Welcome to this week's episode of The Path Went Chili, and today it's going to be just myself and Jewels because two days before we recorded this, Ashley finally gave birth to a beautiful baby boy named Teddy. So a big congratulations to Ashley. And as you can understand, she's probably going to be off for a little while. We don't know yet how many episodes, but for the foreseeable future, it's just going to be myself and Jewels, and I hope actually has a wonderful time with our new baby boy.
We're so excited for her. The pictures are just gorgeous. He's just the perfect little baby, and everything seems to be going just so well for Ashley, so please send her your thoughts and your prayers, and she's so happy to have all of you supporting her.
Definitely. We've gone through her progress of her pregnancy the past several months. We even announced when she was pregnant, so I'm sure a lot of our viewers were waiting to hear this news. So we're going to follow our usual formula when Ashley's not around, where I share the details about a case I know well to Jules and she'll give off the reaction, and I'm presuming she probably hasn't heard of this one. But it's a unique case involving an attempted murder where the victim suffered so much
brain damage that she could not remember the attack. And even though her husband would be charged and convicted of the crime, there's a lot of doubt about whether he actually did it, and of course the victim herself can't confirm or deny if it was her husband. So have you heard of the attempted murder of Nancy Drake?
No, I've never heard of it before.
It's a very obscure case. I once covered it on a Patreon bonus episode of The Trail Went Cold several years ago. And what's unique about it is that it's one of the most rare UNSAWD mystery segments that you're
ever going to find. In nineteen ninety two, the show decided to launch a spinoff series called Final Appeal from the Files of Unsolved Mysteries, where they would cover a lot of cases where people had been convicted of a crime, but there was some doubt about whether or not they actually did it, and one of their last episodes was
going to cover the Thomas Drake case. It was going to air in October of nineteen ninety two, but of course this was the presidential election, and for some reason, the episode got preempted and could not air that night. I think they were showing a presidential debate or something,
and the series got canceled the following week. So the Thomas Drake episode never did actually air, and it pretty much sat in a vault for nearly seventeen years until I think two thousand and nine, when Spike TV decided to do like a reboot of Unsaw Mysteries where they would repackage like a lot of their old segments with new graphics, new music, and because Robert Stack was now deceased at this point, they had Dennis Farina film these all new hosts segments, and they decided to dig out
this whole segment about the Nancy Drake attempted murder and aert on the Spike TV reboot, even though it not been seen in seventeen years. So that's how I got familiar with it. And it's kind of a rare thing where you can watch the Spike TV reboot version on YouTube, but the original Robert Stack hosted episode is still an a vault somewhere and it's never seen the light of day.
That's so bizarre to think that it just sat there just collecting dust, I guess, so to speak. And then it gets a second life when Spike TV does the reboot. I remember that reboot and Dennis Farina right wasn't Was he on like NYPD Blue or something like that.
Yeah, he was kind of a character actor. He was a former Chicago cop who did a lot of movies. He was in and I think Midnight Run Get Shorty Manhunter, good actor, seem like a nice guy, but as a host, he was no Robert Stack unfortunately.
Wow, those are big shoes to fill exactly.
I could probably go on a rand about how terrible that reboot was, but we'd be here all night, so
I'm not going to do that. But as a side note, I don't know if Thomas Drake is innocent and was wrongly convicted or not, but just imagine being in his position where you finally think your story is going to air on national TV and you're going to get all this new exposure and possibly get released from prison, and then it doesn't air and they keep it in a vault for the next seventeen years, so that it doesn't really help you too much.
That's wildly disappointing. He must have been like just completely filled with hope to think that there is going to be this national audience for the case, and if there's somebody else who could be responsible, then maybe they're going to get some tips, maybe they'll even get evidence that could clear him. And then to find out that like, oh, it was preempted for a presidential debate, now it's canceled, so no, no one's ever going to see this. So it gets this like second life when Spike TV picks
it up. So he must have been Florid.
I think he was, Yeah, I mean he'd been in prison a long time at that point. But of course if he was guilty all along, then I guess this was a good karma for him that his hope got to put into a vault somewhere. But another interesting piece of trivia is that this case takes place in a
small town called winter Haven, Florida. And as you probably know, my pet case is probably the Tommy Ziegler case, which took place in a town called winter Garden, Florida, which is only about forty five to fifty miles away from winter Haven. So you could say that I have a particular fascination for cases involving a band named Thomas going to prison for attacking his wife which take place in towns in Florida with the word winter in the title. That's strangely specific.
It's very specific and so paradoxical that Florida would have multiple towns with winter at the beginning.
Yeah, I know, kind of weird and the weird climate that they just seem to love having the word winter and all their town names. But you're going to see some parallels with the Tommy Zigler case because, as you probably remember, that was one where you had to rely heavily on the timeline and eyewitnesses who contradicted each other, and you're going to get that in this case as well. So that's another similarity.
Well, that has to be the most prominent feature in the Tommy Ziegler case. I remember when we covered that on The Bath Went ChIL And Oh my god, Like what a tangled mess of evidence that is. It is just all these different perspectives, all these different kind of timelines.
It's just at the end you're left shaking your head, going what happened, but I would agree with you in that I think that Tommy Ziegler was not guilty, and I'm really interested to see in this case if our opinions fall on the same side.
Yes, I'm anxious to hear your opinion after I've shared all the facts. But rest assured this one is nowhere near as complicated as Tommy Ziegler because that one was four parts, and I think we can do this one in two. Okay, So the victim is forty seven year old Nancy Drake who is living with her forty five year old husband, Thomas Drake. They've been married for nearly
nine years. I know that Thomas had at least one previous marriage and a daughter, though I think they divorced when she was just a baby, so he didn't really have much of a part of her life. Thomas works as a truck driver's helper and is often on the road. So Nancy would completely devote herself to a local church called the First Church of the Nazarene, and she was very devoted to it because essentially became their secretary and would put in sixty hour work weeks which would keep
her occupied while Thomas was away. And she also sang in the choir, and Thomas would help out from time to time because he was in charge of the church's sound system and would tape record the choir's performances. But on July the eighth, nineteen eighty three, in winter Haven, Florida, Nancy was working a very busy day because she was
selling tickets to an upcoming concert at the church. At at around twelve forty pm that day, a local parishioner named Shirley Whitehead stopped by the church to purchase some tickets, and that was when she was horrified to discover Nancy lying on the floor in her office in a pool of blood. And it would turn out that she had suffered a serious head injury because someone had bludgeoned her with a claw toothed hammer, which split open her skull and left some serious head wounds.
Yikes, Whenever somebody uses a hammer as a weapon, there's just something so barbaric about that. To swing a hammer multiple times, especially the claw end, to make contact, it's just to think of the level of anger that would have underscored that type of attack. It's just unfathomable.
Exactly, and the hammer did belong to the church. It was found inside the room and had been wiped clean of fingerprints. And that's always going to be a source of debate because you would think that if this was a premeditated murder, someone would have brought their own weapon
with them. But it almost seemed like this was a crime of opportunity where someone just had to grab the first weapon that they found at the scene and hit her with it, which could indicate that the crime was completely unplanned and may have been a crime of passion.
And even if it was planned in that sense, it would have been planned likely by somebody who would have been really familiar with the church and at the church at that time. So if you planned it days in advance,
you'd likely bring your own weapon. But if you planned it while you were there, say you had a disagreement with her, and you left the room and you went somewhere else to find a weapon, Yeah, I could see that that, like somebody would go looking for a weapon, find a weapon in the church, and then come back
and do it. But I would think that it would have to have been decided that you were going to kill her like that day while you're there, And so that makes it seem odd that, like, if it was her husband, wouldn't you have brought a weapon?
Well, you can look at it both ways, because Thomas did spend a lot of time in the church because he did construction for them. Sometimes he helped out with their sound system. So theoretically, if he planned this, he could have known that there would have been a hammer un scene. And we're also going to talk about another potential suspect who was a regular parishioner at the church, and it's also possible he could have been aware that the hammer was there as well.
So you're going to tell me about the husband's alibi right.
Yes, later on, Okay, So when they found the hammer, it had been white clean of fingerprints, and they also found out that the safe inside the church's equipment room was open and had been cleaned out of approximately three eight hundred dollars worth of cash and checks, which suggested that robbery may have been the motive for the crime.
So Nancy was taken to the hospital, had to undergo surgery multiple times, and was left in a coma, and doctors initially did not expect her to survive, and they thought that if she did, she would be left in a permanent vegetative state because of all the brain damage. But after being in a coma for ten days, Nancy finally and miraculously, even though it had impaired her ability to speak, she was able to start talking again and functioning as a normal human being. So she did pull through.
The doctors pretty much thought it was a miracle considering the severity of her injuries. But of course the side effect is that when she was finally questioned about the crime, she claimed to have no memory of what happened and no idea who attacked her because the brain damage had ruined her memories.
Are you familiar with the Chris Porco case, Yes, I am. Yes, it's giving me those vibes like with his mom not remembering anything, or if she did remember anything, she didn't disclose it. And she was very much on the side of her son, even though he was convicted.
Exactly and I remember she still supported him even though the evidence against him was overwhelming. And you might recall that many years ago we did a series on the murder of Dreen Picard, who was a bludgeoned to death in a laundry room with a lead pipe, and another victim named Susan affair. Tae was also bludgeoned in the same way and remain in a coma, but she did
survive and wake up. But same thing happened. She said she had no memory of the attack and to went after her, and that would cause a lot of concern because a suspect would later go to prison for the attack, but a lot of people thought he was innocent, and his conviction was eventually overturned, and the surviving victim still cannot confirm or deny if this was the right man.
It's such a catch twenty two because the trauma of it all to experience something like that, part of it would be a gift not to remember, but the other part, it's like you've got this blank slate where this memory should be, and you want to be able to understand who did this to you and the why, And until you put that piece of the puzzle there, then you're not going to be able to understand it all. And so I can understand that it's one of those things
that just goes in a loop in their minds. Any of the victims you just mentioned, right, because how do you deal with not being able to who did this to you? And just knowing that there's somebody out there that did this, and like, what if they come back and finish the job.
Yeah, And that's what happened when Susan Laferte was interviewed on Unsolved Mysteries, because this was six years after she was attacked, and she said, I'm sorry, I still have no memory of the crime. I still don't know who did this. And it's the same thing with Nancy Drake. She was interviewed on Unsaved Mysteries nearly ten years after the crime, and she claimed that she still could not
remember who actually attacked her. So you're asking about the alibi for her husband, Thomas, so he could actually be placed in the church. Shortly before Nancy was found, Nancy was planning to go home for lunch that day, but she phoned Thomas at home saying that she was incredibly busy with the ticket sales, so she asked Thomas to bring her lunch to the church, and there was an associate pastor there at the time who was able to confirm that they overheard this phone call and that Nancy
did ask Thomas to come there. Thomas claimed that he arrived at around twelve fifteen pm. And left at around twelve thirty, and he claimed that when he arrived at the church, he saw a white haired man sitting in a green station wagon which was parked outside, and his story was backed up by another parishioner named Althea Toth, who stopped by the church right before Thomas arrived and
claimed that she also saw this white haired man. So they formed a composite sketch for this man and circulated throughout the newspapers and asked him to come forward, but he never did and no one was able to identify him. And you could say that if Thomas was guilty, then he could have fabricated this white haired man as an
alternate suspect. But we do have another independent eyewitness who confirmed that she saw him, so regardless of whether or not he did it, this white haired man probably did exist.
Yeah, and you've got to wonder why he's loitering in the parking lot. You got Althea saying that she saw him as well, So I don't think that he's fabricated. And I feel like if Thomas was coming to bring
her lunch, maybe there would be evidence of lunch. But I also think that if you were planning on killing your wife at the church when she called you, you would think that, like maybe somebody else around would have overheard your conversation, so it would seem like not a very well planned attack since he didn't bring a weapon, and like, you don't know who overheard that conversation. You just called your wife said you were coming, and that people are actually going to see you there. So it
just doesn't feel very covert. Either. He's not a very smart person the way that he planned to do this or he didn't do it.
Yeah, And that's what's very weird to me is that if Thomas was guilty, the only thing that would make sense is this if this was completely unplanned, because, like I just said, Nancy's original plan was to go home for lunch. Like she did not decide until the last minute, Thomas, can you bring my lunch there? So, as far as we know, Thomas had no plans to visit at the church that night. And it's not the safest place to kill your wife or attempt to kill your wife, because
anyone else could walk in there at any moment. So it makes me think that if he did do this, it would have been completely unplanned and they just suddenly
decided to kill her in a fit of rage. But the problem with that scenario is that there was a morning disc jockey from a local radio station who called Nancy up to discuss the upcoming concert that was taking place there, and they had a nine minute interview, and this disc jockey, Pat Morgan, actually recorded it and confirmed that he spoke to Nancy and Thomas sometime between like twelve fifteen and twelve thirty, and they played this recording
to the police, and according to Morgan, he didn't think there was anything unusual about the conversation at all to suggest that Nancy and Thomas have been fighting or anything. So did they just do this interview and then all of a sudden, Thomas decided to grab a hammer and then attack his wife immediately thereafter.
And like, you can't make me believe that this guy who's just casually bringing his wife lunch, having this chill interview is then going to take a hammer and kill his wife and then decide to clean out the safe. I feel like if he decided, if he all he saw was read and he decided to kill his wife, would he really stick around to clean out a safe.
That's the thing, like they're going to talk about how Thomas was suffering from financial problems at the time, so they tried to push forward the idea that maybe robbery was the motive for the crime, or maybe he took it to make it look like she was robbed by someone else, like it was just an act of misdirection.
But that's the thing about this case is we have a very limited a window of time for the crime to have happened, because Thomas claimed that he left at twelve thirty and the parishioner who discovered Nancy's body claimed that she stopped by at twelve forty. So regardless of whether Thomas or an outside party did this, it would have had to have taken place within a window of only ten minutes.
Yeah. I just have a hard time believing that if somebody had a financial motive to do something that it's like killing my wife for a few thousand dollars, that it's probably in the church safe is the best way to go about getting money to solve whatever financial problems that you have. It feels like a bit of a stretch.
It does. Yeah, and I still don't know if Thomas knew the combination to the safe. I mean, Nancy, for all we know, was maybe the only one who would have been able to open it. So if you wanted to steal it, how could he be so certain that Nancy would even open the safe in his presence?
Yeah, I don't think he could have known. It just feels like an active desperation by somebody who's very desperate. You're coming in, you're grabbing a weapon of opportunity, and you're brutally attacking this woman, and it seems like the primary objective is robbery.
So they did eventually find someone who seemed like a potential suspect. He was a regular parishioner at the church, named Raymond Starr, because they found his fingerprints on the glass window on Nancy's office doors. Ordinarily, that might not seem unusual because he was a regular at the church, so he could have very well left his print at
a previous time. But the issue here is that the window had apparently been washed that morning, so Edny Prince that would have been on there on a previous occasion should have been gone. Raymond Starr was forty years old. He still lived with his mother and sister, and when he was questioned, investigators noticed that he appeared to have scratches on his face, hands, and the back of his neck, and he did really come up with a logical solution
for them. He just said that they were the result of razor blades from shaving and because he had scratched himself. Even though he was told his fingerprint was there, Star denied being in the church on the day of the crime. He provided an alibi, claiming that he left his home at twelve ten to run some errands with his mother and sister, and then they returned at twelve fifty, which would have been about ten minutes or so after Nancy
was attacked. But when Star's sister was questioned, she that she had run errands with him at all, claiming that she last saw her brother at home sometime between noon and twelve ten, but did not see him again until after one o'clock, which, if accurate, completely discredited his alibi. So right in the outset, even though there isn't any direct evidence that Star did this, you do have a fingerprint belonging to him on the window of the office door, and he has a shaky alibi.
I mean, I think the first rule of making up an alibi is you're going to have to check with the people who are supposed to alibi you out and make sure that they agree. And clearly he didn't do that, and it makes him look so guilty because why are you lying? And I'm sorry, razor blades were scratching your face. That's what accounts for these scratch marks, which conveniently are there after you brutally attacked a woman, and it seems likely that while swinging a hammer she could have clawed
his face and his finger prints on the window. That's also really sketchy, given that it was just cleaned, knowing what we know happens in the aftermath, I mean, how many people would have put their fingers on that window in the time since it was cleaned. Does he have white hair?
He doesn't as far as I know. So we do have two alternate suspects. We have the white haired man and Raymond Star. I mean, we have witnesses who could place the white haired man near the church, but no witnesses who saw Star at the church. So there really
isn't enough evidence to make an arrest. I know that when Unsolved Mysteries covered this case, they referred to him as a former mental patient, but I do think that was blown out of proportion because I did some further research and it turned out that Star Yes had spent six months in a mental institution when he was nineteen years old, but that was twenty one years before this crime, and he checked in because he had a nervous breakdown, and he really, as far as I can tell, did
not have any known history of violence. So just because he spent time in a mental health facility does not necessarily mean that he's going to attack someone with a clawhammer.
Just a well adjusted guy that lives with his mom.
Yeah, it's true. He was forty years old in living with his mother, so I don't think he was particularly well adjusted. But they never did prove that he was violent, so I guess that's why the cops were reluctant to move in on him. So you might be wondering, with all these alternate suspects, why they started looking at Thomas.
Yeah, I actually I'm really curious and why they started looking at Thomas.
Okay, well, let's start by talking about the weak evidence against him. It doesn't look like they were looking at him at first, But three weeks after the attack, there was a police officer named Nancy Hutzel, who was guarding Nancy's room, and she overheard an argument between Nancy and Thomas where Nancy said she wanted to go home, but Thomas said that she couldn't do that without the doctor's permission, and this caused Nancy to become angry and accuse Thomas
of not caring about her. Before she said the line quote, how would you like it if I hit you on your habit? And during this time period, because Nancy still had these brain injuries, she was still learning how to speak again and would sometimes use the wrong words, so they speculated that she meant to say, how would you like it if I hit you on your head? But instead she used the word habit because she was still
disoriented and confused. But Sergeant Hutsell thought that, I guess it all depends on the tone, because if she said how would I like it if I hit you on
your habit, then it doesn't mean anything. But if she said, how would you like it if I hit you on your habit meaning head, Sergeant's Hustle took that as a sign saying that she was accusing Thomas of hitting her on her head beforehand, and that she said she was going to do the same thing as him, So she somehow took this as a sign that she was accusing her husband of attacking her, and once she shared this information with her supervisor, they decided to put Thomas under
twenty four hour surveillance and investigate him as a potential suspect.
Again, this feelsiest stretch.
I think if I heard an argument like that, this is somebody who's clearly had traumatic brain injuries. She's not speaking in the way that she typically would, probably not able to form sentences and thoughts in that way, and is probably having to do a great deal of rehabilitation work. And so I think it's all about, like you said, tone and context and also perspective. I think if I heard that, I think she could potentially mean, how would
you like it to have this happen to you? Something like this happened to you, just pointing out what had happened to her, not saying that he then is responsible for what happened to her. I think it's just the
way that she's speaking. It could be interpreted in several different ways, and to jump to she's accusing him of that, I feel like, don't you think she would have told law enforcement at some point if she was miraculously then able to remember the events of that night, that she would just be around this man and not raise an alarm.
Yeah, it just seems like a weird contradiction where it sounds like she's directly accusing Thomas, but she never says that to the police. She still tells them I have no memory of the attack, which is just very bizarre to be that she would not be more fearful that a guy who attacked her is with her in a hospital room. So it does sound like very very weak evidence, a weak hunch to start looking at Thomas as a potential suspect, But they're going to discover some bad things
about it momentarily. Wait till you hear this part. So it actually turned out that once they put him under surveillance, they learned that Thomas had spent the past year carrying on a secret affair with a woman from Fort Lauderdale named Carol Lapatta, who had a six year old son of her own from a previous marriage that had ended in divorce, and Thomas, because he was on the road a lot, had met Carol during one of his trucking runs. He actually like well. Nancy was recovering in the hospital.
He actually phoned up Carroll to say that he was traumatized because of what happened to his wife and that he needed to see Carol and she would travel to winter Haven to spend the night in a motel with him, which looked obviously pretty bad to the police, and in Carol's defense, he did know that Thomas had been married and that she had been the victim of a violent attack, but Thomas had told her that their divorce had already gone through in Nay of nineteen eighty three, which was
two months earlier, but that obviously wasn't not true because Nancy was completely unaware that her husband was seeing another woman.
Being a philanderer does not mean that he's guilty. It's not a good look. Like Thomas is not a good look. The fact that you're calling up your mistress. It's very Scott Peterson vibes, and no one's going to look at that evidence and be like, oh, this really looks favorable for him. It makes him look like this. She's got this blatant disregard for his wife at this time when it feels like you could be by her side, But instead, you're going to carry on this emotional and physical relationship
with this other woman. And I can see how investigators would look at him sideways, because you see a deceptive nature with regards to that part of their relationship and how much she wanted to disclose. And then you find out about a secret affair, and then you wonder, well, what else is he lying about?
Exactly like, you're absolutely right that being a philanderer does not necessarily mean that you're a murderer or that you're planning to kill your wife. And if it was just that, I would cut him some slack. But the next part looks really really bad on him because only two weeks after Nancy was attacked, while she was still recovering in the hospital, Thomas decided to bring Carol and her six year old son from Fort Lauderdale to winter Haven and
had them move in to his house with them. And when Carol noticed that some of Nancy's clothing just happened to be in the closet, he actually said to her, Oh, yeah, she had already moved out. We were already divorced, but she just hasn't collected all of her clothing. And I'm thinking to myself. Nancy is still in the hospital. What is your plan when she gets out and she finds out that there's another woman living inside your home?
Thomas, No, you're coming up like a Jewel kaler right now.
Exactly.
Actually, yeah.
I mean even if Thomas was guilty, Like what was he thinking, Like, do you not are you not self aware enough to know that everyone is going to look at you very suspiciously when you move your mistress into your home while your wife is recovering from a brain injury in the hospital, Like, it's still unclear what his plan was, Like, was he planning to tell Nancy she had to move while she has a traumatic brain injury once she was released from the hospital.
I don't think he under Like the lack of self awareness is perplexing. He doesn't get that this, the optics of this is rancid. You can't be bringing in a woman and her child into the home and lying about the state of your marriage to Nancy while she's recovering from being brutally attacked. It makes you look guilty Thomas Exactly.
Yes, And even if he's not guilty, he really has very very poor judgment because, like we talked about, people like Scott Peterson, they're having like affairs on the side, but they're not bringing in their mistresses. Is to move into their house while their wife is missing.
No, they just ended the life of his wife and so he could eventually transition to having the mistress there full time. So Scott Peterson has his own thing going, but like I wonder if he's responsible. Was his objective to end her life? And it's like, oh, this is really disappointing because she lived, and now I can't do
this guilt free. And now I've got a kind of finangle my way around this situation with a living wife who's recovering in the hospital and this mistress who I was planning to be with if that was the case.
Exactly Like up until that point, I wasn't seeing much in the way of evidence or a motive for Thomas to do this. But now it's appearing that this was his original plan, that he wanted to kill his wife. He was going to move his mistress and her son into his house. But because she wound up surviving and is still in the hospital, that's still that threw a monkey wrench it into everything. But he's still not altering his original plan.
Yeah, this just seems like a really horrible plan. And I remember saying earlier this is either somebody who's just not that smart because of the way that the crime was committed and people being able to put him there physically, and knowing that the most likely suspect is typically somebody close to the victim, and they're going to look at the husband. It wouldn't have been a smart plan. And then to carry on with your mistress like this, it's
like you're just tempting fate with investigators. You're just asking them to investigate.
You, exactly like they never even thought about investigating him until they saw this. And of course, once they find out that he's cheating on his wife and moving in his mississ new HER's home, they completely forgot about the white haired man. They completely forgot about Raymond Starr, even though there's a fingerprint placing him at the scene, and now they're putting all their focus on Thomas. And in Carol's defense, when she found out that he was lying
about this, she instantly broke it off from him. She's pretty much like Amber Fry in the Scott Peterson case, where once she learns what kind of man she's hooked up with. She wants nothing to do with him.
I really felt bad for Amber during the initial coverage, like I remember being a kid, and like everyone was coming down so hard on her. It was like the same era as like people coming down hard on Monica Lewinski, very much like blame the woman rather than put the blame where it should be, squarely on the shoulders of the man who is married. And I now I think that Amber Fry's being treated in a completely different way, and people are like celebrating like her bravery and coming
forward and doing what she did. And I think she was very brave, and it's great that the mistress in this situation once she was made very aware and like, yuck, can you imagine finding out through the person you've decided to bring your child around has just completely lied about this situation is actually married, their wife has been attacked, and instead of being by her side, he's carrying on with you, Like I wouldn't be able to deal with that.
So definitely not. And yeah, history is really treated Amberfry quite well over the years and put her in a very favorable light. And thankfully for Carol, this was ninety eighty three This was before social media and the internet, and even though it pretty much only got coverage in Florida, didn't it wasn't like a worldwide story or anything. So she came out of this pretty unscathed, though I'm sure she kind of lost her faith in men a bit.
And if that wasn't enough, investigators started looking into Thomas's financials and discovered that he was suffering from some problems, as he had recently been laid off from his job as a trucking trucker's assistant and did not have a lot of money and was unemployed at that time. And sure enough, investigators would soon discover that only two months before Nancy was attacked, Thomas had taken out hey ten
thousand dollars life insurance policy on her. The life insurance agent confirmed that both Thomas and Nancy were in the room when this happened and it was a mutual decision, but when they asked Thomas about it for the first time, he lied and never mentioned the life insurance policy, and this was pretty much when they decided this is our guy. So he was finally arrested and charged with attempted first
degree murder. They also decided to charge him with armed robbery due to the fact that they believed that Thomas stole the cash and the checks which were missing from the church safe, and that Thomas had stolen them after he attacked Nancy. But that was a bit more problematic because they never did recover of the checks or the money. They did turn up one hundred dollars in cash inside the residence, but Thomas claimed that this was money that the church had donated to him to help raise money
for Nancy's recovery. But they were never able to conclusively prove that Thomas stole anything, but they still wanted to throw the book at him, So that's why he was hit with attempted first degree murder and armed robbery.
I mean, it wasn't like he stole a large amount of money, but I mean at the time, three thousand dollars could have been substantial, Like wouldn't we have seen him pay down some bills?
Yeah, as far as I know, he never did that. So and they never found any evidence that he was stealing the money, so they never were able to conclusively prove that he stole anything. So following his arrest, Thomas was interrogated by the police without an attorney president, and he did mention that, yes, at the time, my marriage to Nancy was on the rocks because she had been devoting so much of her time to the church and we were considering a separation, and that's why I was
carrying on this secret affair with Carol. I was going to have her moved in if the marriage to Nancy ultimately didn't work out. And he also, like I said, he denied knowing about Nancy's ten thousand dollars life insurance policy, but he also said that he had another job offer lined up after being laid off from his job as a trucker's helper, so he didn't really have to worry about anything financial because he was soon going to have
some new income coming in. And during his interrogation, he was asked about his affair and Thomas said the line quote, I already hurt Nancy. I don't want to have to hurt Carol too, and police took this as a sign as an admission that he'd attacked Nancy, but Thomas always maintained that when he used the word hurt, he meant
he had hurt Nancy emotionally by cheating on her. Thomas also told the police that he had dreams of Nancy calling out to him and saying, quote, no, Tom No when asked if he had attacked her, and when police asked if Thomas attacked her, he replied, quote, I don't know, I could have done it, not like that, which police used as incriminating statements, him using the word hurt and saying that I couldn't have done it not like that, and they would use these statements as evidence against him
at the trial, as well as the statement from Sergeant Hutsle that she had overheard Nancy say, how would you like it if I hit you on your habit? But when you look at it, even though Thomas looks like a jerk, like cheating on his wife and having his mistress move into the house, there really isn't much in the way of actual evidence that he did this. All you have are these allegedly incriminating statements that Nancy and
Thomas supposedly made, which they maintain were misconstrued. So you're looking at this and you're like, well, there really isn't a lot of evidence to actually take him the trial here.
I mean, the statements do sound a little bit incriminating, but again, it's open to interpretation, and it doesn't feel like there is a lot of evidence. The guy's clearly adsure, and I don't know if his philandering ways and his inability to clearly empathize or to just be self aware and to understand how he's going to be perceived are the same thing as him being guilty. I just feel like we would see some evidence of him trying to pay off things with that money. I think there's a
possibility that he's responsible. But seeing Star with the actual physical evidence on his face of the scratches, did not you know, making up an alibi and then having his fingerprints on that window, Why are you denying being there? Why are you trying to construct an alibi? So I just think that, Yeah, Thomas looks like a great suspect initially, it's just a pretty weak case against him.
Yeah, That's what's so complicated about this is even with like Scott Peterson, even though the case against him was circumstantial, it was a lot of circumstantial evidence, so it was reasonable to conclude that he murdered his wife an unborn son.
But I'm just not seeing it here. And what further complicated the whole situation is that when Nancy made a full recovery and was finally released from the hospital, she still stood by Thomas like even at though she found out that he was cheating on her and tried to move his mistress into her house, she said, well, I don't like that, but I know my husband, and I do not believe he's capable of violently attacking me. That's
not the man I know. And even though she said she still did not have any memory of the attack and could not say for certain if it was if it was Thomas who hit her with the hammer, she still stood by him and would visit him in the county jail after she left the hospital, and still stood by his side when he went on trial.
It's so hard in those situations because how difficult would it be to grasp on to somebody that you loved and trusted could do that to you. That realization would be really hard to stomach and to accept and to
kind of integrate into your way of thinking. So I could understand if somebody would be in denial about the person that they were with and their ability to carry out a violent attack against them because everything that they believed to be true prior to that, it just it completely evaporates that isn't the person that you thought that they were, and you were completely deceived. And that's a
lot for somebody to accept. So I think that sure, it speaks to the fact that he could be innocent, But I also think that it could be like Christopher Porko's mom, where it speaks to even against overwhelming evidence against her son, she refused to accept that he could do that to her. It was just too much for her.
It's true, it is possible that Nancy is in complete denial and that even though she knows that her husband is not as nice a guy as she thought, she still thought he was incapable of murder. But I'm sure that's good for optics when you go to trial and the person that you're accused of attempting to murder is actually like still by your side. So I'm sure that sort of thing is going to look good for a jury.
But prior to the trial, Thomas's defense attorney approached him and said that the prosecution wanted to make a deal and because there wasn't a whole lot of evidence against him, the case was rather weak. The prosecution said that they would allow Thomas to plead guilty to the lesser charge of grand theft in exchange for dropping the attempted murder and aggravated robbery charges, which meant he would only spend a couple of years in jail in prison at the most.
But Thomas turned down the deal and maintained that he was completely innocent and was not going to plead guilty and serve time in prison for a crime he did not commit. And at the same time, this does look like in favorable for Thomas that he's turning down a very weak sentence to potentially spend the rest of his life in prison. But it also doesn't make the state look good either. When you're thinking, well, we think you're an attempted murderer, but we're going to let you plead
guilty to a much lesser charge like grand theft. It's like you attack someone with a hammer and you're going to prosecute him for allegedly stealing like a couple thousand
dollars even though you can't conclusively prove it. I always get alarm bells in cases like this when the prosecution before a trial offers these very sweet plea deals, because it pretty much shows that they don't have a lot of confidence in their own case and that they're not entirely sure that they're going to get a conviction at trial.
Shows how much they want to win and how weak their actual case is, because you wouldn't be pleading out to a grand theft on an attempted murder case where somebody used a claw hammer on their wife. Potentially, you just wouldn't do that unless you had nothing to really string it together. And by the sounds of all the evidence you've told me, they've got a pretty flimsy case.
They do, yeah, and it's almost like, yes, if he takes the plea deal, it still counts as a win for the prosecution. But it doesn't look good that you're letting a guy who attacked his wife with a hammer walk out of prison after only a few years on a lesser charge. So that made alarm bells go off on my head and makes me think that maybe when they saw that he had a mistress who moved into his house they learned about the life insurance policy, that maybe they just got over zealous and said, this is
our guy, we have to charge him. And it was only after the fact when they realize we really don't have all that much evidence and we may not actually win this case. So I think this would be a good time to bring an end to Part one. But join us again next week as we continue our series on the attempted murder of Nancy Drake.
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail Like 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 signed up with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars tier tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in which I talk about cases which are not featured on The Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon, and if you join our highest tier tier three, the
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So I want to let you know a little bit about the Jewels and Nashty Patreon, so there's early ad free episodes of The Path Went Chilly, Wet, Pathwent Chili minis, which are always over an hour, so they're not very mini, but they're just too short to turn into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those, so we hope you'll check out those patreons.
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Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers comedy,