Welcome back to the Path Went Chile for part two of our series about the unexplained death of Crystal Spencer. Robin, do you want to catch everyone up what we talked about in our previous episode? Well, Crystal Spencer was an aspiring actress who had spent several years living in Burbank, California. She was twenty eight at the time. She hadn't had much luck find the acting job, so she was making her living as an exotic dancer at a club.
She got involved with an older man named Anton Klein, who was an aspiring screenwriter, and for years she didn't want to tell him that she worked as an exotic dancer, but he eventually accepted it and knew that it was a way to pay the bills. Crystal had told Anton that she was being considered for a job as a hostess at a club in Japan, and she seemed excited about it, but the last time she spoke she sounded awfully sick,
and her sister would say the same thing as well. And then another week went by and no one heard from Crystal, and when they finally checked her apartment, they found her decomposing body in the corner and she was wrapped in a telephone chord, but there was no obvious signs of forced entry or foul play, and since the police could not figure out how she died, they listed her cause of death to be undetermined, but it seemed obvious they believed
that there was no foul play and that she had succumbed to some sort of mysterious illness. But there were a lot of weird discrepancies with the investigation, and I know that a bunch of neighbors of Crystal said that they heard some weird screaming from her apartment around the approximate time period she died. And there was some suspicion about a guy named Horace McKenna, a corrupt apparently owned a share of the club Crystal was dancing, and he was involved in a whole
bunch of shady stuff. And Anton would later find out that the FBI had a file on Crystal to suggest she might have been working as an informant, but a lot of the pages have been removed, so he had no idea about what she was actually doing for them, and he began to suspect that perhaps Horace McKenna had something to do with Crystal's death and killed her, but he died a short time after Crystal did, so they never had any evidence
that they knew each other, let alone that he might have been connected in her death. So after all these years, it still officially listed as undetermined and no one has any idea how Crystal died. So you can definitely draw some parallels between this story and a case we covered on this podcast last year,
and that's the nineteen sixty three death of Karen cups in it. In both cases, the victim was a young woman who was attempting to launch an acting career in Hollywood and seemed to be struggling with their own personal demons before they were discovered dead inside their apartment, and no one could conclusively determine if
they were the victim of foul play. I guess the biggest difference is that, unlike Karen Cupsonant, no one ever attempted to link Crystal Spencer's death to John F. Kennedy's assassination, though her autopsy report was examined by someone who worked on the post mortem for Robert F. Kennedy after he was assassinated. So I guess everything did come full circle Crystal's case is a particularly difficult one to get a handle on, since there is compelling evidence to suggest her death
being the result of natural causes and the possibility of foul play. However, Crystal's biggest advocate is her boyfriend Anton Klein, and if you read online discussions about this case, there are a number of people who think there's something off about the guy. He does come across as a bit strange in his interviews and seems rather snobbish when he describes himself as this cultured individual who took a topless dancer under his wing and introduced her to the finer things in life.
There are also a few things about his story which raised some red flegs. I think the one part I just can't get a grasp on is the fact that Anton never even attempted to visit Crystal's apartment during the time period he couldn't get a hold of her. As you recall, he attempted to call her on Nyvy eighth and kept getting a busy signal and the operator told him that
her phone was off the hook. That seems like something that should raise some major concerns, but according to Anton, Crystal was such a disorderly person that she had a habit of inadvertently leaving her phone off the hook after she used it. But then another five days passed before Crystal's body was discovered, and
Anton only learned about it after the police called him. He claims he tried to reach her at the Wild Goose and was told by the dorman she had left for Japan, which is why he never attempted to visit her apartment. Even so, it's strange that Anton wouldn't have gone to her apartment first before trying to find her at the club. I definitely think it's odd. When we first described this case, Anton does seem to be a big advocate for
her. He is the one who's trying to give different suspects. He continues to work with the police, he's trying to get attention on her case. But then you have the other side where he doesn't go to her apartment to check on her. But I do wonder how in depth was their relationship. Remember, she supposedly didn't even tell him she left for Japan, and that wasn't even crazy to him. He said, she'll just call me when she
gets there. So I wonder was it someone that you know? Were Anton and Crystal the kind of couple that were together every evening and they talked all the time. Or was it kind of like him, like you said, being this more pretentious person who says, oh, I help her when I can, and she's a nice companion to have, and it's kind of more flippant and not as engaged as you would think of a partner would be.
That is a possibility because I never saw any indication that they were planning to get serious, like get engaged or get married or anything in the future. So it's possible that maybe Anton is over exaggerating how close relationship was, and if you look at the situation. I know we talked about it extensively in Part one, this Japan trip, and how little we know about it.
There is a possibility. And I'm not saying that Anton is responsible or that he isn't, because obviously we have no idea, but we don't know. Maybe he's the one, or it could have been even somebody who, like say, we'd suggested in part one that if Crystal was sexually assaulted at say that casino that Horace McKenna owned, and there was powerful people there, so if somebody wanted to set her up and they wanted to buy themselves several months.
You could say, Hey, I've got a friend that's going to hook you up with this job in Japan, and then they've got Crystal going around
telling everybody about this job opportunity in Japan. And then when she goes missing or if she doesn't show up places, then they've got a few months before people start really asking questions, because we know she was disorganized, and if we're to go on what Anton's saying, the fact that she wouldn't call before she left, that she would just like impulsively kind to leave without telling her
loved ones. If that is her mo and that's the way that she operates in life, then that would be pretty advantageous for somebody close to her if they were indeed trying to set her up because of a situation such as that, or it could be something simpler. If it was Anton, it could have been because she wanted to leave the relationship and if she wanted to leave him, or if things weren't going well. There could have been any number
of reasons. You could see how somebody could come up with this Japan thing and dangle it just like a carrot, and then hope that she bites and tells everybody about it, and then they've got this time to one clean up
the crime scene. Number two basically just put some time between the act of killing and maybe they thought they would dispose of the body but just weren't able to didn't have a vehicle, it became too arduous to do so, so they just left her body there and thought, Okay, well, now we've at least just got several days, maybe a week before anyone ask questions, because they all are likely going to think, what Anton is saying that she
just left for Japan. Yeah, that's a good point, because I think most spouses if they heard someone say, oh, your girlfriend left for Japan without telling anyone, they probably think that's a major red flag and be pretty
shocked by that. But everyone who described Crystal said that she was very disorganized, she was very scattershot, She had a messy apartment, So maybe that was kind of her personality, that she would be the type of person who would just go off to another country and then not even tell her boyfriend until
after she arrived. It's also pretty baffling that, in spite of all these suspicions about Crystal's death, her body wound up being cremated, But to be fair, I get the impression that the decision to cremate Crystal was made by her family and not Anton, and that it may have been Crystel's wish for
her ashes to be scattered beneath the Hollywood Sign after she died. Her family maintained that even though they were not allowed to view Crystal's body, they had been assured her death was a result of an illness and had no reason to suspect foul play. It was not until after the ashes were scattered that Anton
received information which made him suspect that Crystal was murdered. He showed the autopsy report to a number of medical experts, but of course, since exhuming Crystal and allowing them to examine her body was no longer an option, there's no
way they could conclusively determine that foul play had taken place. I believe the immediate next of kin is the one who can authorize the cremation of a body, So even if Anton had his own suspicions at the outset, Crystal's family likely would have made the final call about cremating her, and it might have been out of Anton's hands overall. Even though I do think some of Anton's actions are a bit strange, I just can't see him being involved in Crystel's
death. The burmank PD were content to write the whole thing off as some sort of illness, and since Crystal's cremation essentially destroyed all potential evidence of foul play, Anton would have been completely in the clear if he killed her. Yet he's the one publicly insisting that Crystal was murdered, keeping the case in the spotlight, taking your story to TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries, and filing
lawsuits in order to garner access to the police files. It just seems awfully brazen for Anton to do this if he was responsible for what happened to play Devil's advocate. If Anton had an ulterior motive for appearing on TV, it might have been to help launch his own fledgling career as a screenwriter. Believe it or not, Anton Klein actually has his own page on the Internet Movie
Database, which only has one credit. In nineteen eighty seven, a made for TV movie was produced called Daniel in the Towers, which covers the story of Simon Rodia the artist who constructed Los Angeles Watts Towers. You can actually watch the film on YouTube and it stars Michael McKean and a young Sean Harrison, who later found fame playing Wualdo Geraldo Faldo on Family Matters. And yeah, that's probably the only time you'll ever hear a Family Matters story referenced on
this podcast. Anyway, Anton got a story by credit on the movie because the script was based partly on his doctoral thesis at UCLA. Because of this, Anton was hoping to become a full time screenwriter himself, but his career never went anywhere. I suppose if Anton was hoping to get himself noticed and potentially land some writing gigs, it would have been in his best interest to keep his face out there by placing himself at the center of a bizarre murder
mystery. But regardless of Anton's intentions, I still don't believe he would have gone to the trouble of generating so much publicity for Crystal if he murdered her. I'm in the same boat. And when you go back to the idea where you're talking about her being cremated, it would have definitely been the parent's decision because Anton and her were not longtime domestic partners living together. Correct, No, I don't think they had ever lived together at any point. They
just dated each other. Okay, So in less Crystal, which she's not a very organized person, so she definitely did not appoint probably someone to handle her burial. Legally, it is the spouse or a long term domestic partner, and then it would fall to either like adult children or parents if you
didn't have a spouse or partner. So for the idea that she was cremated, it is a little shocking because we have this death and of course there's no sign of foul play according to the police, but it's a very bizarre way her body was found. She was decomposed. She only was wearing her T shirt if I can recall correctly, So she was nude from the waist down, and she had that telephone cord wrapped around her. As a family, I would want to say, hey, listen, I need more.
I need you to do more to see how she passed away. She's so young, you don't see any big signs of trauma to her body. But it's confusing to us. But they made the decision to cremate her and that does take away any option, like you said, to have any kind of analysis done down the road. When did the neighbors tell the police about the screaming they heard? Was that before she was cremated. I'm not entirely sure, but I know that we told on the last episode that when they told
the police, they didn't seem particularly interested in it. So it's possible that even if they did tell the police, that Anton and Crystal's family never found out about it until much later. See that's what frustrates me the police, the way they treated Crystal's death from the get go is that she was simply this dancer who was probably dabbling in drugs and things like that, and they just discounted the value of her life. And so they said, case closed,
natural causes, let's be done. And so if the family didn't have information, cremation is a much more affordable option. It does allow her remains to be scattered in a place that's important to her and not in a graveyard. And so I think I think you have to feel just a lot of empathy for the family and say, did they even have the information they needed to try to advocate for their own loved one and why would Anton continue to push and push and push. Yes, he likes attention, Yes he seems
to be full of himself. But if you're the killer, at some point you want to start to distance yourself. When they've told you there is no murder, you go, thank you Lord, right, and you back up, and you just let it go. I don't think he'd keep pushing for years and years to get answers. So now let's discuss the possibility that there was no murder at all and Crystal simply died as the result of a serious illness. It seems that unsolved Mysteries wanted to portray Crystal in the best possible
light, as they never made any mention of her substance abuse issues. I'm not entirely sure how serious these issues were at the time of Crystal's death, but since there were only small traces of alcohol and marijuana found in your system, it seems likely that you did not die of an overdose. But there's been some debate about just how sick Crystel was the last time she was confirmed to be alive. According to Anton, her case of the flu was nothing
more than a bad cold, and she was gradually getting better. The last time he spoke with her. But then there's Cristel's final phone conversation with her sister Julie on May the sixth, which has been the subject of some controversy. Julie claims that when she refused to provide Christel with her mother's phone number, Cristel told her that she was so sick that she could hardly make it
to the bathroom. Since Crystel's death is believed to have taken place during the early morning hours of May the seventh, the police took this exchange as an indication that she was suffering from a serious illness at that time, which soon killed her. However, Julie insisted that her sister was a drama queen who often liked to exaggerate things, and believed that Cristel only said she was incredibly sick in order to garner sympathy and convinced Julie to hand over their mother's phone
number. So it seems like context is everything here, But another neighbor apparently told police that they heard the sounds of someone who was violently ill on May sixth, even though neither Anton or Julie thought that Crystal sounded that ill during their phone conversations with her. However, the one thing which might discount the idea of Crystal being sick is the possibility that she was working at the Wild
Goose that night. Obviously, if Crystal is out there doing topless dancing on stage, her owness couldn't have been so bad that she could quote unquote hardly make it to the bathroom. There seems to be a discrepancy about whether or not Crystal worked on May to six, as the club's records do not support this, but a waitress friend of hers and the security officer believe she was
there that night. Of course, their memories may simply be faulty, but you could also infer that since a potential suspect in her murder owned the club, this person might have fudged the records to make it look like she wasn't working. But we'll get back to him in a little while. This one is confusing because it seems like the people that knew her most said she was exaggerating, right, it seemed like she was sick, and then she told
Anton she was feeling a lot better. Then when she's trying to talk to her sister and get her mom's phone number. She says, Oh my gosh, I'm so sick. You got to give me mom's phone number. I can barely make it to the bathroom. I need mom's phone number. It does seem to play into this idea that maybe she was using an illness to try to get sympathy from Julie, because remember, Julie's being told by mom, don't give out my phone number. Your sister just calls and talks and
talks and talks. I don't have time for that. Don't give her phone number my phone number to her. So Julie's doing what her mom asked. There's obviously a history of the girls going back and forth with her mom like this. And so if she was at the club and she was so ill that she was fighting something that would eventually kill her, I don't think she'd be able to perform at that level. If she was desperate and she had to go, you'd think that coworkers would note she was here, but something
was really off. She was really struggling, she had no energy, she looked really pale. They didn't. They just said she was here and she was dancing. And so I feel like you have to almost buy into the idea that she was exaggerating the illness, which makes natural causes less likely. Yeah, that's a good point, because I do not believe those witnesses of the club, specifically Sanity, thing about her being ill or her acting strangely.
So just since they just said that it seemed like a standard night that she was there dancing, that's what makes me believe that they're probably mistaken and she was not actually there on me the sixth, Because if she was so sick that it would precipitate like this sudden death from an illness, I think her coworkers would definitely notice. So now let's talk about the loud screams Crystel's neighbors heard coming from her apartment during the approximate time period she's believed to have
died. It goes without saying that Jet Taylor and Susan Aiken are probably two of the least like people to ever be interviewed on Unsolved Mysteries. Jet Taylor, well, given the circumstances, I have no qualms about poking fun of his name. But Susan Aiken actually has an interesting backstory. So we mentioned in our last episode that she won the Miss America pageant in nineteen eighty six, and even as her own Wikipedia page. However, she also has a
familial connection to a very infamous crime. In nineteen sixty four, Susan's father and grandfather were just two of the many people believed to have been involved in the racially motivated murders of civil rights workers James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, which took place in Nashoba County, Mississippi. They became known as the Mississippi Burning murders and were later the subject to the Academy Award nominated
movie named Mississippi Burning. Even though neither of the Achins were actually convicted for their alleged roles in the murders, there were quite a few people who did not think a woman from a family associated with such a notorious crime family should have won the Miss America title, especially since Susan once gave an interview in which she said she didn't believe in interracial marriages. You also might be curious to know that, even though Susan and Jet did get married, they wound
up divorcing in nineteen ninety four, But that's beside the point. The issues of the couple have taken a lot of heat over the fact that they heard horrific screaming coming from Crystal's apartment and chose to do nothing about it. During an interview, Susan was actually quoted as saying, we were already told in California you just don't get involved in domestic disputes. But what exactly is she talking about. Why are you specifically supposed to ignore domestic violence in California.
Of course, hindsight is twenty twenty, and they did later report these screams to their landlord, who also refused to do anything, so the blame does not just fall on them. However, it is strange that a couple who did not want to get involved were willing to appear on camera on national television to share their account. It is horrific to think that Crystal was part potentially tortured and murdered inside her apartment while her neighbors were electing to ignore it.
And even if Crystal wasn't being violently attacked, what if she was suffering some sort of medical problem and at that time her life could have potentially been saved if someone had called for help. The scream seemed to be the one aspect of this case which lends the most credence to the foul play theory, because if Crystal succumb to some sort of illness, would it really cause her to
scream like that for an extended period of time. I think we talked about this on episode one, but when I heard her that she was screaming for an extended period of time and the neighbors heard this and did nothing, we talked about the idea that if she was so sick and she was scared, and she's screaming in agony to that extent, what would have stopped her from
calling the police in nine one one? What would have stopped her from crawling on her hands and knees to the neighbor's apartment and knocking on the door and saying, I'm terrified, I'm dying, Help me please. I just don't see her sitting there forever in agony, slowly dying, like I feel like you would have had enough energy and fight for your life to at least crawl to the phone. If you have the ability to scream, that takes a lot of effort, Like if you've cried in the middle of the night and
you've screamed. You're exhausted the next day because it takes a lot of physical effort. So I feel like you could have at least pushed yourself towards a phone or the door to get some help, lie out in the hallway and scream, so if someone had to see you. But then you do. You have these neighbors who say, like, well, we heard it for a long time and it sounded like she's getting tortured. I will say, back in the eighties and nineties, domestic violence was one of those things,
whatever happens behind closed doors, that's your issue. You deal with it, including child abuse, spousal abuse, all of that. And thank god, we've taken the front door of people's houses and pushed it open a little bit and said, it's actually everyone's problem when someone's beating their spouse, or they're hurting somebody inside of a home, or they're abusing their kids, all of
our problems and so. But it wasn't like that back then, and so I do think there was a different mentality at the time, like that's their problem, they're messed up. I'm not getting involved in it. But how tragic, because like you said, what would it have taken to call the police and say you've got to come here. It's a scary sound coming from her apartment, and whether it was illness or violence, her life could have
been saved. Yeah, I know that Jet and Susan originally said that when they heard it they wondered if it was some sort of S and M thing, that maybe they were going through some sexual activities out there which involved Crystal being tortured consensually, but that as they kept hearing it, they're thinking, no, this sounds like something much worse. That someone is like being tortured
against their will, or they're being like beaten or something like that. But then they just decided, no, we're not going to do anything about it. But you brought up the point about why wouldn't she go for the phone. Well, we know that Crystal was found tied up in the phone cord as if she was going there to try to seek help or call for help,
but then died before she could dial in number. But like you said, it just seems weird that she would have the energy to screen for a long period of time if she was alone, but just not use that energy to actually go to the phone. Much earlier it's just so weird that she's not wearing any pants and she's completely unclothed in the bottom half of her body. She was alone. I guess she could have been sleeping like that, and if it was an illness, she could have just woken up and just
been in like a frenzy or something like that. But it's interesting too though, if she was so sick, there was no vomit, there's no feces, there's nothing around her that indicate like this horrible stomach bug or poisoning or anything like that. It's she's just found. It might be difficult to tell as well too, because we're not quite sure on the level of decomposition of
the body. And I think, isn't it pretty common when somebody dies that their body will just kind of release, whether it be urine or feces. And maybe even if there was vomit, would you necessarily be able to tell if Shay she was foaming at the mouth and it wasn't vomit, Maybe it wasn't like vomit as we would you know, typically define vomit, it was just boem. Could that have dissipated? Did they even properly investigate for that is really the question. Yeah, it's never been said in any of the
sources. If they found any vomit or feces, I mean, if it was found near her body, they could have chalked it up to decomposition. But if it had been found in other sections of the apartment, suggesting that she had become violently ill, I'm sure we probably would have heard about it. But as hod as the circumstances of Crystal's death may be, they can still be explained away as some sort of undisclosed medical issue. Like we just said, she was new from the waist down and wearing nothing but a T
shirt, but perhaps that's how she normally liked to sleep. Her body was entangled in the telephone chord. But what if her medical issues were so bad that she was attempting to call for help but collapsed and got tangled in the cord before she could make the call. The fact of the matter is that there were no signs of forced entry at the apartment, and even though the place was a mess, Crystal was known for being a very messy person,
so that doesn't necessarily mean that a violent struggle took place. All that being said, even though the coroner found nothing on Crystal's body to indicate she was the victim of foul play. The autopsy report turned out to be such a screw up that I'm not sure you can consider any of its conclusions to be reliable. As you mentioned in her last episode, Crystal was five feet one hundred and five pounds, while the report listed her as five foot seven,
one hundred and forty pounds, and that's a pretty big discrepancy. Now, personally, I have no doubt that the body found inside the apartment did belong to Crystal. Some people have pushed forward the idea that the decomposing body of another unidentified young woman was planted there to fake Crystal's death, but I think that's pure nonsense, Believe it or not. The security officer at the Wild Goose openly theorized that Crystal was abducted and being held as a sex slave in
Japan, and that the body in her apartment was a decoy. Yeah, I don't think so. I think those discrepancies are simple clerical errors and the result of a medical examiner doing a very sloppy job. Crystal was positively identified through her fingerprints, so I'm sure her body did go to the morgue. But I have to wonder if the coroner mistakenly mixed up Crystal with another dead
body he examined and filled out the wrong information on Crystal's autopsy report. I mean, they intended to come up with explanations for the wrong height and weight being listed, but didn't account for why the report made no mention of the metal pins and plates in Crystal's right ankle. So this begs the question, if there were signs of foul play on Crystal's body, could the medical examiner have either a overlooked it or b not mentioned it in the autopsy report because
he mixed up her body with someone else. For this reason, I am willing to consider the idea that there might have been something about Crystal's death which pointed to murder and just wasn't documented. But since her body was cremated, we'll never know. And what's sad is that because she was so decomposed,
the family never got to see her correct. Yeah, like the I know that Anton and her family requested it, but they pretty much just told her that told them that no, that you do not want to see this. She's in such bad shape. And that's what's sad because then they get the autopsy report back and there's all these discrepancies, and there are those kind of crazy thoughts that enter your mind, like did we even cremate and get back the remains of the right girl? Because we didn't get to see her.
And so for families, that's one of those components of a case, when they don't get an opportunity to touch and view the deceased body, there's those fears of like what if they got it wrong, what if they missed something and you just don't know. And unfortunately, like you said, cremations occurring a few days after the death. But they're starting to get all this information after all of this is happening, and they're getting different theories and stuff fed
to them after she's cremated. So you just got to feel heartbreak for them where they're going what's true and what's not because in this case, it's really hard to know your heads or tails of all the information they're getting. Yeah, I know, on researching this, they made comments about how if you knew how many clerical issues and mistakes are made in the coroner's office with dead bodies, you would be horrified because they're a whole bunch we probably do not
even know about. And that's why it's easy to assume that these kind of errors could have happened in Crystal's case, and that maybe some evidence which pointed to foul play just didn't get just got overlooked or didn't get documented properly. It's just so many errors on one body, like missing all of you know,
the metal plates or rods or whatever it was. And then I could see like if it was just that, But then when you add the height and weight too, and it's like, okay, so what she had pointed toes and that might account for an extra few inches, but how do you go from five feet to five seven? That seems absurd? And then also
okay, maybe the gurney thing, that one makes sense to me. But then when you have all of them together, it just is either some giant conspiracy, which likely it's not, but it's probably just a collection of clerical errors and somebody who's just so sloppy. Did they even scan the body? Is the question? Did you or did you just say that you did and you found nothing? Like who knows how rush they were, how many bodies they had to deal with, if it was chaos at the morgue at that
time. But it seems like somebody dropped the ball. Oh yeah. Like we mentioned earlier, I made a comparison to the Karen Cups in a case which we covered on the podcast last year, and that was the one where they couldn't determine how the victim died and she had a broken hyoid bone on her throat which could point to strangulation. But then it later turned out that the particular medical examiner had a habit of breaking hyoid bones by accident during his
autopsies, so that's the reason it might have been created. So it is pretty horrifying to learn, like the kind of mistakes that medical examiners are capable of. Nothing quite egregious, is our friend Fammi Malik? No, no, oh my god, nobody could be where? Said him? Oh his head was chopped off. You must have died of an ulcer, yes, amen, gunshot wounds? What that must be poisoning? Was it? The dog ate the head? Yeah, the dog ate the head. That was
his explanation for it. Yeah, the hungriest dog ever of your seeing. They eat the skull and everything. Yeah. So now let's examine the foul play theory. The one suspect whom Anton Klein has pointed the finger at is Horace McKenna, the deceased former California Highway Patrol officer who was apparently the secret owner of the Wild Goose. But the connection between McKenna and Crystal is a tenuous one at best, and I'm not even sure it was conclusively proven that
they knew each other. All we have is the account of a former waitress friend of Crystal's who claimed that Crystal often frequented McKenna's illegal casino, But this waitress preferred to remain anonymous, so we have no idea how credible she is. Like Robin just stated, the proposed about Crystal being taken to Japan and forced into sex slavery is absurd, and I think that her job opportunity in
Japan is not really an essential part of this story. There seems to be a misconception that Crystal had been offered a new job in Japan and was planning to go there. But the impression that I've always gotten is that she was being considered for this job at the time of her death, but nothing had
been made official yet. That's why we found it odd that Anton believed why he couldn't get a hold of Crystal was because she'd chosen to leave for Japan without saying goodbye, even though there's no indication that she'd actually gotten the job
yet. But to be fair, Anton came to this conclusion because the doorman of the Wild Goose told him that Crystal went to Japan, which opens up more questions and makes me wonder if there were people from that club who knew more than they were letting on. There's been confusion about whether Crystal was actually working there on the evening of May sixth, but whatever the case, she wasn't found dead until Life thirteen. Did Crystal not have any scheduled shifts there
that week which she didn't show up for? Did all the other employees just assume that she'd quit without notice and left for Japan. If Crystal had gone missing, then I can see why people from the club might have the incentive to lie and claim that she'd travel to a foreign country. But there's really no need to do that if her body is still inside her apartment and is
going to be discovered eventually. Remember, she's at a topless dance club, and so a lot of times we know that there's a legal behavior happening behind the scenes there. There's drug deals, there's sex trade deals, there's money laundering, there's all kinds of things that happened there. And was Crystal aware of something that started to make her a problem for the club? Remember she kept writing in her journal, I'm going to get out of here. I'm
going to stop having to work at this club. And so if that's the case, and that somehow has something to do with what that FBI file was on her, right, they had a large file on Crystal, some little dancer at a club. Was there a reason for the people there to need her gone or to cover and lie about her. I think Anton was given misinformation. I think he's an odd ball, and I think Crystal was a
project of his or this pet friend of his. I don't feel like he was this deeply committed, loving man who was just totally concerned about her. I think Cristel was fun and he was quote helping her and he got benefits from doing that. So I just I don't see him being the killer here. I don't think he's the killer either. I think you said he's really strange and maybe behaves in a way that is odd. But he was the one who was screaming from the rooftops. Something had happened, and he was
trying to keep attention on the case. And I think if you're responsible and the authorities don't seem to care, just walk away. You wouldn't be screaming, going there's something wrong here. You know, she was potentially murdered, and maybe these are ways in which it could have happened, or people who could be responsible. It just doesn't seem to compete who but that FBI file.
I really wish we knew more about it, And I guess it's on brand for Crystal not to if she was an informant, say that she wouldn't have shared anything with Anton, because we know that she has a history of being deceptive with him about certain things that maybe he might not agree with or might not be in line with, you know, what he believes she should be doing, because she lied about working at the Wild Goose until one of
his friends had seen her on stage. So if she was informing for the FBI, I think it would be reasonable to assume that she may have kept up from him for a variety of reasons. So if Crystal and Horace McKenna did know each other, I'd be really curious to know how well they were acquainted. I know there were no signs of forced entry at Crystal's apartment, but that doesn't mean she couldn't have invited someone inside who subsequently killed her.
Let's say Crystal really did work her shift at the Wild Goose on the evening of May the sixth, If McKenna was there that night, perhaps she invited him back to her place after her shift ended, before things went horribly wrong. Now be advised you should take the next information I'm about to share with
you with a huge grain of salt. But if you visit the Unsolved Mysteries message board at the sitcoms online for Him, you'll find a lengthy thread about this case, featuring a post from two thousand and eight by someone under the username Ozzie Rules, who claims to be Cristel's brother. His theory is that a few years before her death, Crystal attended one of those parties that McKenna allegedly held for his friends in law enforcement, and became disgusted when she saw
some of the men there sexually abusing underage children. To prevent her from talking, McKenna arranged things so that Crystal has sold a bag of tainted cocaine laced with boric acid, which caused her to suffer a slow, agonizing death by poisoning. WHOA Okay, now, we don't have any proof that she even
knows McKenna. Yes, he's a bad dude. We know that we know that he has this amazing mansion but can't even hold a legal job, and that he holds these crazy parties with law enforcement agents being there as his guest. I'm sure there's a lot of sexual things going on there. I'm sure there's a lot of drug use going on there, but we don't have proved
that Crystal ever attended these parties. Again, though Crystal was secretive, if she was going there to make extra money on the side, I could see her not sharing that publicly, and who knows what was going on there. But this does seem like a little bit of a stretch because I don't feel like we have any information about McKenna ever being charged with a sexual abuse,
ring of kids or anything like that. And surely at some point he would have gotten busted for something, right, I know, that he died like less than a year later, So I guess it's possible that he could have been killed before they found any evidence that he was abusing underage children. Yeah, he was murdered, Yeah, in early nineteen eighty nine. That's right. And don't you guys think that if they were at this party sexually abusing
young children that it would be a conspiracy of those who'd be involved. I doubt that you would be doing it in front of dancers from the Wild Goose, because then that makes them kind of complicit in the crime and loose lips think ships. So if they're going to do it in front of Crystal,
then they're likely doing it in front of other people. The more people that are going to know about the worst crimes that you could be committing, I would think, the higher the chances that you're going to get caught for that, the higher the probability that you will end up incarcerated for what you've done. So, if you're going to do it, you think you would do it secretively so that less people who aren't directly involved have information about what you're
doing. And let me say this, if you're a law enforcement agent who's complicit in doing these illicit things like sex and drugs and wild parties. That doesn't mean you're okay with child's sex abuse. Like that's a whole nother level. These girls, like you said, jewels, these girls are going to
be witnessing babies being hurt. Like I might be down to do drugs with you, I might be down to do some crazy sexual things with you, But the moment you bring a baby into this, you want to have a child in here where these girls are potentially wanting to be moms one day. These are men who are fathers, a large group of fluctuating guests. I
don't see there being a child sex ring in there. I do think if this was a small intimate group where it was the same folks every week, and like you said, there was one dancer that was the big entertainer and things like that, I could see there being an abuse of a child because this is a small group of people all willing to look the other way or
engage in the act. But not the way they describe these parties. It's like, oh, it's sometimes there'd be you know, all these different law enforcement officers and things like that, and oh, sometimes you'd have girls like it's always changing characters who are down to have a good time, not abuse kids. It just it just sounds like not not the right circumstances for a
child's sex abuse ring. And it's worth mentioning that this was California during the nineteen eighties when they had the daycare sexual abuse hysteria scandal, where a whole bunch of innoc and daycare providers and teachers were accused of sexually molesting children and having these satanic rituals and stuff like that where they would sell them off to
the cartel and they'd slaughter animals, and it just got so ridiculous. So I can totally believe that someone thinking that this is a true story, because this was the time period of like the whole sex abuse hysteria, that someone
would believe a story about Crystal being present for a party like this. Now, we're certainly not going to take the word of an anonymous Internet comment or as gospel, as we have no idea if this poster was actually Krystel's brother, and even if he was, he could have been sharing unverified, third hand rumors that he'd heard. Well, I'm not saying I necessarily believe this
story. The idea of Crystal somehow being poisoned is not that implausible, especially if you believe the account from the neighbor who heard the sounds of her being violently ill in the hours leading up to her death. If Crystal had ingusted poison the symptoms could have conceivably gotten so bad Ristil eventually reached the point where she was screaming in agony, which would explain the screams Jet and Susan heard
during the wee hours of the morning. Crystal soon succumbed to the poison and died, but since there was no outward signs of violence, the police were inclined to think she succumb to an illness and had no reason to suspect foul play. I was inclined to disbelieve the idea that Crystal had been poisoned by tainted cocaine, since you'd assume that that's the type of thing that would show up on an autopsy. But given all the other mistakes made in Crystel's autopsy
report, I could see the evidence of poisoning being overlooked. However, the main problem with pinning Cristel's death on McKenna is that all these accusations against him seemed to start after he was already dead and no longer around her refeude anything. If you look at McKenna's backstory, it doesn't seem like he was a good guy, and he certainly did his fair share of illegal activity, but as far as I can tell, he was never officially linked to any murders.
The one thing which does raise my eyebrows is that the FBI kept a file on Crystal and withheld twenty one pages of documents from the file from Anton. It was still unclear why she would have been involved with them. We know the FBI was monitoring McKenna's activities at the time of his death, so perhaps Crystal really was working as an informant, which is what Anton suspected. I can't help but wonder if things might have turned out differently had a contract
killing not been performed on McKenna ten months after Crystal's death. I'm sure that brought an abrupt end to the FBI's investigation into McKenna's activities, and once the focus switched to solving his murder, Crystal might have become an afterthought. If McKenna had actually lived longer, perhaps a more concrete connection would have eventually been made between him and Crystal. The FBI file bothers me so deeply. Remember Ann asked to get the file and then twenty one pages of it were kept.
And so when you think about the size of that file, Crystal was doing something big. This isn't a local law enforcemtion. It's like, hey, man, make this drug deal for me so I can catch the guy around the corner. That's like normal informant stuff. You know, when you have someone who might have a run in with getting caught with a little bit of drugs on themselves or getting caught doing something illegal that's minor. The police might say, if you flip on this person, I'll let you go on
that. But this is an FBI file built on this girl who seems to be relatively harmless and kind of quote unimportant. Right. She dances at this club, she hangs out with her friends and family, and that's about all we know about Crystal. So the fact that the FBI had her doing something that had twenty one pages worth of information that could not be shared with her
closest friend partner, it's very disturbing. And like you said, if there was a drug deal they're exploring, or like a drug ring they're exploring with McKenna and then he gets murdered. Do they really need to be chasing the drug lead anymore? Or maybe not, Maybe all of that disbanded because their leader's gone or the man who was running the show is dead, and now we need to focus on the murder itself. But Crystal was doing something that
got her into trouble and someone I think found out. Now, again we still don't have information in proof that she was murdered, but that autopsy where the world renowned forensic scientist is saying, yeah, look it looks like she was strangled. That in that FBI file they bother me deeply, And it is frustrating that if Crystal was involved, this was something that the FBI couldn't
finally share the truth about it after all these years. Because if it was something to do with Horace McKenna, he's now dead and the people who killed him have been brought to justice and put in prison. So I wouldn't assume that there's still some secret investigation that they have to keep confidential. So if she was doing something, why not tell Anton? Why not tell her family?
Unless of course, it's a case where maybe they put her life in danger and they don't want to admit that in order to provide potential liability. That's what we theorized in Keith Warne's case, coming full circle to our first episode, exactly, Yeah, if that's what I've always suspected that he might have been involved in some as an informant for something dangerous going on, and the police are so tight lipped because they fear they're going to get in trouble
if they show what they did to put Key's life in danger. However, here's the big issue. If Horace McKenna was actually responsible for Crystal's death, what more can really be done. Anton Klein was carrying on this very public crusade to find answers and expressing his suspicions to McKenna even though he was already dead. Yes, I suppose it's possible that others could have been involved,
particularly if someone really did sell Crystal a poisoned bag of cocaine. But if McKenna was the sole perpetrator, it's not like you can prosecute a dead man. But at the same time, I can understand why Anton would be so determined to see the police files on this case, as the errors in the
autopsy report are a to make one suspicious. But ask yourselves this question, what would be the point of intentionally listing the wrong height and weight for Crystal in her autopsy Unless you believe the absurd theory that someone planted the decomposing body of another woman in Crystal's apartment in order to fake her death. I just don't see those discrepancies being anything more than a clerical error. That's not to say that I completely dismiss the idea of foul play, as I do think
it's possible that Crystal may have been poisoned. The loud screams and strange manner in which Crystal's body was found do lend credence to the idea that she was suffering pretty badly prior to her death. I'm not sure how many standard illnesses could generate that type of reaction, but if she had some sort of deadly
poison her system, that's a different story. But the problem is that any possible motives for why someone would want to poison Crystal wind up venturing into conspiracy theory territory, and there really is a very strong evidence pointing to murder. The alleged prime suspect is aised guy who may have owned the place where Crystal worked, but we can't be certainly even met. Since there is no hard evidence that Crystal was poisoned, I am inclined to lean towards Oukham's razor and
attribute her death to some sort of fatal, undiagnosed illness. Of course, the circumstances are so strange that there's no way I would one hundred percent attribute her death to natural causes. But without stronger evidence pointing to a suspect, I just think it's more logical to assume this is how things went down.
Sadly, the fact that Crystal's body was cremated may have ruined any chances of proving that foul play had taken place, and short of someone making a full confession to her murder, after all these years, I don't think there's any way to conclusively determine the full truth about what happened. But if you do happen to have any information on the unexplained death of Crystal Spencer, please contact
the appropriate authorities. Jules Ashley any final thoughts in this case. This is one of those like I said, I feel so much pain for the family who is in contact with her. Just the day before we know she's likely has passed away. You have poor Julie who carries this guilt of saying, you know she was asking to talk to her mom. I didn't give her the phone number to my mom because my mom had asked me not to. And I honestly don't know in hindsight if my sister was being dramatic or if
she was struggling. And now we have all this misinformation that I don't even know what happened to her. She's been cremated. There's no way to get answers. The more we learn, the more confusing it becomes. It's one of those cases where you ask yourself, even if it was natural causes, couldn't the police have done more to do a thorough investigation and to give enough respect to a deceased body to say we want to guarantee we know what happened
in this case. And instead, I think they do what they do often, and they learned who the victim was, They saw the kind of disarray she lived in and the lifestyle she had, and they said, hmm, looks like natural death. I don't see any cause of a concern here. Let's move forward, and therefore, any concerns that were brought to them before she was cremated, I don't think they passed to the family to allow them to make decisions. And I think you have a friend of hers and a
partner of hers who's left questioning what happened. Her family's left what questioning what happened and if it was foul play, and maybe that FBI informant role got her in trouble. Why don't we know more about that? I think you know they law enforcement doesn't want the family to know. They don't want to have any responsibility in someone's death. But how tragic that putting her in that
position might have actually led to her death. And if nothing else, it did lead to this idea that she's somebody who wasn't valuable enough to investigate. And that is simply heartbreaking because she was a daughter, she was a sister, she was a friend, and she was a partner to somebody, and so my heart just goes out and I'm praying that there could be answers, but unless someone came to confess, I really don't see how that's possible.
Yeah, I ca go either way on what happened here, Like I quite honestly lean sixty percent towards foul play and forty percent towards an illness, just all of these unknown variables. As she just mentioned the FBI report, Why are you holding this back? Why aren't you giving this information to Anton or to her family? I feel like Crystal's death was it was criminal, how
little they seemed to care and how many errors were made. I just don't know, based on the investigation that they did and the type of autopsy report that we have at this point that all of the answers are available to us. And it's so unfortunate that Crystal was cremated so that there wasn't the possibility
to exhume her body later. And I really hope that her family found peace, even just thinking about the impacts on somebody like Julie knowing that Crystal had called her asked for the number for her mother and she didn't give it to
her. She gave the reasoning that her sister talks her ear off. But I can imagine how many times Julie has gone over that in her head and gone, well, maybe things would have been different had I given her that number for our mother, And none of this is her fault, but it's just the impact that these crimes are crimes, whether it or illness, these types of things have on a family, and that's the part that really sticks
with me with this case. Yeah, I've always been split on this, and I do agree that if the police had performed a more thorough investigation right at the outset, then we maybe we might have some more conclusive answers, and that they just did not treat the family very well. And even though Anton Klein does seem to be a bit of an odd individual, I do give him credit for keeping Cristel's memory alive, because if he hadn't pushed so
hard, we might never have heard about her story. For years, I've always been inclined to believe she died of just some sort of unknown illness, just simply because there is no real evidence pointing towards foul play, and that all these stories about Horace mcay and her attending a party was child sexual abuse
and sex slavery. There's never been anything to substantiate that they're true. But like you said, the big elephant in the room here is the FBI file, which makes you wonder why would something like this even exist unless Crystal was involved in something. I mean doesn't necessarily mean she was murdered, but it just shows that there's probably a lot more to her story than what we've been told. I do think if she was murdered, that there is some merit
maybe to the poisoning theory. Like I don't necessarily believe she was sold tated cocaine, but given the lack of a struggle or forced entry or foul play at the apartment, I do think possibly someone could have slipped her some poisoned the day before she died, and that caused her to become more progressively ill, until things reached the point where she got so bad that she started screaming
and had a violent reaction. And in a sense, that would be the perfect murder because you don't actually have to be at the scene to kill your victim, and there's nothing to link you to it. And who knows, maybe if a better autopsy had been done, they would have been able to confirm or deny this poisoning theory. But without any of that, we just don't know for sure, so very sad case. I don't know if we'll know the truth about what happened, but it's good we do these podcast episodes
in order to keep the memories of victims like Crystal alive. Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold? Patreon? Yes, The Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up with
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