5. A Lot of Old Memories

The Clearing is a show about crime and the trauma that can result from crime. It may not be suitable for all audiences. Also, this episode contains a story about sexual assault. We don't usually do a previously on on this show, but maybe we should here. This is The Clearing. I'm Josh Dean. Episode 5. A Lot of Old Memories And previously on the show,

April, Jonathan and I were at the Sheriff's Office in Great Falls, Montana. We just spent an afternoon with John Cameron, trying to figure out how he'd gotten so lost in his pursuit of edwards, accusing April's dad of basically every famous unsolved murder, and then some. At the end of the day, though, Cameron handed over his files to us, passing the baton on April. That's how he put it.

I figured the files wouldn't help much, but I was wrong. I learned some things about two double murders we've been looking into. One of which was the 1956 case from Great Falls. That's the one that first hooked Cameron, too. To refresh your memory, this was another double murder of two teens on Lovers Lane. They were last seen on a day to drive in. The next morning, the boy, 18-year-old Lloyd Bogel, was found shot to death outside his car.

The body of his girlfriend, Patti Kalitsky, turned up a day later, seven miles away, also shot to death. When we went to see the cops, they confirmed that they had a suspect in the case. And it wasn't ed edwards. We know for a fact that DNA on our scene does not match your father. The primary suspect, they said, was a guy named Arnold Blackwell. Cameron had also mentioned Blackwell's name to us.

But this didn't mean the cops had lost interest in edwards. April's dad had also been in Great Falls in 1956. And only that, both he and Blackwell had both been in Portland in 1960, at the time of another famous Lovers Lane killing there. We know for a fact that they're both here and they're both there at the same time. Well, nearly identical murders occur. We know for a fact there. But I do not know that these guys do not know each other. Honestly, I don't.

Kind of ironic that both those people are here at the same time, wouldn't you think? That's why I asked you, if he traveled with somebody. I believe my dad in his earlier years did travel with people, with men. In his younger years, he was learning. He was learning how to kill. He was learning how to get away with things. I will tell you this, my dad had clippings of this murder. I found the clippings. My dad did not keep clippings for no reason.

I'm not saying he wasn't. I'm just saying I know my source of DNA is not your father. But I honestly, I think there could be, he could be involved. I wouldn't rule out anything at this point, honestly. This episode is about what we can, or can't rule out. What other murders could Edward have committed? The five we know of? Those are just the ones Edward's cop too. April and I both assume there are more, and the detectives who worked his cases think so too.

I mean, Edward just basically said this himself. Like, when he was trying to get back to Ohio in 2010 to get the death penalty. The letter he sent to John Canterbury said, I have other places I can go. A few months after that, when he was going back and forth with Brian Johnson about confessing to the murder of Danny Boy, Edward's wrote two letters that were never mailed. They were found in his cell.

And both of them hinted that he'd done more murders. And one of them he says other authorities are questioning him. People are trying to get me for seven other bodies. I said at the beginning of this series that we weren't setting out to solve any murders, but there are some that feel so close. It's been hard for me and harder for April to not obsess about them. April is a map of the murder she thinks her father might have committed.

She calls it the timeline. It's one of the first things she showed me when we met back in 2016. She pulled it out again to show Jonathan back in March 2018. Here's a timeline that I came up with, along with aliases that my dad used, that I handed over to every detective that interviewed me in the hopes that someone would pay attention to these different areas, because I really truly believe that my dad committed crimes in these areas.

Each entry on the timeline is a place the Edwards family lived. April has it organized by school year, because that's how you mark time when you're a kid. And then what I did to help myself remember the years is I wrote out my birth and grades and what years they were. So you've got your grade over on the left hand side and then the year school year and then your town. Town. What's this one? That's the house that he burnt the burnt house in Doyle's town. So that happens in kindergarten.

Remember that list of towns where April lived that we heard about in the first episode? How Edwards would force his family to up and move suddenly? Sometimes in the middle of the night. April thinks her dad may have committed murders in every one of those places. In Ohio, in Florida, in Arizona, in Colorado. Something happened there. We were still in a campground and we ended up in Brighton, Colorado.

This timeline, it's extremely vague. It's a map of sorts, but a map of hunches as much as anything. She says all the time how frustrated she is, the cops all over America won't take her more seriously. But over the past couple of years, I've looked into every one of those places. There were some I could cross off right away. As far as I could tell, either no murders took place while Edwards lived there, or there wasn't enough detail to go on.

Like in her entry on Arizona from the summer of 1979, April can't even remember the town name. All she wrote is stayed in a campground for a short period of time, but then moved on. There was more detail for O'Cala, Florida. April says she has vivid memories of two African American boys who came over to play a lot, and then they just disappeared. She says her dad was pretty racist. So I reached out to O'Cala, PD, and the sheriff's office. They found no such case. And then there's Pittsburgh.

My experience here, I think it says something about how easy it is to fall into a hole when you're chasing the ghost of that Edwards. I sat down with Jonathan in the studio one day to talk about it. Yes, so I ran into Rick Wallace pretty much everywhere except in Pennsylvania. And where does Pennsylvania fall in the timeline of the murders that we know about? So 77 after the Norton murders, those are the second set of murders you confess to in Ohio.

They go to various places, including Florida, Arizona, Colorado, then end up in Wisconsin in 1980, obviously, which is where the original murders that start this whole story take place. They end up in Pittsburgh first. And in that case, April had a very specific memory of... She describes him as a little black boy who picked on her brother, Jeff, or maybe both of her brothers.

And that she always thought something happened to this kid that like he either disappeared or stopped coming around or, you know, I don't know. She just has a feeling. So Pittsburgh is a large police department and I reached out to... I think I sexually sent an email, a long email basically explaining the situation. And then two weeks later, I finally got an email reply from a woman named Emily Schaefer. She's a public info officer.

She says, sorry for delay. I had our homicide. I office look into this. We don't have any cases that fit your description provided. Have a good one, Emily. So another wall. Another wall. You know, I'm thinking that one is the one where I have the most specifics of. I mean, not only do we have rough parameters of the age, it's kind of a specific memory.

And then her dad gives a very weird... I mean, like she remembers her dad saying that he was hitting the head with the baseball hat. Like maybe that's a lie, but it's a weird lie. Anyway, Emily sent me that reply. 45 minutes later, I get like the email ding again. Check my email and I see her name again. I open it up. She says, Josh, actually I stand corrected. We found something. A seven-year-old male named Michael Jackson was found deceased in May of 1981, apparently beaten to death.

Here I'm like, heart-stopping. Like, oh my god. This is it. I found it. She also says the actor arrested was a 15-year-old named Robert Bebout. Sorry for the confusion. And I looked into it a little bit and so the case that was argued and got a conviction was that this older boy was a pedophile and was molesting the younger boy and killed him in the process of that, like either to cover it up or it was part of the thing. This 15-year-old boy.

Yeah. So I sent it on to April. I said, do you recognize any of these names, anything about this? And she said she didn't. She said she even found a picture of the boy and he didn't look familiar. And here's the only other thing I could find out about it was that when Edwards was arrested and in Wisconsin, police departments were reaching out to him and cops were coming forward and his family was asking him questions.

Jeff wrote him a letter with a bunch of questions. Jeff, April's brother, wrote a letter with just like a lot of very specific questions. Did you kill Danny Boy? And this was pretty early. This was before he admitted to Danny Boy, fishing kind of. And it looked like he maybe had read April's timeline because a few of the questions were like he asked about a call. And Edwards in a lot of cases just wrote no answer. Like, that's it.

And in this case, he said he's addressing a series of questions from Jeff. He says, including one from a quote, black boy that was killed in Pennsylvania who was in your class. So Jeff had obviously asked him about this. Like, do you remember that? Did you have anything to do with it? The editor reply was black man killed and raped him. He is on death row at the prison I was at. I can't remember his name. Jeff, I could never heard a child. Three exclamation points.

Which again, okay, maybe that's exactly what happened. Maybe he just happened to live in the neighborhood where it happened and that ends up in the same jail as the guy. Or if you know, if you were John Cameron, John Cameron will tell you will obviously Edwards set that guy up. But my, you know, if I'm going to like not totally dive into the rabbit hole, but like maybe dip a leg into it or I want to know what happened if you're Josh Dean.

If there's a kid bullying my kid and I'm at Edwards who commits murders like to me, it seems conceivable. I know that Edwards remembers it. And he seems to remember it pretty specifically. Yeah, that's what I was going to say is it does seem a little weird that he actually knows the answer to what happened exactly. You would think you would have no memory of it.

Or if he did and someone was asking him about it, like there's a lot of weird things about that, right? So we're talking this was 1981, I think. And this communication with Jeff would be in 2010 or 11. So 30 years later, like instantly remembers it.

So yeah, I mean, it's, it's an example of a case where like in the course of an afternoon, I had like a real moment of like, oh my god, this is going to be it. This is the one I'm going to, I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to connect them. And now, you know, three years later, I don't feel any closer. But, you know, when I say it out loud again, I'm like, it's kind of convincing myself all over that it's possible.

This is as close as I ever got with the timeline, unable to prove anything definitively and feeling frustrated by that as well as feeling like I was failing April in some way. April's never going to feel satisfied, right? Like I feel like even if we one of these cases had turned out, she would still say, okay, about what about the next one?

Why did we leave Colorado? Like what happened in Arizona? Like what about that thing at the state park? You know, on her deathbed, she's probably going to be having this feeling fairly, you know. I think in her head, it's always going to be some cop is going to answer the phone and be like, Chag Garcia. And it's just going to be like, oh my god, yes, yes.

I'm going to, you and I are going to crack this case. That is not how reality works. It's just like, dude, I'm a detective and I have like 40 red names on my board or in the case of Pittsburgh. Man, that case has been closed for 30 years. Like, that's not a problem on my list. Alright, there's one other case I want to talk about. It's a little embarrassing, but I think I have to do this. It's the one case where I sometimes feel like I'm falling into the same hole that swallowed Cameron.

Zodiac. But if we're contemplating what's possible, what Ed Edwards could conceivably have done, within reason, there's stuff to consider here. Zodiac murders are not on April's timeline. They mostly happened before she was born, but she and I have talked a lot about them anyway. The way that my father acted with the zodiac killings and the way that he talked about the zodiac killer was the same way that he talked about all the other murders that he committed.

Back in the early 70s, when the search for the killer was national news, April says that her dad would gather the family around to watch any time a news segment or some fictional recreation about the zodiac killings came on TV. I don't know how to explain it. Well, for instance, while we were watching the shows, the movies that would come out about the zodiac killer and he would be sitting in the background talking to us, that's not what happened. That's not right. That's not accurate.

And then he just wanted to talk about the possible scenarios of who the zodiac killer was. If anything, it seems possible that Edwards knew the zodiac killer. In his book, he describes a fellow inmate from dear lodge, President Montana. And this guy, he sounds curiously like the zodiac. Edward says he had an interest in Egyptian literature. Apparently the guy believed that if he killed someone, they'd be a slave in the afterlife.

That's something the zodiac mentions, almost those exact words and letters he sent to newspapers. So that's weird. Even weirder, one of the two survivors of the zodiac attack actually remembered quite a lot about the perp, including that the killer mentioned having escaped from a president Montana, prison with lodge in the name. There's only one that fits that. Dear lodge.

And then there's this reporter at the Akron Beacon Journal, Edwards hometown paper received an anonymous call in 1971 from someone saying he recognized a police sketch of the zodiac that he knew the guy from dear lodge prison. Edwards clipped the story based on that tip and kept it in his files. April and I are both sure that Edwards is the one who made that call. Of course, it's possible that Edwards made all this up that he was trying to impress people by saying he knew the zodiac killer.

I'd be lying though if I didn't admit that I wonder sometimes what if John Cameron's right and it really is him. There's one obvious parallel, the zodiac like Edward's killed couples on Lover's lane. There is one clear way to find out if Edward's was the zodiac. Test the DNA. Last year, cops in Belého, California announced they'd be using new techniques to recover DNA from stamps on the envelopes of the zodiac letters. That, in theory, could rule out Edwards in a bunch of other suspects.

But the cops have been quite ever since. I've called and emailed Belého several times to ask if they have anything to announce about those results. I've gotten no response. So that's the bottom of that rabbit hole, I guess. Thanks for indulging me. I wouldn't bet the farm on Edward's being the zodiac killer, but I wouldn't be blown away either if some dates revealed he was involved. After the break, a much more likely scenario.

So the trail of crumbs were following in this episode starts in Great Falls, Montana, in 1956. On January 2nd of that year, a couple goes to Park on Lover's lane late at night. The next morning, the man, Lloyd Vogel, he's found dead next to his car. Any valuables are still at the scene, so it's not a robbery. The body of his 16-year-old girlfriend, Patty Kalitsky, later turns up in a different location. All these years later, the detectives in Great Falls finally had a suspect in this case.

Arnold Blackwell, an airman who was stationed at Malstrom Air Force Base, outside Great Falls. Blackwell, as we mentioned at the top of the show, was also in Portland when similar murders occurred in 1960. We also know Ed Edwards was in Great Falls in 1956, and in Portland in 1960. So you have to wonder, did Edwards know Blackwell? Was he involved in some way? I found a lot of stuff to suggest that he might be, and now I'm going to take you through it the same way I discovered all this.

There's a massive trove of material about the 1960 case at Portland City Archive, police files mostly, but also court transcripts and newspaper clippings. And there's a lot in there about Ed Edwards. He was questioned about the murders, but never arrested. After reading through the archive, I was able to piece together a pretty decent picture of Ed's life there. It's total mayhem. On at least two occasions, he called the police and said that someone was shooting at his house.

Jonathan and I talked through this whole chapter of Ed's life too. And on neither of those occasions, is he shot by the bullet? But the cops come and there are bullet holes outside the apartment building. Yes. I think once from the front of the house and once from the back of the house. But here's one of the reports of this house being shot at. This is on June 13th of 1960 at 6.11 p.m.

Mr. Edward showed the officers the hole in the window and stated that around 5 p.m. this date, a bullet had broken the window nearly hitting his wife. Mr. Edwards did not have any suspicions as to who may have done the shooting. And then there's another report after that one that says people shot at his house again, twice, the same night. So basically, if you believe his story, on three separate occasions, someone has fired one bullet into his home.

Which is like the world's least effective drive by shooting. Some context. In 1959, Edward shows up in Portland after spending three years at Dear Lodge Prison in Montana. He gets married, but not April's mom. This was a woman named Marlene. That's the wife referred to in that police report. Ed and Marlene start running around with a guy Edward's met at his rooming house. Someone named Wayne.

The three of them do a lot of juvenile shit together, like driving cars into snow banks, or Ed's favorite pastime when he was a kid, pulling fire alarms and watching the authorities pull up. A lot of this stuff is in Ed's book. April actually talked to Wayne recently. There have been times reporting this story where it's made sense to let April reach out to people, because some of them are more likely to open the door when she knocks.

And that's what happened here. She showed up at Wayne's house in Idaho, and he agreed to talk to her. Wayne went on to live a very normal life. But he told April that, yes, in 1960, he was running around with her dad, who happened to run a room in the same house. Ed, of course, lied about who he was. He said he was with the FBI or whatever. The CIA. The CIA. Yeah. What? You haven't heard that before? We've all heard this before. Remember when Ed was arrested in 2009?

At least found a bunch of fake IDs in his trailer. Running around posing as various law enforcement officers was a lifelong hobby. Wayne told April some other things about her dad, who he calls Wayne. I know, it's confusing. This Wayne said that Ed was a phenomenal boulder, that he excelled at everything he did. Wayne was something else. And even though they were buddies, Wayne says he and Ed would bump up against each other every once in a while. My dad knew how to fight. Oh, he thought he did.

Well, he, yeah. He was good. But I'd been around the block a few times, too. One time, Ed even pulled a knife on him. He pulled one down the basement down there. He was goofing off. And I took it away from him, and he put a good friend from then on. Good for you. But I think I had him totally buffalowed. So what happened is he earned his respect after that? I think so. Yeah. I think so. I used to be pretty tough. I'm just a worse now. For your dragon out a lot of old memories.

Okay, Josh, can we get back to this murder? Yeah, we're going back to this murder in Portland. So let me just lay out a couple of facts again. It takes place on November 26, 1960. The victims, they are two 19-year-olds Larry Peyton and Beverly Allen, right? Yes. Okay, you just fell in the rest. Okay, so he, Larry, he's killed at the site. Her body turns up six weeks later, like 40 miles away. She'd been raped and strangled.

Either in the car or next to his car, stabbed to death, at a lover's lane in Portland, the hills above Portland. There is a bullet hole in the windshield unexplained. But the next day, you know, you can assume it's probably a taped off crime scene and the investigation is going on. The guys in white suits and their tweezers are walking around. Edwards and his buddy Wayne are loitering essentially. And I'm guessing the cops were like, what are these two grown men doing?

Something about Edwards clearly made them suspicious. Okay. Enough to take a statement. Okay. A few weeks later, I believe it's the first week of December. Edwards and Wayne are then arrested with Marlene for pulling fire alarms falsely, reporting. All three of them are? Yeah, all three of them are arrested. I think both she and Wayne get released. Ed is held because he had previous obviously arrests. Okay, so let's recap what we know.

So we've got on three occasions in the summer of 1960, someone shoots a bullet. I'm putting air quotes around someone here. So it's a bullet at Edwards's house. This murder happens on November 26th. The next day, he's seen at the scene of the crime with a friend, the other Wayne. There's a bullet hole in the windshield of the car that's never fully explained. That it was clearly fired from the inside. They did not find a weapon. They could tell that it was fired from the inside.

Yeah, I guess because of the way the glass was broken out. But anyway, mysterious bullet hole in the windshield, who ends up with like a mysterious bullet wound in his arm around the same time? Ed Edwards. So when I'm explaining bullet hole in the windshield, I'm explaining bullet wound in Ed's arm. Are they the same bullet? When he's picked up on December 9th for pulling fire alarms, he's booked into police custody. At that point, they're like taking a close and putting a uniform on you.

So they see this bullet wound. And he starts to give various, in my opinion, outlandish explanations for the bullet wound. And to this day, what I don't understand is why no one is pursuing what to me at that time would have been the most obvious line of questioning. Is this bullet wound related to the hole in the windshield at the murder scene? Right? And when you hear the various explanations that Edwards gives, you're like, okay.

I'm going to run through the story as Ed tells about how he got the wound fairly quickly here. There are a lot of them. First, on the days picked up for pulling a fire alarm, is it his buddy Wayne accidentally shot him with a 22 while they were out shooting tin cans. That account gets published in the newspaper. A woman, a former neighbor of Ed's, reads it, then calls the police to say, nope, that's not how it happened. She says that Ed showed up at a department.

This is right around the time of the murders, and asked her to help him treat what appeared to be a recent bullet wound in his arm. Here's a bit from the police report. She accompanied him to Fred Myers, where he purchased a charge plate, some peroxide, q-tips, methylate, gauze, tape, and some heat or benge. Then proceeded to home where she dressed his wound. Edwards told her he received the wound one night when he was with some policemen friends of his who received a call on a theft.

When they arrived at their destination, he was shot in the arm as he got out of the police car. His reason for not reporting it was he did not want to get his police friends in trouble as he was not supposed to be along. So he's in a ride along, gets out of the car and gets shot at. That's the story. Yep. Whoa. I mean, so many things about every detail in this big story here. I'm like, capital S story are crazy that I sometimes gloss over the little things.

It's sort of like, why would he go to some random person's apartment and ask for help when he's married to a woman and living with Wayne? And probably there's people in his hall. Like, that makes absolutely no sense. So again, I mean, when I read this, my thought was he paid that one. He planted that story. Now, is he trying to put out multiple narratives intentionally to muddy the waters and confuse things? Is he just a pathological liar who can't help himself?

Is he not keeping his lives straight? Like, maybe the most satisfying explanation in that sense is that he's doing this on purpose. He's putting out as many versions as possible because chaos rules. Okay, so two weeks after the murders, Ed and Marlene and Wayne are arrested for pulling fire alarms. This is December 9, 1960. The cops release Marlene and Wayne right away, but they hold on to Ed. Next day, though, while he's still in police custody, Ed just walks out of jail. He's not released.

What he does is he writes a script for some friend of his. I've always assumed this was Wayne. And the friend calls pretending to be Ed's parole officer. He asked if they can let Ed out briefly to meet with him. And then whoever answers the phone, he apparently says, okay, the jailers let Ed out and he never comes back. When April stopped into see Wayne, he admitted he was the one who made the call to the jail. I mean, he kind of admitted it. I know you, I think you also helped him.

Didn't you make a phone call? You know, I've erased so much of that from my head, but it's possible. Wayne did remember the second part of the story very clearly. He says he drove Ed and Marlene to the airport. This is after he got out of the... After he got out, I took him to the airport and then I took the car and parked it in a residential area in Northwest Portland and left it there. Ed and Marlene, they went on the run for two years.

Edwards robbed gas stations to pay the bills all over the place. This is when he achieved his goal of getting on the FBI's most wanted list. Once the feds finally caught him in an Atlanta apartment, Edwards confessed to the whole string of armed robberies. The question of the bullet wound came up again. When the FBI picks him up in Atlanta two years later in 1962, Portland says, could you ask him about it? He says, oh yeah, it was an old wound.

It couldn't have been from the killing because it happened long before that. They just let it go. At that point it would have been the healed wound and who's to say how... You wouldn't be able to tell at that point how old it was. There's no mention at all of the injury and Edwards book. Even though he writes at length about the paid-nallen murders and how he was mistakenly picked up for them. Just to sum up, what's your feeling about the likelihood that he did the paid-nallen murders?

It's hard not to think he wasn't involved in some way. I mean, just what are the odds? He has a bullet wound that's to him explainable, but his explanations make no sense and they change wildly over time. That really doesn't make me think that he's less of a suspect. Not even really over time. The first three were talking just a period of two or three months. Right. By the way, he just had somebody call up and get him out of jail and went on the run. Does a not guilty person do that?

Right. He could say, well, I did that all the time. I didn't want to be held by cops, but come on. I mean, if we could connect Blackwell to all this somehow, I feel like maybe there's a piece that we're missing. There's a lot of pieces that we're missing, Josh. All this shooting and various stories about the origins of a very mysterious bullet wound, and still, no mention of Arnold Blackwell. April even asked her dad's old friend Wayne about it.

Was there a guy named Arnold Blackwell who was friends with her dad in Portland? Arnold Blackwell. That name doesn't do anything. I don't think he had any friends. He was pretty much a loner. Turns out Marlene is still alive, too. She got her marriage to Ed and Null when he was shipped off to prison after that arrest in Atlanta, and claimed in the court filings that she had no idea who he really was or what he was up to.

I tracked down a woman who seemed to be her, but the phone number I found didn't work, and I don't know if the Facebook message I sent never got to her. She didn't respond to it. The Payton Allen murders fall into the jurisdiction of the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office in Portland. Prosecutors tried three men in 1969 and convicted two of them, but the convictions were seen as shaky and the guys served only three in seven years.

In the eyes of the Oregon authorities though, the case has long been closed. But after Edwards was arrested in 2009, his name came up again in connection to the Portland murders. In a detective in Multnomah, a guy named Jay Pentheni went to see Ed when he was back in Ohio. This was in 2011, a month before Ed's death. When I asked Jay about meeting Ed, he told me he tried to keep things loose. They had a casual, free-wheeling conversation.

I did whatever Edwards wanted and tried to get on his side just to tell me what to honest truth. And I think we got that. Jay recorded that interview with Ed. And after our call, he sent me a copy of the tape. During the interview, he stressed Ed that he wasn't there to mess with his wish to Dino Ohio. You know, I could totally be beginning. I'm not here at all to take you back. I'll give you anything you want. I'm not in the hide.

I believe because I think if you were involved in this, you'd tell me when you. Yeah, I would. And not only that. If, okay, I was involved in this call, Kate Nallens, or last name. Kate Nallens, or Kate Nallens. What are you going to do to me? I've got the death penalty. And several lights. Exactly. And so I couldn't tell you. I couldn't have it. Yeah, seriously. But there's nothing. Okay. Like me, Jay had been puzzling over the mysterious gunshots.

There's random bullets that kept flying through Ed's windows. They were unable to locate the bullet. Did you? I'm sure I did that myself. That's it. In the night call. Why would you? I'm just a recognition just to have something going, something on file. You know, is that that's when I was having so-called gun fights. I was CIA and I was using gun fights. And this was to impress Marlene and Wayne and Marlene's mom. So would you go out and shoot at the house, actually? No, yeah, not around.

I was just trying to remember myself and they think of somebody else. They didn't think of me. They thought I was actually out there fighting the bad guy. Jay had read Ed's book, too. He also noticed that Ed went into great detail about the Peyton Allen murders. He even talked about visiting the crime scene and getting picked up. But there's one thing he leaves out. The bullet wound in his arm. Jay pointed this out and asked Ed, how'd you get shot? And Ed's answer in 2011, different again.

It's a version I'd never seen or heard anywhere. He says it was wife at the time, Marlene. She's the one who shot him. 22, rifle. I laid out a bed. I showed her here. Where'd she shoot me? Here's some words. Make sure right there. Make sure it wasn't on the bone. And stand there and shoot me and it went right through. I used cute dips going one side, not the other to clean it out real good. With proxide and everything. They could have been heard. Been heard at all.

Giving Marlene to shoot him was all part of his scheme to get attention. I convincing Wayne that he was some secret agent doing dangerous secret agent work. Your God's honest truth to me today is that your wife did that to you based on you wanting to know to write. That's right. She did it with the rifle. That's how it happened. That's the whole thing. But it just so happened. That that bullet wound come about around right into the same timeline as that double bird did there in the Glovers Lane.

And that's why this was so important to everybody. How I got shot and why I got shot and who shot me and everything. People need explanations for it. Well, I can understand that. I mean, he's somebody gets shot or somebody gets killed. And here's the other bullet hole in his shoulder. Hey, I'm a real wife. This story of Ed's that he laid down in a bed and asked his wife to shoot him in the arm with a rifle. It's kind of ridiculous.

If you ask me, it's far less plausible than the explanation that he got the wound somehow while taking part in the double murder. That it's tied to the bullet hole in Larry Payton's windshield. Also, it's a wound really was innocent. Why did Ed explain it in so many different ways? All of them kind of nuts. But Jay told me he sat across from Edwards and looked him in the eyes. And Ed swore up and down that he was not involved in the Payton Allen murders.

I honestly believe if he had anything to do it, he would have told me because he would want us to know. He would just almost like a bragging thing. He did not want to look down. And if it was something that he could have looked good at and like a little feather in his cap for this murder, then I think he would have told us. I mean, it's always doubt, you know. But if I look at someone and look at him and say, you know, I'm 99%. You know, that he's telling me the truth.

Because there's just really no other reason that's kind of why I gave him that admission of, you know, because I think he'd made a comment during one time he didn't want to go back to Portland or something like that. And I said, I'm not going to take you back to Portland. So yeah, when I laughed, I did not have any kind of thing in my mind going, ah, this guy's lying to me, it's full of shit. I just don't believe him. I didn't get that at all. There was one more thing I wanted to ask Jay.

Did you ever come across a name Arnold Blackwell? Say they get Arnold Blackwell. Does that name ring about? Arnold Blackwell. Let me write that down. Does not ring a bell, but this is 10 years ago too. After that conversation with Jay, I looked over the transcript of the interview he did with Edwards in Ohio. There was one other thing that struck me. Not a direct mention of Blackwell, but a reference to somebody who I thought might be him. I sent it to April and she noticed it too.

Ah, Blackwell, when I was reading, you mentioned Blackwell, when I was reading my dad's transcripts. A couple of things stuck out in those transcripts. Yeah, me too. Remember the transcript about the guy that was working at an East my dad as far as Kirby's? Yep. She means Kirby Vacuums. Edwards was a Kirby salesman in Portland. The best Kirby salesman, he claims. He also said that he didn't have many friends when he lived there, just Wayne and this other guy who he sold back him with.

I was just wondering if Blackwell ever sold Kirby's or... Yep. There could have been a connection right there somewhere. Unfortunately, there is no roster if door to door Kirby salesman from 1960. I know, because I asked Kirby. That Kirby salesman, whoever he was, Edwards seemed to be hanging out with him outside of work. And he took him to the dog races. He took his wife and he was married. He took his wife to the dog races and the guy asked him to get his wife hot for him.

This story is very odd. Here's what Edwards told Jay. He said, he did me a favor when we're driving with him. He said, he's getting my wife hot for me. I said, what? He said, he's getting my wife hot for me. So I'm in the back seat there with her. And he's getting higher and higher. And I'm having an elbow good time. And with his wife. So we get home to his place. And then my car was there. Eventually, him, me, her, and some reason I'm going to see if somebody else.

But we're all in bed together. I went to sleep while he's sleeping. I'm over there banging his wife. And he got up, he was as bad as him once. And I'm coming back and I hear some talking whispers. He's talking to her. You that him fuck you. And she just don't like him. So no one over there got my clothes. This is how you sleep. I get to get home. My wife, if I was not in there, yeah. So they're possibly with her. I got to see her. This gross story about sleeping with some other guy's wife.

It could be another one of Ed's at Landers Tales. But here's the thing. It kind of lines up with another story I read, involving Arnold Blackwell. In a book about the Peyton Allen murders, it's by this Portland reporter named Phil Stanford who was obsessed with this case. He worked on the book for years. When I first read Stanford's book, there was no mention of Blackwell anywhere. So I emailed Stanford and asked him, why isn't in your book?

He is, he said, but only in the second edition, which came out as an e-book. Because I'd read the original, I missed it. In the updated version, Stanford spends a few pages on Blackwell. The first thing he mentions is the Blackwell's wife is pulled over by the cops in Portland, a year or so after the Peyton Allen murders. I explained all this to Jonathan one day in the studio. In April, and I think this would be 61, let me just read from the book.

A 25 year old woman named Barbara Blackwell, who works as a waitress at a dairy queen in southeast Portland, gets pulled over for a traffic violation. Clearly, no stranger to the ways of the Justice system. She tells the arresting officer, something far more interesting than her silly traffic citation.

In fact, she says she has every reason to believe that her husband, Arnold Blackwell, recently discharged from the Air Force for psychiatric reasons, is responsible for the murders of Allen and Peyton. So Blackwell's wife says she thinks he committed these murders. And she thinks he did the Great Falls murders too. She knows all about that, she says, because that's where her husband, Arnold, was stationed at the time at Maustrum Air Force Base, which is just outside Great Falls.

In fact, they were living in a house just five blocks from the drive-in, where the young couple was last seen. And she goes on to say that she had suspicions even then about her husband. He was a taxi driver at nights. And then he'd been out that night. What's more, he always carried a revolver shortly after the murder. He must have gotten rid of it. She didn't see it anymore.

And then in May 1960, Blackwell is transferred to the Portland Air Force Base, putting him in town in time for the Peyton Allen murders. But then, here's where things get interesting. More awful, but interesting. She goes on to tell this story. One night, she says, Blackwell brought an airman friend home to visit. All at once her husband seemed to have lost complete control of himself.

He grabbed her, tore all her clothes off, and proceeded to rape her right in front of the other airman, after which he tried to get the airman to have intercourse with his own wife. So he's a real scumbag. Turns out, he is running around with a guy described as an airman, but no names, or identifying characteristics. And then they can't connect him to the murder, but they do convict him of rape and ultimately send him away.

So, it's not exactly the same story, but it's kind of odd again that like, we're trying to connect these two guys. Edwards just randomly tells a story about going to some guy's house and having sex with his wife. Meanwhile, in the passage of Stanford's book about Blackwell, there are several instances of him bringing men home and having sex with his wife, which is, you know, that's not a typical story. And even though it's not the same version, it's close enough that it's very weird.

I mean, the circumstantial evidence is piling up in ways that are kind of driving me crazy. Good luck, just like. I need someone who says, like, yes, they were friends, they're on the same bowling team. It's like, can we get the roster of their bowling team? Can we? I don't know. Yeah, it's hard to know if you're on to something or if you're in Cameron Land right now. Right, of course. You're always teetering on the brink. We were kind of at a dead end with Portland too.

As much as we wanted to connect Edwards and Blackwell to prove they were friends or accomplices, we just couldn't. The bowling alley he played at is long gone. But I wanted great falls to know what we'd found. So I sent them an email that included an excerpt from the transcript that included this three-some stuff. One of the detectives, John Cadner, wrote back. He said they'd been really busy and hadn't done much on the 1956 case since our visit. But that he'd never seen this transcript.

That's crazy, he wrote. I truly believe those two are connected. I wish we could prove the connection. Me too. For now, this is where we are. All but sure that Edwards was involved in great falls and Portland in some way, but we can't prove it. His body count stands at five. If I've learned anything reporting the story, it's that it's surprisingly easy to get away with Murderer. Next week, how Ed Edwards got away with the murder of someone living under his own roof?

Danny Boy. Oh, one more thing. If you know something we don't about Ed Edwards or Arnold Blackwell, or maybe your grandparents do, we've set up a phone number you can call and leave a voicemail. It's 8-6-2, clear-in. That's 8-6-2, 253-2746. And it's coming from time to run and I run, but there's no real Ed Edwards. Right to home. That's hopeless at best. But what do we get? It's answer regret, which feels like you're there.

The clearing is a production of Pineapple Street Media, an association with Gimlet. It's produced by Jonathan Menhivar and me. I'm Josh Dean. Our associate producers are Josh Gwyn, Dina Kleiner, and Elliot Adler, editing by Joel Lovell, our fact-checker has been failing. Our theme song is Medaphine Illbluse by Matthew Deere, Music Clearance by Anthony Roman. The episode was mixed by Hannes Brown and Jonathan Menhivar.

Chenowice Berman and Max Lenski are the executive producers at Pineapple Street. See you next week.