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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 VTK. 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 Zupanski.
Good Evening. For nine years, South Carolina officials struggled to identify the Boy in the Woods, a young man whose body had been discovered just south of Myrtle Beach in a fishing village called Morel's Inlet. Meanwhile, twelve hundred miles away in Kansas City, Missouri, Frank mcgonagall's family searched for him at Grateful Dead concerts and in the face of
every long haired hitchhiker they passed. Consumed by guilt by how they treated him, Frank's eight siblings came to understand that, like Jerry Garcia, saying he's gone and nothing's going to bring him back. Frank mcgonagal was finally found and identified as the Boy in the Woods. Four years later, the case still unsolved. Jim Cosgrove, a mcgonical family friend and investigative journalist, picked up the trail of Frank's coal case and began uncovering connections to a ruthless local crime boss,
and blunders by the threadbare Sheriff's department. When his research began to stall, a chance meeting with the soft hearted, straight talking energy reader Carol Williams provided a metaphysical spark that reignited Jim's resolve. Although his work as a journalist trained him to be skeptical, Cosgrove found himself starting to become a believer when Carol provided the details about Frank's
murder that turned out to be freakishly accurate. In twenty nineteen, Cosgrove returned to Morel's Inlet with one of Frank's brothers to dredge up old leads and settle Frank's case once and for all. The book that we're featuring this evening is Ripple, A long Strange Search for a Killer, with my special guest and guest of investigative author and journalist and narrator Jim Cosgrove. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Jim Cosgrove, Thank you, Dan,
I appreciate it. Thank you so much. This is an incredible tale. As I was mentioning just before, thank you so much for joining us.
Oh yeah, you know, I love to talk about it.
Let's talk about how you got this start. You say that this book has its start in Saint Peter's Catholic Church in Kansas City, Missouri, in the fall of nineteen ninety four. Who were you We mentioned in the introduction about you being a journalist. Tell us where you were professionally and your connection to this Frank mcgonagal and the family, and how this book got started in the fall of nineteen ninety four.
Yes, you bet well. I grew up in Kansas City, and Frank was the middle child of another large Irish Catholic family in our neighborhood. And in our neighborhood it seemed everybody was Irish, Catholic, or Jewish. That's just the way it ended up in our neighborhood. And we all belonged to the Jewish Community Center, and we had kind of an idyllic community there where everybody knew each other, and everybody, seemingly, at least on the surface, got along.
And their family was close with my family. Our parents were friends, and many of my siblings were in school with many of the McGonagall siblings. But by the fall of nineteen ninety four, I had been I'd moved and I was living in Albuquerque in New Mexico, and I was writing for the Albuquerque Journal at the time. And I happened to be home back in Kansas City for a vacation or just to see to see my mother, and she asked me to take her to Mass at
Saint Peter's Church, so I did. It was a midday Mass, and as we were coming out, there in the courtyard is a statue of a Saint Francis of ASSISI and I looked at the plaque and it was dedicated to Frank McGonagall, and I said, oh, yeah, Frank, I remember when he disappeared. He disappeared when I was in high school. And I said, you know what, And I knew that that there had been, you know, some resolution as far as the family at least finding out kind of what
happened to him. And I said, you know what, whatever came of that, and she kind of filled me in on it and had got my wheels turning. And I thought, you know, that would make a great story. And do you think you know, I asked her, do you think that mcgonagall's would talk to me? And she said sure, they're very open about it, and so I approached mcgonagall's with the intention of actually just doing a story about their journey and what they went through nine years they
searched for Frank. They didn't know what had happened to him, so I kind of wanted to just focus on that. And I needed a subject for a master's thesis for I was getting a master's degree while I was working at the newspaper, and I thought, hey, this would be a perfect subject.
So you decided to use this as your master's thesis, And first thing you had to get cooperation from the mcgonical family and do the necessary interviews tell us about that.
Yes, so you know, I approached them. The mcgonagalls are very well known in Kansas City. Bill McGonagall opened a meat market in nineteen fifty and everybody, at least on
the south side of Kansas City knew the mcgonigal's. They had the best meat in town and you went there to get your brisket seure in your turkeys at Thanksgiving and everybody, and they had such a lot large family that everybody kind of knew someone who knew a McGonagall, and so they were locally well known and great people, very very generous, and they helped out people in their in the neighborhood who maybe you know, would fall on hard times, and so they were well loved as well.
So I approached them and said, I'd like to do this story, and I would like, you know, to just to just find out kind of what you went through. And so I arranged interviews not only with Bill and Joe and McGonagall of the parents, but every one of Frank's siblings, and over the next several months I was able to do that and write my thesis. Now missus McGonagall Joan asked me at the time to not publish it as a book. She said, we get into too many family you know, you know, and family secrets, and
it's a difficult subject. And as a mother of a large family, that was her life's work and any mother would understand that. And so I said, sure, I will just use this as my master's thesis and I won't publish anything. Well, many years later, well I guess it would have been almost ten years later. I, my wife and I were at a brunch with my mother and some of her friends and Joe mcgonagall's there and she pulled me aside. She said, hey, Jim, I've been thinking
about you know, the story you did about Frank. And she said that you if you want to publish it, go ahead. I give you my blessing. And I said, okay. But at the time, I was newly married, we had a child on the way, a lot of other things going on, so I kind of shelved it for a while, and it took me then another ten years before I got on it.
Tell us the story of what happens. And you mentioned that you talked to all the siblings of Frank's siblings. We in the introduction talked about some of the guilt, what was this guilt that they had, and how they treated him? What was Frank like? And before we talk about what happened and his decision to leave home.
Yes, well, so coming from a large family myself, everything I learned from the mcgonagalls was very familiar. I didn't hear anything that hadn't happened in our own family, right. The mcgonagalls are very energetic, boysterous, opinionated, a fun loving family. They very much like ours, just allowed Irish Catholic family. And Frank was really not so much like that. He was a gentle soul. He was a little bit more
introverted and quiet. He was a trusting soul, and he just never quite kind of fit in, I guess, and his siblings would talk about how he just you know,
he would keep to himself. And then he struggled with with depression, and yeah, of course at the time in you know, like a lot of the young kids at that time, and he's experimented with drugs and he was as I interviewed his psychologists later on, he said, Frank was almost too gentle for this world, too trusting for this world, and so he struggled to find his place
in the family. And I tell people, almost know somebody like Frank Frank was, you know, whether it's a brother or a cousin or a friend or maybe we see Frank or ourselves in Frank. He was just trying to find himself. And he struggled. And he was in school
college for like six years and never graduated. At the time he left home, he was twenty six years old and he had moved back into his family home, was working at the family market, meet market and grocery, and you know, any twenty six year old at that point, he's like, you know, he wants to get out, he wants to to you know, find him, you know, make his own way in the world. But he struggled a lot and his family had a hard time. His siblings really trying to help him. They wanted to help, but
they couldn't figure it out. And so when he left, they felt a lot of guilt like maybe they had not done everything they could to prevent him from leaving.
He was close with his siblings and he worked with his brother. Can we talk about what was said between the brothers and the circumstances surrounding that.
Yes, the youngest four of the nine, the youngest for are boys, and they were known as the Boys. And they have an older brother too, who was amongst the sisters. But the boys were tight and they spent a lot of time together. They were always having a game of hockey or they played you know, just broomstick hockey on their patio. They were playing football, they would play foosball in the basement. Anyway, they spent a lot of time together.
And really his Frank's best friends were his brothers. The two of them went away to college and his youngest brother Mike was still at home when Frank was twenty six, and yeah, all the kids, at one point or the other worked at the store. And so at the time Frank and Mike were working at the store, they had recently taken a long trip to California together and they got back and one of their tasks at the store was to clean it. And they had a process for
stripping the floors and waxing them, you know, periodically. So this weekend, on a Sunday, when the store was closed, they went out to wax the floor and they got in silly argument about how to do it. You know. Frank was like, this is the way you do it. Mike the youngest, was saying, no, this isn't night. You're messed up. And anyway, they got in this argument and the final words that Mike said to his brother were, Frank,
why don't you fuck off and die? Yeah, And he stormed out of the store and left, And those were the last words that his brother, Mike said to Frank. And as Mike said, he said, you know, it took me five years of intense therapy to get over that guilt. And Frank left the next day and he never saw him again.
Now that what we were talking about music and everybody's love and this family of the same band tell us about the band, and well we alluded to it in the introduction, tell us about their love of the band, and this is a band that many many people are dedicated to following.
So yes, so the boys in particular in that family big fans of the Grateful Dead, and they had all been too many shows. In fact, their trip to California was kind of a as I think in this book, I referred to it as kind of a trip to Mecca for a Deadhead's day and went to Berkeley to
see the Dead. And they had planned this road trip and they all went out there, or Frank and Mike went out there and met of his siblings out there, and it was a bond that they had through this music and of course the experiences of going to the shows. So when he disappeared, the big assumption was, hey, he
just you know, he's out following the Dead. So one of the things they started to do was starting to they started going to Dead shows and to see if they could find Frank among the people who kind of that community that follows them from town to town. And he Frank liked to hitchhike, so they looked for him
and hitchhikers along the side of the road. They looked in newspapers from around the country just to see if there were any news stories about someone who was, you know, anything from you know, injured in an accident or you know, had amnesian, didn't know who he was, and you know, they were they were looking at any possible leads that they could that they could get. But yeah, the Grateful Dead, definitely, they had a real strong bond over their music.
Tell us of the last day with the family and when he leaves and then what is the response from the parents, Joan and Bill and the police.
Yeah, so that the day after Mike and Frank had their argument at the grocery store. By the time Frank got up out of bed the next day, this was a Monday, the boys were out and already at work, and so he was kind of at home. The other person at home was his mother, and he came out and his mother. He and his mother mother had a little argument about just keeping the place clean. She said, hey, you know, kind of keep this place cleaned up, and he got a little argument with her, and then joan.
His mother had to leave and run some errands. So he then is when he left, and I don't know if he had made the decision. Some of his siblings speculated that he'd already made the decision the day before leave or that morning. But somewhere in there, he drove to the bank a few blocks from their house withdrew all of his money. He had thirty eight hundred dollars
in his account. He took it all in cash. He had asked the teller to convert part of it into travelers checks, but they couldn't because the bank officer at the time who handled that wasn't there. So he took it all in cash. He immediately peeled part of it off put it in a sock because he carried that's where he carried his cash. He always carried a lot of cash in his sock. And he left. And when his you know family that later that day, when he didn't come home, most of them didn't really even think
about much about it. They thought, oh, well, Frank's gone again. I mean, he was not. It was not uncommon for him to take off for a day or two and either go camping or just go on, go gone. An adventure somewhere, but his parents knew he always called, he always let them know her. And so a day went by and they didn't hear from him. So they thought, okay,
in a couple of days. When a couple of days went by, they started to get a little a little concerned, right that, you know, we would have heard from him by now. And so then when you know, a handful of days went by, they didn't approach the kans City Police Department, who of course said, well, there's not much we can do. He's an adult. There was no foul play or anything or any and he left in his own car, and there's not much we can do. So
they then had to kind of rally their community. And you know, so again like I said, we grew up in this big Irish Catholic community. Everybody knows everybody. So people, you know, mobilized and contacted friends in other cities and they they most of them suspected he headed west because he loved the west, and so they hadn't really considered that he went east, but he in fact then you know, that's where he was. And it was just five days after he left home that he was he was murdered.
You write that June fourteenth, nineteen eighty two, Nance's Oyster Roast, a restaurant, there's a report of a dead body. Yes, what happens?
This is?
This is a Deputy Hymen makes a call South Carolina.
So now yes, so now we moved to the coast of South Carolina. So merles Inlet is a little fishing village just south of Myrtle Beach, north of Georgetown, which is an historic town and the county seat there. And so yes, a call comes in from Nance's Oyster Roast, which is a well known local family seafood restaurant, and they say, we haven't you know, we've they found a body in the woods. Can you come and check it out?
So Deputy Hymen shows up and there are two local boys sitting there, and he knows these guys, one of whom in particular is a guy who has a lot of history with the local sheriff's department. He is a local trouble maker. His name's Tommy mcdell. And everybody in town when I went down there first and started asking questions, everybody and now knew Tommy mcdell. Oh yeah, Tommy mcdell.
They all had a story about him, and he was known for stealing stuff, maybe setting some fires, you know, throwing up trouble, shooting them, shooting off guns just to just for fun, and generally just stirring things up. And so he was there and his cousin, Chris Nant's younger cousin was also there, and they reported to the deputy that they had been out playing in the woods, riding their bikes through the woods and had stepped off the path and they found this body up propped up against
the trees. So they went back to the oys to Nance's restaurant and called the Sheriff's department to come up. And so there were two part time deputies who patrolled merles Inlet at that time, and they and merles Inlet is an interesting places. Not only does it it's on the coast, and it's got a history of you know, pyracy through and the bootleg liquor through prohibition and running
drugs in the sixteen seventies. But also to make things more complicated, the there's a county line that runs through literally the north side of town. Part of merles Inlet is in another county, and part of it is it's an unincorporated but you know, part of it is so it straddles a county line, so the jurisdiction over which
sheriff is responsible for it is often toss up. So this fell to Georgetown County on the south side, and the sheriff have the sheriff's deputy then deput behind and then took these two boys to the woods where they showed him where this body was. And from then on he was known as the Boy in the Woods.
Now, the thing is that there's no this is many miles away from where Frank mcgonaga is and where the police are not even looking for him, but the family is. And you say that the family employees everybody that they know in their church, and there's mass masses being said and every effort to make fires and get the word out. Yes, how do you get involved in this and basically investigate this case?
Right? So, at the time he was missing, all of us in the neighborhood, you know, knew that he was missing, and like a lot of things, you know, as it it as it got longer and longer, you know, and it became clearer that something had happened to him. But then also as time goes by, you move on, right.
I then went to college and then you know, and then graduated from college, and you know, so I kind of didn't kind of cat lost track of what was going on until that moment with my mother and we saw statue when she reminded me of what was going on. So that sparked my interest. When I got involved with the mcgonigall's and started to interview them, what really piqued my interest was Merles Inlet, this little town, and you know that they had a suspect, but they just were
never able to, you know, pin it on anybody. It was one of these deals where everybody in town was convinced that Tommy McDowell committed this crime, but they never had any evidence to depending on them. It was just circumstantial. So I thought, hey, in order to do this story,
well I need to go there. So I then in the February of twenty fifth time, I'm sorry, nineteen ninety five, I went to Merles I actually went to Georgetown and where the county seat is in the Sheriff's department and checked into a bed and breakfast there and started poking around and just started the Sheriff's department was very helpful. They let me, you know, look at us. The file
that they had was pretty skimpy file. It was just basically had written police report, a couple of poor laroid photos of the crime scene, and he's just a few other items in there are a few other documents. And so I just started poking around and talking to people and talking to locals, and my gut instinct was, yeah, everybody in town said, oh, Tommy Wodell was he was a mess and he was trouble. But my gut told me that it wasn't that Tommy did not do this.
What struck me about Tommy was that all the crimes that he had been taken in on, you know, as a minor, because this was all before he was eighteen. They were breaking and entering and then you know, writing the checks on somebody else's checking account, and they were but they were not violent. There was nothing in there that And my gut told me, I don't know that this guy had the would have the guts enough or the pension to kill somebody. It just didn't seem to add up for some reason.
When when did you first speak to create? Because Chris is is such an important person in this story. Yes, talk about Chris and who his father is, and that Tommy is a cousin of Chris. Yes, so tell us a little bit more about this.
So Chris was one of the two. So Chris and Tommy found the body of the Frank's body in the woods, and Tommy was four years older than Chris. They grew up together. Tommy was like his older brother and corrupted him like an older sible it might. He was often and Chris was often involved in some of the things that Tommy was involved in. And they kind of ran together. And Chris's father ran Nance's Oyster Roast, the local restaurant
and very well known family establishment. And not unlike the mcgonagall's, they were well known in their community. But Paul Nance, Chris's father, was also well known for some other things. He was one of the big were the biggest drug dealer in importer and dealer along the coast there. So, as I mentioned before, Merls Inlet is a is an inlet from the sea. There's a natural there's kind of an inlet from the ocean and has served for centuries,
has served as a protection from the sea. Sailors would often duck in there to do, you know, to get out of a storm. Pirates were known to hide out in there, and it made a perfect place for drug runners to come in, and you know, boats to come in and so and Paul Nance had a fleet of shrimp boats under his thumb. He bought, so he had shrimp and oyster fishermen who would sell to him. And so he was a kind of their go to guy.
Well at the same time as they were bringing in their hall, they were also bringing in drugs that then he would distribute, distribute up and down the coast, and he had an empire, and he was very wealthy, and everybody in town kowtowed to him, including as many alluded to the Sheriff's department. Many said that, you know that the the good old boy network they had. He had the Sheriff's department department in his back pocket. So he
was known for he was the fixer in town. When anything happened, well he had he either was involved in it or became involved in and and he was feared.
You know.
Chris Nance when I first met him, said, you know, he said, I everybody in he said, it was like the local mafia. And he said, I as a kid, I couldn't get other kids to play with me because they were all afraid of my dad. And so when I first met Chris, he was rather forthcoming about all this stuff. His dad was dead by that time, and
he wanted to kind of set the record straight. Many of his family thought he was rewriting some of the history, but he said, you know, my dad was a you know, was a drug dealer and he was involved in a lot of nasty and very stuff. And everybody in town knew about Paul nance And so there's some speculation that Paul may have helped Tommy and Chris clean up the crime scene when they found Frank's body. There was no
identification on his body. His car was missing, and it was just him and a sleeping bag and a little ring, a fire ring that was set up in the woods like he was about to start at campfire. All of his possessions were gone, So somehow someone had to have cleaned up that site, got rid of Frank's car, taking his wallet and any other identifying things. So yeah, when I met Chris in the then February of ninety five, he kind of filled me in on the local the family history.
What I wanted to just mention as well or ask you about is that Chris originally what Tommy had said is that or there was some contention that Chris wasn't at the scene, but that Tommy had then gotten him and said you want to come and see this body?
Oh, yes, there was that. When I spoke to Chris, he said he wasn't there when the body was found. And I said, well, according to the police report, you and Tommy were out the woods and you stumbled upon this body. Say no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not how it happened, and that he was actually at the restaurant and that Tommy came to him and said, Hey, I found a body of the woods. Do you want
to go see it? And then he went back there with him and a guy that worked at the restaurant, and three of them of them went to look at the body, just to see the body. Then they came to report it. So Chris says he wasn't there originally to begin with. And I personally suspected Chris was somehow not really not involved in the actual murder. But he
said he wasn't even there when they found the body. Yeah, which is different than the police report, so there are some mixed yes and mixed messages there.
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off your first month's subscription. This is their best offer anywhere, and it's only available to US customers for a limited time, plus free shipping on every order. Get fifteen dollars off at nutrifall dot com spelled and ut r afol dot com promo code shocking. Now, Jim we had mentioned that this incredible faithful meeting of someone called an energy reader. He said, she's not a psychic. Right first, a person
that named Carol Williams. This extraordinary person tell us the circumstances in which you meet her and what you eventually team up to do.
Yes. So, while I was saying it's been and breakfast in George, twenty miles south of merles Inlet, I it was off season and I was the only one in the place, but one night, two women moved in across the hall from me, and we struck up a conversation and we chatted up ended up going out that night and having some drinks and one of the women tells me that her friend who is with her is a psychic, an energy reader, and she's worked with FBI and police
departments and sheriff's departments and to solve crimes. And I said okay, And I was very skeptical and like, well, okay, I've heard things like that before. And so then the next day we are at late breakfast brunch with the owner of the bed and Breakfast and it's just a Carol, the energy reader, and the owner of the breakfast and me, and the owner of the bed and breakfast asks me, Hey, Jim,
how's your research going. How's your investigation going? And I said, yeah, you know, I've spoken to a lot of people in town, and I said, I get the feeling that, you know, everybody in town thinks Tommy McDowell is the one who killed Frank. And I said, I don't. I get the feeling that someone else is the perpetrator and he is still living here and people are kind of covering for him. And Carol just said, you're right, and I said, okay, what do you what do you mean I'm right? She said,
you're right. There is someone else involved and he is still alive and living here in town. I said, okay, how do you know? She said, I just know, and she said with her just still the life pose. She said, Honey, you and I met here for a reason. Yeah, you know, it was no coincidence that we met this weekend. You and I were destined to meet here. And I said, okay, finance, yeah,
and she said I'm here to help you. And I said, okay, Well, I don't know what your deal is, but would you be willing to come to me with me to the woods where they found Frank's body and see if you can see if you can pick up anything. She said, absolutely, let's do it. So later that afternoon, we drove up to the woods where they found Frank's body and we
went in. There was a light mist it was late afternoon, and it was kind of a dreary, misty day, and we're in the woods and it's damp, and she stops and she recreated the entire murder scene for me. She said, I'm picking some things up. I see three guys standing here and she started identifying people descriptions, detailed descriptions. One of who met I mean what fit Frank's description perfectly, the other one of the others was fit the description
of Tommy McDowell. And then there was a third guy there described as someone who I had not met, and she recreated what went down and then her you know what she saw, and according to her, was that Frank had asked these guys had shown him where there was a clearing in the woods where he could camp, and he had asked them if there was a place in town where he could buy some pot. Hey, can I buy some pot around here? And they said, yeah, there's a guy in town that I'll sell it to. And
he said, great, let's go. And they said, well, he won't sell it to us if you were with us, So why don't you just give me the money. I'll
go into town right get it. And so Frank peels off a twenty dollars bill from the money he's carrying in his sock, and the one who fit the description of Tommy McDowell leaves then to go by the pot, and according to Carol, while he's gone, the other person saw the money in Frank sock, pulled out a little twenty five caliber pistol and said, hey, give me your money, and Frank laughed at him, said I'm not kidding, you know,
I'm not gonna do that. And the guy fired a shot that grazed him, raised his tumble and then shot him a second time and it went and yeah, shot him in the eye and killed him instantly. And then when the other guy came back with the legitimately had gone to buy the pot came back, it was like, what the he'll happen here, you know, and the other guy laughed, Oh, you should have seen his face when I shot him. And he's like, whoa, whoa, this isn't right.
We got to clean this up. And so again this is all what Carol saw, and they so they go and get somebody else who comes with another car. They clean up the site, and then they she said, they dry of his car north. They drove both cars north and they had eventually found Frank's car several months after a couple months after he left home. They found it abandoned in a housing project in Wilmington, North Carolina, which
is just across the border from South Carolina. And so she Carol gave me like incredible details about what went down. She also got into Frank's psyche and head at the time, Like when Frank realized that he was dead, he was very upset because he had had arguments before he left home, a fight with his mother or his brother, and and and Carol would not have known any of this. She was did She didn't know themonigles. She was lived in North Carolina at the time, and I, you know, I
was from Kansas City. She didn't There's no way she would have known any of that, And that he wanted to let his family know that he loved him very much, and how sorry was that he had left home in that state. And she described for me in incredible detail the guy who pulled the trigger. So over the next couple of days, I mean, that's what Carol saw in the woods, and so over the next couple of days, I had a list of people I was still looking for.
And one of the guys I was looking for was a friend of Tommy's and Chris's, and he was on the list. And I went to track him down, and he was shuck an oysters in an oyster shacked down by the water right. And when I knocked on the door. He turned her out and looked at me, and it was exactly the guy that just fit the description of the guy that Carol said had killed Frank.
Incredible.
Yes, yeah, So she said she hair color, he had dirty kind of blonde hair, dishwater blonde. He had his teeth were gnarled. But she said the main thing about him was his eyes. She said he had tan eyes. They were the color of creamed coffee. And I thought, okay, that's odd. I had never seen tan eyes before. But when he turned around and looked at me, he had a cigarette danging out of his mouth and he and he had tan eyes. I'm like, oh my god, this
is the guy that Carol said killed Frank. And so I was kind of flustered, and I, you know, just said, hey, by you know, I'm in town working on the story about the Boy in the woods. Oh, the Boy in the woods. Everybody knew the Boy of the Woods and I don't know anything about it. And I said, well, tell me about the town. Tell me about what merolz Inlet was like at the town. I said, I heard
it was crazy. There's lots of stuff going on, you know, people getting cut up with chainsaws thrown to the alligators. I mean drug deals gone wrong, he said. He gave me the best line that anybody there had given me, the best. He said, We've been known to raise a little hell around here. And then he looked me up
and down. You know, I'm this, you know, college journalist boy, and he gives me a look from from toe up to my head and he said, but our idea, I said, I imagine our idea raised in hell's a little bit different than yours. Yeah, said, yeah, I think so.
The other thing that Carol had said that we didn't mention was a very profound was she even had a name. She mentioned the name Paul. But more importantly, and this is this is a very vivid, profound scene in this book where you go to the trailer looking for this Jeff mackenzie, and what Carol had told you was so specific, Like again, she identified this person. So when you looked
at him, it was these are these telltale signs. It was extraordinary, you know, you say, this was a you know, a rush for you to for this to be happening occurring. But at the same time she said something about a specific boat. Tell us about this scene when you discover and get verification of that. Yes.
So she just, you know, she threw out whatever she saw. She's like, I also see a boat. It's not in the water. It's got a name on the back MISSI or miss Anna or something like that. And she said, I don't know what it means. Well, yeah, so and she threw out some possible names too, And Paul was on that list. Like she said, I hear the name Paul. There were a couple of other names now that I'm blinking, but yeah. So the next couple of days, I was
out driving around Merle's Inlet. I was looking for the home of Jeff Mackenzie, who was on my list. And I turned down one of these gravel roads and as and I noticed, as I'm driving down the road, there's a there's a lot with a chaining chainling fence around it, and there were several boats parked in there as just a storage place for boats and things. And there on the lot was this boat with the name on the back miss Anna or miss missy Ann or who. And
I thought, whoa, that's what Carol. That's there's boats that Carol. And it was up on blocks. It was for Pedifer's sales sign on it. It was, and I thought, oh, that's odd. And then right across the street or right across the road there was the home. There was actually a house and a and a trailer on the same property where Jeff McKenzie lived. And so yeah, I went went up to the door and spoke to his father, and his dad told me he was shuck an oysters down by the water. So that's how I ended up
getting there. But yeah, so that, you know, showed me details about the McGonagall family, details about know about the you know, the local characters there in merles Inlet, and it was truly amazing what she and she made me a believer. I mean, I was like, wow, this all this stuff is she has come true.
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Now you talked about Carol, and of course, now you want to inform the family of what you found in this investigation, and you're hoping that they'll you'll they'll believe you, just like, yes, you believe Carol. So tell us about that, and then about the plan for this next trip to include one of the family members.
Yes, yeah, So Frank's younger, youngest brother, Mike, was my my main contact mcgonagal family. I spoke to everyone, interviewed everybody, but he he was my main contact. And right after all this happened with you know I, Carol took me to the woods and told me, oh, and she also one of the things was that the guy who killed Frank also has something of his. It's a box of some I see a box, it's a it's a boombox. This guy has Frank's boombox. And I was like, okay, that's a detail.
But okay.
So after all this, when I met you know, Jeff mackenzie and was freaked out and maybe this was who killed Frank. And so I went back to bed and breakfast that I called Mike and I told him everything, and he was sobbing on the phone, just like, oh my god, this is exactly how I had kind of envisioned it going down. And he said, I don't know if it makes any difference. But Frank had my boombox with him when he left home, you know, and I was in the car and I was upset about it.
You know, he took off with my property. And he said, I don't know if it makes any difference, but he said, my social security number is engraved in the back of the boom box, which was a common practice when he moved into the dorms at that time. They would engrave your social Security number and everything you owned in case it was stolen. So and so I presented that back to the detective who had been working on the case with the Sheriff's department, and you know, and he said,
you know, that's not doesn't mean anything. He could have found it on the side of the road, or you could have bought it at it. I mean, even if this guy still has it, it doesn't you know, it's not evidence against him. So I, yeah, I wanted to share this information with the family when I went back to Kansas City. So I had recorded everything that Carol said in the woods where the woods my tape recorder going, so I transcribed the entire conversation with her because some
of it's difficult to hear. And when I got back to Kansas City got together with Joon and Bill McGonagall and the siblings who lived there, I played the tape recording for them and they read along the transcription and it really for me, it was one of the most intense and ooignant moments of my life to bring information to a family who had been grieving for all those years and all the loose ends and the unknowns, and to come in and say, hey, this is what I
found out. I don't know if it's crazy. I don't know if you're going to think it's crazy, but this is what I found out. And it was so cathartic for everybody, but it you know, of course, there were tears and almost to the person, everyone of his siblings said, that doesn't surprise me at all. That makes perfect sense about how this this. It would have been just like Frank to go into this town and say, hey, you can meet some strangers, Hey, can you show me a
place to, you know, in the camp. Yet he would have trusted whomever he ran into, and it would have been like him that, yes, he had his money in his sock yep, that's exactly where he kept his money in. And it would have been like him to flash his money in front of people, because he would never have stolen money from people. Why wouldn't people steal money from him? He was that trusting and perhaps naive. But but that moment,
there was really an intense special moment for me. And you know, I'd felt like an outsider and am in intruding on the family. But they told me that night, Hey, you're part of this. Now, this is this is this is your story as well as ours. And they eventually did meet Carol in person. They went Joan and Bill McGonagall and they were on vacation one year back along the coast of North Carolina, and they went and met with Carol and had a really beautiful meeting with her.
And Carol and I stayed connected for a few months, but then we lost track of each other for years, and it wasn't until like twenty eighteen or so that I was feeling the need to resurrect the story and actually get it finished and published. And my nieces were a big driving force with that. I have told the story hundreds of times, as I mentioned in the book.
I've told it of barstools over you know, enchiladas and over you know, and I've told it at family gatherings and they would officeay, uncle Jim, will you tell the story about the boy in the woods. So one of those meetings they they really impressed upon me you need to get this done. And I thought, you know what, Okay, let's do it. So in twenty nineteen I got my brother Tom, who is always a front adventure, and we
decided to go back to Merles. And he said, you know, we really should bring one or a few of the mcgonigal's with us, and Mike seemed to be a likely choice. So Mike agreed to go to Merles with us in April of twenty nineteen, and so the three of us went to Merles inlet just to go back and you know, tie up some loose ends. If we could revisit the sheriff's apartment and a couple of you know, a couple of folks there were very helpful and revisited some of
the people that I had interviewed her originally. And for Mike, he wanted to you know, he wanted to tie some things up. You know, he had put a lot of this to rest already, but there were still some things I think he wanted some closure on. And one of the people that we visited ended up visiting twice while we were there was Chris Nance's mother, Yes, and the wife of Paul Nance, the first wife of Paul Nance,
the drug dealing mafia Boston Town. And Cyndia Nance's beautiful, just lovely, lovely, peaceful woman who clearly has processed a lot of the stuff that went on in her life and she's had a real place of peace when we met her, and she was delightful, and she said, come in and sit down and let's talk, and I will tell you as much as I can and as much
as I'm willing to tell. And Mike just wanted my donecle just wanted somebody in town to take some responsibility for what had happened, or point them in the direction of somebody that says something that would say, yes, that's how it happened. And eventually Cynthia got there and said, yeah, I could see I could see that Paul, her ex husband, had something to do with this crime or the cleaning up of the crime scene least, and for Mike that
was enough. It was uh yeah, that too was a very moving and pointed trapped.
And visit me.
Yes, this interaction between this eighty year old woman and she said, because Mike was confrontational somewhat and saying, listen, I think you're not telling us everything. I think you're lying, and then saying you're not telling us everything, she said, listen, I know you deserve this. That's why I'm speaking to you. You deserve this kind kind of information. And this is all the information I can speculate, but this is all
the information I could give you. But it was very dramatic to say that this is certainly honest material that she's given you, or information when she talks very candidly about the criminal life of her husband, Paul, and what she just didn't want to know.
Yes, right, and and you know, like like you know, the spouse of someone who's involved in some nefarious things, there is a certain amount of turning your head the other way and not wanting to know. And there were many times, of course, he said to her, you don't need to know this, and for her that was enough. And you know, she they had a very successful restaurant, said it. Some nights they would run four hundred and six hundred people through here in the course of an evening,
and they were they had a lot of money. And she said, I assumed it was most you know from the restaurant. Well it was, and you know, dealing cocaine and selling weed up and down the coast, and so there were a lot of things that went on that she did not know about it. And I think legitimately so she didn't know because she didn't want to know, as she said, very candidly, and I thought beautifully she said, I was ignorant to the point of stupid. And but
and that's what I'm saying about her. The piece that I felt for her is that I think she's processed a lot of this and it came to a place of peace with some of it. Like she said, she didn't know a lot of this stuff until after Paul died. But she suspects that, yeah, he was involved in you know, roughing people up or worse, as she as she said, at one point, you know, he had a group of thugs who worked for him, who would take care of business for him.
Yeah, so the likely scenario is that three people were involved, one person, as you explained, for the family, for the siblings. This trip, you said was satisfying because he finally got some answers and somebody to say that at least it was a very good possibility. Yes, these people sustained themselves when they didn't have any answers for those nine years, thinking that their loved one just left because of the treatment or other reasons. Maybe he was in a hospital.
They knew he was having problems psychologically. So their faith sustained them through this, and the community that they had through their church and their pastor was always involved. And then Carol Williams becomes involved and talks about that there's no you know, no coincidence is meeting you and your involvement with this and your involvement with the family and growing up so near and saying that when Frank left
it affected your family as well. You talk at the end of the book about visiting the grave site that was that he was buried in because they didn't know who he was in Georgetown. Tell us about this very dramatic and sort of that did you feel a presence and did Mike feel a presence?
Yes, So before we left, we went to visit Frank's grave. So in the meantime, so about five years after Frank died, the corner in Georgetown, South Carolina. You know, they had this body that was in the morgue for five years and they needed to do something with it. So they he had it buried in a marker that just said white male died June nineteen eighty two, and so it
was a John Doe grave. And then when the mcgonagalls found out nine years later about what had happened, they decided to leave Frank's body there, not to zoom him and bring him home, but just leave him in South Carolina and then put a marker on there. So they put you know, another marker on there with with Frank's name and birthday at all. Right, So so we stopped by the yeah, the cemetery on the way home and on the week before we left town, and Mike, yeah,
it was just at an appointing moment. I'm there with my brother and then you know, Mike is there at the grave of his brother, and there was this moment where I. I. My brother came over and kind of put his arm hand on me. Here I put my
I can't remember how that went down. And we're standing there and then I and then we're looking at Mike and thinking, wow, how is he connecting or feeling and and we didn't know what to say, really, but we all felt this, this presence and this connection to Frank and to brotherhood really, you know, this bond of family. And so Mike says, hey, I've got something I've been thinking about this moment. And he pulls his phone out and he scrolls through his phone and he calls up this app that he has.
It's called re Listen, and it's got every Grateful Dead show that it was ever recorded, and most of them were it's got them all. So he scrolls back to August of nineteen eighty two when one of his brothers, he and his brother another brother went to see the Grateful Dead in Kansas City and it's called up Starlight Theater, Kansadin, Missouri. Calls it up, and he scrolls over to this song He's gone, and he calls up the song and he
plays it. He sets his phone on the on the gravestone and it's a song He's gone, and that the lyrics are He's gone. He's gone like a steam locomotive run down the track. He's gone, He's gone, and he's never coming back. And he said when he was at that concert with his brother Jerry, when that when they
played that song. Then just a couple of months after Frank left home, they turned to each other, both of them in tears, and he said, we both knew at that time that Frank was dead, but we held out hope that maybe we were wrong, and for the sake of their parents. But he said, both of usk new, and so he played that song for us there in the cemetery, and man, it was it was intense movie.
Another grateful dead song that was his favorite was Ripple. Yes, you've called this book ripple. What's its significance? Ripple?
Yeah, so Frank, Yeah, one of his favorite songs of Ripple and the same same with the brothers. His brother Mark's a great musician and he plays it frequently still. But you know, and I think it was Mark, his brother Mark, who said to me at one time, you know, Frank, Frank was a placid soul, you know, he was. He was the still water and he said, these guys came along and you know, threw a pebble into our pond, into our plastid life, and created ripples that you know,
reverberated far beyond you know, far beyond our family. But and you never know, you never know the effects of your actions. But he said, I want these, you know, the people that were involved to know that what they did was you know, cast some you know, some intense ripples in our in our life. And later on they found, well, we all discovered that each of the three of the three guys that they think were involved in this, Chris, Tommy, Jeff are all dead and all died in some pretty
heavy ways. Tommy went to prison, and actually he died shortly before I went, shortly before I got on the story. He died in prison of AIDS, which is an awful way to die. Chris was beaten to death with a two by four by his nephew and his nephew's roommate Wow, stabbed and set on fire. And Jeff mackenzie was had had a lot of health problems for many many years and then ended up dying in cancer twenty fifteen, I believe. So, yeah, so everybody all the guys involved in this air gone.
Paul.
Of course it's also dead.
Absolutely. I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about Ripple A Long Strange Search for a Killer. The gative author, Jim Cosgrove. You also, I mentioned earlier, you are the narrator, which is unusual and it's great in this respect that you are the narrator for this audiobook as well. Tell us about the release and where people might see more information about this.
Yes, so the book, well, the book is out on April fifth, and the book is available. So the book is available in either you know, in a soft cover or audio, and it's available wherever you get books. I of course encourage everybody to order it through your local bookseller because I am a big fan of local booksellers, and they will have access to it and they can order it and they can get it in you can get it on any platform where you get audio books as well.
Thank you so much, Jim Cosgrove, Ripple A Long Strange Search for a Killer. Thank you so much for this interview day.
Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it. Take care, thank you,