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You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski. Good Evening, Would You
Kill for Love? True Crime master Ron Francis tells the grizzly story of Alice and Gerald Youden, a loving couple who murdered at least four people and lived happily after while cops try for decades to piece together a petrifying tale of murder and secrets. The appalling details are made even more vivid by the author's familiarity with the wyoming times and places that formed the backdrop of his national
bestseller The Darkest Night. In nineteen seventy four, Alice, a desperate young mother in a gritty, Wyoming boomtown, kills her husband and dumps his body where it will never be found, then slips away and starts a new life. But when her new man's ex wife and two kids start demanding more of him, Alice delivers an ultimatum fix the problem. Or lose her forever. With Alice's help, Gerald fixes the problem in an extraordinarily ghastly way, and they live happily
ever after. That is until two thousand and thirteen, almost forty years later, when somebody finds a dead man's scalp in a place where Alice thought he'd never be found. This page turner by best selling true crime author Ron Francell, revisits a shocking cold case that was finally solved just when the murderous murderers thought they'd never be caught. The book they were featuring this evening is Alice and Gerald, a homicidal love story with my special guest, journalist and
author Ron Francell. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for agreenedness interview.
Ron Francell, Well, thank you, thank you Dan for making time for me. It's a privilege to be back.
Thank you very much. It's a privilege to have you on. This is one, as I mentioned, one fantastic exciting edge of your seat book. Let's get right to the central character, or one of them in this book, Gerald Youden, as you write in a book, give us a little bit of background. He was born in Harvard, Nebraska, a little small town. But tell us a little bit about his life and how it came that he landed in Lander, Wyoming.
Well, Gerald was, as you said, Nebraska farm boy he and all that, and you know suggests really he grew up with family all around in a very small town, and ultimately he was just what you'd expect. He wasn't wasn't particularly street smart, he wasn't particularly book smart. And when the time came, he joined the Navy, did his time during during Vietnam, although he didn't go overseas, and when he got out he was still kind of lost.
He wasn't really sure what he was going to do, and so he migrated west to Wyoming, where he'd were job in, you know, the nineteen seventies, and he settled into work as a basically a glorified janitor and mechanic at a big mine out near Land or Wyoming. And that's where this tale sort of picks up.
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Now you talk about his numerous weddings, so numerous marriages, but you also talk about just how it comes to be that he's married, and what he's impressed with, and this whole courting process you include in this. So tell us about his first hasty marriage as you describe it to Wanda.
Well, uh, he's simply all of his weddings are are quick to fall in love, quick to marry, and really quick to divorce too. All of his marriages, including his first UH scene to be about his need to build a family that he thinks he should have, and he falls deeply in love with these women who ultimately who ultimately just can't put up with his neediness, his occasional anger. There's no evidence he beat any of them, but I think he was just sort of a dufus who couldn't
help but falling in love. Whether it was Wanda or any of the others, he became a three time loser. And simply by the time we see him meeting Alice, who herself is a three time loser, we see his personality of this obsession with a lover and a wife and a family. We see that pretty plainly.
You write about nineteen seventy three, after Wanda takes off after six weeks, he has a landlady named Friend that likes him, and he tells her he's kind of lonely, and soon after he has a knock on his trailer door and it's Virginia. Tell us what Virginia tells Gerald about her situation and the premise upon meeting him and knocking on his door in the first place, the.
Moment when she meets Gerald. She comes to his trailer and she's got an old gun, an old rifle, and it's a gun that has been in her family for some time, an older piece, and she who being chronically in and out of work, she wants to know the value of this gun, possibly to sell it and have a little bit more money to support herself and her
two very young sons. Gerald, who fancies himself to be a little of a gun expert, takes a look at it and determines that some changes have been made that rendered it no more valuable than what it was purchased for decades and decades before, little more than thirty dollars. So the gun itself is a bust. But Gerald, of course falls in immediate love with Virginia, and because of that, as I mentioned before, he simply had that compulsion to have a woman, and here was one standing on his
front porch. Not only that, but she appeared to like guns, which was very appealing to him. So it was, in many ways it's the beginning of the end for Gerald.
Yeah, you write that it all starts off quite well. And her two sons take to Gerald and some of the things he does on their behalf and they're calling him Dad. But suddenly there's talk. Virginia says she wants to visit relatives for a little visit, but doesn't want him to go along. Tell us what happens during this visit to relatives in Philadelphia.
Virginia was, of course, originally from Pennsylvania. She came out to Wyoming as a young girl with her mother. Her mother had recently divorced, but she was an independent spirit. She had been a Rosy the riveter type during World War Two. She liked to skull on the rivers and lakes out there, and she brought that passion out to Wyoming. At some point in their marriage, Virginia determines she is going to go out and visit relatives in Pennsylvania, and
she's there for some time. But when she returns, Gerald senses that the things have changed. She's sort of distant. She doesn't seem to have the same passion for him or for anything else that she had before. What happened out there, we don't know. We can maybe surmise that she met someone that this person appealed more to her than Gerald did, but we don't know exactly what happened.
All we know is that by the time she got back and moved, you know, back back in essentially to her home with her boys and with Gerald, she had changed, and that that leads to ultimately to a separation and then a divorce from Gerald.
You're right that in that divorce though, he you know, he had to give her a child support before and he adopted these boys as while she had asked him to adopt these boys, so he did. It was one hundred and fifty a month child support. But he also put the boys on his US Steel health insurance. And you right that he just considered him himself a chump at that time and was depressed. You say that the sets up for yeah, you right though, that one morning he has a new neighbor and there's a knock on
the door. Tell us who's at the door, and a little bit more about this meeting, and again how much is Gerald impressed with this woman and why, Well.
We need to understand that that Gerald considers himself kind of a John Wayne. He thinks he's cunning, he thinks he's powerful, he thinks he's a protector, and that underlies this this need that he has to have a family to be the protector. So after the divorce from Virginia, she she goes back to back East again. Maybe there's
somebody back there that she wants to connect with. And he's left, as you said, kind of feeling like a chump, kind of kind of feeling like he was bamboozled into adopting the boys and and marrying her and and and in the whole process give her something that she wanted from him that wasn't love, that that wasn't a relationship. And he's sort of licking his wounds when again there comes a knock on his trailer door in this little
trailer park in land or Wyoming. Uh And this time it's his new next door neighbor in a slightly bigger trailer and her name is Alice Prunty, and almost on almost at first sight, he is smitten. Uh he he he tells me that that she is the most beautiful
woman he'd ever seen. And and again we see Gerald in this sort of headlong, this headlong romance before before words are spoken in a sense and uh he he does a chore that that Alice needs, and uh invites her to lunch at a local truck stop and she begins to tell him this this sometimes sad, sometimes sortid the story about her life up to that point, with three marriages and five children, including two that were with her at the time, and he's taken by.
The sadness of it, but he's he's.
Also admiring her even.
As she speaks.
As he explains it, he's simply overcome with this obsession, this compulsion to be with Alice.
The next day, they go fishing and.
She tells them a little bit more of her story.
That the.
Urge to be the protector Kicksie in big time. He sees her as somebody who has kind of had a bad life and suffered, has suffered a lot up to that point, and he believes he can make her better, that she deserves better, and that she deserves him.
Uh So.
The the courtship, I should say that after that fishing trip, that evening, they make love for the first time, and Alice tells him as they as they lay there that she had killed a man and that that he was abusive, that he had taken after her child, the toddler, and was about to kill her when Alice got a gun and shot him to death. Gerald, again so obsessed, kind of brushes it off. He believes the guy probably deserved it. Was an abuser. And this was the time in Wyoming
that was unrooted. People came and went with the oil fields, with the mining, with you know, gas production, with coal. It was a big boom time. So people from all over came for work and sometimes just left abruptly to go home, to go someplace else, to get another job, whatever it was. Today they're here, and tomorrow they're gone, and soon.
People just.
When Alice killed this husband, she although she didn't tell Gerald this at first, she disposed of him, as you noted, in a place where she expected that he would never be found, and then she moved away. In the process, nobody noticed it was this nice little couple that had moved into a trailer park in Cheyenne, Wyoming, were gone
the next day, and nobody thought twice about that. And it's then when she goes to Lander and meets Gerald and then tells him the story, not only the story of her life, but the story of this shooting that she claimed to his self defense. And again he simply bought it. He simply wanted to believe it because he needed to protect her, He needed to protect their children. After all that was part of his mindset.
You're right too that not only is young Eliza with Alice, but also that another son, Michael, because she has five children. Michael moves in and through school. He's interested in pigs for this agricultural young Farmer's program. And Gerald, being this ready made, ready to be a father, built a big pig pen for this new son, didn't he.
Yeah, And let me back up a little bit and say Alice had five children, three of them were school age or younger, and they bounced back and forth between her home in Wyoming and various relatives back east. Times just occasionally became tough for her, and when they did, she sent kids back east. When they got a little bit better, they'd come out or when something happened. So they're bouncing around in you know, different combinations. His son and daughter go, then son comes back, then goes back
to Illin Noi, and daughter comes out to Wayne. Was It was a very confusing element of their family which was clearly in chaos, maybe dysfunctional. So yeah, here this one son in who is school age, decides he's going to be in the four h program at his Wyoming school. And he decides that he'll raise pigs. As you pointed out, Gerald builds him a pig pin on their remote little we'll call it a farm, although they didn't raise anything until the pigs came along. He builds the pig pen.
And at that point life is good. The son is thriving more or less in school. They're raising their young daughter, Eliza. They're in a place that they had always in their short relationship, dreamed of being, you know, a remote farm like place that it was distant from other people, distant from towns, distant from all the kind of observation and observers, and that appealed to them. They just wanted to be left alone. And here they were in this place that suited that wish.
Now Virginia, meanwhile, you say that she had moved east and with the boys and for a new start. But you talk about difficulties with the boys and with I guess this new Jersey and everything that they thought that was going to work out for them. So what does Virginia start to do and what does she start to have and what does she do involving Gerald.
Well, Virginia, as you point out, moves east and has a series of jobs. If she had a relationship with somebody out there. It just fell apart because eventually things are just not working out, and she decides she's going to move back to Wyoming and live with her mother, who was a manager of a local laundromat in this small town of Riverton, Wyoming. It was a sort of sanctuary for her, in a free space where she was
protected and as well, you know, could live cheaply. The little boys, although covered by Gerald's pretty good insurance policy, tended to get sick a lot.
Pretty soon.
Her resources were trained, and that's that's what inspires her to come back to Wyoming. Once she's back, she begins to talk in some you know, in a sort of hinting ways, that she needs a little more child support. It's not that much anyway. It's only seventy five dollars a month for both kids, so only one hundred and fifty dollars that Gerald had to pay. Gerald, for his part, was happy to entertain the idea of more child support. He was he was certainly making enough money to cover it.
And once again, this protector, this urged to be the protector had had.
Kicked in. Okay, he he.
Was okay with who wasn't okay with it is Alice. Alice believed very strongly, almost perversely, that an ex wife should simply disappear. She certainly shouldn't pop up in her ex husband's life in any way. So Virginia asking for more money sent Alice up the wall, and pretty soon Alice is responding to Virginia in a series of sort of grotesque letters where she's very angry and very profane and abusive really and the whole relationship, as it were, just went south very quickly. And uh so there we
have it. There, there, we've set up the conflict. Gerald is not not so concerned. Alice is, uh, sort of perversely concerned, and Virginia is out there angling for ways that you get more money and and actually even considers a legal remedy, which I think certainly enrages Alice even more. Although it's difficult when you read these letters, which which are in the book, When you read these letters, it's difficult to believe that that Alice could be more enraged.
But she was. You write that, and in those letters that she belittles Virginia incredibly, and just to top it off, and the torment and those letters says listen, we're going to get those boys. They're going to treat me like their new mom. And then calls her things like worthless and all kinds of derogatory comments. So this was a psychological torment that Alice certainly knew that she was doing, didn't.
She absolutely it was completely deliberate. She simply wanted not not to just make make Virginia feel bad. She wanted to hallow her out and reduce her to, you know, a pile of dust. The names she calls her, the suggestions that she makes as you point out to say, we will become the boy's family, they'll forget you, we will treat them better than you did, that sort of thing, And it was calculated simply to hurt. Beyond hurt, it
was calculated to devastate. Can you imagine a mother being told by her arch nemesis that she's going to lose her two sons to this evil, profane woman who has every intention of winning them over to her affection. I can't imagine. I can't imagine how Virginia must have felt. And frankly, I can't even conjure up how abusive and how evil Alice could be to say the things she said in these letters, and again they're in the book.
You get to read Alice's letters, you get to see brute vi Ginya's responses.
It's startling, it really is.
Let's fast forward to September nineteen eighty. There is contact and visitation with Gerald, but of course Alice doesn't like it. Alice doesn't want to meet Virginia. Virginia is not allowed on their property, so it's not good conditions. But in September nineteen eighty, Virginia is looking to get some of her belongings back from New Jersey and mentions it to Gerald. Tell us what happens with this mentioning of her need for a trailer? What does Gerald come up with?
Well, I say, she has moved back, of course, from New Jersey is where she had ended up out there. She has moved back to Wyoming, but left a lot of her personal belongings, some of the the boys belongings back in New Jersey and storage. In order to go back and get these things. She couldn't use her dilapidated little car. She needed she needed something bigger, a trailer, and she mentions that to Gerald, and I should point out to your listeners that she and Gerald continued to
have a friendly relationship. There was there was. They would see each other on the street and talk. Gerald would have the boys over for you know, visits, even weekends. His relationship with Virginia was still what we'd say was was amicable. It was Alice who was having a problem. But Gerald. Gerald has been given an ultimatum by Alice, and it is essentially, you take care of this or I'm out of here. Let's go back to Gerald's psychopathy. Here he thinks he's John Wayne. He thinks he has
a job to protect. He also is obsessed with having a family, with having a lover, with having a wife, and here he has one who he thinks is the most beautiful woman in the world, and he doesn't want to lose her. It's pretty clear what she's suggesting to him. So when Virginia talks about borrowing a trailer in order to get her goods from New Jersey, Gerald sees an opening. He claims that he has a friend who delivers hay to him on his little farm who has a trailer,
and he'll ask if this guy lend her the trailer. Eventually, he calls Virginia and says yes, he'll loan you this trailer. Just meet me at this remote site on a country road and i'll fix you up. I'll have the trailer and we can take care of it. And so the arrangement is made.
Part of the arrangement is too, he says, let's double up this trip with helping you get this trailer. But also that the boys like hunting, so could you bring your mom's twenty two rifle? And of course she discusses this with her mom, Claire about this twenty two rifle. Tell us what Claire thinks about the twenty two rifle for hunting. But what does Claire do?
You're right, he tells, Virginia. But the boys like to go out and shoot at cans or you know, birds whatever. So when you come out here into this remote place there, we're gonna be where we can do that. So bring bring that old gun. Remember the gun. It's the same gun that she brought to his trailer for a kind of evaluation of its value. He said, bring that along, and while you're out here, we'll take the boys to shoot some cans. When we'll we'll shoot some birds. That
was another element of it. What causes Claire to question that, and Claire Martin, being Virginia's mother, is that she never heard of anybody shooting at birds with a twenty two. That if they really wanted to kill birds for food, they needed something else. Maybe a shotgun, certainly at twenty two wasn't the right weapon for that. Nonetheless, she's glad that they get the two boys whom Gerald had adopted, and as you pointed out, they called him daddy, and
they had a good relationship with him. They even loved him. They certainly were always glad to see him. So the arrangement is made to go on this little outing and Claire, although she gens the use of that gun to shoot at birds, she buys some ammunition and sends them off to get this trailer and to have a day out, assuming they're going to come back.
You talk about September twelfth, nineteen eighty. The virgin in the boys arrived a few minutes early at the location and Gerald was there, just him, no truck, and Jerald greets the boys, but Virginia asks about the trailer because it's supposed to be there. What does Gerald say about the trailer and why it's not there.
Well, the man who had intended to loan them. He says, didn't have it or was using it, whatever it was, it just hadn't worked out, so he didn't have the trailer. But as long as you're here, he said, let let's go out and do this outing anyway. So Gerald gets into Virginia's station wagon, actually Claire's station wagon that Virginia had borrowed. The boys are in the back. Virginia is driving, and he points the way to a place five or six miles up the road, literally in the middle of nowhere,
where they can shoot and nobody's going to complain. They certainly weren't going to hit anybody or anything any home out there. So Virginia drives out and he points out a place on the side of the road where she should stop, and she does.
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I think before they leave, she expresses some reservations to Virginia, but they're certainly not enough to cause Virginia to think
twice about going out there. Claire herself likes Gerald, She isn't suspicious of him in any way, She just hopes that that Virginia can get what Gerald says he can provide the trailer and questions a little bit the weapon, of course, but but they Ultimately Virginia is intent on going out there and taking the boys because she she likes Gerald's so or they like Gerald and.
So.
As they leave, Claire stands at the door of the laundromat where she's the manager and waves goodbye.
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It's after nine o'clock now, and Claire Martin starts to worry, so she calls Gerald. What does Gerald say?
Gerald claims that that Virginia and the boys actually never arrived. That he went out and waited for them for a long time in this remote spot that they had arranged to meet, but Virginia never showed up. He just figured that she changed her mind or went someplace else. He but he'd.
Never seen her.
So Claire is is a little worried and things maybe Virginia has taken the boys to the movies or taken them out for a hamburger or something.
And she.
First goes out with a friend to visit all the places where Virginia might be. And then soon enough Gerald arrives and he goes with them to search. Now, this is a small town. There weren't you know, that many paces that that they needed to stop and see. But but and they hit them, pretty much all of them, and there was no sign of Virginia. Nobody had seen her and the boys they hadn't even seen her the station wagon she was driving, which of course was Claire's.
So Claire's concern is heightened as as she can't find it, and Gerald, you know.
Is helping.
Apparently the best he can to find them, but again no sign of Virginia. So at some point Gerald decides he the search is over for him, and he goes home. Claire continues their search until a point that the sidewalks have rolled up in this little town and she can she can go nowhere else, and she returns home and goes to bed, hoping to restart her search the next morning.
Now when does she go to the sheriff And what is the sheriff's response to this grandmother, this elderly woman looking for her daughter and the two boys.
Well, fairly quickly as you might imagine. And the response like like we so often see on television and in movies, The police say, well, she she could have just wandered off. She could have she could have gone someplace and simply lost touch. Maybe she does nowhere near a phone. Maybe she took the boys to another town and and just didn't feel like she needed to check in. So they they didn't treat it as seriously as they might have. They treated it as a missing at first. They didn't
even treat it as a missing person's case. They said, you know, just just wait she she might show up. And then if she doesn't show up, you know, fairly soon. Then come back and we'll, you know, put out a be on the lookout to other departments and we'll we'll take a look. But give it time, Claire does. Claire continues her search. She even makes more suggestions to the local sheriff about where they might search. And there again just they've got other work to do.
Uh.
And they know from experience that sometimes people just go away to think or to be alone, and they don't check in and then but they turn up. And then in most cases like this, there no shout play happened. They have just lost themselves in their thoughts or gone to a different town for a while. They're not concerned.
To add to that the theory that the police already have that notion that they have four days after Virginia to boys go missing. A deputy added a note to the missing person report at the Fremont County Sheriff's office. Supposedly a missus Hart had called what did missus Hart call to say? And which prompted the deputy to make an amendment in addition to that missing person's report.
Around that time, just a few days after Virginia went missing, Claire starts to get a series of phone calls and letters from people saying, you know, Virginia was just here in Illinois or Iowa or a lot of places out of state, and she was just here and she got some money from you know, the wire, the telegram. She's fine. She wanted me to call and tell you she was fine. A series of male grams came and other letters purportedly from people along the way to say that that Virginia was okay.
She was just.
Getting some alone time and she she simply.
Was out out and about.
So this this series of good Samaritans were just calling Claire or writing to Claire to say everything is okay, don't worry about it.
She is suspicious, Claire and takes all this information and all these all this correspondence that she's suspect about and goes to this captain Larry Matthews. So she thinks something's compelling. But she goes to him, and what does he say to her?
Well, again, the authorities or are just feel that these kind of missing person's case usually resolved themselves, and in this case they felt no different. Although among the letters that Claire receives is one that purports to come from Virginia herself saying, don't worry, we're you know, we're fine, We're we're just traveling. We just needed to get away,
that sort of thing. But Claire, the language doesn't sound right, the signature doesn't look right, and Claire, Claire has questions about that, and that's what she takes to the to the to Matthews at the Sheriff's department. Matthews sees it differently. He sees it as a letter that has come from Virginia to her mother, and that essentially this case has resolved,
that Virginia is fine. She has just gone and walk about and and she's out there case case not closed because I'm not sure it was ever open, And and he's satisfied that Virginia is fine, even though Claire has serious questions about it.
She keeps pushing and she even gets, uh the Illinois address, So he gets the owner's name and address. And what do they find at this address that this correspondence was sent from in Illinois? Well, and who in Illinois?
He gets exactly, And she while she doesn't do that, she gets the authorities to at least make that make that visit and see right where it is and what it is and maybe talk.
To the person.
Who who supposedly had sent the letter or mail Graham from this place. Illinois authorities are asked to do that on behalf of the Sheriff's department, and when they do, they find a place I believe it was vacant at that time, but it's immediate past owner just happened to be the daughter of Alice Uton. Uh So, now we have the plot dickens uh the the source of at least one of the letters happens to be related to someone that that certainly could have a connection to Virginia.
I wouldn't say that at that point they were persons of interest, but Alice and Gerald certainly had a connection. Certainly, you know, in without much brain power, they the authorities could see that there might be a motive in some foul play there. Uh So they're they're curious about about this and uh and they they continue to look into it. But but really, as as intriguing is a lot of these clues that they find might be, they're never really able to connect the dots.
And so.
Ultimately we see Matthews as the first of a succession of detectives investigators who who pursue these ghosts for nearly forty years, never able to connect these dots. I've described this story before as boy meets girl, boy marries girl, Boy and girl kill some people, and then boy and girl live happily ever after. And that's that's because this series of detectives simply can't connect the dots. Even when Alice and Gerald become clear person's interest. There's no body.
There there, there's.
No weapon, there's no confession, the the the presumption is that Alison Gerald were involved. But without some of that hard evidence, investigators and prosecutors saw the likelihood that, you know, any first year law student could probably win an acquittal in a court of law based on reasonable doubt. If that happened, then they lose their chance to get justice for Virginia and for the boys who who they now assume are probably dead, but they don't even know that.
They keep that case open for that reason. And then, you know, for a variety of reasons. One one detective you know, has to has to put it on the back burner, uh, and some you know there then another one comes along and for a while it puts it on the front burner, and then ultimately must put it on the back burner too. This happens five or six times over that forty years. Meanwhile, Alis and Gerald have moved to Missouri. They're they're living the life they always imagined.
They would occasionally cops pop in and ask them some questions, but Dave Dy've they have a story, and and they're consistent in the story, and the cops go away without much more knowledge of of what might have happened to uh Virginia and her boys. Then they started with I think we see that part of it that we see the investigation going on, this passionate kind of uh a
search for justice by the cops. But we also see Claire Martin, who who I believe is the moral center of this story, this activist grandma who keeps the memories of those of the Virginia and her boys who are her only daughter and grandsons. She keeps it alive for literally for decades. Her persistence, I think, is the kind of persistence that we hope somebody will show if something
happened to us or to our loved ones. Altogether, all of these people are real life symbols of the bad in people, of the good in people in the devotion that in some people.
And so I saw a.
Bigger story here than just a simple murder investigation. Saw I saw a very complex story that really challenged my way of thinking, my way of looking at these kinds of cases.
You write about, Well, we skipped over a little bit, but it's not so important. But it's continuing with the narrative here of the police not seeing things right in front of their eyes. Is the car was discovered soon after because they couldn't really be hidden, and there wasn't much discovered in that car. But you show Claire Martin at that crime scene, showing those police how to search for evidence in that car, it's remarkable.
Well, yeah, they find the car way up in the wilderness in the mountains where it has been clearly stashed. They see no evidence of any kind of a struggle or certainly not a murder, and so they take the car and they literally drop it the toe. Druft drops it in Claire Martin's driveway, where you know she was the owner and they had no reason to keep it. As you might imagine, she's she keeps looking at it, she keeps wondering if there's anything there. She's she's no
more an investigator really than they are. But at some point she finds a hidden stain that looks her like blood, and she immediately calls the authorities and they send a couple detectives out, including Larry Matthews, to look at what she has found, and immediately they understand the significance of this stain and some other material that they found. At that point, the car becomes a crime scene, and.
Suddenly I think the.
Authorities are much more attuned to the idea that this might be something more than just a missing person's case. And again that's to the credit of Claire Martin, who
just doesn't give up. But we see again one of those slips that is going to be important to would be important in any prosecution, and that is that the police had lost the chain of custody by simply dropping this vehicle back in Claire Martin's driveway, even though they later find something in it, Any defense lawyer is going to say, who who isn't who can can attest that
it wasn't planted there. The other thing to understand is that this is before we have DNA, This is before we have computer databases that now helped the cops all they had was some shoe leather investigation.
They had.
Fingerprinting, of course, and they had rudimentary blood typing. So even even if they could, even if they typed the blood in there, it would be.
It would be.
Not not really reliable, because again it was rudimentary. And in this particular case, we have three related people whose blood type might not even be known to begin with.
The cracks in this case, or the breaks in this case, come courtesy of Alice's children, primarily Eliza and Michael. I believe, maybe incorrect, you introduce a again, another heroic character in this a real a cold case detective. They won't let this go, and that's Lonnie to beast or the best in his relationship with Claire Martin as well, contacting her Easter, Christmas, her birthday, trying to keep her updated and really a
touching part of the story. How much this guy really cares being criticized by his own police force and this he won't let this thing go. So tell us about how this break comes about in terms of what kind of information do the children of Alice give to police.
Well, let's talk about Alice a little bit. Alice ultimately has shown in this book to be a narcissistic sociopath. And one of the things we know about people like that is that they need to tell their story to somebody because they're narcissists. They want people to know what they've done and to sort of celebrate it. Let's go way back. Alice has killed a husband and she has disappeared.
She's living for a time in a small town in Wyoming in between mean and working as a barmaid in a roadhouse that's thirty miles out in the middle of nowhere. She has among her kids this twelve year old son.
He's you know, seventh grader. He his job is to drive her out to this roadhouse every night, wait in the parking lot until her shift ended, when she would usually bring a six pack of beer out and probably at two three in the morning, and then his job was to drive her home while she drank and while she shared her beers with him twelve years old. Let me remind your listeners. At some point this this twelve year old criticizes Alice's parenting skills and probably does it in a twelve year old.
Sort of way.
Alice then tells him the story about this man, this abusive man.
That she killed.
So we don't have a mother here unburdening herself of a haunting memory to a loved one. We might have here that narcissistic sociopath firing a shot across the bow of this twelve year old kid, basically saying, don't mess with me, don't.
Tell me I'm wrong. I can do to you what I did to him.
At least that's the way the kid takes it. Fast forward, then we have the kid, not without a lot of detail, just remembering that his mother told him a long, long time ago that she had killed somebody, and that begins to put police on a different track. While they had looked at Gerald very hard, now they could look at Alice for a possible second crime. But this again is thirty some years into this case. We have moved through five or six different investigators, ending up with Lonnie to
Beast at this point. And he has built this relationship with Claire simply because she didn't trust any of the people who came before him. The people who came before him were just fine, They were doing good work, they were very passionate. Claire didn't connect with them, but she did connect with to Beast.
They get Sharon Mack. They track her down in Alaska, and that's ron Holtz's daughter if she never even met her father, but they get her DNA. You talk about the determination perseverance of Lonnie to Beast, and finally other people take up the mantle, take up the I guess the cause because you talk about another an agent, a DCI agent named Tina Trimble, who happens to know the kind of work that and the work that Lonnie the
Beast has been doing on this case. Anyway, we fast forward to August twenty six, twenty thirteen, to an idea that Lonnie to Beast had to search where the children had said they heard that Ronnie Holtz's body was buried.
Well, and the children really had no information like that. They were just they were just presuming. They were seeing that this place might be where Alice had disposed of her third husband's body. Without without spoiling this for your readers or for your listeners.
Rather, this cold case warms up.
When a new director of this particular state agency takes takes the office and puts more emphasis on it than the than the administrators before him, and that releases the the investigators, like Lonnie to Beast and Tina Tremble too to take a closer look and and to spend as much money as they needed to to to solve this case.
And that that really is a break. And all they have to go on are these vague planting memories of these kids who'd heard this story maybe thirty thirty five years before, without much detail anyway, And you know what happens to memories over that period of time is just vague, and so people are making not only the kids, but the police are kind of making presumptions, and again, being obsessed with this part of the story, they.
Begin to look, and they begin.
Look in places that maybe they had never imagined looking before. And in preparation for that again, you bring up the daughter that had never met her father, who has never turned up in any way since nineteen seventy three. No social security records, no jobs, no, he doesn't exist in
the traditional ways. So they're presuming the worst, and they get DNA from his daughter should they find anything, because now we have DNA, This investigation has gone on so long that we've gone from a fairly spare kind of forensics situation to something where we now have the powerful computers DNA and a variety of other forensic sciences that we can employ. And they do that. They bring the whole force of that science and of sophisticated kind of
investigation to this case. And again I don't want to spoil it for your listeners, so I suffice it to say that we now have a much bigger force and a much more trained force out looking to break this case.
It's very exciting to where they finally do this search in this hole, this this hole that they know that people have stuck animals for years and and like you say, they have to bring all of these experts into this, they have to really brainstorm to be able to find out who might be able to do this uh and
this dangerous complex. And of course you're you're digging up a crime scene, and you take us right, the listener, the reader right, you take the reader right into that hole, right into that where Lonnie is again instrumental in this. So I won't give this away. I won't We don't have the time to do this, but I won't give
this away. But needless to say that with all these bad breaks and lack of break in this case for all of these years, that when finally they get to speak with Alice and they have a strategy to apply pressure. What you've been talking about all along is this John Wayne character Gerald. He really does try to come to his wife's rescue, and that is his undoing, isn't it.
It's his undoing. Again, we have a very complex case where two sets of murders might have happened by two separate people whose paths ultimately cross. So the possibility that he did something and that she did something is a tangled web, and that ultimately plays a role in all of this. Again, Ian spoilers, but the I think it shows something that my old football coach used to say
that the harder you work, the luckier you get. And what we see here is a stroke of luck that caps forty years of very hard work by five or six investigators. And that's that's who we hope. Think about it this way. A loved one is dead, It murdered. The killer was smart enough to hide the corpse a far distance from their home, in a dark, secret place where it probably will never be Your loved ones. Friends
and family. You wonder what happened, and you want to believe, want to hope against all hope that they just went off and started a new life, but without a body, without a gun, without any shred of evidence, These detectives have to move on to other cases, things that they could solve today. This is justice now, So they push your loved one's file to the to the back corner of the desk. Your loved one just became a cold case. Now, all of us wants to feel that our existence mattered.
We want to feel that we're going to be missed when we're gone, and we all hope there will be somebody who won't forget, somebody who needs to write that missing ending to our story. We want justice to be done. We don't want our lives to be forgotten. So if you're lucky, there will be the passionate, even obsessed detectives who will pursue this investigation when long after others would have been as their sheriffs, their spouses, their colleagues are
all telling them to drop it. So we want somebody like that who believes in justice, even if it's delayed, And really we want someone who believes in us. So I think that's what we see in this story.
I mentioned before that you don't really get any good stories here. Happy stories, but in this there are some vestige of that moment of elation I won't say elation, but at least satisfaction for something that is frustrated and consume these people's lives for decades. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about Alice and Gerald, a homicidal love Story. For those people that
might want to take a look at this. I know this is a book published by Prometheus Publishing, and do you have a website or Facebook page that they might take a look at. Wrong.
Absolutely, I'm on Facebook, We're on francel. My website is www. Ronfrancell dot com and that's fre n s c E l L. And the book is available anywhere you buy books, from online to real life bookstores, so it should be available anywhere you look.
I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about Alison Gerald the Homicidal Love Story. It is truly a remarkable book, and thank you very much for this interview. Ron. You have a great evening. Hope to talk to you again real soon.
Thank you, indeed, Dan, thank you. Good night,