Paper Ghosts is a production of iHeartRadio. I started with one cold case in particular and spent twenty years doing it. And I had heard about this story throughout my career, and finally I was just like, Okay, tell me about this. I want to know about this. And I didn't have a body, didn't have evidence, I didn't have nothing. I had a story. Cold cases, an inherent part of Paper Ghosts, have taught me a lot about the men and women who dedicate their lives to solving these long forgotten stories
of the missing and murdered. My name is m William Phelps. I'm an investigative journalist and author of more than forty true crime books. This is the second of two bonus episodes of Paper Ghosts Season three, in plain Sight. During the Illinois State Police's initial investigation into Tammy Ziwiki's murder, and in the decades that followed, law enforcement looked at
a number of known or suspected serial killers. It was William James Banister, a truck driver from Colorado, who was arrested in July nineteen ninety three for the attempted murder of a fourteen year old girl. Police searched his truck and found bloody clothes they thought could have belonged to Tammy, but ruled him out as a suspect in her case. There was Bruce Mendenhall, known as the truck Stop Killer,
a long haul trucker from southern Illinois. He was arrested in two thousand and seven after decades on the road, and ultimately confessed to six murders. Investigators believe his body count is likely much higher, but we're also unable to connect him to Tammy's murder. If you've listened to this season, you've heard me talk about Banister Mendenhall and other truck driving serial killers who initially look good for Tammy's murder.
But there's one serial killer I haven't spoken much about yet who was also looked at as a potential suspect in Tammy's case. A guy who could be responsible for kidnapping and murdering more than fifty women between nineteen eighty seven and nineteen ninety four, a guy that confounded police for years. Larry Dwayne Paul. I'm going to say that this man is fascinating, but not for any of the reasons that you might think. He's not colorful he's not intriguing.
He's interesting because he's none of that. He's very plain, very soft spoken, very uninteresting on the surface. Lorie Howard is a former deputy sheriff with the McDonald County Sheriff's Department in southwest Missouri. Many of the locations she worked in were less than an hour's drive from Sarcoxi, Missouri, where Tammy's body was discovered. Laurie spent much of her career looking into cold cases in the region, specifically young women who went missing or were killed in the late
eighties in early nineties. I was then trying to develop kind of geographically a timeline and chronologically, why do I have all of these girls? And who came first? And how were they killed? And where are they degree geographically on my timeline? What interstate runs through there? All of these questions that you ask yourself. And I had five or six of them, all within maybe a hundred miles of me. This is how I became involved with Miss Tammy's a Wiki, because Tammy's a Wiki is not in
my jurisdiction. Laurie was trying to identify a victim she named Grace Dough whose remains were found in rural McDonald County. Back in December nineteen ninety, Larry Hall's name came up as a possible suspect, not just for Grace, but for a number of young women who had gone missing in the area over a period of years near this time,
including Tammy's. A wiki. I had a friend working on the Springfiel three and you know that's up the road from me as well, and she said, I think this guy bears looking at And so when I started looking at him for Grace, I obviously started looking at Tammy. But I did look at Tammy very thoroughly because wanted to know. Okay, if I can figure out everything there is to know about Tammy, I can then recreate what happened, hopefully to Grace, and it's going to tell me who
she is. By the mid nineteen nineties, Larry Hall had been on law enforcement's radar for years and was a suspect in a number of missing person cases, most of whom were young women and girls. In nineteen ninety four, Hall admitted to killing nineteen year old Tricia Rutler, a college student who vanished a half mile from Indiana Wesleyan
University's campus the year before. Tricia's body was never found, but police identified Hall as a potential suspect when they were investigating the kidnapping and murder of another teenage girl, fifteen year old Jessica Roach, also abducted in nineteen ninety three. While searching Hall's home and vehicle, police found a number of suspicious items connecting him to both victims, including knives, rope, a mask, along with a collection of newspaper articles and
notes about their disappearances. Hall would go on to recant his confession, something he did quite often. Local police suspected that he was a chronic confessor, a wannabe looking to take credit for crimes he saw in the news but didn't commit. Other agencies, including the FBI, were not convinced. If you're a fan of true crime television, you've likely seen part of Hall's story play out in the Apple
TV Plus limited series Blackbird. The show dramatizes an FBI informants attempt to befriend Hall and get him to reveal the locations of his suspected victims bodies. Ultimately, the informant had some success and was able to help investigators prove Hall's involvement in both Tricia Rutler and Jessica Roach's murders. In nineteen ninety five, Paul was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Since then, he has continued to confess to dozens of homicides, all of which
he later recanted. Still, law enforcement working a number of those cases believe Paul is their guy, and that he may in fact be one of the nation's most prolific serial killers. It's part of the reason Lorie Howard decided she needed to speak to Hall herself. I had talked with Larry at length about all of the horrific scenes that he did to young women. They were graphic in depth. He never missed a beat. He never actually had a lot of inflection in his voice. His affect was very
calm telling me about these gruesome things. But while we are talking, they brought him lunch, and he begins to eat and then stops almost in mid fork and apologizes to me for eating in front of me. I was taken aback because I just thought, that's what he is sorry for. According to a psychological profile done by the Department of Psychology at Radford University, Larry Hall was antisocial, had a low IQ and was often teased by the
other kids for his speech impediment. He was raised in a home located on a cemetery in Wabash, Indiana, and he and his twin brother, Gary Hall, were often ordered to help their father, the church sexton Barry, bodies and tend to the graves. Larry's brother Gary has described him as very awkward, quiet and backward, someone who had a hard time fitting in and also had violent tendencies. I've
studied Hall myself and had brief contact with him. My opinion about Larry Hall is that he's a vicious psychopath who knows exactly what he has done and takes enormous pleasure in playing cat and mouse with law enforcement. Laurie Howard agrees, I do think he is simple minded, but only on a social level. I do not think he's simple minded when it comes to forensics. I think he's extremely meticulous, and I do think he's capable and has hurt many women. And for all of the serial confessor
that he's been labeled, there's truth in there. After graduating high school, Hall found work as a janitor and developed an interest in the American Revolution and Civil War, so much so that he began traveling the country to attend and take part in battle re enactments. Authorities suspect committed many of his murders close to the historical sites he visited. Today, he's at a medium security facility in Butner, North Carolina,
which is where Laurie Howard went to meet him. She asked Hal about the girls on her list, starting with her unidentified Grace Dough. I spoke very briefly about a series of girls. Once he shoots me down and says, you know I'm not responsible for Grays. Then I want to know. Okay, well, tell me more about who you are responsible for, because I've got a list here, let's talk. Utilizing her vast experience and interrogation techniques, Laurie had a
map brought in. Then she began listing off names of victims and locations, carefully studying Hall's reaction to each one. I want to know about Dana Stidham and he says no, And I said, okay, I need to know talk to me about Trisha Ruler. He absolutely would not talk about Trisha Ruler, but he did not deny Trisha Ruitler either, And then Hall forever one to try and change the narrative, did something unexpected and yet also completely in line with
the psychopath that he is. I was just about to finish and hadn't yet finished the girls on my list when he said, let the Springfill three. We did kill them. And so then we started talking about the Springfill three. I said, I want to know where are they? Larry, and he said, okay, we're leaning. The two of us are leaning over a map together on the table, he and I and he said they're buried in the March Train Forest. And I said, no, that's not gonna fly.
The march Tinging Forest is huge. You can't throw out They're buried in the Marching Forest. And so he then begins to kind of narrow that down for me based on the map and what he can remember. The only way to know if Paul was telling the truth was to search the area he indicated in the Mark Twain Force and locate those bodies. The problem became, however, that
the Springfield three case fell outside Laurie Howard's jurisdiction. So she called the Springfield Police Department and shared what Larry
Hall had told her, or at least she tried to. Unfortunately, to some degree, in law enforcement, there are egos, and I think that they did not really want to readily accept the idea that I might have information that they had not either previously looked at and disregarded, or they already had kind of pigeonholed a suspect for that case and didn't really want to go outside of that, And so I they had eliminated him in their own mind.
During her conversation with Larry Hall, Laurie Howard brought up Tammy Zuwiki. On paper, Haul was the perfect candidate to have abducted the twenty one year old college student. Investigators were never able to corroborate his claim, but in two ten, Paul confessed to the abduction of twenty year old Laurie Deppis, went missing just four days prior and a few hundred miles away from where Tammy Ziwiki was last seen alive
in Illinois. Paul denied any involvement with Tammy's murder. And as difficult as it is to believe anything the man says, Laurie Howard thinks he's telling the truth when it comes to Tammy's case. Regarding Tammy, not only does he not take credit for Tammy there's some things with Tammy that are for me stand out geneographically. Jimmy was in the right place at the right time for him. He was three hours and forty five minutes away. The time frame works for me. What doesn't work for me now is
she was wrapped in a blanket. She was also wrapped in a sheet, and she was duct taped. Those things do not do not fit with Larry Hall. He would never do that. He would dispose of them, potentially with rope, but he would never, you know, wrap a red blanket or a form fitted sheet that came from him from his van and leave that, especially with duct tape. He just he's never been known to use duct tape. Like myself, Laurie doesn't believe the circumstances of Tammy's murder fit. Larry
Hall's a mall. It's just not how the guy operated. If he'd abducted Tammy, there's a good chance no one would have found her body. Because if there was one thing Larry Hall was good at, it was hiding his
victims well enough for them never to be found. Larry's way, preferred way of killing would be what he really wants to pretend, at least in that first few initial seconds that this is going to be a reciprocal relationship, that he's going to ask this young lady out or this young girl out, and they're going to one want to get in with him, or two want to be in
his presence. So he will go and ask them out, or he will ask them if they want to ride, and then is astonished when they fight him, and then becomes incensed to the point that you know that he ends up killing them rather graphically and brutally. Falling in line with many of the people I've spoken to, Laurie believes Tammy was likely murdered by a trucker. As for Grace Doe's identity, Laurie finally got her breakthrough thanks to advancements and DNA and forensics technology. I did not know
this until much later on. That was the first time that that had ever been done in the United States to reconstruct with just images. I think it was like one millimeter images of MRI. So my email pops up and it says, Laurie, meet Grace, and that was the first time I'd ever had a picture of her. And so then you know, fast forward years later and DNA evolves and develops, and here we are. We now know who her family is, and so Grace is now Shanna Garber.
Laurie Howard spent nearly twenty years searching for the identity of Shanna Garber, never giving up on every last lead and potential piece of evidence. Breakthroughs like that are rare, but it's a reminder that hopefully dies if we allow it, especially for families of these victims and their chance for justice and a semblance of peace. And that hope is what drives Lorie Howard. I want to tell you the
reason I do what I do. I got a phone call from Shauna's brother and he said, we really want you to come to Shauna's funeral for her burial, and I was moved that they would even ask me, and I said, I want to be there. I want to be there, but I can't be and it really upset me. And so then he calls me back the day of the funeral and he says, I think it's important that you know. Shan's headstone reads SHAWNA graf Harbor. He said, because she was Grace as long as she was on
her it wants something to me. It that's a lot to me. I mean, that's just one of one of a thousand stories. Of course, if you want to learn more about Larry Hall and his crimes and even hear from Hall himself, listen to episodes thirty two and thirty three titled The Man in the Van of my other podcasts, crossing the Line with Them William Phelps wherever you get your podcasts, I take a look at Hall's crimes and focus on two of his victims stories, and you might
even hear Hall confess to yet another murder. Paper Ghosts is written and executive produce by me and William Phelps and iHeart executive producer Christina Everett. Additional writing by our supervising producer Julia Weaver. Our associate producer is Darby Masters, Audio editing and mixing by Christian Bowman and Abu Zafar. Our series theme number four four two is written and
performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Mooney. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.