MARY & BILL: An Ohio Cold Case-Justin Glanville

been solved. Host Producerton Glanville and the sisters of the two victims track down friends, witnesses to the original investigation, and the Columbus Police to understand why the case remains unsolved despite the existence of solid DNA evidence and the fact that police say they have a person of interest. Along the way, the three explore who really owns DNA collected at crime scenes, families or police, and what it takes to bring new attention to a fifty three year

old cold case. In an era when police departments are struggling to attract new recruits. The podcast series that we are featuring this evening is Mary and Bill, an Ohio cold case with my special guest, journalist and host and producer of Mary and Bill, Justin Glanville. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Justin Glanville.

really try to lift up unheard voices. And when I was first starting to work on this series, I thought, Okay, this is something really different from what I ordinarily do. But as I got deeper and deeper into it, I've realized that it's actually not because I'm lifting up voices and perspectives of these two families right that want closure, want answers in this fifty three year old cold case, and working really closely with them to do it.

from out of town. And the next day, when Tom, Bill's room mate, went back home and discovered the bodies, he called back to my mom's apartment and asked for my dad to come over immediately because he had found some dead bodies. My dad of course ran over to the apartment. By the time he got there, it was

a crime scene. The police were there, and my dad showing up the scene so shortly after the police did looked very suspicious, and he was actually taken into custody, put in a police cruiser and questioned as a suspect in the case. And that actually wasn't the end of it for him. He was they tracked him down at college a few weeks later and questioned him further.

the Manson murders. All of these things just kind of added up to this really dark and bloody memory in my parents' past, and I just decided to start poking into it about three and a half years ago.

They had bonded over the French language and culture. Both of them had traveled to France. They liked to be by themselves, talking about brands and French culture. That's why they weren't with my parents partying that night and Bill's roommate. So these were very quiet people and what happened to them was was just the polar opposite of quiet and peaceful.

they were both also strangled. Bill was bound with wire hangers, bound so tight that it was believed that the killer used something like pliers to secure them in place. And then they were both stabbed to the back, Bill sixteen times to the back, Mary twenty three times to the back.

were reportedly, you know, shady characters wandering around. And I should also mention you might be getting into this that there was a serial rapist active in this neighborhood at the time, and the leading theory about what potentially had happened to Mary and Bill back in nineteen seventy at the time of the original investigation was that this was the work of the so called North Side rapist, who would go to women's apartments and gain entry by saying he needed to use the phone or posing as a

door to door salesman. There were no signs of forced entry or struggle scene of the crime in Mary and Bill's case, So that kind of fit with this of this North Side rapist, that he may have gained entry by lying. But what didn't fit and the police kind of drifted further and further away from this theory of the crime over the years was that the North Side rapists did not typically kill or otherwise brutalize his victims. So this was a real outlier in that regard.

taken to Bill's apartment by cab. That cab driver was investigated, but was able to show receipts that he had continued his route later that evening, so he was ruled out. And then, as I said, the investigation really started to focus within those first couple of days on this theoretical North Side rapist. And in fact, the police sketch that was developed was based on women's accounts who'd been attacked

by the North Side rapist. And what those police sketches show is a white man with dark hair and a pockmarked face. That was kind of his distinguishing trait. So that's really where the investigation focused. But I'll tell you Dan, when I first started looking into this, I was really surprised by how quickly the police seemed to have declared

the case cold. By the summer of nineteen seventy, they were saying they had no really good leads and they had basically given up on the case over being solved.

students are out enjoying their Friday night. But still it seems to me a real leap of faith on the part of the killer to think that no one's going to walk into the building and hear something going on. I do know that the police did talk to the other residents of the building. The only person, the only tenant who and I've never been able to find this person, And if anyone listening to this podcast knows who this

might be, I would love to talk to them. The only person who reported seeing anything amiss was someone who came home around ten pm that night and saw Bill's apartment or a jar with a radio playing inside, but did not investigate any further. So that is the only eyewitness account of anyone who lived in the building that I know of, and of course that seems to have been a sighting of the apartment as it was after the murders took place. I think we can pretty safely assume.

that was surprising to me. Yes, I did also find out that there was some DNA evidence in the case, because back in the early two thousands there was a Columbus detective who got interested in this case. So I actually talked to briefly in the show who had lived

in the neighborhood at the time. And remember these murders, got interested in the case, went back into the evidence file and found some good DNA that he submitted to a State of Fender database called CODIS, and there were no hits, and so I knew the case was cold. I knew there was some good DNA evidence, which meant to me in this day and age, when you I've got dead DNA, there's a very good chance the case can be solved because of all the methods we have now.

But then after that, what I did was I reached out to Martha Petrie. So Martha Petrie is the identical twin sister of Mary. I found her very easily just googling around. She was a professor at that time. She's now retired at a college in Michigan, and I sent her an email asking her if she would be willing to speak with me. I knew that if I was going to do anything in depth on this case, I needed to have at least Martha, if not someone also

from Bill's family. Kind of walking alongside me, and Martha did get back to me very quickly and said she would welcome the chance to talk about the case and the title you mentioned in the first episode, their deaths Still Haunt. That's a direct quote from her first email response back to me. I found out later that she did do kind of a background check on me and made sure that I was a legitimate journalist and not sort of a sensationalist or someone just out to exploit

the murders. But she was on board right away, and that's when I thought, Okay, this is there's something here.

to me in person. Of course, I thought this was very odd, you know, I'm not typically a crime reporter, but I've never had a public records request result in, you know, a government official or bureaucrat saying, hey, let me get view these in person.

summary police report for Mary. So in a couple of paragraphs of texts, my dad is named as a potential suspect. And here's this justin Glanville emailing them from out of the blue, sent decades later, wanting to talk about this case. And what they also wanted was to meet with my parents right then and there. They asked me to take to my parents' house so they could interview them, and I said, I don't feel comfortable doing that. I want to at least give my parents some warning. So that's

kind of how that all unfurled. In the early days.

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So we all got in the car, drove to Jackson, Michigan, and we had probably a two or three hour meeting Martha's dining table, and Martha was very open with us about her emotions about the case, how she thought about it. One thing she did tell us was that she really hadn't heard much Dan in the at that time, fifty

years since this had happened from the police. And what she told me later was she decided to move on with her life at some point, you know, she got married, had children, had a career, and this kind of just became a thing that she didn't have the time or

emotional energy to focus on. But at the time that we were reconnecting with her, she was moving into a new phase in her life where she was she did have more time, and she told us that she's always wanted answers, and one of the things she's always wanted most, more than a name, more than justice, is just to understand why why did even though the answer probably wouldn't be satisfactory to a sane person, but why did the killer feel the need to commit crime of this atrocity

on her sister and her sister's boyfriend.

Because back in about two thousand and six, or so the police were really publicizing The Columbus police were really publicizing this case a lot, really trying to get new leads because of the detective that I mentioned taking an interest. So there was a news story that was done and Martha was interviewed and she knew that that DNA had been submitted to again the statewide Defender database, but never

come up with any hits. Now, your listeners Dan probably know that that's not particularly surprising because we're talking about a cold case from nineteen seventy. DNA really only started to be collected at crime scenes as a routine matter in the nineteen nineties, and I think around that same time was also started to be collected from felons. So we're talking about a gap of a good twenty five years between when this crime happened and when DNA started

to be collected. So it's not a shocker that there were no DNA hits. I will say that they have submitted the DNA to some additional databases since then. Then you listeners will learn about that if they listen to the podcast. And the lack of hits in an increasing number of a funder databases points more and more towards something toward a direction that the police seemed to be leaning anyway in this case, which is that they no longer believe that this was a stranger who committed this crime.

They no longer believe that this was a crime of opportunity. They really believe that this was someone who knew Mary or Bill or both. And that's the more that you strike out with a funder databases, the more that you're pointing toward potentially a person who is affluent, who is potentially white, who is not who is less likely to a prior arrest record. Right, So that really jibes with where the police theory of this crime has headed over the last few decades.

because Mary and Bill would have been both dead by the time they started receiving the stab wounds. But not only that the stab wounds were inflicted in a very particular way. The wounds were clustered in both cases right underneath the shoulder blades, the right and left shoulder blades of Mary and Bill, So two groups of clusters right

under the shoulder blades. And that sort of then gets into tip that the police receives in about two thousand and nine that the person who committed these crimes was someone who wanted to punish Mary, in particular for planning to spend the night with Bill. So let me just pause and let that sink in, because when I first saw that, I thought, really, Bill and Mary both came from very religious backgrounds. They both came from very Catholic backgrounds.

Mary in particular, she had one brother who was a priest, she had another brother who was a chaplain. She had a sister who was a nun. So she was a very devout person from a very devout family. And this strange tip from back in two thousand and nine or so said that it was a religious figure in Mary's life who wanted to punish her for potentially considering pre marital sex.

the assumption, where Mary Is ascends into heaven. So more and more the investigation has drifted toward there being potentially some religious aspect of these crimes, and that they were committed by someone known to Marion, Bill, and then finally the strangulation element. The medical examiner who examined these files told me that anytime there's strangulation in a murder case that automatically points to the possibility of someone with an intimate connection with the people involved.

the case went cold. Now a reporter and the sisters of the victims pieced together new forensic evidence, and here from Columbus police who say this case can still be solved fifty years later. Listen to Mary and Bill an

Ohio cole case wherever you get your podcasts. Now. What it's always perplexed me was when the police have this idea that it's someone known to them, despite this religious figure theory that seems a little wild, certainly, but there was certain Protestant and Catholic rivalry in many many cities. But again, to get to this sort of violence is incredible.

in by herself. So if those our accounts are correct, that's a very short window when Bill is alone at the apartment. The other thing that's odd is that Mary herself didn't know she had a ride to Columbus or would be showing up in Columbus until mid afternoon on Friday, February twenty seventh, which is when the murders took place.

So for word to have traveled somehow to Columbus that Mary was coming, if indeed she was the target in that short amount of time between when she knew and when she showed up, is again very odd to me. And who would have known that? Who would have known that she was coming? So there's a lot of mysterious things when you really start to look into the timeline of this case that just really don't seem to add up unless it was someone just very very close to one or both of them.

the building were investigated at that time. But again, the fact that the police, at least publicly, we're talking so much about this Norse rapist being there their preferred suspects back then tells me that unless they were lying about that and that was all a ruse to the fleck from the real direction of the investigation, it tells me that they weren't really leaning toward a tenant being the person who did this. And I will say, this is a building that had a lot of points of entry.

It still does. When I visit the building in episode two, I find out that there's multiple entrances. On the back of the building, there's a front entrance. I talked to somebody who lived there at the time who said the building was pretty much already always open, So certainly the tenants could have been in there without breaking in, but it seems like it might have also been pretty possible for someone who didn't live there to get into the building as well.

Probably not, but I think it does point too. This was a young woman who was apparently very warm and trusting and may have met someone who would have potentially had ill intentions toward her while she was in France alone.

And one thing that's really striking is that from an early stage of my poking into this case, the police were telling me, and this is even before Martha gets heavily involved, that they have a person of interest just from going back through the case file. And they repeated that when I did, when Martha and I did sit

down and talk to them for an interview. What they specifically say is that they don't have a name for this person, but they know that this person is a man, and that there are two other people that they want to rule out before they take additional steps to submit more DNA in the case. So that's when I go down this kind of rabbit hole of really trying to understand the process of submitting DNA evidence in cold cases.

And it's when I talked to James Renner and find out about the Portlite project and these other efforts to bring resolution to cold cases through DNA. It is a maze of regulations and hoops that you have to jump through, and I learned a lot about that through the course of working on this show.

person through forensic genealogy. What I later found out is that and there's a big asterisk here, which I'll get into after I explain this, But if for police departments who want to use federal funding to pursue forensic genetic genealogy, so let me just explain what that is. First of all, that's where you're submitting DNA to labs where they then take that DNA and try to match it to profiles that people have voluntarily uploaded to ancestry sites like jedmatch.

The really famous ancestry sites like ancestryd dot com and twenty three and meet don't allow this, but there are a few smaller ones that do, and that so you're casting a really wide net to find sometimes direct relative is more often cousins, second cousins, third cousins, and then developing a family tree that then gives you some names that you can go investigate and try to get DNA from those people to try to come up with a

direct match. But if you're going to use federal funding to pursue that route, you first have to exhaust your other options essentially for DNA matching. And what I found out is that there's first of all, every state has its own offender database. In Ohio, it's called CODIS, and again, it's a database of either DNA that's collected at crime scenes or collected from convicted felons, and you have to make sure that you have the best possible DNA profile

uploaded to that database. And one thing that seems to have happened here is that because the DNA was in this case was submitted fifteen years ago initially to that database, it appears that they had to go back and get a better sample using current election techniques and start that process over again. If you don't get any hits there, then you can do something called a familial DNA search. That's where you're looking for male relatives of a male perpetrator.

We do know that in this case, the police's person of interest is a male, so they were able to use this because it's all based on the Y chromosome. Then, if you don't get any hits on the femalial search, that's when you can then use federal funding to try a forensic genetic genealogy search. Now, the big asterisk here is that if you don't use federal funding, you don't

have to jump through those hoops. And in episode seven of this podcast, I talked to a woman whose sister was murdered thirty three years ago, who they skipped right to forensic genetic genealogy using private funding from the Porti Lay Project, which is a nonprofit in Ohio that specifically funds forensic genealogy to solve cold cases. And they had

they had a name in less than a year. So if you're cheap using to use private funding to pay for forensic genealogy, you can skip through some of those hoops. And I still sometimes wonder why that couldn't have been done here. And you mentioned in your intro who really does own or control what happens with DNA found at crime scenes? I wonder why the sisters don't have more of a say and how and when that DNA is tested,

especially since they've been waiting so long for answers. So that's one unexpected question that came up for me and working on this case.

murders of Mary Petri and Bill Sprote. It was reported at the time that the police were looking into a link between her murder and the murder of Mary in particular, but that never seemed to go anywhere, at least that I ever saw publicly reported, and the police, when we did interview them, they did not indicate that they felt

like there was any link between those two cases. At this point, they are very different in their circumstances, and that Barbara Davlin White was robbed and shot to death, Mary and Bill do not appear to have been really robbed of anything significant, and of course we've already talked about the ways they were killed. There also was no sexual assault reported in the case of Barbara Devin Loit.

So it's possible it was coincidental, but if it is a coincidence, it's a very yeary one and that case, as you said, remains unsolved as well.

about that journey in the seventh episode. But I think it's a difficult situation I think Dan that survivors find themselves in and I really got to witness this firsthand through working on this podcast, and that they really they don't want to They want to be good partners to the police, right and they don't want to be quote unquote annoying or off putting to the police. But at the same time, they want to be persistent and they

deserve answers. So it's a really fine line I think that survivors' families have to walk in terms of reaching out to police. And I've also reflected on just the generational differences. You know, I think back in nineteen seventy piece people viewed the police very differently than they do now. I think there was, in general, probably a lot more trust in the police, and I think back then you just kind of trusted that the police were doing what

they were supposed to be doing. But I think what we've found out in the course of working on this is that you really do Arthur really has had to be persistent and really had to be the one to keep calling back and really had to be the advocate. And I don't think I can I say this for certain, no, but I don't think the case would be as far along as it is if it weren't for her advocating for the police to pay attention.

touch after fifty three years. And the way that the podcast ends is that they are and I'm not, you know, giving away the ending here, but they are they're presenting a united front to the police at this point in terms of wanting answers, and I think that's only bringing more urgency to the need for this to finally be solved. I mean, the loved ones in this case are now in their mid seventies, you know.

And yeah, and I think the sisters have really their trajectory has been toward believing that as well as a result of working on this, and one of the things they say is that they hope that they can inspire other people who have cold cases in their backgrounds to do what they're doing, advocate for those cases to be solved.

I'll pay the five, five or six thousand dollars. So specifically, I think they're asking for that. I think more generally, what they're asking for is more transparency and a little bit less tight control over exactly how this case is being investigated and solved. It really feels like the police who happen to be working on this case right now really want very tight control over how this case is investigated.

And while I think we're all sympathetic to that on one level, the police have their protocols, they don't want to screw things up. I also think there's a big gap between the stance that they're taking, which is fairly opaque, and one where there's just a little bit more transparency and a little bit more cooperation and open communication.

extra expense of doing forensic genealogy. So she really helped me understand kind of the inside view of how prosecutors and police will approach cold cases when it comes to DNA.

don't know the answer. Why they want to be able to control this case and the investigation and the steps that they're taking.

in a very confident place. I mean, but I will also say the police have told us Dan from practically day one that they believe the case can be solved and they have a person of interest. So I guess we have tried to take that on board and believe that, but at times it feels hard to believe because of how long it's taking from the time they told us that.

I mean, I know, we're talking about a cold case that's been cold for fifty three years now, and so three years in the span of fifty three years is not a long amount, but it's also but it's a long time, and just in absolute terms, I think to be told, yes we think this is solvable, Yes we have a person of interest, but that nothing happens. So it's it's been a real paradox, I think in terms

of the information that we're being given. So you know, what exactly is the hold up that is still that is still unclear.

talk about it in a way that they're not ordinarily invited to do. You know, as a society, we don't make a lot of space for talking about these dark, troubling things. And I think one thing I've realized is that as kind of maligned as the true crime genre is, sometimes I think that that's one of the things.

their lives and being the wonderful people they are. I'll say, like putting together the website and seeing photos of these two young people, it was a very moving experience for me, and I'd really invite people to go visit it, just as sort of a way of honoring maryon Bill. There's also a tip line for anyone who has information they want to show with us and a time, a very detailed timeline of the case, and.