Linda Sherman Pt. Two

away from him, but would always go back. But at this particular point, she has decided that she wants to get a divorce, and Don is on the verge of

being served the papers. But before this could take place, a Linda would go missing and her car would be found abandoned at the airport, but nobody believed that she left voluntarily because she never would have abandoned her daughter, and Patty would say that one morning her father was taking her to school and she recalled seeing her mother sleeping on the couch and This would turn out to be the last time she was confirmed to be alive, which has led to speculation that perhaps she was already

dead at that point and that Don may have killed her. The case went cold for five years, but then a skull showed up outside a restaurant which was known for being one of Don's favorite hangouts, and they could not identify this call For about a year, it sat in a police evidence room, but then they received an anonymous note saying that the skull belonged to al Sherman, and sure enough, it was positively identified as belonging to Linda Sherman, but the rest of her remains have never been found.

Of course, Don instantly came under suspicion, but brought up the legitimate point, saying that why would I dig up my wife's skull and leave it out in a public place so many years later after I had gotten away with it. They speculated that maybe it's because he wanted to get remarried and have Linda declared legally dead, but they never found any evidence that he was the one who dug up the skull, and he tried to say that whoever killed Linda was just trying to toy with

him and frame him. But of course, Patty always believed that Don killed her mother and was pretty much estranged from him, and Don would get remarried, but he died of natural causes in twenty fifteen, so the investigation has pretty much hit a standstill, and it's still heavily debated whether or not Don would have been responsible for what happened to Linda.

But of course we only have Don's word that these events took place, So the last confirmed sighting of Linda is from about ten to twelve hours earlier, when Patty saw her mother lying on the couch while she was leaving the house for school. And before that, we know that Linda signed out from her final shift at work at two sixteen am. Don's story is that they got into an argument because Linda arrived home late, and being the jealous guy that he was, he accused her of

being with another man. After their argument subsided, they both went to sleep in separate rooms until Don woke up and took Patty to school a few hours later, which she found unusual since her mother was the one who generally drove her to school. Patty claims that she saw what appeared to be her mother sleeping on the couch,

which she didn't move at all. So the disturbing implication here is that Down killed Linda after she arrived home from her shift, left her body on the couch, and then disposed of it after he'd dropped Patty off at school. It sounds like this is one of the main reasons Patty believes her father may have killed her mother. But I don't know if Don murdered Linda that morning. It seems to me that leaving her body on the couch in full view of her daughter would be an incredibly

brazen thing to do. I mean, what if Patty had gone over and tried to wake Linda up. If Don had killed Linda in a fit of rage, I'm sure he knew that he couldn't go anywhere to dispose of her body immediately because Patty would wake up in only a few hours, so we had to go through the morning routine of taking her to school to give off

the impression that everything was still normal. But if Don wanted to conceal what he'd done, I would think the most logical step would be to place Linda's body inside their bedroom, close the door, and tell Patty that her mother was sleeping and didn't want to be woken up, which seems far less risky than leaving her dead body

out in the open on the couch. Interestingly enough, Patty was interviewed in an article about the case published in The Riverfront Times in nineteen ninety nine, and she described the image of seeing her mother lying on the couch while leaving for school as a recurring nightmare she often had,

which caused her to wake up in tears. Since she was so young when this actual event happened, I have to wonder if Patty's memories of the situation are a bit exaggerated and the passage of time has made her believe that she was staring at her mother while she was dead. Personally, given that Linda supposedly did not go to sleep until around four am or so. I think it's equally plausible that she was sleeping soundly and simply did not wake up when Patty left.

to school. And so if she had done that and her mother was deceased, it's possible her mother was cold. It's possible that there could have been an injury she saw. So it does seem very wild to think that Don would leave her there, and like you said, Jules not put her in the room with the door locked or something like that so that there was zero risk. And again when we talk about that skull appearing years later outside of Don's favorite restaurant, it does for any logical

human beings scream, why would he do that? If he had gotten away with murder for so long? It does ring that bell of well did he need a deceased body and a conclusion that his wife was dead for things like life insurance? But there's a lot of laws in place that after a certain number of years, a missing person can be legally declared dead. So I'm wondering

if that would have even been a motivator. It seems bizarre and like it could be retaliation or some kind of revenge against Don maybe able to scorned lover or something like that. But for anyone you went to a public place and dropped a skull with a name on it, That is the most brazen act I've ever heard of. It's just wild.

abusive towards Linda. But you have to think would he really be raisen enough to leave her body out in the open, because that just seems incredibly risky and there would be so many horrible things could go potentially wrong.

to dispose of her body on his behalf, then who knows, maybe, like five years later, this person felt compelled to dig up her skull and leave it outside Don's favorite restaurant as a means to toy with him. So, like I just said, my biggest issue with the idea of Linda being dead that morning is that I'm not entirely sure

about Don's whereabouts for the rest of the day. As far as I can tell, he ordinarily worked the day shift in a machine shop, and since April twenty second, nineteen eighty five was a Monday, it's reasonable to assume that Don would have been scheduled to work and went there after he dropped off Patty at school. If it turned out that Don conveniently called in sick, then yes, I can definitely believe he was busy disposing of Linda's body.

But if he spent the entire day working until he arrived home at around six pm, then I find it highly unlikely that he would leave Linda's body lying on the couch the whole time. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that Don is innocent. I'm just saying that if he did kill Lynd, it's far more likely it happened after he got home that day rather than in

the middle of the night. Remember, Linda officially filed for divorce on April the eleventh, but decided to remain in the house with Don because she knew he wouldn't get served the divorce papers for a few weeks. Well, since

April the twenty second was a Monday. What if Don finally got served the papers that day or somehow learned about Linda's plans to divorce him, This could have put him in such a violent rage that he got into a fight with Linda after he returned home and wound up killing her in a crime of passion before she

had the chance to leave for her night shift. To cover up the crime, Don took Linda's body and disposed of it somewhere, and then abandoned her Volkswagen in the parking garage at Lambert International Airport in order to make it look like she took off voluntarily. Don did mention that he thought an overnight bag and some of Linda's personal items were missing from the house, but he could have either been lying or gotten rid of these items in order to help make his story look more plausible.

Of course, there are a number of missing persons cases in which the victim's vehicle is found in an airport parking lot, but the majority of the time it seems obvious that the vehicle was planted there by the perpetrator to give off the impression that the victim took a flight somewhere. The main reason no one believed that Linda took off is because they felt there was no way she would have abandoned her daughter. In the past, Linda had separated from Don and moved out with Patty on

multiple occasions, and was always prepared to fight for legal custody. Ever, but now that she had begun the legal process of filing for a divorce and was planning to end the marriage for good, was she really just going to skip town and leave her daughter alone with her abusive husband.

she makes sure that Patty's with her. There's a little piece of me that wonders if you know, she's one of those women who said I'm going to leave the baby and come back once the divorce is final and get her, But that was never her mo before. It's very possible an attorney could have said, you know, you can't just take Patty. You're going to have to make sure that that's part of the custody agreement. And if she was scared of him, it's possible she could have

taken her again. But never had that been an issue. So given the history, I think that it's more likely that Linda would have stood her ground and said, if Patty's not with me, I'm not leaving. Don was known to be abusive. Don was dangerous to her. That's why she wanted to leave, and therefore, why would she leave her daughter with that man. If she's no longer there, does Patty become the culprit of the abuse. I just don't see Linda leaving.

and won't favor you in the court. So yeah, that's why I thought there was zero chance that she would have taken off on her own.

in the past. He did specifically point to one of Linda's male coworkers, and while it's unclear if these allegations about an affair or true or not, this man was investigated by police and ruled out as a suspect. Regardless, Don seemed pretty certain that Linda was involved with someone and believed this person was ultimately responsible for her murder.

As you'll recall, Don would later tell police he saw Linda inside a van being driven by an unidentified male a few days after she went missing, and she ducked down to avoid being seen. But of course, no one else but Don could corroborate the sighting. And once again, even if Linda really was seeing someone else, would she

really have abandoned Patty for this person. It would be one thing if Don said it looked like Linda was being held against her will inside the van, but his story made it sound like she was there voluntarily and making a deliberate attempt not to be seen by him. There's definitely good reason to be skeptical about Don's story,

though in his defense. If Don was the one who planted Linda's car in the airport parking garage in order to give off the impression that she traveled somewhere, it is odd that he would fabricate a sighting of her a few days later which implied that she was still in town.

I was just curious. He seemed fixated on this affair story and made me wonder if maybe he needed to be single, and his way of doing that was getting rid of Linda and.

misconstrued from somebody that already thinks that she's cheating. But I agree with you, ash is a common abuse tactic, and I think just because we don't know for a fact that dun was having an affair, it doesn't mean that he wasn't We in Part one talked about we just don't know the veracity of the investigation and how deep they dug into the potential that he could have had another woman or women on the side.

tragedy happened in his family. In February of nineteen seventy four, Don's mother was indicted for first tree murder after shooting her husband with a thirty two caliber gun during a heated argument, and Don and his siblings were home at the time this happened. Don's parents were both alcoholics, so it sounds like their marriage was a ticking time bomb, but his mother ultimately wound up pleading guilty demandslaughter and

only had to serve six months in the county jail. Now, what's interesting is that Don's mother was represented by a public defender named Frank Anzeloni, who went on to become a prominent criminal defense attorney who was somewhat torreous for his willingness to defend clients whom most other lawyers were unwilling to touch. Over a decade after defending Don's mother,

Anzelone wound up. Anzelone wound up representing Don himself when he requested an uncontested divorce from Linda after she went missing. By this point, Anzelone mostly handled violent felonies, so it seemed unusual that he would be handling a divorce case, but his client was suspected of potentially murdering his spouse anyway.

As you recall, Linda had filed for divorce from Don less than two weeks before she went missing, so her attorney refused to consent to an uncontested divorce in her absence. He actually wanted to take a deposition from Don, but this never occurred since Anzeloni stated, quote, we will just plead the fifth. So it looks like Don really wanted a divorce from Linda, but not so much that he was willing to go under oath and be asked questions

which he might not have been comfortable answering. As a result, the divorce filing was dismissed in June of nineteen eighty nine, which meant the Sherman's marriage was still legally intact, and it would be exactly one year later when Linda's skull suddenly appeared outside the Cassaga Yardo restaurant.

of his favorite restaurant with her name on it. Someone took the time to drive up there, get the skull, put it out with there with a note that says, this is Linda Sherman's skull. It is mind boggling, and it's looking at the restaurant, if I remember correctly, like at the windows of the restaurant, so it incredibly eerie. I know he's desperate to get out of this marriage for many reasons. There could have been a life insurance policy. There could just be the freedom of getting away from

the marriage itself and moving on with your life. But if the move was to plant the skull to get this to be an official deceased individual, which would then grant you freedom from your marriage, that's an extreme case. It has happened before. I just watched a case of a man who went fishing and his best friend was supposedly fishing with him, and it ended up that the

wife and the best friend plotted to kill him. They couldn't find his body, and they decided to start planting evidence in the weeks and months after his quote drowning to prove that he had been in that area. So they were putting waiters in there. They were putting his hat, his id, things like that to wash up on shore months after he went missing. Mike something right, Yeah, it was in a lake seminole in Florida.

for me and represent me here? Because it was just kind of a unique situation where not only is a divorce, but he's a potential suspect and a disappearance and murder, So he wants someone with experience at this sort of thing to defend him. But I can't think of too many other cases where that sort of thing has happened.

acted surprised. So now he could say, why would I be stupid enough to dig up my murdered wife's skull and leave it outside my favorite restaurant? But if Down was responsible, the obvious question is why would he do something like this. The theory pushed forward at the time is that Dawn wanted to get remarried, and since his attempts to divorce Linda in absentia were rejected, he dug up her skull and left it in a public place so that she could finally be declared legally dead.

the police know that the skull belonged to Linda. To put this into perspective, in most states, a person has to be missing for at least seven years until they can be declared legally dead. The anonymous note was sent in September nineteen ninety one, and the seven year anniversary of Linda's disappearance would have been in April of nineteen

ninety two. If Don wanted to declare Linda dead so badly, I see no logic in waiting fourteen months to send a note, yet not bothering to wait seven more months to declare her dead without any hassle.

location and then send a note to the police. Why do all of that when you literally could just wait for seven months and go we got away with everything. I'm free from my marriage, I can collect any kind of financial benefit of her being deceased, and I can get remarried seven months. Do you really think he would have done that?

after the skull was discovered. And like we said, if you can wait fourteen months, then what's the horror waiting another seven months so you don't even have to go through with this at all?

But I do can see that Don may have originally been planning to get married to someone else in nineteen ninety In the afore mentioned Riverfront Times article from nineteen ninety nine, Michael Webb, the lead investigator on the case, was asked about a rumor that an ex girlfriend of Don's had claimed he confess to Linda's murder. Web simply responded, quote, I won't deny that. I really can't comment on that aspect.

End quote. Well, without more information, I can't really comment on that either, but I'm willing to consider the possibility Don was planning to marry this ex girlfriend at some point, but she changed her mind when she learned of Don's potential involvement in his wife's murder. As a result, his planned marriage to her fell through, and the woman Don ultimately married in nineteen ninety four was a completely different spouse. Wow.

her father killed her mother. But what was interesting is that we talked about this in our last episode, is that if you look up Don Sherman's obituary online from when he passed away in twenty fifteen, it mentions his daughter that he had with his second wife, and also his step kids, but it doesn't mention Patty's name at all as predeceasing him in death. So it gives off the impression that they were just completely estranged from each other by the time Dawn passed away.

Since there were traces of dirt on the skull, this implied that Linda was buried somewhere, and that someone had to go through the trouble of digging her up and then reburying the rest of her remains. Again, no matter who did this. That's a lot of needless work to go through, and it really defies all logic. There's also the fact that the reappearance of the skull helped rejuvenate the investigation, which had pretty much hit a dead end

for years. If this was just a simple missing person's case where Linda vanished and was never seen again, it might have been forgotten about a long time time ago. But the reappearance of the skull put the case back into the spotlight again and was such a creepy detail that Unsolved Mysteries just had to produce a segment about the story.

body somewhere that is missing its head. At this point like that to me would crank up an entirely different investigation. She's an adult, she could have left willingly on her own. Case closed. There is a body without a head somewhere of a poor girl who was murdered. That's a totally different scenario. So not smart for whoever whoever killed Linda, but it really does create this just heartbreak when you think about her poor family. They too were wondering what

the heck happened to her. They were pretty convinced that probably Dawn had the responsibility of killing her. But there was this kind of bizarre hope too that if she did run away, she's going to come back for Patty. And this solidified No, she's not, she was hurt, she's deceased, she's never coming back, and yet we are left exactly where we were at square one, with no evidence of

what happened to her. It's got to be one of the most gut wrenching cases when you think about the poor family going through this roller coaster of emotions and realities.

figure out Linda's exact cause of death. So I'm sure her family was still thinking to themselves, how exactly did she die, what exactly happened to her? And the appearance of the skull only raised more questions than it answers

and didn't give them any sort of closure. If Don didn't do this, then I have my doubts that the perpetrator was just some random serial killer, as they made a calculated choice to leave as they made a calculated choice to leave Linda's skull outside of Don's favorite restaurant, and likely did so for the purpose of taunting him.

But there's a third possibility. What if Don had an accomplice when he killed Linda who helped him dispose of the body, Or perhaps it was someone who wasn't directly involved in the crime but knew exactly what Don had done. This person then made the decision to dig up Linda's skull and leave it in a public place where they knew what would capture Don's attention before they made an

attempt to blackmail him. If Don stopped paying the money or cooperating with this person, that may have motivated their decision to send the police the anonymous letter which revealed that the skull belonged to Linda. However, if they were directly involved in the crime, then they may have stopped short at directly pointing the finger at Don, since they ran the danger of incriminating themselves.

that marriage, or just not obeying what he said. So if there was an accomplass my heart thinks that it would be someone who he asked to help dispose of the body with him, and then it is possible that some falling out happened. But would they be more blatant would they try to do something more like in that

letter of the police have the skull? Could they have written Don killed her this way and actually actually pointed them in a way where Don would get arrested and give them some more information to where this is not just going to be oh, the case gets reopened, but Don gets nailed for it. I feel like there could have been more info. If you have someone that motivated to get back at him, then give some information that would put handcuffs on him too.

maybe he'll give me up and I'll get arrested. As well, So that's why they for whatever reason, they just wanted to toy with them, possibly blacknail him or something, but they didn't want to give up too much information that they could incriminate themselves. Well, we've kept going on about how risky it was for someone to dig up Linda's skull and leave it in a public place. It ultimately did not bring the police any closer to solving this case.

So whatever the perpetrator's endgame was, it did backfire on them. If the perpetrator was Don, he managed to successfully get away with it since he passed away in twenty fifteen. Part of me thinks that the simplest explanation in this case is the correct one, and that Don killed Linda in a violent rage after finding out she was planning

to leave him. If Linda filed for divorce from her jealous, controlling husband and wound up being murdered by a completely different person only a few weeks later, then that seems like quite a coincidence. One of the biggest issues with defending Don is that, even though he maintained that Linda was probably having an affair with another man who did her harm, the investigation has never uncovered any strong alternate suspects. The person who had the motive means an opportunity to

commit this crime is Don. But yet I just can't get over the bizarre reappearance of Linda's skull and the anonymous note, which makes me wonder if there might actually be more to this story. It's such a bizarre anomaly that I can't completely commit to the idea of Don being the guilty party. The odds are he probably is, but I wouldn't say I'm one hundred percent certain if

Don did it. Perhaps he just got tired of living under the cloud of suspicion about his wife's disappearance, so he decided to dig up her skull and make a public spectacle of the whole thing in an attempt to give off the impression that someone else killed Linda. He did not expect it would take the police as long as it did to identify the skull, which is why he decided to send them an anonymous note over one

year later. So this whole decision may have been motivated by ego rather than an urgent desire to get remarried, because even if Don had successfully gotten away with murder, he just wanted to do something to get everyone to stop thinking of him as a murderer. But even so, the whole situation was completely out of the ordinary, So if it turned out that someone else was the killer, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. If Don did it, then there might not be anything else else that can

be done since he's now deceased. But if there's someone else out there who is responsible, then perhaps Linda's family can finally recover the rest of her remain someday and give her a proper burial. So if you happen to have any information about the unsolved murder of Linda Sherman, please contact the appropriate authorities. Jules Ashley any final thoughts on this case.

similar suit. He was raised watching people physically fight and degrade each other and disrespect each other physically and emotionally. And that's the kind of husband he became, which speaks volume to the impact of domestic violence on kids and their adulthood. It also talks about the fact that Linda tried desperately to get away from Don multiple times. And we're changing the conversation. But people always say, if he's hurting, you leave, if she's hurting, you leave, And it's not

that easy. Linda tried it. They had a little girl. I guarantee you there was a lot of pressure, especially back in the eighties. You are married, you have a little girl. She needs her intact family. But Linda kept saying, this is not okay for Patty to be exposed to this. I got to get us both out of here, and she tried multiple times. She's finally at a point where she's about to file for a legal divorce against Don

and leave for the final time. And if you know a lot about domestic violence, that's the most dangerous time for an individual leaving the situation. It's the time where murder's most common and horrific assaults are most common. And whether it's Don or not, because Don would be the most likely one to hurt her in that situation. It is also possible that Linda became a vulnerable target to

somebody else. Remember if she's expressing that she's in an abusive relationship, that she has a little girl, that she's insecure maybe financially about leaving, but she's going to do it anyway. It is very possible that a predator acted as someone who cared for her and was going to help her out of that situation, who was going to be there to support her, but actually saw her as

a vulnerable target. So I don't necessarily think that's what happened, but I do know that Linda was incredibly prime to being a victim at this instance in her life. Patty is a victim in this case. She lost her mom and then eventually would go on to lose the abusive father in her life. There was potential for Don to turn the tides right and to be the father that

she needed. It doesn't seem like that happened because of what details we don't know, but they were not fond of each other, right, She wasn't even mentioned in his obituary, So she lost an access to a parent who was the surviving parent as well, and like I said, the family sat there for years thinking did she really leave? Like I kind of hope she did just leave, because if she did, she might come home for Patty, she might come back to be with her family. But she didn't.

They found just the skull. They never got her intact body to lay her to rest. It's a really complicated, complex and devastating case because of all of those elements. It's bigger than just murder. It's domestic violence that most likely ended in the most horrific way, which was with her death.

And he doesn't sound that smart. I think there is a possibility that he could have left her body on that couch and just thought that he could stand between Patty and her mother. I'm fifty to fifty. I just think there is a possibility that he could have crossed somebody. The person who could have potentially been that co conspirator maybe help dispose of the body. Something happened in their relationship later on, and that spurned that person to then

go and leave the skull outside of the restaurant. But maybe then they thought twice about it for a while before they actually doubled down and sent that note. Because I could see putting the skull there and then being like, wait, what if he's questioned and then my name comes up, and then I get brought in for questioning, and then somehow I'm tied to all this mess. I could see the person vacillating between saying nothing and then leaving an

anonymous note. But I really can't see Don himself leaving the skull there and then just being like, well, why would I do that? So you, like, I couldn't be involved because nothing was really happening with the investigation that would lead him to believe that he needed to make some kind of big move to alibi himself out in

a way. I don't know what happened here, but I just have this sneaking suspicion that Don had something to do with it, and I think the fact that Patty believes that so wholeheartedly probably does inform my decision a little bit. And I just I really feel for Patty here, especially because as Ashley just brought up the fact that she was left off of that obituary, you know, survived by his daughter, Patty and all the other kids were

on there. It just it really breaks my heart that she had to lose Linda at such a young age and then essentially lose her father as well.

pretty bad. And if this had been a case where Linda had simply gone missing and was never found, I would say it was pretty cut and dried that he killed her and disposed of the body But the big complication, as we talked about, is the skull, in that I really can't think of any logical reason why Don would go to the trouble of unearthing her skull and leaving it out in a public place and getting the story

back into the spotlight. Because I looked in the old newspaper archives there was virtually no coverage of Linda's disappearance before this incident took place, but that only just jump started the investigation and got the story national attention on unsaw mysteries. And if Don did this, then he's either like really dumb, or really narcissistic, or just so brazen that he thinks he will still manage to get away with it no matter what, in spite of all this

new scrutiny coming upon him. And technically he did get away with it because he went to his grave without being charged with anything, But I still can't figure out

the logic for him doing that. But even if he wasn't the one who personally unearthed his skull and left it there and sent the anonymous note, that doesn't completely absolve him, because for all we know, maybe he had an accomplice of some sort who helped him dispose of the body, or maybe he bragged about it to someone at some point, and then they decided to pull off some prank or something by unearthing the skull in order

to toy with Don for unknown reasons. But then they just backed off on flat out admitting their own culpability. But yeah, the real victim in this is Patty because she lost her mother and her father, and also Linda's family because even though they found confirmation that she was deceased by getting her skull back, they still have never found the rest of her remains and do not have any definitive answers about what happened to her. And it's just a very bizarre but completely heartbreaking case.

the ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsawd Mysteries, where you can download an audio file and then boot up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very first episode that I did a commentary track over was

the episode featuring this case. So if you want to download a commentary track in which I make more smart ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor than be sure to join Tier three.