SHADOWMAN-Ron Franscell

anytime anywhere with daily bonuses. That's your brighten your day, Lowe actually a lot, so sign up now at Chumbuck Casino dot com. That's Chumbuck Casino dot com.

The largest manhunt in Montana's history ensued, led by the FBI. As days stretched into weeks and weeks into months. Special Agent Pete Dunbar attended a workshop at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, led by two agents who had hatched a radical new idea, what if criminals left the psychological trail that would lead us to them. Patrick mulaney, a trained psychologist, and Howard Tetton, a veteran criminologist, had created the Behavioral Science unit to

explore this new voodoo they called Criminal Profiling. At Dunbar's request, Milani and tent and built the FBI's first profile of an unknown subject who had snatched Susie Jaeger and a few months later, a nineteen year old waitress. When a suspect was finally arrested, the profile fit him to a t. The book that we're featuring this evening is shadow Man, an Elusive Psycho Killer and the Birth of FBI Profiling,

with my special guest journalist and author Ron Francell. Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Ron Francell.

friend notices a little Bernie cries out. He says, I've been shot, and he falls off the top of the bridge into the water and drifts away. The friend runs to the nearest farmhouse, which is I think more than a mile away, and by the time the sheriff's deputies arrived, nobody can find Bernie's body. It's been swept down the river. I think of several weeks that searchers went and looked

for him. They couldn't. Even kids from the high school turned out in occasionally during that time and helped search. But it was about three weeks before they actually found him far down the river, and indeed he had been shot.

on that bridge. And ultimately the case was closed with that explanation that it had just been a stray shot, because nothing ever happens in Manhattan, you know, certainly not murders.

And it was a weekend thing. The kids were gathering for some you know, to learn some skills that boy scouts do, but a great amount of their time was spent, you know, again, being little boys and screwing around and tussling and hiding and all the things.

At first, he thinks it's a bloody nose or something, but he then sees that it's far worse and that Michael is barely conscious. So he arouses their camp leader and many people in the camp who find Michael. He has apparently been stabbed, They get the local sheriff. He gets to the hospital where he lingers a while a couple of days and ultimately dies, and it's determined that

he actually dies from a head injury. It all gets chalked up by these sheriff's investigators to a couple of boys you know, rough housing, and that he must have fallen and hit his head hadn't been reported because they were jacking around and didn't want to get in trouble, and that he ultimately died from it, so again an accidental death. For a time, his tentmate is the suspect, but ultimately the sheriff's investigators don't really believe that pursuing him in any.

great investigation because it ended unsatisfactorily. They kind of wanted to know who did it, but that was never determined, and it had the effect of the sheriff coming under some fire from locals for not doing a great job and to a sheriff in Montana who was generally elected. It became a political it became a hampered him politically. He didn't he didn't really get over that. He felt that it was unfair and he, at least to himself, determined to not be in that position again.

had been fatally injured five years before. They are in the park, they are camping. They mom and dad are sleeping in a van, Grandpa and grandma are sleeping in a trailer, and four of the five kids are in the tent and they're kind of packed in there as you can edge and in their sleeping bags, and but they're having fun. It's it's this grand adventure to them. Heidi awakes the next morning and feels a breeze and they are in a tent, and she thinks, well, that's

that's odd. But maybe somebody got up in the middle of the night to go to the restroom and left left the door to the tent on the zip. So she got up to you know, see where the wind was coming from, and noticed that Susie, her little seven year old sister, was gone. At first, she thinks, well, maybe she has, you know, left for some reason, gone

to the trailer or to the restroom or something. But then she sees a half moon shaped hole that's been cut in the back of the tent, she sees one of her little sister's stuffed animals outside, and suddenly she's she's aware that this isn't as innocent as maybe she first thought it was. She raises an alarm. Mom and Dad come out. They come to the same conclusion. Susie is missing. They see her nowhere around there. They call for her. Some of the people in the campground even help.

The sheriff is called and the first deputy on the scene sees a trail of footprints leading away from the tent to cross the lawn to a park area, and these these footprints, this path is in the dew on the grass. But that is the only evidence they have at that time that Susie's been abducted, and the abductor left no other evidence that his deputy could see. And pretty soon the whole, the whole Sheriff's department is mobilized out there and they begin their investigation.

in the tragic outcome. So they required that the FBI get involved in many abduction type cases very quickly to avoid some of those tragedies. And that's what happened. It seemed clear at the time that they were dealing with a crime, not just Susie wandering way. So the FBI was called in. Pete Dunbar, who was the lead agent,

was actually a Montana guy. He worked with the FBI in other places including Washington, DC, but he wanted at some point to come home to Montana because he had ill parents and he wanted to be He placed in a field office out there, but he was from that area. In fact, his family is I believe great grandfather had homesteaded that area and donated the land that the Headwaters State Park actually sat on. So he had this connection

that was actually significant to the place. But he understood the people, he understood the landscape, and it made him invaluable. But here they are. They're launching this investigation literally the days as he disappears, and pretty soon they've mobilized National Guard. There's a convention of trailer in enthusiasts going on in the same county at the time. They get in law

and it becomes the largest manhunt in Montana history. And there are literally hundreds, maybe more than a thousand people out there combing the area for miles and miles for looking for this little girl. But they find nothing. So the first few days close with nothing more than they had in the beginning, which was a little path of footprints in the dewy grass leading off to a parking area, and that was it. There was nothing else. So when they turned to the public for information, the public has

a lot of information, or it thinks it does. They come for with sightings of hippies, you know, traveling across the county and strangers. And because the rural nature, the small town nature, couldn't believe there could be one of them, of course, so it had to be an outsider. You're also talking about a period of sort of great paranoia. The Manson trials had wrapped up only less than two years before Watergate was going on. The whole counterculture was happening,

plus the protests against the Vietnam War. The world in the view of these rural Montanans, these small town farmers and ranchers and shopkeepers, was that the world was falling apart, and that made this all the worse that somebody would come into their county, uh snatch a little girl and disappear into the shadows. And so when when the FBI opens up the investigation to the public for for kids. There deluged with reports of these hippies that were seen

at the gas station or the market. H There were more reports of Volkswagon vehicles of all sizes and kinds and colors than there were people with names, literally hundreds of reports, sometimes as little as I saw a long haired guy with a little girl who stopped and got gas in three Forks, Montana. So there was never enough

to be able to identify anybody. State police were stopping people hundreds of miles away in little volkswagons with little girls, but coming up with nothing, and it soon became a very frustrating pursuit for Dunbar, for Bill Terry, for Sheriff Anderson, for everybody who worked.

they're back to the square one. They're back to having no good leads, no witnesses, and of course no suspects, and things begin to get more frustrating by the day because of that, and it weighs heavily leap on Dunbar.

and that was it. So it was ultimately judged to maybe be a hoax, But he calls back and he eventually he's kind of angry that he's been blown off, and now somebody is starting to take it a little more seriously. But they really still have no, no clues to go on beyond that, no ransom is paid, No, the whole situation just falls apart. So they're again for a second time, or maybe a third time, back to square one. They don't They don't know almost everything. They do know almost nothing now.

of sort of primitive blood typing and fingerprints. They believed though, that the way to conduct an investigation was a lot of wandering around, talking to people and deducing certain things. But it was a gut level kind of approach. What they did tell su Dieger's family was to buy a simple tape recorder down at the radio shack and connected to the phone and see if this fellow who had called that had called a deputy in Montana, Mike called them in Michigan. It was it was a long shot,

but they thought, let's do it. If nothing happens, no big deal. And so the family did. The family bought a little tape recorder and connected it to the phone, and you know, got a lot of it, captured a lot of calls that were you know, friends and neighbors, but they it was there. They connected it.

home sort of as the phone call is ending. And now they believe that they might have talked to Susan's abductor, but again he had eluded them, but there was a feeling he might call back. It was just if it were him, and he had called a sheriff's deputy, you know, months before, and now was calling their house. They had a sense that he might call again, and so they waited on pins and needles for a good time, hoping that he would, and eventually that happened.

we see her. And this is all in Missoula, Montana, which it's a bigger city than Manhattan or Bozeman, Montana, but still has that small town feel to it, and you know they're only slightly less innocent about what could happen there, and the people some of those same feelings as in the smaller towns. But Chavon goes missing, and it's oh, I think later. Within twenty four hours, she's found dead on the highway, hidden in a culvert on the highway out away from Missoula, and she had been

stabbed but not killed immediately. She'd been stabbed and stuffed in this culvert. She revived and tried to crawl out of the culvert, but there's nothing around there. There would have been no way for her to call or be seen by anybody, so she on her way back, crawling to the culvert for shelter. She dies of exposure in the snow, and that's the way they find her.

just her clothing. It might well have been given back to the family. It just wasn't it was. You know, they bagged it and put it in the evidence locker, and that's you know, where it sat for decades.

basketball season. Then they had a good team that year, Manhattan did. They were playing this other team in a nearby little town, and really most of Manhattan probably turned out for the basketball game, including Sandy, including her parents. She had a boyfriend at that time. He was there, but he wasn't with her. He was with some other people, some other girls in the stands, and she had some

words with him. There's no indication they were angry words, just she had talked to him, let him know she'd seen him. And then the game was over and everybody headed home, including Sandy. She went to her apartment there in Manhattan, which was over an implement store, and she changed her clothes and she walked across the street. You know literally, you know, one hundred paces maybe from her apartment to the American Legion, where people were in the bar having a good time as they often did on

the weekends. And anyway, she went over there, she saw some people, she did some dancing, and then she left, and some friends recall partying with her on the sidewalk there, and that was the last time anybody ever saw her alive.

parents at their home in Hakkison, Delaware. Many speculated that the murders were a crime of passion or committed in a fit of rage. However, when arrested, Cohen made it clear that the murders were premeditated and had a far more sinister motive. Than ever imagined. I love that the Generation Why podcast features such compelling cases, ones that I wasn't necessarily familiar with before conveying the story so interestingly exploring the evidence, the characters involved, and the crimes. Don't

miss hearing Aaron and Justin every week. Listen to the Generation Why podcast on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or you can listen ad free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app Now, Ron, we were talking about the disappearance of Sandra small Again and obviously a an investigation begins. What we hadn't mentioned that there was many suitors. You mentioned a boyfriend in the bar that night, Bob Harrison.

Also in the bar that night was Jack small Again, her former husband that she was still friends with, good friends with, But we hadn't mentioned that there was a person that was interested in her and had before Christmas a date with Sandra. Tell us about this suitor and the date and what Sandra's reaction was to this person.

man named David Meyerhoffer. His father owned the implement store that Sandy where Sandy's apartment was. David was known as a kind of introverted kid who was a little He was one of those guys was kind of half a bubble loft to most of the people there. They were just quiet and strange, and they described him as odd. He had asked her out before Christmas. They went out. He was smitten, she wasn't. She didn't really have a good time. He would send flowers or chocolates, but she

was kind and would thank him. But he would ask her out a few more times and she would politely refuse. So she was at the time of that night of the basketball game, for all intents and purposes, single. Her marriage was, her divorce was still in the process, but she had a lot of suitors, obviously, and so when she disappears that night, the fbis and the Sheriff's Department's interests fall on a lot of these guys, and they

investigate all of them and ultimately dismiss all of them. Harrison, Jack Smulligan, who might have been jealous or angry about her her dating Meyerhoffer, several others, and all of them were dismissed because they all impressed the investigators as having no idea how Sandy would have disappeared or where she might have gone. In fact, a lot of times they were pointing fingers at each other, but she was gone. Nonetheless, she and her card were missing.

in Manhattan, but going out in the successive circles. They got out far enough into this you're talking about a town that's in a remote place. Then this search reaching out into the real wilds, into the real outback of that area, this unsettled outback. They finally come to this ranch among many. As they searched look around, they find nothing. These shacks are decaying. One looks like maybe a cowboy

has stopped and had his lunch there or something. They really find nothing, you know, in their cursory search that screams foul play, So they are They go to the barn and it's kind of nailed shut. So they're about to leave when they find a piece of clothing there that's out of place. So they decide to take another look at the barn, and long story short, they find Sandy Smulligan's car inside the barn, kind of camouflaged with hay and tarps and fifty five gallon drums and that

sort of thing. Suddenly, now this is a crime scene. They mobilize the rest of the sheriff's apartment. Pretty soon everybody's out there and they're collecting evidence and searching the car. And not getting evidence about who the perpetrator might have been, but a lot of evidence about Sandy and what she how this might not be something that she wanted to happen, there was foul play involved in Because it was now a crime scene, everybody spread out to look, and in

time they find some physical evidence that intrigues them. And as they begin to look closer, they start to find these little tiny shards of bone all around the place, as if they'd been scattered by the wind or thrown out there. So they as they concentrate on that, they're collecting more and more and more. They find some bigger remains, some just bone remains, and now they're pretty sure that

they know what might have happened to Sandy Smalligan. And they send all this material off both to a Montana pathologists and to the Smithsonian Institute or the institution, and where they're they're examined and it's determined that indeed they are the remains of female about the age of Sandy Smalligan. But there's one more thing. The remains also include bones or pieces of bones that belonged to a much younger girl between six and eight years old, impossibly Sandy Smulligan's

it had to be a second. Suddenly, Pete dunbar feared the worst, he might have the related killings of both Sandy Smulligan and Susie Yeger, and that in fact, they might have the same killer.

lie detector test. In April nineteen seventy four, though the new FBI training Academy in Quantico and was being set up, and there was two teachers, Patrick Mullany and Howard Teton tell us about the how dunbar Is introduced to Milani and Tetan.

Jay Edgar Hoover himself thought it was hokum, but he had died just before this, and his replacement, Clarence Kelly, was a little more progressive about about law enforcement, and he gave, you know, mild tacit approval to these guys to kind of continue with what they had been pursuing, and they began to put on these workshops. Well, Unbarred

attends one. He believes suddenly as he listens to them talking about all this, all this science and investigation all mixed up, that maybe they can help him, and he follows them after the workshop down to their offices and he tells them the basic story about the vanishing of both Susiegger and Sandy Smalligan. They think that this might be a case for them to get involved with kind of test the theory. They saw it as neither that complicated.

They didn't think it had particularly high stakes, so it was kind of safe to test their theory, and they asked Dunbar to give him the evidence. He shipped it to them, and pretty soon they put together a collection of elements that they believed pointed the direction at this unknown subject or unsubbed and help would help. They hoped Dunbar to narrow the pool of people he was looking for. If they could say, well, this is definitely not a female, will he cuts the pool in half? Correct? I mean

that's they didn't say that that wasn't one. But by giving him all of these elements, there were between fifteen and twenty elements, he could progressively narrow his pool of suspects, which should focus his investigation a little bit better. Instead of having the whole county to be a suspect, he could narrow that down to a group of people where his investigation could be focused. And they so they did. They created what was the first ever FBI criminal profile.

claim you're free welcome bonus. That's Chumbu Casino dot com. And lived the Chumba.

But they had to develop some other things. So they went back to that profile, as I say, about fifteen to twenty items, And when you look at it, you can see that some of that was kind of old cops experience and logic. A little bit of it is guesswork. But you got to remember that Howard Teaton and Pat mulaney had no rule book, They had no system, They had no idea. They were experts in psychology and in crime scenes, but they had no model about how those

things would work together. So a lot of it was based on what they knew, and some of it was low hanging through. You know, an example, we all know from TV, or at least we think we know that the typical serial killer tends to be a white male in his twenties. Sure, that's because we have fifty years of data. You know, profilers have gone out and collected a database of thousands of intensive expert interviews with killers. Teton and Mulaney had visited with a couple a few

and they had no database. They just deduced that the killer was a white male in his twenties. Because these crimes required and now an astounding degree of stealth and strength. They believed that probably suggested there was military experience, which of course was largely male during Vietnam. They believed he had knowledge of his surroundings and the local law enforcement, which means he was probably local. And if he's local, there was a ninety nine percent chance that he was white,

because this county was mainly white. Another deduction they had was that he'd thrive in solitary jobs because he didn't want to be around other people. And that's because they knew that deeply disturbed criminals worked very hard to protect their secret lives. So they believed their suspect, or the perpetrate that they didn't know they're unsubbed, would be he live in fear that his co workers and bosses were always watching him and would know his deepest, darkest secrets,

so he'd avoid that by working alone. At the time, they believed that psychopaths problems their men, that their mental state, their emotional state, was based on conflicts or even flawed views about sexuality. But that was an educated guest too, based on interviews that they'd done with a serial killer named Ed Kemper. So now that we know who the killer was, we also know that there was only one

questionable element out of these fifty. They got it on all but one of the elements, and even that one element is up in the air because we don't have enough information, and we'll talk about why we don't have enough information. But that first profile was astoundingly accurate. And you've got to remember that these guys had no plan, they had no system. This was primarily just them thinking it through and trying to piece this puzzle together using their experience.

back and forth. But also they get investigators get a break when there is a West Montana rancher, Ralph Greene, and he complains about his long distance bill. So tell us a little bit about this dramatic exchange that was recorded and this lucky break and this rancher with a long distance bill.

to Susie's mother. In the process, he gave away a small bid of evidence that proved what only the kidnapper would know. And suddenly they believed they had the right guy on the phone, they just didn't know who it was. And of course his phone call was to their home in Michigan, in the town Detroit suburb called Farmington Hills. Some weeks later, a rancher in Montana calls the local phone company complained that there was he had been built for a telephone call that he and his wife hadn't

made to a place called Farmington Hills. Immediately, the phone company recognized the number because they'd been put on alert by the FBI, and they called the FBI and said, this number popped up, and it popped up related to

this rancher's phone line. So they went out there and they dunbar investigated, and one of the things they found was that there was this sort of homemade telephone wire that they had strung from the poll to their house, and it kind of kind of hung low in a little wash, and they found some tire tracks going in

there underneath the line. The rancher recognizes the tire tracks as belonging to a ranch hand that he had employed, because they were the same kind of truck tires that he had on his own truck, and he had made

the recommendation. So the attention turns to this guy, and indeed they find that his truck has those tires, but he explains, he gives a reason for that, and Dunbar, throughout these investigations looks at at this particular guy two or three times, but two or three times the guy is on the radar and then off the radar because he doesn't fit. Dunbar's gut tells him this isn't the guy, but he goes through and and gives another test in this guy's case, a third truth test to two light detectors,

tests that it happened. Now he's giving him a truth serum test. Suffice it to say this, this guy passes all three of them. Uh, and so once again he's off of Dunbar's radar. Dunbar, by this time is just totally frustrated, but these the profilers believe that he's actually

zeroing in on their guy. So that it's believed that the phone call to Susieyeger's mother was made from that low slung wire, and it would have taken somebody with some knowledge of how to connect to that wire and to make a telephone call, and that told them something that suddenly they had some information that they could act on.

and they want him to know he's under surveillance. There's one point he actually goes over to the deputy and asks for a ride to the next town, since they were both going to be going that way anyway, and he knew that he knew the deputy. He was a local guy, right. So there was a lot of circumstantial evidence that they found there. It was pretty strong, but no smoking gun. But they kept up there, they kept up their surveillance.

They go back to his little converted garage where he lived and search it more closely than they had before, and there they find human remains let's say that he had kept as souvenirs and suddenly confronted with literally a frozen human hand that proves to be one of his victims. It's clear that he is going to have a tough time not being hanged as a murderer, and his lawyer, who had believed in him all this time, confronts him

and literally screams at him about this. Our killers reaction is could I avoid the death penalty by confessing to other killings. Suddenly that lawyer is listening and goes to the prosecutor and says, if you will take the death penalty off the table, we'll confess to two more killings. In other words, we will give you four. We will confess to four.

this interview. And they presumed, in these wee hours of this investigation or this interrogation, that they were going to come back later that day to ask about other killings, about methods he in he had employed, about why he would have done these things. They're awful, awful things and ghastly things, but they were all tired. They'd all been up, the defense lawyer, the prosecutor, Dunbar, and Meyerhoffer himself had been up for two days essentially, and they were all tired.

And at around four o'clock in the morning, they take him back to his cell and they themselves go home to catch a few hours of sleep and then come back to continue the.

that point. They didn't see him as a serial killer, and there was no real indication hadn't really been defined about what we now know about these psychos like Ed Kemper or One Corona or even later Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and so forth. They had an idea that these were freakish kinds of people, but that fascination with serial killers actually comes later, So they weren't necessarily putting together in their minds that he had a psychological flaw

that made him kill people. They just knew that he had been in other places, and there were indications from their search is that maybe he'd been doing some things that they didn't want to think about in other places. So yeah, some other law enforcement agencies, the Marines had sort of started to line up for their chance to talk.

full confession. Just as a part of the story as well, is that Marietta who had the horror of listening to this killer talk on the phone and these incredible exchanges where she said, I know who you are and called him by name and he denied it. At one point in this incredible book, you have the transcript of him putting on a girl on the phone to talk to Marietta.

her little girl and puts her on the line. Marietta doesn't think it's her little girl. The FBI suddenly thinks though, that maybe he has another little girl, and that's when they swoop in for the arrest. They now believe that they don't want to just keep watching him because he might be actually still active with taking little girls, and that's what causes them to swoop in to make that final arrest. But Marietta is really one of the heroes

of this book. Without her, without her conversations with David, they probably would never have caught him.

serial killers of all time. With this, Marietta did not want. She had been counseled by her pastor, but she was specific when the cuter Olsen asked if she was okay with the death penalty. She was not okay with the death penalty, and the death penalty would have been hanging in Montana. What was the ultimate justice in this case?

And of course, by that time, the ultimate justice that you refer to has already happened. But she comes to the conclusion that the death penalty is not the best thing for religious reasons more than anything. But as I say, the justice that you referred to has already happened at that point. It involves death, but it's not carried out by the state.

and even in the fictional world. As you write what was the path forward for Tetan and for Milani and there they mentioned an assistant at that time, Robert k Rustler. As you write what happened with this fledging criminal profiling and.

open now to developing this a little bit more. They believed Teton and Mullaney were maybe on the right track, so there was more latitude given they created the Behavioral Sciences Unit, and they did hire some people. But of course today there's hardly a prime time TV crime drama or movie mystery, or a crime thriller book that doesn't

feature profiling in some form. You know, it's easy to think that cops have just always been intuitive about bad guys, but in fact, it was Keeton and Mullaney less than fifty years ago that formulated this thing. And so that's what this book is about, the fact the criminal mind has always fascinated us. Yes, you know, when an especially debian crime happens, our rational brains want to put things back in order to make sense out of something that

is senseless. That's certainly the case in this crime. And it's not surprising that that we would think that way. Since the beginning of mankind, we've wanted to understand the threats of it are out there that we want to feel safe, we want to avoid unnecessary death. So, you know, I don't think that sort of primitive fascination has changed right now. Our media has changed and we're seeing more of it, we're feeling more of it. Where do we

think we're understanding more of it? There's a question about that. Yeah, but these profilers play a role in that that. You know, we kind of see them as the nights going out fighting the dragons, and whether that's true or not is irrelevant. It's kind of just the media's portrayal of that. But it all starts here. This is the origin story of profiling, something we're all familiar with right now. This is how

it began. Everything we see right now is built on that reality, that real thing that happened.