The Clearing is a show about crime and the trauma that can result from crime. It may not be suitable for all audiences. April has the theory that her dad was most likely to kill in August. We were actually living in Florida at the time, but in August, if I'm not mistaken, we were leaving Florida and we were heading out to the city. We were heading out west and what I can't remember or can't prove if we can't prove that she was in Florida.
We came up here to visit family before we ended up at West. That's just kind of what we always did, but I can't prove that. This is The Clearing. I'm Josh Dean, episode 7. He's In The Water. In the course of obsessing about this case, April has been talking to a woman named Luan Eddie. Luan's brother, Ricky, was one of the two people killed in August 1979. And we'd come to Akkir and to see her. This little white house with the red since the door is open. Is it this house?
It had seemed like a good idea to come here. Luan's family has been trying to find out what happened to her brother, Ricky Beard, and his girlfriend, Mary Leonard, for 40 years. When April first reached out to her, Luan was more than willing to talk. I think she and April both hoped they might be able to jog each other's memories.
200th detail that connected April's dad to Luan's brother or cleared him. But once we were there, standing in Luan's living room, I started to feel a little uncomfortable. We didn't have any real evidence to offer her. I worried that maybe we were just trespassing on someone's private grief, which explains the nervous small talk. So is the big smoke stack? Did that used to be the tire plant? Is that what that is? What's the giant smoke stack out here?
Just like I said, she just laughed at me. No, I'm not laughing. It's hard to hear. But Luan said that smoke stack, April remembered? It wasn't actually a smoke stack. Have you heard of Ernest Angelie, the telepvancialist? Yes, I couldn't remember. Oh, wait. Yes, from the TV, the guy that used to make people faint. Yes, yes. Okay, so that's his church. And the tower goes with the church, but it used to be Rex Humbards before that.
Rex Humbard was a big televancialist from the 1950s through the 70s. He had a popular TV show and started building this enormous tower back in 1971 as part of his Cathedral of Tomorrow. But then there was some trouble with the SEC. Rex was apparently defrauding his flock and he never finished it. When they first built it, it was going to be like a revolving restaurant on top and he had all these grand ideas and then gotten trouble. So it just stood there. So they call it Rex's erection.
I didn't know that. So that's the story. We settled down in Luan's living room. She'd have followed her on the coffee table full of articles about the murders. And notes about possible leads that her family had collected over the years, especially in the early days, people called all the time with tips. Luan is Ricky's oldest sister, the oldest of six kids. She and Rick, as she calls him, were four years apart. They were close.
I knew some of the details of Rick's murder from news reports, but Luan explained how that terrible August night felt from the family's perspective. Rick was 19. Mary was 17. She worked at the ACME, which is the grocery store down the street. She worked there and worked there that day and they went to the drive-in movie, which is not very far up the road here from the erection. And there were other couples and cars. They were teenagers. They went to the drive. You know, you know why they went.
They actually saw the Amityville horror that night, ironically. And Mary, because she wasn't 18, her parents, she had a curfew. She had to be home, so they didn't stay for the second movie. They went home like 11 o'clock or so. So they went home. They were sitting on Mary's porch. And that's the last anybody knows. Some of the neighbors said they saw them sitting on the porch. Mary had gone in the house and gotten lemonade. They came out.
I mean, it sounds like the perfect hot summer evening went to the drive-in. We came home. We were drinking lemonade on the porch. And then they were gone. Her dad was the one who spread it most about the kids. Every time one of them went out, he worried and watched to make sure they got home okay. So he saw that Rick's car wasn't there. I don't know, maybe three or four in the morning. He decided he'd go look for him.
So he drove by all his friends' houses, thinking if he sees his car park somewhere at a friend's house, he's going to think, oh, he spent the night, you know, I'll see him in the morning. But he didn't find his car anywhere. But while my dad was gone doing that, police came to the door. And they had Rick's license, his driver's license, and his wallet and said,
his car was found over here on North Hampton Road. And when my dad came home then, they called every friend they could think of. They called Mary's mom or his brother. I think it was her brother answered the phone. My dad said, so is Mary there? Is she in bed? And they said, yeah, she's in her bed. Well, my dad said, could you go look so they went to look and she was not in her bed? This was really foolish on the part of the police. They let my dad and my brother go get the car.
I read that today. I couldn't believe it like the next day, right? So they never processed the car. No, not so much later. I mean, I think it's right that there was a bullet hole in the windshield. The bullet hole in the windshield and they did nothing. And there was no blood in the car though. That's what so bizarre. Still the fact that they would return. I mean, that's clearly evidence, right? Like there might be something in there fingerprints.
Yeah, they did not. They let my dad drive at home. And what's odd about it is the way that the trajectory of the bullet was like if someone was in like on the floor of the back seat of a car and shot a gun like through the driver's seat and the person sitting in the driver's seat would have gotten shot like in the shoulder blade, maybe. And it went out through the windshield. No blood. So it almost seemed like someone was hiding in the back seat, maybe. And that to throw them off the trail.
Ricky's car was found about two miles from where we were sitting crashed, but not hard into the side of a small barn on what was then a country road. There was no sign of either teenager. They just vanished. As police work goes that the car was just turned back over is egregious. And lo and things other things about the investigation were really shotty or plain dumb. For some reason, they thought that my brother was involved with some motorcycle gang. He did not have a motorcycle.
Biker gangs were a thing in Akron in those days. So the cops were really focused on them. And there's a motorcycle gang like clubhouse very close to where the car was found. So they were trying to tie it to that. And they just wouldn't let up about that theory. But we couldn't find any evidence that that had anything to do with anything. He had Rick had a dirt bike, but that's not a motorcycle gang thing. Like did they think he was like, oh, the money or something?
Like maybe he said he would do a drug deal for him, you know, because there was some pot in his car. And I mean enough for like two joints or something. At first, even though the circumstances of Ricky and Mary's disappearance were obviously concerning, Luanna and her family tried not to panic. In fact, when I found out that he was missing, I was actually at work. And my grandpa came in to where I work and told me, I was like, oh, they'll turn up.
I'm sure there's a story about this because they always had some story to tell. And then as days went on, we realized that this is not their usual antics, you know. I mean also, I mean not to focus too much on the car, but the bullet hole in the windshield is kind of like a big red flag that like they didn't just alope. Which I'm sure people probably told your parents, oh, they just alope. Yeah. And they were hoping they alope.
You know, and then they said, well, possible. Mary was pregnant and there are these good Catholic families. They're afraid to tell their parents. Maybe they ran away. Do you think your parents believed that like, do they think that might have been the case? Like at first. I think at first. I think they wanted to believe something like that. And you know, and they were like, that's okay. They can come back. They can tell us something like that.
As she was talking, Lewand leaned over, started shuffling through the papers on the coffee table. I just wanted to show you guys I know we're not on TV, but these are all notes that my parents kept. And you can see how yellow they are. Because Rick and Mary were missing for six years before they were found. Six years. It wasn't until May 1985 that Ricky Beard and Mary Leonard's remains were discovered. And thick brush about a mile from the spot where the car had been found.
Rick had been shot. Mary was shot and stabbed. During those six long years, Lewand's family heard all sorts of rumors about sightings of the two teens. And they held out hope that somehow Ricky and Mary would still turn up alive. This is a note that one day when I was at work, someone said they saw them in Puerto Rico. So I called my dad and he must have made a note that somebody saw him in Puerto Rico. Just little things like that.
So your parents were actively trying to help in any way they could? Absolutely. Absolutely. There's the reward. Like this one, this says Rick supposedly stole a purse in Athens, Ohio, and Mary was watching. That didn't happen, but someone said maybe that was them. So it's just little things like that we got calls constantly. Until he died, Lewand's dad kept track of every tip and rumor, no matter how far fetched. His death really destroyed my parents.
My dad died two years after Rick disappeared. He was like 48. It just ate him alive. It just totally killed him. Lewand told us that our dad had heart problems. He had open heart surgery just a few months before Ricky vanished. I think he had just gone back to work when Rick disappeared. And he really struggled. He just had a hard time making it through the work day. And I think his heart problems contributed to that, but also this is just weight on his mind.
This is probably for those two years he just never felt at peace or relaxed. He just never got over it. And then your mom sort of left to carry the burden of that. For four years then, she still didn't know. Her husband passed away and then she still doesn't know what happened. My parents really beat themselves up because they said, what did we do wrong as parents? Was he involved with something he shouldn't be involved with? Did he run away? Did he purposely stay away from home?
Did anything happen? Did something happen with Mary? Who knows? In fact, after they found their remains, all they had were some bones really. There wasn't a body for a casket. My mom said, I didn't see his body. That's his bones in there. So she kind of wasn't a niall about it always. Their remains were discovered by a utility worker on the property of a local guy who was known to her ass trespassers. Supposedly there was kind of this known make out area that a lot of teenagers went to.
And there was a guy who used to come out and fire a gun to scare him away. Like he didn't shoot them, but he would shoot the gun. And there were several kids who had reported that to their parents over the years. So there was a suspect for a while, right? Who? Akron, weren't they trying to... Not really, but I think this guy could possibly be the killer. Because that's what their remains were found in his yard. Louis says he even confessed at one point, but the police didn't believe him.
He was mentally disturbed and wasn't considered to be reliable. And they had no physical evidence to link him either. The whole thing felt to Louis and like it was part of the larger years-long bungling of the investigation. There was one Akron cop who Louis and her family trusted though. A guy named Bob Swain. He was charged with guarding the site where the remains were found. This is 1985. Like he had to stay there overnight and guard the remains.
There are so many heartbreaking things about this story. But that image of this cop staying up to the night to guard the remains of Ricky and Mary. I think about that a lot. I wonder sometimes if Bob Swain's life would have turned out differently if he hadn't been told to stand out there that night. He worked the case for the next 25 years, often on his own time. And he never got the breakthrough he was hoping for. Any kind of rumor or tip he heard he would call me.
And he'd say, I heard this or did you know this person or do you remember this incident? A lot of it I didn't live at home then. And you know I was 23. He was 19. Our lives were not intersecting. And I didn't really know his friends very well. But you know so sometimes Bob would call and ask me something and I have to call one of my brothers and say, remember this person and I have to call Bob back. So Bob was on it. He never felt that the motorcycle gang had anything to do with it.
He told me that over and over again. He said, I've looked into that. He said, I cannot find anything that makes me think your brother was involved with the motorcycle gang. He had a lot of theories, but he said, you know, I was a rookie cop. Nobody listened to me. They didn't care what I said about it. Many years later I had many conversations with Bob Swain, you know, and I would say, well tell me what happened.
Somebody dropped the ball somewhere and you're like, I can't, you know, as long as I work for the Akron police, I can't say. So I don't know. And I don't want to accuse the police of anything. I just think they didn't give it enough attention. Like Luan, Swain was willing to try basically anything that might lead to a breakthrough in the case. In 2006, he even joined her on a TV show called Sensing Murder that used psychics to help solve cold cases.
Here's Swain on the show talking about his interaction with one of the psychics. I told her we had a 27 year old double homicide case that had not been solved. She immediately started telling me things and gave me goosebumps. She came up with their names, the description of them, the description of the scene where their remains were found, right down to the point where she said she heard a train whistle.
And in fact, 30 or 40 feet away from where their bodies were found, there is a railroad track. That was a rare thing the psychics actually got right. Early in the show, one of them holds up Ricky's boot and conjures the scene around the murder. Pretty much everything she says is wrong. It's just very strange because all I'm getting at the image of is like legs, like wearing shorts or something. Does that mean anything to you? I mean, is there a reason I'm seeing him wearing shorts?
It means nothing to me. Okay, he wasn't wearing shorts. It wasn't that Swain or Luan or anyone in the family thought the psychics would reveal Ricky's killer. But they figured anything that brought attention to the case was a good thing. My mother was still alive then and she witnessed us taping the show and everything. It was very difficult for her. And then the night that it aired for the first time, we were all with my mom and made sure she watched it alone.
But amazingly, she then said, I don't know why this has never been on date line or 2020. And I'm like, I thought you wouldn't want that. Is Luan talked April sat in the corner looking through the files? I just read something in these notes that struck me. This is on 11th of October, Ohio State Patrolman who works with North something PD says, Rick and Mary disappeared, he followed Rick's car in a van, Western Portage Trail approximately 10-10 pm, or going slow, a car in a van.
Anyway, the thing that caught me was that a car and a van that was following it. What did my dad drive? A green account online van. Oh, I did not know that. April would like to help Luan and herself by proving there's some connection between her father and this crime. So she's on the lookout for signals in the noise. And this signal, the van, it's tantalizing. But it doesn't actually prove anything. Vans are popular in the 70s. Still, it's something. A detailed cop should probably know.
There's another detail April keeps bringing up. She has this vague memory that someone from Ricky or Mary's family babysat her in her siblings, back when they lived in Akron. She's not certain about it. Like, so many things, it exists in a pretty thick haze. And Luan doesn't know either. But it did come up with Mary Leonard's brother. He didn't want to talk to us, but recently told a local journalist that he thought this was possible.
As April and Luan talked, you could feel their mutual hope that one or the other of them might remember something. That April might see some connection in Luan's decades old papers. Or Luan's memories would be jared by April's vague recollections. Luan has thought about Edward Wayne Edwards before. In 2010, she read in the paper that he confessed to the murders in Norton, Ohio. That's about a half hour away. I called the police that day.
I saw it in the paper and I called and I said, can this be related to Rick and Mary? Oh, no, no, no. But Wayne thought it was. So Bob Swain, like John Cantorberry and Brian Johnston, went up to Wisconsin to interview Edwards in prison. When Swain questioned him, Ed's war up and down that he had nothing to do with the murders. He told Brian Johnston the same thing. I wanted those calls, Brian, recorded when he was trying to get Ed to confess to murdering Danny Boy.
So I just reached the hell out of the position to help Bob Swain with his and I don't know. I know nothing about him. You know what? He want to help Bob? Bob's a mind style. He helped me help Bob. He and I are friends now. Yeah, well, anyways, I can't help him because I don't know anything about his friends. Hi, area. Hey, listen Wayne. Right now we're night. On October 21st, 2014, Bob Swain killed himself.
He left behind a wife and five kids and took with him really any hope Lohan had of this case being cracked. If anyone was going to solve the murders of Rick and Mary or find a link to Ed Edwards, it was Swain. He was an awesome man. I mean, I was devastated when he died. I really was. Do you have any idea if this has anything to do with it? I don't know. I don't know. And is it fair to say that aside from him, there hasn't been a lot of action that's accurate over the years?
It's fair to say, yes. After the break, April tries to kick up a little more action. When we left off, we were talking with Lohan Eddie. Her brother Ricky Beard was murdered in 1979. In April, thanks, there's a chance that this is another murder that could have done. Lohan's house is very close to where April lived, up until kindergarten. April remembers the name of the street she lived on, but not the address. After leaving Lohan, we went to look for that house.
It was like the time we'd gone looking for Silver Creek Park and the crime scene that April's dad had led them to. We were tracking our memories again and they're not quite as dialed in as Google Maps. She was still nagged by the idea that someone in Rickier and Mary's family had babysittered. And we wanted to see just how close she'd lived to the beard and Leonard families. We drove up and down the street a few times as April narrowed the options. Hold on, it's not that second.
You know, it's not that one. Like, this might be it. She texted her mom to see if she recalled the address. A bit later, her mom wrote back. April's memory was right again. She picked the exact house. Later, I mapped out the distance from her place to the beard and Leonard homes. This is the distance from your house to the beard family. Which is walking distance. What is that? Not even a mile. 0.7 miles. But if nothing else, you guys lived in literally the same neighborhood.
So now let me do the other address. Exact same distance. 0.7 miles. Different 0.7 miles. But exact same distance. We always end up kind of in the same spot, which is like, God, there's a lot of weird coincidences. And I feel like we know a little bit more than we knew before. But yet, we're probably no closer to actually definitively proving anything. We're constantly circling the airport and we'll never be able to who I am.
You know, I know you need hard evidence, but how many stinking coincidences can there possibly be? Before we left Akron, we wanted to try the cops one more time. Because the truth is, we needed their help. It's incredible when citizens or podcasters end up solving cases. It's also incredibly rare. The norm is more like this. People have hunches. They see links. And yet, have no idea of what they're thinking and seeing is actually useful.
Without access to police files and interviews, it's just really hard to tell. There was a detective April had spoken to a few months earlier. His name is Dave Wooden. So he figured, we're here. Why not try and see him? Find out what he knows. So he deployed our secret weapon. We pulled up to Akron PD headquarters and sent April in. It's a large building right downtown. Looks like the kind of place that would have many gatekeepers.
I told Jonathan I gave April virtually no chance of even making it to the detective's floor. Five minutes later, I got a text. They're sending me up 15 minutes after that. She was back. Well, you got further than I did. You got upstairs. I got upstairs to the desk. At first, they weren't going to... All he said was, as soon as I walked in, they're like, I don't think he's here. I haven't seen him all day. And then... April wasn't having it. Eventually, they sent her to another floor.
I said, all I'm here is I want to talk to Lieutenant Dave Wooden. I said, I don't understand why he won't at least respond to my emails. I said, if my dad was not involved in this murder, that's okay. I'm fine with that. I'd like to prove it one way or the other. In fact, yeah. Arguably, it's a better result for you if your dad did not. Like, finding out that he had definitely killed two more people isn't necessarily good news. All right. Well, I mean, I guess the only way we can help just did.
No, he takes it more seriously and actually calls you back. The reality is, we'll probably never know whether Ed Edwards killed Ricky Beard and Mary Leonard. And we may never know exactly what Akron PD knows either. It isn't that they don't care. It's that it's not a priority for them. Akron's a big city. In 2018, Akron Police reported 36 murders. No detective as the luxury of devoting much time to a 40-year-old case. That reality seemed away on April. And it weighed on me in Jonathan too.
After we left Louis-House, we sat in the parked car and talked for a while. I'm kind of exhausted, mentally exhausted. I like I get after all these interviews, but this one seems a little bit more. I don't know, mentally. Do you feel like you know, were helpful or not help? That's always feel like was that helpful or not helpful? I'm not sure. I'm a little frustrated, especially after seeing that note about the van. Because I know we're probably never find out anymore.
It was a retired police officer. This is 40 years ago. The police station is no longer even an existence. They didn't even have the notes that she had given them recently. I mean, what I can tell you right there. So they're a little frustrated. Maybe. How do you get affected by this Jonathan? I don't know. I mean, it all feels much more real to me. Just the reality of how precarious life is. And Josh is probably the same. I think it is our job to try and know things and to figure things out.
And those are the stories we tell. And often if there is a story that you can't figure out, you don't tell it. You put it aside. And I feel like I'm coming to terms more with knowing that a lot of people live in the world, knowing the answers to the biggest questions they have in their life. It's wanting to come to terms with that and living with that. As dejected as we all felt, there's one more thing that happened while we were sitting in Louis-Anne's living room.
It really stuck in my mind and is, I think, worth sharing. This had nothing to do with evidence or timelines or hunches. Instead, it was something happening in the air between Louis and April. They seemed to find in each other someone who was willing to sit with all that grief and confusion. Someone who could actually understand it. I was reading your dad's notes here. Like every entry, there's just extensive writing until on April 13, 1980. He writes, four words, Mary is 18 today.
That's it. It's all he writes. It's present tense too. She is 18. She is 18 today. Yeah. That would have been less than a year after they disappeared. I don't know if I should share this one, but my dad, when my dad was on his deathbed, he really suffered. They had called and said your dad took a turn for the worst way. That means, so I got there and keep in mind I'm 25 years old. He was lying there and he was glazed over. He said, he was calling Rick and he said, he needs me.
He's in the water. He's in the water. I need to go. He needs my help. I was so young and you know, when you're 25, you don't think about that stuff. It was many years later before I went, oh my God. Rick was calling him over. My dad had just felt like Rick was in distress for all this time and he needed to help him. He wanted to help him. I'm not sure I should have shared that, but you guys are bringing it out at me.
On the wall across from where I was sitting, Loann had hung a series of family photos. Most of them were her girls, triplets, and also their children. Loann's three daughters were born in 1983, four years after Ricky disappeared. And the arrival of so many babies all at once and injected some joy into a family that badly needed it. You know, that's one of the things that I think about. Rick didn't get to see this. These are all people that were born after he was gone.
And he didn't get to have children and he didn't get to have grandchildren. And he didn't get to love all these other people. Loann said that Ricky's murder affected her as a parent. Years later, when her own kids had become teenagers. Every time they walked out the door, she'd think, my God, what if they don't come home? April nodded. She understood completely.
You just said something that you said how every time your teenagers left, you know, walked out the door that you wondered if they would come back when my children were teenagers. That's when I really started thinking about the possibility of what my father did and thinking about the grief that as a parent, what they have gone through and couldn't imagine that, you know, going through that as a parent. You lost a loved one. I didn't. But... But you did. Yeah. Really?
Well, in April, I can't even imagine what it feels like to be you. And I thank you for everything you've done for every family. Even if it doesn't end up solving our case, it's remarkable what you've done. Do you really equate the loss of your brother and what April's had to deal with with her father? Or do they feel like similar losses to you? Yes. Because she lost the whole idea of a father that was there for her. And yeah, I think it is. Not that he deserves sympathy, but she does.
She didn't put herself in that situation. She can't help it what her father did. So here's Luanne. No closer to knowing who killed her brother. In April. Still uncertain of exactly what her father did. It seems even more unlikely that you would know and that you would know that it was April's dad. But let's go there. Let's just what would that mean? I... Gosh, I don't know. I would have a lot more gratitude toward April for having the courage to come out with it and really push it.
Even though I had questioned it many years ago. I don't know. I just really don't know. I do want to know why. Usually in cases like this, there's no sane reason. The reasons are usually they don't make sense to us. You know, supposedly the reasons why my dad killed the other victims. To you and I, they don't make sense. Did you ever talk to your dad about it? No. No, it's something I regret to this day. My dad did you want to?
At the time, no. Right before he passed, I was starting to think about talking to him that I wanted to go down and visit and talk to him. But hadn't gotten enough courage to do that. And my dad did reach out to me in his way of reaching out, a crazy way of reaching out. But he did reach out to me. The way April's dad reached out to her, he sent her a scrap of paper with his autograph on it. Along with a one sentence note that read, hold on to this. It's going to be worth a lot of money someday.
She threw it away. And then he passed. So never happened. Do you think he was remorseful before he passed? Remorseful that he got caught? Okay. Remorseful that he committed the crimes? No. Hate. No. I don't think he was remorseful. Louis said that over the last 40 years, there have been moments when she's felt a kind of clarity about what happened to Rick. Not that she had the evidence, but she just felt sure. That clarity would comfort her temporarily.
And then she'd learned something else. She hears some detail that maybe seemed significant. And whatever certainty she felt would fall away. Like was the green van valuable, you know? Maybe. But who knows? Who knows? You know, I just want somebody who knows to tell the truth. And maybe the truth has already died. April and Lohan hugged as we were leaving. They promised to keep in touch. Thank you so much. I'm going to hug those. I'll hug them. Next week, we go back to where the story started.
And the air gets a little clearer for April. It's the final episode of The Clearing. The Clearing is a production of Pineapple Street Media, an association with Gimlet. It's produced by Jonathan Menevar and me. I'm Josh Dean. Our associate producers are Josh Gwynn, Dena Kleiner, and Elliot Adler, editing by Joel Lovell. Our fact checker has been failing. Our theme song is Modaphanil Blues by Matthew Deer, music clearance by Anthony Roman.
The episode was mixed by Hannah Sproul and Jonathan Menevar. General Ways Burmer and Max Linsky are the executive producers at Pineapple Street. See you next week. Bye.