the one who talked about Pauline's fear of her ex husband. But apparently police ruled out Charles fairly early.
I don't know why. I have really tried to figure that out, but I don't have a lot of information about the investigation because a lot of the case file is gone over the years, A lot of the evidence and a lot of the pages have been lost. But apparently he attended the funeral, was cooperative with the police,
and was cleared early. Pauline's college roommate, Pat the one who said that Pauline didn't date that much, was asked by police if anything strange had happened on the day Pauline was murdered, and she said, yes, there was one thing that was out of the ordinary. She said that at around two pm that afternoon, apparently, two men who were described as white men, young guys who Pauline in her roommate didn't know, invited Pauline and Pat for drinks. The two women said no thanks and didn't take them
up on their offer. Later, the two men reportedly went toward the residence of a guy named Gordon Cummings. Gordon Cummings with someone who we know Pauline had been introduced to. She knew him, but we don't know how well she knew him, and that will be the case with a lot of these relationships. Trying to figure out exactly how these people were related and connected each other is a
huge part of this. We all know that sometimes in these cases, these tiny little details that we know are true and am using air quotes there turn out to be slightly wrong, and those slightly wrong details can multiply over the years and turn into a much larger distortion. We've seen this happen over and over with so many cases. Facts are wrong from the beginning and they're repeated wrong
over the years. At the same time, though, sometimes tiny details are left out and you never know which ones could lead to cracking the case.
Jane Jones wrote a long.
Very in depth article about this case in Ay about U magazine back in twenty twenty. She pointed out that it was a full moon that night. This was something that had appeared in some early news reports, and that detail supposedly meant that Pauline could be seen by the witnesses that night. But actually, because I obsess over these things, I went back and found out actually the moon.
Wasn't full that night. It was a waning gibbous moon.
Not that that makes any difference in the context of the investigation at all, because actually a waning gibbus is almost a full moon. It's actually the part of the lunar phase right after the moon is full. It would be almost as light as a full moon out there, but probably a little bit less poetic in a newspaper article. And I'm bringing this up just to illustrate it's one tiny example of something we thought we knew wrong. Information
gets repeated over the years, and sometimes it multiplies. So I'm really trying to go back and take a look at every single piece of information that we have and try to understand if we really know everything that we think we know. Police were trying to figure out what Pauline's plans had been that night, to see if, other than the two guys asking her in her roommate to have drinks, anything else oude of the ordinary had happened. Police talked to a woman named Terry Keating. Now Terry
worked with Pauline at the ROTC office. She said she had seen Pauline at around seven thirty pm and that Pauline had mentioned something about a gospel concert hosted by a group called Black Americans for Democracy. This concert was going to be held at the Union Ballroom, a building that was basically very close right next door to the
ROTC building. It started at eight pm. But whether Pauline attended that concert or not is still kind of a question mark because some reports say she was planning to go. Other media reports say she told someone she had a class or a conflict and she could not attend. Lance
pointed out something interesting on his website. He said that we're talking about nineteen seventy one Arkansas, and he was speculating, but he said, could some racist person have taken offense at a white woman planning to go to this concert where there were going to be a lot of black singers total speculation, but given the political climate at the time, I do think it's something that police would have to consider. But there was no evidence that this was ever a factor.
So whether or not Pauline made it to that concert, eventually, after she worked her shift at the ROTC, she ended up at the library. She was seen by multiple witnesses there, but then she left suddenly. We don't know exactly what time, but by tracing her route, she must have headed outside at around nine point thirty.
So why did she leave early?
Was it a coincidence or did she see something or someone and there that bothered her. After she left the library, Pauline's route would have taken her south along Duncan Avenue.
She was walking.
Pretty slowly and carefully because she had a big stack of books in her hands, So again I'm betting that she headed straight home because she was balancing lots of school books. She was at the intersection of Duncan Avenue and Treadwell Streets when her attacker struck. The vicious attack happened very quickly, and then her attacker left the scene on foot. Another thing that we know for sure in this case is the time of death. We know she was screaming at nine forty five pm because several people
heard her at the same time. One of them was twenty four year old Jack Huff. He lived at the Summit Terrace apartments, which were nearby. He said when he heard that scream, he ran downstairs and he saw Pauline kind of staggering toward him and holding her stomach. He told the police that Pauline said someone hit her in the chest and that she said someone was following her, someone who was wearing glasses. Another witness named Mike Adare,
also lived nearby. He said he'd actually seen Pauline before the attack happened. He said he was driving home and at the corner of Duncan and Center, right where she got attacked. He said he saw her carrying some really heavy books and he saw a.
Man following her.
Two other men, Gary Gammel, and Joe Clifton, were driving in separate cars north on South Duncan and they were approaching that same intersection. Joe also lived at the Summit Terrace apartment complex. He told investigators that he also saw a man following Pauline. He said he noticed she was carrying some heavy books and he thought about asking her if she wanted a lift, but in the end he didn't. Then a few seconds later, he said he heard the scream. He heard her screaming.
Help me.
So Joe and Gary are also there in their cars. They both rushed up to the scene. Gary said that from his point of view, he saw Pauline collapse to the ground. He said when he looked around, he saw her books and her personal belongings on the ground, but he didn't see anyone else. He said, when he saw Pauline, she was holding her chest. He approached her and when he got closer he could see that she was lying half in the yard and half in the street. He said that her white skirt in one of her arms
were completely soaked blood. Joe said that he asked Pauline if the man that was following her did this.
She told him yes.
He then started trying to help her, asking where her cuts were and which way the man went. But he said at this point Pauline didn't know where the man went, and she was kind of slipping in and out of consciousness. She kept asking for her books. Detectives did find Pauline's black purse with her wallet and ida in it near her body. They took it in for testing, but only found one set of fingerprints, and it turned out that they were Pauline's, so police knew it was unlikely the
killer's motive had been robbery. It didn't seem like they grabbed for her purse at all. They were trying to hurt her, not take her stuff. Police asked all four witnesses some detailed questions about the man that they said they saw following Pauline.
Mike Adair said.
The man following Pauline was wearing a brown sport coat and had blonde or dirty blonde hair, around five ten to six feet tall, and wearing glasses.
So the police did a sketch.
According to these guys descriptions and in the end it's kind of random, but the sketch, a lot of people pointed out, kind of looked like the Zodiac Killer. By the way, no, there was no evidence the Zodiac Killer was ever involved, So like the Zodiac Killer sketch, the sketch in Pauline's case was pretty generic. No one had actually seen this man's face, so it was a sketch of a guy was slipped back, hair and glasses, again, a pretty common look on a college campus.
This guy could have been anyone.
When Mike was asked about the police sketch, he said, yes, it did look similar to the man he saw, but he pointed out that the hair of the guy he saw was messier, not slip back like on that sketch. There were two other potential witnesses, Robert Spray and John Hall. These guys lived nearby at twelve South Hill Street. They said they had seen a man who could have been involved in the crime because the guy kind of fit the description of the assailant. He had a sport code on.
He was described as being medium height with a slight build. They said that this guy was kind of stumbling around like he was drunk. But they didn't have a lot to go on. They didn't have a description of the car, and in the end, police never definitively found that person, so it seemed to be a dead end. So police
had no idea what the motive had been. But they did have potentially four different people who said they definitively saw the killer, but their descriptions differed slightly, which of course is not uncommon in a case like this, But they did all agree on one thing. Pauline had been attacked by one person, one man who stabbed her multiple times, and they said that man had been following her and was able to get very close to her before he pounced.
Because of where Pauline's injuries were the fact that she had stab wounds on the front of her body, police figured out she had turned around to face her attacker, so they wondered was it someone she knew, Was that how they were able to get that close, or were they just really fast and could they have snuck up on her that quickly. The police admitted they didn't know if this had been someone fixated on Pauline specifically, or someone targeting women totally randomly, or even possibly a case
of mistaken identity. Because it was pretty dark it was night, none of the men who saw this stranger were that close, so even though there were multiple witnesses, not a single
one got a good look at the killer's face. But police did know one thing that was such a vicious attack, the person who stabbed Pauline would have blood on their clothing, so police canvassed the area they were looking for a suspect covered in blood, and it wasn't long before they found one a few minutes after the stabbing, police were cruising the area when two officers saw two young men
sitting on a bench. According to a very good article in Master Detective magazine from nineteen seventy four, they were around five blocks away from the crime scene when they saw these guys. One of them was seventeen year old Wallace Peter Cunkle. So the police start talking to these guys and apparently they told the officers that they were just hanging around. They were supposed to have had dates
with two girls, but they'd been stood up. But when police asked them for more details, the guys said they didn't even know these girls' names, which honestly seems a little bit strange to me that they wouldn't even have a first name. But apparently the police thought this story was believable. As the detective was talking to Peter Cunkle, he noticed some dark spots on his white shirt, jacket,
and trousers. Later it was determined those were blood. When the officer asked Peter why he had blood on his clothes, Peter said he'd had a nosebleed recently. Now, to police, with everything going on, this seemed like a pretty big coincidence. So they took him in for questioning. They took his clothes, and they took samples of his blood. Now, obviously this was back in nineteen seventy one, so the testing they could do on blood was much more limited than it
is now. They could basically tell you what type of blood it was, and that's about it. Peter got a lawyer, and his lawyer said he refused to take a polygraph test. Now, by the way, I don't hold this against him at all, just my opinion, but I've said this before. I actually think this is a very smart move. Honestly, asking for an attorney, especially in a situation like this where you know the police are kind of on a fishing expedition,
is something that I think everyone should do. Peter told police, and this is according to his police statement that was released via a Foyer request, that he and a friend were boiling water with speed that night.
So we've talked about injectable speed before.
That was a big thing in the seventies and eighties in Arkansas, and what they were using was a drug that was similar to finfinn. Now, if you were around in the eighties, you may remember that this was an ingredient and a diet drug before it got removed from the market by the FDA in the mid nineties because people who took it were experiencing heart damage. These pills were very strong, they were speed. What they would do is boil water, throw a lot of pills in there,
and then inject this stuff into their veins. So Peter Kunkle said that's what they were doing that night. He said he started shooting up at around seven thirty pm. He took another shot at eight pm and then did a few other things. Stopped by a local store called
the jet Set to get a sprite. Then between nine thirty and nine to forty five pms, so the crucial time when Pauline would have been walking from the library, He said, a friend of his named Richard Finley, who had been hanging out with that night, asked Peter to take him home. So Peter said they borrowed one of their friend's motorcycles, and then he claims that he gave Richard a ride home and their route would have involved cutting right through Dixon Avenue, right through the crime scene.
After dropping Richard home, Peter said that he went back to the Grayhouse. This was the place where he'd been staying, so Peter was in the area. According to the Arkansas Razorback newspaper, both Peter Cuncle and Pauline had Type A blood, but unfortunately, these small amounts of blood that drops on Peter's clothes, they.
Didn't have enough to test it in the lab back then.
So the bottom line was a lot of people have blood Type A and they had no physical evidence tying Peter to the crime scene. And Peter had a good attorney. His attorney was on point and he to deal with the police. He said, Peter would agree to take a lot of detector test, but only if the police would agree that if Peter passed that test, basically they would clear him. And apparently the police agreed to do that and Peter passed. So Peter Conkle was released from police
custody and publicly cleared by law enforcement. The police chief, Hollis Spencer, said that police were quote satisfied that he had no part in the murder of Miss Stormant end quote. Then Peter Councle and his parents held a press conference and he was very emotional at this press conference. I remember he's only seventeen years old and he was crying. He told everybody he didn't blame the police, they were
just doing their job. He said he always knew he would be cleared, and he completely denied having anything to do with Pauline's murder. By the way, the charges against Peter were dropped, but they were what we call nolly prost meaning dismissed without prejudice, so if new evidence ever comes to light, he could technically have been retried. After Peter was released, police started looking for other people of interest.
They did a lot of interviews, they reportedly gave a lot more a lie detector test, and then, just a month after Pauline was murdered, a second University of Arkansas co ed was stabbed. Her name was Andrea Jones, and she lived about one point eight miles from where Pauline was attacked. Police arrested a man named Eddie Rush. He was twenty one years old and not a student.
At the University of Arkansas.
Apparently, Eddie Rush lied his way into Andrew's apartment and attacked her. He stabbed her several times, but she survived. Eddie Rush was convicted and sentenced to twenty one years in prison for attempted murder. And we're bringing Eddie Rush up because his picture in the newspaper from back then looks very much like the sketch that wasulated a Pauline's attacker. He's got a short buzz cut, but he does have glasses,
and he would seem to fit the general description. Eddie Rush passed away several years ago, and because in Pauline's case, there's no DNA attest, sadly there's no way to investigate him now. But after that, no one else was arrested or charged. Then, on May twenty second, nineteen eighty one, a man named Jack Butler walked into the Fayetful Police Department. He said he had something to tell police. He claimed
that he had murdered Pauline Storman. Jack Butler's story was that he was hanging around a swimming pool on the University of Arkansas campus. He said after that he went home and got a pocket knife and started strolling through Evergreen Cemetery. He said that he saw a woman and started following her and attacked her and stabbed her from behind. This is where the story gets a little strange, because apparently he thought the woman was his wife. He told
police when he got home. He was shocked because he thought his wife was dead and she was ready to have dinner. He said he only later realized that the woman he had supposedly stabbed was Pauline Stormant. But he said a lot of things that didn't seem to fit the evidence or actually make sense. Like he said he had stabbed Pauline three times, when we know she had been stabbed a lot more than that. And he also said she was carrying a record player at the time.
If you were anywhere near that scene, you know she had a big stack of books in her hands. Police apparently decided this confession was erroneous and Jack Butler was cut loose. Also, more time went by in the case seemed to go cold. I like to look at old cases so we can see the techniques that work. On April eighth, nineteen eighty one, ten years after Pauline's murder in Texarcana, the two siblings, fourteen year old Karen Alexander and thirteen year old Gordon Alexander, were fatally stabbed to
death inside their home. For decades, this was a cold case. Police said Karen had been sexually assaulted shortly before the murder. The murder weapon was a butter knife, but police never made any arrests. Over the years, Like in Pauline's case, a lot of people said it could have been a serial killer, could have been Henry Lee Lucas. Apparently he claimed responsibility for those killings, but later, like so many of Henry Lee Lucas's other confessions, it was proven to
be false. He was nowhere near Texarkana when these murders happened. It was a really tragic story because after the murders of her children, their mother took her own life after suffering from depression. And it wasn't until forty two years later, when a detective took up the case and resubmitted some forensic evidence into Codis that they.
Discovered the killer was there all long.
It was the children's father in Alexander, who had supposedly had an airtight alibi working an overnight shift a copper tirron rubber plant. Police believe he had been sexually assaulting his daughter, Karen for months. They believe that on the morning when the children were killed, or possibly the night before, he attempted to rape Karen, she fought him off or her brother tried to intervene.
They both ended up being brutally murdered.
It is a sad and horrific case, but I'm bringing it up because sometimes all it takes is one fresh set of eyes who can look at the case file and break the case. The time of death being a little bit earlier or later than police think someone's alibi not checking out.
Even the coldest cases can be solved. Now.
Obviously, in that case, the Alexander murders, there was DNA that could be resubmitted, which I'm not sure is true for Pauline's case. But for all the families out there who have a cold case that has been going on for years or decades, there's always hope. So back to Pauline's case. Pauline's family didn't give up, and eventually Lance started writing on his website and posting on sites like
web slues. Lance said that at one point law enforcement actually put in an email quote at the moment, only a deathbed confession or a secret diary hidden away in an attict basement or bible will close this case.
End quote. Given the fact that.
Police say there's no DNA, and this is what we're left with. What's next for this case? If the Foyer request information we have so far as correct. There's apparently no DNA to test, so authorities can't do, for example, familial DNA testing. Over the years, a lot of people have put a lot of different theories forward. Some people compared Pauline's case to Betsy Ardsma's murder because both of them were killed in college libraries. Police have said there's
no connection betwe those two cases. Some people suggested it could be the Zodiac or Ted Bundy a serial killer, but again, there was absolutely no evidence of this, and this was not Ted Bundy's mo Honestly, there's no evidence that this was a serial killer at all.
But as Lance said, so far, the evidence seems.
To point to a more personal murder, some kind of crime of passion. So if there's going to be a break in this case, it's almost certainly not going to be from retesting of DNA because so much of it has been lost. It's going to be from someone who knows something. It's also interesting that so many people, all the witnesses, seem to agree on a couple of things, including the fact the person who stabbed Pauline approached on foot.
None of them remember hearing a car afterwards. So this is a person who obviously felt confident enough that they could move quickly enough on that campus that they could get very close to her without her being alarmed and without anyone else noticing them. They believe that they fit in, and they probably did, because remembers several people saw a man following Pauline and they didn't realize that was anything out of the ordinary until they heard the screams.
This person's plan was to.
Attack Pauline and to flee the scene, and that's what they did, and it worked because up until now, this person has gotten away with this murder. They walked up to a young woman in the prime of her life, murdered her and got away clean. Was it someone who knew Pauline who had some kind of a grudge or was it someone who maybe was obsessed with her who wanted to know her and was frustrated because they couldn't
make contact in the way they wanted. Remember, in nineteen seventy four, Master Detective magazine had published that big article about the killing. In the nineteen eighties, the magazine got an anonymous letter. The letter was postmarked Capron, Virginia, and so that police had not caught the real killer. The letter said that Pauline's killer had targeted her because they believed she was someone else, that the whole thing had
been a mistake. Investigators did take some fingerprints off that document, but tragically those prints, along with so much other evidence, suffered the same fate. They were lost by law enforcement. But the postmark is interesting for another reason. There's a correctional facility there called the Southampton Correctional Center. Lance points
that out on his website. Now, there were some inmates there who did time who were supposedly friends of Peter Cuncle's, and Joe Clifton, one of the witnesses, was also there incarcerated for a period of time. This is very interesting to me because I wonder could that mean that the police were wrong about Peter Cunkle, that maybe he targeted Pauline because he thought she was his dad who stood him up. And what about Joe Clifton, Could he have been more than a witness. There are so many mysteries
in this case. I have so many questions about the investigation, about these people's relations to each other, whether all of them just happened to randomly be there, or whether there was.
More to these stories.
And I also have questions about Pauline's ex husband, how conclusively he, or for that matter, any of these people were ruled out. I'm not saying that any one of these people is responsible for her murder. Again, We're just trying to follow the threads to pick up on anything that might have been missed over the years. No one has ever been arrested or charged with this murder, so
I'm doing what I usually do. We're reaching out to anyone who may have been in the area on that day, who may have seen anything, any detailed, no matter how small. We're breaking out a giant pot of coffee, and we're going through some case files with a lot of missing pages. According to his obituary, Charles pay after he divorced Pauline, served in Vietnam, got numerous commendations, and later got a job working for the Smithsonian Institute. He moved back to
Arkansas and became a fishing guide. He passed away in twenty eighteen. Then there's Gordon Cummings, the guy Pauline knew, and the two friends who asked the girls if they wanted to have drinks that day? Who were those guys? Could they have had anything to do with this. Could they have seen something or could those two men have had anything to do with Peter Kunkle and his friend,
the ones who said they had dates who stood them up. Yes, Peter was cleared by police, but as we know, he had a very good lawyer, and sometimes mistakes are made. Lance said that while he hopes to have answers one day in this case, he would also really love to have Pauline's memory honored somewhere in the University of Arkansas campus.
My long term goal with this project and anything that comes out of it, I would be completely happy if somehow I could see some kind of plaque with her memory telling the story erected somewhere in the vicinity.
That's my long term goal to see that happens.
I think that would be the best way to honor her memory, is.
To tell her story for all to see whenever they come across it. If the university would do it, I would love to have it right there at the top of South Duncan, at the edge of Dixon Street.
This is what happened in one of our students.
I'm hoping that someone out there remembers April twelfth, nineteen seventy one, at that intersection near the University of Arkansas. Someone who heard a scream or saw something heard someone who was there talking about what happened that night, someone who might have answers and who can help us get closer to finding out what happened to Pauline Stormant. 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. Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance. Music contributed by Ben Sale, 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. It's six seven eight seven four four six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five.
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