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Good evening. In the quiet town of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, the idyllic calm of nineteen seventy eight was shattered by a series of brutal murders. Carol Beavers, of Vivacious High School junior and her mother, Clementine became the unsuspecting victims of a heinous act of violence that left the community reeling For six months, the case went cold, fear gripping a town unaccustomed to locking its doors. Then another shocking
murder occurred, tying the threads of horror together. A Monster in Mount Pleasant delves into the unraveling of this dark chapter. Drawing from years of meticulous research, The story reveals not just the pursuit of justice, but the profound emotional scars left behind, from the shattered dreams of a bright young girl to the lifelong grief of families torn apart. This book captures the deep humanity behind the headlines. This compelling narrative is told through the eyes of a classmate of
Carol and the murderer, now a federal judge. The author unearthed the societal cracks that shape both the victims and the perpetrator. It's a haunting journey into a community forever changed by tragedy, where resilience and the quest for truth stand as testaments that those lost too soon. The book they were featuring this evening is A Monster in Mount Pleasant, A Story of murders and Justice, with my special guest author CJ. Williams. Welcome to the program, and thank you
very much for this interview. CJ. Williams.
Thank you for inviting me to do this interview here today. I look forward to it.
And congratulations on this book, A Monster in Mount Pleasant.
Thank you. I'm happy to have finally got it accomplished for all these years of thinking about it.
Tell us of your connection to this area, this Mount Pleasant, and also to this story. Tell us how you came to be and wanted to be the author of this book, A Monster in Mount Pleasant.
I'd be happy to so. I grew up in Mount Pleasant, small town eight thousand people southeast Iowa. Pleasant quiet little town back in nineteen seventies, and I grew up there, and it was a safetown back in those days. The last time there had been any murder of Mount Pleasant had been back in the nineteen forties. It was policed by a small police force, eight manned police force. The chief of police was guy in his late twenties who had no police training really and didn't really need it
in a town that size. But in the course of about six months, one of my classmates was brutally murdered, raped as she was dying on the garage floor of her house. Her mother had been shot and killed first during the assault. The crime was unsolved for six months months the town was in terror. Six months later, a waitress at a restaurant where I worked as a dishwasher was brutally beaten to death in the early morning hours
and died a few days later in the hospital. It turned out that the perpetrator the murder of all these women was a classmate of mine, a year ahead of me in high school, who had his own kind of sad story. But I lived during that time period. I lived during those murders, and it was a shock to the community and a shock to my family directly. I knew Carol, she was a classmate of mine. I wasn't real close with her. My older brother was closer, but
our families were close to the Beavers family. Carol Beaver's her mother, Clementine Max Beavers, her dad ran a small grocery store in town where we shopped, and everybody knew Max and Clementine. It was a shock in that sense. It was a shock that my mother, who was a newspaper reporter and edited and photographer at the time, was recruited by the Bureau of and Criminal Investigation to come and take photographs at the scene. That was common back then.
Police forces didn't have cell phones back then with their own cameras, and taking photographs in the dark and so forth was a talent, and so they would call upon the local newspaper photographers come out and take photos of crime scenes. So my first knowledge of the murders of the Beavers was when I woke up at about five am and found my mother out in a living room with my father and a couple of friends, drinking and crying because she just got back from taking photographs at
the murder scene, and so this at home. And then it got even worse when Monte Seeger, the high school boy who murdered all these women, was later evidence was suppressed and he wasn't prosecuted for many years later. And so all this happened at a very formative time in my life life when my safe cocoon of a little town of Mount Pleasant was shattered. Everybody was in fear, the complacency, the security that we used to have was gone. And then you had, on top of that the frustration
that you couldn't do anything about it. And then you have the frustration of the legal system seemingly failing to hold this man accountable for the murders he committed. Had a huge, huge influence on me, a huge influence on my twin brother. He later became a police officer. He died in line of duty about three years ago. And then I think it led me to get into law enforcement and ultimately become a prosecutor and now a federal judge because it had such an impact on our lives.
I think my brother and I both felt like we had to do something. I think that influenced us in our futures.
Very interesting. Let's get to your description of Clementine, Clementine pardon me, and Max and Carol. You say Carol's almost like an only child, just because her other siblings have already moved on, and she was conceived when she was when Clementine or Clementine pardon me, was forty two years old.
So just tell us a little bit about Max and Clementine and Carol, and a little bit about what was happening in their lives October twenty eighth, just previous to October twenty ninth, nineteen seventy eight.
I'd be happy to so. Max, a World War Two veteran, served in the Navy, and it was in the Navy where he suffered some hearing loss. He and Clementine, who was working in a post office in a small town near Mount Pleasant, had met before the war and then got married during the war. A good Catholic family. They had eight children. Carol, as you mentioned, was the last of eight children, and children were spread out over many years, so her oldest brother was some twenty years older than Carol.
But so in nineteen seventy eight, Carol was the only child left at home. Most of her siblings were around town. A couple out of state, but most of his siblings were around town living nearby. Every Sunday morning they went to Mass at the church. Max was well known in town. He was just assault of the earth kind of guy. Back in those days. He would allow people to have credit accounts at his grocery store, and so if people couldn't pay for their groceries, they could buy groceries on credit.
He would often write off debts that poor families had so they can make sure they could eat. He and Carol liked golf, and so they were known to golf and father daughter tournaments the local country club. Clementine was a stay at home mom for most of the part, but she also helped out at the grocery store at the time as well. Just a real sweet family. Carol was bubbly, energetic. Her locker in the high school was in the same hallway as mine, And what I remember
most is her constant laughing and giggling. She had a very unique, infectious laugh, and she was a very bubbly person and cheerleaders one might imagine with some kind of somebody with that kind of personality and they're just a very sweet kind girl. Her aspiration one day was to be an architect.
You write about the home that the Beavers lived in, and also the practice at that time in small town America that they would leave the doors unlocked, and so people were very trusting in those days. Tell us about the situation that enabled this person a person to sneak into this home.
Sure, I mean it's ironic in a way, because Clementine was a little bit different from the typical Mount pleasanter back in those days. So I remember, we never locked the doors to our house growing up. Nobody did. Really. We would leave our cars in the driveway with the keys in the ignition because it was just easier that way, and if you needed to move cars around, people could
do that and things went untouched. There just wasn't any burglaries, thefts, that kind of stuff really to speak of in Mount Pleasant in those days. Clementine was a little bit different. And Clementine had a routine. Max always got up five am or earlier in order to go into the grocery store to start the baking, and so he went to bed early every night, usually around eight thirty, and he
would go up to bed. Clementine liked to watch the nightly news, and she would stay down in their basement furnished. They had built a little bar down there, and it was a kind of a TV room, if you will. She would stay downstairs and watch the news. And then it was her routine every night when she came up after watching the news to go to bed, that she would lock the doors to the house, which was very unusual, but that was her routine. On this particular night. The
murders occurred sometime between nine ten o'clock at night. Clementine was downstairs. Clementine, I'm sorry. It was downstairs watching TV when she was murdered, And so it's interesting, ironic. Had she had this taken place an hour later or so, Clementine's schedule would have counted for her locking the door, and the money secer would not have been able to gain entry to the house. Any other house on that block you probably could have gotten into, but not the
Beaver's house. But on this particular night, you struck before Clementine, in her normal routine locked up.
You write about that he likely, this perpetrator likely might have seen her Clementine watching TV. He came into the basement. You say that he likely heard some noise upstairs, but decided to go into the basement. Clementine unaware. He attacked her from behind, shot her in the back of the head. Tell us what happens, and where is Carol at this time? And where is Max at this time? Tell us what happens with this perpetrator and after this initial attack of Clementine.
Sure, and so part of this is based upon the forensic evidence, the circumstantial evidence, my years of experience as a prosecutor and as a judge kind of piecing things together. And part of it's based on what Money Seeger himself told me. I interviewed Money Seger three times in the prison and Moosa, Iowa, and he, for the first time confessed committing the Beaver's murders to me. His version is one where he claimed it was kind of a spur
of the moment, accidental kind of thing, premeditated. I don't buy that for a number of reasons. So here's what I think happened. Explain why I think it happened that way. The basement had small basement windows that you could look through, and Clementine and Carol were both downstairs watching TV for
a while when she goes upstairs. Sometime around nine o'clock, she was trying to get a hold of a boyfriend that she had been dating and they had split up, and so she was trying to make a call to him. Clementine stayed downstairs, and so I think that Monty was outside casing the place. He was looking through the basement window. And it was when Carol separated from Clementine that gave him his opportunities strike and the best opportunity to kill
them separately. Max In the meantime, I had gone to bed at about eight o'clock, between eight and eight thirty, he had gone to bed and was down the hall upstairs across from Carol's room, and Carol was in her room listening to the radio and trying to call a friend of hers, trying to locate her kind of ex boyfriend at the time when Monty entered in through the garage unlocked garage door. From there he entered into the kitchen from the garage immediately to the left of the
stairs going down to the basement. He snuck down the stairs, came up behind Clementine, put the rifle twenty two collars or bold action rifle, put it up against the back of her head and pulled the trigger. The way this rifle operated was it was a manual feed, meaning he had to pull the trigger and then he would have to pull the bolt back, which would have ejected the showcasing from that first shot. He would have then had to have loaded another bullet and then push the bolt
forward in order to discharge firearm again. No shell casings were found anywhere in the house. That tells me that he was careful enough to pick up the shell caseinges after a shot, which tells me this is somebody who's thinking things through. No fingerprints were found anywhere in the house, which tells me he was wearing gloves at the time. So he kills Clementine goes upstairs. Carol had heard a shot and heard something, and she came running down the
hallway to figure out what the loud noise was. I don't know that she knew it was a gunshot, but she came running down the hallway as Monty was coming up the stairs into the kitchen. They met in the kitchen. At that point, Monty raises the barrel of the gun and points to that Carol's face. We know this because she has a defensive wound. The first shot goes through her left arm and acrossed her cheekbone and out the side of her head. It didn't actually enter her skull,
but it was enough to knock her down. According to the pathologist, the blow from that shot, Monty would have you believe that the gun just accidentally went off. That makes no sense. Carol would not have had the defensive move of putting her hand in front of her face if the gun burl had not been pointed at her, and she likely recognized Monty they had a speech class together. Once she was down, Monty came up to her and
then put the gun behind her left ear. I'm sorry, you're right here, and put another bullet into her head at that point. Then he dragged her out to the garage, stripped her pants off of her, pulled down, pulled up her shirt, pulled down her broad and raped her as she was dying in the garage. So he shot her twice in the kitchen. As I just related, no shewcases were found there, which means he was careful enough to pick up the shellcasings from those two bullet discharges as well.
All this time, maxis asleep down the hallway. I remember he had hearing loss from his service in the war, and he was asleep and so he didn't hear any of this and slept through the entire thing. He wakes up a round one thirty in the morning. His Clementine is not in bed next to him, which was unusual and of course, and so he went out to investigate and first found Carol. He saw a trail of blood
from the kitchen leading out to the garage. His initial thought was as somebody cut themselves really badly somehow and probably went to the doctor. And he went out to the garage to see if the car was gone, and that's where he found his daughter. I felt her, she was cool. He goes back inside. He calls the police. Back in those days, there was no nine one one, so he tries to dial the police using the long number. He's off by a diday. He gets a stranger in town,
mumbles out some words. The stranger gets enough to understand that the police are needed at the Beavers home and tells Max he'll take care of it. And then Max goes downstairs to find Clementine and finds her dead downstairs. So that's how Max came to discover the murder of his wife and his youngest daughter.
But Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Yes, this is an incredibly vivid scene that you create in this book. The idea that a sergeant Duncan arrives immediately and doesn't know the particulars yet, and he's in a dark garage. He hears a voice. He discovers Carol's body and all the blood, and notices that her clothes are missing from the waist down. But he when he gets his person, he urges this person to come out of
the garage. This person is disoriented. Max is completely disoriented. He has stunned. His arms are flailing away. You say, spastically, tell us what happens in this incredible vivid scene.
Yeah, I mean imagine this. So you're you're an officer in Mount Pleasant who has never encountered violent crime like this ever. You're one of two officers on duty. It's the middle of the night. The only other officer is a rookie who just joined the police force six months before, and you're called to this horrific scene where all you know is that somebody's been shot. That's the most that Max is able to convey to this other person that got conveyed ultimately to the officer. So So shows up
to the scene. He has a flashlight, he has a three point fifty seven magnum revolver, pulls a revolver because he sees movement, as you mentioned in the garage, here's something in the garage. He can see enough into the garage with a flashlight beam to see a body, half naked, body on the floor with blood. So he knows things are bad and he calls out to whoever's in the garage to come out with their hands up pall several times. The officer related this to me. He's scared to death
at this point. He has no idea what he's going to encounter, and his finger is on the trigger of the revolver of the three point fifty seven magnum. When Max finally starts to come out, a Max is worrying. He's disheveled, his hairs dishevel He's got a pajama top on. He had managed to pull some pants on, but he is in shock and he's mumbling incomprehensively. Hands are as you said, spastic moving all about. According to the officer and it's dark, and so, as the officer described it
to me, Max wasn't stopping. He ordered Max to stop once he came outside, he wasn't stopping. At the last second, the officer recognizes Max and recognized him from the store. Anybody who knew Max knew he wasn't anybody to be afraid. He wasn't violent, and so the officer immediately released the tension he had on the trigger. He said he came very close to killing Max that night. About that time,
the rookie shows up. Max's oldest son shows up because Max had managed to call his son as well, and so the officer puts Max in his son's care, tells the rookie to go around back the house, and then the officer makes the brave decision to enter the house because he's convinced the killer is still inside. Max mumbled something about his wife, and so the officer enters the house alone in the full belief that the murderer is
still inside. He goes through the top floor the main floor of the house and finds nobody, So now he has to go in the basement. There's only one way in and one way out of the basement, and so as he's going down the basement stairs, he's convinced that he's going to encounter the murder down the basement, and yet he carries on. He can hear some dripping coming from the basement. He doesn't know what the dripping is.
He discovers the dripping sound as the dripping of blood coming from Clementine's head into a puddle beneath her as she lay slumped over in the chair. Ultimately, nobody else is found in the house. Ambulance spears personnel arrived soon after.
Now you say that the murders sends shock waves through the mount pleasant, Well, that's of course that would happen. But also you talk about the autopsy of when it reveals and some of the things that like the locket that the heart shaped locket that seems to be missing. Just tell us what the autopsy reveals about the crimes committed.
Yeah, So the autopsy showed Clementine was killed probably fairly instantly. She had a single gunshot, one in the back of the head. It was a twenty two Cloiber rifle. And what many people don't understand is a low velocity twenty two caliber seems it's a very small bullet in many ways, you know, maybe three times the size of a babe. It can be very deadly because it doesn't have enough velocity to exit. And so what happens when it goes into a cavity like your orso or your head, is
it will bounce around inside and tear things apart. And so that's what happened when it went into Clementine's skull. It bounced around inside her skull, scrambling her brain and ultimately lodging right in front of her teeth. Harold again, I described the wounds on her. She had been raped.
They did recover some semen. In those days, DNA didn't exist, DNA testing didn't exist, and so what they were able to tell was blood type and that the person was a secret So some of us secrete blood in our saliva, in our body of fluids, sweat and so forth, and some of us don't. So if you, if you had faint amount of blood that comes out in those circumstances,
you're coldest secretor. And Monte segu was a secreter. He had sucked on Peril's nipple and from that saliva they had obtained his blood type as well as from the semen, but that's all we had back in those days. It was just blood type. He had a blood type that as a screeter, basically thirty five percent of the population could be could be the perpetrator. So it didn't give a lot of leads to the police. And so there were no fingerprints recovered from the scene. There were some oddities.
So there was some unknow fingerprints on the hood of the car that was right next to Carol where she was raped, but that could have been left at any time by anybody. Carol gone out to a restaurant earlier that night, a fast food restaurant, and some high school kid, for all we know, leaned against the car and put his hand on it. There was a stray pubic care
that was found on Carol's clothes. I was later told I did a book talking unpleasant about this book back in April, and the Beaver's family, who were very supportive about this book, came up to talk to me afterwards. And one of the people came up there was a cousin, female cousin, and she thinks that it was probably hers because Carol on her was an older cousin and She and Carol used to trade clothes, share clothes, and so she hypothesized it was probably her puba care that was found.
It was not Monty's because it didn't come back to match him. So there are some stray things like that, but otherwise there was no Despite the closeness of the neighborhood, nobody heard anything, nobody saw anything. There were no eyewitnesses, there were no forensics found at the scene. For the next six months, the police had nothing. They would need an offer for a reward for anybody with knowledge. Nobody came forward. There was a few perhaps sightings or people
thought they saw things, but nothing of any value. So for six months the community was terrified. They had no idea who the murderer was living amongst us. There was no motive that anybody could discern for why somebody would kill Carol and Clementine. They were well liked family. It was a real puzzle and everybody's afraid. Suspicion immediately fell on Max. Of course, he was home during this time period asleep, but anybody again in New Max quickly ruled him out as a suspect.
What does the autopsy reveal regarding Carol's condition? In terms of the sexual assault.
Well, the autopsy did show that it was a violent, violent rape. Her vagina had been torn. I asked Monty about the rape when I interviewed him in prison afterwards, because when I asked him about the murders, he explained shooting Clementine, explained shooting Carol, as I said, you know, he claimed that shooting Carol was an accent to the first shot was an accent. Then once he saw that he had injured so badly, he said he was going to put her out of her misery by shooting her
in the back of the head. I asked him then, so why the rape? And his words to me were I felt like I was giving something back to her she was dying, which is a chilling way of looking at it. When he tells me about killing Clementine and Carol, he really had no expression in his eyes and his face. He told me about it like you'd be describing parking the car. It's no emotion, no remorse in his voice.
All you say this forensic testing, the state of forensic testing at that time, doesn't narrow down the search much, and so this case goes very very cold. What happens in that six month period in terms of the investigation, who comes forward in terms of the lead the investigation, and then what happens to reveal what what happens in the murder of Sue Wheelock.
So the investigation is taken over by what was then called the Bureau of Criminal Investigation now the Division of Criminal Investigation, basically the State of Iowa equivalent of the FBI. It was a police force that was formed in the nineteen twenties in response to Ryan Waves. Back then profession
all investigative force at the state level. And so there was an agent that was out of Brilington, Iowa that came and kind of took up residency working with the local law enforcement officers, staying at the Irish Hotel, a hotel on the outskirts of town. There was a restaurant attached to called the Irish Restaurant. It was the fancy place to eat, the Irish Restaurant. If you were going to celebrate a wedding or birthday or something, you went
to the Iris. It was a fancy restaurant. And that's where I worked as a dishwasher part time when I was in high school. And that's where Monty Seeger the murder of Beaver's. It turns out he also worked there as a short order cook part time while he was in high school, and then Susan Wilock was an assistant manager and ran the lounge, the bar that was attached
to the restaurant as well. It's very likely that the officers were served by her, because they would go and sit in the lounge after investigating the case at night. Very likely that Susan Weilock waited on the officers there. It was on a good Friday that night in the spring of nineteen seventy nine when Susan Weilock was going to close up. The owner of the restaurant, Dave Heaton, and the restaurant closed down. They stopped serving at nine o'clock.
The bar stayed open until about one o'clock and Dave eating a big good night to Susan, and she was going to close up that night. She was alone closing up when she hears a noise in the back kitchen area of the restaurant, back where I worked as a dishwasher. This is about one o'clock in the morning, and she hears a noise and obviously there shouldn't be one, and she had been counting the money from the till and was going to put it in the safe in the
ret in a closet at the restaurant. When she went down to the kitchen to investigate the noise, that's when she is attacked. She was beaten by two weapons glass bottles. Back in those days we had glass leader bottles of soda. He was encountered somewhere in the back of the restaurant and then ran to the front, running from her attacker, where she ultimately went down right by where the bottles are. She was beaten also with a large wooden paddle that was used by Dave to make his famous jam that
he made in a huge vat. Paddle had been used as a weapon against her as well. Dave Eaton shows up the next morning on Easter morning to open up shop on Saturday morning. I'm sorry to open up the restaurant for breakfast. He gets there about six am. He comes in and he noticed there are lights left on that normally Susan would have turned off off. He noticed that Susan's car was stole in the rut in the
parking lot. He came back to the kitchen area and He found her on her face, face down on the floor and a pool of blood with broken bottles around her. He rushed her aside. He touched her. She moaned, but otherwise was unresponsive. Dave immediately calls for the police, rushes outside, waves them down as they arrive, and waves them inside,
and they investigate that murder. They quickly conclude from footprints in the blood that match footprints in the mud outside the back of the hotel that whoever did this had been hiding in a hotel room, had broken into a back window of one of the hotel rooms and been hiding in there before the attack. From the pattern, it was a herringbone pattern from some tennis shoes, and so they had that to go on when they started the
investigation who killed Susan Weelock. Susan was rushed to the hospital course and then ultimately life flighted to the University of Iowa Hospital, where she died three days later.
Let's do this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages now in this investigation, how do they get to Monty Seegers. There is some past experience that people say they'd witnessed in terms of going into this restaurant after hours because Monty Seegers also worked at this restaurant. So tell us how police proceed after this crime.
Yeah, so it's a slow movie investigation in a way. The forensics again are limited, so the footprint that was left in the blood in the mud is a huge clue, and they figured it's an inside job. There was no sign of breaking and entering into the restaurant itself, so they interviewed all of us employees. They fingerprinted us, and they asked us to come wearing what we wore the night before, including shoes, and then they took our shoes
from us so that they could match the pattern. Monty was among the people interviewed, and they made several observations of Monty. First, he had a herring bone pattern on the bottom of his shoes. He also had a brown reddish brown stain on his pants. They seized his pants from him during the interview. Of course, he denied have anything to do with killing her. He did admit that he had gone to the restaurant earlier that night to
borrow some money, and nobody loaned him any money. Dave Heaton was interviewed immediately suspected Monty and mentioned that Monty.
He had found Monty once before in the kitchen area late at night when he shouldn't have been there, and sent him on his way, And so Monty came under immediately immediate suspicion as the murder in this case, based on the shoe print and the pants that they later discovered or concluded that that brown stain was in fact blood that was not matched in Mantes but matched Susan's.
They got a search one for Montes's house, and they searched his house and they found cash that would have been consistent cashing coins consistent with the money taken from the restaurant. The money that Sue had been collecking was missing, and they found other things like iris restaurant match book. They also found some other things that were interesting. They
found a number of photographs of high school girls. Monty had a hobby of taking photographs and gave a speech on it one time in a class, and among the photographs were photographs of Carol. Now there are a lot more photographs of other girls, but Carol was among the photographs they found there. They also saw standing in the corner twenty two caliber rifle. Up to this point all the officers had believed that the weapon used in the house that killed the beavers was probably a twenty two
caliber Saturday Night Special. The reason for that is a revolver does not expand or shoot out showcasings. The showcasings remain in the revolver, and it would make sense you would have a small caliber, a small easily handled weapon you'd use a house, not a long rifle. And so the officer officers had never even thought about the possibility that the murderer used a twenty two caliber rifle. Now, when the officers went in to search for Susan Weelock's murder,
they did not have authorization to seize a rifle. No weapon was used, no firearm was used in killing Susan WIELOCKX. They had no authority to seize that rifle at the time, but they did seize other evidence that was consistent with
Manty having been involved in the Wheelock murder. And so he was very quickly after that charge held in Costy and taken to a jail first in Henry County in Mount Pleasant, and then moved to Burlington, Iowa, because that's where his lawyer lived pending trial for the murder of Susan Weelock. Now, a few months later, officers would go back to a judge to seek a follow up search warrant to seize the firearm that they had seen, because they now thought Monty was a lead candidate for the
murder of the beavers and they needed that rifle. When the officer Gus Hagers, the chief of police and Mount Pleasant, went to the judge to get the warrant for that rifle, the judge didn't think there was enough evidence to authorize the seizure. You have to have probable cause, which isn't a very high standard. But the judge didn't think there was enough even for probable cause to seize that rifle, and so at first he said no, and then Max,
I'm sorry. Then gus Hager's the police chief, said well, there's something else. One of the sheriffs. Sheriff had mentioned to me when we were in the house searching during the Weelock search, he had seen a heart shaped pendant that was missing. Carol had been given for her birthday right a few months before she was murdered, a heart shaped pendant by her mother. She woreked all the time everywhere and it was missing, it wasn't on her body, it wasn't in the house, and police chief said that
the sheriff said that he had seen that in Monty's room. Well, the judge course says, well, geez, that's huge, write that up, And so gus Hand wrote that on the search warrant application. The judge granted the search one at that point, and they seized the rifle. That rifle would later be suppressed as evidence because it turned out the chief of police lied according to the sheriff, he made up the whole statement of the sheriff had never seen a heart shaped pendant.
No heart shape pendant was ever found him on his house, and so courts later suppressed that othernce.
Let's get to the eventual conviction for Sue Wheelock's murder. How they get to that? What was the again, you write about the crucial evidence being the shoeprint, herringbone pattern on the shoeprint. But tell us just a little bit about this conviction. What is the sentence? And before we get back to the police's interest, a new person enters the story, interested in reviving the case and seeing what they could do to convict him for the Beaver's murders as well.
Sure, and so money kind of helps out the governmenting convicting him. Because when he's in jail down and Brillington escapes, did you not his little brother a haxaw blade into the jail. He uses the axaw blade to cut through the bolt to the door, pulling him in his cell. He scales down the outside of the jail and he's on the lamb for a month. Lee's steals a car amidst a number of burglaries, ultimately caught in a high
speed chase down in Arizona. Heavily armed. He had stolen firearms in the various burglaries he had committed, and that's pretty good evidence of guilt. Flight, you know, to avoid prosecution's good evidence of guilt. So when he comes back, he's ultimately extra nited back to Iowa. The county attorney cuts a deal with him and lets him plead to second degree murder. It should have been first agree murder.
Any murder that occurs in the course of committing a felony like a burglary, is automatically first degree Down the attorney cut him a deal. He plays the second degree murder, and he does. He gets a twenty year sentence, so Monty's in prison serving twenty years. In the meantime, the courts suppressed the evidence of the gun and the case goes cold again. In the late nineteen nineties, new DCI agent is assigned to the case, and Maure is kind
of a history of success with cold cases. He jumps back into this case and starts developing new evidence, interviewing more people. They try DNA that DNA exists by them, but it's unsuccessful because there wasn't enough of a sample preserved appropriately to allow a DNA testing, But he starts launching back into the investigation. The interesting side note, the word gets out that the investigations back on. Monty hears
about it. He has a meeting with his stepmother in prison, and he instructs his stepmother to burn a parka that she said had a brown stain on it. There was some sighting of a man with the park of the night of the beavers mur around the neighborhood. She ultimately feels bad about that rule and tells the police about
burning the parka, but it's not recovered. Please also get a letter from a guy named Dennis Cornell who is doing twenty five years in prison in Illinois for having murdered a stockbroker, and that letter says I murdered the Beavers. So Maur and other agents go to Illinois and the interview this Dennis Cornell. Cornell was kind of a friend of Monty's back in the day. They interview with Cornell in the prison and Cornell has all the facts wrong. At the time of day that they entered the Beaver's
residence is wrong, where Carol was killed is wrong. He didn't have any knowledge of the rape, and the officers don't believe him at all. But there is at least that attempt by Dennis Cornell to kind of throw off the investigation, which turns out interesting. But in the end, Mauer keeps going forward the main investigation and persuades the state to charge Monty Segur with murders of the Beavers.
Goes to trial in two thousand. Monty is convicted by a jury, but the Ice Spring Court reverses the conviction. During the trial, the prosecutor had mentioned that Monty had a marijuana grow out behind his house. It comes up because Monty explained at one point that the only time he left the house that night was to go out to water is marijuana plants, and the prosecutor mentioned that the I was spring. Court thought that that was too prejudicial,
and so they threw out the conviction. So Manty is retried and reconvicted in two thousand and one of the murders of Carol and Clementine Beavers was sentenced into life terms of that parle where he is in prison now serving those sentences.
Let's stop for a second to hear these messages. Now, you went through this trial fairly quickly. He didn't testify, but some things were very important in this trial to be able to convict him. Things like his step mother came forward and said that she had witnessed something in retrospect. Now was quite suspicious with that after the Beaver's murders, that he had burns what she thought looked like clothing
in a burn barrel. So just tell us some of the things that really ended up being his downfall in terms of convicted for the Beaver's murders before we talk about your connection. You're connecting with Monty seekers to get some resolution in your mind to what actually happened, because throughout this entire process he denied killing the beavers.
He did. Indeed, in both trials he did not testify, never gave an explanation, and denied having murdered them. You know, the key evidence in the trials really were a number of things. One is his he he had some photographs of Carol. One of the photographs he has of Carol is of her wearing that necklace. Ironically, the yearbook ultimately used that same photo that Monty took unbeknownst to them, as a memorial page to Carol in the nineteen eighty yearbook.
But he had pictures of Carol. He had a firearm that could match the shooting. He had checked out a book out of the high school library on forensics police forensics, including ballistics, and learned that how they matched bullets to firearms, and so he had intentionally used a screwdriver to scratch the inside of the barrel of the gun so that it couldn't be used for matching the bullets recovered from
Carol and Clementine. It ended up not working because the officers recovered other bullets that Monty and his little brother had used when they had gone shooting practice, shooting down in a park, and they had recovered those bullets and then matched those bullets against the bullets from Clementine to show that the gun that Monty had practiced with his little brother was the same gun that killed Clementine, and
that was key evidence in the case. And as you mentioned, his stepmother came forward and mentioned not only the parka that she threw away at his request, but also mentioned the day after the Beavers murder, she observed Monty burning clothes in a burn barrel. By the time she had told the officers that everything had been disintegrated, they did find some buttons would have been consistent with some clothes being burned in that burn barrel, but nothing otherwise of
evidentiary value. So those were the kind of the key pieces of evidence that ultimately linked Monty to the murders and led to his convictions. The defense, of course, focused on Max, and they pushed the theory that Max had killed had somebody kill Clementine because he wanted clept on an insurance policy, and Kerl was somehow simply an accidental victim.
In all this, you right. What's very dramatic is that the idea that he was to be released for and had done his time for the sue Weelock murder by the time of the Beaver's trial finally getting to judication.
Yeah, actually right between, so he's convicted in the first case in two thousand that's overturned, as I mentioned, and in between that reversal of his conviction in two thousand and his retrial, he had completed serving his sentence on Susan Weelock, so he was free at that point. It could have been free. The government moved to detain him
pending trial the retrial, and the judge granted that. But that's how close mind he came to getting out is he had completed his sentence by the time of the retrial, and only coret order holding him pending trial kept him from being free.
With this book, you write, as a federal prosecutor, you prosecuted almost one thousand murder cases or involving a thousand murder defendants. In your Like many people, you write, you were always interested in the motivation for Monte Seegers to commit the murders that he did. You decided to contact him in writing this book. What was the question that was most important to you to ask Monty Seegers the most.
An important question, of course, is why you know, why would you do this? You know, there was a lot of speculation at the time, and one of the motives for writing this book was to put to rest all the speculation or speculation that Carol must have been sleeping with Monty and there was some type of romantic thing, or he spurned she spurned him, or maybe she was
a dope user like Monty was. There was speculation that Susan Weelock was the same, was sleeping with mont hero was a dope user, and I wanted to put the rest and protect their reputations by getting to the bottom line of why. None of that, of course, is true. Monty didn't have a good answer for why. You know, Susan Weilock she surprised him. He figured he had to kill her, he said, because she was gonna turn him
in for burglarizing the restaurant. But for Carol and Clementine, his explanation was, I was out shooting out street lights. I'd like to see him explode. That night, I had my twenty two. I was walking home from engaging in that criminal mischief. When I was walking by Carol's house, that occurred to me that maybe I should just kidnap her, and I don't know what i'd do, but I'll go in and kidnap her. And then I heard the TV on in the basement, and I thought, well, that's going
to be a problem. So I went down and saw Clementine there, and I thought, well, she's just going to stand in the way, So I shot her. And then I went upstairs and I just kind of ran into Carol and accidentally shot her, and then you know, I just had to put her out of her misery and so forth. So his explanation was unsatisfactory, and as I said, it doesn't match the forensics, which tells me, trained to investigator and prosecutor, that this was well thought out, well
plotted out, and premeditated. And so I wanted to get at the why. I kept trying to probe that with him a little bit. I had, as I mentioned, three interviews with him, and as a prosecutor, I used to do is I used to when I first sat down with criminals and they would talk to me, I'd let
them tell me their story, whatever it was. I wouldn't press them too much, let them give me their BS story, and then I'd go back and i'd investigate the case farther, figure out the holes in their story, and then come back and confront them. And that was my plan with Monty tom Is he took me off a visitors list. He can't just go talk to somebody in prison. They have to agree to it. And he took me off a visitor list before I could go back and confront
him with all the holes in his story. I've concluded myself that the motive for killing Carol and Clementine was this. Monty was the product of foster homes and group homes. His father was blind, his mother basically abandoned him when he was seven years old, along with his little brother or little sister, and Monty was pissed off at the world. He had started engaging in crime as a juvenile. He was going to turn eighteen in the fall of nineteen
seventy eight. He had been held back a year in school, even though he raided as a genius tested as a Genius IQ. He had been held back here because of his problems with juvenile authorities. And he was going to turn eighteen. And in the first interview I had with him, well, we didn't talk about the murders at all. In the first interview, but he said something to me that stuck
with me. He said, because we talked about his past mostly that first interview, and he said, I just figured when I turned eighteen, I was going to take control of my life. And so I think what happened was he turned eighteen three days before he killed Carol. Carol lived within six blocks of his house. Monty didn't have a car. The only car his mother used. His stepmother used to go to work that night, so he needed
to exert at his control. He was now eighteen. He was tired of doing what the state told him to do, living where the state gold him to live, following orders, following instructions, living by the law. He was going to do what he wanted to do, and he was going to show people how much power he had. He had to take power back, and he wanted to do it violently, and Carol was a convenient victim. He was more fixated
on another girl in town. They had a lot of photographs of her, but she lived well on the outskirts of town. He needed to find somebody he could go to rape and kill if necessary, and get back home in time for his blind father to claim that he was home the whole time, and so it had to be quick. He had to be able to do it before anybody would discover his absence from the house, and so Carol, living six blocks away, became a convenient target for him. And I think that's the only reason Carol
was targeted. She had nothing to do with Monty. They had a class together, but she was pleasant to him, but barely spoke with him, And so there was no other motive for killing Carol other than she was a convenient target for him to show that he was going to be in charge and nobody was going to tell him what to do with his life.
I thought it was there might have been some sort of connection with him briefly not being considered such a loner and an antisocial character at high school when he developed this hobby, this photography hobby, and had photographed Carol and and other girls like you say, and nobody thought
it was creepy of him. I just thought it was interesting that the brief moment that he came out of his shell somewhat, that he took photos of Carol, many photos of Carol, but there was no interest from Carol as a result of what he thought was impressive this hobby, this skill of photography.
Yeah, and I talked to him about, you know, whether he had a thing for Carol or not, and he said no, he didn't. He he did say at one point that we exchanged looks to suggest to me that he thought that she might be interested in him. But there was no indication from any of the classmates. Nobody observed him ever asking her out or trying to flirt with her. He did come out of his show a little bit, according to the teacher, when he got into
photography and gave a speech about his photography skills. None of the classmates, none of her best friends, nobody mentioned anything about him ever hitting on her, attempting to ask her out. He didn't tell me he did, so. I don't think it was a case where he felt spurned by her, or that somehow she didn't give him enough attention or something like that. I think it was just that she lived conveniently close to him and somebody that he could rape and kill and get away with it. And nearly did.
You write that this book has been out since February and you have I just mentioned that the Beaver's family had appreciated what you had written. I'll just tell us the response from the book published from people that matter to you, what their response has been.
Yeah, it was all the family that mattered to me. So I really wanted to go into this focused on the family. Wanted to write a book that made the writer or the reader see who these women really were, understand that they were totally innocent, did nothing to cause their own demise, and so it was important for me to have that tone to the book. And I expressed that when I talked to the families about writing the book and wanting to focus on the victims and the case,
not on the murder. I didn't want to focus on the graphic details of the murders themselves. I wanted to focus on the victims and the family, and I wanted the reader to know who these women really were. Family appreciated that and spoke with me at length, gave me a lot of photographs and shared a lot of stories about Clementina, Max and Carol, and we're very supportive about it. I also learned after the book came out that Susan Weilock had a daughter ends up. When she was in
high school, she got pregnant. Her own mother was then remarried living in a small town near Mount Pleasant, had children from that marriage, and her mother was dying of cancer, and so she Susan Weilock, decided to give her daughter up for adoption and went to Kansas, stayed there, gave birth, gave her daughter up for adoption, came back, and then cared for her mother, her dying mother, and her mother's children through another marriage unbeknownst to me, and I only
learned about it after the book came out when I got a call or email from a woman who said that she was friends with Susan's and the daughter would like to come visit with me. So she did and shared her story with me. She didn't find out about her true birth mother until after Susan was dead, but she reconnected with Susan's mother's other family and so now they've been kind of reunited as a family in that sense,
and she's been very supportive. Susan's daughter has been very supportive of getting the word out and wanting everybody to know about Susan.
Yes, you've definitely achieved your goal, more than achieved your goal with this book.
I believe good Good.
I want to thank you so much for this interview. I'm a Monster in Mount Pleasant, A story of murders and justice For those people that might want to find out more about this story. Do you have a website? You do any social media that they couldn't prefer to?
I'm afraid not, because I am a federal judge. I keep I have no social media profile for my own security. But A Genius Book is the publisher. They have a website you can gain access there. I also am on Amazon and so you can pick up the book through Amazon as well.
Absolutely, thank you so much. A Monster in Mount Pleasant, A Story of Murders Injustice. CJ. Williams, thank you so much for this interview.
Thank you so much.
Dan, you have a great evening and good night.
Thank you too,